Welcome to Jürgen Braungardt’s Website.

This website brings together different interests of mine. I am a psychotherapist, and I teach philosophy in the Bay Area of San Francisco. I grew up in Bavaria, Germany, and I moved to California in 1988.  I developed this website because I want to bring a philosophical perspective to current events and trends. What are the visions we have for our collective future? How do we balance humanity with technological progress? What is humanity in the first place? What do we mean by “nature,” and how do we relate to the nature around us, as well as to our own nature? Please take a look around; the latest entries are below. I hope you like this website. Thank you for visiting! 

George Orwell: Politics and the English Language.

May 6, 2012 English Literature
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George Orwell’s real name was Eric Arthur Blair. He was an English novelist and journalist, and lived from  1903 to 1950. His writings are witty and intelligent, and he has a profound awareness of social injustice. He is known today for his descriptions of totalitarian systems (“1984″,  “Animal Farm”).  He fought in the Spanish Civil [...]

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Nature by Numbers

March 3, 2012 Biology
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Below you find a movie inspired on numbers, geometry and nature, by Cristóbal Vila. Nature looks complex, but the underlying principles are simple, for instance the Fibonacci Series of numbers.  The natural beauty and complexity we see all around us isdeeply astonishing, but what’s even more astonishing is all the math behind it. It’s also [...]

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Mathematical Infinity

February 12, 2012 Math & Logic
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The treatment of infinity in mathematics has separated mathematicians into different schools. Cantor’s discoveries opened the 20th century debate about the meaning of numbers, and Cantor introduced the idea that there may be an actual infinite. mathematics begins to sound like theology. Here is a quote from  Pi in the Sky, by John Barrow. Oxford [...]

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Rock-Art in Berkeley, California

January 30, 2012 Art
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I went for a walk today in Berkeley, at a place near the ocean.It’s a wild place, full of rocks, bushes, and trash. Sometimes, some artists are visiting. They come here and turn the wilderness into something beautiful. Suddenly, stones become characters, and pieces of wood turn into archaic figures. See for yourself.

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Rudi Dutschke – Revolution and History in 1967. A look back.

December 30, 2011 History
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Thinking about the Arab spring, I am reminded on the German protest movement in the sixties. Here is a quote from one of the student leaders of the movement, Rudi Dutschke, who was later shot: “We can change. We are not desperate idiots of history, unable to take their destiny in their own hands. It [...]

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A 40-year-old puzzle of superstring theory solved by supercomputer

December 25, 2011 Physics
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From Physorg.com: “A group of three researchers from KEK, Shizuoka University and Osaka University has for the first time revealed the way our universe was born with 3 spatial dimensions from 10-dimensional superstring theory in which spacetime has 9 spatial directions and 1 temporal direction. This result was obtained by numerical simulation on a supercomputer. [...]

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Chinese Dynasties

December 24, 2011 History
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I learned almost nothing about Chinese history when I went to school in Germany. In our times, it is really important to learn global history, and not just the history of our own countries or continents. The following short overview of Chinese dynasties is a frame for understanding at least the outline of Chinese history. [...]

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0 to 6 dimensions and back – simple rotation.

December 5, 2011 Math & Logic

This is a simple computer-simulated rotation from a point, which has 0 dimensions, to a line (1 dimension), a square (2), a cube (3), all the way up to 6 dimensions, and then down. Multi-dimensional objects are much more complex than we can imagine.  

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3 Dimensions to 4 Dimensions; Tesseracts.

December 5, 2011 Math & Logic
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The movie below explains dimensional shifts, and how we perceive it. It also talks about tesseracts, which are the four-dimensional analogs of the cube. (In geomery, it is called a regular octachoron or cubic prism.) The tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square. Just as the surface of the cube [...]

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Computing Power from 1997 to 2011

November 23, 2011 Information Theory
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I found the following picture in a power point presentation from Intel. Their newest chip,  Knights Corner, can do in 2011, what a super computer with  9298 cores, distributed over 72 cabinets, could do in 1997.  Where will we be in another 14 years?   Related articles Intel Puts a Supercomputer in the Palm of [...]

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Prime numbers in nature

November 23, 2011 Biology
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I found this on Wikipedia, reading about prime numbers: “Inevitably, some of the numbers that occur in nature are prime. There are, however, relatively few examples of numbers that appear in nature because they are prime. One example of the use of prime numbers in nature is as an evolutionary strategy used by cicadas of [...]

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Shelby Steele: White Supremacy

November 17, 2011 Uncategorized
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“It began, I believe, in a late-20th-century event that transformed the world more profoundly than the collapse of communism: the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty. This idea had organized the entire world, divided up its resources, imposed the nation-state system across the globe, and [...]

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Stephen Hawking’s explanation of creation of matter and energy

November 14, 2011 Physics

  “Where did they [i.e., 1080particles in the universe] all come from? The answer is that, in quantum theory, particles can be created out of energy in the form of particle/antiparticle pairs. But that just raises the question of where the energy came from. The answer is that the total energy of the universe is [...]

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Kojève – hole and ring

November 14, 2011 Continental Philosophy
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 Kojève, Alexandre: Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. New York, 1969. p. 485: Let us consider a gold ring. There is a hole and this hole is just as essential to the ring as the gold is; without the gold, the hole (which, moreover, would not exist) would not be a ring, but without the [...]

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What is thinking? – Heidegger

November 12, 2011 Philosophy

Martin Heidegger: We come to know what it means to think when we ourselves try to think. If the attempt is to be successful, we must be ready to learn thinking. As soon as we allow ourselves to become involved in such learning, we have admitted that  we are not yet capable of thinking. (What [...]

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Platon’s dialogue “Phaidon,” 64a

November 12, 2011 Ancient Greek Philosophy
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The true philosopher is always dying:—why then should he avoid the death he desires? Socrates to Simmias: “Other people are likely not aware that those who pursue philosophy right study nothing but dying and being dead. Now if this is true, it would be absurd to be eager for this all their lives, and then [...]

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