Bell (1987), John S, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, Cambridge University Press 1987 Jacket: JB ... is particularly famous for his discovery of a crucial difference between the predictions of conventional quantum mechanics and the implications of local causality . . . . This work has played a major role in the development of our current understanding of the profound nature of quantum concepts and of the fundamental limitations they impose on the applicability of classical ideas of space, time and locality. 
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Jones (1974), Alexander (ed), The Gospel according to Saint John: The Jerusalem Bible: English Popular Edition, Darton Longman and Todd 1966 Editor's Foreword to the Reader's Edition: When the Jerusalem Bible was first published in Englsh in 1966 the Foreword to the complete Standard edition announced its objects: to serve two pressing needs facing the Church, the need to keep abreast of the times and the need to deepen theological thought. This double programme was carried out by translating the ancient texts into the language we use today, and by providing notes to the texts whch were neitther sectarian nor superficial. In that Foreword also the dependence of the translators on the original pioneering work of the School of Biblcal studies in Jerusalem was acknowledged and the English version was offered as an entirely faithful rendering of the original texts which, in doubtful points, preserved the text established and (for the most part) the interpretation adopted by the School in the light of the most recent researches in the fields of hisdtory, archaeology and literary criticism.' 
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Tillich (1968), Paul, Systematic Theology, James Nisbet and Company Limited 1968 Preface: 'It has always been impossible for me to think theologically in any other than a systematic way. The smallest problem, if taken seriously and radically, drove me to all the other problems and to the anticipation of a whole in which they could find their solution. ... My purpose ... has been to present the method and structure of a theological system written from an apologetic point of view and carried through in a continuous correlation with philosophy."back

Adam Gopnik (2026_04_13), St. Paul Remade Human History. How Did He Do It?, It was Paul, almost single-handed, and against the suspicions of Jesus’ original disciples, who journeyed and pleaded and made the faith portable. Quite a character! So much so that, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the director Frank Capra was eager to make a movie of Paul’s life starring Frank Sinatra. And though it sounds ridiculous when you say it, the casting actually makes sense. Whoever Paul was, he must have had charm, energy, and intensity, and been equally popular with the first-century equivalent of bobby-soxers and of made men. Raphael’s great image of Paul preaching in Athens, arms outstretched, crowd rapt, could be the Chairman on tour in Greece. [. . .]
Was Paul’s effect on history, incalculably large, good or bad on the whole? Edward Gibbon argued that Paul carried a “Jewish” intolerance into a pagan world that, for all its cruelties, was broadly pluralistic in matters of worship. Yet Paul also offered a universalism so urgently moving that it remains powerful today. That may be as close as judgment gets for a figure of his scale. We turn to philosophers and essayists, from Socrates to Richard Rorty, for inquiry and self-doubt. We turn to apostles and prophets, from Paul to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for the broader conviction that faith really can move mountains, and then for the still bolder thought that even moving mountains is not enough if love is absent. “All or Nothing at All,” Sinatra’s greatest epistle, revised across his life as the purposes of his music changed, might have served as a theme for that Capra bio-pic. It is bad advice for a lover. But it is good advice for a believer, since such intensity of commitment is, in the old-fashioned sense, awesome. St. Paul, whenever exactly he lived or whatever precisely he said, was nothing if not all in.' back

Albert Einstein (1915), The Field Equations of Gravitation, ' In two recently published papers I have shown how to obtain field equations of gravitation that comply with the postulate of general relativity, i.e., which in their general formulation are covariant under arbitrary substitutions of space-time variables. [. . .] With this, we have finally completed the general theory of relativity as a logical structure. The opinions I recently voiced here in this regard have been in error. Every physical theory that complies with the special theory of relativity can, by means of the absolute differential calculus, be integrated into the system of general relativity theory — without the latter providing any criteria about the admissibility of such physical theory' back

Albert Einstein (1933), Herbert Spencer Lecture 1933: On the Method of Theoretical Physics , ' It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience. back

Albert Einstein (1936), Physics and Reality: Journal of the Franklin Institute Volume 221, Issue 3, March 1936, Pages 349-382, ' In speaking here of "comprehensibility," the expression is used in its most modest sense. It implies: the production of some sort of order among sense impressions, this order being produced by the creation of general concepts, relations between these concepts, and by definite relations of some kind between the concepts and sense experience. It is in this sense that the world of our sense experiences is comprehensible. The fact thatit is comprehensible is a miracle.] back

Alexandra Souly et al. (2025_10_08), Poisoning Attacks on LLMs Require a Near-constant Number of Poison Samples, ' Poisoning attacks can compromise the safety of large language models (LLMs) by injecting malicious documents into their training data. Existing work has studied pretraining poisoning assuming adversaries control a percentage of the training corpus. However, for large models, even small percentages translate to impractically large amounts of data. This work demonstrates for the first time that poisoning attacks instead require a near-constant number of documents regardless of dataset size. We conduct the largest pretraining poisoning experiments to date, pretraining models from 600M to 13B parameters on chinchilla-optimal datasets (6B to 260B tokens). We find that 250 poisoned documents similarly compromise models across all model and dataset sizes, despite the largest models training on more than 20 times more clean data. We also run smaller-scale experiments to ablate factors that could influence attack success, including broader ratios of poisoned to clean data and non-random distributions of poisoned samples. Finally, we demonstrate the same dynamics for poisoning during fine-tuning. Altogether, our results suggest that injecting backdoors through data poisoning may be easier for large models than previously believed as the number of poisons required does not scale up with model size, highlighting the need for more research on defences to mitigate this risk in future models.' back

Berne Sanders, No more US military aid to Israel, ' I am a proud Jewish American. My father fled Poland in 1921 to escape poverty and antisemitism. Those in his family who stayed were murdered by the Nazis. Since childhood, I have known very well where antisemitism, racism, fanaticism and demagoguery lead.
So let me be clear. Speaking out against the horrific and inhumane actions of Israel, and its extremist leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, is not antisemitic. Speaking out about the dangerous and destructive role that Israel plays in shaping US foreign and military policy is not antisemitic. It is, in fact, what every member of Congress and every American should be doing.
On 7 October 2023, Hamas, a terrorist organization, attacked Israel. They killed more than 1,200 innocent men, women and children and took hundreds of hostages. Like any other country, Israel had the absolute right to respond to the Hamas attack. But they did not have the right to violate international law and wage an all-out war of enormous destruction against the entire Palestinian people – in what experts have correctly concluded is a genocide.
They did not have the right, out of a population of 2.2 million, to kill more than 72,000 Palestinians in Gaza and wound over 170,000 - the majority of whom are women, children and the elderly. They did not have the right to destroy almost all of Gaza’s infrastructure, including its water and sewer systems and its supply of electricity.' back

Brouwer fixed point theorem - Wikipedia, Brouwer fixed point theorem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Among hundreds of fixed-point theorems] Brouwer's is particularly well known, due in part to its use across numerous fields of mathematics. In its original field, this result is one of the key theorems characterizing the topology of Euclidean spaces, along with the Jordan curve theorem, the hairy ball theorem, the invariance of dimension and the Borsuk–Ulam theorem. This gives it a place among the fundamental theorems of topology.' back

Carol Yang (2026_04_16), US officials claim China is ‘hoarding’ oil. What does the data say?, ' Though high-level officials in Washington have accused China of undermining global energy security by “hoarding” oil during the US-Israeli war on Iran, import and inventory data suggest Beijing is facing its own supply pressures as the conflict drags on. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Tuesday labelled China an “unreliable global partner,” alleging that Beijing has prioritised stockpiling crude over easing global shortages triggered by the war, according to a Reuters report.
He also criticised Beijing for limiting exports of certain goods during the crisis.
In response, Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said the global energy market’s current turmoil is rooted in “the tense situation in the Middle East”, and called for an immediate halt to military operations there, noting that China has been playing a “constructive role” in seeking an end to the conflict.
“Securing energy supplies is a rational act under the current circumstances, and also a matter of fair trade,” said Cui Shoujun, an international relations professor at Renmin University of China in Beijing.
By targeting China immediately following the US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz – a vital shipping artery partially under Tehran’s jurisdiction – Cui said Washington is attempting to “create new talking points to divert global attention” from its escalation. [. . .]
Rystad Energy warned in a note last week that even if access through the strait normalises progressively, new loadings face voyage times of three to six weeks before reaching Asian discharge ports, leaving the region vulnerable to a prolonged supply gap.' back

Chris Stokel-Walker (2026_05_07), Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real, ' Got sore, itchy eyes? You’re probably one of the millions of people who spend too much time staring at screens, being bombarded with blue light. Rub your eyes too much and your eyelids might turn a slight, pinkish hue.
So far, so normal. But if, in the past 18 months, you typed those symptoms into a range of popular chatbots and asked what was wrong with you, you might have got an odd answer: bixonimania.
The condition doesn’t appear in the standard medical literature — because it doesn’t exist. It’s the invention of a team led by Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who dreamt up the skin condition and then uploaded two fake studies about it to a preprint server in early 2024. Osmanovic Thunström carried out this unusual experiment to test whether large language models (LLMs) would swallow the misinformation and then spit it out as reputable health advice. “I wanted to see if I can create a medical condition that did not exist in the database,” she says.
The problem was that the experiment worked too well. Within weeks of her uploading information about the condition, attributed to a fictional author, major artificial-intelligence systems began repeating the invented condition as if it were real.
Even more troublingly, other researchers say, the fake papers were then cited in peer-reviewed literature. Osmanovic Thunström says this suggests that some researchers are relying on AI-generated references without reading the underlying papers. [. . .]
Even if readers didn’t make it all the way to the ends of the papers, they would have encountered red flags early on, such as statements that “this entire paper is made up” and “Fifty made-up individuals aged between 20 and 50 years were recruited for the exposure group”.' back

Claude Shannon (1949), Communication in the Presence of Noise, 'A method is developed for representing any communication system geometrically. Messages and the corresponding signals are points in two “function spaces,” and the modulation process is a mapping of one space into the other. Using this representation, a number of results in communication theory are deduced concerning expansion and compression of bandwidth and the threshold effect. Formulas are found for the maximum rate of transmission of binary digits over a system when the signal is perturbed by various types of noise. Some of the properties of “ideal” systems which transmit at this maximum rate are discussed. The equivalent number of binary digits per second for certain information sources is calculated.' [C. E. Shannon , “Communication in the presence of noise,” Proc. IRE, vol. 37, pp. 10–21, Jan. 1949.] back

Craig Costello (2026_04_13), Quantum computers are coming to break our codes faster than anyone expected, back

Darius von Guttner Sporzynski (2026_04_14), Pope Leo’s resolute response to Trump attack reveals a man of God, not politics, ' When Pope Leo XIV condemned threats to destroy Iranian civilisation as “truly unacceptable” in April 2026, the backlash was immediate. US President Donald Trump unleashed a tirade against the pope on social media, accusing him of being “weak on crime”, “terrible for foreign policy”, and acting like a politician rather than a religious leader.
But the exchange that followed matters more than the accusation. Confronted with criticism from Trump, Leo did not retreat. He made his position explicit: he was not afraid to speak, because his task was to proclaim the gospel.
Leo said he had “no fear of the Trump administration”, and “I don’t think that the message of the Gospel is meant to be abused in the way that some people are doing”.
That response clarifies the logic of his pontificate. Leo XIV is not trying to enter politics. He is defining the limits within which politics can operate. [. . .]
The same logic shapes his interventions beyond war. On migration, he has framed the issue in terms of human dignity, questioning whether harsh treatment of migrants can be reconciled with a consistent ethic of life. On social questions, he has resisted partisan categories, insisting moral coherence matters more than political alignment.
His engagement with artificial intelligence follows the same pattern. In December 2025, he warned that technological development must serve the common good, not concentrate power in the hands of a few. The question, again, was not technical but ethical: what does it mean to respect human dignity in a changing world?
Across these issues, the method is consistent. Leo XIV begins with principles, not interests. He does not align with factions. He applies moral reasoning to contemporary problems, even when doing so invites political backlash.
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Dulong-Petit Law - Wikipedia, Dulong-Petit Law - Wikipedia, the free enecyclopedia, ' The Dulong–Petit law, a thermodynamic law proposed by French physicists Pierre Louis Dulong and Alexis Thérèse Petit in 1839, states that the classical expression for the molar heat capacity of certain chemical elements is constant for temperatures far from the absolute zero.
In modern terms, Dulong and Petit found that the heat capacity of a mole of many solid elements is about 3R, where R is the universal gas constant. The modern theory of the heat capacity of solids states that it is due to lattice vibrations in the solid.
The first theoretical proof of the law was given by Ludwig Boltzmann using statistical mechanics in 1877.' back

Equipartition theorem - Wikipedia, Equipartition theorem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In classical statistical mechanics, the equipartition theorem relates the temperature of a system to its average energies. The equipartition theorem is also known as the law of equipartition, equipartition of energy, or simply equipartition. The original idea of equipartition was that, in thermal equilibrium, energy is shared equally among all of its various forms; for example, the average kinetic energy per degree of freedom in translational motion of a molecule should equal that in rotational motion.' back

Gabriel Popkin (2028_04_25), Einstein's 'spooky action at a distance' spotted in objects almost big enough to see, ' One of the strangest aspects of quantum physics is entanglement: If you observe a particle in one place, another particle—even one light-years away—will instantly change its properties, as if the two are connected by a mysterious communication channel. Scientists have observed this phenomenon in tiny objects such as atoms and electrons. But in two new studies, researchers report seeing entanglement in devices nearly visible to the naked eye.' back

Jeffrey Ncholls (1999), On Visible Salvation, One needs a new language of salvation, one that addresses the historical suffering experienced in our world, and the present day consciousness that is scandalised by it, and at the same time is faithful to the scriptural and classical witness about Jesus saving." Haight p 26 back

Jeffrey Nicholls (1987), A theory of Peace, ' The argument: I began to think about peace in a very practical way during the Viet Nam war. I was the right age to be called up. I was exempted because I was a clergyman, but despite the terrors that war held for me, I think I might have gone. It was my first whiff of the force of patriotism. To my amazement, it was strong enough to make even me face death.
In the Church, I became embroiled in a deeper war. Not a war between goodies and baddies, but the war between good and evil that lies at the heart of all human consciousness. Existence is a struggle. We need all the help we can get. Religion is part of that help and theology is the scientific foundation of religion.' back

Jeffrey Nicholls (1999c), Essay 3: Is the Universe Divine? (1999), ' Many of the Catholic theologians insist on the services rendered by heretics in compelling the Church to bring out points that gave precision and support to the faith but could hardly have been understood except when the fatal effects of overlooking them had been developed by the heretics. Wicksteed and Cornford' back

Kalpana Jain (2026_04_14), Trump’s exchange with Pope Leo reflects deep‑rooted tensions between the Vatican and the United States: 4 essential reads, ' President Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV, the U.S.-born head of the Catholic Church, had an unusual and acrimonious public exchange over the weekend.
In a scathing attack on Truth Social, the social media platform he launched in 2022, Trump accused the pope of being “WEAK on Crime and terrible for Foreign Policy.” The lengthy post on April 12, 2026, told Leo to “focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.”
Later that night, Trump told reporters that he was “not a big fan of Pope Leo” and did not think the pope was “doing a very good job.” Leo has repeatedly called for peace amid wars in the Middle East and described Trump’s April 7 threat to destroy Iranian civilization as “truly unacceptable.”
Several hours later, aboard a papal flight to Algiers – where he will begin a 10-day trip to Africa – Leo told reporters that he did not want to get into a debate with Trump, and that his words were not “meant as attacks on anyone.” But striking a firm note, he said he had “no fear” of the Trump administration.
“I do not look at my role as being political, a politician,” the pope said, adding, “I will continue to speak out loudly against war, looking to promote peace, promoting dialogue and multilateral relationships among states, to look for just solutions to problems. Too many people are suffering in the world today. Too many innocent people are being killed. And I think someone has to stand up and say, ‘There’s a better way to do this'.”
The public nature of Trump’s criticism may feel unprecedented. But there have long been tensions between the United States and the Vatican’s effort to seek peace, as scholars writing for The Conversation have shown in past articles. back

Multi-factor authentication - Wikipedia, Multi-factor authentication - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Multi-factor authentication (MFA), also known as two-factor authentication (2FA), is an electronic authentication method in which a user is granted access to a website or application only after successfully presenting two or more distinct types of evidence (or factors) to an authentication mechanism. MFA protects personal data—which may include personal identification or financial assets—from being accessed by an unauthorized third party that may have been able to discover, for example, a single password. Usage of MFA has increased in recent years. Security issues which can cause the bypass of MFA are fatigue attacks, phishing and SIM swapping.' back

Nanda Jarosz (2026_04_15) , Searching for a ‘technofix’ to climate change has many dangers. Could radical humility save the planet?, Review: Brave New Wild: Can Technology Really Save the Planet? – Richard King (Monash University Publishing ' In 1989, environmentalist Bill McKibben announced to the world that nature was dead. Due to the rapid rate and scale of anthropogenic climate change, he argued, the idea of nature as an entity independent of human activity had become obsolete. [. . .]
King considers the moral, political, social and economic implications of a particular way of attempting to solve climate change, known as the “technofix”. This mindset looks for “a technological solution to tackle a social or environmental issue”. We are, King suggests, entering “a period in which mitigation and adaptation are giving way to re-engineering”. As the consequences of climate change become harder to ignore and the environmental and moral costs of inaction become too high, “radical interventions such as geoengineering and de-extinction are taking root in the imaginations of thought leaders and policymakers across the globe”. But solutions that come in the guise of technological progress may harbour dangers to the planet that we can’t fully fathom or control. [. . .]
Brave New Wild advocates an ethical sense of human agency. It offers an accessible point of departure for many ideas circulating in environmental philosophy.
But while it is true that human beings are part of nature and should treat it respectfully, it is also true that “nature” is not limited to human perception or ideas. Human beings employ reason and sensory perception to make sense of the world, but the universe itself is not rational or reasonable.
Despite advances in science and technology, nature exists beyond the powers of human comprehension, in both a material and conceptual sense. As much as scientists can engineer life, they do not know how life in the universe started or how it will end.
' back

PAM Dirac (1927a), , 'The new quantum theory, based on the assumption that the dynamical variables do not obey the commutative law of multiplication, has by now been developed sufficiently to form a fairly complete theory of dynamics. One can treat mathematically the problem of any dynamical system composed of a number of particles with instantaneous forces acting between them, provided it is describable by a Hamiltonian function, and one can interpret the mathematics physically by a quite definite general method.
On the other hand, hardly anything has been done up to the present on quantum electrodynamics. The questions of the correct treatment of a system in which the forces are propagated with the velocity of light instead of instantaneously, of the production of an electromagnetic field by a moving electron, and of the reaction of this field on the electron have not yet been touched. In addition, there is a serious difficulty in making the theory satisfy all the requirements of the restricted principle of relativity, since a Hamiltonian function can no longer be used.
This relativity question is, of course, connected with the previous ones, and it will be impossible to answer any one question completely without at the same time answering them all. However, it appears to be possible to build up a fairly satisfactory theory of the emission of radiation and of the reaction of the radiation field on the emitting system on the basis of a kinematics and dynamics which are not strictly relativistic. This is the main object of the present paper.' back

Peter Layton (2026_04_12), The new National Defence Strategy feels written for a bygone era – and ignores the elephant in the room, ' Sometimes new government strategies really aren’t newsworthy. The 2026 National Defence Strategy (NDS) is like that.
The biggest headline from the document is the additional defence spending of $53 billion over the next decade, which the government claims (with some accounting sleights of hand) will reach 3% of GDP.[. . .]
n terms of actual strategy, though, the main takeaway appears rather muted: there’s been “significant progress in implementing the 2024 National Defence Strategy”. That’s reassuring but surely that was the intent of that earlier document – to be implemented. In being a warmed-up version of the 2024 strategy, the 2026 document seems to ignore what’s happened since – and that’s been considerable. Over the last two years, there’s been a worsening war in Ukraine, an expanded conflict in the Middle East that has encompassed the entire region and sent shockwaves through the global economy, and many unpredictable American military adventures. [. . .]
The Australian NDS discusses the alliance in the pre-Trump language of shared strategic interests, with just a nod to the importance of “upholding Australian sovereignty and increasing our self-reliance”.
The 2026 NDS needed to explain where an unreliable and unruly America now fits into Australian defence thinking, or does not.' back

Qiu-Hong Hu (2005_12_29), The nature of the electron, ' Through investigating history, evolution of the concept, and development in the theories of electrons, I am convinced that what was missing in our understanding of the electron is a structure, into which all attributes of the electron could be incorporated in a self-consistent way. It is hereby postulated that the topological structure of the electron is a closed two-turn Helix (a so-called Hubius Helix) that is generated by circulatory motion of a mass-less particle at the speed of light. A formulation is presented to describe an isolated electron at rest and at high speed. It is shown that the formulation is capable of incorporating most (if not all) attributes of the electron, including spin, magnetic moment, fine structure constant, anomalous magnetic moment, and charge quantization into one concrete description of the Hubius Helix. The equations for the description emerge accordingly. Implications elicited by the postulate are elaborated. Inadequacy of the formulation is discussed.' back

Richard Behiel (2025_12_12), Bell's Theorem, a Glitch in Reality, ' In this video, we explore Bell's legendary 1964 paper in full technical detail, to explore the glitch in reality that he unveiled unto the world, which has been troubling physicists and philosophers ever since. This video is a sequel to my video on the EPR paper (just as Bell's 1964 paper is a sequel the 1935 EPR paper), so I recommend checking out that video first, unless you're already familiar with EPR. back

Salart, Baas, Branciard, Gisin & Zbinden (2008), Testing the speed of 'spooky action at a distance', ' Abstract Correlations are generally described by one of two mechanisms: either a first event influences a second one by sending information encoded in bosons or other physical carriers, or the correlated events have some common causes in their shared history. Quantum physics predicts an entirely different kind of cause for some correlations, named entanglement. This reveals itself in correlations that violate Bell inequalities (implying that they cannot be described by common causes) between space-like separated events (implying that they cannot be described by classical communication). Many Bell tests have been performed, and loopholes related to locality and detection have been closed in several independent experiments. It is still possible that a first event could influence a second, but the speed of this hypothetical influence (Einstein’s ‘spooky action at a distance’) would need to be defined in some universal privileged reference frame and be greater than the speed of light. Here we put stringent experimental bounds on the speed of all such hypothetical influences. We performed a Bell test over more than 24 hours between two villages separated by 18 km and approximately east–west oriented, with the source located precisely in the middle. We continuously observed two-photon interferences well above the Bell inequality threshold. Taking advantage of the Earth’s rotation, the configuration of our experiment allowed us to determine, for any hypothetically privileged frame, a lower bound for the speed of the influence. For example, if such a privileged reference frame exists and is such that the Earth’s speed in this frame is less than 10^-3 times that of the speed of light, then the speed of the influence would have to exceed that of light by at least four orders of magnitude.' back

Third law of thermodynamics - Wikipedia, Third law of thermodynamics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Nernst–Simon statement of the third law of thermodynamics concerns thermodynamic processes at a fixed, low temperature: The entropy change associated with any condensed system undergoing a reversible isothermal process approaches zero as the temperature at which it is performed approaches 0 K. Here a condensed system refers to liquids and solids.' back