In Cosmology: A First Course, Marc Lachieze-Rey writes: The best definition of the cosmos is possibly the ensemble of relations between the constituent parts of the cosmos. First of all, I’ll point out that the larger context, the entirety of the introductory chapter, makes it clear that the cosmos is the parts as well as … [Read more…]
Cosmologists study the universe at a level where records vanish, as we learn in this article: Best Time to Study the Cosmos Was More Than 13 Billion Years Ago. The physical world, with its stars and galaxies and background radiation fields, doesn’t leave us some sort of permanent record to study at our leisure. Information … [Read more…]
Love is probably undefinable but we can at least understand some aspects of that love and can probably come to a substantial narrative understanding of some loves in their specific contexts. We can maybe even understand some of the ways in which a truer and incorruptible love will make the world of the resurrected, heaven, … [Read more…]
I stretch the truth when I sometimes talk as if I were the only one who sees being as a spectrum from the abstract to the concrete. Clearly, there is a sense in which Platonic and Neoplatonic Realists see being in two forms, abstract being (what they call the Real) and concrete being (the real … [Read more…]
[The original version of this essay was published on the as The Christian in the Universe of Einstein: 4. The Cosmos of Thinkers Prior to Einstein. It was finished and uploaded on 2007/02/06. This is a slightly corrected version which will be included in a collection of weblog entries I’ll be making available before many … [Read more…]
As matters currently stand in theories about physical reality and in philosophical analyses of those theories, there are no signs of homogeneity in the nature of spacetime at various scales of time and space though some assume and others hope. In general, created being at the quantum level (think of ‘subatomic’ levels of energy changes … [Read more…]
[Because of its importance to ideas which have been simmering in my mind for years, I’m publishing a minor update of one of my first weblog entries: Symmetry-breaking, From Physics and Mathematics to Metaphysics first published on 2006/12/05. I’ll soon be publishing a new entry which builds on some aspects of the ideas in this … [Read more…]
Once the thought of Plato and Aristotle had a home — the Greek city-state. Once the thought of St. Paul and St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas had a home — Western Civilization. The two situations were different because the Greek philosophers struggled to find the best way to inhabit a home built by their … [Read more…]
In order to move on in my work, I’m studying advanced physics and mathematics, concentrating for now on general relativity — broadly speaking since I have to take various diversions to refresh my old knowledge or to acquire new knowledge in basic physics and matrix algebra and differential geometry and so forth. One of the … [Read more…]