24 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Science Communication: Definitions VS Metaphors
A hundred years ago, Charles Darwin could write books discussing the central problems of biology in language which was scientifically precise and still accessible to the general public. In those days the subject matter of biology was plants and animals. The language of Darwin was intelligible to experts and non-experts alike. One did not need a degree in {55} botany to understand the difference between a fern and a flower. Darwin could assume that his readers were familiar with the world of...Folksonomies: science communicatoin
Folksonomies: science communicatoin
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notes26 MAR 2013 by ideonexus
Mathematics Lies Outside Ourselves
I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our
function is to discover or observe it, and that the theorems which we
prove, and which we describe grandiloquently as our "creations," are
simply the notes of our observations.
* * *
Let us suppose that I am giving a lecture on some system of
geometry, such as the ordinary Euclidean geometry, and that I draw figures
on the blackboard to stimulate the imagination of my audience, rough
drawings of straight lines or ... 1 notes
notesWhen teaching mathematics, it does not matter how nice the drawings or the teaching space, the ideas are what's important and they are independent of the teaching method.
18 JAN 2013 by ideonexus
Newton Was "Last of the Magicians"
Newton provides an example of how the idea of "science" had not yet fully emerged as something separate from religion in early Enlightenment thinking. In fact, during the seventeenth century, the word "scientist" was not commonly used to describe experimenters at all; they were called natural philosophers"^^ in an extension of the Puritan idea of the study of the Book of Nature. Science had also not fully emerged as a separate concept, but was sometimes thought of as a method or style of stud... 1 notes
notesThere was a great deal of belief in magic in Newton's writings.
23 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Why is Scientific Illiteracy Considered Acceptable?
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you...
1 When failing to read Shakespeare is considered unacceptable?
08 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
The Cartesian Duality Broke Philosophy
As modern physics started with the Newtonian revolution, so modern philosophy starts with what one might call the Cartesian Catastrophe. The catastrophe consisted in the splitting up of the world into the realms of matter and mind, and the identification of 'mind' with conscious thinking. The result of this identification was the shallow rationalism of l' esprit Cartesien, and an impoverishment of psychology which it took three centuries to remedy even in part. And set back cognitive science.
06 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
The Universe is Made Up of Two Kinds of Waves
The tendency of modern physics is to resolve the whole material universe into waves, and nothing but waves. These waves are of two kinds: bottled-up waves, which we call matter, and unbottled waves, which we call radiation or light. If annihilation of matter occurs, the process is merely that of unbottling imprisoned wave-energy and setting it free to travel through space. These concepts reduce the whole universe to a world of light, potential or existent, so that the whole story of its creat...
3 Bottled up waves in matter and the roaming waves of radiation.
26 APR 2012 by ideonexus
The Frightening Discovery of the Void in the Atom
When I hear to-day protests against the Bolshevism of modern science and regrets for the old-established order, I am inclined to think that Rutherford, not Einstein, is the real villain of the piece. When we compare the universe as it is now supposed to be with the universe as we had ordinarily preconceived it, the most arresting change is not the rearrangement of space and time by Einstein but the dissolution of all that we regard as most solid into tiny specks floating in void. That gives a...More frightening than the vastness of space.
12 DEC 2011 by ideonexus
QED Explained
Feynman's graphical method provides a way of visualizing each term in the sum over histories. Those pictures, called Feynman diagrams, are one of the most important tools of modern physics. In QED the sum over all possible histories can be represented as a sum over Feynman diagrams like those below, which represent some of the ways it is possible for two electrons to scatter off each other through the electromagnetic force. In these diagrams the solid lines represent the electrons and the wav... 1 notes
notesA good description of the Feynman Diagrams from QED and how the infinite possibilities must be accounted for in mathematics dealing with them.
