What, Why & How do we Know ?
This year’s Edge question 2012 is: WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION? Many of the responses don’t really answer the question, but there are hundreds of responses on many subjects. These are a few that caught my eye – almost all mean further reading! Some are just interesting to see in this … Continue reading “The Edge 2012 Q&A”
Thanks to PZ Myers for the links to this Jerry Coyne piece on Francis Collins (Obama’s choice for NIH Director) lecture at UC Berkeley. (And a review by Sam Harris.) Dr. Collins will have more responsibility for biomedical and health-related research than any person on earth, controlling an annual budget of more than $30 billion. … Continue reading “Religion Does Pollute Science”
That’s the “Completely Ridiculous Anthropic Principle” to you. The Anthropic Principle thread below spawned a long discussion thread with “Island” at Anthropic-Pinciple.Org And coincidentally “crap” was Island’s first comment on that post 🙂 In a nutshell, the way I see it, Island’s anthropic principle is a very weak form, and he uses teleology also in … Continue reading “CRAP”
I said in the previous post that I owed David Deutsch’s “Fabric of Reality” a thorough review – well in my usual style I won’t have time for that, but I can now precis my impression of his main messages, having just finished reading it over dinner. Excuse some repetition with the couple of other … Continue reading “Four Threads Unify Reality”
I blogged several times before about holochory (holography) being closely related to the idea that the world is fundamentally information behind all those things we might think of as particles, waves and forces. (Particularly compelling thought if you ever wonder about communication bypassing the world we conceive as “physical” – ie paranormal stuff, but not … Continue reading “Doh ! Life’s just a hologram really.”
The Mindful Universe by Henry Stapp, from the quantum physics edge of consciousness. [Quote] It is often claimed that science stands mute on questions of values: that science can help us to achieve what we value once our priorities are fixed, but can play no role in fixing these weightings. That claim is certainly incorrect: … Continue reading “We Believe In Science”
Re-reading Michael Talbot – (Can’t believe it’s 3 weeks since I last posted – been so busy with the day job recently – anyway ….) I’ve re-read Michael Talbot’s “Mysticism and the New Physics” in the last few days – it’s only 130 pages plus afterwords. This was the first book I read that explicitly … Continue reading “Re-reading Michael Talbot”
Read the Apoorva Patel article (dead link). Think this is the same one “Quantum Algorithms and the Genetic Code” (tough going for a non-physicist). Anyway, first time, I had one of those WOW! moments. Just like one I remember in schooldays when I came across that integral that links e, i and pi in a … Continue reading “Thinking with Meat II”