And Slaters Go Plop

In 1973 the BBC released a TV documentary series in 13 episodes by mathematician Jacob Bronowski called The Ascent Of Man. 35 years later I purchased it as a DVD box set on the recommendation of a fellow science documentary aficionado.

It’s extremely good! And I’m not just saying that in the context of the era in which it was produced. Sure, some of the music grates on the nerves and some of the graphics don’t compare to what we are capable of these days but overall it’s got a depth that is often missing from the kind of documentaries found on the Discovery Channel. Actually, I take back my comment about the music; it features music from Meddle - my second-favourite Pink Floyd album - which, for me, redeems a multitude of musical sins.

Bronowski is thoughtful, poetic and very deliberate in every sentence. He gives you the feeling that he is treating you, the viewer, as an equal throughout and he conveys a sense of awe that is impossible to resist.

Most moving for me was a scene where Bronowski is visiting a Nazi concentration camp where many of his relatives were murdered. According to the interview with Attenborough in the bonus material the entire scene was spontaneous and filmed in a single take:

Bronowski died a year later of a heart attack at the age of 66.

In celebration of the World Youth Day in Sydney and of the recent “Academic Freedom” law changes in Louisiana I’d like to present Galileo Galilei’s confession for the “absurd and philosophically false” notion that “the earth is not the center of the world, nor immovable, but that it moves”:

I, Galileo Galilei, son of the late Vincenzio Galilei of Florence, aged 70 years, tried personally by this court, and kneeling before You, the most Eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinals, Inquisitors-General throughout the Christian Republic against heretical depravity, having before my eyes the Most Holy Gospels, and laying on them my own hands; I swear that I have always believed, I believe now, and with God’s help I will in future believe all which the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church doth hold, preach, and teach.

But since I, after having been admonished by this Holy Office entirely to abandon the false opinion that the Sun was the centre of the universe and immoveable, and that the Earth was not the centre of the same and that it moved, and that I was neither to hold, defend, nor teach in any manner whatever, either orally or in writing, the said false doctrine; and after having received a notification that the said doctrine is contrary to Holy Writ, I did write and cause to be printed a book in which I treat of the said already condemned doctrine, and bring forward arguments of much efficacy in its favour, without arriving at any solution: I have been judged vehemently suspected of heresy, that is, of having held and believed that the Sun is the centre of the universe and immoveable, and that the Earth is not the centre of the same, and that it does move.

Nevertheless, wishing to remove from the minds of your Eminences and all faithful Christians this vehement suspicion reasonably conceived against me, I abjure with sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I curse and detest the said errors and heresies, and generally all and every error and sect contrary to the Holy Catholic Church. And I swear that for the future I will neither say nor assert in speaking or writing such things as may bring upon me similar suspicion; and if I know any heretic, or one suspected of heresy, I will denounce him to this Holy Office, or to the Inquisitor and Ordinary of the place in which I may be.

I also swear and promise to adopt and observe entirely all the penances which have been or may be by this Holy Office imposed on me. And if I contravene any of these said promises, protests, or oaths, (which God forbid!) I submit myself to all the pains and penalties which by the Sacred Canons and other Decrees general and particular are against such offenders imposed and promulgated. So help me God and the Holy Gospels, which I touch with my own hands.

I Galileo Galilei aforesaid have abjured, sworn, and promised, and hold myself bound as above; and in token of the truth, with my own hand have subscribed the present schedule of my abjuration, and have recited it word by word. In Rome, at the Convent della Minerva, this 22nd day of June, 1633.

I, GALILEO GALILEI, have abjured as above, with my own hand.

The Cosmological Argument has a number of variations but I will only deal with the one employed by William Lane Craig in his recent debate with Bill Cooke.

Here is a transcript of Craig’s version of the cosmological argument:

So, why does the universe exist instead of just nothing? Where did it come from? There must have been a cause which brought the universe into being.

We can summarise our argument thus far as follows:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause
2. The universe began to exist
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause

Now, as the cause of time and space, this being must be an uncaused, timeless, spaceless, immaterial being of unfathomable power.

Moreover, it must be personal as well.

Why? Because this cause must be beyond space and time therefore it cannot be physical or material.

Now there are only two kinds of things that fit that description; either abstract objects like numbers or else an intelligent, un-bodied mind.

But abstract objects can’t cause anything and therefore it follows that the cause of the universe is a transcendent, personal mind.

The big bang is based on the observation that we can see that everything in the observable universe is moving away from everything else which would lead to the conclusion that, if you wound the clock back, things would inevitably be closer together. A lot closer together. With this hypothesis in mind many different disciplines in science attempted to see if the predictions formed by this hypothesis would turn out to be true. And so far they’ve found overwhelming evidence to support the claim.

Clever people in clever coats are able to model the initial conditions of the universe and show that specific transformations probably happened at specific times and that, to the best of our knowledge, the universe as we know it is 13.73 billion years old give or take about 130 million years. So far no one has found a way to gather any information beyond this point and so questions as to what happened before then (which might actually be a non-valid question as we established in the post on infinity) are speculative at best. No one knows.

Now let’s address Craig’s main arguments.

He uses a simple logical proposition-proposition-conclusion to show that the universe must be caused and then, on that conclusion, goes on to show that this cause-er must be God.

Logical conclusions work when the preceding propositions are sound. And it’s the propositions that cause Craig’s argument to fall short. Without sound propositions your conclusion - no matter how appealing it sounds - has no foundation.

We know that the universe does some very strange things at the scale of the very big and the very small. Quantum physics has taught us that things can be in two places at once. No one understands why or how but we can observe it time and time again. I can imagine a similar argument to Craig’s one here where one of the propositions is “1. Nothing can be in two places at once.”. This would have been a perfectly common sense argument only a few years ago but now we have to take a step back and concede that not everything in the universe conforms to the everyday properties we observe as humans.

We live in a “middle earth” where we have a fairly good grasp on how things interact with each other at our level but we lack the ability to make head or tail of what happens outside of the zone we’ve evolved to understand. At the moment, at least.

In short, the answer to Craig’s first two propositions is “we don’t know” and that appealing to common sense at the same time as positing a supernatural and outside-of-space-and-time cause seems to be a bit of a double-standard. If God is allowed to be an uncaused-cause then why not just move the peg back one step and posit that the universe is allowed to be an uncaused-cause? At least we can observe that the universe exists.

As discussed in my previous post there are lots of interesting explanations for how the universe may have possibly come about and for the properties of time (and therefore causality) but no one knows yet what really happened. And it’s quite possible that we may never know.

The rest of Craig’s arguments shouldn’t need to be discussed because his propositions have already been shown to have fallen short of establishing a need for a God as an ultimate cause but they’re quite funny so I’ll briefly cover them.

He then goes on to make some crazy leaps and hops to try to give this ultimate cause a God-like personality. “Moreover, it must be personal as well”, what? I can see what he’s trying to do here by tying forcing a false dichotomy on us of having to choose between numbers or a mind but he’s either woefully behind on his understanding of developments in neuroscience or he’s being deliberately disingenuous.

One of the last bastions of dualism is in the question of the mind. And this is kind of understandable because it certainly feels like “we” are somehow disembodied. That our essence is somehow more than can be cooked up using meat and chemicals alone. But the more we learn about the workings of the mind in humans and observe traits we thought were unique to humans in other species the more it’s looking like dualism is to neuroscience as Thor is to thunder; a shortcut and an economical way of explaining things but not to be taken seriously.

Even assuming that there must be a cause and forcing us to choose between numbers or a mind as the cause I’d have to contend that there is more compelling arguments currently for numbers (i.e. mathematics) as the driving force behind the universe than of a disembodied mind.

Craig’s goal was to show that the concept of God is not a delusion and the cosmological argument doesn’t add any weight (either for or against) here. If you are already convinced that God exists you’ll like the grand-sounding scientific words and the nice 1, 2, 3 steps but you’ll be no nearer the truth with this argument. It’s built on false propositions, gives you false choices, is inconsistent in its appeals for common sense and ignores just about all recent scientific discoveries.

If God doesn’t exist then belief in God is a delusion and if God exists then belief is not a delusion. Craig’s argument adds nothing to this question and if Cooke had bothered to engage at all neither would his. I suspect that the answer to the moot is the same as “Is the invisible pink unicorn a delusion?”. You can’t prove it either way and it’s one of a billion possible but meaningless questions.

God seems to exist only where evidence is hard to find. When a naturalistic explanation is found the next generation of believers will take the science on board and scoff at their ignorant predecessors for believing that God was explanation for lightening, conception, creation (and, now, evolution) or our minds. Perhaps one day God will need to be moved on from his current position at the start of the universe but I think it’s a pretty safe place for him in the meantime. If you are happy to live with that then good for you but stop just making stuff up and pretending it’s real. I’ll await more evidence.

(For another take on Craig’s arguments take a look at Ian’s blog).

While I’m waiting for the YouTube videos to be posted so I can get my facts straight with regard to the debate between William Lane Craig and Bill Cooke I thought I might address the issue of the concept of infinity.

Craig introduced the cosmological argument with the notion of infinity and the fact that atheists will argue that the universe is infinite. I’d just like to put my atheistic hand up at this point and say that I’d tend to go with the ‘finite universe’ personally at this stage. I know people (both theists and atheists) who fall on either side of this argument and so this assertion was a little disappointing. This was posited right before he moved on to the Big Bang so perhaps it was an attempt to portray atheists as non-scientific.

The fact of the matter is no one knows whether the universe is infinite or not. Get used to this phrase because I’m probably going to use it a few times over the next few entries. There is stuff we don’t know; the more we find out the more we realise just how little we really do know. Making up explanations may feel satisfying but it’s not going to get us any closer to the truth.

Back to the issue of infinity. Craig argues that the concept of infinity is an absurdity in terms of logic because, for example, if you minus four from infinity you are left with infinity. And I tend to agree in principle. But there is a problem with how he’s come to this conclusion because he’s used a finite number in relation to an infinite one.

Because whenever we talk about infinity we refer to it in finite units (like time or numbers or oranges) we think that because we can just add or subtract one more as we might do in the real world that it logically follows that we could continue to do so if we had unlimited time, numbers or oranges. Which might be a bit of a circular reasoning because we’re giving ourselves infinity to prove that infinity exists.

Another angle is that if infinity in relation to time is defined as “for the full extent of time” and time can in fact be created then it would also be reasonable to define infinity as from the creation of time to its destruction.

Einstein came up with some theories where mass is equivalent to energy (and vice-versa… I can cope with this one) and - head-hurtingly - where time is equivalent to space (and vice-versa… aaaarrgh! What?!). I don’t even know what to make of this so if anyone has a succinct way of explaining the concept of “spacetime” please feel free to enlighten me.

Hawking has a nice little analogy about the limits of a dimension which I’ll see if I can completely mungle:

If a two-dimensional critter were sliding around on the face of our planet and were asked what’s south of New Zealand it would list Stewart Island (technically incorrect but we’ll leave it be because it’s just a two-dimensional critter) and then Antarctica and, finally, the South Pole. We can almost sense its outrage and confusion when we tell them they can’t go any further south than the South Pole but the fact is, within these dimensions there really is no “South of the South Pole”. Now shift the question up a dimension or two. When I ask you what happened before World War 2 you will list a number of events that occur back in time along the time axis (i.e. just like the “south” axis) until you get to a point where time starts or comes into being. Yes, we are outraged and confused when we are told that there is no such thing as “before time” because everywhere we look we can see a before, a cause. But the truth is that you can’t continue to use the word “before” once we’ve hit this point.

I don’t know if analogies that include the concept of dimensions are any more valid than the keep-adding-an-orange ones. Perhaps our concept of “dimensions” are just another way our minds have to package information about the real world in an attempt to comprehend it.

I don’t know if time unfolded out of the beginning of the universe but as incomprehensible as it seems to me I can see from the example of my two-dimensional critter that my incomprehension doesn’t necessarily make the idea wrong.

For me, the concept of infinity is either:

• A trick of the mind that doesn’t ever map against reality. Perhaps our mind can conceive of infinity because our mind is self-referencing.
• A way of describing the extent of a dimension (like “south” or “before”) that can actually have a start and an end.
• That the universe is, in fact, infinite and that my mind is incapable of comprehending it beyond describing it in terms of finite units.
• Something else altogether… [insert your reasoning here].

For the sake of argument I’m more than happy to go with Craig on this one; the universe is finite. (Until I see further evidence - always a good disclaimer to add to questions of this nature).

A couple of weeks ago I purchased Carl Sagan’s 1979 TV series, Cosmos on DVD. Actually, it aired in 1980 but was filmed in 1979 and 1979 sounds way cooler than 1980.

It totally rocks!

Sure, he’s wearing beige and, sure, there has been progress in astronomy since the series was produced but I found myself learning plenty of new stuff with every episode. (Did you know that Eratosthenes calculated the earth’s circumference to within a margin of 5-10% back in 240BCE?).

What I love about the scientific method is that when done properly you present the facts as best you know them but remain open to future discoveries and you also disclose known weaknesses. In this series at the end of many of the episodes Sagan appears (looking greyer) with a “10 years later update” and very little of the original content needed revision. The only bit that stands out is that in one of the episodes he presents some of the experiments showing the creation of organic molecules in the laboratory and 10 years later added that they now believe it’s likely that the organic molecules may have formed in the icy bodies of comets.

Also, this was produced at a very uncertain time when the threat of all-out nuclear war seemed quite possible and many of his comments about the future of the human race are bracketed with “if we don’t destroy ourselves first”.

This series is a brilliant way to get an excellent perspective on our place in history and in the universe. It’s factual, balanced and remarkably well-produced. They even managed to avoid the temptation to use the snazzy synthesised music of the era (or is that ‘error’?) and instead opted for tasteful classical music.

Sagan had a very broad understanding of our universe and had a knack for presenting it in an extremely digestible way. With that understanding came an enthusiasm that remains contagious even after his death.

If you come across this series in your video store or for sale in a shop I’d encourage you to do yourself a favour and pick it up. And if you know me (this includes Dale, Ken, Frank and Jack), give me a yell if you want to borrow it and I’ll get it to you.

If you live in the Southern Hemisphere you can look up on any given starry night and just over from the Southern Cross you’ll see a fuzzy patch. It’s called the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and is actually another galaxy quite close to our own Milky Way. To get a sense of size and distance our Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across and the LMC is about 160,000 light-years away from us but only about 1/10th of the size. Right on our doorstep so to speak.

160,000 light-years is still a long way away though. A light-year is the distance light can travel in a year which equates to about 9,460,730,000,000 kilometres and this LMC is 160,000 of those.

There are different types of stars and they all go through different stages of their lives. Some stars burn up all their fuel and end up collapsing in on themselves at the same time as shedding an ‘outer shell’ and they go nuts burning new materials - these are called Supernovae, you’ve probably heard of them.

One day in 1987 a star in the LMC (previously catalogued as Sk-69 202 but now called SN 1987A) did just this and it was a spectacular sight. Observatories around the world kept an eye on it as it wrecked havoc in slow motion over the next few years.

One thing they noticed was that when the star in the middle brightened the main ring would brighten eight months later and when the star dimmed the ring would, again, dim eight months later. This means that the light that comes directly from the star to our eyes travels a shorter distance than the light that has to go out to the ring and bounce off toward us. Which also means that the ring has a radius of 0.658 light-years (or a diameter of 6,200,000,000,000 km if we’re feeling clever).

Knowing the size of an object is very useful if you want to be able to know the distance to that object. If you know that person is 2m tall and they look very small (this is really measured in angles) you know that they are a long way away.

Astronomers were able to measure the total angle that SN 1987A took up (a radius of 0.808 arcseconds - very small but still useful) and were able to calculate that it is 168,000±3.5% light-years away from us. Which means that what we saw in the skies in 1987 actually happened 168,000 years ago.

I have a theory based on a number of observations and I want to give it a name. My observations are that there are things that lifeforms do to their environments that leave traces that wouldn’t otherwise naturally occur. I propose that we might be able to detect similar effects on other planets and deduce that there are lifeforms at work and that we might, if we are careful and/or very lucky, find evidence of previously unknown lifeforms here on our planet.

I’ve come up with a name for this theory. I’m calling it Intelligent Design.

We can define what ID is and what it isn’t. We can come up with ways we can test hypotheses. If we find evidence that points towards (or away from) an example of intelligent design we can publish papers in reputable scientific journals. When we find gaps in scientific knowledge in other areas we won’t even think about using this as an argument for Intelligent Design - we’ll have to come up with evidence that points toward our theories and not just away from others.

Unfortunately there are some people who are currently misusing the label of Intelligent Design and they will have to go back to using the old term for their beliefs: creationism. If they have some useful contributions to make they’re more than welcome to join in as they are for any of the other sciences but, just like in the other sciences, they are going to have to leave their non-science behind at the door.

Right, now that that’s dealt with. Onwards and upwards!

[edit: Over at NeuroLogicia, Dr Steven Novella clearly hasn't been informed of the recent changes I've made to the term 'Intelligent Design' but he provides a fairly lucid account of why the proponents of the old term weren't being particularly scientific in their approach that's well worth a read.]

Goodbye and thank you.

Here’s a message from him from last December after his 90th birthday:

Ever since I was young my mind reeled when I tried to comprehend the vastness of our universe and all that is in it. I’ve since realised that it is impossible to truly comprehend these things and that this is a limitation of the bodies and minds we find ourselves in.

However if you, like me, are fascinated by the night sky and you want to get a better understanding of “not only what we know but how we know what we know” then you won’t find a better podcast than the Astronomy Cast.

If I were an alien I’d give it three thumbs up. Check it out.

Like me, you probably wonder from time to time whether you can eat the moon.

I have some bad news; you can’t, even with your friends helping you. Let’s do the figures:

The moon is bigger than it looks (this is because it’s far away) and it weighs in at about 73,477,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg. Contrary to popular opinion it’s made of rock, not cheese (and a half moon is not, in fact, half the size). The fact that it is made of rock is a spanner in the works because it considerably reduces the amount a person can eat in a day. If you want to eat it you are going to have to powder the rock first and then eat it along with other food.

Still, this is a fairly simple equation and we have all the numbers: the weight of the moon divided by the amount you can eat per day gives you how many days it will take to eat the moon.

So, let’s assume that you can eat two powdered tablespoons per meal and we’ll assume that two tablespoons of powdered rock weighs a tidy 50 grams. That leaves us with the weight of the moon divided by 0.150 kg which tells us that it’ll take a person 1,342,045,662,100,456,621,004 years to eat the moon.

If you were to enlist the rest of the world to help you in this enterprise you would be looking at reducing this figure down to a mere 203,271,750,023 years. The age of the universe is 13,700,000,000 years which means you and the rest of the world would be required to exist for 15 times longer than the entire universe has done to date. And to make things worse you’ll probably spend a considerable percentage of this time on the toilet.

(There’s no way to wrap this up in a dignified manner so I’ll just say that perhaps, one day, someone will enter the search string “can you eat the moon?” into Google and I’ll have a little chortle to myself when I see that particular stat in my logs.)