We started this series discussing the basic ingredients of the Universe: events, spacetime, causality. In the last chapter , we introduced massive objects (and thus, matter), which appear as a generalization of the so-called photon box. As it moves, any object traces a path. Physicists call it worldline . We established that a massive object […]
In the previous chapter of this series, we went over the subjective, relative separation of the network of events known as Spacetime into space and time. The speed of light played a major role in the discussion. In particular, we divided Spacetime into three regions (with respect to a particular event) defined by the existence […]
On April 10 th 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope project released the first image ever of a black hole. Five simultaneous press conferences, in Brussels, Taipei, Santiago de Chile, Tokyo and Washington were broadcast live, staging a global media event for astrophysics. Besides the inevitable memes in the so-called social media, more serious press outlets […]
The division of past and future In Part 1 of this series, we presented the empirical fact that under extreme circumstances, a certain observer’s past can be in another observer’s future. To explain this, we introduced the network of cause and consequence relations as the fixed background structure of reality. This network constitutes Spacetime. Causality […]
Observations vs intuitions Einstein’s Theory of Relativity introduced us to the concept of Spacetime, as a unified entity. This stands in contrast with the intuition that we develop since birth, which leads to naturally separate space and time. Human intuition is a way to understand how the world works, our brain processes our daily experiences […]
As I mentioned in passing in my last entry , many, if not most, of the oldest stories about Christian martyrs and saints are nothing but legendary fabrications, something that scholars knew perfectly well since at least the time of the Enlightenment, when scientific criteria of historiographic research started to be employed by ecclesiastical historians […]
One book that has caused much stir in the past months is Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World . I confess I approached the book with some skepticism, for ‘the classical world’, I thought, was already considerably ‘destroyed’ by the time Christianism became the official, and soon the only […]
In the two previous entries (1, 2) of this series I described the different diagnoses that Marina Garcés and Steven Pinker make of humanity’s current predicament, without concealing my sympathies for the latter’s: with up and downs, with unequal division of the benefits, without bringing us a literal paradise, with lots of problems still to […]
We usually think of nature as existing completely independently of us and possessing a definite reality and behaviour even when we are not observing it. For instance, you assume that the world outside of the place where you are now sitting still exists pretty much as it was when you last observed it. Certainly this […]
Are we in the best of the times, as Steven Pinker asserts? Or do we live in a ‘posthumous’ society, to say it with the favourite image of Marina Garcés? As I told in the previous entry, it is not easy to make a direct comparison between the ideas of both authors, because they follow […]