Great Throughts Treasury

"It seems to me that religion is part of life. To strike down laws because they are partially religiously motivated would be to strike down most laws."

"Proponents of civic displays of the Ten Commandments in the United States sometimes claim that such displays are justified because the Ten Commandments are foundational to American law. The Decalogue text represented in such displays typically omits Exodus 20:1–2, the verses in which God self-identifies as the God who brought Israel out of servitude in Egypt. This omission parallels a similar move that pushes the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution into the margins of American constitutionalism. Suppressing from view the context of the law’s meaning and authority in the movement from servitude to redemption, the civic displays resist one possible sense in which the Ten Commandments are indeed foundational."

"Extraordinarily Called upon by the Blessings Which We Have Received [book title]"

"Richard Feynman once famously quipped that no one understands quantum mechanics, and popular accounts continue to promulgate the view that QM is an intractable mystery (probably because that helps to sell books). QM is certainly unintuitive, but the idea that no one understands it is far from the truth. In fact, QM is no more difficult to understand than relativity. The problem is that the vast majority of popular accounts of QM are simply flat-out wrong. They are based on the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of QM, which has been thoroughly discredited for decades. It turns out that if Copenhagen were true then it would be possible to communicate faster than light, and hence send signals backwards in time. This talk describes an alternative interpretation based on quantum information theory (QIT) which is consistent with current scientific knowledge. It turns out that there is a simple intuition that makes almost all quantum mysteries simply evaporate, and replaces them with an easily understood (albeit strange) insight: measurement and entanglement are the same physical phenomenon, and you don't really exist."