Monday, December 12, 2005

Question Time

Here is the qestion board where you can pose a question.
I am not sure about the quality of the answers yet.
Give it a try: www.einstein.webeden.co.uk
If you have a question, or need some advice, ask Einstein!

Sunday, December 11, 2005

Solving the puzzle

If you think that you figure it out, think again. It may work for some time but it will not not work for everyone all the time.
These days it is hard to be original. Woody Allan has said something similar: Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem. I was only pretending to solve the puzzle, but I need to start somewhere.

Thursday, December 08, 2005

Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence

I was searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence on Google. Much less expensive tool compare to all those radio telescopses. Here what Gabe Weinberg writes about ET search: "all we know today is that outer space is huge and most of its detail remains undiscovered. Outer space may be the home of zero, one, hundreds, millions, or trillions of intelligent species. And so we continue the search because the search will never be over. In the spirit of Copernicus, there's nothing necessarily special about humans or Earth--no terrestrial arguments can rule out extra-terrestrial intelligence."

And Copernicus also said “God, without whom we can do nothing.”

Is God the only extra-terrestrial intelligence out there?

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Dark Energy

In cosmology, dark energy is a hypothetical form of energy which permeates all of space and has strong negative pressure. According to the theory of relativity, the effect of such a negative pressure is qualitatively similar to a force acting in opposition to gravity at large scales. Invoking such an effect is currently the most popular method for explaining the observations of an accelerating universe as well as accounting for a significant portion of the missing mass in the universe.
Two proposed forms for dark energy are the cosmological constant, a constant energy density filling space homogeneously, and quintessence, a dynamic field whose energy density can vary in time and space. Distinguishing between the alternatives requires high-precision measurements of the expansion of the universe to understand how the speed of the expansion changes over time. The rate of expansion is parameterized by the cosmological equation of state. Measuring the equation of state of dark energy is one of the biggest efforts in observational cosmology today.
Adding a cosmological constant to the standard theory of cosmology (i.e. the FLRW metric) has led to a model for cosmology known as the Lambda-CDM model. This model is in very good agreement with established cosmological observations.
The term dark energy was coined by Michael Turner.
Based on Wikipedia

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Fuzzy Logic

One of the theoretical approach is called fuzzy logic, developed by American philosopher Lotfi Zadeh. Fuzzy logic proposes a gradual transition between "perfect falsity", for, for example, the statement "Bill Clinton is bald", to "perfect truth", for, say, "Patrick Stewart is bald". In ordinary logics, there are only two truth-values: "true" and "false". The fuzzy perspective differs by introducing an infinite number of truth-values along a spectrum between perfect truth and perfect falsity. Perfect truth may be represented by "1", and perfect falsity by "0". Borderline cases are thought of as having a "truth-value" anywhere between 0 and 1 (for example, 0.6).

Monday, December 05, 2005

Solipsism belief

Solipsism (from the Latin ipse = "self" and solus = "alone") is the epistemological belief that one's self is the only thing that can be known with certainty and verified (sometimes called egoism). Solipsism is also commonly understood to encompass the metaphysical belief that only one's self exists, and that "existence" just means being a part of one's own mental states — all objects, people, etc, that one experiences are merely parts of one's own mind. Solipsism is first recorded with the presocratic sophist Gorgias (c. 483-375 BC) who is quoted by Sextus Empiricus as having stated:
1. Nothing exists
2. Even if something exists, nothing can be known about it, and
3. Even if something could be known about it, knowledge about it can't be communicated to others.
Solipsism is generally identified with statement 2 and 3 from Gorgias.

A thought-experiment related to solipsis, although in principle distinct, is the Brain in a Vat. The person performing the thought-experiment considers the possibility that they are trapped within some utterly unknowable reality, much like that illustrated in the movie "The Matrix". A mad scientist could be sending the same impulses to a brain in a vat that a brain understood to be in the "real world" could receive, thereby exactly replicating the world as one knows it. Yet, for the brain in the vat, that world would obviously not be real. This raises the possibility that everything one thinks or knows is illusion. Or at the least that one cannot know, with any certainty, whether one's brain is in the "real world" or in a vat receiving impulses that would create an equivalent consciousness.

Thought similar to solipsism is present in much of eastern philosophy. Taoism and several interpretations of Buddhism, especially Zen, teach that drawing a distinction between self and universe is nonsensical and arbitrary, and merely an artifact of language rather than an inherent reality. Giovanni Gentile postulated a form of solipsism with his own brand of Idealism, which maintained that one's dependent view of reality only existed in so far as it related to the world it created itself into.

Another variation is a sort of materialistic agnosticism, stating simply that nothing outside of one's own thoughts can be absolutely proven to exist; it may all simply be the illusion/imagination/whatever of the thinker.
Wikipedia