August 28, 2022

Carl Sagan - gods as dreams

"It is said that men may not be the dreams of the god, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men." 

Carl Sagan - Cosmos

August 26, 2022

Hercule Poirot - belief

 


"Belief, monsieur le doctor, is good, but it is not good enough."
Hercule Poirot, The Case of the Missing Will (1993)

August 18, 2022

Abhay Ashtekar on Gödel Universes, Buddha's Poison Arrow, Time Travel, and Loop Quantum Cosmology

 

 

Abhay Ashtekar - from Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abhay_Ashtekar

Abhay Vasant Ashtekar (born 5 July 1949) is an Indian theoretical physicist. He is the Eberly Professor of Physics and the Director of the Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Pennsylvania State University. As the creator of Ashtekar variables, he is one of the founders of loop quantum gravity and its subfield loop quantum cosmology. He has also written a number of descriptions of loop quantum gravity that are accessible to non-physicists. In 1999, Ashtekar and his colleagues were able to calculate the entropy for a black hole, matching a legendary 1974 prediction by Hawking. Oxford mathematical physicist Roger Penrose has described Ashtekar's approach to quantum gravity as "The most important of all the attempts at 'quantizing' general relativity." Ashtekar was elected as Member to National Academy of Sciences in May 2016.

Abhay Ashtekar is an atheist, though he enjoys reading on Indian and other eastern philosophy, namely the Tao and the Zen traditions. Furthermore, he believes to be inspired from the Bhagawat Gita as regards his attitude towards work.

August 13, 2022

Salman Rushdie: The idea of the sacred is...

“The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.” 

Salman Rushdie, “Is nothing sacred?”, Penguin (Non-Classics),1990