Sabine Hossenfelder has a fascinating post in her blog about the role of "heroes" in science writing/popularization. People writing about the sciences want to tell stories, because they presume that the people reading their stuff like learning stories: and they are likely right because the human mind is structured to take information in that way. So ... here's a simple story. Individual A confronted difficult problem B at a certain moment in A's life, and in a specific context got an inspiration. He tested out the inspiration and -- ta da! -- it solved the problem, making him/her a hero. Insert memorable details involving botany or zoology along the way. In this manner a writer/popularizer conveys to his broad not-PhD-holding audience what problem B was, how it was solved, and thus what are the basic scientific ideas involved. Let's leave Newton's apple out of this. There's a much more recent example that involves pigeon shit. What is now called Co...
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"This cosmos was not made by immortal or mortal beings, but always was, is and will be an eternal fire, arising and subsiding in measure." The presumption that the cosmos was not made by immortal or mortal beings draws out attention to the verb. The cosmos was not "made" at all, so there is no answer to the question who made it. The cosmos was not made precisely in the sense that it has always been. So far so good, we might attribute to Heraclitus something akin to the steady-state theory of the cosmos and knock off our exegetical work for the day. But then what are we to do with the final clause? The cosmos continues to exist by "arising and subsiding in measure." To continue with the categories of contemporary cosmologists, this seems like a "Big Crunch" theory. The universe is a closed one, in that it will not expand forever (that would be an expansion without "measure"!). It will at some point start to fall in upon itself,...
The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, 'Seek simplicity and distrust it.' I like that. But simply allowing my train of association to chug along its own tracks, this thought about science brings me to the issue of cosmogony, and the issue of the apparent demise of the old steady state theory of the cosmos. The great motivating factor of the theory was the immensity of infinity, the infinite expanse that opened in the past and presumably too in the future. The contrary Big Bang theory, with its definite moment of beginning and its threat of a heat death of the whole-she-bang, cuts one off from that lovely prospect. Also, relatedly, the Big Bang is sometimes defended as a way in which something might have come out of nothing, and THAT is a strongly counte...
"The great theories of 20th century physics -- relativity, quantum theory, and the Standard Model [of subatomic particles] -- represent the highest achievements of physical science. They have beautiful mathematical expressions that result in precise predictions for experiments, which have been confirmed in many cases to great accuracy. And yet I have just argued that nothing along the lines of these theories can serve as a fundamental theory. This is an audacious claim in the light of their success." Another quote from the Lee Smolin book. I like the audacity. In fact, if I understand him at all, Smolin has delivered me from an intellectual cul de sac in which I have been stuck. I've been unable to accept the Big Bang as an absolute cosmic beginning, given the huge something-from-nothing stumbling block. So I have said -- in this blog and elsewhere -- that I believe some patching up of the old Steady State theory will again have its innings. But the advocates of ...
Free-flowing meditation. I believe that we acquire knowledge pragmatically, through living in the world and experiencing successes and failures. But I also believe that there is something not-this-worldly about us, and this Otherness, this transcendental character in ourselves, is none the less real despite the inability of anything akin to our pragmatic intellect to understand it. In ethics, I believe again that we form ideas of right and wrong based upon the long experience of the human race, butting heads on a small planet and working toward co-existence, and more than that, coincident prosperity. These ideas have at their root unquestionable intuitions, which are very simple: that it is good to enjoy beautiful things, for example, or that it is good to create beauty that others can enjoy. I also believe that nothing comes from nothing, so that in some manner or other the world has always existed, and will always exist, and that as science continues in its own progression i...
The supposed "gravitational waves" created by the Big Bang, a "cosmic signature" of that Bang, may have been something a good deal less dramatic. The Guardian . A mission of the European Space Agency has found that the findings attributed to the 'waves' could in fact be due to ... dust. There seems to be a collective will-to-believe in the Big Bang, to rush to give it a mantle of accepted scientific facts. This incident is part of a broader pattern. But since the notion of a "signature" of the Big Bang has come unraveled, maybe some hard core steady-staters are planning a comeback.
There may not be much of a tendency for seldom-used languages to disappear A natural question (for those who think about languages at all) is: what number of fluent speakers is necessary for the language to be a rational continuing project? Assume that there is some mental energy exerted in learning a language, and continuing to use it over time enough to be "in practice," that is, to be one of those fluent speakers. Some portion of your language-using brain is freed up when you (a multi-lingual person) abandon one of your languages to the forces of erosion or rust or whatever. So: the more fellow speakers of that language you have, the more worthwhile to you are the costs of maintaining that ability. On such assumptions, it is reasonable to expect that there is some number of speakers X which is the minimum for a sustainable language. What is that number? David Clingingsmith thinks it is rather small: steady state (a language that is neither growing nor shrinking...
As regular readers of this blog and its precursor know, I'm always happy to find support for myown prejudice against Big Bang cosmology. Sometimes my search for such support has led me into blind alleys, and I back out of those as quickly as I can . Recall this discussion from September. Here are a couple of pieces I've written that mention alleys that might not prove to be so blind. Maxwell's demon and panspermia might both bear upon the big cosmological questions. Today, I can report something else worth further investigation. Something from Robert Matthews' website: Cosmology and other questions Matthews, a Brit, is a professor who teaches at the Dept of Information Engineering at Ashton University, is a working scientist (a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, author of dozens of articles for refereed publications about statistics, encryption, neural networks, and related matters) as well as a science journalist. Here is the full CV...