Philosophy Wire: The sum of matter and energy stays the same. Except when…

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2013-05-01]: The sum of matter and energy stays the same. That is, except from when a huge mass and energy was created out of nowhere in the Big Bang…

 

Give me one miracle. And I will explain the rest…

 

Check The Limits of Science for more amusing dogmas of Science…

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Philosophy Wire: Faint young Sun blunts Occam’s Razor…

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2013-04-29]: ..Climate scientists acknowledge that the "faint young sun" paradox probably doesn’t have one simple solution. [source: Science News] Well, why should it be? How many people have thought that Science could be flawed because of its reliance on Occam's Razor?

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Philosophy Wire: Absolute temperatures, efficiency > 100%, definitions, “limits”…

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2013-01-05]: What is normal to most people in winter has so far been impossible in physics: a minus temperature. On the Celsius scale minus temperatures are only surprising in summer. On the absolute temperature scale, which is used by physicists and is also called the Kelvin scale, it is not possible to go below zero. Physicists at the Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching have now created an atomic gas in the laboratory that nonetheless has negative Kelvin values ("Negative Absolute Temperature for Motional Degrees of Freedom"). These negative absolute temperatures have several apparently absurd consequences: although the atoms in the gas attract each other and give rise to a negative pressure, the gas does not collapse – a behaviour that is also postulated for dark energy in cosmology. What is more, atoms in this “negative temperature” are more hot than any set of atoms in infinite positive temperatures! Ans this does end here: supposedly impossible heat engines such as a combustion engine with a thermodynamic efficiency of over 100% can also be realised with the help of negative absolute temperatures. [source: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

 

Many times Science sets limits which for many years to come we think as insurmountable. But we must not forget that as we arbitrarily set axioms and principles, we also set these limits that cannot supposedly be overcome. How many people have been ridiculed because they thought thermal machines with efficiency larger than 100% can actually be built? As in the case of imaginary numbers (we once upon a time thought as “true” that the square of a number cannot be negative – then we changed the… definition!) the case of negative temperature shows clearly that everything is in our mind…

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Philosophy Wire: Google, backwards compatibility, human emotions and the need for Commodore

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2011-06-05]: Google announced that its products (Gmail, Google Calendar, Talk, Docs, etc) will not be compatible with old versions of Internet browsers [source: BBC News]. Technology progresses rapidly and is often difficult to follow its evolution. And perhaps this is what differentiates it from humans, whose passions, weaknesses and greatness is based on concepts that remain constant. Love, hate, envy, altruism (not the Dawkins type altruism) of a human in modern Athens of 2011 could easily be matched with love, hate, arrogance and gratitude of a 300 B.C. human… So try using a Commodore! Or grab a piece of paper and write a letter with the old traditional way! It is nice to remember the basic principles sometimes…

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