WHAT CAUSES CAUSE? What Is Causality? What is an Explanation? Pondering the nature of the concept of explanation is the first step in thinking. So you may say that there is nothing more important, nothing more human. I have a solution. It...
In 1905, his so-called Wonder Year, Albert Einstein presented a theory of the photoelectric effect. The new idea came in just two lines. However I boldly claim that Einstein’s theory of the photoelectric effect, although crucially correct, was also crucially...
NO MULTIVERSE, NO PLATONISM (Less Air Travel, Too): Some people go around, and brandish the “Multiverse”. Of course, the “Multiverse” exists, in one’s brain. The brain, among other things, extends all over imagination. Out there, among the galaxies, in the...
Modern Slaves Are Predictable, Free Worms Are Not: Enough of these sad songs about how plutocracy, stupidity, cowardice and greed rule! Worms are smart, and willful! Yes, even worms have Free Will. Too bad for those who thought god controlled...
By claiming emotional thinking is superior, I do not mean that “logical” thinking ought to be rejected. I am just saying what I am saying, and no more. Not, just the opposite, “logical” thinking ought to be embraced. However,...
Some say that correct thinking has to do with avoiding “logical fallacies”. That is, of course, silly. Imagine a pilot in a plane. Suppose she avoids all logical fallacies. Where does the plane go? Nowhere. Thinking correctly is more than...
Quantum everything is unavoidable, because the world is Quantum. When a non-Quantum explanation is advanced it has to be simple enough to be clearly non-Quantum. Yet, much that was thought to be very simple, turns out to be Quantum! QUANTUM EFFECTS...
Metaphysics Rises From Brainy Ground, Including What Dreams Are Made Of: Nihilism is what happens when Metaphysics is yanked out. And nothing could be further from the Truth. Much of the trouble with the present planet can be directly tracked...
DO STAR NEAR-MISSES MAKE SUPER-JUPITERS FALL? How fragile is life? Very. Many disasters can strike a biosphere. A famous “equation” the Drake equation, is meant to estimate the probability of life in the galaxy. It overlooked many factors. One of them is interstellar...
Before unreason took over physics, one of the major principles was energy conservation. However, this was before. Now Sean Carroll, following other Multiversists (as I call them insolently) crucially depend upon nonconservation of energy. Sean wrote an article, short and...
Light slows down in water. That’s a known experimental fact. The usual explanation is that, when light advances through water, it collides with water molecules. So it zigs and zags through the water, and this zig-zagging action slows it...
Thomas Piketty, a young and successful French Science Po economist wrote “Capitalism in The XXI Century”. I bought it ASAP, and then did not read one page. The reason is that there was a waiting list. By the time...
NO NEW PHILOSOPHY, NO NEW SCIENCE Philosophy, and science have the same longing, truth. They go at it in, roughly, the same way. However, the data set philosophy uses, even in its mature form, is much more general. This makes...
QUANTUM: OBVIOUS YET ALL CHANGING Quantum Physics is so natural that it embraces the fundamental organizing principle of superior human intelligence: “Il faut de tout pour faire un monde”. It is continually said that Quantum Physics is “weird”. Maybe it is, but...
Far From Being Absurd, Life May Be A Quantum Force That Gets Ever More Complex The most striking feature of the Quantum is that, by doing something somewhere, one can change the state of something else, somewhere else. Einstein found...
CAUSALITY HAS EXPANDED: Having a notion of when something causes something else is paramount. We have evolved some subtle notions since Shamanism (or David Hume). Two things struck me: a) The paucity of the imagination of many pillars of intellect. In 2008,...