“After Darwin, after Einstein—just as after Galileo and Copernicus—we can’t have the same theological ideas about God as we did before.” An interview with theologian John Haught on science, faith, and the troubles of the new atheism.
Category: Science
“History looks more and more like a science fiction novel in which mutants repeatedly arose and displaced normal humans Äì sometimes quietly, by surviving starvation and disease better, sometimes as a conquering horde. And we are those mutants.” Humans are evolving, and there’s a difference even over the small time frame of the past 1000-10,000 years. Two big causes are the huge increases population growth, which means more mutant genetic strains, and our geographic spread, which makes for environmental adaptation.
How clean is the electricity I use? Mine is about 64% coal, 20% nuclear, 10% natural gas, and a smattering of renewable and non-renewable sources. Yeah, that coal bad news.
Haile Gebrselassie set a new marathon record a couple days ago: 2:04:26. That’s almost 13 miles an hour.
Update: Just to put this in perspective, the world’s best sprinters average about 23-24 miles an hour during their few seconds of exertion. Gebrselassie was going half as fast, but 400 times the distance, and 700 times the duration. It blows my mind.
Alan Nelson links to a collection of Stephen Hawking’s lectures and colloquia. Cool.
Bonobos are in the news again. A while back there was a an article about bonobos in the New Yorker. And in the current issue of The Believer, an interview with primatologist Frans de Waal, who is gently criticized in the New Yorker article. It’s a good read, aside from lousy economics in the third section. The best part of the interview touches on moral emotions, and what we misconceive about morality & Darwinism. De Waal makes the distinction:
WeÄôve been fed a bogus ÄúDarwinianÄù position for thirty years, one that confuses the way evolution works with the things that evolution produces. Because the way evolution works, yesÄîitÄôs a nasty process. Evolution works by eliminating those who are not successful. Natural selection is a process that cares only about your own reproduction, or gene replication, and everything else is irrelevant. But then what natural selection produces is extremely variable. Natural selection can produce the social indifference you find in many solitary animals. But it can also produce extremely cooperative, friendly, and empathic characteristics.
There is a ton of recordings from the 2007 Singularity Summit, featuring all the speakers and panels. [via justin, of course]
Galileo’s sunspot illustrations
Back in the summer of 1612, Galileo did a series of daily observations of the sun. His illustrations were reproduced in his Letters on Sunspots of 1613. The work, part of an ongoing scientific battle with Christoph Scheiner, settled a lot of the contemporary debate on sunspots, killing the idea that the sun had minor satellites and proving our universe just a bit more imperfect.
My weekend project: I took those 35 drawings and put them into a big mosaic of sunspots.1 Sort of a comic strip approach. Not as dynamic as a movie, but then again I can’t frame a movie and mount it on my wall. If you’re so inclined, I also have a giant sunspot mosaic PDF to share with you—20 inches on a side. I had a ton of fun with this thing.
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1. The original scans came from the rare book collection of Owen Gingerich via The Galileo Project. Dr. Gingerich was also kind enough to spare a few minutes on the telephone. Great guy.
Those mechanical models of the solar system are called orreries.
One of my ongoing fascinations is with sense of scale. Here’s a couple other interesting thought experiments to understand the immensity of our universe:
Suppose that our Earth is the ball in the tip of a ball-point pen. How big would the Sun be, and how far away from the pen tip? First, Hold the ball-point pen up in the air. Now hold a ping-pong ball about 15 feet away from the pen tip. This is approximately a size and distance scale model of the Sun and Earth. The moon would be the size of a dust speck beside the ball in the pen.
Time may not exist. What will they think of next? It’s a really cool article. I’m always glad to hear of interesting theoretical physics outside of stri-*yawn* string theory.
There’s a Star Trek wiki, almost 26,000 articles.
Plates from George Catlin’s 1844 North American Indian Portfolio. And I’m a sucker for celestial atlases, like Johann Rost’s 1723 Atlas Portatilis Coelestis—note the fold-out pages for color illustrations. The Linda Hall Library has a number of other cool digital collections.
What if… Earth’s topography was reversed so that continents were oceans and the oceans were continents? Pretty cool. I’m trying to imagine the societies that would spring up and the new planetary politics.
A long essay exploring Human Computer Interaction in Science Fiction Movies.
The Universcale guides you from cosmic size all the way down to the immeasurable sub-atomic scale. Kind of like the Powers of Ten film, but this one has chill Musak.
I was reading this profile of Albert Einstein yesterday and came across this mind-blowing bit of trivia. Einstein “calculated how many water molecules existed in 22.4 litres.” That’s pretty cool in and of itself. But going further, Äúthat many unpopped popcorn kernels when spread across the United States would cover the country nine miles deepÄù.
The Trouble with Physics (review: dnf)
I learned a lot from this book. But at this point, I have neither the time nor the brainpower to finish it off. The half that I read is quite good, though, so I’ll share a bit from that. The title of Lee Smolin‘s book foretells much: The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of Science, and What Comes Next.
Smolin starts off with a an overview of science—what it is and ought to be, the greatest remaining puzzles in physics, what it means to truly solve them, the nature and power of theory, and a history of the major advances in physics since around the Renaissance. Smolin does a great job here. He really takes his time, assumes little, and has a clever way with analogies. Next comes the early development of string theory in the 70s and 80s, its rapid progress in the following decades, and current stagnation. Which brought to the part where he starts talking about branes and M-theory and super-symmetry and… I realized I would never make it. I would need a bit more focus and fewer compelling distractions tapping their foot impatiently in my To-Read queue.
Anyway, here’s a good riff from Smolin on the human side of science:
It seems to me more and more that career decisions hinge on character. Some people will happily jump on the next big thing, give it all they’ve got, and in this way make important contributions to fast-moving fields. Others just don’t have the temperament to do this. Some people need to think through everything very carefully, and this takes time, as they get easily confused. It’s not hard to feel superior to such people, until you remember that Einstein was one of them. In my experience, the truly shocking new ideas and innovations tend to come from such people. Still others—and I belong to this third group—just have to go their own way, and will flee fields for no better reason than that it offends them that people are joining in because it feels good to be on the winning side… Luckily for science, the contributions of the whole range of types are needed. Those who do good science, I’ve come to think, do so because they choose problems that are suited to them.
I’m pretty sure I’ll come back to this book maybe a couples months down the road. See also my post from last September with some stringy links.
Mark Larson 