Sean Carroll

Author: Sean Carroll

  • The First Century of These Wars

    An untitled poem by Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980). Here is Rukeyser’s FBI file.

    I lived in the first century of world wars.
    Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
    The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
    The news would pour out of various devices
    Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
    I would call my friends on other devices;
    They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
    Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
    Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
    In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
    Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
    Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
    As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
    We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
    To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
    Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
    Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
    To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
    To let go the means, to wake.

    I lived in the first century of these wars.

  • You Pinheads

    Update: darn it, Phil beat me by minutes. Always check your RSS reader before posting something from elsewhere on the internets.

    Found this video yesterday morning via Swans On Tea. It was so good I had to include it in the talk I gave yesterday afternoon at the Skeptics Society.

    Backstory: Bill O’Reilly is very fond of using the tides as evidence that science doesn’t understand everything. Apparently some pinheads tried to point out that we actually do understand that.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyHzhtARf8M

    At a slightly deeper level: this is a good example of a worldview that can only imagine ultimate explanations taking the form of reference to some person — a being, a kind of conscious agent, who does things for reasons. If you try to give explanations that simply refer to the laws of physics, they will never be satisfied.

    In the real world, things happen, not always for (those kind of) reasons. The laws of physics might not have any deeper explanation.

  • LHC to Run in 2012

    The Large Hadron Collider is currently (or at least, once it gets off winter break) smashing protons together with an energy of 7 trillion electron volts. The original plan was to work at twice that energy, and the engineers think they can upgrade the machine to achieve it — but only after a year-long shutdown. So, a dilemma: if you upgrade, you have to shutdown and not collect any data for a year; but if you don’t, you’re missing out on all the fun at higher energies. There’s no question that they will eventually shut down and upgrade, the question is only about when it will happen. In particular, would they shut down during 2012, or keep running and shut down in 2013?

    The verdict is now in: the LHC will be running at its current energy, 7 TeV, through 2012. Some had speculated that the LHC shutdown would come sooner, now that we know the Tevatron will be shutting down for good — without competition, the thinking went, you might as well turn it off to achieve the higher energies as soon as possible. I’m not an expert, but this decision sounds good to me; let’s get the data we can, think about it, and take the time to do a perfect job at the upgrade.

    Higher energies should commence in 2014. By then, let’s hope the theorists are tearing their hair out trying to explain all the data from 2011 and 2012.

  • Morality, Health, and Science

    In our last discussion of morality and science, an interesting argument was raised in the comments (by rbd and then in more detail by Ben Finney), concerning an analogy between morality and health. Sam Harris has also brought it up. It’s worth responding to because it (1) sounds convincing at first glance, and (2) has exactly the same flaw that the morality-as-science argument has. That’s what a good analogy should do!

    If I can paraphrase, the argument is something like this: “You say that morality isn’t part of science because you don’t know what a `unit of well-being’ is — it’s not something that could in principle be measured by doing an experiment. But one could just as easily say that you don’t know what a `unit of health’ is, and therefore medicine isn’t part of science. The lack of some simple measurable quantity is a simplistic attack against a sophisticated problem.”

    This gets right to the point. Because, in fact, I don’t know what a “unit of health” is, which is why medicine is not — solely — part of science.

    Let me explain what I mean. Obviously we use science all the time when it comes to medicine. Similarly, we should be very ready to use science when it comes to morality — it’s an indispensable part of the endeavor. But in both cases there is a crucial component that lies outside the realm of science.

    Here’s how we do medicine, in a cartoonishly simplified version that is nevertheless good enough for our present purposes. First, we decide what we mean by “healthy.” Then, we use science to try to bring it about.

    That first step is not science, no matter how much science might be involved in the definition. Various measurable quantities certainly belong to the realm of science — height, weight, pulse, blood pressure, lifespan, time in the 40-yard dash, etc. But what we decide to label “healthy” is irreducibly a human judgment, not an empirical measurable. Some people might think that extreme thinness is part of being healthy, while others might prefer a more robust physique. Some people might define health as the state that maximizes life expectancy, while others might put more emphasis on quality of life even at the expense of total years. It matters not a whit what people actually think, of course — even if everyone in the world agreed on what “healthy” meant, it would still be a judgment rather than an empirical measurement. If one contrarian person came up with a different definition, they wouldn’t be “right” or “wrong” in the conventional scientific sense. There is no experiment we could do to answer the question one way or another.

    In the real world, we more or less agree on what constitutes health, so the non-empirical status of this choice isn’t treated as a crucially important philosophical problem. (At least, until you start reading the literature on disability studies, and you realize that what you thought was obvious maybe is not.) We agree on what health is, and we set out to achieve it, and that second part is very much science.

    Morality is exactly the same way, although with somewhat less unanimity in the first step. We agree (or not) on what morality is, and once we do the process of achieving it is very much a scientific issue, in the broad-but-perfectly-valid definition of “science” as “an understanding of how the world works based on empirical data.” Once again, it doesn’t matter whether we agree or not, because that first step is a decision we human beings make, not something we measure out there in the world.

    While both health and morality are human choices rather than empirically measurable quantities, they certainly aren’t random choices. Human beings aren’t blank slates; we have preferences. Most of us would prefer to live longer and be free of aches and pains; these preferences feed into how we choose to define “health.” Likewise for morality. But “we broadly agree on X” is not, and never will be, the same statement as “X is a scientific truth.” Understanding our preferences, turning vague impulses into precise statements, constructing logical frameworks based on them — that’s what the philosophy of medicine/morality is all about.

    The case of morality is actually much more difficult than the case of health, because most interesting moral questions involve tradeoffs between the interests of different people, not only the state of one individual. So even if we could do experiments to establish a unique map between mental states and human well-being, we wouldn’t really be any closer to reducing morality to science. All very fun to think about, though.

  • A Sense of Doubt

    Jerry Coyne, cheerful fire-breathing atheist that he is, gets invited to a church to talk about evolution. That’s not how it worked out, as people were more interested in talking about the relationship between science and religion. You can guess what happened — or maybe not. There was a productive two-hour conversation in which both sides learned something.

    That’s pretty much the same thing that happened when I visited a Chicago church back in the day. There’s obviously a selection effect at work: the kinds of churches that invite atheists in for conversations are generally ones that enjoy some kind of open dialogue. Not that it’s all warm hugs and pleasant disagreement; I noticed that the older generation in my audience was a lot less open to even thinking about some of the points I raised, while Jerry had to fend off someone who thought that math and science had led to Nazi Germany.

    Jerry concludes that the harmful aspects of religion are correlated with the certainty displayed by its adherents. This is a true but subtle point, as of course there are those who love to accuse scientists and/or atheists of unwarranted certitude. I think the difference is that we feel relatively sure about some things, while we’re quite ready to admit that we don’t know the answer to other questions, and we have a clear notion of where the distinction lies. But I would think that, wouldn’t I?

    Conversations like these are enormously helpful. The trick is that it’s much easier — on both sides — to be polite and interactive in person, while the temptation to lecture people from on high is irresistible in other contexts, where it’s easier to think of the opposition as cartoons rather than real people.

  • Religion and Truth

    One thing that religions typically do — although certainly not the only one — is to make claims about how the world works. How important are those claims to what religion really is, and how we should think about it?

    PZ Myers has posted a very interesting letter from Stephen Asma that talks about this issue. Asma earlier wrote a critique of New Atheism in the Chronicle of Higher Education, to which PZ responded, but I think the new letter is more interesting than the previous salvos. Russell Blackford has also chimed in.

    This is a very healthy discussion to be having — moving a bit beyond the caricatures of atheism by believers, and of religion by atheists. Much of what Asma says I find quite persuasive. The crux is something like this:

    My argument is that religion helps people, rightly or wrongly, manage their emotional lives. And while it doesn’t do very much for me and other skeptics (I prefer art), I would be very inattentive if I failed to notice how much relief and comfort it gave to other people.

    Asma wants to consider the aspects of religion that are closer to those of art or literature than those of science. There’s no question that religions have beneficial effects along with their bad ones. If we’re being rational about it, we should try to understand how those effects work, even if our only agenda is to find some sort of acceptable substitute.

    If we were starting from scratch I would put it this way: some of the sense of wonder and anticipation of possibility that defines us as human is often categorized under the heading of “religion.” We can raise questions about the truthfulness of religion’s attempts to describe how the world works, while at the same time respecting some of the careful thought that religious people have put into understanding the human condition.

    But … there’s usually a “but.” I have to wonder about these attempts to completely downplay the role of truth-claims in religious belief. In my experience, when I hear someone arguing that the important aspects of religion are moral or aesthetic, and the statements about how the world works are an unfortunate bit of historical baggage, it usually is not coming from a religious person, but rather from a sympathetic non-believer. My impression is that the way a religion views the world is actually quite important to a typical believer. I have in mind both very specific kinds of claims, that God created the world some number of years ago or that we are sorted into various afterlives depending on our Earthly track record, or more vague ones, that God allows the world to be or that moments of transcendence represent connection with a higher power. I don’t think these are unimportant to most religious believers, even most very sophisticated ones (I could be wrong).

    And, needless to say, views about how the world works are very often central to the other aspects of religious belief. If you really believe in Heaven and Hell, you’d be crazy not to let that belief influence your view of morality here on Earth.

    So, while I’m all in favor of understanding the nature of religious belief and also exhibiting a willingness to learn from believers who have thought long and hard about philosophy or ethics or what have you, I don’t foresee having a truly open and respectful dialogue without putting questions of how the world really works front and center. If we took a religion and removed from it any claims about how the world works, leaving a set of ideas about morality and human life, would it make sense to even call the result a religion? It would be more like a philosophy or worldview, and those are things that even we atheists are more than happy to engage with.

    Still, we don’t always do a good job of that engagement. I look forward to the day when “atheism” as a worldview takes difficult emotional human questions more seriously in a public way.

  • Thank You

    When we do our more-or-less annual Donors Choose drive, we’re always pleasantly surprised at how many readers are willing to throw in a few bucks to help school kids in poor areas learn science. So now we’re not asking for money — we’re just saying thanks. (Of course there are always good projects looking for donations.) The best part of the process is the thank-you letters that trickle in from the classes that are helped. Here are some pictures from a few of those classes, using their new materials.

    Ms. D’s classroom in Ohio bought science fair supplies.

    Mrs. P’s class in Texas purchased a binding machine and plastic binding strips for use in repairing paperback books.

    Mrs. L’s classroom in Texas purchased thermometers.

    Ms. M’s classroom in Nevada bought “Fun Math Centers.”

    Thanks to everyone who donated. You never know what kind of impact you may have had.

  • Scientists Aren’t Always Complete Idiots

    I don’t like to spend too much time highlighting and making fun of silly things on the internet; it’s not like they are going to be stamped out by a few well-placed blog posts. But this awful little article by Chris Ormell in Times Higher Education merits an exception. It has been ably demolished Jon Butterworth at the Guardian, but is worth revisiting, because its badness illuminates a larger point. (Via @astroparticle.)

    Ormell’s thesis is laid out at the start:

    Mathematics tends to be both misunderstood and credited with magic powers, especially by those who are intelligent but not mathematically inclined. Arising from this, there is a perennial temptation for mathematicians to play to the gallery and to assume the role of magicians and, even more temptingly, high priests.

    The worrisome sign here is not the explicit content, which is vague enough to be unobjectionable, but the gleeful indulgence in overgeneralization. It seems clear that what we are in for is a broad denunciation of mathematicians and their ilk, not a nuanced appreciation. The devil will be in the details.

    We have seen blind faith in mathematics in action recently. In addition to the contribution of mathematical models to the great credit crunch of 2008, take physicist Stephen Hawking’s claim that philosophy is dead. The reason he gave was that philosophers have stopped bothering trying to understand modern mathematical cosmology. This cosmology is based on current mathematical physics, most of which has been in place for less than 100 years. It is an impressive edifice of concepts and mathematical models, but one that has not yet built up a track record for reliability over a thousand years, let alone a million years.

    Hawking’s claim that philosophy is dead was silly, but not nearly as silly as this. I’m not sure what the implication is supposed to be — we shouldn’t trust sciences that don’t have a thousand-year track record of reliability? Since that includes almost all of contemporary science except for a bit of astronomy, we’d be living in primitive circumstances indeed. The “million years” criterion is even more awesome. That means we shouldn’t trust things like “writing,” or for that matter “human beings.”

    (more…)

  • Wind and Mr. Ug

    A charming video story on a Möbius strip, by Vi Hart (via Michael Nielsen).

    Besides the undeniable cleverness, there is some deeper metaphorical message here. Take it for what you will.

  • Friday Bass Solo

    I’m at a pretty intense workshop this week, spending my waking hours talking about causal diamonds, Boltzmann Brains, and the multiverse. My poor regular brain isn’t up to the task of blogging.

    But John Entwistle has some thoughts he would like to share with you.

    John Entwistle bass solo