A new book by Deborah J. Brown and Calvin G. Normore offers us a view of Descartes' philosophy of the material world, the hypothetical PHYSICS within his metaphysics, that is more sympathetic than many of the other recent takes on it. Here's a link to a review by John Carriero, of UCLA. https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/descartes-and-the-ontology-of-everyday-life/ Carriero starts by discussing the Cartesian view of everyday objects. Since extension is the essence of matter, space and matter are one and the same. But for Descartes types of matter differentiate themselves by size. Some are very small, and here Descartes allows for such microscopic realities as may in the course of time be discovered, though he didn't accept atomism -- the idea that there is an absolutely bottom rung of the ladder of scale. Some objects, those of everyday life, are medium size, large globules, and these include the bodies from within which your soul and mine look out at the world. Some objects...
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Now THAT is a neat phrase. "Causal dynamical triangulation." It is apparently a theory on the cutting edge of subatomic physics. There's a wikipedia article under that title but it doesn't really explain the matter for dense folks like me. What I do understand, though, is that efforts continue to render Einstein's understanding of gravity consistent with quantum mechanics. This requires the quantization of gravity, something that was worked out in principle in the 1960s. BUT ... the so-called "naive" quantum gravity developed by Feynman etc. can't be the last word. Physicists are agreed it can only be an approximation. How to get the rest of the way there is the continuing subject for debate. And THAT is here CDT comes in. What intrigues me is that, as Sabine Hossenfelder has written, CDT requires that we treat space and time differently, "which Einstein taught us not to do." So the idea is to keep Einstein's notion of gra...
Happy New Year! On Christmas Eve Day, I mentioned a recent book, Why String Theory? by Joseph Conlon. I said I'd discuss its philosophical significance this week. Here we are, at the start of a new year, and we can start 2017 off with something weighty. String theory is often presented as a "theory of everything" or ToE. This is both its charm and (in many minds) its downfall. These fundamental strings winding through X dimensions might allow for a geometrical description of all the particles, and the forces, enumerated in modern physics courses. The bestiary of different subatomic particles has become confusing and crowded -- the strong demand of human minds for conceptual order requires some clean-up work there. As to forces, the "force left out" is always gravity. The other forces -- strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic, have all made their peace with one another through the magic of quantum mechanics. Gravity remains aloof. One big goal of ...
I'm about to disclose to you a cliff diving fact I learned in a magazine recently, and then explain why it stuck in my head. SInce it is unlikely that any reader of this blog gives a damn about cliff diving, this may seem odd but, hey, it's my blog. To pad this out a bit, I'll start with the sourcing. The following fact comes from the Sept. 2016 issue of SELF magazine. SELF is a woman's health periodical, which includes some celebratory pieces on distaff athletes, and I encountered this issue while sitting in a waiting room with a dearth of other worthwhile material. Moving on..... Here's the fact. If a cliff is 30 meters above the water, then a diver will hit the surface of the water at 50 miles an hour. I haven't done the computation to check it out. On this planet, IIRC, an object in freefall due to gravity moves toward the center of the earth at an accelerating pace, velocity increasing at 9.8 meters per second per second. So: what struck me as w...
In a philosophy group to which I belong, a fellow calling himself Barleycorn posted the following thought: People like to think of the universe as some magical godly force of creation but really it's just the earth that houses life. The universe for the most part is death. Put anything living up in space and the universe instantly kills it. The universe is not your loving friend. This little bubble on earth called an atmosphere is the only thing stopping the universe from instantly murdering you. So why all the memes about the magical mystical universe and all this spirit science crap? And why do so many people feel like the universe will absorb or save your soul at death. No it won't. That's a very romantic idealistic view of the universe. Life struggles AGAINST the universe. My reply was, and is, as follows: First, the "little bubble" of life on earth is only possible because of a continuous stream of energy from the nearest star, and because we are held...