Coming from a former communist country I second the idea you mentioned here, namely the negative (overall) impact of the communist ideology on the development of Science. Lisenkoism is just one aspect here. For example when I was younger I skimmed through some books from the communist era (from...
Theories are 'free creations of the mind', to paraphrase Einstein, and it does not have any importance where they come from (dreams, sudden inspiration, religious beliefs, pondering on the consequences of accepted theories and so on are equally valid sources). What really count in science is the...
If we were to follow rigidly the falsificationist account of what is science then it's metaphysics. But then we should include in the same category superstring theory and so on. Personally I think things are much more complex.
There is an interesting article in Scientific American Special...
By the way I was reading a few days ago the comments to this blog post (https://tjoresearchnotes.wordpress.com/2013/05/13/guest-post-on-bohmian-mechanics-by-reinhard-f-werner/), a lot of disagreement there something which could only reinforce in me that perennial question 'Do we really...
One objection heard quite often is that Bohm's theory cannot be made compatible with Relativity in a profound sense, I only stressed that it can at limit if we relax the requirement of Lorentz invariance to apply solely to observations (explicit non locality cannot be used for superluminal...
To conclude Bohm's pilot-wave interpretation is definitely realist in nature. It has some problems (for example it requires a reformulation of SR to admit the absolute simultaneity of all inertial systems, fully possible see for example Cushing 'Philosophical concepts in physics', chapter 23.4...
In the book 'The undivided Universe. An Ontological interpretation of QM' (written together with Hiley) Bohm (chapter 1) writes in non equivocal terms about his goals at this level, namely to provide an ontology to QM.
Determinism / indeterminism (usually framed in causality / acausality...
The limits of free speech are usually set in the laws, there is incrimination for lying under oath, calumny, promoting proved harmful treatments and so on. However in the free societies, having a healthy level of secularism, there is no incrimination for blasphemy and this is the sense in which...
Lubos Motl has a good blog entry on this: http://motls.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/did-homer-simpson-calculate-correct.html . Unfortunately Homer was off target. Interesting Motl's suggestion that Singh himself is behind the equations written by Homer (if really so I would have expected more from him...
Well given the fact that muslims demand imperatively 'respect' for their religion and people I think he has a point even here. Imagine that a Christian would publish a book, written in an elevated language, without insults, in which he hints that the prophet of islam was a bandit (actually a...
It seems that things changed to the better. At that time many priests were not even aware of the existence of the historical critical method applied to the Bible. As much as Bart Ehrman can be an authority (he's in the 'Bible belt' and teach fundamentalist students) I understand that now all...
Aslan seems to have gained sympathy (when i posted my first post here i had no idea of what Fox News asked him) due to the tendentious way in which that interview was conducted.
Of course the fact that he is a muslim and not even an expert in New Testament studies does not mean that he is...
Thanks for your clarifications. I largely agree with you then. But in my view the fact that he uses those verses which seem to advocate violence is a good indicator that your first alternative is more probable (it seems that he thinks that Jesus gathered disciples to establish a free Jewish...
As far as I understand from the reviews at amazon he claims that Jesus was a lonely zealot, albeit not being part of the Zealot Party. That implies that he was not too far from their conceptions. Everything is a castle of cards which fall easily apart once the alleged 'violence of Jesus' is...
I'm not sure if you try to be the devils advocate here or you sincerely believe that. Anyways I don't think you can save Aslan. There is little evidence to none that Jesus was a lonely zealot (I mean the zealots from Jesus time, who went well beyond your definition), in fact he has much more in...