Tag: Cosmos
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Why Something rather than Nothing?
Despite human knowledge having steadily increased, there are still unanswered questions. Perhaps the first is, why is there something rather than nothing? Putting on our philosophical hat, we need to clarify what we mean by ‘nothing’. The SOED suggests “a non-existent thing”, which sounds like a self-contradiction, since the same dictionary defines a ‘thing’ as…
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A Juxtaposition
The Wordsworth poem reminds me that we are all made of ‘star dust’. We’re made of exactly the same atoms as everything else in the universe. These atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, phosphorus, sulphur, potassium, sodium, chlorine and magnesium were created millions and billions of years ago in the nuclear furnaces of massive,…
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Voices in the Wilderness of Time and Space?
“Welcome to planet Earth – a place of blue nitrogen skies, oceans of liquid water, cool forests and soft meadows, a world positively rippling with life. In the cosmic perspective it is poignantly beautiful and rare; but it is also, for the moment, unique. In all our journeying through space and time, it is, so…
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Let’s get ‘Real’ (ii) ‘The Lord of the Dance’
My previous post was about Materialism, which the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines as “the theory or belief that nothing exists except matter”. My point was that Materialism, arguably, ‘doesn’t have very much in it’, since matter is made up of atoms that are 99.99% ‘empty space’! The truth of the matter (!) is that…
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Thales and Water
It’s generally thought that Thales was the first Greek philosopher-cum-scientist. I like the story in which he’s walking along a path with an old lady, pointing up to, and telling her all about, the stars – when he trips and falls into the ditch. The old lady looks pityingly, but scornfully, down at him and…
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