LMU ☀️ HNRS 240
ON THE NATURE OF THINGS
Practice
  1. Why, according to Peter Atkins, are many of the "Great Questions" not great?
  2. What is Standard Model? Why is it considered ugly?
  3. What are the four forces? Why do most scientists not expect a fifth to be discovered?
  4. At about what point in Western history did philosophy and science start to diverge? What made them diverge? What distinguishes them now?
  5. What are Newton's three laws of motion?
  6. In A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, Pierre Simon Laplace made a case for scientific determinism by writing about an "intellect" with some pretty big powers. What is the now popular term for this intellect? What capabilities did Laplace ascribe to it?
  7. Who discovered that the speed of light was finite and when? Who discovered that it was constant?
  8. You are watching a train travel by at exactly 40 meters per second. On a flat car of the train two people are throwing a ball back and forth. You are watching the player at the rear of the train throw the ball to the other person at a speed of exactly 20 meters per second relative to the train. How fast does the ball appear to move to you, taking into account special relativity? Use 299,792,458 m/s for the speed of light. Express your answer to 16 significant figures. (Hint: that will be 14 places after the decimal point.)
  9. If a body emits an amount of energy E, how much mass does it lose (as a function of E)?
  10. If someone were to travel at 99.999% the speed of light, how long would it take the person to travel 50 light years?
  11. Why do people say the speed of light is a constant, when we know light travels at different speeds through different media?
  12. Newton and Leibniz differed in their opinions of space and time? What were their respective positions?
  13. What was Newtonian mechanics unable to describe how light was affected by gravity? How was this problem resolved in general relativity? What was the first experiment to confirm that light was affected by gravity?
  14. How might David Hume have phrased his principle of empiricism if he had known about relativity?
  15. What are quanta?
  16. What is Planck's constant and why is it significant?
  17. True or false: if we know which orbital an electron resides in now, we can predict with certainty the next orbital it will reside in. Does this question even make sense?
  18. How do we resolve the apparent contradiction is saying an entity is both a particle and a wave?
  19. What principle is Werner Heisenberg famous for articulating? In a nutshell, what does it say? Are there any philosophical implications of the principle worth noting?
  20. Would Einstein be considered a (scientific) realist or idealist (anti-realist)? Would Heisenberg be considered a realist or idealist?
  21. What evidence was gathered by people two thousand years or so ago for a spherical Earth?
  22. Why did people around the time of Newton think the universe was infinite in size?
  23. What is the evidence for the what we call the Big Bang?
  24. Explain Big Crunch, Big Freeze, and Big Rip.
  25. What knowledge did WMAP bring to humanity?
  26. What is the estimated size of the observable universe? Why is it larger than 13.7 billion light years across?
  27. How large (small) is the Planck length? What is the Planck length, anyway?
  28. Define science.
  29. It has been claimed that science has no "authority figures" whose teachings are permitted to go unchallenged. Is this true of any other discipline?
  30. What kinds of knowledge are thought to be "beyond science"? Are there any notable thinkers that think no knowledge is "beyond science"?
  31. In what sense does a scientific outlook motivate curiosity? (Research Feynman and Tyson for ideas.)
  32. About how many religions are there in the world?
  33. Which major religions are notable for embracing science, curiosity, and discovery of the natural world?
  34. Which major religions can be described as atheist (or at least deity-free)?
  35. What are the aspects that characterize (nearly) all religions?
  36. What aspects of religions does Alain de Botton suggest are worthy of adoption by the irreligious?
  37. Give examples of (1) religious mysticism and (2) nonreligious mysticism.
  38. Who was Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ghazālī? Why was he controversial? See articles in Wikipedia, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and a somewhat unfavorable portrayal in this video. Is the portrayal in the video fair?
  39. How does Richard Feynman respond to an artist friend's criticism that scientists see less beauty in the natural world than would a nonscientist?
  40. In what sense did each of the follow four individuals contribute to what are now known as scientific revolutions: Mikołaj Kopernik, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein?
  41. What is the demarcation problem in the Philosophy of Science?
  42. Which influential philosophers have claimed the demarcation problem to be without merit?
  43. What was Karl Popper's "solution" to the demarcation problem? What are the major arguments against it?
  44. Distinguish induction and abduction. How can induction be viewed as a kind of abduction? How can abduction be viewed as a kind of induction?
  45. What did David Hume claim about induction? Has Hume's claim ever been proven or disproven?
  46. Why can't the frequency interpretation of probability serve as a counterargument to Hume's claim about induction?
  47. Why is Occam's Razor appealing?
  48. Give an example of a misuse of Occam's Razor.
  49. How are foundationalism and coherentism opposed?
  50. What are the two main "problems" with Hempel's Covering Law?

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Ray Toal • Computer Science Department • College of Science and Engineering • Loyola Marymount University