Liberty and Science. Anyone who follows political commentary on a regular basis through the standard channels of talk radio and television, newspaper and magazine editorials, popular books, blogs, and the like knows the standard stereotype of what liberals think of conservatives:
A Hasty Report From A Tearing Hurry. Tallis in Wonderland Raymond Tallis has a measured response to numbered seconds.
“And strangers were as brothers to his clocks”W.H. Auden Readers of this column will know that I am committed to snatching time from the jaws of physics; in particular to rescuing it from a reduction to a quasi-spatial dimension and its further reduction to numbers. Thus reduced, time becomes a mere variable – t – that has no qualities, only numerical values, and none of the features that make it central to human life. I could go on about the poverty of t, but I won’t, because I am also aware that in demoting t I might overlook something rather extraordinary: the mysterious verb ‘to time’.
Deep Time Thoughts Timing has not only enabled us to see more of how the material world works so that we can work on it, or with it, more effectively; it has also greatly extended our temporal gaze. This is not all bad, of course. Time for Tyranny This is a beneficent example. Future Continuous © Prof. The Quantum Theory of Consciousness. What is Time? What Happened Before the Big Bang? The New Philosophy of Cosmology - Ross Andersen - Technology. What existed before the big bang?
What is the nature of time? Is our universe one of many? On the big questions science cannot (yet?) Answer, a new crop of philosophers are trying to provide answers. Last May, Stephen Hawking gave a talk at Google's Zeitgeist Conference in which he declared philosophy to be dead. In December, a group of professors from America's top philosophy departments, including Rutgers,* Columbia, Yale, and NYU, set out to establish the philosophy of cosmology as a new field of study within the philosophy of physics.
One of the founding members of the American group, Tim Maudlin, was recently hired by New York University, the top ranked philosophy department in the English-speaking world. Yesterday I spoke with Maudlin by phone about cosmology, multiple universes, the nature of time, the odds of extraterrestrial life, and why Stephen Hawking is wrong about philosophy. Maudlin: So, I guess I would divide that into two classes. And what's driving the renaissance? Has Physics Made Philosophy and Religion Obsolete? - Ross Andersen - Technology. "I think at some point you need to provoke people.
Science is meant to make people uncomfortable. " It is hard to know how our future descendants will regard the little sliver of history that we live in. It is hard to know what events will seem important to them, what the narrative of now will look like to the twenty-fifth century mind. We tend to think of our time as one uniquely shaped by the advance of technology, but more and more I suspect that this will be remembered as an age of cosmology---as the moment when the human mind first internalized the cosmos that gave rise to it.
Over the past century, since the discovery that our universe is expanding, science has quietly begun to sketch the structure of the entire cosmos, extending its explanatory powers across a hundred billion galaxies, to the dawn of space and time itself. I know that you're just coming from Christopher Hitchens' memorial service. I closed with an anecdote, a true story about the last time I was with him. Physics and the Immortality of the Soul. [Cross-posted at Scientific American Blogs.
Thanks to Bora Z. for the invitation.] The topic of “Life after death” raises disreputable connotations of past-life regression and haunted houses, but there are a large number of people in the world who believe in some form of persistence of the individual soul after life ends. Clearly this is an important question, one of the most important ones we can possibly think of in terms of relevance to human life. If science has something to say about, we should all be interested in hearing.
Adam Frank thinks that science has nothing to say about it. Adam claims that “simply is no controlled, experimental[ly] verifiable information” regarding life after death. Obviously this is completely crazy. We also know better for life after death, although people are much more reluctant to admit it. Everything we know about quantum field theory (QFT) says that there aren’t any sensible answers to these questions.
But let’s say you do that.