Intelligent Observers

An interesting concept in special relativity is the intelligent observer. An “intelligent” observer is one who takes account of the finite speed of light to reason from calculations as opposed to what she sees. A simple example illustrates the concept.

The Joy of Cycling, But Not Today

Yesterday I rode 71 miles, part of my training for a Sept. 15th century sponsored by the Richmond Area Bicycle Association. It went well, but it drained me.

This is my first summer on a road bike, and I’m just under 3,000 total miles. I’m your basic recreational cyclist–I bike for fitness, joy, and the challenge of it; I cover about 120 miles during an average week. I’m not fast enough to consider racing competitively, but I’ll admit I look at my speed (mediocre as it is) as the primary measure of my performance.

So today I’m on Plank Road just outside Farmville. This is my standard 20-mile out-and-back, with rolling hills and little traffic. This has been a fairly easy ride for me all summer, but not today. Today the road and the wind beat me to a pulp. I knew heading out that my tank was close to empty after yesterday, but this was demoralizing in the worst way. Back in Alabama we called it blowing up.

Anselm, Salvation, and What’s Wrong with Penal-Substitution.

Note: This is a re-posting, with some editing, of an article written for my first blog at Physica Theologica.

In reading through the Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, I came across an interesting discussion of Anselm’s concept of Christ’s death as satisfaction for human sin. Trevor Hart, in the essay “Redemption and fall,” writes

Most Western thinking about salvation is cut from a rather different cloth than that of the Christian East, although it draws on a tradition which is equally ancient . . . it received what is arguably its most sophisticated and certainly its most influential treatment in the Middle Ages at the hands of Anselm of Canterbury. His development of the notion of Christ’s death as a satisfaction for human sin fed directly into the mainstream of later (especially Protestant) discussions of atonement, although many of those who have ascribed to him credit for shaping their soteriological understanding have in reality underestimated their own creative contribution . . . It is not uncommon, for example, to find Anselm carelessly listed among advocates of the doctrine of penal substitution, a view which he not only did not hold, but went out of his way to avoid.

Heineken Draughtkeg

I’m not a big fan of Heineken, but their technophonic fembot commercial for the Draughtkeg is the coolest thing I have ever seen.

10 Things About the Big Bang You Might Not Know

Ten things about the Big Bang you might not know:

1. The Big Bang was not an explosion of matter in the ordinary sense of the term. Explosion entails a previously-existing empty space into which matter is flung in all directions. But the Big Bang theory asserts the creation of space itself. The concept of “location” has no meaning prior to the Big Bang, and we cannot identify a particular location in the universe where the Big Bang occurred. Since the Big Bang is the creation of the universe, the Big Bang occurred everywhere in the universe.

Eight Propositions on the Bible

Note: This post is inspired in part by Kim Fabricius’ excellent “Ten propositions” series at Faith and Theology.

1. The original text is probably lost forever. The NT, for example, exists in about 5700 Greek manuscripts (hand-written), exhibiting hundreds of thousands of variations. These variations are created by accidental copying errors and intentional scribal changes. But textual critics can reconstruct a very close approximation to the original text using careful methods developed over the last few hundred years. Ehrman discusses the textual history of the Bible in Misquoting Jesus, The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why.

Welcome

Welcome to Very Important Stuff, my home on the web. In this space I will periodically post very important stuff, which is to say I will post about whatever topics interest me. If they interest you too, that’s great! Comments are welcome, although I moderate the comments to keep things civil and on-point.

About me: I am a physics professor at Longwood University, Farmville, VA. I have a wife (Tammy), and two daughters (Sarah & Olivia). My hobbies include reading, bicycling, and computer programming. My family and I attend Farmville Baptist Church, a moderate Baptist church affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Politically, I am a centrist, registered with the Democratic Party.

My previous blog, Physica Theologica, is more or less dead. I’ve started this one to allow myself a broader range of topics, change the tone of my posts, and take advantage of the better features offered by WordPress.

Welcome to my blog!