Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 21

Origenes on the self-defeating incoherence of the [hyper-]skeptic

Origenes is on fire these days, so let’s headline:

Blind men and an elephant. Notice, the mental conceptions respond to an actual reality and a sufficient experience will provide an objective picture.

[Origenes, emergence play thread, 57:] The skeptic wants to criticize, but he doesn’t want to be criticized himself. We all make statements of belief, skeptics included. But the skeptic posits a closed circle in which no beliefs are justified. Yet at the same time, he arrogates to himself a position outside of this circle by which he can judge the beliefs of others, a move he denies to his opponents. Since the raison d’être of his thesis is that there is no outside of the circle, he does not have the epistemic right to assume a position independent of it, and so his belief about the unjustifiability of beliefs or reasoning is just as unjustifiable as those he criticizes. If the circle encloses all beliefs, if all beliefs are unjustifiable, he cannot judge between truth and falsity, since any such judgment would be just as unjustifiable as what it seeks to adjudicate. At no point can he step out of the circle to a transcendent standpoint that would allow him to reject some beliefs as tainted while remaining untainted himself.

Food for sobering thought. END

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At Sci.News: Human Bipedalism May Have Evolved in Trees, Study Says

Bipedalism — walking upright on two legs — us a defining feature of the human lineage. It is thought to have evolved as forests retreated in the Late Miocene to Pliocene period.

Chimpanzees living in analogous habitats to early hominins offer a unique opportunity to investigate the ecological drivers of bipedalism that cannot be addressed via the fossil record alone. In new research, scientists focused on a community of eastern chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) in the Issa Valley, Tanzania, as the first test in a living ape of the hypothesis that wooded, savanna habitats were a catalyst for human bipedalism.

“Terrestrial (land-based) bipedalism is a defining feature of modern humans, and its morphological adaptations are critical to distinguishing fossils that fall within the human clade (hominins) from those of other apes (hominoids) over the past 7 million years,” said University of Kent researcher Rhianna Drummond-Clarke and colleagues.

“The shift to more arid and open environments in the Late Miocene-Pliocene (10 to 2.5 million years ago) has played a central role in hypotheses about hominin evolution.”

“In particular, the emergence and evolution of bipedalism is often considered to be a key adaptation to more open, dry habitats — termed ‘savanna,’ which includes wooded habitats with a grassy understory rather than only treeless grassland assumed in traditional ‘savanna hypotheses’ — in which hominins reduced the time spent in trees and increased terrestrial foraging and traveling as forests retreated.”

Drummond-Clarke et al. show that trees were an essential component of the hominin adaptive niche, with bipedalism evolving in an arboreal context, likely driven by foraging strategy. Illustration by Arturo Asensio, via Quo.es.

Note: Did the genetic information required for bipedalism already exist within hominoids? If not, no amount of environmental opportunity can reasonably be the cause of “the emergence and evolution of bipedalism.”

“Issa chimpanzees are well situated for testing the savanna effect on chimpanzee positional behavior, not only through comparison to forest-dwelling communities but also by comparing how individuals adjust their positional behavior across vegetation types within a savanna-mosaic habitat.”

The researchers recorded more than 13,700 instantaneous observations of positional behavior from 13 chimpanzee adults (six females and seven males), including almost 2,850 observations of individual locomotor events (e.g., climbing, walking, hanging, etc.), over the course of the 15-month study.

They then used the relationship between tree/land-based behavior and vegetation (forest vs woodland) to investigate patterns of association.

Similarly, they noted each instance of bipedalism and whether it was associated with being on the ground or in the trees.

“We found that the Issa chimpanzees spent as much time in the trees as other chimpanzees living in dense forests, despite their more open habitat, and were not more terrestrial as expected,” they said.

“Furthermore, although we expected the Issa chimpanzees to walk upright more in open savanna vegetation, where they cannot easily travel via the tree canopy, more than 85% of occurrences of bipedalism took place in the trees.”

Despite these findings, why humans alone amongst the apes first began to walk on two feet still remains a mystery.

“To date, the numerous hypotheses for the evolution of bipedalism share the idea that hominins came down from the trees and walked upright on the ground, especially in more arid, open habitats that lacked tree cover. Our data do not support that at all,” said Dr. Fiona Stewart, a researcher at University College London.

“Unfortunately, the traditional idea of fewer trees equals more terrestriality just isn’t borne out with the Issa data.”

“What we need to focus on now is how and why these chimpanzees spend so much time in the trees — and that is what we’ll focus on next on our way to piecing together this complex evolutionary puzzle.”

Full article at Sci.News.

The “mystery” of “why humans alone amongst the apes first began to walk on two feet,” and “why these chimpanzees spend so much time in the trees” presents yet another disconnect between the expectations of evolutionary theory and reality. However, both of these findings are in complete accord with the model of intelligent design, in which the Designer intended humans to walk on two feet and chimpanzees to spend most of their time in trees.

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At Astronomy.com: The universe may be more unstable than you think

The cosmos is considered metastable, which means there is a chance it could fall apart — or it already has.

Paul Sutter writes:

Vacuum expectations

Our universe has not always been the same. In the earliest moments of the Big Bang, when our cosmos was a mere fraction of its current size, the energies and temperatures were enormously high that even the fundamental rules of physics were completely different. Most notably, physicists believe that at one time, all four forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear and weak nuclear) were merged into a single, unified force.

The nature of that unified force remains a mystery, but as the universe expanded and cooled from initial state, the forces peeled off from each other. First came gravity, then strong nuclear, and lastly electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force split from each other. That last step we can recreate in the lab. In our most powerful particle colliders, we can achieve the energies needed to – temporarily, at least – recombine those forces into a single “electroweak” force.

Each time the forces divided, the cosmos underwent a radical phase transition, populated by new particles and forces. For example, the unified electroweak force is carried by a quartet of massless particles, but the electromagnetic force is carried by a single massless particle, the photon, while three massive particles carry the weak nuclear. If those two forces hadn’t split, then life as we know it, which depends on electromagnetic interactions to glue atoms together into molecules, simply wouldn’t exist.

The universe has not undergone such a reshuffling of fundamental forces in over 13 billion years, but that doesn’t mean it’s not capable of playing the same tricks again.

The ultimate stability of the vacuum of our universe may rest on the masses of two fundamental particles, the Higgs boson — that inhabits all space and time — and the top quark. The latest measurements of those masses reveals that our universe is metastable, meaning that it can persist in its present state essentially forever… or not.The deciding Higgs boson

The current stability of the vacuum depends on how ultimate that splitting of the electroweak force was. Did that splitting bring the universe to its final, lowest-energy ground state? Or is it merely a pitstop on the road of its further evolution?

The answer comes down to the masses of two fundamental particles. One is the Higgs boson, which plays a major role in physics: Its existence triggered the separation of the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces all those billions of years ago.

At first, when our universe was hot and dense, the Higgs stayed in the background, allowing the electroweak force to rule unimpeded. But once the universe cooled beyond a certain point, the Higgs made its presence known, and interfered with that force, creating a separation that has been maintained ever since. The mass of the Higgs boson determined when that splitting happened, and it regulates how “strong” that separation is today.

But the Higgs plays another major role in physics: By interacting with many other particles, it gives those particles mass. How strongly a particle connects to the Higgs governs that particle’s mass. For example, the electron barely talks to the Higgs at all, so it gets a light mass of 511 MeV. On the other end of the spectrum, the top quark interacts with the Higgs the most, making it the heaviest object in the Standard Model of particle physics, weighing in at 175 GeV.

In particle physics, particles are constantly interacting and interfering with all the other kinds of particles, but the strength of those interactions depend on the particle masses. So, when we try to evaluate anything involving the Higgs boson – like, say, its ability to maintain the separation between the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces – we also need to pay attention to how the other particles will interfere with that effort. And since the top quark is handily the biggest of the bunch (the next largest, the bottom quark, weighs a mere 5 GeV) it’s essentially the only other particle we need to care about.

Stability of the universe

When physicists first calculated the stability of the universe, as determined by the Higgs boson’s ability to maintain the separation of the electroweak force, they didn’t know the mass of either the Higgs itself or the top quark. Now we do: The top quark weighs around 175 GeV, and the Higgs around 125 GeV.

Plugging those two numbers into the stability equations reveals that the universe is… metastable. This is different than stable, which would mean that there’s no chance of the universe splitting apart instantly, but also different than unstable, which would mean it already happened.

Instead, the universe is balanced in a rather precarious position: It can remain in its present state indefinitely, but if something were to perturb spacetime in just the wrong way, then it would transform to a new ground state.

What would that new state look like? It’s impossible to say, as the new universe would feature new physics, with new particles and new forces of nature. But it’s safe to say that life would be different, if not completely impossible.

What’s worse, it may have already happened. Some corner of the cosmos may have already begun the transition, with the bubble of a new reality expanding outwards at the speed of light. We wouldn’t know it hit us until it already arrived. Sleep tight!

Astronomy.com

So, physics researchers have found more fine-tuning: yet another feature of our universe upon which our entire existence is contingent. When combined with the many other fine-tuned parameters of physics necessary for life to exist, we have growing reason to doubt that “luck” is the explanation.

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Michael Denton: The Miracle of Man

  

(This article by Terry Scambray originally appeared in the December 2022 edition of New Oxford Review.)  

The 20th century’s most prominent atheist, Bertrand Russell once said that when he dies if confronted by God and asked why he remained an atheist, he would simply say, “Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence.”

Michael Denton is one of several 20th century scientists who have come forward with evidence that the cosmos by all scientific accounts looks to be a profoundly crafted place for life and specifically for human life to exist and then to thrive and flourish. 

 Even an agnostic like Freeman Dyson, the Angelo American physicist, has said, “The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.”  Voltaire famously wrote: if God did not exist, he would have to be invented; though he less famously followed that by writing, God does exist because of the order in the natural world.  America’s Voltaire, H.L Mencken, wrote, “I can recall no concrete atheist who did not appear to me to be a donkey. For if there is anything plain about the universe, it is that it is governed by law, and law is always a manifestation of Will.”  

Other cosmologists like Brandon Carter, Fred Hoyle, and Guillermo Gonzalez have made similar claims for what has become known as the anthropic principle meaning that this world offers an irresistible invitation for life to come in and stay awhile.

Certainly these findings do not “prove God,” but when one considers the sublime fine tuning of the universe that Denton describes, the conclusion of a Designer is hard to resist.  Indeed, as Denton has recently said, “This just right, Goldilocks universe rings up the curtain on the great scriptural drama of Redemption which requires man’s centrality in some sense and that’s what fitness is bringing back.” 

So science and theology, science and Christianity are inextricably connected as they were when science was invented in the medieval universities and, by contrast, they are not the entrenched enemies as they have been portrayed for the last 200 years.  Physicist Paul Davies goes further when he says, “Science offers a surer path to God than religion.”

Denton’s first book, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, is regarded as the opening salvo of the intelligent design movement, a view which attempts to demonstrate that just as man made things are designed by a mind for a purpose, so the same applies to the even more wonderous features of nature.  

In addition to his medical degree and his doctorate in genetics, Denton knows history and philosophy.  All of this makes him aware that by pointing out the shortcomings of Darwin, he sends an entire worldview into a tailspin.   As Denton puts it, Darwin thought that “the eerie purposefulness of living systems resulted from a blind process – natural selection; that is, time and chance.  God’s will was replaced by the capriciousness of a roulette wheel.  The break with the past was complete.” 

Others had certainly deconstructed Darwin almost immediately after his 1859 publication of The Origin of the Species.  However, Denton’s critique relied mainly on the science of the last 50 years and especially the latest findings in molecular biology to reestablish teleology as the only possible explanation for the complexity of life and the cosmos.

The findings of molecular biology show that the inner workings of the cell alone are too complex, far too interdependent to have been built in a piece-by-piece manner without a purpose, or to use Aristotle’s words, without a “final cause.”

Denton wrote that the claim that time and chance are responsible for such sublime complexity “is one of the most daring claims in all of science.  But it is also one of the least substantiated.  No one has ever produced any proof that the designs in nature are within the reach of chance.”    

 Denton, in his 1998 book, Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe, proceeded to dive deeper into the complexity of life by showing that it exists on a razor’s edge of finely calibrated variables.  As he wrote, “There is insufficient evidence to argue that the laws of nature are uniquely fit for every detail of human biology.  However, I believe the current evidence points strongly in this direction and that future scientific advances will confirm the absolute centrality of mankind in the cosmic scheme.”

 The current evidence that Denton’s book relies on is encyclopedic, including the nature of many variables including carbon, water, fire, sunlight and even the cosmos itself.  His explanations of how all these features are synchronized is finely grained and demanding, but a few examples may suffice to suggest the depth of his investigation.

Carbon is the only element that bonds easily with other elements in long chains without a great loss of energy.  Besides making life possible when it bonds with hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, which make amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, it also makes life bearable when it combines with other elements to make natural gas, gasoline, lubricating oils, gases, waxes, plastics, anesthetics, solvents, Freon, ethanol, coffee, tea and many other items.

As it happened, Hoyle, early on as an atheist, figured that there was a relatively easy pathway to form carbon.   What he found, though, was that combining other elements like helium, hydrogen and beryllium could not form carbon.  Additionally the physical and chemical dynamics within stars play a role in making carbon.   That is, a star, acting as a furnace, must get sufficiently hot in order to blend various elements but not so hot that the star would burn up.  Hoyle concluded that such finely calibrated events cannot be explained by chance, making this one example of many which drove him to say that “a superintellect has monkeyed with physics.”

Another indispensable feature of life that is difficult to explain within a purely materialistic framework is water; for it is the ideal substance for filling the body’s billions of capillaries while also serving as a universal solvent which produces the hygienic conditions conducive to health.

In explaining water’s versatility, Denton writes that when water freezes into ice “it has a viscosity of 1016  times that of water.  The rocks which make up the crust of the earth have viscosities ranging between 1025 to 1028 times that of water.  So if the viscosity of ice had been several times lower than it is, then glacial activity would have been much less effective in grinding down the mountains” to form rich valleys and to expose the vital minerals which make modern industrial society possible.  (1016 means 1 with 16 zeros after it which is a quadrillion; and so on for the others mentioned.)

 Fire literally ignited the industrial revolution and the earth’s boundless forests offered the fuel to make fire while the upright, bipedal features of humans and the manipulative abilities of human hands perfectly fit the demands of fire making.   From burning wood, charcoal was made which burns at the high temperatures necessary to blend raw metals and then to shape them into the materials and machines without which civilization could not exist.

Sunlight is another essential for life because it manufactures energy by the still unexplained process of photosynthesis which grows plants which produce food for humans and animals. 

Some ask how the almost immeasurable size of the universe fits into what might appear to be this rather tidy teleological view.   As it turns out, however, even the most distant galaxies influence the inertia of earthly bodies!   As Denton writes, “The existence of beings of our size and mass with the ability to stand, to move, and to light a fire is only possible because of the influence of the most distant galaxies, whose collective mass determines the precise strength of the inertial forces on earth.”

Denton sees this feature of the universe “as a distant echo of the medieval doctrine of man which held that the dimensions of the human body reflect in some profound sense the dimensions of the macrocosm.” 

In his most recent work, Denton continues his quest to demonstrate the perfect fit between man and the cosmos.  Thus, beginning in 2016 he published a series of four short books on each of the properties of fire, water, light and the cell.  In each of these books, ranging in length from 68 to 168 pages, he delves into even greater detail the elegant features of life.   While specialists will better appreciate the finely grained details from chemistry, physics, optics and so on that Denton discusses, the wizardry of nature described in these monographs will also impress the non-specialist.

[image error]

 For example, in his 2020 book, The Miracle Of The Cell, he writes that a cell “consists of trillions of atoms, representing the complexity of a jumbo jet and more, packed into a space less than a millionth of the volume of a typical grain of sand.  But unlike anything else this entity can replicate itself.  Here is an infinity machine with seemingly magical powers.”

 Denton concludes his “Privileged Species Series” with The Miracle of Man: The Fine Tuning of Nature for Human Existence.  And, in this case, he admits that his claim that the cosmos is uniquely fit for man may strike many as extraordinary.  As Carl Sagan wrote, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”   But unlike the unsupported Darwinian claim that time and accident produced all of nature including man, Denton responds that, regardless of how extraordinary his claim appears, the facts speak for themselves.

And once again, Denton presents an amazing array of facts, from the cardiac muscle cells which have “trillions of tightly packed molecular arrays of contractile filaments” which generate the cardiac cycle as it pumps blood which adds a fourth of a liter of oxygen per minute as it moves one hundred trillion oxygen molecules per minute through the surface of the lungs.

The human brain, for its part, performs 1015 synaptic operations per second and may be “the most complex functional assemblage of matter possible in our universe,” according to Denton.

These are stunning ensembles in themselves, but they become even more so when one considers that they must be synchronized with features like the size of the Earth, its atmosphere, its hydrological cycle, and its soils, along with a staggering number of other variables.

Denton concludes with a Biblical like paean to man: “Our destiny was inscribed in the light of the stars and the property of atoms since the beginning.   All of nature sings the song of man.  We now know what medieval scholars only believed, that the underlying rationality of nature is indeed ‘manifest in human flesh.’”

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Your Designed Body: Engineering Hurdles

Excerpt from Your Designed Body, by Steve Laufmann and Howard Glicksman, MD.

To be alive, each cell must perform thousands of complicated tasks, with both functional and process coherence.  This includes…containment, special-purpose gates, chemical sensing and controls (for many different chemicals), supply chain and transport, energy production and use, materials production, and information and information processing.

What does it take to make these work?  Designing solutions to problems like this is hard, especially given two additional requirements.

The first, orchestration, means the cell has to get all the right things done in the right order at the right times.  The activities of millions of parts must be coordinated.  To this end, the cell actively sequences activities, signals various parts about what to do, starts and stops various machinery, and monitors progress.

The second requirement is reproduction. As if being alive weren’t difficult enough, some of the body’s cells must be able to generate new cells.  This imposes a daunting set of additional design problems.  Each new cell needs a high-fidelity copy of the parent cell’s internal information, all the molecular machines needed for life, and a copy of the cell’s structure, including the organelles and microtubules.  And it needs to know which internal operating system it should use.  Once these are all in place, the cell walls must constrict to complete the enclosure for the new cell, without allowing the internals to spill out.

Somehow cells solve all these problems.  Each cell is a vast system of systems, with millions of components, machines, and processes, which are coherent, interdependent, tightly coordinated, and precisely tuned—all essential characteristics of the cell if it’s to be alive rather than dead.

There remains no plausible, causally adequate hypotheses for how any series of accidents, no matter how lucky and no matter how much time is given, could accomplish such things.  Presently it even lies beyond he reach of our brightest human designers to create them.  Human engineers have no idea how to match the scope, precision, and efficiencies of even a single such cell, much less organisms composed of many cellular systems of systems, each system composed of millions or billions of cells.

Your Designed Body, pages 49-50.

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At Phys.org: Comet impacts could bring ingredients for life to Europa’s ocean

Monica Kortsha writes:

Comet strikes on Jupiter’s moon Europa could help transport critical ingredients for life found on the moon’s surface to its hidden ocean of liquid water—even if the impacts don’t punch completely through the moon’s icy shell.

An artist’s concept of a comet or asteroid impact on Jupiter’s moon Europa. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The discovery comes from a study led by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, where researchers developed a computer model to observe what happens after a comet or asteroid strikes the ice shell, which is estimated to be tens of kilometers thick.

The model shows that if an impact can make it at least halfway through the moon’s ice shell, the heated meltwater it generates will sink through the rest of the ice, bringing oxidants—a class of chemicals required for life—from the surface to the ocean, where they could help sustain any potential life in the sheltered waters.

The researchers compared the steady sinking of the massive melt chamber to a foundering ship.

“Once you get enough water, you’re just going to sink,” said lead author and doctoral student Evan Carnahan. “It’s like the Titanic times 10.”

Whether oxidants can get from where they naturally form on Europa’s surface to the ocean is one of the biggest questions in planetary science. One of the goals of NASA’s upcoming Europa Clipper mission to the icy moon is to collect data that can help narrow down answers.

For now, comet and asteroid impacts are among the most plausible mechanisms. Scientists have spotted dozens of craters on Europa’s surface, many with a distinct rippled appearance that suggests frozen meltwater and post-impact motion beneath the crater.

Like Europa, Saturn’s moon Titan may also hold an ocean of liquid water beneath an icy shell. Rosaly Lopes, the directorate scientist for the Planetary Science Directorate at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said that this model can help scientists understand the role impacts might have on other icy worlds.

“In the case of Titan, this is very important because Titan has a thick ice crust—thicker than Europa’s,” she said. “We’re really interested in the application of this study.”

Complete article at Phys.org.

Dilute concentrations of oxidants do not provide a naturalistic pathway from non-life to life.

Here’s some info on oxidants:

Oxidant by-products of normal metabolism cause extensive damage to DNA, protein, and lipid. We argue that this damage (the same as that produced by radiation) is a major contributor to aging and to degenerative diseases of aging such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, immune-system decline, brain dysfunction, and cataracts.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas...

Oxidants include chemicals such as ozone, hydrogen peroxide, and chlorine.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/...

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Information and the First Cause

Eric Hedin writes:

The famous American physicist John Wheeler did not shy away from seeking to understand the most fundamental aspects of our universe. Wheeler coined the aphorism “It from bit” to describe his conviction, born of the many discoveries in particle physics and cosmology in the twentieth century, that information (characterized by the computer storage term “bit”) preceded and produced everything else (“it”). He elaborated:

Otherwise put, every it—every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime continuum itself—derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely—even if in some contexts indirectly—from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes or no questions, binary choices, bits.

John Archibald Wheeler shortly before his death. www.themarginalian.org

It from Bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom—at a very deep bottom, in most instances—an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin.1

Thus, in Wheeler’s conception, information precedes and transcends matter, energy, time, and space.

We also know, as philosopher of science Stephen Meyer has emphasized, that in every case where we are able to trace information back to a source, we arrive at an intelligent agent—a poet or computer programmer or composer or architect.2 When we couple the “It from Bit” insight with this observation regarding our uniform experience with information creation, we are led toward a conclusion that strongly echoes a core claim of theistic religion such as we find in the Hebrew scriptures announcing that nature “pours forth speech” and is the result of a divine mind’s spoken words “in the beginning”3—or, as one of the New Testament authors put it, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and “all things were made through him.”4

Quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger, in reviewing Wheeler’s contributions to quantum phenomena, notes this same connection between the discoveries of modern physics and what he terms “old knowledge.” Zeilinger states:

In conclusion it may very well be said that information is the irreducible kernel from which everything else flows. Then the question why nature appears quantized is simply a consequence of the fact that information itself is quantized by necessity. It might even be fair to observe that the concept that information is fundamental is very old knowledge of humanity, witness for example the beginning of gospel according to John: ‘In the beginning was the Word.’5

[1] John A. Wheeler, “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links”, in W. Zurek, Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information (Redwood City, California: Addison-Wesley, 1990).

[2] John Archibald Wheeler, A Journey into Gravity and Spacetime (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1990). John Archibald Wheeler, “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links,” in Feynman and Computing, edited by Anthony J. G. Hey (Boca Raton, FL; Taylor and Francis Group LLC, 2002), 109.

[3] Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 394-395.

[4] Psalm 19, Genesis 1.

[5] John 1:1, 3a.

Excerpted from Canceled Science (ch. 12), by Eric Hedin.

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From Reuters: U.S. to reveal scientific milestone on fusion energy

Timothy Gardner reports:

WASHINGTON, Dec 12 (Reuters) – The U.S. Department of Energy on Tuesday will announce that scientists at a national lab have made a breakthrough on fusion, the process that powers the sun and stars that one day could provide a cheap source of electricity, three sources with knowledge of the matter said.

The scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have achieved a net energy gain for the first time, in a fusion experiment using lasers, one of the people said.

Running an electric power plant off fusion presents tough hurdles however, such as how to contain the heat economically and to keep lasers firing consistently. Other methods of fusion use magnets instead of lasers.

See Reuters for the complete article.

Technicians use a service system lift to access the target chamber interior for inspection and maintenance at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a laser-based inertial confinement fusion research device, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory federal research facility in Livermore, California, United States in 2008. Philip Saltonstall/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory/Handout via REUTERSThoughts on fusion energy

Eric Hedin writes:

Fusion energy development has focused on either inertial confinement fusion (reported on in the article) or magnetic confinement fusion (such as in ITER). 

In either case, it takes energy to bring about the release of nuclear fusion energy.  The milestone reported on in the Reuters link is that the inertial confinement fusion experiment at LLL has produced more fusion energy than it took to power the “shot.”  

Inertial confinement fusion works by concentrating numerous powerful laser beams on a small target fuel pellet composed of deuterium or a deuterium-tritium mix (frozen isotopes of hydrogen). The laser beams heat and compress the fuel pellet until the conditions for nuclear fusion occur, and that releases the nuclear energy “stored” in the pellet.  There’s no violation of energy conservation.

Fusion occurs in the cores of stars due to the heat and density resulting from the enormous gravitational compression of the stellar gases (mostly hydrogen and helium).  We can’t use gravitational compression in reactors on earth, since it requires a star-sized mass to attain sufficient heating and compression due to gravity.

Fossil fuels have served humanity’s energy needs remarkably well, and with a theistic worldview, we can be thankful for the foresight that went into preparing them and making them available to us.  But fossil fuels are limited and non-renewable on relevant timescales for human needs. 

Nuclear fusion energy, currently progressing in its development, would provide energy for an almost unlimited time frame, since the fuel is based on the naturally occurring isotope of hydrogen, deuterium.  The tritium can be made in an ongoing fashion within the reactor itself.  It needs to be made, since tritium has a relatively short half-life of 12.3 years.

Fusion energy reactors of either design would be much safer and cleaner than any currently existing nuclear fission reactors.  Fusion reactors could not fail in any catastrophic manner leading to “meltdown” or any sort of a runaway nuclear reaction.  Could fusion energy be God’s design for supplying humanity’s energy needs in a future era?

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At SciTech Daily: New Theory Suggests That the Origin of Life on Earth-Like Planets Is Likely

According to a recent paper by a math professor at the University of Arkansas, the existence of life on Earth provides proof that abiogenesis is relatively easy on planets similar to Earth, refuting the “Carter argument” conclusion.

The new paper argues that the widely accepted theory from astrophysicist Brandon Carter used faulty logic.

Does the presence of life on Earth provide any insight into the likelihood that abiogenesis—the process by which life first emerges from inorganic substances—occurs elsewhere? That is a question that has baffled scientists for a while, as well as everyone else inclined to think about it.

Astrophysicist Brandon Carter makes the widely accepted claim that the selection effect of our own existence limits our ability to observe. Nothing can be concluded about the likelihood of life existing elsewhere based on the fact that we had to end up on a planet where abiogenesis took place.

He claimed that understanding life on this earth had, at best, neutral value. Another way to look at it is to say that because Earth wasn’t chosen at random from the group of all Earth-like planets, it can’t be seen as a typical Earth-like planet.

However, a recent paper by retired astrophysicist and University of Arkansas mathematics instructor Daniel Whitmire argues that Carter’s logic was flawed. Whitmire contends that Carter’s theory suffers from “The Old Evidence Problem” in Bayesian Confirmation Theory, which is used to update a theory or hypothesis in light of new evidence, despite the fact that it has gained widespread acceptance.

After giving a few examples of how this formula is employed to calculate probabilities and what role old evidence plays, Whitmire turns to what he calls the conception analogy.

As he explains, “One could argue, like Carter, that I exist regardless of whether my conception was hard or easy, and so nothing can be inferred about whether my conception was hard or easy from my existence alone.”

In this analogy, “hard” means contraception was used. “Easy” means no contraception was used. In each case, Whitmire assigns values to these propositions.

Whitmire continues, “However, my existence is old evidence and must be treated as such. When this is done the conclusion is that it is much more probable that my conception was easy. In the abiogenesis case of interest, it’s the same thing. The existence of life on Earth is old evidence and just like in the conception analogy the probability that abiogenesis is easy is much more probable.”

In other words, the evidence of life on Earth is not of neutral value in making the case for life on similar planets. As such, our life suggests that life is more likely to emerge on other Earth-like planets — maybe even on the recent “super-Earth” type planet, LP 890-9b, discovered 100 light years away.

SciTech Daily

Bayesian theory aside, the confirmed evidence from science affirms that natural processes destroy information-rich complex functional molecules with time. No evidence supports the ability of natural, unguided processes to bring life out of non-life. Whitmire’s conclusion, that life is “likely to emerge on other Earth-like planets,” only makes sense if it is true that life on Earth arose naturally, without any intelligent design or agency.

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