Georges Lemaître died fifty years ago today, on 20 June 1966. If anyone deserves the title “Father of the Big Bang,” it would be him. Both because he investigated and popularized the Big Bang model, and because he was an actual Father, in the sense of being a Roman Catholic priest. (Which presumably excludes him from being an actual small-f father, but okay.)
John Farrell, author of a biography of Lemaître, has put together a nice video commemoration: “The Greatest Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of.” I of course have heard of him, but I agree that Lemaître isn’t as famous as he deserves.
The Greatest Scientist You've Never Heard Of from Farrellmedia on Vimeo.
@Simon Packer:
1) All real geologists realized that that was the case, because they learned what flood events looked like, and found plenty of evidence that no world-wide flood event had ever happened.
3a) YEC “geologists” differ on what “real” geology is because they start out with the presupposition that the bible trumps reality — if reality contradicts the bible, then it must be reality that is false. Ken Ham said that there was nothing that could change his mind about any part of what he believed; YEC geologists presumably would agree with him.
3b) The gap idea is untenable, since the bible still posits the scientifically ludicrous claim that grass and trees existed before the sun, moon, and stars.
3c) I don’t get what you’re trying to hint at with the moon — something about the Late Heavy Bombardment, which occurred billions of years before multicellular life? Even though the bible claims that the moon was only created after trees and grass?
You write: My opinions remain as my last comment.
Or in other words, you don’t have a hypothesis about the bible; you have presuppositions, and you reject anything that falsifies your presuppositions, and you refuse to bother trying to learn.
@Simon Packer:
OK, so there’s no point in discussing science, since you don’t actually think that the bible is a hypothesis. Let me just clarify something else:
You wrote: The Christian Gospel message is that you can be adopted into the family of God through faith in Christ for the forgiveness of sin. […] Otherwise, yes, you remain under his wrath.
Does this mean that you think that damnation is eternal and applies to everyone who is not a Christian? All atheists, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, Animists, etc?
Owlmirror
The moon surface damage could show the sort of damage which would end a tranche of creation, that is all I meant. I have said early Genesis is partially allegorical; how partially, I don’t know. Maybe the stars appeared behind the fog on the forth day, or maybe earth was parked somewhere else before that. You already know I think long range science could be hopelessly wrong.
‘OK, there’s no point….’ No, I like science, but regarding the Bible, I have said elsewhere that the Bible is a revelation, not a hypothesis.
Man says’I can work it all out, starting from me and my context’. God laughs and says, ‘Shut up and listen; you can’t see what I see, you don’t know what I know, and you’re actually not that smart’.
I never said science would get you to all truth. Maybe you think it is the final arbiter. I can’t believe that. Part of the scientific method should concern itself with its own likely limits. I have discussed some of my own thoughts on that. Science is great, but if you worship it, (put it before God) you get seriously deceived.
I think God will divide humanity based on their responses to whatever real revelation of Christ they have had and it will be a final judgement at some point. This is not fickleness, or vengeance for the sake of it. It is pragmatism. God knows what works.
@Simon Packer
Nobody is worshipping science. We’re using it as a method to aquire knowledge. Approaching nature with scientific method has yielded an understanding of how the world works. We simply point out that interpretations of the world which completely violates this understanding has negligible probability of being useful.
Above you state that you think long range science could be hopelessly wrong. This is a claim in complete violation of the fundamental laws of physics as we know them. You can’t cherrypick this particular area of science (age of the universe/earth) as being questionable. This knowledge isn’t an isolated part of physics/cosmology, it’s completely entangled with everything else we know. That makes your doubt very easy to dismiss.
Simen S
‘Above you state that you think long range science could be hopelessly wrong. This is a claim in complete violation of the fundamental laws of physics as we know them.’
=steady state assumptions?
@Simon Packer
Is your position that the universe was created “really big” but a very short time ago, and that God just for some reason decided to tune it with a wide range of properties that constitute all the mutually confirming clues that have allowed us to arrange an amazingly detailed time line which can be traced back to what appears to be a low entropy singularity 13.8 billion years ago?
I don’t think the construction, “perceive consciousness,” can have any meaning. Consciousness is perception; to perceive consciousness would be like making liquids wet.
We have more than ample reason to have overwhelming confidence that consciousness is not a distinct whatever that fills the brain, except in the most loosely of poetic senses. Measuring that sort of thing has been possible for a long time and is trivial today. Early attempts turned up negative, and it’d be blindingly obvious on any modern medical brain imaging equipment.
Your proposal is a lot like the ancient ones for calorific and humors and the like. Good attempts at workable hypotheses that completely broke down once we had the ability to test them.
Cheers,
b&
David:
Sean’s Poetic Naturalism is very pragmatic, but he’s also big on smelling the roses. Simple pragmatism isn’t going to be all that much fun, by definition.
Cheers,
b&
zarzuelazen:
Yes, but the solution isn’t keeping the hidden variable and dumping the “physical” part. The modern formulations remain solidly grounded in physics; they just dump the hidden variables.
b&
Simon Packer:
Alas, the only reason you don’t know is that you’re afraid, for whatever reason, to admit to yourself the obvious answer that, as Penn & Teller put it, there’s as much history in the Bible as there is pizza.
You don’t need any sophisticated science to dismiss it outright. Just take the Flood. There’s nowhere near enough water on Earth, even in all the glaciers and Antarctica and what-not, to come even remotely close to covering the very modest mountains of the Middle East — never mind the Himalayas! At most, you get maybe a couple hundred meters over current levels…and Jerusalem itself is several hundred meters above sea level.
Now you’re just invoking magic, pure and simple. You really don’t care about reality, just about coming up with ways of pretending that your fantasies aren’t as absurd as you know them to be.
Only if you want to invoke conspiratorial magic, to boot. Are you not aware that, for example, measurements of astronomical absorption spectra have confirmed that α (the “fine-structure constant,” a dimensionless value composed of several factors including the speed of light and the charge of the electron and some other goodies) has remained constant (within measurement limits) for billions of years / light-years? And that you get the same answer from the Oklo natural fission reactor here on Earth? Just that one figure alone consistently integrates hugely diverse fields of science in a way that is more than enough to validate the various fields.
Your god is very, very, very petty, childish, and insecure. But, then again, that’s obvious from Genesis.
But Genesis also lays painfully bare YHWH’s utter incompetence. Humans, the pinnacle of his ultimate creation, were so flawed that YHWH had to evict them after failing to follow some very simple directions. The whole of creation was so flawed he had to destroy it all over and start again with Noah and his family. That didn’t work out and he had to do all sorts of really horrific things non-stop over the generations until he finally gave up and sent his son in to clean up the mess…and we’re already told that even his son is going to have to end the world — but, granted, YHWH will keep his promise and not drown the world this time, but instead burn it.
That’s the best design divine intelligence is able to come up with? Seriously?
That’s actually one of the very first things you learn in science: where to put your error bars. The difference between precision and accuracy, the importance of peer review and replication and…
…and, really. Not knowing its limits is what religion is all about. How could you even in principle limit the divine? Or, horror of horrors, think to question the priests, the official spokesmen of the divine?
Just look at how many scientific revolutions there’ve been over the ages, and compare that with the number of times that religions have even pretended to consider whether they might have gotten their revelations worng.
If it’s reasonably justifiable limits to knowledge you’re after, the only game in town is science.
Cheers,
b&
@Simon Packer:
I am struck by this statement: but regarding the Bible, I have said elsewhere that the Bible is a revelation, not a hypothesis.
But earlier you wrote: I argue from a hypothesis; that the Bible is divine revelation. I frequently test my hypothesis across various spheres of knowledge. (emph added)
Those are your words, written June 29, 2016 at 1:56 pm.
Now, I agree that you didn’t actually and honestly mean those words, but how is it that you are now denying having written that?
Hi Ben,
Let me ask you a question:
Would you say that ‘mass’ is ‘just a way of talking about energy’?
Personally, I don’t think it would be quite correct to say that, because it basically implies that ‘mass’ doesn’t have an objective existence, whereas in fact ‘mass’ is just as real as ‘energy’.
Now, if you rephrased the original statement to say that: ‘mass and energy are equivalent’, then I think that’s the correct formulation.
Now I think that when Sean says that:
‘consciousness is just a way of talking about material processes’, he’s making the same subtle but critical error as above.
If he rephrased it to say that:
‘consciousness is *equivalent* to material processes’
then I might actually accept that.
zarzuelazen:
A point that Sean repeatedly bangs home in The Big Picture is the importance of exercising caution against mixing languages from different descriptive frameworks.
If the context is the everyday world of Newtonian Mechanics, then, no; mass is very distinct from energy.
In the context of high-energy physics, does it become apparent that mass is, poetically, frozen energy? Sure, poetically speaking.
Or…”Would you say that ‘water’ is ‘just a way of talking about electrons and quarks’?” If you’re a civil engineer planning a water treatment facility, then, no; that’s crazy talk. But if you’re going down the rabbit hole of analyzing water and deconstructing its atomic constituents, then, of course.
Cheers,
b&
Ben:
“If the context is the everyday world of Newtonian Mechanics, then, no; mass is very distinct from energy.
In the context of high-energy physics, does it become apparent that mass is, poetically, frozen energy? Sure, poetically speaking.”
Yes, I agree with your answer. And that’s why I think Sean is mistaken when he says that:
‘consciousness is just a way of talking about material processes’
In my view, this is exactly the same type of error as the case of the mass-energy distinction.
zarzuelazen:
The difference is that, when you look closely enough at water, you find hydrogen and oxygen. When you look closely enough at those atoms, you find quarks, and so on.
When you look closely enough at consciousness, you find electrochemical activity in brains — which, if you keep looking at closely, very quickly goes down the exact same path as the water.
Again, we’ve had good reason to strongly suspect as much at least since the Egyptians started brewing beer. In today’s world of advanced neurological research, no other conclusion can even be phrased coherently — with the confirmation from physics that there isn’t even any theoretical alternative just the icing on the cake.
I’m quite serious. Pick any single conscious phenomenon you like, and it can be flipped on or off or altered or mapped at the level of the brain. Color is always a favorite of philosophers, but any color scientist — and I’m as advanced as amateurs get in color science — will be delighted to go into exquisite detail about how color perception works and why we know that you see red (or whatever) almost (but not quite) exactly the same way everybody else does.
If you want to hold out some special place for subjectivity…well, the unfortunate place you’re in is that of Sean’s “zombie photons,” You can explain every significant detail of the phenomenon without invoking magic. If you had an alternate universe in which photons had consciousness but we still observed them the same, their consciousness wouldn’t add anything to the explanation…so, if it doesn’t make any difference if photons are or aren’t zombies, Occam tells us we might as well assume they really are zombies. Same thing with subjectivity…if I can provide that excruciating detail about your subjective experience of color but somehow not capture the essence of your magic, your magic is utterly irrelevant; the Universe behaves (and really is) exactly the same with or without, so we might as well stop pretending it’s with.
Cheers,
b&
Ben:
“I’m quite serious. Pick any single conscious phenomenon you like, and it can be flipped on or off or altered or mapped at the level of the brain.”
But my dear fellow, this is exactly what I would expect to find if there was an ‘equivalence’ relation between consciousness and material process in the same way that energy is equivalent to mass. Indeed, I can translate a mental description into a physical description , that is the very meaning of ‘equivalent’.
But here is the point you seem to keep missing: if panpsychism is true and the equivalence relation holds, then I could equally well reverse what you say and translate every physical description into a mental one! You could pick either one (physical *or* mental) and say that’s fundamental. That is the very meaning of ‘equivalence’!
Ben:
“If you want to hold out some special place for subjectivity…well, the unfortunate place you’re in is that of Sean’s “zombie photons,” You can explain every significant detail of the phenomenon without invoking magic”
Ah, well here’s the heart of the matter! In fact, I do actually agree with you and Sean on this one: if mental properties contributed nothing to the explanation, then there is no point in postulating them, so yes, I agree that zombies don’t make sense.
So the question is what missing ‘degree of freedom’ do I think Sean has over-looked , that leaves a role for consciousness? 😉
Personally, my guess is that it’s the ‘arrow of time’ itself!
Ben Goren,
Admittedly, I used the word ‘perceive’ in a very loose way. What I meant was to ‘understand or realize’ that the other object you have in front of you is conscious or not. According to our current understanding that would require brain for both. But I do not think consciousness is that easy to understand as you think. There have been continuing debates for decades about what Chalmers calls”hard problem of consciousness”. So, your example of caloric is not valid. It has been understood for more than couple of hundred years that heat is a form of energy. I can say without any hesitation that our knowledge of consciousness in no where near that of physics. Consciousness is certainly not matter or energy.
Many great physicists such as Penrose and Stapp have proposed models that consciousness may have something to do with quantum theory. There may be an element of truth in that. Then a question arises as to how far consciousness goes down in the tree of life? You have to admit that cats and dogs have some level of consciousness. Are Amoebas conscious? If it is quantum mechanical then plants, rocks and atoms would have some kind of primitive level of consciousness.
So we have to admit that science does not understand consciousness. Whether there is some truth in the religious idea of external universal consciousness or not remains to be seen. If it is true then my analogy of water in a pot will be appropriate!
@zarzuelazen:
I’m very suspicious of this whole “equivalence” argument. Consider something else: a hurricane. A hurricane is a complex phenomenon involving gasses in layers at different temperatures and pressures moving rapidly in helical paths, which I think most scientifically-minded people would agree is completely the result of physical processes. But does that mean that every physical description can be translated into a hurricanic one? Should we posit panhurricanism as well as panpsychism?
Heck, should we posit pan[every.possible.complex.physical.phenomenon]ism, just for the fun of it? Why not panavalancheism, and pancoralreefism, and panhailstormism, and so on and on and on?
Isn’t everything fundamental, by your argument? Or are some things just more fundamental than others?
@kashyap vasavada:
You write: Consciousness is certainly not matter or energy.
Is a hurricane not matter or energy?
Owlmirror:
“But does that mean that every physical description can be translated into a hurricanic one? Should we posit panhurricanism as well as panpsychism?”
No, because most things clearly don’t have the properties that hurricanes have, so there’s no point to postulating ‘panhurricanism’.
But lets consider the case of consciousness. The defining feature of consciousness is the one thing that seems to be missing from standard physics – it’s the sense of a ‘flow of time’ (the sense of moving forward in time).
But wait….there’s a cup of coffee on the table in front of me as I sit here in Starbucks. It’s hot, but it’s cooling off. Why is it cooling off? Is this explained by the laws of physics. In fact, it isn’t. The laws of physics are completely time-reversible- it would be perfectly consistent with the laws of physics for the cup of coffee to get hotter and hotter over time (the coffee could get the extra heat from the surrounding air no problem).
So there’s a missing ‘degree of freedom’ in everything that Sean over-looked: it’s the ‘arrow of time’ – the tendency for things to be more likely to happen in some ways than others, and it isn’t in the ordinary laws of physics. Furthermore, it exactly matches the defining feature of consciousness: the subjective sense of ‘time flowing’.
So I’m coming right out with a huge call: I’m saying that consciousness IS ‘the arrow of time’. The ‘arrow of time’ is exactly the missing ‘degree of freedom’ that explains consciousness! You heard it right here first on Sean Carroll’s blog! 😀
Sure they do! Hurricanes have wind, which is a gas in motion, so any gas in motion — from a breeze to hailstorm — has some hurricaneosity. Hurricanes form as air over warm water rises, so the air warming over your coffee mug and rising has some hurricaneosity. And of course, hurricanes are spinning vortices, so any spinning vortex — like the air blown by a whirling fan — has even more hurricaneosity than a plain straight draft.
And as for the arrow of time — of course the evolution of hurricanes is a strong result of thermodynamics and a forward arrow of time.
Drop panpsychism; you know that panhurricanism spins your world around.
@zarzuelazen
You have to be kidding. Your cup of coffee certainly obeys the laws of physics.
At the particle physics level there is no noticable arrow of time, but as Sean has covered in-depth in multiple lectures and in his books, the perceived arrow of time is a consequence of the fact that we happen to be part of a universe that started with extremely low entropy 13.8 billion years ago. Additionally, the complexity of life on our planet is sustained by the fact that we have a stable low-entropy energy source (the sun) in our proximity.
You may have noticed the S=k. log W prominently featured in the banner of this blog. This is the Boltzmann equation as it was carved into his tombstone.
I find it puzzling that you have managed to find an interest in Sean’s blog while simultaneously having missed out on perhaps his most cherished equation. At that you may have been first.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMaTyg8wR4Y
Hi Simen
Yes, cooling coffee is *consistent* with the laws of physics, but the actual arrow of time itself is not *explained* by the laws of physics themselves, but by the *extra* principle that you just mentioned: namely that the entropy was extremely low in the distant past.
This ‘extra’ principle representing the ‘arrow of time’ constitutes an extra ‘degree of freedom’ in physical objects that I could postulate is equivalent to conscious experience, thus allowing my panpsychism theory to work and consciousness to play a causal role- I can consistently postulate that there’s a little bit of consciousness going on every time there’s an irreversible process happening in something.
But you don’t NEED any extra principle or fact to account for consciousness. Neither do we have any evidence for the existence of such a fact or principle. Entropy takes care of whatever arrow-of-time oddities you may perceive on the subject of consciousness too.
@zarzuelazen:
Wait a minute. If the arrow of time is what is universal, shouldn’t you be advocating pan-arrow-of-time-ism?
Do you actually realize that you’re doing logic backwards here (a small subset of nonreversible phenomena is magically equivalent to the superset of all nonreversible phenomena)? Do you understand this, and just not care because you think it’s fun, or do you not even notice that you’re doing logic wrong?