A British newspaper Nature reports that one of the 9 authors of a paper purporting to show that the HIV virus does not cause AIDS is now being investigated for illegally dissenting from scientific consensus.

Now one of the whole purposes of University tenure was to protect professors from the sort of the witch-hunts that political parties cannot resist engaging in. Unlike UK, UVa, PSU, and most American universities, will Galileo's old University of Florence be able to resist the allure of political correctness? We will just have to see.

But that led to the question, what is it about some topics that seem to attract politicians like flies to honey? Why is it that AIDS research is such a political hot potato? Why does the defense of Darwinism bring out the most spittle-flecked invective seen on the internet? Why do people commit crimes in defense of global warming? Where can one go to publish alternative theories to the Big Bang?

Here's a handy little table where I've tried to list some of these politically charged scientific theories. I'm sure you can suggest some more as well as correct my poorly researched numbers. (You do know that 73% of statistics are made up on the spot, don't you?)

Table 1: Politically charged Theories

Title	Year	Skeptical Alternative	Cost
Anthropogenic Global Warming	1988-	solar	$100B
Big Bang Cosmology	1950-	steady state, young earth	$20B
Heliocentricism	1530-	Anthropocentric	?
HIV the cause of AIDS	1990	Cure worse than disease	$10B
Darwinism the origin of species	1859--1910	Creationism, panspermia	?
Neo-Darwinism the ascent of man	1930--	Intelligent Design	$1T
Origin-of-Life, Abiogenesis (warm pond)	1859--	Panspermia, ex nihilo creationism	$1B
Copenhagen Quantum Mechanics	1930--	Bohm, EPR, Everett	?
Einstein's Special Relativity	1904--	ether, Newtonian	$10B

(Wikipedia reliably told me that every one of those theories is the accepted if not only factual theory. They are so reliably 100% politically correct, they will soon become a synonym or definition of PC.)
Okay, just for comparison, let's put down some theories that haven't had as much politically charged defense, have been overturned, or are unlikely to show up in a tenure review committee.

Table 2. Other Theories	Year	Skeptical Alternative	Year
Newton's Color Theory	1704	Goethe's color theory	1810
Newton light corpuscles	1700	Huygen's light waves	1678
Newton's gravity	1687	Einstein's gravity	1917
Democritus' atoms	500BC	Aristotle's five elements	400BC
Kant's 3D-Euclidean space	1800	Minkowski's 4D-Non-Euclidean	1907
Laplace's Nebular Hypothesis	1796	Contingent-rogue star, etc
Crick's Central Dogma	1958	Epigenetically Distributed info	2000--

I can't defend these ad hoc lists very well, and in all likelihood, I've biassed my sampling method so badly that none of my conclusions are worth the ink to print them. That is to say, of course it is Procrustean science, but here are my conclusions anyway.

Age of Modernism

Most of Table 1, the list of "Theories to Die For" come from the Age of Modernism, more specifically, the Rise of the Age of Modernism. They are pillars and cornerstones of the Modernist world view. In contrast, most of Table 2, the list of "Theories you May have Heard of", come from either the ancient past, or from the pre-Modern Enlightenment. One or two come from the Post-Modern Era where they reflect ambiguities in the Modernist consensus. By-and-large, none of them have the "building block" status of the Modernist consensus.

Politico-Scientific Complex

A second feature of the Table 1, is how much money is spent defending the consensus. Now mind you, this is often raised as an objection to the Skeptical Alternative, but one must only scratch the argument to see which bleeds straw. The Skeptical alternative to Anthropogenic Global Warming has taken in a few million dollars over the past 10 years, but government contracts to support AGW, as well as carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, EPA regulations and the like have averaged $10's of billions annually. If we include indirect costs, we would be close to $1T, but the accounting gets a bit dodgy.

The higher dollar estimate for Neo-Darwinism reflects the higher budgets for NIH over NSF or NOAA. Not everything at NIH directly defends Neo-Darwinism, but on the other hand, every proposal and paper has to contain a formal kowtow to Darwin as if it were a defense of the theory. So if we add up all the funding of proposals and papers that possess this requisite paragraph, which include the majority of NIH's annual $60B budget, we can easily exceed a $1T in the past 40 years.

Progressive Social Engineering

The other thing I notice about Table 1, is that if it does not involve cornerstones of Materialism, or large dollar government projects, it generally involves some form of social engineering. Even if it is tangentially related, it nonetheless gets invoked as a scientific support for social engineering. Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism have a notorious connection to "Social Darwinism" and racism which is denied by all current biologists, but they do not hesitate to use it as defense of "evolutionary biology", "evolutionary psychiatry", "neuro-biology" and its anti-spiritual, materialist view of the world.  AIDS research is used to normalize homosexual behavior (and contradict Darwinism!) Origin-of-life (OOL) is likewise used to explain away human uniqueness with a "genetic fallacy" that if we know where something came from we have explained its significance. Heliocentricism and Big Bang, despite both being astronomical theories are again applied to the question of human uniqueness and the denial of biblical authority. QM Copenhagen looks like a counter-example, because it undermines Laplacian determinism and the materialism that supports it. However this has been somehow converted into a defense of materialism against determinism, though no one really understands it (Bohr's intention!), so it seems to act more as a vaccination against substance dualism and the glaring deficiencies of materialism.

This leaves only Einstein's special theory as the last of inviolate theories. This is hard to explain, since most of Special Theory is devastating for materialism. Yet to his dying day, Einstein supported materialism, and for that act of loyalty, progressives have beatified and sanctified his theories. So in some strange way, the Special Theory is off-limits to criticism, because it maintains the sanctity of Einstein's progressive social views.

When we look at Table 2, we see progressives and atheists such as Kant and Laplace and Democritus also promoting astronomical theories, but perhaps because they preceded the Materialist era, they were not likewise sanctified. Or perhaps society has such a short memory that their special status has faded from view, and their faults have had more time to be discussed.

So You Wanna Be an Einstein?

Suppose you want to be another Einstein, what kind of theory should you promote?

1) It should be related to the foundations of materialism. That is, it should attack religion, preferably Christianity, and refute some Biblical claim. Noah's flood and 6-day creation are toast, as are most of the Old Testament, so I can't give you any help denying the historicity of Genesis, the Davidic kings, or even the authenticity of the prophets, and likewise in the New Testament, the authority of scriptures and the divinity of Christ have long been denied, so there aren't too many angles there. However, the humanness of man is a ripe fruit waiting to be denied. Claim that humans are pre-programmed robots without freewill, or just chimpanzees with an extra chromosome, and that will make your theory fatally attractive.

2) It should involve large amounts of government funding. Preferably setting up a large international agency to supervise some aspect of human life. A eugenics council, or a UN "quality-of-life" panel would be ideal location, sweetened with some redistribution of international resources guaranteed to keep a whole class of apparatchiks well fed and watered.

3) It should promote a progressive agenda, one that engineers society. The idea here is to become self-propagating, to educate a new generation of children who will blindly reinforce the agenda. With proper positive feedback, society is no longer tethered to natural laws and traditions, but can follow more and more esoteric utopian goals that justify larger and larger gaps between the haves and the have-nots. At some point the haves will become the alpha-males of a childless society, the blue-bloods of a Brave New World.

Anthropogenic Global Warming came very close to the new Einstein, and if it were not for the greed of James Hansen and Al Gore, they may have succeeded at becoming the saints of a brave new world. Alas, Climategate and Al's 24,000 sq foot home prevented the victory expected at Copenhagen, and now the entire story is coming unravelled. But this will not stop the "next big thing". The human genome project, Francis Collins and Craig Venter could have led that direction if they had not uncovered far more complexity than they bargained for. But somebody out there is tinkering in their garage with a universal health care plan that proves Adam and Eve were Denisovans with a FoxP2 gene from a gorilla's fused #2 chromosome which can be embyonically cloned to make a miracle cure for cancer and fundamentalism. The Nobel Prize and the Presidency would be insufficient honors for such a man, even sanctification too little praise, so there will have to be memorials, services, rites. The next Einstein will also be also have to be the next Billy Graham.

Mark my words.

Fareed Zakaria, a hack who writes for the dying Time mag rag, has published an article defending the indefensible--the Obamacare health care plan that has ballooned up to 1.7 trillion dollars over the next 10 years. Think about it, there are 300 million people in America. If I gave each one of them $6000 dollars to invest in, say, Apple stock, it would still be cheaper than Obama's plan--which doesn't even cover everyone. So how does one sell a $1.7 trillion dollar outlay that doesn't accomplish what it purports to do--according to the title Zakaria put on it?

The way liberals of his ilk sell everything--with guilt.

But doesn't the Catholic Church have a monopoly on guilt? And come to think of it, don't they already have hospitals for everyone, staffed by nuns who might arguably take better care of you than the government? So how is Zakaria going to pull this one off?

Ahh. By comparing America to Switzerland.

Don't laugh, it is better than having to learn French. I worked for 3 years in Switzerland, and discovered that English is the unofficial language of the multilingual nation.

Yup, Zakaria thinks Switzerland is the US of Europe. Not only do they speak English, but they have a market-driven economy with voting 4 times a year. And universal health care works so well there, why can't we copy their model? Here's his take-away conclusion:

All of them provide universal health care at much, much lower costs than we do and with better results....

Well, having lived there, let me comment on what I saw of the vaunted health care system. We had a very good friend who was diagnosed with colon cancer, treated, and the cancer went into remission. But a few years later it returned, and didn't respond to the "cheap" anti-cancer drugs. It was still treatable, but expensive, so the Swiss would not treat her because she was 61 and didn't deserve to live any longer. After we flew in from US and her brother from UK, they decided maybe she was more important than they first thought. So they removed the biggest tumors from her liver, and she lived another 3 months before finally succumbing.

The fastest way to determine whether socialized medicine is good for a country, is to look at the longevity rates of patients diagnosed with cancer. There's no question that private healthcare in the US permits people to live longer (especially colon cancer) than the vaunted socialized health care systems of Canada, UK, or Switzerland. So what do you want: "universal death care" or private health care?

Zakaria goes on and on about how expensive treatments are in America. But he confuses the cost of the treatment with the cost of healthcare. Sure the treatments are expensive, and so some people don't get them. Yep, that's unfair, and we can debate the unfairness of life separately. So what do you want, unfair life or fair death?

And when you opt for fair death, realize that it is always cheaper to die, so that cash-strapped governments will always be defining fair death downward.

Which, of course, is why Obamacare is so very much more expensive than private care when it first starts out.

It takes time to build the death camps.

After four months of silence, why the big rush to post?

Well, it's not that I have avoided blogging, but that (a) I was trying to meet a thesis deadline for my long-delayed ThM, and (b) my original audience for this blog--my twin daughters--have been occupied with a new baby and first-year PhD coursework. But the ThM is going to be postponed another year, and skipping meals is going to give me time to slip in a short blog now and then.

So here's a comment I sent to a friend about Lawrence Krauss' new book A Universe from Nothing, which recieved a puff-piece in the NYT by science writer Dennis Overbye "There's More To Nothing Than We Knew".

"Does string theory just about allow everything?" my scientist friend asked.

Here's what I wrote:

Years ago I had a battle with the American Geophysical Union. They wanted to support some piece of legislation in Congress, and so they came up with a statement that said their members were pro-Darwin, anti-Creation scientists. Or something like that.

Trouble was, I was neither. Nor did I see what truck biology had with an outfit that published scientific journals in geology and space physics. Space Physics? Yeah, you see, space plasma physics was an orphan soon after being born. James Van Allen had a geiger tube he put on one of the first American space rockets after Sputnik. We had tried to launch before the Russians, but the Naval Research Lab couldn't build a rocket that worked, and Werner von Braun was finally asked to send up his Jupiter-C rocket. Van Allen hedged his bets, and made his experiment compatible with either the Navy's Vanguard or the Army's Jupiter. So when the call came from Huntsville, Van Allen was ready to go, and discovered, as his graduate student exclaimed, "My God, space is radioactive!"

Well that took satellites to measure, and satellites were the speciality of the newly created NASA, which was run by engineers like Von Braun, not scientists. Up until Van Allen, the fellows studying space were either cosmic ray/neutron scientists, who had big massive lead plates and geiger counters, or the radio scientist/engineers who listened to whistlers and talked about F2 layers of the ionosphere. But neither group really knew what was happening in the environment between the ionosophere and the Sun, in what became the provenance of Space Plasma Physics. Van Allen was a cosmic ray guy, but he quickly switched gears to make small, light instruments that could fit on satellites to measure this unexplored region. His compatriots at the University of Chicago, however, couldn't leave their lead plates and neutron monitors behind. So when it came time to give scientific talks, the gatekeepers at UC kept Van Allen out of the American Physical Society meetings that they organized. Van Allen responded by moving his growing group of satellite experimentalists to the American Geophysical Union, where they have remained ever since.

In my graduate school days I became a member of the AGU, and timidly attended the meetings full of big shots from Berkeley, MIT, Johns Hopkins APL or the University of Iowa. I'll never forget my first presentation, where I had analyzed some satellite data of the radiation belts and the same graduate student who had worked for Van Allen and who had discovered the radiation belts 25 years previously, asked me the question of the origin of the radiation belts. I stammered out a response, but even now, 25 years later, I still don't know the answer to his question. Or more precisely, I think I know the answer, but my papers have been rejected by the AGU journals for straying too far from the accepted wisdom.

For even back then, the AGU was concerned with consensus, with respectability, with politics. It has only gotten worse over the years. When I was a member I used to get their in-house rag, "Eos", which I read cover-to-cover. The back page had all the job offers, separated by community, and I would peruse the Space Physics column eagerly. One week, Eos declared that global warming was too important a topic to be left to scientists, that we all needed to accept it for its political "truth". It was a declaration of war on modernism by the post-modern editors of Eos, and it happened some 15 years ago.

When AGU decided to get into the battle for Darwinism a few years later, I had already seen the hand writing on the wall. The organization was doomed, and I cancelled my $30 a year membership. AGU responded by raising my registration fee for the annual conference by $150 for "non-members". That's when I stopped attending the meetings and reading Eos. Then when my journal articles on the origin of the radiation belts began to be rejected by editors who never read them--a result of contradicting a proposed NASA mission as I later discovered--then I also stopped reading the journals. Whatever the organization had become, I decided, was not worth the high blood pressure fighting.

It also meant, as I discovered to my chagrin, that it made me practically ineligible for NASA grants, because the reviewers relied heavily on AGU journals for evaluation. Politics, grant money, publications--slowly the whole academic-government-complex became revealed for the incestuous monster it had become. Space Science had compromised in order to have access to funding, and like Nietzsche, the diseases it contracted from the relationship were driving it mad.

So it was to my utter surprise that the staid, don't-rock-the-boat, politically savvy AGU made the news this week. Apparently the chair of AGU's "Task force for Scientific Ethics", a certain Peter Gleick,  was caught doing several scientifically inethical things.
  1. He misrepresented himself to obtain sensitive documents from a lobbyist group that he subsequently posted.
  2. He forged a "memo" that made rhetorical points the documents didn't, and released it with the cache.
  3. He fed a feeding frenzy at the NYT, the CSM, and other leading newsmedia concerning said memo.
  4. When the sophomoric nature of the memo was revealed, and his identity discovered, he "confessed" at the Huffington Post that the memo was "fake but accurate" and was forced upon him by the lobbyist group's refusal to dialogue--when in fact, he had turned down an invitation from them the previous week.

When all this hit the fan, AGU quietly removed him as chair, as this link now shows. It's a bit reminiscent of the NYT's "ethicist" Randy Cohen, who was caught making donations to a political party despite the conditions on his employment forbidding it, and the parody printed at NRO is priceless. So who is going to parody the AGU "ethics" panel?

No one.

You see, the NYT was in the business of selling newspapers, but the AGU is in the business of distributing NASA grants. You can parody an institution that people hire, but you don't parody an institution that bought your lunch. And dinner. And career.

More's the pity. Because if the AGU had any inkling of how ridiculous they have become as cheerleaders of global warming, if they had any idea how vacuous and irrelevant they are making themselves over Darwinism, they would have disbanded their "ethics panel" years ago. It is only when we take ourselves too seriously. It is only when hubris damages our vision of the truth that we are capable of such enormous and self-inflicted wounds. That's why kings used to keep a jester in the court, to say the things that no one else had courage to say. Let me then take the role of court jester, and say what your faithful members would say if they could.

That was damned silly thing to do! For shame! Disband the entire ethics panel. And while you're at it, drop the "Climate Communication Prize" aka the Global Warmist Propaganda incentive. It's embarrassing you. Stick to science, it is after all, what your members do for a living.

Oh, and one more thing.

Let non-members come for free--the meetings aren't going to exactly mobbed--and charge the presenters. That should make meeting shorter, and you can post all the posters on the web anyway. That way everyone can spend more time on science and less on travel. It's win-win. If you want to see how it works, come to the big SPIE meeting in August--but come early, the good part lasts only 3 days.

Today is the first day of Lent. There is one day a year I am Irish, and two days a year I am Catholic: Ash Wednesday and Midnight Mass. Everyone needs some memorial in their life, some remembrance of things past, or why else do we celebrate birthdays? My Korean in-laws celebrate death-days. And Ash Wednesday is both.  It marks the death of all things carnal. We fight the world every day and Satan on weekends, but when do we wage war on the flesh? Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of my 46-day Lenten fast.

No, I do mean 46, since it is 46 days from Ash Wednesday to Easter. Everyone calls it 40 days of Lent, but have you ever gotten out a calendar and counted the days? It's 46. So why this talk about 40?  Because Sundays don't count. As the Church would say, the celebration of the the resurrection of Christ, which occurs every Sunday, takes precedence over the crucixion of the flesh. Alas, as the good Father said in his homily today, this leads to an inordinate amount of gorging on Sundays. In my old Anglican days, lenten Sundays were "Death by Chocolate" refreshments. Hardly a way to mortify the flesh.

Years ago I started a 35 day hunger fast when the president of my college refused to consider my discrimination complaint. It so happened that this fast came during Lent, and thus began my practice of giving up food for Lent. "Why not eat on Sundays?" my concerned wife would plead. And every year I remind her that fasting is not a 24 hour phenomena, but requires about 3 days to switch my body to fat-burning metabolism. And yes, I'm one of those people blessed with an ample 40-day supply of fat. So if I eat on Sundays, it will be Wednesday before my body switches back to fat burning. And in the meantime, my blood sugar level is low, my brain interprets that as hunger, and I'm just miserable. After switching gears though, the blood sugar values rise, the hunger pangs go away, and I'm a happy camper. So eating on Sundays might be "allowed", but not recommended.

Of course, I could start fasting after the first Sunday of Lent, and then it would be 40 days, but I like to think that those 6 extra days make up for "cheating". Cheating occurs when somebody invites me over for dinner, and I can't refuse, nor can I sit there like a "wolf" (as my daughter says) and make eyes while they eat. So I try to eat very minimally, so as to not draw attention, preferably vegetables. Still, it isn't fasting, so I use one of my 6 "cheating" days for each occasion.

For the first few years, the 7th day was always the hardest, it felt like hitting a wall. Then I discovered that most of my weariness was not due to low blood sugar, but due to dehydration. I mixed up some diet drinks from WalMart's 15 flavors, added "blue salt" which is Morton's half sodium, half potassium salt substitute, and called it "Diet Gatorade". The miracle drink kept me going all 40 days. I lost about 30 pounds, and wore the suit from my wedding for the first time since last Easter. Maybe I should start calling it my Easter suit.

This year the doctor says I have both high blood pressure and high cholesterol. I told my wife that I wasn't ready for dentures and high blood pressure medicine, but if I lost 30 pounds, both problems would likely vanish.  And that is why Ash Wednesday is also a birthday celebration. It's the only time that I become young again.

And when I become young enough, I shall be born again.

Sean  M. Carroll, a noted cosmologist, in his first column for Discovery Magazine called Welcome to the Multiverse writes that the progress in cosmology has forced cosmologists "kicking and screaming" to accept the Multiverse, the same theory that caused Giordano Bruno to be burned at the stake in Rome in 1600.

Sigh.

I sigh because the two pieces of evidence that have dragged him "kicking and screaming" into multiverse theory are "string theory" and "inflation". And what you should immediately ask, is "What!? Not Bruno's universalism??" because both of those "theories" have about as much to support them as Bruno did.

Carroll knows this, and in a clever twist, argues that like Bruno, we should explore scientific heresies with an open mind. Except that it isn't the Church, but the philosophy of science that is being trashed. That is, while I am all for exploring scientifically heretical subjects, I would prefer to do so on empirically sound foundations, which neither String Theory nor Inflation possess. One should read Bruce Gordon on the metaphysics that undergirds both theories--which have gone through numerous modifications as they fail to conform to data. In fact, on Lakatos' analysis, both StringTheory and Inflation are clearly "degenerate science programs".

So how does one get "forced" by degenerate science programs that expend all their disposable hypotheses on shoring up the main thesis?

By accepting the same main thesis. And what would that be?

The same one Bruno had--human autonomy and moral relativism. This was Stanley Jaki's complaint in his book God and the Cosmologists when he critiqued inflation, and it is the same complaint Bruce Gordon has about "multiverse" theory.

The main thesis, the whole theorizing effort is an attempt to shore up a discredited philosophy based on eternal particles moving through the void. It has been the same goal of Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Newton and Darwin, which goes by the moniker of Materialism. Because Materialism has no Creator.

In the case of Inflation, it is an attempt to explain the enormous amount of information in the small-scale Earth coupled to the "flat" or informationless distribution of matter in the Big Bang. One of them must be an illusion, and inflation has gone through multiple versions that attempt to find a spontaneous answer to flat space-time that is highly contingent. As Bruce Gordon observes, it is completely dependent on fine-tuned "inflaton" forces that are even more contingent than the Georges Lemaitre's Big Bang cosmology. The goal is to replace the contingent Creator with a self-emergent autonomous contingent creation.

In the case of StringTheory, it attempts to modify these point-like particle things into 2-D strings or n-D "branes", but the intent is the same--to find something that is eternal and unchanging and mindless. The appropriation of "landscape theory" to "inflation" is an attempt to make each "inflaton"-generated Big Bang a different flavor of string, so that every possible flavor (10^500) is expressed. Why? Just because, like Bruno, this eliminates the need for a Creator again, replacing it with a cosmic Monte Carlo casino. Since there is absolutely no evidence that a casino is a better model than a Creator, I prefer to call this the worship of the "Chaos" god, who shows up in Greek mythology only to be vanquished by the Olympians.

The subtitle on Carroll's piece is "Could our universe be just one of a multitude, each with its own reality? It may sound like fiction, but there is hard science behind this outlandish idea."

Is Sean Carroll's physics really "hard science"? Hardly. No more than Bruno's physics was "hard science". And Carroll knows this, because he gives his doubts on his blog, just not in his essay meant for mass consumption. We have one story for the plebians, and another for the Intelligentsia. Because there really is no difference with Bruno's time except that we've reversed the roles of the Church and Heretics, with the Heretics (Intelligentsia) now running the State. The only ones likely to be burnt at the stake are now those scientists who insist that science conform to reality. (You think I'm joking? Blasphemy against the Trinity of Darwin, Anthropogenic Global Warming, Newtonian Materialism will get you fired, pronto.)

The sad part about Carroll's piece, is that it confirms one of Jaki's hypotheses--that what stopped the science of the golden age of Greece, what stopped the science of the Chinese or the Babylonians or the Caliphate was not politics, not anti-science reactionaries, not an epidemic of stupidity, but bad metaphysics. Bad metaphysics can turn any "progressive science program" into a "degenerate" one, and this infatuation with multiverses is sucking the life of hundreds of grad students, the resources of a hundred tenure-track cosmologists into the impossible task of predicting the unobservable.

They'd be better off studying theology.

When is a theory a theory? Long ago we  commented briefly on the Climategate revelations that the global warming books have been cooked to support the theory. There are a great many blogs dedicated to tracking how that miserable field is regressing, so I have felt no need to beat an obviously dead and cooling horse. But physicist blogger, Lubos Motl, questions why a 2-sigma result (1:20 chance of being accidental) of climate warming (a highly contested result, not supported by data contends Roy Spencer) should cause the American Physical Society to claim "incontrovertible proof" when a 6-sigma result  (1:Million chance of being accidental) from a neutrino detector is doubted by all concerned.

In effect,  Motl, makes the old argument that there are "hard" and "soft" disciplines within science, and that "hard" scientists tend to need more sigmas in their data, but also give much more significance to the "priors", the body of evidence that support a theory. So when a well-established theory is contradicted then "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". (I'll come back to the strange origin of that phrase, and its degenerate character.) However, Lubos goes on, the "soft" sciences are so squishy, that one never gets better than a 2-sigma effect, and so the criteria are much lower by comparison. By the same token, there isn't much benefit in promoting a novel theory in the soft sciences, say, by imposing a tax on everyone, because these theories are so full of exceptions and prone to reversals. While one would hope that climate science is eventually going to be a "hard" science, the field is young and still quite "soft", which is why Motl sees the exaggerations and politics surrounding climate warming as so egregious.

My own view is that the "soft" sciences are soft for a very good reason--they involve humans. Psychology, psychiatry, sociology, political science, economics and yes, predictive climate change all involve people and populations. Since people have this annoying habit of behaving irrationally or more precisely, obstinately, (where they know the prediction and therefore do the opposite), there can never be great certainty to any process involving them. (If you are callous enough to think otherwise, then imagine that your own theorizing can be predicted accurately, then your own theory turns out to be ho-hum obvious, and you didn't need to waste our time making it anyway, much less the PhD you wrote.) The circularity of the "soft" sciences can be vicious if you pretend they are "hard".

In the case of global warming, the danger sign was including the adjective "Anthropogenic", as in AGW. Once we include humans in the mix, the theory becomes more volatile than nitroglycerine. And this is where Motl and "deniers" claim that the theory parts company with the "hard" sciences.

Even if we have to write off the "soft" sciences, at least we have recovered the objectivity of the hard sciences, or have we?

And here is where I part company with Motl. For it is true that numbers are far more compelling in the hard sciences, but it is also true that the numbers don't vote, don't write textbooks, don't teach, and don't blog. And while the theories may be quite firm and not at all circular, the same cannot be said of the making of the theories. That is, theories don't write themselves, and since theorizing is done by humans, any concerns or worries about theorizing is now just as "soft" as sociology.

Is this a problem? I mean, humans are involved in say, the making of chairs, but that doesn't prevent us from sitting on them, does it?

No, not at all. The problem isn't with the chairs, the problem is when there's a sociological upheaval and chairs get redefined. While the "hard" science remains hard and quite independent of the people who made it, the definitions could change and make it very difficult to sort out the hard from the soft. For example, at one time it was thought that seeing through walls was a supernatural gift and clearly "soft", but the discovery of x-rays redefined the field as "hard". Contrariwise, the study of "animal magnetism" was probably once a "hard" science that has since gone "soft".

So let's take a "hard" science like physics, and ask, what is the status of "string theory"? Is it "hard" or "soft"?

This is the topic of a most interesting paper that evaluates string theory with four modern philosophies of science, which is what the serious study of hard vs soft science is called. The author runs through the criteria, and concludes that the theory fails at all four, making string theory about as soft as AGW. Here's the four views and how they stack up.

Phil. of Science	What is a scientific theory?	String theory is:
Positivism	Verifiable theory	Not verifiable
Popper	Falsifiable theory	Not falsifiable
Kuhn	Incommensurate paradigm	Not even incompatible
Lakatos	Progressive vs degenerate	More likely degenerate

To recap the history of the philosophy of science, the Vienna Circle and logical positivism said a real scientific theory had to have data validating it, it had to be verifiable. Yet theories such as Marx's Communism, Freud's Psychotherapy, and even Darwin's Evolution seemed to be constantly validated without any data ever contradicting them. Thus Karl Popper parted ways with the Vienna Circle, and said that a real theory had to permit or even require that it be invalidated or falsified by some data. This led to the problem that some theories seemed to be in principle unfalsifiable, yet they otherwise functioned as fine scientific theories. Thomas Kuhn was a graduate student of a Vienna Circle member, who was given the task of defending the verification thesis by examining history. He came to the conclusion that the same data supported two opposite (incommensurate) views (paradigms), and thus the victory of one theory over another was sociological--one group of theorists died and another rose up to take their place. Imre Lakatos didn't think the various paradigms had to be incommensurate, Einstein's theory of gravity didn't deny Newton, it merely augmented it. However when a theory spends all of its time making ad hoc excuses to explain unexpected data, then the theory is in its "degenerate" phase, whereas a theory that is explaining more and more similarities with the same set of models is in its "progressive" phase. It is the greater explanatory power of "progressive" theories that makes them superior to "degenerate" theories, and how they ultimately triumph.

String theory, according to the physicists who wrote this article, is empirically degenerate but theoretically progressive. I'm not sure this distinction has any meaning. If one doesn't worry about the data, then how does one know if all these ad hoc rules are brilliant development or just epicycles? But Lakatos only suggests that one choose the more progressive program, and if there is only one program then there is nothing to switch to. The authors suggest that this is the case for string theory, there just isn't any alternative--which I find an odd position to defend. There have been many alternatives, most of which are neglected because all the money is in string theory right now.

But the process of deciding what was a "good" theory made me want to apply this to Darwinism. Here's how it shapes up:

Phil. of Science	What is a scientific theory?	Darwinism is:
Positivism	Verifiable theory	Not verifiable
Popper	Falsifiable theory	Not falsifiable
Kuhn	Incommensurate paradigm	Not even incompatible
Lakatos	Progressive vs degenerate	More likely degenerate

Strangely enough, all the same arguments apply to Darwinism that applied to string theory! Like string theory, it isn't verifiable, or even falsifiable. It is not even incommensurate with any other theory, because it tries to be everything to everyone. When difficulties arise, say altruism or convergent evolution, it makes up rules to handle all the exceptions. So it operates as if it is in degenerate mode. And people are fond of saying that despite its faults, there really is no alternative to the theory that might be more progressive.

So if this be the mode of the 21st century, science will be inundated in "grand unified theories" that suck up all the resources without making much progress--hindering the development of real alternatives. Which brings us to the phrase "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". To my knowledge, the statement was first made in 1976 by Carl Sagan in his own defense. He was a co-investigator on the mass spectrometer experiment on Viking that failed to find life on Mars. His civil engineering colleague, with a spectacularly simple instrument (the Labelled Release) did find life. Since it was informally thought that the discovery of life would be an automatic Nobel Prize, Sagan had to explain why his PhD-loaded team didn't find it but a civil engineer did. So Sagan intoned this famous line, but of course he reserved the right to decide whose data was the more extraordinary. And no surprise, the status quo was upheld. This is what Lakatos called "the protective belt" of ad hoc statements to protect the theory. It is a sign of a degenerate science program.

Kuhn may not have been surprised, but Lakatos surely would have been disappointed.

Every once in a while, more often when I am writing a thesis, I get on a rant about Microsoft. This one came up when my erstwhile editor flagged "biassed" as misspelled. Why did she flag it? Because MS put that wiggly red line under it. And why did they flag it? Because I violated the "Rule" of American English editors. Who are these "American English editors"? Nobody knows. I mean, in France they have the "Academie Francaise" and apparently, many countries have a body of graybeards whose job it is to admit or deny words. From Afrikaans to Yoruba, there is a committee who fixes the spelling. But glaringly missing from this list is anything English. Or American for that matter.

So who gets to make up the rules that Microsoft uses for its "English spelling"? Their committee on "Natural Language Group". And who does this group answer to? Apparently no one but their bosses--which I suppose might still be Bill Gates. But no one can tell, because the spelling dictionary file, Mssp3en.lex, is locked in a proprietary format. We might surmise, however, that the now-discontinued Encarta Encyclopedia and Dictionary, which has been spun off to Webster's International since 2006, might be the source of the spelling regulations. And who listens to Webster International on this subject?

Websters' major clients and partners in the digital and publishing worlds have included — in addition to our extensive contracts as a preferred vendor for Microsoft/MSN — Channel 4, Cranium, The Economist, The New York Times, World Book, Dorling Kindersley, Hachette Livre, Harcourt, Rodale and Macmillan

So the cabal has a long reach into the publishing business. We note the presence of "The Gray Lady" as well as two large book publishers. The significance of these for-profit companies will shortly become apparent.

So what in particular is the reason for rejecting "biassed" as a proper spelling? Microsoft won't say, of course, but after some strenuous sleuthing, here is what "The English Spelling Society" says about superior American spelling:

With phonics now officially acknowledged by the British education authorities as central to literacy acquisition even in such a wayward alphabetic system as English, Britain should also acknowledge most American forms as better suited to the phonic learner than their British counterparts.

And here is how the spelling society views the problem that initiated this blog--the doubling or lack of doubling of final consonants:

One of the most troublesome features of English spelling is the lack of reliable rules to tell us when to double consonants. One often cited rule has it that, when a base word ending in a single consonant letter adds a suffix beginning with a vowel, the consonant is doubled if its preceding vowel is both short and stressed (eg, commit has TT in committing); but where these precise conditions do not apply, the final consonant is not doubled (eg, single T in commitment since the suffix begins with a consonant, and in inviting since the preceding vowel of invite is long and the T is not final in the base form, and in visiting, since the vowel immediately preceding the T in visit is unstressed). This rule, which is generally accepted by both American and British spelling conventions is in itself too complex to be easily mastered, but British (not American) spelling aggravates the difficulty with numerous exceptions. The most widespread pattern of exceptions affects verbs ending in an unstressed vowel plus single L, such as travel.

An editor, who must have been reading from a resource I haven't found on the web, once told me that the American approach to doubling was to use the shorter spelling if it did not already exist in the dictionary. So for example, "bus" plural goes to "buses" rather than "busses" because there is no item "buse" in the dictionary. On the other hand, "fuss" does not go to "fuses" because there is a "fuse" in the dictionary. (What this rule does with "buss" is obviously a bit unclear--Microsoft certainly rejects "busses".)

Well let me clear up what the Spelling Society finds so difficult to understand. The spelling rule for doubling really is quite simple, and applies to ancient Hebrew and Korean as well. There are two kinds of syllables, closed and open. A closed syllable ends with a consonant, whereas an open syllable ends with a vowel. Closed syllables have short vowels, open syllables have long vowels. Therefore one doubles the final consonant in order to "protect" a short vowel. Fuse --> fuses, and bus --> busses, according to this rule. The application is entirely phonetic, and does not require knowledge of a lexicon to be applied. Thus the first statement of the Spelling Society contradicts the later statement--because shorter spellings are no longer phonetic.

In fact, "if two spellings are possible, choose the shorter form of the spelling" is a recursive statement, because it suggests that this rule is not being applied if there is a shorter version. Nor can it be applied consistently because then there will be no second spelling option.

So instead of going by the sound and the syntax of the root word, we are now dependent on a dictionary to figure out the right spelling. This is like going back from phonetic spelling to Chinese characters, or like going from the Phoenician alphabet to the Egyptian hieroglyphics. This undoes 3000 years of convention, and you call this progress?

What if tomorrow someone decides to convert a verb to a noun, "Them cops were 'busing me, man." When do we go back and change the spelling of the noun converted to a verb "Bussing"?

Soon it will require an educated elite, possessing the latest in Microsoft software to tell us peons how to spell. Sort of the way hieroglyphics died out with the last Egyptian priest in 300 AD. Bad spellers will be ostracized, discriminated against, prejudiced. I had a friend tell me that my double consonant on "biassing" was going to get my resume rejected!

And fear will drive us all toward buying Microsoft products to check our spelling. Which, of course, will change arbitrarily as they "improve" the spelling the way the spelling society dictates. This will necessitate buying the latest in Microsoft software, lest we be discovered to be using last year's spelling. Like Winston Smith in 1984, we will spend our lives editing more and more dictionaries for Microsoft, because he who controls the language, controls the people.

Stop! Spellers of the world, unite! Discard your Microsoft Word and your Merriam-Webster dictionaries, you have nothing to lose but your chains!

If the Physics Nobel went for a metaphysical theory weakly supported by data, the Chemistry Nobel went for strongly supported data that undermined a bad metaphysical theory. The two prizes could not have been more different than night and day.

First let's try to understand the metaphysics that underpins chemistry, and its subtle message about materialist reductionism. (I'm a physicist, so I'm bound to get the nuance wrong since I don't work in a chemistry, but I had organic chem in college and a course on solid state physics taught by a crystallographer in grad school, and since the topic of the Nobel is crystallography, I thought at least I'd get the physics right.) Let's start with the history.

Now as the Medieval synthesis of Aristotle and Aquinas began to crumble in the Renaissance, the Greek atomism of Democritus and Epicurus began to gain a hearing. Long before physicists would believe in the metaphysical atom (which being unobservable remained a ideal, not a datum), the chemists were finding that chemical reactions had specific amounts: two parts hydrogen plus one part oxygen = water. Whether or not atoms existed, chemistry was most easily explained as the reaction of individual atoms. Later on, physicists found that the gas laws of Charles and Boyle could be best explained by atoms, Maxwell even found velocity distributions for these atoms, and Boltzmann demonstrated that statistics on these atoms could explain all of thermodynamics.

The metaphysics was clear--all of life was reducible to smaller units so that the macroscopic behavior was merely the accumulation of microscopic behavior. Once atoms were recognized, then all the ways to arrange them were tabulated into 7 crystal systems of 32 point groups. Now when you picked up a rock you had never seen before, you could classify it with the exhaustive classification scheme because you knew it was made of atoms. The power in this knowledge was the power of atomism, of reductionism, of a correct metaphysical view of reality. Later on when glass was found not to be crystalline, one made a special exemption for "amorphous" or "glassy" solids that, we were told, were just extremely viscous liquids. But the difference between the categories was clear, crystals had order, liquids did not.

Now this introduces a very old chestnut into the intelligent design community. Since a crystal had order, but was not designed, how does one distinguish between that and the real ID? The answer came back that the order was not very informative. The NaClNaClNaCl repitition in a salt crystal didn't have much complexity. In fact, we could compress the formula easily (NaCl)_n where n is the number of times we need to repeat. This led to the idea of Kolmogorov Complexity, which is the length of the formula or algorithm necessary to duplicate the object. Obviously a crystal could be compressed to a very short string, as we did above.

Well then, what about glass? If we can't crystallize it or compress it to a formula, then does it have more information than salt? In this case we say that it is highly disordered. No two samples of glass will have atoms in exactly the same place, only the average composition can be known. For example, when we send neutrons or x-rays diffracting through glass, they don't form the patterns that crystals form, they don't have strongly peaked Fourier components of a periodic structure. Imagine that atoms were an orchestra, then crystals would be Mozart and glass would be Bartok. That's what these diffraction experiments revealed, that glass had no long range order. It had no information.

In contrast to this inorganic chemistry, living biology was far harder to characterize. For one thing, many organic molecules just resisted crystallization the way honey stays liquid in your pantry. But it obviously wasn't random either. Was there any way that living things could occupy a space between liquids and crystals, being full of information yet not compressed to simple algorithms? The biologists were happy to give information to their enzymes, but the chemists weren't too sure. Everything orderly comes down to those 7 crystal systems, they would say, and there's less information in a liquid than in a crystal. So don't you go trying to explain life as an information rich crystal. (Cue to Dawkins Ruse claiming life began on the backs of crystals.)

In contrast to this reductionist approach to atoms, mathematicians were already exploring systems that didn't fit those 7 crystal systems. The one I recall most vividly was Roger Penrose's tiles that could make 5-fold "flower" crystals but had no repeating units. That is, none of those 7 crystal systems could have 5-fold symmetry, as any crystallographer would explain, because you just can't find a way to tile a surface with pentagons. Hexagons, squares, triangles, yes, pentagons, no. But Penrose tiles do make lovely 5-fold stars and flowers, but without any repeating units. Why is that?

The chemists were adamant. Whatever Penrose does with his tiles, is not possible with atoms.

Well, why not? Aren't tiles made out of atoms after all?

Because such a system would have no repeating pattern, yet still have an overall pattern. It would have long-range order without short-range order. And if we allow those kinds of objects into our world, then humans would not be reducible to interactions of atoms, but would have long-range order that perhaps made them respond to thoughts and emotions and objects on the other side of the universe. That was what Aristotle and Aquinas were promoting! Remember the 4 elements? The reason rocks sink in water is that they are "seeking their own kind" and the reason fire rises in air is it too is "seeking its kind" meaning the sun and the aurora. It was this sort of "spooky-action-at-distance" that assigned purpose and intent and function to inanimate things like rocks and fire that was precisely what the atomist theory was meant to eliminate. Read Lucretius on the need to reduce everything to atoms to remove any affect of the gods on earthly phenomena.

Not only did everything have to reduce to atoms, but all the interactions had to reduce to collisions between atoms. It doesn't get any more local than that. We have doodles of Descartes' trying to show that the planets move, not because they were set in motion like Aristotle, but because little whirlpools of atoms filling the heavens were colliding with them and pushing them along.

Of course gravity didn't fit that model. It really was spooky-action-at-a-distance, but Newton pled the fifth, "hypotheses non fingo" he said and refused to elaborate. And then Faraday started spouting off about electric and magnetic fields, but fortunately theoretical physicists tamed all these spooky things by claiming they are mediated by particles. Sorry, I got carried away with the physics again.

So in a nutshell, the atomic theory of matter is strongly coupled with the local force interaction theory of matter. If we allow atoms to possess long-range forces, then it would appear we are allowing Aristotle and Aquinas a foothold. In biology, this comes down to a Darwinist theory that will not allow organisms to forsee the future and plan their reproduction accordingly. Just as there can be no planning in Darwinism, there can be no global or long-range interactions in chemistry. That was the metaphysical requirement, and the barrier that separated chemistry from biology. Biology is all about apparent purpose, chemistry is all about local reactions, local equilibria that have no purpose.

Then along comes Shechtman. And he had no commitment to the metaphysics of materialism. If long-range order exists and he finds it, he is going to report it. And if five-fold symmetry is observed, then it will be evidence for the long-range order, since there is no way to include it in the 7 crystal systems. He published that paper in 1984 and you would have thought he had reported being abducted by aliens.

The doorkeepers of the journals, the guardians of the metaphysics were not going to allow such heresy. Twenty-seven long years later, we find who won that battle.

But what exactly does it mean that interactions are non-local? It means that quantum mechanics is closer to reality than Democritus' atoms. It means that people are not merely made up of atoms, but atoms carefully arranged by some external force. It means that experiments are not isolated from the universe, but always under the influence of things far away. It means that integer dimensions do not capture reality, but we live in fractional spaces, in fractal geometries that have information at all scales from the galaxy down to the subatomic nucleus. It means that no man is an island, no man stands alone. If ever there was a rebuttal of materialism, if ever there were a way to convince a Darwinist that he can never recover the reductionist purposeless of Darwin, it would be this Nobel prize.

How does this Nobel impact on ID?

It hardly says that crystals are now an intelligently designed inanimate object, but it does say that the geometry of space is intelligently designed. Rather than elevating crystals to the level of consciousness, it demonstrates the incompleteness, the utter poverty of space and time in which materialism disrespects the geometry of nature. Rather than a Maginot Line between information rich Biology and information poor Chemistry, there is now an entire world, an infinite spectrum of places to tuck in information. Today we are reading the message in the genome, tomorrow we will be reading the message in the quasi-crystals.

We truly live in the Information Age.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Everyone expects the Nobel Peace prize to be a joke. For one thing, the Norwegians who select it are elected officials,I mean what else would you expect from a professional politician? But the Nobel prize in Physics is awarded by the Swedes. It is supposed to be for lifetime achievement, which explains why the Medicine Nobel was given to a fellow who up and died two days before. (No, they aren't taking it back from his widow.) So you would think the Physics prize would go to a whitehaired professor with baggy trousers and leather elbow patches on his jacket. I mean a whole pile of previous Nobel prize winners vote on it!

Oh. I see what you mean. I suppose that is a weak point too. Positive feedback can be quite devastating. Well, maybe that is what afflicted this year's choice. But I suspect worse. Well, what was the award for?

It went to three astronomers for carefully measuring the light from distant supernovae--fifty of them to be precise.

Okay, you are asking, what makes this discovery special? If we examine the Nobel citations, we see that novel discoveries, building a better instrument, and sometimes bold theories that transform the field are the major reasons for awarding the Nobel. Since the Nobel is not supposed to be awarded to dead people, sometimes a worthy recipient is cited for "lifetime achievement" just before he dies. Hence the trio of ancient physicists that got the prize in 2009. So which category does this year's prize fall into?

Have supernovae been observed before? Oh sure, all the way back to the Chinese astronomers in 1054. Some would even say that the Christmas star was a supernova. How about 50, is that a special number? Not really, the era of robotic telescopic observations permit thousands of such objects to be observed simultaneously from both ground and space-based telescopes 24/7. So if it wasn't the observation that was so special, was it the technique? Nope, they used other peoples instruments and data sets. So if it isn't the observation and the technique, is it lifetime achievement? Absolutely not, these are rather youngish astronomers.

I carefully tabulated the last 110 years worth of Nobel prizes and this is the chart I got for the ages.

The trend has been toward older and older Nobel prize-winners, with a trend line of one decade per 50 years. Right before the last 2 years, the average age was above 60. The overall average is 54 years old. This years winners averaged 46 years old, last year 44, and the year before that 80! So we see that the Nobel committee must think either that they need to award younger men (only two have been women), or perhaps these men are above average in contribution. Or is it something else?

We've eliminated novel observations, novel techniques, lifetime achievements, which leaves only bold theories that change the paradigm. What theory did these 50 supernovae prove?

Dark energy.

What's that? Well, to be more precise we could called it negative pressure, or perhaps anti-gravity. But it acquired the name "dark energy" to make it sound like the other thing nobody can explain, which is "dark matter". Now matter that is dark is hard to see with a telescope, especially when it is far away. Sometimes we can see it when it obscures the light from behind, as in dark nebula. But many times it doesn't even do that, and we only discover it by its gravitational affect on the "bright matter" around it. So the name is self-explanatory. But what does "dark energy" mean?

The story goes back to Einstein, who was a materialist and therefore like the Greeks before him, wanted the world to have no beginning, because without a creation there need be no creator. Unfortunately, gravity pulls everything in, so if the universe was eternal, something had to balance out the gravity that was trying to pull it in. Newton accomplished this with a careful balancing act--putting as much matter outside as inside in order to pull it in both directions at once. Einstein's equations, however, had nothing on the outside, but gravity warped the space with no way to flatten it back out. After staring at his equations, Einstein decided that his metaphysics required a modification, and he added in something called "The Cosmological Constant" to balance the gravity. This is the exact same item that today has been called "dark energy". Later when Hubble observed the galaxies all rushing away from each other, Einstein realized that an explosion would neatly keep the galaxies apart, and he removed the constant, calling it "his greatest mistake."

Therefore this constant has been in disrepute since the 1961 discovery of the "Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation," which is the observation of the light emitted 13.7 billion years ago in that enormous explosion. It also generated 2 Nobel prizes for the discoverers, Penzias and Wilson. Robert Jastrow wrote about the effect this observation had on the astronomy community in his 1978 book "God and the Astronomers". The last 3 sentences of his book get quoted a lot, but it bears repeating:

At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greated by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

This has been infuriating for materialists who would give their eyeteeth to be able to get rid of the creation with its implied creator, and go back to the eternality of Democritus. Sir Fred Hoyle, a self-professed atheist and follower of Democritus, denied the reality of the creation, which he attempted to ridicule as "the Big Bang". Despite his enormous intellect, he was unable to persuade very many astronomers of his position. There have been many attempts to make the Big Bang cyclic, and thereby eternal, but one of Stephen Hawking's first contributions with Roger Penrose was to show that this didn't work. \ Roger Penrose a member of the atheistic Humanist Society, however, has attempted a different kind of cyclic Big Bang which resulted in a bizarre publication last year. Hawking, another self-professed atheist, tried to get rid of the Big Bang, first by making time imaginary in his "A Brief History of Time", and now by invoking another 7 dimensions of reality in "The Grand Design".

All of these proposals have been attempts to metaphysically remove the Big Bang. I call them metaphysical, because their central premise is that reality is not the way it appears. Hoyle had protons appearing miraculously out of the vacuum and light getting tired as it got older. Hawking first had to make time an imaginary quantity, now he wants to invoke 7 more imaginary dimensions. Penrose wants so much time that spacetime loses track of its size.

These are not idiots. In fact, if you read the literature of their atheist clubs, they value Reason over all other attributes of man. It is because of their Reason that they consider themselves atheists. Yet their worship of Reason has made them adopt unreasonable positions. We are talking serious physicists here who have abandoned physics for metaphysical statements that in principle cannot be measured.

So when three rather youngish astronomers say, "Look at that, these supernova are dimmer than we expected, could this be evidence of dark energy? Could this be proof that maybe the Big Bang wasn't necessarily the beginning?" You can just imagine the electric jolt that went through the materialist community.

For the first time since Einstein's greatest blunder and since Penzias' and Wilson's discovery, there was data for Democritus and materialism. Now let's be clear, the "dark energy" cabal isn't yet ready to dismiss the Big Bang, but they are well on track for finding solutions to Einstein's equations that make it less and less necessary. First we demonstrate anti-gravity, next we start finding proof of "inflation" and "baby universes" and the "multiverse" is just around the corner.

What exactly is "dark energy"? Nobody knows. It is invisible. It has no effects on any experiment you can do in the lab. It is only quantifiable in the sense that computer simulations that attempt to distribute galaxies in the universe use it as a dial on their codes. When the dial is set at "11," as Spinal Tap would remind us, then we get a better fit. It's physical reality is right up there with the positive feedback parameter in global warming climate codes. It has only a "virtual" reality.

What about this supernovae data, isn't that a slam dunk for the existence of dark energy? (just look how far those data points are from the expected straight line!)

Actually no. Just last week a sixth theory to explain the supernova data without dark energy was announced. For reference, here are a few of the "normal science" explanations that can account for the data.
1. Perhaps the stellar codes (derived from LosAlamos bomb codes) that calculate the light output are in error, just as the were wrong about the mixing ratios in the center of our own sun, so that there is a size-dependence and light-dependence to these supernova.
2. Perhaps far away supernova are dimmed by dust, plasma, light interactions, scattering, etc. The reason they look dimmer the farther they are away, is that there is more and more dust between us. (The z-scale used for x-axis is nearly logarithmic, compressing distances.)
3. Since far away supernova went off earlier in the history of the universe. Perhaps the composition of the star that exploded back then was different from nearby supernovae--specifically, the metallicity--making the light output depend on composition.
4. Since far away supernova went off earlier in the history of the universe. Perhaps the physical constants back then were slightly different than they are today, changing the light output.
5. Perhaps they really are further away because our galaxy is in a less-dense region of the universe, and like a bubble in champagne, it is expanding locally, making it appear as if it is accelerating faster than it should.
6. Perhaps our galaxy and the some of the ones near it are flowing in a "dark flow" through the universe, making supernova in some directions dimmer, while in other directions they look brighter.

The nice thing about most of these alternative explanations, is that they don't invoke any unobservable metaphysical substances like "dark energy". Wouldn't that make them more scientific than dark energy, and not less? Wouldn't the Nobel committee wait for slightly better confirmation of "dark energy" before they award the prize? Like some other measuring stick than supernovae? Why are they so hasty?

Well, other than trying to improve their age statistics that we noted in the graph above, another reason for haste might be economic. NASA has been studying a "Joint Dark Energy Mission" for nearly a decade. This year the New York Times published an article how this mission wasn't faring too well in the constrained budgets of this administration. We're talking a $1.6 billion initiative, which if it overruns the budget like the James Webb telescope, may be multi-billions of funding to the astronomy community. The NYT even quotes the future Nobel winner, Perlmutter, saying he doesn't think this mission will go forward. Of course, if it is now considered Nobel-prize-winning science, maybe NASA will have a change of heart. Maybe this is a proactive Nobel, awarded for spurring future research rather than past. Sort of like the Nobel Peace prize in 2009.

God save us all.

Perhaps you have seen the PETA billboard that went up after a boy was bitten by a shark while spear-fishing. PETA thought they could capitalize on this shock value of this by inserting their none-too-subtle message on a billboard. But whatever the merits of such tacky exploitation of human tragedy, the part that got me was the subtle pantheist religious sentiments of both the billboard and the execrable defense that PETA provided for their insensitivity to the boy and his family. So this is my billboard.


_{Credit: Hieronymus Bosch, Hermitage, St Petersburg.}

A recent blogger has announced that a few million simulated monkeys really could reproduce Shakespeare. This is such a hoary chestnut, that of course, everyone had to go and read just exactly what the fellow actually did, if only to ridicule it. Here's how he describes his project,

Instead of having real monkeys typing on keyboards, I have virtual, computerized monkeys that output random gibberish. This is supposed to mimic a monkey randomly mashing the keys on a keyboard. The computer program I wrote compares that monkey’s gibberish to every work of Shakespeare to see if it actually matches a small portion of what Shakespeare wrote...
For this project, I used Hadoop, Amazon EC2, and Ubuntu Linux.  Since I don’t have real monkeys, I have to create fake Amazonian Map Monkeys.  The Map Monkeys create random data in ASCII between a and z.  It uses Sean Luke’s Mersenne Twister to make sure I have fast, random, well behaved monkeys.  Once the monkey’s output is mapped, it is passed to the reducer which runs the characters through a Bloom Field membership test.  If the monkey output passes the membership test, the Shakespearean works are checked using a string comparison.  If that passes, a genius monkey has written 9 characters of Shakespeare.  The source material is all of Shakespeare’s works as taken from Project Gutenberg.

The bit about well-behaved monkeys is necessary, because the actual experiment reported,

In 2003, scientists at Paignton Zoo and the University of Plymouth, in Devon in England reported that they had left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Sulawesi Crested Macaques for a month; not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five pages consisting largely of the letter S, (the full text may be found here:), they started by attacking the keyboard with a stone, and continued by urinating and defecating on it.

Which would be my reaction too, if at two years old I had been given a toy that was tactilely boring, visually structured for no apparent reason, acoustically monotone, hopelessly inedible and smelled like old coffee. But people aren't as rational as monkeys, and so they spend hours with that thing, banging on it interminably, writing parables about monkeys on keyboards when everyone knows it is really about people. But is it true that a genius monkey could type nine letters of Shakespeare?

Well, of course, but fitting those 9 letter fragments back into a jigsaw puzzle of Shakespeare takes a bona fide human. As one blogger put it, this is just Dawkin's Weasel program all over again--comparing a partially completed solution to the final solution, and modifying only the parts that are wrong. Not a very random way of using those monkeys at all! Imagine taking an MedCat exam where the professor told you which multiple choice problems were wrong and to go back and change them. Even without knowing anything, how long would it take you to score a 100%?

But what would it take to get Shakespeare without any human intervention at all? How long long would it take to collect, say, a page of Shakespeare, say 500 words or 2500 letters completely randomly?

I wouldn't hold my breath for the genius monkeys. This one has been around for a long, long time. From the 2003 internet we can find the software for running it on our own computer. And the blog forums report the progress (cached versions from original site that went down 7 years ago). This comment from Evan Kirschbaum at HP Laboratories:

That seems about right. I'm getting 6 characters about every four or five seconds and there appear to be about 70 characters in the set, so a back of the envelope calculation shows that you should get 7 letters after about 5 minutes, 8 letters after about 6 hours, and 9 letters after about 18 days. (And as I was typing that, I got my first seven letter match: "1. When" from the beginning of Macbeth .) Ten letters would take about three and a half years, and you won't live to see eleven letters (239 years). If a million of us work on this, it'll take two hours to get eleven letters, 14 months to get thirteen, and 82 years to get fourteen. (Got my second seven letter match: "DukeE." from Measure for Measure .)

Okay, how does this work? I'm not sure how Evan justified his calculation, but it seems he was working with the "doubling time", how long does it take to get one more letter is proportionally constant. So he's assuming the ratio Time-for-6-letters / Time-for-5-letters = Time-7 / Time-6.  Let's see how that works out.  His 6-letters is 4.5 sec; 7-letters is 300s (= 5 min);  8-letters is 21600s (= 6 hr); 9-letters is 1555200s (=18 days). Then taking ratios we have 7letter/6letter = 66; 8lett/7lett=72; 9lett/8lett=72; So it looks like his doubling ratio was about 72.

Why ~72? Because he assumed that each letter was drawn from a set of 70 characters, so the information per letter was 70= 2^6.1 or 6.1 bits. Therefore adding a letter required 6 doublings, or a factor slightly more than 64. But did each letter really add that much information?

Claude Shannon, the inventor of Information Theory, addressed this same problem in one of his little papers that shook the world. He asked a related question: If I erase every other letter (or more) can people reconstruct the sentence? By doing this, he was able to figure out how much information was encoded in the first letter, the 2nd letter and so forth. The answer is that the first letter has some 4 or so bits of information decreasing smoothly to about 1.7 bits of information by the time you reach the 10th letter. You can check that out with this web applet.

Then the probabilities are easy to calculate--just add up the bits. Not having his paper in front of me, let me just pretend it is the sequence 4 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 +2 +2 + 2 + 2 = 24 bits in 9 letters. Then 1 in 2^24 are the number of equivalent bits of information in the string, which is 1.68 x 10^7 tries, or 16 million tests. If his circa 2002 computer operates at 100 MHz, and does a thousand comparisons per second, then 16 million tests is completed in 160 seconds or about 3 minutes.

Why the difference?

Well, for one thing, Kirschenbaum was calculating the information from a 70 character alphabet, and Shannon reduced it to 27. Already that is a difference of 6.2 bits versus 4.7 bits. But more importantly, Shannon is asking how much information English speakers assign to each letter, which is a lot less than what the computer assigns to each letter. That's just another way of saying that English text can be compressed by at least a factor of 2. That is, 26 letters of the alphabet plus a space (using only caps) is roughly 4.75 bits of information, but real speakers of English find only 1.7 bits of information after the first few letters. That's because English readers know the rules about words starting with X, and a U after a Q, etc. All those rules mean that the next letter is not really 1 in 27, but more like 1 in 3. So a decent compression algorithm should be able to squeeze English down by 1.7/4.7= 35%.

Back to our Million Monkeys algorithm. When it converts all of Shakespeare into 9-character strings to make the comparison with the randomly generated strings, how many strings is that? The Shakespeare corpus has 884,647 words, which are probably a tad over 5 letters each, for about 4.8 million letters. So does that mean there are approximately 4.8 million 9-letter strings we can extract from his works? No, because those 4.8 million character strings from Shakespeare are all restricted by the rules of English, and so many of them will be identical. Using Shannon's method of calculating above we will have about 2²⁴ possible strings, or only 16 million potential strings. This is larger than Shakespeare's corpus, so perhaps the duplicates aren't so big a problem. Let's say this reduces Shakespeare to 3 million unique character strings. Then the calculation using Shannon's method (27 characters = 26 capitals and a space), we get the following statistics:

5 letters = 27⁵ / 3 million = 4.78
6 letters = 27⁶ / 3 million = 129
7 letters = 27⁷ / 3 million = 3500
8 letters = 27⁸ / 3 million = 94,000
9 letters = 27⁹ / 3 million = 2,500,000

Notice that the comparison to Shakespeare's corpus is a constant that cancels out when ratios are taken. This is what makes Kirschenbaum's method work. But if 6 letters took 5 seconds for Kirschenbaum, 7 letters ought to have taken 2.5 minutes. Since Kirschenbaum saw two 7-letter options spring up while he was typing that text, it suggests that his factor 72 was too large, and he should have been using something a bit smaller, maybe closer to Shannon's 27.

So to answer our question about achieving a page of Shakespeare of 2500 letters, we can now calculate that:
27²⁵⁰⁰ / 3 million = 8.5 x 10³⁵⁷¹ which is longer than the age of the universe by a long shot. If we want Shakespeare any time soon, we'll have to hire some of Dawkin's weasels.
====
_{HT: Jonathan, Jonathan and Jack.}

The bartender says, "We don't serve neutrinos here"

A neutrino walks into a bar.

The blogosphere is all abuzz about the CERN neutrino experiment that reported "faster than light" travel for the neutrinos. We all heard the news first from the blogs, and now the arXive pre-print server has the details. This immediate publication is already truly amazing, given the months before the paper copy appears in the library journal. The comments and consequences are flying so thick and fast, one hardly has time to absorb the impact. Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity some 107 years ago, and this has been the first, contradictory laboratory evidence for "superluminal" transport.

But already, one day later, the first theorist has chimed in with an explanation. Not to miss any opportunities, the same theorist has a second explanation, with a different cast of secondary authors. Since both papers are written exclusively by Italians, it would appear that they had their theories ready to go as soon as the experimentalists were confident enough to publish. Other theorists weren't so fortunate to get advance notice, but they are quick with their theories too. Frank Close, an Oxford physicist who just published a book on the Neutrino, doesn't think his life's work was wasted quite yet.

 "Has Cern overthrown this paradigm? I doubt it. Light travels slower through water, glass, even air, than through a vacuum. Radio waves do, too. So light can be slowed down, but not sped up: the vacuum is nature's open road where light travels at the speed limit. We need to be careful when asking what exactly has the Cern experiment done, or, more pertinently, how did it do it?"

Looks like he hasn't read the arXive paper where they explain carefully how they did it, perhaps because his response like mine preceded the publication. Every physicists first question was--how can you measure +/- 10cm over 730km, GPS isn't that accurate! The article explains: with great difficulty. But apparently no expense was spared to get a geodesy model to measure the distance within 10 cm. Atomic clocks were carried into the tunnels to calibrate the timing. Lasers were used to measure the distances down the tunnels. A commercial firm was hired to produce an independent model. Earthquakes and continental drift were used to calibrate their model. If they did make a mistake, it won't be just scientist's reputations lost, there will probably be lawsuits too.

Let us first dispell the misconception of scientists clocking individual neutrinos starting at the Franco-Swiss border and arriving in Italy. No one can see an individual neutrino twice. In fact, you have about 100 million neutrinos from the Sun going through you each second and you don't even notice because their interactions are so very rare. Neutrinos can go through the entire Earth without much chance of interacting. That's why the neutrinos have to be detected statistically. Imagine a marathon that is so crowded that every 20 minutes, another 100 runners were allowed to start, and each runner's time was determined by subtracting off the start time. This is how the neutrinos were produced, in 10.7 microsecond long bunches, separated by 50 microseconds. Unlike a marathon, however, the experimenters assumed that every runner runs exactly the same speed, so the bunch at the end of the race should look just like the bunch at the start gate. Then by aligning the stop bunch with the start bunch will give the time of flight. The paper shows how the alignment looks if they use the speed of light, and how much better it looks if they use a very slightly faster speed. The difference is 60 nanoseconds, which when multiplied by the speed of light of 1 foot per nanosecond, gives 60 feet.

Is this within the error of their distance measurement?

This is the crux of the experiment. Over in Chicago, the scientists at Fermilab had done a similar experiment and likewise had found that neutrinos possibly travelled faster than the speed of light. But the Fermilab scientists didn't want to go through so much expense as the Italians and so they said "we probably made an error, since our uncertainties are bigger than the difference." That is why the Italians spared no expense to get their uncertainties as small as possible. And they got the same result as Fermilab, but this time the uncertainties were 1/6 of the offset, or a "six sigma" result. In experimental science, six sigmas is as close to certainty as you can ever wish for.

So let us assume that both the timing and the distance have been measured about as well as modern technology allows. How then does one explain the effect?

Well the measurement is a statistical measurement of a subatomic particle, which means it is a Quantum Mechanics measurement, and when it comes to QM, statistics are not what they first appear. For example, if you put one foot in ice water, and another in boiling water, you might statistically feel fine, but not in reality. Likewise, statistically the neutrinos might be going faster than light, but individually and in reality none of them are. For example, suppose that only the leading edge of the 10.7 microsecond pulse creates interactions, but the shape looks like the trailing edge of the protons, so that matching shapes gives a false impression of faster-than-light travel.

A second issue is that the neutrino is describable by a wave-function in QM, which is not a single point but spread out over a region of space. One usually describes the wavefunction in terms of a "wave packet" that looks something like an American football, tapering to a point at the front and back. The speed of the football is the "group velocity" and this is the object that has to travel slower than the speed of light. But the interior of this football is full of waves, and those waves can move faster than the speed of light, which is called the "phase velocity". It is the phase velocity that gives the packet its interior shape, though it is the center-of-packet that gives the group velocity. Now the Italians are correlating to the shape of the packet, and if this means they are statistically sensitive to the phase-velocity, they may be fooling themselves thinking they are measuring simply the group velocity.

A third issue is related to the one above. If a wave-packet has a width, then a measurement of the leading edge of the packet and subtracting off the tail-edge of the packet will cause an offset of approximately the width of the packet. That is, when the proton makes the meson that decays into the neutrino, we time the proton and assume that the neutrino acts as if it were collocated with the proton. But perhaps the neutrino acts as a wave that is not collocated with the proton. It would be quite unusual for the wave packet to be 20 meters long, but perhaps it is QM entangled pairs of particles that have this length. Supposing that this entanglement is somehow energy related might account for the fact that MeV neutrinos don't seem to have anomalous offsets, 15GeV neutrinos have a 53ns offset, and 40 GeV neutrinos have a 67 ns offset.  

Having discarded all explanations that rely on errors in timing or distance, we are left with QM wave-particle effects which are not well developed for neutrinos. The closest cousin to a neutrino is an electron, and it weighs in at 511,000 eV/c^2, whereas these neutrinos are thought to weigh much much less, some putting this particular muon neutrino at a rest mass of only 0.003 eV/c^2. This means that the wavepacket size is almost entirely defined by its kinetic energy, which at GeV energies should be sub-atomic length, which is how it interacts with matter--through the weak force at the subatomic level. But no one is really sure, since it is quite difficult to do experiments on such slippery particles.

Let's play a few games with equations, and see what happens. Suppose the rest mass of the muon neutrino is 0.003eV/c^2 (as determined from flavor oscilations between 1 & 2). Then 40GeV/0.003eV = γ = 1.3 x 10¹³. Now events that happen in the rest frame of the neutrino will be multiplied by gamma in the experiment frame, so things that go quickly in the rest frame will appear to go very slowly in the experiment frame (e.g., the decay of muons from air showers). So let us estimate how long a virtual neutrino-antineutrino pair will last in the rest frame. From Heisenberg's Uncertainty, ΔE x Δt = h, or, 2(0.003eV) Δt = 4x10^-15eV-sec ==> 6x10^-13 sec. Now we multiply that by γ to get the experimenter's viewpoint, and find γΔt = Δt' = 8 seconds. Well it only takes 2 ms to go the 730 km from Switzerland to Italy, so in some bizarre fashion, the experiment in Italy is coherently coupled to Switzerland, and we should be using QM correlated statistics rather than uncorrelated statistics.

This experiment was first performed at Fermilab over about the same range, and the 2007 paper reported a speed just a tad slower than the speed-of-light for 3 GeV muon neutrinos. Unfortunately the dither in their GPS contributed 120ns error, and they could only say that the error bars included a possibility of faster-than-light travel as well.  The smallest error bars are for the Supernova 1987A neutrino detection, which found the speed of the 10 MeV electron neutrinos to be very very close to the speed of light. Not only does the smaller gamma for these supernova neutrinos shorten the correlation length, but the astronomical distances should uncorrelate the wavepackets as well. So on the surface, I would suggest that the mystery can be solved through proper attention to QM effects.

Does this result invalidate Einstein?

Not yet. But it does show the difficulty of making Einstein's relativity consistent with quantum mechanics. Einstein apparently despised QM as being "incomplete" so he didn't care about agreement, but the past 60 years have been spent trying to construct a unified theory. And while the weak force (which controls neutrinos) was thought to be well incorporated with photons/electrons into an "electroweak" theory, the discovery of the Higgs boson that was supposed to confirm the theory has proved elusive. So perhaps there remain mysteries in the electroweak formulation, mysteries compounded with these neutrino results.

No.

What about time travel?

I have returned from the annual non-NASA Astrobiology conference, which I attended this year and delivered two papers. After my NASA colleague's long-delayed paper on the discovery of microfossils in carbonaceous chondrites (meteorites that are widely believed to be extinct comet fragments) was accidentally published in March when Fox News broke the paper embargo that led to 40 million web hits, I had fond hopes that this would be the conference that broke the ice about ET. In fact, my first paper was entitled "More Evidence for Liquid Water on Comets" which recorded the mounting evidence that indeed, comets are natural bio-transporters for moving biology all over the cosmos--sorta like Arthur C. Clarke's novel "Rendezvous with Rama".

Curiously, NASA has been having press conference frenzy about, you guessed it, liquid water again. First there was evidence of past water, then present water found on Mars, then briny liquid water, and soon to be fresh liquid water. Maybe, like the LCROSS impact on the Moon, it will now become swimming pools of fresh water. If you recall, the reason given in 1976 for rejecting the evidence for life in Gil Levin's "Labelled Release" experiment on the Viking Mars lander was because "everyone knows Mars is dry as a bone." So perhaps Hoover's paper is having the desired effect: water and gold are exchanging places in the solar system, from rarity to commodity. (If only Levin's experiment had detected gold we'd be back there already . . . )

But the second paper was far more challenging to write. It was an answer to Stephen Hawking's inspired nonsense about M-theory. You can read mathematician Lennox's critique (here's a review of Lennox's book) but what you won't get from him is any idea why Hawking, the atavar of British reserve in his 1986 best-seller "A Brief History of Time", had become a foam-flecked mouthpiece of new atheism. The answer was that the mathematics of his specialty--the Big Bang Cosmology--was becoming untenable, and evidently it was driving him to distraction. This is just another microcosmic example reflecting the fact that the paradigm worldview of the 20th century, the idol which reigned supreme from the publishing of Darwin's "Origin of the Species" through two World Wars and the raising of the Iron Curtain was now crumbling as certainly as the Berlin Wall. (Which, in fact, was the thematic background for Ben Stein's "Expelled" documentary about Darwinist dogmatism.)

Everywhere you look, the Modernist juggernaut is stalled and smoking. If it isn't too big a stretch, the failure of governments in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria, the failure of the Euro-zone, the failure of NASA to launch astronauts, are all emblematic of the failure of Modernism to thrive in the 21st century. The progressive utopia of New Deals, New World Orders, and New Frontiers has retreated into the mists, taking its promises and its promoters into the swamp with it. Even that Modernist paragon of critical skepticism, the man who dominated the philosophy of atheism in Britain representing the pinnacle of enlightened thought, Anthony Flew, recanted his atheism in 2004. It has been a bad beginning to a new century, a new millennium, and Hawking, like most brilliant men, is very aware of this failure of his life's goal, of the purpose of his career, of his cultural worldview, and it is driving him mad.

Now the death of Modernism has been a long time coming, and it would be fruitless to try and pin a date for its last breath. But more importantly, we need to ask the question, what comes after Modernism?

And that is what Hawking is aiming to provide.

The explanation requires that we make A Brief History of Hawking. The history of Modernism is intertwined with the history of materialism. For as the atomic theory of matter gained credence throughout the 19th century, the organic theory of matter, the purposeful motion of the four elements and the perfection of the heavenly bodies lost credence. As this de-mythologizing of nature continued with Darwin's theory of accidental life (1859), there did not seem to be anything left of life's mystery except the math.

That is, there is no doubt that in the 1930's quantum mechanics undermined the atomic theory of matter, but it did so with a peculiar arithmetic that did not seem to obey the rules of cardinal numbers. One plus one no longer equalled two, and only by arcane math could one discover the secret answer. This triumph of pure unapplied math over nature would later earn Eugene Wigner a Nobel prize in physics, and the tradition continues today with hordes of theoretical physicists pursuing the unapplied mathematics of "string theory" in search of the secret to the universe. Stephen Hawking was one such theoretical physicist, wrestling with the math in his physics papers on cosmology and the properties of the unobservable black hole.

This transition from atoms to black holes is significant for Hawking, because it represents more than his personal journey, but the very birth and senescence of materialism, and by close association, of Modernism as well. The physicist who was hugely influential in Hawkings career and who had coined the moniker "black hole", John Archibald Wheeler, wrote that his career had moved through three phases, from "Everything is particles" to "Everything is fields" to "Everything is information." Wheeler spent his first 20 years during WWII doing nuclear physics whose metaphysical foundation was Newtonian materialism. The next 20 years of his life were spent "recertifying" cosmology and its emphasis on the geometry of spacetime, using a mathematics that superceded Newton. While it was a bit of a shock to lose the solidity of Newton's particles, there was a certain comfort in finding a differential geometry that replaced Newton's gears and cogs with geodesics and light-cones. What Materialism lost in sharp definitions it gained in rococco ornamentation. Hawking, with Wheeler, had made the transition from atoms to math, but unlike him, was not willing to take the final step. What was so formidable about this step?

As Wheeler's biographer Kenneth Ford, recounts,

Enter the "Information Period." Wheeler, in his later years, has been asking two kinds of questions. One centers around the reality of existence "out there" independent of our observations. . .The other kind of question concerns the nature of physical law. "It from bit?" is Wheeler's way of asking if the nature and the behavior of the world around us ("it") is accounted for entirely by on-off gates of information ("bits"). Is the computer a better model for nature than the differential equations of continuous variables that has governed physics for several hundred years?

Here's another popular cosmologist, Paul Davies, explaining Wheeler,

To fully understand nature at the deepest level we need to know why the world obeys quantum rules. Part of the answer involves knowing how the quasi-classical world of observation emerges from the weird domain of quantum physics. Wheeler's "It from bit" program proceeds from a well-known yet still mysterious fact. The wave function describing a quantum particle expresses what is known about that particle, i.e. it represents information, or software, whereas the particle itself is an object, or hardware. How do these fundamentally different concepts, associated with different levels of description, fit together, and how does this fit recover the usual notion of "reality"?

In his own words, Wheeler writes,

It from bit. Otherwise put, every "it" — every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself — derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely — even if in some contexts indirectly — from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits. "It from bit" symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes — no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.

That is, Wheeler no longer thinks that materialist particles are the ultimate reality, nor does he think that neoclassical geometry is the ultimate reality, but some strange hybrid that transcends both. For the universe is only poorly described by math, and something more digital, something more quantum-like, something like participation is closer to ultimate reality. He isn't sure what it is, but in his usual style he already has a name for it, Information.

What exactly is this replacement metaphysics, and why does it frighten Hawking so much? Let's begin with some simple observations, moving up to some less-obvious.

1. Information is non-material, so nothing of Plato's or Democritus' eternal atoms remains in the metaphysical foundations of physics. This may have been shocking in 1904 before Einstein told us that matter and energy were the same thing, but we've had a century to absorb this immateriality of reality. Today we glide over this embarassing failure of materialism by saying "of course, the sum of matter and energy is eternal and conserved."

2. But the evidence for the Big Bang would seem to belie this commonly stated aphorism as well. If both matter and energy had a beginning, then there was a time when they were not conserved. Once again, the metaphysical pillar of materialism appeared to crumble. Fred Hoyle attempted to remove the Big Bang entirely so that materialist eternity was preserved, but ultimately failed. Hawking, tellingly, merely attempted to blunt the point of the Big Bang (as recorded by Carl Sagan's introduction to "A Brief History of Time"), but then went on to argue in his most recent book that there has been an infinity of Big Bangs exploding in some eternal mathematical space.  While Hoyle restrained his eternities to observations of this universe, Hawking is having to invoke unobservable multidimensional mathematical eternities.

3. But information is not energy either.  This has taken physicists even longer to accept. To say that the most fundamental nature of reality is neither matter nor energy demolishes this last fiction of eternity, this last pretense that the creation could be finessed. Hawking fought back with the idea that information was merely a state of matter and energy, and that when black holes swallowed information it vanished. Leonard Susskind carried on a 10 year battle with Hawking, finally declaring victory in his book "The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics" when Hawking finally admitted information was eternal.

4. Information, as defined by Claude Shannon, was the opposite of entropy, of disorder, of chance, of random noise. Information not only was immaterial, it was order, plan, design, improbability, an intrinsic value. It was everything that Democritus hated, everything Lucretius warned us against. It was the meaning to the celestial music of the spheres, the joy in the lark's song, the beginning of wisdom and the end of all pursuits. It was Plato's Demiourgos and Aristotle's Prime Mover and Aquinas' Cosmological Proofs.

What was it that made Hawking so terrified of Information? Because Wheeler is saying that the matter and energy of the Big Bang was created but that the Information, the Forms, the plan, the teleology, the logos of that creation was eternal. Hawking like Hoyle and unlike Wheeler and Flew, could not bear to dispense with the whole purpose of materialism--the denial of purpose. Flew, the son of a Methodist preacher and theologian, and Wheeler, the grandson of New Hampshire (Puritan?) pastor could perhaps grudgingly accept this grand design, but neither Hoyle nor Hawking had the benefit of religious ancestors. Materialism was their religion, and the Modernist century was the last great hope for an Enlightenment utopia.

And so Hawking wrote his last long book, like Lucretius, as a paeon to the triumph of man and materialism over the vicissitudes of life and Lou Gehrig's disease. Lennox finds it a hopelessly incoherent denial of theism, and rakes it over the coals of logic. But Hawking never intended it to be a textbook, he wanted a passionate defense of Modernism. And therein lies the rub, for Modernism, like the nirvana of Buddhism, eschews passion in the name of Reason. This makes Hawking's swan song not a defense of Modernism as he intended, but a testimony to Post-Modern authenticity. In such a way we see the Post-Modern replacement for the Modernist century, foreshadowed in the words of Yeats most famous poem--The Second Coming:
 
TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

So it is that the 21st Century has become The Information Age, the killer app of the Enlightenment. As Post-Modernism absorbs the utopian dreams of the 20th century, it tempers them with the knowledge of diversity, of communication, with the great body of individuals united by thought and by internet. A new sort of consensus is arising, not based on monolithic Reason, which is far less hostile to the religion of 19th century. Biology is no longer about thermodynamic equilibrium, it is no longer about non-equilibrium chemicals in a bag, rather it is about nanomachines and programs, about purpose and design. Biology has become Information. It is in this context that I wrote a paper on the Origin of Life as an insoluble information theoretic problem that can be resolved only through the non-local quantum coherence of the universe. I like to imagine that had Wheeler lived to read it, he would have liked it too.

The idea that it may be possible to penetrate the "Romulan invisibility cloak" has received a boost.

Studies of the low-temperature glow left from the Big Bang suggest that several of these "invisibility cloaks" may have left marks on our sky.

This "Romulan presence" idea is popular in modern physics, but experimental tests have been hard to come by.

The preliminary work, to be published in Unphysical Review D, will be firmed up using data from the Planck telescope.

For now, the team has worked with seven years' worth of data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which measures in minute detail the cosmic microwave background (CMB) - the faint glow left from our Universe's formation.

'Mind-blowing'

The theory that invokes these Romulan cloaks - a theory formally called "warp drive" - holds that as interstellar spacecraft pop into and out of the galaxy using this method, they leave telltale effects on spacetime.

Hiranya Peerless, a cosmologist at University College London, and her colleagues have now worked out that when a spacecraft pinches off spacetime in its warp drive, which is very similar to the process that makes baby universes only smaller, it may leave a characteristic pattern in the CMB.