Crombie (1959, 1995), Alistsair Cameron, The History of Science from Augustine to Galileo, Dover 1995 Jacket: 'The Origins of modern science date back at least to the thirteenth century, but it was not until the end of the sixteenth century that the Scientific Revolution began to gather breathtaking speed. Since then, man's view of himself and his world has changed so profoundly that the Scientific Revolution has been compared in the history of civilization to the rise of the Ancient Greek philosophy in the sixth and fifth centuries B. C., and to the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire to the third and fourth centuries AD. . ... Beginning with a brief account of ideas about the natural world in Western Christendom, from the Dark Ages to the twelfth century, the author goes on to show how the system of scientific thought accepted in the thirteenth century was introduced from Greek and Arabic sources. He also offers thought provoking insights into such topics as the relationship of technical activity to science throughout the medieval period, the criticism of Aristotle in the later Middle Ages and the Scientific Revolution itself.' 
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Khinchin (1960, 1998), Aleksandr Yakovlevich, The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Statistics, Dover 1998 'In the area of quantum statistics, I show that a rigorous mathematical basis of the computational formulas of statistical physics . . . may be obtained from an elementary application of the well-developed limit theorems of the theory of probability.' 
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Le Carre (1993, 2016), John, The Night Manager, Penguin /Random House 'At the start of it all, Johnathan Pine is merely the night manager at a luxury hotel. But when a single attempt to pass on information to the British authorities—about an international businessman at the hotel with suspicious dealings—backfires terrible abd people close to Pine begin to die, he commits himself to a battle against powerful forces her cannot begin to imagine. In a chilling tale of corrupt intelligence agencies, billion-dollar price tags and the truth of the brutal arms trade, John le Carre creates a claustrophobic world in which no one can be trusted.' 
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Weyl (1985), Hermann, and Henry L. Brose (translator), Space Time Matter, Dover 1985 Amazon customer review: ' The birth of gauge theory by its author: This book bewitched several generations of physicists and students. Hermann Weyl was one of the very great mathematicians of this century. He was also a great physicist and an artist with ideas and words. In this book you will find, at a deep level, the philosophy, mathematics and physics of space-time. It appeared soon after Einstein's famous paper on General Relativity, and is, in fact, a magnificent exposition of it, or, rather, of a tentative generalization of it. The mathematical part is of the highest class, striving to put geometry to the forefront. Actually, the book introduced a far-reaching generalization of the theory of connections, with respect to the Levi-Civita theory. It was not a generalization for itself, but motivated by the dream (Einstein's) of including gravitation and electromagnetism in the same (geometrical) theory. The result was gauge theory, which, slightly modified and applied to quantum mechanics resulted in the theory which dominates present particle physics. Weyl's unified theory was proved wrong by Einstein, and his criticism alone, accepted by Weyl and included in the book, would justify the reading. Though wrong, Weyl's theory is so beautiful that Paul Dirac stated that nature could not afford neglecting such perfection, and that the theory was probably only misplaced. Prophetic words! . . . ' Henrique Fleming 
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Alan Turing (1936), On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, 'The "computable" numbers may be described briefly as the real numbers whose expressions as a decimal are calculable by some finite means. Although the subject of this paper is ostensibly the computable numbers, it is almost equally easy to define and investigate computable functions of an integral variable of a real or computable variable, computable predicates and so forth. . . . ' back

Aman Agrawal et al, Did the exposure of coacervate droplets to rain make them the first stable protocells?, Membraneless coacervate microdroplets have long been proposed as model protocells as they can grow, divide, and concentrate RNA by natural partitioning. However, the rapid exchange of RNA between these compartments, along with their rapid fusion, both within minutes, means that individual droplets would be unable to maintain their separate genetic identities. Hence, Darwinian evolution would not be possible, and the population would be vulnerable to collapse due to the rapid spread of parasitic RNAs. In this study, we show that distilled water, mimicking rain/freshwater, leads to the formation of electrostatic crosslinks on the interface of coacervate droplets that not only suppress droplet fusion indefinitely but also allow the spatiotemporal compartmentalization of RNA on a timescale of days depending on the length and structure of RNA. We suggest that these nonfusing membraneless droplets could potentially act as protocells with the capacity to evolve compartmentalized ribozymes in prebiotic environments. back

An Englishman in New York (Film) - Wikipedia, An Englishman in New York (Film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' An Englishman in New York is a 2009 biographical film that chronicles the years gay English writer Quentin Crisp spent in New York City, starring John Hurt reprising his role as Crisp from The Naked Civil Servant (1975). The film takes its title from "Englishman in New York", a song about Crisp written by Sting for the 1987 album ...Nothing Like the Sun.' back

Born rule - Wikipedia, Born rule - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Born rule (also called the Born law, Born's rule, or Born's law) is a law of quantum mechanics which gives the probability that a measurement on a quantum system will yield a given result. It is named after its originator, the physicist Max Born. The Born rule is one of the key principles of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. There have been many attempts to derive the Born rule from the other assumptions of quantum mechanics, with inconclusive results. . . . The Born rule states that if an observable corresponding to a Hermitian operator A with discrete spectrum is measured in a system with normalized wave function (see bra-ket notation), then the measured result will be one of the eigenvalues λ of A, and the probability of measuring a given eigenvalue λ_i will equal <ψ|P_i|ψ> where P_i is the projection onto the eigenspace of A corresponding to λ_i'.' back

Chris Vedelago (2024_08_20), Religious extremism still main security concern, warns Victoria’s top cop, ' “For us, religiously motivated violent extremism is still the highest risk, but it is increasingly with right-wing extremism and their ideologies. Everyone talks about ISIS and how it’s gone, but they’re still influential.” The comments come after ASIO raised the nation’s threat assessment on August 5 from “possible” to “probable” for the first time since 2014. No specific threat was detailed as the reason for the change. The spy agency noted it was not in direct response to months of violence in the Middle East, but said the conflict had resonated in Australia. A “probable” rating suggests there is a greater than 50 per cent chance of an onshore attack or attack planning in the next 12 months, according to ASIO. back

Christopher Malian, A city at the crossroads: how Gaza became one of the great intellectual hubs of the Roman Empire, ' The years 2023 and 2024 will certainly be remembered as some of the darkest in the long and often violent history of Gaza. The recent destruction of schools and universities in the Gaza strip has attracted the attention of the media and concern from the United Nations, which has raised the question of whether the damage may be considered “scholasticide”. Such reports are cause for reflection on the intellectual history of the city – something rarely discussed outside academic circles. This is a shame, as there was a period in the late Roman Empire (5th and 6th centuries CE) when Gaza was one of the great intellectual centres of the Mediterranean world. . . . If you wanted to make it in the Late Roman World (and if you didn’t command an army of Goths), your entry into the civil administration of the newly powerful Christian Church was largely determined by your education. We know quite a bit about the educational syllabus of the Gazan schools. At the heart of this elite ancient education was the study of literature and rhetoric. The curriculum focused on Classical Greek texts (as opposed to Latin or Syriac ones). Young men would be taught how to compose speeches on various topics.' back

Dirac equation - Wikipedia, Dirac equation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In particle physics, the Dirac equation is a relativistic wave equation derived by British physicist Paul Dirac in 1928. In its free form, or including electromagnetic interactions, it describes all spin-1⁄2 massive particles such as electrons and quarks, for which parity is a symmetry, and is consistent with both the principles of quantum mechanics and the theory of special relativity, and was the first theory to account fully for special relativity in the context of quantum mechanics. It accounted for the fine details of the hydrogen spectrum in a completely rigorous way.' back

Ezra Klein, Trump Turned the Democratic Party Into a Pitiless Machine, ' There is a contradiction at the heart of the Republican Party that does not exist at the heart of the Democratic Party. Democrats are united in their belief that the government can, and should, act on behalf of the public. To be on the party’s far left is to believe the government should do much more. To be among its moderates is to believe it should do somewhat more. But all of the people elected as Democrats, from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Senator Joe Manchin, are there for the same reason: to use the power of the government to pursue their vision of the good. The divides are real and often bitter. But there is always room for negotiation because there is a fundamental commonality of purpose. The modern Republican Party, by contrast, is built upon a loathing of the government. Some of its members want to see the government shrunk and hamstrung. This is the old ethos, best described by Grover Norquist, the anti-tax activist who famously said: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub".' back

Gödel's incompleteness theorems - Wikipedia, Gödel's incompleteness theorems - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Gödel's incompleteness theorems are two theorems of mathematical logic that establish inherent limitations of all but the most trivial axiomatic systems capable of doing arithmetic. The theorems, proven by Kurt Gödel in 1931, are important both in mathematical logic and in the philosophy of mathematics. The two results are widely, but not universally, interpreted as showing that Hilbert's program to find a complete and consistent set of axioms for all mathematics is impossible, giving a negative answer to Hilbert's second problem. The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an "effective procedure" (i.e., any sort of algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the relations of the natural numbers (arithmetic). For any such system, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system. The second incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows that such a system cannot demonstrate its own consistency.' back

Intellect Books, Publish with Us, 'At Intellect we strive to preserve the author’s authentic voice and provide an unbiased platform for debate. We have a well-earned reputation for our excellence in design, innovation and corporate integrity. For you, this means access to a publisher that is dedicated to expressing your ideas and insights in an undiluted fashion, to as wide an audience as possible.] back

John C. Eccles, Innovation in Science: The Physiology of Imagination, ' Our task here is to see how far our present ideas on the working of the brain can be related to the experiences of mind. The way to the imagination, the highest level of mental experience, lies through the lower levels of sensory experience, imagery, hallucination and memory, and that is the path we shall traverse. All that we shall learn must itself, of course, be the product of perceiving, reasoning and imagining by our brains! back

Leonardas V. Gerulaitis, The Canonization of Saint Thomas Aquinas, ' The rise of national states made the old order of things, pope and emperor ruling supreme, out of date. In order to survive the papacy had to adopt new means of control. The transference of the Papal See from Rome to Avignon provided an opportune chance to break away from the old traditions and to institute the required changes. During these seventy years a complete change of the papacy occurred. The spiritual character of the papacy was lost and, to a large extent, the financial side became dominant. Avignon took its place as the capital of all Christendom in a way Rome had never been able to achieve. The wanderings of the popes ended and the Curia became highly centralized. Pope John XXII (1316-1334) was mainly responsible for the establishment of an elaborate bureaucracy. With the increase offiscal income, papal patronage became paramount. back

Marjorie O'Rorke Boyle (1997), Chaff: Thomas Aquinas's Repudiation of His Opera omnia, ' I cannot": Thomas Aquinas replied to an anxious inquiry about I why he had abruptly ceased writing and dictating his Summa theologiae. His companion and confessor, Reginald of Piperno, afraid that overzealous study had induced insanity, insisted that he continue. "I cannot," repeated Aquinas, "because everything that I have written seems to me chaffy." . . . Reginald importuned Aquinas to tell him why he refused to write and why he was stunned. After many interrogations Aquinas answered, "I adjure you by the living almighty God, and by the faith younhave in our order, and by charity that you strictly promise me you willnnever reveal in my lifetime what I tell you. Everything that I have written seems to me chaffy in respect to those things that I have seen and havembeen revealed to me."
Processus canonizationis s. Thomae, Neapoli 79, ed. M.-H. Laurent, fascicule 4 of Fontes vitaes. Thomae Aquinatis, ed. Dominic M. Prummer (Toulouse, n.d.), pp. 376-77 back

Novaya Gazeta Undesirable no 37, In which the much-anticipated Russian counterattack fails to materialise, 'Three Ukrainian films that had their world premiere at last week’s Berlinale examined the war through three very different lenses: one looking the violence directly in the eye, another taking satirical stock of eastern Ukrainian society, and a third, far more personal film, documenting the war’s effect on four generations of women in a single family. While work on Svitlana Lishchynska’s documentary about her own relatives A Bit of a Stranger began in late 2021, the threat of war hangs over it from the start, not least as their home town Mariupol is now synonymous with Russia’s brutal three-month siege. . . . Roman Bondarchuk’s highly anticipated second feature The Editorial Office begins as a light-hearted comedy of manners with feckless biologist Yura searching for endangered groundhogs on the Kherson steppe, but the film’s considerable darkness doesn’t take long to materialise as he discovers that forest fires are being set by corrupt business people, after which his companion on the trip goes missing, and he attempts to seek justice by getting two local newspapers to publish his photographs. . . . No such optimism can be found in Oksana Karpovych’s extraordinary post-invasion documentary Intercepted, however. A montage of haunting images of the destruction left by the Russian military in eastern Ukraine — kitchens with food still on the table, empty classrooms, burnt out houses, collapsed bridges and abandoned villages — Karpovych’s sinister cinematography portrays a post-human landscape left to its own fate. Over this meditative succession of exquisitely composed shots, the titular intercepts of Russian conscripts calling their families at home made by Ukrainian intelligence during the first year of the war are played, their disembodied, anonymous voices like those of ghosts narrating the carnage and brutality of the invasion. Despite their initial ordinariness and unremarkable tone, the conversations contain multiple and relentless descriptions of war crimes, the shocking nature of which is only amplified by their matter-of-fact delivery. One soldier describes how civilian passersby are routinely shot to ensure Russian positions aren’t given away, while another gives detailed accounts of torture scenarios and admits to “getting off” on the violent sadism in which he is free to indulge. Even more shocking is the blithe acceptance of the family members to whom these horrors are being recounted, who do little more than parrot propagandist narratives by way of response.' back

Patti Davis, I Knew What My Enablers Were Doing. It’s Murkier With Matthew Perry., ' Matthew Perry was not a moron. He was a man in a dark tunnel, a tunnel that echoes with desperate desires he had tried, but in the end failed, to control. I have seen some in that tunnel who understand, with chilling cruelty, how to prey on addicts and have no pangs of conscience about doing so. They know that rational thought and instincts of self-preservation get drowned out by the raging desire to feel a drug coursing through one’s body. . . . Many different kinds of people prey on addicts. The most dangerous are those who are clearheaded, those who have memorized the map of this disease, who have somewhere along the line decided that monetary profit is more important than the life of a human being. Those who begin as enablers can too easily join that club. People who tell themselves they are helping often come to express remorse. Maybe the five people who have been charged in connection with Matthew Perry’s death will, too. Having known too much of that dark world, I for one won’t believe them.' back

Pius XII (1950_11_01), Apostolic Constitution of Pope Pius XII Munificentissimus Deus defining the dogma of the Assumption, ' 1. The most bountiful God, who is almighty, the plan of whose providence rests upon wisdom and love, tempers, in the secret purpose of his own mind, the sorrows of peoples and of individual men by means of joys that he interposes in their lives from time to time, in such a way that, under different conditions and in different ways, all things may work together unto good for those who love him. [. . .]
44. [. . .] for the glory of Almighty God who has lavished his special affection upon the Virgin Mary, for the honor of her Son, the immortal King of the Ages and the Victor over sin and death, for the increase of the glory of that same august Mother, and for the joy and exultation of the entire Church; by the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own authority, we pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.
45. Hence if anyone, which God forbid, should dare willfully to deny or to call into doubt that which we have defined, let him know that he has fallen away completely from the divine and Catholic Faith.' back

Richard Feynman & Steven Weinberg (1986), Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics The1986 Dirac Memorial Lectures, Foreword: John C Taylor: 'Dirac Died in 1984, and St John's College, Cambridge (Dirac's College), very generously endowed an annual lecture to be held at Cambridge University in Dirac's memory. The First two lectures, printed here, are contrasting variations of Dirac's theme of the union of quantum theory and relativity.' back

Steven Maras, For the love of cinema: what we’re missing from At The Movies, 10 years after its last season, ' At the Movies was first broadcast on the ABC on July 1 2004, with the final episode broadcast on December 9 2014. Hosted and conceived by Margaret Pomeranz and David Stratton, they first began presenting together on SBS’s The Movie Show on October 30 1986, inaugurating one of the most culturally significant collaborations in Australian film culture. Reflecting on the significance of program in this anniversary season, there is much to give present-day readers pause for thought. The last episode of At the Movies brought with it a sense of the end of an era. Academic Huw Walmsley-Evans worried this might be the last picture show: The Australian public need and want smart, entertaining and accessible critical discussion of film. It would be a far better tribute to Margaret and David if we gave someone else a go at providing it. Critic Luke Buckmaster saw Margaret and David’s retirement as marking a “symbolic end of the golden age of traditional film reviewing in Australia”.' back

Supersymmetry - Wikipedia, Supersymmetry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Supersymmetry is a theoretical framework in physics that suggests the existence of a symmetry between particles with integer spin (bosons) and particles with half-integer spin (fermions). It proposes that for every known particle, there exists a partner particle with different spin properties. There have been multiple experiments on supersymmetry that have failed to provide evidence that it exists in nature. If evidence is found, supersymmetry could help explain certain phenomena, such as the nature of dark matter and the hierarchy problem in particle physics.' back

Ulrik Egede, 'Heaviest antimatter observation yet will fine-tune numbers for dark matter search, ' In experiments at the Brookhaven National Lab in the US, an international team of physicists has detected the heaviest “anti-nuclei” ever seen. The tiny, short-lived objects are composed of exotic antimatter particles. The measurements of how often these entities are produced and their properties confirms our current understanding of the nature of antimatter, and will help the search for another mysterious kind of particles – dark matter – in deep space. The idea of antimatter is less than a century old. In 1928, British physicist Paul Dirac developed a very accurate theory for the behaviour of electrons that made a disturbing prediction: the existence of electrons with negative energy, which would have made the stable universe we live in impossible. Luckily scientists found an alternative explanation for these “negative energy” states: antielectrons, or twins of the electron with the opposite electric charge. Antielectrons were duly discovered in experiments in 1932, and since then scientists have found that all fundamental particles have their own antimatter equialents. However, this raises another question. Antielectrons, antiprotons and antineutrons should be able to combine to make whole antiatoms, and indeed antiplanets and antigalaxies. What’s more, our theories of the Big Bang suggest equal amounts of matter and antimatter must have been created at the beginning of the universe. But everywhere we look, we see matter – and only insignificant amounts of antimatter. Where did the antimatter go? That is a question that has vexed scientists for nearly a century.' back

Wu Experiment - Wikipedia, Wu Experiment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The experiment established that conservation of parity was violated (P-violation) by the weak interaction, providing a way to operationally define left and right without reference to the human body. This result was not expected by the physics community, which had previously regarded parity as a conserved quantity. . . . As stated by We et al: If an asymmetry in the distribution between θ and 180° − θ (where θ is the angle between the orientation of the parent nuclei and the momentum of the electrons) is observed, it provides unequivocal proof that parity is not conserved in beta decay.' back

Xinlu Liang & Sylvie Zhuang, ‘Millions benefited’: why generations see Deng Xiaoping as the architect of modern China, ' “He is revered almost as a godlike figure,” Guo said. “He was like the head of a big family – assured us to work hard without fear and cleared obstacles from the path, no matter big or small.” It is a sentiment shared by many Chinese across generations and all walks of life – even 120 years after Deng’s birth on August 22, 1904. Celebrated as the architect of contemporary China, Deng transformed a nation that had been devastated by political turmoil into a global economic powerhouse in just a few decades – something President Xi Jinping has called a “historic and worldwide” contribution. After taking the Communist Party helm in the late 1970s, Deng set about changing mindsets. He unleashed experiments on the economy, on education and culture, science and technology, and tried to rally support with an approach he said aimed to benefit the majority. “Deng brought his pragmatism to the service of clear goals, based on a few clear concepts: the Chinese people were tired of being poor; they wanted individual dignity at home; and they wanted a respected, equal role in the world,” said David Lampton, former president of the National Committee on US-China Relations and professor emeritus and former director of SAIS China at Johns Hopkins University.' back