Tag Archives: aesthetics
The mad world
Kate Wagner writes in The Baffler: What makes industrial landscapes unique is that they fascinate regardless of whether they’re operating. The hellish Moloch of a petrochemical refinery is as captivating as one of the many abandoned factories one passes by … Continue reading
Posted in Culture
Tagged aesthetics, architecture, art brut, HR Giger, industralism, infrastructural tragedy, JC Hallman, Jean Dubuffet, Kate Wagner, picturesque theory, psychology, varelse, world-building
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Some notes on empiricism, etc.
The Wire published a story about the ‘atoms of Acharya Kanad‘ (background here; tl;dr: Folks at a university in Gujarat claimed an ancient Indian sage had put forth the theory of atoms centuries before John Dalton showed up). The story in … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Acharya Kanad, aesthetics, Alfred Shapere, dichotomy, empiricism, epistemology, formal science, Frank Wilczek, Hilary Putnam, history, knowledge, naturalness, nature science, Philosophy of Science, rationalism, sense experience, Social Sciences, string theory, time crystals
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Debating the business of beauty in ‘Dreams of a Final Theory’
In his book Dreams of a Final Theory, Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg discusses the various aspects of the journey toward a unifying theory in fundamental physics. One crucial aspect is the aesthetic of such a theory, and Weinberg’s principal contention … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged aesthetics, beauty, critical exponents, Dreams of a Final Theory, framling, randomness, renormalization, Speaker for the Dead, Steven Weinberg, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, thermal demagnetization, utlänning, varelse
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The intricacies of being sold on string theory
If you are seeking an appreciation for the techniques of string theory, then Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe could be an optional supplement. If, on the other hand, you want to explore the epistemological backdrop against which string theory proclaimed its … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged aesthetics, Brian Greene, Edward Witten, Lorentzian contractions, Paul Aspinwall, principle of relativity, Quantum mechanics, science communication, string theory, superstrings, The Elegant Universe, time dilation
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