This link has been bookmarked by 2 people . It was first bookmarked on 22 Nov 2006, by Maxim.
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29 Nov 10
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Sir Isaac Newton would certainly be astonished today if present at the meeting of an undergraduate physics society. In that respect Sir Winston and other greats of our civilization would certainly be correct. But they should also remember that Sir Isaac tolerated no cheaters. At no time had counterfeiters in the British Isles had more of the fear of the Lord in their bones than in the two decades during which Sir Isaac was director of the Mint and had the power to send to the gallows anyone tampering with the currency. I leave it to you to imagine what he would do now with those who in these days, when lunches are no longer free, claim to deliver entire universes for free, that is, out of that nothing which they are unable to take at face value.
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22 Nov 06
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Yet the question why science did not arise in any of the great ancient cultures is one of the most important questions that can be raised about human history. Its answer is also the answer to the question why science is so novel
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In Copernicus's explanation of why falling bodies do not fall behind on a fast rotating and even faster orbiting earth, they would have recognized a very old idea that had been argued for 200 years as part of the university education everywhere in Europe. The idea was formulated in early 14th-century Sorbonne under the name of impetus theory. It is the clear anticipation of Newton's First Law on which rest his Second and Third Laws, and ultimately all that marvelous set of laws that constitute classical and modem physics.
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Not only in Egypt but in all ancient cultures -- China, India, Babylon and Greece too -- the world was looked upon as an eternal being. Worse, that being was taken for a living entity, often for an animal full of unpredictable turns and twists. This should be kept in mind in recalling another ancient pagan way of looking at the universe. If the universe was not taken for deity itself, it was taken at least for a direct emanation from divinity, whatever it was. Such is the background of Plato's, of Plutarch's and of Cicero's references to the universe as the only-begotten, monogenes or unigenitus, being.
These words immediately take us to the very core of Christian religion, the dogma about Christ as the only-begotten, monogenes or unigenitus, Son of God. On the face of it, this dogma may seem to force a choice between Christ and the universe, or between the world to come and this world, or between religion and science.
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In ancient Egypt only opinions were allowed. The only dogmatic phase of Egypt of old -- Akhenaton's exclusive sun worship -- was erased with all its traces immediately upon Akhenaton's. death and at the instigation of priests from Thebes. Clearly, they wanted neither innovation nor those certainties which are always dogmatic if truly certain. The ancient Egyptians' engrossment with the wildest combinations of animal forms shows their preference for. inconsistencies over certainties or dogmas.
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Of course, not even the Greeks of old were able to give the word dogma the meaning given it by the church fathers. The new meaning stood for the conviction that truth, superhuman or supernatural as its reference point may be, must mean complete absence of contradictions and even of inconsistencies. This conviction produced the Trinitarian dogmas of Christianity and is, or rather should be, the deepest motivation of the scientific quest. Science certainly owes its only viable birth to that Christian dogmatic conviction. Viable birth is, of course, the best and most promising token of growth or progress, religious or other, together with the possibility for continual revitalization.
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If progress is something like a voyage, its continuation does not cease to be a function of its very starting point and of the provisions acquired there. If religion is to be an ongoing progress, its very starting point should be rethought continually.
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