Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2013-03-25]: Two forthcoming European Physical Journal D papers challenge established wisdom about the nature of vacuum. In one paper, Marcel Urban from the University of Paris-Sud, located in Orsay, France and his colleagues identified a quantum level mechanism for interpreting vacuum as being filled with pairs of virtual particles with fluctuating energy values. As a result, the inherent characteristics of vacuum, like the speed of light, may not be a constant after all, but fluctuate. [source: Science News] Fluctuating spped of light. Fluctuating theories. Fluctuating knowledge. Building castles on the sand…
Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2013-03-21]: It has been four decades since Belgian mathematician Pierre Deligne completed the work for which he became celebrated, but that fertile contribution to number theory has now earned him the Abel Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics. The Academy has rewarded Deligne, who works at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, “for seminal contributions to algebraic geometry and for their transformative impact on number theory, representation theory, and related fields”. [source: web news]
Are you worried that you do not know him or his theories? It does not matter. He does not know you either. And anyway: why know theories which have nothing to do with your life?
Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2013-02-18]: The most serious things can be said in the form of a joke. Jokes are thought-liberating. They allow you to use forms that you couldn’t if you were to stay “serious”. And free forms is the basis for creative thinking. As Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes”. Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow (Oscar Wilde)...
Researchers created software which can reconstruct ancient words of dead languages. [1, 2] Interesting, but futile. What is gone, is gone. What existed still exists. To know something means to Live with it.
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Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2012-11-21]: ICANN faces great problems with hundreds of applications to register new domains. Who will register the .islam domain? Who has the right to represent Islam? Who will register the .book domain? Or the .philosophy domain? [source: BBC News] The wrong decision is such a seemingly "technological" matter will determine a lot more than just a domain... It is unfortunate, but most people rely on appearances to make up their mind. And it is also unfortunate that the majority of people are weak minded and not able to see beyond the domain name that appears first in Google... So be careful ICANN... The future of widespread philosophical ideas lies upon you... (unfortunately)
Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2012-11-09]: Microsoft demonstrated a software that can translate spoken English into spoken Chinese almost instantly. The software preserves intonation and cadence so the translated speech still sounds like the original speaker. [source: BBC News] What are you actually doing when you speak through a machine in a language you do not know? I do not know Chinese and yet I can speak Chinese. Does that make any sense? The question of the Chinese Room could be really upon us sooner than we might think… Literally…
Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2012-01-18]: What do Greek taxi drivers and Wikipedia, which will be closed tomorrow as a protest against SOPA [source: BBC News], have in common? Easy: when the first are on strike of the latter is closed, things are just… better! At last we will be able to search at Google for something and not end up at the “high quality” content of the infamous online encyclopedia which is written by the many for the many… Important Knowledge has never had such characteristics.
Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2011-07-09]: The last mission of the Space Shuttle reminds us of thing we want to forget: how shallow we really are, how much we care for things like politics (the reason Space Shuttle begun) and money (the reason Space Shuttle ends) instead of things like Truth or the Quest for Knowledge (the reason Star Trek and Enterprise wander around the Galaxy)… So long Space Shuttle… Unfortunately only few people will miss you…
Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2011-06-09]: It looks that Strabo was right after all: Piraeus was an island many years ago and was connected again with Athens via the soil that the Cephissus river brought [source: web news]. A knowledge that was forgotten and now is discovered again. What does “forget” actually mean? Piraeus was “not an island” before we make that discovery. Now it is a former “island"… Are the properties of things dependent on what we “know” ? Or is there an objective set of “properties” somewhere?
