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Science, God, Truth, Imagination and Hawking

The hoopla about Hawking’s new book made it frustratingly clear that there’s a real impasse in the centuries-old debate over whether science, and its intrinsic rationality, can or should definitively dispute religious ideas. The impasse is, I believe, a consequence of our not seeing the elephant in the room, namely ourselves. The debate proceeds, as […]

Michelangelo and the Brain

I just read through a series of blogs generated by an article in the journal Neurosurgery, in which two neurosurgery researchers at Johns Hopkins University argue that an anatomically accurate image of the human brain is hidden in God’s neck in one of Michelangelo’s frescos. I was struck by how little the reports and blogs […]

Naming Infinity by Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor

This may not be a timely commentary, but I only recently read the book Naming Infinity (Harvard University Press 2009). It was a gift from my husband who rightly expected that I would be interested in a book purported to be about how mathematicians were supported through a conceptual crisis by the bold work of […]