If you’re new to Soul Physics, try some of our classic posts! The following posts received either a lot of traffic or a lot of comments (or both) in 2009. Where the material conditional gets its truth conditions. A simple explanation to aid students of classical predicate logic. Hyper-intelligent fish and black hole thermodynamics. A thought on the well-known analogy between hydrodynamics and black hole thermodynamics. Can Time Unfold in the Wron…
Read more…ems. I’m sure you’ve done the calculation: how many people can be expected buy the textbook at that price? Not many. Not to mention that we could pick up two copies of J. K. Rowling’s “complete works” for this royal sum. This is not dissemination of information. This is you failing the academic community. Because of your silliness, Souriau’s scholarship is not being widely shared in the way that the academic community needs. In this case, the auth…
Read more…tructure of the Rubik’s cube. Rokicki’s brute-force combinatorics approach offers little in this regard, despite its practical effectiveness. Toward the mathematical end, Douglas Hofstadter suggested in 1981 (reprinted here, chapter 14) that there are sophisticated group theoretic arguments pointing to an upper bound of 22 or 23 moves. Frey and Singmaster also conjectured in 1982 that the maximum number of moves required to solve the cube may be i…
Read more…astination, a few shirts were produced by yours truly. The Philosophy Gift Shop. Here is where you go if you want a well-known quote by a dead philosopher on your t-shirt. Perhaps interesting for some, but there are more inspiring options. SagaciTree. Slightly more interesting designs. But you can do better. Philosophy at CafePress. There are some much more interesting designs here, both interesting and entertaining. Zazzle.com is the most random,…
Read more…will also be a possible according to the laws. One can check that this is equivalent to the statement that commutes with the Hamiltonian, Why is so often symmetry? There is a theorem that explains it: if we characterize quantum field theory in a very plausible and general way (such as by the Wightman axioms or Haag axioms), and in particular assume that it admits a unitary representation of the Poincaré group, then -invariance is guaranteed. This…
Read more