Slashdot Mirror
Black Holes Don't Exist???
OldSoldier writes: "Here is an article
that was first published in the April issue of a small SciFi magazine called
Analog. The author, John
Cramer, is one of two columnists for the Alternate
View column and his columns are very thoughtful and more grounded in
science than most. In particular, this article states that there is a small
but growing group of physicists who have come up with an alternate formulation
to Einstein's General Relativity equations that do two rather stunning things.
One is that they allow super massive non-black hole objects and the other
is that they are able to be quantized. If you like this article, I suggest
you go to his index and
read some of his previous articles."
Hasn't the recent Microsoft debacle taught people anything? You can't post a copyrighted work in it's entirity without permission, even if it is slashdoted. That goes way beyond the provisions for fair use, and only encourages people to start reducing the simplicity of accessing information.
Do you want slashdot to become like those theiving commies at FreeRepublic?
The salient points are:
In other words, real holes have all of the important features of theoretical holes; they differ only in minor details.
-rpl
God by definition (or at least by most definitions of God given by Christians) is infinite, all powerful, all knowing, and all encompasing. By definition God is also "supernatural", or rather, beyond nature.
By definition, therefore, God cannot be measured, quantified, or otherwise observed scientifically. As God is God, He can change the rules, alter reality, change the very structure of the universe at his will. Or, if you are a deist, at the very least he set the wheels of the universe rolling before the Big Bang, and set a perfect universe in motion.
Either way, you cannot describe the nature of God scientifically. Therefore, science has nothing to say about God (at least, good scientists will say this), and so being both a theist and a scientist is not inherently incompatable. Actually, science and theology are orthogonal--so one can be both a scientist and a theist (or not) without consequence.
Well, without most consequence, as one's morality may alter one's behavior. So your morality towards little mice may affect your willingness to kill and dissect the little fuzzy things in the name of scientific research.
Oh, and I'm native american.
Beyond that, I've spent quite a bit of time asking people what they believe. And what people have said is that "God is infinite." One consequence of the infinity of God is that God is unknowable--as it is impossible for the finite to encompass the infinite.
I have been following physics for quite some time and have seen the difficulty in trying to formulate a Quantum Theory of gravity. I think that we will find--very soon--the bridge that crosses the gap between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
One of the more promising theories, as of late, is called M-Theory. It is able to unify all five "types" of super strings. This view of sub-nuclear physics also attempts to answer a lot of questions about cosmology. This would include the actual number of dimensions in space-time and the actual structure of universe, itself.
The problem with the original Super String Theory was that it lacked "testable" predictions. The energies required to probe to that level were in the range of around 10^16 TeV. However, there has been some recent speculation that some of the extra dimensions could be larger than the Planck length (10^-34 m). Physicists were hoping to catch a glimpse at these higher dimensions by observing the effects of gravity at close range.
Some believe that gravity may propagate through more than three spacial dimensions, since it is so hard to unify with all the other fundemental forces. If this is the case, then gravity will fall off at a rate greater than the square of the distance. This would also mean that super-unification would probably happen at a lower energy scale (in the TeV range), as opposed to the dreaded 10^16 TeV range.
Einstein is known to have not believed in the physical reality of the mathematical singularaties generated by his own equations. He wrote, "For large densities of field and of matter, the field equations and even the field variables which enter into them will have no real significance. One may not therefore assume the validity of the equations for very high density of field and of matter, and one may not conclude that the 'beginning of the expansion' [of the universe] must mean a singularity in the mathematical sense. All we have to realize is that the equations may not be continued over such regions."
> If this is right, it means that there are probably only 4 dimensions to spacetime,
> not 26 or even 10.
Damn! Then what feature are they going to add for Quake XMVLX??
First of all, with the word "theorem." My area of expertise is mathematics, and in math a theorem is any statement which can be shown to be a logical consequence of axioms assumed at the outset. Now, in math we use a bunch of set theory axioms as the foundation of theorems, and in fact (strange as it may seem) all theorems of mathematics can be formulated as statements in set theory and proven using these axioms.
Physicists have also been known on occasion to use the word "theorem" (Noether's theorem from mechanics, Hawkings' theorem on existence of singularities in GR), but physicists also restrict themselves to the strict definition of theorem--theorems are always logical derivations from basic assumptions (which in physics take the form of hypotheses).
Secondly, I will agree that scientists have an underlying assumption that the world works in a consistent, predictable manner. However, I personally consider this assumption to be an hypothesis, i.e. just as falsifiable as any other proper scientific theory. This hypothesis has a major prediction--roughly, that natural processes proceed the same everywhere and at all times. The existence of such wonderfully verified theories as evolution, quantum theory, and yes, GR, is testament to how remarkable this theory is.
Anyway, my point is that GR is a theory, and placing it as an axiom one can produce theorems like those of Hawking. GR, however, is perfectly falsifiable, and so if this alternate theory turns out to predict phenomena better than GR, eventually it will inherit acceptance. This doesn't, however, mean that physicists working in GR right now will lay down immediately. Partisanship is an important part of the scientific process--without a healthy debate about theories, ideas get stale. The result is that scientists end up adopting the theory which has been least falsified. And I have every confidence that if GR is shown to be substantially more inconsistent with observation than this new theory, then Hawking and everyone else will accept it.
BUT, this does not mean that you can just go around claiming that scientists who have no alternate theory for, say, evolution are necessarily not open-minded. In my opinion, comparing evolution and quantum theory to GR suggests a severe lack of understanding. Evolution has been around for 150 years and itself has been a continuously evolving theory, changing as more information is uncovered. Somehow, however, the basic idea (that species arise from differential change within other species) has stood the test of time. Quantum Theory is very similar--the Standard Model is one of the best predictive models in science, and has been ruthlessly tested in particle accelerators for half a century. GR, on the other hand, is one generalization of special relativity (which has been heavily verified on a microscopic level), and its interesting implications are all in a high-gravity context, about which we have very little direct information. As this new theory agrees with GR for low-gravity environs (like our own), it seems to be a reasonable alternate theory. Whenever you have an area of science where data is not in much abundance, multiple theories will crop up. But usually, large bodies of evidence (like that for quantum theory and evolution) will leave space for only one major theory.
Sorry for the rant. I just get irate when people try to argue about science without the proper context.
Aren't you dead?
You don't need a new formulation or interpretation of the General Theory of Relativity to come to this conclusion either. This has been known for many years. Still, people, including many scientists make the error that a star can collapse to a point of zero size, as seen from our timeframe. This is not possible. As a star collapses, it is subject to its own gravitational time-dilation. The collapse, as seen from outside, would appear to slow down the closer the star became to its own event horizon, with this boundary as the limiting condition. It would take infinitely long to actually reach it. In order to see the star collapse to zero, you would have to match its timeframe, by jumping into it! (and living! Also, an infinite amount of time would pass outside, so the universe would end and you would have no way of telling anyone your discoveries.) So, a more correct (and commonly used) term for a black hole is a "frozen star." This is also the title of an excellent book by astrophysicist George Greenstein which introduced this idea to a wide audience.
It is still an open-ended question whether these processes would still be upheld in the creation of "primeval" black holes that really are of point size, or at least smaller than their event horizons, that were created by the Big Bang.
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
Scientists believe that singularities are points of infinite density that are produced when a massive star collapses under gravity. What I don't understands about singularities is why they are presumed to be infinite with all the mass at the same place. Heisenburg's uncertainty principle states that the position and momentum of a particle or object cannot both be known to arbitrary precision. Surely this means that the singularity would be "smeared out" somehow? You would still have a singularity, but because it's smeared out, it's no longer infinitely dense, just very large.
Can someone help me out here? Or is the answer to this going to have to wait until we have the unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity for which physicists have been seraching for sixty years, and I'm out of luck?
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
... think of all the SciFi material we have to rewrite now!!!
it's in my head
I would just like to mention that Yilmaz theory of gravity has been already discussed at length in sci.* USENET newsgroups several years ago. You can find these discussions archived here where you will find what are experts objections.
The advocates of the Yilmaz theory list the following additional advantages (not discussed further here) of the Yilmaz theory over conventional GR: (1) it predicts a definite stress-energy tensor while GR does not; (2) it provides exact solutions for gravity waves of arbitrary field strength while GR does not; (3) it has a true Lagrangian while GR does not; (4) it implies Einstein's equivalence principle, while GR must take equivalence as a separate assumption; (5) it is quantizable while GR is not.
PS: When I read the article, their counter was at 340. Next refresh displayed all zeroes ... poor website.
it's in my head
"When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood."
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
This article makes some good points, but some fairly invalid ones. Maybe it's just the way he explains.
Mathematics doesn't "blow up" at singularities -- it's merely a place where every known equation we have that deals with GR gives us an answer of infinity. Now, this is a problem that's occured in mathematics for centuries, and people have solved these problems for centuries (L'Hopital's rule, for one)
Well, if Black Holes don't exist, we're sorta screwed. Not necessarily screwed, but it does flush about 60 years of decent cosmological physics down the drain. I guess that's happened before.
It comes down to who you want to believe, I suppose. Neither side of this argument has barely any evidence of what they're claiming, so, what sounds better to you?
You'll probably scoff and write it iff as 'mass hallucination', even though psychologists know of no such mass phenomenon.
Errm, yes there is - the phenomenon of "ergotism" caused by the ergot in rye grains. The ergot is closely related to LSD IIRC, and there have long been incidences of whole towns succumbing to mass attacks of ergotism, including all of the same symptoms as taking LSD. And trust me, I've seen wierder things than the sun dancing across the sky when I've taken LSD :)
Before you bash Hawking (Yes, there's a 'g' on his name) maybe you should get to know the guy first. He's a brilliant, charismatic, humorous guy, and he's perfectly ready to admit he's wrong when shown to be so by evidence. Hawking has said some stupid things (stupid relative to the level of brilliant science he usually produces) in his life, and he has been quick to throw out erroneous work when he was shown to be wrong.
People like Hawking, if confronted with a suitable replacement for GR (not necessarilly saying this is suitable, obviously there were no mathematics in this pop article), will jump on-board the new theory, excited at the chance to learn and demonstrate new things about existence. It's the pursuit of truth that drives them, not the glory.
Maybe you could learn a thing or two from them about pursuit of truth... It has nothing to do with what you believe to be true, it has to do with what you can determine to be true. Belief can still exist, it isn't a problem, but if you believe something that contradicts what is in front of your face, then maybe what you believe needs minor adjustment.
Removing singularities from the theory of gravity does not necessarily remove the possibility of black holes.
If there exists a region of spacetime with a field strength high enough that the escape velocity was greater than that of light, then an event horizon would exist. By the arguments backing up the cosmic censorship hypothesis, and the "no hair" theorem, it doesn't matter what is inside the event horizon, as the only observable features of a black hole are it's mass, angular momentum and electric charge.
If this alternative theory has allows event horizons to exist then black holes still exist, although with different limiting masses. I don't know the exact details of the new theory, so I can't check if event horizons are possible under it.
Therefore, if JUST ONE of these X-Ray sources produces HR, then GR as-is stands. If none do, it may spell the doom of classic GR.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
-rpl
-rpl
Thats fine, as long as you acknowledge the possibility that the answer to the "why" question is that there could very well BE no "why", that a mechanistic universe is all there is. I know that possibility upsets a lot of people, who typically respond with a "then what is there that gives our life meaning?" type question. But, to be totally honest, we have to acknowledge the possibility exists.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
actually, I did the math, and my pencil blew up.
Ramble on!
mfspr r3, pc / lvxl v0, 0, r3 / li r0, 16 / stvxl v0, r3, r0
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
It's been a little over a year since I was reading GR, but I seem to remember that GR produced the Newtonian Field equations in the weak field limit... that would, of course, have been one of the first tests to see if it was "correct."
And everybody should remember that their are pretty large egos on both sides of this argument: those that want to validate many years of research, and those that want to be on the side that "corrects Einstein."
I will say that the argument presented here is generally saner than most, since they are pointing out that all they are doing is making a minor chnage in the assumptions of Einstein... but I would believe that those assumptions are well justified and have been checked/rechecked many times over the years.
Analog is the most important magazine in the genre. It first published Asimov! It was the home of too many writers to count for decades!
Einstein included the cosmological constant to create a long-range force opposing gravity. He did this to make a static universe possible. In this respect, he just missed predicting the expanding universe long before it was observed. Also, it is not correct to say that the Type Ia SNe results have not resulted in a modification to GR. Hardly a week goes by that there isn't a paper on astro-ph describing a time-variable cosmological 'constant' of some sort. It is too early to tell what effect these proposals will ultimately have on our understanding of GR.
This statement is patently untrue. The gravitational energy does not appear explicitly in the stress-energy tensor, but it still contributes because Gmu nu is nonlinear in derivatives of gmu nu. Indeed, if memory serves, people have constructed solutions to the vacuum Einstein equations in asymptotically flat space that have a nontrivial metric. If so, that would be an example of a gravitational field produced solely by gravitational energy. In fact, gravitational waves in free space might qualify, but I'd have to ponder it for a while to be sure.
The event horizon of a black hole is a "coordinate" singularity, which means that it can be gotten rid of by a change of coordinates. (The pole in a polar coordinate system is another example of a coordinate singularity; there is nothing special about the pole in cartesian coordinates.) In Penrose coordinates, for example, the event horizon is well behaved. It is because of this that we know that a particle can cross the event horizon in finite proper time. The center of a Schwarzschild black hole, on the other hand, is an "essential" singularity, which means it really does represent a point where the theory breaks down. Getting rid of "coordinate" singularities is no fantistic feat. I hope this is just something that the author bungled.
The sun will most likely neither have a supernova explosion, nor form a neutron star. The sun is expected to end life as a white dwarf.
The nuclear equation of state is very poorly understood, so a little "tinkering" (or even a lot) is to be expected. To me, this evidence is better taken as a constraint on the nuclear EOS than as evidence against GR. If arbitrarily massive (non-black hole) compact objects are allowed, then where are the 5 or 10 solar mass neutron star--like ojbects? For that matter, what holds them up? Degenerate neutron pressure has to fail eventually because the pressure contribution to the stress-energy tensor outstrips the pressure forces' ability to resist gravity. Since their theory claims to include an explicit gravitational contribution to the stress-energy tensor, I would think that the tendency would be to make this problem worse instead of better.
This is not a statement about physics, so much as it is a statement about mathematics. We can't (usually) solve the GR equations in closed form. Big deal; the same is true of quantum field theory. Surely he doesn't mean to claim that solutions don't exist for strong gravitational waves in GR.
I don't understand this claim at all. If this theory is a metric theory of gravity, then it builds the equivalence principle into the theory in the same way that Einstein GR does; viz., by making the equations of motion depend on the metric.
I am beginning to see why; the more I read about this theory the more skeptical I get. It would be interesting to see what the criticisms were; pity the author didn't give them a few column inches. Maybe there are references in the original article.
Not holding my breath,
-rpl
After being a hard core science fiction reader for years (and years, ...) I'd gotten pretty fed up with the genre in recent years. The two novels by Cramer got me back to reading it again. The chapter in Einstein's Bridge where the alternate universe breaks through into the Super Collider tunnel still creeps me out sometimes when I think about it.
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Most non-physicists don't care about what goes on under the event horizon, and would be perfectly happy to call anything a black hole that is heavy enough to have an escape velocity greater than the speed of light at some height above its surface. You still couldn't see them unless something was falling in, they'd still have a powerful lensing effect on light, they'd still gobble up stars and planets, you still would never want to fall into one, and things would still be seriously wierd right near the "event horizon" (meaning, in this case, distance beyond which even light cannot escape).
Really, they just mean "no singularities," and since singularities are supposed to hide behind event horizons, they aren't really very interesting to the layman. I suppose it also means "no small black holes" (which would evaporate so quickly you wouldn't notice them anyway, except perhaps as a hiccup in the massive blast you'd need to create them with), since without singularities you'd need to pile up enough mass to make an escape velocity over the speed of light beyond the surface of the pile.
OTOH, maybe we don't need singularities for singularity-like effects. Maybe matter will compress beyond composite baryon structures more easily than we think, and be stable enough to be interesting. Quantum mechanics is still pretty hairy, and I don't think we know as much as we think we know.
Interesting, but people have been trying to "extend" GR for years. Prof Yilmaz is probably not the only one around. Here is a summary of why GR is so troublesome to many people : (a) It is not a gauge theory. Which is irritating to physicists because the rest of the other forces (weak, strong, electromagnetism) is. Basically a gauge theory takes some form of "particles/fields" (field is the correct word, but people seem to be familiar with particle more), impose some "geometric" constraint on it (i.e. the curvature thing Cramer is talking about), and Walla! You get the equations of motions, eg. the Maxwell equations for EM etc.. The point is that all the other forces are DERIVABLE from some consideration, which led physicists to believe ALL forces must be a gauge theory. But GR is not. Now in a Gauge theory, one can derive the Stress-Energy tensor by using Noether's Theorem. Why is this S-E thing so crucial? Well because the S-E tensor basically says Energy/Momentum/What-have-you is conserved! Yes, another surprise : Conservation of Energy is DERIVABLE from a gauge theory. It is not some "fuzzy concept" we impose arbitrarily. But in GR, we can't do that. So we can't impose local conservation of energy. People are disturbed by this... That's why physicists wanted nice "gauge theories" . Now, having said all that, it is conceivable to "extend" GR, by basically adding more "terms" in the equations, take make GR a gauge theory. This is what probably Yilmaz has done (i've not seen his papers, but I will bet my library on this). OK, the get nice gauge theories and such....BUT why add more terms?? This question is begged to be asked. They say : so it's a nice Gauge Theory! But we say : but that's cheating! The solution : make observations. The observations : nah....Black Holes probably exist. (b) GR is not renormalizable. "Renormalization" is just a big term to indicate that we can "get rid of the infinities" by some trick. Now Renormalization is a big thing to physicists : it makes equations nice and "well behaved" (literally). Physicists/Mathematicians know how to renormalize Gauge Theories (a few Nobels have been awarded for this great breakthrough, Feynman/Schwinger/Tomonoga for QED, Wilson for renormalizable gauge theories, d'hooft and Veltman for non-abelian gauge theories). But GR is NOT a Gauge theory! And people still don't know how to renormalize it. But instead of screaming "no!", physicists embraced the resulting Infinities as "hey that's cool! Look Ma, a Black Hole!". Why? I don't know, probably historical. But IT'S BLOODY HARD TO RENORMALIZE A NON-GAUGE THEORY!!!!! (c) It is not Quantizable. Now, we know how to quantize a renormalizable gauge theory (see : I cleverly organized this article such that everything falls into place :)). But GR is NOT a renormalizable gauge theory! So we don't know how to quantize it! Thus we are in a time in the history of Science that we are stuck. Unless we do things like Yilmaz, by arbitrarily adding terms to the equations (for those physicists out there : we add extra couplings to the Lagrangian), we are left with either accepting that GR is just DIFFERENT from the rest of the world, OR, that we just have an incomplete theory. Physicists, of course, to protect their jobs and grants, say "We have an INCOMPLETE THEORY! GIve us more money!" The current "hot" thing is Superstring. A marvellous piece of beautiful mathematical theory that "may" unify GR and the rest (the so call Super Unified Theory, as opposed to Grand Unified Theory w/o GR). The only problem is, as Cramer said, "it's under construction". He did not mention something more sinister : "Superstrings predict crazy things!!!!" Yeah, like 10^16 GeV particles (an accelerator the size of the Milky Way is needed to make such particles). So SUPERSTRINGS has NO experimental evidence. Here thus, is the current situation in Physics. So, as a wanna-be theorist, I implore you, Slashdotters to : GIVE US MORE MONEY ! WE HAVE AN INCOMPLETE THEORY!
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
On the contrary, I've spent the last semester taking a course on the history of life, one of whose purposes is to make a cogent argument for evolution as a theory quite consistent with observation. Note my terms: consistent with observation. There hasn't been a scientific theory yet proposed that is not, for some detail, "false." The purpose of science is not to look for some ultimate truth, it is rather to try and model the processes of the universe. Evolution is a theory which has given remarkably accurate predictions; that is what I mean when I say it "has stood the test of time."
A few lectures in the course I took focused on the movement in the U.S. to try and produce an alternative theory in some way consistent with the events as literally portrayed in the Bible. This movement seems to have two main tactics:
a) Produce examples/arguments why evolution cannot be correct.
b) Produce an alternate theory to evolution which suggests certain parts of the Biblical story.
The problem is, both these tactics are not science in good faith, because they seem to operate separately within the movement. In order to replace a theory, you must produce another theory that explains properly more than the original theory; in other words, you must find places where the old theory gave bad predictions and your new theory must improve these predictions (as well as predicting accurately everything the old theory did). So "creation scientists" are not acting in good faith when their new theory and their criticisms of the old theory have nothing to do with one another.
When I say "evolution has stood the test of time" what I mean is that in the 150 years since Darwin came up with his theory, no one seems to have produced a theory which explains as much observed phenomena.
The issue of whether atheism is a religion is a whole other point. You're absolutely correct in observing that some people seem to believe that the theories of science are "true" in the same way that you probably believe in a G-d. I've thought about this a lot, and I think what atheism comes down to is to making logical arguments based on the axiom that there is no G-d. Some people believe that there is no G-d as fervently as you probably believe there is one. Science, when practiced in good faith, however, is immune from such arguments, because the physical reality of a G-d (in the sense that Its existence can be inferred from physical phenomena) is a scientific hypothesis like any other. As I see it, there is no or next to no evidence for an active G-d, and so I am forced to conclude that the world now operates in a natural (i.e. consistent and predictable) fashion. This does not, however, mean that I am an atheist. I consider myself to be an agnostic, in the sense that believing in a G-d or a lack Thereof serves no purpose in my life, and so I leave the question open. It is unanswerable by scientific means.
Let me be clear. I think the whole atheism/theism argument is silly--agnostics will not get involved in the discussion, and then all you have left are die-hard believers shouting at deaf ears.
Aren't you dead?
Well, the creationism "scientists" are also acting in bad faith because what they propose is not science per se. That is, what they have produced is not observable nor testable in any reasonable fashion; instead they say "because God (defined as a supernatural, superpowerful being which is beyond the relm of observation or measurement) made it happen, and because God told us so (in the Bible)."
Well, God (as so defined) cannot be quantified nor measured. So it is impossible to perform any observations or experiments on creationist science as this would require us to measure or quantify God.
Perhaps Creationism is good theology, but it's crappy science. And like oil and water, theology and science cannot mix: theology (such as creationism) deals in things that cannot be observed or measured by it's very definition, while science deals exclusively in observable and measurable things.
The only difference I can think of is that you can limit the behavior of the search engine bots, to some extent. I don't know if you can control caching, but you are supposed to be able to tell the bots not to index your pages. Not doing so could be interpreted as implicit permission to cache. I very much doubt the law would agree, but I'm sure someone would argue it.
Come to think of it, the whole issue of web caching on the sever side (e.g., to speed browsing), and possibly even client-side, seems to have been under-addressed. I believe the UK (or EU; whatever) has law on the books, but I can't remember what it says. I could be thinking of the wrong caches, though.
Then again, while the law certainly doesn't agree (I assume), this doesn't appear to threaten the copyright holder's rights. Google makes it very clear where the page came from and how to get to the original, and this really seems to be beneficial to page owners, given the unpredictable nature of the Web (e.g., server crashes). Maybe caching should be fair use, perhaps as an infrastructure feature.
-jcl
Doesnt Google Cache a lot of websites? Are there Copywrite problems in that case?
^Z
The slashdot effect is destroying the internet, sucking helpless webpages into a black hole!
*sigh* I see someone hasn't studied the philosophical underpinnings that make modern science. Okay, let's review.
Science is a special process first outlined in the principles of logical positivism. That is the philosophy of deriving how the universe works around us through the process of observation, deduction and testing through hypothesis. Logical positivism itself is a descendant of logical objectivism, where one derives how the universe works through observation and testing alone--if you can't observe it, you can't talk about it.
My point is that logical positivism is not opposed to theism or a theistic point of view. Logical positivism doesn't say "if you can't deduce it, it doesn't exist"--instead, it says "if you can't observe and deduce it, you can't say anything about it at all with certainty."
Science, as a form of logical positivism, basically inherits this trait. That is, science, being the process of observation, creating hypothesis to explain the observations, and testing those hypothesis to make sure they're true, has nothing to say about the existance or non-existance of God.
That is, Science says "as I cannot test the existance or non-existance of God, I have nothing to say about God." This is not atheism. This is ducking the question, as any good scientist, wearing a science hat, must do.
A second truism of logical positivism is that as searching for the truth is the constant refinement of observation, hypothesis and testing, no single hypothesis can completely explain the universe. In fact, the findings of Godel's incompleteness theorm applies here: no mathematically constructed system can be "complete." So it is an inherent truth of Science that no theory is complete.
However, this does not mean the theories are inherently wrong, or fictions created by a bunch of atheists to deny the existance of God. As I said before, science has nothing to say about God--science has nothing to do with the validity or non-validity of any theological system. (To suggest otherwise is to be an insulting and inconsiderate twit towards the many scientists who are also good Christians, Jews, Muslems and others, but I digress.)
Much of the uncertainty of the theories that scientists work with have more to do with tweaking the fine points when you reach the theoretical limits of what has so far been observed and tested. The article refered to was basically not suggesting that General Relativity was bullshit--actually, it was suggesting that an additional tensor added to the energy equations expressing the warping of space-time by gravity makes the mathematics more elegant. To suggest that we throw out GR because of a debate over the addition or removal of a tensor factor is akin to suggesting I have the IRS lock you up in jail because you forgot to declare finding a $5 bill on the ground, or suggesting you be excommunicated for the $0.90 in taxes that you stole from the government in direct violation of God's commandments and the words of Jesus Christ.
Theism is a wonderful philosophical branch, giving firm roots in both our need to find reason in our lives, as well as finding a firm ethical, moral and spiritual ground on which to stand. And this is totally orthogonal to good science--you cannot put a soul in a mass spectrograph, nor can you weigh morality on a balance beam.
Darwin said in the introduction of a later edition of his "Origin of Species" that it was not his intent to disprove the existance of God. Instead, it was his intention to illustrate the process by which God created us all, and thereby showing us in great detail the hand of God as it moves across creation. It always fascinates me the number of fundamentalist wackos who conveniently forget this fact in their effort to muck-rake, just as it is interesting the number of them who call Catholics "un-Christian" because the Holy See has embrased scientific results of evolution, quantum mechanics and relativity as illustrative of the hand of God in action.
Then there are those of us who concede that the presence or absence of God is something that inherently cannot be described by Science, and who thus realize that we must have faith in something that by definition cannot be measured or quantified.
Most fundamentalists who believe you must either "believe" or "not believe" and who believe that scientists must "not believe" have apparently replaced faith with anger.
It's rather sad, really.
The purpose of science is not to look for some ultimate truth, it is rather to try and model the processes of the universe. Evolution is a theory which has given remarkably accurate predictions
'The purpose of science' is still open to debate. The one you are advocating is, or is related to, empiricist theories of science, which in turn are closely related to anti-realist theories - ie that there is nothing at all 'in' science aside from predictive powers.
I am not sure that you are arguing that the sole purpose of these models is for predictive purposes alone, and I don't necessarily advocate the realist view of science - I'm just pointing out it exists.
Some problems that have been noted with the empirical (ie purely predictive) view of science are that it is difficult to determine the line where the constituents of the model (say 'atoms' for example) and observed scientific phenomena begin (ie 'bacteria', which cannot be seen with naked eye might be postulated as merely an explanatory device for the occurance of disease, or a phenomena in their own right).
I suspect that you postulate 'organisms' and 'species' as real things that evolutionary theories predict the behaviour of. Some theorists haven't - they have regarded the immediate sensory perceptions of our mind as reality, and 'organisms', 'society', 'sub-atomic particles', 'people' etc as tools to predict immediate sensory phenomena (and then there's the problem of defining what a single, irreducible sensory phenomenon is for the purpose of predicting them).
Basically, I'm just noting that although many 'working scientists' (who have apparently been placed under the microscope by philosophers) hold an empiricist view of science, there are some who hold the view that science is a quest for ultimate truth about reality, and that current scientific theories are closer to describing that reality than, say, religious beliefs, and that refinement of scientific theories as time passes approximate reality more closely than before. To these people, the development of evolutionary theory in line with their idea of the scientific method, and its contribution to an overall picture of reality might be make the case for holding it as powerful as its predictive powers would.
If this is right, it means that there are probably only 4 dimensions to spacetime, not 26 or even 10.
Um, it's a reposting of the original article, not a commentary on it.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
This article might seem very provocative, but it isn't really. Some people say "this undermines 60 years of relativity studies, so it almost can't be true" as an argument for Einsteins GR theorem. This is the WORST attitude that any scientist can have
I'me a christian, and everytime I have a discussion about things like the Evolution theorem there are people that say "You can never be as open-minded as we are, because the truth is already certain for you, and you will never accept anything that doesn't support that". I partly agree with them, but the forget that as atheists, they do exactly the same. There is always one thing they can rely on, and that's the fact that God doesn't exist, so there has to be a theorem that explains our existence. This shows that nobody is completely objective.
My point: Some people (like Stephen Hawkins) thank their careers from theorems about black holes or other theoretical astronomical theormens. The outside world looks at them as real (objective) scientists, but when an alternate theorem appears, they are the ones that will fight it the most. Not because the theorem might be wrong, but because they loose all their status in the scientific world.
I think that a lot of things that are considered to be certain (like the evolution theorem, relativity, quantum effects, etc.) are not as certain as most scientists want us to believe. I hope and pray that there will be more sceptical scientists that put questionmarks by those theorems.
--
If code was hard to write, it should be hard to read
And I guess you must have missed your "Philosophy of Science" classes.
I'm quite aware that Logical Positivism has been abandoned by most philosophers since about the 1950's, for two reasons: one, it doesn't explain itself. Two, as a philosophy which attempts to explain "why", logical positivism falls flat on it's face. It's really quite unsatisfying as a unified system of philosophical thought, given how many questions it leaves totally unanswered, and how much of the very nature of our existance it leaves totally unexplained.
However, shadows of logical positivism lives on in the scientific method.
Unlike philosophy, science (and any good scientist) is quite content to side-step "why" and concentrate on "how". And science is quite content to leave a lot of questions unanswered, and leave that to the theists and the philosophers. The very limitations which made philosophers abandon logical positivism as a philosophical system cause scientists to implicitly embrase it's methodology.
And that goes right back to my point that science has nothing to say about the nature of God.