10 ideas
3061 | Anaxarchus said that he was not even sure that he knew nothing [Anaxarchus, by Diog. Laertius] |
Full Idea: Anaxarchus said that he was not even sure that he knew nothing. | |
From: report of Anaxarchus (fragments/reports [c.340 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 09.10.1 |
20739 | Levinas took 'first philosophy' to begin with seeing the vulnerable faces of others [Levinas, by Aho] |
Full Idea: Levinas forwarded a notion of 'ethics as first philosophy' that begins from the concete exposure and openness to 'the face' of the other, an experience of vulnerability and suffering that undercuts our ordinary egoistic and objectifying tendencies. | |
From: report of Emmanuel Levinas (works [1956]) by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 1 'Existentialism' | |
A reaction: Iris Murdoch speaks of seeing a falcon in flight as having a similar effect of diminishing the ego. If the main focus is on potential 'suffering' does this eventually cash out as utilitarianism? I bet not! |
20445 | Levinas says Marxism is the replacement of individualist ethics, by solidarity and sociality [Levinas, by Critchley] |
Full Idea: For Levinas, Marxism is the absorption of the ethical in the socioeconomic, and so it is the disappearance of the face-to-face relation and the privileging of relations of solidarity and anonymous sociality, which he calls 'socialism'. | |
From: report of Emmanuel Levinas (works [1956]) by Simon Critchley - Impossible Objects: interviews 1 | |
A reaction: Startling, if you are not used to this sort of thing. If you are in trouble, I should help you, not because you are you, or a human being, but because you are a member of my group? So what about the Good Samaritan? Or solidarity with humanity? Animals? |
24162 | Planck introduced the idea that energy can be quantized [Baggott] |
Full Idea: By deriving his radiation law, Planck had inadvertently introduced the idea that energy itself could be 'quantized'. | |
From: Jim Baggott (The Quantum Story: 40 moments [2011], 01) | |
A reaction: He earlier assumed energy is continuously variable. I presume this means that the older idea of energy is now subsumed into the concept of fields, which are quantized into particles. The powers of nature are found in the fields. |
21731 | Fields can be 'scalar', or 'vector', or 'tensor', or 'spinor' [Baggott] |
Full Idea: Fields can be 'scalar', with no particular direction (pointing, but not pushing or pulling); or 'vector', with a direction (like magnetism, or Newtonian gravity); or 'tensor' (needing further parameters); or 'spinor' (depending on spin orientation). | |
From: Jim Baggott (Farewell to Reality: fairytale physics [2013], 2 'Quantum') | |
A reaction: [compressed] So the question is, why do they differ? What is it in the nature of each field the result in a distinctive directional feature? |
21730 | A 'field' is a property with a magnitude, distributed across all of space and time [Baggott] |
Full Idea: A 'field' is defined in terms of the magnitude of some physical property distributed over every point in time and space. | |
From: Jim Baggott (Farewell to Reality: fairytale physics [2013], 2 'Quantum') | |
A reaction: If it involves a 'property', normal usage entails that there is some entity which possesses the property. So what's the entity? Eh? Eh? You don't know! Disappointed... |
24163 | Free electrons have clouds of virtual particles, arising from field interaction [Baggott] |
Full Idea: A free electron doesn't simply persist as a point particle travelling along a predetermined, classical path; it is surrounded by a swarm of virtual particles arsising from self-interactions with its own magnetic field. | |
From: Jim Baggott (The Quantum Story: 40 moments [2011], 19) | |
A reaction: It seems to me important for amateurs and mere philosophers to hang on to this idea of virtual particles, because they undermine any attempt to impose a macro picture on sub-atomic events. |
24161 | Thermodynamics sees nature as a continuous flow of energy, as radiation and as substance [Baggott] |
Full Idea: Thermodynamics reinforced a vision of nature as one of harmonious flow. Energy, which could be neither created nor destroyed, flowed continuously between radiation and material substance, in themselves unbroken continua. | |
From: Jim Baggott (The Quantum Story: 40 moments [2011], 01) | |
A reaction: Interestingly, Einstein's Special Relativity e = mc2 seems to endorse this view, by equation energy and mass. I've always wanted to know what energy is, but no one seems to know. |
21732 | The current standard model requires 61 particles [Baggott] |
Full Idea: The current model requires 61 particles: three generations of two leptons and two flavours of quark, in three different colours (making 24); the anti-particles of all of these (48); 12 force particles (photon, W1, Z0, 8 gluons), and a Higgs boson. | |
From: Jim Baggott (Farewell to Reality: fairytale physics [2013], 6 n) |
24160 | Particle measurements don't seem to reflect their reality [Baggott] |
Full Idea: It seems that we can no longer assume that the particle properties we measure necessarily reflect or represent the properties of the particles as they really are. | |
From: Jim Baggott (The Quantum Story: 40 moments [2011], Pref) | |
A reaction: [He cites a 2006 experiment] This gives an interesting response to the Copenhagen Interpretation - that observers appear to be creating the reality they observe, because they only have 'observations', with no reality to correspond to them. I like it. |