Tag: science

Is this synthetic leaf thing possible?

I’m by no means a chemist or a biologist (I like to blame my education for that), but I can’t not feel skeptical about the synthetic leaf that set the internet on fire a few days back.

Melchiorri's silk leaf


That ugly catch 22

There’s a reason that arguments about religion often turn into completely meaningless battles of empty words. Such arguments in general are based on standard logic and follow the scientific method of drawing conclusions based on a set of axioms and trying to find inconsistencies.

The big problem of a scientist trying to argue with a strictly religious Christian, for example, on an equal footing is that their sets of axioms are different. Sure, they are same for the most of it – one could maybe even say that the scientific axioms are a subset of the Christian ones. That is because the first and foremost axiom of a strict Christian is the absoluteness of God.


On religion

I don’t think that following a religion is a bad thing, that it should be reprimanded, nor do I claim that there are no higher spiritual beings. Religion is a very important pillar of culture and civilization, a fundamental part of mankind’s history. It provides an explanation for things there used to be no clear explanation for before, and while I don’t think that this function of it is as relevant in this age and day when science is capable of explaining phenomenon without involving divine beings (and please note that William of Ockham, the man who’s famous for stating that all theories should be kept as simple as possible, was a Christian monk), I also think that religion can and does provide moral guidelines and a spiritual respite, something that science can not and is not supposed to do.


On Ken Ham’s historical science

Just two days ago there was a debate between “evolutionist” Bill Nye and the creationist Ken Ham. I finished watching the whole thing today, and I thought I’d put down my ideas.


Három dimenzió

Tudtátok, hogy van olyan háromdimenziós test, aminek csak egy oldala van?


Chaos

You know what, this chaos theory thing is very interesting. Yesterday, when i started reading a book about it, after the first few pages, i told my mom to warn me if i become too much of a theoretical physician. True, there are some expressions that i had to look up in a dictionary for their exact meaning (in chaos theory, where one millionth difference from the real value can cause huge differences in the outcome, i need to know each phrase very well), such as determinism. As of now, after the first chapter, the only thing i’m exactly sure now is that this will be very interesting, in addition to befriending the whole idea of chaos and such. Though i don’t really see a practical use to it (am i really such a practical mind?), it’s very interesting to finally read a precise description of that popular “butterfly-effect”, about which Ian Malcolm was talking in Jurassic Park (the first and original).

It also shows a problem (or at least now i think so): computers can’t really understand anything like a human can. If you see a Lorenz attractor, you immediately see some system in it, and can also tell it looks like a butterfly (this must be God’s joke, that it resembles the shape of the animal used in the most known example of this theory – that would be the butterfly effect i wrote about before and will write about later), but for a computer, it couldn’t be predicted, it couldn’t be totally calculated, it’s just a… something. We can see it as a whole, but a computer can only check one point at a time, and it works in a binary way, so that point is either there or not. It doesn’t matter if the point beside that one is indeed on the line. I wonder if a computer using some numeral system more complicated than binary would be possible or useful.

Anyway, the butterfly effect is… well, either look it up, or wait for me finishing the book, because i won’t write about it now.