In praise of the Trivium

Dorothy L. Sayers

I have often said that education in Spain has worsened over the last fifty years. Almost whenever the government has changed, a new education law has been promulgated that, without exception, has always been worse than the previous one. The duration of learning has been lengthened. In 1963, I entered the university when I had just turned 17. Today nobody arrives there without having turned 18. Sometimes it is argued that children must learn more and need more time. It may be true, but do they really know more when they get to the university?

The answer to this question is undoubtedly negative. When they get to the university, the level of the students is low, they are not able to reason and sometimes they don’t even understand what they read. They are getting easier to manipulate. Perhaps this is what is intended.

Is there life in the solar system beyond Earth?

At the end of 1981, Editorial Mezquita (a subsidiary of Editorial Alhambra) published my book entitled La Vida en Otros Mundos (Life in Other Worlds), one of whose chapters addressed the question in the title of this post. When the book was discontinued, it was again published in 1992 by MacGraw Hill of Spain, in an updated version, in a collection dedicated to science popularization, which kept my book in its catalog for around a decade. It is currently out of print.

Since then, things haven't changed much. Subsequent research has added a couple of satellites that weren’t considered in the 80s and the 90s to the list of bodies where it might be possible to find microscopic life. Of course, nobody expects to find intelligent life, or multicellular animals and plants, in any body in the solar system outside the Earth, although in science-fiction literature those things happen.

Quantum Teleportation

Anton Zeilinger

This year the Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger, for their pioneering work in quantum communications.

• Clauser (with Stuart Freedman, who died in 2012) carried out the first experiment with entangled photons in 1972, which proved that the direction of Bell's inequality favors the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, thus solving the EPR paradox (acronym for Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen), which tried to contradict this interpretation. This experiment was not complete, so others were carried out later, under increasingly strict conditions.

Information on the Internet is ephemeral

Manuel Calvo Hernando

I'll start with a personal anecdote:

• At the end of the 1980s, I became a member of the Spanish Association of Scientific Journalism, which had been created in the early 1970s by the famous Spanish science popularizer Manuel Calvo Hernando, whose articles in a major newspaper I had been following since the 1960s. By then, I was writing many science popularization articles, which were published by another Spanish newspaper, La Vanguardia. Calvo Hernando was delighted to receive me at the Association.
• Around the year 2000, this association changed its name to the Spanish Association for Scientific Communication (AECC in Spanish). These initials happened to be the same as those of the Spanish Association Against Cancer. Therefore, the acronym has recently been changed to AEC2.

Some predictions by Ray Kurzweil for 2020

Ray Kurzweil

Short-term predictions are dangerous, because the expected date does not take long to arrive, and the "prophet" runs the risk that someone (like me) takes a note of the predictions and checks if they really took place.

On December 13, 2009, the New York Daily News published an article with the following headline:

Top futurist, Ray Kurzweil, predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020

The hidden premise

Alvin Plantinga

In previous posts in this blog I have mentioned that atheists sometimes try to justify their beliefs by using hidden premises in their reasoning, the most important of which is this:

God does not exist

At the end of their line of thought, they usually conclude that God does not exist, or some equivalent statement. As the starting premise is hidden, they probably don’t notice that they have incurred in circularity, one of the best-known fallacies since ancient times, which tries to prove the truth of a statement, by assuming from the beginning that the same statement is true.

In the introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Karl Marx writes this:

Klara and the Sun

Kazuo Ishiguro

Those who are considered great writers don’t usually dedicate part of their efforts to science fiction. This genre has traditionally been considered second-rate, despite the fact that some prestigious authors have occasionally engaged on it. In this context, the most cited work is Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley (1932), a book I have talked about in previous posts in this blog.

But there has been a recent foray into this genre, by no less than a Nobel Prize winner for Literature. Kazuo Ishiguro, who writes in English and received the award in 2017, is well known for works such as The Remains of the Day, or An Artist of the Floating World, plus his science-fiction novel, Never Let Me Go, a dystopia along the same lines as Corinna Turner's I am Margaret, which I mentioned in my post on dystopias in this blog. Now, in 2021, he has published a science fiction novel that touches on the theme of strong artificial intelligence.