Novel scientific theories first setout to explain one anomalous phenomenon which the old theory cannot. Whether it’s explaining the production of heat, the formation of the earth, or how society stays intact, the same current of development can be seen working below the surface. Kuhn has developed a theory to explain this commonality over the…
Trial Week, Part 2
A few months ago I wrote up an article about what I call a Trial Week. It is a week where you break free from habits and take part in a personal experiment. The only real good is to live your life during that week a bit differently and come away from it with a new…
Why I’m looking forward to moving out of the south
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed my past year and a half, almost two years, living in Tallahassee. The often forgotten capital of Florida has served me well and I’ve made friends down here that I wouldn’t sacrifice for anything, yet I already know that my days down here are limited. After having grown up…
Political Economics: Formation of the State
This essay is taken nearly verbatim from notes on the subject taken during a seminar at Boston College and later compiled into essay form. All information was presented by Dr. Fukuyama with additional content and context provided by me. Fukuyama is perhaps best known for his influential textbook, The End of History and the Last…
Philosophy Monday: On the Origin, Propagation and Cause of Variations
Darwin’s On the Origins of Species provided a vivid and practical mechanism to explain how variations within a species can be selected for. This mechanism became known as natural selection or, perhaps less accurately, survival of the fittest. Although Darwin’s natural selection mechanism was not novel—Malthus described a similar mechanism as actively limiting a population’s…
Sapir-Whorf and the nature of experience
The novel 1984 by George Orwell is a classic all its own. Sure there’s WE, Brave New World and countless other dystopian novels from the early to mid 20th century[1]; yet none of these novels are quite so prescient or relevant decades after their release. While literary critics and poor graduate students will certainly continue…
Philosophy Monday: The Birth of Education
Go up to any student of a modern literature course as ask what their reading. Perhaps you’ll hear about Shelly’s Frankenstein or Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment or perhaps Orwell’s 1984. Regardless of which works make their reading list, if you ask this student if what they’re reading is ‘True’ with a capital T you’ll likely…
Philosophy Monday: Heat
From the ancient times of philosophical thought to the advent of the first chemical theories of Becher, heat had been a mysterious concept. It is almost a wonder that something as ubiquitous as heat could be debated, but often daily experience is a poor substitute for real understanding. Although a defining character in differentiating chemistry from…
Philosophy Monday: Lonergan Part 1
The following is a series of short essays based on an assignment I had with Dr Braman at Boston College. Since Lonergan’s philosophy has surely impacted me in ways that I know not of, and since so many people have trouble delving into his work, I thought it most responsible to share the following.
Quantifying Error
Being able to appropriately address uncertainty and error is fundamental to the pursuit of science. Without it, results and theory would never match up since theory usually involves a level of abstraction that permits simplification of the problem and observational results are never perfect and include all sorts of uncertainty. Recently I’ve been trying to…
On cooking: or a polemic on over-analysis
Recently I was over at a friends apartment making dinner and I saw what a beautifully well-equipped kitchen she had. It got me thinking, or rather inspired, to take a moment and reflect on my own relationship with cooking. This reflection process got me to: deplore the lack of culinary skills in my generation, challenge…
Paper of Note: Re-designing Distance Functions and Distance-Based Applications for High Dimensional Data
While it may be argued–and successfully so–that this is an article pertaining to an esoteric subset of computer science that few people will ever find practically useful, you may actually find it quite intriguing. I’ve found the article quite eye-opening and I’m certainly no computer scientist. What this article does do, which I feel is critically…
Philosophy Monday: Einstein v Newton
The source for the tension between Newton’s view of the universe and of Einstein’s stems from each person’s respective choice of axioms. Newton choose to take the most concrete axioms for his mechanics: absolute nature of space and time. These intuitive assumptions mark and define the whole of Newtonian mechanics since all the other definitions…
Philosophy Monday: The Role of Instruments in Science
The use of instruments and tools to understand, measure, and record the natural world may be a staple of modern scientific inquiry, but the relationship between the instruments and their validity in describing the natural world has developed over time. This relationship has changed considerably since the earliest recorders of Greek natural philosophy started over…
Philosophy Monday: The Baconian Ideal
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) has been–and will continue to be–an infamous individual in the history of science for he managed to influence countless scientists from numerous generations through his keen understanding of human nature and his tremendous rhetorical skill. First in Novum Organum Scientiarum and later in New Atlantis, Bacon establishes his understanding of science along with a new methodology…
Paper2Plastic
Over this past summer a new initiative in the Boston College chemistry department had its first year: year 0. This program, titled Paper2Plastic, is our response to the under-representation of women and minorities in the STEM fields. By introducing the students to the conditions of a research lab early in their educational careers (i.e. high…
Science Classification
Today I was exposed to a novel idea that I thought I would share. The idea comes from a paper that came up as part of a reading group I’m in which is delving into the recent philosophy of chemistry material. The article was a chapter from “Professionalism and Ethics in Chemistry” by Jeffrey Kovac (Amazon) wherein…