03.13.13
Posted in Science and rationality at 11:39 am by rhanrott
The mind of the bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract.” — Oliver Wendell-Holmes, quoted in the San Diego Union-Tribune
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01.05.13
Posted in Science and rationality at 10:27 am by rhanrott
Our Milky Way galaxy is home to at least 100 billion alien planets, and possibly many more, a new study suggests.
Lead author Jonathan Swift, of Caltech in Pasadena and his colleagues arrived at their estimate after studying a five-planet system called Kepler-32, which lies about 915 light-years from Earth. The five worlds were detected by NASA’s Kepler Space telescope which flags the tiny brightness dips caused when exoplanets cross their star’s face from the instrument’s perspective.
If you are interested in the technical details and how they arrived at a figure of 100 billion read this months issue of The Astrophysical Journal. This is not the place to expand on the matter, only to draw your attention to this probable massive number of planets in our own galaxy alone, many of whom are the right distance away from their suns to have water and possibly some form of life.
From an Epicurean point of view it all points to the littleness of humans and their concerns and the insignificance of our planet. The idea that we are the supreme beings specially created by god is patently absurd. Our lives are frequently nasty, brutish and short and it is time we exercised some humility in the face of emerging knowledge of the universe. Epicurus would enjoin us to stop petty squabbling, make an effort to be tolerant, civilised and considerate of those less fortunate than ourselves. He would tell us to concentrate on our own versions of the Epicurean garden, enjoy life and friendships, try to abandon fear and stop worrying about “success”.
P.S ……..and his words fell upon stony ground!
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11.13.12
Posted in Science and rationality at 7:14 pm by rhanrott
25% of British adults say they have “experienced a ghost” – up from 19% in 2003, and 7% in the 1950s. (The Sunday Times, London).
This is not at all surprising. On a planet where human beings believe in virgin births and finding inscribed tablets, supposedly from God, in a pile on top of a mountain, seeing a ghost is pretty harmless. Indeed, I myself heard a ghost walking up the stairs in the dead of night when I was eight years old (my Dad told me it was the wind affecting our 15 th Century cottage). The capacity to set aside objective reason and espouse the unlikely is a charming side of human nature – until control freaks start maiming, torturing, burning and killing you because you don’t believe in their fairy tales.
Epicureans believe in reason and the evidence of their own eyes. They have fun being entirely rational (joke).
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09.07.12
Posted in Science and rationality, Uncategorized at 7:03 am by rhanrott
Quote:
The modish cause of today’s chattering classes, says Brendan O’Neill, is overpopulation. They thrill to hear how a world of seven billion people is imposing an “unbearable strain on nature’s limited larder”. They rush to the London theatre where an Oxford don has been giving “a lecture dolled up as a drama” on the “perfect storm of resource depletion and pollution” that lies ahead. Some subscribe to the Optimum Population Trust’s website that allows “well-off Westerners” to offset their carbon emissions by helping prevent more births “in less fortunate countries”. But the agonising is misplaced. The “population panic merchants” make just the same mistake as Thomas Malthus, the great 19th century doomsayer, who failed utterly to foresee the huge boost in output brought about by the Industrial Revolution. The Earth’s population has trebled over the past century, yet in the same period the real price of rice, corn and wheat has fallen, thanks to advances in agricultural science. So away with this needless “Malthusian miserabilism”: have faith in human ingenuity. (Brendan O’Neill, The Spectator, Aug 2012, in an article about over-population).
A comment like this from the highly politicized Spectator is to be expected. The agenda of the extreme Right is to lull the peasants into a false sense of security so that the funders and friends of the rich can continue spending and consuming, consuming and spending, gobbling up the world’s resources and exacerbating the gulf between rich and poor unimpeded.
The evidence to man’s contribution to global warming is now so overwhelming that only people people directly funded by oil and similar corporations with deep pockets continue with climate skepticism. But global climate change is only one of the threats to the world. Simple lack of water resources is another serious problem, even in California, but particularly on previously desert fringes and countries like Bangladesh. Even London is threatened . The world situation is totally different to the era of Malthus. Has Mr. O’Neill not heard about the drought in the Midwest, a warning sign that what we previously could rely on is no longer reliable? Every year there are further signs of threats to food supply . There is a raft to similar threats one could add. Ingenuity might help somewhat, but the the practical people, the ingenious people at organizations like the OECD are talking about giant glass self-contained bubbles, like giant covered stadiums, in which life will go on as usual. Sorry, they will be for the privileged. And the rest? Well, the poor don’t vote.
Epicureans are realists.
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07.17.12
Posted in Science and rationality at 2:42 pm by rhanrott
I finished Redondi’s book on Galileo, possibly the worst written book I have ever encountered. So, for those who are interested, I will try to sum it up in accessible English, and preferably in one paragraph. That will relieve you all from having to read it.
The trouble started in Rome with Galileo’s book ” The Assayer”, published in 1623 . The book was a huge success and enlightened people from the Pope downwards hailed Galileo as a genius. However, the Jesuits and the followers of the old thinking were secretly appalled at Galileo’s support of atomism, although this was only a small part of the book. Transubstantiation had been debated for centuries, and the Jesuits thought that the matter had been settled at the Council of Trent. Galileo’s positive references to atomism once again threatened the teaching on the subject of the Eucharist. Were the bread and wine the body and blood of Christ or were simply they an arrangement of atoms, like water or a cabbage? A secret charge of heresy was made against Galileo. At that moment Galileo was protected by Pope and the establishment, and the charge was suppressed. But later the political situation changed with Protestant successes in the Thirty Years War and the relative power shift in the Vatican towards Spain. The Jesuits then struck. But they wanted to avoid further debate about the eucharist at all costs, so they concentrated on Galileo’s views on the matter of the Earth moving round the sun. It was a no-brainer. Every sensible person could see with their own eyes that the sun went round the Earth. It was thus easy to obtain public support for the heresy charge, which finally silenced the Century’s greatest scientist, and could be said to have effectively ended his life. The subtle attack on the eucharist had been beaten back.
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06.14.12
Posted in Science and rationality at 10:30 am by rhanrott
In his Assayer of 1623, Galileo explained his notion of the difference between the qualities, mostly found by touch, that are inherent in bodies (weight, roughness, smoothness, etc.) and those that are in the mind of the observer (taste, color, etc.)–in other words, the difference between what we call primary and secondary qualities. In this discussion he referred to bodies that “continually dissolve into minute particles”, and stated his opinion that “for exciting in us tastes, odors, and sounds there are required in external bodies anything but sizes, shapes, numbers, and slow or fast movements.” An anonymous cleric filed a report with the Inquisition in which he claimed the first citation to show that Galileo was an atomist and the second to be in conflict with the Council of Trent’s pronunciations on the Eucharist. The report did not lead to any action against Galileo. (from Greenblatt’s The Swerve)
The proposition is that the Inquisition needed to squelch the idea that objects that can be smelt or tasted are merely atoms, because this would give the faithful the idea that the Host was not, after all, the body and blood of Jesus but a rather ordinary arrangements of atoms. It was safer, in the campaign against Galileo, to focus on his views about the Earth circling the Sun, for the man in the street could see with his own eyes that that was a preposterous idea – couldn’t you see the Sum going round the Earth every day of your life?
I am about the read Redondi’s “Galileo: Heretic”. This book, very controversial, explores the above idea, that is, that Galileo’s enemies deliberately focused on the one thing that ordinary people could understand and would sympathize with the church.
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03.12.12
Posted in Science and rationality at 11:27 am by rhanrott
Epicurus believed that everything is made up of invisible particles that are in constant motion, clashing with one another, coalescing, falling apart and decaying. These particles , or atoms, are indestructible and immortal. The forms they coalesce into are temporary, but the constituent parts are eternal.
This idea became increasingly accepted from the 17th century onwards. However, Epicurus and the poet Lucretius may have laid the foundations of what became modern science, but their actual scientific knowledge was necessarily rudimentary.
Nowadays scientists refer to the Wave Structure of Matter. This posits that matter in the universe moves in waves in a constant two-way communication of knowledge. Every wave center particle is vibrating and communicating with all other matter in the universe, with continual feedback occurring.
Now I would call this a refinement of what Epicurus and Lucretius were describing, based upon three centuries of modern science. Pretty smart of the old philosopher, I reckon.
Are there any professional scientists out there who can elaborate on this?
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03.07.12
Posted in Science and rationality, Uncategorized at 5:47 pm by rhanrott
There was no single moment of creation, but a gradual evolution, with many false starts and dead ends. Various tools were added to help species survive. Eyes are a good example. But survival is not a foregone conclusion. Many species have been and gone, and maybe we are in self-destruct mode ourselves owing to selfishness, greed and the passion for power. When we are history other species will take our place. The bonobos?
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03.06.12
Posted in Science and rationality at 5:40 pm by rhanrott
Epicurus taught that there was no intelligent design. The particles that make up the universe, you, me, the animals and the trees, have not been put together by an unseen hand, but are made up of myriads of atoms that over eons of time have coalesced or broken apart by accident. That we have stars and planets is the result of chance and experimentation over lengths of time hard to imagine by human beings.
Every year that goes by shows that nature can be explained by science, not the tales invented centuries ago by primitive man. Soon we will have, in all likelihood, an answer to the issue of the Higgs Boson and take another step towards understanding the universe. That is, if we want to understand it!
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06.04.08
Posted in Science and rationality at 4:16 am by Robert Hanrott
Immanuel Kant taught that enlightenment was a process, not a state, namely the process of thinking for oneself, and therefore living autonomously without submitting yourself to group-think and conformity with all those around you.
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another…..Sapere Aude! (dare to know)….. Have courage to use your own understanding, that is the motto of the enlightenment.
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