87 ideas
| 9786 | Philosophers working like teams of scientists is absurd, yet isolation is hard [Cartwright,R] |
| 9784 | A false proposition isn't truer because it is part of a coherent system [Cartwright,R] |
| 13941 | Are the truth-bearers sentences, utterances, ideas, beliefs, judgements, propositions or statements? [Cartwright,R] |
| 13942 | Logicians take sentences to be truth-bearers for rigour, rather than for philosophical reasons [Cartwright,R] |
| 19482 | Current physics says matter and antimatter should have reduced to light at the big bang [New Sci.] |
| 19483 | CP violation shows a decay imbalance in matter and antimatter, leading to matter's dominance [New Sci.] |
| 9783 | While no two classes coincide in membership, there are distinct but coextensive attributes [Cartwright,R] |
| 14961 | Clearly a pipe can survive being taken apart [Cartwright,R] |
| 14962 | Bodies don't becomes scattered by losing small or minor parts [Cartwright,R] |
| 13952 | Essentialism says some of a thing's properties are necessary, and could not be absent [Cartwright,R] |
| 13954 | The difficulty in essentialism is deciding the grounds for rating an attribute as essential [Cartwright,R] |
| 13955 | Essentialism is said to be unintelligible, because relative, if necessary truths are all analytic [Cartwright,R] |
| 13953 | An act of ostension doesn't seem to need a 'sort' of thing, even of a very broad kind [Cartwright,R] |
| 13945 | A token isn't a unique occurrence, as the case of a word or a number shows [Cartwright,R] |
| 19737 | A system can infer the structure of the world by making predictions about it [New Sci.] |
| 19736 | Neural networks can extract the car-ness of a car, or the chair-ness of a chair [New Sci.] |
| 16419 | No one has yet devised a rationality test [New Sci.] |
| 16417 | About a third of variation in human intelligence is environmental [New Sci.] |
| 16418 | People can be highly intelligent, yet very stupid [New Sci.] |
| 19484 | Psychologists measure personality along five dimensions [New Sci.] |
| 13948 | For any statement, there is no one meaning which any sentence asserting it must have [Cartwright,R] |
| 13950 | People don't assert the meaning of the words they utter [Cartwright,R] |
| 13944 | We can pull apart assertion from utterance, and the action, the event and the subject-matter for each [Cartwright,R] |
| 13947 | 'It's raining' makes a different assertion on different occasions, but its meaning remains the same [Cartwright,R] |
| 13943 | We can attribute 'true' and 'false' to whatever it was that was said [Cartwright,R] |
| 13946 | To assert that p, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to utter some particular words [Cartwright,R] |
| 13951 | Assertions, unlike sentence meanings, can be accurate, probable, exaggerated, false.... [Cartwright,R] |
| 4377 | Intellectualism is an excessive emphasis on reasoning in moral philosophy [Burnyeat] |
| 21167 | Gravity is unusual, in that it always attracts and never repels [New Sci.] |
| 19950 | Entropy is the only time-asymmetric law, so time may be linked to entropy [New Sci.] |
| 21176 | In the Big Bang general relativity fails, because gravity is too powerful [New Sci.] |
| 21147 | Quantum electrodynamics incorporates special relativity and quantum mechanics [New Sci.] |
| 21155 | Photons have zero rest mass, so virtual photons have infinite range [New Sci.] |
| 19478 | Light moves at a constant space-time speed, but its direction is in neither space nor time [New Sci.] |
| 21161 | In the standard model all the fundamental force fields merge at extremely high energies [New Sci.] |
| 21146 | Electrons move fast, so are subject to special relativity [New Sci.] |
| 19474 | Quantum states are measured by external time, of unknown origin [New Sci.] |
| 19473 | The Schrödinger equation describes the evolution of an object's wave function in Hilbert space [New Sci.] |
| 21148 | The strong force is repulsive at short distances, strong at medium, and fades at long [New Sci.] |
| 21151 | Gluons, the particles carrying the strong force, interact because of their colour charge [New Sci.] |
| 21152 | The strong force binds quarks tight, and the nucleus more weakly [New Sci.] |
| 21143 | Quarks in threes can build hadrons with spin ½ or with spin 3/2 [New Sci.] |
| 21150 | Three different colours of quark (as in the proton) can cancel out to give no colour [New Sci.] |
| 21142 | Classifying hadrons revealed two symmetry patterns, produced by three basic elements [New Sci.] |
| 21145 | The four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism, weak and strong) are the effects of particles [New Sci.] |
| 21153 | The weak force explains beta decay, and the change of type by quarks and leptons [New Sci.] |
| 21154 | Three particles enable the weak force: W+ and W- are charged, and Z° is not [New Sci.] |
| 21156 | The weak force particles are heavy, so the force has a short range [New Sci.] |
| 21164 | Why do the charges of the very different proton and electron perfectly match up? [New Sci.] |
| 21170 | The Standard Model cannot explain dark energy, survival of matter, gravity, or force strength [New Sci.] |
| 21140 | Spin is a built-in ration of angular momentum [New Sci.] |
| 21149 | Quarks have red, green or blue colour charge (akin to electric charge) [New Sci.] |
| 21158 | Fermions, with spin ½, are antisocial, and cannot share quantum states [New Sci.] |
| 21165 | Spin is akin to rotation, and is easily measured in a magnetic field [New Sci.] |
| 21157 | Particles are spread out, with wave-like properties, and higher energy shortens the wavelength [New Sci.] |
| 21163 | The mass of protons and neutrinos is mostly binding energy, not the quarks [New Sci.] |
| 21168 | Gravitional mass turns out to be the same as inertial mass [New Sci.] |
| 21138 | Neutrons are slightly heavier than protons, and decay into them by emitting an electron [New Sci.] |
| 21144 | Top, bottom, charm and strange quarks quickly decay into up and down [New Sci.] |
| 21141 | Neutrinos were proposed as the missing energy in neutron beta decay [New Sci.] |
| 21169 | Only neutrinos spin anticlockwise [New Sci.] |
| 21166 | Standard antineutrinos have opposite spin and opposite lepton number [New Sci.] |
| 21171 | The symmetry of unified electromagnetic and weak forces was broken by the Higgs field [New Sci.] |
| 19954 | It is impossible for find a model of actuality among the innumerable models in string theory [New Sci.] |
| 21178 | String theory is now part of 11-dimensional M-Theory, involving p-branes [New Sci.] |
| 19953 | In string theory space-time has a grainy indivisible substructure [New Sci.] |
| 19476 | String theory needs at least 10 space-time dimensions [New Sci.] |
| 21179 | Supersymmetric string theory can be expressed using loop quantum gravity [New Sci.] |
| 21175 | String theory might be tested by colliding strings to make bigger 'stringballs' [New Sci.] |
| 21177 | String theory offers a quantum theory of gravity, by describing the graviton [New Sci.] |
| 21162 | Only supersymmetry offers to incorporate gravity into the scheme [New Sci.] |
| 21159 | Supersymmetry has extra heavy bosons and heavy fermions [New Sci.] |
| 21173 | Supersymmetry says particles and superpartners were unities, but then split [New Sci.] |
| 21172 | The evidence for supersymmetry keeps failing to appear [New Sci.] |
| 19947 | Hilbert Space is an abstraction representing all possible states of a quantum system [New Sci.] |
| 21160 | The Higgs field means even low energy space is not empty [New Sci.] |
| 19948 | Einstein's merging of time with space has left us confused about the nature of time [New Sci.] |
| 19475 | Relativity makes time and space jointly basic; quantum theory splits them, and prioritises time [New Sci.] |
| 19955 | Space-time may be a geometrical manifestation of quantum entanglement [New Sci.] |
| 19949 | Quantum theory relies on a clock outside the system - but where is it located? [New Sci.] |
| 19951 | Entropy is puzzling, so we may need to build new laws which include time directionality [New Sci.] |
| 19477 | General relativity predicts black holes, as former massive stars, and as galaxy centres [New Sci.] |
| 19952 | Black holes have entropy, but general relativity says they are unstructured, and lack entropy [New Sci.] |
| 16420 | 84.5 percent of the universe is made of dark matter [New Sci.] |
| 21174 | Dark matter must have mass, to produce gravity, and no electric charge, to not reflect light [New Sci.] |
| 17604 | We are halfway to synthesising any molecule we want [New Sci.] |
| 17603 | Chemistry just needs the periodic table, and protons, electrons and neutrinos [New Sci.] |