The heat is on for Bill Nye

"Bill Nye the Science Guy defends anti-creationist video"

by

Dennis Bodzash

August 30th, 2012

examiner.com

Last week, Bill Nye, best known as TV's 'Science Guy,' created quite a stir when he appeared in a video for the website the Big Think, in which he declared that a belief in creationism was bad for children. Now, after the video has gone viral (over 1.6 million hits and counting), a lot of attention (and criticism) has come down on Nye for his view

Appearing on CBS This Morning, Nye is fighting back against his critics, declaring that he was not attacking religion at all, but is merely trying to promote science.

Speaking on the science vs. religion struggle, Nye stated that "You can believe what you want religiously. Religion is one thing, but science, provable science is something else,” adding that “you want people to believe in science, this process, this great idea that humans had to discover more about the universe and our place in it, our place in space.”

Turning to current events to illustrate his point, Nye focused on Hurricane Issac, stating that “this morning, talking about Hurricane Isaac, and we're watching satellite maps made with spacecraft orbiting the earth, and this all comes from science. If you have this idea that the earth is only 6,000 years old, you are denying, if you will, everything that you can touch and see. You're not paying attention to what's happening in the universe around you. As I say, this is bad for kids."

Basically, Nye is saying that people can believe in whatever they want to in terms of religion, but that religion should not be confused with science.

As for what is supposed to be taught in schools, Ohio has implemented academic content standards for all core school subjects, including science. The goal of these standards is to ensure that teachers are teaching the same content in every school at any given grade level. By looking at the Ohio science standards, one sees no reference to creationism/intelligent design, only evolution, to which there are over a dozen in just the high school grades alone. Besides scientific facts, the Ohio standards also emphasize the scientific method, which makes no room for including one's preconceived notions in scientific research. .

Now, one may be asking “what does all of this have to do with astronomy and space? Answer: plenty.

Like biology, astronomy is a subject that has had a history of conflicting with religion and, even now, can shock the sensibilities of some, particularly religious fundamentalists, who continue to hold onto the belief that the world was created in a matter of days and that the age of the Earth can be determined by counting back the years as given in holy books. Just as anyone committed to the correct teaching of science would be appalled at the lack of evolution in biology, a same revulsion would occur if the Big Bang along with solar system formation were taught side by side with the account in Genesis, or skipped altogether, in an astronomy class. Needless to say, omitting these two most basic of processes would do as major a disservice to any astronomy student as glossing over evolution or teaching it in tandem with a most nonscientific idea as creationism would do to anyone learning biology.

Needless to say, if biology teachers are too afraid to teach evolution through either personal ignorance or risk of offending someone, what's not to say that astronomy teachers will become the same way if the religious decide to get up in arms over the Big Bang or solar system formation? It's a scary thought but, considering the social climate of the country we live in, it may not be an impossibility, especially considering that the U.S. is an anomaly in the Western world wherein belief in creationism far outweighs that in evolution.

As a final thought, consider the following: in science, if there is any commandment, it is this: respect the facts. No matter what we want the world to be or what our preconceived notions are, the world is the way it is, inflexible to human will. If one truly wishes to assume a scientific mindset, he/she must have respect for facts, no matter how contrary to personal beliefs they are. In the case of both evolution and the Big Bang, all facts point towards the scientific theories, not the religious dogma, being the truth. Yes, there are many great things about religion, such as ethical principles, its function as a social bonding agent, influence on the arts, and many others. However, religion is not science and it should be kept out of the science classroom.
 
The video is at this link...

Some thoughts by Bill Nye regarding creationism, evolution, and science

Science needs philosophy...tools for a sound epistemology

"Philosophy: Why it matters to science"

by

Bruce Gorton

December 6th, 2011

Time

Philosophy, the study of arguments, is one of those fields that is often under-appreciated in terms of its real value, particularly if you look at the fallacies.

Take for example the ad hominem, and the ‘Hitler was a Darwinist’ myth.

It is a myth because Hitler actually wasn't. Hitler banned Darwin’s work and stated his belief that a ‘fox remains a fox’. He accepted micro-evolution, but dismissed macro in much the same way as most modern creationists.

But this is beside the point, the fact that Hitler believed X has no more bearing on whether it is true, than him believing in gravity would make jumping out an 80 floor window a good idea.

That Hitler did or didn't believe something has no real bearing on whether or not it is true, and this is a big point in science. One cannot consider personalities, only facts, and that means learning to spot and avoid ad hominem style thinking.

Another example of this is the appeal to authority. There was once a study done where a professor told people he was doing a study on pain and learning, and that he was essentially hiring them to push the pain button when someone got the answer wrong. The people getting the shocks were actors who were in on it.

It was called the Milgram experiment, and the bone chilling findings explain tooth paste adverts.

Nine out of ten dentists agree that a photogenic actor in a white lab coat telling you to buy X toothpaste is an effective marketing ploy – after all Milgram showed that two thirds of people will obey authority figures to the point of administering 450 volts to their fellows. Buying toothpaste is pretty mundane in comparison.

The thing here is that one cannot entirely trust credentials; one has to think for oneself before fully accepting anything. That also goes for factual findings – while we do not have the time to re-perform every experiment, or the funds to find every artifact, it is generally a good idea to ask “How do you know that,” rather than “Who are you to say this?”

And that is the contribution of philosophy – it helps us evaluate the science we are presented with and how well evidenced it really is. By keeping in mind philosophical concepts, we train ourselves to better consider scientific ones.

Fallacies

Photoshop astronomy...good thing?

Observer...BEWARE. I have mentioned this before...SEEING ISN'T BELIEVING. A reminder from a space.com article.

"Coloring the Universe: Why Reality is a Gray Area in Astronomy"

by

Robert Roy Britt

June 25th, 2002

space.com

From Hubble Space Telescope pictures to the vocabulary used to describe the stars, astronomers and the media are coloring our universe, and they've been doing it for decades. While not intended to deceive, the efforts can range from the overly subjective to the absurd.

Earlier this year two astronomers from Johns Hopkins University announced they had determined the collective color of the cosmos, a shade of green that hypothetical viewers could see from afar. The idea was new and intriguing, an apparent answer to a question most of us had not thought to ask. Experienced science reporters and editors recognized the street value of the story and fell for it like paparazzi on a J. Lo sighting.

Various interpretations of light green or turquoise were reported by all the major news organizations. A color patch made the front page of The New York Times.

The astronomers later said an incorrect computer algorithm in some freeware they had grabbed from the Web had rendered the color wrong. They apologized and said they were embarrassed. The universe became beige, spawning another round of stories. Beige, however, turns out to be a near impossibility in the world of light emissions -- only reflections can really be beige. Our hypothetical viewer almost surely would not see a beige universe when gawking from afar.

The researchers have not given up, however. In fact, they've sifted through e-mail suggestions and given their color a popular name: "Cosmic Latte."

"Ridiculous" is how Kenneth Brecher, a professor of astronomy at Boston University, views the question of the color of the universe. "Meaningless and absurd," he calls the whole affair. "It's very nearly white." But even that view depends on a viewer's point of view.

Color cannot be discussed without context, Brecher says. "All cats are black at night."

Misleading terms

Brecher complains that "color is not what most astronomers and physicists think it is." It involves hue, saturation and brightness, he instructs, and it can't be thought of as just a wavelength or a frequency.

In the jargon of color science, Brecher explains why beige does not work: "It is almost impossible for a collection of blackbody emitters to give rise to beige, even allowing for absorption or emission line contributions."

On a more popular note, Brecher suggests the very vocabulary of astronomy is riddled with misleading color terms. Red giant stars like the bright and popular Betelgeuse, for example, are not really red, though they can sometimes appear so from Earth.

"If you could walk up to Betelgeuse, it would look white," he says.

That's because the star's light would overwhelm the color-sensing cones in your eyes. Only from a great distance, when the star is relatively dim, can the cones sometimes detect a hint of red. The vast majority of red giants, however, set off only the rods in your eyes, which cannot detect color at all. So most stars appear white, regardless of how they are classified.

Color conundrums go beyond the stars. Even the most famous images from the Hubble Space Telescope are no more than representations of reality, Brecher argues.

Photoshop universe

The quintessential Hubble photograph is a 1995 image of the popular Eagle Nebula, also known as M16 or the Pillars of Creation. The soaring structures had one of their red emissions converted to green -- by the astronomers who took the picture -- in order to highlight scientific detail. In "reality," no green was detected coming from the Pillars.

Interestingly, all Hubble images are created with black-and-white cameras. Ones and zeros are sent to Earth. Color is dropped in later with the popular Photoshop program.

Brecher and most other astronomers agree that what is done with Hubble pictures is not deceptive; the process is rooted in science, a way of extracting and highlighting information. However, the professor worries that the media do not always communicate when and how images are colorized.

Furthermore, he calls the process highly subjective.

"The color of objects that astronomers release are not really representative of a thing one might imagine exists, which is the objective color of a star or a galaxy," Brecher said in an interview last month during a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Albuquerque, where he made his case before his peers.

"Color is a very, very subjective phenomenon," he said. "Color is in the eye of the beholder."

As an example, Brecher asks what color the Moon is. The instinctive answer is "white." Some might say yellow. And in certain sky conditions, it can look orange.

Brecher calls this question absurd, too, because it does not include the context necessary to allow an accurate answer. The dusty coating on the Moon's surface resembles finely ground charcoal. "If you bring average lunar material to Earth and view it in normal terrestrial lighting, it would look very dark." The color of the Moon and the light coming from it are two very different things.

"It is time for astronomers and the press alike to carefully distinguish between [color and light] when discussing astronomy," Brecher said.

Teasing color

With many objects and phenomena in space, color is only made visible by the power of a telescope. Planetary nebulae provide a good example. These bizarre and detailed structures -- often symmetrical bubbles or hourglass shapes -- are the result of gas that's been cast into space by a dying star. Different gases, such as oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, each generate a different wavelength, or color, depending on the local physical conditions.

Human eyes, even if very near to or inside one of these nebulae, could not make out the colors, however, because the emissions are too faint. They would see little more than a big gray area.

Hubble astronomers make multiple long exposures to draw out these colors. They also employ a different filter for each exposure to block all but a certain color of light. A digital imager records a grayscale image. After adding the color in Photoshop (and also eliminating artifacts generated by piecing the data together) the filtered images are combined.

In some cases, the colors are as true to reality as anyone could imagine. Other times, as with the Eagle Nebula, colors are changed for effect. Hydrogen and sulfur were each detected in red tones, so the hydrogen, which involved a shorter wavelength, was made green.

When images are taken outside the visible light spectrum -- in the infrared, for example -- the color choices are entirely up to the astronomers and photo processors.

"This is a representation of some kind to convey the information that Hubble has gathered," Brecher says. "It's scientifically sound, but their presentation is subjective."

Adding value

"That's why we built the Hubble Space Telescope, because we can't see these things," says Zoltan Levay, who leads a team of imaging specialists at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which operates Hubble and prepares most of the photographs.

Levay says the process of coloring photos is never arbitrary.

"What we're doing is representing physical processes and representing actual astronomical observations in a visual and artistic way," Levay explained shortly after discussing the issue with Brecher. "I'm adding value, but it's not arbitrarily added. What I'm mostly doing is enhancing what's already there."

Levay points out that color is in fact a quantitative thing, a numerical difference between brightness measurements in well-defined wavelength bands, "though it may not have much relationship to perceived color." He says the measured color of Betelgeuse, the red giant, is redder than many other stars, even though the physiology of the eye may prevent us from actually perceiving the subtleties.

What does this have to do with those beautiful Hubble pictures?

Levay likens his work to darkroom photography, where images are dodged and burned and colors are adjusted in order to tease out the most information possible. He offers home videos up as another analogy. The recording turns colors into numbers, and when you play a video on your television, the numbers are converted back to color.

"That's precisely what we're doing," he said. "Now, we're going a step further. We're twiddling the knobs on the TV screen. We may be turning up the color knob a little bit or playing with the brightness."

Levay and his colleagues sometimes take the editing process another step. Images made with Hubble's infrared camera, called NICMOS, have no intrinsic color values in the visible spectrum. To these photos, the image specialists typically apply a corresponding range of colors from the visible realm in a logical pattern -- red for longer wavelengths and blue for shorter.

"Color is a somewhat fuzzy term," Levay admits in relation to the infrared pictures. "We are artificially applying a perceptual color to light that we cannot perceive." One astronomer would not necessarily apply the same colors to a given infrared image as another, he said, but the same logic with respect to wavelength shifts is typically employed.

Levay points out that what he does is nothing more than an extension of two manipulation techniques that transformed modern astronomy.

"We've been manipulating our view of the universe since the advent of black-and-white photography," he said. "And even before. A telescope manipulates your view of the universe, because it expands the size of your eyes."

Ability to mislead

Manipulation, of course, opens the door to misrepresentation.

"You can definitely mislead," Levay said. "Mistakes get made. Science happens by mistakes being made. But those mistakes are corrected."

Back in the Voyager days, some critics objected to what they saw as excessive goosing of color to bring out subtle details.

"In certain specific cases, the colors were stretched strongly to emphasize particular information," Levay says. "By and large, Voyager produced wonderful, evocative, and mostly quite color-accurate images."

Today, there is small group who criticizes what Levay and his colleagues do with Hubble pictures, according to Ray Villard, news director at the STScI and a man who helps choose which Hubble images the world will see. Villard thinks some of the criticism is rooted in envy over Hubble's wide popularity, or suspicion that something in the sky is being hidden from the public, or that mundane-looking data is heavily glamorized purely for publicity.

Villard dismisses these suggestions. He also notes, based on his decade of experience in answering public questions about the telescope, that the vast majority of people "don't really care" how the photos are processed. "They don't think about it, any more than one would worry if a beautiful Kodachrome photo of a sunset was really the exact color."

The STScI's guiding principle, Villard says, is to create aesthetically beautiful pictures that yield a lot of science. "An aesthetic picture also conveys the maximum amount of information. Because the Hubble images are intrinsically very evocative, it's not a crime to artistically bring out their most attractive features."

The greening of Jupiter

The interpretation of color has gone awry before at the STScI, grossly in one example from the orbiting observatory's earliest days. The public, however, never saw it.

The offending photo was of Jupiter. Going by the numbers, an astronomer presented Villard with a picture of a green gas giant. Knowing they would be laughed at by every amateur astronomer who had ever spied the planet's pale reds and creams through a backyard telescope, Villard protested.

"That's what it is," the astronomer retorted, sticking to his data.

Eventually, Villard persuaded the astronomer that the public should not see a green Jupiter, no matter what data might be behind the picture. He later learned a lesson in just how subjective color can be: "Come to find out," Villard recalls, "the astronomer was color blind."


False astronomy colors and epistemology?

Cool astronomy photographs

"Science--philosophy rules" poll

"String Theory"--Knot

Should a set of rules be established to discern the difference between "science" and "philosophy"--to make clear, recognizable, and a sound epistemology...i.e., "string theory" as being simply wild speculation--science fiction?

Yes...5
No...5

A fine line or demarcation must be established for a sound science epistemology otherwise statements become intertwined in the unprovable--fantasy or science fiction. For example, "string theory", as most represented by Brian Greene, is littered with unprovable statements and descriptions of parallel universes, multiple universes, interacting universes, and other assorted bizarre features. What kind of science is that? It isn't science; it's philosophy...and should be prefaced with the declaimer that it is philosophy and treated as such. A sound science castle is not built on a sand foundation.

And yes, I have asked this question before...

"Theoretical physics...good epistemology?" poll

"Science laws universal" poll

Do you consider the scientific facts we have established are "truly" universal? For example: f=ma is true within our observable area...and at the far, unobservable ends of the universe.

Yes...3
No...2
Undecided...3

I am somewhat "undecided" on this. Our knowledge is basically based on observation and prediction. But it may be somewhat far fetched to extrapolate what we know to the whole universe. What may be true here fails a zillion light years away. We just don't know and express a lot of faith in the physics we know.

Conspiracies...diehard myth makers

There is a demand for a sound epistemology of events in the universe but alas a short fall of human formulation or comprehension of such events will fall into a viable metaphysics and the cloudy realm of conspiracy theories.

"A nation of conspiracy theorists can't be wrong"

From miracle diets to creationism to rumors about the origins of 9/11, a new book traces our irrational love of misinformation.

by

Louis Bayard

October 2nd, 2008

Salon

The U.S. government blew up the twin towers. The AIDS virus was engineered by scientists to kill African-Americans. Chinese explorers landed on American shores in 1421. Crystals will heal you. Aliens landed at Roswell. The Priory of Sion is protecting the secrets of the Messianic bloodline. Barack Obama is a Muslim.

If you believe any of those propositions, you are ... well, let's tack toward charity. You have been swept along in a tide that the British polemicist Damian Thompson likes to call "Counterknowledge." Moreover, you are legion. Millions of unwary souls from every quadrant of Earth are swallowing a daily diet of quackery, conspiracy theory, bogus history and faux science. We haven't just turned off our bullshit detectors, we've permanently disabled them. And in so doing, Thompson argues, we've made for ourselves "a thrilling universe in which Atlantis is buried underneath the Antarctic, the Ark of the Covenant is hidden in Ethiopia, aliens have manipulated our DNA, and there was once a civilization on Mars."

Thrilling but, of course, wrong. Demonstrably wrong in most cases. And yet we're ready to buy in, aren't we? Dear God, what won't we buy into? UFOs, miracle diets, astrology, Bible prophesy. Satanic ritual abuse, recovered memory. Aromatherapy, reflexology, craniosacral therapy. What ties together all these ancient and not-so-ancient belief systems is, by Thompson's reckoning, simply this: They all purport to be knowledge without actually being knowledge. They are "misinformation packaged as fact."

And packaged all too well. "Ideas that, in their original, raw form, flourished only on the fringes of society are now being taken seriously by educated people in the West, and are circulating with bewildering speed in the developing world." The result, he says, is "a pandemic of credulous thinking ... a huge surge in the popularity of propositions that fail basic empirical tests." How wide a pandemic, you might ask? How great a surge? Thompson is a stickler for facts but -- ironically enough, given the nature of his enterprise -- he's not so keen on hard numbers. And the ones he provides don't necessarily back him up. A 2004 Gallup poll found that 45 percent of Americans "believe that God created human beings in their present form about 10,000 years ago." (In anatomical terms, modern humans date back at least 100,000 years.) But that finding is virtually unchanged from the 44 percent figure in a 1982 poll. We may not have progressed on this subject, but at least we haven't gotten significantly dumber.

Thompson is far more effective at charting how counterknowledge has morphed under modern conditions. As the Internet tears down traditional news portals, untested propositions go hurtling through cyberspace, vastly increasing the ability of bad information to take root -- that is, to look simply like new information. "A rumor about the Antichrist can leap from Goths in Sweden to an extreme traditionalist Catholic sect in Australia in a matter of seconds," writes Thompson. As for creationism, it is now less a religious phenomenon than a technological one. Sites like CreationWiki and Conservapedia and Kids 4 Truth (a primer in intelligent design) dress up their unsecular ideas in secular clothing -- and obliterate the difference between fact and faith more effectively than Sarah Palin ever could.

But why harp on American fundamentalists when, as Thompson points out, irrationality is just as deeply entrenched in the Islamic world, if not more so? A 2006 poll of higher-education students in the United Kingdom found that fewer than 10 percent of Muslims accept evolution. Among the populaces of Indonesia, Pakistan and Egypt, that percentage drops to 2, 5 and 3 percent, respectively. Turkey is now overtaking the United States as the wellspring of creationist agitprop.

No surprise that, in the Internet's strange-bedfellows world, Christians are now sharing intelligent design curricula with Muslims, just as some creationists are overlapping with Holocaust deniers. The same readers who swallow hogwash about freemasonry and the Great Flood and the Priory of Sion are the first in line to buy books like "The Jesus Papers" and "Fingerprints of the Gods." "If you believe one wrong or strange thing," writes Thompson, "you are more likely to believe another." Especially if you're seething with hostility toward political, intellectual and scientific elites. Counterknowledge, for all its transience, gives its owners an enduring feeling: They have been entrusted with the very secret they weren't supposed to know.

It's a contagious feeling. Thanks to "The Da Vinci Code," 40 percent of Americans now believe that churches are concealing "the truth" about Jesus. Tens of millions have seen "Loose Change," the "documentary" that charges the Bush administration with single-handedly carrying out the 9/11 attacks, right down to elaborately faked cellphone calls from Flight 93. And in today's bazaar of craziness, conspiracy theory is far from being the only booth. The best-selling book and DVD package titled "The Secret" exhorts us to reap untold riches through the simple troika of asking, believing and receiving. (As best I can tell, it's virtually identical to professor Harold Hill's "think system" in "The Music Man.")

Damian Thompson is a feisty and sure-footed debater, and he has great fun with the bogus archaeologists who want to turn the Americas "into the Grand Central Station of the ancient world, visited by Greeks, Romans, Celts, Phoenicians, Israelites, Nubians and 'Hindoos.'" He is equally withering on "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" and its pseudo-historic cronies: "Open a page at random, and there is a good chance you will find a passage that reads: 'We could not believe what we had in our hands. If these documents were what they said they were, then the whole history of [insert as appropriate] would have to be rewritten,' etc."

But what becomes clear as one reads through "Counterknowledge" is how much our sense of true or false is conditioned by our belief systems. Thompson, for his part, believes alternative medicine is "'alternative' for a good reason: it doesn't work." And yet there are many who would contend it does. Insurers, who have as good reason as any to be skeptical, have begun to cover practices like chiropractic and acupuncture, which Thompson would consign to the bin of mumbo jumbo.

The author's biases come most clearly to the surface when he tries to allot blame for counterknowledge's diffusion. One finger is pointed at left-wing multiculturalists who have transformed orthodox science into "a language game played by a white elite." Another is pointed at craven academic institutions for giving practices like homeopathy the imprimatur of science. Still another is pointed at profit-obsessed publishers who spend so much time promoting and so little time fact-checking fraudulent texts like "1421: The Year China Discovered the World."

But one could argue that "1421" is a model of historic rigor alongside, say, the Bible or the Quran. And where Thompson treads rather delicately -- and where he temporarily parts company with atheist fellow-travelers like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett -- is on the subject of religion. Perhaps because his day job is helming Britain's leading Catholic newspaper, the Catholic Herald, Thompson seems far less eager to attack irrationality when it takes place around an altar. "Religion," he argues, "becomes proper counterknowledge only when it seriously seeks to undermine, or is contradicted by, the evidence of our senses. There is no reason to believe that the historical miracles claimed by any faith actually happened; but common sense tells us that there is a practical difference between declaring one's belief in isolated supernatural events such as the Resurrection, which is what ordinary churchgoers do, and making falsifiable statements about the world around us, which is what faith healers do."

I don't see that there is a practical difference. Once you have opened the door to one supernatural event, you have opened the door to another. Whether the event happened 2,000 years ago or yesterday morning hardly makes it more believable or empirical, which is why religious critics like Sam Harris have attacked moderate Christians for giving cover to extremists.

One could further argue that orthodox religion functions as a training ground for counterknowledge, both by transforming the irrational into evidence of a higher rationality and by persuading followers that they are uniquely able to make sense of the world. If we can build a private channel to God, we can surely build a private channel to knowledge.

In other words, Thompson needs to think a little more about what constitutes knowledge. I myself am a die-hard evolutionist who loathes creationism in whatever form it takes. But how do I know evolution to be true? I know it because generations of the world's greatest scientists have subjected Darwin's theory to the most rigorous possible scrutiny. But have I reviewed their work? Do I have the time or capacity to do so? No, I accept the scientific community's word for it, and this is in itself a kind of faith. A faith grounded, yes, in verifiable and empirical and replicable studies. A vastly superior faith, I would argue, to knowledge-averse creationism, but a faith nonetheless.

And sometimes even faith in science can be misplaced. Science can get it wrong. Science can't always get the job done. (According to GlaxoSmithKline, 90 percent of new drugs produce benefits in only 30 to 50 percent of patients.) And sometimes science doesn't know. Counterknowledge thrives not just in opposition to knowledge but in knowledge's absence. Which makes it a more existential and perhaps less eradicable condition than Damian Thompson would wish. Given the choice between, on one side, not knowing and, on the other, knowing the wrong thing, I like to think I'd always choose the former. But maybe, in my darkest moments, I wouldn't. Maybe, in need of an answer, I'd take one wherever I could find it.


British UFO data released

E=mc2...Einstein's idea?

Einstein iconography--five papers

Frankenstein and bioethics is on campus at WSU

G. K. Chesterton--myths/logic

Gavin Menzies--back at it again

Hyperbolic sentiment--the engine of illogical thinking

Myths/science; science/myths--needed...compatible?

Newton and 2060

Origin of sciencel

Popularization of science

Prediction vs prophecy

Pseudoscience...be careful

Science and Government

"Science, Knowledge, Wisdom, Life"

Shroud of Turin to be questioned once again

Stanhengues...early astronomy?...and new digs

Super good "Superheroes"

Things of Christmas

Theoretical physics...philosophy/sci-fi?

UFOs and foreign invasions [Earthly kind]

Value of "history of science"

If you don't believe that studying the "history of science" is of value, then read these three preprint papers.


Jane Maienschein and George Smith

Abstract:

This essay opens up the question of what difference the history of science makes. What is the value of the history of science, beyond its role as an academic pursuit that we historians of science know and love? It introduces the set of essays that follow as explorations that grew out of a seminar on this topic and that arise from the authors’ particular concerns both that historians of science do not work hard enough to make their work of value and that others do not know of the potential. That seminar, at the Marine Biological Laboratory, was funded for nineteen years by the Dibner Institute and last year by Brent Dibner. It will continue and carry such discussions forward in new ways as the Arizona State University–Marine Biological Laboratory History of Biology Seminar Series. This set of focused essays seeks to invite lively discussion and response.

What Difference Does History of Science Make, Anyway?

Jane Maienschein, Manfred Laubichler, and Andrea Loettgers

Abstract:

History of science has developed into a methodologically diverse discipline, adding greatly to our understanding of the interplay between science, society, and culture. Along the way, one original impetus for the then newly emerging discipline-what George Sarton called the perspective “from the point of view of the scientist”- dropped out of fashion. This essay shows, by means of several examples, that reclaiming this interaction between science and history of science yields interesting perspectives and new insights for both science and history of science. The authors consequently suggest that historians of science also adopt this perspective as part of their methodological repertoire.

How Can History of Science Matter to Scientists?

Zuoyue Wang and Naomi Oreskes

Abstract:

Historians of science have participated actively in debates over American science policy in the post-World War II period in a variety of ways, but their impact has been more to elucidate general concepts than to effect specific policy changes. Personal experiences, in the case of the debate over global warming, have demonstrated both the value and the limits of such involvement for the making of public policy. To be effective, historians of science need to strive for clarity in public expression, to accept the importance of engaging with the public at all levels and through diverse media, and, above all, to recognize that the nature of such debates will make normal scholarly nuance hard to achieve. Moreover, in the current political climate, historians may be surprised to find themselves defending sciences, when the usual stance of historians is to be critical.

History of Science and American Science Policy

Faith/science--mutually exclusive?

Interesting. This is a prepublish paper by Richard MacKenzie. We are still fussing over the epistemological relationship between faith and science and it appears that people still wish to draw the conclusion that science and religion [theology] are mutually exclusive. I disagree, but you may draw your own conclusions. Presented below is MacKenzie's paper and a response from Lawrence M. Krauss.

Abstract:

In this article, inspired by Lawrence Krauss' plenary talk at the 2007 CAP congress, the relation between faith and science is examined. Some readers of this article may have seen Lawrence Krauss' entertaining and thoughtprovoking plenary talk at the 2007 CAP congress in Saskatoon. They may remember that the first individual to raise a hand during the question period did so in an almost-Horshackian fashion, and that he bluntly asserted that he disagreed strongly with the following statement made by Krauss on the challenge of teaching science to the public:

Faith is not the enemy.
Ignorance is the enemy.

That brazen individual was me, and I would like to explain why I disagree with this statement- to the point where I would be inclined to go so far as to interchange the words "faith" and "ignorance." Let us recall that Krauss’ talk, entitled "Selling Science to Unwilling Buyers," concerned itself with how to teach science to the general public - the unwilling buyer - by discussing applications of science which interest the buyer, rather than more traditional “bottom-up” approaches to teaching science which might themselves be partly responsible for the preconception that science is boring in the first place. Krauss talked about the current (and abysmal) state of scientific illiteracy in the US, its underlying causes, and how to improve the situation. In giving such a talk to an audience of physicists, Krauss was to a large extent preaching to the converted, and I myself was entirely in agreement with everything he said, except for the above quote, which I found surprisingly discordant with the rest of his talk.

"Is Faith The Enemy Of Science?"

Lawrence M. Krauss reply

Psilocybin...for that metaphysical experience

Psilocybin mushrooms

The Jolly Green Giant may want to explore the possibilities here...to enhance a metaphysical epistemology accessible to all at the local grocery store. The 60s are back and a positive force in the understanding of the universe. But the Schedule I drug may have many hurdles to jump.


physorg.com:

"Spiritual effects of hallucinogens persist, researchers report"

In a follow-up to research showing that psilocybin, a substance contained in "sacred mushrooms," produces substantial spiritual effects, a Johns Hopkins team reports that those beneficial effects appear to last more than a year.

Writing in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, the Johns Hopkins researchers note that most of the 36 volunteer subjects given psilocybin, under controlled conditions in a Hopkins study published in 2006, continued to say 14 months later that the experience increased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction.

"Most of the volunteers looked back on their experience up to 14 months later and rated it as the most, or one of the five most, personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives," says lead investigator Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., a professor in the Johns Hopkins departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Neuroscience.

In a related paper, also published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, researchers offer recommendations for conducting this type of research.

The guidelines caution against giving hallucinogens to people at risk for psychosis or certain other serious mental disorders. Detailed guidance is also provided for preparing participants and providing psychological support during and after the hallucinogen experience. These "best practices" contribute both to safety and to the standardization called for in human research.

"With appropriately screened and prepared individuals, under supportive conditions and with adequate supervision, hallucinogens can be given with a level of safety that compares favorably with many human research and medical procedures," says that paper's lead author, Mathew W. Johnson, Ph.D., a psychopharmacologist and instructor in the Johns Hopkins Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.

The two reports follow a 2006 study published in another journal, Psychopharmacology, in which 60 percent of a group of 36 healthy, well-educated volunteers with active spiritual lives reported having a "full mystical experience" after taking psilocybin.

Psilocybin, a plant alkaloid, exerts its influence on some of the same brain receptors that respond to the neurotransmitter serotonin. Mushrooms containing psilocybin have been used in some cultures for hundreds of years or more for religious, divinatory and healing purposes.

Fourteen months later, Griffiths re-administered the questionnaires used in the first study -- along with a specially designed set of follow up questions -- to all 36 subjects. Results showed that about the same proportion of the volunteers ranked their experience in the study as the single most, or one of the five most, personally meaningful or spiritually significant events of their lives and regarded it as having increased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction.

"This is a truly remarkable finding," Griffiths says. "Rarely in psychological research do we see such persistently positive reports from a single event in the laboratory. This gives credence to the claims that the mystical-type experiences some people have during hallucinogen sessions may help patients suffering from cancer-related anxiety or depression and may serve as a potential treatment for drug dependence. We're eager to move ahead with that research."

Griffiths also notes that, "while some of our subjects reported strong fear or anxiety for a portion of their day-long psilocybin sessions, none reported any lingering harmful effects, and we didn't observe any clinical evidence of harm."

The research team cautions that if hallucinogens are used in less well supervised settings, the possible fear or anxiety responses could lead to harmful behaviors.

Source: Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions

Michael Shermer--comments on "reductionism"

A good essay on why, in part, "reductionism" in physics fails.

"Sacred Science: Using Faith to Explain Anomalies in Physics"

Can emergence break the spell of reductionism and put spirituality back into nature?

by

Michael Shermer

June 24th, 2008

Scientific American

In the early 17th century a demon was loosed on the world by Italian mathematician Galileo Galilei when he began swinging pendulums, rolling balls down ramps and observing the moons of Jupiter—all with an aim toward discovering regularities that could be codified into laws of nature.

So successful was this mechanical worldview that by the early 19th century French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace was able to "imagine an Intelligence who would know at a given instant of time all forces acting in nature and the position of all things of which the world consists.... Then it could derive a result that would embrace in one and the same formula the motion of the largest bodies in the universe and of the lightest atoms. Nothing would be uncertain for this Intelligence."

By the early 20th century science undertook to become Laplace’s demon. It cast a wide "causal net" linking effects to causes throughout the past and into the future and sought to explain all complex phenomena by reducing them into their simpler component parts. Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg captured this philosophy of reductionism poignantly: "All the explanatory arrows point downward, from societies to people, to organs, to cells, to biochemistry, to chemistry, and ultimately to physics." In such an all-encompassing and fully explicable cosmos, then, what place for God?

Stuart Kauffman has an answer: naturalize the deity. In his new book, Reinventing the Sacred (Basic Books, 2008), Kauffman—founding director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary in Alberta and one of the pioneers of complexity theory—reverses the reductionist's causal arrow with a comprehensive theory of emergence and self-organization that he says "breaks no laws of physics" and yet cannot be explained by them. God "is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere and human cultures," Kauffman declares.

In Kauffman's emergent universe, reductionism is not wrong so much as incomplete. It has done much of the heavy lifting in the history of science, but reductionism cannot explain a host of as yet unsolved mysteries, such as the origin of life, the biosphere, consciousness, evolution, ethics and economics. How would a reductionist explain the biosphere, for example? "One approach would be, following Newton, to write down the equations for the evolution of the biosphere and solve them. This cannot be done," Kauffman avers. "We cannot say ahead of time what novel functionalities will arise in the biosphere. Thus we do not know what variables—lungs, wings, etc.—to put into our equations. The Newtonian scientific framework where we can prestate the variables, the laws among the variables, and the initial and boundary conditions, and then compute the forward behavior of the system, cannot help us predict future states of the biosphere."

This problem is not merely an epistemological matter of computing power, Kauffman cautions; it is an ontological problem of different causes at different levels. Something wholly new emerges at these higher levels of complexity.

Similar ontological differences exist in the self-organized emergence of consciousness, morality and the economy. In my recent book, The Mind of the Market (Times Books, 2008), I show how economics and evolution are complex adaptive systems that learn and grow as they evolve from simple to complex and how they are autocatalytic, or containing self-driving feedback loops. It was therefore gratifying to find corroboration in Kauffman’s detailed explication of why such phenomena "cannot be deduced from physics, have causal powers of their own, and therefore are emergent real entities in the universe." This creative process of emergence, Kauffman contends, "is so stunning, so overwhelming, so worthy of awe, gratitude and respect, that it is God enough for many of us. God, a fully natural God, is the very creativity in the universe."

I have spent time with Stu Kauffman at two of the most sacred places on earth: Cortona, Italy (under the Tuscan sun), and Esalen, Calif. (above the Pacific Ocean), at conferences on the intersection of science and religion. He is one of the most spiritual scientists I know, a man of inestimable warmth and ecumenical tolerance, and his God 2.0 is a deity worthy of worship. But I am skeptical that it will displace God 1.0, Yahweh, whose Bronze Age program has been running for 6,000 years on the software of our brains and culture.


"Science, Knowledge, Wisdom, Life"

Scientific Method out the window?

Species "Truths"

Theoretical physics...philosophy/sci-fi?

Why study physics?

Scientific Method out the window?

Really? I don't think so. This is a rigid interpretation that all epistemology emanates from scientific investigation. There is room for supplemental interpretations and a genuine humbleness that all epistemology is not a function of scientific investigations.

"But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete. Consider physics: Newtonian models were crude approximations of the truth (wrong at the atomic level, but still useful). A hundred years ago, statistically based quantum mechanics offered a better picture — but quantum mechanics is yet another model, and as such it, too, is flawed, no doubt a caricature of a more complex underlying reality. The reason physics has drifted into theoretical speculation about n-dimensional grand unified models over the past few decades (the "beautiful story" phase of a discipline starved of data) is that we don't know how to run the experiments that would falsify the hypotheses — the energies are too high, the accelerators too expensive, and so on."

This Popperian conclusion "...we don't know how to run the experiments that would falsify the hypotheses" is shallow in perspective in that there is the underlying assumption that all epistemology is scientific based. It futhermore excludes the possibility that ultimate universal epistemology [via scientific methodology] may be impossible of human quantification and comprhension...a species liability where the physical brain is inadequate or unable to design and execute instruments that can quantify physical events.

"The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete"

by

Chris Anderson

June 24th, 2008

Wired Magazine

"All models are wrong, but some are useful."

So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don't have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don't have to settle for models at all.

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.

At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.

Google's founding philosophy is that we don't know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that's good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required. That's why Google can translate languages without actually "knowing" them (given equal corpus data, Google can translate Klingon into Farsi as easily as it can translate French into German). And why it can match ads to content without any knowledge or assumptions about the ads or the content.

Speaking at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference this past March, Peter Norvig, Google's research director, offered an update to George Box's maxim: "All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them."

This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.

The big target here isn't advertising, though. It's science. The scientific method is built around testable hypotheses. These models, for the most part, are systems visualized in the minds of scientists. The models are then tested, and experiments confirm or falsify theoretical models of how the world works. This is the way science has worked for hundreds of years.

Scientists are trained to recognize that correlation is not causation, that no conclusions should be drawn simply on the basis of correlation between X and Y (it could just be a coincidence). Instead, you must understand the underlying mechanisms that connect the two. Once you have a model, you can connect the data sets with confidence. Data without a model is just noise.

But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete. Consider physics: Newtonian models were crude approximations of the truth (wrong at the atomic level, but still useful). A hundred years ago, statistically based quantum mechanics offered a better picture — but quantum mechanics is yet another model, and as such it, too, is flawed, no doubt a caricature of a more complex underlying reality. The reason physics has drifted into theoretical speculation about n-dimensional grand unified models over the past few decades (the "beautiful story" phase of a discipline starved of data) is that we don't know how to run the experiments that would falsify the hypotheses — the energies are too high, the accelerators too expensive, and so on.

Now biology is heading in the same direction. The models we were taught in school about "dominant" and "recessive" genes steering a strictly Mendelian process have turned out to be an even greater simplification of reality than Newton's laws. The discovery of gene-protein interactions and other aspects of epigenetics has challenged the view of DNA as destiny and even introduced evidence that environment can influence inheritable traits, something once considered a genetic impossibility.

In short, the more we learn about biology, the further we find ourselves from a model that can explain it.

There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough." We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.

The best practical example of this is the shotgun gene sequencing by J. Craig Venter. Enabled by high-speed sequencers and supercomputers that statistically analyze the data they produce, Venter went from sequencing individual organisms to sequencing entire ecosystems. In 2003, he started sequencing much of the ocean, retracing the voyage of Captain Cook. And in 2005 he started sequencing the air. In the process, he discovered thousands of previously unknown species of bacteria and other life-forms.

If the words "discover a new species" call to mind Darwin and drawings of finches, you may be stuck in the old way of doing science. Venter can tell you almost nothing about the species he found. He doesn't know what they look like, how they live, or much of anything else about their morphology. He doesn't even have their entire genome. All he has is a statistical blip — a unique sequence that, being unlike any other sequence in the database, must represent a new species.

This sequence may correlate with other sequences that resemble those of species we do know more about. In that case, Venter can make some guesses about the animals — that they convert sunlight into energy in a particular way, or that they descended from a common ancestor. But besides that, he has no better model of this species than Google has of your MySpace page. It's just data. By analyzing it with Google-quality computing resources, though, Venter has advanced biology more than anyone else of his generation.

This kind of thinking is poised to go mainstream. In February, the National Science Foundation announced the Cluster Exploratory, a program that funds research designed to run on a large-scale distributed computing platform developed by Google and IBM in conjunction with six pilot universities. The cluster will consist of 1,600 processors, several terabytes of memory, and hundreds of terabytes of storage, along with the software, including Google File System, IBM's Tivoli, and an open source version of Google's MapReduce. Early CluE projects will include simulations of the brain and the nervous system and other biological research that lies somewhere between wetware and software.

Learning to use a "computer" of this scale may be challenging. But the opportunity is great: The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all.

There's no reason to cling to our old ways. It's time to ask: What can science learn from Google?

Insight?

Lydia Kavina plays Claude Debussy's [1862-1918] "Claire de Lune" on the theremin.

"We have also sound-houses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmony which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which, set to the ear, do further the hearing greatly; we have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and, as it were, tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have all means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances."--Francis Bacon in The New Atlantis [1626].

"Although Bacon's text was Utopian, there is some indication that he was influenced by technological experiments of the day. For example, Salomon de Caus (c.1576-1626), a French hydraulics engineer, demonstrated in England such sonic curiosities as musical fountains, hydraulically activated songbirds, and even a kind of player piano."


Prediction vs prophecy

And yes Tim, the theremin was used in many science fiction films including your favorite The Day the Earth Stood Still.

But, Forbidden Planet is mine.

Corey D. Kaup's "Nothingness Theory"

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass
into nothingness..."

Endymion

John Keats

1818

Does existence equal "a state of perfectly uniform static equilibrium"? There are many theories and fussing among philosophers and scientists about the nature of the universe and mankind. But have you ever heard of the "Nothingness Theory"..."The connection between the evolution of the universe and human thought". Consider the thoughts of Corey D. Kaup. I know nothing about Corey D. Kaup or his unusual position. Your thoughts.

From the Introduction:

It’s a brisk fall morning in New York City. Wind blows dust and leaves around in little tornado shaped circles outside the windows of my 7th grade science class. As I watch the hypnotic swirling motion our teacher, Mr. Lobel, leans against the granite lab-table and poses this question: “Let’s say you put a piece of cork and a metal spoon in the refrigerator over night, which one will be colder the next day?” It seems like a trick question. “you're going to have to figure it out, we’ll talk about it tomorrow”. Of course none of us want to wait until tomorrow to get the answer, but Mr. Lobel can not be swayed.

I open the refrigerator at home and feel the milk carton – that’s pretty cold. I feel the cork on the wine bottle – not as cold. The coldest thing in the refrigerator is a wet piece of lettuce, but Mr. Lobel didn’t say anything about wet lettuce. I’m still not sure what the answer is, but I'm pretty sure it's the spoon. There's no way that cork can be colder than metal.

Most of us think it's the spoon. There are a few oddball cork-guys, but they have pretty lame ideas about why it's the cork, so Mr. Lobel finally resolves the mystery: "The cork, spoon and anything else hanging out in the refrigerator long enough will be of equal temperature". He uses this model to illustrate three profound ideas in physics:

One: there is no such thing as “cold”; there is only more or less heat. Cold is a matter of human perception. The metal spoon transmits heat away from the hand faster than cork so it feels colder.

Two: heat will try to even itself out. It will always go to where there is less heat until equilibrium is established.

Three: Heat is energy and energy is motion. The type of motion known as heat is the vibration of atoms and molecules.

This changed my perception of everything. It gnawed at my understanding of reality. How can heat just be wiggling atoms? Heat burns, melts, and boils. Why do the atoms wiggle in the first place? Why does the oscillation always even itself out?

I had unwittingly asked myself a question, the answer to which reveals a connection between the primary forces governing the behavior of the universe. I learned that the ubiquitous evening-out process I had questioned results in a state scientists call equilibrium. In the seventh grade experiment, had I actually gone to the trouble of putting a spoon and cork in the refrigerator, the internal refrigerator temperature would have disturbed the equilibrium between the spoon, cork, and their previously warmer environment. They would have spontaneously given up heat until thermal equilibrium was achieved with the surrounding refrigerator air.

There is a fourth profound idea in this experiment. Even without a rocket, or a cyclotron, or millions of dollars worth of exotic equipment it is possible to explore the universe. By showing us that the deep mysteries of life are revealed by observing everyday phenomena, Mr. Lobel opened the door to real freedom-of-mind. This is how the ancient Greeks invented modern science, mathematics, philosophy, and government. We are only just catching up to them now.

General Nothingness Theory