Fine tuning solved....or not?

I was interested this week to see the blurb for an article in the January 2010 edition of ‘Scientific American’; the U.S equivalent of ‘the New Scientist’. Like it’s UK doppelganger this mag has had something of a reputation among grouches like Peter Woit for ‘multiverse pseudo-science stories’ including ‘Parallel Universes, The Great Cosmic Roller-Coaster Ride and Does Time Run Backwards in Other Universes?’. Now they have produced an article by Alejandro Jenkins and Gilad Perez purporting to address the issue of so called cosmic ‘fine tuning’. The article description reads:

Multiple other universes—each with its own laws of physics—may have emerged from the same primordial vacuum that gave rise to ours. Assuming they exist, many of those universes may contain intricate structures and perhaps even some forms of life. These findings suggest that our universe may not be as “finely tuned” for the emergence of life as previously thought.

It begins:

'Remarkably, we have found examples of alternative values of the fundamental constants, and thus of alternative sets of physical laws, that might still lead to very interesting worlds and perhaps to life. The basic idea is to change one aspect of the laws of nature and then make compensatory changes to other aspects

Or ‘very few’ examples as it transpires. The rest is a quite interesting discussion of alternative biochemistry, with an abundance of ‘maybe’s, ‘could’s and ‘possibly’s. I have to say I was more impressed by how little you could actually change rather than the alternate scenarios that could work. In fact you can’t alter any of the values of many of the forces without compensating in other areas. Some of the conclusions seemed more than a little dodgy, for instance they reckon you could knock out the weak nuclear force and still produce a habitable universe (you would still have to fiddle with the standard model to get the remaining forces to work properly).

The fundamental problem the 'weakless' universe is going to have is that the stars produced are only going to churning out energy at a few percent that of our sun. Secondly the elements would not be spread by supernovas as these would fail (but they could still be spread to a lesser extent by thermo-nuclear explosions caused by accretion). Earth like planets would have to be a lot closer to suns and they would have no plate tectonics (that has implications serious for evolutionary processes). If any complex life did eventually evolve it would doubtless be bored out of it’s mind as the lack of heavy elements would make this alternate earths landscape flat and dull; a bit like the Midwest.

These objections however pale in comparison to that raised by Dr. Robert Piccioni on his blog:

“Contrary to the cover story in Scientific American's January 2010 issue, life would NOT be possible in a universe without the weak nuclear force, because then matter and antimatter would have completely annihilated each other, leaving no atoms to make life. Only the weak force treats matter and antimatter asymmetrically, allowing slightly more matter to develop in the first second after the Big Bang. Everything we see, and are made of, comes from that slight excess that the weak force enabled.”

On the other hand it looks like you can fiddle with the values of the three lightest quarks and still get some kind of functioning chemistry (but not by very much).

If quark masses were adjusted to make the proton heavier than the neutron, then the proton in a hydrogen nucleus would capture the surrounding electron and turn into a neutron, so that hydrogen atoms could not exist for very long. But deuterium or tritium (hydrogen 3) might still be stable, and so would some forms of oxygen and carbon. Indeed, we found that only if the proton became heavier than the neutron by more than about 1 percent would there cease to be some stable form of hydrogen. With deuterium (or tritium) substituting for hydrogen 1, oceans would be made of heavy water, which has subtly different physical and chemical properties from ordinary water. Still, there does not appear to be a fundamental obstacle in these worlds to some form of organic life evolving.

This seems like a fair conclusion on the surface but I suspect it's not that simple. Heavy water in large quantities has the effect of slowing down a great many chemical reactions occurring in biological systems. Smaller forms of cellular life can adapt to this pretty well but more complex lifeforms get into difficulties.

Yet all this speculation proves to have been of no avail since, following this discussion of cosmological ‘what ifs’, the authors still go back to arguing for the multiverse at the end on the basis of the 'cosmological constant' problem.

Our work did not address the most serious fine-tuning problem in theoretical physics: the smallness of the “cosmological constant,” which our universe neither recollapsed into nothingness a fraction of a second after the big bang, nor was ripped part by an exponentially accelerating expansion. Nevertheless, the examples of alternative, potentially habitable universes raise interesting questions and motivate further research into how unique our own universe might be.…..in the late 1990s, astronomers discovered that the universe is indeed expanding at an accelerating rate, pushed by a mysterious form of “dark energy.” The observed rate implied that the cosmological constant is positive and tiny—within the bounds of Weinberg’s prediction—meaning that dark energy is very dilute. Thus, the cosmological constant seems to be fine-tuned to an exceptional degree. Moreover, the methods our teams have applied to the weak nuclear force and to the masses of quarks seem to fail in this case, because it seems impossible to find congenial universes in which the cosmological constant is substantially larger than the value we observe. Within a multiverse, the vast majority of universes could have cosmological constants incompatible with the formation of any structure.

So having read all the way through an article purporting to have solved the fine tuning problem you find at the end that the problem is just as intractable as ever and it’s full speed ahead to the multiverse. Bottom line is, if you read the blurb for an article of scientific paper, take it with a pinch of salt.

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The Calvinist Doctrine of Glossolalia

(If you can't see it, go here.)

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Human Vivisection and Dissection

If you enjoy a good argument and you’re at all interested in the history of science and religion, have a look at the post and discussion over at Richard Carrier’s blog on medieval science. It started when Mike Flynn corrected a really quite stupid piece of anti-Christian polemic. Richard found the polemic quite stupid too but was more interested in correcting Mike. The debate continued happily below the line and showed how good the internet can be at linking people who share interests but not points of view.

I’m not going to comment on the debate for the moment as Richard has kindly promised to say something about my book. It seems appropriate that I shouldn’t write anything much until then.

But I’d like to flag two related issues that Richard raises on which I happen to have reviewed some of the literature. The first is the question of whether or not the Hellenic physicians Herophilus and Erasistratus carried out human vivisections in Alexandria. Richard says not and claims that this is a “slander”. I expect he has in mind a remark made by Tertullian (On the Soul 10) who accuses Herophilus of being a "butcher". The Latin for butcher, lanius, can also mean executioner, so it is by no means clear whether Tertullian is accusing the Alexandrians of dissecting humans or vivisecting them. Either way, he doesn’t like it at all. If this was the only evidence, Richard would be quite right to dismiss it – it is ambiguous and hostile. But the key text is neither of these things.

Writing about 30AD, the Roman medical author Celsus made a statement of a quite different character in the prologue to his book On Medicine. It is worth quoting in full:

Consequently, it is necessary to dissect dead bodies and examine their viscera and intestines. Herophilus and Erasistratus adopted the best method. They dissected criminals, received from the kings out of prison, and contemplated even while the breath still remained those things that nature had before concealed.

Now this statement is not only as clear as daylight, it is also approving of the practice (at least from a scientific point of view). The doyen of scholars on Herophilus, Heinrich von Staten, states that “the ancient evidence may be trusted” (p. 139, Herophilus (Cambridge, 1989)) and he should know given that his mammoth edition and commentary of Herophilus fragments and sources covers all the ground. Von Staten notes Richard’s objection that Galen is silent on the matter in his extant works. The trouble is that this is an argument from silence one hundred and fifty years after the positive and unambivalent statement by Celsus. Von Staten also notes that Galen refers to a lost treatise that he wrote specifically on vivisection (p. 151, Herophilus). If Galen did discuss whether the Alexandrians vivisected humans, we might expect it to be in this lost work. In any case, Galen’s lack of comment in no way cancels out Celsus. Richard also suggests vivisection would be against the Hippocratic Oath, but who knows what they actual swore. The linked version appears to apply only to patients, not criminals. So, however distasteful, we must face the fact that they probably did carry out anatomies on live victims.

And why shouldn’t they? Torturing people to death was no big deal in the ancient world. Indeed, cutting open live people may have been less offensive to social mores than waiting until they were dead. They were convicting criminals after all. Our own squeamishness may be what leads us to discount the clear evidence. It seems similar to the way humanists would avoid facing up to the blatant homoeroticism in Plato’s Symposium and elsewhere.

I think Richard also errs in his statement that Galen carried out human dissections himself. He clearly has the advantage over me in that he has gone over all the relevant passages in the Galenic corpus. But still the scholarly consensus is against him. As Von Staten notes, Galen’s anatomy is that of a simian overlaid onto a human skeleton. (It is a bit odd that Richard cited Von Staten in his case that Galen did perform human dissections where von Staten actually thinks the opposite, but doubtless we are referring to different works of his.)

The error is systematic and not amendable by adopting a particular reading of passages that mention human dissection. Galen never says he has done it and makes it very clear that he’d like to. This is a good argument from silence since it is not contradicted elsewhere and is consistent with the clear pattern of his anatomical observations.

But I haven’t seen Richard’s own detailed work on this topic. If feels he is successful in overturning the scholarly consensus, he should publish as soon as possible (although the delays in getting material accepted by journals are now nothing short of scandalous). Let’s hope an article sees the light of day soon.

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The Collapse of Good Faith in Science

In legal circles, the words “in good faith” simply mean without an agenda. A person acting in good faith or giving evidence in good faith is assumed to have integrity and to be an honest witness. And quite often, we assume good faith because to do otherwise makes life very difficult. If you thought your doctor was following his own agenda, as it seems Mr Andrew Wakefield was doing in his research on autism and MMR, you might hesitate before popping the pills he was prescribing you.

What happens when the presumption of good faith collapses? There is a technical term for rejecting the idea that anyone acts in good faith – it’s called being paranoid. Conspiracy theories thrive on the idea that the other side have something to hide.

Creationists assume that evolutionary biologists lack good faith because they are following a materialist agenda. Of course, in the case of Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, they are probably right. But the vast majority of biologists are just getting on with the job. Unfortunately, the lack of a presumption of good faith on either side of the creationism debate means that it cannot be resolved by evidence or argument. Nobody trusts their opponents enough for that.

And now the climate change fiasco has caused scientists to lose a vast amount of public goodwill. The scientific arguments are irrelevant because any evidence that climate scientists present will be assumed to be bogus by sceptics. And sceptics now make up half the population of the UK and an even larger proportion in the US. They have good reason to doubt the proclamations of the scientists.

Because climate science fully deserves the opprobrium being heaped upon it. We find researchers in senior positions conspired to hide data from their critics – data that turns out to have been badly flawed (as even the front page of the Guardian alleged this week). We find that the sacrosanct IPCC reports contain conclusions cherry-picked from popular magazines and environmentalists’ campaign material. It is clear that some climate scientists saw themselves as advocates and not as objective researchers.

So what can we do about this? It is bad enough that such an important issue as climate change cannot now be discussed with a presumption of good faith. But if this contagion spreads to other areas of science (and there are enough scandals in medical research for that field to reach tipping point as well) we will all be the poorer. The problem is getting serious.

It seems likely that the answer will involve additional layers of bureaucracy and regulation to police the activities of scientists. As for climate science, it is effectively back at year zero and almost everything ever done on the field will have to be reviewed by panels that include sceptics who are currently outside the mainstream. The careers of several eminent climatologists are now over, but they will need to be publicly defrocked and preferably confess to their sins for public confidence to be restored. And if climate change is the crisis that we were told, we really have had it. The popular and media consensus has evaporated and without it no western government can act.

Luckily, there was an important breakthrough in fusion power this week. Thank goodness for physicists...


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Wow

So it turns out frankincense may cure cancer. They really were wise men. The news isn't in yet on the myrrh. Via Alphecca.

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Updates on God's Philosophers and Related Matters

I hope I’ll be forgiven for a bit of self promotion. Much of this stuff will already be known to followers of the God’s Philosophers Facebook page. By the way, I've added a followers' box for this blog too if anyone fancies signing up. Somewhat to my surprise, I've found we have seventeen fellow clerks already...

After a six week hiatus caused by Boris Johnson cleaning us out just before Christmas, God’s Philosophers has been reprinted a second time and is finally back on Amazon.co.uk and will shortly return to the shops. This will certainly be the last reprint of the hardback, so if you like that format, as I do, then you should pick one up for twelve quid while stocks last. The paperback should appear over the summer.

In the autumn, Nieuw Amsterdam will be publishing a Dutch translation (and thus seeing me become a stable mate of Richard Dawkins). I’ll be over in the Netherlands doing a bit of promoting around the time it comes out. Rights for other languages are still available through the Marsh Agency.

Most exciting of all, Regnery will be bringing out a U.S. edition of the book. As often happens, the American version will have a new title and will hopefully be out later this year or early next. More news as I get it.

In other news, I’ll be giving a talk on early-medieval cosmology at Bede’s World in Jarrow, Newcastle on 24 April. It will cover Bede’s own view of the universe and also how the best Latin sources of astronomy were mastered in the court of Charlemagne, laying the groundwork for the rediscovery of the advanced Greek texts later on. I’m looking forward to seeing my patron saint’s home and especially the surviving Saxon chancel of Jarrow’s church.

Finally, I’ll be giving a lecture on medieval science on the first full day (12 July) of the Faraday Institute’s summer conference in Cambridge. It’s quite daunting to be sharing the bill with luminaries such as Sir John Polkinghorne, Simon Conway Morris, Peter Harrison and Ernan McMullin.

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The Fall of the West

If you haven't already, you really should read Tim O'Neill's outstanding review of Adrian Goldsworthy's The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower. Like all the best reviews, it nearly renders the book in question superfluous. Certainly, I now feel qualified to bluff with the best of them on the current state of scholarship on the fall of the Western Empire.

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Medieval Blog

Dan Jones, author of the riotous history of the Peasants' revolt, Summer of Blood, has started regularly updating his blog about all things medieval in popular culture. If the Middle Ages are your thing, and they are certainly mine, it is well worth adding to blog feed.

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The Indivisible Intellect

I recently posted a review of The Achilles of Rationalist Arguments by Ben Mijuskovic (here). This book deals with the history -- primarily in the early Modern era -- of the idea that "The essential nature of the soul consists in its power of thinking; thought, being immaterial, is unextended, i.e., simple (having no parts); and what is simple is (a) indestructible; (b) a unity; and (c) an identity."

I have recently been pointed to this summary of Mijuskovic's writing on the Simplicity Argument, including another book, Contingent Immaterialism: Meaning, Freedom, Time and Mind, which looks pretty darn interesting. It also looks at recent developments in this argument, including a collection of essays entitled The Achilles of Rationalist Psychology. There are many more references at the link. It looks like my reading list just doubled.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

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The Medieval Science Syllabus

If you were studying at, say, Cambridge, during the late Middle Ages, you would have been expected to master a fair amount of natural science and mathematics in order to gain an MA degree (which in those days was not a just freebie for those with BAs). But unlike today, you would have found everything you needed to know from books and lecturers rather than being expected to do any practical work. These books and lectures, of course, were all in Latin which was the only language students were allowed to speak at any time.

Mathematics and Geometry

Mathematics was broken down into four sub-subjects - arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy – so it was known as the quadrivium. At Cambridge arithmetic meant learning how to do sums, extracting roots and solving equations. Surprisingly, though, it seems to have been very different at Oxford. There, you would have studied the properties of prime and perfect numbers with the aim of reaching a philosophical understanding of them rather than learning about practical applications. At both universities, music was devoted to the theory of ratios and harmony and consequently was not seen as a particularly useful subject. The evidence suggests many students paid no attention to it and the music lecturers sometimes asked to change their course because no one was turning up. Geometry was based squarely on the Elements of Euclid which is an ancient Greek textbook that can still be used with profit today. He starts from the simplest definitions and proceeds to erect the entire edifice of geometry onto this solid bedrock in logical and indisputable steps. So perfect was Euclid’s system that it was used as an analogy for the work of God when he produced the heavens.

Astronomy and Geography

The final of the four sub-subjects making up the quadrivium was astronomy. The greatest misconception about science in the Middle Ages is that people thought the earth was flat. In fact every educated person knew it was a sphere and they also believed that the whole vastness of the universe was the same shape. The most popular textbook for astronomy was by the Englishman, John Sacrobosco, who wrote a short treatise called The Sphere in the thirteenth century. This was especially for university students and it was still being used up to the scientific revolution as a basic introduction from which more advanced topics could be introduced. Sacrobosco, following the nearly unanimous opinion of the ancient Greeks, did place the earth at the centre of the universe but this made a lot of sense. After all, the earth is obviously not moving and if it were rushing through space as Copernicus required, presumably we would notice.

Geography was another subject, generally considered part of mathematics, that was becoming increasingly popular through the sixteenth century. Despite the discovery of the New World in 1492, the most popular textbooks had been written over a thousand years before by ancient Greeks and Romans. However, modern authors like the Germans, Peter Apian and Sebastian Münster, began to produce up-to-date books that made it part of their selling point to include all the latest details about Peru or Mexico. We find these being used side by side with the ancient authorities.

After mastering the quadrivium, students moved on to natural science proper. This was based almost entirely on the work of Aristotle, but after 1535 the English Government ordered the universities to stop using the old medieval commentaries and concentrate on the original texts or new works by humanists. Consequently, the scholastics, who had dominated philosophy for centuries, were hardly studied at Cambridge after this date. Instead the emphasis was on modern interpretations of Aristotle including a good deal of criticism of his thought. This meant that although Aristotle seemed to provide answers for everything about the universe, people realised that they were not necessarily the right ones.

Science and Religion

The influence of Christianity on Cambridge University in the Middle Ages was obviously profound, but it does not seem to have had a negative impact on the study of science. It was commonly believed at the time that by studying God’s creation and marvelling at his work, you were engaged in a religious duty. This meant that doing science was something that was of interest to even the most religious of men. As we have seen. the main effect of the Reformation was to give an opportunity for the syllabuses to be radically overhauled and most of the medieval texts removed from them. There is a famous story related by the antiquarian, Anthony à Wood, about the Protestant Reformers ransacking Oxford’s libraries for mathematical books they thought were Satanic. However, there is no evidence for that happening at Cambridge and the evidence from Oxford turns out to be pretty shaky as well. So, we should certainly dispose of the idea of religion holding back science even during a period when Christianity was the absolutely dominant social reality and the Reformation had heightened religious sensibilities even further.

In the end, the subjects being studied at Cambridge before the scientific revolution were nothing like modern science. But it was a period of rapid change when Platonic number theory was being replaced by practical arithmetic and algebra, when the classical view of the earth was being radically overhauled and when new knowledge and interpretations were often welcomed and studied. It was this that provided the foundations upon which the scientific revolution could be built.

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