A few words today about psychology before James, or Freud, or Pavlov. Before any of them there was Wilhelm Wundt, who may have been the first scholar writing about the human mind to call HIMSELF a "psychologist". A few words about the timeline. Herbert Spencer wrote his PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY in two volumes, which appeared a decade apart, in 1870 and 1880. Wundt's most important works in the field were published in 1873-74 and 1881. James published his brilliant two volume Principles in 1890. Freud's breakthrough began with Studies in Hysteria and Three Essays, in the 1890s and after the turn of the century, respectively. Pavlov published his lectures on the nervous system, which included his famous observations of salivating dogs, in 1897. One gets the impression, then, of Wundt (and perhaps Herbert Spencer in his psychological writings) as constituting the Old Guard in psychology, in the days just before the field was about to explode in a variety ...
Posts
The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, 'Seek simplicity and distrust it.' I like that. But simply allowing my train of association to chug along its own tracks, this thought about science brings me to the issue of cosmogony, and the issue of the apparent demise of the old steady state theory of the cosmos. The great motivating factor of the theory was the immensity of infinity, the infinite expanse that opened in the past and presumably too in the future. The contrary Big Bang theory, with its definite moment of beginning and its threat of a heat death of the whole-she-bang, cuts one off from that lovely prospect. Also, relatedly, the Big Bang is sometimes defended as a way in which something might have come out of nothing, and THAT is a strongly counte...
A quote from the cover story in the May 2015 issue of Harper's. As early as the 1930s, scientists knew that in the process of radioactive decay, an atom's nucleus will release an electron. They were puzzled, though, by variations in the electron's energy level. The law of conservation of energy dictates a mathematical tidiness, whereby all such differences had to be accounted for. The Swiss physicist Wolfgang Pauli suggested a solution: Perhaps the electron was accompanied by an undetected 'ghost particle' which was more energetic when the electron was less so, and vice versa. The particle came to be called the neutrino, or 'little neutral one.' Pauli thought it might never be detected because it would hardly react with matter. That is Pauli's visage above.
I've been writing here of late about the disappointment I felt upon reading Hilton Ratcliffe's book, The Static Universe. Not only does it fail to make much of a case against the Big Bang Theory, but it tries to do so at the expense of all of modern geometry, going back to the great Gauss himself. The key line of argument comes late, in chapter 8. One might say Ratcliffe has buried his lede although, this being his lede, it may be natural to try to bury it. In chapter 8, after praise for Gauss' simple life, teaching skills, and generous spirit, we learn that he had one weakness, an "obsession with the abstract." That would seem to be a job requirement for a geometer, but by calling it an "obsession" Ratcliffe has established to his own satisfaction that it is a weakness. After working on global cartography, Ratcliffe tells us, Gauss succumbed to his eagerness to abstract and "presented his scientific progeny the gift of Differential ...
Jonah Lehrer has left his post at The New Yorker amidst a bit of scandal . Lehrer is the author of a non-fiction book on neurology, called Imagine, published in March of this year. The subtitle of Lehrer's book sounds a bit ironic now, "How Creativity Works." Lehrer uses Bob Dylan as one of his examples of a creative individual, someone whose creativity can be understood through contemporary neuroscience. Well, this is how creativity doesn't work: making up sh!t and attributing it to someone else. Michael Moynihan pointed out in the devastating article that forced Lehrer's admission and resignation at TNY, Lehrer had simply lied. He had invented some Dylan quotes out of thin air, and in other cases terribly distorted their significance to fit his broader neurological narrative. Lehrer has now admitted as much , "The quotes in question either did not exist, were unintentional misquoations, or represented improper combinations of previously existi...