What, Why & How do we Know ?
Hat tip to Sabine Hossenfelder for this link to SciAm article by Victor Stenger, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian. Their title is “Physicists Are Philosophers Too” misled me slightly. Misled me into the “Yes, but often not very good ones, if they prejudice their philosophy with their physics” response. What was it Max Born said? “When … Continue reading “More on Science Denial of Philosophy @Platobooktour”
A little microcosm today of why I find myself (as an atheist) arguing in defence of religious theists, particularly more sophisticated theologian types, when they’re confronted with the stereotypical “flying spaghetti monster” or Dawkins / Krauss attack formations. You know the kind, since god is clearly a ridiculous supernatural invention, everything you believe or say … Continue reading “Throwing Ishmael Out With The Bathwater @SamiraAhmedUK @RevRichardColes”
The political philosopher Roberto Unger and the cosmologist / physicist Lee Smolin have jointly written “The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time” and its release last month had already been promoted as a landmark work. It’s actually two books, one by each of them, with common introduction and index. So far, in addition to … Continue reading “Cosmology in Crisis – Unger & Smolin sweeping away the metaphysical gloss.”
A phrase coined by Feynman apparently. Mentioned in a post from Scientia Salon, linked on Facebook by David Morey. Promising, I commented … “current practice of inflationary cosmology as [un]able to accommodate any experimental result, so, on philosophical grounds, no longer science – cargo cult physics (after Feynman)” Thank you. And we already know “string … Continue reading “Cargo Cult Physics”
Hat tip to Maria Ana of The Thinking Hotel on LinkedIn for the link to this 15minute TED Talk from philosopher Ruth Chang. For reasons of various IT and physical interruptions, I partially listened to this talk 4 or 5 times before finally listening right through this morning. The presentation of example life-choices seemed so … Continue reading “Ruth Chang – Subject-Created Reason”
I’m not an expert cosmologist, nor even a physicist. And as someone already said in a comment in the thread that posed me the above question, few people in such threads are actually experts. [Aside: I’ve probably 120 posts over 14 years on this blog alone highlighting sources of doubt – eg arising from CMBR … Continue reading “Evidence of Big Bang Flaws?”
Blogging live from the IAI – How The Light Gets In – conference at Hay-on-Wye. (Not to be confused with the contemporary and almost co-located Hay Festival of Arts and Literature.) Well, I was live when I wrote that – but sadly teeming rain, muddy tented venues and lack of any safe power supplies, meant … Continue reading “Bang Goes The Big Bang”
We may be getting somewhere, slowly. One of my agenda threads is that the naturally tendency of science and many scientists to defend themselves against (so-called blind, unreasonable) “faith” is to treat all accepted scientific models as objective fact (despite formally qualifying themselves with concepts like evidence, contingency and empirical falsifiability) – something, after Maxwell, I refer … Continue reading “Cracks in the Cosmic Egg”