I saw an odd question on Quora recently. I suspect it was asked by someone with a weak command of English language idioms, and I answered it accordingly. But it leads to thought about a fascinating incident in the history of physics, the Bohr-Einstein correspondence over quantum physics. The question was as follows: What's the meaning of "only to have Bohr" here? "Einstein would come up with a scenario in an attempt to defeat the quantum theory, only to have Bohr present an argument consistent with quantum theory that overcame it"? I answered as follows. If the idiom is unfamiliar to you, it is because of the conditional wording of the sentence. “A would do X, only to have B do Y.” One could rework it this way, “Einstein repeatedly came up with scenarios in an attempt to defeat the quantum theory, and in each case Bohr presented an argument consistent with quantum theory that overcame it.” It was Bohr, by the way, who got the publication cre...
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Dear Readers: Enjoyable as my time spent here is, I do have to make a cutback, at least through the end of 2020. So this is your notice that I will only be posting twice a week, not the four that has been my custom. Starting immediately. The two posts will come up on each Thursday and each Sunday. All I wish to say after THAT is something I should have said back in June. A journalist who died because she dared probe the crookedness of Malta's ruling received a tribute in June of this year, about three years after her demise. https://www.fraud-magazine.com/cover-article.aspx?id=4295010544 Her name was Daphne Caruana Galizia. I believe I have told her story before. She was the author of the influential blog Running Commentary and a regular columnist in The Sunday Times of Malta. She met her demise on October 16, 2017, when someone detonated a car bomb within her vehicle. This year, her son, Matthew, accepted on her behalf an award from the Association of Certi...
More than a year ago, someone asked the following question on Quora: "Is there any way to reconcile Plato and Aristotle? I like them both. How strong is the schism between them?" There is much with which I could quarrel in the framing of the question, aside from vagueness. The personal-sounding note, as if the question had gone to school with them both and retained some fondness for their memory. No ... he didn't. They are the collective names given to sets of writings and the systems of ideas we think we find therein. We can understand and appreciate them. The word "like" sounds wrong. "How strong is the schism?" Again, the wording is off. But this is the Trump era, and the predicate "strong" is ubiquitous. My quibbles notwithstanding, two Quorans offered answers to this question at the time. I was one of them. But I won't quote my own answer today. I'll give you a good chunk of the other one, which frankly is...
A number of common fallacies in reasoning have a common property. They help us deny to ourselves the idea that we are responsible for harm to others. For example, there is a logically fallacious bias in favor of inaction. "I didn't do anything" seems to most of us, on some level, to imply "I did nothing wrong" and this seems to imply "I'm not in the wrong." There is also a fallacious bias in favor of non-contact. We tend to think the "trigger man" more responsible for a murderer than whoever hired him. The employer presumably was somewhere far away, which is exculpatory in some sense. Further, that is key to an explanation for the prevalence of these fallacies offered by evolutionary psychologists. Human beings evolved to live in small groups. There was a lot of potential for violence between the groups, but selection pressures must have strongly favored the gene lines of those in groups with a lot of cohesion. Groups where confo...
The philosopher Brian Leiter has listed the following as the characteristics of "cancel culture,: the cultural impetus for shutting down and punishing dissent. I will reproduce what he has written with only very minor re-writes. If you want the original, I'll leave the link to the source below. 1. Punitiveness. Are people denouncing you to an employer or social connections? Are they blacklisting you from jobs and social opportunities and jeopardizing your livelihood, directly and indirectly? 2. Deplatforming. Are campaigns trying to prevent you from publishing a work expounding the forbidden ideas? giving speeches? attending meetings? Are they claiming that merely allowing you such a platform is a form of "violence" against them? 3. Organization. Does this criticism seem to be organized and targeted? Are the organizers recruting others to pile on? Are people hunting through your work and scouting your social media for further ammunition? 4. Secondary boy...
I am told that physicists, astronomers, and cosmologists dream about is the placement of a radio telescope on the far side of the moon. Putting it on the dark side would of course ensure that the planet earth would not be in its way. What is more important, the moon has no atmosphere, so the clarity of radio 'view' the human race would get of distant parts of the cosmos would be ... well, to use a technical phrase, an ass-kicking thrill. And though a radio telescope would be all that, ambitious scientists have additional related ideas. For example, there is a proposal to put a gravitational wave interferometer in the moon. Obvious question ... a whaaaaat? Interferometry is a set of techniques by which waves are made to interfere with one another, creating patterns that convey information. Usually this sort of measurement involves electromagnetic waves. But the study of gravitational waves is a new thing. The first direct observation of gravity waves was recorded in...
Derek Parfit's book, ON WHAT MATTERS, published in two volumes in 2011, acquired a third volume from his posthumous writings, in 2017 (he died on the very first day of that year). The book was much anticipated, generating both discussion groups and an academic conference in advance of its 2011 publication. Parfit's thesis, in short, is that there are three distinct moral theories and that, if each is pursued rigorously, it ends up in concord with the other two. Kantian deontology, utilitarianism, and contractualism are all different paths on different slopes of the same mountain. They lead to the same behavior: that is, the paths come together at the summit. That's a bold claim. Decoded (in accord with pragmatism) it means that the differences turn out to be merely conceptual not practical. A right-thinking Kantian and a right-thinking proponent of either of the other views will do the same thing at the notorious trolley switch. Today I will merely say a few wor...