GANGS... A DEMORALIZED, ALIENATED SOCIETY

GANGS... A DEMORALIZED, ALIENATED SOCIETY

NASA: New Report of Life from Space

  John Lake

A NASA scientist, Richard Hoover, an astrobiologist at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, claims to have found tiny fossils inside meteorites recovered from the Spanish Ebro Delta waterway.

He found the remains of the micro-organisms during an internal inspection of three of the oldest meteorites to have yet been discovered. Hoover claims that the microbes could not be of earthly origin, because if they were there would be traces or evidence of nitrogen in and around the objects from space. A meteorite is a meteor that has slammed into earth for a final rest.
I concede some skepticism. The theory of “panspermia,”which suggests that life on our Earth originated elsewhere, has never been my cup of tea. Life had to develop somewhere, so, why not here? I see it as the suggestion of a sort of astronomical inferiority complex. But I also concede some interest in the idea that life in all its forms transmits through space; not with a single starting point, but with some unknown evolution, distributing itself through the universe. This idea is within the sphere of interest of astrobiology, and NASA astrobiologists continue to assess the possibility.
Hoover asserts that the fossils are the remains of extraterrestrial life forms that grew on the parent bodies of the meteorites when liquid water was present, long before the meteorites entered the Earth's atmosphere. A finding of bacteria, if indeed from deep space, is a radical notion. Bacteria are not life forms that thrive in isolation. Bacteria as a rule live in the guts of animals and humans, or on the roots of certain plants, and, in our experience, convert nitrogen to something more usable. The bacteria we know are among those sustaining mechanisms that break down waste organic material, dispose of it, and make for a viable environment. Bacteria are extremely flexible, owing perhaps to their millions of years of development, and have a capacity for rapid growth, reproduction, and a very long age span. The oldest known bacteria fossils are about three and a half billion years old.

David McKay, another NASA researcher, claimed Martian life inside a meteorite found in Antarctica in 1984. Scientists tell us that five trillion Martian rocks have over time fallen to Earth. They estimate that tons of Martian material must have come to land on Earth, although only a few Martian meteorites have been found.
Rudy Schild, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics and editor of the Journal of Cosmology, which carried Hoover's report, said: "The implications are that life is everywhere, and that life on Earth may have come from other planets." Dr. Hoover says, "I believe these findings indicate that life is not restricted to Earth, but is broadly distributed, even outside our solar system."

Heraclitus: 'The World Bubbles Forth.' An Invitation To Us All.

 

by Stuart Kauffman

We may be at a time when our scientific world view is about to undergo a radical transformation.
Recently, physicist Stephen Hawking wrote an article entitled, "Godel and the End of Physics." His concern is that no finite set of laws may suffice to describe the evolution of the universe, and with it, I add, the biosphere, econosphere, human cultural evolution and history.
I hope in this and forthcoming discussions to explore a new issue in Western born science: Do laws sufficiently describe the becoming of the universe and all in it? If not, as I believe, what does such a failure of sufficiency portend? If the becoming of the universe is partially beyond natural law, the issue is deeply important: The way the world becomes may be ever creative and open. Its implications touch all aspects of our lives and humanity as we move toward a co-evolving ecology of world civilizations, need a sharable sense of the sacred, a global ethic, and a deeper understanding of ourselves, living forward not only not knowing what will happen, but not even knowing what can happen. As we will see, if right, we live forward into Mystery. A partially lawless reality has very large practical consequences for our lives. How could it not?
Perhaps as Heraclitus said about 2700 years ago, the world does bubble forth.
  If we are to discuss this, we must first understand the basic framework welded by physics since Descartes, Galileo and Newton. The first modern summary of this view was put forth by French mathematician, Laplace, in Napoleon's time: Given a vast computing system that knew the positions, velocities and masses of all the particles in the universe, this computer could, using Newton's laws, compute the entire future and past of the universe. This claim is the essence of what is called "reductionism", the framework of science in which we in much of the "first world" live.
Add quantum mechanics, general relativity, and the Standard Model of particle physics, and one has most of contemporary reductionistic physics. Despite its stunning successes, reductionism is now doubted by Nobel Laureate physicists Philip Anderson, in "More is Different", Science, 1972, and Robert Laughlin in A Different Universe: The universe from the bottom down, 2005.
There are at least five major features of Laplace's claim: 1) The universe evolves deterministically, because Newton's laws are deterministic and time reversible. 2) All that exists in the universe are particles in motion. 3) All that happens in the universe is fully describable by natural laws. 4) Those laws capture what Aristotle called "efficient causes", the sculptor chiseling the statue, so all that occurs in the universe is due to efficient causes. 5) There exists at least one language, here Newton's laws, capable of fully describing the universe.
I shall doubt all these claims in our further discussions. The first claim is in serious doubt due to quantum mechanics, which, on the famous Copenhagen interpretation due largely to Niels Bohr, and the Born rule, asserts that at the quantum level particles obey the Schrodinger equation whose amplitudes, when squared, give the probabilities of events, but those events happen fully by chance - acausally. The universe is not deterministic at the quantum level.
A preamble: These discussions will often be exploratory, take side trips, may sometimes be confused and confusing, may sometimes be dead ends, but I do sense, and glimpse enough, to believe that they are important and hope you will join me in thinking through the issues. Perhaps a quite new view of reality can be envisioned.

Below is a video put together by the good folks at the American Museum of Natural History, in collaboration with the Rubin Museum of Art.

Masks Of The Universe

by Adam Frank

Last week one of our astute blog community members recommend the book Masks of the Universe by cosmologist Edward Harrison. I was delighted to see this work come up. This is one of my favorite discussions of Cosmos and Culture and so I wanted to pass along the recommendation with a little extra background.
Harrison's book is an unusual addition to the popular science literature. It is not simply a recounting of Big Bang physics and its triumphs. Instead, Harrison begins with a fundamental, but slippery, question. What is interplay between the raw data the world gives us, and the image of the world we create in response. These responses are what Harrison calls "Universes" and his masks are meant to be the physical science version of Joseph Campbell's Masks of God. As Harrison describes it:

Wherever we find a human society, however primitive, we find a universe and wherever we find a universe, of whatever kind, we find a society; both go together, and one does not exist without the other. Each universe coordinates and unifies a society, enabling its members to communicate their thoughts and share their experiences. Each universe determines what is perceived and what constitutes valid knowledge, and the members of each society believe what is perceived and perceived what is believed.

Harrison has chapters on prehistory, on the first urban societies, on the Greeks etc all the way up to the modern era. Each chapter unpacks the ideas expressed in the quote above - there is more to the story of cosmos and culture than simply being right or wrong about an objective reality. One can not doubt that there is a reality out there that pushed back on us but, in Harrison's view, that reality is always viewed through the prism of culturally constructed paradigms.
In the end Harrison does not answer the most pressing question - to what extend has science finally "gotten it right"? To what extent is the Universe revealed by science THE UNIVERSE and to what extent is it another mask. But that is small criticism given this book's big ambitions. It is a thoughtful and unusual work and well worth more discussion on these pages.

One Universe Too Many? String Theories, The Multiverse And The Future Of Physics.

 

by Adam Frank

quinet/via flickr
 

The hidden dimensions described by String Theory might be real, but "how much effort do we put into explorations based on the potentially unobservable while shifting away from the tradition of exploring only the actual?"

Either there is far more Universe to the Universe than we ever expected or the frontiers of physics may be wandering into a mathematically beautiful but ultimately sterile aether of dubious substance.
"The scientist should treasure the riddles he can't solve, not explain them away at the outset" That is what Roberto Unger a Harvard philosopher told me when I interviewed him for a piece I was writing on alternative approaches to "fundamental physics". The story, which appears in this month's DISCOVER, was born from questions I ran up against as I prepared to teach a graduate cosmology course last year. While cosmology is not my own research area I have, for years, watched from the sidelines as the field evolved. And like a number of colleagues I have been puzzled by developments that seem potentially troubling.
Fundamental physics is a catchall term for our bedrock understanding of reality's bedrock — Space, Time, Matter, and Energy. Increasingly, fundamental physics has grown to include Cosmology, the study of the origin and structure of the Universe, as particle physicists and astrophysicists came to see their problems linked. This mixing led to spectacular successes in understanding the evolution of the Universe. But pushing backwards towards the bare instant of the Big Bang, it has also led to a strange development — research fields where the details of potentially unobservable parts of reality shape what we can observe and experimentally test.
For critics, these new domains of theory are less solid science than mathematical allegory. They are "fictions" created in response to some challenge posed by the real world, the world we directly see and test. String Theory contains these kinds of elements. Physicists have struggled for years to develop a workable description of Quantum Gravity — a marriage of the curved Space-time of Einstein's relativity with the discontinuous microworld of quantum physics. Early on String Theory - which swaps point particles for microscopic vibrating strings - looked like an attractive solution. But the theory failed in a world of only 3 space dimensions. In response String Theorists opened space up, adding an extra 7 dimensions that are hidden from us. A mathematically abstract but workable framework for quantum gravity emerged from this construction but a steep price was paid in terms of 7 invisible dimensions added to reality.
  Another potential theoretical allegory comes in response an enigma hidden in the decades old, highly successful "Standard Model of Particle Physics". The Standard Model captures the behavior of all known kinds of matter. It has been verified thousands of times in particle accelerator experiments over the last 40 years. But to match theory with experiments physicists need 20 different numbers, 20 different "constants of nature" that must first be measured in experiments. Needing precise values of 20 separate numbers before you even start making predictions seems less than elegant. Shouldn't a fundamental theory be a lot more fundamental? The problem got worse when physicists recognized those numbers needed to be very finely tuned. Change any of the numbers by a tiny fraction and the details of cosmic evolution change so dramatically that humans would never appear the Universe. Our existence seemed to depend on this "fine-tuning". Ouch.
In response many researchers began to explore so-called Multiverse Cosmologies. The multiverse is a universe of universes. What we think of as the cosmos becomes, in this theoretical framework, just one of many pocket universes each with their own form of the laws of physics. The multiverse first gained widespread attention in the context of inflationary cosmology, a theory of the very, very, early Universe that appeared to solve a growing list of problems with the Big Bang. At first the multiverse was met with raised eyebrows as in "that's a weird idea". But in time it become more attractive, particularly as a response to the dilemma posed by the standard model and its 20 constants.
In a Universe of Universes the values of the constants we see in our cosmos are simply an accident. Instead of needing a fundamental physics explanation, the values of the constants become just a matter of the statistics of universes. The values we see in our universe are perhaps nothing more than the average ones occurring across the many incarnations of the standard model in the many "pocket universes" comprising the multiverse. No fine-tuning is required.
In both these cases — the multiverses' pocket universes and String Theory's hidden dimensions — critics content the new theories don't explain, they explain away. For philosophers like Roberto Unger and physicists like Lee Smolin, George Ellis and my co-blogger Marcelo Glieser, both the unseen universes and the hidden dimensions are fictions that drain the reality out of the only reality we actually experience.
The core problem is that, as of this writing, there is no experimental evidence that hidden dimensions or alternate universe exist. Proponents will justifiably point to the rich theoretical insights that a field like String Theory has provided. They also rightly argue that Einstein's relativity seemed overly mathematical and abstract when it was first introduced and took time before people figured out how to test its veracity. These are valid points but it seems to me there is more at work here than simply technical abstraction. There is an unspoken metaphysics in the new theories that manifests itself as shift in the focus of science. That shift needs to be brought out in the open as part of the debate lest we end up in a very dead end. As Unger says "When we imagine our Universe to be just one out of a multitude of possible worlds we devalue this world, the one we see, the one we should be trying to explain."
I think I would have to agree. There might, indeed, be a multiverse and I like alternative universes as much as the next science fiction groupie. But I wonder how long we should wait before a field yields real, experimentally verifiable fruit. It may well be that String Theory's hidden dimension's are real. Still how much effort do we put into explorations based on the potentially unobservable while shifting away from the tradition of exploring only the actual? More importantly what do we make of the ontological status of theories that need what might be permanently hidden to explain what is always visible?
How many universes, ultimately, are enough?

Matter, Antimatter, And Existence

by Marcelo Gleiser

Last week, the headlines were buzzing with news from Fermilab, the huge particle accelerator some 40 miles west of Chicago: “A New Clue To Explain Existence,” read the article by Dennis Overbye, from The New York Times.
Very catchy title. (Too bad he didn’t mention my new book, which is all about the importance of this and other asymmetries. The timing couldn’t have been any better.) However, some of the readers complained of the need to mix up science and religion even when reporting on a particle physics experiment. Case in point, Overbye quotes a (very good) theoretical physicist from Fermilab, Joe Lykken: “So I would not say that this announcement is the equivalent of seeing the face of God, but it might turn out to be the toe of God.” Lykken was referring to the comment Nobel Prize winner George Smoot made when reporting on his team’s findings of the temperature properties of the microwave background radiation, the leftover “light” from the period when the first atoms were made, just some 400,000 years after the Big Bang: “it was like looking at the face of God.” Does the existence of matter and antimatter really have anything to do with God? If so, what? And if not, why is there a need to invoke God when publicizing results in cosmology?
Now, Lykken is a serious physicist and his comment was certainly tongue-in-cheek. What he meant was simply that the results at Fermilab are indeed very important and do have a relationship to our existence. But his use of God, as that of Smoot and many other physicists (e.g. “The God Particle”, the book by Nobel laureate Leon Lederman and Dick Teresi, about the Higgs particle, or Hawking’s famous quote that finding a final theory is like “knowing the mind of God”) does tell us something about not only what the public expects to hear, but of the cultural role modern theoretical physicists—in particular physicists working on “origins” questions—believe they have. I am guilty as charged, since this is the main focus of my own research.
Is physics a new kind of theology?
  Hardly. To confuse the practice of science with the tenets of religion is a grave mistake. That said, modern physics is encroaching on territory that for millennia has been the province of religion. The goal of modern cosmology is to construct a narrative of the Universe’s history. This history, it is expected, should start as early as possible, hopefully as early as the very concept of classical time, that is, a time that flows inexorably forward, starts to makes sense. Thus, the goal of modern cosmology is quite ambitious, to explain how the Universe evolved to become what it is now, starting from initial conditions lost in the fog of faraway time.
It’s then clear why God shows up so often in news and explanations of cosmology. After all, isn’t Creation (with a capital C) the biggest of all mysteries? If humans could explain how the Universe came to be, what would be left? Sure, there are other mysteries and wonders, such as the origin of life and of mind. But even these are secondary to the origin of all things: without a cosmos there is no life or mind! (Although it could also be argued that without a mind there is no Universe…something for another day!)
So, if cosmology could explain not just why the Universe is the way it is but why the Universe is, we would be entering a new era in the history of ideas: human reason explains Creation and thus human reason is equated with…yes, the mind of God! No wonder the metaphor is so prevalent. It reveals the ambitions behind the whole enterprise. It also goes to show, as readers of my new book know, that we must seriously exorcize this metaphor from science. It’s damaging to science and simply wrong!
The question of why there is more matter than antimatter in the cosmos is indeed very fundamental. The reason it relates to our existence is the following: according to the laws of particle physics, if matter and antimatter coexisted in equal footing, they’d mostly annihilate into pure radiation. That is, according to our present description of particle physics, unless there is an excess of mater over antimatter during the cosmos’s first moments of existence, space would be filled with radiation and not much else. Clearly, given that we are here, this is not what went on. We can then say that, yes, the fact that the experiments at Fermilab indicate that there is an excess of matter over antimatter is consistent with the fact that we are here. What is needed, of course, is an explanation for this excess. Can the current laws of physics produce it?
The answer is no. We need something else, something new, physics that goes beyond our current understanding. This is why the results are exciting; not because it tells us something we didn’t know—there was plenty of evidence for an excess of matter over antimatter in previous experiments—but because it reinforces that our current picture of physical reality is incomplete, that more is needed.
Exciting as this is, I certainly wouldn’t equate this discovery with the toes of God or, for that matter, with any other part of the divine anatomy. Quite the opposite. This discovery is a triumph of human inventiveness, having really nothing to do with God or theology. Science certainly opens new windows into reality, but these windows don’t let us peer into Heaven with any more clarity.

Astronomy Picture of the Day - Cotopaxi volcano in Ecuador.

A superb clip from the Cotopaxi volcano in Ecuador found at that most wonderful of websites Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Dark Matter Rivisited

Toward Quantum Gravity? Discrete Space, Dark Energy And the Real Line

 

by Stuart Kauffman

Jeffrey Newman/NASA Using the Hubble telescope, it took NASA scientists eight years to get a measurement of the expanding universe. This spiral galaxy — NGC 4603 — was the most distant galaxy helpful to the study.

Unfortunately for previous cosmological theories, the universe appears reasonably convincingly to be expanding at an accelerating rate.  This, all physicists know, is no small problem.  It is so severe that physicists now invoke “Dark Energy” to explain this accelerating expansion.
Here is the central problem: Throw a ball into the air. If you do so at less than the escape velocity from the earth’s gravitational field, it will fly upward, exchange kinetic and gravitational potential energy until the two are equal at the top of its trajectory, then the ball will fall back to earth.  If the initial velocity of the ball is just equal to the earth’s gravitational field, the ball will “coast to infinity” ever more slowly, reaching infinity at 0 velocity, in the absence of other matter in the universe to provide additional gravitational fields. If the initial velocity of the ball is still higher, it will fly from the earth and coast to infinity at an ever decreasing, but finite velocity.
The Big Bang, well, Banged. To put the issue over-simply, vast energy arising from nothing became a quark gluon soup, became matter and fields containing energy, hence, by E=MC², matter, as the universe expanded. The mutual gravitational attraction of all the mass and energy in the universe is supposed to forever slow the expansion of the universe. Given General Relativity, the universe should either expand then collapse in the Big Crunch, like the ball falling again to earth, it should expand forever to infinity reaching infinity at a zero rate of expansion, a critical state of affairs, or it should expand  forever, but at an ever slowing but finite rate.
The first and last cases correspond by General Relativity to a positively curved spacetime, and a negatively curved space time. The critical case corresponds to a flat spacetime.  Cosmologists thought the universe was critical.
What the universe should not be doing is expanding at an accelerating rate.
But it seems to be.
Einstein made a “mistake.”
  He thought the universe was of constant size, and his equations did not predict this. He “fudged” and added the simplest correction term to his equations, the “Cosmological Constant.”  Using it, Einstein could achieve a universe of constant size. Hubble soon discovered that galaxies recede from one another in proportion to their distance apart and concluded the universe was expanding.  Einstein admitted it was the worst mistake of his scientific life.
But the Cosmological Constant has remerged as a start to account for Dark Energy. With it, one can achieve an accelerating expansion of the universe.  The Cosmological Constant is as if there were a “repulsive force” in space, pushing any two regions of space further apart, and the more so as their distance apart increases.
Einstein realized that his Cosmological Constant implied an increasing energy in the expanding universe, such that the vacuum energy per unit volume remained constant. This flies in the face of the Big Bang belief that all the energy of the universe came to exist in that Bang.  Well, OK, so it does.
The problem is, there is, in a deep sense, no physics behind the Cosmological Constant, it is just a constant added the only place Einstein could in his equations and keep the rest of the physics of General Relativity unmodified.
Thus, the deep question is: What conceivable physical process(es) could constitute the Cosmological constant.
I am going to propose a related set of concepts that might do the job:

1. Space is NOT CONTINUOUS. Space, on the smallest length scale, the Planck length of 10³⁴ centimeters, comes in discrete units. These units cannot interpenetrate, otherwise, once again, space would be continuous. An approach to quantum gravity, Loop Quantum Gravity, kindly taught to me by Lee Smolin, a founder of that field, proposes that on the Planck scale, space is comprised of tetrahedra.
2. These units of space also cannot expand. But this implies that space itself cannot expand!  The only way “space” can expand is if more units of space, the tetrahedra, come into existence.  In Loop Quantum Gravity this is allowed: tetrahedra can build new tetrahedra on any of their four faces in what are called Pachner moves.  So for space to “expand” it must build itself by “cloning” itself.
3. Tetrahedra or units of space have a constant “rate” or probability per unit time, of cloning themselves.  This postulate implies that space builds itself and expands EVER FASTER. Indeed, like a bacterial colony freshly plated, space expands exponentially.  We are stepping towards Dark Energy and a Cosmological Constant which yields an exponentially expanding space.  Before I go further, it is clear that the more space now exists, the more tetrahedra there are, so any two regions of space are being “pushed apart” by the cloning of tetrahedra between them.
4. Every time a tetrahedron of space is created, new energy enters that tetrahedron from nowhere, so the vacuum energy is constant as space expands at an accelerating rate.  This accords with Einstein’s realization that the Cosmological Constant could imply can constant energy per unit space as space expanded: Dark Energy we now say. I note that it makes us uncomfortable in imagine energy arising from “nothing”, but we accept this magic at the Big Bang  It is no more magical here.  Some energy per unit space is needed for point 5) next. Also physicists say that once there is matter, energy, expansion, and gravitation, energy is not conserved.
5. Newborn tetrahedra are quantum objects. More, by Pachner moves, quantum geometry can be in a superposition of more than one “graph structure” connecting the nodes of the tetrahedra in a diversity of ways. But because they contain energy, they contain mass.  At some scale and volume of cloning tetrahedra, considered as a “system” in a still larger spatial volume  considered as the “environment” of the “system”, the mass in the space in the “system” is sufficient that some number of quantum tetrahedra DECOHERE into CLASSICAL SPACE.
6. Now two alternative postulates: 6A, even classical space can give birth to new tetrahedra. 6B, decoherence can be reversed occasionally, and newly quantum tetrahedra can clone themselves and give birth to new tetrahedra.  The alternative postulates matter of course, but I will not favor either.

Taking the above non-mathematized schema of a physical a theory of Dark Energy as the cloning of space by space, the first thing to do is estimate the rate of cloning of space needed to  account for the observed accelerating expansion of the universe.  This is a relatively straightforward job.
The Real Line is a Real Mess. Best if space is discrete on some small scale.
There is a separate reason to consider space on some smallest scale to be discrete: The real line is a real mess.  Recall that the real line, a human invention, is a continuous line, for example from 0.0 to 1.0 on some scale like a meter stick.  The real line has both  an infinity of rational numbers, where rational numbers can be expressed as the ratio of two whole numbers such as 34/6501.  But as Pythagoras proved, there are numbers that cannot be expressed as such ratios. These are the irrational numbers and are expressed as INFINITELY LONG sequence of the integers, 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 after the “decimal point”.  How many irrational numbers are there?  Well, between any two rational numbers, no matter how close, there are an infinite number of irrational numbers.  The rational numbers are of the same order of infinity as the integers. The irrationals are of second order infinity.
Here is the problem. Mathematics is largely founded on set theory.  But suppose I want to form two sets of irrational numbers, each with specific irrational numbers in it.  How can I do so?  Each irrational number is an infinite series of the first 10 integers above. How can I pick a “specific” irrational number?
One answer would seem easy: have a computer algorithm to compute each such number, like Pi, or the square root of 2, both of which are irrational, and then just form the sets.
Unfortunately, Alan Turing of the Turing Machine that is the basis of all digital classical and quantum computers today, proved that almost no irrational numbers were “effectively computable” using a Universal Turing Machine.  So we cannot use this idea for our two sets.
The mathematicians, wishing to preserve set theory, postulated an Axiom of Choice asserting, well what the heck, that one can just go ahead and form the two sets.
Axioms are fine, but Turing tells us there is no effectively computable way to achieve the formation of these two sets for arbitrary choices of irrational numbers.
Why should we care?  Because on the one hand, classical physics is based on the continuous line, rational and irrational numbers included. But then, classical physics works at length scales far above the Planck length scale of 10 to the - 34 centimeters.
We don’t need a continuum at that scale for classical physics.
On the other hand, if we remember that it is we who invented the idea of the real line and have learned to love it, this does not mean that the real line is the right description of reality.  And it is filled with problems. As I said, the real line is a mess.
Then if we give up the real line, space must have a smallest length scale.  The Planck length scale is the obvious scale.  Then we get to Loop Quantum Gravity’s tetrahedra, or some other minimal discrete units of space, avoid the continuous line, and with the postulates that these minimal units of space cannot interpenetrate, cannot expand, and can clone themselves we have the start of an exponentially expanding space.  If we add  energy per new unit of space and decoherence of quantum units of space, we get classical space and a constant vacuum energy.  And if on 6A or 6B space tetrahedra can continue to clone themselves at some rate per unit volume of space we have Dark Energy.
There is as yet no matter or other energy in this space, of course, to add its mutual gravitational attraction to that of vacuum energy, as described by General Relativity, but given CLASSICAL SPACE achieved by the decoherence of quantum regions of space considered as “systems” into larger regions of quantum space considered as “environments, General Relativity seems safe.
This could conceivably constitute a theory, or part of a theory, of quantum gravity. The ideas could just possibly unite General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.  It seems worth thinking about.

Discrete Space, General Relativity, Dark Matter And The Casimir Effect

by Stuart Kauffman

In an earlier blog, Marcelo discussed Dark Matter and stated that, with the exception of hopes of exotic particles called WIMPs, (Weakly Interacting massive particles) which have not been found, we have no idea what Dark Matter might be.
Fools rush in where physicists, no doubt wisely, do not tread.  That said, I wish to propose concepts that may prove helpful with the issue of Dark Matter, relate to the hypothesis of discrete space on the Planck length scale that I discussed two blogs ago, seem to have potential relevance to General Relativity and perhaps quantum gravity, and appear to be testable now using the Casimir effect.  I shall predict that the strength of the Casimir effect is weaker in a local gravitational field exactly in the proportion that General Relativity shows that space-time curves locally in a gravitational field.
While the ideas are novel, and of course I am not a physicist, they have the virtue of being simply testable.
What is Dark Matter?  If one observes the rotation of galaxies or clusters of galaxies, the outer margins of the galaxies, or clusters of galaxies, are rotating too rapidly to be accounted for by either Newtonian or Einsteinian gravity.  There is essentially no doubt about this excess velocity.  To explain it, physicists have for years postulated the unknown Dark Matter in the outskirts of a galaxy or cluster of galaxies, in a “squashed sphere” hovering about the galaxy or cluster of galaxies.
My attempt to offer a new line of thought about Dark Matter begins with the postulates of my blog on Discrete Space and Dark Energy, two blogs ago.  There, borrowing the general idea from Loop Quantum Gravity, I proposed that on the Planck length scale of 10 to the -34 power centimeters, space is discrete.  Again, but not limited by, Loop Quantum Gravity, I supposed that these discrete units of space were tetrahedra that could not interpenetrate, or else space is again continuous. And I supposed that tetrahedra cannot expand. The latter implies that space must “clone” itself, like bacteria, giving rise to an exponential growth of space, hence the start of a theory of Dark Energy.  I further proposed that when a new tetrahedron is “born”, new energy comes with the tetrahedron “from nowhere”, thus keeping the energy density of space a constant.
You may cavail at energy entering space units “from nowhere” but we accept energy from nowhere in the Big Bang, with no explanation, so one magic is no worse than the other. In addition, my physicist friends say that with an expanding universe, matter, energy, and gravity, energy is not conserved for the universe as a whole in any case.
Finally, I proposed that space units are quantum degrees of freedom with alternative topologies connecting the nodes of the tetrahedra. Because space has energy, it has mass, thus will decohere at some space scale considering a volume of space a “system” and surrounding space as an “environment.  Then quantum space becomes classical because quantum space decoheres.
Now, on to considering a testable hypothesis for Dark Matter.
  I begin with General Relativity and the deformation of space in the vicinity of a mass, M.   General Relativity speaks in terms of a space “metric”.  In the absence of masses, M, space is thought to be flat.  One uses two coordinates, dR and dL, where dR is the flat space metric and dL is the curved space metric.
In General Relativity, one can define dL in relation to dR as a massive object, M, is approached from a distance.  What occurs is that space is curved into a funnel shape, ever steeper as the center of mass of M is approached.
In terms of dR and dL, as the center of mass M is approached, one can plot dL/dR for each small change in either coordinate.  One obtains the funnel described above, where for initial small changes in R, dR, far from M, changes in L, dL are approximately equal to changes in R, dR. That is, space is locally almost flat.  As the center of mass, M, is approached, small changes in R, dR, are associated with large changes in L, dL, yielding the funnel described above.  In short, as the center of mass is approached, General Relativity states that space is curved in such a way that, to accommodate large changes in the metric, dL, as M is approached, space is stretched as the center of mass of M is approached.
How can General Relativity be brought into accord with the hypothesis that space comes in Planck scale discrete units that can neither interpenetrate nor stretch, ie expand?
One possibility seems a bad idea: if space cannot expand, perhaps the stretching of space in the vicinity of a mass, M, requires the generation of more tetrahedra, proportional to the stretching.
This seems a terrible idea, for there is no physical basis then for the “stretching” of space near M.
I turn then to the alternative simple hypothesis. But it has many consequences.
Marcelo pointed out with respect to my blog on Discrete Space, Dark Energy, ...which yielded a Cosmological Constant in the rate at which space clones itself so expands exponentially, that the Cosmological Constant is rich in physical interpretation. Most critically, the Cosmological Constant is identical to the 0 point quantum fluctuations of quantum field theories.
Then I propose a very simple postulate:  The local curvature of space is identical with local changes in the 0 point energy of the vacuum, hence with local changes in the Cosmological Constant.  In particular, the local stretching of space demanded by General Relativity in the vicinity of a mass, M, is exactly equal to a local proportional decrease in the 0 point energy of the vacuum, hence of the Cosmological Constant.  This hypothesis proposes a possible underlying quantum “mechanism” for the curvature of classical space in General Relativity.
Why can this hypothesis explain Dark Matter?  To my knowledge, vacuum energy is not accounted for in the excess rotational velocity of the outer margins of galaxies or clusters of galaxies.
But if the hypothesis I propose is correct, as the center of mass of a galaxy or cluster of galaxies is approached, the vacuum energy density, ie the 0 point quantum energy, ie the Cosmological Constant, decreases in proportion to the “stretching” of space given by the metric of General Relativity.  Thus there is less energy per unit of space where it is stretched by the metric near the center of mass of the galaxy than at its outskirts where space is nearly flat.  Then if there is less energy near the center of mass and more in the outskirts of the galaxy or cluster of galaxies, by E = MC squared, there is less mass due to vacuum energy near the center of the galaxy, and more vacuum energy mass in the outskirts of the galaxy.  This is my proposed explanation of the dark matter postulated in the peripheries of galaxies or clusters of galaxies.
One can consider a further idea:  If the increased mass on the periphery of the galaxy or cluster of galaxies must itself be in an orbit to account for the increased rotational velocity, one can think of wave packets of energy (hence mass) flowing in orbit around the galaxy or cluster of galaxies.
One can consider a second idea: Relax the assumption that the volume of a discrete unit of space cannot expand. Then postulate that the expansion of a unit of space is proportional to its 0 point energy.  Then as space curves and 0 point energy per unit space falls, units of space expand proportionally.
The Casimir Effect
The hypothesis I put forth can, I believe, be tested by the Casimir Effect which should be weaker in a strong gravitational field that far from such a field.  More, the hypothesis of discrete space on the Planck scale may help with an embarrassing infinity in the formulation of the mathematics of the Casimir effect which is “solved” by a questionable “renormalization”.
The Casimir Effect was predicted and confirmed in a setting in which two large conducting metal plates are very close to one another in a vacuum.  A close distance is a micrometer or less.  Casimir realized that for a quantized field as is common throughout quantum field theory, one could think of the field as a set of quantum oscillators, one at each point in space.  Now these oscillators can harbor waves, but the waves must match the boundary conditions of the two metal plates.
The predicted attractive force between the plates, the Casimir Effect, has been measured with two parallel plates and with a plate and a large sphere one of the surfaces of which is near the first plate.  It is a well confirmed effect.
But there is a critical problem.  If space is continuous, then any possible wavelength meeting the boundary conditions, from a micrometer long to arbitrarily short wavelengths, can fit into the vacuum between the plates. The total energy of the Casimir effect should be the sum of the energies of these wavelengths. Each wavelength has an energy which is inversely proportional to its wavelength.  The sum is, unfortunately, infinite because wavelengths can become ever shorter and of ever higher energy.
In standard quantum field theory, this is “handled” with a “renormalization” that many physicists are not comfortable with.
Now consider the hypothesis that space is discrete on the Planck length scale.  Then there is a natural cutoff of wavelengths at this length scale. No shorter wavelengths can occur and the sum of energies is FINITE.   This is, of course, an argument for discrete space, but not a conclusive one.  The calculations have been done, reported for a general audience I believe in Leonard Suskind’s “The Cosmic Landscape”.  If I remember correctly, with a cut off at the Planck length scale, the energy is still much too high.
The hypothesis for Dark Matter which I suggest above, has an experimental consequence, even without detailed calculations:  The Casimir Effect should be less in a strong gravitational field than in a weaker field.  This is rather simply testable by measuring the Casimir effect on the surface of the Earth, and in space at different distances from the Earth, including the position of balance between the lunary and the earth’s gravitational fields.
I close with the obvious caveats: I am not a physicist. Physics is a richly interwoven skein of consistent theory, and some crude steps.  I am much more likely to be entirely wrong than even partially right. For example, consider the central hypothesis relates local curvature of space to a corresponding decreases in the 0 point energy of a quantum field. This seems radical and may of course be entirely wrong.  I do not know the ways the 0 point energy of a quantum field is locally experimentally testable directly. But the Casimir effect would seem to measure the 0 point energy of a local volume of vacuum, so seems a good test of this hypothesis.
The theory I propose in outline seems to contain a conversion of space to matter and energy, for it relates the local curvature of space to a local loss of 0 point energy, hence mass. Thus when space is “stretched” by a nearby mass, M, the energy per volume of space decreases.   Then space, matter and energy are all inter-convertable. Since on this proposal, a stretching of space is related to a proportional decrease in energy per unit space, it would be wonderful if “space, matter and energy” are conserved together. I confess I do like this possibility a lot.

Blowing Up Stars: A 50 Year Old Question Goes Down?

 

by Adam Frank

NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Gehrz (University of Minnesota)

  The Crab Nebula is the shattered remnant of a massive star that ended its life in a supernova explosion.

There are some critical, crossroads problems in science that just refuse to go away. They linger like ghosts haunting researchers for decades and eluding all attempts at resolution. Entire careers are spent searching for an answer and sometime entire lifetimes go by without that answer found. But every so often one of those vexing problems on which so much depends falls to human effort and ingenuity.
Today may be one of those days.
Supernova, the apocalyptic explosions of massive stars, are the brightest most energetic events in the Cosmos second only to the Big Bang which birthed the Universe itself. Visible from across the Universe Supernovae result from the self-immolation of stars. More than fireworks supernova matter acting as nuclear forges that create many of the heavy elements on which life depends. But living at the heart of these beasts is a mystery that 50 years and untold effort has been unable to solve. Until perhaps today.
When a massive star (more than eight times the sun mass) reaches the end of its life it runs out of nuclear fuel. With no visible means of support against its own titanic gravity, the star comes crashing down on itself squeezing tremendous amounts of mass into an ever smaller space. In less than seconds, a kind of nuclear alchemy occurs in the compressed center. A giant hyperdense core (a proto-neutron star) forms like a hard rubber ball that can only be squeezed so far. The dense core resists further compression. As the outer layers of the star that are still freefalling inwards slam into this nuclear brick wall a rebounding shock wave forms that blows the star apart.
At least that was the story.
The problem was the story never really worked. For 50 years, astronomers have been trying to find some variation on this theory –- the story –- that could make a massive dying star blow up. The added rotation, included the effects of ghostly particles called neutrinos, thought about jets and magnetic fields forming at the ultra dense core. Some of these ideas almost work, or work in some cases. But when explored in detail, they never produced a convincing, universal mechanism for creating the supernova that we know exist. It was a great and grand puzzle. Now, perhaps, the puzzle has been solved.
Jason Nordaus is a post-doctoral student working with Professor Adam Burrows at Princeton University. In a paper that has just appeared today, Nordhaus may have found the key to nature’s most extreme fireworks. Now you will have to excuse me for being a bit proud as Nordhaus got his PhD in our theory group at University of Rochester and we love our graduates going on to do great work with other scientists. If this result holds up it will be very important for astronomy. More importantly the answer Nordhaus found goes beyond science and directly touches our beloved Cosmos & Culture theme.
Using very high performance computers Nordaus ran simulations of exploding stars that focused on one key piece of physics. Squeezing matter produces lots of particles called neutrinos. The absorption of these neutrinos near the shock wave had already been suggested as a way to power it up and blow the star to bits.
What mattered for Nordaus was the ability to simulate the explosions — in detail — in 3-D. Lacking the computational power many previous studies were forced perform simulations in lower dimensions. That means imagining the star to be highly symmetric limiting the ability for neutrinos to deposit their energy in the gas and blow the star up. By tracking the full lumpy, bumpy, 3-D behavior of the collapsing star and the neutrinos Nordau’s found he could consistently get his model stars to explode.
The answer to this 50-year-old mystery turned out to be “nothing more” than our inability to explore detailed physics in its detailed 3-D behavior. That is where the link between Cosmos and Culture emerges.
Nordhuas’ result was simulation at the “Peta”scale frontier. PetaBytes means a million, billion bytes. PetaFlops means a million billion computations a second. That is the edge computational science is now crossing. With it comes our first real shot at virtual reality. Things are going change at Petascale domains in everything from video games to immersive computing (you don’t drive your car, your car drives you for example).
As we cross this frontier in machine power we can expect explosions in a lot more than model stars.

The Dark Universe

 

by Marcelo Gleiser

M.J. Jee/Johns Hopkins University/NASA

A dark matter ring in a galaxy cluster.

We are living through golden times. At least when it comes to cosmology and particle physics.
Nothing is more exciting in science as when new technologies allow for the testing and advancement of theories. Sometimes, decades pass before new machines are capable of probing into new realms.
But eventually, if the ideas are testable, their day comes. And then it’s either glory or the garbage can.


The history of cosmology during the past 100 years is a great example. Einstein was the first to propose a model for the cosmos, based on his freshly-minted theory of general relativity that attributes gravity to the curvature of space around a massive body. The year was 1917, and he had no reason to suppose that the universe was changing in time. So, he chose the simplest possible geometry for the cosmos, static and spherical.
Between 1917 and 1929, the year Hubble discovered that galaxies were moving apart at a rate that grew with their distance (the farther away the fastest they receded), many cosmological models were proposed, suggesting all kinds of alternative behaviors: In 1922, the Russian Alexander Friedmann proposed a time-varying universe, that could either expand forever or reach a maximum size and begin contracting until it reached a singular point. This alternation of expansion and contraction could, in principle, go on forever.
Einstein wasn’t very enthusiastic about Friedmann’s solutions. Only in 1931, when he visited Hubble at the Mount Wilson observatory, he finally conceded. He needed hard data to change his mind.
The next big episode happened in the late forties. In England, a trio of physicists had proposed a model where the universe didn’t really change in time: it was eternal. Their model was a reaction to the obvious corollary of Hubble’s discovery: an expanding universe was smaller in the past. Go back far enough and you reach a point when all matter was squeezed into a very small volume. Thus, you could argue that the universe had a starting point, a history. Echoes of genesis were too strong for many. So, the British trio proposed the “Steady State” model, where more matter is created in order to compensate for the dilution caused by the expansion. In the balance, the universe remains the same, in a steady state.
  Meanwhile, George Gamow, a US-based Russian expatriate who studied with Friedmann, proposed what became known as the Big Bang model: the universe does have a history, and it started at a singularity in the past. Gamow wasn’t too interested in the metaphysical implications of his model. Together with Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman, he computed the approximate history of the universe, proposing that chemical elements where made in the primordial furnace moments after the bang: the cosmos as the ultimate alchemist. They also proposed that a hot universe should have left behind a sea of radiation, the remnants of the initial formation of atoms. (It was latter shown that only the lightest elements were made in primordial times. Stars are the true alchemists.)
In 1965, the radiation proposed by Gamow and collaborators was discovered. The Steady State model, a contender until then, had to be discarded. Once again, data decided which theory to pick, precisely as it should be in science.
Cut to the present time. We have two mysterious observations, still unexplained. First, that galaxies are shrouded in dark matter, a kind of material that doesn’t produce its own light, interacting only gravitationally (or very weakly otherwise) with ordinary matter (that is, matter made of normal stuff like protons and electrons). Second, that the universe is not only expanding, but doing so at an accelerated rate. The culprit has a name, “dark energy."
Dark matter, not being made of quarks and electrons, must be something new.  Because it contributes about 23 percent of the stuff in the cosmos, even neutrinos are not enough to do it. Dark energy, well, we really don’t know. All we do know is that it contributes some 73 percent of the total cosmic recipe. My bet is that it has some deep relation to the very nature of the vacuum.
Yes, it’s possible that the dominant component of our universe comes from emptiness.
In quantum theory, there is no such thing as empty space. Energy fluctuations capable of creating matter pop out of “nothing” and go back to nothing. This weirdness can be traced back to the uncertainty principle, which essentially says that nothing stands still; there is always some agitation. The world of the very small is in a perpetual dance of creation and destruction.
There are explanations for both dark matter and dark energy involving modifications of Einstein’s theory. At this point, they don’t seem very likely. And there are explanations that are related to the existence of theories of everything, to extra dimensions of space, and to a symmetry called “supersymmetry,” that mixes particles of matter and particles that transmit forces. Or, it could be something completely different and unexpected.
In science, it’s exciting not to know.
We need data to decide. And data is coming soon. Both the Large Hadron Collider, the giant particle accelerator in Switzerland, and a slew of new cosmological missions will help us see the way.
After all, experiments without theories are lame and theories without experiments are blind. I think Einstein would have agreed.

Life On Titan?

by Marcelo Gleiser

 

NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

 

The Cassini spacecraft peeks through the murk of Titan's thick atmosphere in a search for clouds.

The headlines were bombastic: “NASA scientists discover evidence ‘that alien life exists on Saturn’s moon’,” at the Daily Telegraph in the UK.

There were many others about a month ago.
The news was based on two papers using data collected by the Cassini spacecraft, which has been flying about Saturn and its magnificent moons. In one of them, published in Icarus, scientists described how hydrogen molecules were seen flowing down Titan’s atmosphere and disappearing at the surface. In another paper, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, a survey of the plethora of hydrocarbons blanketing Titan’s surface found a lack of acetylene. Normally, hydrogen shouldn’t be flowing downward and disappearing, and acetylene should be an ingredient of the organic soup brewing on Titan.
According to NASA scientist Chris McKay, acetylene forms the best energy source for a methane-based life on Titan. So, if acetylene is missing, maybe it’s being consumed as food. Hydrogen is even more important, as it’s a key ingredient in a methane-based metabolism.
An argument for alien life based on the absence of two chemicals is not very strong. But what if there was life on Titan?
  McKay is a very reasonable and extremely serious scientist. He is careful to stress that these are indications of a hypothetical methane-based life form which has never been observed: the absence of hydrogen and acetylene is not yet evidence of life.
The Daily Telegraph’s headline was way out of line.
However, the discoveries are suggestive of some form of extreme chemistry taking place at the moon’s surface, where the temperature is around minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit. In this kind of frozen world, methane and ethane flow as liquids, collecting in lakes not so different from those found in our water world. Reality does beat fantasy!
If anything, Titan’s exuberant organic chemistry serves as an indication that alien worlds have many surprises for us. That McKay could predict what kind of effects a methane-based life would have on an alien world is, in itself, quite remarkable. Even if these two signatures prove to be something quite lifeless (that’s my bet), the fact is that we now have machines that can examine alien chemistry in search of exotic life forms, is an amazing achievement.
We are privileged to live in a time when aliens step out of novels and movies and become part of serious scientific inquiry.
It remains to be seen if we are actually going to discover some kind of life form in the next few decades. However, even if we do, odds are this life will be quite simple, possibly unicellular like our bacteria. That’s not a bad thing.
Finding any kind of life would have very deep implications for humankind. After all, if another kind of life exists in a celestial body in our cosmic neighborhood, the probability that life would be widespread in the galaxy would skyrocket. And that would beg the question as to why we haven’t seen any convincing signs of intelligent life.
We would then have to wonder if the reason is that intelligent life is quite rare. That being the case, we would have to wonder why we are so special.

PLAYING WITH DARK MATTER

Also check out this  interactive presentation from McGraw-Hill that will allow you to explore how astronomers conclude that the Universe is full Dark Matter.

P.S. Make sure you read over the Introduction and How To sections to see how it all works.

Death Of The Big Bang, Or The Problem Of Time's Beginning

 

by Adam Frank

NASA

  At an estimated age of 13 billion years, this is the oldest known planet. 
It orbits a peculiar pair of burned-out stars in the crowded core of a cluster of more than 100,000 stars. The measurements were taken by Hubble.

The Big Bang is all but dead and we do not yet know what will replace it.
There are those who will tell you that Cosmology — the study of the Universe entire — has become an exact science.  They will tell you that this grand and all embracing field has, in the last 50 years, moved from the realms of philosophical speculation into the purest domains of science via exacting confrontations between theoretical models and high-resolution data. You should know that they are right.
For the first time in the long march of human thinking we are now, finally, able to construct a detailed and verifiable account of cosmic history.
So when I tell you that Big Bang is dead I do not mean the story that begins with a Universe far hotter and far denser than what we see today. I do not mean the story of a Universe expanding, of matter cooling and congealing over billions of years into stars and galaxies.  That story, the scientific narrative of cosmic evolution over the last 13.7 billion years is doing just fine. That story is, for all intents and purposes, secure.
It’s the beginning that has fallen. It is genesis that stands ready to be replaced.
  The singular and all-important moment of creation at the beginning of the Big Bang — the beginning of time and existence — has become precarious and is poised to be swept aside.  In other words it’s the Bang in the Big Bang that we humans, in our endless quest to understand the world, are ready to abandon.  That single moment of creation with no before is almost exhausted, done in by the very precision of the science which gave it's conception a measure of reality.
Now it appears that science is ready to go beyond, and before, the Big Bang.  Cosmology is waiting at the precipice of its next great revolution.  The only question is where, or better yet “when,” do we go from here? We are ending the beginning and beginning down another path.
There are different reasons for this push backward.  I am in the midst of writing a book on the subject (almost done… almost… done) so I will be blogging on this topic more as time goes on. Today, I will leave you with two terms which sum up the move away from a single moment of creation: Inflationary Cosmology and Quantum Gravity.
Inflationary Cosmology is a major addition to standard Big Bang theory. It emerged in 1980s to solve a number of paradoxes that arose in both particle physics and cosmology.  Inflation imagines a tiny sliver of the Universe undergoing expansion on steroids at the barest instant after the Big Bang.  Inflation makes all we see nothing more than a bubble in a much larger, unknown Universe.  In the Eternal Inflation versions of the model, the process goes on and on with no beginning and no end — bubble universes are always being born and are always “dying”.  No single Big Bang need exist and hence no beginning of cosmic time.
Quantum Gravity is the name physicists give to their holy of holies — a theory uniting Einstein’s description of Space-Time and the Quantum description of the microworld.  String Theory makes a claim to this throne but there are other equally interesting ideas like Loop Quantum Gravity.  What they all share is the desire to climb within that first moment of creation, the singularity at t = 0 when the Universe and time just began.  From these explorations new cosmological ideas like Cyclic Universes emerge: Big Bangs followed by Big Crunches or Big Bangs as collisions between hyperdimensional sheets of reality.  There are many ideas coming from research on Quantum Gravity theories, many ways of avoiding a single moment of “Let There Be Light.”
Most scientists were never happy with a comsic beginning.  It was too strange, like firing up the engine on God’s Porsche.  Now there seem to be many routes to before but only time (and ultimately data) will tell us what to do with problem of time’s beginning.

Understanding Nature On Her Terms, And The Fear That Comes With It

 

by Ursula Goodenough

Robert F. Bukaty/AP

  It is not enough to appreciate nature.
It is also crucial that we understand it.

Aldo Leopold has written a passage in his classic A Sand County Almanac that goes to heart of what I want to write about this morning.

No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions. The proof that environmental conservation has not yet touched these foundations of conduct lies in the fact that philosophy and religion have not yet heard of it. In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial. ...We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.

Leopold wrote this passage in 1949, and it can certainly be said that religion and philosophy have since come to hear about conservation, in good part, because of the environmental movement that Leopold helped to catalyze.
But I hear him saying something more.
I hear him saying that it is not enough to appreciate nature.  It is also crucial that we understand it, deep in our bones.
Several years ago I attended a workshop where the speakers described various ways that environmental topics had been effectively woven into college curricula.  Many interesting programs were outlined. In not one presentation, however, was there any mention of science courses. Indeed, the S-word was never used in the entire two hours of discussion. Sustainability, yes, and stewardship and subsidies and self-restraint. But not science.
Let me take a short detour and bring to your minds another key social movement of the past 50 years, one that we can call cultural studies. We have come to realize that in order to have an appreciation of a culture other than one’s own, it is essential to leave one’s own culture-laden perspectives behind. To take in another culture requires a deep understanding of its language, its history, its dynamics, and its mythos from the perspective of those who inhabit that culture, from those who indwell. We now insist on hearing their voices.
In the same way, I would say, to understand a tree is not just to think of it as beautiful, or as a habitat for birds, or as provisioning shade for the ferns or loam for the forest floor.  A tree is all of these things, to be sure. But it is also carrying out photosynthetic electron transport and cyclic and non-cyclic phosphorylation and NADP reduction and DNA replication and lignin biosynthesis. To say that these vital activities of the tree are not interesting, or too difficult to understand, sounds dismissive to me, or even arrogant, like hearing someone say that he wants to observe a Central American culture through his own lenses, on his own terms, wants to pull up in a cruise ship and buy a few postcards and leave. To my mind, it is our obligation to understand how genes work and evolution happens and galaxies collide and water freezes and brains think and stars burn. This is the language and the history of our entire context. Trees speak in electrons and carbon and chemical bonds and DNA.
How could a curriculum on environmentalism leave these things out?
  Well, let’s begin with the perception that “these things” are not very interesting or too difficult to understand. True, our schools in the main do a terrible job of making science interesting, and an excellent job of making it incomprehensible. And true, the perceived linkage between scientific understanding and the technological use of scientific understanding fuels an anti-science bias in persons who are alarmed by the technological juggernaut (although to my mind, as I’ve developed here, this bias arises from a misunderstanding of how the science-technology linkage works).
But I pick up on something deeper: I encounter a resistance to scientific explanation. Resistance doesn't usually come from cognitive sources.  It comes from the gut. Therefore, I would suggest that much of the resistance to scientific explanation comes from what we can call a fear of reductionism. We fear, however inchoately, that to view the Sun in terms of its language of thermonuclear reactions and gravitational pressures will destroy our experience of the Sun’s majesty and the beauty of sunsets. We fear that to view life as the product of genes interacting with environment is to destroy the meaning of both life and environment. We encounter, that is, the ominous specter of “scientific materialism,” which sounds for all the world like soviet-style “dialectical materialism” that can morph into “diabolical materialism.” We shudder, a long existential shudder, and then we scurry back to thinking about nature on our own aesthetic and political terms.
Poor matter. This magical stuff, undergirding everything that we know to exist, including the minds that hold our understandings of existence, is so often given disparaging qualifiers, like “mere” matter or “just” matter or “only” matter. What else, pray tell, would we want to be made of?
So the resistance, I submit, is embedded in our fear that we will somehow lose what we sometimes call our spirituality by encountering our context in material form. And to lose our spirituality, we fear, is to lose our humanness, our soulfulness, our capacity for transcendent experience. We will become automatons.
Here’s what I say to undergraduates when we arrive at this potentially gloomy juncture. I say to them, OK, a good-looking guy walks by and I feel my pulse quicken and my face flush. Do I say to myself, aah, norepinephrine released from my sympathetic neurons has just stimulated my sinoatrial node to generate increased cardiac output? Of course not. I say to myself, Wow, that’s a really good-looking guy!  It’s not like I can’t go there. I can certainly reflect on how interesting it is that the experience I just had was mediated by action potentials and calcium influx. But, I assure them, this doesn’t wreck the experience. It’s just a second way to think about it. The immediate experience, the subjective experience, is uncompromised. Subjectivity, in the end, is immune to anything but its own inherent experiential manifestations.

The Scales of the Universe

  NICE MUSIC... INFINITE ZOOMING

VISIT >>> Scales of the Universe by Carl and Micheal Huang.

ARE WE DRIVEN BY SELF INTEREST?

Cultures 'R' Us: Evolution, Self Interest And Wanting What We Have

 

by Ursula Goodenough

Mahmoud Zayat/Getty Images Birds migrate over the southern port city of Sidon, Lebanon.

Continuing this week’s 13.7 focus (here and here and here) on our self-absorbed human predicament, let me offer a few evolutionary perspectives on how we got here and how we might move forward.
All organisms, by definition, are laden with self-interest. Self-maintenance, self-protection, self-reproduction — these are biological imperatives. This mandate is often stated as “surviving to produce fertile offspring,” but organisms that only eke out survival are far less likely to be the ancestors of large lineages than are organisms that flourish in a given ecosystem. Nor is “flourishing” a synonym for that old canard “the fittest.” Rather, it connotes being well adapted to the particular environmental circumstances in which one finds oneself.
Social organisms remain self-interested, but in addition, they also cooperate in such vital activities as food acquisition and predator protection. Hence their mandate is both to flourish as an individual and to flourish in community. Sociality has evolved numerous times: Bacteria secrete signaling molecules to regulate group-related activities (quorum sensing); butterflies migrate; fish swim in schools; birds join together to chase off the circling hawk; wolves hunt in packs.
Social behaviors are in most cases “instinctive,” but in some cases organisms inherit the capacity to learn social behaviors. Primates, in particular, develop minds capable of keeping track of friendships and favors and mastering the nuances of fluctuating social hierarchies, behaviors that enhance the stability and hence the flourishing of their troops. Importantly, natural selection doesn’t “care” whether behavior is hardwired or learned; it only “cares” whether the outcome is adaptive.
Navigating the demands of self-interest versus group cooperation can be fraught with conflicting impulses, and the option to go-it-alone is frequently taken in the context of stress. Under such circumstances, social organisms typically hunker down and engage in self-interested survival patterns, the default behavior of all creatures.
Stress invariably arises when organisms find themselves in environments that fail to mesh with what their genetic scripts anticipated. Unexpected ecosystems fail to provide the necessary context for pulling together the social behaviors that were selected to generate flourishing communities in expected contexts.
Which brings us to human primates.
  We turn out to be “niche constructors” — the familiar prototype being the beaver who dams up a stream and inhabits the resultant lake. We inhabit not only the planetary ecosystem but also the human-made, language-based niche we collectively call culture, allowing us access to information accumulated from generation to generation.
Language-based cultures are continuously evaluated and modified; hence humans are by definition born into unanticipated contexts. The stress engendered by this feature of our niche is minimized when a culture is stabilized by "tradition,” and maximized when cultures are amended in increasingly rapid timeframes, as is currently the case.
From this perspective, the angst expressed in this week’s series of blogs need not be attributed to the new information provisioned by scientific inquiry, nor to the new technologies generated by that knowledge, nor to the challenges modernity poses to traditional religious or political or community or family systems.
The angst arises because it’s all changing so precipitously that we’ve lost our bearings. We had hundreds of thousands of years to absorb fire and spear production; thousands of years to absorb the written word; hundreds of years to absorb heliocentricity.
And now look at us.
Talk about the stress of inhabiting unanticipated environments! Under such circumstances, self-interested survival patterns could be said to be adaptive.
But they aren’t, of course, for the simple reason that the planet lacks the carrying capacity to provide grounding and solace for all in the form of plastic purple penguins by the pool. If there has been an overarching human error, it has been to construct cultural contexts that fail to mesh with planetary realities.
But cultures are us. We invent them and re-invent them. We learn and we teach. Our growing awareness of our error and its consequences will hopefully allow us to access our inherited suite of social emotions – fairmindedness, respect, reverence and empathy – as we generate cultures that balance self-interest and Earth community. Such cultures wouldn’t seek to mask or bemoan our earthly materiality but rather would celebrate it.
We’ll always be self-interested. We’ll always want stuff. That’s part of our animal nature. But as I’ve lift up in a homily on stuff, it’s not getting what you want that’s important, it’s wanting what you’ve got. What we’ve got is a splendid planet; what we need to want is that it flourish.

Re-Imagining Society: Are We Trapped By Old Ideas?

 

by Stuart Kauffman

We always live in a world we partially construct for ourselves by a ring of ideas.
This holds true for the society that shapes us and that we shape.
In this blog I want to sketch familiar ideas that frame us, and will critique them in later blogs.

We can begin 4,900 years ago with Abraham, breaking the idols in his father’s idol shop, and his putative role in inventing monotheism.  With that shift from polytheism, the ancient Jews culled 100,000 years of beliefs in multiple gods to be appeased, with their conflicting egos - think of the Greek gods and their strife - into a single Creator Agent God and that God’s Creativity acting in the ongoing becoming of the universe: “In the Beginning was the Word...”, Genesis, our current religious Abrahamic creation myth among three billion of us on this planet.
The ancient Jews lived stubbornly with Yahweh, debating the interpretations of His Laws, and sought to live righteously with those commandments. They were a people deeply of history, namely, their own as the Chosen People with their God, who would also love their non-Jewish neighbors.
The Greeks were universalists, seeking universal laws. Think of Archimedes running through the streets: Eureka!, as he understood floatation.  The Greek universalist culture was deeply at odds with the particularist Hebraic culture rooted in historicism.
  Skip to glorious Newton.  In three laws of motion and a universal law of gravitation, the invention of the differential and integral calculus, he gives us, in a stunning integration, a Greek-spawned view of the world, classical physics. In this view, still workable in many settings, given the initial and boundary conditions of a system of particles, or billiard balls, the future evolution of those particles is entirely determined and knowable by integration, hence deduction as Aristotle would want, of the differential equations given initial and boundary conditions.
Skip to Laplace and his Demon: Such an intelligence, if knowing the positions and momenta of all particles in the universe, could know from Newton’s laws, the entire future and past of the universe.
So with Newton, we arrive at both reductionism, seen first clearly in Laplace and in our Dreams of a Final Theory, as Steven Weinberg wrote not long ago, and we become frozen with the conflict between the Creator Agent God and that God’s Creativity acting forever in the open becoming of the universe, for that God is a free willed one on the one hand, and classical physics on the other.  If we are to be modern in that 17th Century world of Newton and thereafter, the tension between religion and science is enormous. We are left with either Deism, or a God of the Gaps retreat of religion.
This gives rise to the foundations of both our secular society, our loss of spirituality as we cleave to science as telling us what the world really is, and the rise of capitalism with the invention of banking and the Industrial Revolution unleashed by physics then chemistry.
The birth of secular society is also the child of our beloved Enlightenment, unleashed by about fourteen thinkers whose aims were to shut down the irrational and antiscientific bounds of the clerics, and unleash the power of reason and science to tell us what the world really is, and, via reason, to make forever progress is mastering nature for our benefit, and build a perfect society.  With the Enlightenment, the sacred wanes into the dwindling gaps of the God of the Gaps.
In this vein, Locke was a close friend of Newton and from Locke we get, in the United States, and now around the world, a unique political philosophy: Our Constitution with its three branches of government, Exectutive, Legislative, Judicial, in a hoped for constant tension of counterbalancing forces which - Newton like - would sustain an ongoing equilibrium of power.
But notice something deep: The Hebraic idea of life in living history is not part of our Constitution.  We do not have a “theory of history,” even with Hegel and Marx trying, and Kant, before them, seeking laws of history.  Lacking a theory of history, we do, however, have in our Constitution, derived also from British Common Law, the concept of the gradual, hopefully wise, evolution of our laws as history unfolds.
So here is a new conflict: On the one hand, classical physics says the becoming of the universe is either a becoming that is deterministic, Newton and Laplace, or there is no becoming at all in Einstein’s four dimensional spacetime, only geometric world lines.
On the other hand, we grope with the sense that we do live in a world of open becoming: As I have noted before, the invention and wide sale of the main frame computer enabled the invention and wide sale of the personal compute,r which in turn enabled the invention and wide sale of word processing, which enabled the storing of computer files, whose wide use enabled the storage and sharing of files, which enabled the invention and wide use of the Web, which enabled selling things on the web, which enabled content on the web, which enabled Google.
This is a constant becoming in what I call the Adjacent Possible of the econosphere.  The Adjacent Possible is like a forever expanding house, where passing via a particular door from a room to another room, opens new doors in the Adjacent Possible which we explore in, for example, the explosion of goods and services in our economy in the past 50,000 years, rising from perhaps 1,000 goods to billions. The economists have no theory for this explosion, which has created our technological present beyond stating that research brings new inventions. I will hold that this is a strongly impoverished understanding of the unfolding of economic history, in which the current Actual opens new possible opportunities in the Adjacent Possible, both for human life and for the biosphere's historical evolution.
One deep question is the ontological status of this Adjacent Possible of the economy. Is it a wisp of our imagination?  When the young entrepreneur presents his business case to the venture capitalist, are the possibilities and countervailing risks he presents that may convince the VP to invest, mere “imaginings?” Or, I will very tentatively suggest, perhaps this Adjacent Possible is ontologically real, so reality consists of the Actual and the Possible, as Aristotle suspected and Alfred North Whitehead believed.  This will, I think, lead us to the mysteries of quantum mechanics as part of stepping beyond our familiar framework.
But the first, firmer step beyond the grip of these framing ideas will be to examine whether we can have sufficient natural laws for the evolution of the biosphere, econosphere, and history. I will claim that we cannot have such sufficient natural laws, with, I believe, widespread consequences for our views of ourselves, thus our full humanity and the society we may want to enable that humanity.