Isaac Asimov's Foundation - Psychohistory

past, present and future. He presents a series of arguments that attempt to build on each other to prove time is unreal. McTaggart splits his paper in two sections. He spends the first part of the paper attempting to prove that time can only exist if A-series exist. “ We perceive events in time as being present, and those are the only events which we actually perceive.

Starting with Descartes’ vision of a philosophy with a mathematical certainty, rationalists claimed to have grasped a rather large portion of reality, including the world, God, consciousness, and whatever falls in-between. As empiricists argued, most of this "knowledge" was in effect assumed, a habit, as it had no representation in the real world. The rationalists’ notorious abstractness and their disregard for the seeming discrepancy between their proofs and the real world have been the main reasons for the fearsome opposition and caricature they faced: even Voltaire, though influenced to a great extent by Leibniz’s philosophy, ridicules it in his masterpiece Candide in the form of ludicrously optimistic Pangloss. . Kant, especially, has put a rather impressive dent in the hull of rationalist philosophy, branding it dogmatic metaphysics.

tell us – teleportation is the name given by science fiction writers to the feat of making an object or person disintegrate in one place while a perfect replica appears somewhere else. Dr. Samuel L. Braunstein of University of New Mexico gives us something simpler – teleportation is some kind of ‘disembodied’ transport. The actual process of this transport is not easy to understand for a person from our world. And that is precisely why I must make a fool of myself trying to make you understand it. After all I get my support... ... middle of paper ... ...ll not care to explain.

While in the future Aristotelian physics would turn out to be completely incorrect, his original ideas and theories were critical for developing modern science as we know it today. However, it was not until humanity accepted the flaws in Aristotelian physics that science made any progress toward finally understanding the universe. While Aristotelian physics was completely wrong in a multitude of ways, it was still needed to form a basis of the modern method of discovery. Furthermore, the majority of theories in the history of science are incorrect at first. Historically, this has been the method of progress in the sciences.

When a nation, terrorist group, or someone with ill intent secures sole-control of nuclear capabilities, the world will be at the mercy of this group's sanity, since the world is currently nowhere near an acceptable defensive system. So from this scenario, one can infer that in the present, the only deterrent to nuclear war is the existence of nuclear arms in opposition to each other. The second subheading, whether a nuclear war can occur without escalating into a victorless, nuclear holocaust, is an evolving argument due to its dependency on modern technology. The two stances on this topic are known by their acronyms of NUTS and MAD (Nuclear Utilization Target Selection, and Mutually Assured Destruction respectively). The position taken by NUTS is that limited use of nuclear weapons can occur, without igniting an all-out, nuclear holocaust-resulting in the devastation of both conflicting parties, and hence a mutual loss.

Although we have placed ourselves on the top of the social hierarchy, Wells argues that even though we have such advanced weapons, an entity exists that could prove formidable against humans. Even through human means and weapons, ignorance exists which leads to the downfall of humans and the pyramid of the social hierarchy being flipped, with the weakest proliferating and strongest dissipating. As interesting as a Martian may sound to the curious, how would one approach a being from a different planet? If ignorance dominated, perhaps the first move would be to eliminate them before they eliminate us. This method, if the narrator had seen the future, could have saved many people’s lives.

One of the most quintessential aspects of this ideology includes the drive for constant technological advance and strategic superiority. Without the brainpower of the scientists and intellectuals who dedicated their lives to the extension of technological power and the study of international conflict, the Arms Race would certainly not have been possible. These academics not only became the architects of atomic weapons but they were also faced with justifying the use of these nuclear bombs, and creating a theoretical framework within which nuclear warfare might be appropriately (and rationally) conducted. Within this context, one noteworthy parallel between Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove is the existence (in both films) of a single intellectual genius that actively perpetuates the “science” of nuclear advancement and strategy. Indeed, through the characterizations of Professor Groeteschele and Dr. Strangelove, both Lumet and Kubrick examine the prominent role of intellectuals (both scientists and theorists) in the creation and justification of nuclear warfare.

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions Who would have ever thought the way a radioactive particle decays would relate to whether or not we have bad attitudes towards life? Who would have ever suspected that the structure of space-time would be so closely linked to whether or not we would marry rich wives? And who indeed would have ever expected that the properties of light might affect whether or not we go on homicidal rampages? Perhaps Kurt Vonnegut did. Could it be possible that a writer known more for his pictures of assholes than his knowledge of advanced physics actually centered some of the deepest concepts in his works on the philosophical implications of general relativity and quantum mechanics?

Keith Jenkins and Richard Evans are the two historians that will be used in relation to this debate. Trachtenberg believes that history should be ultimately obtainable however, he is worried that the way in which society is heading that it will soon become an obsolete ideology. His believes that history's ultimate goal is to discover the truth. Trachtenberg believes that you should "put your political beliefs aside and frame questions in such a way that the answers turned on what the evidence showed." He realizes that this may be a slightly naïve idea however he still stands by this belief even when others such as Keith Jenkins have totally given up on objectivity.

If you take time to think about it, Huxley’s prediction of the future generations to come hit exactly on the mark, but how could he have possibly know? For me, being able to put his prognostication into such detailing is pretty amazing. The generation of the present day is slowly spiraling down the direction of that in “Brave New World” and, in time, it will eventually make it to that point in the future. My thesis is mostly circling around how he could have possibly known this was making its way down the “Generation’s Log”. My paper is going to focus mainly on the similarities in Brave New World and the world of today.