Science historian cracks the 2000 year old ‘Plato code’
Plato was the Einstein of Greece’s Golden Age and his work founded Western culture and science. Dr Jay Kennedy’s findings are set to revolutionise the history of the origins of Western thought.
Dr Kennedy, whose findings are published in the leading US journal Apeiron, reveals that Plato used a regular pattern of symbols, inherited from the ancient followers of Pythagoras, to give his books a musical structure. A century earlier, Pythagoras had declared that the planets and stars made an inaudible music, a ‘harmony of the spheres’. Plato imitated this hidden music in his books.
The hidden codes show that Plato anticipated the Scientific Revolution 2,000 years before Isaac Newton, discovering its most important idea – the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. The decoded messages also open up a surprising way to unite science and religion. The awe and beauty we feel in nature, Plato says, shows that it is divine; discovering the scientific order of nature is getting closer to God. This could transform today’s culture wars between science and religion.
“Plato’s books played a major role in founding Western culture but they are mysterious and end in riddles,” Dr Kennedy, at Manchester’s Faculty of Life Sciences explains.
“In antiquity, many of his followers said the books contained hidden layers of meaning and secret codes, but this was rejected by modern scholars.
“It is a long and exciting story, but basically I cracked the code. I have shown rigorously that the books do contain codes and symbols and that unraveling them reveals the hidden philosophy of Plato.
“This is a true discovery, not simply reinterpretation.”
Full article at PsyOrg
New Hawking book out in September
British physicist Stephen Hawking has co-authored a book that’s due out in September. Bantam Dell said Monday that “The Grand Design” will be published on Sept. 7.
The publisher said it’s Hawking’s first major new work in nearly a decade. His previous books include “A Brief History of Time.” Hawking’s co-author is another physicist, Leonard Mlodinow. He teaches at California Institute of Technology, and previously wrote “The Drunkard’s Walk.”
In “The Grand Design,” they examine evidence of “a unified theory” that can “describe and explain all the forces of nature.”
Strangers in the Mirror
“Oliver Sacks, the famous neuroscientist and author, can’t recognize faces. Neither can Chuck Close, the great artist known for his enormous paintings of … that’s right, faces.
Oliver and Chuck–both born with the condition known as Face Blindness–have spent their lives decoding who is saying hello to them. You can sit down with either man, talk to him for an hour, and if he sees you again just fifteen minutes later, he will have no idea who you are. (Unless you have a very squeaky voice or happen to be wearing the same odd purple hat.)
In this podcast, we listen in on a conversation Robert had with Chuck and Oliver at Hunter College in New York City as part of the World Science Festival. Chuck and Oliver tell Robert what it’s like to live with Face Blindness and describe two very different ways of coping with this condition, which may be more common than we think.”
Read more at WNYC
Male fish in Mexico sports sexy ‘moustache’
Male molly fish in Mexico wear a moustache that makes them appear more sexy to females. Scientists were unsure why male Mexican mollies wear an extravagant moustache-like structure on their top lip.
Now a study has revealed that female fish find the moustache sexually attractive, and it is likely to be a sexually selected trait. As well as being visually-attractive, the moustache may be used to rub the female fish’s genitals, exciting them.
Details are published in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. As their name suggests, Mexican mollies (Poecilia sphenops) live in Mexico, being a fairly common species that resides in a range of habitats from small rivers to creeks and lakes.
The fish has a complicated mating behaviour, with males fertilising females internally, rather than spreading sperm over externally laid eggs.
The girl who must eat every 15 minutes to stay alive
Lizzie Velasquez weighs just four stone and has almost zero per cent body fat but she is not anorexic. In fact, the 21-year-old from Austin, Texas, must eat every 15 minutes to stay healthy.
Despite consuming between 5,000 and 8,000 calories daily, the communications student, has never tipped over 4st 3lbs.
“I weigh myself regularly and if I gain even one pound I get really excited,” said 5ft 2 ins Miss Velasquez, who wears size triple zero clothes. ”I eat every 15-20 minutes to keep my energy levels up.
“I eat small portions of crisps, sweets, chocolate, pizza, chicken, cake, doughnuts, ice cream, noodles and pop tarts all day long, so I get pretty upset when people accuse me of being anorexic.” She was born four weeks prematurely weighing just 2lb 10oz. Doctors found there was minimal amniotic fluid protecting her in the womb.
“They told us they had no idea how she could have survived,” said Miss Velasquez’s mother Rita, 45, a church secretary.
Doctors speculated Lizzie might have the genetic disorder De Barsy syndrome but soon ruled it out as it became clear she did not have learning difficulties.
“They kept on trying to figure out what was wrong with her but we treated her like any other child,” said Mrs Velasquez, who charted her daughter’s health in dozens of notebooks. She was taken to see genetic experts but they still could not diagnose her.
Full story at Telegraph
LHC smashes beam collision record, Earth not sucked in to black hole
Scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) say they have moved a step closer to their aim of unlocking the mysteries of the Universe. The world’s highest-energy particle accelerator has produced a record-breaking particle collision rate – about double the previous rate.
The collider is now generating around 10,000 particle collisions per second, according to physicist Andrei Golutvin. The LHC is housed in a 27km circular tunnel under the French-Swiss border.
The vast machine is operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), based near Geneva in Switzerland.
Physicists say this marks the start of turning the LHC into the world’s most powerful particle collider. ”It’s clear that the LHC is the new boy in town, but in two years running we’re going to put Fermilab out of business,”
Why We Dream: Real Reasons Revealed
The slumbering mind might not seem like an apt tool for any critical thinking, but humans can actually solve problems while asleep, researchers say. Not only that, but one purpose for dreaming itself may be to help us find solutions to puzzles that plague us during waking hours.
Dreams are highly visual and often illogical in nature, which makes them ripe for the type of “out-of-the-box” thinking that some problem-solving requires, said Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist at Harvard University.
Barrett’s theory on dreaming, which she discussed at the Association for Psychological Science meeting here last month, boils down to this: Dreaming is really just thinking, but in a slightly different state from when our eyes are open.
Full Article at Live Science
Woman with no arms displays incredible feet of dexterity
A women born with no arms in China is said to be the best embroiderer in her village.
Ren Jiemei, 65, is so skilled with her feet that she can always thread a needle at the first attempt, reports Qilu Evening Post. Her embroidering skills are so perfect that able-bodied villagers say can’t compete with her in terms of speed or quality.
“I was born without arms. So from childhood, I swore to myself that I’d use my feet to do everything,” she said. Ren, of Haiyang, Shandong province, has learnt to use her feet to eat, wash, comb her hair, draw pictures and cut paper.
Did Jesus even die on a cross?
Many aspects of Jesus’ life are historically inaccurate – the mass culling of babies by Herod certainly never happened, the idea of a census is also highly questionable and the location of Jesus’ birthplace doesn’t appear to tie in with archaeological evidence. Even the Gospels themselves appear to contradict each other on key events like the time of the last supper and when he actually died. However the latest bit of research reveals that Jesus may not have even died on a cross at all.
In his doctoral thesis, newly graduated Swedish theologian Gunnar Samuelsson argues that the cross Jesus supposedly died on may not actually have been a cross. He explains in an interview with DRadio Wissen, a German station: “the New Testament said that Jesus died some way on something called a staurus … that’s a Greek name for a cross or a pole or something … I call it an execution device only to be [distinguished] from the common notion that it must be a cross, because it mustn’t be a cross–it could be a pole, for instance, or a tree trunk, or something else.”
Full article at The Atlantic Wire
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