Categories: science

Why, of course. (I think.)

I read a book called “On Being Certain” by Richard Burton (a college professor at Yale, not the dead actor) on a plane ride back from Paris recently, an environment that always encourages freedom of thought. I’m a voracious consumer of laymen’s books on recent advances in neuroscience, so I was familiar with all the authors he noted (including Stephen Jay Gould – another favorite of mine.) I’m also interested in physics, in particular quantum mechanics. And chaos theory. More >>

Culture & gravity

I've come to believe that culture is at once the most powerful, and least easily perceived, influencer of human behavior. Like gravity, which is one of the four fundamental forces controlling the universe, culture is an all-pervasive web of attraction that invisibly holds everything together. (For those who are counting, the other physical forces are the weak nuclear force, the strong nuclear force and electromagnetism.) Gravity is the weakest of the four forces in its local effects, yet it protects all matter and energy everywhere in the universe from disintegration and chaos. Gravity also, like culture, operates over great distance, though its influence diminishes as the distance grows (and the gravitational pull of other bodies take hold.) More >>

  • 1