Entangled States

Swarming stars in the galactic core

Astronomers are pretty much convinced that there's a super-massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. (Just writing that sentence reminds me about how quickly opinions can change in science - years ago people doubted the existence of black holes, much less even imagined that they could come in a super massive variety.)

The reason for this belief is not theory. It's experimental data. Check out the AMAZING video of 15 years worth of stellar observations of the galactic core. (Much of the data comes from the new adaptive optical telescopes on Mt. Keck in Hawaii.)

Some of the stars in that video are O and A class main sequence stars - which means they're many time more massive than the Sun. And the galactic core is playing catch with those stars making them orbit with a period of 15 years or less.

There's no way to get that sort of orbital behavior without putting something very very massive at the core. Like something with a mass of millions of suns. And there's no way for something so massive to be able to exist in a normal space. The self-gravity of such an object is so strong that it would immediately collapse on itself and disappear into a singularity. A black hole.

Observational evidence of a black hole. I can't tell you how amazing that is to me.

When a standard candle isn't a standard candle

The idea of a standard candle is very important in Astronomy. The concept is simple. We understand (thanks to Sir Newton) how the inverse square law connects brightness with distance. If we know the absolute brightness of an object (like a candle) and we then measure how bright it appears, we can work out how far away it is. Using this idea with stars (which aren't very standard in terms of brightness) we can work out things like the distance to nebulas, galaxies, and clusters of stars.

But when you're looking at things very very far away, the candidates for standard candles become very few. You need something very bright so that you can see it, even dimly, halfway across the Universe. That's why there's been such an interest in a certain kind of supernova over the years. The explosion *is* very very bright. And, because it was thought to be caused by a very simple mechanism - a white dwarf star exceeding the Chandrasekhar limit of 1.4 solar masses - each explosion should be just about exactly the same. Which makes it an excellent standard candle.

In fact it's so good that it was the first place people were able to observe the increasing inflation of the Universe. Hubble first saw that the Universe was expanding. But in the late 80's people, using the standard candle novas saw that the rate of expansion was getting greater the further out one looked.

No one nows exactly why this should be. The best answer at the moment is the invocation of the mysterious entity of Dark Energy. Which means..., well actually no one is sure. But we have to come up with something to explain what we're seeing and you have to admit, that's a really cool name.

Except that perhaps we don't have to come up with something. Because maybe things are as we thought they were. Turns out that standard candles we've been using aren't all that standard. Researchers announced this morning that the explosions aren't being caused by white dwarfs gradually exceeding the limit as thought - the explosions seem to be caused by collisions between degenerate matter objects. Which means the explosions could be much brighter than we thought (in absolute terms) which means we're overestimating their distance from us...

"Mario Livio, a theorist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said that while the new results and the idea of two classes of supernovas ‘muddies the water,’ they would not affect the measurements of dark energy. Most of the supernovas in those studies, he said, came from spiral galaxies, and the astronomers, moreover, were very careful to calibrate their data.

‘The main results so far will remain unchanged,’ Dr. Livio said."

I'm glad he thinks that. But I'm not quite as optimistic. This whole idea of Dark Energy violates Occams Razor six ways to Sunday. I wouldn't be surprised if there are other calibration errors out there.

Like what happened when we figured out that another kind of intermediate standard candle - the Cephid Variable Star - came in different forms. They can still function as a sort of candle, but you have to be very careful now.

Read the full account in the New York Times here.

Napping your way to success?

Saw this report this morning:

"A power nap indeed works to recharge the brain, improving memory, according to findings of a study on sleep and midday napping by researchers from the University of California at Berkley. Led by study author Matthew Walker, the team of scientists compared the results of memory tests after a group of test subjects took a 100-minute nap versus those who did not.

The findings were announced at the annual meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego.

The results, though preliminary, showed the group that powered down for a spell during the afternoon did better on the memory test, which was designed to stimulate the hippocampus, a part of the brain thought to be linked to memory function. Walker compared napping to clearing your e-mail inbox or rebooting a computer."

Read the full article here.

One of the unexpected consequences of moving to Phoenix is I sleep a lot better at night - the allergens out here are a lot less bothersome as far as my body is concerned. I do notice that I'm able to concentrate better. At least I think I am...

Maybe it's time to return to the afternoon nap. That used to be an option when the rectory was relatively close to the parish building. It's not terribly convenient these days, but if it helps us be sharper for evening meetings, perhaps driving home is worth the inconvenience.

How do tiny asteroids exist?

In the great list of physics conundrums, the question of small astronomical body mechanics doesn't come near the top. But it is one of those questions that always seemed puzzling.

Most models for planetary formation assume that a process of accretion creates large bodies like the planetesimals from microscopic dust in the pre-stellar nebula. The primary mechanism driving the accretion is thought to be gravity. And while a small object the size of snowball might not have much gravity, in the micro-gravity environment of the nebula, it's probably sufficient for the task.

The problem though is that the *self-gravitational* attraction of larger objects (like a boulder) isn't strong enough to hold them together if they're doing something as likely as spinning a bit. Self-gravitation is what holds the sun, the earth and all of the planets together. The problem has been with the small objects like moonlets, planetesimals and smallish asteroids.

Now there's a new mechanism suggested that holds things together - and it's the same one that lets bugs walk on water and creates the meniscus disks in a graduated cylinder:

In 2005, the Japanese Hayabusa mission circled and landed on the potato-shaped asteroid Itokawa, which measures just a few hundred metres in size. (It is due to return to Earth later this year with a sample of asteroid dust.)

Spin rate statistics suggest that Ikotawa and asteroids like it are piles of rubble held together by gravity on scales of 150 metres and larger. But smaller boulders should fly off into space at this rate of spin.

But that creates a puzzle. Images from Hayabusa show that on smaller scales, Ikotawa is little more than a collection of boulders and dust. But if gravity cannot beat the centripetal forces involved, what's holding Ikotawa together?

Astronomers have known for some time that the forces involved do not need to be large: various simulations have shown that even small cohesive forces can make spinning piles of rubble stable in low gravity environments.

[...]Scheeres and co show that none of the usual suspects is the likely culprit. Instead it looks as if small asteroids are held together by van der Waals forces."

Read the full article here.

More Entanglement

All the neat things about Entanglement are "neat" primarily because they are fundamentally counter-intuitive. They are counter-intuitive because entanglement has been only seen in very low temperature and limited settings. Now there's a theoretical proposal that claims this limit isn't as strong a limit as we thought.

The paper that makes the proposal is written up on the Arxiv blog. I'm quoting the beginning of the article because it's such a great introduction to the idea of Entanglement (and it's pretty obvious from the description's first paragraph why I find the phenomenon so evocative when viewed theologically):

"Entanglement is the weird quantum process in which two objects share the same existence. So a measurement on one object immediately influences the other, not matter how far apart they may be.

Entanglement is a strange and fragile thing. Sneeze and it vanishes. The problem is that entanglement is destroyed by any interaction with the environment and these interactions are hard to prevent. So physicists have only ever been able to study and exploit entanglement in systems that do not interact easily with the environment, such as photons, or at temperatures close to absolute zero where the environment becomes more benign.

In fact, physicists believe that there is a fundamental limit to the thermal energies at which entanglement can be usefully exploited. And this limit is tiny, comparable to very lowest temperatures.

Today, Fernando Galve at the University of the Balearic Islands in Spain and a few buddies, show how this limit can be dramatically increased. The key behind their idea is the notion of a squeezed state."

Read the full article here.

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.