“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, June 8, 2013

Lee Smolin

...is now saying what Rupert Sheldrake was saying, namely that the laws of the universe are path dependent (not transcendental but evolving as events occur). Rupert Sheldrake whose book was called “an ideal candidate for burning” by an irate Nature editor who forgot that he was not the Spanish Inquisition.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Sheldrake's most recent TED talk was banned, of course. Among other things, Sheldrake announced that after scouring a British national library for records of the exact measurement of the gravitational constant in the 20th century he discovered that reliable measurements at different places indicated wildly different values at the same time. If one charts the differences over time the result is quite puzzling -- is this systematic error by the world's best 20th century scientists or an indication that the gravitational constant is path dependent?

Sheldrake said much else besides, of course. But his points are quite clear.