Tag Archives: entropy

The New Pope’s Liberalism vs. Thomas Aquinas’s Leninism

Thomas Aquinas was the Leninist of his day; he was a Party man. For Aquinas, nothing should be done without reference to The Party. All focus should be on The Party. The Party is the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy … Continue reading

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Whatever Works: Pierce’s Abduction, Darwin’s Evolution, Entropy, Bayes’ Rule, and Rorty’s Pragmatism

I’ve recently been struck by the similarity between Charles Sanders Pierce’s notion of abduction (reasoning to the best hypothesis; “may the best hypothesis win”), Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution (survival of the fittest; “may the best organism win”), entropy (what … Continue reading

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What is Information? A Three Word Definition

The three word definition. The physicist Brian Greene, in his book The Hidden Reality (Knopf 2011), gives the best definition of information I’ve ever encountered: So, you start to ponder. What actually is information, and what does it do? Your … Continue reading

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Entropy, the Novel, and Nietzsche

At The New Yorker, Joan Acocella asks why novels, even great ones, so frequently have endings that sag. One of her examples is David Copperfield: The first half of “David Copperfield” leaves you gasping. You laugh, you cry, you think you’re … Continue reading

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Measure Twice, Saw Once

This is in the business section of the Los Angeles Times today: Managers spend nearly 17% of their working hours dealing with poor performers, according to a report from staffing firm Robert Half International. That’s basically a full day a week that could … Continue reading

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The Resurrection of Jesus: Why I Don’t Think It’s a Crazy Idea

It seems to be universally agreed upon, whether you are a theist or an atheist, that one of the characteristics of dead matter is the following: it can sometimes come to life. Let me say it more explicitly. Whether you’re Jewish … Continue reading

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I Still Like Obama

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Follow the Entropy: A Pretty Good Argument for God’s Existence

The apparent fine-tuning of the cosmos’s physical constants is an unusually strong argument for God’s existence. Below, I’ll set out the argument very concisely, try to make a plausible case for it, and see if anybody in the comboxes comes around … Continue reading

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Thinking about Entropy

One way to think about entropy is as a measure of disorder in a system: where disorder is high, entropy is high; where disorder is low, entropy is low. I don’t have the exact quote in front of me, but the … Continue reading

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The Thorny Problem of Defining What a Book Is (It’s Not as Easy as You Might Think)

I like this definition of a book (which I found in a Times Literary Supplement essay): I. A. Richards called the book “a machine to think with” . . . Notice that the definition has the two elements that Aristotle … Continue reading

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Is the Universe a Broken Symmetry? I Need a Physicist’s Help!

Could a physicist (or someone at least somewhat in the know) answer a simple question for me? Does the video below roughly approximate what went on at the Big Bang (a symmetry is broken, its granular debris entropically shattering and cascading … Continue reading

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Is Gravity Entropy?

The New York Times yesterday had a curious science article suggesting that maybe one way that entropy manifests is as gravity; or, to put it another way, gravity may not be a fundamental force in the universe, but just another way … Continue reading

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Entropy (or “En-TRIP-py”)

Question: Why do things so frequently end up in a way that we call “messed up”? Answer (echoing Gregory Bateson): Because there are so many more ways that we call “messed up” than we call “not messed up.” This, for … Continue reading

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