Philosophy vs Science

In recent times we seem to be a entering a new argument characterizing our time, the one between Philosophy and Science. I have read a whole slew of articles and posts on this issue lately. Most of these posts have been in defense of Philosophy sparked by incidents where famous physicists like Stephen Hawking and Neil de Grasse Tyson seem to be disparaging and dismissing philosophy as a worthless enterprise. I recently read another post by a scientist sparking me to write this post providing a counter-view.

When Hawking or Feynman or NdGT criticize philosophy it seems disingenuous, since these minds have produced sentences of great philosophical earnest and profundity in recent times. I myself am incredibly partial to philosophical speculation and conjecture, this blog can easily convince you. Yet I find myself agreeing with these "critics" of philosophy. So I will pretend I understand what they mean by their dismissal and try to elucidate it.

Also I will limit myself to natural philosophy, philosophy that seeks to explain the natural world around us. For sure, there is philosophy of morality and behavior and politics and others that I am unaware of, but I presume no physicist is trying to comment on that, nor am I qualified to comment. 

Much of the debate between philosophy and physics seems to be muddled by the semantics of what philosophy is. Both science and natural philosophy can be said to be the love and pursuit of truth as it pertains to the natural world around us. Science, in fact, is a descendant of natural philosophy in the sense that all the old world fathers of science were philosophers of their time. For most defenders of philosophy, the shared heritage and eventual divergence seems to be a positive argument justifying why philosophy is relevant. I do not agree. Just because we have a different word to define two nuances of the pursuit of knowledge doesn't mean they need to be done by two separate classes of people. 

The problem is that natural sciences have so far surpassed the realm of common knowledge that it is impossible to ask meaningful questions, much less answer them, without a long and intricate study of the natural sciences.

As a result, today there can only be two constructive kind of philosophers. 

1. Active scientists who are of an intellect and courage required to see the larger picture and ask questions that may or may not be easily answered. 

2. An individual who is well trained in science, enough to reach the frontier of human knowledge, but chooses to not engage in active scientific research preferring the more contemplative and speculative method of philosophy.

Regardless of which camp you are in, you qualify to be called a scientist. The designation of philosopher can be applied to the second class only with full knowledge that they are ex-scientists or at worst, amateur scientists, but never non-scientists. Any non-scientist, one who did not go through training in science simply cannot understand what is already known and therefore cannot even ask the right questions about the unknown.

The point is beautifully made in The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, although about religion, not philosophy. Physicists and scientists often deflect unanswerable philosophical questions by saying that is not the purview of science but of theology. And Dawkins asks, why? What expertise does religion bring in the attempt to answer the question?

A similar question could be posed to philosophy. If you have an individual who is not trained in the science and is asked the question why the universe exists, how good can we really expect the answer to be? If you do not understand string theory or the standard model or relativistic field theory, what expertise about the nature of the universe can you bring to that question as a philosopher versus a scientist? My feeling, and perhaps the view of the famous scientists in question, is that a natural philosopher without training in science has nothing to add to this conversation. 

Another notable spat in the philosophy science tussle was the one between David Albert and Lawrence Krauss, wherein Albert criticizes Krauss' book for dismissing that the philosophical question of why the universe is as it is compared to the scientific question of how the universe came to be as it is. I personally do not dismiss the question, in fact, I would side with Albert on his criticism of Krauss (I am not a fan of Krauss, that's why I don't count Krauss in the list of physicists I'm defending here). Albert is a professor of philosophy but has a PhD in theoretical physics. He represents the second method for practicing constructive philosophy. I am fairly sure his kind is not the one physicists have a problem with nor do I. 

Remember, Feynman, Hawking and NdGT are huge public faces of science and face vastly more of the general non-scientists populace than most others. I am sure they have to face questions everyday from "philosophers" who would like to stump scientists in an attempt to prove that science does not have all the answers. The anti-science ignorance is betrayed by the presumed non sequitur that if scientists cannot answer the question, someone else has to do it. Bringing us back to Dawkins' question, who? Who is qualified to ask or attempt answers to these questions? A philosopher? The famous scientists, in my opinion, are dismissing amateur philosophy by non-scientists who can easily be misled into believing that a difficult question is a profound question.

As the post points out, Hawking, Feynman and NDT themselves are philosophers in many respects and we are all wiser for it. In fact philosophy, in so much as it is questioning every aspect of knowledge and attempting to formulate answers, is the fundamental building block of science. I believe philosophy of science should be a required learning for all scientists, to either excite and unleash their inner philosopher or at the very least, inform them of the thought process of the giants in their fields. Science encompasses and surpasses all of natural philosophy, one could say philosophy has grown into modern science, hence the observation that philosophy is dead and replaced by science. 

A final confusion here is the difference between philosophy is dead vs philosophy is unimportant. Latin and Sanskrit are dead, yet a study of these languages is essential in liguistics. They are essential to understand how the currently alive languages evolved and to understand broader aspect of the civilizations they thrived in. They also might provide insight into the future of language evolution and methods of language construction.

Similarly a study of philosophy is essential, not only to understand the history of science and philosophy but also to understand the evolution of human thought in the past, present and future. More importantly, philosophy for a non-scientist is introduction to scientific thought and for scientists, a source of great foresight and insight.

But natural philosophy, as a separate entity and not as an attribute of scientific thought, making any meaningful contribution in understanding the physical world is just as likely as Latin making a comeback as a practical language. 

A scientist with a philosophical bent is a great scientist. A scientist who is not a philosopher is a good scientist. A philosopher who is not a scientist (and not trained as one) is just "dopey".

Interstellar is awesome, People are depressing!

I just watched Interstellar this weekend. I went in with very low expectations, even lower than the cautious intrigue I express in my previous post, thanks to a flurry of negative reviews on my various newsfeeds. I did not read any of them before I saw the movie for fear of spoilers, but I was prepared to be disappointed.

But I was not.

By far the best movie I have seen in quite some time, Interstellar solidly redeems Chris Nolan from the ghastly TDKR. I am just going to forgive him that one and never mention it again.

In the aftermath of the movie, I unfortunately let myself devolve. Out of morbid pitiable curiosity, I wanted to see what all the negative reviews were about. A precious few of those critics have anything worthwhile to say. I almost wrote a massive rant in answer but then thankfully caught myself. So I will just briefly mention the broad classes of irritating Interstellar criticism and not waste my too much of my time on pointless banter.

1. The Petty Fault Finding

"What causes the food to go scarce, why can't the blight be cured? Won't the X-Rays from the black hole killed the ships and life? How can a planet with frozen clouds be stable?"

The people who watch movies and notice "bloopers" like "the table cloth was a different color in the two scenes" come out in full force to greet every science fiction movie.

Science fiction, by its very definition, takes liberties with science and shows things we may not think are physically or practically possible. As I read on Twitter, "the plot holes of a science fiction seem to be just the fiction part". One of the reasons for this attitude might be the proliferation of hard science fiction, sci-fi where the science is used accurately. The reason hard sci-fi has become a separate genre in the last few decades is because fiction that details any science, accurate or inaccurate, is now too complex for mainstream fiction readers. Some of the hard science fiction can be called just fiction. But this is just semantics and not important. 

What is important is that existence of hard sci-fi does not take the license of true 'soft' science fiction away. Interstellar is not a documentary, it is fiction, art. Would you say you do not like Van Gogh's screamer because the person's head is not realistic? The painting is not intended to be realistic, it is meant to make the artist's point. Sci-fi is allowed to imagine worlds or rules that may differ from the rules of real life because it is just that, imagination.

Then there are other "plot holes" which are not holes at all, but opinions. "Scientists don't talk like like they do in the movie", "Love transcends space and time" speech is so stupid, "If Cooper loves his daughter, why does he go to space/to Brand at the end". These are the dumbest plot holes because more often than not these opinions are wrong and misinformed. Or they go away when you think deeper into the subject - e.g. the "Love" speech is brilliantly done to expose Brand's own emotional frailty and willingness to say anything, even compromise rationality to see her lover. It never seemed like a stupid and sappy attempt to prove that love is a physical force of the universe.

There are bunch of other non-scientific plot holes like "if entire video communications could be sent to Cooper's ship, then why couldn't the Lazarus ships send more information about the planet back to Earth than just a beacon signal" and "who made the tesseract" so on. I admit, some of them do seem like contrivances, but not large ones. Suspensions of disbelief this small are fairly easy for me when so much else is going right. If you can't swallow even these tiny incongruencies for the sake of a larger story, well, good for you.

I will not go through other "plot holes" since mentioning some of them is an insult to a reader's intelligence.

2. The Lazy Entertainhog

One review I read says, "His movies are numbingly sexless...Characters gabble on about taking risks, about needing oneanother, but they never leap toward anything so dangerous as intimacy."

Nolan's three most famous movies, Inception, The Dark Knight and Interstellar are indeed 'sexless' and are clear examples of why they must be so. All three movies are set in a setting where the bulk of the action happens within a few days of constant action (the long travel years in Interstellar are spent in cryo-sleep). All the protagonist are (Cobb, Gordon, Cooper, Brand) were married or committed (or dysfunctional like Bruce Wayne) and are brought together for a short intense mission. Whether by design or coincidence, the story does not require "sex", or more broadly, intimacy.

Scientists, mercenaries, police commissioner and vigilantes don't really feel the need to build intimate relationships when on a fast-paced mission to save the world. Hot single ultra-skilled prodigies do not really hang around waiting for the most dangerous moments in history to form intimate relationships with other conveniently paired hot single prodigies. If the story makes said intimacy work within its framework, good for it. But the idea that nothing in this world happens without deep intimate relationships forming between complete strangers shows an extreme myopic view of movies and reality. Given my experience of everyday American life, the necessity of intimacy in a story reveals a level of hypocrisy that I thought did not exist outside Bollywood's depiction of "real Indian women".

3. The Snooty Art Critic

These critics are harder to please, because they are right in their own way. Yes the character development is not too great. And the musical score sometimes overdoes it a bit. My personal opinion is that the setting of the movie did not have any scope for character development. Most characters in the movie have defects but they seem to be aware and in acceptance of their character flaws. So while the characters don't really evolve (except perhaps Murphy) and grow through the movie, they are still multi-dimensional. Not much time was wasted in the 3 hour movie and so any more development would put this story beyond the scope of the movie medium itself. So there is some truth in the decree that the movie was perhaps ambitious for the medium, but I liked it for that very same reason.

2001, the art critics' fav sci-fi. Interstellar has suffered the most being compared to 2001, a pity we are not allowed to like both.

To the movie's credit however, it does not try to bamboozle the audience with physics. Every physics term is mentioned in the shortest words possible - time dilation, black hole and wormholes. No MichaelBay-BigBangTheory-ish fake words like Lepto-Chrono-Transmogrification. The movie tries hard to be accessible and if its not, it is just a reflection of how far the common populace is from hearing, much less understanding, basic truths about how their GPS-Facebook-LED world works. If you still think the movie is too laden with science, I would only say that you go easy on this critique because they tried and this is the best they could have done. Banishing such topics from ever entering the public zeitgeist will only further the divide. If you could not follow the movie even on its face value as a piece of fiction, then the movie is perhaps not for you and you can take solace in that only a Nolan is allowed to do something like this once in a while.

4. The Juvenile Revolutionary

Of course a movie with such overt socio-political theme atleast in the first half of the movie will attract its fair share of "intellectuals". Many of them might find their beliefs validated by the movie, while others might simply be picking and choosing. However, I do not think it entirely fruitless to find validation in art, since Nolan clearly did want to just make a summer blockbuster. I do believe a true artist can't help but make ideological statements which can certainly influence the public opinion.

The obvious one is environmentalism, and they will find validation in Nolan's imagery of a bleak future for Earth. The anarchists and libertarians will find great joy by their paranoia of suppression of speech by big govt being given its due by Nolan's schools rewriting the history of Apollo lunar landings, calling them a hoax operation intended to bankrupt the Soviets. I have written before on why I agree with these groups about some of the problems in society, but disagree on their proposed solution so I will not extol it here.

But I was quite amused by another review I read which said "If there is anything that Christopher Nolan represents, it is the belief that technology trumps everything else. ...I think that Bezos [advancing space tourism, super-rich in space]... should be encouraged but not exactly for the same reasons. Given the bestial behavior we can expect from the super-rich bent on destroying just such a rational system, there will be a need to quarantine the Koch’s and Bezos’s of the world. What better place than a colony in outer space where they can live in comfort and be of no possible danger to the rest of us?"

Millionaires who are pushing for space travel.

Wow, that's the stupidest thing I have read in a while. Where did the rich spring out of? I decry the hyper-capitalist system of inequality as much as the next guy, but to pretend that the rich are somehow evil and separate from "the rest of us" is just as juvenile as hippies and anarchists. The rich are just like everyone else, some are good, some are bad and all just respond to the socio-economic system we build around us. Even if you managed to vaporize all of the rich, it would not save the Earth, other people would just take their place. Science, technology and education is the only way any progress has ever been made in any direction. Whenever there is any form of scarcity, someone will always try to exploit it, whether it is a capitalist, socialist or any other form of society. And the only way to mitigate, and hopefully someday eradicate scarcity, is technology.

5. The Misguided Educator

The last class of critics is the hardest to stomach. Various newsfeeds are full of people who are science literate and lambast the movie for being scientifically inaccurate. These people are not petty or lazy, they are intelligent people who understand some if not all of the science in the movie and are simply misguided imo.

The goal of a science educator is to broaden the horizons of a person by exposing them to what humans have discovered about the universe. Technology is the second step of harnessing said knowledge to invent tools to benefit humanity. Together they show how beautiful and awe-inspiring our universe is and at the same time how powerful a force human ingenuity and curiosity is. Anyone who believes that science/technology is the key to the future, regardless of whether they themselves are in the field, I will bunch broadly in the category of science educator.

The critique that most annoyed me was Phil Plait's (science writer at Slate) review. Apparently he "really really did not like the movie". And then in his post he goes on to "debunk" the time dilation construct and numerous other scientific leaps in the movie. He says that such a large time dilation would only literally on the edge of the horizon of the black hole and could not be a stable orbit for a planet. Stable orbits around black holes must be at least 3 times the size of the black hole and therefore cannot have such strong time dilation.

Another one - Where is the matter for the bright accretion disk coming from, no other star is visible?

That is your problem with a movie? Phil Plait, I have been a follower of your science journalism for a while and I find it quite enjoyable, but this is far out. Firstly, Nolan is not educating people on where stable orbits of black holes can be. As I have already said before, its fiction, so get over it. 

Secondly, when challenging an art form on the basis of unrealistic depiction you have to be careful. The art form has no onus to be accurate, but you the critic of said accuracy, do. Are you confident enough in your claims that your knowledge is so sound and true that you cannot even admit the remotest possibility of such a thing being invented or is covered or happening? Remember, any sufficiently advanced technology might seem like magic to the unimaginative. 

Just over a hundred years ago, no one would consider that anyone or anything could walk through walls. Yet today, we know that particles passing through walls is possible and happens every day, a.k.a. quantum tunneling. I personally work with quantum teleportation and particles that are in multiple places at the same time every day. Are you sure there can never be an untreatable blight? Are you so absolutely sure, so unshakeably sure that not stable orbit can exist with a large time dilation can exist for a black hole? As it turns out, Phil should not have been so sure. He later learnt that his calculation had not accounted for spinning black holes, which would allow such orbits and he had to issue a retraction.

But I wish Phil Plait was not wrong. Because now he can apologize for not checking his math. The point I am making is that even if Phil had been right he was still wrong. 

So does the qualification of fiction give complete freedom to show anything with no regard to reality? Well yes, because freedom of speech ideal gives every idiot the right to say whatever wrong things they want to say. However, the same freedom also gives other sane people the right to call the idiot an idiot. So when you should you exercise that right?

Every one will have their own opinion here for sure. In my opinion, a science educator should only be critical of science-fiction is the fiction does harm to science education. The reason is very simple.

Science is intricate, with many prerequisites necessary to reach the frontier of current knowledge. If scientific concepts were taught as currently understood, no kid would ever learn Newton's gravitational law or Bohr's model of the atom. Saying half truths is not an incorrect method of instruction, it is often necessary because the complete truth might be beyond the scope of the current method of instruction. If a movie that exposes millions of people to concepts such as time dilation and wormholes for the first time used an exaggerated time dilation to make the effect interesting, I don't think it is not doing anything wrong. Educators such as Phil Plait should use this opportunity and point out the correct intricacies of the scenario without saying the movie was bad because of the inaccuracy. This shows off their knowledge and educates those who are capable of following the calculations to learn even more without bashing the movie that tries so hard to make "nearly" accurate science interesting to the people. 

But if a movie uses artistic license to spread a patently false message, then the above excuse obviously does not apply. Say a movie introduces the idea of black holes and then tries to scare people saying false things like the LHC might make a black hole tomorrow and destroy us all, sure criticize the movie for using bad science to spread fear and discredit. Even if a movie is positive using ridiculous excesses like heroes throwing black holes to fight villains and running faster than light to bring back their one true dead love, the criticism would be well deserved, even if hilarious. If someone made a documentary or an educational movie with bad science, that would be worthy of the exact criticism leveled by Phil. 

But Nolan is not doing any of the above. He is staying close to the rules of science we know while bending some to make a entertaining, fictional movie. Educators and science literates who do not realize this and try to score cheap points rather than use the opportunity to educate have lost sight of the reason why they do what they do. 

In fact the movie does something far more valuable than just educate about science or entertain. It portrays science as the savior of mankind, but not scientists. Every scientist in the movie except maybe Murphy, is fallible and given to bad, sometimes irrational, decisions. The fallacy in the argument against science is that scientists are somehow different than non-scientists, which leads to either elitism or irrational opposition to reason, depending on where you stand. The movie treats scientists as humans and science as the key to the future, and manages to separate the two, something not many movies can or even aspire to do.

Anyway, that was the massive Interstellar rant I thought I was not going to write. You don't want to read when I do rant. I pity my wife for having to listen to many of my diatribes.

On more movie news, The Imitation Game looks promising.

BlackHole Weekend : Interstellar and Theory of Everything.

This weekend is all about black holes in Hollywood with Christopher Nolan's wormhole sci-fi Interstellar and the the movie about Stephen hawking, The Theory of Everything.

Stephen Hawking is, of course, the pre-eminent authority on black hole physics in the last few decades. His life is among the more interesting and should definitely be an interesting watch. Even though my wife thinks he is an asshole for leaving his wife of many years who stuck with through his disease to marry his nurse. I might agree if I was not distracted by his vastly more important contributions to science. The movie is probably going to be all about love but hopefully they can capture some inspiration and make science look cool for at least an hour.

At first glance, I almost dismissed Interstellar as standard sci-fi movie hollywood churns out every now and then. Then I found out it was directed by Christopher Nolan... hmm... mild intrigue. Amazing memories of the Dark Knight said "oh yeah" but then blocked out memories of the Dark Knight Returns snuck in and whispered "slow down". But then I read this greatly illuminating post by Quantum Information boss, John Preskill, on the awesome Caltech blog Quantum Frontiers. The post details how big names from Caltech staff played a role in the brainstorming and fleshing out the story of the Interstellar, from way back when Spielberg was at the helm, and later when the Nolans took charge. I won't go through all the details spelled out in the post but do check out Caltech theoretical physicist Kip Thorne's book The Science of Interstellar which goes on sale the same day. Kip Thorne is an executive producer for the movie and was the "science consultant" (how can I get that job?). So now, my mild intrigue has grown to intrigus maximus.

Definitely looking forward to watch both these movies.

Earth's core might flip and Robots might make rotis!

I report
The SWARM (a network of connected satellites that orbit the Earth) detected an increase in the rate of decrease of Earth's magnetic field. No one knows why this is happening, but the purported conjecture is that the Earth magnetic field may be ready to flip. It has happened every million years or so in the past, and that it might happen now is pretty cool. But it will not happen in your lifetime as such a flip would probably take a few hundred years to happen.

The magnetic field  deflects the solar wind from reaching Earth. No mass extinctions in the past have been connected to such magnetic flips so hopefully handling solar wind is a breeze

I comment
But if true, we might see appreciable change within our lifetime. Seeing the evidence of a mutable, evolving Earth within a human lifetime... that's awesome.

We are lucky its happening at a time in human existence when we can understand its significance. Though I wonder what our ancestors could have come up with if there were any visible effects of this global polarity flip was happening two thousand years ago .

I conjecture
I have read a whole bunch (though I know nothing too rigorous) about how animals and birds can sense the Earth's magnetic field and use it to navigate and find their through migratory paths. It would be a great opportunity to see if such a flip causes changes in various organisms and/or ecosystems.

After all if we can find out how exactly, if at all, birds can track magnetic fields, maybe someday in the future we can enable communication via electromagnetic signals straight to the brain. That's exactly how its going to happen... in the future... Telepathy... yea' I seen it!!!

In other news finally robots make rotis. Big deal for the future of robotics and the diet of millions of culinarily handicapped Indians like me.

Playing God : Can Man Create Life?

Yes!!!!!!!!!!!!

Incredible news I read today.

Itsy bitsy bacterium gets a bigger genetic code (2014) published in nature here

First truly artificial organism engineered (2003)

Be sure to read the article in its entirety... after you read this post of course. So you should know hopefully that all life on earth seemingly exists only to propagate their genetic information to the next generation... information written in a chemical language called DNA. The alphabet of this language has 4 letters or bases, A T G C, which stand for 4 distinct chemical compounds, Adenine, Thymine, Guanine and Cytosine. Each cell of the human body contains a DNA sequence that is approximately 3.2 billion base pairs, (pairs because DNA is almost always present as a pair of strands twisted around in a helix).

That pretty much sums up all life on earth from bacteria to rats to pterodactyls to humans... all life we have ever known to have existed has the exact same genetic makeup made up of ATGC bases pairs. 

Until now.

3 Dimensional CDs : The technology for the future of data storage

Yes you have it right, that's the word "HAIR" written on top of an actual human hair. Crazy!!

How did they do it??

SpaceX and Man's Journey to the Heavens

Today April 20th, around 10 am EST in the day, the Dragon capsule docked at the International Space Station. Photos/Video

Dragon capsule 100m and closing in to dock at the ISS... Awesome!!

A little background info for those living under the proverbial rock...

Is it OK to Lie to Save the Earth ??

An interesting article was published a few days ago in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, "Information Manipulation and Climate Agreements". This one seeks to analyze the so-called information manipulation in climate science. (You can probably not access it without paying for it or going through a University license like me... but you can read the abstract)

Now I have not paid much attention to the climate change/global warming discussion. And the literature trail that I followed gave me some things to write about. 

The modern form of conservationism arose to use resources in a way that is sustainable, an idea pioneered right at home in India although by the British (Sir Dietrich Brandis, considered the father of tropical forestry) trying to maximize long term profits from plantations and forest logging. This seems to me the most rational motivation for conservationism. It was used to protect nature from wanton destruction caused by human activities. First widely implemented in the United States by Theodore Roosevelt and followed by most of the world, national parks, sanctuaries and wildlife reserves have become an acceptable way to preserve natural treasures in all its serenity. I agree... there are objects, natural and biological, which are far too fragile to trust to people's good manners. More systematic and idiot proof ways to protect the environment are required. But inevitably, again spearheaded by America, conservationism has evolved... on to a distinct more radical breed... Environmentalism. 

Conservationism seeks to protect nature from destructive tendencies of short sighted individuals, so that current and future generations can continue to benefit from the natural bounty in a responsible and sustainable manner. Environmentalism, however, claims that nature is sacred, and mankindghkjfsd is a parasite, infecting the earth and consuming nature from within. It seeks to protect nature, not from man's destructive tendencies, but from man himself.

Might need some background info about the 2012 US presidential race, but too good a joke to be left out.

Naturally, I object.

Hilarious: Neil deGrasse Tyson high on Newton

Brian sent me this hilarious video of Neil deGrasse Tyson, seemingly all Grassed up. Its just slowmo, but its ultra funny nonetheless.

BTW Einstein's 135th birthday was on Pi day, 3/14, in case you missed it. You should hold your sacred thread in your ring finger and say E=mc^2 1008 times.

Why The Universe Is What It Is : A Conjecture

The interwebs is full of krayzeee...  

This post was inspired by yet another crazy website/book I found : Galileo was Wrong, Church was Right. I am not really in the mood to discuss this website. It claims that Earth is the center of the universe, even relativity is false propaganda... etc etc. Read it till you are bored, or don't... whatever... I am not going to. Rather, I will talk about the science of what we know about the universe and our place in it and go on to make some pseudo-philosophical conjectures.

The Geocentric model or the Ptolemaic principle advocates that the earth is the center of the universe. It was the dominant world-view since probably the dawn of man at least up until the 15th century. Even though it was completely wrong, it is hard to be too harsh on this model even from a scientific standpoint. The best observations people could make pre-15th century were naked eye observations of the sun, moon and the stars, and yeah... it does kind of look like the earth is static and the sky resembles a back-lit canopy with holes punched in it that is revolving around the earth. But the philosophical/social/moral/cultural implications of this idea are profound and conversation-worthy. In particular, it is easy to extend this empirical observation to imply a general idea, that humanity, or life, or mankind is the central premise of the universe, its purpose even. That leads to the obvious question... why? If we are indeed special, we must have been created for a reason, for some purpose. But whose purpose, whose reason... a line of reasoning the undoubtedly led our ancestors to create the oldest Gods. 

This methodology of philosophy (love of wisdom) where thinkers and ponderers would sit in great halls and muse over the great questions is, after all is said and done, not much more than fantastic imagination. To understand or even contemplate the nature of the universe we must first study it. Thus began science, initially to supplement, but eventually entirely replacing philosophy. Philosophy as is understood by most people today, as it is taught now in schools and universities is actually just the history of classical philosophy. Ideas of a time before knowledge was rigorous, before the invention of logic. 

Philosophy of the modern world is through science, for there can be no wisdom without knowledge, no comprehension without information. Science is the ultimate quest of understanding who we are and our place in the universe, and it took many millennia before humans could develop a consistent method of elevating ideas and observation to undeniable truths that could then be used as the basis for further understanding . 

Proper Scientific discourse in the time of Copernicus and Galileo

And 19th century science could not find any evidence about the universe that suggests that humanity or life has any special place in it. 

Parallel Universes and Us

I was looking for a subject matter for 'The Post That Was Promised'. I wanted to write something science for a change, maybe wave-particle duality or quantum computing, and was just googling random sciencey words across the big wide interwebs. And thus it is that I stumbled onto this gem.  Meet the American Monk, Burt Goldman... also sometimes known as "the 85 year old man who jumps across universes". Nice! So what and how does Burt do 'it'? But first, is multiple universes an actual 'thing' in science/physics?

Well, the closest thing to parallel universes in rigorous, non-startup-yogi physics, is the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, attributed to Hugh Everett. This is not a proven theory, in fact, we don't know if it is even provable. It is just an interpretation put forth as one of the possible explanations for some of the bizarre and unsettling results of QM experiments. QM postulates that all matter, electrons, protons, cats, you and me... exist as probability fields, rather than as localized bodies. Therefore our beloved billiard balls electrons from middle/high school are actually more like clouds. However the cloud can never be seen, for it is not physical, but a probability density cloud. If we try to see the electron, the cloud vanishes and all we see is the billiard ball. The density of the cloud at a location tells us the probability of actually seeing the ball there. Yet the ball could be anywhere, and indeed is simultaneously everywhere, in the cloud, even if the cloud spans the entire universe. Imagine one electron, smaller than anything you can imagine, indivisible (as far as we know), being at every point in the universe at the same time. It is not our ignorance of the truth that the probability cloud represents, but the fundamental way nature itself behaves. Its not that you don't know whether your cat is dead or alive, its that  the cat is both dead and alive, existing as a cloud of all possibilities, and when you open the box, probability is all that separates pet from landfill. QM is the most counter-intuitive theory mankind has ever had to deal with, yet it is not something we created. It is the puzzle revealed to us by nature, one that is more bizarre than anything we want to believe and yet it has stood the tests of time and our adamant faith in our sensory perception. And so we make interpretations to reduce the majesty of nature's puzzle into familiar, if arguably mundane, blocks. Rather than accept that the cloud is a probability wave and every time a measurement is made, God rolls a die, one may choose to believe in many-universes. That every time a measurement is made, the universes branch each one realizing a possible outcome. And all the possibilities that can happen, do happen. You however, happen to reside in one of the worlds and see only one of the possibilities, while your copy in a parallel universe wins the lottery. Thus everything that could have possibly happened in our past but did not, has occurred in the past of some parallel universe. Your existence, your past, and future is still random, but at least the lottery tickets are 'real' and not an unfathomable mist.

And this is where Burt comes in and says, "there an infinite number of parallel universes, each with an alternate version of you, or as the site (and HIMYM) calls it, your doppleganger. Some of them might be great painters, or musicians, or scientists. There is an infinite number of parallel universes coexisting with us in the same room, but you cannot tune into them unless you are on the same frequency. And Quantum Jumping allows you to open the same frequency.” So the goal of the program is to teach you to jump through parallel universes and talk to alternate more successful 'you's and they will be kind enough to teach you the ways of awesomeness. And apparently that's pretty easy. "You don’t need to be a mad scientist to master Quantum Jumping. All you need is an open mind, and the willingness to learn."... and $167 to get the DVD from Burt. The website goes on to claim that more that 180000 people have benefited from the 'scientific' breakthrough of jumping through universes to access your genius dopplegangers' wisdom. Some of the people came through writing stellar reviews of the process...

"I’m a musician and song-writer and I Quantum Jumped to gain inspiration. During my jump, I met my Doppelganger who said “I want to see you smile.” That day I wrote a song with that title. Later that week, I did it again. I jumped through the door and this time saw a big white house. Inside, I saw a wall full of golden records and other prizes. WOW! I could even read the titles of the songs on the records. One said, “Just Fun.” The same day I wrote another song by that name. These songs are the best I’ve written so far in my life and I’ve been song writing for 20 years! Next, I asked my Doppelganger what to do with these songs. Where do I send them? To who? He wrote on a piece of paper “Virgin Tokyo.” Now that’s more than insight, that is clear information! Quantum Jumping really works!"

"I've long believed in parallel universes and a few close brushes with one finally got me to quit smoking. After about 25 tries over 30 years I finally did it. I don't think QJ is imagination, but that might help some to allow it to "work." More that when it doesn't, the mind is closed to it working anyway - consciously or not. I can open a very helpful channel - except when I'm trying too hard to hear or don't want an answer - and then of course I can't."

That's about as much of this site I can abide by putting on my blog. There is a dearth of text on the website, some of it true, the rest just not false, a lot of it funny, much of it a runaround chasing links that get old quickly.

The possibility of multiple universes along with most of QM challenges human preconceptions about our existence in many unique ways. The idea has spawned countless science fiction, or perhaps science fiction has seeded the idea in physicists. Can we actually access, thus prove the existence of, these multiple universes... maybe, perhaps we can interfere two near identical universe-waves? If we can, then would it be akin to time travel... if you could go to the past, to a point before a particular branching could you opt to go into the alternative branch instead? Or does the very act of time travel create new branches, and your own universe's past remain unchangeable? Is it even time travel at that point or just inter-universal travel (which does not make it less cool)? All I know is, nature is way more complicated, beautiful, and glorious than our minds can possibly imagine right now, maybe ever... and if we ever are able to access multiple universes... I suspect we would have much more to gain than Virgin Tokyo's hot new single, "Just Fun".

#Suggested Reading - 
The epic book about a book about alternate histories...
The Man in the High Castle. : Philip K Dick.

#Suggested Listening - 
No connection, just one of my favourite bands and albums
"Parallel Universe" - Californication - Red Hot Chilli Peppers