Conner Wood takes a look at Robert McCauley's book, 'Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not'. Robert McCauley, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Emory University, thinks that religion is natural, but science isn’t. Such a claim could easily inspire all manner of outrage and uproar from both offended believers and irked scientists alike. But what … Continue reading Religion is natural, science is hard
Category: Zeitgeist
PHD Comics: Cosmic Inflation Explained
So, even though I already linked to two sources about cosmic inflation this week, this is good enough that I'm also going to throw it in. It's fascinating to me that the large scale structure of our universe is ultimately caused by quantum fluctuations in the earliest moments of the big bang. Click through for … Continue reading PHD Comics: Cosmic Inflation Explained
Scientia Salon: a manifesto for 21st century intellectualism
Primers on detecting primordial gravity waves and cosmic inflation
First, Minute Physics takes a shot at explaining what the BICEP2 team actually found and how it relates to gravitational waves. I think I'm going to have to watch this a second time to pick up everything. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IlBNJbCzfk And Ethan Siegel has an in-depth discussion of cosmic inflation at his Starts With A Bang site.
Who’s afraid of math? Study finds some genetic factors
As someone who's never been good at math, I found this particularly interesting. It's strange that I've always been in the top tier of programmers on any team I worked on, easily gotten As in any programming class I took, and that programmers as a general breed tend to be good at math, but I've … Continue reading Who’s afraid of math? Study finds some genetic factors
The long reach of reason
A cool TED cartoon video of Rebecca Goldstein and Steven Pinker discussing reason and its effects on history. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk7gKixqVNU I've said it before, but just because reason is a means to an end, as they note Hume observed, doesn't take away its value. Acknowledging it only gives us a healthy, and reasonable, awareness of its … Continue reading The long reach of reason
First Direct Evidence of Cosmic Inflation – SpaceRef
Wow! There were lots of rumors about this over the weekend. Turns out that, in this case, the rumors were spot on. Almost 14 billion years ago, the universe we inhabit burst into existence in an extraordinary event that initiated the Big Bang. In the first fleeting fraction of a second, the universe expanded exponentially, … Continue reading First Direct Evidence of Cosmic Inflation – SpaceRef
Top 10 scientists of the 13th century | Science News
One of the things I used to think was that the scientific revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries was a revolution of method, that before that period the scientific method either didn't exist or was not yet complete. But I realized last year that the revolution was really more of an acceleration of progress … Continue reading Top 10 scientists of the 13th century | Science News
Battle of the “Cosmos,” Round 3 – Out There | Discovermagazine.com
Corey Powell, and editor at Discover Magazine, and Steven Sotor, co-writer of the new Cosmos series, have been having a back and forth about Giordano Bruno, who was highlighted in the first Cosmos episode. Your suggestion that Giordano Bruno was not the first to realize that the stars are suns is mistaken. You cited his … Continue reading Battle of the “Cosmos,” Round 3 – Out There | Discovermagazine.com
Will civilization collapse in the coming decades?
Apparently, there is a NASA funded study which says so. If history is any guide, our civilization will eventually collapse. Every other society in human history has ultimately done so: Sumer, Egypt, Rome, etc. There's no good reason to think we've beaten the civilization life cycle, any more than there is to believe the assertions … Continue reading Will civilization collapse in the coming decades?
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