What is marvelous, amazing, about nature is that it was here before us and will be here long after we are gone. In the meanwhile we sit around the campfire and entertain ourselves with stories.

The following selections from a recent popular book on cosmology, Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang by Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, would make for good reading at a campsite under a dark, star-filled desert night sky:

Cosmology, the study of the origin and evolution of the universe, has some unique limitations that call for a high degree of caution. Scientists cannot perform direct experiments on the universe, and they cannot travel back in time. The best they can do is gather indirect information about the history of the universe through painstaking observations of distant objects that emitted their light a long time ago and try to piece together a logical account. But the evidence is uneven, with highly detailed information about some epochs and little or no information about others. Even if one story fits all the available evidence well, there is always the possibility that another story might fit just as well, or better (7-8).

The history of the universe can be compared to a play in which the actors–matter and radiation, stars and galaxies–dance across the cosmic stage according to a script set by the laws of physics. The challenge for the cosmologist is to figure out the story line after arriving at the show 14 billion years too late, long past the crucial opening scenes (18).

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from intro to a Guardian America - Observer article on Darwin and Wallace, “How Darwin Won the Evolution Race,” by Robin McKie

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from intro to set of Wired articles on info-glut:

Sensors everywhere. Infinite storage. Clouds of processors. Our ability to capture, warehouse, and understand massive amounts of data is changing science, medicine, business, and technology. As our collection of facts and figures grows, so will the opportunity to find answers to fundamental questions. Because in the era of big data, more isn’t just more. More is different

Article by Chris Anderson:

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

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o proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don’t have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don’t have to settle for models at all. > > >

Click here to read the rest of Anderson’s article.

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From a recent Seed Magazine article by Joshua Roebke

A team of physicists in Vienna has devised experiments that may answer one of the enduring riddles of science: Do we create the world just by looking at it?

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o enter the somewhat formidable Neo-Renaissance building at Boltzmanngasse 3 in Vienna, you must pass through a small door sawed from the original cathedral like entrance. When I first visited this past March, it was chilly and overcast in the late afternoon. Atop several tall stories of scaffolding there were two men who would hardly have been visible from the street were it not for their sunrise-orange jumpsuits. As I was about to pass through the nested entrance, I heard a sudden rush of wind and felt a mist of winter drizzle. I glanced up. The veiled workers were power-washing away the building’s façade, down to the century-old brick underneath.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

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from a review of Susan Neiman’s Moral Clarity on Slate.Com:

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f you’re a philosopher, the easiest way to introduce yourself is not by elaborating a doctrine, but by telling a story. That’s because philosophical views are always arguments with previous views, and so they arise within a historical narrative. Susan Neiman is a masterly storyteller; her new book Moral Clarity offers retellings of the Odyssey and the Book of Job that are themselves worth the price of admission. But she also has stories about the origins of her own position that place her in both larger intellectual narratives and more local political ones.

Neiman, an American philosopher who runs the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, worries that American progressives have drifted away from the values and intellectual traditions of the West, stretching from classical antiquity to the Enlightenment (this is the larger narrative).

Click here to read the entire review.

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Don Quixote and The Narrative Self

Stefán Snaevarr asks, are our identities created by narratives?

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nce upon a time a philosopher wrote an article called ‘Don Quixote and The Narrative Self’. He commenced by saying: In this essay, I will discuss the question of whether our selves are constituted by narratives, ie stories. Are we like Don Quixote, whose self was created by his reading of medieval romances: are we Homo quixotienses, the narrative self? Or are we rather like the protagonist of Sartre’s novel Nausea, Antonin Roquentin, whose life did not form any narrative unity? Are we in other words rather Homo roquentinenses?

Click here to read the full article at the Philosophy Now website.

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