Author: Satya Prakash Verma
Publisher: Partridge Publishing
ISBN: 9781482840469
Category: Social Science
Page: 270
View: 480
In spite of the fact that the story of Blind Students and the Elephant is merely a story, the same has been repeated several times in the history of the mankind right from the primordial times till to-date; in fact this is the way science has gradually grown on its journey of evolution. Scientists have to face similar situations on many occasions; they never get full information before devising any theory, instead they discover part-truths in several steps, each of which is discovered after long periods of time. This is analogous to concept developed by a blind man who forms an idea about the elephant by touches only one of its body-part. Scientists can therefore consider only one aspect of a problem at a time; they encounter with other aspects of the same problem at a much later point of time. At times such a situation might lead to misconceptions. Sometimes such misconceptions, conceived by some renowned personalities, are even considered to be very brilliant ideas and valuable achievements. As a result heritage of falsified knowledge had been transferred, several times in the past, to at least next 3-4 generations. This becomes possible because common man blindly follows renowned persons who are considered to be wise; normally no one even bothers to verify the truth; this is the greatest misfortune of the human kind. Misjudging or regarding such misconceptions as valuable discoveries might cause science to divagate from its path to find out absolute truth; a very long and valuable time might also be lost in elimination of such misconceptions.
Author: Kitty Ferguson
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 9781448167227
Category: Science
Page: 320
View: 277
Suppose you and I still wondered whether all of the pinpoints of light in the night sky are the same distance from us. Suppose none of our contemporaries could tell us whether the Sun orbits the Earth, or vice versa, or even how large the Earth is. Suppose no one had guessed there are mathematical laws underlying the motions of the heavens. How would - how did - anyone begin to discover these numbers and these relationships without leaving the Earth? What made anyone even think it was possible to find out “how far,” without going there? In Measuring the Universe we join our ancestors and contemporary scientists as they tease this information out of a sky full of stars. Some of the questions have turned out to be loaded, and a great deal besides mathematics and astronomy has gone into answering them. Politics, religion, philosophy and personal ambition: all have played roles in this drama. There are poignant personal stories, of people like Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Herschel, and Hubble. Today scientists are attempting to determine the distance to objects near the borders of the observable universe, far beyond anything that can be seen with the naked eye in the night sky, and to measure time back to its origin. The numbers are too enormous to comprehend. Nevertheless, generations of curious people have figured them out, one resourceful step at a time. Progress has owed as much to raw ingenuity as to technology, and frontier inventiveness is still not out of date.
Author: Tom Findlay
Publisher: Grosvenor House Publishing
ISBN: 9781781481608
Category: Science
Page: 200
View: 744
Most people just accept that our universe is ruled by gravity; an assumption that is wrong. Evidence instead shows that the force responsible for all the objects and events we observe throughout the universe is the electric force that enables current flow and therefore magnetic fields to exist. If we consider that the electric force is fundamentally one thousand, billion, billion, billion, billion times more powerful than gravity and that the universe consists of 99.99% plasma; charged matter through which electric currents flow, then you have good reason to open your mind and reading what this book has to say.
Author: Colin Wright
Publisher: Asymmetrical Press
ISBN: 9781938793349
Category: Fiction
Page: 83
View: 270
Every civilization has creation stories. Some are inspiring, others terrifying, while still others leave us with more questions than answers. But there's one consistency across them all: they attempt to explain how something emerged. How a species was born, how the world came to be, or how a civilization became capable of speculating about its own origins. Mean Universe is a collection of short stories about different aspects of creation, including Buki, Loop, Mean Universe, SB72, Cremation, Winter's Pet, Mindless Machine, and Son.
Author: Edith Wilks Dolnikowski
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004102264
Category: Philosophy
Page: 272
View: 707
This volume evaluates Thomas Bradwardine's view of time as a mathematical, philosophical and theological concept within the context of ancient and medieval discussions concerning the problem of time and eternity. The book begins with an assessment of his career as a natural philosopher and theologian in order to establish the factors which influenced his treatment of time. Two succeeding chapters examine the sources of his temporal theory in classical, early medieval and thirteenth-century texts. Next, a series of chapters surveys his view of time as it related to proportionality, continuity, contingency and predestination. The final chapter establishes his place among fourteenth-century natural philosophers and theologians. Because this study traces the issue of time through several major works, it demonstrates how the mathematical, philosophical and theological ideas of one prominent scholar converged within a setting of lively academic discourse. Thus it illuminates a fascinating dimension of one of the most important debates in late medieval thought.
