This blog is motivated in part by my conviction that life itself is far more mysterious than we are yet able to ponder. And it is mathematics that has often redirected my attention back to that mystery as its wealth of conceptual possibilities shows me more of what we don’t understand. David Deutsch very nicely […]
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In another blogging heads interview (and in a related blog), John Horgan explores with David Rothenberg the significance of beauty in scientific thinking. Rothenberg’s new book Survival of the Beautiful, is the subject of much of their discussion. While the conversation centers on questions of beauty (how biology does or does not take it into […] As I talked about in a recent post, string theories, and the multiverse models they imply, have been widely criticized for their lack of testability. Some physicists argue that the problem is that the theory is more mathematics than it is physics. Is the distinction becoming fuzzier? And why isn’t that discussed? Why not bring […] I ventured down a series of paths today, no doubt related, but with no quick and easy way to tie them together. So I decided to invite you to look with me and let your mind play. I started with a couple of talks at a recent at a recent Foundational Questions Institute conference on […] I came across an article on vision at Physicsworld.com that is concerned chiefly with how digital imaging technology may and may not be able to provide a fix for damaged retinas. While digital cameras can better mimic the human eye, the gaze of the camera, unlike the eye, is static and uniform. As sensors in […] A recent Radiolab episode brought some interesting things together by exploring loops, repetitions, and self-referencing phenomena. Among other things, they told the story of Melanie Thernstrom (The Pain Chronicles) who, in trying to manage her pain, investigated the self-inflicted pain of religious rites. She later did some work with neuroscientist Sean Mackey. Mackey had seen […] In a recent post on the Scientific American blog network, George Musser reported on talks given by neuroscientists at a conference, organized by the Foundational Questions Institute on how the brain works to construct our sense of past, present and future. Musser’s post made some observations that were familiar to me – like the idea […] I have often said that I get particular pleasure from mathematics that defies common sense expectations. A simple example would be the observation that two things can be the same size even though one of them is contained in the other – like the set of natural numbers and the set of positive even integers. […] A number of websites have reported on a recent study, that correlated innate number sense with mathematical ability. A concise report of the study can be found in the Johns Hopkins University Gazette, published by the institution where the study was done. The study’s results confirm a correlation between the strength of ones number sense […] I recently listened to a radiolab podcast (from this past November!) that featured two authors: Steven Johnson (author of Where Good Ideas Come From) and Kevin Kelly (author of What Technology Wants). The thrust of the argument, that both authors defended, was that the things we make (from tools to gadgets to computers) are an […] |
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