The Damned

Like a blind man in a cluttered room, we’re bumbling around blindly knocking our shins into coffee tables in the dark trying to figure out how this universe works. But as we wander and experiment we continue to discover small pieces of it that we can understand, eventually building up our knowledge of the confusing space enough to avoid the tables and construct a map of how the space fits together.

Robert Krulwich of PBS writes about Richard Feynman and this messy universe:

We think great scientists know so much, but really, they know very little. “Science,” said the physicist Richard Feynman, “is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

Feynman told his audiences, even though the subatomic world looks so messy, so unintelligible, bit by bit, we are learning some of its secrets. They don’t add up yet. The rules Feynman and others discovered don’t even work all of the time, the parts don’t coordinate, but scientists learn to stay humble, roll with new information, we will learn more.

The key, he says… is accept the universe as it is. We must instruct our minds to live with the facts we discover.

The facts don’t make sense at first. They may never make sense, but hey, this is our universe. We’re stuck with it. We don’t have another one, not yet. So the best we can do is try to fit our minds to universe we find.

Isn’t this what we skeptics joyfully espouse? There is a humility and wonder in science that allows us to both embrace the unknown and mold our minds to the discoveries made along the way that help us explain this amazing  reality. It may not be a perfect understanding—in fact, I’m sure it isn’t. But just because it all seems jumbled at first doesn’t mean the solution is to dream up a supernatural puzzle piece to fit in where science has yet to tread.We should not be afraid of  neither the mess nor the mystery.

Dimidium facti qui coepit habet: sapere aude (“He who has begun is half done: dare to know!”) -Horace

Dr. Cham over at PhD Comics put together this animated comic, set to an interview with a set of physicists to explain dark matter to the masses.

Dark Matters from PHD Comics on Vimeo.

It has been my experience that Young Earth Christian Creationists (YECCs) often cite the second law of Thermodynamics as a stumbling point against the theory of evolution.  This is incorrect the biological systems underpin evolution are subject to the second law as is any other chemical reaction.

The second law of Thermodynamics states that:

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is commonly known as the Law of Increased Entropy. While quantity remains the same (First Law), the quality of matter/energy deteriorates gradually over time. [Source] AllAboutScience.org

In other words the energy in a system will equalise of space given enough time, you could think of this as a room with a gas heater.  Initially the room is cold and all the energy is stored in the heater.  When the heater is turned on the First Law takes over: you cannot create nor destroy energy, but you can change it.  So the heater turns the potential energy of the gas fuel into heat.  At this stage all the heat is clustered at the front of the heater, this is where the Second Law comes into effect, the heat (energy) will dissipate around the room until the room is a uniform temperature.

In a cell there are chemical reactions happening all the time.  Each one of these chemical reactions loses a bit of potential energy to heat and that increases the entropy of the system (the heat dissipates around the system, equalising the energy in the system).  This is how biological processes obey the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

So each time a cell replicates DNA some of the potential energy is lost as heat and occasionally a replication error occurs allowing natural selection to judge if the mutation is beneficial to the genome.  Since the basis of evolution is mutation and natural selection and this process requires many generations of DNA replication which loses potential energy as heat, this shows that evolution does indeed obey the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

A colleague of mine at the Christians vs Atheists (Discussion Board) on Facebook sent me an article by George Monbiot this morning critiquing another article by Christopher Booker that seems to link evolution deniers to climate deniers.

The basics of the second article by Booker is that a secret group of twelve “top” scientists have gathered to discuss how they are afraid of persecution for the stance that evolution is false.  But it also implies that these same scientists are also part of the climate denier camp and are either Biblical creationists or ID proponents.

The first article by Monbiot directly criticises the second and points out that the “top” scientists take their stance in spite of overwhelming evidence for both evolution and man made climate change.  But the second point of the article is what really interests me, the idea that once you reject one set of scientific findings you will find it easier to reject more sets of scientific findings.

Take for example a young earth Christian creationist.  In order to maintain this view point in the face of science you must reject the underlying principles of physics, geology, and biology.  Once you have done this through what ever means necessary for your own internal comfort, does it become easier to say “I think that the climatologists are all lying to me just like the physicists, the geologists and the biologists.” Because the grounding for belief that science is a lie is already there or is it just as hard to deny a new field of science as it is to deny the first field of science?

One thing that bothers me about those “top” scientists (their specialities are unknown and could be anything from anthropologists to psychologists) is that they seem to feel that they are experts on multiple fields of science, more so than people that dedicate their lives to the pursuit of a single subject, as if studying one field of science brings automatic qualifications to all fields of science.  Booker’s article doesn’t even mention the fields that the dozen study so it is impossible to know if they are biologists or climatologists, but the likelihood that they are both biologist and climatologist is low.

So does this mean that it isn’t several camps of scientists that deny several theories, but one camp that denies several theories?  And why deny the evidence without a superstitious motive?

But at the end of the article Booker fails to provide evidence that the meeting was anything more than a fantasy.  He cites no research, he cites no articles, the only book he cites is the Origin of Species and he doesn’t even reveal the mysterious financial backer as anything other than a young billionaire.

(Via sixtysymbols)

Channel 4 News 02 September 2010

From The Times:
Modern physics leaves no place for God in the creation of the Universe, Stephen Hawking has concluded.

Just as Darwinism removed the need for a creator in the sphere of biology, Britain's most eminent scientist argues that a new series of theories have rendered redundant the role of a creator for the Universe.

In his forthcoming book, an extract from which is published exclusively in Eureka, published today with The Times, Professor Hawking sets out to answer the question: "Did the Universe need a creator?" The answer he gives is a resounding "no".

Far from being a once-in-a-million event that could only be accounted for by extraordinary serendipity or a divine hand, the Big Bang was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, Hawking says.

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist," he writes.

"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going," he finds.

Thanks to TheRationalizer for the link

RICHARD FEYNMAN, Nobel laureate and physicist extraordinaire, called it a “magic number” and its value “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics”. The number he was referring to, which goes by the symbol alpha and the rather more long-winded name of the fine-structure constant, is magic indeed. If it were a mere 4% bigger or smaller than it is, stars would not be able to sustain the nuclear reactions that synthesise carbon and oxygen. One consequence would be that squishy, carbon-based life would not exist.

Why alpha takes on the precise value it has, so delicately fine-tuned for life, is a deep scientific mystery. A new piece of astrophysical research may, however, have uncovered a crucial piece of the puzzle. In a paper just submitted to Physical Review Letters, a team led by John Webb and Julian King from the University of New South Wales in Australia present evidence that the fine-structure constant may not actually be constant after all. Rather, it seems to vary from place to place within the universe. If their results hold up to the scrutiny, and can be replicated, they will have profound implications—for they suggest that the universe stretches far beyond what telescopes can observe, and that the laws of physics vary within it. Instead of the whole universe being fine-tuned for life, then, humanity finds itself in a corner of space where, Goldilocks-like, the values of the fundamental constants happen to be just right for it.
... continue reading

Aired June 3, 2010

A clip from the Channel 4 documentary Genius of Britain.

Outstanding video which depicts that consciousness is what drives and shapes everything. This means ultimately everything in the universe and that even matter is consciousness in the most subtlest and dense form.

No, CERN hasn’t started slamming protons into each other at the Large Hadron Collider early. And no, a top secret warp drive hasn’t been test-driven in Earth orbit (not that we know of anyway). In reality, an electromagnetic black hole has been fabricated in the laboratory for the first time.

Before you start getting concerned that the planet will soon be swallowed up by a rampaging singularity, the black hole in question isn’t the gravitational behemoth you might find after a supernova or in the center of the Milky Way. This particular table-top black hole mimics the curvature of space-time, creating a fabricated event horizon that swallows electromagnetic radiation at microwave wavelengths.

The best thing is that this experiment isn’t just for curiosity-sake, it has a practical application that could revolutionize future solar panel design, making the production of solar energy a lot more efficient than it is currently.

According to previous theoretical studies, mimicking the curvature of space-time around an analog black hole should be possible, guiding electromagnetic radiation around a cylindrical structure “consisting of a central core surrounded by a shell of concentric rings” (as explained by the New Scientist article). The theory is that a material of increasing permittivity (a characteristic of the medium electromagnetic radiation travels through, influencing the electrical component of the photons) could be used between the outer and inner surface of the cylinder. If the transition is smooth enough, and the permittivity eventually matches that of the cylinder core, the photons should be absorbed by the core, rather than reflected.

Although the physics sounds complicated (and I think I’d have to see the apparatus up-close to fully appreciate what is going on), the result is astonishing. What’s more, theory has just been turned into a working model by Tie Jun Cui and Qiang Cheng at the Southeast University in Nanjing, China. This is the world’s first working black hole.

By designing a printed circuit board with an intricate pattern of “meta-materials” (i.e. a man-made material that can alter the characteristics of the passage of electromagnetic radiation), a steady permittivity gradient was created, ensuring the photons’ absorption by the core. The physicists used microwaves, not optical light, in this set-up as the wavelength of microwaves is easier to manage (the wavelength of microwaves in the electromagnetic spectrum is longer than optical light, so larger scale meta-material patterns could be made).

“When the incident electromagnetic wave hits the device, the wave will be trapped and guided in the shell region towards the core of the black hole, and will then be absorbed by the core,” says Cui. “The wave will not come out from the black hole.”

However, the microwave energy has to go somewhere (this black hole is still bound by physical laws), and in Cui and Cheng’s black hole, microwave energy is converted into heat.

This sounds like fun, but how can this technique be used in solar panels? Although optical light can’t be manipulated so easily, Cui is confident that by the end of this year that he will be able to manufacture an optical black hole. If this can be done, then it isn’t such a stretch of the imagination to think that a meta-material surface could replace traditional photovoltaic cells to literally suck sunlight into an array of tiny black holes printed in a circuit board.

Source: Discovery Blog

“Rock star physicist” Brian Cox talks about his work on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Discussing the biggest of big science in an engaging, accessible way, Cox brings us along on a tour of the massive complex and describes his part in it — and the vital role it’s going to play in understanding our universe.

I posted last month about Bill Gates having purchased the rights to a lecture series by Richard Feynman.

As a follow up to that, it turns out that the Cornell University’s Messenger Lecture Series are now (allegedly) available on the Microsoft Research web site under something called Project Tuva.

I say “allegedly” because I’ve repeatedly failed to access that web site all day¹. Which is a bit crap for one of the richest corporations (and individuals) on the planet.

Oh, well—perhaps tomorrow…

/hattip to The Perplexed Observer

1. Perhaps it’s because I generally use a Mac or Linux and haven’t touched Windowsboxen in absolutely ages, but YMMV

Possibly related posts:

1. Feynman for all! There are plenty of reasons to dislike Bill Gates, but...

I posted last month about Bill Gates having purchased the rights to a lecture series by Richard Feynman.

As a follow up to that, it turns out that the Cornell University’s Messenger Lecture Series are now (allegedly) available on the Microsoft Research web site under something called Project Tuva.

I say “allegedly” because I’ve repeatedly failed to access that web site all day¹. Which is a bit crap for one of the richest corporations (and individuals) on the planet.

Oh, well—perhaps tomorrow…

/hattip to The Perplexed Observer

1. Perhaps it’s because I generally use a Mac or Linux and haven’t touched Windowsboxen in absolutely ages, but YMMV

Possibly related posts:

1. Feynman for all! There are plenty of reasons to dislike Bill Gates, but...

There are plenty of reasons to dislike Bill Gates, but his philanthropic gestures aren’t generally among them (this is, of course, an obvious exception).

Gates has apparently recently purchased the rights to a collection of lectures by physicist, author, skirt-chaser and bongo player Richard Feynman, and will be making them freely available to the public.

From Symmetry Breaking magazine:

Bill Gates recently bought the rights to a series of lectures by legendary Caltech physicist Richard Feynman. The former Microsoft head’s purchase shows that the cultural and scientific legacy of Feynman remains strong even 21 years after his death.

The lectures, given in 1964 as part of Cornell University’s Messenger Lecture Series, were filmed by the BBC, who had retained the rights since. Gates purchased the lectures for an undisclosed amount.

But what would the former Microsoft head want with the copyright to lectures by the revered physicist? In a recent interview with the CERN Bulletin, Gates said that his only plan is to make the footage freely available to the public.

The videos themselves don’t yet appear to be online, but I’m sure that’s one of the places they’ll first appear.

/hattip Atheist Media

Possibly related posts:

1. Project Tuva: Feynman online I posted last month about Bill Gates having purchased the...
2. Channel 4: The Genius of Charles Darwin Starting next week, Channel 4 in the UK is screening...