Aug 7, 2017 If currently fashionable theories are Ultimate Truth (or at least smart ideas) and myth was stupid superstition, where is the dividing line? Was Ptolemy stupid and Newton smart? But General Relativity is not just an improved version of Newton’s theory, it’s different: Einstein’s stretchable space-time is not…
Jun 28, 2017 Christiaan Eijkman discovered that a bacterium in polished rice caused beriberi and an anti-toxin in the coating cured it. Eijkman verified his theory with a massive study of 280,000 people. He ruled out the possibility of other causal factors–sanitation, hygiene, and so on. And he cured…
May 2, 2017 Don’t stop looking. The Finder’s Fallacy is the downside of the “Eureka!” of discovery. Searching for a needle of explanation in the haystack of data is exhausting, frustrating, often disappointing. Finally to have found a needle, a theory that “works”, is cause for celebration. But the…
Apr 26, 2017 Have you ever seen a carpenter try to cut a 2×4 with a hammer? Probably not. Carpenters usually carry a saw as well as a hammer in their toolboxes, and they know to use the proper tool for the task at hand. If they didn’t have…
Apr 3, 2017 We peer at the universe through keyholes. We sense half a dozen colors, variations of rough and smooth, flavors that are sometimes familiar, a few octaves of pressure oscillations in air. What are we missing? The colors of microwaves and x-rays, the sounds of electric currents,…
Mar 6, 2017 When Einstein introduced the theory of relativity in 1905, astronomers thought the universe consisted of only the Milky Way. What we think of today as galaxies were thought of then as tiny clouds within the Milky Way. It was 20 years later that Hubble showed they were…
Feb 8, 2017 A slide rule hangs on the wall of my office, a dual-base vector hyperbolic log-log slide rule. A mere 40 years ago it was a state-of-the-art calculating machine. It reminds me that technology progresses not only by incremental improvements but by extinction and speciation: My aluminum slip-stick…
Jan 9, 2017 Changing your beliefs feels like dying. Whether it’s religion, politics, or science, letting go of the complex of ideas that provides an orderly explanation for your life and your experiences seems like falling into chaos and oblivion. It seems suicidal even to loosen your grip on…
Nov 30, 2016 Currently accepted theories have evolved a long way toward catastrophics from their ancestry in uniformism. Assumptions of actualism and gradualism-that present-day processes acting over long times could explain the changing morphology of rocks and species-have been displaced. Impacts from space have broken the continuously gradual action…
Nov 9, 2016 Electricians know the electric force is 39 orders of magnitude stronger than gravity, and the graviticians know the gravitational force is 40 orders of magnitude stronger than electricity. This misses the point. On the purely mathematical level, you can plug numbers into the equations to get…
