Thoughts and not beliefs, with the occasional wild speculation
A small respite from the news. A breath of tranquillity with science and philosophy… Why is there something rather than nothing? We have been barking up the wrong tree asking this question, which Leibniz calls the PEQ – the Primordial Existential Question. As Bede Rundle says, the right question is why would there be nothing …
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The following are off-the-shelf, ready-to-go replies to the vexations of deniers, liars and fools. Sufficiently concise as to fill a coffee break or banter around the water cooler, they could, possibly, have an effect on the recipient. Climate change denial First, try reason. Through ample scientific evidence climate change is real and human driven, you …
Continue reading “Denial, Delusion and the Village Idiot[1],”
Though Science makes mistakes, it never cheats or fails whilst making them. This is probably what Max Plank intended when he said that science is always truthful. It does not claim to be error free, but it can claim to be truthfully in search of correct answers whilst getting some wrong. It has a valid …
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Britain is currently going through one of its worst national economic crises ever, just after the supposedly empowering move of Brexit. In amongst soundbites on freedom from the tyranny of the EU and a magical NHS (represented by a magic all bus) the slogan that reportedly clinched Brexit was as we all by now know …
Continue reading “Take Back Control: Nationalise Public Utilities and Services”
If asked to decide on the matter, Erwin Schrödinger would very likely have answered that the cat was “going both up and down the stairs, until you looked at it.”
Climate change can be viewed as a handy, planetary scale, natural experiment whose outcome will cast new light on the politics of left and right. In amongst the gathering climate disaster and impending catastrophe of unchecked climate change there is an uncounted blessing. Small comfort though it is, we might finally have a test that …
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Climate change deniers argue that if anthropogenic global heating is real, there is little to worry about because geoengineering will fix it. The best response to this is to pose the counterfactual, and ask whether a cold planet could be made hotter, and if so, what would be the best mechanism for achieving that? Raise …
The field of Senescence research is alive, well and growing fast. In a nutshell it seeks to understand and counter age-related decline by tackling the processes of aging at the cellular level. Though the science is still someway off from stopping and eventually reversing age-related decline and the many diseases that accompany it, that day …
Continue reading “Major Hair Loss and General Decline: the Battle Against Aging”
Only entropy comes easy – Anton Chekov In a quaint BBC Radio 4 short, comedian Robin Ince (co-presenter Infinite Monkey Cage) provides an entertaining insight into Murphy’s Law. After a review of Murphy’s Law (and a brief mention of Sod and his law), Ince tells of an equation that purportedly actually computes the probability of …
Continue reading “Murphy’s Law, Entropy, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics”