Category: Natural Science
We’re excited that you’ve joined the conversation! At HMU, we want to continue the great authors’ conversations in a contemporary context, and this blog will help us do that. We look back to Aristotle and the early philosophers who used reason and discourse to gain wisdom and now we endeavor to do the same every day.
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May 1, 2026
Thanks to Chinyere Okoh, a 2026 Fellow in Ideas, for today’s blog.
Beyond the Silence
by Chinyere Okoh
I find myself alone in a still room,
where shadows seem to stretch and exhale with me.
The quiet carries a single, fragile question that lingers in the air:
Where am I?
The voice feels both distant and familiar,
as though it belongs to me and yet echoes from somewhere beyond. » Read more about: Rebuilding Connections: Book Review of Together by Vivek H. Murthy, MD »
March 20, 2026
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Last week, I introduced some of Martha Nussbaum’s thoughts from Justice for Animals. The idea of granting capabilities to animals is unique to Nussbaum. However, even she admits that it will be problematic to assign capabilities to species that are so completely other from us as to be unintelligible. Here, I insert the example of sharks,
» Read more about: What Lurks Below Melville’s Whale: The Shark Chapters Part III »
February 6, 2026
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
I don’t know if anyone reads Galen anymore. I certainly never encountered his works during my education. Yet it turns out that Galen wrote a lot. In fact, he was one of the most prolific of the ancient authors. He also touched on nearly every subject. Not only did he write about medicine, but he wrote about grammar, rhetoric,
December 5, 2025
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
David Macaulay’s book Crossing on Time discusses the way that life inevitably changes. In it, he illustrates the making of the SS United States, an ocean liner from the 1950s. He writes about how, in his own lifetime, we moved from ocean liners meant to cross the Atlantic in less than a week to airplanes meant to cross in a few hours.
April 4, 2025
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
As an entry point into the great idea of “Family,” Adler quotes Rousseau who claims that family is “the most ancient of all societies and the only one that is natural.” Adler then explains that by natural he means something to the effect of either “instinctive” or “necessary.” Rousseau continues that children stay with parents only as long as is necessary.
January 31, 2025
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Michael Faraday introduces Lecture 1 of the Chemical History of a Candle with a passionate discussion about the function of the cup of wax which builds at the bottom of a burning wick. This liquid wax pools to be used as fuel in burning. This cup wastes nothing since all gathered wax will be burned or will eventually cool for the next usage.
November 15, 2024
Thanks to HMU Tutor, Peter Ponzio, for today’s post.
Milton, in describing Satan’s fall in Book II of Paradise Lost, compares the fallen angel to a comet. The five-line description of Satan reads as follows:
“Satan stood/ Unterrifi’d and like a Comet burn’d, / That fires the length of Ophiucus huge/ In the Artick Sky, and from his horrid hair/ Shakes Pestilence and Warr…”
» Read more about: And Like a Comet Burn’d, /That fires the length of Ophiucus huge »
May 17, 2024
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s blog.
Metaphor was born from curiosity. From metaphor comes astonishing revelations. Such was the experience of this year’s April Quarterly Discussion. We discussed two short stories written by completely different authors, one by the contemporary science fiction and fantasy author Ted Chiang, and one by the Canadian Lucy Maud Montgomery.
Montgomery’s story “The Man on the Train,” first published in 1914,
February 16, 2024
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Every January, our Quarterly Discussion centers around Natural Science. Since I was recently reading Carlo Rovelli’s book Anaximander and the Birth of Science, I decided to focus this discussion on the rift between science and philosophy. This is a subject which Rovelli writes about extensively. Honestly, I don’t fully understand the discord, so I used this discussion to better comprehend the places where science and philosophy meet as well as the places which cause the most debate.
July 14, 2023
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Following our discussion series “What the Greeks Can Teach Us About AI,” I have become increasingly interested in understanding the uses and reasons for using artificial intelligence (AI). Throughout the series, participants repeated the notion that AI was simply a tool. While I believe this is true, I keep returning to the question: what is AI a tool for?