Belief in God

I just finished sending a comment to “Tim” (http://existence-of-god.com/author-information.html). Sorry, I don’t know any more about his name. Tim’s site provides a huge discussion of arguments for and against the existence of God. Each argument against God’s existence is refuted. The counter arguments, however, are very well presented, though, which is rare on “Evidence for God’s existence” sites.

If you look down the left, you see links to other sites or pages arguing for God’s existence. You see links to proclamations that “So and so rejects atheism.” I don’t see any saying “So and so converts to atheism.” I would feel better had I seen these. I realize, though, that “Tim” has no wish to convince anyone of the unreasonableness of his belief in God. And therein, really, lies the problem. The ideal philosopher, the ideal searcher after truth, should not care whether the statement “A is B” is actually true. The ideal searcher after truth should not have an agenda to convince readers that his point of view is the (only) correct one.

I am always suspicious of people’s objectivity when they have a strong belief in the truth of some statement, whether the statement is “We never went to the moon”, “HIV (virus) does not cause AIDS” or “God exists.” As I said before, though, I commend Tim for the depth of his coverage of both sides of the discussion.

I have a confession to make: I’m an atheist. As a high school physics teacher, I never stated this fact to my class. I taught that there is a separation of science from religion/philosophy/belief. I suggested that if there was any way to absolute truth, only religion could get there. I taught that science didn’t say anything about God; only that science’s goal was to come up with a useful, testable, non-divine explanation for observed phenomena. I never answered the question “Do you believe in God?”

Now, having retired, I can concede that the concept of the existence of God just does not fly with me.

One of the arguments for God’s existence is based on probability: the likelihood of the universe being precisely right for the development of intelligent life on Earth is so small that one concludes that there had to be a designer.

But I use probabilities a different way. Most people follow the faith of their parents. What is the likelihood, of all the faiths on this planet, that the one my parents happened to believe is the only true faith? I don’t think I’m that lucky. The fact that most people believe the faith of their fathers leads me to the conclusion that the correctness of their faith is suspect.

Related to that argument is the statement of humility: So many people believe in other religions, other Gods, other ways that the universe may have come to be, who am I to assume that my way is correct?

Frankly, I find the certitude of believers disturbing. I can’t buy the existence of an entity watching me/us/humanity/the cosmos, caring what we do, (perhaps) interceding (on our behalf), desiring to be worshiped, judging us.

A friend told me, “You are a good person. You have to believe in God because God is the source of all goodness.” Sorry, but I think you can be good without the need for a God (to set a standard, presumably, for ultimate goodness).

And people say, “Yes, but in the Bible it says…” Again, I don’t mean any disrespect when I say that, not believing in the existence of God, I don’t accept the Bible to be the word of (any) God.
I respect people’s belief in God. Fanatics apart, most people I meet are sincerely interested in doing good, sincerely interested in the welfare of others (not just their own kind or own religious group). If belief in a God helps them to be that way, good for them. When their loved ones die and they find solace in a belief that “God had other plans for them” or that they have “gone to a better place”, I’m happy for them. Perhaps I’m even a little envious of believers’ satisfaction, or the peace that a belief in a God has brought them.

I concede that I might be better off if I believed in God. But that is not a valid reason for a belief. I don’t think you can say, “I believe it because it’s advantageous to do so.”

So, do I believe in God? No, but if you do, that’s OK. As long as you don’t discriminate against others who believe differently from you.

Standard Accepted Knowledge

In my last article I commented on the differences in positions held by scientists and non-scientists on whether Earth had been visited in the past by intelligent extraterrestrials. I use the term scientists widely, not referring to an occupation but to a state of mind.

No matter what your occupation, I call you a scientist if you look for answers by studying the evidence; if you test to see if proposed explanations work; and if you assume that there are reasonable, physical explanations first, before resorting to magic or far-out justifications for an extraordinary claim.

I made a statement that there is near universal agreement among scientists on the big issues. Here is a list of what I consider those issues to be.

Earth is a speck in the cosmos. There are likely to be many small, rocky planets orbiting stars, some of which will be similar to our sun. There are so many stars, there are bound to me many Earth-like planets at suitable distances from their sun that conditions were similar to those on early Earth.

Earth is old and changing. Continents drift around and collide. Mountains rise. Rivers cut canyons. Lakes and oceans fill up with debris that eventually becomes sedimentary rock. As you dig down through layers you reach older and older rock.

Life processes follow the laws of chemistry and physics. There is no process that requires “magic”. We don’t know all the processes, but are confident that they are “knowable”. (Consider the opposite. If, for example, some magical process causes the heart to beat, then we might as well stop trying to understand how the heart works!)

Life evolves. Little changes in short periods add up to bigger changes over long periods.

The laws of mathematics and physics apply everywhere. The formula for a circle and value of pi is the same on Mars. Magicians don’t do true magic: they are still constrained by the laws of physics. (While watching a magic show, everytime you ask yourself, “How did he do that?” you are applying this concept. You feel that there was a physical explanation, a “trick”. You didn’t see true magic.)

Matter is particulate. Substances are made of atoms that join to become molecules. (Atoms themselves are made of particles.)

The properties an object possesses depend on the observer. (This claim, for which there is much evidence, arises from relativity and quantum physics. Relativity deals with the big concepts of time, space, gravity, matter and energy; quantum physics with the behaviour of matter and energy at the tiniest level.

I might as well mention the fringe items, too.

There are no ghosts, werewolves, vampires, living dead, mammoth spiders, King Kongs, Spidermen, invisible people, extraterrestrial aliens living amongst us.

Astrology is false.

There is no such thing as psychic ability. You can’t move objects by though alone. No one can actually read minds, see the future (rather than predict likelihoods), perceive present, past, or future events by other than the five senses.

Men HAVE landed on the moon (i.e. the landing in 1969 was not a hoax.)
Humans and dinosaurs did not inhabit the Earth at the same time.

I expect many to disagree with me on many of this last list. In particular, countless people will cite amazing occurrences, coincidences, anecdotes, and “facts”. I will leave it as this: I have seen no repeatable, non-controversial evidence that convinces me that, for example, ESP exists. A million dollar prize is available for ANY purported psychic who can demonstrate ANY psychic ability. No one has yet been able to do it.

As much as we, scientists included, might wish for exceptional abilities, extraordinary creatures, and assistance from the stars, there is just no good evidence for any of it.

Has Earth Been Visited?

Last night I was reading Discover, a science magazine. The cover story dealt with the new, mammoth telescopes presently under construction that may actually show us planets about nearby stars.
Presently we know of over a hundred extrasolar planets, as they are called, but detect them by looking at wobbles in the position of the star. We haven’t actually seen them. From our distance, the dots would be too tiny, lost in the glare of the star that is their sun. A sentence in the article stuck me. While describing the discoveries the next giant telescope might make, the author wrote, “For now, we know of life on just one planet around just one of the [billions of billions] of stars in the known cosmos.”
I paused, and reflected that almost everyone reading the article would agree. Although we reason that there is a high probability that life exists elsewhere in the universe, scientists are still awaiting concrete evidence. I asked myself, however, what the majority of people not reading the article thought.
Having been a secondary school science teacher, I know what many high school students would tell you. With great excitement, they would announce that alien spacecraft make crop circles, that stone-age paintings on cave walls show spacemen, that there are dead aliens in an air force hanger near Roswell, New Mexico.
Many adults believe these tales, too. While scientists spend time and money searching for life, even mere microbial life, off the Earth, vast numbers accept that Earth has already been visited by alien life forms.
Four hundred years ago, learned people considered Earth to be in the centre of the universe. Now, astronomers teach that Earth is a small rock orbiting an average star in the outskirts of a spiral galaxy that contains billions of stars. Decades passed, though, before most intelligent people stopped saying, “I still believe Earth is in the centre.”
Two hundred years ago, many intelligent, learned people had no trouble accepting that the Earth was about six thousand years old. Scientists universally accept that the planet has been around for billions of years.
Sixty years ago the concept that the continents are moving was taken dubiously, but continental drift is standard policy now. The motions of the great land masses are measurable, and their collisions cause mountains to rise and the earth to quake.
Are there people now who reject the changed perspectives, people who consider the Earth to be young, in the centre of the universe, and composed of stationary continents? If so, would they be reading science magazines? And if so, would they be continually shaking their heads over the hundreds of incorrect statements from the world’s astronomers, biologists, geologists, chemists, and physicists?
I don’t maintain that all scientists agree with each other on every topic. Part of the fun of science is the constant debate, the tussles over the details and explanations. There is near universal agreement, though, on the big issues, one being that there is no good evidence for life off the Earth, now or in the past.

ESP

I had a discussion recently with members of my writer’s club. A small group of us meet regularly to exchange critiques of our developing novels. Two involved forms of ESP. In one, a character had the ability to picture previous inhabitants of a house and, specifically, “feel” terrifying experiences that happened to others. Another novel featured a scene in which a character was awakened in the night at a crucial time via a “signal” from her distant mother.

I’m a physics teacher and sceptical of the these phenomena. No, I’ll be honest, I’m not just sceptical, I don’t believe ESP exists. I’m careful not to let this disbelief affect my critiques of the novels. After all, my novel-in-progress uses parallel universes, a concept no less dubius.

I made the mistake, at the end of the evening, of mentioning my scepticism. Jim, one of the authors, was incredulous. “You don’t believe in ESP?” he remarked.
Me: No. There’s no good evidence that ESP exists.
Jim: You don’t think people can read minds?”
Me: Of course not. Nobody has been able to demonstrate that ability when examined carefully.
Jim: How about Edgar Cayce?
Me: Are you kidding? Magicians can do that stuff.
By this time Jim was laughing. At first I thought he was just having fun. But he was laughing with disbelief that I could be so mistaken.
Jim: How about astral projection?
Me: For heaven’s sake. There’s no evidence for that.
Jim: [laughing harder] Uri Geller bending spoons?
Me: URI GELLER!!! He couldn’t do it on Johnny Carson. Magicians can bend spoons. They aren’t using any special powers.
Jim: Astrology?
Me: Jim, astrology and horoscopes are demonstrably false.
Jim: [laughing uproariously at my ignorance] Alien abductions?
Me: No way. There’s no evidence for that.
Jim: Have you read about Betty and Barney Hill.
Me: I’ve read about them, and am satisfied that alien abduction is not the explanation for Barney’s drawing.
Jim: Well, they’re my aunt and uncle. They believe it.

At this point, the teacher of our little group spoke up passionately.

Lynda: What about when a little girl at home sees her Dad in the doorway waving goodbye when he was actually in the hospital, and her Mom next to her in bed awakens and says “You just saw your Dad, didn’t you?” and the Mom telephones the hospital to find out that he just died?

I wanted to respond with some more old saws (like “when my grandmother died, her picture fell off the wall”) but bit my tongue, for Lynda was talking from personal experience.

Me: I accept that you experienced what you say, but my explanation might be different from yours.

Suffice it to say that I took quite a roasting for expressing strong doubts about ESP and its kin. There is not much you can say when honest, intelligent people give testimonials. When I related this story to my friend Bruce, he pointed out that my disbelief in ESP’s existence is a belief in its non-existence. So I’m expressing a belief just as ESP’s proponents are.

Me: But there’s evidence that supports my position.
Bruce: But believers consider anecdotal evidence to be of equal value to scientific testing.
Me: But it’s not.
Bruce: That’s your BELIEF. You believe that the scientific method is the only way to truth. They believe that there are other ways to truth for some phenomenon that science just can’t catch reliably.

Bruce was not necessarily defending ESP’s existence, only arguing for the equality of belief for and against, given different background beliefs in the validity of the scientific method for determining truth. Interesting.

More on that in the next article.

Intelligent Design in the Science Classroom

There are several court cases and school board elections in the United States revolving around the issue of the teaching, or even the mere mention, of Intelligent Design in science classrooms. ID is, basically, the idea that the complexity of the world around us shows the influence of an architect; in essence, a divine creator. An example that usually arises is the claim that the human eye could not have evolved because there are too many steps between non-eye and eye. Evolution, supposedly, is sequential, and the fact that a partial eye confers no reproductive advantage, the theory of evolution fails to explain the development of the eye. Only an intelligent designer able to conceive of and construct the entire eye could have brought about the presence of eyes in humans (and other animals.) He did this instantly…no half-measures.

Proponents claim that ID is every much a science as is evolution. At least, ID is no more a religion than is evolution. Therefore, ID should be taught in science class. At a minimum, a statement should be read to science students that the theory of evolution is found wanting in some areas, and Intelligent Design provides the answers.

As a retired science teacher, I find myself in an ironic position. I agree whole-heartedly that ID, or even the statement requested by ID fans, has no place in a science classroom. Yet I discussed ID in my classroom, of my own volition. The difference was, I discussed why ID was out of the realm of science, without actually declaring its truth or falsity.

A recurring theme in my senior physics course was the distinction between religion/belief/philosophy and science. With examples drawn from ancient Greece, from the European eras Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein, and from twentieth century America, I tried to show how the disciplines differed.

Science deals with observable, repeatable phenomena and provides testable, falsifiable explanations. By definition, an explanation for a specific phenomenon or observation that includes God would not be a valid scientific explanation.

The reason is simple: since God can do anything he wants (or she wants, but we’ll stick with “he” for simplicity) he could make the phenomenon happen or not happen on a whim. Repeatability goes out the window. Similarly, you can’t test for God. To be contrary, suppose that a test does exist for the presence of God. For argument’s sake, we can suppose the test to be the mixing of two liquids, with favourable results being a yellow product. That is, suppose that if we mix the two liquids and get a yellow product, that means God exists. We demonstrate, repeatedly, the positive result: yellow after yellow after yellow. Each time we mix the liquids, the product turns yellow. We say, “See, God exists.” Suddenly, one day, the result is red. What do we say then when we see a result that is contrary to known behaviour of the two liquids? It would be like seeing a falling ball suddenly hovering motionless in the air. We’d call that a miracle (if we had no other physical explanation, such as hidden strings or magnets). But consider: a miracle is evidence of God’s existence. So if the liquids turned yellow or didn’t turn yellow, both results supposedly implied that God exists. Thus the experiment was irrelevant. There can be no test for God.

I tell my students, “I’m not saying that God doesn’t exist, only that there is no scientific test that can confirm it.” The statement “God exists” is philosophical, religious, a statement of belief.

In science, no acceptable explanations for an event can mention God. How did the Grand Canyon form? Explanation: God made it. How was Earth created? God made it. How does haemoglobin carry oxygen? God puts it there. These explanations may be true (who knows?) but are simply not scientific.

A God explanation is an intellectual dead-end for a scientist. And for you, too. Have you watched magic shows? The magician makes a rabbit appear from an empty black hat. Don’t you think to yourself, “How did he do it?” The very act of searching for an explanation shows that you believe that the magician was subject to the same laws of physics as you are, and used no true magic. How disappointing magic shows would be if the true explanation for each trick was “magic”! You might as well not try to figure anything out, if the explanation is “magic”.

Science, the search for physical explanations, deals only with non-God hypotheses. That’s why Intelligent Design is an unacceptable scientific explanation for a phenomenon.

Intelligent Design grew out of (evolved!) from Creation Science. Most creationists were fundamentalists, believers in the literal interpretation of the Bible. They taught that God made the world as described in Genesis, fundamentally as we see it today. He made the mountains, the valleys, the plants, the animals, and the humans. There was no evolution; the Earth was young. Creation Science’s close adherence to the Bible made the religious connection obvious. The US Supreme Court ruled that Creation “Science” could not be taught as a science.

The Intelligent Design proponents try to escape the “religion” label. They say that they are not discussing religion in the classroom (which would be contrary to the US Constitution.) Rather, they are proposing a valid “scientific” explanation for a phenomenon that happens to involve an architect. The distinction between the architect and God is rather tenuous. (And arguing that there is such a distinction is somewhat disingenuous.)

ID looked good at first blush, but fails on a number of planes. As already mentioned, ID requires a deity. But let’s ignore that fatal wound for a minute. ID fails for other reasons. The sequential evolution of the eye can be shown to provide benefits during the intermediate steps. As explained in Dawson’s book The Blind Clockmaker, there are animals on Earth right now possessing “eyes” (or light detecting regions/organs) in a multitude of different shapes and complexities that can be strung together to demonstrate the development of the human eye (or follow alternate paths for the evolution of other eyes, such as that of the octopus or house fly.) The presence of each “partial-eye” is advantageous over the previous step. Second, our eyes, although very good, could have been designed better. The light-sensing cells of the retina are backward, with nerve connections to the brain extending toward the front (i.e. inside the eye) rather than the back. The result is less than optimum light reception, and a blind spot where the bundled nerves pass through the retina on the way to the brain. The “Intelligent” designer was not fully intelligent in the case of the human eye. (Evolution, however, just goes where it goes. The drift is toward improvement, but optimal results are not guaranteed.)

There are many examples where an intelligent designer could have done a better job. Here’s another. Unlike women’s ovaries, men’s testicles hang outside the body, exposing them to potential harm. The reason is that sperm must be formed and stored at below body temperature. Why not just make sperm that “liked” body temperature? Remember, the designer had God-like powers, and God can do anything. He certainly could have made sperm that thrived at 37°C.

At this point, many IDers will say that God must have had some other reason for making eyes or testicles in what appears to be a less efficient manor. This is the old “God moves in mysterious ways” argument. The problem with this damage control spin is a little abstract. “God moves in mysterious ways” makes the original claim of God’s intervention non-falsifiable. Here’s why: when we see an example of something that works as we expect a God would have make it, we say “Look. There’s good evidence for our (God) argument.” When we see something that runs counter to the God-did-it argument, we say “Well, it probably supports the argument too, but we just can’t see the connection.” Thus the God-did-it argument holds regardless of whether we perceive it or not. Evidence is irrelevant.

At a little deeper level, the “mysterious ways” argument is intellectually dishonest. When we announce a connection between the world and what we feel God would have done, we are claiming that humans have the ability to grasp the divine purpose. But when we retreat to “God moves in mysterious ways” we are saying that humans don’t have the ability to grasp the divine purpose. You can’t have it both ways.

I taught all the above, little by little when applicable, to my senior science students. When someone asked “Do you believe in God?” I refused to answer yes or no. My response was that I did not want to influence young person toward either answer. When a student asked “Do you believe in evolution?” my response was, “By using the word “believe” you are asking for my religious position." If the student rephrased the question as "Do you think evolution is a good scientific explanation for the living world as we see it?” my response was, "Yes. Evidence for evolution is wide-spread and overwhelming."

If you ask, “Should science teachers be forced to mention Intelligent Design in their classrooms” my response is “No.” And, if you ask, “Did I mention ID in my classes?” my answer is “Yes”.

God and Why Things Happen

I had an interesting discussion on a car trip last night with my wife Sue and niece, Jenn. We had started with the question of life off the Earth, and touched on parallel universes and extra dimensions, God and science. At one point I mentioned the tube worms and other creatures living around the deep sea vents.
Sue: What is the purpose of them being there?
Rob: Do you mean what role do they play in their little ecosystem?
Sue: No, what is the reason they are there?
Rob: Evolution doesn’t happen for a reason, that is, in order to fulfill something. Like giraffes didn’t evolve long necks in order to eat the leaves of tall trees. Its just that longer necked creatures were able to get more food, so stayed healthy, and had more babies. So over the long run, a long-necked creature evolved.
Jenn: So you don’t believe there was a purpose to their evolution.
Rob: “Believe?” Good word, Jenn. You are asking a philosophical question: what is my philosophy or religious position on the matter. Not a question of science.
Jenn: No, no. Science. If giraffes didn’t evolve long necks there would be more leaves left on the trees. They would shade the ground, changing the temperature. They would fall and rot and change the pH. There’s be a different ecosystem.
Rob: Right. Good point. That’s why we have to be careful because when we engineer a change in the ecosystem, a million other things are affected.
Jenn: Right, like adding rabbits to Australia, or using pesticides. So can’t the purpose of the giraffes be that they are needed for that ecosystem?
Rob: But let’s for a moment assume that there are no giraffes. You would say to me “The reason there are no long-necked creatures is that they would eat the high leaves, there would be more sunshine, so the ground would be warmer at the base of the tree. There would be fewer leaves to rot, and the pH would change.
Jenn: (laughs) Same argument.
Rob: Right. Your original argument was, basically, if there are no giraffes, things would be different. When that argument can be used both for and against the point being examined, that argument is valueless as a scientific statement.
Jenn: I see that.
Rob: You could make it into a valid philosophical argument, though. A religious person could say, for example, that if there were no giraffes, conditions would be different and the difference would be bad. Since God would not have wanted the conditions to be bad, God wouldn’t have allowed that (i.e. no giraffes) to happen, and would have created/evolved giraffes in the first place.
The problem with this argument, though, is that, for consistency, it must be applied everywhere. You could say that the malaria mosquito or the TB virus must have been created/evolved for a purpose. So why are we (even “good” religious people) contributing money to eradicate these creatures? Might not we be acting against God’s will?
There are a couple of ways out of this conundrum. One is to say that we are part of God’s creation/evolution, so our purpose was to alter the ecosystem (for the good) by wiping out the bad bugs. Unfortunately, this argument also has too wide a range, because it could be used by the people eradicating the rainforests and polluting the environment, too.
Another escape is the “free will” argument: God gave us free will to do our best to determine what’s good and what’s bad. We see that wiping out giraffes is bad, but wiping out TB is good. (That leaves the question about why God allowed the TB in the first place, if not to test us when we develop the capability of eradicating it. (This heads towards “Why do bad things happen to good people?”, perhaps the deepest, most important religious question.)
Sue: Rob! Pay attention. You’re heading to Niagara falls!
Rob: [cutting across two lanes highway traffic, and driving on the shoulder until we can get into the correct lane] Sorry.

Extra dimensions
Current cutting edge physics talks about the universe being made of eleven or so dimensions, not the three physical and one temperal (x,y,z,t) of Einstein. This concept is very hard to visualize, of course.
One of the best books I have read that helped me get an intuitive grasp of the many dimension idea is Galileo's Finger, by Peter Atkins. I highly recommend the book for thinkers, for people who want to be taken past what they already know.
In my high school classroom, I marry an idea from his book with my own examples to show why extra dimensions arise in physics. In a nutshell:
1. In senior physics, students learn how to solve 2-D collisions. Ball A of a certain mass and velocity hits ball B, with its mass, and velocity, at some angle. The laws of conservation and momentum allow the two final velocities (including direction) to be calculated. Basically, two equations are used to calculate the two unknowns (the two final velocities) from the initial data.
2. What if there were three bodies hitting at EXACTLY the same time? Now there are three unknowns, but still only two equations. So, exact solution can't be calculated. This is the 3-body problem, still unsolved. (We can get approximate solutions by numerical methods, but the exact solution is not known.)
3. How about if one object comes in from the west and hits two identical objects balls lined up in contact north-south? (i.e. ball at 12 o'clock, ball at 6 o'clock touching in the centre of the clock. Other ball comes in from 9 o'clock) This 3-body problem is solvable because of the symmetry. The two stopped balls will pick up the same velociy, different directions but equal angles from 3 o'clock direction.
4. Thus if there is symmetry, we can calculate answers to problems which would otherwise be unsolveable.
5. Atkins points out that a line segment horizontal line segment is equivalent to a vertical line segment. We just rotate it (or turn our head!) Similarly a square and a diamond are equivalent, because one is a rotation of the other. (Turn the square 45 degrees.) Are a square and a hexagon equivalent? No. You can't rotate a square and make it a hexagon. Except that...
6. Draw a square and a cube. The cube is the 3-D object whose shadow is a square. But if you rotate a cube, its shadow can be a hexagon. (To see this, draw a box whose corner is rotated toward you, viewed from slightly above.) Therefore a hexagon and a square can be considered equivalent, or symmetrical, if you think in 3-D instead of 2-D.
7. We have already seen that if you find symmetries you can solve previously unsolveable problems. And we just saw that by viewing a concept from a higher dimension, you can find symmetries that were not apparent (or not there!) in lower dimensions.
8. Physicists are attempting to find formulas to describe the fundamental subatomic particles, and the behaviour of radiation and matter at the very small and large, and quantum theory, and relativity, and gravity (as discussed in general relativity). They haven't succeeded in finding exact solutions to the various equations that combine to describe things. BUT...
9. By working in more directions, symmetries were found that enable solutions.
10. Apparently, solutions exist if you use eleven dimensions.
So, there you are. Like all concepts in science, we find explanations that satisfy us and are useful. Eleven dimensions proves to be useful. Hence, proposing eleven dimensions becomes useful.

On Astrology
I notice in my Blog profile, my sign of the zodiac is listed. I regret this, but it comes with the territory.

I would rather not have my sign showing, for the simple reason that it reinforces the fraud/delusion/hoax that is astrology. You may say, “Come on, it’s just for fun. Nobody expects that the little reference to astrological sign will have any significant effect.” Try saying something similar to Big Tobacco, which pays hundreds of thousands of dollars to have a star smoke a cigarette once in a picture, just an incidental smoke. Tiny references add up.

Astrology, horoscopes, signs…the whole thing is of course demonstrably false. Experiments show that the location of Mars, say, in the sky when you were born has zero effect on whether you will lose your wallet today or marry a tall, dark stranger tomorrow. Same with the Sun. And to top it off, the dates are wrong. I’m supposed to be a Virgo, meaning that the Sun was in Virgo when I was wrong. Well, it wasn’t. ALL the dates are wrong. Yours, too. That means you have been reading the wrong horoscope in the newspaper all your life. You’ve been waiting for, or avoiding (they cover themselves by giving two options) the wrong person all this time!

Seriously, the fact that so many people accept astrology (and ghosts, ESP, werewolves, psychic fairs, etc.) as valid is disconcerting to me…especially as I am a physics teacher. Carl Sagan said “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence before they should be accepted.” I find it unfortunate that so many people accept stuff for which there is no evidence or even evidence to the contrary.

Pertinent quotes on this subject:
Sagan – “Don’t be so open-minded that your brains fall out.”
Person sitting before a “psychic”, after being asked his name, “Why do you need to ask?”
Me: Did ANYBODY forecast 9-11? (Answer: no.)

A Challenge for the Reader

I have been working on a science fiction novel recently. To help me, I bought most of the How-To-Write-A-Novel books at the local bookstore. Now when I read novels, instead of being able to enjoy them, I find myself looking to see if the author followed the instructions in the books.

I also do this with movies, which are novels writ small. One technique that I notice is how the movies tell us the backstory, the background of the major characters and how they got to the position they occupy when the movie begins. Usually one character will say to another, in the first few minutes, “I know you have been a cop for the last five years…” or “Remember when we were together in college and you fell for that girl?” The characters are really telling us, the viewers. It’s so obvious when you know what to look for.

Something really clever, though, is the way well-written movies set up later events or conversations by an earlier image. I don’t mean the obvious way where, in a murder mystery, the camera lingers on an upside down book. You just KNOW that when the hero wraps up the case, he or she will link the book to the murderer.

No, I’m talking about something deeper. Let me illustrate what I mean. Many superb examples occur in one of the best-written movies, The Right Stuff. For instance, near the beginning Chuck Yeager gets knocked off his horse by a cactus plant. Did you know that it was the SECOND time we saw his arm get struck by a cactus plant? Find the earlier interaction, which must surely have been in the script to set us up, if only subliminally, for the bigger one. Others are needed to make sure the viewer is informed. When you see Glamorous Glennis painted on the plane, how do we know who Glennis is? The author made sure we heard Yeager call his wife by name earlier. How do we know the CEO of Life Magazine is important? We saw Cooper reading an issue of Life earlier (twice). How about Glenn’s humming during his descent…when did you hear that before? And look at Cooper sleeping in his capsule before its launch…when did you see that before? Another purpose of this technique is to hint what is to come. What did Cooper foreshadow when he dropped a tiny toy capsule into Gus’s glass of water? I can find over a dozen examples where the screenwriter or director set up a later event by an earlier reference. I challenge you to find them (and enjoy once again an excellent movie.)

Russell and Godel - What's so important?

A former student emailed me about Russell's discovery of the inconsistency inherent in considering the set of all sets that don't contain themselves. "What's all the fuss?", he asked.

I mentioned how this led Godel to the discovery and proof that in any formal system (like geometry) there are statements that have been proved to be true, statements that have not yet been proved to be true but are provable, and, unfortunately (and this is the big shocker!) true statements that will never be able to be proved to be true (and we won't know which of the unproved statements belong in this category.)

He still wondered why this was so important. Here's my response.

Imagine you have some organized system, like geometry. You start with some axioms (assumptions), and derive theorems. Each of the theorems is proved. You KNOW therefore that your system is consistent. Sometimes you make lucky guesses by seeing patterns, so you propose new theorems, but you call them postulates because you haven't proved them yet (like the Four Colour Map Postulate or the Congruence Postulates). Eventually, either a counter-example is discovered so the postulate is dumped, or you prove the theorem. The FCM postulate is now the FCM Theorem because it has been proved. The conguence postulates remain unproved. We use them, though, but in the back of our minds we have that tiny reservation that everything proven using congruent triangles as an intermediate step is suspect. Our dream, of course, is completion: we prove all true theorems in our system.

What if the system has an infinite number of possible theorems. OK, so we can't get completion in a finite time, but completion (at the end of time!) is possible in principle.

BUT, suppose (heaven forbid!) that there are true theorems in the system that are forever unprovable and YOU DON'T KNOW WHICH ONES THEY ARE!

You would be calling them postulates because you haven't proved them yet, but you have a gut feeling that they are true, so you are devoting time to proving them. This time will be ultimately wasted, even if you devote an INFINITE amount of time, because the statement you are trying to prove happens to be one of the unprovable statements.

Russell/Godel's work showed that this horrendous situation exists in ALL formal systems. (Formal=axiom/theorem/ proof system.) There will ALWAYS be true but unprovable statements, so you will never know the system is complete. Persistance is futile!

This was a great shock to mathematicians and logicians. It's like discovering that the earth is not the centre of the universe, or that humans evolved from non-humans. Ever since Euclid, mathematicians delighted in thinking of their discipline has solid and objective. Opposite angles are equal not because we want them to be so, or some king demands them to be so, but because we can PROVE them to be so. What fantastic advances came from the development of formal systems: number theory, set theory, calculus, etc. I think it's more than just the worry that a mathematician might be wasting time trying to prove a true-bue-unprovable-theorum. It's deeper. What makes THAT theorem (i.e. the unprovable one) different from the other proveable theorems? No one will ever know! --sigh--

General Relativity Lite

When I taught secondary school physics, I always tried to take the students a little farther than required by curriculum guidelines. The goal was to give them just enough so that future learning might be easier. In complex topics such as relativity, cosmology, string theory, fractals, or chaos, the aim was turn on in their head a little light bulb so they might say “OK, I sort of get it.” I’ll try that here with general relativity. It's a little tricky without a diagram, but do you want to try it?

General Relativity: Curved space and a Theory for Gravity

Background (and you don’t really need this)

You may remember that an object’s weight is mg, where m is the mass and g is the Earth’s gravitational field strength. Remember also that Newton’s second law is F = ma. A subtle point about these formulas is that the two m’s needn’t be the same thing. The m in mg is the gravitational mass, that quality of a body that causes it to be attracted to another object. The m in F=ma is the inertial mass, that quality of a body that causes it to resist being accelerated. Writing g in N/kg and giving it a value for Earth’s surface of 9.8 N/kg gives both the m’s the same unit (kg) and the same value (because a N/kg equals a m/s2, and the gravitational acceleration is 9.8 m/s2 down at Earth’s surface.)

Does it actually matter that these m’s might be different? Not for general relativity, because Einstein started general relativity with the assumption that they ARE the same thing. That led to …

Curvature of Space

Being in an accelerated frame of reference, like a box accelerating "upward" in empty space at 9.8 m/s2 is equivalent to being in a gravitational field where g=9.8 N/kg. That is, you can’t tell the difference. All experiments must come out the same. If you release a ball in that accelerating box, it seems to fall to the floor. (It travels up with the speed it had in your hand, but the floor’s speed is increasing, so the floor comes up and hits the ball. To you inside, it looks as if the ball is falling.)

But what if you release two balls, one from each outstretched hand? In the box, the balls fall on parallel paths to the floor. They hit the ground the same distance apart as they were when you released them. But on Earth’s surface the balls fall toward Earth’s centre, so should converge. But Einstein supposed that both experiments should come out the same. To rescue the assumption, he makes a great intellectual leap (but one that is simple and logical.) He says that in the gravitational field case, the balls DO fall on parallel lines, EVEN THOUGH they appear to be converging, because space is curved! How does this work? Imagine you and your friend walking north on Earth’s surface. You are walking parallel to your friend but converging. So parallel lines converge on (positively) curved surfaces. If VOLUME is curved, that could happen in space. So Einstein proposes that space is curved in the vicinity of masses.

So what’s gravity? Remember dropping the ball in the box that was accelerating upward in empty space? Inside, you observe (and feel) a force down even though there was really no force down on objects in the box. (Same thing in a rotating frame of reference…you feel a force to the outside (which you call centrifugal force) even though there is no such force. Objects in rotating frames of reference are tending to travel STRAIGHT, the paths they travel in the absence of force.) In accelerated frames of reference fictitious forces are felt.

Are you ready for General Gelativity Lite - An Explanation for Gravity?

Gravity

If space is curved, then when you think you are travelling a straight line, you are actually travelling a curved path (through space-time, actually). So when you think you are in a non-accelerated frame of reference, you are really in an accelerated frame of reference. Therefore you feel a fictitious force. That “force” is gravity.

In Twenty Five Words or Less

If this phrase means something to you, welcome to the over-50 club! These days (i.e. for the last 35 years!) most contests that people enter by writing their names on a coupon or an entry blank are sweepstakes. When I was young, contests on the back of cereal boxes required some additional element, such as drawing a picture, writing a joke, or composing a poem. I must have been about ten when I entered a contest printed on the back of a box of Nestle's Quik, a chocolate milk powder. I had to write, in twenty five words or less, why I like Nestle's Quik. I don't remember what I wrote, but I won a watch!

It was disappointing that, a few years later, the contests changed to becoming straight draws. (Of course, my earlier win could have been drawn from the hat, too...I'll never know.) Evidently, the Canadian government very strongly disagreed with the change, because they brought in the infamous skill-testing question rule. Apparently, voters (or some prominent legislators) objected strongly to people winning money without actually demonstrating that they deserved the prize. From then on, to claim the prize you had to earn your prize by computing 9 times 8 divided by 4 minus 3.

I still see the skill-testing question on some sweepstakes entry blanks, so I guess the law is still on the books. I wonder if it has ever been enforced.

To Discover Magazine: It's about time.

I finished high school in 1968. The physics textbook we used was the P.S.S.C. text, an American textbook. There were no inches, miles, feet, or pounds in that book.

It is now 2005, 37 years later. Yet Discover Magazine, my favourite science magazine, still uses those units, instead of metres, kilometres, and kilograms. Two entire generations of American children have grown up with the metric system in science. When will Discover Magazine slide into the twenty-first century and realize that American adults and youth are ready to read scientific articles that contain the units as the rest of the world uses; indeed, the same system of measurements that the scientists in their own country use daily?

Lucky to have been a teacher

This is my last year teaching. I am so lucky to have been in this profession. Imagine being able to tell people about things you find interesting every day. When you return from a good movie, don't you want to tell everyone about it, persuade them to go see it, too? That's the way it has been for me in physics, computers, science, astronomy, math.

And I have been so fortunate to be able to live out fantasies: waving my hands in front of the junior band is the equivalent of conducting a symphony orchestra; my girl's baseball team is my Blue Jays; when directing a musical, I'm standing on Broadway.

I have had a decent salary and great holidays. Of course, the general public doesn't know I marked papers and developed handouts, on average, about 16 hours a week at home. That's just the way it is, teachers work longer hours than anyone realizes. But I'm not complaining, just stating.

If you like interacting with youth, creating intellectual resources, teaching something different every day, you could do worse than enter the teaching profession. You must be able to handle change, be willing to bring your work home with you, and have something prepared for every period of every day. (Nothing is worse, or more pressure-inducing, than facing 30 young people with nothing for them to do!)

I have been so lucky to have been able to help a couple of generations of young people get a start in life. The amazing thing is that someone has actually paid me to spend 32 years doing what I love. I hope you are as fortunate.
-RS

Here in Canada the Supreme Court has just ruled that the refusal to allow gays to marry is discriminatory and unconstitutional. It has affirmed that a specific church may refuse to provide a service if that marriage contravenes that religion's edicts. But the government cannot deny civil marriage.

I am proud of the court, and the way the Prime Minister is handling the issue. He has announced a free vote on a law OK'ing the removal of "opposite sex" from the marriage definition BUT has said that the cabinet is ordered to support the bill. (I might take issue with the general principle that members of parliament should ever be forced to support a government position regardless of what they think is right or what they feel their constituents want. But that's another issue.)

Both Supreme Court and the PM have walked a sensible line. The court ruled wisely by reaffirming freedom of religion while making sure that discrimination against homosexuals cannot be made by government. (I disgree with discriminatory church policies. But that, too, is another issue.) And the PM announced that MP's can vote their conscience but gave a clear message that the cabinet is expected to support gay marriage. This is a courageous (and just) position.

No coat hooks, part 2

Twenty years ago, when VCR's were new, my school had once player. It was kept in a geography classroom on the second floor, just overtop of my physics classroom. There was a tree outside the window. One night, someone climbed the tree, broke a window, and stole the VCR. There had been intruder sensors in the halls, but this enterprising thief beat the system by entering and leaving the upstairs window via the tree.
How did the principal respond? He had the tree cut down! Because our school was ringed with windows (it was built before the period of fortress-like schools with tiny windows), cutting down the tree reduced the number of accessible windows from about 250 to 249. I couldn't believe this ridiculous over-reaction.

Don't you think this story, although less tragic, is similar to that of the removal of the coat hooks mentioned in the previous posting?

One difference is that the tree decision was made by one person. Nowadays, I think it's the lawyers who call the shots. Lawyers told our board of education that teachers were not to be taking students to Europe during the March Break (during holidays!) because if there was a terrorist attack somewhere and the trip got cancelled, the students might lose their deposits and the school board would get sued. So, no more educational trips.
I had taken students to Greece, Italy, and Spain. I protested. I got a letter from the tour company saying that money would be refunded if a government travel alert was sounded for the trip destination. The board official responded that the students would be too disappointed if a trip was cancelled so they were not going to allow the possible disapointment to occur! I guess they felt that no one would be disappointed if there were no trip offered at all. Thank you Board of Education lawyers.

Probably it was the lawyers who recommended removing the hooks. Imagine, they would have said, what would happen if there were a repeat of that tragic situation: what if a student in this board of education were killed by being hung on a coat hook? The parents' lawyers would say in court "You KNEW that a student had been killed on a coat hook previously, yet you DID NOTHING to prevent it happening in your schools?"

The darn thing is, the lawyers would be right. That argument would win, wouldn't it? So what's wrong. The lawyer's advise was probably good. By following the advise the board was acting in its own best interest, and, perhaps, in a now-not-to-be-killed child's best interest, too. Yet I can't help thinking that the removal of the coat hooks was a dumb overreaction to an extremely rare event. If that's so, where is the flaw in the logic? How do we fix this paradox?

There are no coat hooks in my school
About 10 years ago a little boy in an Ontario elementary school was lifted up and suspended on a coat hook. He suffocated. Police were unable to find who killed him. Now all the coat hooks in all the washrooms in all the schools, elementary and secondary, in my board of education have been removed.
This brings up an interesting, though unsettling, question: was the removal of all the coat hooks a vast over-reaction? In over 200 years of public education in Canada, one student in one school was killed on a coat hook. Now, intellectually, it is hard to argue against a position that if the removal of the hooks saves even one child, the policy is worthwhile. How can you measure the cost of a life of a child against the inconvenience of hot being able to hang a coat or jacket on a hook?
On the other hand, as callous as it seems, we might say that there are many ways and times, in 200 years, that someone can be killed, and you can't stop them all. There are more children killed falling down stairs than being hung on coat hooks, and we still build multistory schools.
Sometimes a reality check is needed.

Are the religious right right?

CBC Radio ran an interesting program today in which a committed, evangelical, fundamentalist Christain minister took the CBC reporter into his home for a week. The program, told entirely in alternating first-person accounts, related how they came to respect each other even though their viewpoints about God, homosexuals, abortion, G.W.Bush, and almost everything else, were so different. Each told how wary they initially were about each other, how they became friends, and respected the other (even though his view was wrong!)

Here's what bothers me a little about the certainty of strongly religious people. Throughout history, religious people have always been strongly convinced of the correctness of their own beliefs. A while ago, African Americans were unworthy of treatment as humans; before that Native Americans, witches, heretics, "infidels" in the holy lands. Jews have been persecuted by Christians for a couple of millennia. Church doctrines have changed over time.

At each instant in history, I will bet that committed religious people have always said that they were certain their beliefs were true. They would have said that those who lived before them were misguided; that, in fact, EVERYONE who thinks differently is wrong.

My question to an evangelical, fundamentalist person of any religion is this. Isn't it worth considering that all of the people in those earlier eras felt as strongly that they are absolutely right as you do? You have been born and raised (or otherwise come) to accept certain tenets as absolute truths. If you are truly open-minded and rational, shouldn't you acknowledge that there is a rather low probability that you happen to have been born at just the perfect time in history that your generation was taught the absolute truth, while all those who came before (or believe different things now) are the ones who are wrong? How can honest, clear-thinking, fair evangelicals be so certain of the correctness of their positions?

Save "me", please

English may be a living language, but the proper use of "me" is dying. Often bad language comes up from the bottom: kids, TV shows, wrestling matches. Over the last ten years, an error that bugs me came down from the top, from adults, from professionals. It is the use of the word "myself" when the speaker or writer means "me."
e.g. Turn your documents into Kevin or myself by 3:00.
e.g. (worse) Dave and myself will be away tomorrow. (should be "I")

I turn in documents to you, not to yourself. I see her, she sees herself. You play with me, I play …

On second thought, I guess the word "me" is not imperiled as I first thought. Almost every student says "Me and her are going to the mall." Hearing that always gives myself a headache.

If we only knew

I'm old enough to remember "Whites Only" drinking fountains and regulations in the American South that blacks had to sit in the back of the bus and give up their seats to white people. This concept looks so repulsive now. (It was repulsive then, too, but not for many southerners...bear with me.) If whites in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia in 1960 could have looked ahead 45 years, they would have seen the disgust that people today have for their attitudes. If they knew, then, how their attitudes would appear to people 40 years in the future, would they have continued to hold their values?

My parents grew up on the Toronto Islands. Up until the 60's there were no Jews allowed in the bowling and baseball leagues, nor at the events in the Clubhouse. And my parents and their friends were otherwise very good people. Why didn't they see how wrong this was? If someone told them what people in 1980 would think of this policy, would they have changed it sooner?

Or take Sadam Hussein. He wanted to be known as a great leader, like Saladin. If he had known that he would be despised by future generations, would he have acted differently?

Let's assume that people would change their behaviour if, magically, they found out what future generations thought of them. The question becomes, then, what are WE doing today that people in 2040 will say "How could they have thought THAT? How disgusting! How could they have behaved that way?"

A couple of suggestions might be
"How could they (i.e. we) have ignored/contributed to global warming so much?"
"How could they have treated homosexuals that way?"
"How could they have destroyed so many species?"

Are there any things about us that you think might disgust future generations as much as those behaviours from the near past, like routinely-accepted racial descrimination, that disgust us now?