Welcome to The Tangled Bank 108 and to the little-known but still fascinating Wheat-dogg’s World. I hope that after you peruse the fine entries in this edition of The Tangled Bank you’ll stroll around and check out things here in my neck of the Worldwide Woods.
Today we have science bloggers musing on some of the greater profundities of the universe as well on more concrete issues closer to home. Some of these posts ask more questions than they answer, but heck that’s what science is all about, hey?
I’m the resident physics teacher, so we’re going to start the ball rolling with our lone physical-science submission, from Yoo Chul Chung at Yoo’s Ramblings. (Sorry, life scientists, a little physics never hurt anyone!) After reading the July issue of Scientific American, Yoo contemplates the meaning of hypothetical “building blocks” that can organize themselves to create the space-time we know and love. These “space-time quanta” curiously exist in two dimensions at the quantum level, but exhibit four dimensions at larger scales. Further, causality is integral to this system, closing any fancy relativistic loopholes to would-be time travelers hoping to jump through a wormhole to watch history unfold in real time. There goes about half the world’s Star Trek plotlines …
While Yoo ponders whether the universe is made of building blocks, the Evolved Rationalist considers whether William Dembski is clever enough to even play with blocks. In Dembski: The failure that keeps on failing, our author glosses on Bill’s seeming immunity to rational, logical thought as Bill gripes about the lack of theology in Kenneth Miller’s biology textbooks. Yes, dear friends, you read that right. Check out the Evolved Rationalist and see what we mean.
