Comments on: Gregg Easterbrook is having a bad month

By: The long bomb | Cosmic Variance

The long bomb | Cosmic Variance — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 19:43:03 +0000

[...] These limits have been emphatically violated by Gregg Easterbrook, commenting at NFL.com about the weekend in football and gamma-ray bursts. Easterbrook doesn’t even attempt to actually tie his occasional science musings into the subject matter of his football columns; he just sticks them in there because nobody would ever read anything he wrote about science by itself. (Well, pot, kettle, okay.) His unfortunate track record along these lines includes weird statements about cosmology, particle physics, and extra dimensions. [...]

By: Jon H

Jon H — Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:34:33 +0000

“I wonder if Easterbrook realizes that in his many spiritual dimensioned world, the possibility then exists for multiple gods?” Pascal’s wager is a little bit different if the real god turns out to be one that exists in the 5th through 7th tiny curled up dimensions of string theory. And boy, is it pissed.

By: Abraham Binder

Abraham Binder — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 20:36:23 +0000

If we take Gregg’s assertions to heart, we have to ask what newly spiritual scientists are to do about finding a spiritual plane. What would be the approach? I can see the Physics Department Chair enter a meeting: “Folks, drop the laptops. Forget about all the research you’ve ever done. We’re going to start our search for Heaven. I have a Priest, a Rabbi, and an Imam on the way.” If a spiritual plane is discoverable by science, science will find it (eventually) through its own processes. If not, what’s the point of looking for it? The bottom line is that Gregg’s vision quest gets us exactly nowhere. Why should the religious beliefs of scientists matter if they are pursuing valid research? Ethics matter, but not theology. Anybody who seriously suggests that science research religious beliefs should be ‘laughed out of the room.’

By: Bev D

Bev D — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 17:00:07 +0000

I wonder if Easterbrook realizes that in his many spiritual dimensioned world, the possibility then exists for multiple gods? Just thought I’d throw that in the mix…

By: Jon H

Jon H — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 14:44:34 +0000

Wouldn’t Easterbrook’s spiritual plane also be subject to the many-worlds hypothesis?

By: Thomas Dent

Thomas Dent — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 13:25:31 +0000

Aagh, I’m going to violate my rule of not appearing to know anything almost immediately! Quantum-mechanical interference between two or more superposed states (so-called Schroedinger cat states) has been observed – under rather special experimental conditions. Here’s a Nature article about QM evolution, superposition and interference. One can also see how the superposition gradually changes into a “classical” state without observable interference. The problem with quantum computers is that the conditions under which the interference remains are incompatible with miniaturization and mass-production.

By: John Kozak

John Kozak — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 12:47:26 +0000

aaron: Deutsch’s point is that a working QC would derail some oft-heard “common sense” objections to MW (like Easterbrook’s “not a scintilla” above). That’s what I meant by “validate”, anyway.

By: ralphj

ralphj — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 11:57:10 +0000

Kieran wrote: “Actually, taken together, this post and the one about the Jews show the problems with naive falsificationism as a philosophy of science.” No philosophy (of science) would, of course, convince religious zealots – they can be easily called enemies of reason. That’s the real problem. No matter how much evidence you throw at them, they’ll stick to their beliefs like a drowning person to a lifebuoy. (Popper was aware of the problems of pet-theories and said that one of the first requisites of being a (good) scientist is to be willing to abandon theories. That might be naive, but I still think his ideas are relevant and true. Unwillingness of people to being convinced doesn’t “falsify” falsificationism.)

By: Matt McIrvin

Matt McIrvin — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 04:20:25 +0000

John: Yeah, the thing about experimental tests of wavefunction collapse, like quantum erasers and (possible future) quantum computers, is that if the collapse fails to appear, you can always push it out to the realm of still more complicated phenomena. Some have already proposed that it only happens when a thermodynamically irreversible measurement happens, which would make it pretty hard to falsify. (But these experiments are worth doing, because if wavefunction collapse is real it could someday be verifiable—and that would be a pretty remarkable result!)

By: Aaron

Aaron — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 04:13:51 +0000

Deutsch’s comments speak to just how confusing and misleading the ‘many worlds’ idea is. A quantum computer doesn’t validate or invalidate any interpretation of quantum mechanics. Here’s something I wrote a while ago on MWI and related issues.

By: Cosma

Cosma — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 02:07:56 +0000

Thus Peter: > If Adam Smith meant “God” when he > made the case for the “invisible hand” > of the market, wouldn’t many people > find his argument more, well, wing- > nutty? But the point of the invisible hand argument was to give a mechanism which produced the effect of foresight without any actual intelligence. If you then turn around and say “That mindless mechanism is, of course, Divine Providence”, you either have really peculiar theological views (see “Spinoza, B.”), or you’re covering yourself against charges of blasphemy (see “Spinoza, B.”).

By: John Kozak

John Kozak — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 00:42:31 +0000

Actually, as David Deutsch points out, working quantum computers would validate MW quite nicely, as some of the computations would be being carried out in other MWs. A fortiori, DD (ha!) suggests a particular, feasible-at-some-future-point, computation which would involve more “stuff” than there is (thought to be) in our universe.

By: Peter

Peter — Tue, 28 Oct 2003 22:54:35 +0000

I think Easterbrook is more a hose than Kieran does, so I am somewhat more willing to abandon the ‘when smart guy says dumb things’ approach. But that said, if Easterbrook asked the question thusly: Aren’t there parallels between ‘religious faith’ on the one hand and ‘scientific speculation’ on the other that are either dismissed or denigrated by (mostly secular humanist) scientific folks? Would that still be problematic? If Adam Smith meant “God” when he made the case for the “invisible hand” of the market, wouldn’t many people find his argument more, well, wing-nutty? Of course, given the format of Easterblog (no comments, less a forum for discussion than another spout for whatever brain-farts come into the guy’s head), this is being overly generous. But this is at least an interesting debate. It would explain, at least, some of the antipathy academics and other edumacated folks get from normal, reasonable, God-fearing people.

By: John G

John G — Tue, 28 Oct 2003 21:37:23 +0000

Enjoyed your reference to the Christian Cinema movie. I wrote an article delving into Christian movies a while back—one of them, “The End of the Harvest,” was about believers getting laughed out of a campus philosophy club made up of mean athiests.

By: Abraham Binder

Abraham Binder — Tue, 28 Oct 2003 20:25:47 +0000

One note from a layperson (in the lab and the glebe): they do in fact talk about “the one unobservable dimension — the plane of the spirit” at “Yale, Princeton, Stanford, or top schools.” It’s called the Theology Department. Science is different than religion, even when it’s speculative.