sciences in general, what they are and their methods
Mathematicians have built axiomatic systems since Euclid that have become more and more extensive and sophisticated. But Kurt Gödel performed a great service when he showed that there is much more truth to mathematics than could ever be formalized in an axiomatic system. Mathematicians gave up looking for a complete theory, except within limited domains […]
Isaac Newton was the first science “star” — someone who achieved great prestige as a result of their scientific investigations. His contemporary Alexander Pope famously wrote about him: Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said “Let Newton be” and all was light. Newton himself was more modest of his own achievements, writing
Michael Crichton, a well-known scientist and author, delivered the Caltech Michelin Lecture on January 17, 2003. He entitled it “Aliens Cause Global Warming” which criticized what is called “consensus science” starting with SETI. A few excerpts: I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called
Petteri Nieminen et al. have written two similar papers analyzing creationist writings: Argumentation and fallacies in creationist writings against evolutionary theory (Evolution: Education and Outreach, 2014, 7:11) and Experiential Thinking in Creationism–A Textual Analysis (PLOS ONE, March 3, 2015). These are welcome additions to the literature that try to shed some light and reduce the heat of debate. They
Remodernism is a growing movement of artists and filmmakers who oppose post-modernism and its cynical and ironic attitudes and seek to renew the vision of early modernism, emphasizing the spiritual and expressive dimensions of art. See their manifesto here. What is interesting is the rejection of late modernism and its denouement in post-modernism. Something similar
Parsimony is considered a desirable or even necessary characteristic of a scientific theory but what this means is not clear. There are many types of parsimony (see the article on Simplicity in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy for a list). The most common kind of parsimony is qualitative parsimony, often called Ockham’s Razor, which says that
The book “Relational Mechanics and Implementation of Mach’s Principle with Weber’s Gravitational Force” (2014) is by Andre Koch Torres Assis. A bound copy is available through Amazon and a pdf is online at http://www.ifi.unicamp.br/~assis/Relational-Mechanics-Mach-Weber.pdf. Recall “Mach’s Principle”: Newton’s concepts of absolute space and time were not accepted by all scientists and the call for a
The last few centuries have seen a number of theories of history which tried to make history a science and tried to articulate laws of history, including natural history. All of these have failed to find anything like a physical law. Natural history was treated as a science with “principles” substituting for fixed laws. The
There is a dualism between naïveté and skepticism. In ancient and medieval times there was a kind of skepticism about science. Zeno’s paradoxes for example questioned whether or not motion was real. Logic was refined to a high degree in the middle ages but was used for abstruse philosophical and theological matters rather than for practical knowledge.
‘Nature’ is the world conceived without reference to God. A natural rock is a rock as if it exists on its own or as part of a world that exists on its own. It has no absolute origin. Its only ‘origin’ is from other rocks, other existing substances. It is all transformation. This presupposes a
