The Universe has No Obligation
A man said to the universe: 'Sir, I exist:' 'However,' replied the universe, 'The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.'
Memes in the Watson category “/science/phyiscs”
21–40 of 106
Everything is Made of Atoms
Everything is made of atoms. That is the key hypothesis. The most important hypothesis in all of biology, for example, is that everything that animals do, atoms do. In other words, there is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to…
The Three Principal Means of Investigation
We have three principal means: observation of nature, reflection, and experiment. Observation gathers the facts, reflection combines them, experiment verifies the result of the combination. It is essential that the observation of nature be assiduous, that reflection be profound, and that experimentation be exact…
Observation Reconstructs the Real
A scientific observation is always a committed observation; it confirms or denies one's preconceptions; one's first ideas, one's plan of observation; it shows by demonstration; it structures the phenomena; it transcends what is close at hand; it reconstructs the real after having reconstructed its representation.
Man, Universe-Builder and Maker of Over-Beliefs
Every man is a "Universe-Builder"; he is, likewise, a maker of "Over-beliefs". Man's inner and outer necessities, real or imagined, have made him both a Scientist and a Philosopher. Neither Science nor Philosophy alone has been adequate. The material facts of the science of his universe have not satisfied; an…
The Interbeing Perspective
So, if we continually exchange matter with the outside world, if our bodies are completely renewed every few years, and if each of us is a walking colony of trillions of largely symbiotic life-forms, exactly what is this self that we view as separate? You are not an isolated being. Metaphorically, to follow current…
The Connections in the Brain
Two neurons can communicate with each other at a synapse, which is the computational unit in the brain. The typical cortical synapse is less than a micron in diameter (10-6 meter), near the resolution limit of the light microscope. If the economy of the world is a stretch for us to contemplate, thinking about all the…
Survival of the Stable
Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name. It may be a unique collection of atoms, such as the Matterhorn…
A Thought is Like Film Being Exposed Over and Over
A thought is a system, and is inherently conceptual-though often only dimly and confusedly conceptual at the moment of first awareness of the as yet only vaguely describable thinking activity. Because total universe is nonsimultaneous it is not conceptual. Conceptuality is produced by isolation, such as in the…
Does the Universe have a Purpose?
Anyone who expresses a more definitive response to the question is claiming access to knowledge not based on empirical foundations. This remarkably persistent way of thinking, common to most religions and some branches of philosophy, has failed badly in past efforts to understand, and thereby predict the operations of…
Developing Puzzle Games Requires Experimentations
...you need fewer art assets to build a simple puzzle game. This is very good news for small developers, and for those just starting out in gaming. One or two people can build a world-class puzzle game. It would be next to impossible for one or two people to build a world-class third-person action game from scratch…
Laplace's Demon
We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to…
Einstein's Cosmological Constant
Georges Lemaitre was a pudgy, pinkish Belgian Jesuit abbe—a Catholic priest—who also happened to be a skilled astronomer. Lemaitre had noticed that Einstein's general theory of relativity would have implied that the universe was expanding but for a troublesome little mathematical term called the cosmological constant…
Infinite Creativity was Stored in Hydrogen Atoms
Once the matter created by the Big Bang cooled sufficiently, the universe consisted of a vast cloud of hydrogen atom consisting of a single proton surrounded by a single electron—along with a smattering of slightly heavier elements, including helium (with two protons) and lithium (with three). The universe at that…
How Small are Atoms?
Why are atoms so small? ... Many examples have been devised to bring this fact home to an audience, none of them more impressive than the one used by Lord Kelvin: Suppose that you could mark the molecules in a glass of water, then pour the contents of the glass into the ocean and stir the latter thoroughly so as to…
The Universe is Just Right Intellectually
For myself, I like a universe that, includes much that is unknown and, at the same time, much that is knowable. A universe in which everything is known would be static and dull, as boring as the heaven of some weak-minded theologians. A universe that is unknowable is no fit place for a thinking being. The ideal…
Physics VS Metaphysics
In the 1920s, there was a dinner at which the physicist Robert W. Wood was asked to respond to a toast ... "To physics and metaphysics." Now by metaphysics was meant something like philosophy—truths that you could get to just by thinking about them. Wood took a second, glanced about him, and answered along these…
Do What All Good Scientists Do
You all have learned reliance On the sacred teachings of Science, So I hope, through life, you will never decline In spite of philistine Defiance To do what all good scientists do. Experiment. Make it your motto day and night. Experiment. And it will lead you to the light.
Science is Not Built, But Evolves
The advance of science is not comparable to the changes of a city, where old edifices are pitilessly torn down to give place to new, but to the continuous evolution of zoologic types which develop ceaselessly and end by becoming unrecognisable to the common sight, but where an expert eye finds always traces of the…
Universe as a Library with Atoms as Words
The words are strung together, with their own special grammar—the laws of quantum theory—to form sentences, which are molecules. Soon we have books, entire libraries, made out of molecular “sentences.” The universe is like a library in which the words are atoms. Just look at what has been written with these hundred…