Intro:
WHENEVER LIFE GETS YOU DOWN, MRS. BROWN, AND THINGS SEEM HARD OR TOUGH, AND PEOPLE ARE STUPID, OBNOXIOUS OR DAFT AND YOU FEEL THAT YOU'VE HAD QUITE ENOUGH...

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving.
And revolving at 900 miles an hour,
That's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour,
Of the Galaxy we call the Milky Way.

Our Galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars
It's 100,000 light years side to side,
It bulges in the middle, 16,000 light years thick
But out by us it's just 3,000 light years wide
We're 30,000 light years from the galactic central point,
We go round every 200 million years
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding Universe.

The Universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know,
12 million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember when you're feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
Because there's bugger all down here on Earth.

Composer: Eric Idle/John de Prez
Author: Eric Idle
Performed by: Monty Python's Flying Circus

Quantum Mechanics in the Classical Limit

It's sad that otherwise very, very bright people have thought that Quantum Mechanics was going to save free will or allow God back into the picture, when it can do neither. As is so often the case when this kind of error is made, it's because people think Quantum Mechanics is beyond them, when so much of what they need to understand in order to understand that Quantum Mechanics cannot give them what they want is nothing more than College Algebra.

For example, the following claims are simply false:

1. The predictions made by quantum mechanics about the "real" world are incompatible with the predictions made by classical mechanics about the "real" world.
2. The non-determinism inherent in quantum mechanics is not to be found in the "real" world.

Ethical Relativism
and
Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity

The claims of scientific theories often get generalized to broader intellectual arenas, and in the process, claims that would not otherwise be accepted are, simply because of their "scientific pedigree". Einstein's theory of relativity is a case in point.