Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

This famous phrase, made famous by Sir Isaac Newton, and celebrated ever since, may have been a public attempt at modesty and historical gratitude that was sure to endear him to, and inspire, subsequent generations of natural philosophers, but it may also have been a little bit of an underhanded insult to Robert Hooke, just the kind of thing Newton would do when his gigantic and fragile ego was wounded if anyone dared to question some of his ideas...

Still, the phrase has taken on a life of its own, and it is now used to describe the incredible scientific and technological progress that has taken humanity to the unique position of being able to question its own origin and place in the universe, and to actually start to answer those questions, change its environment, make its dreams more ambitious and then make those dreams come true. The following captivating video is a beautiful celebration of the cumulative knowledge and insight we've gained about ourselves and the universe in only a few centuries, and the amazing feats we've accomplished as a result, by standing on the shoulders of giants:

Hope you're inspired!

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Adam Savage - How Simple Ideas Lead to Scientific Discoveries

We live in a world in which we presuppose as a given that great scientific discoveries require the existence of great, expensive technological equipment: lasers, the Large Hadron Collider, microscopes, computers, the Hubble and Kepler telescopes, synchrotrons, super-duper cameras, you name it...

But more than great technology, the real secret to discovery is creativity, because creativity helps you make good use of whatever tools are actually available to you, even if they happen to be, as in the case of Eratosthenes, two sticks on the ground. In the following TEDTalk animated presentation, Myth Buster Adam Savage recounts a few examples (starting with Richard Feynman, moving on to Eratosthenes,  Galileo, and Armand Fizeau's toothed wheel to measure the speed of light,) about how small ideas can give rise to mind-blowing ideas and revolutionary discoveries.

And if Carl Sagan is more your style, you might be interested in his take on Eratosthenes.

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Dangerous Knowledge

Beneath the surface of the world are the rules of science, but beneath them there is a far deeper set of rules, a matrix of pure mathematics, which explains the nature of the rules of science...

So begins this David Malone tour-de-force tribute to four geniuses who dared to confront the nature of the rules underlying all mathematics, logic and science, and saw in their various ways that the certainty with which we had become so familiar and comfortable was but an illusion.

Their stories are both inspiring and tragic. These men, Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, were all destined for intellectual fame and greatness, if only posthumously, but because of the nature of their research, because of the intense dedication that their academic problems demanded of them, because of the great resistance they had to overcome from detractors, and because of the major threat they posed to our most foundational beliefs, they came to the brink of madness, and their ends were all tragic, lonely and regrettable. For all of that, however, and however briefly, they each got a glimpse of a reality few, if any of us, will ever get to experience.

This is, quite possibly, the best thing you may do for your brain this week...

And for another masterpiece on Alan Turing's intellectual contributions, check out Jim Al-Khalili's The Secret Life of Chaos.

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Neil DeGrasse Tyson - The God of the Gaps

There are many reasons why lots of otherwise reasonable people don't 'believe' in the theory of evolution. Yes, some of it has to do with their religious background and with a lack of basic education concerning science generally and evolution specifically, but that can't be the whole story.

Part of it also has to do with the way our minds work. For instance, we have a natural tendency to think teleologically (in terms of goals, purposes and design) and in terms of agency (there must be some intentional mind or subject behind any given phenomenon), and so we commit a basic category mistake when we apply these modes of thinking (the manufacture of industrial and commercial goods) to non-teleological phenomena (like biological complexity and organic processes).

But it doesn't stop there. The problem is that as evolved creatures, we have inherited a set of cognitive quirks and biases that conferred our ancestors with practical benefits that are not always conducive to the attainment of truth. To add insult to injury, our cognitive biases often lead us to commit logical fallacies, like the God of the Gaps argument.

In the following fascinating and amusing presentation, Neil deGrasse Tyson explains how even some of the greatest scientific minds of all time, people whose education and intelligence are unimpeachable, when confronted with the limits of their own knowledge and understanding, quickly retreat to this pernicious mode of poor thinking. In the process, he draws some deliciously thought-provoking lessons.

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Pendulum Waves

Pendulums have been around for a very long time, at least since the 1st century, when the Chinese polymath Zhang Heng used one to build what is widely considered to be the very first seismometer in history.

The rigorous and scientific study of the properties of pendulums, however, didn't start until the 17th century, when Galileo took up the question. Undeniably, Galileo did some great and unprecedented work, but one can't help but wonder how much easier and productive his time could have been if he had thought up of this beautiful little experiment (without just becoming mesmerized by the optical illusion created by it):

And here is another beautiful version of the same basic idea.

And if you're curious about how seismometers, including Zhang Hen's, work, listen to this:

And if you want more on pendulums, I'll post an awesome entry on Foucault's pendulum soon. Stay tuned.
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Peter Millican's Introduction to General Philosophy

You know what's missing from your life? More philosophy. Sure, the practical benefits may not always be obvious (though they are most decidedly there), but philosophy deals with the deepest, the most elusive, the most important and the most interesting questions human beings can think of.

Here at the philosophy monkey blog, we've featured Michael Sandel's popular course on Justice before. Now we get to cross the ocean and switch from Harvard to Oxford, as philosopher Peter Millican gives us a fascinating overview of modern philosophy (with a beautiful English accent) in eight gripping lectures covering everything from the nature and sources of knowledge to skepticism of the external world, Cartesian dualism (and the mind-body problem), primary and secondary qualities, the problem of induction, free will and determinism, and the metaphysics of personal identity.

In today's first lecture, Professor Millican traces the history of philosophy from its roots in Ancient Greece and Rome, and how it would undergo a revolution in the 17th and 18th centuries, as great thinkers like Galileo and Descartes would rebel against the previously unchallenged authority of Plato, Aristotle and religious dogma, and would attempt to develop new and useful methods of inquiry. The world would never be the same again...

Click here to see the course slides.

And check out the rest of this excellent course.
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