Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 430

Rob Sheldon responds to Sabine Hossenfelder on the hologram universe

Just now we noted that theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder has a new vid at YouTube on why some scientists think the universe is a hologram Her view: “Personally I think that the motivations for the holographic principle are not particularly strong and in any case we’ll not be able to test this hypothesis in the coming centuries. ” And in our this post, experimental physicist Rob Sheldon replies.

Experimental physicist Rob Sheldon responds: More revealing than Sabine’s confession about theoretical physics: “Personally I think that the motivations for the holographic principle are not particularly strong and in any case, we’ll not be able to test this hypothesis in the coming centuries. Therefore writing papers about it is a waste of time.” … Is Peter Woit’s analysis of a new physics film:

“Last night I went to a showing of Chasing Einstein, a new documentary about the search for dark matter.”

One of his own Columbia colleagues spent a decade in fruitless search. “If a WIMP particle responsible for dark matter had existed in the region advertised by many theories, they would have found it and followed the LIGO people to Stockholm.

Instead, they put a strong limit on the possible properties of such a conjectured particle. The film includes a heart-breaking scene when they unblind their data, quickly realizing that their years of effort haven’t been rewarded with the discovery that they had been hoping for.”

Since WIMP particles haven’t worked, the movie turns to novelties.

“Attention then turns to Erik Verlinde and his “Emergent Gravity” explanation for the dark matter phenomenon. I’ve never found the motivation for this compelling, so haven’t followed his work carefully. … My understanding is that the positive results her group found are matched by other more negative results, see here.”

This isn’t looking good for dark matter physics, but Woit’s next blog discusses a particle physics workshop at Harvard: “There was a workshop last week at the Harvard CMSA, focusing on new ideas about physics rooted in topology. … There was an interesting introductory talk by Dan Harlow, in which he lays out his view (which I think is a very mainstream one) of the current situation of HEP theory.”

Woit then gives a transcript of the meeting: “Seiberg: It’s not that we’re doing what we’re doing because we have to fill the time (audience laughter). We’re doing what we’re doing because it’s very important (audience laughter)….Comments like these have been used against us (audience laughter), in addition to the fact that they are wrong.”Harlowe:  OK, yeah, yeah, I’m not talking to the New York Times, right. (audience laughter).”

Woit concludes: “HEP [high energy physics] theory is at a very difficult point in its history, and it seems that the older generation struggling with this is not particularly amused to hear what sounds like flippant takes on the problem from the younger generation.”

Even Woit himself is too much of a specialist to realize that it isn’t just HEP theory, it is large swathes of all the sciences. They have painted themselves into a sterile, but formerly well-funded “consensus” corner, and are discovering that the younger generation (and the NYT) is quite flippant on their prospects for survival.

The realization that “science as a societal endeavor” results in a Darwinian ruthlessness toward their lifework, comes as a shock for many of Woit’s colleagues that are nearing retirement. Indeed, a very difficult point in history.

Rob Sheldon is the author of Genesis: The Long Ascent

Further reading on the hologram universe:

Sabine Hossenfelder: Why some scientists think the universe is a hologram Her view: “Personally I think that the motivations for the holographic principle are not particularly strong and in any case we’ll not be able to test this hypothesis in the coming centuries. ” And in our next post, experimental physicist Rob Sheldon replies.

Sabine Hossenfelder: Can gravitational wave interferometers tell us if we live in a hologram universe? It’s actually a good thing if theses in physics don’t gain currency just because they make good TED talks. That could be part of their problem.

How is the hologram universe coming?

Astrophysicist Niayesh Afshordi Explains The Holograph Universe To Suzan Mazur At Oscillations

and

“Substantial evidence” claimed for universe as a hologram

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Sabine Hossenfelder: Why some scientists think the universe is a hologram

Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is the author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, a thoughtful critic of imaginative cosmologies.

Like the universe as a hologram:

Today, I want to tell you why some scientists believe that our universe is really a 3-dimensional projection of a 2-dimensional space. They call it the “holographic principle” and the key idea is this.

Usually, the number of different things you can imagine happening inside a part of space increases with the volume. Think of a bag of particles. The larger the bag, the more particles, and the more details you need to describe what the particles do. These details that you need to describe what happens are what physicists call the “degrees of freedom,” and the number of these degrees of freedom is proportional to the number of particles, which is proportional to the volume.

At least that’s how it normally works. The holographic principle, in contrast, says that you can describe what happens inside the bag by encoding it on the surface of that bag, at the same resolution. …

Personally I think that the motivations for the holographic principle are not particularly strong and in any case we’ll not be able to test this hypothesis in the coming centuries. Therefore writing papers about it is a waste of time. But it’s an interesting idea and at least you now know what physicists are talking about when they say the universe is a hologram.

Sabine Hossenfelder, “Why do some scientists believe that our universe is a hologram?” at BackRe(Action)

And in our next post, experimental physicist Rob Sheldon replies.

Further reading on the hologram universe:

Sabine Hossenfelder: Can gravitational wave interferometers tell us if we live in a hologram universe? It’s actually a good thing if theses in physics don’t gain currency just because they make good TED talks. That could be part of their problem.

How is the hologram universe coming?

Astrophysicist Niayesh Afshordi Explains The Holograph Universe To Suzan Mazur At Oscillations

and

“Substantial evidence” claimed for universe as a hologram

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Another Darwinian mass shooting?

Apparently, the shooter at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in California last July (three killed, two of them children) was a believer in “Might Is Right” and “Survival of the Fittest”:

GILROY, Calif. — The gunman who killed three people and wounded a dozen more at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in Northern California was an angry 19-year-old who had recently waded into the world of white supremacy.

Santino William Legan, who was shot dead by police Sunday before he could do more damage, posted online about an 1890 racist manifesto, “Might is Right or The Survival of the Fittest,” NBC News confirmed.

David Ingram, Brandy Zadrozny and Corky Siemaszko, “Gilroy Garlic Festival gunman referred to ‘Might is Right’ manifesto before shooting” at NBC News

Oddly, an FBI spokesperson thinks it’s “wrong” to infer a motive:

In a press conference Tuesday afternoon, FBI Special Agent in Charge Craig Fair said investigators had no reason to believe the shooter was targeting any particular characteristics Sunday. They were still reviewing his social media and digital media forensics, among other pieces of information.

In an Instagram post just before the shooting, a now-deleted account believed to belong to the gunman urged people to read “Might Is Right,” a late 19th century book that the Southern Poverty Law Center said is “widely popular” among white nationalists, Rolling Stone reported. …

Bennett said Wednesday that, just because someone posts about an 1890s book, it’s information anyone can put out.

Eduard Cuevas, “FBI: Media ‘wrong’ on Garlic Festival shooter’s white supremacy ideology, despite social media post” at USA Today

Huh? How many of us read 1890s “Survival of the Fittest” literature and recommend that others do so? It was really not a clue at all?

The Guardian tells us (July 30) that there is “no clarity yeton motive”: “Read Might is Right by Ragnar Redbeard,” the gunman reportedly wrote. “Why overcrowd towns and pave more open space to make room for hordes of mestizos and Silicon Valley white tw*ts?”

Perhaps there will never be clarity on motive. Maybe Darwinian naturalism can’t count as a motive in principle because it is Approved. So commentators cast around for other motives like “white supremacy” – which sounds good but doesn’t really account for the gunman’s hatred of the Silicon Valley palefaces.

But hey, these days, even asking critical questions like that could signify that one belongs to the deplorable enemy horde.

This story reminds some of us of two things: The Columbine massacre and Finnish massacre, where the shooters’ belief in Darwinism was even more explicit. And also the curious case of Eric Pianka.

It’s not a surprise that hardline Darwinism affects some people this way but it is a surprise that talking about it is so difficult.

See also: Darwin At Columbine (Barry Arrington)

The person who sent this tip recommends the Science Uprising series of films as an educational antidote. Well, it is a good start:

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Maybe messiness somehow jiggered life into existence?

Neatness doesn’t work, it seems:

But research is beginning to show that starting with the right kind of mess is not only more realistic, but more effective at generating the materials vital to life, while also doing away with problems that have plagued purer systems. “There are times when we have mixtures, rather than just the isolated reactants that people typically use, and we get better results,” said Nicholas Hud, a chemist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. When mixtures are taken into consideration, the emergence of life on Earth in some ways “is not as hard as we might think it is.”

In the most compelling evidence to date, Krishnamurthy and a postdoctoral researcher in his lab, Subhendu Bhowmik, looked at how a system of chimeric RNA-DNA molecules — molecules built from the chemical units of both RNA and DNA — produced pure RNA and pure DNA more easily than systems that started out pure. The work, published today in Nature Chemistry, highlights just how essential a diverse, complex blend of ingredients may have been to life’s earliest evolution. …

It also eliminates certain theories: Perhaps it’s time to bid farewell to hypotheses based on a linear, progressive path from the primitive soup to today’s biology, in favor of ideas that embrace the complex mixes of systems chemistry. “If you think of the transition between day and night,” Lazcano Araujo said, “you never go from purely bright shining sun into a dark moonless night. You go through dusk.”

Jordana Cepelewicz, “Origin-of-Life Study Points to Chemical Chimeras, Not RNA” at Quanta

Deep: “If you think of the transition between day and night,” Lazcano Araujo said, “you never go from purely bright shining sun into a dark moonless night. You go through dusk.”

True, but the planetary rotation system already exists, right, governed by gravity? One stage does not invent the next.

It’s not so clear that simple complexity can produce anything. What is the organizing principle? If there is a goal, how does it come to exist?

Paper. (paywall)

See also: The Science Fictions series at your fingertips – origin of life What we do and don’t know about the origin of life.

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Amazon’s Alexa is testing out crowdsourcing

How did that work out at Wikipedia?

● Here’s an example of the overall problem: Wikipedia’s own co-founder Larry Sanger has described an article on the intelligent design controversy as “appallingly biased” (8 December 2017). Sanger is not a partisan of design in nature. The problem he identifies is created by the fact that fierce partisans of naturalism and Darwinism are far more likely to be the “crowd” from which the information is “sourced” and to keep others out.

As just one example, when paleontologist, Gunter Bechly announced that he doubted Darwinism, he was disappeared from Wikipedia, despite continuing to work in the field and classify fossils. So if, for example, you need to understand a controversy over ID at the local school board in more depth, Wikipedia would not be a good choice, despite claims about the value of crowdsourcing.

The obvious problem with crowdsourcing is anonymity and the lack of accountability that goes with it. Individually sourced information is different: If a politician seeking re-election informs you that her opponent’s policies spell disaster, you will naturally consider the source. The car salesman’s new wheels pitch, the realtor’s market assessment, the vet’s advice, the bishop’s letter read from the pulpit, are all clearly sourced and evaluated as such. And all these sources are accountable. We implicitly factor in our experiences with each of these sources in determining our level of assent.

By contrast, crowdsourced information from Alexa on contentious issues could be based ultimately on the internet’s public landfill

.Denyse O’Leary, “Ask Alexa (and an anonymous crowd answers)” at Mind Matters News

Further reading: Alexa really does NOT understand us. In a recent test, only 35 percent of the responses to simple questions were judged adequate.

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80-year-old problem around irrational numbers solved by new proof

It involves approximating numbers with fractions:

The duo’s solution came as a surprise to many in the field. “The general feeling was that this was not close to being solved,” says Aistleitner. “The technique of using [graphs] is something that maybe in the future will be regarded as just as important [as]—maybe more important than—the actual Duffin-Schaeffer conjecture,” says Jeffrey Vaaler, a retired professor at the University of Texas, Austin, who proved a special case of the conjecture in 1978.

It may take other experts several months to understand the full details. “The proof now is a long and complicated proof,” says Aistleitner. “It’s not sufficient just to have one striking, brilliant idea. There are many, many parts that have to be controlled.” At 44 pages of dense, technical mathematics, even leading mathematical minds need time to wrap their heads around the paper. The community, however, seems optimistic. Says Vaaler: “It’s a beautiful paper. I think it’s correct.”

Leila Sloman, “New Proof Solves 80-Year-Old Irrational Number Problem” at Scientific American

So math isn’t as cut and dried as some students fear.

See also: Some philosophical questions to keep you awake, if the prospect of partying doesn’t:

Does the size of the universe sweep us toward atheism?

Philosopher: If there is something rather than nothing, questions around God cannot be ignored Waghorn: “Firstly, that on the most plausible demarcation criterion for science, science is constitutionally unable to show theism to be a redundant hypothesis; the debate must take place at the level of metaphysics. ”

Is zero even?

Absolute zero proven mathematically impossible?

Is celeb number pi a “normal” number? Not normal. And things get worse. Surely this oddity is related in some way to the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.

Durston and Craig on an infinite temporal past . . .

Physicist David Snoke thinks that Christians should not use the kalaam argument for God’s existence

and

Must we understand “nothing” to understand physics?

Why is space three dimensions anyway? Why not six? A new theory is offered. They want to test their theory?  What a great idea! In an age of wars on falsifiability, that’s a refreshingly new/old idea. Anyway, our universe seems pretty smart and can keep us awake.

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Rob Sheldon on why astronomers believe in dark matter

3-D impression of dark matter via Hubble

Recently, we picked up on a discussion over at The Conversation on why astronomers think dark matter exists.

Rob Sheldon weighs in:

“As this article records, the evidence for dark matter, is abundant and all gravitational, but now known to be neither a mysterious particle nor a black hole. This leaves a tremendous parameter space of black, cold objects that are bigger than a pea and smaller than a Jupiter which fit the bill. Most, if not all the hype you read, is looking for more and more exotic particles, all the while ignoring mundane macroscopic things like comets and asteroids. The reason they ignore all these well known objects, is that modellers tell them it can’t be normal “baryonic” matter. But the models are all based on assumptions, and the assumptions are based on either theoretical shortcuts (1-D, isotropic, homogeneous needed by the modellers), or on model fits. When pressed to explain in detail, you discover the argumentation is circular. Just as Stan Robertson argues about black holes, the assumptions are widespread, and there’s a consensus for using them, but ultimately they are not based on empirical data. Like so many of the other 20th century models (population genetics, Darwinism, cladistics, global climate, no-zero-threshold, gravity waves, dark energy, origin-of-life), when we elevate our assumptions to the authority of empirical data, we enter a wilderness of our own making.”

Rob Sheldon is author of Genesis: The Long Ascent

See also: At The Conversation: Why DO astronomers believe dark matter exists? Is dark matter the Higgs boson, hard to find but eventually found, or the ether, once believed to pervade the universe? If twenty years pass with no dark matter, unfortunately, the needle will tilt a bit more toward the ether.

Discover: Even the best dark matter theories are crumbling

Researcher: The search for dark matter has become a “quagmire of confirmation bias” So many research areas in science today are hitting hard barriers that it is reasonable to think that we are missing something.

Physicists devise test to find out if dark matter really exists

Largest particle detector draws a blank on dark matter

What if dark matter just doesn’t stick to the rules?

A proposed dark matter solution makes gravity an illusion

and

Proposed dark matter solution: “Gravity is not a fundamental governance of our universe, but a reaction to the makeup of a given environment.”

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New: Another philosopher openly dumps Darwinism, cites its acceptance of deception

Do readers remember when it was customary to sneer—on behalf of the great medieval philosopher, Thomas Aquinas—at the idea that the universe and life forms show evidence of design? It’s hard to imagine any medieval philosopher, let alone Thomas, thinking that the world around us does not show evidence of design. Medieval thinkers generated orderly hierarchies the way people today generate graphs, except they used imagination, not software. They were often over the top but their instinct was not wrong.

But suddenly, for some years earlier in this century, Thomas—of all people—was cast as the anti-design guy. I won’t soon forget Barry Arrington’s comment on possibly the most egregious example of this trend at First Things, of all places, “This year I let my subscription to FT run out after nearly 20 years. If I want misguided, uninformed anti-ID rants, I can go to Panda’s Thumb for free.”

The writer of the First Things article advised “Readers interested in these arguments are urged to visit websites such as The Panda’s Thumb”

Hmmm. Taking the yayhoo-driven Panda’s Thumb seriously is not a good look for a thinkmag inspired by traditional Western religion and philosophy. For a while, there was silence.

Iust recently, George Weigel made explicit at First Things that Panda’s Thumb Darwinism is not consistent with serious thinking in the Western tradition.

And now, another First Things type, addresses the misuse or bad handling of evidence prevalent among Darwinists:

Philip Kitcher, a philosopher of biology and a supporter of natural selection, chastises Darwin for “appeasing his critics,” writing that “If the presence of particular goals can interfere with the epistemic evaluation of a novel proposal, then it is epistemically desirable for the proposer to respond to those goals, even if it requires deception.”

In other words, you may have to lie to the stupid people to get them to take Darwinism as seriously as we smart people do.

A more elaborate argument in favor of deception is offered by philosopher Phillip L. Quinn, who says that sometimes, in public debate over Darwinism, the only arguments that have a chance of convincing policymakers are bad ones. He argues that presenting arguments one knows to be faulty is morally permissible, but only “provided we continue to have qualms of conscience about getting our hands soiled.” He does worry that after presenting effective but bad arguments has become easy and second nature, one’s hands “become dirty beyond all cleansing and one suffers from a thoroughgoing corruption of mind.” But perhaps scholars could “divide up the labor so that no one among us has to resort to the bad effective argument too frequently.” That way, “we can succeed in resisting effectively without paying too high a price in terms of moral corruption.”

In others words, if you feel bad about lying to the stupid people, that makes it okay, so long as you take turns with other liars so that the habit doesn’t become so well-entrenched that it spills over into the rest of your life. (Why, you might then begin lying to us smart people too.)

J. Budziszewski, “I’m with stupid” at MercatorNet

Budziszewski is onto something here. In a Darwinian universe, there is no reason not to lie to achieve a survival goal. In the traditional universe, classically assumed to exist by most human civilizations, morality is intrinsic to the nature of the conscious entities of the universe. That is, whether one believes in God or in karma, lying separates one from reality. And the universe keeps score and it eventually catches up with you, as surely as physics will.

Not so in a Darwinian frame where consciousness is an evolved illusion and free will does not exist. And morality is an evolved illusion too so … happy are those who know nothing of morality.

It is good to see people clarifying where they stand on such fundamental issues. Could David Gelernter, recently waving Darwin goodbye, have had with what seems now to be a trend?

See also: (for reference) First Things Goes From Giving ID A Platform To Viciously Attacking It (Barry Arrington)

and

Brit commentator Melanie Phillips weighs in on David Gelernter dumping Darwin. For many intellectuals, it must seem like an agonizing, nasty divorce but Phillips would be well placed to take it in stride.

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New edition of Aeschliman’s Restoration of Man challenges scientism again

Here:

Editor’s note: Today Discovery Institute Press releases the newly revised and expanded edition of Michael Aeschliman’s classic work The Restoration of Man: C.S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism. The new edition includes this Foreword by James Le Fanu, physician and author of Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves. …

Modern science may imply that the world (and ourselves) are organized “strictly in accordance with mechanistic principles,” but it can scarcely be said to have demonstrated this to be so. On the contrary, impressed — dazzled even — by that overarching historical narrative, it is easy to overlook that its intellectual legacy is almost precisely the reverse of that which is commonly supposed. Those major landmarks — the scientific understanding of the origins of the universe, the creation of the chemical elements, the formation of our solar system and planet and so on — cannot by definition be rediscovered, so the major challenge for science in more recent times has been to refine and elaborate on what is already known. And that has proved surprisingly tricky. For while the broad outline still holds, the practicalities of how (or why) those major events came about in the way they did has proved impervious to scientific scrutiny.

The evidence for the origin of the universe at the moment of the Big Bang 14 billion years ago (or thereabouts) and its sudden dramatic expansion seems compelling enough but only serves to emphasize the inscrutable perplexity of this most influential of scientific theories. The proposition that the universe sprang into existence a finite time ago from nothing (or, at least, from nothing physical) places a heavy (insupportable) demand on any causal explanation that must — by necessity — transcend time, space, matter, and energy.

So, the scientific community has been compelled to acknowledge that the universe must have sprung into existence ab nihilo. It has subsequently emerged that the physical laws of the universe — e.g., gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces, the speed of light — are so finely tuned that the slightest alteration in their values would have rendered impossible the subsequent emergence of life on earth. It is very difficult to convey just how precise the values of those forces had to be, but physicist John Polkinghorne estimates their fine-tuning had to be accurate to within one part in a trillion trillion (and several trillion more), a figure greater by far than all the particles in the universe.4
James Le Fanu, “Between Sapientia and Scientia — Michael Aeschliman’s Profound Interpretation” at Evolution News and Science Today:

But isn’t science on a downward trajectory now anyway? Never mind the multiverse nonsense. What about the war on science and the war on math?

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St George Mivart, early Darwin doubter (1827–1900), rethought

Mivart was one of those respectable non-Darwinian paleontologists who got buried in the tide of Darwinism. We are asked to note a fairly recent discussion of his contributions to paleontology:

St George Mivart as Popularizer of Zoology in Britain and America, 1869–1881

Recent scholarly attentions have shifted from key actors within the scientific elite and religious authorities to scientific practitioners and popularizers who used science to pursue a wide variety of cultural purposes. The Roman Catholic zoologist St. George Mivart (1827–1900) has typically been cast as a staunch anti-Darwinian ostracized by Darwin’s inner circle of scientific naturalists. Understood as a popularizer of science, his position can be re-thought. Mivart did not operate on the periphery of Victorian science. Instead, his notable contributions to the fields of zoology and anatomy and his participation in debates about the origin of the human mind, consciousness, and soul made him a central figure in the changing landscape of late-Victorian scientific culture. Through the popular periodical press and his anatomy textbook for beginners, Mivart secured a reputation as a key spokesman for science and gained authority as a leading critic of agnostic scientific naturalism. – Emma E.Swai, The School of Natural and Built Environment, Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology, Elmwood Avenue, Queen’s University, Belfast BT7 1NN, United Kingdom, Endeavour
Volume 41, Issue 4, December 2017, Pages 176-191 (paywall)
Paper.

Mivart became controversial for his theological views, including “hell is empty,” which led to his being buried in unconsecrated ground (then later reburied in consecrated ground when his most unacceptable opinions were put down to mental issues created by diabetes.)

See also: Respectable People Who Doubt Darwin – A Long List

and

Evolution appears to converge on goals—but in Darwinian terms, is that possible?

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