54 ideas
1502 | Parmenides was much more cautious about accepting ideas than his predecessors [Simplicius on Parmenides] |
448 | No necessity could produce Being either later or earlier, so it must exist absolutely or not at all [Parmenides] |
447 | Being must be eternal and uncreated, and hence it is timeless [Parmenides] |
449 | Being is not divisible, since it is all alike [Parmenides] |
1503 | There is no such thing as nothing [Parmenides] |
445 | The realm of necessary non-existence cannot be explored, because it is unknowable [Parmenides] |
21820 | Parmenides at least saw Being as the same as Nous, and separate from the sensed realm [Parmenides, by Plotinus] |
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.] |
452 | All our concepts of change and permanence are just names, not the truth [Parmenides] |
1504 | Something must be unchanging to make recognition and knowledge possible [Aristotle on Parmenides] |
444 | The first way of enquiry involves necessary existence [Parmenides] |
450 | Necessity sets limits on being, in order to give it identity [Parmenides] |
451 | Thinking implies existence, because thinking depends on it [Parmenides] |
1506 | Parmenides treats perception and intellectual activity as the same [Theophrastus on Parmenides] |
3058 | Only reason can prove the truth of facts [Parmenides] |
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.] |
20239 | Unlike us, the early Greeks thought envy was a good thing, and hope a bad thing [Hesiod, by Nietzsche] |
5081 | There could be movement within one thing, as there is within water [Aristotle on Parmenides] |
1509 | The one can't be divisible, because if it was it could be infinitely divided down to nothing [Parmenides, by Simplicius] |
20900 | Defenders of the One say motion needs the void - but that is not part of Being [Parmenides, by Aristotle] |
226 | The one is without any kind of motion [Parmenides] |
1505 | Reason sees reality as one, the senses see it as many [Aristotle on Parmenides] |
453 | Reality is symmetrical and balanced, like a sphere, with no reason to be greater one way rather than another [Parmenides] |
555 | People who say that the cosmos is one forget that they must explain movement [Aristotle on Parmenides] |
1792 | He taught that there are two elements, fire the maker, and earth the matter [Parmenides, by Diog. Laertius] |
5115 | It is feeble-minded to look for explanations of everything being at rest [Aristotle on Parmenides] |
19950 | Entropy is the only time-asymmetric law, so time may be linked to entropy [New Sci.] |
19478 | Light moves at a constant space-time speed, but its direction is in neither space nor time [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.] |
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.] |
19954 | It is impossible for find a model of actuality among the innumerable models in string theory [New Sci.] |
13217 | The void can't exist, and without the void there can't be movement or separation [Parmenides, by Aristotle] |
19947 | Hilbert Space is an abstraction representing all possible states of a quantum system [New Sci.] |
19948 | Einstein's merging of time with space has left us confused about the nature of time [New Sci.] |
19955 | Space-time may be a geometrical manifestation of quantum entanglement [New Sci.] |
19475 | Relativity makes time and space jointly basic; quantum theory splits them, and prioritises time [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.] |
22918 | What could have triggered the beginning [of time and being]? [Parmenides] |
1791 | He was the first person to say the earth is spherical [Parmenides, by Diog. Laertius] |
1794 | He was the first to discover the identity of the Morning and Evening Stars [Parmenides, by Diog. Laertius] |
19952 | Black holes have entropy, but general relativity says they are unstructured, and lack entropy [New Sci.] |
19477 | General relativity predicts black holes, as former massive stars, and as galaxy centres [New Sci.] |
16420 | 84.5 percent of the universe is made of dark matter [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.] |