PHIL 101: Time Edition

 the advantaged (whose current holdings came about in an unjust way) cannot say “we are justly entitled to our standard of living and the poor are not entitled to any more from us.” In his 2006 article "Environmental Degradation, Reparations, and the Moral Significance of History", Simon Caney argues against what he deems the Causal and Beneficiary Accounts regarding reparations for environmental injustice. On the former account, perpetrators of environmental injustices ought to pay reparations to the victims of those injustices (467). With respect to this account, Caney raises the following question: "Is it, however, fair to say that a state that was causally responsible for an injustice performed in the nineteenth century should pay reparations two centuries later?" (469). Caney argues that it would not be fair. Consider a person who has only recently migrated to a country that centuries ago perpetrated injustices--Caney thinks that person can not reasonably requi

The second, symbol s, is the SI unit of time. It is defined by taking the fixed numerical frequency ΔνCs, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom, to be 9 192 631 770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which is equal to  s − 1 NIST F2 and friends Imagine a single caesium atom (or "cesium" atom if you stick to the American English spelling). Imagine this atom alone, at rest, undisturbed, at a temperature of absolute zero. Counterfactually, suppose that the unpaired electron of this atom in its ground state were to be irradiated with the precise frequency of light to bump the electron from its lowest energy state into the next lowest energy state, and then that the resulting radiation released as the electron returned to its lowest energy state is recorded. Call the frequency of the resulting radiation ΔνCs. By fiat, set ΔνCs = 9,192,631,770 Hz. Since the unit Hz expresses cycles per second, this means that, by definition , the duration o

 Dr. Nora is taking a week off blogging in order to finish grading PHIL 101 student essays. In the meantime, please enjoy Feynman playing the bongos