Truth is Its Own Evidence The word evidence comes from the Latin root meaning “to see”. When we demand evidence of something, we want to “see” it in some sense, although the thing itself may be absent by circumstance, or invisible by nature. The scientific method is evidence-based. It presupposes a correspondence between true abstract theories and natural phenomena. This is why theories in physics must be corroborated by experiments […]
Read moreLatest Post
Moralia: Life of Demosthenes the Orator
They say that when he was still a young man he withdrew into a cave and studied there, shaving half of his head to keep himself from going out; also that he slept on a narrow bed in order to get up quickly, and that since he could not pronounce the sound of R he learned to do so by hard work, and since in declaiming for practice he made […]
Read more
Moralia: Signs of Malice in a Writer
In one of his essays, Plutarch accuses Herodotus, another famed historian, of malice. Whether the specific charges are true is open to dispute. However, the general signs of malice he describes is very insightful. Six Signs of Malice First, use of severe words when gentle ones will serve, derogative generalities, rather than specifics regarding the facts. For example, when he might have called Nicias “too much addicted to pious practices,” he […]
Read more
Finding Cinderella: A Metaphor Of the Scientific Method
Philosophical Foundation of Science When quantum theory and the theory of general relativity shook the foundation of physics at the dawn of the 20th century, many physicists, such as Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg, explored and revisited ancient Greek philosophy. For they suspected there might be something wrong with the philosophical foundation of classical physics. They attempted to retrace the steps in the labyrinth and find out where the wrong […]
Read more“A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens
From Film to Novel My taste in fiction is quite naive: If it can’t be adapted into a great motion picture, I don’t read it. For this reason, I have not read any of Dickens’s novels, as none of the movie adaptions impressed me enough to read the original. The only exception is the movie “Scrooge” (1951) starring Alastair Sim. I watched it for many years around Christmas, almost as […]
Read more
Moralia: Why Salt Was Regarded As Divine
In Iliad, Homer writes, “He sprinkled with salt divine”. Plato says in Timaeus that by the custom of mankind salt is regarded as of all substances the one most favoured by the gods. Egyptian priests, on the other hand, made it a point of religion to abstain completely from salt. Perhaps the Egyptians from motives of purity avoid salt on account of the aphrodisiac properties sometimes attributed to it. But […]
Read more“The Transcendentalist” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into three sects: 1. The Materialist: “Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” 2. The Transcendentalist: “Though we should soar into the heavens, though we should sink into the abyss, we never go out […]
Read more