Y’know the giant eagles that come and rescue Frodo and Sam two or three hours before the end of The Return of the King? (That’s the one were the king gets back.)
Turns out that something like them really exited.
Huge birds!
Ten-foot wingspans!
Were the dominant predator in their ecosystem (as opposed to dogs or wolves or hyenas or lions or tigers or men).
Know where they existed?
New Zealand. (Oh, the irony!)
As Michael Crichton tells us, nobody really knows what would happen to the climate as the result of a nuclear war. The science behind "nuclear winters" is junk science.
But that’s not to say that large amounts of dust ejected into the atmosphere wouldn’t have an effect on climate. In fact, it’s happened before.
One time it did was 1816, also known as "the Year without a Summer" and "Eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death."
It was caused by the erruption of the volcano Mt. Tambora in . . . Indonesia (then the Dutch East Indies).
Summer temperatures were drastically lowered. Rain poured. Snow fell. Crops were destroyed. Food rioting began. People moved out of New England to settle the Upper Midwest. And a group of laudanum-laced British friends retired to a Swiss house where they told and later wrote down their stories, among them the horror classic Frankenstein.
All because it was the Year without a Summer.
Here’s something I believe but cannot prove:
The common interpretation of quantum mechanics that most scientists hold today is completely and hopelessly wrong. True randomness does not exist in the behavior of subatomic particles. Apparent randomness is just unexplained complexity. Left to itself, all physical matter and energy behaves deteministically, though a supernatural agency (such as God, an angel, or an embodied human soul) can cause matter to act in accord with the free-will decisions of the agency (which are not random, either).
In short, "God does not play dice with the universe."
That means that I agree with Albert Einstein on this (except that I don’t know what he thought about supernatural agency and free will).
This is something that I believe but cannot prove because of the technological limitation resulting in the uncertainty principle.
If we ever find a particle that is acted-upon by electrons without the reverse being true then the limitation vanishes. That would push the problem back one step as we’d now be able to measure what we need about electrons without affecting them, though we still might not be able to measure what we need about the new electron-testing particle. The problem would go away altogether if we found a way to measure all we need about the electron-testing particles without disturbing them and without getting into a regress of new particle-testing particles.
Regardless of whether the problem would be pushed back a step or totally solved, I still believe that all physical matter and energy behaves deterministically, even though we can’t (at least at the moment) prove it.
I’m not a scientist, but
HERE’S AN ARTICLE IN WHICH A BUNCH OF SCIENTISTS WERE ASKED WHAT THEY BELIEVE BUT ARE UNABLE TO PROVE, THUS REVEALING THEIR OWN LEAPS OF FAITH.
Interesting stuff!
(Richard Dawkins’ contribution is no surprise, but at least he admitted that he can’t prove it.)
What do you believe that you cannot prove?
Here’s something I believe but cannot prove:
The common interpretation of quantum mechanics that most scientists hold today is completely and hopelessly wrong. True randomness does not exist in the behavior of subatomic particles. Apparent randomness is just unexplained complexity. Left to itself, all physical matter and energy behaves deteministically, though a supernatural agency (such as God, an angel, or an embodied human soul) can cause matter to act in accord with the free-will decisions of the agency (which are not random, either).
In short, "God does not play dice with the universe."
That means that I agree with Albert Einstein on this (except that I don’t know what he thought about supernatural agency and free will).
This is something that I believe but cannot prove because of the technological limitation resulting in the uncertainty principle.
If we ever find a particle that is acted-upon by electrons without the reverse being true then the limitation vanishes. That would push the problem back one step as we’d now be able to measure what we need about electrons without affecting them, though we still might not be able to measure what we need about the new electron-testing particle. The problem would go away altogether if we found a way to measure all we need about the electron-testing particles without disturbing them and without getting into a regress of new particle-testing particles.
Regardless of whether the problem would be pushed back a step or totally solved, I still believe that all physical matter and energy behaves deterministically, even though we can’t (at least at the moment) prove it.
I’m not a scientist, but
HERE’S AN ARTICLE IN WHICH A BUNCH OF SCIENTISTS WERE ASKED WHAT THEY BELIEVE BUT ARE UNABLE TO PROVE, THUS REVEALING THEIR OWN LEAPS OF FAITH.
Interesting stuff!
(Richard Dawkins’ contribution is no surprise, but at least he admitted that he can’t prove it.)
What do you believe that you cannot prove?
1905.
One hundred years ago.
That was the year ideas exploded across Albert Einstein’s brain that would revolutionize modern physics.
In one year he wrote five papers that shook the foundations of science like nothing since Isaac Newton’s similar miraculous year two and a half centuries earlier.
Among other things, he proved the existence of atoms in one of these
papers–something that was still debated up to that point.
If you’ve ever wanted a chance to have a brief, understandabl tutorial in Einstein’s thought and its significance,
One hundred years ago.
That was the year ideas exploded across Albert Einstein’s brain that would revolutionize modern physics.
In one year he wrote five papers that shook the foundations of science like nothing since Isaac Newton’s similar miraculous year two and a half centuries earlier.
Among other things, he proved the existence of atoms in one of these
papers–something that was still debated up to that point.
If you’ve ever wanted a chance to have a brief, understandabl tutorial in Einstein’s thought and its significance,
HERE’S AN INTERESTING PIECE ABOUT THE FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN ALBERT EINSTEIN AND KURT GODEL.
It starts as a rare look at the personalities and personal side of these two great thinkers–as well as many other names familiar from 20th century science.
Among the things it mentions, Einstein liked ice cream cones, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was Godel’s favorite movie, and Alan Turing killed himself by eating a poisoned apple.
But the article moves into theoretical waters, noting the disagreement between Einstein and Godel on the one hand and Werner Heisenber on the other. The subject of dispute: quantum mechanics. (And, frankly, I’m with Einstein and Godel on this one: I’m very suspicious of a lot of the interpretations of reality that are alleged to fall out of quantum mechanics.)
Where the piece ends up, though, is with a long-forgotten piece of collaboration between Einstein and Godel. The author summarizes it this way:
Einstein saw at once that if Gödel was right, he had not merely
domesticated time: He had killed it. Time, "that mysterious and
seemingly self-contradictory being," as Gödel put it, "which, on the
other hand, seems to form the basis of the world’s and our own
existence," turned out in the end to be the world’s greatest illusion.
In a word, if Einstein’s relativity theory was real, time itself was
merely ideal. The father of relativity was shocked. Though he praised
Gödel for his great contribution to the theory of relativity, he was
fully aware that time, that elusive prey, had once again slipped his
net.But now something truly amazing took place: nothing. Although in the
immediate aftermath of Gödel’s discoveries a few physicists bestirred
themselves to refute him and, when this failed, tried to generalize and
explore his results, this brief flurry of interest soon died down.
Within a few years the deep footprints in intellectual history traced
by Gödel and Einstein in their long walks home had disappeared,
dispersed by the harsh winds of fashion and philosophical prejudice. A
conspiracy of silence descended on the Einstein-Gödel friendship and
its scientific consequences.
Until Stephen Hawking took up the subject again.
Sometimes people ask me where I learned what I know about theology and apologetics.
"University of Late-Night Studies," I tell them.
But maybe that school is about to close.
For me and other sufferers of insomnia.
FIRST LONG-TERM INSOMNIA TREATMENT APPROVED.
The problem up to now has been that insomnia treatments have either had horrible side-effects (like grogginess during the day) or been ineffective for more than a few nights at a time (because your body gets used to them).
Long-term effects of the new treatment on apologetics are unknown.
Final excerpts from Crichton’s important speech:
And at the moment we have no mechanism to get good answers. So I will propose one.
Just as we have established a tradition of double-blinded research
to determine drug efficacy, we must institute double-blinded research
in other policy areas as well. Certainly the increased use of computer
models, such as GCMs, cries out for the separation of those who make
the models from those who verify them. The fact is that the present
structure of science is entrepeneurial, with individual investigative
teams vying for funding from organizations which all too often have a
clear stake in the outcome of the research-or appear to, which may be
just as bad. This is not healthy for science.Sooner or later, we must form an independent research institute in
this country. It must be funded by industry, by government, and by
private philanthropy, both individuals and trusts. The money must be
pooled, so that investigators do not know who is paying them. The
institute must fund more than one team to do research in a particular
area, and the verification of results will be a foregone requirement:
teams will know their results will be checked by other groups. In many
cases, those who decide how to gather the data will not gather it, and
those who gather the data will not analyze it. If we were to address
the land temperature records with such rigor, we would be well on our
way to an understanding of exactly how much faith we can place in
global warming, and therefore what seriousness we must address this.
Earth narrowly avoided an "asteroid" strike Sunday when an "asteroid" whizzed past Earth so close that it went under the orbits of some satellites.
Fortunately, it was tiny (16 feet wide, which makes me wonder whether it should even be classed as an asteroid).
Wouldn’t have hurt us (or so they say).
It was the second-closest such miss on record.
