Bibliolater 📚 📜 🖋 @bibliolater@qoto.org

Blaise Pascal, the philosopher born just over 400 years ago, made what is know as "Pascal's Wager" about the existence of #god.

He argued for betting on the existence of God. “If you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing,” he wrote, positing that although one cannot know for certain whether or not God exists, we are better off believing in God’s existence than not.

His #philosophy is all of life is a wager.

Read more:
https://theconversation.com/400-years-ago-philosopher-blaise-pascal-was-one-of-the-first-to-grapple-with-the-role-of-faith-in-an-age-of-science-and-reason-199659

And would you take his wager?

In Blue Machine, I cover how the structure of the ocean helped produce the vast guano reserves near Chile that were extracted by western nations in the mid-1800s. I’m just reading The Devil’s Element by Dan Egan (recommended!), which includes the grim source of phosphate fertiliser before the guano arrived: human bones from the battlefields of Waterloo, Crimea etc. This extraordinary quote by the biologist Liebig describes his fears about the ruined environment this was creating: #science #books

Drought In Europe Mid-June

Source: European Drought Observatory (EDO), for the period of June 11-20, most recent data available

#News #EuropeanNews #Europe #ClimateChange #Drought #Droughts

Amazing thunderstorm photos captured at 37,000 feet by airline pilot Santiago Borja.

Web: https://www.santiagoborja.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/santiagoborja/

Besides doing a bunch of useless research on the motion of planets, Kepler did some practical work on the volume of wine barrels. The story is interesting! Roberto Cardil writes:

"Kepler had several children before his first wife died. In 1613, he married for the second time in a celebration in Linz, Austria. Kepler bought a barrel of wine for the wedding but questioned the method the wine merchant used to measure the volume of the barrel and thus determine the price. In consequence, afterwards Kepler set out both to determine the correct volume of a wine barrel or cask, and to find the proportions that optimize the volume of such a barrel."

To determine the volume of a wine barrel, Kepler thought of any solid body as made up of thin layers, took the sum of the volumes of these layers, and then took a kind of limit where the thickness of these layers became infinitesimal.

Otto Toeplitz wrote:

"Working out finer approximations of various barrel shapes, Kepler consulted Archimedes and discovered that his own method of indivisibles had enabled him to obtain results in a far simpler and more general way than Archimedes, who had been struggling with cumbersome and difficult proofs. What he did not suspect was that Archimedes, too, had found his results by the same method of indivisibles (for his book The Method was lost until 1906!)."

I guess these "indivisibles" are like "infinitesimals".

For more, read this:

Roberto Cardil, Kepler: The Volume of a Wine Barrel, https://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/kepler-the-volume-of-a-wine-barrel

The "optimization" problem is not quite clearly explained here, but it seems to be maximizing the volume of a barrel while keeping its volume as measured by the wine merchant constant! 😈

Tonight's #YouTube watch:

best physics equation | virial theorem | gravothermal catastrophe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CdE5a3xyxE

This person has an amazing sense of comic timing, and a perfect deadpan delivery ("It's fine"), and manages to make physics that I juuuuust barely understand (some of, sometimes) extremely fun.

Unexpectedly delightful.