Author Archives: PlatoHagel

Determinism/Indeterminism

Determinism Determinism (also called antiserendipity) is the philosophical proposition that every event, including human cognition and behavior, decision and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences.[1] With numerous historical debates, many varieties and philosophical positions on … Continue reading

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Richard Feynman

“The adventure of our science of physics is a perpetual attempt to recognize that the different aspects of nature are really different aspects of the same thing” — Richard Feynman Source:Amazon.com Richard Feynman: Cover of The Feynman Lectures on Physics … Continue reading

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Incompatible Arrows

Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.Ralph Waldo Emerson I just happen to visit Cosmic Variance yesterday after not visiting for some time. The timing seemed appropriate to my questions … Continue reading

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Kurt Godel

He turned the lens of mathematics on itself and hit upon his famous “incompleteness theorem” — driving a stake through the heart of formalism By DOUGLAS HOFSTADTER Source:ALFRED EISENSTAEDT/TIME LIFE PICTURES-Kurt Godel at the Institute of Advanced Study See: The … Continue reading

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Time is Like a River

How can a speck of a universe be physically identical to the great expanse we view in the heavens above? (Greene, The Elegant Universe, pages 248-249) As Alice learned, it’s not always clear what’s a looking glass, and what’s a … Continue reading

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Images of Super-Kamiokande events from tscan

The Navier-Stokes equations are also of great interest in a purely mathematical sense. Somewhat surprisingly, given their wide range of practical uses, mathematicians have yet to prove that in three dimensions solutions always exist (existence), or that if they do … Continue reading

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What is AMS?

General objectives:To collect precision cosmic ray data at high energies, including 10^10 protons; to discover or rule out certain particles as explanations for dark matter; to study cosmic ray propagation in the galaxy; to search for exotic particles or spectral … Continue reading

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Numerical Relativity and the Human Experience?

“I’m a Platonist — a follower of Plato — who believes that one didn’t invent these sorts of things, that one discovers them. In a sense, all these mathematical facts are right there waiting to be discovered.”Donald (H. S. M.) … Continue reading

Posted in E8, Ingenuity, Numerical Relativity, Sir Roger Penrose, Thomas Banchoff | Tagged , , , , | 11 Comments

Cosmic censorship hypothesis

The New Bet Whereas Stephen W. Hawking (having lost a previous bet on this subject by not demanding genericity) still firmly believes that naked singularities are an anathema and should be prohibited by the laws of classical physics, And whereas … Continue reading

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Blackhole Information Paradox

What good is a universe without somebody around to look at it?Robert Dicke John Archibald Wheeler (born July 9, 1911) is an eminent American theoretical physicist. One of the later collaborators of Albert Einstein, he tried to achieve Einstein’s vision … Continue reading

Posted in Black Holes, Colour of Gravity, Jacob Bekenstein, Kip Thorne, Sir Roger Penrose, Stephen Hawking | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments