Physics tells us that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. And because someone always brings it up, yes, that includes quantum entanglement, which makes it possible for a measurement on one particle to instantaneously have an effect on an entangled particle no matter how far apart they are, but which cannot actually transmit a message without additional elements bound by light speed. These days we can push information transfer right up to that limit, but knowledge seems to take quite a bit longer. Ideas are sticky; we hold onto them even in the face of revisions or contradictions. So once an idea does spread, it can take a long time to update it. For example, we’ve had 400 years to spread the story of Galileo and the Catholic Church. So when the Vatican recently had a cosmology conference in honor of George Lemaitre, Galileo was the only reference point some could muster for how the church handles science.
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Book Review: Hear, My Son
Proverbs 1-9 is an extended address on the value of wisdom from a father or elder teacher to a son or student that introduces the wisdom sayings of the remainder of Proverbs. In Hear, My Son: Teaching & Learning in Proverbs 1-9, Daniel J. Estes has taken a novel approach to this literature and written a monograph exploring the philosophy and practice of teaching and learning reflected in this instruction given in these chapters. It is part of New Studies in Biblical Theology (InterVarsity Press) series of monographs.
That may sound like dry, stodgy stuff but what Estes does is outline in a very straightforward fashion what we might learn from these texts about teaching and learning. The book is not an exposition of Proverbs 1-9 but rather a study of this discourse through the lens of what it teaches about education. [Read more…] about Book Review: Hear, My Son