A legal conundrum

Apart from the substance of the issues involved, the two same-sex marriage cases argued before the US Supreme Court last week provided an interesting legal twist.

In the adversarial system that exists in the US, the two parties involved must have a direct vested interest in the issue in order to have ‘standing’ to argue their side. For example, if the public school system in the district that I live in decides to teach religious ideas in science classes, I cannot take them to court simply because I, as a concerned citizen, think it violates the constitution. But if my child is in one of the classes that is doing this, then I can claim that I, as the legal custodian of the child and responsible for her welfare, am experiencing direct harm and can sue to stop the practice. [Read more…]

Establishment Clause? What Establishment Clause?

In another sign of desperation at the increasing secularization of society that is resulting in religion being relegated to its proper sphere of the private domain, the legislature of North Carolina is proposing a bill that would allow the state to declare an official religion as well as “nullify any federal ruling against Christian prayer by public bodies statewide”. The bill reads in part: [Read more…]

The Higgs Story-Part 8: Gravity and the graviton

Although I will not be talking about the graviton much in this series, it is worthwhile to make a slight detour from the main story line to discuss the role of the gravity force. (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.)

I should point out that unlike with the other force fields, we have not as yet been able to find a way to ‘quantize’ the gravitational field, i.e., find a way to make its particle properties manifest, the way we have been able to do with the theories of the strong, electromagnetic, and weak forces. But despite this, we have been able to make great progress in understanding it. As this article points out, because we have the option of visualizing the behavior of fields using either a particle model or a wave model, we can choose which is the most convenient in any given context, and that has enabled us to overcome the lack of a quantized theory of gravity. [Read more…]

The Loving Story

Kate Sheppard wrote last year about Mildred and Richard Loving, the couple whose 1967 case before the US Supreme Court ended forever the restrictions on inter-racial marriage in the US.

Even as they changed America, the Lovings were never a household name. After getting married in Washington, DC, in June 1958, they simply returned to their home in Central Point, Virginia. Mildred was unaware, she said, of her state’s “Racial Integrity Act,” a 1924 law forbidding interracial marriage—although she later added that she thought her husband knew about it but didn’t figure they’d be persecuted. [Read more…]

If the obituaries of male scientists were like those of female scientists …

Yvonne Brill died recently. She was a highly respected rocket scientist who received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2011 from president Obama and was noteworthy enough to merit an obituary in the New York Times. Also noteworthy was the fact that the obituary also focused on her sterling qualities as a mother, wife, and cook, as if her ability to combine the mundane duties of everyday life with her scientific work was her main achievement. [Read more…]

Einstein’s views on religion

It is well known that Einstein spoke about god frequently, leading many believers to hope that he was religious in some way. This habit of his was a puzzle to his physics contemporaries who could not imagine that a scientist of his stature would be religious. They knew that he had no sympathy for the idea of a personal god and concluded that he was using the word god as a metaphor. [Read more…]