May 6th, 2012
Presented this talk at a school at Petropolis, Brazil. Lorentz covariance requires that gravity be velocity dependent. But old physicists can’t get over the 19th c. idea, reiterated by Eddington, that introducing velocity dependence in gravity makes the two-body problem unstable! They never studied functional differential equations, and no physics texts yet mentions my first solution of functional differential equations in a serious physical context. Old-time physicists confuse the mathematical theory of ordinary differential equations with physics. But young people do better.
Posted in Physics | No Comments »
May 6th, 2012
But why a year on the Christian calendar? That calendar embodies the European ignorance of elementary arithmetic and simple fractions (hence their persistent inability to determine Easter correctly until the Gregorian calendar reform of 1582 when they got the length of the year from Indian books). Click the image for the text version. This newspaper has a circulation of 40 million.
Even so, the Gregorian calendar retains the unscientifc chaos about months. This is a disaster for Indian agriculture. (More details of the monsoon mess in my book Cultural Foundations of Mathematics, or an early preliminary article at http://www.indianscience.org/essays/t_es_raju_monsoon.shtml.)
More recent newspaper clips on the “delayed monsoon” effect are at http://ckraju.net/papers/Monsoon-pages-from-calclnm.pdf.
Posted in Education, History and Philosophy of Mathematics, History of Astronomy, Science and Society | No Comments »
May 6th, 2012
Strange that governments do not support the use of open source, when it has so many advnatages. Some news reports below on the press conference by the Consumer Association Penang on 13 April, and a full charter of demands.
More press reports. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
May 5th, 2012
The Pusat Islam organized a talk on Islam and the philosophy of science. (Click the image for the paper. But the paper does not cover the queston of ethics of science, taken up during the talk.)
Posted in Education, History and Philosophy of Mathematics, History of Astronomy, Physics, Science and Society | No Comments »
May 5th, 2012
A workshop was held at Al-Bukhari International University to formulate a new curriculum for the history and philosophy of science. Scholars from 3 countries participated. Here is the announcement for the workshop, and an earlier one on the Multiversity site.
The issue is part of the decolonisation agenda, but was precipitated when a person who trained as a missionary in Singapore Bible College, and never acquired any knowledge of science or philosophy, but got a PhD from Cambridge in the philosophy of science, started trying to use the classroom as a pulpit. See the minutes of the discussion, and the draft syllabus.
Here is a group photo
and a press report in Alef (Iran). (Click image to go to site, and use Google translate for hilarious results.)
Posted in Education, History and Philosophy of Mathematics, History of Astronomy, Science and Society | No Comments »
May 5th, 2012
To teach science one needs to know the right stories of how science developed. That is one needs a truthful history of science, not the trash history one gets from the West. Strange that all those who talk of teaching students to innovate can only blindly imitate the syllabus from Western universities!
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Education, History and Philosophy of Mathematics, Science and Society | No Comments »
March 24th, 2012
For the last six months I have been repeatedly answering the question about superluminal neutrinos. I post below one such response from Sept 2011.
Einstein was, of course, wrong, but not for this reason. He (and most other physicists after him) wrongly thought relativity matters only for speeds close to light. That is true only for the one body problem. For the many body problem, relativity matters even at lower speeds. Einstein never understood this subtle mathematical point all his life.
CERN is wrong because the claim about superluminal neutrinos is conceptually confused. (But, of course, Western journalists superstitiously believe in the authority of CERN, “God particle” and all that. They have the money, so they must be right.)
—————email of 26 September—–
The point I made is that theory of relativity starts off by defining a clock. There is no God-given time out there to be measured, as Newton wrongly thought.
So what clock should one use?
If you do not know exactly how to measure time, you cannot measure velocity either, so it is meaningless to speak of velocities greater than that of light.
Posted in Physics | No Comments »
March 17th, 2012
Colonialism used church propaganda to inculcate the myth of Western superiority among the colonised. It is high time to break this dirty and evil myth, which is still propagated by our schools and universities. Had the British not got Mahatma Gandhi assassinated (through Savarkar), to ensure Nehru’s supremacy, we would have got real freedom, real swaraj. Not Hind Swaraj, not Swaraj in Ideas, but swaraj in thought
My paper on swaraj in thought was presented at the 35th Indian Social Science Congress, Wardha in Dec 2011. What a pity that the vice chancellor of the Mahatma Gandhi University is a police official.
Posted in Education, History and Philosophy of Mathematics, Science and Society | No Comments »
March 3rd, 2012
Many people think that the system of secretive refereeing (euphemistically called “peer review”) serves as a system of quality control. Whole groups of nations (such as the Organization of Islamic Conference) have formed their science policies on the basis of that belief. (See my paper on “Benchmarking science” for the USM-PSU conference at Hat Yai, October, 2011.)
But, what is the scientific evidence that such secretive refereeing serves the purpose of quality control?
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Science and Society | No Comments »
February 19th, 2012
Another way to see the religious bias in present-day science (see previous post) is to look at the way it is used to attack Islam. (Note: specifically science vs Islam, not science vs “religion”.) See my paper on “Islam and Science” Indian Journal of Secularism, 15(2), 2011, pp. 14-29.
For example, consider the claim that Islam is anti-science because it does not believe in “laws of nature” or “laws of physics”. As my paper explains, belief in “laws of nature” is part of the post-Crusade theology of Aquinas; it is no part of science. Newton himself believed that theology and thought that he was a prophet to whom God had revealed those laws. (He also thought he was born on 25 December.) So, here we have a simple situation where science is pro-church but anti-Islam (as in Hawking’s singularities which support the church doctrine of creation against Islam).
It is true that people are still taught “Newton’s laws of physics” in school. But that is bad terminology which spreads church indoctrination. Because colonial education blindly imitates the West, this propaganda is still propagated through science teaching in schools which should have changed that long ago. Newton’s “laws” have proved to be false, and science cannot ever lay claim to any eternal truth. Science only constructs fallible models.
Posted in Education, Physics, Science and Society | 1 Comment »