Epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. Stephen M. Barr, in Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, distinguishes between science and religion on the basis that faith in a religious dogma is a justifiable method of acquiring knowledge of the universe, at the same time claiming that science’s corresponding belief is that only knowledge […]

At the end of last year my son recommended an approach to Lucid Dreaming which includes setting dream targets and then recording your dreams every day. Amazingly, it seems to work! Last night’s dreaming encompassed 3 questions: 1) If the Big Bang started from a zero dimensional point, that would look like a black hole […]

As Hurricane Irene settles in on us, I recollect rehearing last week the Dimensions edition of “Through the Wormhole” and subsequently dreaming of a multidimensional tesseract-looking unfolding of spacetime. Since then the imaginings have wandered back to one dimensionality, but with line segments of length 1 and no time dimension, just the continuous operation of […]

After noticing in my previous post that the highest energy photon would be the smallest black hole, I continued wondering about the smallest possible mass. And after dancing around the obvious non-starter of a no energy photon, because zero energy would be equivalent to infinite wavelength, it occurred that it could be descriptive of the […]

I got to wondering a couple of weeks ago, what is mass? What is the smallest possible amount of mass that theoretically could exist? It is thought the least massive particles we are aware of are the lightest of the 3 “flavors” of neutrino, in the range of 1/2 to 1 electron-volt. Then in the […]

A few weeks back my son asked me to explain the redshift, and I discovered I could not! Having started with the usual comparison to the Doppler effect in the sound waves of a train or siren, it suddenly occurred to me there was no correspondent to the collection of air molecules the sound wave […]

Among several scary and alarming assessments of our, and the world’s, (lack of) security capabilities at today’s conference, I found Dr. Edward Amoroso’s retrospective from the year 2035 the most imaginative and interesting of the presentations. He used the scenario to review his entire 50 year tenure at AT&T and the curious developments of security […]

Since my last post there has been much investigation of other people’s thinking along these lines, including even some math background. I realized that my attempt to start with zero dimensional points was leading to the anathema of infinities that have plagued quantum mechanics for a long time. The universe is apparently 13.7 billion years […]

The last attempt at this discussion started with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle already in play. But that presupposes too much. Instead, I’d like to take a common saying of my teenage son as a starting point: “Dad, I’m bored.” Now I think he is asking for coaching about how to discover more interesting things, which […]

I recently tweeted: Even the richest person envies someone. The true measure of wealth is gratefulness. That definition works for me, but the economics lecture I attended today explored more traditional notions: value of use, value of exchange, value from production and value from obligation from the Henry George school of thinking about economics. I […]