Multiplicities In Paradise

  The Many Splendored Worlds of Hugh Everett Though celebrated now, when Hugh Everett first introduced his theory of multiple universes, he was met with scorn and mockery. Hugh Everett abandoned the world of academic physics and turned to top secret military research. His private life was tragically lamentable. Fifty years ago Hugh Everett devised the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which quantum effects spawn countless branches of the universe with different events occurring in each. Although this theory sounds like a bizarre hypothesis, more suited for science fiction than real science. It is in fact, inferred from the fundamental mathematics of quantum mechanics. Nevertheless, most physicists of that time dismissed it, and he had to abridge his Ph.D. thesis on the topic to make it seem less controversial. Discouraged, Everett left physics and worked on military and industrial mathematics and computing. Personally, he was emotionally withdrawn and became a he...

T he universe is deteriorating.  A mere 10 years ago, any decent search engine would reveal 100s of YouTube videos and thoughtful articles from people like Christopher Hitchens , Stephen Hawkins, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris if you searched for Intelligent Design or Creationism. Today, most of those entries have disappeared or moved 100s of pages back in the queue and instead there is a plethora of pseudoscience nonsense much of which intentionally being passed off as science, much of which can be traced back to the Discovery Institute or Discovery Science - anything from these sources is propaganda masquerading as science. It's a con job. And like in the political realm, people are apparently easy marks. Don't be duped. The pressure is on. The invisible and the nonexistent look very much alike. I find this particular type of con job must disdainful.  Here's the deal. I don't believe, nor do I elevate the subject matter by disbelief,  There is NO evid...

  H istory repeats itself, often in a strikingly similar way. Democracy lasted 250 years in ancient Athens until privilege, corruption and mismanagement strangled it.  American democracy, is now approaching 250 years, and it is desperately ill. D emocracy is under assault. We may think that these clashes are an aberration, a Mar-A-Lago Mussolini thing. But they are actually part of a troubling dichotomy that seems to be intrinsic to democracy itself.  D emocracy is more than a bundle of laws, norms and institutions. It is an open culture of communication.  Democracy affords people the right to think, speak and act and it allows every possible means of persuasion. Going all the way back to Plato's Republic, it's understood that the seeds of democracy include the roadmap to destruction in it's very DNA.  It's understood that every democratic society  is inescapably vulnerable to the consequences of communication. We may not like it, but something li...