Tim asks, Do you believe in the theory of gravity?

Absolutely not. Its just another case of scientist making up crazy theories.

Henry asks, What would happen if I shot a gun in space?

Depends if you have a license to carry a concealed weapon in space and whether or not you hit someone. I imagine you would end up in jail or possibly a large fee.

Jeff asks, I just read that scientists actually came within one ten millionith of a degree from reaching Absolute Zero, back in 2000 bu have not been able to get any closer. How much would that suck to be those scientists? Sooo close, but no cigar.

LOL. I hadn’t thought of it that way, I bet they went home and cried. Then they tried make ice cream but only got cream and then they tried to build a tree fort but only got a back porch. Ehhh… well that’s all I got. This was fun.

James asks, Why is there light on earth from the sun, but yet in space, it is black?

In order to see something light has to reflect off it, black is total absorption (i.e. no reflection), so when nothing reflects it looks black like space.

Eric asks, What is the fifth dimension?

Its the one right past the fourth but before the sixth. You can’t miss it.

Jared asks, What is the most destructive weapon in the world, which does not use nuclear power? (Real weapons, not metaphors like “Hate”)

I would say non-nuclear missiles, or maybe biological stuff. Things that burn, or melt you are pretty powerful. I would rather be vaporized by a nuclear weapon than die slowly from fire or some crazy disease that makes your eyes fall out. Greed is pretty powerful too.

Liam asks, Which law of physics best describes you?

I would say conservation of Mass. I eat a lot but don’t seem to get fat.

Stephen asks, Are you a “Dark Matter Theory” or “Modified Newtonian Physics” kind of person? Do you create something invisible to explain the world or just change the rules?

We here at OW are rule changers. We see the status quo and then do awesome things that force the world to change. We’re different, trend setters if you will. The cool kids that are smart, and incredibly sexy. So yeah, ladies, let us know, most of us are single.

Shawn asks, What do you know about the theory of everything?

Nothing.

Nicole asks, Who knows the equasion for gravity

I bet Newton and anyone who has taken an intro physics class.

Dawn asks, What is the benefit of studies if we are not going to imbibe in our daily life?

Imbibe? Is that a word? I think it means drink, are we going drink our studies? I’m not sure that’s a good idea, don’t most schools have a problem with imbibing?

Phil asks, The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest atom smasher, started up this month. Scientists predict collisions of sub-atomic particles produced by the LHC. Is anyone worried about ‘black holes?’

Lord knows I am. As we all know scientists are the agents of Satan and this device is a gate for Satan. So forget black holes, I’m worried about Satan.

Joe asks, What is another name for a circular particle accelerator?

What? I don’t know. A round particle accelerator?

10. Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau acted as a romantic counter-weight to the often convoluted nature of Kantian enlightenment. His political and social theories influenced not only his own generation but much of the 20th century French social theory. Here we had a man who was not afraid to be other than what it was to be a human being. Here we had a man who would even privilege the life of animals and “prior-man” in his “Discourse on Inequality” where he traces the genealogy of man solely to the nexus of private property, where man sees other men building huts from the sediments and eventually asks himself “Why can’t I have one of those?”, or “I wonder if I can use the structure that he has made.”. In his famous political treatise “The Social Contract”, Rousseau states his more enduring maxim; “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains” referring to his own political situation and reflection on instituted law. It is there where we have one of the more strong insistences on human freedom in distinction to the competition that makes man dependent on other men. Rousseau serves as a sign of the individual in the face of a possible myth created by those wealthier that there is a certain defined social hierarchy. While government must implement its laws as long as we are human beings in need of security, we as human beings must recognize that this counter-influence to the “state of nature” may not be the whole truth to our whole happiness.

9. David Hume

David Hume is the primer empiricist and skeptical philosopher of the 18th century. A simple and often jolly man, no one would have thought that his ideas would serve as the benchmark for skeptical thought centuries after. His influence not only traversed the myriad of 20th century social Darwinists, but also the counter-influence of German enlightenment, especially Kant. What Hume advocated was nothing other than philosophical destruction. By negating the fact that we can know anything about the external world, we were led to believe that our scientific audacity was nothing other than exaggerated hubris. All we have for Hume are recognized patterns from external phenomena. That something should happen twice, there is no necessity for this in the external world. That we should form mental patterns from the external world, this is simply limited to itself, in other words, we should be quite foolish to think our mental patterns can tell us anything about the world “in itself”. All we can understand is our own subjective experience of the world. We can’t know total truths, we can state aggrandized maxims, and we can only know what we experience. With this fact in mind, Hume stands as the “Bulldozer of Metaphysics”, as the ever-consummate challenger to the value of abstract thought.

8. Friedrich Hegel

After Kant had rescued abstract philosophical thought from Hume, Hegel took it upon himself to describe the entire existence of the totality of the world in his magnum opus appropriately titled “The Phenomenology of Spirit”. The task was so big, some say it drove him to madness. Carl Jung has been quoted as saying that “If Hegel lived in the 20th century, he would have been diagnosed with a mania”. 20th century pedestrian psychological thinking aside, Hegel would prove to be the foremost thinker in romantic philosophy for his large leaps of logic that covered all that could be known in the human world. In the “Phenomenology of Spirit”, Hegel traces the human being from his purely conscious state to his self-conscious state and then his fall back into non-consciousness. This would be referred to later as the Hegelian Dialectic. For Hegel, with the recent accomplishments of enlightenment reason and science, we have become self-aware of ourselves in a grandiose historical narrative, where we realize we had a large past and possible future where we no longer recognized ourselves like we do now. We see ourselves in a time with ancestors before us. For Hegel, because we see ourselves, there is no more left for the human-being to accomplish, making the goal of human existence the realization of the self. Francis Fukuyama would echo this sentiment in his book “The End of History and The Last Man”, where he foresees democracy and world-wide communication ending history as we know it, because we have fulfilled what we have needed to fulfill. Hegel swayed by the trust in reason of the enlightenment created the greatest and most sweeping of systematic philosophies, one that wanted to exemplify everything in one text.

7. Martin Heidegger

In the early part of the 20th century 2 world wars devastated the morale and spirit of both the west and the east. During this time, there were massive vacuums for spirited leaders to find the “groundings” of all existence in hopes of gaining clarity on their situations. Heidegger was the foremost thinker of this period who insisted that we reestablish what it is we mean by “being”. We all use the word, but none of us really understand what it means. In Heidegger’s most famous work “Being and Time”, Heidegger sets out to reestablish what “Being” is concretely. Through his existential analytic, we are brought to the most insightful, basic, understandings of the Dasein (Being-There, Human Being). We are simply “Looking-around-for-things-to-do” circumspectively. We are influenced by the “They-Self”. We are always calculating for future purposes, what Heidegger denominates as “Running-ahead-of-itself” when referring to the futural Dasein. It’s in this explanation, this subtle criticism of what he found man to become, that he demands a look back to the pre-socratic thought of greek antiquity, a time where thinkers were more in awe of the world than in trying to calculate an infinite amount of sediments that ostensibly make it up. Heidegger would become a Nazi, a move that he tacitly apologized for, a move that would repudiate him of the legacy as a philosopher he deserves. The task when reading Heidegger is trying to understand how one could be such a brilliant philosopher while at the same time being a nefarious Nazi. It’s in Heidegger that we learn more than anywhere, how deep the divisions are between politics and philosophy.

6. Soren Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard is undeniably the father of existentialism. It’s Kierkegaard’s reaction to Hegelian idealism that places him as the founder of personal subjective philosophy in contra-distinction to “systematic” philosophy. A thinker who thought more with his body than mind at times, Kierkegaard was known for making decisions based on sometimes ostensibly absurd reasons. As a thinker deeply influenced by the tradition of Christianity, especially the life of Jesus Christ, Kierkegaard would go on to give deep polemics against his own native church of Denmark, in hopes of restoring the passion of the actual life of Jesus Christ. In one of his more famous books “Either/Or” Kierkegaard speaks of a “Rotation Method” which is nothing other than limiting yourself as a human being to the most focused passionate existence that often defies modernity’s discursive social logic of “Being everything to everyone” ubiquitously. In his somber “Sickness unto Death” Kierkegaard would trace a genealogy of despair from the unconscious despairer to the conscious despairer, to the despairer-no-more (the man of pure faith). In all his works, he encounters the cumbersome division between faith and reason that the modern catholic church often likes to package up in a nice present, as if they may never come into conflict, a point that Kierkegaard absolutely negates. Kierkegaard places philosophy solely into the human being who has to make these difficult choices. It’s with Kierkegaard that philosophy starts to become distinctly human.