As a freshman many years ago, I went off to Park College, idyllically situated on hills overlooking the Missouri River just north of Kansas City. It was there I had my first opportunity to visit a world-class museum: The Nelson Gallery of Art. On that auspicious day I found myself pausing many times before the… Continue reading Slender Gold: Emperor Huizong’s Brush with Beauty
Month: April 2023
No-No Nse-Nse
The American poet Jonathan Williams surely sowed high mischief, not to mention irony, when he gave the following title to one of his volumes of verse: No-No Nse-Nse. Rearranged, these words reveal: No Nonsense. I discovered this only recently and, to my surprise, found that JW coined the word “Meta-Fours” early in the 1990s. I… Continue reading No-No Nse-Nse
Awaken Your Inner Socrates
Socrates is deservedly famous for the art of questioning he discovered and put to good use. Many who came to Socrates with confident beliefs soon came to see, under the light of his incisive questioning, that these beliefs were built upon the sands of confusion, self-contradiction, and superficial misunderstandings. This way of questioning has become… Continue reading Awaken Your Inner Socrates
Sublimity of Structure: The Hydrogen Atom
In process philosophy’s social conception of reality, even atoms are social beings. Consider the simplest case: the hydrogen atom with its one proton and electron. Did you ever stop and wonder what holds such an atom together—that is, what holds the electron and proton together, and at the same time apart, in dynamic and elegant… Continue reading Sublimity of Structure: The Hydrogen Atom
Does God Have a Future?
This question presents an ambiguity that reveals at least two questions, at one and the same time. The least interesting has to do with Nietzsche’s assertion that “God is dead,”1 a bold claim that summarily denies God any future—period! Far more interesting are the entwined questions of whether God is, in an important sense, temporal… Continue reading Does God Have a Future?
The Greatest Inventor of All Time
West西Don’t just sit there—do something! East東Don’t just do something—sit there! Buddhism can lay claim to what may well be the longest ongoing experiment in the history of humanity. I refer to the practice developed by Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism. And what was that practice? Zazen, or seated meditation.坐禪 After trying, without success, everything… Continue reading The Greatest Inventor of All Time
A Joker in Nature’s Deck of Cards?
Einstein once remarked, famously, that God does not play dice with the universe. He said this in reaction to Quantum theory which, based fundamentally on probability, robustly affirms that God does play dice with the universe and, to mix metaphors, that there might even be a Joker in nature’s deck of cards. Is the universe… Continue reading A Joker in Nature’s Deck of Cards?
Stop and Wonder
“No thinker thinks twice.”Alfred North Whitehead Here’s the quote in context: The ancient doctrine that “no one crosses the same river twice” is extended. No thinker thinks twice; and, to put the matter more generally, no subject experiences twice. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 29. If you’re still wondering about this, hold that… Continue reading Stop and Wonder
An Odyssey in Space and Time
In 1911, the French physicist Paul Langevin proposed the following thought experiment: Imagine two people: a chronologer, or timekeeper on earth, and a space traveler who departs from earth on a space craft that zips away at just under the speed of light. The space craft travels for one year and then reverses direction and… Continue reading An Odyssey in Space and Time
The Most Beautiful Formula in Mathematics
“And it was Euler1 who discovered the most beautiful formula in all mathematics: eiπ + 1 = 0 a mysterious and ineffable expression connecting the five most important numbers in the universe.”2 This formula is a special case of Euler’s famous equation: eix = cos x + i sin x To derive the special case,… Continue reading The Most Beautiful Formula in Mathematics