Month: February 2015

Posted Saudi 1 : Russia 0 late last year, and the strategy continues.
(Paul Mason is the common point on twitter.)

An event that passed me by in London last week. Reported here in THE.

Just joining up some obvious dots.

Should we wish humanity could replace aggression with empathy as suggested by a scientist, or should we talk softly and carry a big stick as suggested by a politician? (Hawking vs Roosevelt)

All or nothing or a balance of both. Having the power to act, the freedom to act is one thing, it is restraint and empathy brought to bear on conflict (verbal or physical) that makes us human.

(When was a “new atheist” last empathetic with a theist for example? Good job the scientists are not in charge.)

Finished Unger & Smolin. Having breezed through Roberto Unger’s 2/3, Lee Smolin’s 1/3 was tougher going. As advertised, this is not “popular science” writing and Smolin drops into the mathematical, symbolic and technical weeds of several aspects of many different theories in physics from quanta and string-theories to cosmogeny itself, and he does it in very clipped highlights, referring to published works of his own (and others) for details.

Maths itself is of course one of the target topics – it’s own evolution (evocation) within our models of the cosmos and its history. Much of the agenda is to propose new directions for research in physics given a radically simpler metaphysics – see my previous summary here – lines of experimentation especially open to falsifiability. The summaries and conclusions are clear and positive for science. Scientists must resist their knee-jerk to run screaming from the metaphysical proposals.

Like Unger, Smolin also spends a good deal of time on the cosmological fallacies and the “problem of the meta-laws”. As I said previously I don’t see meta-laws as a problem per se. Clearly having introduced them, the task is to explain them, but that’s “problematic” only if you see them simply as laws at another level operating on the erstwhile “laws” – ie just a shift in the problem to another set of “laws” outside time and the cosmos – nothing gained explanatorily. Obviously meta-laws are not law-like as we know them; they need to be seen as different principles or forms of causal explanation. For me it’s their meta-ness not their law-ness that is no-brainer significant – recursive, meta upon meta upon … and orthogonal to … the things we generally think of as laws. Different animals altogether. No simple language can yet exist to do justice to their explanation – they’re novel as far as common sense physics is concerned. Anyway, time will tell.

The other pleasant surprise from Smolin is the very brief chapter 7 on the consequences of the new metaphysics for consciousness et al. Perceptions – qualia – are the most certain realities we know, and they’re given a proper place as moments within the real flow of cosmological time. Yes, time is real, so qualia, and consciousness, and free-will, and the creativity of genuine novelty can all be real too. Hallelujah. A much needed injection of common sense into so-called science of consciousness.

I’m going to have to investigate more of Smolin and how he fits with accepted “authority” within physics and the philosophy of science. Suggestions on further reading much appreciated.

Unger & Smolin is a recommended read for anyone interested enough to wade through the philosophical and scientific technicalities, and a compulsory read for any scientists bumping up against the gaps and mysteries in the standard models of accepted physics.

[Post Note : From Bryan Appleyard’s review :

It’s important because it is not just about physics …
It is about the way we live now
and the world view we have been sold as “scientific”.

Science is currently selling us a pup. And “scientific” in scare quotes – what I tend to brand as scientistic. Interesting, last time I commented on Appleyard.]

[Post Note : Related from Joel Achenbach in the Washington Post on why science is hard to believe (via Sabine Hossenfelder) :

Scientists can be as dogmatic as anyone else … For some [scientists], the tribe is more important than the truth; for the best scientists, the truth is more important than the tribe.

Scientists can be as PC as anyone else.]

[Post Note : Another physicist (Nobel-prize-winning) Brian Josephson I’ve been following, I see also published on “Law Without Law” (after Wheeler). Semantics more fundamental than the physical. Fascinating.]

[Post Note : Noted this A C Grayling piece on Smolin’s trouble with physics from 2007.]

Not in any technical sense incest, agreed. No sense of “genetic-in-breeding” in the specific conception, but nevertheless a little weird arrangement.

“Beautiful” if you’re a geneticist / biologist that Mary chose her brother to be the “biological” father of her “adoptive” child, as sperm donor to her marriage partner, specifically to have some genetic tie with the child. Neat solution to the wish, I’d agree.

But the father (brother) living with the biological and adoptive mother in the same family household as “Daddie”(?), and the idea of choosing a donor for their genetic content for a non-medical reason(?), are both worthy of ethical committee scrutiny as possible precedents. I’m uncomfortable with both. Being possible, doesn’t make it good. (The “love” is not in doubt, but the underlying issue here as in other means of “assisted conception” is whether parenthood is in any sense a “right” – sufficiently strong to push other ethical boundaries.)

Another keeper for later (HT to Paul Mason on Twitter)

“”What part of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason didn’t you understand?”

Interesting that Blackburn’s recent lecture drew attention to the point in the title of  Kant’s critique being against “Pure” reason – ie why would anyone expect enlightenment reason to be anything more than a new tool in the armoury of argumentation, justification and decision-making, rather than seeing any suggestion that some purer rationality could entirely replace established human decision-making reality. The servant of the passions, the emissary of the master.

Holding post for further comment. Vint Cerf last week on losing our digital data.

Jon Butterworth’s column in the Grauniad picks up where he left off introducing the importance of symmetries in physics last time, in explaining how symmetries beyond the particles in the standard model (ie super-symmetries) affect the search for “what next” in the CERN LHC restart – dark matter or whatever.

Prompted to record the point since I’m in the middle of reading Lee Smolin’s contribution to the latest Unger and Smolin book (notes on Smolin chapters yet to be published) – where one corollary of their placing maths inside cosmological history (and its evolution) is that the idea that symmetries must be fundamental to physical laws and cosmological models is misguided – a misleading impression gained from experience within “Newtonian control volumes” as sub-sets of the cosmos.