Poetic Justice: Rereading Plato’s Republic

Poetic Justice: Louis Brandeis’s Epitaph

Louis said from the grave, If I am Remembered, don't make me a sham Of a nice Jewish boy, Or the life of a goy (Not to shul [1], Christmas tree [2], and ate ham [3]). False biography would be a flaw-Don't recount what would stick in my craw And thus bring me to grief. For my spiritual brief Was Democracy. Ideas. The law. (It is clear to me that there's a God. Justice comes from Him. But it's no...

Poetic justice or petty jealousy? The aesthetics of revenge

The growing body of research on workplace revenge has focused on morality-based principles (e.g., organizational justice) that people use to judge acts of revenge. By contrast, in the present research, we report findings from two studies that focus on aesthetics-based principles (e.g., the ‘‘beauty’’ of executing the act of revenge) that people use to judge acts of revenge. In Study 1, a qualit...

Poetic (In)Justice? Rap Music Lyrics as Art, Life, and Criminal Evidence

Rereading Ludwig Boltzmann

Ludwig Boltzmann is one of the first physicists who brought probability and statistical considerations into physics. Particularly famous is his statistical explanation of the second law of thermodynamics. However, Boltzmann’s ideas on the relationship between the thermodynamical properties of macroscopic bodies and their microscopic mechanical constitution, and the role of probability in this r...

Rereading Einstein on Radiation

Albert Einstein tinha um talento genial para extrair teoria revolucionária de simples considerações: do postulado de uma velocidade universal, ele criou a relatividade especial; do prinćıpio da equivalência, ele criou a relatividade geral; de argumentos elementares baseados em estat́ıstica, ele descobriu os quanta de energia. Seu artigo de 1905 sobre a quantização do campo de radiação (frequente...