/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.10250284]

>As a middle-school kid: "One Two Three Infinity", by George Gamow and "Mathematics and the Imagination" by Edward Kasner and James Newman. On the fiction side, nothing compares for me to "Gulliver's Travels", by Jonathan Swift. Not the Lilliput story that we all know, but the rest of Gulliver's voyages. That's where most of the deep social commentary is embedded. In later life, I can't get enough of Issac Newton. "Principia", in particular. The most influential book ever on what we call modern civilization. It established the fact that the Universe is knowable and that mathematics is the language it uses to communicate with us. -NDTyson

[Anonymous No.10250289]

Average and uninspired.

[Anonymous No.10250301]

>>10250284

[Anonymous No.10250307]

Brown and scientistic. A nonentity. Means nothing to me.

[Anonymous No.10250313]

>Entropy is not the enemy people might be led to believe All it takes is a source of energy to reverse it. Earth is not a closed system. We receive energy daily from the Sun, which empowers the chemistry and life of our planet to grow complexity -- against the wishes of entropy. Consider, however, that the Sun-Earth system, taken together, loses energy and gains entropy. And the entire universe itself is on an one-way trip to entropic oblivion, ending not in fire but in ice, and not with a bang, but with a whimper. Have a nice day. -NDTyson

Why does NDT present unsupported conjectures as scientific fact? And why does he present scientific fact as LITERALLY THE TRUTH (tm)?

[Anonymous No.10250315]

>>10250313
the mustache gives him authority

[Anonymous No.10250318]

Francis Bacon is up there. I recently came across a book of his that was filled with accounts of experiments he conducted, which may have informed his important philosophical conclusions about the value of experiment in finding scientific truths. This was around the same time as Galileo, who arrived at the same conclusions. Of course back then, "Natural Philosophy" was practically synonymous with what today we call Physics.
In the 20th centruy, when the atom revealed itself to our experiments, and the expanding universe entered our largest telescopes, it made philosophizing about the natural world harder than before, where now, what's true no longer issues forth from our senses.
Experiments matter. And if you do experiments, we generally call you a scientist and not a philosopher.
Plenty of philosophy frontiers abound, including Moral & Ethical Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Religious Philosophy. And there are still-emergent fields that could benefit from some smart ideas about where they should look next, especially in studies of consciousness, neuroscience, and ecology. -NDTyson

[Anonymous No.10250322]

[Anonymous No.10250332]

>>10250313
universal entropy is generally accepted as it follows directly from our current understanding of physics and entropy on a local scale. Not really an unsupported conjecture.

[Anonymous No.10250348]

>>10250332
>universal entropy is generally accepted as it follows directly from our current understanding of physics and entropy on a local scale
Assuming the universe works like a closed system, obviously. This might not be the case at all..

Also even if there is such a thing as universal entropy, the heat death of the universe rests on a ton of assumptions that may or may not hold (e.g. the universe is open (but somehow still a closed system for whatever reason), no black swan events, and so on), and given that we've completely failed at reducing thermodynamics to more basic physical theories, there's no real reason to assume that this is going to be literally what happens in the future

[Anonymous No.10250484]

>>10250332
Sounds like nonsense dude

[Anonymous No.10250493]

>>10250284
Frig off. Neil is cool.