I've updated a few of my sideblogs. I'll hopefully do more work tonight. Most of the blog additions were down in the science section. I don't know how many people who read my blog care about my science musings. But my background is actually physics, not philosophy, so you'll have to excuse it. One link I want to bring your attention to is about the future of physics. It is a list by David Gross (winner of last year's Nobel Prize) on the top 25 big questions left in physics. It's not technical, so all you readers who never took physics in college might still find it interesting.
A few of the more interesting problems I noted were the ever big question about the origin of the universe, the nature of dark matter, the nature of dark energy, and the origins of structure in the universe. It's interesting that despite a lot of progress the last 50 years, in a lot of the real big questions we've made precious little progress. That's not surprising considering how difficult the questions are. Every few years there's some "excitement" in physics, but it never really leads to a resolution of the problems.
great link!
i had always thought that "time and space: emergent or fundamental?" had been pretty well decided on the side of emergent, since kant i guess. or does emergent mean something other than what i think it does?
Interesting question. Actually it's definitely gone the other way. The blog Cabi's Glasses actually had a rather interesting recent post on the topic. Leibniz (who he doesn't mention) tried to have a fully relational (emergent) system. Time wasn't emergent, but space was. You had with Leibniz and infinite number of immaterial "souls" called monads. The relations between them gave the appearance of space. Mach, while more a positivist than a classic metaphysician, tried to provide a fully relative view of mechanics in opposition to Newton who had a real time and a real space in which mechanics took place. Mach didn't succeed. (The old bugger in the system is always acceleration which breaks attempts at a relational model) Einstein really was trying for something similar. He got closer, but you still end up with space-time being a substance. Leibniz' view still is discussed a lot in modern theories of quantum theory. But I don't think any of them go as far as Leibniz wished.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
and Theology
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Blogged by Clark Goble