No Exceptions! None! Nowhere! Never! (Or not.)

Cassandra, for Richard: How do we know the laws of physics are universal? Why can’t there be a far-off galaxy where our laws of physics don’t apply? (Is that a really stupid question?) Richard, for Cassandra: We don’t. There can. (It’s not.) Such was Cassie’s contribution to LWON’s first anniversary post last May. As part of [...]

Bang? Whimper? Whatever.

What is the fate of the universe? Cosmologists are converging on an answer, and it ain’t pretty. Or so I gather from people who, hearing that the latest science favors a universe that goes on forever, growing colder and colder, lonelier and lonelier, ask me, “Don’t you find it depressing?” The short answer is, No. [...]

Abstruse Goose: Newton #1

Socrates (according to Plato) is explaining to a follower, Glaucon, an overly-complex but famous metaphor.  Prisoners who have been raised in a cave sit chained facing a wall, which is lit only by the fire behind them.  For the prisoners, says Socrates, reality is “only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another.”   And [...]