Category Archives: Cosmology

The Parochial and the Cosmic

Posted on Sunday 10 November 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Our mistake was thinking we lived in a better country than we do; The US has lost faith in the American dream; Connie Willis’s detailed daily political summaries are now at CW Daily on Facebook; With today a dozen or … Continue reading →

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César Hidalgo, WHY INFORMATION GROWS

Posted on Monday 4 November 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies” (Basic Books, 2015, xxi + 232 pp, including 51pp of acknowledgements, notes, and index) A few weeks ago I sat down to read the new Yuval Noah Harari book, NEXUS, and … Continue reading →

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Passages from Brian Greene and Richard Dawkins

Posted on Tuesday 17 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

How unusual is this? An esteemed scientist, Brian Greene, with an Opinion piece in a major paper. (I just reviewed his book UNTIL THE END OF TIME ending here.) Washington Post, Brian Greene, 16 Sep 2024: Opinion | Decades later, … Continue reading →

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Brian Greene: UNTIL THE END OF TIME, post 2

Posted on Wednesday 7 August 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

More summary of this Brian Greene book. Earlier: post 1. 3, Origins and Entropy: From Creation to Structure, p44 If the universe began with a big explosion, how has so much order, with complex structures, emerged? Because, consistent with the … Continue reading →

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Brian Greene: UNTIL THE END OF TIME, post 1

Posted on Saturday 3 August 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

I’ve mentioned this book several times over the years (it was published in 2020), most recently here in early June, when I sat down to read it all the way through. I finished in mid-July. Subtitled: “Mind, Matter, and Our … Continue reading →

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Visiting the Profound

Posted on Sunday 2 June 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Brian Greene on understanding reality as a collection of nested stories; Recalling analogous thoughts by Sean Carroll and others; Big Think’s Ethan Siegel on the success of modern fundamental science. Perhaps today we can step back from the paranoid, delusional … Continue reading →

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Another Gloss on Philosophy

Posted on Monday 6 May 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

I think I mentioned this book before. It’s a compilation of rough summaries of twelve general topics, from American Studies to World History, with literature, music, philosophy, religion, science, and others in between, written for people who worry that their … Continue reading →

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Jaime Green, THE POSSIBILITY OF LIFE

Posted on Tuesday 9 April 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Here is a book published about a year ago now that turns out to be very similar, thematically, to the more recent book by Adam Frank, The Little Book of Aliens, that I reviewed here in January. That book was … Continue reading →

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A Potential Revolutionary Scientific Reinterpretation

Posted on Saturday 16 March 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

No one thinks that all of physics, or cosmology, is solved; the reigning problems in cosmology include contradictory conclusions about the age of the universe, and the nature of “dark matter” and “dark energy,” both terms being placeholders for unknown … Continue reading →

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Cosmic and Psychological Lessons

Posted on Friday 8 March 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Phil Plait on the scale of the cosmos; Beware of pluralistic ignorance; How math education can be better taught with examples about money. – – –   Today’s cosmic lesson. Scientific American, Phil Plait, 8 Mar 2024: The Scale of … Continue reading →

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