How about juggling, riding a unicycle, and playing bongo? Or catching criminals or cracking safes?:
4.Claude Shannon, the Unicycling Juggler
If you use a cell phone, you are impacted by the work of Claude Shannon. (1916 – 2001). While working at Bell Labs in 1948, he published a paper that founded modern information theory. He was the first to use the term bit. He proved that digital transmission across a noisy channel could be accomplished with little to no error. Shannon also wrote what is possibly the most important master’s thesis in the 20th century. He showed that the switching networks used by Bell Telephone at the time could be analyzed and simplified using Boolean algebra. Shannon’s thesis work is taught even today to engineers and mathematicians.
But Shannon was also a juggler and was often seen around Bell Labs riding a unicycle while juggling. Shannon loved juggling. He even developed a juggling equation: (F+D)H=(V+D)N, where F = time a ball spends in the air, D = time a ball spends in a hand/time a hand is full, V = time a hand is vacant, N = number of balls, and H = number of hands:
Robert J. Marks: , “Five surprising facts re famous scientists we bet you never knew” at Mind Matters News
Many people would be very surprised by the things that matter most to many famous scientists. Hint: Many are not atheists.
As to this comment from the linked article,
Alvin Plantinga, who is not too impressed with Bertrand Russell’s overall work as a philosopher, tells this joke about Russell’s brief foray into solipsism,
As to Pierre-Simon Laplace, contrary to popular belief, LaPlace never uttered the words ‘I have no need for that hypothesis’, and even tried to prevent the ‘garbled’ version of events from ever being published,
In fact, Laplace cites with approval Leibniz’s criticism of Newton’s invocation of divine intervention to restore order to the Solar System: “This is to have very narrow ideas about the wisdom and the power of God.”,
In fact, the math for correcting perturbations in a stable solar system is very difficult to solve and, contrary to popular opinion, the problem of perturbations was not solved by Laplace,
In fact, I hold that Newton, Leibniz, and even Laplace, would all be very pleased by what modern science has now revealed about ‘the wisdom and power of God’ in keeping our solar system in a stable configuration free from perturbations:
As to this comment from the linked article in particular,
This oft repeated claim from atheists is 180 degrees from the truth.
Not only are science and Christianity NOT mutually exclusive, but modern science owes its very origins to Christian metaphysics which hold that the universe is contingent, not necessary, in its existence, and which also holds that the universe is rational, not random or chaotic, in its foundational basis. i.e. “the contingency and rationality of the cosmos are like two pillars supporting the Christian vision of the cosmos.”
In fact, the oft repeated claim from atheists that Christianity and science are mutually exclusive is false revisionist whig history at it worse. A false history that was “created for polemical purposes”
In fact, the only ‘war’ that there has ever been between science and religion has been the war that the religion of atheistic naturalism has with science.
As I have stated several times before, assuming ‘methodological naturalism’, instead of assuming Christian Theism, as one’s starting philosophical presupposition for ‘doing science’, then that leads to the catastrophic epistemological failure of science itself,
Although the Darwinian atheist, (or the atheist in general), may firmly believe he is on the terra firma of science, (in his appeal, even demand, for methodological naturalism), the fact of the matter is that Darwinian atheists are adrift in an ocean of fantasy and imagination with no discernible anchor for reality to grab on to:
It would be hard to fathom a worldview more antagonistic to modern science, indeed more antagonistic to reality itself, than Atheistic materialism and/or methodological naturalism have turned out to be.
Moreover, it is not as if the presuppositions of Intelligent Design, that are necessary for even ‘doing science’ in the first place, are off somewhere hiding in a corner.
Every nook and cranny of science is literally crammed to the gills with the presuppositions of Intelligent Design.,,, Science is certainly NOT based on the presuppositions of methodological naturalism and/or atheism.
From the essential Christian presuppositions that undergird the founding of modern science itself, (namely that the universe is contingent and rational in its foundational nature and that the minds of men, being made in the ‘image of God’, can, therefore, dare understand the rationality that God has imparted onto the universe), to the intelligent design of the scientific instruments and experiments themselves, to the logical and mathematical analysis of experimental results themselves, from top to bottom, science itself is certainly not to be considered a ‘natural’ endeavor of man.
Not one scientific instrument would ever exist if men did not first intelligently design that scientific instrument. Not one test tube, microscope, telescope, spectroscope, or etc.. etc.., was ever found just laying around on a beach somewhere which was ‘naturally’ constructed by nature. Not one experimental result would ever be rationally analyzed since there would be no immaterial minds to rationally analyze the immaterial logic and immaterial mathematics that lay behind the intelligently designed experiments in the first place.
Again, all of science, every nook and cranny of it, is based on the presupposition of intelligent design and is certainly not based on the presupposition of methodological naturalism.
Verse and Music: