Built on Facts

Let there be pi?
Mark Chu-Carroll at Good Math, Bad Math has an interesting post taking down a guy who thinks messages from God are encoded into pi.
Stare at any number, and set of numbers, or any numeric coding of a text. If you try hard enough and long enough, then you will find some interesting [...]

[Read more →]

Is the universe made of math? That’s a question going around internet science-fan circles of late, and it’s a pretty difficult question. Roughly, a cosmologist named Max Tegmark believes in a very concrete form of mathematical Platonism - the idea that math is “real” in some sense. Now I and many other [...]

[Read more →]

On this date in history was one of the earliest known dates in history.
There’s lots of things we can date with certainty. In the last few hundred years most dates can be pegged pretty accurately. December 7, 1941 was the date of the Pearl Harbor attack. Nicholas I of Russia was born [...]

[Read more →]

Tom Levenson has a guest post at Cosmic Variance that I think illustrates a fundamental flaw in some of the modern ideas about neuroscience. Like some physicists who embrace Many Worlds or other “interpretation” ideas without empirical evidence, many neurosciencists have done essentially the same thing in their own discipline.
The first part of Levenson’s [...]

[Read more →]

Snap! The light has gone on in your head, and you have a brilliant and revolutionary new theory of physics. But you’re not a professional physicist, you’re just an amateur who may or may not have any physics training at all. How will you get your ideas recognized?
Here’s the problem. There’s thousands [...]

[Read more →]

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
- Isaac Newton
The moon orbits the earth, held precisely by a delicate balance between gravity and inertia. A piece of lint clings to a shirt, held tightly by a delicate balance between electric charges and fields. Laughter [...]

[Read more →]

Yesterday was the Idaho Republican primary. As far as primaries go it wasn’t very meaningful, since the presumptive nominee has already almost certainly wrapped things up. The Democratic nomination is not quite so certain, but we’re getting to the point where there’s realistically not much doubt remaining as to the outcome.
How can we [...]

[Read more →]

There’s a very interesting column in the New York Times that’s caused a lot of discussion in various corners of the internet. That tends to happen often these days when science and theology intersect. The column is The Neural Buddhists, and its thesis is that since our minds are a result of our [...]

[Read more →]