Can you explain this? Or the idea behind this? It's just such an interesting statement I'm not sure I understand.
From Wikipedia:
Nothing Makes Sense in Biology Except in the Light of Evolution is a 1973 essay by Evolutionary Biologist (and Russian Orthodox Christian) Theodosius Dobzhansky.
The statement itself was first published by Dobzhansky in a 1964 article in American Zoologist, to assert the importance of organismic biology in response to the challenge of molecular biology.
The essay criticizes anti-evolutionary creationism and espouses theistic evolutionism.
The notion of "the light of evolution" came originally from the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who wrote:
"(Evolution) is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforward bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow — this is what evolution is."
Eric Lerner is involved with the Focus Fusion which makes me more skeptical of it, Lerner's a proponent of a completely off the wall type of cosmology.
Eric Lerner is involved with the Focus Fusion which makes me more skeptical of it, Lerner's a proponent of a completely off the wall type of cosmology.
I had to look him up to see what was so "off the wall" about his views on cosmology. I can see not accepting the big bang model (or whatever the current refinement is calling itself this week), but I can't imagine you'd get very far at all without the 2nd law of thermodynamics. I would be skeptical of any project he's heading up, too.
Ok, so here's just a general discussion topic I though of while reading a Scientific American article. For some reason, SA has decided to send me articles to get me to purchase a subscription again...I think I had a subscription like 6 years ago...anyway...
The article they sent me was on Parallel Universes. Now this is a subject that interests me a lot. Maybe that's because I watched a lot of Sliders in my day. Anyway, i've read a lot of books on the subject and in reading this article I wondered what others in this thread though of any of the multiverse theories?
The idea that there are an infinite amount of universes is one that has always intrigued me. Where every single possibility for every single atom is experienced. That is God right there.
So what theory do you subscribe to? Being able to empirically test these theories is always the challenge, and perhaps one day we can say for certain that we live in a multiverse, but what's your guess?
One of the world's oldest scientific institutions is marking the start of its 350th year by putting 60 of its most memorable research papers online.The Royal Society, founded in London in 1660, is making public manuscripts by figures like Sir Isaac Newton.
Benjamin Franklin's account of his risky kite-flying experiment is also available on the Trailblazing website.
Society president Lord Rees said the papers documented some of the most "thrilling moments" in science history.
The Royal Society grew out of the so-called "Invisible College" of thinkers who began meeting in the mid-1640s to discuss science and philosophy.
Quote:
Among the highlights are a gruesome account of a 17th Century blood transfusion and the article in which Sir Isaac showed that white light is a mixture of other colours.
Also included is Mr Franklin's account of his ill-advised attempt in 1752 to show that lightning was a form of electricity by flying a kite in a storm, and a 1970 paper on black holes co-written by Professor Stephen Hawking.
There is also an entertaining paper about a study of the nine-year-old Mozart in London in 1770 to determine whether he really was a child prodigy.
Suggestions he was in fact a midget adult were dismissed by writer Daines Barrington on the grounds that young Wolfgang was more enthusiastic about playing with his cat than practising his harpsichord.
Ok, so here's just a general discussion topic I though of while reading a Scientific American article. For some reason, SA has decided to send me articles to get me to purchase a subscription again...I think I had a subscription like 6 years ago...anyway...
The article they sent me was on Parallel Universes. Now this is a subject that interests me a lot. Maybe that's because I watched a lot of Sliders in my day. Anyway, i've read a lot of books on the subject and in reading this article I wondered what others in this thread though of any of the multiverse theories?
The idea that there are an infinite amount of universes is one that has always intrigued me. Where every single possibility for every single atom is experienced. That is God right there.
So what theory do you subscribe to? Being able to empirically test these theories is always the challenge, and perhaps one day we can say for certain that we live in a multiverse, but what's your guess?
Ok, so here's just a general discussion topic I though of while reading a Scientific American article. For some reason, SA has decided to send me articles to get me to purchase a subscription again...I think I had a subscription like 6 years ago...anyway...
The article they sent me was on Parallel Universes. Now this is a subject that interests me a lot. Maybe that's because I watched a lot of Sliders in my day. Anyway, i've read a lot of books on the subject and in reading this article I wondered what others in this thread though of any of the multiverse theories?
The idea that there are an infinite amount of universes is one that has always intrigued me. Where every single possibility for every single atom is experienced. That is God right there.
So what theory do you subscribe to? Being able to empirically test these theories is always the challenge, and perhaps one day we can say for certain that we live in a multiverse, but what's your guess?
It's an awfully contrived theory. The problem with string theory and its derivations (besides the dimensional explosion) is that they're impossible to test (so far).
There are some new theories popping up, such as causal dynamical triangulation, loop quantum gravity, and deformed quantum field theory.
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The notion of "the light of evolution" came originally from the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who wrote:
"(Evolution) is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforward bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow — this is what evolution is."
In light of what Teilhard de Chardin actually believed, I'm not sure his compliment to evolution here is much of a compliment. He viewed humanity as some kind of culmination of the evolution of the universe. He thought that all of reality works under some kind of teleological evolutionary directive, and personally, I think he's guilty of one of the most common misinterpretations of evolution -- that it has some kind of goal, or point. Which it does not.
Teilhard de Chardin is an interesting study but he is a far thing from a credible scientist.
ScienceDaily (Nov. 30, 2009) — Which come first, the supermassive black holes that frantically devour matter or the enormous galaxies where they reside? A brand new scenario has emerged from a recent set of outstanding observations of a black hole without a home: black holes may be "building" their own host galaxy. This could be the long-sought missing link to understanding why the masses of black holes are larger in galaxies that contain more stars.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has made history and become most powerful particle accelerator on the planet.
In the early hours of Monday morning, the LHC accelerated protons to a record-breaking 1.18 TeV (tera-electronvolts). The previous record sat at 0.98 TeV and was achieved by Fermilab's Tevatron in Illinois back in 2001.A "tera-electronvolt" (or a million million electronvolts) is a unit of kinetic energy; as the velocity of protons are pushed to higher (relativistic) speeds, their kinetic energy increases. Therefore, the LHC has also broken the land speed record for accelerator protons.
So pretty.
