Get Started Reading Books and Articles on the Cheap

…y dead. Download Free Articles from Preprint Servers. Read the almost-ready-for-print version, without paying for it! Physics and mathematics: arxiv.org. Philosophy of Science: philsci-archive.pitt.edu. Download Free Articles from the Author’s Homepage. Did you know that Jeremy Butterfield has dozens of his most recent papers posted on his website? Or that John Norton has written a free introduction to Einstein’s theories? You can always google an…

Read more

Get Started Learning General Relativity Online

…eory. Emphasizes philosophical perspectives, where relevant. Available for free online. Introduction to General Relativity on Wikipedia. A quick overview of a few of the essential features of GR, on everyone’s favorite non-scholarly resource. Mathematical introductions to general relativity Oz and the Wizard, by John Baez. This is very entertaining introduction to general relativity in the form of a dialogue. It also contains a fantastic dictionar…

Read more

Special: What’s With the Economy.

…not complicate this story.) That payment is called a mortgage. PART 3: PRE-PAYMENTS & FORECLOSURES. In order for the deal with McDuck to be fair, there’s one exception about those mortgage payments. Imagine that, one week after McDuck gave BurgerBee the money for the restaurant building, BurgerBee came into 100,000 bucks all by themselves. (Let’s say they owned another store elsewhere, and were able to sell it.) BurgerBee wants to pay back McDuck…

Read more

LHC Black Holes: Why I’m Not Holding My Breath

…t-jobs are receiving is a bit discouraging. Some people do hope to see mini-black-holes at CERN, it’s true. Some calculate that we will see thousands. But: (1) if you have any empiricist scruples, then you won’t believe in these mini-black-holes at CERN; alternatively, (2) if you have no such empiricist scruples, then you’ll agree that all mini-black-holes at CERN are short-lived and harmless. Here’s why: Let’s begin with (2), and suppose that you…

Read more

Could You Have Defended Galileo?

…ies fall. But you can still try to put upper and lower bounds on motion in free fall, in order to get your result. How can the law of uniform velocity provide bounds on the time it takes for a body to fall? On Monday, I’ll elaborate on that last hint. (It’s actually an interesting problem all by itself.) Later, I’ll sketch a little bit of the first answer to this challenge, which was given by Pierre de Fermat in an obscure letter to Gassendi, arou…

Read more