“Quantum theory predicts that the vacuum of space is a roiling bath of virtual particles that continuously appear and disappear. These vacuum fluctuations produce measurable phenomena, such as the Casimir effect, which arises from the pressure the virtual photons exert on stationary bodies. In 1970, Gerald Moore theorized that bodies in accelerated motion would produce […]
Gestapo Chief Rudolph Diels: “The infliction of physical punishment is not every man’s job, and naturally we were only too glad to recruit men who were prepared to show no squeamishness at their task. Unfortunately, we knew nothing about the Freudian side of the business, and it was only after a number of instances of […]
Pain really does hurt, but what is it that hurts? In consciousness, the subjective and objective are mysteriously unified. I am unmistakably corporeal, and yet also, unmistakably, immaterial. I have diverse sensations and thoughts, yet I am unitary. I unconsciously act and feel, and yet have agency and free will. I daydream and sleep, and yet have […]
In the early 1960’s, gun running was a profitable business. From Miami to Mexico, this involved organized crime, latin-american revolutionaries, a man in Dallas named Jack Ruby, and a New Orleans man named Lee Harvey Oswald. In records released in 1989 by the Dallas police department, Mary Le Fontaine, a local reporter, discovered that a […]
“I want to know how God created this world. I’m not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts, the rest are details.” Albert Einstein. An overwhelming intuition for Einstein was that there is an all-encompassing, intelligible, something, ‘out there’, some unified and […]
A person who finds that he is just never wrong would perhaps now and then be perplexed. Steve Jobs would be such a person. “We think that computers are the most remarkable tools that humankind has ever come up with, and we think that people are basically tool users. So if we can just […]
“The Nazi and the Psychiatrist“, Scientific American Mind, by Jack El-Hai, Jan/Feb 2011 The highest ranking captive of the Nazi leadership, Reich Marshal Hermann Göring, Commander of the Luftwaffe, was evaluated at Nuremberg by Major Douglas M. Kelley, MD, from Truckee, California, Chief Psychiatrist of the U.S. Medical Corp. He found Göring to be forthright, […]
1.5 million years ago, pre-modern hominids moved out of Africa, migrated across the Levant, into the Caucasus, past the Carpathian Mountains, north of the Danube, and on to the great vast “mammoth” steppe of grasslands, and great herds of animals. This is where the big brain hominids could hunt and eat the big stomach mammals […]
“Like most people, I think that there is something real out there, entirely independent of us and our models, as the earth is independent of our maps. But this is because I can’t help believing in an objective reality, not because I have good arguments for it.” Steven Weinberg, New York Review of Books, […]
Seth Kantor was a news correspondent in Dallas the day JFK was killed, and he knew Jack Ruby. At Parkland Hospital, just after the assassination, Ruby tapped Kantor on the back, and said hello. Kantor is absolutely sure of this. Later, Ruby denied ever being there. “What would make Jack Ruby seek out a news […]