The Chemicals of Karma & Effect

            Many of the greatest threats to human health today are products of our own creation.  Chemicals in our water and foods breed cancer.  Air pollutants clog our lungs and deplete the ever ominous ozone layer.  Our ever expanding cities and industries encroach on areas never before inhabited by man, potentially holding diseases which could spread as a pandemic across the world.

Ayurvedic Medicine

Ayurveda is an alternative medicine deeply rooted in the Hindu religious tradition of northern India and established over 5000 years ago.  According to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, “Ayurdevic medicine continues to be practiced in India, where nearly 80 percent of the population uses it exclusively or combined with conventional (Western) medicine” (Ayurvedic Medicine: An Introduction).  While it is a tradition of medicine with a long history, it is believed that much of Ayurveda’s practices were lost, at least in the West, until the early 1980s when they were reborn through the work of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (Barrett).  Ayurveda is a combination of two Sanskrit words: ayur, meaning life, and veda, meaning knowledge; so Ayurveda is the knowledge, or science, of life.  The Ayurveda is completely based on the Vedic literature and as such is very much spiritual.

The Presocratic Scientists

“Philosophy began with Thales” – Bertrand Russell
The fundamental questions persist today: What is everything made up of, or what is matter?  Why does matter move or appear to move in the way it does?  What causes it to move?  Does matter really move or is this merely a trick of the mind or senses?  These are the fundamental questions the presocratics sought to answer.  They created many of the philosophical arguments which continue to this day: Monism vs. Pluralism, Materialism vs. Idealism, Plenism vs. Atomism, Chance vs. Necessity, and Finite vs. Infinite.  (Magruder).  The presocratics are important because they laid the foundations of modern scientific thinking.  They had grown tired of the application of divinity to the functioning of the world and as such decided to begin thinking not so much in a religion as applied to science context but science as a fundamentally necessary being all in itself.

Seeing in the Dark

The following is an analysis of the book Seeing in the Dark. 

            “The foundations of modern astronomy were laid largely by amateurs” (Ferris, Seeing in the Dark, p. 33).  Most of the men whose work in astronomy is found throughout the history books saw it merely as a pastime not something that could pay the rent, including Copernicus, Kepler, and Halley.  For one to study the skies he usually needed to have a large bank account and not until the twentieth century did astronomy become a career.  Yet, “even in the twentieth century, while they were being eclipsed by the burgeoning professional class, amateurs continued to make valuable contributions to astronomical research” (Ferris, Seeing in the Dark, p. 35).  The amateurs lagged behind the wealth and technology afforded to the professionals until the 1980s when, specifically, the Dobsonian telescope, developed by an American Buddhist monk, much cheaper CCD light-sensing devices, and the Internet.  The Dobsonian allowed amateurs to view nebulae and galaxies that otherwise before would have only been accessible to the wealthy and the professionals, and at merely a few dollars cost combined with much labor, should one be so inclined.  The affordability of charge-coupled devices, which can absorb light much more feint than is possible with photographic plates, and their ability to digitally store images of the universe allowed for much more exchange of information.  Combine CCDs with the Internet, along hundreds of millions of people instantaneous access to information and images, and the age of the amateur had returned.  The Internet also enabled much more collaboration between amateurs and professionals than ever before.  Although, “the amateur approach had its limitations.  Amateurs insufficiently tutored in the scientific literature sometimes acquired accurate data but did not know how to make sense of it.  Those who sought to overcome their lack of expertise by collaborating with professionals sometimes complained that they wound up doing most of the work while their more prestigious partners got most of the credit… But many amateurs enjoyed fruitful collaborations, and all were brought close to the stars” (Ferris, Seeing in the Dark, p. 41).

Disease, Its What's for Dinner

No human practice, other than the overuse of antibiotics and international travel, has a greater effect on disease transmission than agriculture and food processing.  Many of the disease related byproducts created by the agriculture and food processing industries could be easily avoided through the application of the practices of the old ways.  Throughout the pre agricultural revolution era, disease existed in our food supplies, just not on the scale that is seen today.

White's Science v Religion

A.D. White’s War upon Galileo

            The premise behind Andrew Dickson White’s argument is that the Church conducted a Holy War against the works of Galileo and against the man himself in order to keep secure its socio-political position in the hierarchy of seventeenth century Europe and to prevent the spread of anti-papal and Reformist sentiment.  White believes that the Church stands for all that is superstitious and against logic and reason, while Galileo, and his contemporaries, represent the March of Science through the use of rational, philosophic thinking.  White believes that the Church has intentionally attacked “almost every man who has ever done anything new for his fellow-men” through the use of weapons such as “infidel” and “atheist” (White 135).  According to him, the betterment of man has been continually betrayed by the Catholic Church and that the story of Galileo’s silence is the pinnacle of this dark treachery (130).

What Quantum Theory says about Physical Reality

Is there a physical world, and if there is, what is it like? In other words, what is the nature of physical reality? Although this may seem like an obsessively philosophical question, our best current scientific theory about the basic stuff that makes up the physical world, quantum theory, seems to force us to try to answer this question. Even the scientific founders of this theory were driven to address this issue.

There is no quantum world ... only an abstract quantum description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.  (Niels Bohr)

This may look like an attempt to avoid engaging in “metaphysical speculation”. But it does states a view about the nature of physical reality. It seems that no one who takes physics seriously as an attempt to account for what the world is like can avoid such issues.