Scientific Heresy

The Infinity Heresy

Of course, before an unending number of objections start pouring in to my bottomless email box, I need to clarify this brazen claim. After all, humans have been grappling with the concept of infinity for many millennia and mathematicians seem to have (at least in the last 150 years or so) finally tamed it. First, building on the work of Euler, Cauchy and Weierstrass, we now have the ability to ...

Panel: “Heresy, Inquisition, and the State”

Religious persecution of “heretics” by the Catholic Church that characterizes the middle ages had its roots in power struggles centuries prior. In the first centuries of Christianity, Christians fought amongst themselves for interpretive and doctrinal authority. Heterodoxy didn’t stand a chance in the Middle Ages; in Late Antiquity nothing was certain. Everything changed when, in 380, Emperor T...

On Mally’s Alleged Heresy: A Reply

In this paper, I respond to critics who claim that E. Mally’s distinction between two modes of predication, as it is employed in my theory of abstract objects, is reducible to, or analyzable in terms of, a single mode ofobjects, is reducible to, or analyzable in terms of, a single mode of predication plus the distinction between nuclear and extranuclear properties. I argue against these claims ...

Transmissible Proteins: Expanding the Prion Heresy

The once heretical concept that a misfolded protein is the infectious agent responsible for prion diseases is now widely accepted. Recent exciting research has led not only to the end of the skepticism that proteins can transmit disease, but also to expanding the concept that transmissible proteins might be at the root of some of the most prevalent human illnesses. At the same time, the idea th...

Dogma and heresy in quantum computing