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Sean Kirkpatrick

Conflicts between science and religion - 0 views

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    I found another article that highlighted the clear conflict between science and religion as the author reflects on the work of all the scientists we studied, including Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, three of the most famous scientists in history. The author highlights the struggle between church and the findings of these scientists. For example, in the Steven Hawkings movie, the narrator talked about how Newton's discovery of gravity and his laws of motion went against what the church believed. In the article, the author highlights this conflict when he says, "Interestingly, this led to two diametrically opposed inferences. On the one hand, many people saw the success of Newton (and many people see the continued success of physics to the present day) as an argument for atheism. If God is not needed to explain the behavior of the world, and if the cosmos, like a giant clock, operates on mechanical principles alone, then one has no reason to suppose that God even exists. There are no explanatory gaps left for God to fill. Newton himself would have rejected this. He considered God to have a vital role in setting up the initial conditions for the universe."
Javier E

Everyone Should Write - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast - 0 views

  • You should write because when you know that you’re going to write, it changes the way you live
  • the difference between you and a zoologist or you and a botanist is that the botanist, when she looks at a flower, has a question in mind. She’s trying to generate questions. For her the flower is the locus of many mental threads, some nascent, some spanning her career. Her field notebook is not some convenient way to store lifeless data to be presented in lifeless papers so that other scientists can replicate some dull experiment; it’s the site of a collision between a mind and a world.
  • When I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a thematic gravity well, a magnet for what would otherwise be a mess of iron filings. I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular I’ll remember everything better; everything will mean more to me
anonymous

Free will debate: What does free will mean and how did it evolve? - 0 views

  • Many scientists cannot imagine how the idea of free will could be reconciled with the laws of physics and chemistry. Brain researchers say that the brain is just a bunch of nerve cells that fire as a direct result of chemical and electrical events, with no room for free will
  • Scientists take delight in (and advance their careers by) claiming to have disproved conventional wisdom, and so bashing free will is appealing. But their statements against free will can be misleading
  • Free will means freedom from causation.” Other scientists who argue against free will say that it means that a soul or other supernatural entity causes behavior, and not surprisingly they consider such explanations unscientific.
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  • There is a genuine psychological reality behind the idea of free will. The debate is merely about whether this reality deserves to be called free will.
  • Our actions cannot break the laws of physics, but they can be influenced by things beyond gravity, friction, and electromagnetic charges. No number of facts about a carbon atom can explain life, let alone the meaning of your life. These causes operate at different levels of organization.
  • Free will cannot violate the laws of physics or even neuroscience, but it invokes causes that go beyond them
  • Self-control furnishes the possibility of acting from rational principles rather than acting on impulse.
  • If you think of freedom as being able to do whatever you want, with no rules, you might be surprised to hear that free will is for following rules. Doing whatever you want is fully within the capability of any animal in the forest. Free will is for a far more advanced way of acting
  • That, in a nutshell, is the inner deciding process that humans have evolved. That is the reality behind the idea of free will: these processes of rational choice and self-control
  • Self-control counts as a kind of freedom because it begins with not acting on every impulse. The simple brain acts whenever something triggers a response: A hungry creature sees food and eats it
  • Our ancestors evolved the ability to act in the ways necessary for culture to succeed. Free will likely will be found right there—it’s what enables humans to control their actions in precisely the ways required to build and operate complex social systems.
  • Understanding free will in this way allows us to reconcile the popular understanding of free will as making choices with our scientific understanding of the world.
sissij

Quantum Gravity Loops Back To Ancient Atomic Logic, and The Big Bang Becomes A Big Boun... - 0 views

  • Greeks had the “first true alphabet”: a “universal” writing system that used a few letters to encode the infinite variety of all possible utterances. Similarly, all matter is written in a "language… of atoms."
  • Mysterious “meanings” still surround 100-year-old quantum mechanics equations
  • Their meaning/function/grammar is relational and sequential and word-like. The information encoded in matching sequential text-like compositions matters (DNA—>RNA, letters—>“social cartesian” lexicon).
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  • Beyond the grammars of geometry and algebra lies a domain of not math-like but text-like compositions and meanings (of semantics beyond mathematics).
  • 17. Word and world both have grammars that don’t fit our available mathematical rules.
  • 18. Reality is relational, and not entirely objective. Subject and object aren’t separable, they’re entangled, inescapably. “Objective” is always relative to some other system/observer. 
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    I find it very interesting that the author is trying o look at the world from a different perspective than mathematics. He thinks atoms as a language that have grammar and meanings. He thinks mathematical rules cannot fully explain our world because it is too objective. He involves the idea of language to describe how the world is entangled and relational. As we learned in TOK, language is an important AOK that shows human civilization in a very complicated way. Language is flexible, emotional and relational. It gives things meaning as human likes to assign meaning and pattern to things around. The world around us are not just cold fact, we as observers give them meaning to exist. In that sense, the concept of language can better help us depict the world. --Sissi (2/27/2017)
maxwellokolo

NASA launched a superbug into space - 0 views

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    Before you start to worry, this isn't a sign of an impending apocalypse. Working in conjunction with NASA, lead researcher Dr. Anita Goel hopes that by sending MRSA bacteria to a zero-gravity environment, we can better understand how superbugs mutate to become resistant to available antibiotics.
maxwellokolo

Sound waves could take a tsunami down a few notches - 0 views

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    Acoustic-gravity waves would exchange energy with destructive water wave A tsunami's immense wall of water may not be stoppable. But there may be a way to take the ferocious force of nature down a few notches, using a pair of counterwaves.
Javier E

The American Scholar: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education - William Deresiewicz - 1 views

  • the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy
  • I’m talking about the whole system in which these skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs, the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away from it. The message, as always, is the medium. Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated.
  • The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals.
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  • My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me.
  • The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic.
  • Students at places like Cleveland State, unlike those at places like Yale, don’t have a platoon of advisers and tutors and deans to write out excuses for late work, give them extra help when they need it, pick them up when they fall down.
  • When people say that students at elite schools have a strong sense of entitlement, they mean that those students think they deserve more than other people because their SAT scores are higher.
  • The political implications should be clear. As John Ruskin told an older elite, grabbing what you can get isn’t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists.
  • students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State.
  • The second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth. Getting to an elite college, being at an elite college, and going on from an elite college—all involve numerical rankings: SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to think of yourself in terms of those numbers. They come to signify not only your fate, but your identity; not only your identity, but your value.
  • For the elite, there’s always another extension—a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab—always plenty of contacts and special stipends—the country club, the conference, the year-end bonus, the dividend.
  • In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse.
  • Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls “entitled mediocrity.”
  • An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist
  • The liberal arts university is becoming the corporate university, its center of gravity shifting to technical fields where scholarly expertise can be parlayed into lucrative business opportunities.
  • You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life? Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education?
  • Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.
  • This is not to say that students from elite colleges never pursue a riskier or less lucrative course after graduation, but even when they do, they tend to give up more quickly than others.
  • But if you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual.
  • being an intellectual is not the same as being smart. Being an intellectual means more than doing your homework.
  • The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name. It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.
  • Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas—and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade.
  • Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers. GA_googleFillSlot('Rectangle_InArticle_Right'); GA_googleCreateDomIframe("google_ads_div_Rectangle_InArticle_Right_ad_container" ,"Rectangle_InArticle_Right"); Places like Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big questions
  • Professors at top research institutions are valued exclusively for the quality of their scholarly work; time spent on teaching is time lost. If students want a conversion experience, they’re better off at a liberal arts college.
  • When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business.
  • Although the notion of breadth is implicit in the very idea of a liberal arts education, the admissions process increasingly selects for kids who have already begun to think of themselves in specialized terms—the junior journalist, the budding astronomer, the language prodigy. We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.
  • There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics. An independent mind is independent of all allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering institutional loyalty.
  • At a school like Yale, students who come to class and work hard expect nothing less than an A-. And most of the time, they get it.
  • Yet there is a dimension of the intellectual life that lies above the passion for ideas, though so thoroughly has our culture been sanitized of it that it is hardly surprising if it was beyond the reach of even my most alert students. Since the idea of the intellectual emerged in the 18th century, it has had, at its core, a commitment to social transformation. Being an intellectual means thinking your way toward a vision of the good society and then trying to realize that vision by speaking truth to power.
  • It takes more than just intellect; it takes imagination and courage.
  • Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there.
  • Paradoxically, the situation may be better at second-tier schools and, in particular, again, at liberal arts colleges than at the most prestigious universities. Some students end up at second-tier schools because they’re exactly like students at Harvard or Yale, only less gifted or driven. But others end up there because they have a more independent spirit. They didn’t get straight A’s because they couldn’t be bothered to give everything in every class. They concentrated on the ones that meant the most to them or on a single strong extracurricular passion or on projects that had nothing to do with school
  • I’ve been struck, during my time at Yale, by how similar everyone looks. You hardly see any hippies or punks or art-school types, and at a college that was known in the ’80s as the Gay Ivy, few out lesbians and no gender queers. The geeks don’t look all that geeky; the fashionable kids go in for understated elegance. Thirty-two flavors, all of them vanilla.
  • The most elite schools have become places of a narrow and suffocating normalcy. Everyone feels pressure to maintain the kind of appearance—and affect—that go with achievement
  • Now that students are in constant electronic contact, they never have trouble finding each other. But it’s not as if their compulsive sociability is enabling them to develop deep friendships.
  • What happens when busyness and sociability leave no room for solitude? The ability to engage in introspection, I put it to my students that day, is the essential precondition for living an intellectual life, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude
  • the life of the mind is lived one mind at a time: one solitary, skeptical, resistant mind at a time. The best place to cultivate it is not within an educational system whose real purpose is to reproduce the class system.
carolinewren

Bridgegate scandal coverage puts media 'bias' on 'full display,' Christie says | NJ.com - 0 views

  • Gov. Chris Christie insisted during his latest trip to New Hampshire that the fallout from the George Washington Bridge scandal wouldn't have been as nearly as intense if he were a Democrat.
  • argued to early-primary voters Hillary Clinton escaped scrutiny for clearing the private server housing emails from her tenure as secretary of state because she's a Democrat and he declared "bias is on full display" when that's compared to his own controversy.
  • "Could you imagine if my response the day after
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  • "As you all know, I went through a really fun time the last 15 months with lots of different people investigating me too, right?"
  • "There is a bias," Christie insisted
  • all of that happened last January was, 'Oh, by the way, ... I have a private email server and all my emails were on this private server and I deleted a bunch of them, but they were only personal, and you're going to have to take my word for it cause the servers gone."
  • not the first time the governor suggested media bias was to blame for the fallout of the George Washington Bridge lane closure controversy.
  • December 2013, a month before the now infamous "time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee" email from a top Christie staffer was revealed, Christie brushed off questions about the lane closures during a Statehouse news conference
  • "I know you guys are obsessed with this, I'm not. I'm really not. It's not that big a deal," Christie insisted. "Just because press runs around and writes about it, both here and nationally, I know why that is and so do you, let's not pretend it's because of the gravity of the issue. It's because I am a national figure and anything like this will be written a lot about now, so let's not pretend this is some grave thing."
  • Christie signaled in New Hampshire he's intent on pressing Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner in the 2016 presidential race, on the attacks in Benghazi, Libya that's been a lighting rod for Clinton critics just as the governor declared during a recent trip here that he's done "apologizing" for the Bridgegate scandal
  • "I don't think there's been nearly enough questions asked about this," Christie said. "We need to ask a lot more questions about Benghazi. We need to get to the bottom of what happened because it does matter, madam secretary."
grayton downing

Oort cloud tosses astronomers a cometary curveball | Science News - 0 views

  • a mountain-sized chunk of primordial solar system, will approach within 2 million kilometers of the sun and either fall apart or slingshot back into deep space. Astronomers aren’t sure yet how much of a spectacle ISON will be for earthbound observers, but from their vantage point the comet is already providing a brief, unprecedented glimpse into what the solar system was like in its infancy.
  • “It’s the sort of thing I’ve been waiting for my whole career,”
  • hat probably indicates large amounts of ice near the comet’s surface, where the sun can easily drive it off, he says. The finding confirmed that ISON is on its first pass through the inner solar system, not a periodic visitor like Halley’s comet.
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  • Looking ahead, astronomers found that ISON will pass within a cosmic whisker of the sun, close enough to potentially be ripped apart by the star’s intense gravity.
  • Unlike previous sungrazing comets, ISON was detected more than a year out, giving researchers at the world's major ground-based telescopes plenty of time to watch its approach to the sun.
  • . Because sunlight interacts with gas and dust to make comets light up, Meech thinks the best explanation for her team’s data is that ISON’s nucleus contained a buried layer of solid carbon monoxide, a featherweight molecule that rapidly turns to gas when exposed to sunlight.
  • Because scientists have no data on the comet’s rotation, Knight and Walsh conclude that ISON will probably survive. However, Knight acknowledges that other comets have broken up for no known reason, and he is prepared for surprises.
  • Earthbound stargazers won’t notice these details, but motivated observers may be able to spot a new object in the predawn sky
Javier E

A Billionaire Mathematician's Life of Ferocious Curiosity - The New York Times - 0 views

  • James H. Simons likes to play against type. He is a billionaire star of mathematics and private investment who often wins praise for his financial gifts to scientific research and programs to get children hooked on math.But in his Manhattan office, high atop a Fifth Avenue building in the Flatiron district, he’s quick to tell of his career failings.He was forgetful. He was demoted. He found out the hard way that he was terrible at programming computers. “I’d keep forgetting the notation,” Dr. Simons said. “I couldn’t write programs to save my life.”After that, he was fired.His message is clearly aimed at young people: If I can do it, so can you.
  • Down one floor from his office complex is Math for America, a foundation he set up to promote math teaching in public schools. Nearby, on Madison Square Park, is the National Museum of Mathematics, or MoMath, an educational center he helped finance. It opened in 2012 and has had a quarter million visitors.
  • Dr. Simons received his doctorate at 23; advanced code breaking for the National Security Agency at 26; led a university math department at 30; won geometry’s top prize at 37; founded Renaissance Technologies, one of the world’s most successful hedge funds, at 44; and began setting up charitable foundations at 56.
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  • With a fortune estimated at $12.5 billion, Dr. Simons now runs a tidy universe of science endeavors, financing not only math teachers but hundreds of the world’s best investigators, even as Washington has reduced its support for scientific research. His favorite topics include gene puzzles, the origins of life, the roots of autism, math and computer frontiers, basic physics and the structure of the early cosmos.
  • In time, his novel approach helped change how the investment world looks at financial markets. The man who “couldn’t write programs” hired a lot of programmers, as well as physicists, cryptographers, computational linguists, and, oh yes, mathematicians. Wall Street experience was frowned on. A flair for science was prized. The techies gathered financial data and used complex formulas to make predictions and trade in global markets.
  • “He’s an individual of enormous talent and accomplishment, yet he’s completely unpretentious,” said Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a neuroscientist who is the president of Rockefeller University. “He manages to blend all these admirable qualities.”
  • On a wall in Dr. Simons’s office is one of his prides: a framed picture of equations known as Chern-Simons, after a paper he wrote with Shiing-Shen Chern, a prominent geometer. Four decades later, the equations define many esoteric aspects of modern physics, including advanced theories of how invisible fields like those of gravity interact with matter to produce everything from superstrings to black holes.
  • Working closely with his wife, Marilyn, the president of the Simons Foundation and an economist credited with philanthropic savvy, Dr. Simons has pumped more than $1 billion into esoteric projects as well as retail offerings like the World Science Festival and a scientific lecture series at his Fifth Avenue building. Characteristically, it is open to the public.
  • Forbes magazine ranks him as the world’s 93rd richest person — ahead of Eric Schmidt of Google and Elon Musk of Tesla Motors, among others — and in 2010, he and his wife were among the first billionaires to sign the Giving Pledge, promising to devote “the great majority” of their wealth to philanthropy.
  • For all his self-deprecations, Dr. Simons does credit himself with a contemplative quality that seems to lie behind many of his accomplishments.“I wasn’t the fastest guy in the world,” Dr. Simons said of his youthful math enthusiasms. “I wouldn’t have done well in an Olympiad or a math contest. But I like to ponder. And pondering things, just sort of thinking about it and thinking about it, turns out to be a pretty good approach.”
Javier E

Ta-Nehisi Coates's 'Letter to My Son' - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term “people” to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me.
  • When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is tree houses and the Cub Scouts. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option, because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.
  • The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.
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  • you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy
  • But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.
  • It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth
  • ou must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.
  • And should one live in such a body? What should be our aim beyond meager survival of constant, generational, ongoing battery and assault? I have asked this question all my life.
  • The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and myths.
  • I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my West Baltimore neighborhood
  • The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T- shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.
  • To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body
  • I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies
  • here will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been “black,” and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. Now I saw that we had made something down here, in slavery, in Jim Crow, in ghettoes. At The Mecca I saw how we had taken their one-drop rule and flipped it. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.
  • I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.
  • Before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils which seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed
  • When I was your age, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not—all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body.
  • Why were only our heroes nonviolent? Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and the threatening intonations of armed black gangs saying, “Yeah, nigger, what’s up now?” I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?
  • the beauty of the black body was never celebrated in movies, in television, or in the textbooks I’d seen as a child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental “firsts”—first black four-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor—always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit.
  • erious history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read, from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember where I read it, or when—only that I was already at Howard. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?,” Bellow quipped
  • this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilized, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?
  • now I looked back on my need for a trophy case, on the desire to live by the standards of Saul Bellow, and I felt that this need was not an escape but fear again—fear that “they,” the alleged authors and heirs of the universe, were right. And this fear ran so deep that we accepted their standards of civilization and humanity.
  • “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” wrote Wiley. “Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” And there it was. I had accepted Bellow’s premise. In fact, Bellow was no closer to Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga. And if I were closer it would be because I chose to be, not because of destiny written in DNA. My great error was not that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.
  • still and all I knew that we were something, that we were a tribe—on one hand, invented, and on the other, no less real. The reality was out there on the Yard, on the first warm day of spring when it seemed that every sector, borough, affiliation, county, and corner of the broad diaspora had sent a delegate to the great world party
  • I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white. “White America” is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, “white people” would cease to exist for want of reasons
  • There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling of black bodies
  • Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into each of them, was sent flowing back to the earth. It is terrible to truly see our particular beauty, Samori, because then you see the scope of the loss. But you must push even further. You must see that this loss is mandated by the history of your country, by the Dream of living white.
  • I don’t know if you remember how the film we saw at the Petersburg Battlefield ended as though the fall of the Confederacy were the onset of a tragedy, not jubilee. I doubt you remember the man on our tour dressed in the gray wool of the Confederacy, or how every visitor seemed most interested in flanking maneuvers, hardtack, smoothbore rifles, grapeshot, and ironclads, but virtually no one was interested in what all of this engineering, invention, and design had been marshaled to achieve. You were only 10 years old. But even then I knew that I must trouble you, and this meant taking you into rooms where people would insult your intelligence, where thieves would try to enlist you in your own robbery and disguise their burning and looting as Christian charity. But robbery is what this is, what it always was.
  • American reunion was built on a comfortable narrative that made enslavement into benevolence, white knights of body snatchers, and the mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor, and élan. This lie of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, is the Dream.
  • I, like every kid I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. But I would have done well to think more about why two outlaws, driving a car named the General Lee, must necessarily be portrayed as “just some good ole boys, never meanin’ no harm”—a mantra for the Dreamers if there ever was one. But what one “means” is neither important nor relevant. It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
  • Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this.
  • It had to be blood. It had to be the thrashing of kitchen hands for the crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip. It had to be some woman “chear’d ... with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday again.” It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a beautiful wife, or a summer home in the mountains. For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization.
  • “The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.
  • There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. I would like to tell you that such a day approaches when the people who believe themselves to be white renounce this demon religion and begin to think of themselves as human. But I can see no real promise of such a day. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own.
  • I think now of the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in someone else’s chancy hood, his friends must stand with him, and they must all take their beating together. I now know that within this edict lay the key to all living. None of us were promised to end the fight on our feet, fists raised to the sky. We could not control our enemies’ number, strength, or weaponry. Sometimes you just caught a bad one. But whether you fought or ran, you did it together, because that is the part that was in our control. What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies of our friends. That was the wisdom: We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could—and must—fashion the way of our walk. And that is the deeper meaning of your name—that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning.
  • I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
  • You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never redeem this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have
  • I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful—the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements. You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie.
  • “I could have you arrested,” he said. Which is to say: “One of your son’s earliest memories will be watching the men who sodomized Abner Louima and choked Anthony Baez cuff, club, tase, and break you.” I had forgotten the rules, an error as dangerous on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as on the West Side of Baltimore. One must be without error out here. Walk in single file. Work quietly. Pack an extra No. 2 pencil. Make no mistakes.
  • the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined—with Eric Garner’s anger, with Trayvon Martin’s mythical words (“You are gonna die tonight”), with Sean Bell’s mistake of running with the wrong crowd, with me standing too close to the small-eyed boy pulling out.
  • You are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life
  • I am sorry that I cannot save you—but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked by the rages of logic and the natural world in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be.
  • I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.
  • I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life determined to struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.
Sophia C

Thomas Kuhn: Revolution Against Scientific Realism* - 1 views

  • as such a complex system that nobody believed that it corresponded to the physical reality of the universe. Although the Ptolemaic system accounted for observations-"saved the appearances"-its epicycles and deferents were never intended be anything more than a mathematical model to use in predicting the position of heavenly bodies. [3]
  • lileo that he was free to continue his work with Copernican theory if he agreed that the theory did not describe physical reality but was merely one of the many potential mathematical models. [10] Galileo continued to work, and while he "formally (23)claimed to prove nothing," [11] he passed his mathematical advances and his observational data to Newton, who would not only invent a new mathematics but would solve the remaining problems posed by Copernicus. [12]
  • Thus without pretending that his method could find the underlying causes of things such as gravity, Newton believed that his method produced theory, based upon empirical evidence, that was a close approximation of physical reality.
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  • Medieval science was guided by "logical consistency."
  • The logical empiricist's conception of scientific progress was thus a continuous one; more comprehensive theory replaced compatible, older theory
  • Hempel also believed that science evolved in a continuous manner. New theory did not contradict past theory: "theory does not simply refute the earlier empirical generalizations in its field; rather, it shows that within a certain limited range defined by qualifying conditions, the generalizations hold true in fairly close approximation." [21]
  • New theory is more comprehensive; the old theory can be derived from the newer one and is one special manifestation" [22] of the more comprehensive new theory.
  • movement combined induction, based on empiricism, and deduction in the form of logic
  • It was the truth, and the prediction and control that came with it, that was the goal of logical-empirical science.
  • Each successive theory's explanation was closer to the truth than the theory before.
  • e notion of scientific realism held by Newton led to the evolutionary view of the progress of science
  • he entities and processes of theory were believed to exist in nature, and science should discover those entities and processes
  • Particularly disturbing discoveries were made in the area of atomic physics. For instance, Heisenberg's indeterminacy (25)principle, according to historian of science Cecil Schneer, yielded the conclusion that "the world of nature is indeterminate.
  • "even the fundamental principle of causality fail[ed] ."
  • was not until the second half of the twentieth century that the preservers of the evolutionary idea of scientific progress, the logical empiricists, were seriously challenged
  • revolutionary model of scientific change and examined the role of the scientific community in preventing and then accepting change. Kuhn's conception of scientific change occurring through revolutions undermined the traditional scientific goal, finding "truth" in nature
  • Textbooks inform scientists-to-be about this common body of knowledge and understanding.
  • for the world is too huge and complex to be explored randomly.
  • a scientist knows what facts are relevant and can build on past research
  • Normal science, as defined by Kuhn, is cumulative. New knowledge fills a gap of ignorance
  • ne standard product of the scientific enterprise is missing. Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none."
  • ntain a mechanism that uncovers anomaly, inconsistencies within the paradigm.
  • eventually, details arise that are inconsistent with the current paradigm
  • hese inconsistencies are eventually resolved or are ignored.
  • y concern a topic of central importance, a crisis occurs and normal science comes to a hal
  • that the scientists re-examine the foundations of their science that they had been taking for granted
  • it resolves the crisis better than the others, it offers promise for future research, and it is more aesthetic than its competitors. The reasons for converting to a new paradigm are never completely rational.
  • Unlike evolutionary science, in which new knowledge fills a gap of ignorance, in Kuhn's model new knowledge replaces incompatible knowledge.
  • Thus science is not a continuous or cumulative endeavor: when a paradigm shift occurs there is a revolution similar to a political revolution, with fundamental and pervasive changes in method and understanding. Each successive vision about the nature of the universe makes the past vision obsolete; predictions, though more precise, remain similar to the predictions of the past paradigm in their general orientation, but the new explanations do not accommodate the old
  • In a sense, we have circled back to the ancient and medieval practice of separating scientific theory from physical reality; both medieval scientists and Kuhn would agree that no theory corresponds to reality and therefore any number of theories might equally well explain a natural phenomenon. [36] Neither twentieth-century atomic theorists nor medieval astronomers are able to claim that their theories accurately describe physical phenomena. The inability to return to scientific realism suggests a tripartite division of the history of science, with a period of scientific realism fitting between two periods in which there is no insistence that theory correspond to reality. Although both scientific realism and the evolutionary idea of scientific progress appeal to common sense, both existed for only a few hundred years.
Emilio Ergueta

Human engineering | New Philosopher - 0 views

  • You know the situation is getting desperate when three bioethicists propose genetically modifying humans to reduce our environmental impact. In a bizarre paper titled ‘Human engineering and climate change’, Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg and Rebecca Roache argue we should seriously consider technologies to engineer human bodies to reduce carbon emissions.
  • The paper, to be published in a respectable journal, is beyond satire and its only likely effect is to bring the philosophy profession into disrepute. Philosophy, it seems, does not have a ‘laugh test’ for filtering out whacky proposals. So why stop at cat’s eyes and midget babies? Why not genetically modify people to make them white in order to cool the Earth by increasing its reflectivity?
  • The three bioethicists suggest that people who are appalled at the idea of human engineering may have a “status quo bias”, resisting their innovative ideas because of an inherent conservatism.
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  • But perhaps the paper by Liao, Sandberg and Roache will turn out to be a prank played on the journal, like the Sokal hoax, named after the physicist whose paper deploying post-modern gobbledegook to show that “quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct” was published in a cultural studies journal.
  • It’s easy to imagine academics sitting around swapping the most outrageous solutions to climate change and then daring one another to have them published. I hope this will turn out to be the case. In the meantime I cringe at the thought of what the long-dead giants of Western philosophy would make of their discipline’s response to the climate crisis.
Javier E

Stephen Hawking on God, Science and the Origins of the Universe - WSJ.com - 0 views

  • As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.Our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws. That multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account for the miracle of fine tuning. It is a consequence predicted by many theories in modern cosmology. If it is true it reduces the strong anthropic principle to the weak one, putting the fine tunings of physical law on the same footing as the environmental factors, for it means that our cosmic habitat—now the entire observable universe—is just one of many. Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states. Only a very few would allow creatures like us to exist. Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos, this makes us in a sense the lords of creation.
carolinewren

So Many Earth-Like Planets, So Few Telescopes - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Astronomers announced on Tuesday that they had found eight new planets orbiting their stars at distances compatible with liquid water, bringing the total number of potentially habitable planets in the just-right “Goldilocks” zone to a dozen or two
  • As the ranks of these planets grow, astronomers are planning the next step in the quest to end cosmic loneliness: gauging which hold the greatest promise for life and what tools will be needed to learn about them.
  • recalled that the first discovery of a planet orbiting another normal star, a Jupiter-like giant, was 20 years ago. Before that, she said, astronomers worried that “maybe the ‘Star Trek’ picture of the universe was not right, and there is no life anywhere else.”
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  • yet we still do not have a clue that we are not alone.
  • Finding Goldilocks planets closer to home will be the job of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, to be launched in 2017. But if we want to know what the weather is like on these worlds, whether there is water or even life, more powerful instruments will be needed.
  • hundreds of light-years away, too far for detailed study. We will probably never know any more about these particular planets than we do now.
  • “but until we can observe the atmospheres and assess their greenhouse gas power, we don’t really know what the surface temperatures are like.”
  • Kepler has discovered 4,175 potential planets, and 1,004 of them have been confirmed as real
  • investigating the concept of a starshade, which would float in front of a space telescope and block light from a star so that its much fainter planets would be visible.
  • studying a method known as a coronagraph, in which the occulting disk is inside the telescope.
  • study dark energy, and they plan to include a coronagraph to search for exoplanets
  • The goal is to have a pool of dozens of “exo-Earths” to study in order to have any chance of seeing signs of life or understanding terrestrial planets
  • perhaps because as planets get bigger their mass and gravity increase, and they are better able to hang on to gas and lighter components.
  • The work complements and tightens studies done last year by Geoffrey Marcy and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley; that group looks into the nature of so-called super Earths, planets bigger than ours and smaller than Neptune.
  • common in the galaxy.
dpittenger

We Got to See This Supernova Explode Four Times Simultaneously - 0 views

  • It's not every day we get to see a supernova, and a single exploding star split into four images is an absolute first.
  • The optical illusion of four exploding stars is produced by an effect known as gravitational lensing, wherein light from the explosion is bent, distorted, and dispersed to four separate points by the immense gravity of the galactic cluster itself.
  • Because each cosmic echo of the supernova is produced by light traversing a unique path, the different images appeared, and may fade out, at different times.
  •  
    This is an article about a supernova that was captured blowing up 4 times. It was an optical illusion created b y space itself, but I thought it was interesting because it seems like something that is impossible,but it still happened and was explained by science.
Javier E

The Trouble With Brain Science - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • What would a good theory of the brain actually look like?
  • Different kinds of sciences call for different kinds of theories. Physicists, for example, are searching for a “grand unified theory” that integrates gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces into a neat package of equations.
  • The living world is bursting with variety and unpredictable complexity, because biology is the product of historical accidents, with species solving problems based on happenstance that leads them down one evolutionary road rather than another.
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  • ut biological complexity is only part of the challenge in figuring out what kind of theory of the brain we’re seeking.
  • What we are really looking for is a bridge, some way of connecting two separate scientific languages — those of neuroscience and psychology.
  • An example is the discovery of DNA, which allowed us to understand how genetic information could be represented and replicated in a physical structure. In one stroke, this bridge transformed biology from a mystery — in which the physical basis of life was almost entirely unknown — into a tractable if challenging set of problems
  • We know that there must be some lawful relation between assemblies of neurons and the elements of thought, but we are currently at a loss to describe those laws.
Javier E

The Price of Denialism - The New York Times - 0 views

  • As the comedian John Oliver so aptly put it in commenting on a recent Gallup poll that found that one in four Americans disbelieve in climate change: “You don’t need people’s opinion on a fact. You might as well have a poll asking: ‘Which number is bigger, 15 or 5?’ Or ‘Do owls exist’ or ‘Are there hats?’”
  • we are about to be steeped in political arguments on every conceivable issue, all carried out with the usual confusing mix of fact, opinion, opinion stated as fact and fact portrayed as opinion. How can we prepare ourselves to make sense of it?
  • A good first step would be to distinguish between skepticism and what has come to be known as denialism. In other words, we need to be able to tell when we believe or disbelieve in something based on high standards of evidence and when we are just engaging in a bit of motivated reasoning and letting our opinions take over
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  • When we withhold belief because the evidence does not live up to the standards of science, we are skeptical. When we refuse to believe something, even in the face of what most others would take to be compelling evidence, we are engaging in denial. In most cases, we do this because at some level it upsets us to think that the theory is true.
  • The throes of denial must feel a lot like skepticism. The rest of the world “just doesn’t get it.” We are the ones being rigorous. How can others be so gullible in believing that something is “true” before all of the facts are in? Yet a warning should occur when these stars align and we find ourselves feeling self-righteous about a belief that apparently means more to us than the preservation of good standards of evidence
  • how to tell a fact from an opinion? By the time we sit down to evaluate the evidence for a scientific theory, it is probably too late. If we take the easy path in our thinking, it eventually becomes a habit. If we lie to others, sooner or later we may believe the lie ourselves. The real battle comes in training ourselves to embrace the right attitudes about belief formation in the first place, and for this we need to do a little philosophy.
  • a telltale sign of denialism: that these alleged skeptics usually have different standards of evidence for those theories that they want to believe
  • Surely few would willingly embrace the title of “denialist.” It sounds so much more rigorous and fair-minded to maintain one’s “skepticism.” To hold that the facts are not yet settled. That there is so much more that we do not know. That the science isn’t certain.
  • The problem here, however, is that this is based not only on a grave misunderstanding of science (which in a sense is never settled), but also of what it means to be a skeptic.
  • Doubting the overwhelming consensus of scientists on an empirical question, for which one has only the spottiest ideologically-motivated “evidence,” is not skepticism, it is the height of gullibility. It is to claim that it is much more likely that there is a vast conspiracy among thousands of climate scientists than that they have instead all merely arrived at the same conclusion because that is where they were led by the evidence.
  • Couldn’t the scientists nonetheless be wrong? Yes, of course. The history of science has shown us that any scientific theory (even Newton’s theory of gravity) can be wrong
  • this does not mean that one is a good skeptic merely for disbelieving the well-corroborated conclusions of science. To reject a cascade of scientific evidence that shows that the global temperature is warming and that humans are almost certainly the cause of it, is not good reasoning, even if some long-shot hypothesis comes along in 50 years to show us why we were wrong.
  • In scientific reasoning, there is such a thing as warrant. Our beliefs must be justified. This means that we should believe what the evidence tells us, even while science insists that we must also try our best to show how any given theory might be wrong. Science will sometimes miss the mark, but its successful track record suggests that there is no superior competitor in discovering the facts about the empirical world
  • When we cynically pretend to withhold belief long past the point at which ample evidence should have convinced us that something is true, we have stumbled past skepticism and landed in the realm of willful ignorance. This is not the realm of science, but of ideological crackpots
Javier E

Physicists in Europe Find Tantalizing Hints of a Mysterious New Particle - The New York... - 0 views

  • Two teams of physicists working independently at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, reported on Tuesday that they had seen traces of what could be a new fundamental particle of nature.
  • One possibility, out of a gaggle of wild and not-so-wild ideas springing to life as the day went on, is that the particle — assuming it is real — is a heavier version of the Higgs boson, a particle that explains why other particles have mass. Another is that it is a graviton, the supposed quantum carrier of gravity, whose discovery could imply the existence of extra dimensions of space-time.
  • At the end of a long chain of “ifs” could be a revolution, the first clues to a theory of nature that goes beyond the so-called Standard Model, which has ruled physics for the last quarter-century.
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  • The Higgs boson was the last missing piece of the Standard Model, which explains all we know about subatomic particles and forces. But there are questions this model does not answer, such as what happens at the bottom of a black hole, the identity of the dark matter and dark energy that rule the cosmos, or why the universe is matter and not antimatter.
  • When physicists announced in 2012 that they had indeed discovered the Higgs boson, it was not the end of physics. It was not even, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, the beginning of the end.
  • A coincidence is the most probable explanation for the surprising bumps in data from the collider, physicists from the experiments cautioned, saying that a lot more data was needed and would in fact soon be available
  • The Large Hadron Collider was built at a cost of some $10 billion, to speed protons around an 18-mile underground track at more than 99 percent of the speed of light and smash them together in search of new particles and forces of nature. By virtue of Einstein’s equivalence of mass and energy, the more energy poured into these collisions, the more massive particles can come out of them. And by the logic of quantum microscopy, the more energy they have to spend, the smaller and more intimate details of nature physicists can see.
  • Since June, after a two-year shutdown, CERN physicists have been running their collider at nearly twice the energy with which they discovered the Higgs, firing twin beams of protons with 6.5 trillion electron volts of energy at each other in search of new particles to help point them to deeper laws.
  • The most intriguing result so far, reported on Tuesday, is an excess of pairs of gamma rays corresponding to an energy of about 750 billion electron volts. The gamma rays, the physicists said, could be produced by the radioactive decay of a new particle, in this case perhaps a cousin of the Higgs boson, which itself was first noticed because it decayed into an abundance of gamma rays.
  • Or it could be a more massive particle that has decayed in steps down to a pair of photons. Nobody knows. No model predicted this, which is how some scientists like it.
  • “We are barely coming to terms with the power and the glory” of the CERN collider’s ability to operate at 13 trillion electron volts, Dr. Spiropulu said in a text message. “We are now entering the era of taking a shot in the dark!”
kushnerha

Physicists in Europe Find Tantalizing Hints of a Mysterious New Particle - The New York... - 1 views

  • seen traces of what could be a new fundamental particle of nature.
  • One possibility, out of a gaggle of wild and not-so-wild ideas springing to life as the day went on, is that the particle — assuming it is real — is a heavier version of the Higgs boson, a particle that explains why other particles have mass. Another is that it is a graviton, the supposed quantum carrier of gravity, whose discovery could imply the existence of extra dimensions of space-time.
  • At the end of a long chain of “ifs” could be a revolution, the first clues to a theory of nature that goes beyond the so-called Standard Model, which has ruled physics for the last quarter-century.
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  • noting that the history of particle physics is rife with statistical flukes and anomalies that disappeared when more data was compiled
  • A coincidence is the most probable explanation for the surprising bumps in data from the collider, physicists from the experiments cautioned
  • Physicists could not help wondering if history was about to repeat itself. It was four years ago this week that the same two teams’ detection of matching bumps in Large Hadron Collider data set the clock ticking for the discovery of the Higgs boson six months later.
  • If the particle is real, Dr. Lykken said, physicists should know by this summer, when they will have 10 times as much data to present to scientists from around the world who will convene in Chicago
  • The Higgs boson was the last missing piece of the Standard Model, which explains all we know about subatomic particles and forces. But there are questions this model does not answer, such as what happens at the bottom of a black hole, the identity of the dark matter and dark energy that rule the cosmos, or why the universe is matter and not antimatter.
  • CERN physicists have been running their collider at nearly twice the energy with which they discovered the Higgs, firing twin beams of protons with 6.5 trillion electron volts of energy at each other in search of new particles to help point them to deeper laws.The main news since then has been mainly that there is no news yet, only tantalizing hints, bumps in the data, that might be new particles and signposts of new theories, or statistical demons.
  • Or it could be a more massive particle that has decayed in steps down to a pair of photons. Nobody knows. No model predicted this, which is how some scientists like it.
  • “The more nonstandard the better,” said Joe Lykken, the director of research at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and a member of one of the CERN teams. “It will give people a lot to think about. We get paid to speculate.”
  • When physicists announced in 2012 that they had indeed discovered the Higgs boson, it was not the end of physics. It was not even, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, the beginning of the end.It might, they hoped, be the end of the beginning.
  • Such a discovery would augur a fruitful future for cosmological wanderings and for the CERN collider, which will be running for the next 20 years.
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