Physics has long aspired to provide a faithful map of reality: a representation in which events can be placed unambiguously, trajectories traced deterministically, and the past and future related…Read more
January 2026
January 2026
Why Relativity Looks Like Spacetime—and Why It Isn’t Relativity is usually presented as a theory about spacetime: its structure, its curvature, and the transformations that relate one observer’s measurements…Read more
I generally avoid religious topics per se on this blog, not out of policy, but for lack of interest. But there are many topics usually addressed in conversations concerning…Read more
We’re trained to think that causes precede effects, energy flows like water. With the variational principles in physics, it doesn’t work that way. The solutions don’t violate causality —…Read more
Analogies are easily stretched beyond viability, but they are the stuff of intuition. Consider a barrel filled with water and a rock on a string dangling over it. If…Read more
Our familiarity with the concept of dimensions is based on a commonsense notion of specifying the locations of objects in what we otherwise consider to be an empty ‘space’.…Read more
A friend indicated that he and his wife had conceived of their new relationship as the two faces of Janus. It brought several things to mind: First was that…Read more