I’ve been looking for this for years online — Monty Python’s classic International Philosophy football match, Greeks vs. the Germans.

“This is Nietzsche’s third booking in four games.”

Jacques is advertising the launch of a new physics group blog - The n-Category Café. Run by John Baez, David Corfield and Urs Schreiber ( of the String Coffee Table), with technical support from Jacques himself, their self-described brief is the interface between Physics, Mathematics and Philosophy.

They’re just getting going, but I expect we’ll see plenty of fascinating stuff from them, and I hope you drop by to welcome this new venture to the physics blogosphere.

Since today, 6/6/06, is (granted some typographical latitude) International Number of the Beast Day, I should tell you about my visit on Sunday to the Augustana Lutheran Church near the University of Chicago. (Not to disparage my kind hosts, but I have to say that sacred architecture really took a turn for the worse after the Reformation; give me those Gothic cathedrals any day.) I was invited by Shane Caldwell, a student in my cosmology class, to speak to a group that meets to talk about science and religion. Of course, my take on the matter is that science and religion are in stark conflict. But they understood where I was coming from, and were interested in hearing my spiel on cosmology and atheism. (All practiced academics understand that it’s important to have a small number of spiels that can be adapted to multiple circumstances at the drop of a hat; mine was rather different in this case than Clifford’s.)

Hot dogs and hamburgers were served, and we had a fun time debating the meaning of “knowing” and the existence of God. Robert Smith, the pastor of the church who is also the campus minister of the UofC, was very welcoming, and excited to be starting this kind of dialogue between different parts of the community. Most of the small audience were actually students, some who had taken my classes and some undergrads who were members of the church. There were also a few representatives from the Zygon Center for Science and Society, an organization across the street that is dedicated to studying the relationship between science and religion.

I’ve given my “God does not exist” talk to a couple of religious audiences before, and they’re generally very interested in hearing a different perspective and thinking about the issues in an unfamiliar way. Granted, these audiences were highly selected and undoubtedly academic, not randomly chosen evangelical churches in the heartland. And you may suspect that nothing I might say would ever change anyone’s mind, but that’s not true; I had one professional theologian tell me that I did change his mind. Not about the existence of God, but about the efficacy of the argument from design. And there is a tight (inverse) correlation between age of the listener and willingness to engage with the ideas; the students were interested and ready to tackle my claims on their own terms, while some of the older folks wanted to argue that there were plenty of scientists more famous than me who were religious, so what right did I have?

There are a million things one could talk about concerning science and religion, and the discussions tend to become rapidly unfocused (or individually focused on the concerns of each person in the room, with everyone talking past everyone else). Not to mention that theology is a rich subject with a complex history about which I know only the basics. So I make a real effort to define all the my words very carefully, and limit myself to one extremely specific chain of reasoning: science and religion do overlap in their mutual interest in understanding the basic workings of reality, and therefore it is possible to judge at least some religious claims using the ordinary empirical criteria of science, and that when one does so, a materialistic conception of reality (in which there exist nothing but stuff following unbreakable rules) comes out very far ahead of a theistic one (in which there exists a separate supernatural/spiritual category not bound by the laws of physics). There might be other interesting things to talk about, and there are other things that religion is concerned with besides the workings of nature, and there could be other criteria besides the scientific method that one might want to use in deciding between different pictures of the world. But in the quite specific question I am choosing to address, I think there is a sensible answer.

At the same time, I want to argue that the answer is not inevitable, or it wouldn’t be worth going through the exercise. There are several ways that thinking like a scientist could have led us to believe in God (or the supernatural more generally). The most obvious would be if God just kept showing up in our world and performing miracles; a sensible scientific approach in that case would be to search for the “laws of nature” that were in effect when God wasn’t around, and treat his manifestations as outside that box. More subtly, we might look for evidence of design in nature, or we might look for impassable “gaps” in our understanding (like the beginning of the universe, or the origin of life and/or consciousness) that only God could bridge. I’m perfectly happy to contemplate that such things could be part of a logically possible world; I just strongly believe that, in the actual world in which we find ourselves, there are no such fingerprints of design or unbridgeable gaps, and hence no scientific reason to appeal to the supernatural. We don’t understand everything in nature, but there’s absolutely no reason to think that it’s not understandable (even the beginning of the universe etc.) in terms of purely mechanical laws. So God, as an hypothesis, is discarded along with geocentrism and phlogiston and the Steady State universe and whatnot. Sadly, it’s taking a little while for the discarding to actually sink in, but I suspect it’s just a matter of (perhaps a very long) time.

A little while ago I went to see Zizek!, a new documentary about charismatic and controversial Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek. Part of the Zizekian controversy can be traced straightforwardly to his celebrity — not hard to get fellow academics ornery when you’re greeted by admiring throngs at each of your talks (let me tell you) — but there is also his propensity for acting in ways that are judged to be somewhat frivolous: frequent references to pop culture, an unrestrained delight in telling jokes. I was fortunate enough to see Zizek in person, as part of a panel discussion following the film. He is a compelling figure, effortlessly outshining the two standard-issue academics flanking him on the panel. He adamantly insisted that he had no control over the documentary of which he was the subject, indeed that he hasn’t even seen it, but then reveals that a number of important scenes were admittedly his idea. In one example, the camera lingers on a striking portrait of Stalin in his apartment, which the cinematic Zizek explains as a litmus test, a way of interrogating the bourgeois sensibilities of his visitors. The flesh-and-blood Zizek, meanwhile, points out that it was just a joke, and that he would never have something so horrible as a portrait of Stalin on his wall. It ties into his notion that a film will never reveal the true person behind the scholar or public figure, nor should it; the ideas will stand or fall by themselves, separate from their personification in an actual human. I have no educated opinion about his standing as a thinker; see John Holbo, Adam Kotsko (and here), or Kieran Healy for some opinions, or read this interview in The Believer and judge for yourself.

The movie opens with a Zizek monologue on the origin of the universe and the meaning of life. We can talk all we like, he says, about love and meaning and so on, but that’s not what is real. The universe is “monstrous” (one of his favorite words), a mere accident. “It means something went terribly wrong,” as you can hear him say through a distinctive lisp in this clip from the movie. He even invokes quantum fluctuations, proclaiming that the universe arose as a “cosmic catastrophe” out of nothing.

I naturally cringed a little at the mention of quantum mechanics, but his description ultimately got it right. Our universe probably did originate as a quantum fluctuation, either “from nothing” or within a pre-existing background spacetime. Mostly, to be honest, I was just jealous. As a philosopher and cultural critic, Zizek gets not only to bandy about bits of quantum cosmology, but is permitted (even encouraged) to connect them to questions of love and meaning and so on. As professional physicists, we’re not allowed to talk about those questions — referees at the Physical Review would not approve. But it’s worth interrogating this intellectual leap, from the accidental birth of the universe to the richness of meaning we see around us. How did we get there from here, and why?

It’s the possibility of addressing this question that I take to be the most significant aspect of the “computational quantum universe” idea advocated by Seth Lloyd in his new book Programming the Universe. Lloyd is a somewhat controversial figure in his own right, but undoubtedly an influential physicist; he was the first to propose a plausible design for a quantum computer. I.e., a computer that takes advantage of the full quantum-mechanical wavefunction of its elements, rather than being content with the ordinary classical states.

To Lloyd, quantum computation is a hammer, and it’s tempting to see everything interesting as a nail — from black holes to quantum gravity to the whole universe. The frustrating aspect of his book is the frequency with which he insists that “the universe is a quantum computer,” without always making it clear just what that means or why we should care. What is the universe supposed to be computing, anyway? Its own evolution, apparently. And what good is that, exactly? It’s hard to tell at first whether the entire idea is merely a particular language in which we are free to talk about good old-fashioned physics and cosmology, or whether it’s a profound change of perspective that can be put to good use. What physicists would really like to know is, does thinking of the universe as a quantum computer actually help us solve any problems?

Well, maybe. My own personal reconstruction of the problem that Lloyd is suggesting we might be able to solve by thinking of the universe as a quantum computer, although in slightly different words, is precisely that raised by Zizek’s monologue: Why, in the course of evolving from the early universe to the end of time, do we pass through a phase featuring the fascinating and delightful complexity we see all around us?

Let’s be more specific about what that means. The early universe — at least, the hot Big Bang with which our observable universe began — is a very low-entropy state. That is, it’s a very unlikely configuration in the space of all the ways one could arrange the universe — much like having all of the air molecules accidentally be located in one half of a room (although much worse). But entropy is increasing as the universe evolves, just like the Second Law of Thermodynamics says it should. The late universe will be very high entropy. In particular, if the universe continues to expand forever (which seems likely, although one never knows), we are evolving toward heat death, in which matter cools down and is dispersed thinly over space after black holes form and evaporate. This is a “natural” state for the universe, one which will essentially stay that way in perpetuity.

However. While the early universe is low-entropy and the late universe is high-entropy, both phases are simple. That is, their macrostates can be described in very few words (they have low Kolmogorov complexity): the early state was hot and dense and smoothly-distributed, while the final state will be cold and dilute and smoothly-distributed. But our current universe, replete as it is with galaxies and planets and blogospheres, isn’t at all simple, it’s remarkably complex. There are individual subsystems (like you and me) that would require quite a lengthy description to fully specify.

So: Why is it like that? Why, in the evolution from a simple low-entropy universe to a simple high-entropy universe, do we pass through a complex medium-entropy state?

Lloyd’s suggested answer, to the extent that I understand it, arises from the classic thought experiment of the randomly typing monkeys. A collection of monkeys, randomly pecking at keyboards, will eventually write the entire text of Hamlet — but it will take an extremely long time, much much longer than the age of the observable universe. For that matter, it will take a very long time to get any “interesting” string of characters. Lloyd argues that the situation is quite different if we allow the monkeys to randomly construct algorithms rather than mere strings of text; in particular, the likelihood that such an algorithm will produce interesting (complex) output is much greater than the chance of randomly generating an interesting string. This phenomenon is easily demonstrated in the context of cellular automata: it’s remarkably easy to find very simple rules for automata that generate extremely complex output from simple starting configurations.

So the force of the idea that “the universe is a quantum computer” lies in an understanding of the origin of complexity. Think of the different subsystems of the universe, existing in slightly different arrangements, running different quantum algorithms. It is much easier for such subsystems to generate complex output computationally than one might guess from an estimate of the likelihood of hitting upon complexity by randomly choosing configurations directly. There is an obvious connection to genetics and evolution; DNA sequences can be thought of as lines of computer code, and mutations and genetic drift allow organisms to sample different algorithms. It’s much easier for natural selection to hit upon interesting possibilities by acting on the underlying instruction set, rather than by acting on the (much larger) space of possible configurations of the pieces of an organism.

Of course I don’t really know if any of this is true or interesting. In particular, the role of the “quantum” nature of the computation seems rather unclear; at a glance, it would seem that much of the universe’s manifest complexity lies squarely in the classical regime. But big ideas are fun, and concepts like entropy and complexity are far from completely understood, so perhaps it’s permissible to let our imaginations run a little freely here.

The reason why this discussion of quantum computation and the complexity of the universe fits comfortably with the story of Zizek is that he should understand this (if he doesn’t already). Zizek is a Lacanian, a disciple of famous French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Lacan was a similarly controversial figure, although his charisma manifested itself as taciturn impenetrability rather than voluble popular appeal. One of Lacan’s catchphrases was “the unconscious is structured like a language.” Which I take (not having any idea what I am talking about) as a claim that the unconscious is not simply a formless chaos of mysterious impulses; rather, it has an architecture, a grammar, rules of operation much like those of our higher-level consciousness.

One way of summarizing Lloyd’s explanation of the origin of complexity might be: the universe is structured like a language. It is not just a random configuration of particles typed out by tireless monkeys; it is a quantum computer, following the rules of its algorithms. And by following these rules the universe manages to generate configurations of enormous complexity. Examples of which include science, poetry, love, meaning, and all of those aspects of human life that lend it more interest than we attach to other chemical reactions.

Of course, it’s only a temporary condition. From featureless simplicity we came, and to featureless simplicity we will return. Like a skier riding the moguls, eventually we’ll reach the bottom of the hill, and dissolve into thermal equilibrium. It’s up to us to enjoy the ride.

Hmmm, so it seems that I keep running into my colleague KC Cole this week. While settling down to drink my morning coffee after a couple of hours of battling dust around the house and leaves outside the house, I found myself looking at the LA Times’ Book Review section, and saw that KC wrote a review of the book entitled “What We Believe but Cannot Prove”, edited by John Brockman. The subtitle of the book is “Today’s leading thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty”.

(Note to self: Figure out when this “Age of Certainty” thing took place and find out why I did not get the memo.)

It seems that the book is supposed to be a collection of essays about things scientists believe but cannot prove…. KC deconstructs this notion a bit, and I’ll let you go and read the article (which can be found here) yourself, since instead of blogging I’m actually supposed to be running around buying a wedding present and then getting ready to head north to Santa Barbara to attend the actual wedding later today…..

She obviously does not think that this book is as good as it could be, largely because of the brevity of several of the contributions, which “either state the obvious or cut off just as things get interesting, random bursts of intellectualizing designed for compulsive channel surfers”. She likens this to blogging, by the way. (Ahem!) She also says:

Fans (and I count myself among them) of such contributors as Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, Sir Martin Rees, Freeman Dyson, Daniel Dennett and Howard Gardner would be better off sticking to their wonderful books.

She has a number of positive observations, such as:

The essays worth reading take pains to put beliefs in context: Psychologist Irene Pepperberg studies how gray parrots talk and think (compared with apes, marine mammals and children). She believes birds are the best model for understanding human language. But before making her argument, she offers a highly informative backgrounder on bird song. So, by the time she proposes that the “missing link” between learned and unlearned vocalizing may be found in a recently discovered flycatcher that learns its songs, you’re ready to go along.

There’s also this:

Theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind uses a parable to explain that all proof is ultimately based on probability. He can’t prove that a coin flipped a million times won’t come up consistently heads. But he’d bet his life, soul (and even his salary) on it. Mathematician Devlin admits that he believes Andrew Wiles’ 1994 proof of Fermat’s last theorem only because “experts in that branch of mathematics tell me they do.”

(Hmmm. *All* proof? I’m not sure I would go as far as Lenny in that statement, but maybe I’m being a bit picky. I like the rest of the paragraph quite a lot.)

There are a number of other interesting things about the book, and about the review, but why not go have a look at the site and have a read? Fulfilling KC’s observation about blogging, I’ll cut off my thoughts on this at this point….. because I have to dash out to the shops!

-cvj

You are offered a deal in which you are asked to flip a coin ten times. If any one of the flips comes up tails, you are swiftly and painlessly killed. If it comes up heads ten times in a row, you are given a banana. Do you take the deal?

For the purposes of this thought experiment, we may assume it is a perfectly fair coin, and that you like bananas, although not any more so than would generally be considered healthy. We may also assume for simplicity that your life or death is of absolutely no consequence to anyone but yourself: you live in secret on a deserted island, isolated from contact with the outside world, where you have everything you need other than bananas. We may finally assume that we know for certainty that there is no afterlife; upon death, you simply cease to exist in any form. So, there is an approximately 99.9% chance that you will be dead, which by hypothesis implies that you will feel no regrets or feelings of disappointment. And if you survive, you get a banana. What do you think?

Now change the experiment a little. Instead of flipping a coin, you measure the x-component of the spin of an electron that has been prepared in an eigenstate of the y-component of the spin; according to the rules of quantum mechanics, there is an even chance that you will measure the x-component of the spin to be up or down. You do this ten times, with ten different electrons, and are offered the same wager as before, with spin-up playing the role of “heads” for the coin. The only difference is that, instead of a classical probability, we are dealing with branching/collapsing wavefunctions. I.e., if you believe in something like the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, there will always be a branch of the wavefunction of the universe in which you continue to exist and now have a banana. Do you take the deal?

Brian Leiter points to a short essay by John Perry about his colleagues in philosophy, and excerpts this scene:

[A] thought about this wonderful and interesting group of people, my philosophical colleagues. I have a very distinct memory of arriving at the Eastern Meetings of the American Philosophical Association some years back, when they were held at a hotel in Baltimore. The meetings began just after a National Football League playoff game had been played in that city, and the previous occupants of the hotel seemed to be mainly people connected with this game. Since I was flying from the west coast, and had to attend some meeting or other in the early afternoon of the first day, I arrived the night before most of the other participants. I was able to watch the amazing transformation that took place as the football crowd checked out and the philosophy crowd checked in. The NFL people were large, some very large, most quite good-looking, confident, well-dressed, big-tipping, successful-looking folk; the epitome of what Americans should be, I suppose, according to the dominant ethos. We philosophers were mostly average-sized, mostly clearly identifiable as shabby pedagogues, clutching our luggage to avoid falling into unnecessary tipping situations. We included many bearded men— some elegant, some scruffy— all sorts of interesting intellectual looking women; none of the philosophers, not even the big ones and the beautiful ones, were likely to be mistaken for the football players, cheerleaders, sportscasters and others who were checking out. The looks from the hotel staff members, who clearly sensed that they were in for a few days of less expansive tipping and more modest bar-tabs, were a mixture of curiosity and apprehension. The talk, as philosophers recognized each other and struck up conversations, was unlike anything that ever had been or would be heard in that hotel lobby: whether there are alternative concrete possible worlds; whether there is anything in Heidegger not better said already by Husserl; whether animals should be eaten; not to mention topics that aroused truly deep passions, mostly related to proper names.

What a wonderful group of people, I thought, and how wonderful, and lucky, that the world has managed to find a niche for us. Even if philosophy had no real intellectual content at all — was as silly as astrology or numerology certainly are, or as I suspect, in dark moments, that certain other parts of the university are— it would still be wonderful that it existed, simply to keep these people occupied. Especially me. What would I be doing without this wonderful institution? Helping people in some small town in Nebraska with their taxes and small legal problems, I suppose, and probably not doing it very well.

It would take very little to apply this to physicists (or scientists, or academics more generally) as well as philosophers. We tend not to bring up Heidegger, but we do argue about alternative possible worlds all the time.

More importantly, it’s the second paragraph that hits home. How fortunate we are to live in a time and place where society is sufficiently robust and diverse as to put aside a bit of its resources in order to foster a tiny group of people whose professional duty it is to think deeply about the secrets of the universe. I am reminded of the dedication page in the most poetic general relativity textbook ever written, Gravitation by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler:

We dedicate this book
To our fellow citizens
Who, for love of truth,
Take from their own wants
By taxes and gifts,
And now and then send forth
One of themselves
As dedicated servant,
To forward the search
Into the mysteries and marvelous simplicities
Of this strange and beautiful Universe,
Our home.

K.C. Cole, moving force behind the Categorically Not! meetings that Clifford has blogged about, has left an interesting comment on Clifford’s post from September on Point of View. It’s provocative (and I largely agree with it), so I thought I would reproduce it here on the front page.

Now that it’s time for our October Categorically Not!, I finally have a moment to respond to objections some people raised about my September blurb on the subject of Objectivity, or Point of View.

As a journalist who writes about science, I thought my colleagues could learn a thing or two about the nature of “objective truth” from physics. Objectivity is a word that journalists use a lot—but in my experience, scientists don’t, because it’s not a very useful term. Journalists believe that it’s possible (and desirable) to have zero point of view—that is, to look at the world from some privileged frame through which they see the unvarnished “truth.” What makes science strong, in my opinion, is that it doesn’t fall into that trap. What scientists say is: I made this measurement, and I got this result. Or, I solved an equation, and I got this solution. To say you have a “result” or “solution” without saying how you got it is meaningless. Even when I say the sky is blue, it’s understood that I am a human being whose retina is detecting certain wavelengths of light which are then being interpreted by my human brain in very specific ways. The sky is not “blue” to a snake or a dog or a bee (or if I look through a red filter).

Similarly, if I say the universe was created in a Big Bang (never mind the details) 13 billion or so years ago, there’s no reason anyone should believe me unless I point out that this particular “objective reality” is based on evidence from several very different points of view (cosmic microwave background, expansion, nucleosynthesis….). Journalists often fail to explain this—which is one reason I believe the whole ID issue has been so badly handled in the press. It’s not enough to say “most scientists think evolution is correct….” That leaves the reader in the position of choosing who to believe—the NAS, or the president, for example. It’s not so difficult, I think, to explain that evolution is an answer to specific questions about the fossil record, morphology, DNA, embryology, etc. But it’s rarely done.

What really seemed to get people’s goat (goats?) was my statement that how you look at something determines what you see. I fail to understand the problem. If I look at light with a certain kind of apparatus, it’s a wave; if I look with another, it’s a particle. Reality is always reality, but how we choose to ask the question does determine the answer. So the only way to get an “objective” answer to is say how you asked the question! (And if I’m viewing the world through the eyes of an educated middle aged white woman living in LA–which I am–then I’d better take that into account as well.)

An astronomer friend told me he was upset because my wording played into the hands of the “relativists” (not that kind); that it was understood as “code” to mean “there’s no reality,” or some such. But I’m really tired of other people telling me what my words mean—whether the subject is objectivity, “family values,” “culture of life,” “liberal,” “feminist,” or any of the rest.

So, yes. Objectivity—meaning looking at a situation from a supposedly privileged frame from which you can see the unbiased “truth” —is, as I said, “not only unattainable, but intrinsically fraudulent and ultimately counterproductive.” Science understands this; it’s journalism that has the problem.

Well, Steinn has already taken my idea of constructing an entire blog post from this quote from Michael Bérubé, but I’ve decided I’m not too proud to do it anyway. (Andrew Jaffe actually has some things to say.)

Now, the last time I got together with my editor, on a weekday evening in a midtown restaurant in New York, he flagged the opening pages of the chapter on my postmodernism seminar and said, you might want to watch the mention of Kuhn—because, as you know, there are any number of readers out there who are really tired of humanities professors citing Kuhn and getting him wrong. Likewise with Gödel and Heisenberg on “incompleteness” and “uncertainty.”

As you might imagine, this remark made me violently angry. Yanking the bottle of pinot grigio from the ice bucket to my right, I smashed it on the edge of the table, stood up, and said, “All right, man. I know all about those readers. And I’m as pissed off about sloppy appropriations of Kuhn as anyone. But let me say one thing.” At this point I had drawn the alarmed attention of all the diners-and-drinkers in the place, not least because I was waving the broken bottle around and making random stabbing motions. “I’ll put my reading of Kuhn up against anyone’s. Anyone’s, do you hear me? DO YOU HEAR ME? I’m serious, man—I don’t just go on about ‘paradigm’ this and ‘incommensurability’ that, people. I can take Kuhn’s examples about phlogiston and X-rays and shit, and I can extrapolate them to Charles Messier’s late-eighteenth century catalog of stellar objects, or the early controversy over the determination of the Hubble constant, or the 1965 discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation by Penzias and Wilson. GET IT? So don’t mess with my goddamn reading of Kuhn. Any of you.”

There were a few moments of silence, punctuated only by some nervous clattering of silverware. Then a conservatively-dressed man in his early fifties got up from a table fifteen or twenty feet away. “People like you,” he said, trying to stare me down, “read Kuhn backwards by means of Feyerabend’s Against Method, and as a result, you make him out to be some kind of Age of Aquarius irrationalist who thinks that scientists run from paradigm to paradigm for no damn reason.” Then he tossed his napkin across the table. “And if you want to deny it, I suggest we step outside.”

In my experience, it’s scientists who get The Structure of Scientific Revolutions wrong more than humanists (or at least as much). Both of them lazily envision Kuhn as a screaming relativist; the difference is that scientists do so with disdain, while humanists do so with approval. Although he wasn’t really very clear about it, Kuhn wasn’t a relativist of any sort; he thought that scientific progress was very real. It’s just not clean and algorithmic, at least during those moments of “revolutionary” science when two very different sets of ideas seem equally plausible. The good news is, the dust always settles, and one paradigm doesn’t overthrow another paradigm just because the new paradigm’s supporters take the old paradigm’s supporters out back and beat them up. Ultimately Nature makes it clear that one idea is just better than another, and all but a few lonely cranks hop on the bandwagon. It’s guessing which bandwagon to hop on in the early stages that is the real fun.

This is a reminder, for those of you busy people in the Southland who need plenty of warning, to mark your calendars for September 18th. Recall my post on the Categorically Not! series of events held at the Santa Monica Art Studios. Well, the first one of the new season is fast approaching. Here is K.C. Cole’s teaser:

Point of View

As physicists know better than anyone, they way we look at things determines what we see. A point of view is inescapable. Yet science and journalism both are frequently expected to be “objective”—a goal that is not only unattainable, but intrinsically fraudulent and ultimately counterproductive. Instead, the lesson of both relativity and quantum mechanics is that “truth” emerges only when “point of view” is inserted squarely into the equation. As the philosopher Max Otto wrote: “Let us remember that even Plato wore spectacles, and that if he or any absolutist ignores or repudiates this fact, it only makes him careless of the kind he wears.”

For our September 18th Categorically Not!, USC anthropologist Amy Parish will discuss how point of view has been central to her research into relationships among female bonobos, close cousins to chimpanzees who may be our closest living relatives; many aspects of their female-dominated society challenge popular assumptions about human evolution. From a journalistic perspective, Victor Navasky, author of the recently published A Matter of Opinion, will draw on his experience as an editor at Monocle, “a leisurely quarterly of political satire” (it came out twice a year), The New York Times and The Nation to speak about objectivity, subjectivity, ideology and opinion. Finally, Jon Boorstin, Oscar-nominated filmmaker and author of Making Movies Work will talk about how making movies, and enjoying them, relies upon the mysteries of point of view.

Directions and other information from the website. I’ll try to remember to do another reminder closer to the date, but I’m not promising anything, so mark those calendars now!

Do come and hang out with us!

-cvj

As predicted, we had a great time (as it were) talking about the nature of time last night at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Antonia and David gave great presentations, Gretchen moderated with aplomb, and Angel Ysaguirre and the rest of the Illinois Humanities Council crew organized the whole thing with practiced professionalism.

I was happy to have a chance to catch up with David, who has become semi-famous for his appearance in the movie What the #$*! Do We (K)now!? (known informally as “What the Bleep?”). This movie was a travesty of a docu-drama, the basic gist of which was to push on an unsuspecting public certain New Age ideas about how quantum mechanics allows human consciousness to affect reality. David was interviewed by the filmmakers for hours, in which he patiently explained that everything they were saying was wrong. They then sliced his words to make it look like he was agreeing with the spirit of the movie, creating a willful misrepresentation of his views in the final product.

But since I last saw David in December, he had attended an event in Santa Monica in February featuring all of the speakers from the movie (such as Ramtha, a 35,000-year-old warrior spirit who is available for consultation for an appropriate fee). Although billed as a “conference,” it was really an excuse to sell expensive tickets to hundreds of gullible New Agers. The conference organizers were a different group from the filmmakers, who belatedly informed them that this was one person they should have left off the guest list — but too late.

After some hesitation, David decided to go, and thought very carefully about the talk he would give. I can’t do justice to the precision with which he worded his presentation, but the basic message was essentially this: “When you are trying to figure out how the world works, there are two ways to proceed. One is to invent a story about Nature which serves to say something flattering about yourself. The other is to listen to the story that Nature itself tells, no matter what it may turn out to be. What you are doing is the former; science is the latter.”

He was aiming specifically at pseudo-scientific mysticism, but I can’t think of a better characterization of the really fundamental difference between science and religion. There are differences in methods, and of course there are differences in results. But the most important distinction is in the initial attitude one takes toward the world. Real scientists will take what Nature tells them, and make sense of it as honestly and courageously as they can, regardless of what it says about their own place in the cosmos. If there was one lesson that we could spread through science education, that would be my choice.

The punchline was the response from the California audience. The other personalities on the speaker list were of course outraged, and attacked David in increasingly strident tones. But the audience, after the initial shock wore off, quickly took his side. Not really because they had become convinced of the superiority of reason and evidence to mysticism and quackery, but because they had transferred their reverence from the modern-day shamans to the philosophy professor from Columbia. They had found a new guru, who spoke more convincingly than the old ones. The more important lesson, that finding the right guru isn’t really the path to enlightenment, remained elusive.

I want to say more about those rumored forces mentioned in JoAnne’s post, but tomorrow (Thurs) I’m giving a presentation on Time’s Arrow, and, ironically, I’m running out of time. The event itself should be great fun. It’s sponsored by the Illinois Humanities Council, and will be held at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I’ll talk about time in Einstein’s universe for half an hour, and then we’ll have responses from philosopher David Albert and artist Antonia Contro. Preposterous Universe readers will remember David from my report on a meeting last December. Antonia, in addition to being a talented artist, is the executive director of Marwen, a non-profit organization devoted to teaching disadvanaged youths about art. The moderator will be former Preposterous guest-blogger (and occasional radio host) Gretchen Helfrich, and I’m sure it will be a blast.

The event is sold out, but at some point it will be televised on the Illinois Channel (”like CSPAN for Illinois”). You can also check out two previous events in the Humanities Council’s celebration of the Einstein year: Peter Galison on Einstein and Poincare, and Janna Levin and Rocky Kolb on cosmology.

Here’s a teaser for my talk. How important is the notion of “time,” anyway? I did the obvious thing — I asked Google. So here is the number of search results returned when you search Google for various important concepts.

• space:                   422,000,000 pages found
• money:                 262,000,000 pages found
• fun:                       173,000,000 pages found
• love:                     170,000,000 pages found
• sex:                       76,400,000 pages found
• peace:                   89,900,000 pages found
• war:                     179,000,000 pages found
• harry potter:         20,900,000 pages found
• time:                   972,000,000 pages found

Good news there about love vs. sex. Not so much about peace vs. war. But the important thing is, “time” kicks the rest of the concepts’ collective butts, with nearly a billion pages found. Yet another reason I should get a raise.

Things have been busy, but at some point I hope to stop just linking and start actually writing something. In the meantime, why not link to something profound?

Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if its cause is not lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own intelligence!

— Immanuel Kant, in “What Is Enlightenment?”, 1784

Is it too cynical to think that the anti-science attitude on the part of our government is part of a bigger picture, a roll-back of rationality itself? Shakespeare’s Sister examines the evidence, and concludes that it’s not too cynical at all.

As an undergraduate I took a delightful course in the Philosophy of Religion from a young lecturer named Tony Godzieba. He was a committed anti-foundationalist, and would discourse passionately on the Hermeneutics of Suspicion — along with Augustine and Aquinas we read Nietzsche and Freud and Ricoeur and had a grand old time.

But Tony had one deeply ingrained habit that used to drive me nuts. He took seriously the idea that there was no neutral vantage point from which we could discuss absolute truths; rather, our lively class discussions were to be thought of as interactions between a variety of perspectives. And he knew that my friend Padi Boyd (who was also taking the class) and I were the astronomy majors in the room. So whenever he would call on either of us, he would (with the best of intentions) inevitably say something like “So now let’s get the natural-science perspective on this.”

Man, that drove me crazy. Putting aside for the moment any disputes between foundationalist and perspectivalist theories of truth, granting that anything I say might necessarily be coming from some perspective, there is still a crucially important difference between my perspective (or that of any other individual scientist) and some abstracted notion of a “natural-science perspective.” When I would argue that St. Anselm’s ontological proof for the existence of God was a load of hooey, I may have been informed by my scientific education, but also by innumerable other influences — random and deliberate, obvious and hidden, justified and irrational. Physical sciences propose crisp mathematical structures in order to model the inner workings of the natural world, but the scientists themselves are human, all too human.

So what we have here is a group blog constructed by some idiosyncratic human beings who also happen to be physicists. Sometimes we’ll talk about science, other times it will be food or literature or whatever moves us — I know I have some incisive things to say about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, for one thing. We’re not a representative collection of scientists, just some engaged individuals curious about our world.

Welcome!