(Roughly) Daily

email readers click here for video

What is space?  Three contenders for the theory of everything converge on a single very big idea– that our universe was born in the instant when nothing and nowhere were joined.

Read more at “Goodbye big bang, hello big silence” (summary; full text requires subscription).

* Albert Einstein

###

As we ruminate on relativity, we might spare a thought for Thomas Samuel Kuhn; he died on this date in 1996.  A physicist, historian, and philosopher of science , Kuhn believed that scientific knowledge didn’t advance in a linear, continuous way, but via periodic “paradigm shifts.”  Karl Popper had approached the same territory in his development of the principle of “falsification” (to paraphrase, a theory isn’t false until it’s proven true; it’s true until it’s proven false).  But while Popper worked as a logician, Kuhn worked as a historian.  His 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions made his case; and while he had– and has— his detractors, Kuhn’s work has been deeply influential in both academic and popular circles (indeed, the phrase “paradigm shift” has become an English-language staple).

 source