MC Hammer time:

Have a giggle on the house with some mormon doctrine put to that most famous of 90's songs. man why did the 90's stop?

Alan Alda

Speaking of Alan Alda in a post or two back, I though I should do some credit to the man I count as my hero in life. He gave this brief essay in response to the question, "What have you changed your mind about":

Until I was twenty I was sure there was a being who could see everything I did and who didn't like most of it. He seemed to care about minute aspects of my life, like on what day of the week I ate a piece of meat. And yet, he let earthquakes and mudslides take out whole communities, apparently ignoring the saints among them who ate their meat on the assigned days.  Eventually, I realized that I didn't believe there was such a being. It didn't seem reasonable. And I assumed that I was an atheist. 

As I understood the word, it meant that I was someone who didn't believe in a God; I was without a God. I didn't broadcast this in public because I noticed that people who do believe in a god get upset to hear that others don't. (Why this is so is one of the most pressing of human questions, and I wish a few of the bright people in this conversation would try to answer it through research.) 

But, slowly I realized that in the popular mind the word atheist was coming to mean something more: a statement that there couldn't be a God. God was, in this formulation, not possible, and this was something that could be proved. But I had been changed by eleven years of interviewing six or seven hundred scientists around the world on the television program Scientific American Frontiers. And that change was reflected in how I would now identify myself. 

The most striking thing about the scientists I met was their complete dedication to evidence. It reminded me of the wonderfully plainspoken words of Richard Feynman who felt it was better not to know than to know something that was wrong. The problem for me was that just as I couldn't find any evidence that there was a god, I couldn't find any that there wasn't a god. I would have to call myself an agnostic. At first, this seemed a little wimpy, but after a while I began to hope it might be an example of Feynman's heroic willingness to accept, even glory in, uncertainty. 

I still don't like the word agnostic. It's too fancy. I'm simply not a believer. But, as simple as this notion is, it confuses some people. Someone wrote a Wikipedia entry about me, identifying me as an atheist because I'd said in a book I wrote that I wasn't a believer. I guess in a world uncomfortable with uncertainty, an unbeliever must be an atheist, and possibly an infidel. This gets us back to that most pressing of human questions: why do people worry so much about other people's holding beliefs other than their own? This is the question that makes the subject over which I changed my mind something of global importance, and not just a personal, semantic dalliance.

Do our beliefs identify us the way our language, foods and customs do? Is this why people who think the universe chugs along on its own are as repellent to some as people who eat live monkey brains are to others? Are we saying, you threaten my identity with your infidelity to my beliefs? You're trying to kill me with your thoughts, so I'll get you first with this stone? And, if so, is this really something that can be resolved through reasonable discourse? 

Maybe this is an even more difficult problem; one that's written in the letters that spell out our DNA. Why is the belief in God and Gods so ubiquitous? Does belief in a higher power confer some slight health benefit, and has natural selection favored those who are genetically inclined to believe in such a power — and is that why so many of us are inclined to believe? (Whether or not a God actually exists, the tendency to believe we'll be saved might give us the strength to escape sickness and disaster and live the extra few minutes it takes to replicate ourselves.)

These are wild speculations, of course, and they're probably based on a desperate belief I once had that we could one day understand ourselves. 

But, I might have changed my mind on that one, too.

West Wing Style:

One of my all time favorite TV series, the West Wing, today offers us this little gem. If you think you've ever ranted and raved, you might want to sit down for this. For context, martin sheen there is playing a fictional democratic president, who nonetheless has always been religious. That's all fine and good until his secretary, perhaps the person he was closest to in the whole west wing, gets hit by a drunk driver, after the service he lets this one fly: 

I mean, I've been mad before, but never Latin Mad. 

The latin incidentally translates to: 1:10 - "Thank you, Lord"  and 2:32 - "Am I really to believe these are the acts of a loving god? A just god?" a wise god? To hell with your punishments! I was your servant here on earth. And I spread your word and did your work. To hell with your punishments! To hell with you!" 

Its a powerful piece of television. 

Bonus: Martin Sheen saying everything I've ever wanted to in exquisite style to boot: 

Always remember kids, the president doesn't like it when you don't stand, and he will use his religion to tear the kneecaps off yours. 

Tom Lehrer's Quick How-To on Catholicism

Seeing as final's week is here, and both procrastination and important work are here in staggering amounts , the rest of these post's will likely be short, quick, and not at all sciencey. With that being said, here's something to make you laugh, courtesy of one of the funniest mathematicians of all time, Tom Lehrer, who was once reviewed as having his muse "not fettered by good taste"

For your consideration, The Vatican Ragtime:

I have to admit, the line about the friday-meat inconsistency makes me laugh more than it should.

and for funsies here's some of his other sorta related stuff, including his Sunday Plans and the love of his life:

This man ranks up there with Alan Alda and Neils Bohr as one of my heroes.

Instant Depression, Just Add Fundamentalism

This goes outside of my regular scientific bent towards this blog, but I've found what may be the single most depressing anything christian anywhere. It's a site known as "Fundies Say the Darndest Things". Welcome to the best quotes from the wide world of ignorant debate, bigotry and hatred.

http://www.fstdt.com/QuoteArchives.aspx?Archive=1

Just hit the "Random Quotes" link up top and enjoy the whirlwind of hatred and ignorance. To believe that just some small portion of a "christian" population believes this is all the fuel my cynicism will ever need. The list of people who can and will be offended, horrified, and/or shocked include: people with liberal politics (myself included), the entirety of the LGBT community, women, people of African or Middle Eastern descent, women again, anybody who knows anything about science (evolution seems to be a particular sticking point, as is ussher's chronology), and atheists and agnostics (myself included under the agnostic territory).

If you keep reading though occasionally you come across extremist feminists, or extremist socialists or even extremist atheists. To be sure the christian population isn't the only group with these kinds of extremist views. in fact, i don't even know that you can cal it "extremist" as simply opposed to another view. I know it sickens me to think of somebody telling somebody else that their way of thinking is offensive or ignorant, but what happens when the right to think as you wish defends those who hate and those who are misguided and closed-minded?

On another note, go watch Inherit the Wind with Spencer Tracy and Gene Kelly. Great movie on similar ideas.

(Ninja edit: some of the quotes could be extremely offensive to Catholics as well, forgot about that.)

Ussher Chronology or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Radiation

Speaking of the overlap between scholarly and ecumenical pursuit, sometimes it does't fly too well. The one that comes most readily to mind is the various chronologies of the world and creation that have been put forth by various figures. So pretty important names have tried to chronologically establish just when it was genesis 1 happened, people like Newton, Kepler, and St. Bede. Perhaps the most famous of all these attempts at putting calendar dates to biblical creation is that of Bishop Ussher, a 17th century bishop, who postulated that based on names times and dates available in the bible that creation began on Sunday the 23rd, 4004 BC.

The problem is that that's physically impossible.

Let us for starters talk about the age of the universe. OF course any discussion about age, is a discussion about time, but one of the fundamental discoveries of late 19th century, early 20th century physics, is that space and tie are fundamentally connected (a la Einstein).Like I've mentioned before, the universe likes things to stay below a certain speed, making things go shooting off towards infinity in terms of mass and energy in the relevant reference frames. This speed of course, is the speed of light. Having a fixed speed of light does some interesting things  seeing as we need light to well... see, the light emitted by an object takes some time for to travel to us and for us to see it. in most cases this is a relatively short delay. going from the sun to the earth would take 8 minutes at light speed, so any light traveling from the sun takes 8 minutes to get here, meaning the light we see the sun by was created and shot off towards here 8 minutes ago. This is a pretty well known fact. Going further we can apply this same logic to the stars and other objects in space. We can prove using a little trigonometry, or the the properties of the shift of the light spectrum to prove that stars in the night sky are incredible distances from us. But because we can see them, it means that light has traveled from these places all the way here, at the speed of light, and however long the a distance that was, has a specific time it would take the light to travel that distance ( we simplify these distances into light-years, or the distance light can travel in one year, meaning a distance of 15,000 light years means it took light 15,000 years to cross that distance). Long story's short with all this, because we can see the light emitted from hundreds of thousands of light years away, it means it must have traveled all that time, and the universe could not possibly be 6000 years old as Ussher would have said, as we would never see  any light from anywhere more than 6000 light years away.

So how old is the universe actually? to answer this question, we are led by the above facts to a startling conclusion, the further we look out into space, the longer it takes light to traverse that distance, and therefore the older we are seeing things. So instead of asking, how old is everything? we can ask, how far away is it all?

This is the Hubble Extreme Deep Field. Each of those dots of light? they're Galaxies. They contain millions of stars bigger or smaller than our sun. And to think heights make my head spin. Image courtesy of wikimedia Commons

That right there ladies and gentlemen, is the Hubble Extreme Deep field, a photo taken by aiming the Hubble space telescope at a relatively dark chunk of nowheresville deep space, messing with the focal length quite a bit, then opening the shutter for 23 days to gather all the light pouring in. Based on the Light these things give off, they're more than 13.2 billion light years away. This is about as we can see optically with the telescope power available to us, but this means the universe is at least 13.2 billion years old. Bishop Ussher was only off by several orders of magnitude. But it gets better.

This is the result of the WMAP experiment. In essence what you are staring at is a picture of the universe relatively soon after the big bang did its thing. Image courtesy of wikimedia commons.

While we can't necessarily "see" any farther than Hubble's Extreme Deep Field Exposure at the moment, we can do other experiments. This is the Cosmic Microwave background. Its a little technical, and I'd need to do more research to explain it perfectly, this is what was left over from the big bang essentially and it's characteristics reveal it to be by far the some of the oldest anything in the universe. In fact using this and some of the laws of cooling as they apply to the big bang has allowed us to put the age of the universe at around 13.8 billion years old plus or minus around 37 million years! Because I'm pretty crappy at explaining this, here is the details of it in all its wikipedian glory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_universe

The obvious next question is: well then how old is the earth? Ushers chronology could be made to explain just the earth. but here Ussher falls short as well from a different type of radiation. 

Living things as you might now are by in large made up of carbon. The problem is not all carbon is created equal, some carbon is created as what's known as an isotope, meaning they have extra neutral "hangers on". In carbon's case, the most typical thing to find is that it has two extra neutrons, and exists as something called carbon 14. Living things tend to create and store carbon 14 in their bodies during their lifetime, but when they die these processes tend to stop and the amount of carbon 14 becomes fixed and starts to decay. Because of the properties of radioactive materials, the rate of decay of carbon can be categorized under one important measure, half-life. Half-life is essentially the amount of time it takes for half of the radioactive isotopes to decay (lose their radioactivity, extra particles, and energy). This half life stays constant no matter what, so by knowing carbon 14's half life, and knowing what ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12 (the normal version of carbon) you can expect in plants or other organic matter, it becomes possible to "count backwards" and figure out how long something would have to decay to become like it currently is. We can use this to establish a pretty good age on old organic matter on the earth. the upper end of this age testing scale? 60,000 years ago, until natural amounts of carbon 14 in the air start messing with things. And this is just organic matter, we can perform all sorts of similar radioactive dating tests with rock and meteorite samples the world over, knowing what to expect in terms of radioactive elements in newly formed rock. doing this we can place the age of the earth 4.54 billion years ago plus or minus 50 million years!

so Ussher's chronology as a valid scholarly crossover between the christian traditions and our understanding of physics? Ussher loses out big time, and we can prove he was wrong by huge orders of magnitude in almost all cases.

The Magnificent Albertus Magnus

So here's something I did not know, apparently I have a patron saint, one Albertus Magnus.

Albertus Magnus, saint, genius extraordinaire, scientist decade ahead of his time, and  apparently a  big fan of Cincinnati   centuries before any European even knew that was a thing. Image courtesy of wikimedia commons. 

He is apparently the Patron saint of natural scientists (chemists, biologists, physicists  astronomers, etc) and the students of said sciences, medical technicians... and Cincinnati, Ohio. I spent about a minute after reading that trying to find a connection, it's hard enough believing Ohio is blessed by anything. Going over his life, apparently he was the teacher of one Thomas Aquinas, a familiar name, during his life he was a geologist, zoologist, logician and chemist. He was an avid translator and critic of Aristotelian physics, going so far to translate them out of Arabic in a time when the crusades were the form of recreation for the clergy and nobles. He was a Dominican and bishop as well, and one of only 35 people in the history of the Catholic church to be endowed with the honor Doctor of the Church. Apparently he was also a scholasticist, a school of medieval thought focusing very heavily on logic. Seems like a cool dude.

Are We Sure God Loves Physicists?

There comes a time in everyone's life where you have to sit back and reflect on things. For me today that consisted of the stunning realization that I spent most of today trying to rationalize the surface integrals of square loop-magnetic field interactions so as to properly get magnetic flux and determine the magnitude of the resulting ring current. If that made no sense to you, imagine how I felt sitting around trying to figure it out in my head. Throw on some obnoxious second order differential equations to try and figure out the characteristics of series of capacitors and inductors, then applying that knowledge to capacitor-inductor-resistor circuits and it became very clear to me why it is I don't have the Nobel prize. Also why it is physicists always seem to have the crazy hair, i suspect some of their brains may have exploded.

Anyways, relevant SMBC:

God's sense of humor is a little different I guess. And a little dickish.  Guess where credit to for this. 

Somebody once said god was subtle, and while I guess I can agree with that to the furthest extent my agnosticism alows, that doesn't mean he isn't frustrating and difficult I guess.