The British army fought a war against the IRA, as well as Loyalist terrorist groups like the UVF and the UDA, which lasted for three decades. If the UK government had even considered using the brutal and indiscriminanent methods the IDF are currently undertaking against the civilian population...
Yes, physics works, especially when it tells us something meaningful about nature. But it doesn’t really tell us much about human nature, and nothing at all about how we should live.
Physics is not the only thing which works btw. So does faith, as anyone who has relied upon it to see them...
I remember watching the end of communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall on television. It was quite a surreal time, because my generation had grown up thinking that Europe would be divided into East and West for all of our lives. With hindsight, the collapse of the Soviet Union meant liberation...
Well yes, it would be egotistical to think the purpose of the universe were us; but I don’t think that at all. I think we’re all part of something far greater than ourselves, and that there is an underlying purpose behind the majesty that surrounds us, flows through us, and inspires us to wonder...
It appears most unreasonable to me, to deny the astronomical improbability of our universe even allowing galaxies to develop, never mind sentient apes evolving on a planet somewhere in one of those galaxies. Had the critical density of the universe at the time of the Big Bang deviated by a...
The deck of card analogy only works here, if every micro-state (in this case, every random arrangement of cards) results in a nearly equivalent macro-state (ie. a shuffled deck). But we are not talking about any shuffled deck; the universe we observe, is one in which the cards are precisely...
Didn’t String Theory and Loop Quantum Gravity get lost in the weeds years ago? I’m pretty sure many of the scientists working in these fields have begun to intuit that they’re chasing ghosts…
Yes of course intuitive insights should be tested wherever possible, as should all speculative...
Robert Kuhn's PBS and Youtube channels are dedicated to pushing the boundaries of pure reason, to see how far it can take us in pursuit of truth. I've watched several episodes in which Kuhn respectfully interrogates philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, psychiatrists, theologians etc. The...
Yeah, this I think is one reason why, despite being unfalsifiable, various Multiverse and Many Worlds theories are taken seriously in scientific circles: Given unlimited events, statistical near-irrelevencies become inevitabilities. And given an infinite number of universes, a universe as...
There was a radio DJ in England called Tony Blackburn, who had a lot of fun with the song Shagging by Ceelo Green. I guess you know what shagging means in England? Was a great tune btw
Were they even slightly different, I likely wouldn’t be here at all.
“Why did the universe start out with so nearly the critical rate of expansion that separates models that re collapse from those that go on expanding forever, so that even now, fourteen thousand million years later, it is still...
Obviously as an antidote to destructive behaviour, religion has frequently been far from effective. No argument from me there.
My point was that the fundamental values on which most religions are founded, albeit values from which their adherents frequently stray, are generally benign...
Two basic laws which govern the behaviour of mass and energy in space and time, perhaps. Not sure you can account for all of existence, without accounting for the great mystery which is time.
But if all the delicately weighted complexity we see around us truly emerges from deep simplicity...