essay
The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time. Cambridge University Press, 1973; paperback edition 1974; reprinted 1976, 1977, 1979, 1980, 1984, 1986. By Stephen Hawking and George F. R. Ellis. This was written at a strategic time in the development of General Relativity Theory, summarising the new causal and topological methods and discoveries made between 1965 and…
STATEMENT BY GEORGE F. R. ELLIS At The Templeton Prize News Conference, March 17, 2004 I am simultaneously humbled and delighted at the award of the Templeton Prize. I feel greatly honoured by the choice the judges have made. I am a scientist by profession, specialising in general relativity theory (that is, Einstein’s theory of…
Dr. Raymond Damadian failed to be included in this year’s Nobel honors for work in Medicine, and feels sore about it. Although he was the inventor of the first machine that discovers cancers through magnetic resonance imaging, the award went to two other and somewhat subsequent scientists, Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield. Notoriously, the Nobel…
Metanexus Sophia. 2004.03.12. 1,034 Words. Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not.Both are equally terrifying. – Arthur C. Clarke This quotation from Clarke comes to mind when considering the essay below byPhysicist Lawrence Fagg, emeritus at Catholic University. Writing in response toan article by Paul Davies that discusses…
Metanexus Sophia. 2004.03.03. 4,132 Words. Do the logics of science and religion share the same grammar? Can we evaluate claims from each domain according to the same epistemological methods and principles? These are fundamental questions in the field of science and religion, and in the essay below, delivered at the AAR/SBL conference in Toronto in…
Some questions about his neuroscientific research on Carmelite nuns.
1: Introduction Two recent contributions have advanced understanding of brain function: Gerald Edelman’s Neural Darwinism (Edelman 1989, 1992, Edelman and Tononi 2001), dealing with how brain development and function can be well understood in terms of a process of natural selection applied to neural connections, and Jaak Panksepp’s Affective Neuroscience (Panksepp 1998, 2001), addressing how…
We are complex animals with complex, multifaceted thought processes. The Darwinian approach to religion is only beginning to scratch the surface here, and adaptive religions like adaptive individuals are complex.
Metanexus Sophia. 2004.02.24. 3,130 Words. Below is another paper presented at the International Seminar on ModernScience, Values and the Quest for Unity, held last month in Mahabaleshwar,India. This paper provides an introduction to Jainism and Science and iswritten by Dr. Dedhia Ela Manoj, College of Home Science Nirmala Niketan inMumbai, India. Jainism is all about…
Metanexus Sophia. 2004_02_19. 5380 Words. Below is part two of the two-part essay by Dhruv Raina from the Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India. Raina compares two pious scientists, the renowned English Sinologist Joseph Needham and the Pakistani physicist Abdus Salaam, in order to unravel the complex…