This is a great idea. In my second year as a graduate student, a friend of mine would meet up every morning to do a Feynman Lecture for an hour. We eventually had to stop because it took up a little too much of our time/energy, but here are some thoughts I had:

• Feynman Lectures are best when you already know the core concepts. I would not use the lectures as a tool to learn physics for the first time, but rather to gain insight into how a great physicist thinks of elementary physics principles. For this reason, some of the very elementary chapters (vectors, work/potential energy, etc) are pretty boring, and I would recommend skipping them. One of my favorite lectures, on the other hand, is Chapter 7, the Theory of Gravitation, where he really extends a simple idea into a exquisitely beautiful description of nature. Discussion of these special chapters are truly fantastic and in my opinion, the only time-worthy ones.
  
  
• I enjoy doing Feynman Lectures along with the audio of them. I don't know how to get them conveniently except for torrenting - here is a link I just found. http://torrentz.eu/6db29ff23486160b61fb5fff048333639b3ec4aa. What you realize when following on the audio is that even though each lecture only lasts 1 hour, it takes about ~3 hours to truly understand each lecture, and it involves a lot of pausing and discussing. I wouldn't have liked to be a freshman in those lectures for the first time, I think it would have gone too fast for me.
  
  
• The Feynman Lectures do not offer very much insight into solving physics problems. In fact, there is a related book, Tips on Physics (http://www.amazon.com/Feynmans-Tips-Physics-Reflections-Problem-Solving/dp/0465027970) whose preface discussed how students would sit in lecture, love the content, but fail to be able to solve any problems afterward. I read this book and don't think this book was very good at helping students solve problems either. So for this subreddit, I would suggest not confusing it with how to solve physics problems, for which I think a subreddit does exist.
  
  
• Some of the more conversational/philosophical chapters (the ones that went into Six Easy Pieces) are wonderful but I'm not sure how 'discussion-worthy' they are, because while they explore his views on the world, they don't really demonstrate the 'genius physics intuition' of his other chapters. I'm less interested in these than the others, but that's up to the subreddit, of course.
  
  Good luck, I will for sure participate in the subreddit.

A high-profile prize like the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Sciences is not just about the accomplishments of the recipient; it signals what is valued in economics community. The prize committee considers not only the contributions of the nominees to economics as a field of inquiry, but also whether the economics community would benefit from a signal-boost for the approach that the nominees use, or the particular sub-field or topic the nominees research. If the prize was only awarded for big ideas and grand narratives, that would signal that those are the only kinds of contributions that really matter to economics--or, alternatively, that the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Sciences is really a niche prize dedicated to a small subset of what the economics community cares about.

I agree with you that some of the most influential economists are the ones who presented big ideas and grand narratives. Big ideas and grand narratives give a framing to an otherwise too complex world, so if along comes a well-expounded grand narrative with a core big idea at just the right time, it can take over the world--even if it's demonstrably wrong. (See: Karl Marx, "Das Kapital".)

Speaking of Karl Marx: Despite the massive misery that his works supported in the 20th century, I agree with those who say that he was actually a pretty good sociologist. He masterfully described the misery that permeated the factories of his day, and he presented a framework that attempts to explain its causes. His weakness, both as an economist and as a sociologist, is that HE DIDN'T TEST HIS THEORIES WITH A FREAKING RCT.

Sorry for finger yelling. I guess I am still raw about Karl Marx, having lived under communism.

My point is that causal relationships that appear obvious, aren't. This observation underlies the entirety of social sciences. It is also very difficult to demonstrate causal relationships. While it's possible to do so without intervention, the approach requires one to already have a good model to account for confounders, and of course measurements of all the confounders. RCTs don't. That's why they are still regarded as the gold standard of demonstrating causality.

Entrepreneur Reading List

1. Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
   
2. The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
   
3. The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It
   
4. The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything
   
5. The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win
   
6. Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers
   
7. Ikigai
   
8. Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition
   
9. Bootstrap: Lessons Learned Building a Successful Company from Scratch
   
10. The Marketing Gurus: Lessons from the Best Marketing Books of All Time
    
11. Content Rich: Writing Your Way to Wealth on the Web
    
12. The Web Startup Success Guide
    
13. The Best of Guerrilla Marketing: Guerrilla Marketing Remix
    
14. From Program to Product: Turning Your Code into a Saleable Product
    
15. This Little Program Went to Market: Create, Deploy, Distribute, Market, and Sell Software and More on the Internet at Little or No Cost to You
    
16. The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully
    
17. The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
    
18. Startups Open Sourced: Stories to Inspire and Educate
    
19. In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters
    
20. Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup
    
21. Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business
    
22. Maximum Achievement: Strategies and Skills That Will Unlock Your Hidden Powers to Succeed
    
23. Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
    
24. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant
    
25. Eric Sink on the Business of Software
    
26. Words that Sell: More than 6000 Entries to Help You Promote Your Products, Services, and Ideas
    
27. Anything You Want
    
28. Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers
    
29. The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business
    
30. Tao Te Ching
    
31. Philip & Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
    
32. The Tao of Programming
    
33. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
    
34. The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity
    
    

    Computer Science Grad School Reading List
    

    
    

35. All the Mathematics You Missed: But Need to Know for Graduate School
    
36. Introductory Linear Algebra: An Applied First Course
    
37. Introduction to Probability
    
38. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
    
39. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society
    
40. Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery
    
41. What Is This Thing Called Science?
    
42. The Art of Computer Programming
    
43. The Little Schemer
    
44. The Seasoned Schemer
    
45. Data Structures Using C and C++
    
46. Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs
    
47. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
    
48. Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming
    
49. How to Design Programs: An Introduction to Programming and Computing
    
50. A Science of Operations: Machines, Logic and the Invention of Programming
    
51. Algorithms on Strings, Trees, and Sequences: Computer Science and Computational Biology
    
52. The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation
    
53. The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine
    
54. Computability: An Introduction to Recursive Function Theory
    
55. How To Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method
    
56. Types and Programming Languages
    
57. Computer Algebra and Symbolic Computation: Elementary Algorithms
    
58. Computer Algebra and Symbolic Computation: Mathematical Methods
    
59. Commonsense Reasoning
    
60. Using Language
    
61. Computer Vision
    
62. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
    
63. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
    
    

    Video Game Development Reading List
    

    
    

64. Game Programming Gems - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
    
65. AI Game Programming Wisdom - 1 2 3 4
    
66. Making Games with Python and Pygame
    
67. Invent Your Own Computer Games With Python
    
68. Bit by Bit

> Or that communism creates starvation (joke)

I don't think this is a joke. While causal designs would be difficult to apply, the spatio-temporal correlation is hard to ignore.


>Regarding causality- as you know that’s nearly impossible to prove in the social sciences.

Actually, these days the application of designs and approaches that provide strong support for causal claims have become quite prevalent. Some standard references-



1

2

3

4

good framework reference or a slightly heavier read

and the old classic


In fact, the Nobel prize in economics this year went to some people who have built their careers doing exactly that

It's actually become quite hard to publish in ranking journals in some fields without a convincing (causal) identification strategy.


But we digress.


>We will never be able to do an apples to apples study between heterosexual and homosexual child rearing for some of the reasons you mentioned above. (Diversity of relationship styles, not both biological parents within gay/lesbian couples)

In this case it isn't far fetched at all. The data collection for the survey data used in the study you linked could just as easily have disagregated the parents involved in same sex romantic relationships instead of pooling them. If I understood correctly, the researcher had obtained the data as a secondary source, so they didn't have control over this.

Outcomes for children in the foster care system are well studied, so one could in principal easily replicate the study comparing outcomes between children in the foster care system and those adopted into homes shared by stable same sex couples (you couldn't likely restrict it to married same sex couples, though, because laws permitting same sex civil marriage are too recent to observe outcomes).

>My bottom line-that I don’t see many disagree with if they are being intellectually honest, is a stable monogamous heterosexual family structure is the best model for immediate families. Or would you disagree?

But that's not the question at hand, is it? What we are interested in here is comparing kids bouncing around the state care system to those adopted into homes with two same-sex parents in a stable relationship.

That is exactly my point. The comparison you propose is uninformative relative to the question of permitting same sex couples to "foster to adopt". Because the counterfactual for those children is not likely to be a "stable monogamous heterosexual family". It is bouncing around the foster care system.

A Tour of the Calculus by David Berlinski is a very poetic introduction to basic calculus, both in its intuitive concepts and its rigorous development through the intermediate and mean value theorems. The whole book paints a very artistic picture of the whole subject, interlacing mathematical descriptions with historical discussions of the founders themselves and anecdotes of the author's own experience teaching the subject. From the introduction:

>Whatever physicists may say, both space and time, it would seem, go on and on; the imaginary eye pushed to the very edge of space and time finds nothing to stop it from pushing further, every conceivable limit a seductive invitation to examine the back side of the beyond. We are finite creatures, bound to this place and this time, and helpless before an endless expanse. It is within the calculus that for the first time the infinite is charmed into compliance, its luxuriance subordinated to the harsh concept of a limit. The here and now of ordinary life, these are coordinated by means of a mathematical function, one of the noble but inscrutable creations of the imagination, the silken thread that binds together the vagrant world's far-flung concepts. Fabulous formulas bring anarchic speed panting to heel and make of its forward rush a function of time; the wayward area underneath a curve is in the end subordinated to the rule of number. Speed and area, the calculus reveals, are related, the revelation acting like lightning flashing between two distant mountain peaks, the tremendous flash of light showing in the moment before it subsides that those peaks are strangely symmetrical, each existing to sustain the other...
>
>The dryness of this description should not obscure the drama that it reveals. Of all the miracles available for inspection, none is more striking than the fact that the real world may be understood in terms of the real numbers, time and space and flesh and blood and dense primitive throbbings sustained somehow and brought to life by a network of secret mathematical nerves, the juxtaposition of the two, throbbings on the one hand, those numbers on the other, unsuspected and utterly surprising, almost as if some somber mechanical puppet proved capable of articulated animation by means of a distant sneeze or sigh.

It really is a fantastic piece of writing, mathematical or otherwise.

On the textbook side of things, Strogatz' Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos is an excellent read. It is a textbook, with exercises and technical descriptions, but it reads surprisingly casually. I just read it front to back like a regular book and enjoyed the whole thing immensely.

(Former) theoretical physicist here, with a few years of college teaching experience.

A lot of the recommendations provided so far by other people here emphasise a mathematical background, which is definitely important and necessary if you're going to pursue physics in the long term. However, when starting, it's easy to get sidetracked by the math and lose sight of your stated goal, thereby getting discouraged.

Therefore, my best advice is to start with a solid conceptual book and build up from there, depending on your interests and knowledge. As for the math, learn as you go until you feel that you want to dive deep into a particular subject in physics, at which point you'll know what math you'll need to learn in depth.

An excellent conceptual start is Hewitt's Conceptual Physics.

Other good starting point books are Feynman's Six Easy Pieces and Six Not-So-Easy Pieces.

Hewitt's book is a more traditional textbook-style text while Feynman's books are more free-style.

From there, the Feynman Lectures in Physics are challenging but extremely rewarding reading.

Once you've gone through those, you'll be in great shape to decide on your own what you want to read/learn next.

Also, as already suggested, online resources such as MIT's Open Course are highly recommended.

Best of luck!

Your description is good, but it starts to look a lot more like a scientific culture at that point.

There's really no clear overarching method that links a theoretical physicist, an epidemiologist, a research chemist, a neurologist, and a geologist.

It's more like you say - a culture dedicated to the notion that you gain a clearer, more reliable and useful description of things through open assent tied to reproducible evidence, and the careful removal of intentions from the process of description.

If OP's interested in a thought-provoking, fairly troll-worthy, look at the various... meta-techniques (?) used in science - say, practical abstractions like equations and scale models, what's common between them and why they're so powerful, etc., then Bruno Latour's Science in Action is a different, wacky, but not pretentious and dense, read.

Maybe instead of just debunking religion, you should invest in getting to know the alternatives. Not just skepticism and rationality instead of superstition, but also humanism, for example, as a set of ethical values, and curiosity and enthusiasm for science as uplifting and fascinating things in your life that make life worth living.

Maybe The Magic of Reality is a place to start. Ask someone to give it to you for Christmas or make it a special gift to yourself.

(Get it at your local bookstore, if possible, instead of supporting Amazon.)

"Then you wouldn't understand" and "In Indian culture" where you related it back to your own ethnicity. That's literally all I had to read to get the impression. And I'm not saying that that it's east Asians, but these challenges shouldn't be isolated to certain ethnicities. Anyone who researches into the degrees, MD/DO would have similar concerns and that's perfectly fine. But it's also important to understand the motivation and reasoning that led to the "condescending" view of Osteopathy.

I highly recommend The DOs: Osteopathic Medicine in America , not just to you, but anyone that is curious about the degree.

Granted my experience is from my father, who is a practicing MD, but even in the 90's when he was completing his residency, DOs were still seen as similar and equivalent at least in the medical field. Of course, the patient's perspective was probably condescending, but in the medical field as long as you produced similar results and work with scientific backing, all was good.

I have a few books I read at that age that were great. Most of them are quite difficult, and I certainly couldn't read them all to the end but they are mostly written for a non-professional. I'll talk a little more on this for each in turn. I also read these before my university interview, and they were a great help to be able to talk about the subject outside the scope of my education thus far and show my enthusiasm for Maths.

Fearless Symmetry - Ash and Gross. This is generally about Galois theory and Algebraic Number Theory, but it works up from the ground expecting near nothing from the reader. It explains groups, fields, equations and varieties, quadratic reciprocity, Galois theory and more.

Euler's Gem - Richeson This covers some basic topology and geometry. The titular "Gem" is V-E+F = 2 for the platonic solids, but goes on to explain the Euler characteristic and some other interesting topological ideas.

Elliptic Tales - Ash and Gross. This is about eliptic curves, and Algebraic number theory. It also expects a similar level of knowlege, so builds up everything it needs to explain the content, which does get to a very high level. It covers topics like projective geometry, algebraic curves, and gets on to explaining the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture.

Abel's proof - Presic. Another about Galois theory, but more focusing on the life and work of Abel, a contemporary of Galois.

Gamma - Havil. About a lesser known constant, the limit of n to infinity of the harmonic series up to n minus the logarithm of n. Crops up in a lot of places.

The Irrationals - Havil. This takes a conversational style in an overview of the irrational numbers both abstractly and in a historical context.

An Imaginary Tale: The Story of i - Nahin. Another conversational styled book but this time about the square root of -1. It explains quite well their construction, and how they are as "real" as the real numbers.

Some of these are difficult, and when I was reading them at 17 I don't think I finished any of them. But I did learn a lot, and it definitely influenced my choice of courses during my degree. (Just today, I was in a two lectures on Algebraic Number Theory and one on Algebraic Curves, and last term I did a lecture course on Galois Theory, and another on Topology and Groups!)

If you want a strong mathematical approach, check out Peter Smith's Teach Yourself Logic Guide. If you don't want to take as heavy of an approach, you can use the suggestions as a roadmap and pick-and-choose from the suggestions. Even the introductory logic book suggestions in that guide might be too math heavy, but you might at least read their reviews on Amazon. A lot of reviewers tend to link to books on either side: easier and harder approaches.

For what it's worth, while I was in University we used Computability and Logic in the second logic course, which is after the introductory course teaching basic propositional and predicate logic. It's not a book for learning logic, but it's an awesome book for tying together a lot of what you initially learn with computability, model and proof theory. In another course we used An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic. I really enjoyed both of these books, and they're relatively cheap, but as I said they are not introductory logic books.

I'll be happy to reply again if you have any further questions.

At 15 years old he should be able to handle any sort of casual history book. A text book probably isn't up his alley, but when I was 15 I bought a Philosophy for Dummies book to help me understand some topics a teacher didn't clarify well enough for me. I was hooked on those For Dummies books for awhile. They're vaguely humorous and they explain topics in an easy to digest, non-tiring way.


Aside from that, A Little History of the World by E.H. Gombrich, and A Brief History of Time and the Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking were both wonderfully fun books that might appeal to his history and science interest without being belittling.

> They main competing idea for the theory of multiple universes is the Judea/Christian God.

First, according to who? There are a number of other scientific theories - multiple universes are not even one of the most scientifically accepted ones, since as yet it is purely a prediction of some theories, and there's limited evidence for them - although not zero evidence, since the observed behavior of quantum mechanical systems can certainly be interpreted as implying multiple universes.

Second, "the Judea/Christian God" is not a scientific theory, not even remotely. Schroeder's books don't provide such a theory, and nor does anyone else. The reason for that is simply that no-one has figured out how to turn claims about gods into a scientific hypothesis - something that follows from theories that fit our observations of the world.

> Try reading Gerald Schroeder's (a physicist) Genesis and the Big Bang

It sounds to me that you've read this book without much background in science or the scientific method, which makes it difficult for you to put it in context. I suggest reading a bit about the scientific method, the philosophy of science, and epistemology (the study of how we arrive at knowledge). Here's an online intro to philosophy of science - it's a bit dense, but it may give you some idea about the depth of this subject, and the dangers of relying purely on one's intuition, which you reveal when you talk about "proof" the way you have been.

On that note, you might want to investigate philosophy at a more basic level, for example via Bertrand Russell's Problems of Philosophy. If you're willing to spend about $10, Rudolf Carnap's Introduction to Philosophy of Science is quite informal and accessible, and very good.

> Again, I'm not saying that that is any better an explanation than parallel universes just don't try to pretend that there is.

The reason that parallel universes are a better explanation than the non-science of the Judeo-Christian God is simply that they are possible predictions of successful scientific theories. You keep trying to give them the same status, but I've pointed out repeatedly why they're not. You either need to address those points, or concede that you're wrong on this.

One severe weakness of the Judeo-Christian God as a hypothesis is that it fails to be "hard to vary". David Deutsch gave an excellent TED talk on this, about explaining explanation.

The issue in this case is that as an hypothesis, the Judeo/Christian God has many details that seem arbitrary and could be arbitrarily varied - there's not much connection between the hypothesis and the subject it's supposed to explain. For this reason alone, it is unscientific.

One way to understand this is to ask the question I've alluded to a few times, which is why we're talking about one specific god with a certain set of characteristics, as opposed to the infinite alternatives. This is an important point you have yet to address.

> the whole point of religion is to attempt to answer questions like "why are we here," or what's the meaning of life.

There's a subtle difference between religious myths or stories, and fairy tales. The difference largely has to do with how seriously the tellers of these stories are. That's about it.

For example, there are Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories that include ones with titles like "How the Leopard Got its Spots" Now, when adults tell this story to children, and the kids ask whether this is a real story, no sane adult would say yes. Nearly all of them would say that it's a story that teaches a moral lesson, or attempts to answer a question in a poetic or metaphorical way. The talking animals also sort of give it away.

If you take the story of Adam and Eve, this is a creation myth that is based on Babylonian folk tales - their "Just So Stories" if you will. Even has a talking animal in it. These stories, like with Kipling's, attempt to answer questions in a poetic way about where people came from and why things aren't perfect, and why we are mortal and so on. The only real difference between this story and other myths is that you were likely raised to believe these as being serious stories, that are representative of reality in some way.

I know a lot of religious people get annoyed when their stories are compared to fairy tales. That's understandable, given the fact that these people are raised to treat them with reverence, respect and sincerity. But, I'll point out that there are many people who don't see them any differently compared to fairy tales, because these people aren't looking at them through rose-coloured glasses.

If you've not ever read it, definitely check out the book The Magic of Reality. In it, Richard Dawkins begins each chapter with a fairy tale or myth from a different religion that attempts to answer a question, and then he goes into the science we currently understand to tell the actual answer to the question, as best we currently understand. This isn't to dismiss the stories - far from it. We should celebrate these stories because they remind us how curious we are about our universe and how understanding reality has always been important to us, and that it's only been in the last few hundred years that we've actually developed the tools and the processes to systematically go about answering these questions. Here's the Amazon page for the book.

Some of it just recognition - if you see something in a book that reminds you of something you read about in another book, or something you know about the world, or history, or religion, then your mind may make the leap to say "Oh, this is a symbolic reference to trench warfare in France during WWI" or whatever. So the more "stuff" you know about, the more equipped you are to recognize references. So studying history, religion, economics, world news, various natural sciences, etc., etc. will help you with this And the more you know about the author you're reading, the time he/she lived and wrote in, etc., the more you can pick up on.

Note though that a lot of this symblic stuff is indirect / abstract... they are vague allusions using analogy or metaphor, and not necessarily explicit. So the more you develop your capacity for abstract thinking, thinking in metaphors, etc., the better. To that end, you might consider reading Metaphors We Live By, Surfaces and Essences, and similar books.

Also, a lot of "symbolism" is rooted in the thinking of Freud and Jung, even to this day. A lot of Freud's stuff has been discredited now, but from a "cultural literacy" standpoint, it wouldn't hurt to read his book on dream interpretation, as well as some of Jung's stuff. The stuff about archetypes and the "collective unconscious" would be good.

Also, a lot of symbolism may be rooted in, or linked by metaphor, to existing mythology. Some ideas from myth are tropes that appear again and again. With that in mind, I'd suggest reading The Hero With A Thousand Faces and The Hero's Journey by comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell. If you're really interested, any and all of his other books would probably be useful as well.

One last final note: It's entirely possible that all of most of this "symbolism in literature" stuff is total bullshit. What I mean is, you (or I, or whoever) can "find" all sorts of symbolic links in a work, and find arguments to support that link. But unless the author is still alive, and willing to confirm or deny his intent, you never really know if the "link" you've found is really "a thing" put there by the author, or just your own overactive imagination running wild.

I can post a few links from some books about numbers. I haven't read a few of them, but the history of some numbers like phi, pi, zero... all of them are fascinating.

• http://www.amazon.com/Joy-Pi-David-Blatner/dp/0802775624
  
  
• http://www.amazon.com/Golden-Ratio-Worlds-Astonishing-Number/dp/0767908163/ref=pd_sim_b_4
  
  
• http://www.amazon.com/Story-Number-Princeton-Science-Library/dp/0691141347/ref=pd_sim_b_2
  
  
• http://www.amazon.com/Imaginary-Tale-Story-square-minus/dp/0691127980/ref=pd_sim_b_1
  
  
• http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Biography-Dangerous-Charles-Seife/dp/0140296476/ref=pd_sim_b_3
  
  
• http://www.amazon.com/History-Pi-Petr-Beckmann/dp/0312381859/ref=pd_sim_b_5
  
  Those six are all the history of the five most important constants in mathematics. If you're looking for the history of some of the most brilliant minds in mathematics, I'm afraid I haven't the resources or expertise to help you out.

My advice is to keep on keeping on. The kids are young and impressionable, but will take long term cues from the people raising them. If you and your wife do not feed them bullshit but continue to use reality to explain things they'll come through okay. My oldest (now 10) bought all that stuff when he was under five. Now he will reject grandma's explanation of "god bowling" when talking about thunder and give an approximate scientific answer about lighting, rapid heating and cooling of air, and the sound waves generated thereby. First time he did that (when he was eight) I was ecstatic and my wife and MIL could only give me disapproving looks since he was right. Now they don't even bother with the stories anymore.

Edit: I'd recommend The Magic of Reality by Dr Dawkins. It's a book aimed at children that discusses myths from many cultures and explains them in simple to understand terms. I was lucky enough to get a copy signed by Dr Dawkins when he was speaking at Northwestern University a few years ago and I use it as a reference now and then to help explain things to my kids.

The expansion of the term hemiola to mean things other than 3:2 groupings is a natural process of the acquisition of language. We learn a rule or a meaning and generalize. Check out Surfaces and Essences for this process of analogizing—it is excellent even if it’s a bit example heavy.

I got the idea of a hemiola being a note that is held over the end of one bar into another, but that’s because I heard the term from someone who either didn’t understand or didn’t properly explain it. Judging from your experience and the comments of some others, similarly vague and over-generalized definitions seem to be pretty widespread, which as a linguist, makes me want to encourage the redefinition of hemiola to be broader and more useful.

It is worth noting that a brilliant explanation for this is provided for us by a participant: Werner Heisenberg. Not only was he a protagonist in Breaking Bad but he was also one the most intelligent men to have ever lived, and it shows in this fine book by him, which you can download for free. It is interesting to see how he engages with the philosophical side of things: how can we know that which we claim to know.

Confrontational atheism: Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier

>"Know, then, my friends, that everything that is recited and practiced in the world for the cult and adoration of gods is nothing but errors, abuses, illusions, and impostures. All the laws and orders that are issued in the name and authority of God or the gods are really only human inventions…."

>"And what I say here in general about the vanity and falsity of the religions of the world, I don’t say only about the foreign and pagan religions, which you already regard as false, but I say it as well about your Christian religion because, as a matter of fact, it is no less vain or less false than any other.



Softer (much less confrontational) atheism: 50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God

>This unique approach to skepticism presents fifty commonly heard reasons people often give for believing in a God and then raises legitimate questions regarding these reasons, showing in each case that there is much room for doubt. Whether you're a believer, a complete skeptic, or somewhere in between, you'll find this review of traditional and more recent arguments for the existence of God refreshing, approachable, and enlightening.



Favorites non-fiction (or at least mostly non-fiction as time will tell) and not directly related to atheism: Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension and The Illustrated A Brief History of Time and the Universe in a Nutshell



Favorites fiction (also not directly atheist related): Treasure Island, and Hogfather: A Novel of Discworld



Atheism book I've tried to read and found to be over my head that's supposed to be the end-all-be-all: The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God

***

Currently reading and while enjoyable it's a bit tough to get, I've found myself re-reading pages regularly: QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

The Baroque Cycle is brilliant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baroque_Cycle (as is the related Cryptonomicon).

They are Alt History in a way, but they are also Science fiction (that is the genre the author himself uses).

I was quite lucky in that i read a history of science just before reading this series, so i had knowledge of some of the historical characters used fresh in my mind. (this was the science history book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Science-History-1543-John-Gribbin/dp/0140297413 , a great read in its own right).

I'm 2 years into a part time physics degree, I'm in my 40s, dropped out of schooling earlier in life.

As I'm doing this for fun whilst I also have a full time job, I thought I would list what I'm did to supplement my study preparation.

I started working through these videos - Essence of Calculus as a start over the summer study whilst I had some down time. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDMsr9K-rj53DwVRMYO3t5Yr

Ive bought the following books in preparation for my journey and to start working through some of these during the summer prior to start

Elements of Style - A nice small cheap reference to improve my writing skills
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/020530902X/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

The Humongous Book of Trigonometry Problems https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1615641823/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o08_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Calculus: An Intuitive and Physical Approach
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0486404536/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o09_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Trigonometry Essentials Practice Workbook
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1477497781/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Systems of Equations: Substitution, Simultaneous, Cramer's Rule
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1941691048/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Feynman's Tips on Physics
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0465027970/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Exercises for the Feynman Lectures on Physics
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0465060714/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o08_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Calculus for the Practical Man
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1406756725/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o09_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

The Feynman Lectures on Physics (all volumes)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0465024939/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o09_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I found PatrickJMT helpful, more so than Khan academy, not saying is better, just that you have to find the person and resource that best suits the way your brain works.

Now I'm deep in calculus and quantum mechanics, I would say the important things are:

Algebra - practice practice practice, get good, make it smooth.

Trig - again, practice practice practice.

Try not to learn by rote, try understand the why, play with things, draw triangles and get to know the unit circle well.

Good luck, it's going to cause frustrating moments, times of doubt, long nights and early mornings, confusion, sweat and tears, but power through, keep on trucking, and you will start to see that calculus and trig are some of the most beautiful things in the world.

An excellent tribute to a great scholar and public academic. Thanks for posting!

I will point out that the author seems surprised that Gardner's only degree is in philosophy. This isn't so surprising when you realize that Rudolf Carnap was at Chicago in the 30s, and Gardner was one of his students. Carnap was one of the most eminent logicians of the last century, and his work focused almost exclusively on mathematical logic and the analysis of science. Gardner actually edited a revised version of one of Carnap's last books.

Priest's introduction to non-classical logic. Goes through all the next steps (modal, intuitionist, fuzzy logics etc.). The formating may take a while to get used to. But a good book.

Edit: It is perfect for finding the logics you find interesting and then you can go more in depth with other books. Also, I think, it is a perfect reference book for logics that I do not know too well (but I do not know if everyone could do this due to have the chapters are arranged and so forth).

Edit2: I would also recommend the following book for nonmonotonic logic, if that floats your boat

Some of this is based on a post I made a few days ago. By karma I don't mean a cosmic ledger of good vs. bad deeds, I mean the intrinsic metaphysical rules that govern causality. Also, the mathematical structure of causality has been studied extensively, e.g. see this and this (admittedly expensive and dense book).

I'm just putting together what I know about mathematics, computer science, biology, and metaphysical philosophy (heavily weighted towards Buddhist); in particular, I am taking a given that we are all eternal observers that have chosen to participate in one "reality" that has causality built into it. With just this assumption alone it is possible to infer a bunch of other propositions about the way things "work".

> Yeah but that tree falls in the forest if nobody's around.

Depends what you mean by "nobody". The animals in the forest are observers, so their participation in the causal "matrix" (if you will) means that the event gets "recorded". But if there are truly no observers, there is no Akashic record, so it never "happened".

Re: "aliens". They are also observers. However, they may understand the rules better than human observers do, enabling them to manipulate reality better than we do. E.g., modern engineers better understand the laws of physics than people did a hundred years ago, enabling them to create instruments that manipulate physical systems with more control than what existed a hundred years ago. Same idea. We are all still bound to the basic laws of causation.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by saying that you want to focus on astronomy; I'm not aware of much in the way of the philosophy of astronomy. There's been some movement toward establishing the philosophy of cosmology as a distinct subfield, but it's still a relatively new thing, and there's not a lot out there. Your best bet, probably, is to focus more on the philosophy of space and time more broadly, so that's the kind of stuff I'm going to suggest. I'm not sure what your starting level is, but here are some things that might be worth your time:

• Hans Reichenbach's The Philosophy of Space and Time and The Direction of Time
  
  
• Tim Maudlin's The Metaphysics Within Physics and Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity
  
  
• Gordon McCabe's "The Structure and Interpretation of Cosmology"
  
  
• Josh Knobe's "The Philosophical Implications of Inflationary Cosmology"
  
  
• David Albert's Time and Chance and After Physics
  
  
• Huw Price's Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point
  
  
• Larry Sklar's Space, Time, and Spacetime
  
  There's a lot more out there, but a close reading of even all this is probably beyond the scope of single semester. If you can say a little bit more about what exactly you're interested in, I might be able to narrow things down a little bit.

> I guess I thought that modus ponens could be derived from the three laws I mentioned.

How is modus ponens derived from identity, LNC or LEM?

None of those even allow you to derive anything, let alone modus ponens. They're just statements. Without some background rules governing derivability they're useless.

I can't state this enough: this whole picture of their being some set of laws like the ones you say is constantly baffling to me. It's completely antithetical to the modern (post-Boole) way of doing logic. It is almost completely backwards! According to proper logic, LEM, LNC and identity are logical truths which hold because they're always derivable. That is, their fundamentality is completely derivative of the rules of derivability.

There is a certain sense in which they're special, but it has nothing to do with being foundational. Rather it's because they are often taken to have some sort of metaphysical import: for example, Dummettians often claim that LEM is a determinacy principle; it only holds of domains which are determinate.

> How many independently axiomatic logical foundations are there?

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this. Most philosophers and logicians wouldn't phrase things this way and don't think of logic in terms of "axiomatic logical foundations". They might think of which particular logical system they're working in, so that may be what you have in mind. For example, the most popular (historically) logics to work in/with are classical logic and intuitionistic logic.

As to how many logics are there are: I don't know. It's well-known (from some lesser known work of Gödel's) that there are at least continuum many logics. I don't know if there's any reason for thinking there's a larger cardinality of logics than that; I suspect not.

Most of those logics have never been used and will never be. There are probably a handful - maybe a couple dozen - logics which have been continuously used and developed over the past century. The standard text to see most of these is Priest's An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic.

> And how do you know which ones to exclude?

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this. You might be asking how do we know which logic(s) is the "right one". That's a really hard question. People write entire books and dissertations on that question. I should know - I'm one of them!

In general people start with some phenomena that you're interested in or some problem, and try to figure out which logic best accommodates that. Implicitly there's an understanding that the starting point is classical logic, and we work our way down (in terms of logical strength) from there to some non-classical logic(s) or another.

To give you a concrete case: take intuitionistic logic. LEJ Brouwer, the founder of modern topology, was concerned with the use of infinity in mathematics as it developed around the turn of the century under Cantor, Hilbert and others. To combat this, he developed a new school of mathematics: a form of constructive mathematics called intuitionism. Intuitionism is a complicated subject worth its own thread. But one of the things they deny is the Law of Excluded Middle, because it's tied up with infinity, determinacy and impredicativity. Brouwer's student Heyting developed intuitionistic logic based on these ideals, and since then it's been used for a variety of philosophical reasons, most notably in the debate over semantic realism/anti-realism.

I've linked a half dozen SEP articles above which include days worth of info that you might find interesting.

You may wish to take a look at page 36 of Amazon's preview of this book starting at "Caltech from the bottom". There is a good chance you'll find it relatable and maybe even comforting - if so, the book is a worthy read. If not, maybe someone else will find it so :)

Seems easy enough. The (0,1) gods each demand that you worship a specific 0 < x < 1 every day, and no other 0 < y < 1. They are all infallible, and all say that if you so worship you will be eternally rewarded. Hey presto, one uncountable set of contradictory gods. Easily generalisable to any cardinality too, just have each god have a 'favourite' element of a set with that cardinality.

Naturally I'd worship the ɣ-god, I was very much convinced by The Gospel of Havil.

ok i see you like philosophy so i would give you one of my favorite books , witch covers lots of good philosophical ideas and much more http://www.amazon.co.uk/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0552997048/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1416775987&sr=1-1

seriously though this is a must read for someone like you :)

I discuss that a bi more in the new book, and David Albert looks at it carefully in his book:

http://www.amazon.com/Time-Chance-David-Z-Albert/dp/0674011325/

The main point is that we can only successfully correlate conditions in the current universe (such as "I remember liking that show") to what conditions actually were ("I was watching that show, liking it") because entropy used to be lower. Otherwise, the most likely explanation would be "the impression that I liked the show just randomly fluctuated into existence."

There's a book geared toward your question.

I really enjoyed it. Like a history channel special on it (but less ancient aliens). And it looks like it's under a dollar.

What scares me about this story (dare I say 'parable'), is the implicit understanding that it is socially and morally repugnant to seek out knowledge or to ponder the mysteries of the universe. Instead of encouraging spiritual growth and community involvement, the story celebrates shutting one's mind and one's heart to the world. The moral of the story is devoid of compassion towards others and the cheeky arrogance of this little blonde-haired brat comes across as horrifying rather than humorous.

But what is funny, and possibly ironic (or maybe just hypocritical?), is that the girl's display of religiosity is actually a modern example of idolatry in action. Here the reader is shamed (by a little girl, no less) into gathering around a shiny idol of Ignorance in order to praise the power of Not Knowing Shit. Personally, it's so sad to me that children are being raised to accept ignorance as God's Law instead of tackling it head on and making sense of the unknown.

On a related note, [Ignorance: How it Drives Science by Stuart Firestein] (http://www.amazon.com/Ignorance-Drives-Science-Stuart-Firestein/dp/0199828075) is an interesting read. The book describes how no respectable scientist revels in the darkness of ignorance. Instead, rational minds use the absence of understanding as a solid starting point for lifetimes of inquiry and research into everything and anything you could wonder about, even including poo.

Here's a book you might enjoy. Well worth twelve bucks. Plenty of great material here for a paper.

http://www.amazon.com/Story-Number-Princeton-Science-Library/dp/0691141347

I've been told that Richard Dawkin's "The Magic of Reality" is a good book for children, but I haven't read it myself so I cant really say much more than that. The Amazon reviews of it certainly seem positive!

e: The Story of a Number was pretty good.

I also enjoyed Ian Stewart's Letters to a Young Mathematician.

I found Feynman's books easy to read and he has a knack of explaining complex ideas in a reasonably simple way - I'd start with Six Easy Pieces and then move on to some of his others depending on your field of interest.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Six-Easy-Pieces-Fundamentals-Explained/dp/0140276661

Here is an article about macro-level quantum phenomena in biology.

How much do you know about quantum mechanics? If very little, and if you have the mathematical and basic physical background, it's worth reading (or brushing up on) an introductory textbook, as you'll learn about (or recall) the intrinsic randomness (and observer-dependence) of the physical world at the atomic level.

Also, your OP (which was very nice, BTW) mentions a lot about causation, and it might be worth reading scientific treatments of causation. The seminal work is Judea Pearl's Causality, but it is mathematically very dense. So is the Robins school of causal inference in epidemiology (see also other stochastic process treatments of causation, in the causal inference subdiscipline of epidemiology and statistics).

Hope this helps!

Hofstadter had this to say on the importance of Bongard problems in What are A and I?:

>... It is clear that in the solution of Bongard problems, perception is pervaded by intelligence, and intelligence by perception; they intermingle in such a profound way that one could not hope to tease them apart. In fact, this phenomenon had already been recognized by some psychologists, and even celebrated in a rather catchy little slogan: "Cognition equals perception"...
>
>...Sadly, Bongard's insights did not have much effect on either the AI world or the PR [pattern recognition] world, even though in some sense his puzzles provide a bridge between the two worlds, and suggest a deep interconnection. However, they certainly had a far-reaching effect on me, in that they pointed out that perception is far more than the recognition of members of already-established categories--it involves the spontaneous manufacture of new categories at arbitrary levels of abstraction. As I said earlier, this idea suggested in my mind a profound relationship between perception and analogy-making--indeed, it suggested that analogy-making is simply an abstract form of perception, and that the modeling of analogy-making on a computer ought to be based on models of perception...

It is unfortunate that Hofstader's insight on Bongard's insights still hasn't had much effect on the AGI world (AFAIK, no mention on the opencog group) or the ML [machine learning] world!

BTW, Hofstadter has expanded the latter portion of the 2nd paragraph above into a 500 page book published just last month: Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking. Has anyone here read it?

Causality by Judea Pearl. I've been interested in tackling this book for a while. Being able to use observational probabilities to bolster causal models seems interesting and useful.

To understand the general history of math, you won't need to understand what you most likely consider to be math. You will, however, need to understand how to put yourself in the shoes of those who came before and see the problems as they saw them, which is a rather different kind of thinking.

But anyway, the history of math is long and complicated. It would take years to understand everything and much of it was work done on paths that are now basically dead ends. Nevertheless, here are some other resources:

• In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World - In general, Ian Stewart is very good for introductory explanations to math.
  
  
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Perhaps the only explanation of Gödel's work that I would consider "good." It's notoriously lengthy and can be difficult to read, but it doesn't assume much about the reader.
  
  
• Thinking about Mathematics: The Philosophy of Mathematics
  
  
• Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings
  
  
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  
  
• Science: A History - Math did not evolve in an intellectual bubble and much of the mathematics we use today evolved out of a sort of feedback loop between scientists and mathematicians.
  
  Of course, let's not forget what is possibly the most complete single resource available today:
  
  
• Wikipedia
  
  This is a huge area and I applaud you for being interested in it. If you decide to look into it seriously, you WILL find yourself confused, bored, and annoyed at times. Yet it's a beautiful history and one that will illuminate much of the apparently meaningless gibberish in calculus, as well as many other areas.
  

A bit of a follow up: your observation that only the wealthy could afford the luxury of science is pretty much dead on, up until the late 19th century. Nearly all the famous scientists you encounter to that point were either aristocrats doing their own thing, or employed by wealthy aristocrats and merchants doing science to drive innovation and technology for their patrons.

I'd highly recommend John Gribbin's Science: A History http://www.amazon.com/Science-A-History-John-Gribbin/dp/0140297413#

Hofstadter has expanded that idea into a 500+ pg book, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel & Fire of Thinking.

This view also seems to be gaining a foothold in the computer vision community. I recall a recent talk by a UC Berkeley professor specializing in CV, Alyosha Efros, IIRC, the main theme of which was: Ask not "what is this?", ask "what is this like?"

BTW, Bongard problems seem like a far better test for intelligence than the vague Turing test.

I enjoyed "Is God a Mathematician?" by Mario Livio. It deals with the philosophical question of whether math is invented in order to explain the universe, or if math is the basis of the universe and humans are the ones discovering it. I found it to be very accessible, and many of the stories of famous mathematicians were interesting.

http://www.amazon.com/God-Mathematician-Mario-Livio/dp/0743294068/

I took a Philosophy of Physics course as an undergraduate and we focused on thermodynamics and the arrow of time. I'd recommend the two books we read:

Physics and Chance, by Sklar:
It looks at the philosophical issues associated with the statistical mechanics approach to thermodynamics.
http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Chance-Philosophical-Foundations-Statistical/dp/0521558816

Time and Chance, by Albert:
A little more accessible than Sklar.
http://www.amazon.com/Time-Chance-David-Z-Albert/dp/0674011325

The M.D. was the first doctorate awarded in the US. That is, it pre-dated the PhD in America by about 100 years.

The D.O. came about when a group started offering chiropractic treatment for illness in lieu of pharmaceuticals, believing that all disease came from musculoskeletal misalignment. The D.O.s started having pretty good outcomes compared to the M.D.s who were randomly dispersing toxic meds they knew little about. Eventually, educational requirements for docs began getting more intense and the D.O.s followed the M.D.s in increasing the rigor of their schooling. They became parallel, redundant degrees. Source: http://www.amazon.com/The-DOs-Osteopathic-Medicine-America/dp/0801878349/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1373072965&sr=8-1&keywords=the+dos

As a side note, I thought you guys in Australia still went by "Doctor So-and-So." Isn't that still using an inflated title?

I've studied from Stewart's Calculus: Early Transcendentals and like it very much. Every page uses colour, it has a lot of pictures for building intuition and tons of examples and exercises. A downside might be the sheer size of it -- I've no doubt covers far more than you need to start a physics degree, and you can't exactly carry it around in your pocket. But it's a handy thing to have on the shelf, for sure.

If you haven't seen any calculus before you might enjoy Berlinski's A Tour of the Calculus, which is a very gentle, conversational introduction with almost no formulae; it can be read in a weekend and should give you a flavour of what calculus is about.

[EDIT: Regarding the exercises in Stewart, it may be worth emphasising that you'll only learn calculus by working a lot of calculus problems. So lots of exercises with solutions are a huge advantage if you're self-studying.]

So do something about it! Start reading books like Six Easy Pieces: Fundamentals of Physics Explained by Richard Feynman, and go from there. There has never been more access to knowledge. Entire MIT, Cornell and Open University courses are online for free, there is the Khan Academy, and so on and so on. If you don't want to be depressed about not understanding particle physics then earn your time playing Skyrim by trying to learn about it!

This is a more casual book but the author is an excellent mathematical writer.

A Tour of the Calculus - David Berlinski

Well, according to one of the most important thinkers alive, the sentence you just wrote is complete horseshit. https://www.amazon.com/Surfaces-Essences-Analogy-Fuel-Thinking/dp/0465018475

This may be a little above the age range you're looking for, but Bill Bryson's short history of nearly everything is a brilliant introduction to some of the coolest aspects of science and technology. Had a profound influence on me as a kid.

I was unable to find a TOC for the book you mention, but the causality book's TOC can be seen here . I am also behind schedule because I didnt have people to discuss with, so have not reached the interventions part of the book. From what I see, causality is about the basics of graphical models, with a focus on causal models. This includes inferring what the graphs are like from the data, dealing with unobserved variables, dealing with sudden actions like fixing a variable etc. All the topics in the book you mention find their place here, but i dont know how the books compare

If you're not afraid of math there are some cheap introductory textbooks on topics that might be accessible:
For abstract algebra: http://www.amazon.com/Book-Abstract-Algebra-Second-Mathematics/dp/0486474178/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1459224709&sr=8-1&keywords=book+of+abstract+algebra+edition+2nd

For Number Theory: http://www.amazon.com/Number-Theory-Dover-Books-Mathematics/dp/0486682528/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1459224741&sr=8-1&keywords=number+theory

These books have complimentary material and are accessible introductions to abstract proof based mathematics. The algebra book has all the material you need to understand why quintic equations can't be solved in general with a "quintic" formula the way quadratic equations are all solved with the quadratic formula.

The number theory book proves many classic results without hard algebra, like which numbers are the sum of two squares, etc, and has some of the identities ramanujan discovered.

For an introduction to analytic number theory, a hybrid pop/historical/textbook is : http://www.amazon.com/Gamma-Exploring-Constant-Princeton-Science/dp/0691141339/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1459225065&sr=8-1&keywords=havil+gamma

This book guides you through some deep territory in number theory and has many proofs accessible to people who remember calculus 2.

I enjoyed E, the Story of a Number:

http://www.amazon.com/Story-Number-Princeton-Science-Library/dp/0691141347

Heck, I just like e.

Osteopathy in Europe != osteopathy in the US. One is exclusively manipulation, the other is a full fledged, fully trained, medical doctor who took an extra class on manipulation (albeit at the cost of less basic science classes and possibly a rotation in manipulation in lieu of one in something else). Most DOs don't use manipulation to any significant degree.

The history behind it is interesting. I refer you to Norman Gevitz's The DOs. In short, the late 1800s/early 1900's had a lot of wonky areas claiming to be medicine. Things like electricity, magnetism, naturopathy, old school allopathy, homeopathy, etc. Many of the better aspects of these fields consolidated under the allopathic banner and with the Flexner report, most of the ones that didn't were regulated out of mainstream existence. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the report was commissioned by the AMA and critiqued by many as an example of regulatory capture.

For some reason osteopathy tended to remain it's own thing, and while many osteopathic schools closed due to Flexner report, enough were found competent to teach medicine and flexible enough to change curriculums as needed, and remained open to have a significant influence in certain areas of the country and the field developed as a kind of offshoot of the allopathic model with their own board exams and residency training. In WW2 there was a shortage of MDs in the army so they allowed DOs in which greatly increased mainstream acceptance. In the 1950s there was talk of integrating the California osteopaths and/or schools into the allopathic organization which culminated in UC Irvine being bought out and the california DOs being able to buy an MD title. This led to more mainstream acceptance though with the large cost of losing one of our best schools and much influence in the west coast. In short it's a complex, long, and hard fought history that got us where we are.

As far as EBM and the litigious culture, I honestly have no idea why most of this stuff is reimbursed. There really isn't much level 1 research on the stuff and the cochrane review for LBP pain and manipulation says its no better than other interventions. A tylenol is a lot cheaper than an office visit... I don't mean that in a disparaging way but just to highlight the lack of quality research.

Haha!

I'm reading this book right now!

http://www.amazon.com/Is-God-Mathematician-Mario-Livio/dp/0743294068

Completely Relevant. The guy goes off in the first chapter to claim Mathematics is God.

A Tour of the Calculus

My Calc 2 professor gave me this book. I wish I had read this before I started learning calc. It helps to lay some groundwork, and made me really appreciate calculus much, much more.

A great book for people who want to know more is e: The Story of a Number by Eli Maor.

I've only attended medical school so far, unfortunately. Everything I know about chiropractors come from my professors, personal experience, and various articles and books.

I think the history of medicine is fascinating, especially since the branches now seen as "alternative" like homeopathy, magnetic therapy, chiropractic, and osteopathy had really good reasons for existing back when MDs thought heavy-metal poisoning was a panacea and rusty hacksaws would suffice for limb amputations (aka the late 19th century).

A good book that tackles the subject in an interesting manner is entitled "Ignorance: How it drives Science" , by Stuart Firestein.

Amazon link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0199828075?pc_redir=1404709311&robot_redir=1

He argues that pure research, without clear application to current practice, is required in future research. He is also largely against the hypothesis-driven model of setting research questions.

I haven't read it myself, but I heard it was very good.

http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Philosophy-Revolution-Science-Perennial/dp/0061209198

I highly recommend the book, Is God a Mathematician? It deals with this question directly. Link

You've got to read Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything

It's not just about one topic.. except for the topic of Bryson being a polymath in all the best ways.

If inconsistent, paraconsistent, and otherwise Brazilian logics aren't already your bag, my usual recommendation is Priest's Introduction to Non-Classical Logic.

I would, of course, love to hear others' suggestions.

From reading your post you are not afraid of books that get into the detail. Given that I would recommend anything by Julian Havil (over other more "popular books" but I can offer many popular book level recommendations that are wonderful). Two that spring to mind are:

• The Irrationals: A Story of the Numbers You Can’t Count On
  
  
• Gamma: Exploring Euler's Constant

It does not, and the set of confounding variables in fitness is legion. The particular study you linked is a pure observational exercise that makes no attempt to deal with selection issues and the idea that one might find causality in the results is fantasy.

Consider checking out some causality literature, either the Ruben-Imbens thread or the Pearl devotees. Join us in believing nothing very few extant studies.

Or just read people like Andrew Gelman and dispense with learning about causality, there are ten dozen other reasons most published research findings are false.

Related.

Two great books combined:
http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Brief-History-Universe-Nutshell/dp/0307291227/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374682560&sr=1-3&keywords=universe+in+a+nutshell

If you haven't heard of the book Ignorance: How It Drives Science, by Stuart Firestein, I recommend checking it out. It's a fairly short read that explores the idea that it's not really knowledge we are/should be looking for, but more questions (I mostly agree with this).

Not really. For the cup to break to subatomic level, you'd need to have enough energy from the fall of the cup to break the cup to that level and you just haven't. This motion is forbidden by the laws of mechanics alone.

Second, I'm talking about microstates. The macrostate is the cup broken in that particular arrangement. The microstates are the different atomic configurations that at the macrolevel look like that exact same broken cup and not another broken cup. We're not even looking at broken something elses.

Look, this was my best attempt to an ELI5 explanation of a question that is not even an ELI5 question. No 5-year old kid will ever ask what a Boltzmann brain is unless he has read about thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. And at that point, it's better to give the full and correct mathematical explanation rather than an approximate one. So, if you're not satisfied with the reply, I advise you to read up on the subject.

I advise "Time and Chance" by David Z. Albert as an excellent semi-technical read on the subject. But you'll appreciate it more if you have a background in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics.

Hawking is a wonderful direction to go

The Illustrated "A Brief History of Time" and "The Universe in a Nutshell" https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307291227/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_d5m3Cb47NHXQC

pantheist basics right there.

Actually, rhetoric of science is a rather burgeoning field. Check out Alan Gross's The Rhetoric of Science and Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.


Also, honorable mentions for Latour's Science in Action and Sontag's Illness as Metaphor,

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Short-History-Of-Nearly-Everything/dp/0552997048 Absolutely brilliant book for Science related knowledge. Brief chapters on a lot of things, ranging from the Big Bang to Evolution etc.

Other things to do is read newspapers, magazine (informative magazine, I read How it Works and New Scientist. I'd like to subscribe to more but can't afford it currently.

Not quite. Cicadas understand primes. And God really stated Maxwells Equations of electromagnetism when he said "Let their be light. So what you're getting at here is: "Is God a Mathmatician"? I believe He is.

edit: formatting.

> Almost all economic data is non-experimental and thus cannot be used to demonstrate causation. We cannot say "x causes recessions".

Without commenting on the rest, I just want to note that it actually is possible to infer causation without experimentation. There's been work on this that came out of economics, out of AI research, etc, but the net effect is that we can sometimes infer causality information purely from observational data.

Example: Consider four variables, A, B, C, and D.

Now, let's say you notice, for instance, that A and B are statistically independent. From this you could reasonably conclude that there's no causal link between A and B, neither A->B, nor B->A, nor some hidden common variable influencing both of them.

However, let's say that the data is such that A and B are both statistically dependent on C (And similarly, A and B are conditionally dependent given C)

From this one could conclude either A has causal influence over C, or some common cause influences both A and C. (I'll just say "causes" to mean "has causal influence over" from now on.)

Similarly, B causes C or some hidden variable causes both B and C.

There, we've now inferred some causality information. Not with absolute certainty, but reasonably. But can we do better? So far what we've found was stuff of the form "X and Y have a causal link, and Y does not cause X"

But can we actually nail down an X causes Y link?

Enter the D.

Suppose D has the following properties: D and C are statistically dependent (and remain so even if you condition on, say, A or B or both.)

Further, D and A are statistically dependent.

Further, suppose that if you condition on C, D and A become statistically independent. (That is, if you know C, knowing A provides no further information on D)

If all of the above are true, that is, if A, B, C, and D all obey the properties listed above, then we may deduce that C causes D.

This is a relatively simple example. Judea Pearl, incidentally, has done lots of work in this area and has a book on it, named, appropriately enough, Causality. (I think some newer printings with corrections for that edition are coming.)

I found this 1958 book by Heisenberg himself a good read (with the added historical perspective): Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science. Copenhagen interpretation only, for obvious reasons.

> The funny thing is, this is probably the exact same way the human brain works to think.

Not necessarily. Many believe it is though analogy, which Douglas Hofstadter (of G.E.B. fame) has been working on for decades. You can read more about his work and ideas on this subject in the book Surfaces and Essences.

There's a good book about it:

​

https://www.amazon.com/Ignorance-Drives-Science-Stuart-Firestein/dp/0199828075

The first chapter of Bill Bryson's Short Hisory of Nearly Everything does a good job of putting the universe in perspective.

I'll only ask you to re-read the artists work, and refer you to ignorance:how it drives science. Since you are so set on one being better than the other, take time to really consider the other position.

P.S. May I also recommend:
e: The Story of a Number,
A History of Pi, and
Zero: The Biography of a Dengerous Idea

Really? Nolt's Logics? Besides the numerous errors, it's telling that the book has not come out in a second edition.

I think Quine's Methods of Logic remains a fantastic text, if it is a bit dated and filled with Quinean quirks. A more recent text, Ted Siders' Logic for Philosophy is also very good, although the exercises are sometimes quite difficult. I would combine Sider's text with a book on metalogic, since he skips over some of that. Kleene's Mathematical Logic is a classic text by a real giant in the history of 20th century logic. Those should keep someone busy for a good year of study. If you want to branch out, Graham Priest's Introduction to Non-classical Logics will get you started in modal, tense, epistemic, paraconsistent and dialethic logics, also by a contemporary giant in the field.

After that, I would go on to set theory, and stop when I had a grasp of forcing.

If you are looking into philosophy of science, I recommend this as well:

http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Philosophy-Science-Rudolf-Carnap/dp/0486283186

I finished Is God a Mathematician - Mario Livio

I'll rate it golden ratio out of 2

This book: Mario Livio - Is God a Mathematician could be what you are looking for. It discusses by way of looking at the history of math whether math is invented or discovered.

It collapses the wave function, not the wave itself. The wave function can be seen as a set of positions and probabilities of being at those positions, observing forces many of these positions to dissappear. The more precisely you measure the fewer positions remain possible.

One of the pieces in Six easy pieces by Richard Feynman covers this very well.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Six-Easy-Pieces-Fundamentals-Explained/dp/0140276661/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1398412419&sr=1-1&keywords=6+easy+pieces

If you want to start with very basics I suggest http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~dang/books/Learning%20Bayesian%20Networks%28Neapolitan,%20Richard%29.pdf

This book is also very fine to read: http://www.amazon.com/Causality-Reasoning-Inference-Judea-Pearl/dp/052189560X

and while I was searching for it I stumbled upon this article:

https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~russell/papers/hbtnn-bn.pdf

I have no experience in your field, but here is another google hit you may find relevant: http://www.bayesialab.com/book

Concerning software, you may want to check this out: http://www.phil.cmu.edu/tetrad/publications.html again I don't have enough experience to actually answer the software question.

*There is no way to determine causation from a single correlation without further assumptions. There is a large body of literature devoted to estimating causal relationships without experimental data. Here are a couple of standard textbooks in this literature.

> 3rd: I wasn’t trying to be right or wrong. I just wanted some perspective on the way I think about the unknown. it seems that I’m more of a believer that what we don’t know could be anything while most people I’ve talked to think that what we don’t know will end up being nothing.

The unknown is precisely that: unknown. The reason I am an atheist and not a believer any longer is because of the assertion by religion that it knows answers it can't justify. Because of revelation, because of scripture, because of any number of excuses that followers give that don't actually translate to anything concrete. I don't know what people you've talked to who assume what we don't know will end up being nothing but they are most assuredly not scientists.

Here's some food for thought from actual scientists:

Imagination is more important than knowledge. -Albert Einstein

We know that what we do know about the universe comprises four percent of everything that drives it. - Neil deGrasse Tyson

Ignorance is what drives science. - Stuart Firestein

It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man. - Richard Feynman

If you want a deeper understanding that stays fairly conceptual (ie., away from math), you could try Stephen Hawkings work: http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Brief-History-Universe-Nutshell/dp/0307291227/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1452022887&sr=8-1&keywords=a+brief+history+of+time+%2F+the+universe+in+a+nutshell

I'm afraid it's not a secret. Someone wrote a book about it.

A Short History of Nearly Everything

An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

This is by Carnap. Rudolf Carnap.

recommend - quite a big-picture interpretation of "history of the world"

Can confirm, had to buy the illustrated edition just to understand.

Werner Heisenberg in this book.

Interesting to note: since thermodynamics is Newtonian, and Newtonian physics is time-reversable, entropy also increases going backwards in time. To get around that, you have to insert prior information into the problem by assuming a low-entropy state in the past.

In that sense, it's not entropy maximization that breaks the symmetry, but the prior information.

Discussed in more detail in this book.

A Short History of Nearly Everything

A Short History Of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.

This. People do not need to skate around discussions of causality because we have discovered ways to mitigate confounding. Specifically, causation can be pragmatically inferred from interrelationships between correlatative statistical networks, d-separation criteria, and counterfactual modeling. Further reading can be found here.

You could buy this book but if you don't want to just read the wikipedia article on Osteopathic Medicine.

> causality

I've finished this book twice now and built several software models off of it; I urge you to do the same. Pay particular attention to the "do" operator and what constitutes the difference between social datasets (people, groups of populations, sampling ,social studies, economics, sociology), and what constitutes non-human biological and chemical ones. To "Do" is quite different between these contexts.

>believe in concepts like logical constructs.

Tell me how Charles Boole completely nailed Qubit spin.


Also, if I'm irrational, it means I don't divide evenly.

This is a difficult topic because the subject matter of logic is contestable. For instance, is logic about the laws of thought or is it about language or is it about reality? If it is about language, then classical logic is highly dubious. In ordinary language, A does not characteristically imply A or B. Nor does A and not A characteristically imply B in ordinary language.

In answer to your question, it depends on what the subject matter of logic is, and what logic is under consideration. If you want to know more, I recommend studying classical logic (propositional and predicate logic) and then reading Graham Priest's An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic. http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Non-Classical-Logic-Introductions-Philosophy/dp/0521670268

I've lost 2 replies due to the stupidness of the reddit app on my phone. Just wanted to say that as a soon to be teacher that I enjoyed your posts here.

This book is right up your alley if you haven't heard of it:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0199828075?pc_redir=1406030988&robot_redir=1

It's from Feynman's Tips on Physics. It's not a very interesting book and it's just a series of side lectures given to struggling students but it does have a very interesting introduction section about struggling in class.

Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking by Douglas Hofstadter


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36OscZs3cCQ

It's possible to bypass the "is it permissible?" question by pointing out that our use of language is thoroughly saturated with analogies and metaphors. So much so that it seems impossible to conceive of a way of thinking and talking that excludes metaphors as tools of the living language. This point has been pretty extensively argued in Doug Hofstatder's Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the fuel and fire of thinking.

Even if we could conceive of a metaphor-free language, that language would not be our own, so it may follow that the question of permissibility is bypassed on the grounds that there is no alternative.

It depends what you're trying to get out of it.

There are literally hundreds of introductory texts for first-order logic. Other posters can cover them. There's so much variety here that I would feel a bit silly recommending one.

For formal tools for philosophy, I would say David Papineau's Philosophical Devices. There's also Ted Sider's Logic for Philosophy but something about his style when it comes to formalism rubs me the wrong way, personally.

For a more mathematical approach to first-order logic, Peter Hinman's Fundamentals of Mathematical Logic springs to mind.

For a semi-mathematical text that is intermediate rather than introductory, Boolos, Burgess, and Jeffrey's Computability and Logic is the gold standard.

Finally, if you want to see some different ways of doing things, check out Graham Priest's An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic.

All of the above and more. This is a large area of philosophy of biology and of biology itself. Huge amounts of literature on the gene concept. You could start with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article and move on to Keywords in Evolutionary Biology.

It is indeed a foolish question in the sense that thinking there is one and only one gene concept that works for everything and all uses is the wrong way to think about concepts (never mind the gene concept). I just started reading Surfaces and Essences and am taken by its argument.

>this is not really a good way to think about experimental design. this book goes into model development regarding controlling variables and randomizing inputs, and developing counterfactuals.

Expand on this. Why not?

Fundamentally to test in experimental conditions is to test a part of the system in isolation. This requires knowledge of what to isolate, what it does to the the overall system and confidence that all external factors have been accounted for.

Similarly, a model only conveys what we are aware of and its level of complexity is limited by what we think is sensible given available computational capability and the requirements for the model.

Looping back to my usual point, this makes such experimentation highly unreliable when applied to the economy as it is an immensely complex system.

>This course I took around 2013 also goes into what influence different graph nodes implicate on one another. So, no, scale wise, there's not a "hard limit". Not one present in this book's examples anyways.

What do you mean by "hard limit"? To what?

Logically that statement does not align. It sounds like: You took course, therefore there is no hard limit, at least according to the book.

This doesnt make sense. I can't respond to that. Expand please.

>Nope, just that "emergent order" has no boundary to tell which is fictitious and what isn't.

We know a-priori that, say, the solar system emerged and wasnt imposed by deliberate action of some conscious entity, specifically not through human action. I get what you mean, we can't prove it empirically. I argue we don't have to.

>Right, wrong, and "end up" are all functions of input by a biased humanoid. Particularly involving "errors of input", data selection, and adapting older models (knowledge) to newer.

Look, if my goal is to train an AI to identify trees, then a tree would be right, a non tree would be wrong. The fact that we call a stick with dangling bits a "tree" has little significance in this context.

>I'm currently planning and executing a FPGA Evolvable Hardware project, where "we don't know what our ignorance looks like" on the circuitry level". Doesn't default to "emergent order"; no more than a "God of the Gaps" defaults to "Must be God".

Within the framework that I have outlined emergent order is an order that occurs naturally without deliberate outside interference by means of human action.

Its been a while since I did anything with FPGAs/ASICs but you essentially run a genetic algorithm of sorts to come up with the most efficient design given initial parameters and restrictions.

Either way you clarified that you don't deny existence of complexity as a whole so lets just leave this point be.

>Quite the opposite. I'm an atheist, so I'm still asserting that any aspects of "order" are imposed. We don't have any "somewhat ordered", "non-ordered", "imposed ordered", "emergent ordered", "99.999% deterministic ordered", "43.2% non-deterministic ordered" (....etc...) Universes to compare against. Thus, no demarcation of repeatability and falsifiability. We're stuck with what we got, and any claims of "order" are likely made by someone with something to prove. Teleology ain't a science.

>The fact that you can't articulate this doesn't reveal insidiousness, rather, it reveals the knowledge you've learned is biased. It's like bad set theory by reusing "error", "loss", "noise", and other "wrong" variables in inappropriate contexts.

This looks to me like an argument of definitions with an ultra-empiricist twist.

Arguing definitions across frameworks is pointless. Definitions dont prove anything in their own right but are merely tools to assist in conveying a message.

Lets take a step back, and before we continue this discussion define "emergent order" the way you see it within your framework, then lets compare to the way I define it to see if we are discussing the same thing to begin with.