Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 125

The reality of “imaginary” numbers — discovery, not invention

Over at YouTube, there is a bit of history of Math, on study of cubic functions — and yes there is as usual, some less than exemplary detail — that led to the “invention” of imaginary numbers:

Now of course, I contend that this was discovery not invention (I often don’t buy Veritas Sum’s narrative, but here is a way to see the story).

In News’ thread on i, I commented at 33:

your definition [– Eugene at 8: “there exists such a pair of real numbers (0, 1) that (0, 1) * (0, 1) = -1, where “*” is the specific multiplication rule defined for these types of pairs” –] is tantamount to describing the role of sqrt – 1 in a vector system of numbers, extensible to the ijk vectors and onward to quaternions etc. I often just say take the j* operator as rot 0x 90 degrees anticlockwise. do a double and we see j*j* x –> – x, i.e, the sqrt has a natural, rotation linked sense as j^2 = – 1. Where, oscillations and waves including transients [think here Laplace and Fourier transforms] are closely tied to rotations. Where of course waves are pervasive in quantum mechanics, the Schrodinger expression is about waves and of course energy with standing waves under constraints naturally being quantised as we know from school physics. Further to such, I showed that from {} –> 0 thence N,Z,Q,R,C,R* etc, once distinct identity of possible worlds obtains, core math is embedded in any possible world which gives it universal power as Wigner marvelled at.

So, we are back to Wigner’s wonder. END

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50 Christmases Later

December 19, 1971 was a Sunday, the last one before Christmas.  I was ten.  My sister was eleven.  We went with our family to the evening service at Trinity Baptist Church in Boyd, Texas.  After services my parents left us with a group that was going Christmas caroling.  We never made it to the first house.

Our church was on the highway on the western edge of town.   Our group of about 20 carolers walked along the side the highway toward the first neighborhood a few hundred yards away.  The leaders were in the front and back of the group.  My sister and I were with the kids in the middle.  My memories of what happened next are episodic.  I don’t know if this is because I was in and out of consciousness or if my mind will not let me remember.  This is what I do remember.

It is a dark night.  We are walking along the side of the road.  My friends are around me.  Two headlights.  Screeching tires.  Screams.  Darkness.

Laying in a ditch.  Where is Robin?  Grabbing hands full of weeds as I crawl in the ditch.  Why can’t I stand?  Darkness.

Laying on the side of the road.  Someone has put a coat on me.  A crowd has gathered around a car.  Yelling.  A man is beating someone with his fists.  Darkness.

The flashing lights of ambulances.  My mother is here.  She is hysterical.  She is screaming and fighting with a man who will not let her into an ambulance.  Darkness.

In an ambulance going down the road.  My father is beside me.  He weeps silently.  Darkness.

Bright lights of a hospital.  A doctor is wrapping plaster around my leg.  I see one of my friends on the other side of the room.  Sleep.

Later I learned that a drunken 19 year-old man had swerved toward the group as a joke to frighten us.  He lost control and drove into the middle of the group among the kids.  Eight were injured, including me and my sister, and one nine year-old girl was killed when the car pinned her against a highway post.  This girl was wearing the same style coat as my sister, and my mother had fought to get into the ambulance with her, thinking it was her daughter.  My sister was in a different ambulance, and my father was weeping because the entire trip with me to the hospital in Fort Worth he thought Robin was dead. 

Robin was not dead, but she was badly injured.  She was hit so hard that her body became a projectile that struck another kid and broke his leg.  She sustained a broken nose, a broken leg, a broken arm and injuries to her spinal cord.  She had operations and lived a fairly normal life, though she always struggled with fine motor skills.  Over 40 years later, in 2014, complications from her injuries caused her to become a quadriplegic.  She lived six more years and died in 2020.  By comparison, my injuries were slight, a broken leg from which I fully recovered. 

What to make of all of this?  Terrible, senseless things happen to children as Ivan Karamazov recounted in his famous indictment of God.  How can a loving God allow this?  I have contemplated the theodicy for decades, and in that time I have learned only one thing for certain.  Ivan’s indictment cannot be refuted by logic.  If it can be countered at all, it can be countered only as Alyosha countered it, by faith in God’s love as demonstrated though Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.  Robin trusted.  She forgave.  She did not allow bitterness to consume her soul.  This is our second Christmas without her, but I will see her again.  With joy in my heart, I sing the old song:

I’ll meet you in the morning
With a how do you do
And we’ll sit down by the river
And with rapture old acquaintance renew
You’ll know me in the morning
By the smile that I wear
When I meet you in the morning
In that city that is built four square

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If imaginary numbers are needed to describe reality, then isn’t materialism dead already?

Why are we even wondering?:

The researchers stressed, however, that their experiment only rules out theories that forgo imaginary numbers if the reigning conventions of quantum mechanics are correct. Most scientists are very confident that this is the case, but this is an important caveat nonetheless.

The result suggests that the possible ways we can describe the universe with math are actually much more constrained than we might have thought, Renou said.

Ben Turner, “Imaginary numbers could be needed to describe reality, new studies find” at Live Science (December 21, 2021)

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Does a culture reach a point where a rebirth of science is not even possible?

Or not any time soon enough to matter:

For too long, there has been a longstanding slowdown in support for challenging paradigms — a “graying” of science that has resulted in talented scientists receiving their first large grants when they are ten years older than was typical of scientists in the past. The conflict of interest between Dr. Fauci’s roles as funder and lockdown architect is merely one example of how those within existing power structures in the scientific community control which ideas are deemed valid. Those wielding power are afraid of having their views and orthodoxy overturned. Those who control the funding and the publication are often the same people, and peer review itself has shifted from controlling quality to controlling ideas.

It’s not an exaggeration to view the iron-fisted grip over the funding and publication of new scientific findings as a threat to the continuation of scientific freedom. It’s increasingly hard for ideas that challenge orthodoxy to break through. This is a recipe for a prolonged stagnation that could jeopardize the societal well-being, economic health, and security of the United States.

Scott W. Atlas, Jay Bhattacharya & Martin Kulldorff, “America Needs a Rebirth of Science” at Natoinal Review (December 20, 2021)

Question: What are they actually going to do?

Anyone who lives in an aging society will be aware of this problem: Old ladies demanding endless lockdowns and crackdowns to fight COVID-19 who don’t even know what viruses are. Or care. But they don’t need to know — or care — because viruses are “science.” Once science replaced religion in some people’s lives, science became a superstition. And it shows.

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Believing in God and science at the same time

Wow! What a radical idea. Isaac Newton would’ve had a fit. Oh wait.

From Prager U:

Does belief in God get in the way of science? The idea that science and religion are inevitably in conflict is a popular way of thinking today. But the history of science tells a different story.

But now, just asking: Have new atheists made any difference to the practice of science? Why are they even associated with science in particular?

You may also wish to read: How did new atheism,/a> become the “godlessness that failed”?

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To what extent is the science we must learn at school materialist propaganda?

Honestly, it’s just not clear. Here’s Neil Thomas:

In the early 19th century, the poet Shelley rather grandiloquently proclaimed poets to be “the unacknowledged legislators of humanity,” but as the century wore on that messianic role became increasingly one claimed (no less grandiloquently) by scientists of this or that stripe. However, the benefit of hindsight and historical reappraisal have joined to recategorize some of the more notable of such (would-be) legislators as mistaken messiahs. Post-1989 neither Marx’s earthly utopia purportedly achievable by political prescription nor Freud’s theories about endemic human angst being curable via talking therapies have any longer been accorded the status of “science.”3 Seen against the intellectual context of the displaced messianisms of Communism and Freudianism,4 it might be expected that the overreaching explanatory ambitions of Darwinism would now be read as a comparable form of (secular) apocalyptic yearning promising more the hope of enlightenment than its reality. Yet Darwinism has been permitted to escape that fate by a variety of quite remarkable face-saving maneuvers.

When Darwin’s ignorance of genetics became clear after the belated rediscovery of Mendelism in the first decade of the 20th century, there was some talk of Darwinism’s eclipse5 and yet a slow but concerted move was initiated to save Darwin’s scientific honor by enshrining him as the foundation of what in 1942 was proclaimed to be the New Synthesis — effectively melding older Darwinian ideas with the new science of genetics. Similarly, when in the early 1970s Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge advanced their theory of punctuated equilibrium to challenge Darwin’s ideas of strict biological gradualism, they claimed with whatever plausibility and verbal finessing they could muster that theirs was not an assault on Darwin’s theory since neither chose to challenge Darwin’s foundational mechanism of natural selection. Both in the 1940s and in the 1970s, then, a firm determination revealed itself to hold Darwin within the scientific embrace as an untarnished icon despite any and every difference of opinion. It appeared that Darwin, that very quintessence of the English gentleman in his own person, has been blessed with some decidedly gentlemanly (and/or self-interested) opponents in the 20th century. The net result of this sedulous Darwinian ring-fencing has been that, although other would-be gurus such as Marx and Freud have been toppled from their pedestals, “Darwin’s acolytes still speak with all the unassailable confidence of 19th-century men of science and empire,”6 and this despite well-substantiated opposition from the intelligent design community plus numerous others not formally associated with that scientific grouping.

Neil Thomas, “Materialist Science as Paternalistic Propaganda” at Evolution News and Science Today (December 14, 2021)

The American approach (legal action) — Scopes Trial, Dover Decision — doesn’t really help.

Here’s a question: Given what we (hope we) know today about the origin and development of life forms, would anyone today propose neo-Darwinism (natural selection) in any of its forms as an explanation – if they hadn’t already had to accept it anyway in order to get to where they are today?

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Ostrich eggshell beads from 50 000 years ago shed light on human history

Digital microscope images of archeological ostrich eggshell beads/Jennifer Miller

Like following a trail of breadcrumbs:

Ostrich eggshell (OES) beads are ideal artifacts for understanding ancient social relationships. They are the world’s oldest fully manufactured ornaments, meaning that instead of relying on an item’s natural size or shape, humans completely transformed the shells to produce beads. This extensive shaping creates ample opportunities for variations in style. Because different cultures produced beads of different styles, the prehistoric accessories provide researchers a way to trace cultural connections.

“It’s like following a trail of breadcrumbs,” says Miller, lead-author of the study. “The beads are clues, scattered across time and space, just waiting to be noticed.”

To search for signs of population connectivity, Miller and Wang assembled the largest ever database of ostrich eggshell beads. It includes data from more than 1500 individuals.

Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, “Ostrich eggshell beads reveal 50,000-year-old social network across Africa” at Eurekalert (December 20, 2021)

Except that when Hansel and Gretel did it in the old story, it didn’t work because the birds ate the crumbs, So the kids ended up having to stuff the witch into the oven…

This information sounds more promising and the paper is open access.

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At one time, academic ideologues were just bores. Then they discovered politics…

At Quillette, one academic spoke out:

Nearly a quarter of the approximately 200 email responses I got included a description of some personally observed or experienced instance of cancel culture, or of the intrusion of politics into scientific pedagogy. But with few exceptions, these writers said they were scared of being seen as opposing this movement. “The situation in STEM is certainly Orwellian,” wrote one writer, whom I am quoting on condition of anonymity. “I am frequently scared of expressing the Wrong viewpoint, resulting in self-censorship. Worse, at times I feel pressured to give a statement (a social performance) [indicating] that I am aligned with the Correct viewpoint.”

Another correspondent wrote: “I came [across] your viewpoint … as I was scrolling through Twitter over the weekend. Unsurprisingly, a Twitter mob … came together to demand the retraction of this essay from the JPCL. I am appalled with this behavior … Ideas like this should be rigorously and thoroughly discussed and debated, instead of just shutting [them] down. I am a gay person of colour, supposedly belonging to that same group of people that [the mob seeks] to protect. However, I do not think I am protected, nor am I ‘safe.’ And often because of this, I remain quiet in these social-media platforms, fearing that my future career in science will be in peril.”

Anna Krylov and Jay Tanzman, “Corrupting STEM. The Silent Liberal Majority Must Fight Back” at Quillette (December 18, 2021)

Sadly, that “gay person of colour” who kept silent has largely built his/her OWN prison. It wasn’t the howling stupids who did that.

Look, please. Freedom costs. If you can’t speak up, you can’t be free. That’s why we commemorate Remembrance Day. Those people actually died, by the way.

But does anyone really believe that the “silent liberal majority” will ever really fight back? As opposed to morphing into Bores-for-Life by sacrificing everyone and everything that the new fascists want? So far not looking good.

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Steve Meyer on Darwin’s Tree of Life

Everyone has seen the iconic tree of life depicted by Darwin. But in this bonus interview released as part of the Science Uprising series, best-selling author Stephen Meyer describes how the fossil record poses significant challenges to Darwin’s tree of life. When one studies the various biological forms of the fossil record, one finds that these forms remain static with slight variations until the species either goes extinct or persists into the present day. According to Meyer, “we don’t see the kind of morphing from one major morphological innovation into another that you would expect on the basis of Darwinian theory.”

The Tree of Life is how artsies came to embrace Darwinism. True, false, or indifferent, it practically illustrates itself. Good myths work that way. A problem arises when we are commanded by authorities to believe them.

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More on why people don’t “trust science” the way we used to

It’s not just because a vast mass of people are stupid, ignorant rubes. Get this, re U.S. government bureaucrats:

The GBD [Great Barrington Declaration]- authored by previous DailyMail.com contributor Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, calls for individuals at significantly lower risk of dying from COVID-19 – as well as those at higher risk who so wish – to be allowed ‘to resume their normal lives.’

That would mean allowing people in low risk groups to go to offices, hang out in bars and restaurants and go to sporting and entertainment events.

Stephen M. LePore, “‘There needs to be a quick and devastating take down’: Emails show how Fauci and head of NIH worked to discredit three experts who penned the Great Barrington Declaration which called for an end to lockdowns” at Daily Mail (December 18, 2021)

What was prevented is exactly what science needs, an honest discussion of the pros and cons.

To what extent, today, does “trust science” mean no more than “sign on to whatever an increasingly clueless elite thinks?” Worth asking.

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