Mahatma Gandhi
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was an Indian activist, the leader of the Indian independence movement against British colonial rule. Employing nonviolent civil disobedience, Gandhi led India to independence and inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world; the honorific Mahātmā was applied to him first in 1914 in South Africa – is now used worldwide. In India, he was called Bapu, a term that he preferred and Gandhi ji, is known as the Father of the Nation. Born and raised in a Hindu merchant caste family in coastal Gujarat and trained in law at the Inner Temple, Gandhi first employed nonviolent civil disobedience as an expatriate lawyer in South Africa, in the resident Indian community's struggle for civil rights. After his return to India in 1915, he set about organising peasants and urban labourers to protest against excessive land-tax and discrimination. Assuming leadership of the Indian National Congress in 1921, Gandhi led nationwide campaigns for various social causes and for achieving Swaraj or self-rule.
Gandhi led Indians in challenging the British-imposed salt tax with the 400 km Dandi Salt March in 1930, in calling for the British to Quit India in 1942. He was imprisoned upon many occasions, in both South Africa and India, he lived modestly in a self-sufficient residential community and wore the traditional Indian dhoti and shawl, woven with yarn hand-spun on a charkha. He ate simple vegetarian food, undertook long fasts as a means of both self-purification and political protest. Gandhi's vision of an independent India based on religious pluralism was challenged in the early 1940s by a new Muslim nationalism, demanding a separate Muslim homeland carved out of India. In August 1947, Britain granted independence, but the British Indian Empire was partitioned into two dominions, a Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan; as many displaced Hindus and Sikhs made their way to their new lands, religious violence broke out in the Punjab and Bengal. Eschewing the official celebration of independence in Delhi, Gandhi visited the affected areas, attempting to provide solace.
In the months following, he undertook several fasts unto death to stop religious violence. The last of these, undertaken on 12 January 1948 when he was 78 had the indirect goal of pressuring India to pay out some cash assets owed to Pakistan; some Indians thought. Among them was Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist, who assassinated Gandhi on 30 January 1948 by firing three bullets into his chest. Captured along with many of his co-conspirators and collaborators and his co-conspirator Narayan Apte were tried and executed while many of their other accomplices were given prison sentences. Gandhi's birthday, 2 October, is commemorated in India as Gandhi Jayanti, a national holiday, worldwide as the International Day of Nonviolence. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869 into a Gujarati Hindu Modh Baniya family in Porbandar, a coastal town on the Kathiawar Peninsula and part of the small princely state of Porbandar in the Kathiawar Agency of the Indian Empire, his father, Karamchand Uttamchand Gandhi, served as the diwan of Porbandar state.
Although he only had an elementary education and had been a clerk in the state administration, Karamchand proved a capable chief minister. During his tenure, Karamchand married four times, his first two wives died young, after each had given birth to a daughter, his third marriage was childless. In 1857, Karamchand sought his third wife's permission to remarry. Karamchand and Putlibai had three children over the ensuing decade: Laxmidas. On 2 October 1869, Putlibai gave birth to her last child, Mohandas, in a dark, windowless ground-floor room of the Gandhi family residence in Porbandar city; as a child, Gandhi was described by his sister Raliat as "restless as mercury, either playing or roaming about. One of his favourite pastimes was twisting dogs' ears." The Indian classics the stories of Shravana and king Harishchandra, had a great impact on Gandhi in his childhood. In his autobiography, he admits, he writes: "It haunted me and I must have acted Harishchandra to myself times without number."
Gandhi's early self-identification with truth and love as supreme values is traceable to these epic characters. The family's religious background was eclectic. Gandhi's father Karamchand was Hindu and his mother Putlibai was from a Pranami Vaishnava Hindu family. Gandhi's father was of Modh Baniya caste in the varna of Vaishya, his mother came from the medieval Krishna bhakti-based Pranami tradition, whose religious texts include the Bhagavad Gita, the Bhagavata Purana, a collection of 14 texts with teachings that the tradition believes to include the essence of the Vedas, the Quran and the Bible. Gandhi was influenced by his mother, an pious lady who "would not think of taking her meals without her daily prayers...she would take the hardest vows and keep them without flinching. To keep two or three consecutive fasts was nothing to her."In 1874, Gandhi's father Karamchand left Porbandar for the smaller state of Rajkot, where he became a counsellor to its ruler, the Thakur Sahib.
Werner Heisenberg
Werner Karl Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist and one of the key pioneers of quantum mechanics. He published his work in 1925 in a breakthrough paper. In the subsequent series of papers with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, during the same year, this matrix formulation of quantum mechanics was elaborated, he is known for the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which he published in 1927. Heisenberg was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the creation of quantum mechanics", he made important contributions to the theories of the hydrodynamics of turbulent flows, the atomic nucleus, cosmic rays, subatomic particles, he was instrumental in planning the first West German nuclear reactor at Karlsruhe, together with a research reactor in Munich, in 1957. He was a principal scientist in the Nazi German nuclear weapon project during World War II, he travelled to occupied Copenhagen where he discussed the German project with Niels Bohr. Following World War II, he was appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, which soon thereafter was renamed the Max Planck Institute for Physics.
He was director of the institute until it was moved to Munich in 1958, when it was expanded and renamed the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics. Heisenberg was president of the German Research Council, chairman of the Commission for Atomic Physics, chairman of the Nuclear Physics Working Group, president of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Werner Karl Heisenberg was born in Würzburg, Germany, to Kaspar Ernst August Heisenberg, a secondary school teacher of classical languages who became Germany's only ordentlicher Professor of medieval and modern Greek studies in the university system, his wife, Annie Wecklein, he studied physics and mathematics from 1920 to 1923 at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Georg-August University of Göttingen. At Munich, he studied under Wilhelm Wien. At Göttingen, he studied physics with James Franck and mathematics with David Hilbert, he received his doctorate at Munich under Sommerfeld. At Göttingen, under Born, he completed his habilitation in 1924 with a Habilitationsschrift on the anomalous Zeeman effect.
Because Sommerfeld had a sincere interest in his students and knew of Heisenberg's interest in Niels Bohr's theories on atomic physics, Sommerfeld took Heisenberg to Göttingen to attend the Bohr Festival of June 1922. At the event, Bohr was a guest lecturer and gave a series of comprehensive lectures on quantum atomic physics. There, Heisenberg met Bohr for the first time, it had a significant and continuing effect on him. Heisenberg's doctoral thesis, the topic of, suggested by Sommerfeld, was on turbulence; the problem of stability was investigated by the use of the Orr–Sommerfeld equation, a fourth order linear differential equation for small disturbances from laminar flow. He returned to this topic after World War II. In his youth he was a member and Scoutleader of the Neupfadfinder, a German Scout association and part of the German Youth Movement. In August 1923 Robert Honsell and Heisenberg organized a trip to Finland with a Scout group of this association from Munich. Heisenberg arrived at Munich in 1919 as a member of the Freikorps to fight the Bavarian Soviet Republic established a year earlier.
Five decades he recalled those days as youthful fun, like "playing cops and robbers and so on. From 1924 to 1927, Heisenberg was a Privatdozent at Göttingen, meaning he was qualified to teach and examine independently, without having a chair. From 17 September 1924 to 1 May 1925, under an International Education Board Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, Heisenberg went to do research with Niels Bohr, director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen, his seminal paper, "Über quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen", was published in September 1925. He returned to Göttingen and, with Max Born and Pascual Jordan over a period of about six months, developed the matrix mechanics formulation of quantum mechanics. On 1 May 1926, Heisenberg began his appointment as a university lecturer and assistant to Bohr in Copenhagen, it was in Copenhagen, in 1927, that Heisenberg developed his uncertainty principle, while working on the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics.
On 23 February, Heisenberg wrote a letter to fellow physicist Wolfgang Pauli, in which he first described his new principle. In his paper on the principle, Heisenberg used the word "Ungenauigkeit", not uncertainty, to describe it. In 1927, Heisenberg was appointed ordentlicher Professor of theoretical physics and head of the department of physics at the University of Leipzig. In his first paper published from Leipzig, Heisenberg used the Pauli exclusion principle to solve the mystery of ferromagnetism. During Heisenberg's tenure at Leipzig, the high quality of the doctoral students and post-graduate and research associates who studied and worked with him is clear from the acclaim many earned. At various times they included Erich Bagge, Felix Bloch, Ugo Fano, Siegfried Flügge, William Vermillion Houston, Friedrich Hund, Robert S. Mulliken, Rudolf Peierls, George Placzek, Isidor Isaac Rabi, Fritz Sauter, John C. Slater, Edward Teller, John Hasbrouck van Vleck, Victor Frederick Weisskopf, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Gregor Wentzel, Clarence Zener.
In early
Government of the United Kingdom
The Government of the United Kingdom, formally referred to as Her Majesty's Government, is the central government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It is commonly referred to as the UK Government or the British Government; the government is led by the Prime Minister. The prime minister and the other most senior ministers belong to the supreme decision-making committee, known as the Cabinet; the government ministers all sit in Parliament, are accountable to it. The government is dependent on Parliament to make primary legislation, since the Fixed-terms Parliaments Act 2011, general elections are held every five years to elect a new House of Commons, unless there is a successful vote of no confidence in the government or a two-thirds vote for a snap election in the House of Commons, in which case an election may be held sooner. After an election, the monarch selects as prime minister the leader of the party most to command the confidence of the House of Commons by possessing a majority of MPs.
Under the uncodified British constitution, executive authority lies with the monarch, although this authority is exercised only by, or on the advice of, the prime minister and the cabinet. The Cabinet members advise the monarch as members of the Privy Council. In most cases they exercise power directly as leaders of the Government Departments, though some Cabinet positions are sinecures to a greater or lesser degree; the current prime minister is Theresa May, who took office on 13 July 2016. She is the leader of the Conservative Party, which won a majority of seats in the House of Commons in the general election on 7 May 2015, when David Cameron was the party leader. Prior to this and the Conservatives led a coalition from 2010 to 2015 with the Liberal Democrats, in which Cameron was prime minister; the Government is referred to with the metonym Westminster, due to that being where many of the offices of the government are situated by members in the Government of Scotland, the Welsh Government and the Northern Ireland Executive in order to differentiate it from their own.
A key principle of the British Constitution is. This is called responsible government; the United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy in which the reigning monarch does not make any open political decisions. All political decisions are taken by Parliament; this constitutional state of affairs is the result of a long history of constraining and reducing the political power of the monarch, beginning with Magna Carta in 1215. Parliament is split into the House of Commons; the House of Commons is the more powerful. The House of Lords is the upper house and although it can vote to amend proposed laws, the House of Commons can vote to overrule its amendments. Although the House of Lords can introduce bills, most important laws are introduced in the House of Commons – and most of those are introduced by the government, which schedules the vast majority of parliamentary time in the Commons. Parliamentary time is essential for bills to be passed into law, because they must pass through a number of readings before becoming law.
Prior to introducing a bill, the government may run a public consultation to solicit feedback from the public and businesses, may have introduced and discussed the policy in the Queen's Speech, or in an election manifesto or party platform. Ministers of the Crown are responsible to the House. For most senior ministers this is the elected House of Commons rather than the House of Lords. There have been some recent exceptions to this: for example, cabinet ministers Lord Mandelson and Lord Adonis sat in the Lords and were responsible to that House during the government of Gordon Brown. Since the start of Edward VII's reign in 1901, the prime minister has always been an elected member of Parliament and therefore directly accountable to the House of Commons. A similar convention applies to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, it would be politically unacceptable for the budget speech to be given in the Lords, with MPs unable to directly question the Chancellor now that the Lords have limited powers in relation to money bills.
The last Chancellor of the Exchequer to be a member of the House of Lords was Lord Denman, who served as interim Chancellor of the Exchequer for one month in 1834. Under the British system, the government is required by convention and for practical reasons to maintain the confidence of the House of Commons, it requires the support of the House of Commons for the maintenance of supply and to pass primary legislation. By convention, if a government loses the confidence of the House of Commons it must either resign or a General Election is held; the support of the Lords, while useful to the government in getting its legislation passed without delay, is not vital. A government is not required to resign if it loses the confidence of the Lords and is defeated in key votes in that House; the House of Commons is thus the Responsible house. The prime minister is held to account during Prime Minister's Questions which provides an opportunity for MPs from all parties to question the PM on any subject
A Guide for the Perplexed
A Guide for the Perplexed is a short book by E. F. Schumacher, published in 1977; the title is a reference to Maimonides's The Guide for the Perplexed. Schumacher himself considered A Guide for the Perplexed to be his most important achievement, although he was better known for his 1973 environmental economics bestseller Small Is Beautiful, which made him a leading figure within the ecology movement, his daughter wrote that her father handed her the book on his deathbed, five days before he died and he told her "this is what my life has been leading to". As the Chicago Tribune wrote, "A Guide for the Perplexed is a statement of the philosophical underpinnings that inform Small is Beautiful". Schumacher describes his book as being concerned with, it is a treatise on the nature and organisation of knowledge and is something of an attack on what Schumacher calls "materialistic scientism". Schumacher argues that the current philosophical "maps" that dominate western thought and science are both overly narrow and based on some false premises.
However, this book is only in small part a critique. Schumacher put forward what he considers to be the four great truths of philosophical map making: The world is a hierarchical structure with at least four "levels of being"; the "Principle of Adequateness" determines human ability to perceive the world. Human learning relates to four "fields of knowledge"; the art of living requires an understanding of two types of problem: "convergent" and "divergent". Schumacher was much in favor of the scientific spirit, but felt that the dominant methodology within science, which he called materialistic scientism, was flawed and stood in the way of achieving knowledge in any other arena than inanimate nature. Schumacher believed that this flaw originated in the writings of Descartes and Francis Bacon, when modern science was first established, he makes a distinction between the instructional sciences. According to Schumacher the descriptive sciences are concerned with what can be seen or otherwise experienced, e.g. botany and sociology, while the instructional sciences are concerned with how certain systems work and can be manipulated to produce certain results, e.g. biology and chemistry.
Instructional science is based on evidence gained from experimentation. Materialistic scientism is based on the methodology of the instructional sciences, which developed to study and experiment with inanimate matter. According to Schumacher many philosophers of science fail to recognize the difference between descriptive and instructional science, or ascribe this difference to stages in the evolution of a specific science, which for these philosophers means that the instructional sciences are seen as being the most advanced variety of science, he is offended by the view that instructional science is the most advanced form of science, because for Schumacher, it is the study of the low hanging fruit of inanimate matter, or less metaphorically the study of the lowest and least complex level of being. As Schumacher sees it, knowledge gained about the higher levels of being, while far harder to get and far less certain, is all the more valuable, he argues that applying the standards and procedures of instructional science to descriptive sciences is erroneous, because in the descriptive fields it is not possible to use the experimental techniques of instructional sciences.
Experimentation is a effective methodology when dealing with inanimate matter, but applying it to the living world is liable to destroy or damage living things and systems, is therefore inappropriate. He uses the term scientism because he argues that many people, including some philosophers of science, have misunderstood the theory behind instructional science and believe that it produces truth, but the instructional sciences are based on induction. Furthermore, according to Schumacher, instructional sciences are concerned only with the parts of truth that are useful for manipulation, i.e. they focus on those instructions which are necessary to reliably produce certain results. But this does not mean that an alternative instruction set won't work, or indeed an alternative instruction set based on quite different principles. For Schumacher, instructional sciences therefore produce theories which are useful: pragmatic truths. By contrast, Schumacher argues that the descriptive sciences are interested in the truth in the wider sense of the word.
He argues. The maps of western science fail to show large'unorthodox' parts of both theory and practice of science and social science, reveal a complete disregard for art and many other high level humanistic qualities; such an approach, Schumacher argues, provides a grey, utilitarian worldview without room for vitally important phenomena like beauty and meaning. He observes that the mere mention of spirituality and spiritual phenomena in academic discussion is seen as a sign of'mental deficiency' among scientists. Schumacher argues that where there is near total agreement a subject becomes dead. Schumacher believes in contrast to materialistic science that what is in doubt should be shown prominently, not hidden away or ignored, his biggest complaint against materialistic scientism is that it rejects the validity of certain questions, which for Schumacher are the most important questions of all. Materialistic scientism rejects the idea of levels of being, but for Schumacher this leads to a one-sided view of nature.
For Schumacher, you can learn much
Columbia University
Columbia University is a private Ivy League research university in Upper Manhattan, New York City. Established in 1754, Columbia is the oldest institution of higher education in New York and the fifth-oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, it is one of nine colonial colleges founded prior to the Declaration of Independence, seven of which belong to the Ivy League. It has been ranked by numerous major education publications as among the top ten universities in the world. Columbia was established as King's College by royal charter of George II of Great Britain in reaction to the founding of Princeton University in New Jersey, it was renamed Columbia College in 1784 following the Revolutionary War and in 1787 was placed under a private board of trustees headed by former students Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. In 1896, the campus was moved from Madison Avenue to its current location in Morningside Heights and renamed Columbia University. Columbia scientists and scholars have played an important role in the development of notable scientific fields and breakthroughs including: brain-computer interface.
The Columbia University Physics Department has been affiliated with 33 Nobel Prize winners as alumni, faculty or research staff, the third most of any American institution behind MIT and Harvard. In addition, 22 Nobel Prize winners in Physiology and Medicine have been affiliated with Columbia, the third most of any American institution; the university's research efforts include the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Goddard Institute for Space Studies and accelerator laboratories with major technology firms such as IBM. Columbia is one of the fourteen founding members of the Association of American Universities and was the first school in the United States to grant the M. D. degree. The university administers the Pulitzer Prize annually. Columbia is organized into twenty schools, including three undergraduate schools and numerous graduate schools, it maintains research centers outside of the United States known as Columbia Global Centers. In 2018, Columbia's undergraduate acceptance rate was 5.1%, making it one of the most selective colleges in the United States, the second most selective in the Ivy League after Harvard.
Columbia is ranked as the 3rd best university in the United States by U. S. News & World Report behind Princeton and Harvard. In athletics, the Lions field varsity teams in 29 sports as a member of the NCAA Division I Ivy League conference; the university's endowment stood at $10.9 billion in 2018, among the largest of any academic institution. As of 2018, Columbia's alumni and affiliates include: five Founding Fathers of the United States — among them an author of the United States Constitution and co-author of the Declaration of Independence. S. presidents. Discussions regarding the founding of a college in the Province of New York began as early as 1704, at which time Colonel Lewis Morris wrote to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the missionary arm of the Church of England, persuading the society that New York City was an ideal community in which to establish a college. However, it was not until the founding of the College of New Jersey across the Hudson River in New Jersey that the City of New York considered founding a college.
In 1746, an act was passed by the general assembly of New York to raise funds for the foundation of a new college. In 1751, the assembly appointed a commission of ten New York residents, seven of whom were members of the Church of England, to direct the funds accrued by the state lottery towards the foundation of a college. Classes were held in July 1754 and were presided over by the college's first president, Dr. Samuel Johnson. Dr. Johnson was the only instructor of the college's first class, which consisted of a mere eight students. Instruction was held in a new schoolhouse adjoining Trinity Church, located on what is now lower Broadway in Manhattan; the college was founded on October 31, 1754, as King's College by royal charter of King George II, making it the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York and the fifth oldest in the United States. In 1763, Dr. Johnson was succeeded in the presidency by Myles Cooper, a graduate of The Queen's College, an ardent Tory. In the charged political climate of the American Revolution, his chief opponent in discussions at the college was an undergraduate of the class of 1777, Alexander Hamilton.
The American Revolutionary War broke out in 1776, was catastrophic for the operation of King's College, which suspended instruction for eight years beginning in 1776 with the arrival of the Continental Army. The suspension continued through the military occupation of New York City by British troops until their departure in 1783; the college's library was looted and its sole building requisitioned for use as a military hospital first by American and British forces. Loyalists were forced to abandon their King's College in New York, seized by the rebels and renamed Columbia College; the Loyalists, led by Bishop Charles Inglis fled to Windsor, Nova Scotia, where the
Knowledge
Knowledge is a familiarity, awareness, or understanding of someone or something, such as facts, descriptions, or skills, acquired through experience or education by perceiving, discovering, or learning. Knowledge can refer to a practical understanding of a subject, it can be explicit. In philosophy, the study of knowledge is called epistemology. However, several definitions of knowledge and theories to explain it exist. Knowledge acquisition involves complex cognitive processes: perception and reasoning; the eventual demarcation of philosophy from science was made possible by the notion that philosophy's core was "theory of knowledge," a theory distinct from the sciences because it was their foundation... Without this idea of a "theory of knowledge," it is hard to imagine what "philosophy" could have been in the age of modern science; the definition of knowledge is a matter of ongoing debate among philosophers in the field of epistemology. The classical definition, described but not endorsed by Plato, specifies that a statement must meet three criteria in order to be considered knowledge: it must be justified and believed.
Some claim that these conditions are not sufficient, as Gettier case examples demonstrate. There are a number of alternatives proposed, including Robert Nozick's arguments for a requirement that knowledge'tracks the truth' and Simon Blackburn's additional requirement that we do not want to say that those who meet any of these conditions'through a defect, flaw, or failure' have knowledge. Richard Kirkham suggests that our definition of knowledge requires that the evidence for the belief necessitates its truth. In contrast to this approach, Ludwig Wittgenstein observed, following Moore's paradox, that one can say "He believes it, but it isn't so," but not "He knows it, but it isn't so." He goes on to argue that these do not correspond to distinct mental states, but rather to distinct ways of talking about conviction. What is different here is not the mental state of the speaker, but the activity in which they are engaged. For example, on this account, to know that the kettle is boiling is not to be in a particular state of mind, but to perform a particular task with the statement that the kettle is boiling.
Wittgenstein sought to bypass the difficulty of definition by looking to the way "knowledge" is used in natural languages. He saw knowledge as a case of a family resemblance. Following this idea, "knowledge" has been reconstructed as a cluster concept that points out relevant features but, not adequately captured by any definition. Symbolic representations can be thought of as a dynamic process. Hence the transfer of the symbolic representation can be viewed as one ascription process whereby knowledge can be transferred. Other forms of communication include observation and imitation, verbal exchange, audio and video recordings. Philosophers of language and semioticians construct and analyze theories of knowledge transfer or communication. While many would agree that one of the most universal and significant tools for the transfer of knowledge is writing and reading, argument over the usefulness of the written word exists nonetheless, with some scholars skeptical of its impact on societies. In his collection of essays Technopoly, Neil Postman demonstrates the argument against the use of writing through an excerpt from Plato's work Phaedrus.
In this excerpt, the scholar Socrates recounts the story of Thamus, the Egyptian king and Theuth the inventor of the written word. In this story, Theuth presents his new invention "writing" to King Thamus, telling Thamus that his new invention "will improve both the wisdom and memory of the Egyptians". King Thamus is skeptical of this new invention and rejects it as a tool of recollection rather than retained knowledge, he argues that the written word will infect the Egyptian people with fake knowledge as they will be able to attain facts and stories from an external source and will no longer be forced to mentally retain large quantities of knowledge themselves. Classical early modern theories of knowledge those advancing the influential empiricism of the philosopher John Locke, were based implicitly or explicitly on a model of the mind which likened ideas to words; this analogy between language and thought laid the foundation for a graphic conception of knowledge in which the mind was treated as a table, a container of content, that had to be stocked with facts reduced to letters, numbers or symbols.
This created a situation in which the spatial alignment of words on the page carried great cognitive weight, so much so that educators paid close attention to the visual structure of information on the page and in notebooks. Major libraries today can have millions of books of knowledge, it is only that audio and video technology for recording knowledge have become available and the use of these still requires replay equipment and electricity. Verbal teaching and handing down of knowledge is limited to those who would have contact with the transmitter or someone who could interpret wr
