Scottish Nous

Yang-Mills Theory and the Mass Gap

Scientists believe that there are four, and only four, fundamental forces of nature: gravity, the strong force, electromagnetism, and the weak force.  In the ongoing search for a grand unified theory, physicists and mathematicians are working hard at combing these forces into one theory.  The last two have succesfully been combined into the electroweak force, but the strong force, which holds the nucleus together, hasn't yet been incorporated into the theory, much less gravity.  But things are looking up for the strong force!

God is Pissed

God is pissed - and he'll destroy millions of lives to prove it.  At least, that's part of the buzz amongst the faithful.  In other bizarre religious news, the tsunami is reportedly being taken as confirmation of the fundamentalist, non-preterist Christian worldview and has the religious unusually busy predicting the dawn of the apocalpyse and Christ's return.  Head over to Prophecy Update to convince yourself of the Bible's predictive power.  Per the Good Book:

And great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven...  and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring... And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. -Luke 21:11, 25, 27

And Christians aren't the only ones reflecting upon matters divine:

Not So Imaginary Numbers

The interesting zeros of Riemann's zeta function fall into one of two classes, or so Riemann famously intuited and then hypothesized.  Picture your standard graph with two axes, x and y.  Now let the x-axis represent the real numbers and the y-axis the imaginary numbers.  This is the complex plane.   

Now if you're a philosopher - particularly with nominalistic predilections - you might be afraid of normal numbers, not to mention imaginary numbers.  (Imaginary numbers are just normal numbers multiplied by i, the perplexing square root of -1.)  It was originally thought that i was just a useful tool for getting the math done, so long as it was discharged before the calculation was finished.  Yet matters appear otherwise.  Perhaps the following will serve to mitigate your concern.

Reasonable Disagreement: Cruel and Unusual

Judge Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has made his first post as this week's Leiter Reports guest blogger.  In an attempt to be less caustic than usual, I'll just say that his position is frightening in a very Humean way.  Rather than discussing the effects (my experience with so many indicates) too much Humean rhetoric can have on one's psyche, I'll instead focus on some ethical ramifications surrounding the epistemological issues of reasonable disagreement raised multiple times by Posner throughout his fascinating post:

You cannot convince a religious person that there is no God, because he does not share your premises, for example that only science delivers truths. There is no fruitful debating of God’s existence.

(I do hope that the highly suspect statement following the "for example" was only that - an example.  Since it doesn't look anything like the sort of belief that could be non-inferentially justified, it would be a very awkward assumption or "premise" for anyone to hold.)  In any case, when it comes to matters religious, Posner seems to think that disagreement goes "all the way down".  For purposes of this post, reasonable disagreement is defined any disagreement that cannot be resolved by appeal to reasons.