Subject: [AthofSV] Physicist at Stanford

From: "earthboundje" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2005 09:10:18 -0000

I've let Stanford's group know about this, but I thought ASV members 
might help me look into it as well.  It's a 10-week class and it 
costs $355+ to take the course, but often one can generally check a 
class out without registering (and I doubt I will be around to do 
so).  Look at the class description below... it's a physicist having 
a hard time with the "uncannily well designed" universe.  I'm sure he 
will stick to math and science and then pull sort of a Einstein or 
Carl Sagan bit of "wonder" out of the bag, but it's pretty blatantly 
a man being tripped up on the notion of "Intelligent Design", and the 
context raises a big red flag for me.  What baffles me is that 
Stanford would see fit to include this in their Continuing Studies 
phsyics department at a time when a conspiracy of utter morons are 
trying to turn the fraudulent non-science of ID into a national 
academic policy.  Perhaps Condoleezza had something to do with it.

- je

http://continuingstudies.stanford.edu/course/PHY22.asp

Modern Theoretical Physics: The Cosmic Landscape (PHY 22)
This course will deal with big questions about the origin of the 
universe and the origin of the laws that govern it. In a recent 
scientific article, "The Anthropic Landscape of String Theory," I 
called attention to an emerging concept I christened "The Landscape." 
The paper stirred up a big fuss in the physics and cosmology 
communities, and raises a question that has profound cultural and 
political repercussions: can science explain the extraordinary fact 
that the universe appears to be uncannily well designed for our own 
existence? Why is it that the universe has all the appearances of 
having been designed just so life forms like us can exist? Recent 
discoveries in astronomy, cosmology, and, above all, string theory, 
have provided evidence for a strangerthan- fiction explanation of 
the "Illusion of Intelligent Design," that depends only on the 
principles of physics, mathematics, and the laws of large numbers. 
This is what my book The Cosmic Landscape is about, and it is the 
focus of this Fall's course.

Leonard Susskind
Felix Bloch Professor in Physics
Leonard Susskind has a PhD from Cornell University and has been a 
professor at Stanford since 1979. He has won both the Pregel Award 
from the New York Academy of Science in 1975 and the J.J. Sakurai 
Prize in theoretical particle physics in 1997. His current research 
interests include the structure of hadrons, instantons, quark 
confinement, and quantum cosmology. He is a member of the National 
Academy of Sciences.

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