For this purpose, I take 'traditional knowledge' to mean the body of knowledge, science and techniques used by rural people, and the term 'modern knowledge' to mean the body of knowledge, science and techniques arising essentially from the European scientific revolution of the 17th century.1 Traditional knowledge and modern knowledge are not at either end of a continuum of usefulness or scienti...

Cosmology is the dot com of the sciences. Boom or bust. It is about nothing less than the origin and evolution of the Universe, the all of everything. It is the boldest of enterprises and not for the fainthearted. Cosmologists are the flyboys of astrophysics, and they often live up to all that image conjures up. It is hardly surprising then that words written about cosmology are rarely balanced...

The paper deals with the problem of early modern scientific citations. It attempts to establish a measure of scientific popularity in a specific area of the academic medicine in a way which resembles a modern evaluation of scientific activity (citation index). For this purpose an analysis of a series of plague treatises written between 1480 and 17...

Arguments and evidence against the hot big bang model are summarized. The observations which point to an explosive cosmogony and the quasi-steady state cosmology are outlined. 1 The Historical Setting Modern cosmology began with the realization that there were solutions to Einstein’s theory of gravity discovered by Friedmann and Lemaitre which when combined with the redshift distance relation o...

Although quintessence cosmologies seem to explain the amount of cosmological constant today, the required conditions are severe. For example, an extremely slowly varying and light scalar field that rolls toward the vanishing vacuum energy state is needed, which must satisfy the required initial conditions so that the energy density in matter is comparable to the energy density stored in quintes...

studying the prominent iranian-islamic scientific texts of middle ages in the field of ophthalmology may play a role in recognizing the science of traditional ophthalmology and its crucial diagnostic and therapeutic points. the most important and reliable resources in the context of ophthalmology belong to iranian scientists. this study collects these references and provides their relative equi...

In this paper we show that any reasoning process in which conclusions can be both fallible and corrigible can be formalized in terms of two approaches: (i) syntactically, with the use of defeasible reasoning, according to which reasoning consists in the construction and assessment of arguments for and against a given claim, and (ii) semantically, with the use of partial structures, which allow ...

An ensemble of pure numbers of the order of 10 is produced naturally from the fundamental parameters of modern cosmology. This new large-number coincidence problem is resolved by demonstrating implicit physical connections that follow from the standard cosmological model. However, the occurrence of the new large-number coincidence combined with the known coincidence among pure numbers of the or...

There is given a list and discussion of what are arguably the top 20 unsolved problems in physics and astrophysics today. The list ranges from particle physics to cosmology. Possible resolutions are noted, but without judgement. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the discussed problems is that they are closely interrelated. This opens the prospect that a solution to one or a few may lead to ...

In the 15 years since Alan Guth’s famous paper[1] the idea of cosmic inflation has established itself as a central feature of modern cosmology. At this point the inflationary cosmologies are the only theories which can claim to explain the initial conditions of the Standard Big Bang Model, although people still debate the extent to which this claim is legitimate. One of the main difficulties cu...