The Linguistics Wars


Randy Allen Harris - 1993
    Soon, however, there was talk from Chomsky and his associates about plumbing mental structure; then there was a new phonology; and then there was a new set of goals for the field, cutting it off completely from its anthropological roots and hitching it to a new brand of psychology. Rapidly, all of Chomsky's ideas swept the field. While the entrenched linguists were not looking for a messiah, apparently many of their students were. There was a revolution, which colored the field of linguistics for the following decades. Chomsky's assault on Bloomfieldianism (also known as American Structuralism) and his development of Transformational-Generative Grammar was promptly endorsed by new linguistic recruits swelling the discipline in the sixties. Everyone was talking of a scientific revolution in linguistics, and major breakthroughs seemed imminent, but something unexpected happened--Chomsky and his followers had a vehement and public falling out.In The Linguistic Wars, Randy Allen Harris tells how Chomsky began reevaluating the field and rejecting the extensions his students and erstwhile followers were making. Those he rejected (the Generative Semanticists) reacted bitterly, while new students began to pursue Chomsky's updated vision of language. The result was several years of infighting against the backdrop of the notoriously prickly sixties. The outcome of the dispute, Harris shows, was not simply a matter of a good theory beating out a bad one. The debates followed the usual trajectory of most large-scale clashes, scientific or otherwise. Both positions changed dramatically in the course of the dispute--the triumphant Chomskyan position was very different from the initial one; the defeated generative semantics position was even more transformed. Interestingly, important features of generative semantics have since made their way into other linguistic approaches and continue to influence linguistics to this very day. And fairly high up on the list of borrowers is Noam Chomsky himself. The repercussions of the Linguistics Wars are still with us, not only in the bruised feelings and late-night war stories of the combatants, and in the contentious mood in many quarters, but in the way linguists currently look at language and the mind. Full of anecdotes and colorful portraits of key personalities, The Linguistics Wars is a riveting narrative of the course of an important intellectual controversy, and a revealing look into how scientists and scholars contend for theoretical glory.

The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us


Noson S. Yanofsky - 2013
    This book investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing facts that science, mathematics, and reason have revealed to us, this work studies what science, mathematics, and reason tell us cannot be revealed. In The Outer Limits of Reason, Noson Yanofsky considers what cannot be predicted, described, or known, and what will never be understood. He discusses the limitations of computers, physics, logic, and our own thought processes.Yanofsky describes simple tasks that would take computers trillions of centuries to complete and other problems that computers can never solve; perfectly formed English sentences that make no sense; different levels of infinity; the bizarre world of the quantum; the relevance of relativity theory; the causes of chaos theory; math problems that cannot be solved by normal means; and statements that are true but cannot be proven. He explains the limitations of our intuitions about the world -- our ideas about space, time, and motion, and the complex relationship between the knower and the known.Moving from the concrete to the abstract, from problems of everyday language to straightforward philosophical questions to the formalities of physics and mathematics, Yanofsky demonstrates a myriad of unsolvable problems and paradoxes. Exploring the various limitations of our knowledge, he shows that many of these limitations have a similar pattern and that by investigating these patterns, we can better understand the structure and limitations of reason itself. Yanofsky even attempts to look beyond the borders of reason to see what, if anything, is out there.

The Reality Revolution: The Mind-Blowing Movement to Hack Your Reality


Brian Scott - 2020
    More and more people are discovering the power of their minds to shape the world around them faster than ever before. The question is: how do you create the reality of your design?Brian Scott wants to help you find the answer. After walking away unscathed from a near-fatal shooting in his home, Brian began a fanatical search for answers. He deepened his research into parallel realities, quantum mechanics, and consciousness to uncover what happened in his close call with death. Along the way, he developed a series of techniques capable of creating profound transformations.In The Reality Revolution: The Mind-Blowing Movement to Hack Your Reality, Brian introduces you to the techniques that have helped his clients find lasting love, create wealth, and revitalize health. You'll learn how to surf through parallel realities and unlock the power of your mind through a mix of researched and science-backed techniques like qi gong, meditation, quantum jumping, energy work, and reality transurfing. If you're ready to create an incredible reality for yourself, this book shows you the way.

The Two Cultures


C.P. Snow - 1959
    But it was C. P. Snow's Rede lecture of 1959 that brought it to prominence and began a public debate that is still raging in the media today. This 50th anniversary printing of The Two Cultures and its successor piece, A Second Look (in which Snow responded to the controversy four years later) features an introduction by Stefan Collini, charting the history and context of the debate, its implications and its afterlife. The importance of science and technology in policy run largely by non-scientists, the future for education and research, and the problem of fragmentation threatening hopes for a common culture are just some of the subjects discussed.

The Everything Answer Book: How Quantum Science Explains Love, Death, and the Meaning of Life


Amit Goswami - 2017
    Quantum physics is an antidote to the moral sterility and mechanistic approach of scientific materialism and is the best and clearest approach to understanding our universe. In short, quantum physics is indeed the theory of everything.Here in 17 chapters, Dr. Goswami and his friends and colleagues discuss, among other things, how quantum physics affects our understanding of:ZenThoughts, feelings, and intuitionsDreamsKarma, death, and reincarnationGod's will, evolution, and purposeThe meaning of dreamsThe spiritualization of economics and business, politics and education, and society itselfThis fascinating new book will appeal to a wide array of readers, ranging from those interested in the new physics to those captivated by the spiritual implications of the latest scientific breakthroughs.

Why Beauty Is Truth: A History of Symmetry


Ian Stewart - 2007
    In Why Beauty Is Truth, world-famous mathematician Ian Stewart narrates the history of the emergence of this remarkable area of study. Stewart introduces us to such characters as the Renaissance Italian genius, rogue, scholar, and gambler Girolamo Cardano, who stole the modern method of solving cubic equations and published it in the first important book on algebra, and the young revolutionary Evariste Galois, who refashioned the whole of mathematics and founded the field of group theory only to die in a pointless duel over a woman before his work was published. Stewart also explores the strange numerology of real mathematics, in which particular numbers have unique and unpredictable properties related to symmetry. He shows how Wilhelm Killing discovered “Lie groups” with 14, 52, 78, 133, and 248 dimensions-groups whose very existence is a profound puzzle. Finally, Stewart describes the world beyond superstrings: the “octonionic” symmetries that may explain the very existence of the universe.

Leibniz and Clarke: Correspondence


Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - 1716
    Ariew's introduction places the correspondence in historical context and discusses the vibrant philosophical climate of the times. Appendices provide those selections from the works of Newton that Clarke frequently refers to in the correspondence. A bibliography is also included.

Moving Through Parallel Worlds To Achieve Your Dreams


Kevin L. Michel - 2013
    This is most blatantly revealed in the mind shattering 'double-slit' experiment and is at the core of what is called 'the measurement problem,' in quantum physics. The results are startling, but this is what the science is clearly showing. It is human awareness that causes matter to fix into a single position, and reveal a single reality. The science is showing that at every moment we become aware of our reality, the universe splits into unseen parallel dimensions and we become trapped in just one of these many parallel realities. This is all powerful stuff but what does this mean for our lives? What if you could learn how to access these parallel worlds that are being created? What if you could do what many billionaires and great minds in history have done but have only hinted at. What if you could move through parallel realities in order to achieve unfathomable greatness. Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Michelangelo, Nikola Tesla, Isaac Newton, John D. Rockefeller and many others all used this quantum mind power that is now available to you. This is one of the most powerful books you shall ever read. With research from quantum physics, psychology, biology and behavioral epigenetics, as well as many great spiritual teachings, 'Moving Through Parallel Worlds' will guide you on a path to achieving your grandest ambitions. The title, 'Moving Through Parallel Worlds To Achieve Your Dreams,' is literal - based on the 'Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics,' and it is also a metaphor suggesting positive life transformation. This very night, you shall be reading and then applying the concepts in this book, and that moment will be the starting point of your mastery of wealth, romance, creation, and mastery of all things in the physical world. 'Moving Through Parallel Worlds' draws on science and timeless wisdom, to guide you on a path to unlimited power and enlightenment. 'Moving Through Parallel Worlds To Achieve Your Dreams' will allow you to bridge the discontinuity in your life from the point where you are at right now, to the point where you dream that you can be. This book shall put you into alignment with all that you have imagined possible for yourself and shall show you a path even to that which you may have considered impossible. This book has emerged so that you may be lifted up, and that you may come to realize the power you have to exist in a world that is exactly as you imagine it should be. This is your moment and this book is here, just for you. Enjoy the journey!

Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists


Sharon Traweek - 1988
    But who are these people? What is their world really like? Sharon Traweek, a bold and original observer of culture, opens the door to this unusual domain and offers us a glimpse into the inner sanctum.

Social Contract: Essays by Locke, Hume, and Rousseau.


Ernest Barker - 1947
    Rousseau.

The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe


Arthur Koestler - 1959
    In this masterly synthesis, Arthur Koestler cuts through the sterile distinction between 'sciences' and 'humanities' to bring to life the whole history of cosmology from the Babylonians to Newton. He shows how the tragic split between science and religion arose and how, in particular, the modern world-view replaced the medieval world-view in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. He also provides vivid and judicious pen-portraits of a string of great scientists and makes clear the role that political bias and unconscious prejudice played in their creativity.

Gödel's Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse


Torkel Franzén - 2005
    With exceptional clarity, Franz n gives careful, non-technical explanations both of what those theorems say and, more importantly, what they do not. No other book aims, as his does, to address in detail the misunderstandings and abuses of the incompleteness theorems that are so rife in popular discussions of their significance. As an antidote to the many spurious appeals to incompleteness in theological, anti-mechanist and post-modernist debates, it is a valuable addition to the literature." --- John W. Dawson, author of "Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt G del

The Little Book of Philosophy: An Introduction to the Key Thinkers and Theories You Need to Know


Rachel Poulton - 2019
    Including accessible primers on: • The early Ancient Greek philosophers and the ‘big three’: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle • Key schools of philosophy and their impact on modern life • Insights into the main questions philosophers have explored over the years: Who am I? What is the meaning of life? Do I have free will? • Practical applications for the theories of Descartes, Kant, Wollstonecraft, Marx, Nietzsche and many more. This illuminating little book will introduce you to the key thinkers, themes and theories you need to know to understand how human ideas have sculpted the world we live in and the way we think today.

The Beginner's Guide To Winning The Nobel Prize: A Life In Science


Peter C. Doherty - 2006
    Beginning with his humble origins in Australia, Doherty shares his early interests and describes his award-winning, influential work with Rolf Zinkernagel on T-cells and the nature of immune defense. In prose that is amusing and astute, Doherty offers a rare insider's look at the realities of being a research scientist. He lucidly explains his own scientific work and the selection, funding, and organization of research projects; the major problems science hopes to solve; and the rewards of a career in scientific research. For Doherty, science plays an important role in improving the world, and he argues that scientists need to do a better job of making their work more accessible to the public. He concludes with tips on how to win a Nobel Prize, including advice on being persistent, generous, and culturally aware.

God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion


Guy Consolmagno - 2007
    A full fledged techie himself, he relates some classic philosophical reflections, his interviews with dozens of fellow techies, and his own personal take on his Catholic beliefs to provide, like a set of "worked out sample problems," the hard data on the challenges and joys of embracing a life of faith as a techie. And he also gives a roadmap of the traps that can befall an unwary techie believer. With lively prose and wry humor, Brother Guy shows how he not only believes in God but gives religion an honored place alongside science in his life. This book offers an engaging look at how--and why--scientists and those with technological leanings can hold profound, "unprovable" religious beliefs while working in highly empirical fields. Through his own experience and interviews with other scientists and engineers who profess faith, Brother Guy explores how religious beliefs and practices make sense to those who are deeply rooted in the world of technology.