Very Nice Post on Cosmic Rays

This week’s Ask Ethan has a very nice post on cosmic rays, their origins, and how they interact with the Earth.  Recommended reading.

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/12/06/ask-ethan-14-the-highest-energy-particles-in-the-universe/

Jensen K, Karch A. Holographic Dual of an Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Pair has a Wormhole. Phys. Rev. Lett. 2013;111(21)

Quoted from Brian Koberlein, Rochestor, NY.

Entanglement is a well-known property of quantum mechanics.  It is perhaps most famously demonstrated through the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) experiment.  Suppose we have a mischievous mutual friend.  She decides to prank us by sending sending each of us one member of a pair of gloves.  She packs each glove in a box and mails one to each of us.  We find out about the prank, so we both know that we’re getting one glove of a pair.  But until either of us open our respective box, neither of us know which glove we have.  Once the box arrives at your door, you open it up, and find you have the left glove.  At that moment you know I must have the right glove.

This is the basic idea of the EPR experiment.  For gloves it isn’t a big deal, because from the get-go the left glove was heading your way.  You just didn’t know you were getting the left glove.  That’s because gloves are not quantum things.  In the quantum regime, things get much more strange.  In quantum theory, things can be in an indefinite state until you observe them.  It would be as if our boxes contained a pair of something (gloves, shoes, salt and pepper shakers, etc.) but it is impossible to know what specific something until one of us opens their box.

In quantum theory we would say the boxes contain a superposition of possible things, and the outcome only becomes definite when the outcome is observed.  Now even though you can’t know what specific object you have, you know that I must have its pair.  So if you open the box to find a red right shoe, you know immediately that I must have a red left shoe.  We both know this without opening the box, so we can say that the outcomes of opening our boxes are entangled.  Knowing the contents of one box tells us the contents of the other.  We’ve actually done this experiment with photons, atoms and the like, and it really works.

Of course this is really hard to wrap your head around.  If I’m thousands of miles away from you, and I open my box to find a salt shaker, I know you must have a pepper shaker.  But your box couldn’t have known that until I opened the box.  How is that possible?  How can the opening of my box instantly affect your box thousands of miles away?  Do the boxes communicate faster than light? (No.)  Is there some secret (hidden variable) so that the boxes know what they will become when observed? (No.)  That is part of what makes entanglement so strange, and the EPR experiment so popular.  The one thing we can say is that entanglement is a very real physical effect in quantum mechanics.  There isn’t anything magical going on, just something we humans find strange.

Wormholes come from general relativity.  Unlike entanglement, there is no experimental evidence for wormholes.  Instead, they are a hypothetical connection between two locations in space.  Normally when people think of wormholes, they think of something out of science fiction (http://goo.gl/nz5SV2) where people use wormholes to travel to distant stars, but the hypothetical wormholes in general relativity aren’t traversible, nor do they have to be large.

This particular paper is looking at how there might be a connection between wormholes and quantum particles.  This idea isn’t new, in fact the idea that fundamental particles could be wormholes dates back to the 1950s, when John Wheeler proposed a model known as geometrodynamics, where everything was empty space and charged particles were the mouths of wormholes.  Wheeler was an excellent physicist known for coming up with a lot of wild ideas, some of which worked, and some of which didn’t.  In the case of geometrodynamics, it never really worked, and after a while interest faded.

But with the rise of string theory, different versions of the idea have gained some popularity.  Hence this new paper.  What the authors did was to look at a specific case of the EPR experiment, dealing with two quark particles.  What they were able to show is that the entangled quarks can be described in two ways.  The first is the standard way in which entanglement is described in quantum theory, but the second (dual) way is as two particles connected by a wormhole.  Both of these descriptions are equivalent.

Does this mean that entangled particles are wormholes?  No.  What it means is that there is an interesting connection between the mathematics of entanglement and the mathematics of quantum wormholes.  Just to be clear, this has nothing to do with any new experimental evidence.   But it is interesting, because it shows a connection between quantum entanglement and general relativity, and that may lead the way toward a better understanding of quantum gravity.

John Lennon RIP

	C	Cmai7	F	C	Cmai7	F
	Im	agine	th	er	e's no	heaven, it's easy if you try

	C	Cmai7	F	C	Cmai7	F
	No	hell	be	lo	w us,	above us only sky

	Am	Dm	G	G7
	Ima	gin	e	all the people, living for to day. A-ha..

Imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do.

Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.

Imagine all the people, living for to day. You-u..

	F	G	C	F	G	C	E
	Yo	u	ma	y	sa	y	I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

	F	G	C	E
	I	ho	pe	some day you'll join us,

	F	G	C
	An	d	the world will be one

Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can

No need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people, sharing all the world. You-u..

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

I hope some day you'll join us,

And the world will live as one http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=john+lennon&sm=3

Philosophy and the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Nicholar Joll

http://books.google.dk/books?id=VuAgtqaPBvoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=subject:%22Philosophy%22&hl=da&sa=X&ei=LJSkUsSNFunJsQTqkYLADA#v=onepage&q&f=true

"Philosophy and the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy"

For full details go to the link above.  Sounds utterly fascinating.  I wasn't able to extract any info or pictures to show here.  Another link is http://najoll.wordpress.com/hitchhiker-philosophy/.  I got the following information:

Nicholas Joll, philosopher

Philosophy and THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY

‘[A] very readable and mind-expanding collection’ – The Guardian, 8/9/2012 (and online here)

For a list of contributors to the book, please click here.

News

Julian Baggini on the World Service’s Newshour programme (via BBC Listen Again) on Hitchhiker’s and how it is philosophical. That material starts 47 minutes through.

The slides from my Hitchhiker’s Towel Day talk (at Cambridge Central Library, May 25th 2013).

Radio interview from 12/09/2012: me talking about the Hitchhiker book with Sean Moncrieff on Newstalk Ireland.

Reviews

• The aforementioned Guardian review is here.
• The book has a 4.5 out of 5 rating on Goodreads.
• Another review.
• Reviews are forthcoming in (1) Philosophy Now magazine (and there is a sort of draft of that review here), (2) the journal Philosophical Quarterly.

Try and Buy

Buy the Hitchhiker book (in handsome paperback or rather nice e-book) from

• the UK’s Guardian newspaper
• the publisher, Palgrave Macmillan
• various independent U.K. bookshops (via ‘Hive’, a tool for shopping locally online)
• Amazon.co.uk
• Amazon.com
• or from one of the other Amazon sites such as Amazon.caand Amazon.de
• or (e-book only) Google Play

Excerpts (try before you buy!)

1. the book’s front matter (PDF file) including the preface and the contents pages (the latter being separately available as a JPG) (and this whole bundle is the one available via the ‘send to’ link in the sidebar on the right of this page) ©
2. part of the Introduction (PDF) ©
3. the book’s index of ‘philosophers, sages, luminaries, and other thinking persons’ (webpage) ©
4. a larger image of the cover (in a PDF) ©

Understanding psychology as a science: an introduction to scientific and statistical inference

Zoltán Dienes

Palgrave Macmillan, May 13, 2008 - Philosophy - 170 pages

ttp://books.google.dk/books/about/Understanding_psychology_as_a_science.html?id=LY5WAAAAYAAJ

An accessible and illuminating exploration of the conceptual basisof scientific and statistical inference and the practical impact this has on conducting psychological research. The book encourages a critical discussion of the different approaches and looks at some of the most important thinkers and their influence.

The VASIMR Plasma Rocket: Bridging the Gap in Space Travel

by William W. on November 22, 2013

Plasma rocket technology was first introduced to the scientific community in 1977 by Franklin Chang Díaz, a Costa Rican scientist and astronaut. The idea has been developed since then and is now at the stage where it can be implemented into future projects. The technology allows for considerably faster space travel than what the technologies currently employed by organizations such as NASA can do.

What is the VASIMR Plasma Rocket?

VASIMR stands for Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket, which makes use of argon gas (one of the most stable gasses known to man) and a renewable source of energy found in space, radio waves in the form of light. The main difference with this type of rocket is being able to use mostly renewable energy in the propulsion system, which gives the rocket a greater lifespan than similar, modern-day rocket technologies. The plasma technology has multiple applications such as the cleaning and coating of surfaces in a plasma coating system at nano-level. The uses of plasma, the 4th state of substances, are just being touched on now with recent advances in science.

The new plasma rocket is able to heat the argon gas, creating the plasma which is then focused out electromagnetically to give the rocket its propulsion. A shield protects the machinery from what is known as electrode erosion, which is a major cause of general wear and tear on a plasma rocket.

VASIMR’s Impact on Space Travel

Over the last 36 years, the various shortcomings of the propulsion system have been ironed out. Problems such as wear and tear as well as the total velocity it can achieve have been improved dramatically. This new form of thrust is said to cut space mission times by up to six times. With the use of the plasma rocket, it will be possible to make quick surveys to other planets or even asteroids that may be on a collision course with Earth.

The thing that excites most scientists about the applications of the new rocket is a mission to Mars. The main problems in previous missions to Mars were that it would take too much fuel to allow the spaceship to reach the red planet and make a return journey. Deep space is another area that opens up to space explorers with the abilities of the plasma rocket. Travels to the areas of space that have remained inaccessible are back in the realm of possibility for scientists. Space debris removal as well as in-space resource recovery are also said to be possible with the new plasma rocket technology. Additionally, the magnetic field created by the rocket is thought to create a protective shell for the spaceship, which would help protect it against the radiation in space.

The 39-Day Mission to Mars

The rocket will allow for a mission to Mars with a travel period of just 39 days, which is almost 6 times faster than current methods. With speeds estimated at 35 miles a second, the rocket system will make quick work of the distance between Earth and Mars. NASA rates a new system on a scale of one to ten based on its readiness to be deployed. The VASIMR system is at a six currently, which means that it is ready to be tested in space. It would seem that it won’t be much longer before the new rocket system is employed in all space missions.
Image: Wikipedia
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The good news and the bad news

 By Jerry A. Coyne, Ph.D

First, first, I'd like to offer some comments.  When I read Coyne's piece below, it didn't just sound like an attack on New Atheism (I am a little foggy about what this is, admittedly, though I do read my Dawkins and Dennet, etc.), but a disguised form of religious apologism.  They believe that religion isn't all so bad, that we (or many of us) do need at least the "good" parts, and that we should keep it in some forms.  New Atheism does sound like religion is a complete scourge on all mankind that should eviscerated from humanity's soul.  If I exaggerate, please correct me, but -- and I speak as a born and raised atheist and nature/science lover, so it would only be an honest mistake on my part -- at least some people give that impression.  To me.

I remember a Facebook(?) question, by Dawkins(?) to the effect that what would the world be like if religion were to completely disappear -- I don't recall if "suddenly" were in there, but treated it as such.  My reply is that the vast masses of humans would be wondering around aimlessly crying,  "Landrew guide us!"  (If you aren't a fan of the original Star Trek series you might not catch the allusion.)  I suspect most people, though certainly not close to all, really do have a deep, one might say throbbing", need for some "heartfelt" guidance and direction and control.  Nor is it merely taught; there is an evolutionary basis for it, albeit reinforced by social upbringing.  So I suppose religion must gradually (and is) diminish very gradually, with still a lot of its pains still to be endured.  Perhaps New Atheism is compatible with this view, I don't know.

Well, I can say more, but without further ado, Jerry Coyne, whose original post is at http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/12/08/the-good-news-and-the-bad-news-2/#comment-631306.
 

First, the bad news—so that you won’t be left fuming after you get both pieces of news. The two “pieces” are pieces of journalism that just appeared.
For some time now, Salon has been publishing pieces excoriating New Atheism, its Horsemen, and other atheists. I’m not sure why this is so, but it’s definitely been noticed.  And its most recent article, “What Hitchens got wrong: Abolishing religion won’t fix anything.” by journalist Sean McElwee, continues the tradition. It’s dreadful, and fails on four counts: it is gratuitous (a postmortem attack on Hitchens—do we need another one?), it says nothing new, it is mean-spirited, and many of its claims are wrong.  Because of that, I won’t dissect it in detail, but we need to see what kind of attacks keep on coming. Here are the main points (indented quotes are from McElwee):
1. New Atheists think that all suffering comes from religion.

The fundamental error in the “New Atheist” dogma is one of logic. The basic premise is something like this:
1. The cause of all human suffering is irrationality
2. Religion is irrational
3. Religion is the cause of all human suffering

That syllogism is obviously wrong, even logically, and we all know it. But who among atheists has said religion causes all human suffering? Name one person!  Our contention is, of course, that it causes a great deal of human suffering, but that some suffering will remain even when religion is gone. That will be caused because some humans are malicious or uncaring, because there are inequities in society, and because some “evil” is simply the workings of nature. But who can deny that areligious societies like Sweden or Denmark have less suffering than, say, Yemen or Saudi Arabia?
2. Hitchens was a hypocrite because he supported a war promulgated by a religious American president.  I kid you not:

But then [in the 2003 Gulf War] Hitchens decided that, in fact, bombing children was no longer so abhorrent, because these wars were no longer neocolonial wars dictated by economics and geopolitics but rather a final Armageddon between the forces of rationality and the forces of religion. The fact that the force of rationality and civilization was lead by a cabal of religious extremists was of no concern for Hitchens.

How many times is Hitchens going to be excoriated for this? Granted, I disagreed with that war, and with Hitchens’s stand, but it’s not the only stand he ever took. Do any people we admire only have opinions we agree with? At any rate, there’s no point in dragging Hitchens around the block for this once again.  And the fact that Bush was religious was irrelevant given Hitchens’s feelings about the Kurds.
3. The problems associated with militant Islam come from politics, not religion.  This contention is so common that it should be given a name. Here’s McElwee’s version:

Is not the best explanation for the Thirty Years’ War more likely political than religious? Might it be better to see jihad as a response to Western colonialism and the upending of Islamic society, rather than the product of religious extremism? The goal of the “New Atheists” is to eliminate centuries of history that Europeans are happy to erase, and render the current conflict as one of reason versus faith rather than what is, exploiter and exploited.
Bernard Lewis writes,
“For vast numbers of Middle Easterners, Western-style economic methods brought poverty, Western-style political institutions brought tyranny, even Western-style warfare brought defeat. It is hardly surprising that so many were willing to listen to voices telling them that the old Islamic ways were best and that their only salvation was to throw aside the pagan innovations of the reformers and return to the True Path that God had prescribed for his people.”
I have to wonder if Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris truly believe that eliminating religion will also make the Islamic world forget about centuries of colonization and deprivation. Without religion, will everyone living in Pakistan shrug off drone strikes and get on with their lives?

First of all, eliminating religion won’t fix the problems of the Middle East, though it will certainly help.  Those problems stem not only from dysfunctional theocratic types of government, but also oppressive dictators (viz., Assad), corruption, and so on. Those factors often have nothing to do with Western oppression.
But they also stem from the issue that Hitchens always singled out as critical in making a society dysfunctional: the economic disempowerment of women. That, of course, is embedded in Muslim doctrine. My own view is that we should argue against religion directly, for one can convert believers and those on the fence, but ultimately one must also try to create a more just and caring world, for it is people’s lack of security and their own dysfunctional situation that makes them religious. And working orking on both fronts has a salubrious feedback effect, for religion itself creates as well as stems from dysfunctional societies. Hitchens, of course, recognized that (I believe he used Marx’s famous “opium of the people” quote), and was doing his bit to oppose dictatorship and foster equality whenever he could.
But the main problem here is that most Islamic violence is directed not at colonialist oppressors, but at other Muslims (e.g., Sunni vs. Shia). Or against Islamic women.  Or it comes from a religiously-motivated hatred of Jews: another religious motivation.  Yes, colonialism plays some role, but if you read Lawrence Wright’s absorbing book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (highly recommended, and it won a Pulitzer Prize), you’ll see that the origins of Al-Qaeda and its predecessor the Muslim Brotherhood trace back not to colonialism by Western powers, but to resentment of the “secular” government of Egypt and the desire to spread Islam throughout the world. I wish more people who play the “it’s-all-politics” card would read that book!
In fact, McElwee goes further, arguing that:
4. No war was ever about religion; they were all “political.”

Religion has a tendency to reflect political and economic realities. Hitchens, in fact, has made ample use of this Marxist analysis, questioning religious experts whether it was Constantine or the truth of Christ’s words that were largely responsible for its breakneck spread. Constantine was, and his proclivities shaped the church. The doctrine of the Trinity was not decided exclusively by decades of intense debate; the whimsy of Constantine and political maneuvering between by Arius and Athanasius had a significant influence on the outcome.

But if there were no religion, there would be no conflict over the Trinity, regardless of the “political maneuvering” involved! Of course not all wars are religious, and there is always a secular element even when religion is involved, but to deny that religious beliefs motivate internecine conflict and war is to deny reality.
I sometimes wonder if there is anything that would convince people like McElwee that religious beliefs contribute to armed conflict. Or will they always find a way to construe things as “political”? I see that tactic as close to theology in its refusal to accept reality and its obsession with confabulating explanations when reality shows its face. If you waffle hard enough, you can even construe the Inquisition as “political”.
5. Atheists and rationalists don’t understand religion, and promulgate a simplistic caricature of it. McElwee quotes the odious Terry Eagleton on this point:

Similarly, within the church there are modernizers and reformers working to quash the Church’s excesses, no Hitchens, Dawkins or Harris needed. Terry Eagleton writes,
“Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster.”

What McElwee ignores is that many, many atheists were once fervent believers, and understand religion very well. Think of the atheists who were once preachers or fervent Christians: Dan Barker, Jerry DeWitt, Bart Ehrman, John Loftus, Eric MacDonald, and so on. Did those people fail to understand religion? I don’t think so. And many readers of this site have testified to—”witnessed,” as it were—their former deep immersion in religion. (I should also note the recent survey that showed that UK Christians knew less about their faith than did UK atheists).
And why do you have to be a believer to criticize religion? Do you have to be a Nazi to criticize Nazism, or a segregationist to understand and efface the evils of segregation? It seems to me that being an outsider gives one a certain advantage, at least in seeing and publicizing the harms of religion. Those in the asylum are often blinded to their delusion. And, at any rate, we have a distinguished roll of former religionists who are plenty well equipped “to understand what they castigate.”
That bit of obtuseness leads McElwee to his last inane conclusion:
6.  Atheists should shut up about religion because change is best made by the believers themselves.  Yes, that’s what he says:

Of course, I’m entirely aware of the problems in modern American Christianity. I have written an essay excoriating what I see as the false Christianity. But any critique of religion that can be made from the outside (by atheists) can be made more persuasively from within religion. For instance, it would hardly be the theologian’s job to point out that, according to The Economist, “Too many of the findings that fill the academic ether are the result of shoddy experiments or poor analysis. A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated.” I’m sure scientists are well aware of the problem and working to rectify it. Similarly, within the church there are modernizers and reformers working to quash the Church’s excesses, no Hitchens, Dawkins or Harris needed.

This is nonsense.  First of all, nearly all pressure to reform churches comes not from religion or church doctrine itself, but from secular movements outside the church that affect believers. I am absolutely convinced, for instance, that some churches’ acceptance of gays and women’s equality comes from social movements outside of religion. That kind of secular pressure is needed if any reform is to take place.
But, most important, “insiders” aren’t working to reform the most invidious forms of faith.  How many Catholics in the Vatican are undermining its doctrines about sex, divorce, the sinfulness of gays, and the prohibition of birth control? Answer: none that I know of.  How many Muslims in Saudi Arabia and Iran are working to dismantle the pernicious doctrines of Islam? Are we supposed to sit back and let the Vatican fix Catholicism? If so, then we’ll wait a long time!
If McElwee lived in Nazi Germany, he’d probably tell us: “Look, Rommel and von Stauffenberg are working to bring down Hitler. Call off the U.S. and British troops, call off the French Resistance, because any critique of Nazism made from the outside can be made more persuasively by members of the Nazi Party.”
The fact is that the “reform” of religion will occur much faster with pressure from nonbelievers, for many forms of faith have no motivation for changing.  And you don’t have to be a believer to see the harm.  If I were offered a plate of dog feces to eat, I wouldn’t be persuaded by the argument, “You can’t know whether it’s bad until you’ve eaten a lot of dog crap.”
McElwee goes on to espouse a form of NOMA, arguing that we need religion to tell us about the meaning of being human and how to live the good life, and that religion shouldn’t intrude on science. He’s right about the second part but not the first. Religion doesn’t have any more credibility about the meaning of life, and the best way to live  than the exertions of secular, humanistic philosophy in telling us how to live. In fact, religion is the worst guide for life, because it relies on faith rather than reason.
I see I’ve written too much again. But this stuff just keeps coming, and will continue, I suppose, until the memory of Hitchens has faded.