The Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroeporganisatie (VRT), the national public-service broadcaster for the Flemish Community of Belgium, has found in its archives an interview with Georges Lemaître that was thought to be lost. The cosmologist from Leuven was the founder of the big bang theory in the 1920s and 1930s. He was interviewed about it in […] …
On Specialisation and Mathematics
From R.G. Manley's Waveform Analysis, this observation, at the start: At a not very remote period in the past, a university education in Natural Philosophy, together with a small amount of private reading, enabled a man to claim fairly the he knew the whole of science, so far as it was at that time revealed. …
Georg Cantor and infinity
On 03 March 1845, the German mathematician Georg Cantor was born in St. Petersburg. In 1862, he entered the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, eventually becoming a member of the mathematics department. At the death of his father, he left Zurich for Berlin where, in addition to his mathematical interests, he began to study philosophy …
The tyranny of a Covid amnesty — UnHerd
I spent the last days of innocence before Trump and Brexit heavily pregnant. Like many first-time mums, I read a lot of pregnancy books, but the one I liked most was… 1,620 more words The tyranny of a Covid amnesty — UnHerd One thing that would come from this amnesty would be "forgiveness." I'm not sure …
The Challenge from Aquinas That Changed Mathematics
A few years back, in my post If You Really Want to Get Into Trouble, Read the Mediaevals, I quoted Carl Boyer's A History of Mathematics as follows: The son Georg (Cantor) took a strong interest in the finespun arguments of medieval theologians concerning continuity and the infinite, and this militated against his pursuing a mundane …
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Should My Students Be Here?
Last year, before the Fall semester started, I posted Teaching Secular Blasphemy, where I attacked the whole "perfect life" concept that pervades our culture, inflates our expectations and makes us depressed and angry when they don't work out. I didn't attack this idea because of their psychological or sociological damage (which are evident) but because …
Maybe a few Soviet Books Would Change Their Mind
The Democratic Socialists of America are on a roll in Los Angeles, and the school system continues to decline: Minority students are disproportionately hurt by Los Angeles’s subpar public school systems. The DSA’s refusal to challenge underperforming schools in minority neighborhoods is a testament to its role as a mouthpiece for failed public-sector unions such …
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You Think They’ll Ever Bother to Ask Christian Scientists About How To Approach Science?
This book, for the most part, does the opposite: The goal of the book is to examine the “reception of the natural sciences among Protestant theologians in the modern era” (1). The editors picked ten influential theologians from various Protestant denominations over the past two centuries in Europe and America to analyze the way they …
Christians Believing in Evolution: My Response to Larry Arnhart
I've gotten to the point where I find debating anything in an American context inherently discouraging, but Larry Arnhart's piece Nature's God: Why Christians Should Accept the Theory of Evolution caught my attention as an interesting presentation of a point of view. It is not my intent to produce a blow-by-blow refutation or commentary of …
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Learning Nothing from Beating the Scots-Irish to a Pulp
We're not prepared to support a sustained war in the Ukraine: Currently, the West may not have the industrial capacity to fight a large-scale war. If the US government is planning to once again become the arsenal of democracy, then the existing capabilities of the US military-industrial base and the core assumptions that have driven its development …
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Positive Infinity 