I will be taking a bit of a break from this blog for the next couple of months, doing little more than occasionally posting some odd bit of flotsam that amuses me, as I need to dig in and complete a couple of fairly large projects. The project most on the front burner right now is the presentation I’m committed to for the 2015 International Whitehead Conference.

My particular bit will be in Section 4, track 2, session 5, where I’ll be addressing issues of intuition relating to Whitehead’s challenges to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and the frankly catastrophic (from the logical perspective) ways in which Einstein undermines the very possibility of measurement in astrophysics and gravitational cosmology. (On this point, see also my two earlier posts about “model-centrism.”)

For better or worse, I’m slated to do an entire 90 session on my own. Rather than just read at people that entire time — even I get tired of my own voice — I’m breaking things out in 3 presentations of about 20 minutes each, with a 10 minute period of Q&A, demonstrations, examples, jumping up and down, shadow puppets, etc. I actually have a detailed outline, which I’ll trickle out as the text itself is more or less completed. But the three major parts of my presentation are these:

A. Intuition and Radical Empiricism
B. The Measurement Problem of Cosmology
C. Intuitions, Models, and Explanations

This is just a teaser, of course.  The “track” I am in is being managed by an especially good historian and philosopher, Ronny Desmet, whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and working with in the past. The hope is that the papers from this track will be assembled before the actual conference so that they might be published in a book form. (A preliminary manuscript might even be available by the time of the conference.)

In any event, fulfilling my responsibilities here is not only a good idea, it would be down-right courteous.

This is only one of the projects presently in front of me. For the others, I shall (with all due apologies) remain coy for the time being, until more concrete declarations can be made, and made with more real confidence.