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Nine Crazy Ideas in Science
Here's the deck of nine ideas under consideration:
- More Guns Mean Less Crime
- AIDS is Not Caused by HIV
- Sun Exposure is Beneficial
- Low Doses of Nuclear Radiation Are Beneficial
- The Solar System Has Two Suns
- Oil, Coal, and Gas Have Abiogenic Origins
- Time Travel is Possible
- Faster-than-Light Particles Exist
- There Was No Big Bang
So in this review I'm going to give you generalities first, and bury "the butler did it" type information after a SPOILER warning.
One of the problems with the execution of this work is that you can pretty often tell when Ehrlich is enthusiastic about an idea just from his general tone as he writes about it... and conversely, in retrospect I think I should've been able to spot when he disagreed with, because the writing in those chapters was a little confusing.
Part of his schtick is that at the end of each chapter he rates the idea on a scale of 0 to 4 "cuckoos". Oddly enough I often find that I strongly disagree with his cuckoo ratings even just based on the evidence that he presents. But the absolute magnitude of my disagreements are typically no more than a single "cuckoo".
I was worried about some of his evaluation criteria (see the introduction available on-line as a sample chapter), because he includes several points that strike me as fairly dicey: "Who proposed the idea?"; "How attached is the proposer to the idea?" and "Does the proposer have an agenda?" These all relate to judging the person rather than the idea itself. (Consider that "consider the source" and "ad hominem argument" are pretty much the same as far as logic goes.) But he does clearly understand that these are just rules of thumb, and I note with some amusement that he doesn't resort to these particular rules anywhere in the later chapters. He's more interested in the logic of the arguments, which is as it should be.
I could bring up lots of quibbles (and I probably will after the spoiler warning), but overall I found this to be a great breezy read. I learned quite a bit from it. While nothing here made me do a reversal of my beliefs, I was often surprised that the evidence for something was stronger or weaker than I'd supposed.
Here we have an educated, astute, person doing a relatively independent review of some controversial, interesting technical subjects. Why aren't there more books like this?
Ah, but at least there's one more! I see that a sequel has just come out: Eight Preposterous Propositions: From the Genetics of Homosexuality to the Benefits of Global Warming . I bet I'll be submitting a review on that one shortly ...
Anyway, now into the nitty gritty. Here's your SPOILER WARNING. Skip the following if you want to play the "guess where he's going" game with this book. Let's take it chapter by chapter:
More Guns Mean Less CrimeI'm a "right to bear arms" kind of guy myself, and I was surprised that the data doesn't seem to support private ownership of guns as a crime deterrent. Ehrlich argues persuasively that the statistical evidence for this is very weak. I appreciate the fact that Ehrlich concludes that both the pro and anti gun sides are nuts: he rates them 3 and 2 "cuckoos" respectively, where a 3 is "almost certainly not true" and 2 is "very likely not true."
But here, we come to my first strong disagreement with him. If the effects aren't strong enough to measure, why the asymmetry in the "cuckoo" rating for the pro and anti side? I might rate them both at a 2 myself.
AIDS is Not Caused by HIVI've had the impression that the the Duesberg hypothesis was pretty screwy, but I was willing to tentatively consider it might have something of value. For example, what about the possibility that multiple diseases are now being diagnosed incorrectly as one single syndrome "HIV"?
But Ehrlich's analysis satisfies me that there's not much of scientific value in Duesberg's ideas at all. I don't argue with his 3 cuckoo rating (but I wouldn't blame you if you thought it deserved the full 4).
Sun Exposure is BeneficialEhrlich concludes that this looks fairly plausible, and gives it a 0 cuckoo rating, pretty much as I would have expected. Many people might find this surprising though, certainly the popular impression these days seems to be that sunlight is deadly.
Low Doses of Nuclear Radiation Are BeneficialHere, Ehrlich lays out the case for "radiation hormesis", and I really don't think this is that fantastic a notion (the difference between a poison and a medicine is often a matter of dosage, why wouldn't this be true of radiation?). But radiation is so demonized in the popular imagination that "radiation is good for you" comes off an insane joke. Ehrlich takes it seriously, and essentially concludes that while there are reasons for suspecting that this effect exists, it hasn't been entirely established. And here we have one of my quibbles: he awards it 1 cuckoo, which translates to "probably not true, but who knows". But there is no reason for saying it's probably not true. If something is not crazy, just not established, I would be inclined to award it "0 cuckoos," aka "Why not?"
The Solar System Has Two SunsThis is the "Nemesis" hypothesis, which it will probably come as no surprise is rated at 2 cuckoos. The short version of the story: originally they looked at part of the extinction record, and it looked like there was a definite cycle. But if you look at the whole record it doesn't seem to be there.
Oil, Coal, and Gas Have Abiogenic OriginsThis is subject that's been of some interest to me, ever since I heard Thomas Gold give a talk on this idea about a decade ago. It turns out that this is now looking much less like "an intriguing possibility" and much more like a truth awaiting a few funerals before it will be declared established. The odds are good that "fossil fuels" don't actually come from fossils, rather they're from hydrocarbons that pre-existed the formation of the earth, which means we're probably not going to run out of them. (So that means we can ignore those environmental wackos, right? Nope: imagine what happens to the atmosphere if we keep ramping up the rate at which we burn this stuff.)
Ehrlich rates this at 0 cuckoos, but maybe he should have invented a "-1 cuckoo" for this one.
Time Travel is Possible2 cuckoos: no surprises.
Faster-than-Light Particles ExistEhrlich mentions in his introduction in the interests of "full disclosure" that he's actually strongly attached to one of the ideas discussed here (the existence of tachyons), but by the time I'd gotten to that chapter I'd entirely forgotten about this, and I was disappointed to realize that he was being an advocate, not an independent reviewer (it includes a picture of him wearing a "no tardy-centrism" T-shirt).
Ehrlich rates this at 0 cuckoos, but come on. Even just based on the write-up he presents, it's a clear 1 cuckoo.
There Was No Big BangClocks in at 3 cuckoos, as you might expect.
You can purchase Nine Crazy Ideas in Science: A Few Might Even Be True from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
VeryGeekyBooks has more reviews of this book.
1. Duplicates are a thing of the past
2. Editors will stop rejecting relevant stories that aren't theoretical (ie overheated Teflon causes flu-like symptoms for 2 days)
3. Spelling errors will become a thing of the past on the front page
4. Trolls will be stopped
5. Reviews about books written over a year ago won't appear on the frontpage
where apes evolved from men?
I mod this post "-1, Cuckoo".
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
...atomic power should be a consumer product. Many people would rate this as a 4 cuckoo because of the "danger" of terrorists developing a nuclear weapon. The truth is that atomic power is exceedingly easy, safe, and clean to produce and should be a zero cuckoo idea. Don't think that they'd completely rid us of batteries tho. In order to power your car with a RadioIsotope Generator (non-fission), you'd need hundreds of pounds of plutonium. However, if combined with batteries, you could reduce the amount of plutonium significantly, and have an auto-recharging electric car. Sure, it means a few more pit stops on long trips, but you NEVER have to refuel!
A great site on atomic energy is:
http://www.atomicinsights.com/AEI_Topics.html
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Slashdot: nearly 700,000 cuckoos.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
I'm not a geologist, but I was under the impression that fossils are regularly found in coal, and that we've observed the intermediate steps of its formation from peat bogs.
When it was first thought of, the theory of relativity was just a 'crazy idea'.
So was the Segway.
JP.
--- Worst tagline ever.
No, I don't think it ever was considered a "crazy idea" at all, at least not by anyone who understood it. It was a hit right out of the chute.
"Intelligent Design" is neither a particularly new theory, nor a particularly compelling one.
The chances of all of those variables being "perfectly tuned" to allow human life to evolve are certainly small, but are only statistically interesting if you presume that human life was some sort of universal "goal" from the outset. At that point, arguing for Inetlligent Design is just question begging.
Yes, and so were (and are) a bunch of ideas which truly are crazy. Just because one can point to examples of theories that at first sounded impossible which later were accepted as fact, doesn't mean that all (or indeed, many) of them are.
In other words - for every crazy idea that turns out to be right, there are 999 that are just plain crazy. The fact that one turned out to be correct doesn't in any way validate those which are just plain wrong.
Intelligent Design is just the latest attempts of the creationists to pretend they are scientists. It suffers from the same flaw as other such "theories" -- it presumes that which it seeks to prove. In a nutshell, their argument is that life is too complicated to have arisen from a random process, so must have been created by some intelligence. In other words, we can't explain it, so it must be god.
Re guns: If the effects aren't strong enough to measure, why the asymmetry in the "cuckoo" rating for the pro and anti side?
Because (like the vast majority of such things) the pro- and anti- positions are themselves asymmetric -- the anto-gun position is not a simple negation of the pro-gun one, similarly the pro-life position is not a simple negation of the pro-choice one.
It's something quite a few studies like this one suffer from, too many fall foul of the same few logical fallacies.
"They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
The real difference between his 'crazy idea' and these 'crazy ideas' is a matter of defined mathematical equations that proved to be true. As I see it, these theories are only conjectures as ways things might be with no truly defined methodology for it's reasoning other than, "hey, why couldn't it be this way instead?" (If that's true, pull up a chair and I will tantalize you into the next century with 'crazy ideas' :) ) I understand it's possible all of mathematics could be a joke, but from what I have studied and know it would be highly unlikely for that to be true. Therefore, once we were able to prove his theories in lab settings, it became no more then an abstract theory and a revolutionary way. His numbers proved correct down to an arbitrarily defined decimal.
While both ideas are crazy, don't argue if you don't have some overwhelmingly surmountable proof other then a work that explains a brilliant theory in an extremely abstract way. That doesn't make the theory out to be crazy in and of itself.
Intelligent design should be 3 or 4 cuckoos, because for every argument that exists in favor of ID, there's a better argument that shows why that argument is a fallacy.
For example, the argument you gave about the extremely unlikely odds that we would be here is trivial to refute. ANY event that happens is dependent on an extremely unlikely chain of events. Any little shift in that chain, and poof, the entire thing is completely different. For example, a big lotto win for Bob XXX in Des Moines is an extremely unlikely event. The odds against it are unimaginable, and any little change would have made Bob XXX lose the lottery. Even a little molecular sized disturbance in the airflow propelling those little balls would have done it. Nevertheless, people win the lottery almost every week. They beat the unimaginable odds.
After Bob XXX won the lottery, would Bob be justified in thinking that he won the lottery due to intelligent design? No, because if he didn't win the lottery, either someone else would have won, or nobody would have won. When he looks back at his lottery win, it's hard for him to see that *all* the possibilities were equally unlikely to happen, but one of those possibilities *must* happen.
When you add up the probabilities of every extremely unlikely event, you always come out to exactly 1.
Please, present more arguments, and I will present the superior counter-argument. Intelligent design is very interesting to think about, and studying it can be an instructive act in itself.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
Well duh, that is one way our body makes vitamin D, if I remember correctly. It is the amount of exposure that matters. Speaking of sun exposure, my favorite university memory of walking across the medical school campus was the cluster of smokers puffing away and sunbathers roasting right next to the Cancer Research and Treatment Center sign. One of these days I have got to take a picture of that.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
It can still be a significant issue -- afterall even if surplus COx, SOx & NOx are absorbed/washed away they're still present in the eco-system. Even if the source-fuels are available in limitless supply there are still potential problems with waste by-products (including waste energy (esp heat)), of course this is still a problem with "green" energy sources aswell.
It depends on what you accept as "evidence." For instance, the major reason some people oppose the Big Bang theory is because it goes hand-in-hand with evolution, and necessitates a univers billions of years old. Since this "goes against the Bible," both the Big Bang and Evolution are considered false.
If this is your evidence, then yes, you are cuckoo.
However, if you have compelling, or even rational, evidence to the contrary, please let us know.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
There is no greater proof that science has won the Evolution VS. Creationism argument than the "Intelligent Design" theory. The religious right knows that they cannot win with a "faith based" argument in this day and age, so they've resorted to rhetorical jujitsu and created "Intelligent Design" theory. (Intelligence Design summary : the world is so gosh darn complex that SOME higher power must have created it, right?).
would you ever see such a quote:
"But the absolute magnitude of my disagreements are typically no more than a single "cuckoo"."
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
One theory proven and thounsands of nuts are forever vindicated! ;-)
Quack, quack.
Most scientist will assume the ideal situation and assume that colleagues are playing fairly. Therefore, the system is fairly easy to game, for at least a little while. All it takes is a small group of 'scientist' with an agenda. This usually involves some idea that they really want to be 'true'. These characters only need to selectively choose demonstrations and filter data in such a way that their 'truth' is shown to result from the data. Of course real science has great difficulty defending against such attacks because, as in all things, playing by the rules to discover truth is vastly more difficult than just asserting something is true and then picking the few examples that support the position. Even when no malice is involved, such fictions have taken years to disprove.
In the case of softer sciences, or even the harder sciences where duplicating of demonstrations are really difficult, the credibility of the person is critical. The ease by which such sciences are gamed is the reason why we have so much confusion over a variety of social issues, even though the basic consensus is amazingly clear. OTOH, consensus can be wrong, which is why science uses resources to look at all sides of the issue
As an aside, the physicists, and really scientists in general, I know are extremely open minded. They just get jaded after a while due to the number of malcontents that abuse science to promote personal doctrine. To a trained and logical mind, the rhetoric some of these idiots spout is really equivalent to just throwing throwing feces everywhere.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
John Baez's Crackpot Index is a great way to quantify your ad hominem atacks in physics. http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/
The Crackpot Index A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics: A -5 point starting credit.
1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false.
2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous.
3 points for every statement that is logically inconsistent.
5 points for each such statement that is adhered to despite careful correction.
5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts the results of a widely accepted real experiment.
5 points for each word in all capital letters (except for those with defective keyboards).
5 points for each mention of "Einstien", "Hawkins" or "Feynmann".
10 points for each claim that quantum mechanics is fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).
10 points for pointing out that you have gone to school, as if this were evidence of sanity.
10 points for beginning the description of your theory by saying how long you have been working on it.
10 points for mailing your theory to someone you don't know personally and asking them not to tell anyone else about it, for fear that your ideas will be stolen.
10 points for offering prize money to anyone who proves and/or finds any flaws in your theory.
10 points for each new term you invent and use without properly defining it.
10 points for each statement along the lines of "I'm not good at math, but my theory is conceptually right, so all I need is for someone to express it in terms of equations".
10 points for arguing that a current well-established theory is "only a theory", as if this were somehow a point against it.
10 points for arguing that while a current well-established theory predicts phenomena correctly, it doesn't explain "why" they occur, or fails to provide a "mechanism".
10 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Einstein, or claim that special or general relativity are fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).
10 points for claiming that your work is on the cutting edge of a "paradigm shift".
20 points for emailing me and complaining about the crackpot index, e.g. saying that it "suppresses original thinkers" or saying that I misspelled "Einstein" in item 8.
20 points for suggesting that you deserve a Nobel prize.
20 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Newton or claim that classical mechanics is fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).
20 points for every use of science fiction works or myths as if they were fact.
20 points for defending yourself by bringing up (real or imagined) ridicule accorded to your past theories.
20 points for each use of the phrase "hidebound reactionary".
20 points for each use of the phrase "self-appointed defender of the orthodoxy".
30 points for suggesting that a famous figure secretly disbelieved in a theory which he or she publicly supported. (E.g., that Feynman was a closet opponent of special relativity, as deduced by reading between the lines in his freshman physics textbooks.)
30 points for suggesting that Einstein, in his later years, was groping his way towards the ideas you now advocate.
30 points for claiming that your theories were developed by an extraterrestrial civilization (without good evidence).
30 points for allusions to a delay in your work while you spent time in an asylum, or references to the psychiatrist who tried to talk you out of your theory.
40 points for comparing those who argue against your ideas to Nazis, stormtroopers, or brownshirts.
40 points for claiming that the "scientific establishment" is engaged in a "conspiracy" to prevent your work from gaining its well-deserved fame, or suchlike.
40 points for comp
Five cuckoos.
From the original Slashdot article:
Science is a human endeavor. It's conducted by humans. Science is a process, however, and that process is defined in such a way that it doesn't matter which humans conduct it.
Perhaps with homeopathy and other forms of medical quackery coming as a close second, "creation" "science" is the canonical example of why "Does the proposer have an agenda" and "How attached is the proposer to the idea" are important questions you have to ask yourself when evaluating a theory.
The scientific method is independent of humanity. Any sentient being is capable of doing science. But to the best of our knowledge, the only sentient beings that are performing science are humans. We know from observation that humans are fallible. Humans let their emotions get in the way of the facts. When a human is very attached to a theory, and even more so when a human has an agenda that can be advanced by promulgation of that theory, it's not guaranteed, but it's highly more probable, that the human will depart from the scientific method in an effort to cling to a theory that's been repudiated.
One of many links: A Bullshit Detection Guide
Creation "science" fails on: 1A: Manipulative buzzwords - "Intelligent"? "Design"? :)
1C: Audience the BS appeals to: Self-explanatory here
1E: Underdog appeal: "Just the little ol' Christians fighting the hordes of Godless Atheistic Communistic Scientists that Run the Schools"
1F: Requires A Negative View of Authority: As above. Evolution is part of the Grand Conspiracy to Keep The Christians Down.
2B-1: A small group of "experts" pretending to own the field
2B-2: Experts beyond their field of expertise.
2B-3: False claims of objectivity. It used to be called Creation Science, then it got renamed to Intelligent Design. Wonder what it'll be called next week when the scam is exposed?
2E: Blizzard of Numbers - the Creation "scientist" to whom I'm responding is the case in point: "26 variables? 66 variables? Does he really know enough about physics, cosmology, and biology to be sure it's not 27, or 65? Does anyone?!?!
Intelligent Design: Pegs the BS Detector. Five cuckoos.
ID is a nice belief system if you're already a creationist who accepts on faith that the Universe was created by the God of Genesis (optional: 6,000 years ago in a week), but it's not science.
For the record, I'm not bashing Christians here. Frankly, I see zero inconsistency between Genesis and our presently-understood notions of cosmology. Take a guy from 4000 BC and show him a PBS documentary on current theories of cosmology, and ask him to write what he saw. You're likely to get something like "Umm, I saw this vision with moving pictures about how the universe came to be. So, like, first there was nothin'. No time, no space, zilch. Then Something Happened, a couple of branes smacked into each other and nobody knows quite what that means yet. But that was the start of our universe. Then they said something about electromagnetic force breaking symmetry with the weak force, which I couldn't understand, and there was light, which I could understand. Then it cooled enough that the mean free path of a photon got pretty long, and I didn't know what that meant, but that was when it b
I think the non-fossil origins of oil and other subterranean hydrocarbons is just about a lock. Of course, I'm not any sort of chemist or geologist, but the idea that only biological processes can produce hydrocarbons has been in trouble ever since we found out Titan has a methane atmsophere (aka "Natural Gas").
When you consider how much biomatter would have to have been tied up in swamps and then covered in just the right ways and held at just the right pressures and temperatures to produce the amount of oil and coal we've already pulled out of the ground, and how inefficient that process would have to have been, the "fossil" explanation becomes pretty unlikely. When you look back at the history of that explanation, it becomes pretty clear that nobody cared much, then someone noticed plant leaves and bark patterns in some lumps of coal and everyone said "Oh, that must have been it." (HINT: Petrified forests weren't grown by stone trees)
Cook's theory isn't really "abiogenic", BTW. The only abiogenic "fossil fuel" under his theory would be plain methane. Rather, he believes that methane left over from planet formation is steadily separating out, and somewhere in the mantle (around 10-30 kilometers subsurface) a bacterial ecosystem based on sulfides and methane is forming it into complex hydrocarbons. Given that we already know of sulfide-based, high-temperature ecosystems in the deep ocean thermal vents, it's really not much a stretch anymore.
By that theory, the oil-richness of the Middle East becomes inter-related with the East African Rift (both being the consequence of a deep upwelling of methane-rich rock). But we're going to have to wait for those funerals before it will be acceptable for a petro-geologist to admit they have been back-asswards about it for the last century. The "Appropriate Technology" bunch is going to have a screaming fit, as well.
--Dave
Given it was derived from known experimental data that is indeed the case. Revolutionary, and hard to swallow for some I bet, but it took just 11 years for a more complete follow-up and a further 3 years for experimental data to prove that ideas espoused follow-up had great credibility.
Funnily he received the Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on the photoelectric effect, not relativity.
Um....if they prexisted the formation of the earth, but they're in the earth now, where would they be coming from that "we're probably not going to run out of them"?? Unless there's some wormhole down there in the bowels of the planet, their origin doesn't affect their finite nature, only the possibility that our estimates of their quantities are wrong.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Not really. As I understand it, it was seen pretty much as a theory that happened to explain certain things, but theories don't mean much until they correctly predict/explain something not originally intended. For general relativity, this happened when Einstein's revised gravity formulas explained the change in orbit of Mercury, something that was unexplained by gravitational pulls of other planets, but perfectly explained by general relativity.
Why should the origin of hydrocarbons affect whether we are likely to run out of them? Just because they originated in outer space doesn't mean they are necessarily abundant.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
The Cuckoo rating is entirely irrelevant. Consider the Big Bang Theory. It hasn't yet been formally accepted (as a Physical Law*) by the scientific community, yet the author considers the notion of the Big Bang never happening to be nonsense?
There is no such thing as "formal acceptance" there isn't even really such a thing as the "scientific community". The big bang is generally accepted as the current best theory by the majority of astrophysicists. Does this mean it is true? No, it just means its the theory that fits most consistently that observational and experimental data currently available to us.
The fact of the matter is, the scientific community has been wrong more often than right. With further investigation, ideas are refined, and those that don't fit the observations are rejected.
That's correct and exactly the way it should be. Science is a process, not a collection of laws or facts. You gain knowledge of the way things work by applying the scientific method. That means that the set of best theories is constantly being re-evaluated and changed. That's a key differentiator of science from (for example) dogmatic religions.
But the process takes a long time. For nearly 2,000 years the best Western thinkers believed that the Earth was the center of the universe. That's a long time to be wrong about something so big.So even though I believe that the scientific method has its merits, I recognize the limitations.
As opposed to which system? The limitations of the scientific method are usually limitations of our ability to gather data. We can't attach more certainty to theories like Big Bang or Evolution because we have incomplete data to work from, for obvious reasons. That's not a limitation of the scientific method at all. If your notion of gathering knowledge is not based on the evidence available, then you are in a considerably worse situation that science can give you, incomplete though that may be.
If I had a time machine and could travel to the future, I would not be the least bit surprised if 500 years from now the Big Bang theory and Evolution were considered myths from the past.
While that's certainly a possibility, its much more likely that they will be considered incomplete. Much as Newtonian physics wasn't replaced by relativity, it was just seen as a particular case of relativistic physics at "low" speeds compared with c.
Even now, there's substantial logical and statistical problems with the "proofs" of Evolution.
Not really. Would you care to cite these supposed problems, or are you just trying to argue from authority?
Sailing over the event horizon
I guess sympathy is why he's got Hawking Radiation named after him, holds Isaac Newton's chair at Cambridge, is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and have won the following awards:
- Eddington Medal
- Einstein Medal
- Maxwell Medal
- Heinemann Prize
He may be controversial, and have been wrong in the past, which he is the first to admit, but his track record shows quite a few leaps of thought that turned out to either be correct or possible but currently unprovable.
Regards,
--
*Art
The theory is there's a companion dwarf star to our Sun 1-3 light years away. Here's some info.
Heh I don't think anything as ever really been proven right. Other than the ol' "I exist" clause. But even that's questionable in some circles.
- shazow
The "Big Bang" is rather simple, actually. We see that the universe is expanding. If you run the clock backwards, it comes to a point. So at some point in time, the universe had to expand from that single point at a fairly quick rate. "Big Bang" was a moniker given to Hubble's expanding universe by an opponent to be mocking. It was adopted and stuck around.
The M-Brane theory doesn't contradict the Big Bang, it is just a model of what might have caused the expansion to start. The "Big Bang" doesn't really address what cause the expansion, only that there logically must have been an expansion 13.5 billion years ago.
In special relativity, faster than light travel (FTL) implies time travel quite directly.
So to treat the two subjects as being significantly different means to be working in a theory other than relativity.
Special Relativity (SR) is nice and simple but fairly limited in scope, but agrees extremely well with experiments within that scope.
Its extension to cover gravity, General Relativity (GR) is extremely elegant, and also agrees well with experimental observations, but is not integrated with the rest of the infrastructure of fundamental physics (quantum physics, quantum electrodynamics, the Standard Model...)
So general relativity may eventually become obsolete, even though currently it's currently a great theory, and whatever replaces it may modify special relativity too. So this isn't some kind of absolute statement.
Still, in the absence of a theory that is trying to supplant relativity, FTL implies time travel. Presumably the author of the book knows this, despite listing FTL and time travel as two different subjects.
For more info see these two sections of the relativity FAQ: relativity: time travel and relativity: FTL , hosted by and partly written by John Baez, a quantum gravity researcher with impeccable physics background (I've done some online study under him; he's also a fantastic teacher).
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
Even now, there's substantial logical and statistical problems with the "proofs" of Evolution.
Are you refering to darwinian ideals of evolution, or the concept as a whole?
True original darwinism as the sole motivator for the changes in species over time is being challenged, but the concept as a whole - that life came from very simple beginings and has changed/adapted over time is not. The mechanisms involved are what are being challenged - such as the idea that small changes in genotype over time that favor the survival of a particular subset of a species lead to massive changes in the long-view. Fossils for the 'in-between' variants are not being found, hence it is becoming more widly accepted that large leaps are made, and that such large leaps could actualy be triggered by environmental pressure.
However, these new mechanisms being discused and discovered are just that - mechnisms. Evolution as Darwin envisioned it may be being disproven, but the idea that life evolves over time is not.
If, instead of refering to darwinian evolution, you are refering to evolution as a whole - then you are seriously mistaken. There is no creationist or other theory of life that is being pushed ahead of evolution by scientists. The logical and statistical problems you mention are about the problems with darwinian evolution and its mechanisms.
man is machine
The most intriguing explanation for the Big Bang I've seen recently come from String theory.
The idea is that the Big Bang may have been another universe colliding with our own at a single point in 11-dimension space. The energy of the collision resulting in a huge amount of mass being created.
If this is true, this means that there may be more than one Big Bang (or more in the future). For more on this read the Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, or watch tv series at here.
Someone find me an oil or coil reservoir outside of a sedimentary basin, and I'll swallow this B.S. That some methane may have abiogenic origin is conceivable, but the natural gas we collect now is clearly primarly biological in origin. Petroleum geologists are not so dumb that they could so seriously wrong about the origins of petroleum.
The data on gun ownership alone is not particularly correlated with crime deterrent, but that's conveniently ignoring the data on concealed carry licenses published by John Lott, not-coincidentally in a book called "More Guns Less Crime"
His data showed a consistent and predictable decline in violent crime after the passage of concealed carry laws. Furthermore his data shows that violent crime was exchanged for crimes where there was less risk of meeting a person during commision (car theft, etc). Both of these are consistent with basic economic hypotheses (ie. greater risk costs means less people participate)
Of course when it comes to criminals evaluating their risks, it doesn't matter how many people have guns locked in cabinets at home, it matters how many people MIGHT have them hidden under their jacket.
John Lott: More Guns Less Crime
Kleck and Kates: Armed, new perspectives on gun control.
are the two most important available books that use logic and statistics to examine how firearms affect crime.
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) http://www.endpointcomputing.com a scientific approach to custom computing.
The correct link is http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Oracle/4855/bs.htm
;
the page is titled "A BullSh-- detection Guide"
so I hadn't found it in a google search, either
(usually my first line of defense for bad
URLs)
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
Surely he could have found one or two to fit the high end of the scale.
How about crop circles by electromagnetic fields?
Trust me, you can't reason with the pro crop circle camp, I've debated with them over at Space.com
Some other over looked -- way out ideas.
No Anti-Gravity Speculation?
The Anti-Gravity by Spinning Super-Conductor: Seems to be clocking in at 3 cuckoos by my estimate
However
Gravity Wave Detection and coupling to Electromagnetic Fields: a 1 cuckoo currently, but could go higher or lower in the
near future with new experiments.
Multiple Universes: I'd give this a zero, but experimental confirmation is going to be a real bitch.
Dark Mater: a zero cuckoo for sure, but we haven't really seen the damn stuff yet.
Brane Collision origin of the universe: 1 to 2 cuckoos, but could gain respectability. Less violent than Big Bang, less
inflation, but still an abrupt origin in the 10-20 Billion Year range.
String Theory: a zero cuckoo. It's hard to bet against a theory that just keeps changing, refining, and redefining itself.
In the end String Theory will probably be the GUT, but by then will probably have no strings
Underlining process to Universe are computational: Main premis to Stephen Wolfram's "New Kind of Science." I like Stephen, and even use to work for him, but he has a long way to go before being able to claim a truly "New Kind of Science." I'd say 1 cuckoo.
Cold Fusion: I'd give it 2 cuckoos (these guys just won't go away)
Homeopathic Medicine: I'd give this one a 5 on the 4 cuckoo scale.
MOND Modified Newtonian Dynamics: 1 cuckoo probably, but could really upset the apple cart in physics. Has even had write ups in Scientific American
see
Where's the Dark Matter?
These are just a few off the top of my head, I look forward to seeing some other Slashdotters lists.
Letter To Iran
I understand it's possible all of mathematics could be a joke, but from what I have studied and know it would be highly unlikely for that to be true.
I think most people who have considered the issue (from the viewpoint of a scientist/mathematician/whatever) would disagree: The whole point is that mathematics is perhaps the one thing which cannot be a joke.
Mathematics is a way of discovering truths, requiring only logic (perhaps we should say "rational thought" here since logic has an overloaded meaning in math). You start with a set of assumptions, and you end with a set of theorems, truths, which follow inevitably from those assumptions.
Note that mathematics doesn't require "logic and some set of assumptions". Pure math tries to divorce itself from whatever set of assumptions you are working with.
Choosing your set of assumptions to correspond to the real world in some useful way is applied math.
Here, where you start making assumptions about the real world, is where you can start thinking that our existance might be a joke.
I'm sure some philosopher has said it better than I; the point is, it doesn't even make sense to talk about "reason" not working, because then we are trying to reason about "reasoning". You can't really present a good argument (presenting an argument is reasoning) saying that "reasoning" is invalid.
(bleh, I wish I could phrase that better)
scientific community has been wrong more often than right
(followed by)
For nearly 2,000 years the best Western thinkers believed that the Earth was the center of the universe.
The "scientific community" as we know it didn't even exist 2000 years ago. Blaming science for the mistakes of it's predicessors makes as much sense as blaming Christians for feeding Socrates Hemlock for daring to question the established order of things. It happened before they were even around yet.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I read this tomorrow.. erm yesterday..
Time flies like an arrow...
(with a stopwatch? With tomato ketchup?)
I understand it's possible all of mathematics could be a joke, but from what I have studied and know it would be highly unlikely for that to be true.
It does get a little hairy when you start reducing it to as basic a set of concepts as you can. You start getting hung up on certain things. The Axiom of Choice is a fine example. Almost all modern mathematics requires it to be true. It feels like it ought to be true. Then again youy can do nasty things like the Banach Tarski Paradox if you assume it true. Ouch.
Jedidiah
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
For a good read on an advocate of HIV != AIDS, go here.
She has HIV, does not take any of the AZT drugs and is and has been healthy as a horse for a looong time.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
A quick search on Google reveals much:
Tomas Gold has quite a bit of interesting information, including reference to an oil deposit sans sediments.
As an off-topic side note, if this is true then there would possibly be oil on Mars and other planets - a nice kick in the pants for space exploration once we tell George Bush...
If I was worried about Karma, I'd eat tofu.
This isn't so much a comment about the book as about the person who reviewed it here on slashdot and posted the article. The reviewer makes the same mistake repeatedly, of assuming that if an idea hasn't been proven wrong, than it's proponents don't deserve a cukoo rating at all - it should be zero.
No. That's not how it works. When positing the existence of things, or putting forth an explanative theory to describe why things that are there got that way, the burden of proof is always on the positor. Therefore someone who is willing to believe a theory purely because it hasn't been proven wrong DOES deserve at least a little cukoo rating for that.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Actually, mathematics has been proven to be true. One of the classical masters (I believe either Plato or Aristotle) laid the work for it; Basically he took basic set theory
He did? This is interesting since formal set theory wasn't formulated until the mid-nineteenth century. Aristotle did come up with the axiomatic system of deriving all possible truths from a basic set of simple truths, but that's hardly set theory as such.
which is not mathematics but a logical framework that is provably true, and used it to prove that all mathematical operations of the time is also provably true.
Except of course the ones Euclid couldn't prove to be true so he assumed them to be axioms - some of which were later derived from the other axioms.
Certain modern mathematical concepts, most notably i (the square root of negative 1) were not included in this treatise, however.
Imaginary numbers were encountered by mathematicians in the sixteenth century and established as a concept by the early eighteenth century - hardly a modern concept. By comparison set theory, linear algebra and statistical probability theories didn't emerge until late nineteenth/early twentieth century!
Sheesh.
I believe you're missing the entire point. Mathematics is a map, a la Korzybski, that DESCRIBES reality. This is not the same as and is in fact far from being the same as the common and incorrect assumption that it EXPLAINS anything. All that can be said is that reality BEHAVES AS IF it were obeying the equations that are used to describe it. A good example to think about would be a computer pinball game in which you can change the gravitational parameters of the machine. Nothing in mathematics prevents this kind of programmed response from being invoked to explain its congruency with physical reality.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
Surely then, the anti position should be considered the least plausible, since the status quo is to recgonize the basic human right to keep and bear arms.
Why is the ownership of a gun somehow special as a basic human right?
Is owning a dog a basic human right?
Is owning a house a basic human right?
Is owning a car a basic human right?
Is owning a tank a basic human right?
Is owning a cruise missle a basic human right?
Is owning a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapon a basic human right?
Are any of these basic human rights distinct from the basic human right to own property? How?
Is maintaining the status quo always the least insane policy?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Re: Evolution. Since evolution is a family of theories, I'll choose one - abiogenesis. IIRC, the smallest practically useful DNA chain is about 4,000 bases. Given that there are 4 bases, the odds of a single DNA molecule forming the smallest useful chain are about 1 in 4^4000. Since it's been a long time since I've heard this argument, my numbers may be wrong. But the basic gist of it is this: given what we know, to build the smallest useful DNA chain by random trial and error would require more atoms than the entire universe contains.
Michael Behe has covered similar problems in his writings.
I don't take issue with the theories that scientists propose (except when they lack logical consistency. The statistical problems inherent with most current theories of abiogenesis seem to indicate that the proponents didn't think through their ideas before they published them). My main objection is the unwavering credibility that the masses give to scientific theories. If a scientist says so, it must be true! If I had a dollar for every time someone said "Modern science proves..." in an argument, I'd be rich by now. Science doesn't prove anything!. It explains.
But since so few laymen are able to articulate the difference between explanation and proof, scientific theories are often used as the basis for supporting belief systems. Witness the manner in which evolution has been used by atheists to justify their lack of belief in God. When science becomes entangled with religious beliefs, objectivity disappears; those wanting to question the status quo find themselves fighting not only a battle of proof, but of politics as well. Today, the idea of evolution is as firmly entrenched in the common mind as a geocentric universe was in Galileo's time.*
And of course, the real problem is that because science has become so credible, it is often sought as an authority for legislative or social changes. Thus, the otherwise objective nature of science becomes soured when funding becomes contingent on the political ramifications of the results. Again, if you want examples, Google the Exxon Valdez disaster - after 5 years, one set of scientists said the environment had healed, and another said that it would never recover.
* - Incidentally, Galileo's publishing problems were political, not religious. In his work, he advocated a Heliocentric model for prediction purposes only, and went so far as to suggest that nothing in his model should be construed as a definitive statement regarding the Heavens.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I think Erdos said this: A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.
Not quite on topic, but I've always liked this quote.
All I was pointing out is that mathematics hasn't been proven consistent, and more importantly, can't be because of Godel's proof. I'm not sure exactly this has to do with your description/explanation idea... But I agree with you, mathematics doesn't explain anything, we can use it to model phenomena, but it's up to theorists to interpret the models, hence the distinction between quantum mechanics and quantum theory. I just don't get what it has to do with whether or not mathematics is consistent.
The person behind a proposal is an good heuristic predictor when you review an idea in most areas (probably including science) -- without doing a full research paper on the idea.
For most subjects there are many more ways to be totally wrong than there are ways to be (close to) correct. So, e.g., any randomly choosen answer to a problem (how to stop crime, etc, etc) is almost certainly non-working (or even detrimental).
People of fixed ideas (and of any ideological political (etc) opinions) have pink colored glasses that distort their world view and they base their decisions on how to e.g. solve problems (relevant to their fixed ideas) because of that. This results in an (at least) partly randomly choosen solution -- which probably is bad because randomly choosen solutions don't work (or are incorrect) -- see previous paragraph.
So it is a good heuristic to assume that cranks and people with agendas seldom are correct.
(Of course, the ideology or preconceived opinion might be correct... But it will be accepted if the cranks turn out to do correct predictions. Most to all ideologies are wrong, of course -- see argument above.)
Disclaimer: I'm playing a bit of the devil's advocate here -- at least in the way I've formulated this comment.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Entirely theoretical. Little or no emperical data either way. 3 Theoretical cuckoos to more guns - less gun crime for ignoring the singularity in their argument (There will be more gun crime with 1 gun than with 0).
This statement is wrong if just one instance of an HIV infection caused AIDS. The empirical data for this is extremely large. - 4 Cuckoos
Non excessive sun exposure is healthy. - 0 Cuckoos.
With one cavaet, when it is known to benefit the condition being treated. - 0 Cuckoos.
Look up. - 4 Cuckoos
Possibly, but I doubt it greatly. The ability of RNA as a catalyst to its own replication and that of and other biological materials makes it very likely that there were small ammounts of many organic chemicals, including some functioning RNA, and that the first time frame in which we see huge ammounts of organic chemicals should be the RNA catalysts putting the formation of organic chemicals into exponential growth (until restrained by the resources available). The largest producer of hydrocarbons is photosynthesis. So if lots of this stuff was formed before photosynthesis, we should find even more formed afterwards. 1 Theoretical Cuckoo for overcorrecting.
According to quantum mechanics, to a limited degree, yes. However to move a person back in time about one second you need a negative energy of about the mass of jupiter. We havn't found any negative energy, so don't hold your breath. - 3 Thoeretical Cuckoos.
Not enough research - As an idea 0 Theoretical Cuckoos, be creative. As a statement of fact - 2 Cuckoos - do more research first.
Lots of theory here - As an idea 0 Theoretical Cuckoos, be creative. As a statement of fact - 2 Cuckoos - do more research first. (There was a big bang has the same ratings.)
And you reply: "Good argument!! There are lots of irresponsible idiots so don't let anyone have guns."
So, you have never seen an 18 wheeler in your life, have you?
Who, the HELL, is modding that crap up? Seriously, what is wrong with you. I say "restrict", I get trolled with semi-litterate idiots who say that I said "ban".
Is this bizarro slashdot or something?
Why is it not possible to have a fucking rational discussion about guns when people from the U.S. are around? Its not that hard people: read what the other person actually wrote, not what you are expecting to read!
On to the rest:
So it's OK to let irresponsible idiots drive 3000 pound cars.
No, its not.
And it's OK to let irresponsible idiots buy chainsaws.
Please, PLEASE look up murder statistics. Compare numbers of homicide with firearms to homicide with chainsaws.
Please.
You can't take the sky from me...
The reviewer doesn't really explain the theory, and his bit is kinda misleading.
The idea is that hydrocarbons, rather than being formed from rotting garbage or coming from outer space, are formed via big furnacey things in the mantle. This is supposed to explain events where oil fields appear to have refilled themselves, and the distribution of fields and the wierdities of the geology in and around them.
Personally, I don't buy it, even if I do agree that it's becoming reasonable to question whether organic matter is the only source of oil/gas/coal. The theory's missing anywhere close to a decently complete explaination of how this subterranean coal factory is supposed to work, and even if it does, it doesn't seem like any of the theories I've seen would support treating oil fields like bottomless pits. Whenever they talk about oil being superabundant, it's below a couple miles, where, unless I'm very much mistaken, your drill bit tends to melt like butter.
Few atheists, if any, will claim that proof of evolution is somehow proof *against* the existence of God. (Most atheists are aware of the fact that you can't prove or disprove the existence of supernatural entities like God, for whom there cannot, by definition, be any evidence.)
This is a problem with people, not with the scientific method. If you can suggest a better method for accurately determining the nature of the universe, I'm sure everyone would be glad to hear it -- but right now, science is the best method we have."Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Later Tycho Brahe, Galileo and Johannes Kepler did the footwork that was needed to fix the problems of the Copernican system. In particular Galileo gathered data was really necessitated the sun centered theory, which got him into trouble with the church. The church then proceeded to waste vast amounts of resource prosecuting him, money that would better have been spent helping plague stickmen victims. All in all, by this time there was 150 years of evidence supporting the sun centered philosophy, and pretty much anyone who mattered accepted it as reality.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
the nonreducible complexity problem
Nonreducible complexity is a concept put forward by the Intellegent Design advocates. So far, all the examples of irreducible complexity (the exact term they use) aren't really irreducible.
If you have a specific example of irreducible complexity, I'll give it a shot. The famous example given is the eye, which has been shown to be a) useful in all intermediate stages and b) existant in nature in all intermediate stages.
But your analogy to a lottery winner is silly.
The analogy is a tool meant to illustrate, not to argue. When one takes the metaphor too far, it breaks. Specifically, when I used the lottery metaphor, I was making the point that it would not be logical to assume that the lottery maker intended Bob XXX to win when he designed the lottery. There was no further implications of my lottery example, and none should be drawn. I am aware that the lottery is indeed an intelligently designed thing, but to say that my example supports intelligent design is to stretch the metaphor past the breaking point.
I repeat, the analogy was only to illustrate my point. The argument is not the same thing as the analogy.
Let me rephrase the argument without the lottery in it:
We are here 12 billion years after the event at the start of the universe. There are many things that have happened in that time, and all of them have so far led to us on this little planet. The probability of this exact chain occurring is very small. So small, that some of us think that it wasn't an accident. Some of us think that an intelligent being MUST have started the universe in such a way that it resulted in people on this little planet.
This particular outcome is a result of a chain of unlikely events, and each of those events is just as likely as any other. When we look back, it's not proper to say that there's a 99.99% chance that we weren't here, but a 0.01% chance that we are here. You have to remember that the liklihood of all the small events is exactly the same, and that one of those events must happen.
(Here I interject the analogy again, in a different form. Note that it's not an argument, just an example of the argument given in the paragraph above. I do not argue by analogy, therefore it is not logical to make suppositions about my analogy to disprove my argument. This is why you can't point out the fact that a lottery need not occur and expect that it refutes my argument. It does not.)
When I roll the percentage dice in D&D (if you never played, it's two 10 sided dice, read off and interpreted as a two digit percentile number), and I get a '37', the odds of that happening are very remote. Only 1 in 100. What are the chances of that happening? Is it logical to assume that an intelligence ordained that the '37' should be rolled? No, because we realise that all numbers are equally likely to be rolled, and that no matter how unlikely, once the dice are rolled a percentage must come up.
(end of the analogy, used for illustration only)
Finally, if some other sequence of events resulted in a lifeless universe, then we wouldn't be around to ask about the intelligent designer. Nevertheless, the universe would still be here.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
According to Stephen Hawking in one of his books, the theory was not popular because it showed strong evidence against there being "absolutes" in the Universe, which implied that not only were things like absolute location and absolute speed nonsensical, it also implies that absolute time, and thus absolute existance are merely constructs for us to better wrap our minds around our Universe.
Hawking argues that the theory of Relativity itself does in fact fly in the face of the existance of "God" because it refutes even other absolutes like "all powerful" and "absolute morals" or "absolute truth" and other such constructs of religion.
Stewey
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
Why don't nine-foot seams of Ordovician or Silurian coal exist below Carboniferous strata then? Also, why does Pennsylvanian coal contain carbonized Lycopodium stumps a yard wide? There are brown coal seams from the Cretaceous, and pre-coal deposits from relatively Recent peat bogs. The four cuckoos this one deserves will outlast the funerals of Western Civ.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
can it really be said to exist in any practical way?
"Practical way" subtly implies an observer, so it can't exist in a practical way. It can't exist in a non-practical way either, because that implies that there is a practical way, which implies an observer. It would have to exist in a way that is completely independent of practical. I have no idea what that means, but it's logical.
'irreducible complexity' problem WRT the eye. Can you point me in the right direction?
First the ID side, which I think is wrong, but probably not maliciously so:
Home page of Michael J. Behe. For more info, pick up books or writings on the web by Behe, and William A. Dembski. Google is your friend, there's a huge amount of stuff out there.
Now, for the skeptical side:
The talkorigins website
When someone puts forward the idea of irreducible complexity, remember two things: first, it's up to the person saying that the eye is irreducible to prove that it is. The argument must satisfy the skeptic. Second, irreducible complexity sounds a lot like the fallacy of argument from lack of imagination. Just because one cannot imagine how something could happen is not a reason to believe that it did.
The talk origins website has a lot of information on there, hope you enjoy reading some of it.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
*Rolls up newspaper*
NO! Bad logic, BAD!
the gist of the argument is that random selection of base pairs won't result in life, except under the most exceptionally lucky circumstances.
OK, so we could be lucky. Of course, the timeframe allows for a lot of chances, and maybe lucky starts to approach inevitable. That doesn't argue for any divine intervention.
there's a mechanism by which complex strings may be built from simpler ones,
Evolution, natural process which involves absolutely no divine intervention...
it suggests that the origin of life was not merely a fortunate accident. Rather, it was the result of design
This is where the logic jumps a ridiculous distance. Because simple can become complex, it may, nay... It MUST be designed that way. There's not even a word to describe the magnitude of that leap.
whether or not that design was instrumented by a higher power may be left for debate.
Oh, come on. This is just absurd. The argument "we're not saying it's necessarily God..." is just trying to be cutesy.
But it does much damage to the atheistic worldview if it can be shown that no life can result from purely random events.
Only if you can actually show it.
How does it follow from "hydrocarbons pre-existed the formation of the earth" that "we're probably not going to run out of them"? I'd think you could draw the opposite conclusion - if we use up the accessible stuff and it's not a renewable resource... how far are we going to have to dig or go out in space to get more? It becomes rather impractical doesn't it? Or is there some mechanism by which they are supposed to get replenished right here on earth?