The struggle is nothing new

Author(s):  
Andrew Briggs ◽  
Hans Halvorson ◽  
Andrew Steane

The question of tension between scientific study and religious commitment is examined through two historic examples: the impact of Aristotelian physics on thirteenth-century Europe, and the motion of the Earth argued by Copernicus and Galileo. Aristotelian physics was constructed from ideas around change, form, and substance, which together implied the physical universe must have existed into the infinite past. This conflicted with religious ideas about time itself having been brought into being in the finite past. Bonaventure wished to reject Aristotelian science, but others such as Averroes and Aquinas adopted a more nuanced view, in which the meaning of statements is to be drawn with reference to their context. Something similar happened in the resolution of the seventeenth-century dispute about Earth’s motion. From the perspective of Einstein’s General Relativity, statements about motion, including accelerated motion, are never absolute but always relative to frame of reference.

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 464-469
Author(s):  
C. Y. Lo

Simulation shows that general relativity would lead to the existence of black holes if gravitation is always attractive. However, although we observed an invisible and extremely heavy object governs the orbits of stars at the center of our galaxy, we still cannot determine the existence of a black hole. Thus, one may ask whether black holes actually exist. Einstein’s general relativity has been established, because its prediction on the bending of light rays has been confirmed by observation. However, Einstein’s prediction on the increment of weight for a piece of metal as the temperature increases is proven incorrect by experiments, which actually show a reduction of weight. This leads to the necessary existence of repulsive gravitational force, which has been demonstrated by a charged capacitor hovering above the earth. Thus, Einstein, Newton, Galileo, and Maxwell all made the error of overlooking the repulsive gravitational charge-mass interaction. Thus, it is necessary to rejustify the existence of black holes, because gravity is not always attractive. Moreover, repulsive gravitational force makes it necessary to extend general relativity to a five-dimensional theory. Thus, to find out whether black holes exist, it is necessary to investigate the repulsive gravitation and a five-dimensional space.


2004 ◽  
Vol 202 ◽  
pp. 247-249
Author(s):  
Xuejun Wu ◽  
Chongming Xu ◽  
Michael Soffel

The general relativistic perturbations of a uniformly rotating and axisymmetric elastic deformable astronomical body in the first post-Newtonian approximation of Einstein's general relativity is discussed in a co-rotating coordinates. The main new results presented here are the post-Newtonian variations of the energy and Euler equation, which at the Newtonian level of accuracy is so called Jeffreys-Vicente equation and it play a fundamental role for the description of global geodynamics in the classical geophysics. Our results will be useful to treat the relativistic nutation and precession of the Earth and other planets.


1962 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 415-418
Author(s):  
K. P. Stanyukovich ◽  
V. A. Bronshten

The phenomena accompanying the impact of large meteorites on the surface of the Moon or of the Earth can be examined on the basis of the theory of explosive phenomena if we assume that, instead of an exploding meteorite moving inside the rock, we have an explosive charge (equivalent in energy), situated at a certain distance under the surface.


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (9) ◽  
pp. 1671-1694
Author(s):  
R.M. Mel'nikov

Subject. The article addresses the impact of religious confession on wages and the likelihood of unemployment in Russia. Objectives. The aim is to test the hypothesis that religious faith and high church attendance are accompanied by an increase in employment earnings. Methods. Using the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey data, I estimate the Mincer's extended equation with variables that characterize the respondent’s religious commitment. To assess the impact of religious identity and the activity rate of attendance at religious services on the likelihood of unemployment and life satisfaction, I use probit models. Results. The estimates demonstrate that the Russian labor market rewards men with moderate and high degree of religious commitment; their wage growth reaches seventeen percent of the level of non-believers with comparable education and work experience. However, faithful Muslim women are employed in the lowest paid areas. Religious faith and regular church attendance have a positive effect on satisfaction with life (significant for Orthodox Christian women). Conclusions. Positive impact of religious capital on income and employment can be attributed to the development of business qualities that are rewarded in the labor market, the mutual support of religious network participants. Therefore, it possible to consider religious capital, along with educational capital and health capital, as a component of human capital and a factor of socio-economic development.


Author(s):  
Mark Burden

Much eighteenth-century Dissenting educational activity was built on an older tradition of Puritan endeavour. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the godly had seen education as an important tool in spreading their ideas but, in the aftermath of the Restoration, had found themselves increasingly excluded from universities and schools. Consequently, Dissenters began to develop their own higher educational institutions (in the shape of Dissenting academies) and also began to set up their own schools. While the enforcement of some of the legal restrictions that made it difficult for Dissenting institutions diminished across the eighteenth century, the restrictions did not disappear entirely. While there has been considerable focus on Dissenting academies and their contribution to debates about doctrinal orthodoxy, the impact of Dissenting schools was also considerable.


Author(s):  
Lawrence H. Starkey

For two centuries Kant's first Critique has nourished various turns against transcendent metaphysics and realism. Kant was scandalized by reason's impotence in confronting infinity (or finitude) as seen in the divisibility of particles and in spatial extension and time. Therefore, he had to regard the latter as subjective and reality as imponderable. In what follows, I review various efforts to rationalize Kant's antinomies-efforts that could only flounder before the rise of Einstein's general relativity and Hawking's blackhole cosmology. Both have undercut the entire Kantian tradition by spawning highly probable theories for suppressing infinities and actually resolving these perplexities on a purely physical basis by positing curvatures of space and even of time that make them reëntrant to themselves. Heavily documented from primary sources in physics, this paper displays time’s curvature as its slowing down near very massive bodies and even freezing in a black hole from which it can reëmerge on the far side, where a new universe can open up. I argue that space curves into a double Möbius strip until it loses one dimension in exchange for another in the twin universe. It shows how 10-dimensional GUTs and the triple Universe, time/charge/parity conservation, and strange and bottom particle families and antiparticle universes, all fit together.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 180-190
Author(s):  
Ireneusz Wlodarczyk

AbstractWe computed the impact solutions of the potentially dangerous Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) 2001 BB16 based on 47 optical observations from January 20.08316 UTC, 2001, through February 09.15740 UTC, 2016, and one radar observation from January 19.90347 UTC, 2016. We used two methods to sample the starting Line of Variation (LOV). First method, called thereafter LOV1, with the uniform sampling of the LOV parameter, out to LOV = 5 computing 3000 virtual asteroids (VAs) on both sides of the LOV, which gives 6001 VAs and propagated their orbits to JD2525000.5 TDT=February 12, 2201. We computed the non-gravitational parameterA2=(34.55±7.38)·10–14 au/d2 for nominal orbit of 2001 BB16 and possible impacts with the Earth until 2201. For potential impact in 2195 we find A2=20.0·10−14 au/d2. With a positive value of A2, 2001 BB16 can be prograde rotator. Moreover, we computed Lyapunov Time (LT) for 2001 BB16, which for all VAs, has a mean value of about 25 y. We showed that impact solutions, including the calculated probability of a possible collision of a 2001 BB16 asteroid with the Earth depends on how to calculate and take into account the appropriate gravitational model, including the number of perturbing massive asteroids. In some complicated cases, it may depend also on the number of clones calculated for a given sigma LOV1. The second method of computing the impact solutions, called thereafter LOV2, is based on a non-uniformly sampling of the LOV. We showed that different methods of sampling the LOV can give different impact solutions, but all computed dates of possible impacts of the asteroid 2001 BB16 with the Earth occur in accordance at the end of the 22nd century.


1998 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 398-398
Author(s):  
Kenji Tanabe

Propagation of the surface waves of the lobe-filing components of close binary systems is investigated theoretically. Such waves are considered to be analogous to the gravity waves of water on the earth. As a result, the equations of the surface wave in the rotating frame of reference are reduced to the so-called Kortewegde Vries (KdV) equation and non-linear Schroedinger (NLS) equation according to its ”depth”. Each of these equations is known to have the solution of soliton. When this soliton is sent to the other component of the binary system through the Lagrangian point, it can give rise to the flare activity observed in some kinds of close binary systems.


Urban History ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Boulton

It is nearly two decades since Tony Wrigley first discussed the possible effects that the experience of London life may have had on changing the society of seventeenth-century England. Despite some excellent work on certain aspects of London's social history, however, his qualification still stands: ‘too little is known of the sociological differences between life in London and life in provincial England to afford a clear perception of the impact of London's growth upon the country as a whole’. Among the obstacles to this latter goal are that metropolitan and provincial society are often seen as qualitatively different and, perhaps in consequence, comparisons between the two have not been seriously attempted. What is needed is a model which might serve to embrace the experiences of both urban and rural inhabitants within a common framework.


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