Pekakak adalah salah satu tokoh yang memiliki pengetahuan mendalam dan perencanaan yang cermat. Saat fajar menyingsing, ia terlihat bertengger di atas pohon. Dengan kemampuan sempurna untuk mengontrol kecepatan penerbangan miliknya, seperti kapan harus memperlambat atau mempercepat, dia dapat dengan mudah menghitung cara optimal untuk menangkap ikan.

Geared toward readers already acquainted with special relativity, this book transcends the view of theory as a working tool to answer natural questions: What is ...

In the October 1937 number of Philosophy of Science Lindsay has made certain criticisms of the adequacy of the “operational method” of analyzing and giving meaning to the concepts of physics, documenting his criticisms chiefly from my own writings. In these criticisms he has made statements as to the method which I would by no means accept. This is not characteristic of his paper only, for I have seldom indeed seen a printed discussion of the method which I would accept (...) as being an adequate or sometimes even fair representation of what I understand by it. It will perhaps pay therefore if I attempt to state what I conceive it to be all about, particularly since I have never attempted such a comprehensive statement and since my own ideas on the subject have been developing since I first wrote in the Logic of Modern Physics. For one reason I have hesitated to do this, for fear of seeming to subscribe to the not uncommon idea that we are dealing with some elaborate and profound new theory of the nature of knowledge or of meaning. I believe that I myself have never talked of “operationalism” or “operationism”, but I have a distaste for these grandiloquent words which imply something more philosophic and esoteric than the simple thing that I see. What we are here concerned with is an observation and description of methods which at least some physicists had already, perhaps unconsciously, adopted and found successful—the practise of the methods already existed. What I have attempted is to analyze these successful methods, not to set up a philosophical system and a theory of the properties that any method must have if it hopes to be successful. Since I was concerned with a technique already extant, my principal method of getting others to see what the technique involved has been to exhibit examples of the technique in action, rather than to attempt any exhaustive characterization of the technique itself. (shrink)

Consciousness has long been a subject of interest in philosophy and religion but only relatively recently has it become subject to scientific investigation. Now, more than ever before, we are beginning to understand this mental state. Developmental psychologists understand when we first develop a sense of self; neuropsychologists see which parts of the brain activate when we think about ourselves and which parts of the brain control that awareness. Cognitive scientists have mapped the circuitry that allows machines to have some (...) form of self awareness, and neuroscientists investigate similar. (shrink)

History of Science is a many-sided subject, permitting approach from the point of view of various human interests, and presenting a wide variety of problems, many of them paradoxical and perhaps not capable of satisfactory solution. In the following it will probably seem to the reader a number of times that I am talking at cross purposes. Anything that I can say is of necessity limited by my background as a physicist.

Introduction, by G. Holton.--Three eighteenth-century social philosophers: scientific influences on their thought, by H. Guerlac.--Science and the human comedy: Voltaire, by H. Brown.--The seventeenth-century legacy: our mirror of being, by G. de Santillana.--Contemporary science and the contemporary world view, by P. Frank.--The growth of science and the structure of culture, by R. Oppenheimer.--The Freudian conception of man and the continuity of nature, by J. S. Bruner.--Quo vadis, by P. W. Bridgman.--Prospects for a new synthesis: science and the humanities as complementary (...) activities, by C. Morris.--A humanist looks at science, by H. M. Jones. (shrink)