Reading on the VRE the initial chapters of a book by Lee Smolin, Time Reborn. (I get the impression he is controversial in his field of physics.) He is claiming that the Platonists have won, that modern western scientific thinking is that time is an illusion and that the laws of nature are out of the flow of time, that they exist on some eternal ( Read more... )

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SO? Who cares? I do, because I like cheering for the underdog.

Over the last several years we have had a series of lunchtime lectures by excited astronomers who had been peering through the Hubble, stalking extra-solar planets, and who were jumping up and down like maniacs trying to impart in 55 minutes how incredible it is to find other ( Read more... )