Contents tagged with Science
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The physics of portals
You heard it like me, someone just asked about the physics of Aperture Science's neat Portal Gun. I'll try to give an account of what we know from the material that Aperture recently made available and from what can be deduced from demonstrations of the product. -
Rees, ethics, aesthetics and religion
Sir Martin Rees said this right after receiving a huge pile of money from the Templeton Foundation:[…]I think just as religion is separate from science, so is ethics separate from science. So is aesthetics separate from science. And so are many other things. There are lots of important things that are separate from science.
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Do not reward luck
Here is a little experiment. I have built a bunch of programmed agents that are using a variety of strategies to try and predict the outcome of a randomized event. The event in question is the roll of a dice. The twist is that the probabilities of all sides of the dice are not equal: there is a distribution of probabilities that is itself decided randomly before the experiment. -
Apologetics is not a proper form of reasoning
Apologetics is the systematic defense of a position. It's usually done by religious people in defense of their dogma. -
“One cannot prove a universal negative” Oh really?
This is a claim I've read so many times in comments that I think it deserves a little debunking. If you do a search on that little sentence, you'll see that it's very rarely if ever used in a scientific context but is repeated like a mantra by religious apologists. They seem to be persuaded that it is an established rule of logic. -
Stephen Hawking's The Grand Design
Many silly things have been written and said about this book, mostly by people who haven’t read it. Too bad, it’s a very short and easy read... -
Faster than the wind
There is a vigorous debate going on about whether it’s possible to build a vehicle that uses only wind power to accelerate to a speed that is higher than the speed of the wind and in the same direction as the wind itself (a phenomenon referred to as Downwind Faster Than the Wind or DWFTTW). You can see a summary of the debate here and a video of an actual cart going at 2.8 times the speed of the wind here. -
What that guy believes
Michael Egnor has now answered his own questions so we can now review his answers and discover in amazement how they make a lot more sense than what non-theists and scientists could come up with. Or not. His new post can be found here. My own answers to those same questions can be read here. -
An answer to what does this atheist believe
Michael Egnor doesn’t know me but as his question seems to be addressed to the community collectively I’ll take the liberty to give my answer here. If you haven’t already, go and read his post first: -
How the hell do we know?
I was once asked “Why do you believe the Earth to be revolving around the Sun, and not the other way around?”