outward not upward

A very noteworthy shift occurred in the world of physics in the early part of the 20th century, and I’m not talking about Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis. In fact, much of Einstein’s work was diametrically opposite what I’m talking about: use of statistics as a foundation for physics.

I have to note a quotation from Niels Bohr, which shines with uncommon insight:

It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.

I think many scientists before the Modern era would have disagreed with this. Einstein would almost certainly have disagreed, because of his unusual obsession (shared with Newton) with mathematical beauty. It is explicit throughout his work that Einstein believed (and this rings out in Hawking, too) that the “mind of God,” or absolute reality, must be able to be inferred from physical observation.

After 1905, though, things turned ugly. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last couple of days, I’ve put together a little program I’m calling RabidRead*. RabidRead was conceived when I read a forum post by someone about how he was able to achieve very high comprehension at very high speeds by using a piece of software he wrote.

Programs of this sort are called “serial readers,”and they work by presenting a single word (from a long text) at a time, in rapid succession (say, between 200 and 1000 words per minute).

Read more here!