“Apologetics, Christian or other, is always a risky enterprise,” the late Stanley L. Jaki once wrote. “Once caught in apologetic zeal, one can, especially if one is a historian, easily overshoot the target.” It was a characteristically shrewd insight, and one that might be applied to certain aspects of Jaki’s own remarkable career.
A few years back I wrote about astrophysicist Gaurav Khanna at University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and his low-cost approach to harnessing computer power for modeling black holes. Why spend a lot of money to rent time on a university supercomputer when you can devise your own by going to Best Buy? The physicist has not… Continue reading Taking Sony Playstation 3s to the Next Level
The confirmations of Eintein’s General Relativity get more and more precise. This is extraordinary: Now, a team led by Holger Müller of the University of California, Berkeley, has measured the time-shifting effects of gravity 10,000 times more accurately than ever before. They show that gravity’s effect on time is predictable to 7 parts per billion… Continue reading
Book Notes: The Last SuperstitionI read Edward Feser’s excellent book a few months back, and rather than write a comprehensive book review in one post (which, given my schedule, would never happen before Ed was officially retired) I’d like instead to pick out one section of the book that struck me (and bearing in mind… Continue reading
Nice post by Moshe Rozali about the problems facing physicists trying to unify general relativity and quantum physics: Alas, there are many indications (which I may get to at some stage) that quantizing the gravitational field is problematic: when going down to length scales for which the quantum mechanics of gravity is important, we simply… Continue reading
