Category: Science
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Richard Feynman on How Science is Like Chess
An excellent analogy. (HT: Ron Brinegar) But every analogy limps. There is no such thing as a perfect analogy. A perfect analogy would be an identity, and one cannot (usefully) compare a thing to itself. So, after enjoying Feynman's fine analogy, you should ask yourself what the points of disanalogy are.
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Notes on Chapter One of Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design
Many thanks to reader David Parker for sending me a copy of Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (Bantam, 2010). Not a book worth buying, but graciously accepted gratis! When physicists need money, they scribble books for popular consumption. But who can blame them: doing physics is hard while writing bad philosophy is…
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“We’re Just a Bit of Pollution,” Cosmologist Says
(People have been asking me to comment on Stephen Hawking's new book. As a sort of warm-up, I have decided to repost the following entry from the old site.) I am all for natural science and I have studied my fair share of it. I attended a demanding technical high school where I studied electronics and…
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Guest Post: Is There a Real Distinction Between Reductionism and Eliminativism?
What follows is a guest post by a long-standing card-carrying member of the MavPhil commentariat, William the Nominalist. He is eager to hear any thoughtful and pertinent comments you may have. The distinction between reductionism and eliminativism is widely recognised in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science. It also seems to be very…
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More on the Law of Non-Contradiction and its Putative Empirical Refutability
A reader's e-mail with my comments in blue: Nice post on the LNC. That topic is a real quagmire, isn't it? I’ve lost the link to the Science Daily report of the Cleland experiment, so the details of how he confirmed the superposition are lost to me, but I’m really struck by the fact that you…
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The 1961 JFK Moon Speech
An excerpt from the speech without which, arguably, there would have been no moon landing on this date in 1969. How pusillanimous and shortsighted are those who balk at space exploration. Have they stopped to consider what ‘satellite TV’ means? Are they aware of how those communication satellites were placed in their geosynchronous orbits? Do…