Entangled States

The most beautiful equation ever

It is said that one day, when the great German mathematician Leonhard Euler was at the Court of Catherine the Great, a friend asked him for a proof of the existence of God. Euler is supposed to have replied with what is now called the Euler Identity and then essentially said Q.E.D.

Adam Frank explains the Identity and detail and points out just why it's both profoundly surprising, and to a numbers and relationship sort of person, beautiful, in a post over on the NPR Cosmos and Culture blog:

"The best equation ever - the incomparable and glorious Euler's Identity.  Here is it:

e^i(π)+1 = 0

 
Why are so many mathematically inclined folks sent into paroxysms of delight over this string of symbols which seem like gibberish to others.  Let me quote from Paul Nahin's wonderful Dr. Euler's Fabulous Formula: Cures Many Mathematical Ills -

I think [Euler's Identity] is beautiful because it is true even in the face of enormous constraint.  The equability is precise: the left hand is not 'almost' or 'pretty near' or 'just about' zero, but exactly zero.  That five numbers each with vastly different origins, and each with roles in mathematics that can not be exaggerated, should be connected by such a simple relationship, is just stunning.  It is beautiful.  And unlike the physics or chemistry or engineering of today which will surely appear archaic to technicians of the future, Euler's equation will still appear, to the arbitrarily advanced mathematicians ten thousand years hence, to be beautiful and stunning and untarnished by time.

So to begin with, its the appearance of those five magic numbers that starts things off.  Lets go down the list.

• Zero (0) which can be added to any number and the number is unchanged
• One (1) which can be multiplied to any number and the number is unchanged
• Pi which appears everywhere from trigonometry on to the most abstract domains of mathematics
• e which is the base of natural logarithms.  It is also a number which 'just shows up' again and again in the exploration of mathematics
• i which is the fundamental imaginary number.  There is no number which when multiplied by itself gives a negative result i.e. 1*1 = 1; (-1)*(-1)=1.  So someone just invented a new number: i = Square Root(-1).  They called it imaginary (cause it is) and so much mathematical magic suddenly appeared as to almost defy imagination.  How can an imaginary number be so central to mathematics?"

Read the full article here.

Seems like a profitable reflection for Labor Day.

String Theory makes a prediction. Scientists shocked.

The bigggest rap against String Theory till now has been that while it successfully can explain lots of interesting things, it doesn't actually predict anything. And if it doesn't predict anything, then according to Popper's ideas of Science, it isn't actually scientific.

But today comes surprising news that a group of theorists have managed to massage a prediction out of the spaghetti mathematics that is String Theory. And the prediction actually has something to say about the phenomenon of quantum entanglement. Specifically, it makes predictions about the behavior of 4 qubit entangled systems:

"'If experiments prove that our predictions about quantum entanglement are correct, this will demonstrate that string theory 'works' to predict the behavior of entangled quantum systems,' said Professor Mike Duff, lead author of the study.

[...]Duff and his colleagues realized that the mathematical description of the pattern of entanglement between three qubits resembles the mathematical description, in string theory, of a particular class of black holes. Thus, by combining their knowledge of two of the strangest phenomena in the universe, black holes and quantum entanglement, they realized they could use string theory to produce a prediction that could be tested. Using the string theory mathematics that describes black holes, they predicted the pattern of entanglement that will occur when four qubits are entangled with one another. (The answer to this problem has not been calculated before.) Although it is technically difficult to do, the pattern of entanglement between four entangled qubits could be measured in the laboratory and the accuracy of this prediction tested.

The discovery that string theory seems to make predictions about quantum entanglement is completely unexpected, but because quantum entanglement can be measured in the lab, it does mean that there is way – finally – researchers can test predictions based on string theory"

Read the full article here.

Or drop the theory all together, if the tests indicate that String Theory is unable to make correct predictions regarding 4 qubit behavior.

Hate to give up the brane model of the multiverse though if this doesn't verify. I really like saying "The Brane Multiverse".

Fine Structure Constant ain't constant?

What an interesting week so far! First a suggestion that we need to relax the Copernican Principle. Then a scientific test for the existence of Free Will. Now experimental evidence that a fundamental constant of Physics changes with time and location in the Universe.

The Fine Structure Constant is a measure of the coupling strength of the Electo-Magnetic field. It's roughly equal to 1/137. It's been measured to less than one part in a billion. It's very well observered. It's been of interest to physicists for a long time because of its nearly integer form. That fact has been linked often to Dirac's Large Number Hypothesis.

So the news this morning that research into the fine structure constant at the cosmological scale is showing a spread of values is a big deal. Apparently a telescope in the northern hemisphere looking at one side of the Universe is seeing one value and another telescope looking in another direction is seeing a different value.

"This means that in one direction, the fine structure constant was once smaller and in exactly the opposite direction, it was once bigger. And here we are in the middle, where the constant as it is (about 1/137.03599...)

That's a mind blowing result. One of the biggest conundrums that cosmologists face is explaining why the fundamental constants of nature seem fine tuned for life. If the fine structure constant were very different, stars and atoms wouldn't form and the universe as we know it couldn't exist. No theory explains why it takes the value it does which leaves scientists at a loss.

The implication from Webb and co's data is that the fine structure constant is continuously varying throughout space and is merely fine-tuned for life in this corner of the cosmos: the universe's habitable zone. Elsewhere, presumably well beyond the universe we can see, this constant is entirely different."

Read the full article here.

There's another implication. If the value is different in one direction than another, it mean's this is an experimental proof that the Copernican principle needs to be redone. Because, the fact that we happen to live in a region of space-time in which the fine structure constant is tuned to allow life to arise, then we can legitimately claim to be "special".

Ugh. It's fine to be special and all, but if physics doesn't work the same everywhere, it means there's going to have be some fundamental philosophical reevaluations made.

Where's Karl Popper when we need him?

Entanglement a measure of Free Will?

So do human beings have free will or not? That's not just a theological or philosophical question, it's also a scientific one. In a completely deterministic world as envisioned by Newton and his followers, every action is pre-determined by the conditions which lead to it. (Biology has a version of this question in its nature vs nurture debate.) Quantum effects, with their fundamental unpredictability are usually invoked to counter a deterministic world view, and create the space for free will actors in the Universe.

So here's something interesting today involving an idea that would seem to backdoor a way to explain away the results of Bell's Theorem which has confounded many for years. The issue is whether or not the randomness and unpredictability of the quantum regime is not actually fundamental. It arises because there's a deeper physics we don't understand. (This was Einstein's suggestion, and its line of reasoning is what led to Bell's work and the experimental verification of the non-locality of quantum effects.)

But Bell's analysis of the situation depends in a fundamental way on the observer in the system having free will. So what happens if the observer doesn't?

This is on the ArXiv blog today:

"Jonathan Barrett from the University of Bristol and Nicolas Gisin from the University of Geneva provide us with an interesting new take on this problem. They assume that entanglement does occur as quantum mechanics proscribes and then ask how much free will an experimenter must have to rule out the possibility of hidden interference.

The answer is curious. Barret and Gisin prove that if there is any information shared by the experimenters and the particles they are to measure, then entanglement can be explained by some kind of hidden process that is deterministic.

[...]In fact, if an experimenter lacks even a single bit of free will then quantum mechanics can be explained in terms of hidden variables. Conversely, if we accept the veracity of quantum mechanics, then we are able to place a bound on the nature of free will."

Read the full article here.

So, if this idea turns out to be broadly accepted, does this mean we can finally answer the conflict between supralapsarianism and infralapsarianism? Will we be Calvinist or Arminian as a result?

Radioactive decay rate influenced by the Sun?

Yesterday there was news that the Copernican Principle might need to be reexamined. Today there's news that radioactive decay rates aren't nearly as constant as we've thought. They appear to seasonally speed up and slow down - and increase when there's a solar flare.

That's sort of big deal because all of our time keeping is now based on the assumption that radioactive decay (at the macro level) occurs at a constant rate. It's an issue in medicine where anti-cancer drugs and treatments are administered assuming a constant rate, and if that's different during the year, then we're going to need to change things. I suppose radio-carbon dates might be adjusted too, but it might well be that the seasonal variations has the effect of canceling themselves out.

The effect was discovered, interestingly enough given my post yesterday about the Copernican Principle, by a researcher who was trying to verify another researcher's data regarding a sample array of radioactive decay rates. Observing the discrepancies, the scientists didn't just explain them away as mechanical problems, instead they looked closer and discovered, over a period of years, that the rates were seasonal.

"Going back to take another look at the decay data from the Brookhaven lab, the researchers found a recurring pattern of 33 days. It was a bit of a surprise, given that most solar observations show a pattern of about 28 days – the rotation rate of the surface of the sun.

The explanation? The core of the sun – where nuclear reactions produce neutrinos – apparently spins more slowly than the surface we see. 'It may seem counter-intuitive, but it looks as if the core rotates more slowly than the rest of the sun,' Sturrock said.

All of the evidence points toward a conclusion that the sun is 'communicating' with radioactive isotopes on Earth, said Fischbach.

But there's one rather large question left unanswered. No one knows how neutrinos could interact with radioactive materials to change their rate of decay."

Read the full article here.

How much fun is this? An excellent bit of scientific sleuthing. Even more fun because we don't understand why neutrino flux should change decay rates. More science to learn!

The end of the Copernican Principle?

One of the most important philosophical ideas in science, particularly in Astronomy and Cosmology, is the "Copernican Principle". In its shortest form it states "We are not special". The idea that human beings are not in a privileged reference frame was the underlying idea behind the Copernican revolution (in which science came to understand that the Earth is not the center of the Universe.)

Much of modern science depends on this idea, often in unspoken ways. We assume that physics works the same in all labs here on earth for instance when we expect scientific results to be reproducible and verifiable. If the Gravitational constant was different in China than it is in Brazil this wouldn't be the case. We assume that fusion works the same on the Earth as it does in Sun. And the same in the Sun as it does in Alpha Centari and as it does in giant blue and uv stars formed right after the big bang. We assume that galactic dynamics are the same in all galaxies...

Break this chain of reasoning and suddenly everything becomes questionable and our ability to explain phenomenon starts to fail. So it's never been really challenged since it was broadly accepted as a result of Kepler's and Galileo's use of Copernicus' ideas.

Except there's a problem. The application of the strict Copernican principle, which would say that physics works the same everywhere and at every era of cosmological history, is taking us to a place in Cosmology where we're inventing all sorts of complicated ideas to explain observations that seem to indicate the Universe is accelerating in its expansion, that it's primarily made of some sort of Dark Matter that we can't yet detect, and that Dark Energy automatically seems to violate a fundamental conservation law.

Seems sort of epicyclical in its complexity doesn't it?

Now apparently some cosmologists looking at this scandalous structure (and more than that) have asked the question "What if the Copernican Principle isn't as strict as we've insisted?"

They specifically decided to test the consequences of this idea by seeing what happens in one of the scandals of modern cosmology, the prediction of elemental abundances. Right now the standard models of the big bang predict that there should be about 3x as much lithium in the Universe as we observe.

" Marco Regis and Chris Clarkson from the University of Cape Town in South Africa say they can explain this shortfall in lithium. What's extraordinary, however, is that the same thinking also explains the supernova observations without any need for an accelerated expansion or dark energy.

Their new idea is that the lithium abundance can be explained by abandoning one of the fundamental assumptions of modern cosmology: the Copernican principle. This is the notion that humans have no privileged position in the universe. For cosmologists, this means that the universe must be more or less the same everywhere and on all scales.

Various cosmologists have pointed out that if we abandoned this principle, it would be straightforward to explain the supernova data. It simply means that the universe is not homogeneous on the very largest scale. Instead, we must be sitting at the centre of some kind of giant void in a much larger universe."

Read the full article here.

This is a rather breath taking idea for scientists. To some extent Relativity, which states as one of its fundamental assumptions that there can be no privileged or special reference frame is a systematic codification of the Copernican Principle. Relativity theory works pretty darn well and it's been repeatedly verified, but not necessarily at the Cosmic scale.

There are interesting philosophical problems associated with this idea too I imagine. I wonder what Karl Popper would make of it.

Any rate, this is a particularly interesting idea. It's much more elegant than having to modify newtonian gravity and other methods that have been suggested for fixing the scandalous observations of experimental cosmology. Elegance is often a sign that something is worth following up on in scientific circles. I expect we'll be hearing more about this...

Girard quote of the day

(I'm working on this weekend's sermon, for a liturgy that features a wonderful, long married couple's renewal of marriage vows, and the Lectionary has handed me Luke 12:49-56 as the Gospel.)

Interesting quote from Girard apropos of that theme:

The Apocalypse is not some invention. If we are without sacrifices, either we’re going to love each other or we’re going to die. We have no more protection against our own violence. Therefore, we are confronted with a choice: either we’re going to follow the rules of the Kingdom of God or the situation is going to get infinitely worse.

I think that will preach for this Sunday...

How fast is the Beacon of Gondor? : Dot Physics

It's been a long summer already. How long? Physics professors, waiting around for classes to start, have enough time on their hands to answer important (to me) for questions about events in the Lord of the Rings.

In the film there's a beautiful cinematic sequence that shows the signal beacons being lit in Gondor and then the signal fires being lit along the tops of the mountains until the alarm is raised in Rohan:

Video here.

So, a professor in Louisianna asks the same question I did when I saw it: "How long does it actually take to alert the Rhoridiim?"

Rhett Allain writes:

"Can I get an estimate of these three parameters from that movie clip? Oh, yes I can. Will it be realistic? Who knows. Here is the stuff I found.

• When Pippin lights the first signal, it takes about 12 seconds from the time he puts the fire on it until it is mostly lit.
• After the first signal is on fire, Gandalf sees the next signal only 6 seconds later. WHAT?
• The guys (or gals) at the next station must have just been sitting there staring and waiting for a signal. Oh, it was probably like 40 years since the last time it was used. I guess you can do stuff like that if you don't have youtube. But wait, the more I think about this, the more upset I get. I am ok with invisible rings, flying dragons, glowing swords and stuff. However, it is beyond the bounds of reason to expect me to believe that some guys are sitting way on the other mountain with a hair-triggered lighting mechanism. Six seconds. Seriously.
• The next time to light is 12 seconds. That is reaction plus light time.
• The next one is at night and has a total time of about 6 seconds. At night! Don't these guys even sleep?
• 3 seconds for the next one. Come on man.

In this last one, Aragon notices the signal in under 2 seconds. Luck or skill?"

Read the full article here to see what he gets for an answer.

Spoiler: The film sequence isn't too over the top fanciful at all.

Thanks to David Simmons for the heads up about the post.

Learning to listen to the locals

What follows is an essay I just wrote for a Diocese of Arizona project which is collecting reflections from people who have been involved in various MDG projects over the past. Our diocesan MDG committee is going to publish these both in hope that other in the diocese might be inspired to get involved, and also so that local parish and mission committees might use them to guide their own decision making process. (I'll try to remember to share a link to the full collection once we have them collated.)

My first startling impression of Swaziland came when I stepped out of the airport into the darkness of the night into which we had landed. The car to pick us up was not there waiting for us, and the airport was closing down for the night. The guards told us that we could not wait inside the compound, so we gathered up our luggage and started walking out to the main road hoping to either meet our ride there, or find a phone to make a call.

In the darkness, with gravel crunching underfoot, I looked up. It’s something I do reflexively as a former stargazer. Seeing the stars in the familiar positions makes me feel centered no matter what is happening around me. Their slow progress across the sky is always a touchstone of stability for me when I’m not feeling particularly secure. Except this time. When I looked up, things were all our of sorts. It was a combination of my first time to the Southern Hemisphere, with new constellations, and the effect of seeing all the familiar constellations upside down. It took me moment to recognize Orion. There he was, warding off Taurus the Bull, backed up by his faithful dogs, but he was standing on his head!

The idea of the familiar standing on its head became sort of repeated theme during my visit. Things that appeared familiar turned out, when more closely examined, to be topsy-turvy according to my expectations. Things that seemed totally foreign to me turned out to actually be closely to related to things I recognized once I took the time to see.

This was driven home as I began to speak to people around the country-side who were involved in Swazi Hospice at Home, the NGO I had come to support during visit. The program allows people who are dying of HIV and AIDS to die relatively comfortably at home surrounded by their family and friends. This is not just important to them, but to the whole health care system in the country because if the dying are not cared for at home, the all too few hospital beds in the country would be wholly given over to these patients and not by people who, frankly speaking, have a chance of recovery. In a country where 250,000 people have access to only one small clinic (a two room 1500 square foot affair) with 2 beds, this is a matter of life and death for many.

My immediate response to seeing this desperate shortage of hospital beds was to begin to plan some sort of response that would raise sufficient money to open clinics all across the country. But that wouldn’t be much help without trained medical personnel, medicines, equipment, transportation, or just electricity… In speaking with the local healthcare providers, and with the local committee who were charged with expanding the existing clinic, I learned how great the challenges were, and how little effectiveness throwing money at the problem would have. Much important was to listen to them explain why a Hospice program made so much more sense to their community.

There were numerous reasons. First and foremost was that by a number of different methodologies, it appeared that something between 35 to 45% of the adult population was HIV positive, and expected to develop full blown AIDS and likely die within the decade. The anti retro-virus drugs simply aren’t available in the Swazi countryside, and even if they were, the people suffering from AIDS couldn’t afford them, and wouldn’t have access to the necessary medical monitoring. Better people should live out their last days as comfortably as possible, and give those who are not infected with the disease, especially the children, an opportunity to access what health care is available, than to have even more people die unnecessarily because the inadequate health care system becomes overwhelmed. The second reason was not one I would have ever imagined…

Most of the land in Swaziland belongs not the individual but to the tribe. Families are allowed to live on plots of land as long as they are farming it and giving a portion of the crops to the chief, the King and to the tribal council. If they are not able to produce from the land, it is taken away from them and given to someone who can. Most often it is given to a member of the chief’s family. As long as an adult with children is able to remain on the land, the children can farm the land. If the adult leaves, the children would mostly likely have to as well, which would mean they would lose their families land and any means of independent support. There is no effective social safety net in Swaziland so losing the ability to raise their own food means that the families children are likely to die soon after their parent or parents.

Caring for people at home rather than in the hospital in Swaziland is less about the emotional needs and dignity of the dying as is the case in the developed world and more about trying to keep the whole of society from collapsing.

I only learned this by learning to listen to the local people who were doing the actual hands on work that our MDG group was supporting. It was the quintessential experience of the familiar standing on its head. I think my reflection on these sorts of experiences have informed my own continuing work on the Diocesan MDG committee and my coordination with that of the Cathedral’s committee. We must learn to allow the people on site to propose their own appropriate solutions. Our western solutions won’t alway work, and will sometimes make the situation much more dire.

Learning to listen in this way was for me one of the great and primary gifts that I received from my involvement in that project back in 2002.

From organic entanglement to synthetic solar cells

There have been a number of papers recently which have suggested that amazing efficiency of the photosynthesis stems from its exploitation of quantum entanglement in the conversion from light to energy. Now some investigations into the details of the mechanism are beginning to give us a hint about how to move forward exploiting that knowledge to be build much more efficient solar cells:

"In a paper in The Journal of Chemical Physics, which is published by the American Institute of Physics, these ideas are put to the test in a novel computer simulation of energy transport in a photosynthetic reaction center. Using the simulation, professor Shaul Mukamel and senior research associate Darius Abramavicius at the University of California, Irvine show that long-lived quantum coherence is an 'essential ingredient for quantum information storage and manipulation,' according to Mukamel. It is possible between chromophores even at room temperature, he says, and it 'can strongly affect the light-harvesting efficiency.'

If the existence of such effects can be substantiated experimentally, he says, this understanding of quantum energy transfer and charge separation pathways may help the design of solar cells that take their inspiration from nature."

Read the full article here.

Imagine a solar energy farm that would comprised of leaves, small mechanical ones, instead of large southern facing panels. Certainly the HOA's of the world would be much happier. But more importantly, this may represent the big break-through we've all been waiting for in solar energy that will make it much more financially viable as a local energy source.

This is of no small interest in a place like Arizona where the sunshine in the desert state, if harnessed, could really turn us into the OPEC of solar power in the US. (Assuming we can upgrade the nation's electric grid into the hoped for smarter next generation one that is in development.)

Prayers for peace at the beginning of SB1070's enactment

We've had quite the morning here at the Cathedral in Phoenix. Last night, at midnight, the controversial bill SB1070 went into limited effect. Much of the bill was blocked from being enforced by an injunction issued by a local federal judge yesterday morning.

We hosted a group of community leaders who wished to have a prayer service to begin the day's events. There were representatives from every major faith group in the city (with the exception of the Mormons I guess.) We had bishops from the Roman Catholic diocese, the Methodist, the Episcopal Church, heads of the Unitarian Church, the UCC, the Lutheran Synod, rabbis and imans. We all offered prayers, blessings or words of encouragement.

The news of the temporary injunction changed the feeling of the whole day from one of tension and possible defiance to one of thanksgiving and hope. It was extraordinary to see all the different people of faith gathered around the one altar lifting prayer to God.

This is the prayer that I wrote for today; it's meant to remind us that God is present with us:

Almighty God, Holy ONE; we are grateful for the gift of your reconciling love in our lives. The very unity of your nature teaches us that perfect love unites all people. The story of Jesus’ triumph reminds us that love conquers all, all that would destroy and separate your children, and even your children’s anger toward you and one another.

Thank you for being present with us in this moment, in these days. Let us feel your holy love suffusing our lives and let it empower our actions today. Make us instruments of your peace. Give us words of hope to speak to a community of your children which has become divided and is in despair.

As you sent your Holy Spirit to the Prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, to your poet King David, to the Blessed Mother who sang Magnificat, so too send your spirit to us today. Let the Spirit strengthen our resolve to proclaim peace, to proclaim love, to proclaim HOPE.

For you are our Hope. And you have shown us again and again that in you, and in the reconciliation you desire for your children, our Hope will never be in vain.

We pray these words, in the power of your Spirit, to you the Lord of all people and of all ages, in whom there is no East or West, no North or South, no Jew or Greek, no male or female, no slave nor free, but one great fellowship of love finding its unity in thee.

Amen.

There was a rather large press contingent here today. I'll try to find links to some of the coverage and update this post with them as I have time.

Proper 10C 2010: Sola Fide!

The Parable of the Good Samaritan was, for the first thousand years of the Church's life, understood to be a teaching about God's role in salvation. The Good Samaritan, who does not obey the ritual law is able to save the man when the religious leaders are not.

You do not have to earn your way into Heaven. God, in Christ Jesus, comes to us. That's such an important point that I wonder why we keep forgetting to hammer it home? Maybe because it's so hard to accept.

As one of the commentaries tries to do, writing “Who is the neighbour? The religious person? The legal expert? The fellow Jew? No! The neighbour is the person who acts in a neighbourly way -- the person who helps.” We have always managed to push this parable into the direction of a morality lesson rather than the exposition of a profound cosmic paradox.

Where is St. Paul when we need him?


MP3 File

Entanglement and DNA

I apologize for the extended silence on this blog. My family and I have been traveling; looking at colleges for our daughter who's a rising High School senior. I was back in the eastern US for much of the past month, living out of a suitcase and learning more about liberal arts colleges than I've ever known. It was all worth it. Even if our daughter doesn't attend one of the schools we visited, getting a chance to just hang out with her for one last long trip before she starts the process of leaving home and going off on her own was priceless. Plus we had some wonderful conversations and experiences that I'll treasure the rest of my life. (And which make the sticker shock of this whole thing more palatable...)

I've not been neglecting to keep up with my reading though. I've got pile 'o links to articles that were published over the past couple of months and I expect it's going to take me the rest of the summer to work through the backlog. I've been traveling with my new iPad, a truly wondrous device if you're traveling by air, and it makes staying current really quite easy. So sit back and enjoy the stream 'o news for the next few weeks or so.

A number of the articles that I've been reading and marked for posting have to do with the location of the effective boundary between classical and quantum mechanical behavior. Classical physics is fixedly deterministic. Mostly. Except when things go non-linear or chaotic. But mostly deterministic. Quantum physics just isn't. It's probabilistic. Most of the time this isn't a problem because the probabilism occurs at a regime far distant than the one which we experience.

But every so often an important part of our world turns out to depend totally on a quantum effect. Like solid-state transistors. Without the possibility of quantum tunneling, all the keen electronics we play with today wouldn't be possible. The computer I'm writing this upon, and the one you're using to read these words? Totally dependent on quantum physics. In a perfectly deterministic Universe, where "yes" was always "yes" and "no" was always "no", and where we could just use plain sense reasoning to work out what was going on around us, computers such as we use right now couldn't exist.

Neither too could we apparently.

Ever wonder what makes DNA able to create such magical, replicable, sequences of information? Scientists have. Simple chemical bonds don't have the reliability apparently - and will break down too easily for the DNA coding to be able to last very long.

So, now:

"a group of physicists say that the weird laws of quantum mechanics may be more important for life than biologists could ever have imagined. Their new idea is that DNA is held together by quantum entanglement.

That's worth picking apart in more detail. Entanglement is the weird quantum process in which a single wavefunction describes two separate objects. When this happens, these objects effectively share the same existence, no matter how far apart they might be.

[...]The question of course is how to prove this. They say that one line of evidence is that a purely classical analysis of the energy required to hold DNA together does not add up. However, their quantum model plugs the gap. That's interesting but they'll need to come up with something experimentally convincing to persuade biologists of these ideas.

[...]Speculative but potentially explosive work."

So, it's apparently theoretically tenable, solves a significant problem in biology, and nw needs to verified. It's not terribly surprising to me. Quantum entanglement apparently allows birds to literally see magnetic field lines and thus perform their amazing navigational feats. Perhaps biology is much more quantum than we've ever imagined.

Full article here.

So, if the probabilistic world is critically important to life, shouldn't we be thinking about how to talk about God using the same sorts of thinking? I mean, God makes life possible...

Stay tuned.

Protons a bit smaller than thought. Scientists world over gasp aloud.

An article in Nature (a very prestigious refereed journal) announced on Wednesday that a team of researchers have measured the radius of a proton and found it to be 4% smaller than expected.

Now, for me speaking from an astronomical view point, this is a pretty great result. In Astronomy we're often happy to get a measurement within a factor of 10 or so of what is predicted. But in elementary particle physics this small miss is a pretty big deal.

It could likely spell trouble for the Standard Model - which is the very successful description of interactions of the quarks and gluons that make up the internals of a proton. It's such big trouble that the first instinct of many, including the editorial board of Nature, that the researchers messed up their calculation somehow.

But, as an article in the LA Times says:

"If the startling results are confirmed, a possibility that at least some physicists think is unlikely because the calculations involved are so difficult, they could have major ramifications for the so-called standard model on which most modern physics is based.

In an editorial accompanying the report in the journal Nature, physicist Jeff Flowers of the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, England, said there were three possibilities: Either the experimenters have made a mistake, the calculations used in determining the size of the proton are wrong or, potentially most exciting and disturbing, the standard model has some kind of problem.

If the theory turns out to be wrong, 'it would be quite revolutionary. It would mean that we know a lot less than we thought we knew,' said physicist Peter J. Mohr of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md., who was not involved in the research. 'If it is a fundamental problem, we don't know what the consequences are yet.'"

Read the full article here.

More here.

Neat! Stay tuned... (as Steve Jobs is wont to say of late.)

"Seven days that shook the Vatican"

As you may have intuited, I've been traveling throughout much of the month of June. Most of the time I was with my daughter and some of it with my daughter and wife as we looked at colleges for our rising High School senior child. We found three exciting prospects for a young lady who's thinking about a dual major in physics and political science with a minor in music.

I took my iPad with me for most of the trip and was able to keep up on the goings on in the Anglican Universe but there was no easy way for me to write anything substantive, and besides it was supposed to be a vacation.

But now I'm back, and starting to get caught up on all the interesting, shiny links to stories that I forwarded to myself during my traveling. I'll get to those over the next couple of weeks. But first...

A friend forwarded this note to me just this morning. It's from a longish article in the National Catholic Reporter about the long-term implications to the Roman Catholic Church from the seven days of horrific revelations of sexual misconduct by clergy and bishops last month. The writer, John L Allen, Jr. describes the week's revelations of coverups as "seven days that shook the Vatican".

"Yet I’m inclined to think the past week does mean something, and here’s my first-blush stab at expressing it: Collectively, I think these events both symbolize and advance the collapse of Catholicism as a culture-shaping majority in the West. When the dust settles, policy-makers in the church, particularly in the Vatican, will be ever more committed to what social theorists call ‘identity politics,’ a traditional defense mechanism relied upon by minorities when facing what they perceive as a hostile cultural majority.

While there are an almost infinite number of ways of defining a ‘minority,’ one widely invoked model says it has four characteristics:

• Suffering discrimination and subordination
• Physical and/or cultural traits that set them apart, and which are disapproved by the dominant group
• A shared sense of collective identity and common burdens
• Socially shared rules about who belongs and who does not

A growing swath of Catholics in the West, particularly in the church’s leadership class, believes that all these markers now apply to the Catholic church, and the events of the past week will strongly reinforce those impressions."

The full article is here.

I'm starting a course tonight here at the Cathedral in Phoenix on the writings of Rene Girard, using his book "The Scapegoat" as my primary text. When I read these words of Allen's about the reaction of the Roman Church to the tensions of the moment, I was immediately reminded of Girard's descriptions of the phenomenon that tend to arise as the scapegoating mechanism engages within social systems. It's the second one in particular that I found surprising when I first read it, and now see it again in Allen's piece. (It makes me think that Allen is working out of a Girardian read of the situation actually.)

Girard uses Greek mythology to illustrate his point referencing both the physical deformities of Oedipus and of Hercules to show how the mechanism works. Allen certainly isn't talking about physical deformities of the same sort as Girard illustrates, but the principle is the same. Think of the "raghead" moniker that American troops have given to arab military types, or the jokes about the nose of the jews in the Second World War - or even the lisp of gay men in our own days. All characteristics that a group feeling it is being persecuted emphasizes in groups it will define as "other" and, if things run according to form, eventually persecute as a scapegoat.

It's rather sobering, scary even, to see the mechanism once you know what to look for. We see it in a similar stage right now in Arizona as the Latino people in the community are being marked as somehow responsible for the economic collapse of the state and the attendant depression we're in at the moment.

The only happy note is that perhaps recognition of what is happening will keep us all from walking the road to its bitter end. Perhaps not. It may just be that the recognition and ultimate defanging of the scapegoat mechanism will hasten a final confrontation that has no real resolution short of Our Lord's return. At least that's what Girard seems to be expecting in his final books.

More I think as I work through the books tonight with a group of friends.