I was completely captivated by something David Deutsch said in a TED talk in 2005. This particular observation was not the theme of his talk. But I found the language he chose to describe the working model of the universe (that physics and mathematics have provided) to be loaded with implications about human knowledge, even […]
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Galileo is often called the father of modern science because of an insight he had about the relationship between mathematics, and what we are able to see in our world. Two of John Horgan’s recent blog posts (and the writing to which they refer) nicely demonstrate what I think is a remarkable oversight in discussions […] Sean Carroll, Theoretical Physicist at the California Institute of Technology has recently published a new book. Entitled The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Higgs Boson Leads us to the Edge of a New World it discusses the importance of the Higgs boson as well as the significance of the extraordinary work […] Julian Barbour is a theoretical physicist with a clear interest in tackling foundational issues and the errors of judgment that can lead physics theories astray. One of these candidates for a mistaken judgment is time itself, and in 1999 Barbour authored the book The End of Time published by the Oxford University Press. He wrote […] Leibniz disassociated ‘substance’ from ‘material’ and reasoned that the world was not fundamentally built from material. His is not simple or familiar reasoning but it was clear to Leibniz that for a substance to be real, it had to be indivisible and since matter was infinitely divisible, the true nature of reality could not be […] In general, I tend to resist talking about the thing that everyone is talking about, but I find reason to make an exception today. I do want to say something about yesterday’s announcement from physicists at the LHC that they saw the Higgs particle. Frank Wilczek describes the significance of this observation (particularly nicely) in […] Not long ago I wrote about the work of Bob Coecke, an Oxford University physicist, who is pioneering an application of category theory to quantum mechanics. In that post I referred to the work he is also doing with language, using the same kind of graphic structures. I drew attention to the fact that category […] Three things I read today converged in a way I had not anticipated and they all had something to do with truth. First, there was the announcement of the Foundational Questions Institute’s 4th essay contest. Entrants are invited to address this topic: Which of Our Basic Physical Assumptions Are Wrong? Scientific American is a cosponsor […] The extent to which an idea in mathematics creates an idea in science is largely underappreciated. It is common to think of mathematics as the tool that one needs to describe the reality explored by physics, as if the mathematics is secondary, or a purely linguistic consideration. But it should be clear that this is […] Bob Coecke has received a grant of over $111,000 from the Foundational Questions Institute to continue his work on a graphical language to describe quantum mechanical processes. The work is based on category theory, a branch of mathematics that focuses less on the mathematical objects themselves, and more on the maps that transform them. The […] |
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