3QD essays
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London, 1641
“Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased” – Daniel 12:4 London was an exciting place to be in 1641. The political uncertainty was both thrilling and terrifying: many Puritans, convinced that their suspected crypto-catholic king, Charles I, was in league with the Anti-Christ, were pushing back against his high-handed policies. Their Continue reading
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The Fermi Paradox, Mass Effect, and Transhumanism
The Fermi Paradox The story is that sometime in the early 1950s, four physicists were walking to lunch and discussing flying saucers. The place was Los Alamos, and the lunch group included Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Emil Konopinski, and Herbert York. None of them believed in flying saucers, of course, but – and this is Continue reading
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Overcoming Babel
We all seek to capture the world with a net of language. Yet it is in the nature of nets to capture some things and let others slip away, and that goes for languages too. Our words turn experiences into objects, qualities, and actions, and we can build these into a kind of structure, a Continue reading
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Hobbes, Boyle, and the vacuum pump
Sometime in the late 1650s, Robert Boyle built an apparatus that removed the air from within a glass dome. The members of the newly-formed Royal Society promptly set about devising all manner of experiments to perform with the newfangled device. They placed candles, mercury barometers, and then – just as one might expect of unsupervised Continue reading
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The aural time traveler
Some years back my musicologist friend introduced me to the charming world of gramophones. (A brief history may be in order: before there were iPods and YouTube, there were CDs; before that, there were vinyl records, still very much in vogue among hipsters today; and before that – from roughly 1895 to 1950 – there Continue reading
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Quaere, how much do we really see?
How much of the world do we actually experience? Of course, I’m not bemoaning the shortness of human life, or the narrow range of the visual spectrum, or the insensitivities of our skins and tongues. There’s no doubt we’re missing out on a lot. But within the world of our experience – how much of Continue reading
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Leibniz’s Stepped Reckoner, and a clock to last for the next 10,000 years
In 1671, in some letters exchanged with the French mathematician Pierre de Carcavy, Leibniz mentioned his plans to create a calculating machine. Apparently, he had been inspired by a pedometer, probably thinking that if machines could count, they could then calculate. Within a couple of years, he hired a craftsman build a wooden prototype of Continue reading
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Hume and the expedition to Canada
In 1746, Hume returned to London after touring Europe as tutor and caretaker of the mad Marquess of Annendale. He was not sure what was next in his life. He was already 35 and somewhat ashamed of not having yet made a career for himself. He resolved to return to Scotland, but at the last Continue reading
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Hume falls into a bog, promises his way out
At the beginning of book three of his Treatise on Human Nature, David Hume argues that justice is something we invent. In a word, justice is unnatural. It isn’t something we just see in the world, since we only ever see what is, and nothing in what we see tells us how things ought to Continue reading
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“The Metaphysician and the Hole in the Ground”
“In his middle to late thirties (over the years 1679-85), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz spent more than three years in his visits to a silver mining region in the Harz mountains. He believed he could devise new and more efficient ways of pumping water out of the deep shafts, enabling miners to dig even deeper and Continue reading
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Sea battles, beasties in the blood, and the summer of 1665
In the summer and autumn of 1665, a German expatriate in London exchanged a series of fascinating letters with a renegade Dutch Jew. The expatriate was Henry Oldenburg, who was serving as secretary of the newly-formed Royal Society of London. The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge – which, if formed Continue reading
Huenemanniac 