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A brief note and a little from Deutsch

I’m short on time today and working on a guest blog which I hope to be able to provide a link to shortly. But I did begin exploring a website that has short video interviews with some of my favorite thinkers. I found among a list of participants on the website Closer To Truth, Gregory […]

The light that Einstein sees

I read another New Scientist article today. The article was written by Brian Greene. While it didn’t give me a lot of new information, it made an interesting point about what it means (and when is it particularly effective) to take our mathematics seriously. He talked about Einstein’s insight regarding the speed of light. It […]

Avalanches, structure, and expectations

New Scientist did an article in their February 6 issue called Mind Maths: Five laws that rule the brain.

As is usually the case, the article’s allure is the suggestion that new research may hold the promise of capturing the brain’s complexity in just a few mathematical models. And, as is usually the case, […]

Are we finding the mathematical structure of reality?

I’m intrigued by Max Tegmark’s conviction that the universe is, itself, a mathematical structure. He presented his ideas, again, on February 15 at the recent annual meeting of AAAS, in a symposium called Is Beauty Truth? He said that he has just completed a book on the same topic. I listened to the entire session […]

Networks: The brain, the internet, and the cosmos

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 […]

Can we see where math begins and science ends?

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 […]

Time, mathematics and Plato’s cave

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, from metaphysics to mathematics to us

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’s Insight? Looking forward and back

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 […]

Mathematics and the Higgs

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 […]