TOF first ran across the notion of humans in America prior to the American Indians in a fiction! It was "Beringia," a 1990 story by Poul Anderson in his Time Patrol book The Shield of Time. It follows Wanda Tamberly, a time patrolman who has been studying this pre-Indian people (and has grown attached to them) when a band of Indians finds its way ( Read more... )

which outlines Pierre Duhem's takedown of falsification and positivism.

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Deja Vu All Over Again

Check out the four video clips here. Plus ça change and all that. Clinton is especially interesting, though no one later accused him of lying.

How to Spot Bad Science

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Today, TOF presents for your delight a Quote of the Day, a Science! Marches On!, and a Statistical Puzzle for you to solve, among the usual sundry miscellany.

A Devoted TOFling yclept Guy Stewart writes:

"While reading io9 (which I enjoy a lot), I came across this article: “Are Religious Beliefs Going To Screw Up First Contact ( Read more... )

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey - Standing Up in the Milky Way
Season 1 Episode 1
Giordano Bruno's spiritual epiphany about the universe; a compressed version of the cosmic calendar.

'Nuff said.

Spanish researchers discover the first black hole orbiting a “spinning” star

-- headline, Astronomy Magazine (January 16, 2014)

Stephen Hawking: 'There are no black holes'
-- headline, Nature (24 January 2014)
+++
 And speaking of black holes...

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In an amusing article in Smithsonian Magazine, a brain scan researcher discovers that he is a psychopath:

The Neuroscientist Who Discovered He Was a Psychopath
Quote:

[James] Fallon seeks to reconcile how he-a happily married family man-could demonstrate the same anatomical patterns that marked the minds of serial killers ( Read more... )

Question I. Whether Christianity promoted the rise of science Article 1. Whether there was a Scientific Revolution
Objection 1.  It would seem otherwise, because the term science is not well-defined. Lindberg (1992), for example, provides no less than seven different definitions.  Therefore, there was no Scientific Revolution because there is no one ( Read more... )