Miscellany

I have nothing unpredictable to say about Alabama judge Ashley McKathan, who has gone a step beyond the usual loopiness of Alabama judges and had the Ten Commandments embroidered on his robe. Ed Brayton says what needs to be said. But I did the gritty blogo-journalistic legwork to surf through the internets and find a picture! From the Andalusia Star News.

I hope they don’t mess around with McKathan. If a judge intentionally flouts the highest law of the land, his butt should be on the unemployment line the next day.

First from Majikthise, later from Julian Sanchez, Grammar.police, and Matthew Yglesias, we hear about Antony Flew’s theistic waverings. Flew, a philosopher well-known for his atheism, has apparently “converted” to a kind of deism, where he acknowledges the possibility of an Aristotelian Unmoved Mover, although he explicitly rejects the idea of a caring, interventionist God.

Two disclaimers. First, I had barely heard of Flew before the current dust-up, so I’m certainly not an expert on his views. Second, who cares? A change of heart on the part of any single individual doesn’t change the status of an argument. If a religious leader like John Paul II, or Pat Robertson, or Ayatollah al-Sistani were to suddenly embrace atheism, it would be interesting on a personal-history, People-magazine kind of level, but I wouldn’t hold it up as a reason for anyone else to become an atheist. I’m more interested in good arguments on either side.

Sadly, Flew’s arguments seem really bad, even back when he was an avowed atheist. Here is an interview he did a few years back, trying to put to rest previous rumors that he had found God. In the interview he draws a conventional distinction between “positive atheism” and “negative atheism” — the former being the claim that God does not exist, and the latter (which is [was] Flew’s position) simply holding that there is no evidence for God, but there also aren’t any disproofs of His existence, so we can’t be sure one way or another. I have to say, even though this is an extremely common position (some of my best friends are negative atheists), it makes no sense. Is there any other question about the universe for which we say, “Well, there’s no evidence for it, but I can’t absolutely rule it out, so I’ll keep an open mind”? Bertrand Russell raised the question of the existence of an exquisite tiny china teapot in orbit around the planet Saturn. We have no firm evidence that there is no such teapot, you see, even though there is also no reason to believe in it. Should we really keep an open mind? (Hint: no. When there is no need for something, no evidence for it, and it unnecessarily complicates our description of the universe, it’s okay to simply not believe in it.)

The reasons for Flew’s recent change of heart are even worse. Essentially, he has bought into the modern, cosmology-based argument from design. (Here’s a recent interview with Gary Habermas, and a short essay by Richard Carrier at the Secular Web.) Despite the fact that the big news here is Flew’s change of mind on the existence of God, the interview doesn’t go into details about his reasoning, preferring to jump right to some theological implications; but it’s a fairly common argument. There are basically two pieces of evidence from modern cosmology that purportedly provide reasons to believe in God: the mysterious creation event at the Big Bang, and the fine-tuning of parameters of nature in order to allow for intelligent life. The idea is that invoking an omnipotent Creator helps to explain these otherwise puzzling features of our universe.

Which is just ridiculous. For one thing, it doesn’t “explain” anything; if I tell you ahead of time that there exists an omnipotent Creator, but you didn’t know anything about our actual universe, you wouldn’t be able to use that “theory” to say anything useful about how the universe would work. You couldn’t derive the existence of the Big Bang, much less the particle content of the Standard Model.

Second, there isn’t anything that needs explaining. The Big Bang event is something that we don’t yet claim to understand, but that’s just how science works; we understand more and more, but not everything at once. There is no reason to believe that the Big Bang won’t eventually be understood as part of a comprehensive bigger picture. (I mean, if even I can come up with scenarios like that, it can’t be that hard.)

And the fine-tuning argument isn’t any better. The claim is that we find laws of physics that seem delicately arranged to allow for the existence of life. Of course, it is quite unclear that there is anything here to explain, even in principle; if conditions in our universe didn’t allow for the existence of life, we wouldn’t be around to argue about it. But one might still argue that the God hypothesis provides a greater economy of explanation than simply listing the numbers that describe our universe, despite the fact that it requires the introduction of an entirely new metaphysical category. One would be wrong. For one thing, it is far from obvious that there is any significant amount of fine-tuning going on. It’s true that small changes in physical parameters would result in a very different universe; but nobody really knows what that universe would look like, or if it would be able to support some form of intelligent life. (People occasionally claim to know, but don’t believe them.) And if someday the state of the art allows us to quantify a significant degree of fine-tuning, there are perfectly naturalistic explanations available, in the context of the anthropic principle. We might not like the anthropic principle, but our distaste is based on the fact that it’s more fun for scientists if there is a unique kind of universe in which we can live, not because it isn’t a plausible explanation.

Finally, if God really did provide an explanation for the parameters we observe, we should be able to use this explanation (“God arranges the universe in the simplest possible form consistent with our existence”) as a good old-fashioned scientific theory, and start making predictions. What would God have chosen as the mass of the Higgs boson, for example? Would God make use of low-energy supersymmetry breaking? Why are there three generations of fermions? Why is the proton lifetime so long, and why are flavor-changing neutral currents so small? If you’re going to claim explanatory power, you’d better be able to explain things.

In reality, the temptation to believe in God arises from a combination of wishful thinking and a loss of nerve — the fear that there are some features of reality that will never admit of a conventional scientific explanation, despite the historical reality that such fears have always proven groundless. Just as Darwin killed off the biological argument from design, physicists will eventually kill off the cosmological one. The universe we actually observe is elegant, preposterous, extravagant, and generally quite thrilling; no need to sully it with superfluous pieces of pseudo-explanatory baggage.

Plane trips are great. You have time to think about all sorts of random things that you would never get to if you had a working internet connection. I wanted to write about cosmology and the argument from design, but I got sidetracked into thinking about how complicated our current universe is, at least those aspects that are relevant to human existence. The mass of the top quark, for example, doesn’t affect your life very much, unless you are a high-energy physicist (and we can ignore them for the moment).

So let’s imagine we are given the basic set-up of the standard models in particle physics and cosmology — the gauge groups and representations of the particles, a cold dark matter candidate, the dimensionality and signature of spacetime, a flat homogeneous and isotropic universe with a scale-free spectrum of adiabatic fluctuations. These are the fundamental discrete facts that describe the framework of our universe. But within that framework, there are a number of parameters, which we could imagine taking on all sorts of values. How much information is required to specify those values?

We can easily list the continuous parameters that matter to human life: the masses of the electron and up and down quarks, the QCD scale, the Fermi constant, Newton’s constant of gravitation, the fine-structure constant, the amplitude of density perturbations, and the densities of baryons, dark matter, and vacuum energy. So I count eleven parameters — really only ten, since only dimensionless ratios of mass scales matter — each of which needs to be specified to three significant digits or fewer. A number expressed to three significant digits in decimal notation requires about ten bits (2¹⁰ = 1024), so ten such numbers requires about one hundred bits of information. And there you have it, our whole universe. Or at least, the statistical properties of our branch of the wavefunction of the universe. It wouldn’t be enough information to predict, for example, how long it will take the Cubs to win the World Series.

Have I missed anything important? Some of these numbers (in particular, the quark masses) aren’t even known to three significant figures. But other numbers that could in principle be derived from them (like the masses of the neutron and proton) are known quite well, and are pretty important to the way the universe looks.

There are a lot of other parameters, of course, both in particle physics and in cosmology: masses of neutrinos and the heavier fermions, CP-violating angles, amount of isocurvature perturbations, and so on. But all these numbers have values that are safely removed from our everyday lives; we could change them by quite a lot and you’d never know. For a look at what might happen if you really messed around with different parameters, see Robert Cahn’s The eighteen arbitrary parameters of the standard model in your everyday life (postscript). You wouldn’t want to live in a world where the muon was the lightest charged lepton.

Of course it would be nice to have something even more economical — maybe even just one number! But still, it’s interesting that it takes so little information to specify the workings of our universe. As a homework problem, look up the actual values and turn them into a hundred-digit binary number. It would make a nice T-shirt.

Update: I realized I was a little too optimistic about expressing each number with just ten bits. Even if the number of significant figures is only three, you still need to keep track of the overall size of the number; i.e., if you want to express 2.85×10^-16, you need to encode the -16 as well as the 2.85. So a few more bits will be necessary, but not very many; perhaps 15 bits per parameter.

From Patridiot Watch, via Pandagon: the strategic missile defense that is supposed to make us safe from nuclear catastrophe won’t work in the rain.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The first flight test in nearly two years of a planned U.S. missile-defense shield has been scrapped two days in a row this week because of bad weather, the Pentagon said on Friday.

[…]

Bush’s goal, announced in 2002, was to have a rudimentary ground-based shield in operation by the end of this month. But the timetable may slip, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer, Michael Wynne, suggested earlier this week.

[…]

The Pentagon is spending $10 billion a year on the project.

The test would be the first since a December 2002 failure in which the “kill vehicle” — a Raytheon Co. -built 120-pound package of sensors, chips and thrusters — failed to separate from its booster rocket. Of eight intercepts attempted so far, five hit their targets, but under highly scripted conditions.

[…]

The target missile was to be fired in Kodiak, Alaska, to vary engagement angles tested in previous launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The first attempt to conduct the test this week was scrubbed by clouds over Kodiak.

The Pentagon’s official goal for the test is a “flyby” to gather data on the new hardware linkups as well as on the nerve center, rather than to shoot down the target.

[…]

The current chief weapons tester, Thomas Christie, said in a written reply to Reuters that the test, if successful, would increase confidence that the system “has some operational capability against a North Korean threat ballistic missile.”

Coyle said the tests so far and the coming one gave him no such confidence.

“The target launch time and location, the flight trajectory, the point of impact, what the target looks like, and the make-up of other objects in the target cluster have all been known in advance to plot the intercept,” he said. “No enemy would cooperate by providing all that information in advance.”

Sorry for the long excerpt, but it’s just all so good. The finest comedy minds of our generation couldn’t make this look any more ridiculous than it already does.

Our session here at Irvine was this morning, it went fine. Everyone seemed to buy into the ideas of dark matter and dark energy, but really wanted them to have interactions. Well, so do I.

Now we’re having a great session on music and computers. Increasingly, computers are incredibly useful tools for working musicians — not just as synthesizers of different sounds, but as aids to composition. A program called Band-in-a-Box will take the chords that you give it, and basically create an arrangement of backing instruments in the style of your choice. Belinda Thom is telling us about her work on something even more ambitious — a program that will allow the computer to improvise along with you in real time as you play. The idea is that the computer will “listen” to your phrases, get the idea, and come up with an appropriate riff to play back to you. She showed some simple examples that were not in real time — you type in a transcription of, say, Charlie Parker soloing on Mohawk, and the computer comes up with its own solo. It sounds okay, actually.

This is an incredibly sophisticated problem in artificial intelligence. When you hear some sounds, how does the computer deal with them? Before even worrying about improvisation, you need to deal with how the computer understands the music. How to turn a time-stream of audio data into something comprehensible? How, for example, should the computer group sets of “related” notes into discrete phrases? The work is by no means a priori — they collect lots of data on how people actually hear real pieces of music, which is not always the same for different people. Is there an inherent “musical grammar” in human beings, as a Chomskian would suggest that there is an inherent linguistic structure?

Again, I’m not an expert in this field, so I can’t do justice to the details. But here’s a tiny example of the kind of thing that goes on. Imagine giving the computer a head start by explicitly breaking up the music into bars (information that it wouldn’t actually have in real time). Then the computer can characterize each bar according to several different tests, to determine what “style” the music is being played in. By examining real pieces of music, you learn interesting things about the way that real human beings play. For example, it’s common to use scales as the basis for improvisation. A scale is characterized by a subset of the twelve notes in an octave; but there is actually more information than that, since not every note is played equally often. So the computer can make a histogram of which notes are being played in a given bar, to help it determine which scale is being improvised on.

Okay, it will never replace the real thing. But who knows, computers might help train a new generation of young lions. And if we learn something about how people think in the process, it’s all good.

If you’re wondering why posts from the last few weeks are lacking a certain, you know, “substance,” it’s because I’ve been traveling like crazy. Right now I’m in Irvine, California, at the National Academy of Sciences (“Home of Studies that are Increasingly Ignored”), for a Japanese-American Frontiers of Science meeting. They bring together young (-ish) scientists from the two countries, in various fields, to share the wonders of their research. The good news is that they have wireless internet all over the place. So we’re livebloggin’, baby!

Except that, not being an expert in the talks, I can’t really report accurately what we are hearing. This morning we heard about the geological (areological?) history of Mars, especially as it was influenced by the presence of water. There is very good reason to believe that Mars used to be filthy with the stuff, so we’d like to know where it all went. The Earth could someday end up like that.

Right now we are hearing an extremely amusing talk on cloning by Teruhiko Wakayama. His group was the second to clone mammals; they cloned multiple generations of mice shortly after the first mammalian clone, Dolly the sheep. Clones should be boring — they’re just genetic duplicates of the parent, just as twins are duplicates of each other. But there’s more to life than genetics! It turns out that clones tend to be overweight and die young, on average. You might think that the cloning process had somehow messed up the DNA. But, interestingly, when the clones have offspring via ordinary sexual reproduction, they come out perfectly normal! Here I am far outside my expertise, but the point seems to be that the expression of the genetic information is somehow disrupted by the cloning process, but the children of the clone are okay.

(The one thing I remember from a similar meeting last year is that female clones are effectively not genetic copies of their parents. Each individual uses the same amount of genetic information, but the X chromosome has more information than the Y. So the men (XY) use all the information they have, but the women (XX) will randomly turn off some fraction of the data in their X chromosomes while they are still embryos. There are something like 2⁵⁰ possible outcomes. So, for example, you can clone a female cat, but the kittens will all have different colorings.)

On Sunday I’ll be giving a talk on cosmology, along with Hitoshi Murayama and Naoshi Sugiyama. Still need to decide what I will talk about. Tomorrow I might skip the talks and go Xmas shopping.

No, not -symmetry. Nor -string, nor -nova, nor -conductor. Good old-fashioned super-hero, as promised previously.

As you see, my superhero identity involves atoms and mysterious energy fields of some kind; only makes sense, as I work in the same building as Enrico Fermi did. Presumably these fields would be detectable in fifth-force experiments some day.

As a bonus, “Mr. H” sends along a familiar physicist in fighting garb:

He’s pretty buff, for an old guy. Go make your own!

A friend of Preposterous points us to the following announcement in the American Astronomical Society electronic newsletter:

___________________________________________________________

8. FOX TELEVISION REALITY SHOW LOOKING FOR ASTRONOMERS

Fox Television’s hit new reality show “Trading Spouses” is

currently casting for the third season and is looking for

a family of astronomers! There must be two parents and

children over six living at home. If interested, please

contact Kate Currier.

Kate Currier

Assistant Talent Supervisor

Rocket Science Laboratories

8441 Santa Monica Blvd.

West Hollywood, CA 90069

Phone: 323-802-0489

fax: 323-802-0599

email: katec@rocketsciencelabs.com

___________________________________________________________

If anyone gets selected, I want a cut of all proceeds.

While I was in Sweden, everyone was naturally excited about the upcoming Nobel Prize lectures. As you know, the Physics prize was given to David Gross, David Politzer, and Frank Wilczek for the discovery of asymptotic freedom (the phenomenon by which the force between quarks becomes weaker, rather than stronger, at short distances). All of the laureates give lectures on their work, although occasionally someone will wander off topic — Einstein won the prize for the photoelectric effect, but talked about general relativity in his lecture.

So people were quite curious about David Politzer’s scheduled talk, which had the provocative title “The Dilemma of Attribution.” Now the lectures have apparently been given, but I can’t find any indication of what Politzer talked about; does anyone know? Eventually the talks will appear online, but that hasn’t happened yet; the news articles give every indication of being written before the events they describe.

In other news, we’re talked a lot about the idea of sending robots to service the Hubble Space Telescope. They could never do as good a job as an ordinary manned servicing mission, but NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe seems set on the idea. Now a National Academy of Sciences study has come out strongly in favor of a manned shuttle mission. We’ll see if it makes any difference.

From Tony Auth.