12 DEC 2017 by ideonexus
Feminist Portrayal in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Writing
All day the memory of this interview haunted him. He felt that he had come very badly out of it. She had showed herself to be his superior on his own pet subject. She had been courteous while he had been rude, self-possessed when he had been angry. And then, above all, there was her presence, her monstrous intrusion to rankle in his mind. A woman doctor had been an abstract thing before, repugnant but distant. Now she was there in actual practice, with a brass plate up just like his own, comp...30 JUL 2013 by ideonexus
Scientists Read the Book of Nature
IN IMAGINATION there exists the perfect mystery story.
Such a story presents all the essential clues, and com-
pels us to form our own theory of the case. If we
follow the plot carefully, we arrive at the complete
solution for ourselves just before the author's disclosure
at the end of the book. The solution itself, contrary to
those of inferior mysteries, does not disappoint us; more-
over, it appears at the very moment we expect it.
Can we liken the reader of such a book to the sci...But unlike a detective novel, they can't flip to the last page and they may not even find an answer.
29 MAR 2013 by ideonexus
Belief VS Evidence
Our own view of what is and is not
possible in reality affects how we
perceive identical evidence. But that view
shifts with time, and thus, evidence that
might at one point seem meaningless can
come to hold a great deal of meaning.
Think of how many ideas seemed
outlandish when first put forward, seemed
so impossible that they couldn’t be true:
the earth being round; the earth going
around the sun; the universe being made
up almost entirely of something that we
can’t see, dark matter and...Many great minds have been taken in by supernatural ideas.
20 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
The Boundary of Life
The harder we look at the border between life and non-life, the
more elusive does the distinction become. Life, the animate, was supposed to have some sort of
vibrant, throbbing quality, some vital essence - made to sound yet more mysterious when dropped
into French: elan vital. Life, it seemed, was made of a special living substance, a witch's brew
called 'protoplasm'. Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger, a fictional character even more
preposterous than Sherlock Holmes, discovered that the ...Different attempts to define it over the years.