Johannes Kepler

We need more tiny knowledge projects—here’s one

Crowdsourcing dynamic illustrations for a new astronomy book by Terry Tao and Tanya Klowden. The other day I was reading the sample chapter of a new book by Terence Tao and Tanya Klowden, on the so-called cosmic distance ladder. It’s a lovely piece of writing. The chapter tells the story of how Johannes Kepler, using data collected by Tycho Brahe, solved the puzzle of planetary motion. It puts us in the discoverers’ shoes: instead of working backwards from Kepler’s equations, we work forwards from the inexp

Peter Plavchan on Twitter / X

Came across this beauty of a Research Note. Looks like it was done by someone at JPL with a HS student. Pulled period and semi-major axis for Kepler and TESS transiting planets from the NASA Exoplanet archive, and verified Kepler's 3rd law. https://t.co/JSIlg6Aw5s— Peter Plavchan (@PlavchanPeter) September 27, 2024

The Coming Second Copernican Revolution | NOEMA

Astrobiology is rewiring our understanding of the intimate connection between life and planets as they appear in the universe.

Thomas Simpson

Thomas Simpson FRS was a British mathematician and inventor known for the eponymous Simpson's rule to approximate definite integrals. The attribution, as often in mathematics, can be debated: this rule had been found 100 years earlier by Johannes Kepler, and in German it is called Keplersche Fassregel, or roughly "Kepler's Barrel Rule".

Terence Tao – Kepler, Newton, and the true nature of mathematical discovery

“And what those stories teach us about how AI will revolutionize math”

Parmenides

Parmenides of Elea, active in the earlier part of the 5th c. BCE,authored a difficult metaphysical poem that has earned him areputation as early Greek philosophy’s most profound andchallenging thinker. His philosophical stance has typically beenunderstood as at once extremely paradoxical and yet crucial for thebroader development of Greek natural philosophy and metaphysics. Hehas been seen as a metaphysical monist (of one stripe or another) whoso challenged the naïve cosmological theories of his predecessorsthat his major successors among the Presocratics were all driven todevelop more sophisticated physical theories in response to hisarguments. The difficulties involved in the interpretation of his poemhave resulted in disagreement about many fundamental questionsconcerning his philosophical views, such as: whether he actually was amonist and, if so, what kind of monist he was; whether his systemreflects a critical attitude toward earlier thinkers such as theMilesians, Pythagoreans, and Heraclitus, or whether he was motivatedsimply by more strictly logical concerns, such as the paradox ofnegative existentials that Bertrand Russell detected at the heart ofhis thought; whether he considered the world of our everydayawareness, with its vast population of entities changing and affectingone another in all manner of ways, to be simply an illusion, and thuswhether the lengthy cosmological portion of his poem represented agenuine attempt to understand this world at all. This entry aims toprovide an overview of Parmenides’ work and of some of the majorinterpretive approaches advanced over the past few decades. Itconcludes by suggesting that understanding his thought and his placein the development of early Greek philosophy requires taking dueaccount of the fundamental modal distinctions that he was the first toarticulate and explore with any precision.

Paul Feyerabend

Paul Feyerabend (b.1924, d.1994), having studied science at theUniversity of Vienna, moved into philosophy for his doctoral thesis,made a name for himself both as an expositor and (later) as a critic ofKarl Popper's “critical rationalism”, and went on to becomeone of the twentieth century's most famous philosophers of science. Animaginative maverick, he became a critic of philosophy of scienceitself, particularly of “rationalist” attempts to lay downor discover rules of scientific method.

The Original Attention Crisis - Cal Newport

I recently heard from a historian of science at All Souls College, Oxford. He forwarded me ​an essay​ he wrote about Nicolaus Steno, a seventeenth-century ... Read more

Seymour Papert

Seymour Aubrey Papert was a South African-born American mathematician, computer scientist, and educator, who spent most of his career teaching and researching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, and of the constructionist movement in education. He was co-inventor, with Wally Feurzeig and Cynthia Solomon, of the Logo programming language.

The Philosophical Implications of the Second Scientific Revolution

Notes from my history of philosophy course lecture on Darwin, Maxwell, Einstein, and Bohr

Planets and Bright Stars

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.

Pappus of Alexandria Book 7 of the Collection

The seventh book of Pappus's Collection, his commentary on the Domain (or Treasury) of Analysis, figures prominently in the history of both ancient and modern mathematics: as our chief source of information concerning several lost works of the Greek geometers Euclid and Apollonius, and as a book that inspired later mathematicians, among them Viete, Newton, and Chasles, to original discoveries in their pursuit of the lost science of antiquity. This presentation of it is concerned solely with recovering what can be learned from Pappus about Greek mathematics. The main part of it comprises a new edition of Book 7; a literal translation; and a commentary on textual, historical, and mathematical aspects of the book. It proved to be convenient to divide the commentary into two parts, the notes to the text and translation, and essays about the lost works that Pappus discusses. The first function of an edition of this kind is, not to expose new discoveries, but to present a reliable text and organize the accumulated knowledge about it for the reader's convenience. Nevertheless there are novelties here. The text is based on a fresh transcription of Vat. gr. 218, the archetype of all extant manuscripts, and in it I have adopted numerous readings, on manuscript authority or by emendation, that differ from those of the old edition of Hultsch. Moreover, many difficult parts of the work have received little or no commentary hitherto.

Marc Andreessen is a philosophical zombie

A quasi-scientific polemic.