Entangled States

A thought

The Bible is not about the origin of the world or the mechanism of creation, it is about the meaning of the cross, the mechanism of redemption.

Teleportation of energy

A few years ago physicists actually demonstrated that it was possible to teleport very simple systems from one place to another. Now, something with greater immediate application is proposed. The teleportation of energy from one place to another.

The matter teleportation that has been achieved thus far is that of a simple system that is entangled with another system. It's been done with a photon system, a simple atom and even ions. But it's not immediately obvious how to scale the system.

A Japanese theorist, Masahiro Hotta has suggested a more immediately achievable idea:

"The process of teleportation involves making a measurement on each one an entangled pair of particles. He points out that the measurement on the first particle injects quantum energy into the system. He then shows that by carefully choosing the measurement to do on the second particle, it is possible to extract the original energy.

All this is possible because there are always quantum fluctuations in the energy of any particle. The teleportation process allows you to inject quantum energy at one point in the universe and then exploit quantum energy fluctuations to extract it from another point. Of course, the energy of the system as whole is unchanged.

He gives the example of a string of entangled ions oscillating back and forth in an electric field trap, a bit like Newton's balls. Measuring the state of the first ion injects energy into the system in the form of a phonon, a quantum of oscillation. Hotta says that performing the right kind of measurement on the last ion extracts this energy. Since this can be done at the speed of light (in principle), the phonon doesn't travel across the intermediate ions so there is no heating of these ions. The energy has been transmitted without traveling across the intervening space. That's teleportation."

Read the full article here.

So, playing a bit with the idea, let's say we were to put a giant solar energy collector in orbit around the Sun at the same distance as Mercury. That's an obvious way to gather energy. The problem is how to transfer the energy back to where we live and where it's needed.

Teleportation via a set of entangled particles solves that neatly. You might need a series of way points, but that's simple enough. Isn't that why God gave us Lagrange points in the first place?

Fun!

Another use of Entropy in Cosmology

Last week came word of a different way of looking at Gravity - seeing it in terms of entropic flow in a holographic universe gives us the ability to simply connect quantum phenomenon and gravitational theory. (Something that's been a sort of Holy Grail in physics for decades.)

Now a team of physicists here in the United States is making a simple argument from entropic principles that answers the questions raised by the Anthropic principle; the idea that our Universe seems "tuned" to give rise to carbon based life.

From the Physics ArXive blog:

"Today, they outline their idea and it makes a fascinating read. By thinking about the way entropy increases, Bousso and Harnik derive the properties of an average Universe in which the complexity has risen to a level where observers would have evolved to witness it.

They make six predictions about such a Universe. They say 'typical observers find themselves in a flat universe, at the onset of vacuum domination, surrounded by a recently produced bath of relativistic quanta.These quanta are neither very dilute nor condensed, and thus appear as a roughly thermal background.'

Sound familiar? It so happens that we live in a (seemingly) flat universe, not so long after it has become largely a vacuum and we're bathed in photons that form a thermal background. That's the cosmic infrared background that is emitted by galactic dust heated by starlight (this is different from the cosmic microwave background which has a different origin).

That's a remarkably accurate set of predictions from a very general principle. The question, of course, is how far can you run with a theory like this."

Read the full article here.

I've just finished Antony Flew's book "There IS a God". Much of his argument hinges on the taking the Anthropic principle seriously. He finds it leading him to a relatively strong form of deism. I'm wondering, if this paper survives challenges and review, what effect the paper's point that the Anthropic Principle is derivable from first principles will have on his argument.

Dark Energy can explain Hubble Galactic sequence

Woah.

One of the old questions in galactic structure is whether or not there is any meaning in the Hubble arrangement of galactic structure. (Galaxies seem to "evolve" from elliptical in shape to spherical to spiral forms.) People have long speculated that the distribution of galactic shapes indicated some sort of evolutionary trend, but no one could ever explain the mechanism that might cause the trend.

Now a few astronomers have found that if they include dark energy in their models, the Hubble tuning fork falls out of the calculations:

"‘We were completely astonished that our model predicted both the abundance and diversity of galaxy types so precisely,’ said Devereux. ‘It really boosts my confidence in the model,’ Benson said.

The astronomers’ model is underpinned by and endorses the ‘Lambda Cold Dark Matter’ model of the Universe. Here ‘Lambda’ is the mysterious ‘dark energy’ component believed to make up about 72% of the cosmos, with cold dark matter making up another 23%. Just 4% of the Universe consists of the familiar visible or ‘baryonic’ matter that makes up the stars and planets of which galaxies are comprised."

Read the full article here.

This is just so cool! People have been wondering about this forever.

Gravity from first principles, no longer a fundamental force?

Erik Verlinde, a very well respected physicist, has posted a paper that argues that Gravity is not really a fundamental force of physics. Rather he believes it arises from a tendency of matter to seek to increase its' entropy. (Or at least as far as I understand the paper so far.)

The basic idea is to consider reality in terms of information theory - the more information concentrated in a region, the powerful the attraction to a region of less information. (At least in terms of holographic view of the Universe ala String theory.)

And since information is related to energy then it is also related to temperature. Which means that if information is related to gravity, gravity is connected to temperature, and we're in the realm of thermodynamics and information flow.

From the blog of the Hammock Physicist:

"Subsequently, Verlinde takes a deep dive: if an acceleration is proportional to a temperature, it has all the characteristics of an entropic effect. Entropic acceleration results from the tendency of a system to evolve such that there is an increase in the minimum number of bits required to describe the system in all its details. Could it be that gravitational attraction results from nothing more than a growth in number of bits required? Verlinde argues that such is indeed the case. Key is that one needs to follow a holographic approach with all bits describing reality residing at holographic screens.

I think the relation to entropic effects is clearest in one of the Newtonian scenarios Verlinde considers: a given matter distribution that creates a gravitational potential. Verlinde requires the holographic screens to coincide with equipotential surfaces, and arrives at the conclusion that the bit saturation (the number of bits required to describe the system divided by the number of bits available on the screen) equals -phi/2c^2 where phi represents the Newtonian gravitational potential. This bit saturation is a positive number that vanishes at large distances. If one shrinks the holographic screen whilst ensuring it keeps following the equipotential surfaces, the bit saturation keeps growing until it reaches a value of unity at which the screen is saturated with information. It can not shrink further, a black hole hole has formed with the screen representing its holographic horizon.

Again, you have to reverse this thinking. When doing so, the picture that emerges is that of a gravitational attraction (acceleration defined by a gravitational potential) that results from a tendency of physical systems to evolve such that the holographically available bits saturate with information. This tendency towards bit saturation is an entropic effect, that we experience as gravitational attraction."

Read the full article here.

From this point Verlinde shows that it's possible to derive the Equivalence Principle, and thus Einstein's field equations and Newton's laws.

Which is huge. To be able to explain the Equivalence principle without recourse to something like the Higgs particle is a very very big deal. It would resolve one of the fundamental questions of modern physics.

Wow.

Now we just need to find a way to test this... though I suppose if the LHC actually finds the Higgs, then there's likely not a whole lot here.

Golden ratio observed in quantum states

There's an interesting, and slightly surprising observation published this week. Apparently there's a nanostate that is unexpectedly demonstrating a phi (1.618) based symmetry.

Generally when we observe quantum states they tend to be chaotic or "smeary" with little connection to the sorts of common arrangements of matter we find the macroscopic world. Take for instance the golden ratio or mean that is observed in many biological systems (like the nautilus shell) and in human symmetry (Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man) and even in architecture (the Parthenon). We know that it generally results in biology and human constructs because of the basic principles of Euclidean geometry (and/or the use of the Fibonacci series).

But at the quantum level intuition would suggest that uncertainty would smear out any sort of rigid adherence to the idealized world of Euclidian thought.

From the report of the news online:

"The observed resonant states in cobalt niobate are a dramatic laboratory illustration of the way in which mathematical theories developed for particle physics may find application in nanoscale science and ultimately in future technology. Prof. Tennant remarks on the perfect harmony found in quantum uncertainty instead of disorder. 'Such discoveries are leading physicists to speculate that the quantum, atomic scale world may have its own underlying order. Similar surprises may await researchers in other materials in the quantum critical state.'"

Read the full article here.

If there's an underlying order in the quantum world, that would be a rather significant philosophical shift. So I'm guessing this meaning of this result is going to be rather highly debated. Is it just an artifact of a group theory based symmetry? (I think I remember that the E8 lie group has this symmetry.) Or is it a sign that there's a deeper underlying order to reality than we have heretofore uncovered?

If so, it would probably be sort of like the order that's being suggested as result of the Large Numbers observations that notes the apparent interconnectedness of the fundamental constants of Physics.

Structure on the largest scale

Just as I was leaving my physics studies to begin my theological ones, word began to trickle out among astronomers and cosmologists that something very unexpected was being observed at largest imaginable scale.

Cosmologists had always imagined that when you zoomed out to the scale of the Universe (a la the Powers of Ten movie that I used to regularly show on the first day of one of my astronomy classes) that the relative clumpiness of matter at the small scale would smooth out into an homogeneous and isotropic one. If you imagine that the Universe began in a cosmic explosion then it's hard to see how anything else might have arisen.

And yet, back in the mid-eighties, people were talking about a cosmic void in the direction of the constellation Boötes. There was a huge zone that had no galaxies within its bounds. There was no way to imagine how such a thing came to be. And then another void was discovered. And another.

Eventually people started plotting the distribution of galaxies in three dimensions rather than two. And they discovered that the voids were much more common:

"But only in the last ten years or so have astronomers discovered that galaxies themselves form into a far larger structure. The 100 billion galaxies that we know about are woven into a wispy web-like arrangement consisting of dense compact clusters, elongated filaments and sheet-like walls, amid large near-empty void regions.

This structure has become known as the Cosmic Web and one of the great challenges in modern cosmology is to accurately model and simulate it.

That's turning out to be tricky.

One of the important features of the Cosmic Web is that its structures range over many orders of magnitude. And since the largest structures, such as the wall-like features, are formed out of the smaller ones such as filaments and clusters, it's crucial that any model can handle the relationship between them at all these scales."

Lately there's a new idea about how to explain this surprising structure - which still violates one of the primary principles of Cosmology, cosmic homogeneity, though not the more fundamental principle of cosmic isotropy (which is based in the Copernican principle).

Enter Rien van de Weygaert and Willem Schaap at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. These guys have developed a way of modeling structures over many scales without the unnatural smoothing that other approaches use.

Their trick is to think of galaxies as points in 3D space and to fill the space between them with tetrahedra. These tetrahedra must be constructed in such a way that, if a sphere were inflated inside each one until it touched the sides, there would be no galaxies inside each sphere.

This is known as a Delauney tessellation. What's special about Delauney tessellations is that as the scale gets larger, there are rules for combining the tetrahedra into larger ones. These rules are special because they are reversible, meaning that the important features of the original structure can be reconstructed when you zoom in again.

That makes it much easier to simualate the feedback between structures on various scales.

Read the full article here.

So yay. A new field of mathematics to master. And a new tool to think about how the non-fractal structure of the Universe came to be.

And tonight is the Longest night of the year. Something to think about as you walk outside in the silence of the solstice night and look out into the dark sky peering to the edge of the Universe.

Researchers announce dark matter detection

Nothing more detail-wise at the moment except this "press release" but:

"The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) project is announcing on Friday 18th December, the possible detection of two dark matter particles. However, the chances of a false positive seem to be 23%, which is rather high compared to the threshold of 5% which is usually employed in measurement science, and in fact many particle physicists require the probability of a false positive to be much lower still before they are willing to treat an event as a genuine discovery.

The CDMS detector resides in an abandoned iron mine in Minnesota, (to minimise the background neutron radiation from cosmic rays), and consists of germanium discs cryogenically cooled to an extremely low temperature. The discs are coated with phonon sensors, designed to detect the tiny vibrations in such a crystalline solid. When the crystals are cooled to a very low temperature, the vibrational background of the solid is virtually eliminated, and it is possible to detect the phonons created by incoming particles colliding with the atoms in the solid. "

Read the full article here.

How to equally share a pizza?

I remember when I was in college. The brothers in my fraternity and I developed quite a taste for stromboli from the pizzeria around the corner from our house. Generally I would order a large and eat it all by myself. (I had the digestive tract of a Denebian sandworm in those days and because I was a teaching assistant, I could generally spring for the full cost of $6.)

But I remember one day when, for some reason, I split the cost with J.C. (who was my "big brother"). J.C. opened the box and cut the strom in half. Then he invited me to choose which half I wanted. As anyone who grew up in a house with brothers knows, this is the fair way to split food between two people. Why I'd not seen it until then I had no idea. It was a beautiful and elegant solution to the problem. I was more impressed with the elegance than I was with my stromboli. And that's saying something.

So today, when I stumbled across a paper describing how a pair of mathematicians worked out a rigorous methodology for sharing a pizza fairly, I just had to read on.

It turns out that sharing a pizza cut into even or odd numbers of slices is a bit more complicated. It's simple if one of the cuts of the pizza goes through the center of the pizza - two people can easily then have the exact same share.

But if the slice misses the center - or if the pizza isn't exactly circular, then things get complicated. And the solutions to the problem bifurcate between cases with an even number of slices and ones with an odd number:

"The first proposes that if you cut a pizza through the chosen point with an even number of cuts more than 2, the pizza will be divided evenly between two diners who each take alternate slices. This side of the problem was first explored in 1967 by one L. J. Upton in Mathematics Magazine (vol 40, p 163). Upton didn't bother with two cuts: he asked readers to prove that in the case of four cuts (making eight slices) the diners can share the pizza equally. Next came the general solution for an even number of cuts greater than 4, which first turned up as an answer to Upton's challenge in 1968, with elementary algebraic calculations of the exact area of the different slices revealing that, again, the pizza is always divided equally between the two diners (Mathematics Magazine, vol 41, p 46).

With an odd number of cuts, things start to get more complicated. Here the pizza theorem says that if you cut the pizza with 3, 7, 11, 15... cuts, and no cut goes through the centre, then the person who gets the slice that includes the centre of the pizza eats more in total. If you use 5, 9, 13, 17... cuts, the person who gets the centre ends up with less (see diagram).

Rigorously proving this to be true, however, has been a tough nut to crack. So difficult, in fact, that Mabry and Deiermann have only just finalised a proof that covers all possible cases."

From here.

It took Mssr's Mabry and Deiermann 11 years to find the proof they began to seek back when they were waiting around for the pizza they were having for lunch to cool.

They initially tried to prove it with computer aid in what seems to have been a proof by exhaustion. But recently, putting the computer aside, they found a more elegant algebraic expression of the problem. And writing the problem in that form gave them a more fundamental understanding of the problem. Which led them, via a literature search to a set of papers written beginning in the '70s that ultimately gave them to the tools they needed to solve the problem.

What strikes me about this odyssey is that it was ultimately solved by the researches putting the question into an elegant form that allowed them to gain a new perspective on what they were seeking to find.

My Master's advisor in Physics used to quip "Physics is easy - it's just a matter of asking the right question."

I have a sense that what is true for the Queen of the Academy (Physics) is true too for the King (Theology).

I wonder if so many of the problems that are vexing us theologically these days are vexing because we've yet to formulate them in a way that will give us a hint about how to answer them.

Perhaps that's the way out of the hermeneutics problems we keep stumbling across in modern Christianity.

More on this as I have time...

Bursty speciation

One of the typical challenges to traditional evolution is the gaps that are observed in the fossil record. We find many fossils of a given species. But we rarely or never find the fossil record of the transitions that lead from one species to another - like from dinosaurs to birds. There are possibly some feathered dinosaur fossils, but not enough for us to be able to say that the fossil record records the transition.

Generally the explanation for this is to point out that the chances that an individual organism is going to leave a fossil behind are pretty small. So if there's a small transitional population of organisms that represent the process of a species transforming to another then the chances of catching that in the fossil record are that much smaller. Thus the fact that we don't see the transitions is a function of sampling and not something that disproves the basic ideas of evolution.

Except it sort of does. Traditional evolutionary thought would have us think that there are a relatively smooth rate of biological mutations as one generation of organisms leads to another. That's what we've been able to observe today in short lived species like fruit flies or various bacterial strains. And if the evolutionary development is made up of small steady perturbations, then we should be seeing more transitional fossils than we are.

So there's a problem.

There's a new suggestion that takes the old idea used to explain the former suggestion about why we don't see the transitions and looks into more closely. I think of it as the model of bursty speciation - where BIG changes happen quickly, and then the regular rate of small changes resume.

There's a new paper that argues, from a computational view, that this might be exactly what happens:

"'What we've shown is that speciation is about happy accidents — rare events that happen in the environment that cause a species to speciate,' says Pagel. These events could include a mountain range being thrust up or a shift in climate, he says.

The team's findings might stir things up in the world of evolutionary biology. 'It really goes against the grain because most of us have this Darwinian view of speciation,' says Pagel. 'What we're saying is that to think about natural selection as the cause of speciation is perhaps wrong.'

Mike Benton, a palaeontologist at the University of Bristol, UK, agrees that the work might ruffle a few feathers, adding that it could also shift attention to how groups of species evolve, rather than the minutiae of competition or predation effects that affect a single species. Where speciation is concerned, at least, 'maybe all of this squabbling in the undergrowth is quite irrelevant'."

Read the full article here.

Bears watching I would imagine.

The Future fixes our Past

Understanding the connections between the non-deterministic claims of the Quantum Physics and the deterministic predictions of Classical Physics is, at least philosophically speaking, THE scientific challenge of physics today.

One way of looking at the problem - and a way that preserves the strongest form of the "Copernican Principle, that no point in time and space can claim to be special" (which is just a restatement of the Principles of Relativity (that there is no fundamental rest frame and that each inertial frame observer's observations must be considered valid) - is to imagine something called the Block Universe.

In the block Universe each point in time and space is equivalent to any other. Which means that we are taking time to be reversible. And it means that time is, speaking in terms of higher dimensionality, just another coordinate. Looking at the Universe in such a view one would see that all present and future are fully present in the model - there's not a sense of evolutionary development where past flows only into future. (Theologically this is very evocative of the term "eternity".)

So...

"Today, Ellis and Rothman introduce a significant new type of block universe. They say the character of the block changes dramatically when quantum mechanics is thrown into the mix. All of a sudden, the past and the future take on entirely different characteristics. The future is dominated by the weird laws of quantum mechanics in which objects can exist in two places at the same time and particles can be so deeply linked that they share the same existence. By contrast, the past is dominated by the unflinching certainty of classical mechanics.

What's interesting is that the transition between these states takes place largely in the present. It's almost as if the past crystallises out of the future, in the instant we call the present. Ellis and Rothman call this model the 'crystallising block universe' and go on to explore some of its properties.

They point out, for example, that this crystallisation process doesn't take place entirely in the present. In quantum mechanics the past can sometimes be delayed, for example in delayed choice experiments. This means the structure of the transition from future to past is more complex than a cursory thought might suggest."

Read the full article here.

The upshot then is that the future is in a non-simple way measurably influencing the past.

Theologically, the vision of Revelation is modifying the meaning of the stories of Genesis even though it has not yet "happened" as far as we who live now are concerned.

See? Isn't Physics fun?!

The God particle may be somewhere else

There are so new indications that the Higgs particle (the "God particle") may not be found where we are looking with the Large Hadron Collider. A team of researchers have been looking over a collection of data that indirectly puts bounds on the mass of the top quark has been able to use that data to make some predictions about the mass of the Higgs.

"'The new results may be an indication that the Higgs boson has different properties than the Standard Model indicates,' Kehoe says. 'It's very difficult to devise a theory without some mechanism that mimics fairly well the Higgs mechanism. But if the underlying cause of this mechanism is significantly different, that will have a major impact on the fundamentals of the Standard Model. It could point to something deeper than the standard Higgs boson at work, and that is very interesting.'

The measured value of the top quark mass may even go beyond constraining the standard Higgs. It may suggest that our current understanding of the Higgs is not correct, he says.

If the Higgs does not show up where the constraints indicate, the top measurement may force consideration of new theoretical possibilities that lie outside the existing Standard Model, Kehoe says."

From here.

All of which is pretty neat. The Higgs particle is the proposed gauge particle which would link gravitational "charge" to inertial mass. If it exists, it would explain the mechanism of the equivalence principle and would be the capstone on the Standard Model of Field Theory.

If it's not found where it's supposed to be, then that means there will be a whole sack full of Nobel prizes for physicists to claim.

I'm just can't decide which outcome to root for...

Why is that God always seems to be made in our own image?

Albert Schweitzer once quipped regarding the search to uncover the real, historical Jesus from behind the mythic cosmic religious background that "Once one peers back down into the well of history, one generally finds ones own face reflected back up." It's a well remarked upon issue in the study of the Gospels that any attempt to find the "true" image of Our Lord inevitably ends up looking like an idealized savior that appeals to the beliefs of the researchers.

Now some scientists think they know why. A study reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says that as people's beliefs about the world around them change over time, so too does their image of God. In fact they'll tweak both their beliefs and their image of God so as to keep the two in agreement.

"The team conducted seven studies in the US, including four in which they surveyed people about their own beliefs on controversial issues such as abortion and the death penalty. Participants were also asked about what they thought God believed, as well as famous people like Bill Gates and President George Bush [Sydney Morning Herald]. Scientists then asked the participants—all of whom believed in the Abrahamic God and most of whom were Christians—to do things that might change their minds, like writing an essay about the death penalty from the opposite viewpoint of their own. When participants changed their own opinions, their ideas of God’s opinion changed too, though their opinions of what other people thought remained the same.

Finally, the team used fMRI to scan the brains of volunteers while they contemplated the beliefs of themselves, God or ‘average Americans.’ … In the first two cases, similar parts of the brain were active. When asked to contemplate other Americans’ beliefs, however, an area of the brain used for inferring other people’s mental states was active. This implies that people map God’s beliefs onto their own [New Scientist]."

More here.

The article does point out that these changes in the image of God in a person's symbolic universe do not take place quickly, but seem to be made up of small tweaks made over time that end up nudging people's thinking in one direction or another.

This isn't terribly surprising. Anyone who's ever done any scientific research or engineering work knows how easy it is to decide in advance what the correct answer is to a question and then to selectively choose the data that fits one's presupposition. The observed value of the charge of the electron was off slightly when first measured by Michael Millikan in his oil drop apparatus. People who repeated the experiment tended to discard observations that gave the correct value and keep the observations that corresponded to Millikan's published result. It was only over time that the consensus settled on the value we use today.

That's why the scientific method works though - by insisting that people publish their data and their methodology - their work can be repeated and their personal errors and/or biases removed.

It seems obvious to me that we need to do the same thing in religion. The Bible functions as a collection over a long period of time and in many different contexts of humanities interactions with the Triune God. The variety of time and authors helps to remove any individual biases. It's why the fact that there are contradictions in the Gospel accounts have never particularly troubled me.

I think the Episcopal Church's insistence on gathering for Common Prayer using forms created through the workings of the broadest possible committee has the same effect for our human worship. Using the historical, consensual text of the Prayer Book keeps us from worshiping our own personal image of God and forces us to confront new ideas that cause us to tweak our understandings.

Hopefully, like the now accepted value for the charge of an electron, we too will begin to move toward a truer image of the God who created us and who was revealed to us in the person of Jesus.

Churches and believers need to leave the bubble

I've written a few times on this blog about my concern that our natural human tendency to associate with people who agree with us causes us to create comfortable intellectual bubbles for us to live within. Most people, rather than seeking people who hold contrary opinions to their own, instead create virtual and/or real communities of people who hold the same thoughts or same opinions as they do. When this happens online it's described as speaking into the "echo chamber". Darrel Falk, describing a similar philosophical idea describes it as living in the bubble. I've described it elsewhere as the self-creation of ghettos.

Falk though has gone into a great deal more detailed analysis of the mechanisms involved when it comes to churches and people of faith choosing to live in a world where they can avoid having the beliefs challenged by scientific data. He writes of an encounter recently with a friend of his, a young biology graduate student who left her studies as she became more and more involved in her sense of a call to ministry and heightened her involvement in her church.

He describes an encounter he had with her after she decided to leave the church:

"As I drank my coffee and munched on my toast I felt a little lonely as I adjusted to this new person sitting across from me. She was bitter. The Church, she felt, had lied to her. Having purposely distorted the real world, it had kept her enclosed in the bubble. Upon emergence, she looked back and saw the layers around it, not as a protective shield, but as impenetrable barriers which would forever prevent her re-entry. She would never go back. She had lived in a fairy-tale world. I was no longer her mentor. I was a perpetrator of that which she now regarded as an ephemeral event—a dream in her past.

I would like to begin by suggesting that we Christians may have unnecessarily surrounded ourselves with a multi-layered bubble that isolates us from the academic world. I will explore whether many of the bubble’s layers are products of our own Christian culture and not the Bible itself. Indeed, I wonder if some may arise from our inadequacies in how to understand the Bible. Others may come from our unwarranted skepticism about science. True, scientific hypotheses are sometimes wrong. However, the branch of science which is causing the greatest discord is not simply centered upon a hypothesis. Rather, it involves an all-encompassing theory which, following 150 years of testing its many dimensions, is consistent with all the sub-disciplines of biology. One of the hallmarks of a great scientific theory is cohesiveness. Few if any theory in the history of science has ever unified all the disciplines of the natural sciences as has the theory of evolution. Perhaps it is time for us, even we evangelicals, to explore whether we are propping up the layers of a bubble that we, and not God, have put in place and thereby, have artificially isolated ourselves from the world of academics."

Read the full article here.

He lists five concentric rings or bubbles that people within the Church have used (with some collusion by those in the scientific community) to isolate themselves from academic research and scientific observations:

1. The Story of Adam and Eve must be viewed as history

   By history he means people focuses on the historicity of the account and ignore the theological and allegorical elements of the story.

2. A God who is love would not create through a process that includes suffering and death

   The theory of Natural Selection (survival of the fittest) is contrary to the New Testament message of self-sacrificial love that we find in Jesus.

3. Science explains it all - there is no need for God in the history of life

   This is a misunderstanding of the limits of the scientific method, and the limits of our present understanding of creation. Christians often imagine that there is absolutely no place for God because Science has all the answers and has no need of God.

4. St. Augustine's warning (which I've referenced a number of times)

   It is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, while presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense...If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintain his foolish opinions about scriptures how then are they going to believe those Scriptures in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven?

5. As it relates to science and faith, Christians are perceived as people who distort facts and lack integrity

   One only has to talk to a few evolutionary biologists to hear all about this layer.

Let me strongly commend this paper to you. You'll find it linked above.

While I'm at it, let me commend to your attention a blog written by a friend of mine (and a member of our Cathedral here in Phoenix) David Ord. David is the editoral director of Namaste Press and he writes today about how he manages to hold his faith in tension with his willingness to trust in the scientific method:

If I hold ideas that don’t stand up in the light of science, then no matter how dear my ideas may be to me, I let them go.

This isn’t choosing science over sacred scriptures. It’s allowing all scriptures to be understood from the perspective of our growing light.

We see what these authors penned more intuitively, spiritually, rather than factually.

I’m not suggesting that science knows everything—that there may not be a lot more to reality than we have so far discovered.

Quite the contrary. One of the things the last century has shown us, with our exposure to relativity and the quantum world, is that just when we imagine we have figured out how things work, we really know little about the nature of our material existence yet.

What I’m saying is that if something is contrary to what we have established, then if I am a person of faith, I must modify my ideas, not cling to them and proclaim my “certainty.”

Faith has nothing to do with mental certainty. Rather, it’s the sense of being grasped by something greater than myself—and yet in which I participate.

From here.

I'm quite taken with the last four paragraphs.

Climategate and the Irish Church scandal

Last week, while most of us here in the states were busy spending time with family and friends, the ongoing scandal of "Climategate" took a couple of new turns.

Climategate is the popular term referring to the release by a computer hacker of a large body of private emails written by climate researchers. As people have combed through the emails they've found a number of questionable statements regarding the data the researchers have been citing to support their contention that Earth is growing warmer.

Note that there's a variety of terms and causes that are typically included under the popular phrase "Global Warming". People use that term to imply that human beings, by using fossil fuels, are causing a global rise in temperatures that will have deleterious, even catastrophic effects on our climates.

But, more accurately people can speak of climate change (which means that some places are getting warmer and others are getting colder), anthropogenic change (which means human caused change), global warming in general (which means a rise in average temperatures on the surface of the earth), and rising Carbon levels (which can both be of natural cause and/or human origin) that can contribute to global warming.

How these different things lead to one another, or even interact is not well understood. It's not even clear that there's anything we as humans can do to change the system or that we're driving whatever change is being observed. But all of those questions are dependent on what has, until now, been a broadly accepted set of data that show that whatever the cause or mechanism, global temperatures are getting higher.

But that data is being called into question because of some references within the emails referred to above. These references have caused broad calls that the raw data about the temperature rise be fully published. Until last week, these calls were being rejected.

That changed over the weekend:

"The U-turn by the university follows a week of controversy after the emergence of hundreds of leaked emails, 'stolen' by hackers and published online, triggered claims that the academics had massaged statistics.

In a statement welcomed by climate change sceptics, the university said it would make all the data accessible as soon as possible, once its Climatic Research Unit (CRU) had negotiated its release from a range of non-publication agreements."

From here.

This is critically important, and frankly should have happened long ago. The scientific method fundamentally depends upon transparency. The worst sin a scientist can commit is to fake data. Data points need to be published, and the methods used to obtain them fully disclosed so that the data can be verified and if not, errors can be identified.

The fact that there are loud critics challenging results is no reason at all to hold back on the publication of raw data. If anything it all the more reason to be scrupulously honest. If there are errors, the opponents are going to be the most likely people to find them. And if they're found, they can be corrected. Which will lead to better data, and better understanding of what is happening. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I can add that I believe the same thing to be true about pretty much any human endeavor, including theological thinking and church governance.

There's been a great deal of human mischief done to people by the Church because of the sense that the institution needs to be protected from harsh questions. Take the situation in Ireland right now. A series of four archbishops have acted to cover up many many cases of sexual abuse by clergy inflicted upon children throughout that country. Their need to protect the church from "scandal" and not the children, has allowed the abusers to continue to have free access to more victims.

A transparent and public airing of the scandal from the very beginning would have been very embarrassing for the Church. But it would have saved the lives of many children. There's no doubt what Jesus would do.

Ring Worlds discovered

There are some startling beautiful pictures of a galaxy named "Centaurus A" that were published late last week. The image though that makes you stop and stare is the image of the galaxy when viewed in infrared instead of visible light. The central portion of the galaxy is obscured by a large amount of dust, but the dust is transparent to infrared light and we can see the structure of the galaxy much more clearly.

The infrared image reveals that the galaxy is basically a GIANT ring of new stars being formed around the core of the galaxy - which in this case is a galactic black hole. It's the for real Ringworld, though not quite in the form that Larry Niven imagined.

From the write up in Universe Today:

"Centaurus A is believe to house a supermassive black hole that has the mass of 200 million Suns at its core, evidenced by the radio emissions streaming out from the galaxy. Previous images of the galaxy from the Spitzer Space Telescope, the ESA's Infrared Space Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope revealed some aspects of the structure of the galaxy.

The infrared eyes of Spitzer peered partway through the dust to show a warped parallelogram, the cause of which is the gravitational disturbance caused by the merger of Centaurus A with a smaller spiral galaxy.
The presence of rings such as the one seen in Centaurus A is probably not common among other elliptical galaxies, but other such galaxies are known to exist. It's possible that they are present during only certain periods of an elliptical galaxy's formation after it merges with another galaxy.

Dr. Kainulainen commented on this possibility: 'One should consider that seeing so bright ring structure is probably quite time-critical. The rings are believed to be induced by 'a violent event' of merging galaxies, and they may evolve rather quickly to something that no longer looks like a clear, bright ring. Therefore, they might actually be quite common for merging galaxies, but they 'last' only such a short time that we don't see them in so many galaxies.'"

Read the full article here and see the difference between the visible light images and the infra-red ones.

For what it's worth, spiral arm galaxies are also probably short lived structures that are caused by a combination of resonances in the differential rotation of the stellar systems and a collision with another galaxy.

All of which is a reminder of how vast Creation truly is. And what a wonder it is that we - creatures of star dust - have granted the ability to comprehend some of it grandeur.

Greenland's ice cap disappearence accelerating

Whether you attribute the cause to climate change (global warming) or to some other mechanism, it appears that the fact is that Greenland's ice cap is melting rapidly, and the rate of melt is increasing.

This from a report about the new data published in Science detailing the results of dual studies using atmospheric modeling and satellite data:

"[The observed] mass loss is equally distributed between increased iceberg production, driven by acceleration of Greenland's fast-flowing outlet glaciers, and increased meltwater production at the ice sheet surface. Recent warm summers further accelerated the mass loss to 273 Gt per year (1 Gt is the mass of 1 cubic kilometre of water), in the period 2006-2008, which represents 0.75 mm of global sea level rise per year.

Professor Jonathan Bamber from the University of Bristol and an author on the paper said: 'It is clear from these results that mass loss from Greenland has been accelerating since the late 1990s and the underlying causes suggest this trend is likely to continue in the near future. We have produced agreement between two totally independent estimates, giving us a lot of confidence in the numbers and our inferences about the processes'."

Read the report here.

This is troubling on a number of levels. First it does indicate that the climate in the Northern Atlantic is changing. Whether that change is anthropogenic or not doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter because if it is, we may be too far into the warming process to be able to reverse it. If it isn't, there's not much we can do.

It's very troubling news for people who live in Northern Europe. Northern Europe achieves its relatively mild climate because of the heat that is carried out of the Gulf of Mexico in the Gulf stream and other conveyor effect currents.

A large release of free water from melting ice on Greenland is expected to disrupt those surface and deep water currents. That will in turn decrease the amount of heat carried to the shores of western Europe. Which would probably mean that cities with the same latitude as Moscow (and even more northern) would reasonably expect to see the same sorts of harsh winters.

Which would mean the end of tropical plants on Lands End and of palm trees in Dublin.

Which I think would in turn lead to a massive demographic shift out of the Northern Europe.

Forget the issue of women bishops in the Church of England. The greater threat is probably the lack of people that such a climate change driven process would cause.

The extent of the Fall?

If one accepts the theological doctrine of the Fall of Creation, then one is led to ask: "is it a universal fall or just a local one?" I've been thinking about this as a result of the discussion around the Theology of Alien Life post last week. In that discussion the question of whether or not alien species (if discovered) would need redemption or not was suggested.

Someone quipped (on the Facebook feed I think) that if that need was true, the Fall of Creation through the actions of humankind was the biggest example of theological Exceptionalism ever posited.

So, with all that rattling around in the back of my head, when I came across this bit of news about plant's preferences for their own kin and their instinctive desire to harm others, I guess I started thinking about Harmitology:

"The research, which appears in the current issue of the American Journal of Botany, suggests non-kin plants will not only compete underground for soil nutrients, but will attempt to muscle out the competition above ground in the ongoing struggle for light.

It follows previous research from McMaster University which found that plants can recognize their kin through root systems and will compete more strongly for soil nutrients and water with non-sibling plants.

'This is the first study that shows plants are responding to kin at the above ground level,' explains Guillermo Murphy, lead author of the study and a graduate student in the Department of Biology at McMaster University. 'When they recognize their kin, they grow differently in shape, taller, with more branches and fewer resources into leaves, therefore allowing their siblings to access precious sunlight.'"

From here.

There's nothing terribly surprising here biologically speaking. Seems to me that it's basically an example of the Selfish Gene principle a la Dawkins except at the plant level rather than the genetic.

But why should Nature have this inherent "selfish" quality? If we believe that God is Agape (Love) and Agape can be described at one level as altruism (the polar opposite of selfishness) than the natural world would seem to be organized around a radically different principle than the divine world.

Now to be clear, this is all totally speculative musing on my part, and it's not self-coherent. And there's the problem of God's describing Creation as Very Good on the sixth day according to the Genesis account. And it's possible to make an argument, I think, that individual greedy actions leads to a systematic equitable distribution of resources (ala Adam Smith)...

But, those caveats granted, does this research from the plant world indicate that at least in the biological sphere, selfishness and not altruism is more common. And if that's the case, might we argue that Life is in a fallen state? (I'm not sure where one would go with ethics in non-living forms.)

James Hogan, in his book "The Gentle Giants of Ganymede" had the alien races in the Solar System describing the Earth as the "Nightmare Planet". The altruistic "giant" species couldn't imagine what it would be like to live in a world that was ruled by selfishness and greed. In the book, they felt sorry for us as humans because we had been forced to endure that experience.

If the fall is real, might the sinful nature of our human experience need to be extended to other parts of creation (like this plant research evocatively suggests)? If the Fall is limited to Terrestrial experience, might other races thinks something like that of us?

Interesting speculative questions. At least they are to me. Today. Who knows what tomorrow will bring. Grin.

Is evolution creating religion?

Well, not exactly creating religion, but driving the development of more and more sophisticated religion? And I suppose, to be completely clear, I should use the term "social evolution" rather than just "evolution" since the latter seems to denote primarily physical evolution.

But then I wouldn't have such an interesting headline. Grin.

However, given those semantic caveats, the idea that social evolution is driving the form our religion is taking seems to be given strong support in some research discussed in the New York Times today. It reports on the research done by two archeologists in the Mexican Oaxaca Valley:

"During 15 years of excavation they have uncovered not some monumental temple but evidence of a critical transition in religious behavior. The record begins with a simple dancing floor, the arena for the communal religious dances held by hunter-gatherers in about 7,000 B.C. It moves to the ancestor-cult shrines that appeared after the beginning of corn-based agriculture around 1,500 B.C., and ends in A.D. 30 with the sophisticated, astronomically oriented temples of an early archaic state.

This and other research is pointing to a new perspective on religion, one that seeks to explain why religious behavior has occurred in societies at every stage of development and in every region of the world. Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that it exists because it was favored by natural selection. It is universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland.

For atheists, it is not a particularly welcome thought that religion evolved because it conferred essential benefits on early human societies and their successors. If religion is a lifebelt, it is hard to portray it as useless."

Read the full article here.

In other words, religion is a survival strategy. Which isn't terribly surprising if you give the idea more than a moments thought, especially when religion undergirds what social anthropologists describe as an impulse to altruism.

The interesting bit here is that the archeologists are attempting to correlate religious forms to societal developmental stages. Again, not a surprising idea, but I think this is the first time anyone has attempted to make more than a qualitative argument that such a thing would happen.

It's hard to confirm such an hypothesis in Archeology given the relative paucity of data, but it would be very interesting to try. Perhaps there's more data than I think, or perhaps there's more data out there that's not been analyzed in this light.

So basically a watched pot never boils...

A Cathedral member here in Phoenix sent me a short note from a local "human potential" organization. In a nutshell it was arguing that the only way to live our lives was to follow the teaching of the Stoics. Except it didn't use the word Stoic.

So I was trying to explain the stoic ideals as I wrote up my response, and googled the wikipedia article on Zeno of Citium so as to link to it in my email. And whilst I was mucking around in Wikipedia I thought I'd read the entry of Zeno of Elea; the maker of wondrous paradoxes.

Zeno's paradox of the Dichotomy (which some argue is the same as Achilles and Tortoise) is one of the ways I used to argue that space was fundamentally quantized when I was teaching the Philosophy of Physics. Basically, if you go halfway to the wall, and then halfway again, and again, and again, conceptually you'll never actually reach the wall. Except we know that we do.

Mathematics solves the problem by demonstrating that convergent series have limits. A physicist would say that ultimately after a number of steps, you get to the point where you can no longer subdivide space-time. (You've reached the Plank Scale.)

While I was reading the paradoxes, I came across this interesting adaption of one of Zeno's ideas (the Paradox of the flight of the arrow) to quantum decay:

"The quantum Zeno effect is a name coined by George Sudarshan and Baidyanath Misra of the University of Texas in 1977 in their analysis of the situation in which an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay.[1] One can nearly ’freeze’ the evolution of the system by measuring it frequently enough in its (known) initial state. The meaning of the term has since expanded, leading to a more technical definition in which time evolution can be suppressed not only by measurement: The quantum Zeno effect is the suppression of unitary time evolution caused by quantum decoherence in quantum systems provided by a variety of sources: measurement, interactions with the environment, stochastic fields, and so on.[2] As an outgrowth of study of the quantum Zeno effect, it has become clear that application to a system of sufficiently strong and fast pulses with appropriate symmetry also can decouple the system from its decohering environment.[3]"

Read the full entry here.

So, in other words, if you pin a system into a specific quantum state by making an observation, and then repeat rapidly enough that the system's wave function cannot evolve, you've effectively frozen the system.

And therefore, we can show that if you watch a pot of water on the stove carefully enough, it can never actually boil.

And yet it does.

A paradox to the paradox!

I love it when that happens.