As we saw in the first entry of this series, traditionally the idea of theoreticity had been understood as a kind of ‘negative’ concept, for theoretical entities or properties were thought about as those that cannot be observed; hence, ‘theoretical’ was more or less a synonym of ‘ un -observable’. Things started to change around […]
It is not risky at all to assert that fundamental physics has not been in good shape in the last forty years or so, not because of lack of work, talent, conjectures and resources, but because few really big advances (as big as, say, the discovery of thermodynamics, of relativity, of quantum field theory, or […]
Humanity is the unlikely result of 4 billion years of evolution. From self-replicating molecules in Archean seas, to eyeless fish in the Cambrian deep, to mammals scurrying from dinosaurs in the dark, and then, finally, improbably, ourselves – evolution shaped us. Organisms reproduced imperfectly. Mistakes made when copying genes sometimes made them better fit to […]
Witchcraft involves the use of magic or supernatural powers to harm others. In medieval and early modern Europe, where the term originated, those accused of witchcraft were usually women who were believed to have attacked their own community and often to be in communion with evil beings. Witchcraft powers were acquired by inheritance or initiation […]
Contemporary philosophy of science was, at least during its first decades (those of the glorious Vienna Circle), a kingdom of radically empiricist and positivist intellectuals: scientific knowledge had to be obtained and tested mainly through experiment, and everything that could not be robustly grounded on experimental observations was just dangerous speculation and metaphysics. The connections […]
While waiting to board a plane on a recent trip out of town, an airline staff member asked me to momentarily take off my face mask to allow the facial recognition technology to check me in to expedite my boarding process. I was taken aback by the bluntness of the request — I did not […]
For the intellectual history of our century, one of the most important books published in 2021 will probably be David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity , a monumental description of the evolution of the first human societies and of our understanding thereof. The book is conceived as […]
“The last star will slowly cool and fade away. With its passing, the universe will become once more a void, without light or life or meaning.” So warned the physicist Brian Cox in the recent BBC series Universe. The fading of that last star will only be the beginning of an infinitely long, dark epoch […]
For the first few million years of human evolution, technologies changed slowly. Some three million years ago, our ancestors were making chipped stone flakes and crude choppers. Two million years ago, hand-axes. A million years ago, primitive humans sometimes used fire, but with difficulty. Then, 500,000 years ago, technological change accelerated, as spearpoints, firemaking, axes […]
In the mid-1990s, there was research going on at Stanford University that would change the way we think about computers. The Media Equation experiments were simple: participants were asked to interact with a computer that acted socially for a few minutes after which, they were asked to give feedback about the interaction. Participants would provide […]