104 ideas
| 9108 | From an impossibility anything follows [William of Ockham] |
| 16676 | Why use more things when fewer will do? [William of Ockham] |
| 6806 | Do not multiply entities beyond necessity [William of Ockham] |
| 9107 | A proposition is true if its subject and predicate stand for the same thing [William of Ockham] |
| 16300 | Ockham had an early axiomatic account of truth [William of Ockham, by Halbach] |
| 9106 | The word 'every' only signifies when added to a term such as 'man', referring to all men [William of Ockham] |
| 9113 | Just as unity is not a property of a single thing, so numbers are not properties of many things [William of Ockham] |
| 9110 | The words 'thing' and 'to be' assert the same idea, as a noun and as a verb [William of Ockham] |
| 19482 | Current physics says matter and antimatter should have reduced to light at the big bang [New Sci.] |
| 19483 | CP violation shows a decay imbalance in matter and antimatter, leading to matter's dominance [New Sci.] |
| 16608 | Ockham was an anti-realist about the categories [William of Ockham, by Pasnau] |
| 16654 | Our words and concepts don't always correspond to what is out there [William of Ockham] |
| 18529 | Relations are expressed either as absolute facts, or by a relational concept [William of Ockham] |
| 22132 | Species and genera are individual concepts which naturally signify many individuals [William of Ockham] |
| 9103 | A universal is not a real feature of objects, but only a thought-object in the mind [William of Ockham] |
| 15388 | Universals are single things, and only universal in what they signify [William of Ockham] |
| 16779 | Cut wood doesn't make a new substance, but seems to make separate subjects [William of Ockham] |
| 16757 | Hot water naturally cools down, which is due to the substantial form of the water [William of Ockham] |
| 16599 | Ockham says matter must be extended, so we don't need Quantity [William of Ockham, by Pasnau] |
| 16681 | Matter gets its quantity from condensation and rarefaction, which is just local motion [William of Ockham] |
| 9109 | If essence and existence were two things, one could exist without the other, which is impossible [William of Ockham] |
| 16792 | If parts change, the whole changes [William of Ockham] |
| 9089 | Knowledge is a quality existing subjectively in the soul [William of Ockham] |
| 9091 | Sometimes 'knowledge' just concerns the conclusion, sometimes the whole demonstration [William of Ockham] |
| 9100 | Our intellect only assents to what we believe to be true [William of Ockham] |
| 9090 | Knowledge is certain cognition of something that is true [William of Ockham] |
| 3061 | Anaxarchus said that he was not even sure that he knew nothing [Anaxarchus, by Diog. Laertius] |
| 19737 | A system can infer the structure of the world by making predictions about it [New Sci.] |
| 9101 | Abstractive cognition knows universals abstracted from many singulars [William of Ockham] |
| 9102 | If an animal approached from a distance, we might abstract 'animal' from one instance [William of Ockham] |
| 19736 | Neural networks can extract the car-ness of a car, or the chair-ness of a chair [New Sci.] |
| 9114 | There are no secure foundations to prove the separate existence of mind, in reason or experience [William of Ockham] |
| 16419 | No one has yet devised a rationality test [New Sci.] |
| 16418 | People can be highly intelligent, yet very stupid [New Sci.] |
| 16417 | About a third of variation in human intelligence is environmental [New Sci.] |
| 19484 | Psychologists measure personality along five dimensions [New Sci.] |
| 9104 | A universal is the result of abstraction, which is only a kind of mental picturing [William of Ockham] |
| 9105 | Some concepts for propositions exist only in the mind, and in no language [William of Ockham] |
| 16675 | Every extended material substance is composed of parts distant from one another [William of Ockham] |
| 21167 | Gravity is unusual, in that it always attracts and never repels [New Sci.] |
| 19950 | Entropy is the only time-asymmetric law, so time may be linked to entropy [New Sci.] |
| 21176 | In the Big Bang general relativity fails, because gravity is too powerful [New Sci.] |
| 21147 | Quantum electrodynamics incorporates special relativity and quantum mechanics [New Sci.] |
| 19478 | Light moves at a constant space-time speed, but its direction is in neither space nor time [New Sci.] |
| 21155 | Photons have zero rest mass, so virtual photons have infinite range [New Sci.] |
| 21161 | In the standard model all the fundamental force fields merge at extremely high energies [New Sci.] |
| 21146 | Electrons move fast, so are subject to special relativity [New Sci.] |
| 19474 | Quantum states are measured by external time, of unknown origin [New Sci.] |
| 19473 | The Schrödinger equation describes the evolution of an object's wave function in Hilbert space [New Sci.] |
| 21148 | The strong force is repulsive at short distances, strong at medium, and fades at long [New Sci.] |
| 21152 | The strong force binds quarks tight, and the nucleus more weakly [New Sci.] |
| 21151 | Gluons, the particles carrying the strong force, interact because of their colour charge [New Sci.] |
| 21143 | Quarks in threes can build hadrons with spin ½ or with spin 3/2 [New Sci.] |
| 21150 | Three different colours of quark (as in the proton) can cancel out to give no colour [New Sci.] |
| 21142 | Classifying hadrons revealed two symmetry patterns, produced by three basic elements [New Sci.] |
| 21154 | Three particles enable the weak force: W+ and W- are charged, and Z° is not [New Sci.] |
| 21145 | The four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism, weak and strong) are the effects of particles [New Sci.] |
| 21153 | The weak force explains beta decay, and the change of type by quarks and leptons [New Sci.] |
| 21156 | The weak force particles are heavy, so the force has a short range [New Sci.] |
| 21164 | Why do the charges of the very different proton and electron perfectly match up? [New Sci.] |
| 21170 | The Standard Model cannot explain dark energy, survival of matter, gravity, or force strength [New Sci.] |
| 21158 | Fermions, with spin ½, are antisocial, and cannot share quantum states [New Sci.] |
| 21165 | Spin is akin to rotation, and is easily measured in a magnetic field [New Sci.] |
| 21140 | Spin is a built-in ration of angular momentum [New Sci.] |
| 21149 | Quarks have red, green or blue colour charge (akin to electric charge) [New Sci.] |
| 21157 | Particles are spread out, with wave-like properties, and higher energy shortens the wavelength [New Sci.] |
| 21163 | The mass of protons and neutrinos is mostly binding energy, not the quarks [New Sci.] |
| 21168 | Gravitional mass turns out to be the same as inertial mass [New Sci.] |
| 21144 | Top, bottom, charm and strange quarks quickly decay into up and down [New Sci.] |
| 21138 | Neutrons are slightly heavier than protons, and decay into them by emitting an electron [New Sci.] |
| 21141 | Neutrinos were proposed as the missing energy in neutron beta decay [New Sci.] |
| 21169 | Only neutrinos spin anticlockwise [New Sci.] |
| 21166 | Standard antineutrinos have opposite spin and opposite lepton number [New Sci.] |
| 21171 | The symmetry of unified electromagnetic and weak forces was broken by the Higgs field [New Sci.] |
| 19953 | In string theory space-time has a grainy indivisible substructure [New Sci.] |
| 19476 | String theory needs at least 10 space-time dimensions [New Sci.] |
| 21175 | String theory might be tested by colliding strings to make bigger 'stringballs' [New Sci.] |
| 21177 | String theory offers a quantum theory of gravity, by describing the graviton [New Sci.] |
| 21178 | String theory is now part of 11-dimensional M-Theory, involving p-branes [New Sci.] |
| 21179 | Supersymmetric string theory can be expressed using loop quantum gravity [New Sci.] |
| 19954 | It is impossible for find a model of actuality among the innumerable models in string theory [New Sci.] |
| 21159 | Supersymmetry has extra heavy bosons and heavy fermions [New Sci.] |
| 21162 | Only supersymmetry offers to incorporate gravity into the scheme [New Sci.] |
| 21172 | The evidence for supersymmetry keeps failing to appear [New Sci.] |
| 21173 | Supersymmetry says particles and superpartners were unities, but then split [New Sci.] |
| 19947 | Hilbert Space is an abstraction representing all possible states of a quantum system [New Sci.] |
| 21160 | The Higgs field means even low energy space is not empty [New Sci.] |
| 19955 | Space-time may be a geometrical manifestation of quantum entanglement [New Sci.] |
| 19948 | Einstein's merging of time with space has left us confused about the nature of time [New Sci.] |
| 19475 | Relativity makes time and space jointly basic; quantum theory splits them, and prioritises time [New Sci.] |
| 19949 | Quantum theory relies on a clock outside the system - but where is it located? [New Sci.] |
| 19381 | The past has ceased to exist, and the future does not yet exist, so time does not exist [William of Ockham] |
| 19951 | Entropy is puzzling, so we may need to build new laws which include time directionality [New Sci.] |
| 19477 | General relativity predicts black holes, as former massive stars, and as galaxy centres [New Sci.] |
| 19952 | Black holes have entropy, but general relativity says they are unstructured, and lack entropy [New Sci.] |
| 16420 | 84.5 percent of the universe is made of dark matter [New Sci.] |
| 21174 | Dark matter must have mass, to produce gravity, and no electric charge, to not reflect light [New Sci.] |
| 17604 | We are halfway to synthesising any molecule we want [New Sci.] |
| 17603 | Chemistry just needs the periodic table, and protons, electrons and neutrinos [New Sci.] |
| 9111 | God is not wise, but more-than-wise; God is not good, but more-than-good [William of Ockham] |
| 8010 | William of Ockham is the main spokesman for God's commands being the source of morality [William of Ockham] |
| 9112 | We could never form a concept of God's wisdom if we couldn't abstract it from creatures [William of Ockham] |
| 9115 | To love God means to love whatever God wills to be loved [William of Ockham] |
| 16679 | Even an angel must have some location [William of Ockham, by Pasnau] |