Søren Kierkegaard on the Religious Problem

Søren Kierkegaard on the Existential Problem

Road to General Relativity - November 25th 1915

November 25th 1915

Gravity is communicated by the shape of the universe, warps and curves in space and time. This is the heart of the new picture of how gravity works. This is the heart of the General Theory of Relativity.

~Brian Greene

Road to General Relativity - November 18th 1915

November 18th 1915
 
[Einstein] receives a paper from [German mathematician] David Hilbert, and this paper completely shatters Einstein's triumphant mood.

~Brian Greene
 

Road to General Relativity - November 11th 1915

November 11th 1915

Mercury had a particular (peculiar) orbit around the sun, which baffled Newtonian-oriented physicists. Albert Einstein made a bold, fateful decision: To apply the equations he had been working on for the General Theory of Relativity, and ... it worked! His equations predicted the orbit that Mercury took.

Road to General Relativity - November 4th 1915

November 4th 2015

"It is quite an unnerving moment for Albert Einstein, because for the first time in his long journey, he realizes that he's got stiff competition on this final leg of the race toward the General Theory of Relativity."

~Brian Greene

What was the unnerving moment?
 

Science and Islam (3) Universality

[2:54:15]

Nature's rules are refreshingly free of human prejudice.

That's something the scientists of the medieval Islamic world understood and articulated so well...

These scientists' quest for truth, wherever it came from, was summed up by the 9th century philosopher Al-Kindi, who said:

It is fitting for us not to be ashamed of acknowledging truth and to assimilate it from whatever source it comes to us. There is nothing of higher value than truth itself. It never cheapens, or have bases, he who seeks.

One moral emerges from this epic tale of the rise and fall of science in the Islamic world between the 9th and 15th centuries, and that is that science is the universal language of the human race.

Decimal numbers are just as useful in India as they are in Spain. Star charts drawn up in Iran speak volumes to astronomers in Northern Europe. And Newton's "Principia" is just as true in Arabic as it is in Latin or English.

What medieval Islamic scientists realized, and articulated so brilliantly, is that science is the common language of the human race. Man-made laws may vary from place to place, but nature's laws are true for all of us.

~Jim Al-Khalili
Professor of Theoretical Physics
University of Surrey