Category: Science
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In 2023, Jason Arday was appointed a professor of sociology of education at Cambridge, attracting media attention as the youngest black professor in the university’s history. Earlier this year, it emerged that Arday may have plagiarized some of his writings, falsified research, and made false claims in his academic history and autobiography. An intense witch-hunt…
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We are currently in a period of unprecedented warm weather here in the UK. Temperatures of 35°C or higher have now been recorded in May, June and July of the same year for the first time in Britain since records began. And it’s not just the UK that’s suffering in the heat. With temperatures spiking…
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The human brain is an incredibly complex organ. Nonetheless we usually imagine that our brains remain roughly static over time. A recent article in New Scientist argues that this view is incorrect. According to the conception outlined there, our brains our dynamic systems which transform continuously over the course of our lifetimes. In this blog…
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Consider a particle moving in discrete time in one dimension. Let X(t) denote the position of the particle at (discrete) time t; let dt denote the increment between time steps; let U(t) = [X(t+dt)-X(t)]/dt denote the discrete velocity of the particle at time t; and let [X,U](t) = E[X(t+dt)U(t)-X(t)U(t)] denote the discrete commutator between position…
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Bigfoot, also commonly referred to as Sasquatch, is a large, hairy creature said to inhabit forests in North America, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. Proponents for the existence of Bigfoot have offered various forms of evidence to support the creature’s existence, including anecdotal claims of sightings, as well as photographs, video and audio recordings, and…
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The theory of relativity comprises two physics theories by Albert Einstein: special relativity and general relativity. These theories transformed theoretical physics and astronomy during the 20th century, superseding a 200-year-old theory of mechanics created primarily by Isaac Newton. Einstein published the theory of special relativity in 1905, building on many theoretical results and empirical findings…
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One of the most surprising things about the Epstein files, to me at least, has been the number of eminent scientists who are implicated. These include cognitive scientist Joschua Bach; neuroscientists Edward Boyden and Mark Tramo; linguist Noam Chomsky; computer scientists David Gelernter and Marvin Minsky; psychologists Jonathan Haidt, Stephen Kosslyn, and Steven Pinker; physicists…
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In a previous blog post I derived discrete versions of two key equations in quantum mechanics: the canonical commutation relation between position and momentum, and the Schrödinger equation. I did this by considering a particle moving in discrete time and space where time was taken to be imaginary. The eagle-eyed reader would have noticed a…
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The American physicist Richard Feynman once famously remarked: “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.” The point Feynman was making is that quantum mechanics is strange, weird, counter-intuitive, and that some questions about it cannot or should not be asked. However, this strangeness disappears if we are willing to accept…
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The principle of stationary action is a great unifying principle of physics, and is usually presented in a continuous-time framework. In this blog post I will attempt to present a discrete-time formulation of the principle in accordance with the materialist conception of physics I put forward in a previous blog post. Let x(t) denote the…
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Language is arguably mankind’s greatest invention. It has enabled us surpass other large-bodied predators like lions and wolves in our ability to command the environment. This is all the more remarkable when you consider that our senses are pathetically weak compared with other species. Could these two facts related? That is, could it be that…
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In a previous blog post I suggested that some ideas in physics that seem strange when formulated in a continuous framework based on infinite sets make more sense in a discrete framework based on finite sets. In this blog post I will attempt to flesh this out in more detail. Consider a particle moving in…
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Which came first, the chicken or the egg? As we all know, this question has no answer, but it is instructive to think about why it has no answer. The reason, as we all intuitively understand, is that there isn’t a linear relationship between chickens and eggs; rather, there is a feedback loop between the…
Groucho Marxism 