Thoughts on Quantum Mechanics

Found this paper by Jeremy Bernstein discussing his understanding of the current debate between physicists concerning quantum mechanics and the problem of measurement.

A very interesting paper on a very lively debate about how physicist should think about the future and the past as it relates to quantum scale events. The most interesting aspect of the debate, to me, is how physicists are still grappling with the apparent determinateness and indeterminateness of physics as it relates to past and future events.

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1012/1012.1020.pdf

Conclusions we can draw from historical evidence. A response to William Lane Craig’s failed reasoning.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjOSNj97_gk

and the transcript if you like http://www.philvaz.com/apologetics/p96.htm

Watch the video above or read the transcript, or really see any of his debates, and you will have enough background to understand the purpose of this essay. People, even with P.h.D’s in philosophy and expertise in their field of study, use bad reasoning glossed over with a veneer of seeming plausability to convince people of irrational ways of understanding the world. Hopefully, I can expose some of this bad reasoning

When talking about the historicity of the event of Jesus’s resurrection, Dr Craig commonly cites 4 facts that he claims are independently verified and accepted among current scholars and experts on this particular subject of historical study. I am willing to grant this point, as it is his conclusion resulting from these facts, namely that it is most reasonable to conclude that Jesus rose from the dead, that is terribly flawed. I think most people of a skeptical mindset have an innate sense as to why this is so, but I have never come across a thorough explanation that did not require a philosophical background to understand. I will attempt to elucidate the reasons why it is unreasonable to make Dr. Craig’s conclusion, and explain the conditions under which it necessary to reach the conclusion he reaches. I will begin with a somewhat rough treatment of what separates some assertions from others, in regard to the level of certainty we can ascribe to them.

For any assertion we can make there is a corresponding degree of certainty that is attached to that statement. It is also reasonable, in the interest of truth, that the degree of certainty we attach to any particular assertion correlates in equal measure to the evidence in support of that assertion. If we were to represent this on a scale, an assertion would fall somewhere between absolutely certain and absolutely false, with these polar extremes being largely illustrative as they are, in reality, unobtainable. Even the strongest assertions of science cannot be fully spared from doubt. Indeed, it is the assiduous application of doubt that keeps these assertions strong. On the opposite end, as long as there is some mystery left in the world there is no assertion that we can fully discount.

Scientific assertions, being the most rigorously tested in controlled settings, and as such fully vulnerable to destruction by inconsistent facts, populate the upper echelons of this scale. This is reasonable, as scientific assertions have a community of devoted thinkers and experimenters constantly endeavoring to test and overthrow them. It is also a testament to the strength of these assertions that they have transformed our society and enlarged our powers in such meaningful and readily tangible ways.

Historical assertions occupy a lower echelon, as they deal with events that are inherently unrepeatable, and with evidence, such as witness testimony, that is often unreliable and tainted by the biases of both the recorder of historical events and the individual investigating them. That is not to say that scientific assertions are not tainted by bias as well, but scientists study events that are often repeatedly occurring, and are able to design experiments with the explicit intention of minimizing or removing the biases of the investigator. They have much more control over the conditions under which they encounter information, and because of this, can draw much stronger conclusions.

However, while assertions regarding historical truth are less certain than scientific assertions, they are still reasonable to believe lacking other, more evidenced claims. We find it perfectly reasonable to believe that Julius Caesar existed, based entirely off of historical evidence. But here we come to the crux of the issue at hand. When examining historical events, or supposed events, why should some, perhaps appealing to respected historians of the time, be taken as reasonable to believe, while others with seemingly equal amounts of evidence or eyewitness testimony, and sometimes appealing to other respected historians with differing opinions, be regarded as apocryphal?

Now, I am not a historian, and do not claim expertise in the examination and evaluation of historical evidence according to respected standards. However, there is one way by which historical evidence can be examined which does not require expertise in the specific methods of historical examination. The sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology make assertions about how our world behaves; assertions which are evidenced to a much higher degree of certainty than can be achieved by historical evidence alone. In the case where a historical event is said to have taken place that is countered by scientific evidence that asserts that it could not have happened as it has been represented to have happened, according to known processes of chemistry, biology, and physics, then it is unreasonable to believe this event took place.

That is not to say that these things cannot happen, or that the event did not happen as described. Science does not make absolutely certain conclusions, there is always room for doubt. This means only that current scientific conclusions are more reasonable to be believed than conclusions based solely off of historical evidence. According to the current known processes of chemistry and biology, the cascade of cellular destruction and the progressive disorganization of a very particularly organized biological organism, a process we call death, cannot be reversed, and it is unreasonable to believe at this time that it can. This would also include the miracles of Christ, the actions Greek gods, or any other witnessed phenomena of this nature. Even if one were to say that resurrection was possible, the method of establishing this would not be in plowing through historical accounts, and there are numerous ones, where it has been claimed to have occurred; it would be in a laboratory, under controlled settings, and one would have to particularly describe how it occurs.

The only time it would be reasonable to reach Dr. Craig’s conclusion is if one previously believed that things like resurrection can and have occurred. Does Dr. Craig explain how the resurrection occurred? He must bring in another actor, God, a being of infinite power, who does it by a process we know nothing about. His position that his conclusion is reasonable on its own grounds is dishonest. It is only reasonable if one previously assumes the existence of a powerful being with both the ability and desire to perform a resurrection. It’s interesting to carry on this method of reasoning. As it is reasonable, in Dr. Craig’s opinion, to assume the existence of all-powerful beings as explanations for historical accounts of a supernatural nature, it is also reasonable to believe other accounts of supernatural happenings for which there are multiple, independent sources or witnesses claiming they have occurred, and for which we lack other, similarly evidenced explanations. Indeed, the chief reason Dr. Craig argues that it is reasonable to conclude as he does is that no one else, at the time people were declaring that a miracle had occurred, advanced an alternative explanation for Craig’s four facts, and because of this an alternative explanation must be made up by modern historians, something that gives Dr. Craig adequate fodder for rebuttal and the position that seemingly has the more credible claim.

However, we all know that historical accounts must be edited for fantastical claims. The people writing these accounts lived thousands of years ago, and believed all kinds of incredible things. We do this all the time when reading the accounts of the actions of Greek or Roman gods, or the insights into the afterlife given by Egyptian priests. We don’t put coins in the eyes of deceased loved ones to pay Charon to ferry their spirits across the river Styx because of this. Curiously, it is only in regard to historical events that would be uncomfortable for us to deny that we forget this fact, and our amnesia passes as quickly as we pass to areas where we wield our skepticism more comfortably.

Explorations in the Realm of Numbers

Most people are not fascinated by mathematics.  It is generally viewed as either a pedantic, mundane business made obsolete by calculators, or an esoteric, inscrutable pursuit relegated to a few hardy souls with a head for that sort of thing.  However, there are some surprising, even shocking, results which are not really all that esoteric and which may have a profound impact on the very concept of number itself.

Enter Frank Benford, an industrial physicist for General Electric in the 1930's.  Back then they did not have computers or even calculators, and probably had to walk twenty miles to and from work every day, in the snow, uphill both ways.  So when somebody like Dr. Benford had to multiply two really big numbers like 143 and 2697 they had two choices: sit down with a pencil and paper for about half an hour, or look up the result in a giant book of logarithmic tables for an answer that somebody else already found by sitting down with a pencil and paper for about half an hour.  Being a physicist, Frank Benford had to do this quite often and after a while he began to notice something rather strange.  The book was laid out in numeric order, which was not so strange, with the numbers starting with 1 at beginning all the way down to the 9's at the end of the book.  What Dr. Benford noticed was that the first parts of the book were dirtier, more creased, and generally more worn out than the last parts of the book.  The greater wear and tear on the first half of the book indicated that he was looking up numbers starting with 1, 2, and 3 a lot more than those that start with 7, 8,, or 9.  Being a physicist, Dr. Benford did not just shrug and think to himself "oh well, that's an interesting coincidence".  Being a physicist, he decided there must be something bigger at work here, some strange, interesting reason why he would be using numbers that start with 1 a lot more than numbers that start with 9.  And it is strange if you think about it, there are 9 numbers from 1 to 9 (duh) so you would expect that each number would show up one ninth of the time, or about 11.1%.

So Dr Benford started collecting numbers...lots of numbers.  He compiled tens of thousands of statistics and found that no matter what the number described, no matter what units the numbers were in, be it feet, meters, degrees or whatever, they all displayed a certain pattern. You guessed it, the 1's, 2’s and 3's occurred as the first digit a lot more than 7's 8's and 9's.  Is your mind blown yet?  Why would the lengths of rivers, heights of buildings, populations of towns, numbers on tax returns, or even specific heats of materials or molecular weights of compounds follow this pattern?  Guess what?  It's not a coincidence.  It is now a proven mathematical law.  

As sure as 1+1=2, numbers starting with a 1 are a lot more common than numbers starting with 9.

That is a very surprising result indeed!  So why is that?  Why is it a mathematical truth that collections of “random” numbers begin with 1’s more often than 2’s and 2’s more often than 3’s and so on?  Is there some sort of Universal conspiracy? 

Not really.  Benford's law is a little creepy, but it only works for numbers distributed over multiple orders of magnitude.  For example, if "town" is defined as settlements of population greater than 500 and less than 1000, then the list of town populations will not follow Benford's law.  This is actually a clue as to why numbers are distributed in such a fashion.  It's not some spooky conspiracy, it arises from the fact that logarithms of numbers are distributed evenly.  Common sense assumes that the first digit of a number in a collection has an equal chance of being a 1 through 9.  What actually happens is that the logarithms of numbers are evenly distributed in such a fashion.  That means that a number is just as likely to be between 100 and 1000 (logarithm 2 and 3) as between 10,000 and 100,000 (logarithm 4 and 5).

Perhaps it is strange, foreign even, that a concept as abstract as logarithms has such a profound effect on the numbers we use every day.  It just so happens that logarithms are not really so abstract after all and the "numbers we use every day" are in fact much more abstract constructions than most people would ever know.

To investigate this statement a little further we shall turn to the work of Stanislas Dahaene, one of Europe’s leading cognitive neuroscientists.  He wrote a book called “The Number Sense” in which he outlined his work on how babies think about numbers.  Many people would assume that babies are a blank slate and are taught numbers and counting by relating the word for each number with a quantity.  However, babies are actually born with an innate sense of number and quantity, it's just not the sense that we're used to thinking in.  Babies, in fact, think logarithmically, not linearly.  It is only by thorough teaching of "how to count" that they learn to think numerically in terms that we are all familiar with as adults. 

One might ask then, what happens if a baby is never taught "how to count"?  To answer this question we turn to the Piraha.  They're one of the few indigineous, hunter-gatherer tribes left in the Amazon region of South America and they all think about numbers in the same way as babies.  An example of this is as follows; what number lies between 1 and 9?  The answer, of course, is five.  However, a Piraha would answer 3.  That is because linearly, in terms of 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, the number in the middle is 5.  But in logarithmic terms, which is really just in terms of ratios, the answer is 3 because 3 is the triple of 1 and the triple of 3 is 9.  So 1 is to 3 as 3 is to 9, that's why 3 is exactly between 1 and 9.

Such reasoning might seem much more complex than simply counting from 1 to 9 but, believe it or not, that is how the human brain is wired.  We actually have to rewire our brain to think about numbers in the "more simple" linear way.

Hopefully this titillating tidbit of trivia has sparked some reflection on the nature of number and the hidden consequences of imposing abstract ideas such as "one" and "two" etc. on quantities of objects in the real world.

We need better internet

Video of my friend Chris testifying before the FCC on the need to resist the stultifying efforts of internet service providers and what we should do about it. Rise up Denizens of the webverse, or watch your beloved internet cut up into channel packages so Verizon and At&t can roll around in larger piles of your hard-earned cash

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMQS_TJPp7s&feature=player_embedded