After Break Bonanza: Expading the Nerdom of God

I know this one is usually outside my purview, as i don't usually do the whole programming thing, but i thought i would go ahead and post an XKCD on programming the universe. For those who don't know, LISP and Perl are two computer languages (the code your computer reads and runs). LISP is the great grand-daddy of coding language, developed in 1958, exceedingly complex, very sturdy and logical, and still in use today. Perl on the other hand is much more modern, much more simple, and some would argue, a little more ramshackle. So what would god write the universe in?

For once i get to say this one is not from SMBC, but instead all credit and rights go to Randall Munroe at XKCD.com

After Break Bonanza: I Just Find This Funny to be Honest

Speaking of New Religious Movements, what do you suppose mainline Christianity will look like in millennium  2? 3? we sure wouldn't recognize first century Christianity today, it would be a far different place. Here's SMBC's take on it.

Guess

After Break Bonanza: Logic Disputes

Personally i want to see the pope's cage match.
Bet you can guess this came from Zach Weinersmith over at SMBC without me telling you. 

In all the years that people have been discussing god, theology and Christ  it is notable that we have precisely no accepted proof on the nature of god. What gives? You would think that after some thousands of years the logic or mathematics of this would have become one way or the other at least. I mean, shouldn't something so fundamental show up in the most fundamental of all of things, logic, math or physics? I suppose to me, that  none of these disciplines can offer me a solid argument on what's going on up there with beardy is a pretty troubling thing. Christ lived, and was real (at least that is the accepted theory), yet the people of his time couldn't figure him out. So what gives? Why isn't this much simpler? And what would happen to all of us i we knew one way or the other? In continuing with the feast for thought I guess.

After Break Bonanza: Relativistic Rocks

There are fundamental Constraints on the universe. You probably know the most famous on, the speed of light. try as you might you cannot get something over the speed of light, the reasons are a little complex, but in essence whatever you are "pushing" trying o get faster, will actually gain mass as you do it (making your "push" less effective) and time for that object will slow down, and space as that object would see it, expands.  This was essentially Einstein's genius, was coming up with the way this worked. Other things are fundamentally limited too, for instance we can only know where and how fast an object is to a certain tolerance, most notable when dealing with small objects. any attempts to figure one out exactly are doomed to failure and mess up the other value so incredibly completely that we lose hold of the thing entirely. But god by definition is limitless...

SMBC, Zach Winersmith, legal rights all belong to them, yadda yadda yadda

So then how do the physics of such a thing work? physics as we know it is constrained, but god is not. What happens to the physics of a situation that is subject to god's unlimited nature? For instance in the above, by creating something infinitely massive, you essentially destroy space-time. By going faster than the speed of light you can manage to violate causality, by disobeying quantum effects... well actually the universe makes more sense doing that but a great deal of technology would fail. More food for thought.

After Break Bonanza:Theodicy

So i asked in my last post how we can rationalize god with all of the (sometimes cruel) elements of the universe, and i think once again Zach Weinersmith gives a pretty decent way of explaining it with side trips into what can only be described as "theological gallows humor"

It sometimes surprises me at all that we try analyze our theology more closely, you'd think it would give the same response as trying to touch something hot when you were a kid. You learn not to do it again. Courtesy of SMBC and Zach Weinersmith

I'm gonna kinda go out on a limb and justify this by calling logic a branch of math.

After Break Bonanza: Why?

Given plenty of time over break to regain a horrid sense of humor, I'm going to start this off with this

God's taking his children leaving home pretty harshly apparently. Image Courtesy of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and for the umpteenth time all rights go to Zach Weinersmith.

All jokes aside however, the common judeo-christian theological standpoint places a whole lot of responsibility directly at god's feet for the various things of this universe, explained or not. For example, why is only the tiniest imaginable sliver of the universe suitable for humans? Could've at least mentioned that during genesis or something, seems appropriate to me. Also, the whole "god moves in mysterious ways" thing doesn't really satisfy me in terms of the whys of things like disasters, or the various extremely hard to decipher things in the universe. I mean, earthquakes floods and thunder and lightning seems pretty old testament punkish to me, and at least throw us a clue on some of the inner workings of the universe man. Just food for thought i guess.

Georges Lemaître's Big Pyrotechnics

Jumping forward a little in the history of physics comes the name Georges Lemaitre. Georges Lemaitre was a catholic priest that you would perhaps know best for that well known explosion: the Big Bang.

Georges Lemaitre at work at the second holiest place for him, a black board.  Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Georges was born in Charleroi, Belgium, in 1894. Growing up he was interested in both science and theology, but before he had a chance to act on either of these things, he and the rest of Europe were greatly inconvenienced by the first world war. After serving as an artillery officer and witness to the first poison gas attack in history, Georges got himself ordained and studied theoretical physics abroad, eventually obtaining his PHD in america from MIT no less. He continued to be both priest and professor the rest of his life even serving as president of the pontifical academy of sciences from 1960-1966.

The work that made Georges famous occurred in 1927 when he published a paper on solutions of systems of general relativity for expanding universes. Meaning he went to the drawing board, said "huh, wonder what happens if the universe is expanding" worked with general relativity a bit, and came up with a good idea of what was going on. What he concluded was of course, that if the universe was expanding, then rewinding the clock meant that at some point in the past the universe ad been smaller, going back even further meant that at some point the universe had been even smaller, and if you kept going back, at some point the universe had been a speck of infinitely small size and incredibly density and energy. This revelation was ignored. Supposedly he was told by no less than Einstein that his math was perfect, but his physics was terrible.

This was up until another (astro)physicist/astronomer going by the name of Edwin Hubble (yeah the guy they named the telescope after), proved conclusively through extensive examination of distant galaxies that they were indeed all flying apart at a speed proportional to their distance.

This was enormous. Lemaitre had in essence discovered the beginning of time! What's more he in essence had created an incredibly valid theory that meshed with both sides of his personality, it worked for him theologically (indeed perhaps theology inspired him to think of a beginning of time in the first place) and it fit Hubble's observations accordingly. Interestingly enough though, when pope Pious XII tried to call this proof of the catholic faith, Lemaitre tried to separate the religious and scientific portents of the theory, working with theologies instead of validating them.

Waiting on the other apple to drop.

He's only staring because he's concerned you don't understand the gravity of the situation.  He's concerned he doesn't either. Image courtesy of Wikimedia commons.

Issac Newton was born on December 25th, 1642. Funny enough the man could tell you all sorts of things about being gifted. He was born and raised an insecure boy, owing to parental abandonment ( his mother remarried to a minister of all the ironic things), something that would leave a mark on his psyche the rest of his life. His life was relatively uneventful, and found being a farmer's son incredibly dull so a relative recommended him to a university (Trinity College), where he lived on a sort of work study program. While trinity college essentially taught some of the the same things you could have heard from Aristotle  centuries earlier, by this time the heliocentric model of the solar system was fell founded and regarded in upper level European academic circles. this set something off in newton and he began to imagine the universe as a giant machine, impersonal and obeying rules, not unlike a clock. It is a viewpoint physicists today still cling too with reverence. It was relatively early in his life that newton started coming up with the ideas that would start define mathematics and physics for the next century, it was during these initial college years. Returning to trinity though as a fellow, he was required to become an ordained priest, something he was loathe to do on account of certain theological revelations that would continue his legacy.

Newton seemingly revolutionized every field he put his hands to in his time at Trinity. He is credited with independently developing the techniques of differential and integral calculus (quite independently of Leibniz). He invented most of the principals of dynamics and mechanics in physics (the rules for regular moving objects). He is credited with contributions to optics (remember those cool prisms?) and other amazing things. these things helped newton pass the time until his later life where his theological ideals caught up to him.

Newton was a prodigious writer of theology as well. He wrote numerous tracts on the literal interpretation of the bible, and works criticizing and doubting the trinity as a religious object. Newton's views were so radical and heretical it is easily questionable as to whether or not he even believed in the divinity of Christ at all. We do however know that he did as a part of his physical revelations believe in some sort of god who had created it. Newton was also an extreme occultist,

One of These Things is not Like the Others

Very busy this week so I figure I'd leave you with more crappy jokes. 

Credit and Copyright and all other sorts of fun legal ownership goes to Zach Weinersmith over at SMBC. Of Course

And as much as I should be apologizing for this, it does make a very legitimate point. Physically, the laws of the universe are sublime and, while initially impenetrable, beautiful in their simplicity. It seems strange to perhaps affiliate things like obtuse and arbitrary moral codes, somewhat bewildering or confusing in their catechisms, to what is metaphorically a symphony of perfect logical interaction of matter and energy. Put another way, doesn't seem a little bit funny in religion, that whoever penned the simple expression for gravity, f=GMm/r^2, decided that also that homosexuality is not okay? One is this statement of amazing universal equality and power, another, this arbitrary law of social conduct, it just.... doesn't seem to mesh. 

Perspective

For what must be the millionth time, All Copyrights to Zach Weinersmith over at SMBC. 

Seeing how wordy my last post was, I'll try to keep this one simple. Perspective is weird.

Determinism, Dear Augustine

A brief aside on broader concepts.

Reading about Augustine, his seminal philosophy is the idea of predestination, from start to finish what is going to happen to you is already laid out in stone, and well, you're in or you aint. It is a little disturbing a concept to believe that free will doesn't matter for beans in Augustine's world, However there is a physics concept that goes directly hand in hand with this idea, it's known as determinism (it's very related to the idea of causality).

The idea behind determinism is simple, if you know the rules of how things work with absolute certainty, and you know the initial conditions perfectly, it is entirely possible to predict mathematically the whole of the unfolding scenario. Think of it this way, we know the rules for pool balls colliding, so if i set up a pool table (ideal and friction-less of course, because this is physics and it cant be too real) and rolled one of the balls at a group, you could using the rules of how pool balls move and collide to perfectly mathematically predict where all the pools would go and would be at any point in time. Given enough paper, time, and boredom, you could actually plot in advance how this would all work out. However interpreting this further, the whole system is completely determined (hence the name determinism) before hand, there can be no deviations and under these conditions this is the only possible way it can go down, no deviations. In other words the future is set and solid.This is very similar to Augustine's idea's since he feels he know how humans started, and roughly the rules of god, and thinks the future is set and solid, you are either in or you aren't and that's already been done for you.

For the most part determinism is a pretty good model for the universe. If you knew roughly the laws of special relativity, newtons laws, basic mechanics, had a good idea of the velocities and accelerations of the stars and galaxies (and dust and rocks and atoms, whatever), and had a computer the approximate size of Manhattan run on magic fairy dust, you could sit and run the 14 billion years of cosmological history backwards and show us at any point what was going on.

The problem with this kind of view is that it simply doesn't work at small scales. At a small enough scale perfect Newtonian determinism breaks down. We can't tell you with absolute certainty what's going to  be where. Repeated measurements for exactly the same experiment yield a probability curve, not a discrete answer. Plainly speaking, the best i can do to tell you where an electron is going to end up at any second in time, is a really good guess, and a couple of percent-chances. In case that sounds like crap and totally counter-intuitive (welcome to quantum physics by the way), this probability theory of quantum mechanics is maybe the best proven theory of science around (partially because you only have to prove probabilities  not discrete answers).

So what? Well what happens if determinism breaks down? well that means that at some scale we can't predict with absolute certainty what is going to happen to you (as I understand it a favorite grad student problem is to predict the probability based on quantum theory that you find that you wake up on mars one day, and the probability exists its just so ludicrously tiny in scope that  its hard to express just how laughable it is). Furthermore, suddenly Augustine takes a scientific dive, at some scale, predestination works on the idea of determinism, Augustine knew the rules and the starting conditions of your soul, and he could tell you whether or not you should learn some harp chords, but determinism just isn't a set facet of reality, it only works at certain scales, with certain things as a nice approximation.

So on philosophical-scientific grounds, Augustine's dependence on determinism for his ideas of predestination simply is a logical fallacy, and at least scientifically he can't be right.

"light" reading on the concepts of determinism and causality:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality_(physics)
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism#Quantum_mechanics_and_classical_physics