blake johnson

Through my classes on the history of 20th century physics and the philosophy of Nietzsche, it has become ever more apparent to me that physical theories are really a kind of art. This is to say that even in physics— a field which purports to reveal the truth of the nature of the universe— there is choice in constructing our theories and interpretations. These choices are not made based upon what is “real”, but on aesthetics.

This realization is something that I have oft resisted, because the possitivist viewpoint which governs most physicists’ thinking attempts to ground our theories in an external, measurable, truth. Yet, I am coming now to reconsider some of these conceptions. This is not to say that I now doubt the existance of truth, but rather that I now realize that the point of the scientific method is not that reproducibility ensures truth. Instead, reproducibility gives us a measure of confidence in experimental results. In the end, there is no certainty of any result, because researchers many years from now may discover a fatal flaw in our experiments.

Yet, there is still value in the possivist viewpoint, because at some point we need to posit the existence of facts in order to develop new theories and progress to new, better, more accurate ideas.

I’ve heard of weddings which spare no expense, but this is incredible.

The Rev. Prof. Peter Gomes provides his take on the gay-marriage issue in Massachusetts. Here’s a nice quote from it:

“Judicial tyranny” is a phrase usually heard from those whose prejudices have not been sustained by a court’s decision. Happily, the fundamental rights of citizens in this Commonwealth and republic are in the long run defended against another form of tyranny even more dangerous, the tyranny of the majority.

Sammy spoke today with fond memory of a comment he had written on a blog. He sent the comment— it is so typically Sammy that I just have to post it here for posterity:

I burst forth. Not me the person, me the words you read here. What is at stake in the transcription of feelings/emotions in the form of a letter, a graph of any sort? Nothing short of translation. Not unlike a new language, beginning in the limited sense of unintelligibility between speakers of different languages, the translation repeats itself in interpretation and understanding. The problem of letter writing? What the other reads is not what you wish them to. I had a conversation with Allie yesterday. Not a vocal conversation, or even properly speaking, a text conversation, though it was textual. The trace? Nothing. Our memories. Divergent. A letter we may write each other in the future about such conversation? Different. Distant.

BTW, the CAPTCHA solution I am using is a modified version of the plugin which can by found on James Seng’s blog. I’ve kept Seng’s method of storing keys in files, but I’ve changed the actual challenge to be much more difficult by using some code from the FirstProductions Human Test project. I suspect that my version is much harder to crack with OCR software than Seng’s version.