Footnote Physicist

by Steven Gussman             0 The ancient Greek Sophists were populists—they fancied themselves practical philosophers for laypeople, as opposed to those ivory tower elitists, who horded knowledge for themselves. 1  Surely, we are just as capable as any elite at adducing truth, they thought. And surely you deserve affordable advice about the way the world works, they advertised. Indeed, the enterprise was something of a private market sector phenomenon: it was a for-profit teaching business for practical folk. 2  It is perhaps here in the spirit of populism that we find the root of their vain hubris in thinking they could start from scratch and see further than all past knowledge combined, for the Sophists were relativists. 3             The Sophists were not only moral relativists (believing there are no such things as absolute, objective moral facts), but a much rarer breed: epistemological relativists (bel...

 Bibliography / Suggested Reading Books The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (Mariner Books) (2006 / 2008) The Dream Of Enlightenment by Anthony Gottlieb (Liveright Publishing Corporation) (2016) The Dream Of Reason by Anthony Gottlieb (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.) (2000 / 2016) The Communist Manifesto  by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (translator unknown) (Millennium Publications) (1848 / 2017) The Madness Of Crowds: Gender, Race, And Identity  by Douglas Murray (Bloomsbury Continuum) (2019) 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote To Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson (Random House Canada) (2018) The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial Of Human Nature by Steven Pinker (Penguin Books) (2002 / 2016) Enlightenment Now: The Case For Reason, Science, Humanism, And Progress by Steven Pinker (Viking) (2018) A Conflict Of Visions: Ideological Origins Of Political Struggles by Thomas Sowell (Basic Books) (2007) Misbehaving: The Making Of Behavioral Economics by Richard Thaler (Norton) (2015) (...

The Sophistructure  Table Of Contents Acknowledgements (coming soon) Introduction (coming soon) PART I: A Grand Narrative Chapter 1: Sophistry Chapter 2: Marxism COMING SOON PART II: Facts And Feelings COMING SOON PART III: The Civil War On Civility COMING SOON Afterward: (coming soon) Bibliography Index (by author) (coming soon) Index (by topic) (coming soon)

by Steven Gussman             1 Physicist Max Tegmark's Our Mathematical Universe is a hodge-podge, part popular astronomy book, part memoir, and part creative playground for exploring new ideas. His account of mainstream physics and astronomy sheds light on the subject in a unique way, and I appreciate that he is willing to directly recognize the obvious big questions. 2 The book ultimately revolves around Tegmark's unlikely idea of the most expansive multiverse imaginable, and several arguments from fundamental physics to cognitive psychology are employed to get there. Like many of us, Tegmark is dissatisfied with standard quantum physics, but he (and increasingly his colleagues in physics) embraces a cure that's worse than the disease in the Everettian “many worlds” multiverse interpretation, which simply moves the central problem without answering it. 3 By taking advantage of the most simple models of recent scientific ideas in need of more ...