It looks like creationists are about to be hit with another scientific discovery they are going to have to work hard to ignore, as another gap slams shut and no god was found in it.
There are persistent rumours in the scientific world that a team working with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) system will announce tomorrow that they have discovered 'primordial gravity waves'. These are gravity waves from the first moments of the Big Bang and, if confirmed, could increase our knowledge of exactly what happened in that first few microseconds of the Universe's existence.
I've never been to the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland, nor to Fingal's Cave on Staffa in the Outer Hebrides but they're on my bucket list. Maybe one day when I'm rich from <irony>all my book sales </irony>. What I have seen though is the Great Whin Sill alongside Hadrian's Wall at Houseteads in Cumbria.
They're not so obvious there but parts of the Whin Sill are composed of hexagonal stacks like the Giant's Causeway. At first glance it would be easy to assume that they are man-made or even superman-made (hence the legend of Benandonner and Fionn mac Cumhaill (Finn MacCool)), those remnants of the pre-Christian Irish pantheon.
A team of Canadian theoretical physicists claim to have solved the question of how the Universe arose from nothing. And guess what? It didn't need a magic creator; it can all be explained in materialist terms.
Now, I don't have the maths or detailed knowledge of physics to be able to fully understand the underlying principles they used, let alone to be able to explain it in simple terms, so I'm dependant on what others have said.
Once again, when scientist shone a light in a gap in our understanding they found no god in it. And shining a light in this case is especially apt, as it was light that was analysed. There is even talk of a Nobel Prize. While, as is normal with significant science, the results are to be subjected to intense scrutiny and other teams will try to replicate them, it looks very much as though scientists of the PICEP2 Project led by Prof John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have found the data verifying the inflation model of the Big Bang.
Inflation was basically inserted in the Big Bang theory as the best explanation for things not quite adding up. It proposed that, during the initial few moments of the Big Bang, the Universe expanded exponentially at faster than light speed until it was about the size of a marble. Not much of an inflation you might think, but bear in mind a fraction of a billionth of a second earlier, the entire Universe had been packed into something so small that it would have been indistinguishable from nothing. What inflation did was offer an explanation of how the three 'quantum' forces of weak and strong nuclear forces and electromagnetism became stripped away from the fourth, gravity, allowing the Universe to continue to expand and not collapse immediately under its own gravity. Basically, gravity had lost control. This went a long way to explaining why we have something from nothing. The total of the three 'quantum' forces exactly equates to gravity, so, in terms of fundamental forces, the Universe was and still is zero.
The problem was, it was an educated guess the best evidence for which was that nothing seemed to contradict it and it explained a great deal. This is, of course, only circumstantial evidence - not enough to convict in a court of law. What was needed was the smoking gun.
Any interesting draft paper has been discovered which throws considerable light on both Albert Einstein's thinking and on his personal integrity in scientific matter. The paper written in German was apparently 'hidden' in full public view at the Albert Einstein Archives in Jerusalem and may be seen here. It had been wrongly classified as the draft of another paper.
Almost any religious apologist worth his salt will have thrown out the claim that Albert Einstein believed in God, quoting his "God doesn't play dice with the Universe" argument against quantum theory. This is usually deployed when the argument is going badly and the only ploy left is to try to make their detractor look like they're just too stupid to see the sense of the argument. If Einstein, one of the most intelligent and scientifically literate of people, believed in God, then who are you to disagree?
Einstein, of course, was always at pains to point out that by 'God' he meant nature - the God of Spinoza; the forces which produce the universe as we see it - but religious apologists are never slow to 'mistake' a metaphor for a statement of fact, unless it comes to defending an absurd statement of 'fact' in the Bible or the Qur'an, in which case they are clearly metaphors, often for something too obscure and ineffable for mere humans to understand. God didn't always want to be understood so he wrote a book to be misunderstood in, apparently.
What Einstein was clearly doing here was expressing his personal distaste for a theory which appeared to throw a large dose of randomness into the mix. Quantum theory appeared to say that we shouldn't expect the Universe to be predictable, with clear causality and that events can occur without cause. Einstein's Universe was unchanging and ran on basic rules which, with sufficient diligence and observation, couples with the right analysis, we should be capable of discovering.
We present a translation and analysis of an unpublished manuscript by Albert Einstein in which he explored a 'steady-state' model of the universe. The manuscript, which appears to have been written in early 1931, demonstrates that Einstein once considered an expanding cosmos in which the mean density of matter is maintained constant by a continuous formation of matter from empty space. This model is very different to previously known Einsteinian models of the cosmos (both static and dynamic) but anticipates the later steady-state cosmology of Hoyle, Bondi and Gold in some ways. We find that Einsteins steady-state model contains a fundamental flaw and suggest that it was discarded for this reason. We also suggest that he declined to try again because he realised that a successful steady-state model would require an amendment to the field equations. The abandoned model is of historical significance because it reveals that Einstein debated between steady-state and evolving models of the cosmos decades before a similar debate took place in the cosmological community.
But, both Einstein's Relativity, and quantum theory, seemed to be showing that the Universe not only had a randomness at the very small scale but that it actually began as a very small random event. In a way, Einstein was anticipating the still unresolved conflicts between Relativity and Quantum Mechanics which has recently caused Stephen Hawking to revise his thinking on black holes.
[The manuscript was probably] a rough draft commenced with excitement over a neat idea and soon abandoned as the author realized he was fooling himself.
James Peebles, cosmologist.
Princeton University, New Jersey, USA
The paper was written in 1931, apparently during a visit to California, and appears to have been written quite quickly, as though following a sudden flash of insight, only to be revised later.
By 1931, the Big Bang appeared to have been confirmed by Edwin Hubble's discovery of the Red Shift in the 1920's but Einstein still seemed to be searching for ways around this and had hit on an idea which Fred Hoyle also proposed almost 20 years later - that the Universe was expanding but it had always been expanding and would continue to expand forever - the so-called steady state theory which only required some slight tweaking of Einstein's Relativity equation to remain consistent with Relativity.
Einstein appeared to have been toying with this idea in this draft paper then, as he thought it through, he realised he had made errors in the maths and that it wouldn't work. At any rate, he abandoned the idea, never completed the paper and never mentioned the idea again.
Hoyle's theory was eventually falsified by astronomical observation but not before he had made a spectacle of himself by publically trying to taunt a young Stephen Hawking by asking him why the background radiation required by the Big Bang theory had not been found - "because it's not there perhaps? Hmmm?" - just before it was discovered.
Dark Matter is something of a problem for science because it suggests our understanding of the Universe is incomplete. Not just incomplete in the detail, but incomplete at a fundamental level. The problem is, we devised our models, such as the model of fundamental particles, to explain what we could see.
This is not to say we are on the wrong track completely - the discovery of the Higgs Boson which essentially completed the theoretical collection of fundamental particles suggests quite the opposite - but that the track is much longer than we expected.
In some ways it's analogous to the state we were in when Einstein discovered the relationship between matter and energy and showed the velocity of light in a vacuum to be a universal constant independent of the velocity of an observer, and so discovered Relativity. Like just about everyone else at that time, Einstein's conceptual model of the Universe was that it consisted of the Milky Way galaxy and very little else, and that it was static - neither expanding nor shrinking.
Having realised his formula predicted that the Universe should be expanding, Einstein then made what he later called 'the biggest mistake of my life' and included a 'cosmological constant' for no other reason but to remove the expansion which he assumed must be an error. In doing so, he not only failed to be the first to predict that the Universe was expanding but also to make the logical deduction that it must therefore once have been very small, and so to discover the very small silent event mis-named the Big Bang.
The problem with dark matter is that it isn't a small problem. Some theoreticians have calculated that it, together with dark energy which is thought to be related to it, comprises some 95% of the Universe, meaning we only really have much idea about 5% of it.
In several ways, dark matter is paradoxical to our understanding. For example, it is generally accepted that dark matter consists of weakly interactive massive particles (WIMPs) which basically means they have mass (and therefore gravity) but barely interact with the particles we know about. This means they are difficult to detect because we detect things by observing how they interact with other things. This in turn means we would expect not to be able to find much evidence for it, and that, apart from one thing, comes perilously close to arguing that absence of evidence is not only not evidence of absence but confirmation of presence.
The one thing, of course, is the reason we know about it in the first place. We can detect it's effect on other things because it has mass and so exerts a gravitational effect. In fact, it was that which led us to suspect there was a lot of dark matter about. Rotating galaxies rotate at speeds which should make them fly apart according to basic Relativity and Newtonian Laws of Motion, yet we see they don't. Therefore there must be more mass present than we can see. In fact, it's the presence of so much dark matter that causes the rate of rotation in the first place to conserve angular momentum.
The term WIMPs is merely descriptive of what we are fairly sure particles of dark matter will be like. It doesn't tell us what they are nor how they relate to other particles so we don't know what it is that has this mass and in the absence of evidence, all we have is theory and hypotheses - rather like where we were with Higgs Boson.
We tested every single scenario we could come up with and eliminated things very carefully. The upshot is we just don't know what this is. The most exciting explanation is the decay signature of sterile neutrinos.
Esra Bulbul, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
But now we may have moved a little closer to understanding what this dark matter is, or rather confirming one of the theories about what it's made of. Two teams of researchers acting independently have both detected bursts of x-rays being emitted from crowded clusters of galaxies and their energies appear to be exactly what we would expect of a hypothetical 'sterile neutrino' decaying into x-ray photons and other neutrinos, and these 'sterile neutrinos' are one suspected culprit for the building blocks of dark matter.
Neutrinos are notoriously incapable of interacting with 'normal' matter, hence the difficulty in detecting them. Billions of neutrinos come sleeting through the cosmos to pass right through your body and right through Earth every second, yet leave no trace at all, so their form make them highly suspect as the WIMPs of dark matter. The problem is that the three neutrinos we know about don't have enough mass, hence the hypothecated 'sterile' type which is not only even less interactive that the others but is much more massive. (Incidentally, don't confuse 'massive' with volume; it relates more to weight).
It's intriguing. There's a consistent picture for it being dark matter, but I think confirming it would really require deeper observations of other things.
Kevork Abazajian, University of California, Irvine, USA
For a contrast with how science copes with something like dark matter and how religion copes with new information which upsets its established dogma, see The Dark Matter of Gods. Imagine, for example, authenticated documentary evidence being found that the 'Gospels' were the work of committees complete with evidence of editing and embellishment, and marginal notes such as "Will people believe this?!!!", so destroying the standard Christian theological model of how the New Testament was written and how reliable it is as history. How would established churches incorporate this into their understanding and teaching? My guess is it would be ignored completely.
As the above New Scientist article shows, one of those little frissons of excitement is spreading through the worlds of theoretical physics and cosmology, just as it did a couple of years ago when the folks at CERN thought they had discovered neutrinos which could travel faster than light. Now another fundamental idea is being questioned, reassessed and reconsidered.
When one of the creators of the Black Hole theory questions one of the fundamental principles of black holes, people take notice.
Stephen Hawking has just published an online paper entitled Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, in which he casts doubt on the idea that nothing can escape from a black hole and that all information about the matter which falls into one will
In this week's New Scientist we have another example of how detached modern religious apologetics has become from reality. The above article deals with the science behind the origins of our Universe and never once needs to invoke magic or deities. Instead it offers evidence for an explanation which has been mooted for many years - that our Universe arose by a perfectly natural (albeit difficult to comprehend) process, from a pre-existing metaverse. Nor is intuition invoked or an insistence that the explanation has to be easy to understand by people with little or no understanding of physics or advanced mathematics.
Contrast this with my recent public debate with Christian Apologist, Richard Bushey, who was trying to argue the line William Lane Craig takes that the so-called Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) leads to only one possible conclusion - that the Universe was created by magic by the locally popular god, who of course just happens to be the Christian one of whatever denomination you had the great good fortune to be born to parents who were believers of.
A great deal of that debate centred around the question of whether, even if we ignore the evidence of quantum mechanics that quantum events, of which the Big Bang is an example, do not require a cause, and that causality is a property of Relativity not of quantum mechanics, we have still not established that the only cause of the Big Bang must be supernatural because nature did not exists prior to it.
In fact this conclusion of the KCA is not only based on the circularity of assuming a priori that the god in the conclusion existed and was the only entity capable of creating a universe, but it also relies on the scientific ignorance of it's target audience. Any reading of the readily available literature will show that science offers several possible, perfectly natural, explanations for what the Big Bang could have occurred in and what could have caused it.
In this New Scientist article compelling evidence from a detailed analysis of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) (the 'echo' of the Big Bang and one of the strongest pieces of evidence for it) suggests our Universe could have arisen by a process termed 'bubble nucleation'.
In this picture, our universe arose from quantum fluctuations in a much bigger cosmos called a metaverse. The quantum effects caused a phase transition in the fabric of the metaverse, and our universe popped into being, like an air bubble forming in boiling water.
Incidentally, I could almost kick myself that in my debate with Richard Bushey I completely forgot Stephen Hawking's 1993 book, Black Holes and Baby Universes, in which the hypothesis that this Universe could have arisen in a non-zero energy field in a black hole in another universe was dealt with at length. It's not as though this hypothesis is new, since Hawking was writing about it twenty years ago. Surely this is enough time for people genuinely interested in scientific truth to have updated their knowledge.
And that's the dilemma for apologists. Do they update their arguments and incorporate the latest science into them, which would be honest but would mean continually abandoning old arguments, admitting they were wrong and having to think up some new ones and find smaller and smaller gaps in which to fit their shrinking god, or do they simply continue to try to fool a shrinking target audience and concentrate on those who know nothing about science and so won't have heard the science that refutes the lie they are being sold?
The contrast between science and religious apologetics is starkly revealed here. The KCA manifestly depends on the state of scientific knowledge and understanding of the Universe as it was when the KCA was first stated in its modern form a thousand years ago. This was a Universe centred on Earth where the debate still raged about whether Earth was flat or spherical and magic spirits and demons were assumed to be influencing things. It was a Universe where another physical realm was assumed to exist above the sky, inhabited by magical beings and operating the Universe as a mechanic operates his machines. It was a Universe where angels were assumed to be pushing the stars and planets on their daily circuit of the heavens.
To maintain this position, religious apologists need to avoid incorporating advances in scientific knowledge which undermine any of the basic assumptions which must have seemed intuitively true to people with that primitive level of knowledge and understanding in the eleventh century. As we saw with Richard Bushey's arguments and as we see with the identical ones put forward by people like William Lane Craig, advances in Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, Astrophysics, Particle Physics and Chaos Theory all have to be assiduously ignored because they never support their apologetic. And so religious apologetics becomes more and more detached from reality, increasingly only working in the scientifically illiterate parts of the world where religion's power-base resides and where an understanding of the world is closer to that of an early medieval camel trader or a Bronze-Age nomad than to someone from a twenty-first century, technological society.
They will happily wave science around when they imagine it supports them, or where they imagine their audience will think it does, yet where it destroys their basic premises and assumptions, and so destroys their apologetic altogether, science can be dismissed with the wave of a hand, can be wished away by pretending it isn't there or, with the arrogance of those who believe their faith is the best measure of reality available, can be rationalised as a conspiracy by evil scientists.
And those few apologists who are able to adjust their knowledge and update their thinking will undoubtedly show they will be unable to let go of the basic intellectual dishonesty which underpins their 'art'. They will still insist the metaverse must have begun to exist and that the god they are promoting was the only thing capable of creating it, so simply shifting their argument up one level. And they will still depend on the circularity of demanding we accept a priori that their cause of the metaverse exists and has the properties they have ascribed to it in order to make their conclusion come out the way they want it to.
None of them will do what science does and start from the premise that we don't know, yet, so let's go look at the evidence and see what we can make of it. For an apologist, their 'knowledge' of what the answer will be is the only evidence required. They call this 'faith' and claim the right to special respect and the power to make rules for us based on it.
The Illustrated Sutra of Cause and Effect. 8th century, Japan
In the end, all theological apologetics boil down to one thing - causality. Ignoring for the moment the circularity of assuming your favourite deity doing magic is the only possible cause, then including that assumption to the exclusion of all else, as apologists do with the Cosmological Argument so it always comes up with the god they first thought of, there is still the unsupported assumption that 'everything' must have had one single cause.
Apologists find no difficulty with this assumption yet the more fundamentalist of them get quite hysterical at the thought that all living things might well have had a single common ancestor, but that's a different problem. Let's stick to causality.
Why this assumption?
How many phenomena actually have a single cause?
Let's forget for the moment that some quantum events appear not to have any cause and that the Big Bang, if there ever was a Big Bang, was probably a quantum event, and let's indulge religious apologists and grant them their prefered version of reality in which things happen or not according to the convenience of whatever argument they are trying to deploy at the time. Let's assume that everything that happens actually does have a cause.
Causality (also referred to as causation) is the relation between an event (the cause) and a second event (the effect), where the second event is understood as a consequence of the first.
In common usage, causality is also the relation between a set of factors (causes) and a phenomenon (the effect). Anything that affects an effect is a factor of that effect. A direct factor is a factor that affects an effect directly, that is, without any intervening factors. (Intervening factors are sometimes called "intermediate factors".) The connection between a cause(s) and an effect in this way can also be referred to as a causal nexus.
Now, try this mind experiment. Think of a single event which has a single cause, and not a multiplicity of causes, each of which has a multiplicity of causes.
I've previously blogged about how many apparent basic laws, such as the Gas Laws, are only laws of mass action; emergent properties which depend on statistical probabilities involving chaotic motions of atoms or molecules. Nothing at the level of the atom or molecule is obeying a Gas Law; only in aggregated probability across the whole population does the property emerge from an underlying chaos.
What caused the Herald of Free Enterprise to sink?
Blow a balloon up until it bursts. What single event caused it to burst? Was it the last molecule of air you blew in? What about the effect of all the others? Without them, that last molecule would have had no effect. Was it pressure in your lungs or cheeks? How did that get there? What about the fabric of the balloon; the rubber? Was it the parting of a single atomic bond somewhere in the organic polymer that the rubber is composed of? How did that happen unless it was caused by the mass action of the atoms of air inside the balloon pushing on the balloon skin with a high enough average force exerted by chaotically moving molecules of air?
Make a splash in water by dropping a stone into it. What single event cause that splash? Gravity? Letting the stone fall? How did your fingers move to cause that event? How about the atomic structure of the rock which gave it solidity and enough density to allow it to fall through the air with enough force to push the water molecules out of the way? How many molecules of water constitute a 'splash'? We're back to laws of mass action and emergent properties from the chaos of water molecules again. Even the atoms of the rock and the water, or rather the fundamental particles from which they are made may well be emergent properties from an underlying chaotic structure of force fields and vibrating multi-dimensional superstrings. The positions of fundamental particles in those atoms can only be described as a probability distribution derived from integrating all possible paths through spacetime.
Which snowflake caused the avalanche? How could it have done that without all the others and in the absence of gravity or without the mountain side? And if there is a single, predictable chain of causality in an avalanche it should be entirely predictable. Guess what! It isn't. An avalanche in progress is a system in total chaos and it's not even possible to accurately predict their occurrence. This is what makes them so dangerous.
The problem is we have evolved to deal with reality at the level at which we, as complex, multicellular organisms can perceive it by processing the photons which come into our eyes and the vibrations which come into our ears, or through other senses which only work at the level of organisation within which we operate. There would be no evolutionary advantage in being able to detect things at a different level because we can't eat it, be eaten by it, use it for shelter or have sex with it.
So we assume that the Universe behaves pretty much the way things do in our world. We flick a switch or turn a key and something happens. We throw a spear and it flies through the air. If it hits the antelope in the right place the antelope dies and we get food. We press a key on our keyboard and it makes 'p' appear on our computer screen. We assume a narrative - a story behind the event.
We assume A->B->C->D. We assume that there is a simple chain of causality like there seems to be when we strike the match with which we light the fire which burns the wood which boils the water which cooks the food. Actually, I switch an electric hob-ring on, but you get the point.
In fact almost nothing happens because of a single, identifiable cause or even as the endpoint of a chain of single cause-effects. Normally, many things need to happen, some of them in sequence, some in parallel. We can't throw a spear without our brain firing off a salvo of signals to work a myriad of muscle fibres, coordinated by our eyes detecting incoming photons, processing them and passing signals on to our brains for further processing, and after a complex process by which we've weighed the spear, judge the distance, computed the trajectory and coordinated muscles in our arm, shoulder, hands, legs, back, chest and abdomen. And then, of course, gravity and inertia, explained by Newton's Laws of Motion, takes over, as well as a whole mass of small effects as the spear pushes molecules of air around causing friction and drag. Throwing a spear is not a single event in any causal sense of the word. It is a whole bunch of different events coming together to produce a single effect - the spear travelling from A to B.
So why assume a universe exists because of a single, identifiable cause?
Perhaps the major challenges in physics is to come up with a Grand Unified Theory which unifies quantum mechanics with Einsteinian Relativity because it is assumed there should be a single principle as the basis of all physics. At the moment, Relativity explains gravity while quantum mechanics explains the other three forces - the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism. Because gravity exactly balances the sum of the other three forces, making the total energy in the Universe equal precisely zero, it is assumed they have a common 'cause' expressible by a single theory. The problem is that no one has managed to unify them yet (note: this isn't the same as saying they can't be, or won't be).
But why do we assume there should be a single cause? Why can't relativity and quantum mechanics have different causes which together caused the Universe? Why limit it to two causes even? It is said that a tendency to assume a single cause is more likely in scientists from monotheistic cultures. Is this merely an example of a culturally biased assumption; of intuition over-riding what the evidence points to; of an argument from personal incredulity?
There is of course nothing other than a baseless assumption behind the religious apologist's insistence that the Universe had a single cause, just as there is nothing behind their assumption that the single cause must have been their favourite magic friend. It is nothing more than a manifestation of their insistence that the Universe must be as they require it to be. Just because a medieval theologian who knew nothing of physics or cosmology, and probably believed that Earth was a flat disc round which a small sun orbited, thought there should be a single cause, and just because primitive people from the beginnings of recorded history who knew even less thought that the Universe worked by magic, doesn't mean there is or it does.
Scientists using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN are getting closer to understanding why there is matter in the Universe. So far, they have not detected any gods, nor found any need to include them in any hypotheses.
We have long known that pairs of virtual particles arise spontaneously (that is, unpredictably and without cause) inside a quantum vacuum. These pairs always consist of matter-antimatter pairs which exist for a fraction of a second and then mutually annihilate, releasing energy.
We're reaching into the fabric of the Universe at a level we've never done before. We've kind of completed one particle's story. ... Now we're way out on the edge of a new exploration. This could be the only part of the story that's left, or we could open a whole new realm of discovery.
Professor Joe Incandela, University of California at Santa Barbara
This can be demonstrated with the Casimir Effect where a pair of uncharged metal plated placed a few micrometers apart in a vacuum can exhibit attraction or repulsion depending on their arrangement. This is explained by virtual particles spontaneously forming between the plates.
Incidentally, the spontaneous generation of these particle/antiparticle pairs is an example of an uncaused event, so giving the lie to the Cosmological Argument beloved of religious apologists, that everything that begins to exists must have a cause. This is demonstrably not so with quantum events such as this - and the Big Bang was a quantum event.
But the mystery was why, if there were equal numbers of matter and antimatter particles formed in the initial instant of the Big Bang, why they didn't all annihilate one another almost instantaneously, leaving nothing behind but energy. In other words, why was there an apparent surplus of matter over antimatter when there should have been perfect symmetry.
Now scientists at CERN are beginning to unravel that conundrum. As PC Computerworld US's Sharon Gaudin reports:
CERN reported that when scientists there smashed protons together inside the underground collider, they have been able to create conditions similar to the period soon after the Big Bang. That means they have seen some anti-matter particles.
CERN said they discovered a subatomic particle, dubbed BOs, which decays unevenly into matter and anti-matter. The anti-matter part decays faster than the matter.
It is only the fourth subatomic particle known to exhibit such behavior, scientists noted.
"By studying subtle differences in the behavior of particle and antiparticles, experiments at the [Large Hadron Collider] are seeking to cast light on this dominance of matter over antimatter," CERN reported on Wednesday. "The results are based on the analysis of data collected by the experiment in 2011."
This comes close on a report last month that equipment attached to the International Space Station may have detected particles that could be the building blocks of dark matter which is thought to make up about one quarter of the Universe's mass but which is almost undetectable other than by observing the gravity its mass exerts because it is made of of particles which interact only weakly, if at all, with other particles.
Very gradually, methodically, and without fuss, science is unweaving reality and find no trace of gods or supernatural entities. In fact they have found not the slightest trace, either directly or implicitly, of a supernatural realm at all.
But then, no scientific progress was ever made by anyone who gave up looking and declared it must have been the locally popular deity which did it. Science long ago abandoned Bronze-Age guesswork and declaration of truth by fiat. The result is the modern world which can build such machines as the LHC at CERN.
One of the strings in the theists bow is the argument that the Universe is 'fine-tuned' for the existence of intelligent life in it. It takes many forms from the frankly childish to the scientifically sophisticated but the conclusion is invariably the same - so obviously [insert desired god] did it. It is also one of the hardest for Atheists to counter because the more sophisticated arguments normally take place in the specialist realms of physics and higher maths that few lay people understand well enough to mount a competent rebuttal.
Mind you, it is also one of the hardest for the normal scientifically illiterate Creationists to defend too. It can be quite funny, when they rush excitedly into social media like Twitter announcing that the fine-tuning of the Universe proves their particular favourite god, to ask them why they would expect the values of the 'parameters' to be anything different to what they are. Chances are they won't know what the 'parameters' are, what their values are, or how they have any bearing on the existence of life. Many of them will be hard-pressed to explain what a 'parameter' is, exactly.
It's been the worst kept secret for several days now that the team using the LHC at CERN have found something significant in their search for the Higgs boson - the so-called 'God particle'. In typical scientifically caution language they have found a 'bump' in their data which corresponds to a particle of 125.3 GeV, in other words, just where the Higgs boson was predicted to be, with a confidence "at the 5 sigma point" (that is, with a probability of less then 3.5 in a million of this being due to statistical variance or experimental error).
This is science-speak for saying they are 99.99965% sure they have seen a Higgs boson, which is just about as close as science ever gets to proving anything. Professor Stephen Hawking, who had disputed the existence of the Higgs boson, has conceded that he has lost a $100 bet that the particle would not be found at CERN.
This effectively completes the Standard Model of particle physics because the Higgs field, composed of Higgs bosons, explains why other particles have mass.
Technically, it is the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, and the non-zero value of the ground state of this field gives mass to the other elementary particles such as quarks and electrons through the Higgs mechanism. The Standard Model completely fixes the properties of the Higgs boson, except for its mass. It is expected to have no spin and no electric or color charge, and it interacts with other particles through the weak interaction and Yukawa-type interactions between the various fermions and the Higgs field.
The Higgs particle is name after Peter Ware Higgs the British theoretical physicist and emeritus professor at Edinburgh University, who, in 1964, along with others, predicted the existence of this super-massive particle. Higgs is an atheist and dislikes the term "God particle" because "It might offend religious people". That term is attributed to Richard Lederman [correction: Leon M Lederman] from the title of his 1993 book The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?. However, this may have been at the insistence of his publishers, Dell Publishing, who objected to his original title "The Goddamn Particle". Higgs was a member of CND until they moved to campaign against nuclear power as well as nuclear weapons. He also resigned from Greenpeace because of their opposition to GM.
Professor Joseph Incandela addressing a special conference at CERN
4 July 2012
So, what does this mean for particle physics?
We're reaching into the fabric of the Universe at a level we've never done before. We've kind of completed one particle's story. ... Now we're way out on the edge of a new exploration. This could be the only part of the story that's left, or we could open a whole new realm of discovery.
Professor Joe Incandela, University of California at Santa Barbara
But, of course like every other piece of scientific 'knowledge' no serious scientist would claim ever to have proved the Higgs boson beyond any possible doubt. Note how the level of confidence was expressed as the probability of being wrong. Contrast this with religion, where any shadow of doubt is regarded as heresy and none can ever be admitted for fear that the entire edifice will collapse. People have been killed for expressing doubt. What Christian or Muslim would try to put a probability on there not being a god other than zero?
This is an important result and should earn Peter Higgs the Nobel prize.
Stephen Hawking
Note too how this discovery almost certainly validates a prediction of theoretical physics made 48 years ago. This illustrates the nature of science and how a theory is used to make predictions which are then experimentally tested or measurements and observations are made which either confirm or falsify the theory. And of course, either result would be equally good science. A falsified theory will need to be revised or scrapped. A validated theory can be used as a platform on which to stand and build new theories which can be tested in turn. And so science progresses, building on the discoveries of the past to investigate new areas or to understand better where our understanding is incomplete.
What Christian or Muslim would ever make a testable, and so falsifiable, prediction based on their god hypothesis? Indeed, how could such a hypothesis ever be falsified when it is so carefully constructed and hedged around with definitions intended to make it unfalsifiable?
As Joe Incandela said, "...we could open a whole new realm of discovery". For science, the end of one journey is just the beginning of another. Having broken through the Higgs boson barrier, We can now go on to explore the fabric of reality.
Another gap has been closed by science, and, once again, no god was found and none proved to be necessary. This is the great thing about knowing you could be wrong - you set out to find out if you are, or not, and so you find new things to discover and realise there is more you do not know. Religions, by claiming to know all the answers and by being too afraid to question even that assumption, have remained stuck in the Bronze Age, from a time before science invented the wheel, and they have never produced a single discovery which was of the slightest use to mankind.
But then, if religions had any evidence, like science there would only be one, and it would also be science.
Here we are at Chapter 13 of the Creationist 'science' book, It's A Young World After All, by assistant professor of psychology, Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD.
In case you are new to this series:
To judge by his writing, Dr Ackerman seems to have no formal qualifications in science subjects nor much in the way of understanding of scientific methodology. There is no record of him publishing any research papers in a peer-reviewed science journal nor of presenting any to an audience of professional scientists. Nevertheless he feels qualified to write about science for a Creationist readership. His academic qualifications appear to be confined to his speciality - psychology.
This is the last chapter in which Dr Ackerman purports to deal with specific scientific claims. I get the impression that he had a few fallacies left over which he hadn't been able to fit into the preceding chapters, so he created this rag-bag of leftover scraps as somewhere to put them. The simplest approach is probably to deal with them as they come.
The argument of this book is that the universe is quite young. If the universe can be shown to be young, then evolution is ruled out, since all agree that the evolutionary process requires vast numbers of years. Time is often viewed as the great friend of evolution, supposedly performing all the miracles of creation that in the Bible are attributed to God. The famous Harvard professor George Wald has explained the evolutionists' view of the importance of time as follows:
The important point is that since the origin of life belongs in the category of at-least-once phenomena, time is on its side. However improbable we regard this event. . . given enough time it will almost certainly happen at least once. . . . Time is in fact the hero of the plot. . . . Given so much time, the "impossible" becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait; time itself performs miracles.
Of course this is true and it shows us what Dr Ackerman is concerned about. "If the universe can be shown to be young, then evolution is ruled out..." So, if Dr Ackerman can persuade you to believe the universe is young, he can persuade you that evolution can be ruled out. Something of a give-away that, and it helps explain his extensive use of bad science and fallacies, aimed, as they are, at a largely scientifically unsophisticated and uncritical audience.
No, this is not a Creationist writing another 'science' book.
A better-known form of the evolution-through-limitless-time argument is the monkey-and-typewriter illustration. Physicist William R. Bennett, Jr., has stated it this way: "Nearly everyone knows that if enough monkeys [my emphasis] were allowed to pound away at typewriters for enough time, all the great works of literature would result."
Something about this argument is intuitively persuasive.
Obviously, if the monkeys were to type long enough, one of them would inevitably type the word to, and with just a little more time surely no one would be surprised to find the word two. And if such circumstances produced to and two, then why not eventually four, eight, and finally a complete sentence, paragraph, and so on?
The question of whether or not time is actually on the side of evolution, as Wald and Bennett maintain, is an important one even if, as this book argues, there is very little of it to work with. The fact of the matter is that time is not a friend of evolution. It is evolution's enemy.
To put it simply, if a monkey[my emphasis] is going to type a literary work, it will need to get the job done in a hurry. Time will work against the monkey's literary efforts as well as against any similar uphill evolutionary process in the real world. This fact is reflected in what scientists call the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that all real processes in the physical universe—when isolated and left to themselves—go irreversibly downhill toward increasing disorder and chaos.
The first thing to notice here is the subtle change from 'enough monkeys' to 'a monkey'. The actual monkey-and-typewriter illustration said that if an infinite number of monkeys could type on an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite amount of time, at least one of them would type the complete works of Shakespeare. It was meant to help understand the nature of infinity and how, when we include it in a calculation, anything is possible, no matter how unlikely it is. It can easily be mathematically proven, but it was never an argument for evolution and, so far as I am aware, it has never been used as an argument for it.
Using a single monkey doesn't change the logic because we are talking about infinite time, but what Dr Ackerman seems to be trying here is the fallacy that evolution depends on a single accumulation of probabilities to result in something pre-defined and specific, hence his subtle change to 'a monkey'. Evolution is, of course, not an explanation for convergence on a single pre-defined outcome; it is an explanation for divergence into many outcomes - as many as there are species, sub-species, varieties and variations in nature. Dr Ackerman's 'argument' is nothing more than a straw man; a ridiculous caricature intended to be easily ridiculed and dismissed. Straw man arguments are usually a sign either of ignorance or deliberate dishonesty.
Evolution by natural selection is emphatically not the kind of process that Dr Ackerman is presenting it as. It is not a process which is trying to produce a specific outcome and it is not a single accumulation event. I went into this in some detain in Why You? Briefly, it's the difference between dealing a specific hand of 13 cards from a pack of 52, and dealing any hand from the same pack.
Dr Ackerman either believes himself, or assumes his readers will believe, that the TOE is trying to explain how evolution dealt a specific hand at every deal. It is not. It explains how, at each generation, some individuals with a particular 'hand' of cards were more successful at dealing copies of their 'hand' and some were less so, and how this filtering process resulted in the next generation having a 'hand' they were more likely to be able to deal in that environment whilst other lines of evolving 'hands' were more successful in other environments, so they tended to deal different 'hands'. And, of course, the 'hands' they were dealing tended to change slightly because the mechanism for producing new cards is not always perfect.
There was never a specific 'hand' which evolution was trying to deal, hence we have diversification and not convergence on a specific type, as in the infinite monkey example. If we are looking for a specific outcome from the process of evolution by natural selection the only possible one is that it produces a next generation which is slightly better at producing the next generation, in that gene line, in that environment.
Another subtle 'error' in Dr Ackerman's argument here is the assumption that an evolving line only has a single ancestor at each preceding generation. This is, after all, the only rationale behind his error in accumulating probabilities to produce a single hugely unlikely improbability. Yet we know that we each have an exponentially expanding number of ancestors, hence the accumulated probabilities tend to be focussed on each generation from many gene lines, after having been filtered for ability to replicate successfully by natural selection.
With a trillion ancestors a thousand years ago, the probability of one of them having a beneficial mutation is extremely high, even if the likelihood of that mutation is one in ten million. If that stands a better chance of being replicated (which it would do it it is beneficial) then that probability of it being inherited is increased in the next generation, until, by the time it reached your generation some thousands of years later, if has become highly probable that you will inherit it.
Meanwhile, other highly improbably beneficial mutations will have occurred in other remote ancestors, and the probability of you inheriting that one is also high. The probability of you inheriting one does not affect the probability of you inheriting the others. So the chances of you inheriting a whole bunch of beneficial mutations together is extremely high, not highly unlikely as Dr Ackerman wants you to believe.
Note that, in all this, the mutation only had to happen once. It does not have to happen in every generation. Once it has happened, if it conveys an advantage, then its occurrence will tend to increase in subsequent generations. If it conveys a disadvantage then it's occurrence will diminish in subsequent generation, if it is not immediately removed.
Yes, okay you couldn't have had a trillion ancestors a thousand years ago because there weren't that many people then. That means you are related to a very large proportion of those who were around then, so you are benefiting from almost all their advantageous mutations and, because natural selection will remove any disadvantageous mutations very quickly, the probability of you inheriting one of those quickly becomes almost zero.
In terms of the typewriting-monkey example, it means that along with the accumulating chance of producing something meaningful as time increases, there must also be a consideration of the more rapidly accumulating chance that the monkey, typewriter, or both will break down. Thus, the longer the monkey types, the greater the chance that its typewriter will break. If it would take a million years for the monkey to accidentally hammer out something as meaningful as a good poem or short story, there is no chance whatsoever that the typewriter would last that long—to mention nothing of the monkey or its paper supply!
I'm beginning to wonder if Karl Pilkington is Dr Ackerman in disguise. I'm certainly beginning to feel like Ricky Gervais in this video.
Evolution does not depend on mechanical typewriters, a supply of paper or longevity of monkeys. This point is so infantile it is scarcely worth commenting upon. All it tells us is either that Dr Ackerman has misunderstood his own straw man or that he is hoping his readers will have. Quite frankly, this passage insults the intelligence even of his target audience of Creationists. To me, it suggests he holds his readers in a contempt far in excess of anything they deserve. If there were such a thing as a Code of Conduct or ethical standards for professional Creationists, this would surely risk him being struck off.
In the real world, any system posited to produce ordered and meaningful outcomes will inevitably be subject to the processes of decay and disordering known to scientists as the law of entropy (Second Law of Thermodynamics). Time is no friend of evolution.
At last our old friend the Second Law of Thermodynamics makes its appearance!
The entropy of any closed system not in thermal equilibrium almost always increases. Closed systems spontaneously evolve towards thermal equilibrium -- the state of maximum entropy of the system -- in a process known as "thermalization". Equivalently, perpetual motion machines of the second kind are impossible.
Note the words 'closed system'. They are not there just to make the Second Law a bit longer; they are an essential part of it. The only truly closed system is the Universe itself. No localised part of the Universe is closed, and especially not Earth or living systems. The only thing essentially required to overcome the tendency towards increased entropy (in other words, Dr Ackerman's 'processes of decay and disordering') is energy. Given that he spent so long in Chapter 6 talking about the sun, it's difficult to believe he is unaware of it as the major source of energy on Earth. It's also difficult to believe that, as a grown adult, he is unaware that living things take in food as a source of energy and use that energy to drive their metabolism. Maybe, as a non-biologist, he is simply unaware that 'life' is, at it's lowest level, nothing more than anti-entropy machines.
Until recently, life on Earth was thought to be entirely dependent on solar energy, however, with the discovery of the deep ocean volcanic vents, particularly in the Pacific, we now know that geothermal energy can also be used by some specialised organisms. In both those systems, an increase in entropy in the energy source results ultimately in a decrease in entropy in the living organisms, but the total result is increased entropy so the system as a whole obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
And that is just about that so far as Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD.'s substantive claims go. Not a single one of them has proved to be based on real science, or supported by science, or to disprove science in ways in which he either thinks it does or wants his readers to think it does. Most of his 'evidence' is equally fanciful nonsense from other Creationists, some of which is frankly, made up.
If anything, this singularly inept attempt to falsify Darwinian Evolution with bad science serves only to emphasis just how well supported the TOE is by the other sciences. Just as with the Laws of Thermodynamics, where we can say with as close to certainty as science ever gets, that if a theory seems to falsify the Laws of Thermodynamics then the theory is wrong, so we are close to being able to say that if science seems to falsify the TOE, then the science is wrong.
Dr Ackerman fails to falsify the TOE because his science is quite laughably wrong.
Had this book been subjected to peer review by proper scientists every chapter would have been struck out. The final chapter is simply a statement of 'faith', that is, unsubstantiated assertions, and little bits of motivational gibberish designed to make his readers feel smugly superior to those crazy know-nothing scientists and that gang of evolutionists who are trying to trick them into losing their faith and think they are descended from monkeys.
To show the world you know you need to lie for your 'faith' is to show the world you know your faith is a lie.
For a change, a purely science blog rather than explaining the idiocy of creationism, Bible literalism and superstitious belief in magic in general.
One of the hardest things for a human to imagine is the idea of curved space. We have evolved in a three-dimensional world in which lines projected in each of the three dimensions carry on in a straight line at 90 degrees to one another and never meet, yet we are told, and Relativity supports the idea, that if we could build a powerful enough telescope and look far enough in front of us we could see the back of our own head. This is because the mass of the universe curves space in on itself. So, our three lines projected at right angles to one another all meet up eventually.
Exploring this thought a little led me to an interesting idea which I'm not sure I have grasped completely, it seems so intuitively untrue, yet, like Xeno's Paradox, logically true.
Just by looking up into the night sky, we can see objects which have turned out to be distant galaxies, often several million light years away. What this means is that we are looking back at the history of that object as it was when the light we are now seeing left it several million years ago. With light travelling at 186,000 miles per second, an object 1 million light years away will have been 186,000,000,000 (that's 186 billion) miles away 1 million years ago.
With a small home telescopes we can see even more objects, even further away and by using even more powerful telescopes we can see further still to objects possibly a billion or more light years away. We would now be seeing objects maybe 186,000,000,000,000 miles away.
Now, because the light from these objects has taken so long to reach us, and because we know the universe is expanding, we know that these objects are not now where they appear to be. They are now even further away from us. In fact, this recession is what causes the famous Red Shift, which incidentally holds true for every point in space because it's the space between objects which is increasing, which is not the same thing as everything moving away from a central point.
So, if we regard the range of our increasingly powerful telescopes as a sphere increasing in size with each increase in power we have the idea of an expanding sphere ever increasing in volume as the power increases. For the want of a better term, I will call this a 'sphere of perception'. Think of it as an expanding bubble seen from the inside.
Now, there is a limit to what any telescope could show us because we will also be looking further and further back into the universe's past and we will reach a barrier through which no light, or radio waves, etc. could pass. Until 300,000 after the Big Bang, the universe was opaque. This was because the temperature was so high it would have been impossible for electrons and protons to form any stable, electrically neutral, arrangements like hydrogen atoms or neutrons without high-energy photons smashing them apart, so there were no stable neutral particles. This meant that all particles interacted with all electromagnetic radiation and photons could not go anywhere, let alone pass through it. When, at about 300,000 years, the temperature fell far enough, protons could capture electrons to form hydrogen, and stable neutrons could form, sometimes binding with more protons to form larger atomic nuclei, and capture charged electrons to form electrically neutral atomic matter. At that point photons became free to stream through the universe and it became transparent.
So, even our most powerful telescopes our expanding sphere of perception would be physically limited to the universe as it was when it was just 300,000 years old. Our expanding sphere of perception would now be 13.73 billion light years. In other words, the radius would be the distance light has travelled in 13.73 billion years.
But supposing we could somehow see through this barrier and beyond, right back to the moment the universe came into existence 13.76 billion years ago...
How big would our expanding sphere of perception be now?
At the moment of the Big Bang, our sphere of perception would be the size of a singularity and it would occupy a 'space' inside where we now stand, albeit a 'space' that was there 13.76 billion years ago. You wouldn't really see the back of your own head because your head wasn't there in those days.
And even if we couldn't get past the 300,000 year barrier, our sphere of perception would only be as large as the expanding universe was after 300,000 years.
So, how is our sphere of perception both expanding and moving further away (intuitively) and contracting and getting closer (logically)? The thing which we thought was getting larger and moving further away was actually getting smaller and moving towards us, but just getting further away in time.
The answer to this is, I think, that light has not travelled in a straight line through space-time but has curved outwards as the universe has expanded. And so we 'see' a universe which appears to get larger as we look further back in time, whereas the reality is that it gets smaller. The problem is that we are using an intuition which was never evolved for the purpose for which we are trying to use it.
According to the Bible, God once flooded the earth to a depth which covered the highest mountains (Genesis 7:20 Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered). I expect a cubit was pretty big in those days because Everest's peak is 30,000 feet above sea level, so a cubit must have been 2,000 feet.
Moving on...
Now, let's assume an average depth of 15,000 feet of additional water above the former sea level.
Obviously that additional mass of water would have given Earth additional mass, which would have affected at least four or five things in the Sun-Earth-Moon system and to the inner planets.
BTW, I'm not a physicist so I'm happy to be corrected by someone who is. Hopefully, someone can do the sums and fill in the detail for me.
To conserve angular momentum, the speed of rotation of the Earth would have needed to slow down so days would have lengthened.
Similarly to conserve angular momentum in earth's orbit around the Sun, Earth would have needed to move away from the sun into a larger orbit to give a longer year.
As Earth moved out towards the orbit of Mars and away from Venus these would have been disturbed in their orbits which would need to adjust accordingly.
The additional mass of Earth would have pulled the Moon into a closer orbit.
So, to all you creationists who believe the science supports a literal interpretation of the Bible and the inerrancy of the Noah's Ark story, complete with global flood, and who keep telling us how you've all studied science and are experts in stuff like physics, these questions should all be answerable with ease.
Real physicists might like to have a go at this too, please. I'd love to know the answers myself. "A magic man did it by magic" seems such an unsatisfactory answer somehow.
By how much would Earth's rotation have slowed down and how long would the days have been?
How far out from the Sun would Earth have moved and how long would a year have lasted?
How would the orbits of Mars, Venus, and maybe Mercury and Jupiter have been changed by the change in Earth's orbit?
How much closer to Earth would the Moon have moved and why did it not get pulled into Earth to destroy both bodies in a catastrophic collision?
By how much would the temperature have fallen on Earth as it moved away from the Sun and how did the water remain liquid at this low temperature so the Ark could float about?
Or would it be easier to conclude that the story is one of the least plausible in all mythology and could only have been made up by people completely ignorant of basic physics and astronomy?
Gravitational waves: Scientists might be about to announce detection of 'ripples in the fabric of spacetime' | Independent.
