Sat, 23 Jan 2010
High Noon
Tibetan New Year will be on February 14th this year. The rule of thumb is that it falls on the New Year in February and this year it's smack dab in the middle. When this happens, the Chinese and two Tibetan calendars agree on New Year's day. When it falls to either end of the month, they disagree, with the Tibetan New Year often being the later new moon.
Everyone knows that the shortest day is the Winter solstice, the first day of winter. Succeeding days are longer, but there is an asymmetry. Sunset gets later faster than sunrise gets earlier. The reason is that every day is not twenty four hours long. Some days are shorter and other days are longer and twenty four hours is only the average length. The real length of a day is measured from noon to noon, where noon is the moment when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky. Most of the motion of the sun is caused by the rotation of the earth, but a little bit of it is caused by the motion of the earth around its orbit. From our vantage point, this looks like the earth has to rotate for four extra minutes each day to catch up with the motion of the sun in the sky. This motion is not perfectly uniform, it is faster during the Northern Hemisphere's winter. This makes Winter days a little longer on average and as a result sunrise and sunset are a little later each day, independent of the length of the day. During the Northern hemisphere's Summer, days are shorter and sunrise and sunset are both a little earlier each day. But the effect is not as large and noticeable as in Winter. This effect is known as the equation of time and if you want the full explanation, check out this page on the Greenwich Observatory site. Part of the effect is due to the variation in the Earth's orbit. The Earth is closer to the Sun in the Northern Hemisphere's Winter and moves faster in its orbit. The season that the Earth is closest to the Sun is not fixed. It varies through time, mostly due to the pull of the planet Jupiter. Some believe that this variation in the Earth's orbit is responsible for the ice ages.
One of my old astronomy professors that is in the news. He headed a commision reporting on NASA's asteroid tracking program. The report says the program is behind schedule because Cangress hasn't allocated the money to support it. Which is fine by me, because if I'm going to die a firery death because of an asteroid collision, I'd rather not know about it beforehand.
Fri, 17 Apr 2009
Anti-Science
Yesteday I was called anti-science for advocating homeopathy. It's a strange term and I'm not sure what it means. I understand anti-technology, which is the belief that technology causes more problems than it solves. I suppose anti-science means advocating some idea the scientific community does not accept. It's a strange inversion of science. What is supposed to be a method for discovering new ideas becomes a tool for criticizing old ones. As if there were some laundry list of things every right minded person must believe. Science, of course, being a living thing, grows and develops and what was believed yesterday is not believed today. One wonders if villians of the past. such as Lysenko, who taught that acquired traits can be inherited, and have been proven correct, will ever be rehabilitated.
Thu, 29 Jan 2009
Verificationism
I was reading an argument between a Skeptic and a Buddhist today and the Skeptic's went something like this. Science is based on verifiable facts, religion, including Buddhism, is not. So science is valid, and religion is nothing more than thought spinning. This seems to be the skeptical party line, and I find it tiresome, because it's so clearly wrong. I've said why before, but since no one seems to be listening, I'll say it again. If we divide statements into two piles, one pile being statements verified by observation and the other pile statements not verfied, we will need a procedure to determine which statement goes in which pile. The question then is, has this procedure been verified or not? Clearly the procedure cannot validate itself, so either it is unverified, or there is some second procedure to verify the first. This obviously leads to an endless regress. So each verifiable statement is an infinite conjunction of the form, "This has been verified AND the procedure which validated it has been verified AND the procedure which validated the first procedure has been verified AND ..." on into infinity. According to the rules of logic, a conjunction is only true if all its terms are true. If we accept the premise of verificationism, we can never know anything. So either verificationism is untrue, and the skeptic has no grounds for criticizing religion, or it is true, and the skeptic is in the same quandry as the person of faith, as neither can know anything.
Fri, 31 Oct 2008
Naturalism
I'm going away until Wednesdy evening. It's another Buddhist themed vacation. I'll be mumbling mantras along with a small group of fellow practitioners on the mountaintop at TMC. Yes, it's just been two weeks since I got back from seeing Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche at KTD> I'd prefer to schedule these things further apart, but I have to make do with what's offered.
I've been reading rants by scientists and doctors on the web, mostly directed at homeopathy. This is mostly because I keep track of press articles on homeopathy and the Google news alert thinks certain blogs (but not this one) are news. Anyway, the opinion expressed is that science is the only way to certain knowledge and anything outside of science is either opinion or superstition. Thus yoga and homeopathy are cast aside without any need to examine the facts, that is, whether they actually work. It's easy enough to see that this claim leads to problems. Is the claim "science and the scientific method are the only certain route to knowledge" a scientific statement? If it is not, the statement is self-refuting. If it is not, the claim stands in need of validation. It's the equivalent of lifting oneself up by one's bootstraps.
I've learned this claim has a name—it's called naturalism. I have no problem with naturalism as a purely pragmatic program. Let's try to expand the boundaries of knowledge though science and apply it to different areas and see how far we get. But let's not assume the conclusion before the attempt is completed. It seems to me that there are whole areas of human endeavor where science has not much to offer. Despite the calims of sociobiologists, science has contributed little to our understanding of ethics.
More than that, i think the effort to fit all of human experience on the Procrustean bed of science does violence to the human spirit. More than once people have told me they believe no one ever acts except from a selfish motive. Even seemingly altruistic acts are only done to impress others or oneseelf. It seems to me that this opinion is based on a mechanistic view of behavior. The selfish search for gain is the program that the human computer is running. But to htink this way is to lead a loveless life and blunt the human spirit.
Fri, 08 Jun 2007
The Arp Effect
I like to think of myself as a scientific, rational person, and I think that's how others see me. So people sometimes wonder how I can believe in something as unscientific as homeopathy. That takes a little explaining. For scientists to accept a hypothesis as true, two things must be the case. First, there must be evidence to support the hypothesis. And second, the hypothesis must be congruent with the other theories that form the science. This is not a new idea with me. Thomas Kuhn talked about it in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Homeopathy is attacked as unscientific, not because it fails the first test, but because it fails the second. No one can explain how infinitesimal dilutions can work with our current understanding of science, so homeopathy is ignored, no matter what the evidence of its effectiveness might be. It suffers from what I call the "Arp Effect." Arp is an astronomer who believes that the red shift of galaxies is not caused by the fact that they are receding from us, but for some other reason. To support his position he has measurements of galaxies that seem to be associated with each other that have greatly different red shifts. This evidence has no effect on astronomers at all, because no one has a plausible theory of how red shift could be caused by anything other than galaxies receding from us. So his evidence is explained away as coincidence, unassociated galaxies that merely lie in the same line of sight. But if some astrophysicist came up with an alternative theory for red shift tomorrow, the evidence that is now ignored would be hailed as proof.
Similarly, successful results from homeopathy are ignored as coincidence or the placebo effect -- an all purpose explanation for anything you wish to ignore. Positive studies are attacked as insufficient, flawed or the result of fraud. And the same is true of other theories, like cold fusion, the scientific establishment wishes to ignore.So if I use homeopathy, it's because I'm pragmatic and am only interested in the evidence that it works, which has been more than demonstrated to my satisfaction. How it works is not my problem.
Tue, 24 Apr 2007
Good Bye to Reality
A recent experiment in subatomic physics increases confidence that there are no "hidden variables" in subatomic physics.Markus Aspelmeyer, Anton Zeilinger and colleagues from the University of Viennahave now shown that realism is more of a problem than locality in the quantum world. They devised an experiment that violates an inequality proposed by physicist Anthony Leggett in 2003 that relies only on realism, and relaxes the reliance [in Bell's Theorem] on locality.
They found that, just as in the realizations of Bell's thought experiment, Leggett's inequality is violated Ð thus stressing the quantum-mechanical assertion that reality does not exist when we're not observing it. "Our study shows that 'just' giving up the concept of locality would not be enough to obtain a more complete description of quantum mechanics," Aspelmeyer told Physics Web. "You would also have to give up certain intuitive features of realism."
I think the article confuses hidden variables with realism. There are realistic interpretations of quantum mechanics, such as the many worlds interpretation, that do not rely on hidden variables. No one in physics takes hidden variables seriously, anyway. It would have been quite a shock if the experiment came out the other way. Still, quantum mechanics shows that the naive "common sense" view of reality is not only wrong, it is provably wrong.
Mon, 16 Apr 2007
Art or Science
One of my all time favorite quote come from the German occultist Rudolf Steiner. The in a book of talks called "The Younger Generation," as they were given to a young audience in 1922. The quote is on nature as art or science:
People say today he is not a true scientist who does not interpret observation and experiment quite logically; who does not pass from thought to thought in the correct methods that have been evolved. If he does not do this he is no genuine thinker. But, my dear friends, what if reality happens to be an artist and scorns our elaborate dialectical and experimental methods? What if Nature herself works according to artistic impulses? If that were so human science, according to Nature, would have to become an artist, for otherwise there would be no possibility of understanding Nature. That, however, is certainly not the standpoint of the modern scientist. His standpoint is: Nature may be an artist or a dreamer; it makes no difference to us, for we decree how we propose to cultivate science. What does it matter to us if nature is an artist? It matters not at all, for that is not our standpoint!
Thu, 22 Mar 2007
Glory
An article in the Chinese press talks about a phenomenon known as Buddha 's Light. This is nothing other than a well understood atmospheric phenomenonknown as the glory or brokenspecter. Like the rainbow, it's caused by light refracted through water drops.
A glory is only visible when sunlight is at the observer's back; therefore, they are always exactly opposite the sun, centered on the antisolar point. A glory will appear if that light entering into a cloud or fog bank is scattered or reflected backward to an observer's eye. Diffraction of the light bends the returning light rays slightly as they pass around the edges of uniformly-sized cloud water droplets. Interference among overlapping, returning waves produces light and dark bands that form the glory. Dark bands in the glory rings result from destructive interference when overlapping rays have their waveforms 180 degrees out of phase, and as a result, the low portion of one wave cancels the high portion of another
Fri, 12 Jan 2007
Out of the Matrix
In the Matrix Neo is trapped in a computer simulation that he mistakes for reality until he's given a red pill that takes him out of the simulation. (By blocking his i/o ports.) What most people don't recognize is that they're trapped in a different sort of matrix: the belief that the laws of physics are a description of reality and that we live in that reality. Descartes invented coordinate geometry and Newton based his laws of mechanics upon it. Since then physics has described reality as a three dimensional continuum. (Four dimensional since Einstein.)
Practically everyone considers this a description of reality, but it can't possibly be so. The reason why is simple: the continuum has paradoxical properties that reality does not have. For example, a sphere in a three dimensional continuum can be cut into a finite number of pieces and reassembled into two spheres of equal size to the first. (This is the Banach-Tarski theorem.)
In the continuum there is always an interval between any two points that do not coincide. This means two objects can never touch, because the concept of touching has no meaning in a continuum. You may not be trouble by giving up the concept of touching, but are you willing to give up the concept of causation? Our idea of causation is that the cause must precede the effect. If the effect exists at the same time as its supposed cause, then it could not have been the cause. But if the cause no longer exists at the time of its effect, there must be a gap during which the cause has ceased and the effect has not yet arisen. Our concept of causation rests on the idea of two events touching, which cannot happen if time is a continuum.
It's not that there's a problem with physics that needs to be fixed. Physics provides a good model of reality, but it is not that reality itself. Once you see that, you've stepped out of the matrix.
Thu, 30 Nov 2006
Quantum Reality
I smacked around the New Agers in my earlier science post. Now it's time to to set my sights on the atheists. Deepak Chopra wrote a post defending the reality of consciousness. PZ Meyers snorts that it's just more "New Age babble." Deepak Chopra's post is rather muddled, but he makes some solid points. He starts off with argument that consciousness can be shown through the existence of qualia. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives a clearer argument in their entry on qualia. I tried to make a similar argument in my post Red Head two years ago.
When you see something red, where or what is the color red? First let's distinguish between the experience of the color red and the scientific understanding of the physical process that gives rise to it. Everyone knows that we experience red when light of a certain wavelength falls on our open eyes, but this understanding is different from the actual experience of red. Someone completely color blind, so that they only see black and white never experiences the color red, no matter how well they understand physics and biology. But if there were some operation that restored their color vision, then they would experience it, even if they were completely ignorant of the physics of color. So the intellectual understanding of color and the actual experience of color are distinct.
So where is the color red? Is the light red? No, light is an electromagnetic wave and is completely described by Maxwell's equations. If an electromagnetic wave had color, there would be a qualitative difference between radio waves and light waves, and there is not. So is the color red in the eye? No, the light waves falling on the receptors causes them to fire. This is an electrochemical process and there's no experience of red in any of this. Similarly you can trace the nerve impulses through the brain and not find the color red in any of this biological process. So where exactly is the color red?
The second part of Deepak Chopra's argument invokes quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is much misunderstood by persons of all philosophical persuasions. But it is difficult to reconcile quantum mechanics with materialism, the belief that the objects postulated by physics are real. I can't give an exhaustive definition of what "real" means, but to say that an object is real implies that it exists (there are no non-existent real objects) and that it is not a relation between two or more other objects. Is the wave equation which describes a quantum systems real? No, because the wave equation describes the probability that a quantum exists in a given state. Something which describes the probability of existence cannot itself exist. And since it doesn't exist, it can't be real. Does the quantum particle whose existence is determined by the wave equation real? No, because it is a relation between the quantum system being measured and the measurement being made.
So materialism has a hard time of it. If the physics of quantum mechanics tells us what matter is, then there's no reality in the quantum world, only a web of potential relations described by equations. Quantum mechanics doesn't yield the "consciousness equals God" that Deepak Chopra is looking for, but it's equally unkind to the materialist.
Wed, 22 Nov 2006
Energy
Next on the list of things that people believe that aren't true is the belief that Einstein's formula E = mc2 proves that everything is really energy. There's two problems here. There's a misunderstanding of what energy is. Most people think of energy as an immaterial substance. For physics it is not, it is a property of a system, just as your height is a property. For physics both mass and energy are properties of systems. It's even more nebulous than that. For physics energy is defined as a differential, meaning that only a difference in energy levels is physically significant and the absolute amount of energy in a system is irrelevant. What Einstein showed is that the total amount of mass and energy in a system is conserved, but one can be converted into another. It's like a stick. When you lay it down it's one inch high and one foot long. But when you stand it up it's one inch long and one foot high. But neither the length or the height of the stick is the stick or its stickiness.
I think it's important to understand that even physics, thought of as the most fundamental science, doesn't talk about the substance or essence of things, it talks about their properties, because it's their properties that are observable and measurable. What things actually are is a question for philosophy. An electron has a mass and charge, but what is it that has the mass and charge? It was questions like this that drove me to Buddhism, where I got to ask similar questions about the mind. What is the mind, other than the ephemeral thoughts and emotions that pass through it? So the question didn't change, only its location did.
Tue, 21 Nov 2006
No Escaping Gravity
I'm going to take a break from the stuff I normally post and turn to another subject: stuff that people believe that isn't actually so. The first topic: there's no gravity in outer space, because otherwise, why would astronauts float around in the Space Shuttle. Actually, there is gravity in outer space, it's what keeps the Space Shuttle and everything else that orbits the Earth in orbit. The reason why astronauts float around in orbit is that gravity pulls the Space Shuttle and astronauts with equal force. If you go sky diving and let go of a pen, the pen will appear to float along side you. This is because it's falling at the same speed that you are. The same thing is happening in orbit: the astronauts and the Space Shuttle are "falling" towards the Earth. Only they're so high up and going so fast that they miss the edge of the Earth and continue "falling" all the way around it. That's what being in orbit actually is. Even if you're on the surface of the Moon you're in Earth's gravitational field, otherwise the Moon wouldn't orbit the Earth. In the same way on the surface of the Earth we're in the gravitational field of the Sun. So there's no escaping gravity.
