Sunspots 987

 

Quanta magazine on the 100 birthday of quantum mechanics.

Gizmodo analyzes the results of DOGE's activity. There wasn't much money actually saved.

MSN and other outlets report on a study of the singing patterns of leopard seals. They are a lot like nursery rhymes.

MSN a nd other sources report that a man stayed under water for almost a half hour, after ingesting pure Oxygen.

National Public Radio reports on a push to stop using the common Mercator projection map, which expands the apparent size of geographic features near the poles, and seriously downsizes the appearance of the African continent.

Thanks for reading.

". . . being dead, yet speaketh." Science

My wife saw a quote from a previous post of mine, which said this:

"I am constantly struck by the strangeness of reading works that seem addressed, personally and intimately, to me, and yet were written by people who crumbled to dust long ago." (source)

She told me that she wanted to know some of the statements that seem addressed to me. In other words, who speaks to me, though dead? (Hebrews 11:4, KJV, says "By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts: and by it he being dead yet speaketh.")

In the first installment of this series, I quoted 10 brief sections from the Bible which particularly speak to me. In the second installment, I posted quotations from three of my favorite dead authors of fantastic literature, all of them Christians, namely George MacDonald, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis.

Quotations from science are more difficult. Science typically depends on periodical articles, many of them so specialized that even scientists reading outside their own area find them difficult to understand. Most scientists of the twenty-first century have never read Galileo, Newton, Darwin or Einstein, whereas, in literature and theology, as I understand it, it is important to read the classics. Nonetheless, below are some important quotations from the literature of science. (The quotations are in black. Various reference and explanatory material is in this color.)

Galileo accepted the inerrancy of Scripture; but he was also mindful of Cardinal Baronius's quip that the bible "is intended to teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go." "The Galileo Affair," by Catholic.net.

And so, after postulating movements, which, farther on in the book, I ascribe to the Earth, I have found by many and long observations that if the movements of the other planets are assumed for the circular motion of the Earth and are substituted for the revolution of each star, not only do their phenomena follow logically therefrom, but the relative positions and magnitudes both of the stars and all their orbits, and of the heavens themselves, become so closely related that in none of its parts can anything be changed without causing confusion in the other parts and in the whole universe. Therefore, in the course of the work I have followed this plan: I describe in the first book all the positions of the orbits together with the movements which I ascribe to the Earth, in order that this book might contain, as it were, the general scheme of the universe. Thereafter in the remaining books, I set forth the motions of the other stars and of all their orbits together with the movement of the Earth, in order that one may see from this to what extent the movements and appearances of the other stars and their orbits can be saved, if they are transferred to the movement of the Earth. Nor do I doubt that ingenious and learned mathematicians will sustain me, if they are willing to recognize and weigh, not superficially, but with that thoroughness which Philosophy demands above all things, those matters which have been adduced by me in this work to demonstrate these theories. In order, however, that both the learned and the unlearned equally may see that I do not avoid anyone's judgment, I have preferred to dedicate these lucubrations of mine to Your Holiness rather than to any other, because, even in this remote corner of the world where I live, you are considered to be the most eminent man in dignity of rank and in love of all learning and even of mathematics, so that by your authority and judgment you can easily suppress the bites of slanderers, albeit the proverb hath it that there is no remedy for the bite of a sycophant. If perchance there shall be idle talkers, who, though they are ignorant of all mathematical sciences, nevertheless assume the right to pass judgment on these things, and if they should dare to criticise and attack this theory of mine because of some passage of scripture which they have falsely distorted for their own purpose, I care not at all; I will even despise their judgment as foolish. Nicolas Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, public domain, 1543, from the dedication to Pope Paul III. The Wikipedia article on the history of science says that this book, claiming that the earth was not the center of the universe, began the scientific revolution.

Our design not respecting arts, but philosophy, and our subject not manual but natural powers, we consider chiefly those things which relate to gravity, levity, elastic force, the resistance of fluids, and the like forces, whether attractive or impulsive; and therefore we offer this work as the mathematical principles of philosophy; for all the difficulty of philosophy seems to consist in this – from the phenomena of motions to investigate the forces of nature, and then from these forces to demonstrate the other phenomena; and to this end the general propositions in the first and second book are directed. In the third book we give an example of this in the explication of the System of the World; for by the propositions mathematically demonstrated in the former books, we in the third derive from the celestial phenomena the forces of gravity with which bodies tend to the sun and the several planets. Then from these forces, by other propositions which are also mathematical, we deduce the motions of the planets, the comets, the moon, and the sea. I wish we could derive the rest of the phenomena of nature by the same kind of reasoning from mechanical principles; for I am induced by many reasons to suspect that they may all depend upon certain forces by which the particles of bodies, by some causes hitherto unknown, are either mutually impelled towards each other, and cohere in regular figures, or are repelled and recede from each other; which forces being unknown, philosophers have hitherto attempted the search of nature in vain; but I hope the principles here laid down will afford some light either to this or some truer method of philosophy. Isaac Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, public domain, 1687. This passage is from the Preface to the first edition. Newton was a philosopher, in his own eyes, and scientific journals weren't as important in his day, hence the introduction of Newton's ideas in this book, rather than in a journal article. This book, more than any other, founded classical physics. The Wikipedia article on the history of science says that this book completed the scientific revolution.

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, public domain, 1859. This is the last paragraph of that book. Note that Darwin said "originally breathed into a few forms or into one," thus allowing for Divine creation.

"I did not think; I investigated." Wilhelm Roentgen, on his thoughts when he first discovered X-rays, from an interview with McClure's Magazine, May 1, 1896. Ideally, scientists don't have preconceived ideas about what they will find, but just let the facts take them where they will. In practice, of course, that isn't always true.

Sometimes, as Max Planck observed, and Thomas S. Kuhn quoted (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, (Wikipedia article on that book, accessed 12/07/2006) p. 151):

"a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

Thomas S. Kuhn was a historian of science. The quotation encapsulates the idea of his book, namely that science doesn't "progress" (he didn't use that word) by adding experiment to experiment, but by sudden leaps, or scientific revolutions, when some scientist has a revolutionary insight, such as Newton's (possibly legendary) sudden revelation, when seeing an apple fall from a tree, that gravity is an attractive force. The following quote is from a man who is not known for the experiments he did, except those he did in his own head:

The basal principle, which was the pivot of all our previous considerations, was the special principle of relativity, i.e. the principle of the physical relativity of all uniform motion. Let as once more analyse its meaning carefully.

It was at all times clear that, from the point of view of the idea it conveys to us, every motion must be considered only as a relative motion. Returning to the illustration we have frequently used of the embankment and the railway carriage, we can express the fact of the motion here taking place in the following two forms, both of which are equally justifiable :
(a) The carriage is in motion relative to the embankment,
(b) The embankment is in motion relative to the carriage.

In (a) the embankment, in (b) the carriage, serves as the body of reference in our statement of the motion taking place. If it is simply a question of detecting or of describing the motion involved, it is in principle immaterial to what reference-body we refer the motion. As already mentioned, this is self-evident, but it must not be confused with the much more comprehensive statement called "the principle of relativity," which we have taken as the basis of our investigations.
The principle we have made use of not only maintains that we may equally well choose the carriage or the embankment as our reference-body for the description of any event (for this, too, is self-evident). Our principle rather asserts what follows : If we formulate the general laws of nature as they are obtained from experience, by making use of
(a) the embankment as reference-body,
(b) the railway carriage as reference-body,

then these general laws of nature (e.g. the laws of mechanics or the law of the propagation of light in vacuo) have exactly the same form in both cases. Albert Einstein, Relativity: the Special and General Theory, public domain, from the chapter entitled "Special and General Theory of Relativity." The theory of special relativity was actually introduced in an article, one of those published in Einstein's breakout year, 1905, not in this book.

Margrethe So what was this mysterious thing you said?

Heisenberg There's no mystery about it. There never was any mystery. I remember it absolutely clearly, because my life was at stake, and I chose my words very carefully. I simply asked you if as a physicist one had the moral right to work on the practical exploitation of atomic energy. . . . (p. 36) Michael Frayn, Copenhagen. New York: Anchor Books, 2000. (Copyright by Michael Frayn, 1998) This excerpt was written about two scientists, not by them. For more on this play, see here. Scientists have occasionally been very concerned about the social impact of their work. They haven't always been concerned enough.

We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D. N. A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest. . . . It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material. J. D. Watson and F. H. C. Crick, "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" Nature 171:737-738, 1953. The first sentence is the opening sentence of this paper. The second sentence I have quoted comes near the end of this two-page article, and it indicates that Watson and Crick knew that this was a highly significant result. Crick is now dead. Watson isn't (yet).

Watson and Crick might not have published this paper without the work of Rosalind Franklin. I am sorry to say that none of the quotes above are from a woman, except the fictional one from Margrethe Bohr, who was not a scientist. There have been, unfortunately, until my own lifetime, few women who achieved prominence in science. I have previously posted about a female scientist who didn't achieve prominence, but did some very significant work.

Choice and 20th Century physics, 1

I continue a series of musings on the question, "does anything at all really happen by chance?" This post is the third on that subject. The first two consider what the Bible has to say on the subject. (Here's the second, which has a link to the first, or, better, click on the "choice" label at the bottom of this post.)

Modern physics seems to say that almost everything that happens to sub-atomic particles is due to chance.

This belief is known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. (I have posted previously about Werner Heisenberg.) This principle states that it is impossible to determine both the position and speed* of sub-atomic particles precisely. Some positions are more likely than others, and, if you know what you are doing, you can produce a graphed curve describing the likelihood that the particle will have each possible position, but the exact position is uncertain. A similar statement could be made about the speed. As a result, electron positions cannot be known, but are described as wavefunctions, or orbitals. They are often shown as blobs or clouds in chemistry texts.

Does this mean that everything at the sub-atomic level is due to chance? As I see it, not necessarily. It means that nothing at the sub-atomic level can be predicted absolutely by physicists, except as a statement of the probability that certain things will happen, something like predicting that there will be a 30% chance of rain. Unlike (we suppose) weather prediction, which will get better and better as we learn more about what causes weather events, and are better at detecting these causes, prediction at the sub-atomic level has fundamental limits -- it isn't ever going to get any better, if the theory is correct. Just because something can't be predicted doesn't necessarily mean that it's actually random, however.

Einstein was notoriously uncomfortable with this idea. He is said to have quipped (probably in German, not English) "God does not play at dice." (do a Google search on this phrase -- in quotation marks -- if interested.)

Some have speculated that this sub-atomic (quantum) uncertainty is a physical basis for free will. That may be so, but there are at least a couple of problems with this idea. First, just because physicists can't predict something doesn't mean that God doesn't control it. (God must at least allow sub-atomic events, but I suppose it is possible that He really does let some or all of them happen at random. It is also possible that every sub-atomic event is directed and controlled by God.) Second, it is not clear that chance events on the sub-atomic level could be responsible for the brain activity that leads to choices. The sub-atomic, after all, is orders of magnitude smaller than a nerve cell. To have such events change the action of nerve cells, at least one of which would be expected to do something if an individual chooses, would be roughly as if random impacts from dust particles in the air changed the direction of a moving car.

I'll probably have more to say about this later.

Thanks for reading.

*It's really not the speed, or even the velocity, but the momentum, but I'm trying not to be too technical here.

Michael Frayn's Copenhagen

My wife was good enough to go to see a production of Michael Frayn's Copenhagen with me on Father's Day, at Centre Stage South Carolina. She assigned me to report to our daughters on our attendance. (She also pointed out a grammatical mistake. Thanks!) I decided to do this as a blog post.

This play won the Tony award (best Broadway play) for 2000. It was an amazing choice. There are only three characters, all playing dead people, on a bare stage. The plot is that the dead people, Werner Heisenberg, Neils Bohr, and Bohr's wife, Margrethe, are trying to understand a visit Heisenberg made to Bohr, in Copenhagen, in 1941, by discussing it, over and over. There's enough physics in the play that I once assigned the script for a physics class to read.

Based on this description, the play doesn't sound like much, but it is. There are many interesting aspects of our lives explored during Copenhagen. Can we really ever understand ourselves? Is memory accurate? Why do we do things? What is the responsibility of a scientist for the application of that scientist's work? Do humans perceive reality, or determine it?

Bohr and Heisenberg were two of the greatest physicists of the past century. Heisenberg, like many others, studied under Bohr, in Copenhagen, Denmark, where Bohr lived. During, or before, World War II, many of the physicists of Europe, ethnic Jews, left. Heisenberg did not. He was in charge of Germany's nuclear physics program. He did go to see Bohr. Frayn's play dramatizes real uncertainty about why he went, and what they said to each other. The play works in Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which tells us that we cannot accurately measure both the momentum and position of sub-atomic particles, and Bohr's Complementarity, which says that a sub-atomic particle can present itself as either a wave or a particle, depending on how it is measured. Although neither of these ideas was supposed to be about ordinary human knowledge, both of them have influenced our thinking about how we know, and what reality is. (So has Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which, again, was not supposed to be about moral absolutes, but about measuring movement of one physical system from a second one, but has influenced our thinking about moral absolutes*.)

Historians are not clear about what happened during Heisenberg's meeting with Bohr, except that these people, who had been great friends until that time, had a falling out during this meeting. Frayn dramatizes this lack of clarity, having the actors suggest that Heisenberg was trying to use Bohr to find out about Allied work on nuclear fission (the atomic bomb), or to get Bohr's advice on the production of an atomic bomb, or that Heisenberg was trying to tell Bohr that he, Heisenberg, would try to deliberately hold back the German nuclear program, or that Heisenberg wanted Bohr's blessing for working on a project which might protect Heisenberg's country from destruction by the Allies, even though Bohr was in Denmark, occupied by the Germans.

Both men survived the war. Both were invited to give Gifford lectures, a noted and long-running series of prestigious lectureships on natural theology. According to the play, Heisenberg was generally shunned by physicists after the war, even though, as Frayn put it, Heisenberg had not built a fission bomb which destroyed two cities--the scientists working for the Allies had.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded by some of the scientists who helped produce fission bombs, questioning, after the fact, the impact of their scientific offspring. It is still discussing the implications of nuclear weapons, almost sixty years after their testing and use. One of its features is the Doomsday Clock, which represents how close we are to nuclear war. Currently, it is set at seven minutes to midnight.

There was a discussion after the play, and perhaps a third of the audience stayed for it. The leaders tried to center it on the moral responsibility of scientists for the application of their work, but it ranged further. My belief is that scientists are partly responsible for the forseeable consequences of the application of their work, and might be morally obligated, under some circumstances, to stop working in certain areas. The only time that I know of when that happened was at the Asilomar Conference on recombinant DNA in 1975, and even in that case, most of the research which was questioned then is now being done, and perhaps all of it will be, including germ cell DNA engineering (changing the DNA of a sperm or egg, or cells which produce them).

My only contribution to the discussion was when a lady said that there were no absolute moral standards, in response to one of the leaders, who said that there are, and that they come from a supernatural God. I remarked that her statement was itself an absolute. The leader got her to agree that there was at least one thing (raping a two-year-old) that was absolutely wrong. The discussion pointed out that one argument for actually using the fission bomb was that the deaths caused would be far less than if the Japanese had been defeated more conventionally.

I thought about asking three questions. First, is a scientist responsible for how the public sees reality as a result of her work (see remarks on relativity, the uncertainty principle, and complementarity above)? Second, could, or should, such a play be written about the invention of gunpowder (my wife says guns--she's probably right) rather than the fission bomb? Third, the play brought out that Heisenberg was an accomplished musician. It didn't bring out, but it is true, that Bohr was a student of philosophy (as was Einstein, and most of the European physicists of the first half of the previous century). I don't believe that most scientists in the U. S., nor, probably, the rest of the world, are as versed in the humanities as those of Bohr's times. If this is true, is that dangerous? Shouldn't scientists know more than science?

My wife and I certainly were gripped by the play, and were glad we went. It wasn't merely entertainment.

* * * *

*Rebecca Goldstein has recently written on how the work of Einstein, and of Kurt Gödel, a great mathematician, both of them fierce believers in an objective reality, was used to argue that there is no such thing.