1. What really goes on at the Large Hadron Collider

Comment #176018 by miaka on May 6, 2008 at 11:33 am

"Anyway, back to the LHC - my prediction is they won't find a thing - perhaps a couple of fleeting minor exotic mesons. It's not sensitive enough, need more time, blah blah."--Rtambree

I don't know of any high energy physicist who thinks that the LHC won't at least discover the Higgs boson. In fact, probably the worst thing that could happen is that they discover the Higgs boson but nothing else. If they don't discover anything new, as you predict, then that itself would be an amazing revelation, because it would imply that there was something wrong with the standard model.

I would rank the possible scenarios from best case to worst case as:

best case: they discover SUSY as well as Higgs.
next best: no new discoveries.
worst: Higgs discovered, but nothing else.

Another thing: it seems that when scientists don't explain their work to the public, they're accused of conspiracy. When they do explain their work to the public, they're accused of hype.

2. The Lava Lizard's Tale

Comment #131607 by miaka on February 22, 2008 at 5:00 pm

Have to agree with Shuggy. Am I missing something? What was this documentary even about? It doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Seriously, can anyone summarize the main point in this video--I'm genuinely interested to know what it was.

3. Math Religion Trouble

Comment #117505 by miaka on January 29, 2008 at 1:46 am

Oh, and as for that comment by jeepyjay that writing papers about Hilbert spaces is akin to talking about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Maybe, *maybe* you could say that about certain obscure areas of math that hardly anyone works on except for a few professors at universities no one has heard of. Maybe.

But Hilbert spaces? Could you have picked a worse example than that? That's like one of THE most useful and ubiquitous mathematical constructs ever. I'm hard-pressed to name an important area of science that isn't, in some way, connected to a mathematical result that relies on Hilbert spaces. All of quantum mechanics is essentially talking about Hilbert spaces. Fourier transforms--another Hilbert space topic. The list goes on and on. Do just a little bit of research before you make these preposterous pronouncements.

4. Math Religion Trouble

Comment #117500 by miaka on January 29, 2008 at 1:34 am

As for the comment: no mathematician has deliberately flown planes into buildings....

Ouch. Let's not forget Ted Kaczynski, the unabomber, was a mathematician.

Practicing mathematics does not make people immune to crazy or irrational behavior.

5. Three Little Pigs 'too offensive'

Comment #115849 by miaka on January 24, 2008 at 11:20 pm

Let's not lose sight of an important point:

Is this "Three Little Cowboys" book even a good children's book? I mean, before we get too carried away with our offense, maybe we should check it out.

I took a look at an online demonstration of the book, and personally, I found myself rather disgusted by the whole thing. There's nothing about it which I found politically or culturally offensive. But it did strike me as a simply terrible idea for a children's book, and I could feel a sense of panic welling up inside me at the thought of having to incorporate that mess into a curriculum. The book has the look of "uninspired children's fable meets Microsoft Powerpoint presentation." Yuck!

6. Why (Almost All) Cosmologists are Atheists

Comment #110664 by miaka on January 11, 2008 at 9:06 pm

Just a general observation: Isn't it great to see a physicist post an article criticizing religiosity, and to watch the atheist community engage in a lively critique of the article, rather than accept everything it says at face value? We should point this out to people who accuse atheists as being just as dogmatic as religious fundamentalists.

7. 'Boycott Worked': Compass Flops - Opening Weekend $26 Million; Narnia $63 Million

Comment #97660 by miaka on December 12, 2007 at 1:46 pm

Steve99, I totally understand what you're saying and where you are coming from. I'd probably react similarly if I hadn't seen the movie.

But boy oh boy was that movie bad. And I didn't go into it with particularly high or low expectations. I was expecting the movie to at least entertain me, and it couldn't even achieve that.

For all I know, the written story may be much better. But I have a hard time believing that a really good story could translate into such a terrible movie. Certainly the overall narrative arch had to have some basis in the book, and even this basic component of the story was constructed in a derivative and amateurish way. If you don't believe me, see it for yourself.

I'll give the movie this: it had absolutely beautiful visual effects. The rest? Garbage, pure and simple. If this is what passes off as good storytelling, even for children, then we're in trouble.

8. 'Boycott Worked': Compass Flops - Opening Weekend $26 Million; Narnia $63 Million

Comment #97364 by miaka on December 12, 2007 at 12:55 am

Just saw the Golden Compass. I think this was an embarrassingly bad movie. I really had to suppress the urge to laugh out loud at its hideous dialog and confusing editing, not to mention its thinly veiled simplistic attack against the Catholic Church. And boy was this movie BORING! When the movie ended on a cliff-hanger, I got genuinely upset at the idea that I'd have to sit through another hour. Fortunately they saved the ending for another movie, which I will do my best to avoid. If I were a member of the clergy, I'd be tempted to encourage people to see this movie because it does such a shoddy job representing the other side.

The person who wrote this garbage simply has no talent whatsoever as a children's writer. The children were never believable as children, and spoke in an embarrassing caricature of English dialect. The characters overall were never believable as people--but merely served as agents to move the story along. It was never clear who anybody was or what anybody was doing, although you never got to know anyone well enough to care anyway. In order for a fantasy story to work, you have to create a sort of self-consistent world for the characters to operate in. You have to pick some sort of other-worldly atmosphere and stick to it. Instead, this movie insists on populating its alternate reality with witches, nazis, talking animals, physicists, and a cowboy. And it just doesn't work--there are just too many anomalies to make the world hang together. I can't believe this kind of thing gets published, much less made into a multi-million dollar movie. I must be in the wrong business, because I didn't realize how easy it was to pass off poorly executed propaganda as legitimate children's fiction.

And I'm on your side people!

9. Jury Awards Father $11M in Funeral Case

Comment #84624 by miaka on November 2, 2007 at 11:36 pm

To add one more thing, a lot of people seem to be suggesting that the crazy people in the article aren't protected by free speech rights since their hate speech is of a form that incites violence.

I'm not so sure I agree with this point of view, though I'm open to be persuaded otherwise. Part of me thinks that the hate speech is just too weird and out of context to get that kind of reaction. It reminds me of a joke a stand-up comedian told about how he likes to confuse people with out-of context hate speech. The example he gave was shouting "go back to Mexico" at a line for a Star Trek movie. Whether or not this joke is funny is fortunately not the issue. I only mean to give it as an example of where their hate speech seems to fit into the scheme of things.

10. Jury Awards Father $11M in Funeral Case

Comment #84622 by miaka on November 2, 2007 at 11:26 pm

Again, probably everyone will disagree with me on this, but I just don't see the point of this verdict. The subsequent appeals tie up the courts, and presumably cost the state a considerable amount of money. Why charge so much more than the defendants can reasonably pay? To the plaintiff I extend my utter sympathy and regret. However, were I in this situation, I would recognize the right course of action as coinciding with the hardest thing to do--and that's to simply walk away. Don't get me wrong--every bone in my body would be screaming to retaliate in one form or another. But what would it accomplish? I don't know how much time anyone here has spent with nutty people, but these are not people who can be reasoned with. It's like seeing a guy drooling on himself and repeatedly banging his head against a wall while singing "cheese man, cheese man, cheese man." You can't simply go up to that guy and say "cool it, daddy-o". And if you succeed in fining him a million dollars for being incredibly annoying, he's still going to go back to his wall, and pick up where he left off. The "cheese man" guy won't shut up that easily--if you take pity on him, then you'd still need to devote 'round the clock attention to him. Removing that element of pity, is getting the cheese man to shut up really worth all that effort when you have the option of gritting your teeth, punching a hole in a wall, and then walking away? I submit that the cheese man is only slightly more incoherent (though less hateful) than the people mentioned in this article.

11. Arguments From Design, First Cause, Something Rather Than Nothing, Fundamental Constants

Comment #82148 by miaka on October 25, 2007 at 6:34 pm

Steve99 has it right. Understanding the "fine tuning" of physical constants is a fundamental problem in high energy physics. We should embrace this problem as a lofty goal worth pursuing, not try to brush it under the rug. Even an unsuccessful attempt at understanding the nature of physical constants should still lead to some fascinating physical and mathematical discoveries.

So if a religious believer confronted me with this issue, my answer would be, "what a fascinating observation, let's explore whether there's a deep physical or mathematical explanation." As I mentioned in an earlier post (which it seems no one paid any attention to) physicists have been able to arrive at deep explanations for why the electric force law is an inverse square law, why like charges repel and opposite charges attract, etc. They even have deeper understandings of how quantum fields acquire mass. Focus on these successes when confronted with believer incredulity (an oxymoron?). We may not understand why the fundamental constants take on the values they do, but that doesn't mean we never will, and given the remarkable progress of physics in the last 100 years, it's far too soon to plug this mystery with a God of the gaps cork.

12. Arguments From Design, First Cause, Something Rather Than Nothing, Fundamental Constants

Comment #81890 by miaka on October 25, 2007 at 11:12 am

I'd prefer people stayed away from the "multiverse" explanation, because my gut feeling is that a non-cosmologist is likely to misinterpret what physicists are actually doing, and come off sounding silly.

My response to the fine-tuning argument is much simpler, and it's an answer every scientist can appreciate. The response is this: "wow, what an interesting topic for research."

In some sense, the fine-tuning argument is another God of the gaps argument, because it discourages further investigation into why the fundamental constants of nature take on their particular values. Physicists understand, in a deep sense, all sorts of phenomena that we probably thought were axiomatic. For example, physicists understand why the force between two charges varies as 1/r^2 (as opposed to 1/r^a for some other power a). The explanation comes from quantum field theory. Given that, do we not have reason to hope that we'll one day understand where the fundamental constants of nature come from? To me, the observation that their values are so important for the universe to behave the way it does suggests that there might be some underlying deep physical explanation that we should look for. In other words, it should inspire us to learn more physics, not theology.

13. Report on Hindu god Ram withdrawn

Comment #79022 by miaka on October 15, 2007 at 10:55 pm

You know, if someone decided to bulldoze the Mann Chinese Theater in Hollywood, everyone would throw a fit. But almost everyone here seems to be fine with bulldozing an ancient landmark that has great cultural and religious significance to a large group of people. Who cares if they give superstitious explanations for wanting to keep the landmark? The bottom line is that they have an ancient cultural attachment to it, and that's reason enough to withhold poking fun at their protest.

14. A Revelation

Comment #78463 by miaka on October 13, 2007 at 2:05 am

Taking a gander at some of the other posts here, I feel like I can tell which people actually study history. I can't claim to be an expert myself, but I do know that any attempt to explain away the role of the Church in the Middle Ages as "dogmatic-therefore bad" is going to fall flat on its face. Issues like why someone does or doesn't get persecuted are always much more complicated when you dig beneath the surface. My sense is that religious persecution was rarely about the supposed heresy alone. Rather, it might provide a convenient way to get rid of someone you owed money to, or to acquire someone's property. Not to say these are good motivations for persecution, but they're manifestly non-religious in their origin.

Of course, some instances of persecution are consequences of mass hysteria, like the Jewish pogroms during the Great Plague. In this situation, the Church actually passed a decree declaring that the Jewish peasants were not responsible for the pestilence, since they were falling ill as well. Few listened.

Surely one can attribute a wealth of misdeeds to the Medieval Church--I only mean to suggest that people not develop a knee-jerk attitude toward this period in history.

15. A Revelation

Comment #78453 by miaka on October 13, 2007 at 1:24 am

Regarding the persecution of Galileo:

This is a piece of history that everyone seems to get wrong--and there's no excuse since it's actually discussed in some detail on Wikipedia.

Pope Urban VIII actually admired Galileo and had disapproved of the Inquisition's earlier attempts to suppress his work. When Galileo decided to write a book discussing the heliocentric viewpoint, the Pope agreed, but asked that Galileo also discuss the Church's viewpoint. Instead of presenting the two viewpoints with even-handedness, Galileo mockingly expresses the Church's position through the voice of a character named "Simplicius", who, as wikipedia puts it mildly, "sometimes comes off as a fool."

The Pope was publicly humiliated by a man he both admired and viewed as a friend. In this light, the subsequent persecution of Galileo strikes me as having more to do with personal betrayal than with the Church suppressing science.

16. Critical Analysis of Case for a Creator

Comment #72382 by miaka on September 20, 2007 at 11:06 pm

The "critical analysis" provided in this video is so poorly put together, it almost makes a case for the other side. I don't think anyone in this video, be it Lee Strobel, or the person providing the commentary, knows beans about physics. For example, the commentator repeatedly insists that the universe is infinite. Last time I checked, the verdict was still out on that one. In fact, a few years ago, there was an article in Notices of the Amer. Math. Soc. discussing the possibility a spherically shaped (hence bounded) spatial universe. He also seems to suggest that there's no meaningful notion of a beginning with regard to the universe. Certainly some physicists, such as Stephen Hawking, have proposed boundary-less models of the universe, but I'm not aware that this issue has been settled to any degree.

But what really irked me was the commentator's suggestion that random chance was a viable explanation for the values taken on by physical constants. If that's the case, then I guess we should just give up on looking for a unified field theory to explain the relative values of these constants.

The religious arguments in this video are certainly refutable, but some of the arguments are a little subtle and require more than glib dismissal. There was a moment when the commentator just completely misunderstood the point someone was trying to make. The person in the video was essentially asking: how are we so good at discovering remote properties of the universe since there's presumably no evolutionary benefit to this skill? It's not that dumb a question, though I'm sure Prof Dawkins or any other evolutionary biologist would have a good answer. My only point here is that the commentator didn't even recognize the question being posed, and this was a source of embarrassment for me.