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At the International Conference on the History of Computing held in Los Alamos in 1976, R.W. Hamming placed his proposed agenda in the title of his paper[1]: "We Would Know What They Thought When They Did It." He pleaded for a history of computing that pursued the contextual development of ideas, rather than merely listing names, dates, and places of "firsts". Moreover, he exhorted historians to go beyond the documents to "informed speculation" about the results of undocumented practice. What people actually did and what they thought they were doing may well not be accurately reflected in what they wrote and what they said they were thinking. His own experience had taught him that.
Marin Mersenne
The Truth of the Sciences
René Descartes
On Motion
Christiaan Huygens
On the Motion of Bodies Resulting from Impact
Christiaan Huygens
On Centrifugal Force
Christiaan Huygens
Horologium Oscillatorium, Part IV
On the Center of Oscillation
Outline: "Bohm, Bell - and Boom! The End of Modern Dualism"
The End of Cartesian Dualism: Physics (re)discovers Philosophy: over against Cartesian and especially 19th ct. positivist dualisms which separate physics and philosophy - the emergence of quantum mechanics forces physicists to be become philosophers again. Indeed, the logic of complementarity which q.m. requires ripples into a larger (re)turn to complementary relationships between physics, philosophy, and religion.
If Thales was the first of all the great Greek philosophers, Plato must remain the best known of all the Greeks. The original name of this Athenian aristocrat was Aristocles, but in his school days he received the nickname Platon (meaning "broad" ) because of his broad shoulders. (He is not the only great man to be known universally by a nickname. The Roman orator Cicero is another. )
Edward O. Wilson is the founder of Sociobiology and is widely regarded to be the world's most famous living scientist. Recently, Wilson seized the word "consilience" from deep within the history of science and reintroduced it into our language by emblazoning it across the cover of his latest best-seller, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. In this book, Wilson offers to unify the "two cultures" of literature and science for once and forever, as "the way to renew the crumbling structure of the liberal arts" (12). It is an offer many of my colleagues find attractive, for Wilson carries enormous authority both as a natural scientist and as an eloquent speaker for the environmentally appealing concepts of "biophilia" and "biodiversity." He has well-nigh captured the Thoreau Society: for example, in June 1998 he joined Bill and Hillary Clinton as a featured guest at the opening of the Thoreau Institute, delivering a brief address which has been reprinted as the Preface to the Thoreau Society's collection of Thoreau's writings on science, which I edited and entitled Material Faith.
It's practically the refrain of modern life: "Everything's relative." The claim that nothing can be known for sure or in common--that truth is a construct or a fiction--is an idea that contributes to many of our contemporary discontents, from debates sparked by multiculturalism to disagreements over the state of the environment. It's also the idea behind the postmodern doctrines that now hold sway in many parts of the intellectual and academic worlds. Might it also be wrong? This special WQ debate takes that question as its starting point.
The Victorian biologist and early social philosopher Herbert Spencer was a great rival of Charles Darwin's. His theory of evolution preceded Darwin's own, but was soon overshadowed because of the absence of an effective theory of natural selection - although it was Spencer, and not Darwin, who popularized the term "evolution" itself and coined the now-ubiquitous phrase, "survival of the fittest". Although no longer influential in biology, his extension of his theory of evolution to psychology and sociology remains important. His "Social Darwinism" was particularly influential on early evolutionary economists such as Thorstein Veblen, but, more contemporaneously, it was adopted with gusto by American apologists such as William Graham Sumner and Simon Nelson Patten.
Galton and subsequent investigators find wide divergences in people's subjective reports of mental imagery. Such individual differences might be taken to explain the peculiarly irreconcilable disputes over the nature and cognitive significance of imagery which have periodically broken out among psychologists and philosophers. However, to so explain these disputes is itself to take a substantive and questionable position on the cognitive role of imagery. This article distinguishes three separable issues over which people can be "for" or "against" mental images. Conflation of these issues can lead to theoretical differences being mistaken for experiential differences, even by theorists themselves. This is applied to the case of John B. Watson, who inaugurated a half-century of neglect of image psychology. Watson originally claimed to have vivid imagery; by 1913 he was denying the existence of images. This strange reversal, which made his behaviorism possible, is explicable as a "creative misconstrual" of Dunlap's "motor" theory of imagination.
The Niels Bohr Institute (NBI) is a part of the Niels Bohr Institute for Astronomy, Physics and Geophysics, University of Copenhagen, and shares premises in the city with the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (Nordita), which has programs in condensed matter and astrophysics in addition to the subjects listed below. Most experimental activity takes place at CERN, Brookhaven, and DESY as well as other facilities in Europe and overseas.
The NBI has a long tradition of international collaboration and is a meeting ground for scientists from all over the world. Short term visitors at the NBI number more than 150 per year, not including participants in the many symposia, workshops, and schools arranged each year. As a result, the NBI has the infrastructure needed to care for many foreign visitors and has a network of international contacts with the nearly 2000 physicists who have spent longer periods at the NBI and Nordita. The scientific staff at the NBI now comprises 25 permanent scientists, about 25 temporary scientists including long-term visitors, and 21 Ph.D. students.
