“Those who regard philosophy as a ‘soft’ and unscientific discipline, in contrast to the ‘hard’ and scientific fields of mathematics and physics, have accepted a Big Lie. The ideas of mathematicians and physicists can be no more objective or certain than the philosophic ideas on which they depend. Philosophy is the discipline that tells us…
The lack of news reports in recent months has been due to a very heavy workload in preparing papers, a course and presentations. This work continues with the upcoming Natural Philosophy Alliance’s 18th annual conference at the University of Maryland, July 6-9, where I will give two papers including the invited John Chappell Memorial Lecture.…
What can be said about the Deep Impact spacecraft’s imminent second rendezvous with a comet? From NASA websites comes the following information: The Deep Impact spacecraft is about to rendezvous with another comet. It will be the fifth comet to be observed in a close flyby by a spacecraft. The mission is called by the…
“We stand on the verge of a vast cosmical discovery such as nothing hitherto imagined can compare with.” —Sir John Herschel in 1850, upon the discovery of a link between magnetic storms on Earth and sunspots, to Michael Faraday, the vaunted experimentalist who was investigating the links between electricity and magnetism. Incredibly, one hundred and…
“In the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don’t know any better. That’s not a good future…
“Is it likely that any astonishing new developments are lying in wait for us? Is it possible that the cosmology of 500 years hence will extend as far beyond our present beliefs as our cosmology goes beyond that of Newton?” —Fred Hoyle, The Nature of the Universe NASA’s IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer) spacecraft has made…
“Some people in each successive generation believe that theirs is the one that has at last seen everything clearly, that their insights point to the truth, the final answer. Yet scientific discovery marches on and today’s truth will become tomorrow’s anecdotes.” —Gerrit L. Verschuur, Interstellar Matters Since my last report I have been in England…
We cannot see what is not on our mental ‘map.’ Almost the entire visible universe is in the form of highly-conductive plasma but electrical discharge in plasma is nowhere on the map. The red supergiant star Betelgeuse, the bright reddish star in the constellation Orion, has steadily shrunk over the past 15 years, according to…
“Nothing comes from nothing. Nothing ever could.” —from The Sound of Music. It seems the toughest thing for scientists to grasp—that a cherished paradigm like the big bang can be wrong. The latest crisis was reported in Physorg.com on May 5th: “Study plunges standard Theory of Cosmology into Crisis.” The study of dwarf companion galaxies of the…
We are told that gravity rules the cosmos. The story of the big bang, the origin of galaxies and stars, and our ultimate fate are founded on this belief. But the March 2009 Astronomy magazine carries the surprising headline, “Is there something we don’t know about gravity?” The question should be, “why do we think…