Welcome to the very first issue of Lab Letters, FF’s weekly science news micro-post!

While the Philippine justice system is busy placating the feelings of the offended Catholic clergy and trying to stifle free speech, here’s what the rest of the world’s scientists living in the 21st century have been up to:

 

Tang was just the beginning

The NASA Space Food Systems Laboratory’s Advanced Food Technology Project has posted a series of pictures detailing the various things astronauts eat while in space:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/27/3922806/nasa-space-food-photos

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/slsd/about/divisions/hefd/project/advanced-foods.html

 

Psychology gets in on the gigil phenomenon…

…scientifically dubbed “cute aggression,” with an experiment involving bubble wrap:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2013/01/26/psychology-why-you-want-to-squeeze-cute-things

 

165-million-year-old blood-biting tyrant swimmer identified

The partial skeleton, said to be related to crocodiles and similar to dolphins, has been sitting in a Glasgow museum since 1919:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-21220499

 

Wow! Almost as much as a floppy disk!

UK scientists convert Shakespeare’s sonnets and other data totalling 739 kilobytes into DNA strands:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/?p=42546

 

Scotty would be proud

UK and Czech scientists are working on a ‘tractor beam’ that can ferry small molecules across a small distance, hopefully scalable to bigger objects:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-21187598

 

Once you pop

Finally, here’s how popcorn happens:

http://i.imgur.com/AFhpo.gif

 

What information would YOU want to be stored in DNA? Tell us in the comments!

See you next week for another awesome issue of FF’s Lab Letters!

 

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Image c/o D. Bogdanov/University of Edinburgh

The Reproductive Health Bill is now the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act of 2012. While the measure has passed all legislative hurdles, the RH Law is now facing a predictable challenge in the Supreme Court. More predictably, the challenge comes from Catholic Church associates. While the intention behind the challenge is supposedly to protect the unborn, it is clear that if the goal of Catholics is to protect as many unborn children as possible, striking down the RH Law is just about the worst thing you can possibly do.

On the first working day of the year, January 2, James and Lovely-Ann Imbong filed a petition for the Supreme Court to nullify the recently passed bill. “In behalf” of their minor children, the Imbongs also name their two offspring as petitioners. As has been pointed out, the “Imbong” name should be very familiar because the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines has Jo Imbong, mother of James, as its lawyer. Also, James Imbong is the first nominee of the CBCP-backed Ang Pro-Life Party-List, which claims to represent not the Church, but OFWs. Try to stop yourself from laughing; it gets better. The CBCP has come out to state that they are in no way involved with the petition against the RH Law. Melvin Castro of the CBCP said that their counsel’s relation to the petitioners was “purely incidental.”

Reason and Science of Contraception

It is typical for conservative Catholics to equivocate the RH Law with abortion. On the contrary, the availability of contraception diminishes the number of abortions. The logic is simple: people who use contraception want to prevent pregnancy resulting from particular sexual encounters. They can choose to have children from later coital acts by stopping the use of contraceptives. By reducing the number of pregnancies of people who do not want to be pregnant, the number of unwanted pregnancies decreases. Since unwanted pregnancies are the targets of chemical and surgical abortion, less unwanted pregnancies means less induced abortions. After all, why would you willfully abort a wanted pregnancy? Consistent and proper use of contraceptives therefore ensures that a pregnancy that does occur is wanted and planned instead of unwanted and by chance.

But, let’s not rely on pure reason and let some empiricism enlighten us. A four-year study by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis came out last year to show that when free contraceptives were provided to a community, abortions decreased. It should be noted that from their study, most women (75%) chose to have “long-acting” contraceptives such as IUDs instead of pills, which must be taken daily. They found that abortions in St. Louis, Missouri, where the study was conducted, dropped by 20%, while the rest of Missouri’s abortion rates remained steady.

This result, however, is not enough to show that opposition to the RH Law will result in more abortions.

 

Intelligently Designed Abortion

Abortion is an unavoidable fact of pregnancy. Spontaneous abortions are more politely called “miscarriages,” but the essence is the same for either spontaneous or induced abortion—pregnancy ends and a fertilized embryo fails to develop into a child. Catholics would argue that the embryo is already a person and intentionally inducing abortion is murder. Miscarriages, then, would be accidental death. It turns out, however, that as much as 50% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. This estimate includes the great number of pregnancies that were never even noticed because the embryos were spontaneously aborted so early. That means, for any sexual act that successfully results in a fertilized embryo (which Catholics believe are people), 50% of all of these “people” will die. If the Christian God is anti-abortion, it’s hard to imagine greater hypocrisy.

The main mechanism of contraceptives is to prevent the meeting of sperm and egg altogether, meaning no embryo is formed. The opposition of the Church against condoms should have been a dead giveaway that their concern is sex and not unborn children. Chemical contraceptives, like the pill, prevent the meeting of sperm and egg through various means, such as by slowing down the transport of the egg from the ovaries to the uterus. But, even if a drug were specifically designed to prevent the implantation of a fertilized embryo (which is supposedly a person), its users would not rival the number of abortive events caused by well-meaning couples wanting to get pregnant. That’s not a strong enough statement. All the induced abortions performed in the world (over 470,000 in the Philippines according to 2000 data from the Guttmacher Institute), cannot even begin to compete with spontaneous abortions.

The Department of Health reported that there were 1,700,000 live births in 2000. If that is just 50% of all successful pregnancies, then that means there were also 1,700,000 embryos naturally aborted, or over three times the number of induced abortions in the same year. Therefore, if many pregnancies are prevented altogether through contraception, there will be less abortions. Thus, the Catholic plan of “openness” to pregnancy is tantamount to “openness” to spontaneous abortion. In contrast, a couple with no plans of ever conceiving risks no abortions. Comparatively, a couple that plans each pregnancy with contraceptives, and does not haphazardly sire dozens of kids, will not abort as many embryos as the well-meaning Catholic couple.

 

Accessories to Murder

If you want to avoid abortion altogether, the best way is not to have kids. If you want kids, you will risk having an abortion, whether or not you know about it. That is a fact we must accept as a nation. If you want to risk the least number of abortions, then you will need to plan your pregnancies and use contraception.

If you have as many kids as you want, you will abort just as many. It’s statistics. And if you want to kill as many unborn as possible, go a step further like the Imbongs and deny Filipinos the right to access to contraceptives.

The use of the Imbongs’ children in the petition, despite their being incapable to consent, is consistent with anti-RH values, since the Imbongs (and the Church) claim to represent children and the unborn in their crusade against reproductive rights. And in this crusade, they are not shy to employ the bloody imagery associated with the Catholic Church’s own medieval Crusades. About President Aquino’s signing of the RH Bill, Batangas Archbishop Ramon Arguelles compared him to the Connecticut shooter who killed 20 schoolchildren because the RH Law would supposedly kill millions. But, we can see from the scientific evidence that it is not contraception, and not even induced abortion, that will lead to the most aborted embryos—it is the Church’s anti-contraceptive dogma. If abortion is murder, the Imbongs are accessories, and the Catholic Church is the killer.

No, the world is not going to end this week. That belief is too unfounded to be even worth a rebuttal.

Now that we have that out of the way, let us talk about more productive things, like how to really end the world. But before we can start with our crash course on world ending, let us first look at what people usually mean when they say the end is nigh. Based on a survey done by a reputable organization composed solely of the author of this article, when people say “the world is ending” they usually mean one the following things:

1. they lost their iPhone;
2. human civilization will collapse or people will be wiped out from the face of the Earth;
3. all or a significant portion of life on Earth will end;
4. the universe will end.

Since no one really cares if some hipster lost his iPhone, I hope everyone agrees that we can skip the first item. Let us now take a look at how we can successfully bring about the other three world-ending scenarios.

 

Bye Bye Humans

Here’s how you end human civilization: you do nothing. Or, to be more precise, you just allow humans to keep on doing what they are doing right now. I’m not kidding; just let them carry on with their lives. They’re already civilization-destroying forces just as they are.

How does this work? Here’s how it goes. If humans live as they live right now, then the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere will just keep on going up. This will have the effect of further messing up the Earth’s climate. If humans do not change, the climate will.

 

But how can climate change end human civilization? When it gets hot in here, can’t people just follow Nelly’s advice and take off all their clothes? Excellent as Nelly’s advice is (and I surely recommend it to some of more well-endowed human specimens), it simply wouldn’t do because the Earth’s systems are just so damned complicated. Even a mere 1-degree increase in global average temperature can ruin the whole delicate balance of the Earth’s life-supporting systems.

 

Let me mention just a few of the many possible nightmare scenarios that can be brought about by climate change.

First, sea level will rise significantly, causing many major cities to get flooded. If fishes want Manila City, they could inherit it someday, although I already here them saying “Thanks, but no thanks.” Students of UST know for a fact that nature has already been doing not-so-dry runs of this thing, and for those who wish to see the end of human civilization it’s all looking good.

Second, many ecosystems will be messed up and might even crash. Scientists who study the details of this nightmare scenario usually get a lot less sleep at night. But just to give you an idea, when an important ecosystem crashes, farms will fail, the sea  will give up providing fishes (and I’m not even talking about overfishing yet), and the creatures that provide humans with much needed oxygen might simply call it quits.

If those scenarios have not impressed you yet, then this one might. Some scientists think that climate change might cause the ocean’s thermohaline circulation to stop. The thermohaline circulation acts as the ocean’s conveyor belt, distributing oxygen, carbon dioxide and nutrients throughout the ocean’s many levels. If this circulation stops, then much of the ocean will be reduced to a big puddle of stagnant water. When this happens, many ecosystems in the ocean will get messed up, and we’re back to the scenario discussed in the previous paragraph.

Well, that’s just climate change. There are other things that can cause the crash of human civilization without any help from a malevolent Loki figure, like the world’s oil reserves running dry, or overpopulation causing a population crash just like what happened to the reindeer of St. Matthew Island.

If you want to be more proactive in bringing about the demise of human civilization, then you might want to introduce a microbial pathogen that is downright nasty, spreads fast, and is quick to mutate and develop resistance to drugs, quite like the virus that caused SARS. Since international flights are so common nowadays, this pathogen will find it easy to go global. And while you’re at it, why not make it a virus that attacks the human immune system? In other words, why not make a nastier version of the HIV? Also, if you feel a little creative and sadistic, try to go for a zombie apocalypse virus. Although making it spread globally could be a bit tricky considering how strict airport authorities are when it comes to passengers who bite their airplane seatmates.

 

Hurtling Hunks of Rock

But if you really want to end a world, why just go for just one species out of the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions that call the Earth their home? When humans go extinct, will bad ass tardigrades give a damn? No.

 

Species come and go all the time; extinction is a part of life on Earth and it is the ultimate fate of all species that exist. Dodos and dinosaurs are not losers for going extinct, they just got there before humans did. (Although at the rate humans are going, they won’t be far behind.) Scientists estimate that around 99.9% of all species that have ever existed have now gone extinct. In fact, every few million years several species go extinct.

However, for us who want to see the world end, several extinctions every few million years are not enough. What we want is a mass extinction event, a massive blowout where up to 90% of all species on Earth bid goodbye to existence within a very short span of time. (And by “very short” we mean around a few million years.) Feel free to choose any of the following means to bring about your desired mass extinction event:

• Send a big hunk of rock (an asteroid, a comet or a big meteor) hurtling towards the Earth. If this hunk of rock is big and fast enough, its collision with the Earth can release the energy contained in millions of tons of TNT. How much energy is that? Well, just enough to boil much of the ocean. It will also be enough send tons of dust into the air, covering the Sun for years on end and causing the Earth’s climate to change – and we’re back to climate change, yay!
• Your big hunk of rock does not really need to hit the Earth to cause a lot of damage. If it’s big enough, even a close encounter with the Earth can cause a drastic change in the Earth’s orbital tilt, rate of rotation or distance from the Sun. If any of the mentioned things happen, creatures everywhere will suddenly find themselves in places too hot, too cold, too humid or too dry for them. Once this happens, many of the more choosy creatures – which is, well, most of them – will say goodbye to existence, and a cascade of extinctions will ensue.
• Turn up the Sun. Or, alternately, turn in down. Just do it quickly. The Sun has been having mood swings for billions for years now. However, it’s been doing it slowly enough that a lot of the Earth’s creatures were able to adapt to many of them. A sudden overabundance of sunlight, or a sudden lack of it, will surely change the climate drastically. Yes, you’ll never go wrong with climate change, fellow world-ender.
• Let the Sun go red giant. It will do this a few billion years from now, anyway, so why prolong the suffering of all earthlings? Go ahead and let their star become a big red ball that will boil all their oceans and possibly even consume their planet.

•  Help the humans do their work of causing the sixth mass extinction. Scientists have discovered five mass extinction events in the 4.5-billion year history of the Earth. The most popular of the five is the one that led to the demise of all non-avian dinosaurs. Nearly all scientists agree that it was caused by an asteroid impact around 65 million years ago. (If you want to sound smart, call this the K-Pg mass extinction event. K-Pg stands for Cretaceous-Paleogene. It was between these two periods that the extinction event happened. It used to be called the K-T event, for Cretaceous-Tertiary.) The greatest of the five, however, was the Permian extinction event, also known as the Great Dying (dun dun dun!). The Great Dying (dun dun dun!) involved, well, a great amount of dying. 90% of all the species on Earth alive at the time, to be more precise. Many scientists think that a sixth extinction event is on the way, and it is caused by the joy humans derive from cutting down trees and polluting the seas. Hence, if you want to see the end of the world as we know it, you might give these Homo sapiens a little help in their endeavor.

• Life on Earth is resilient. The cosmos has been sending all sorts of nasty stuff to Earth for billions of years, and yet life goes on. If you really want to obliterate life on Earth, you might want to send a rogue black hole to the Solar System. The black hole will gulp up the Sun and all its planets and that’s the end of it goodbye thank y’all.
• If you want to be a bit more dramatic, you can make a supernova explode a few light-years from the Sun. Even though it’s billions of kilometers away from Earth, it will still incinerate all the planets of the Solar System, ending life in this sector of the galaxy for good.

 

Crunching and Heat

Yes, yes, I know, with billions upon billions of planets in the universe some of you might find it lame to end life in just one planet. You want to end all life in the galaxy, even in the universe, right? Well, unfortunately for us, the universe is such damned big place. How big, you ask? Well, damned big. If you want numbers, the observable universe is about 46 billion light years or 4,300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 meters across. Good luck with trying  to comprehend that.

One way of ending something this huge is by adding enormous amounts of matter to it. You can even add dark matter, if you’re into that sort of thing. If you add enough matter, this will cause the universe to become closed. In a closed universe that lacks dark energy, there will be enough matter to stop the current expansion. This will lead to a universal contraction and an eventual Big Crunch, which is just a delicious name for the opposite of the eve more deliciously-named Big Bang.

 

Unfortunately for those who like to crunch, the universe has a lot of this thing they call dark energy. Scientists know very little about dark energy, but whatever it is, it seems to exert a repulsive force that accelerates the expansion of the universe. If this is indeed the case, the only way for the universe to “end” is by undergoing a heat death. The heat death of the universe will happen when all the energy in the universe will be converted to useless energy, that is, energy that cannot be used to do work. This is given by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that as time goes by, the energy in the universe gets more evenly distributed. Evenly distributed energy is heat, which is energy that cannot be exploited to do anything useful. Since life requires energy that can be used to do work, the head dead universe will not be able to support life of any kind.

Now to the important question, how can you bring about the heat death of the universe? Answer: you do nothing; let the Second Law of Thermodynamics do its work. Give it time. Be patient.

 

Take Home

So there you go, a teaser course on how to end the world. By now I think you would’ve noticed that it’s not really that difficult helping the world reach its demise. With lots of humans caring greatly about trivial things and little about things that matter, the world needs little help to meet its destruction. As a matter of fact, tremendous effort is expected not from those who want to end the world, but from those who want to pass it on the next generation. Even more effort is required from those who want to see a better tomorrow for their descendants. So it’s time to stop reading this article and start help building a better world for all of us. After all, the world is not ending anytime soon.

As the United States shuts down its eastern seaboard for Cyclone Sandy, the Philippines will be shutting down as well, for completely different reasons. November 1 marks All Saints’ Day, when many establishments close up, since most people head to cemeteries to gamble and eat among the remains of the dead.

What comes with the holiday is the belief that when our bodies cease to function, even after we are laid into the soil or burned to ash, something survives. We are not just bodies, supernaturalist believers claim. There is a ghost in this machine and it breaks free from its mortal shackles upon death.

Some people claim to see these surviving entities, these spirits or souls, dwelling among the living. Ghostly apparitions are reported with disturbing regularity. Disturbing, in that even in the age of ubiquitous photography, no one has ever gathered any credible support for these ectoplasmic assertions. The reality of disembodied souls would necessarily overturn everything we know about physics. Any scientist would be itching to find evidence for the supernatural—evidence that never seems to turn up, despite the most adamant and most confident protestations of believers.

Human visual perception works because of light, and light works through electromagnetism. Electromagnetic/light particles called photons travel at the speed limit of the universe. When they hit objects, the energy of the photons is absorbed by particles in the object (such as electrons). These particles then release some energy back as another photon. The energy of the photon released determines the color and intensity of the light humans perceive.

If ghosts (under which I include saintly apparitions) can be seen, that means ghosts interact with photons! Electromagnetism is a physical phenomenon. This implies that at least some aspects of ghosts are physical, and therefore investigable by the methods of science. What kinds of photons are these spirits carrying? Are they different from everyday photons?

When people claim to hear ghosts, either through spooky screams or through elaborate homilies about the current geopolitical situation, they are actually claiming that physical objects are being moved by supernatural events. The perception of hearing occurs when the pressure of the air around us is locally fluctuated. When people talk, their vocal folds vibrate and push around air molecules. The air then vibrates the eardrums of animals within earshot. These vibrations correspond to what we hear as sound. The case is similar for those who report interacting with apparitions through touch (except that objects apart from air molecules are being moved, such as a uterus).

The Earth rotates on its own axis at around 1,674.4 km/h. It revolves around the Sun at 108,000 km/h. We don’t even feel these exorbitant speeds because we are moving with the Earth. We move with the Earth because we are on it and its forces are acting on us without variation. Should the Earth suddenly change in speed, however, we would definitely feel a calamitous disturbance. The Earth is tumbling around our galaxy, which is itself moving with respect to the rest of the universe. Should the Earth’s motion stop, we’d fly off into space—like a tetherball released from its rope. For the most part, we can happily ignore that we are hurtling across space because we are physical objects that obey the laws of physics. It is curious, therefore, when even immaterial ghosts follow physical laws.

When people claim to see ghosts, nobody ever reports them appearing one moment then zipping out into space the next, left behind by the Earth’s motion. Rather, people claim to see them stay in place long enough to scare the bejesus out of them, or tell them about some magic water that would heal people. Again, ghosts are eerily physical in all convenient aspects.

Imagine now that you have died. Ignore the paradox that you could not do such imagining because that would be imagining that your imagination could not imagine any longer. For the sake of argument, let us say that souls do exist and you are one right now, formerly in control of a body, currently disembodied.

Where are you? What do you see? Let us suppose that even though you are supernatural, you have some sort of particles that interact electromagnetically. Can you blink? It would be odd to do so, seeing as your soul would need to have eyelids.

At what direction are you looking? When you had a body, your eyeballs would sense a local cone of vision. Now that you’re a ghost, do you see all of existence at once? If so, where in the world are you? Certainly not floating just above your corpse.

When you had a body, you used your vision (and other senses) to determine where you were. You were limited by the local area that could be perceived by your physical sense organs. Now that you are without a body, the question of ‘where’ becomes meaningless. If ghosts exist, then they must be everywhere. They cannot otherwise be.

If these ghosts cannot exist as they have been claimed to be, then it must be that they are wholly in the mind of those who see them. They don’t have photons bouncing off of them, they don’t fly through space, because they’re not in the outside world! They do not exist objectively. These disembodied souls are figments, like how optical illusions, while very convincing, do not really show moving objects.

Our brains are easily fooled into seeing things that do not exist. People who claim to see ghosts often truly believe that they have experienced such a thing. I do not believe that they are all liars (though some must be). However, even though their brush with the supernatural must have felt very real, that does not mean that it was anything more than a psychological episode. The human brain is so adept at pattern recognition that it sees patterns everywhere—from clouds to dog anuses. It is no surprise, then, that ghosts follow the patterns we are so familiar with and that they are so much like normal natural objects, except for that little difficulty of being able to show them to others.

The supernatural world is suspicious to the scientifically literate because it is too convenient. It looks exactly like the natural world except when it’s favorable not to be. It looks like bad science fiction. Ghosts can hover, but not be left behind by a moving Earth. Ghosts can pass through solid walls, but can affect air molecules to produce sound. Ghosts can be perceived but not leave behind any independently-verifiable traces.

Surely some scientist must have left from the spirit world by now to show all his skeptical journal-publishing colleagues that the supernatural does exist. And yet, no scientist has ever come back from the grave to do so. Instead, we have saints who supposedly cure comatose patients, almost 400 years removed.

The vastness of space and time is available to the dead, if we are to believe the claims of the religious. Despite that, what is regularly professed to be done from beyond the grave is so vapid that miraculous claims are barely worth a 30 second spot on the evening news. The deep incongruence between the scale of the universe and the parochial concerns of people betrays the very human imaginations that spawn these stories.

Senator Tito Sotto responded to allegations of plagiarism by denying them on national TV. In case comparing his speech with the blog post isn’t enough, the blogger herself, Sarah Pope, has confirmed that she was indeed plagiarized. And as it turns out, she might not be the only victim of Sotto’s plagiarism: some count at least 3 other plagiarized bloggers.

Let’s humor Tito Sotto and entertain the possibility that his excuse is valid — that he wasn’t quoting the blogger, he was quoting the blogger’s source: Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride. But was citing Dr. Natasha a good move?

I don’t think so. As far as Sotto’s credibility goes, citing Dr. Natasha was even worse than plagiarizing Pope. Because Dr. Natasha is a quack. She is most known for inventing the idea that autism — and many other symptoms and diseases — is caused by bacteria in our gut, a condition she calls “Gut and Psychology Syndrome” or GAPS — because “gut bacteria” just doesn’t sound as scientific.

And what causes gut bacteria? According to Dr. Natasha, children who aren’t breastfed get gut bacteria. Sure, breastfeeding has benefits, and even real doctors prescribe it. But they don’t scare people with invented consequences, especially not without any real evidence. And by evidence, I mean the results of proper clinical trials. Does Dr. Natasha have such evidence? No. All she has are testimonials.

And when you replace the objectivity of Science with the subjectivity of anecdotal evidence, anything goes. Without the need to adhere to the rigors of Science, Dr. Natasha can confidently claim that like vaccinations, oral contraceptives cause gut bacteria, something Sotto now believes to be the cause of his son’s death.

Dr. Natasha’s disrespect for scientific procedures translates to a distrust of mainstream medicine — a distrust Sotto seems to share, both of them claiming that the pharmaceutical industry only cares about making money. And what alternative does she prescribe? She sells plenty of them in her online store, where anyone can purchase books, DVDs, probiotics, supplements, kitchen equipment, and garden hose filters, all based on the principles of the GAPS diet — an alternative solution that I think Sotto should promote.

Because if he believes Dr. Natasha, he should recommend these products to other alleged victims of vaccination and oral contraception. After all, these are the same products that could’ve saved his son. Unless, of course, he doesn’t buy this bullshit and he’s just trying to grasp at any scientific sounding nonsense to further delay voting on the RH bill.

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Image sources: 1, 2

Further reading:

• http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/08/01/gaps-in-a-doctors-reasoning-about-vaccines/
• http://thesecondsight.blogspot.com/2010/10/self-reinforcing-circle-of-improbably.html

Now that the hoopla over Curiosity’s landing has died down, let us stand back and examine what has been achieved to see if it was really worth all that hype.

Below is a picture of Mars as seen from Earth. That reddish dot in the sky is an alien world hurtling and spinning through the unimaginable vastness of space at astounding velocities, billions of kilometers away from Earth. The smartest members of our species have just sent a laboratory on wheels to that dot. But they did not just aim for that dot, they aimed for a tiny pixel within a pixel within that dot. And they hit the mark. Soon, that lab on wheels will rove its way around a very tiny portion of that little bright spot in the night sky. If that does not make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on their end, then I do not know what will.

 

 

And now that we have placed things in perspective, I believe it’s time for Curiosity itself to tell us the rest of its story.

 

Curiosity Speaks

Hello, my name is Curiosity. I am the rover of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) program. I know I am animate only in the broadest sense and that my artificial intelligence is comparable to that of a fly, but allow me this conceit of having conscious thought, if only to tell the story of my mission in Mars. It is, after all, also the story of my cousins, Spirit and Opportunity. It is also the story of Mars. Ultimately, it is also the story of life on Earth. My story is your story, too.

When I landed safely on the surface of Mars on the 6^th of August, 2012, my parents at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) were ecstatic. Their ecstasy is understandable not only because they have high hopes for me, but also because my landing was daring. In fact, it was so risky I wouldn’t blame you if you think they were a bit nutty when they planned my entry, descent and landing. To provide a comparison, my cousins Spirit and Opportunity touched down on the surface of the red planet surrounded by giant airbags while I was dropped naked. (In this way, I am more human-like than my predecessors.) The slogan “Dare mighty things” was well chosen for my landing.

I may be beautiful and sophisticated, but I am also hardy. To appreciate this, imagine what I had to survive during my “7 minutes of terror”. Upon my entry to Mars’ thin atmosphere, I was travelling at a speed of 21,000 kilometers per hour. That’s more than 60 times the speed of sound. At that speed I would be able to circle the world in less than two hours. From such unimaginable velocity, I had to decelerate to zero in a mere 7 minutes. At one point during my descent, I survived a deceleration of 9g. Imagine stopping from 120 kph in less than half a second – basically the definition of a fatal car accident – that’s 9g.

 

While the whole world celebrates my safe landing, the challenges I am to face have only begun. Although it is my home from now on, Mars will also be my constant enemy. Unlike Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom, the real Mars is a world very different from Earth. With temperatures ranging from –15°C in the summer to –100°C in the winter, it forbidding even to most robots and extremophiles. But cold as it is on the Martian surface, the pressure here is so low that if you were to stand next to me without wearing a space suite, your blood will boil away into the sparse atmosphere. (That scene from Watchmen when Dr. Manhattan brought Silk Spectre to the surface of Mars is a reminder of how difficult it is for human intuition to understand the environment of another planet.) If any creature evolved to survive on Mars’s surface, it would find the pressure on the summit of Mt. Everest crushingly high.

The hypothetical Martian would also find the Earth’s oxygen-rich atmosphere exceedingly poisonous. For you earthbound animals who have evolved to handle oxygen so well, it is forgivable that you forget how potent an oxidizing agent it actually is. Here on the fourth planet, the oxygen is locked in the rusty soil and rock that gives the planet its characteristic color. Since Mars’ thin atmosphere is composed largely of carbon dioxide, it will not only suffocate any human foolish enough to breathe it in, it will suffocate even fire. No campfire or candle will burn on the surface of the my new home planet.

The Martian surface is also buffeted by nearly direct solar radiation. Mars does not have an ozone layer. It does not even have a magnetosphere, which means the fierce “solar wind” batters its atmosphere like crazy. And because Mars lacks a significant magnetic field, no auroras streak its pinkish sky. Using a magnetic compass for navigation is not an option here.

 

Finally, there are the notorious dust storms of Mars. Because of a combination of low pressure and low gravity, the dust particles on the Martian surface are eager to be airborne. My predecessors have warned me that such storms can rage for months on end. Luckily, my parents at NASA designed me so that I do not depend on the Sun for my energy. Instead of having solar panels like Spirit and Opportunity, I am, like Vikings 1 and 2, powered by the heat generated by a radioactive isotope I carry around with me.

And speaking of power, I need lots of it. After all, I am a not just an explorer, I am a science laboratory on wheels. I carry with me tools as simple as cameras and light microscopes to equipment as complex as a gas chromatograph coupled to a mass spectrometer. (I have at least 4 kinds of spectrometers. You cannot have too many spectrometers.) I use my equipment to analyze the composition of interesting rocks I happen to pass by. However, I do not limit myself to the rocks on the surface. I am armed with a laser gun that blasts off surface rocks,  allowing me to analyze the chemistry of the underlying rocks. I am a mean machine. If intelligent Martians see me walking around their planet, they would think earthlings are waging war against them. It’s like War of  the Worlds, only it’s the other way around.

My parents at NASA call me a robot scientist. In that case, I am a robot meteorologist, geologist, and chemist. Using my powerful instruments, more numerous and sophisticated than the ones aboard Spirit and Opportunity, my mission here is to study the climate of Mars, examine its rocks, and peer into its history. For these purposes my landing site, Gale Crater, was carefully and well chosen. Gale Crater houses kilometers upon kilometers of exposed rock layers. For a terrestrial analogy, think Grand Canyon. Because of its exposed rock strata, Gale Crater is like an open book into parts of Mars’ history. Studying the rock layers at Gale Crater might provide clues to the following questions: Why is Mars so different from Earth? Was there ever plate tectonics on Mars? And did water play an important role in Mars’ history?

I am also here to search for water. Such is a daunting task given how bone-dry Mars is. Compared to the red planet’s surface, the Sahara Desert is a lush, wet forest of life. Not even Frank Herbert’s Arrakis can match the dryness of the real Barsoom.

 

However, there are tantalizing clues that liquid water once flowed in abundance on the ancient Martian surface. Orbiting space probes have taken pictures of what appears to be dried river channels, deltas, and flood plains. Spirit and Opportunity even discovered mineral formations that probably formed in the presence of neutral water. Even more intriguing are the suggestions that there’s more water on Mars today than was initially thought. Much of this is heavily debated by earthbound scientists. The results of my investigations here on Mars may end these debates. It may also start new ones.

You can also call me a robot biologist, although what that means no one clearly knows. In fact, one of my missions is to clarify what it really means to study life. When Viking 1, Viking 2, Spirit, and Opportunity tried to search for life on Mars, their tests were riddled with false positives and inconclusive results. The world even witnessed bedazzled NASA scientists excitedly, and some would say carelessly, announcing signs of “alien life” at every opportunity. Their failures remind you humans how ignorant you are of this thing called life. Because NASA has learned from the failures of my predecessors, I am not going to search for life directly. Instead, I am going to look for conditions that you think are “suitable for life”. For life “as you know it”, at least.

 

The success of my landing proves that you humans can achieve mighty things if only you work together. Wars and bigotry are a waste of your energy, resources, and lives. By successfully doing what has been deemed be crazy, my example has the power to encourage a generation of dreamers.

By now I think you understand why I am here on this desolate wilderness called Mars. By studying this world, I can give you humans more insights into your own. By examining this seemingly dead planet, I can help you understand the fragile balance of your living globe. By probing a planet possibly devoid of life, I can help you know more about what it means to be alive.

As for those dreamers my success will inspire, know that I will be here patiently awaiting the coming of your descendants to the surface of the red planet.

The Filipino Freethinkers, alongside hundreds of other organizations across the globe, sign The Declaration of Internet Freedom which can be read in full here.

The following is an excerpt from the site:

DECLARATION

We stand for a free and open Internet.

We support transparent and participatory processes for making Internet policy and the establishment of five basic principles:

• Expression: Don’t censor the Internet.
• Access: Promote universal access to fast and affordable networks.
• Openness: Keep the Internet an open network where everyone is free to connect, communicate, write, read, watch, speak, listen, learn, create and innovate.
• Innovation: Protect the freedom to innovate and create without permission. Don’t block new technologies, and don’t punish innovators for their users’ actions.
• Privacy: Protect privacy and defend everyone’s ability to control how their data and devices are used.

Throughout the years, the Internet has enriched the lives of countless people and has made the world so much smaller with the incredible connectivity that it offers. It has enabled individuals to access virtually the whole pool of human knowledge through online encyclopedias and search engines, giving everyone almost unlimited sources for learning. It has allowed for near-instantaneous communication and sharing of creative content, revolutionizing what it means for information to be viral. It has given birth to a playful and entirely new Internet culture and has helped forge the image of an open global village in the minds of its users. It has fueled the growth of countless web-based services and communities that enable meaningful interaction between strangers and even better ways of collaborating with peers.

With these in mind, we realize that increased connectivity, openness, and transparency should be observed, and to abandon the very principles that guaranteed the success and speedy development of the Internet would be a huge step back for humanity.

 

 

 

Image from geeksaresexy.net

Higgs Hoopla

Last 4th of July, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (also known as CERN  – don’t ask me why) made the announcement that they have detected a particle that could possibly be the long sought after Higgs boson.

As a non-hipster science fan, I find it heartwarming that a scientific discovery made in the French-Swiss underground scene is finally making it into the mainstream. However, I noticed that many people are at a loss when it comes to comprehending the excitement surrounding this Higgs thingy. After all, where in the big picture of science does this so-called “God particle” fit in?

 

The Higgs boson is one of the few missing pieces of the Standard Model of particle physics. If the particle detected this week was indeed a Higgs boson, that’s +100 points for the Standard Model. The Standard Model is currently our best theory when it comes to explaining the behavior of our universe’s basic ingredients. Over past decades, it has been very successful at predicting how every known particle behaves and interacts.

If the universe is a stage, the Standard Model gives us the best insider story about the cast of characters and the role each character plays. Before we can describe what part the Higgs boson plays, we must first introduce the other members of the cast.

 

Enter the Leptons

The first members of the cast are the light leptons. There are six kinds of free-living leptons. The first three have charges, and they are called electrons, muons and tau particles. The next three don’t have charges, and they are called neutrinos. There are three kinds of neutrinos: electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos.

Electrons are part of the atoms that make up most of the material things we handle everyday. In fact, electrons are the first subatomic particles to be discovered. You can read this article on a computer screen only because humans have mastered the art of making electrons the way they want it to move.

Muons are similar to electrons, only they are heavier and short-lived. Tau particles are even heavier and more short-lived! In particle physics jargon, we say that the electron is stable while the muon and tau particle are unstable. (Most people are, unfortunately, like muons in more ways than one.) It is because of their short lives that we do not meet muons and tau particles in our daily affairs.

Neutrinos are very light and elusive particles. They are also neutrally charged, which means that they do not get repelled or attracted by other charges. In fact, they very seldom interact with other particles. This is why it took scientists a while before they finally detected them. In this regard, neutrinos are basically ninja particles!

Their elusiveness aside, neutrinos are actually everywhere! Right this instant, there are billions upon billions of neutrinos whizzing through your body like bullets flying though mist. You are not feeling it precisely because neutrinos mostly ignore other particles and are ignored by other particles. In fact, they can pass through the Earth like the Earth is not there.

Neutrinos recently made the news when some scientists thought they found neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. It was later discovered that neutrinos don’t break the universe’s speed limit after all.

 

Six Quarks for Muster Mark

The next members of our cast of characters are the quarks. There are also six of them: the up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom quarks (aaawww yeah).

The six quarks are grouped according to “generation”. The up and down quarks belong to the first generation, the charm and strange to the second, and the top and bottom to the third. Quarks in each generation are heavier than those in the previous generation.

What distinguishes the quarks from the leptons is the fact that we do not find free-living quarks. Quarks are always tightly glued to other quarks to form hadrons. When a hadron is composed of a quark and its anti-quark glued together, we call it a meson. Meanwhile, when a hadron is composed of a triad of quarks, we call it a baryon.

You have quadrillions of hadrons in you, and so is the computer screen you are staring at right now. Why? Because the nucleus of atoms are made of protons and neutrons, and protons and neutrons are hadrons. To be more specific, they are baryons; protons and neutrons are made of three quarks glued together very tightly. The proton is made of two up quarks and one down quark while the neutron is made of one up quark and two down quarks.

 

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of CERN is so-called because it was designed to smash together hadrons at very high speed. And also because it’s very large, as far as lab equipment go – it is found in a more or less circular tunnel 27 kilometers in circumference!

 

May the Force Carriers be with You

There are four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetic, weak, and strong. According to the Standard Model, the three forces aside from gravity are mediated by particles called force carriers.

Photons are the force carriers of the electromagnetic force. Photons are massless particles that travel at the speed of light, which is not surprising given that photons are the particles of light; light is but a stream of photons. Photons are also responsible for making like charges repel and unlike charges to attract. This means that without photons, atoms won’t exist either, because photons are what keep the electron around the nucleus! Without photons, the universe will be a very dark place indeed.

The force carriers of the strong force are called gluons, so-called because they form the “glue” that tightly binds quarks to form hadrons. Like photons, gluons are also massless. Without gluons, protons and neutrons won’t exist.

The weak force, on the other hand, is mediated by heavy force carriers called the W and Z bosons. These particles are around 80-90 times heavier than protons. The obesity of these force carriers is the reason why the weak force, unlike the electromagnetic force, has a very short range. The weak force can only act across distances smaller than an atom. But exotic as it may sound, the weak force is in fact very important to life on Earth. The weak force is responsible for some forms of radioactivity without which our Sun wouldn’t shine and the Earth’s interior wouldn’t be a dynamic fluid.

Of the three forces of the Standard Model, the weak is the weakest and the strong is the strongest (like duh). Compared to the electromagnetic force, the weak force is a trillion times weaker while the strong force is a hundred times stronger.

 

The Punch Line

The Standard Model makes many now well-confirmed predictions about the behavior of the particles that make up our world, but there’s a catch: it seems to say that all the particles of the model (the six leptons, six quarks and the force carriers) have to be massless. Except for photons and gluons, which are indeed massless, this is clearly not the case. This is a problem of the theory. And it’s a major one, too.

This is where the Higgs boson comes to the Standard Model’s rescue. Higgs bosons provide a mechanism that imbues some particles with mass. This happens because Higgs bosons, which are everywhere in the universe, “couple” with some particles and thus supply them mass. The stronger the coupling of the Higgs bosons with a certain particle, the more massive that particle becomes. (Unfortunately, for people who want to lose weight really quickly, changing how you couple with Higgs bosons is not an option.)

In a universe without Higgs bosons, the Standard Model predicts that all particles will be massless and they will all zip across space at the speed of light. Since we find ourselves living in a universe where only photons and gluons can travel at the speed of light, then either Higgs bosons exist or the Standard Model is wrong after all. The discovery of the Higgs boson is therefore a major triumph of the Standard Model.

 

In Search of a New Standard

To date, the Standard Model is one of two best theories about the universe. However, it still has a lot of problems. For one, it does not say anything about gravity. For another, it goes haywire when combined with the other theory we have of the universe, General Relativity.

Gravity is the weakest of the four fundamental forces; it is literally weaker than weak. In fact, it is weaker than the weak force by a factor of 10^25 or a thousand million quadrillions! That is why in the world of tiny particles, gravity is negligible. Another problem with gravity is that the Standard Model says nothing about it. But it is the force that keeps you anchored to the Earth, the force that keeps the planets tethered to the Sun, and the force that herds stars into galaxies and galaxies into clusters. Gravity, weak as it may be, is a force to be reckoned with.

Our best theory for gravity is Einstein’s General Relativity, which explains that gravity is the curvature of space and time. General Relativity has passed all experimental and observational tests with flying colors. It powerfully explains the behavior of the universe as a whole from its earliest stages up to the present. But it is not friends with the Standard Model, something that bothers physicists to no end. This is especially bothersome given that the origin of our universe, the moments approaching the Big Bang, is subject to both the laws of General Relativity and the Standard Model.

Another problem with the Standard Model is that it accounts for only 4% of the universe! As for the other 96%, it has nothing to say. In fact, the other 96% is so mysterious to us that we decided to simply call them “dark matter” and “dark energy,” which just goes to show that we know next to nothing about them, except that they exist. (IMHO, calling the other 96% “love” would have been apt.)

 

The Search Goes On

Let us summarize what we have talked about. The Standard Model is our best theory about the composition of our universe. It tells us that the universe is composed of six leptons that can fly around freely (like electrons and neutrinos), six quarks that are always glued to other quarks (protons and neutrons are just quarks glued together), and force carriers that mediate the interactions between the other particles. But the Standard Model can only account for the mass of some of the particles if a particle known as the Higgs boson exists. If the particle detected last week was a Higgs boson, it would be a major triumph for the Standard Model.

However, it is apparent that the Standard Model cannot be the last say. It has its own problems, chief among these is that it cannot explain gravity, it is not compatible with our best theory explaining gravity, and it can account for only 4% of the universe. And so the search for the solution to the problem of existence has not ended. In fact, the discovery of the Higgs boson opens the door for more furious research; in other words, the search has only begun.

After around 50 years since the Higgs boson’s existence was proposed in the 1960′s, scientists at CERN have now confirmed at a 4.9 sigma significance level (more than 99.9999% confidence) that a particle that looks like the Higgs boson exists. Evidence from the ATLAS and the CMS experiments at CERN show a particle with the predicted Higgs boson mass of around 125 GeV resulting from the head-on collision of two protons.

Remember from Albert Einstein’s famous E = mc^2 equation that mass is energy divided by the square of the speed of light. Particle masses are measured using the voltage (or energy) of the electron as the standard. At over 125 x 10^9 electrons worth of energy, the Higgs boson is the heaviest particle that has ever been produced at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Indeed, finding this particle was one of the main motivations of building a particle accelerator with the size and power of the LHC in the first place.

A boson is a particle whose behavior can be described by a system called Bose-Einstein statistics. The Higgs boson is a special kind of boson called a “gauge” boson. This class of bosons brings about the fundamental forces of nature, with the photon mediating electromagnetism, gluons mediating the strong force (which holds quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons, together), and the Z and W bosons mediating the weak force (which is involved in radioactive decay and hydrogen fusion in stars). The as-yet-undetected graviton is not predicted by the Standard Model, but is a gauge boson that mediates the force of gravity in some quantum mechanical descriptions of gravity.

The Higgs boson has been called in the media as the “God particle,” as it will solve a key problem in the current Standard Model of particle physics. The Standard Model describes the nature of matter through dozens of subatomic particles. The initial problem with the model, however, is that it shows that particles initially have zero mass and cannot explain why some particles have mass. If particles don’t have mass, they will whiz through the universe at the speed of light. This is clearly not the universe we live in.

To solve this matter, Peter Higgs, among other independent teams of scientists, proposed what came to be known as the “Higgs mechanism.” Higgs suggested that throughout the universe exists a field, now called the Higgs field. Fields can be described using particles, like how the electromagnetic field can be represented by light particles called photons. The particle of the Higgs field is the legendary Higgs boson.

 

The Higgs mechanism acts similarly to how photons, or light particles, travel at 299,792,458 m/s in a vacuum, but not when there are particles in the way. Light appears to slow down (and bends) in a medium, such as glass, because it actually travels a longer-than-apparent path.

 

 

Photons hit glass particles and get deflected from their path, resulting in a longer true distance traveled despite appearing to have traveled a shorter distance. Since speed is distance over time, it appears to us as if the photon has taken a longer travel time, when it actually just traveled a longer distance at the same speed it always does. Higgs bosons act like glass particles on a photon, obstructing the path of Higgs-interacting particles, such as electrons, in the universe. The “God particle” isn’t magical or supernatural as its name suggests it to be, but without the Higgs boson, there would be no people to wonder why particles have mass.

 

Recall from Newton’s first law that inertia is the tendency to remain at rest, if initially at rest, and tendency to remain in motion, if initially in motion. Since mass is simply the measure of inertia and particles naturally have no mass and fly around at the speed of light, all Higgs-interacting particles will be slowed down by the Higgs field and look to us as if they had gained a resistance to change in motion, which we measure as mass. The photon does not interact with the Higgs field, so it retains its speed and lack of mass.

The Higgs mechanism explains how many particles, such as electrons, gain inertia (or mass). Quarks, which make up neutrons and protons, also gain some of their mass through the Higgs mechanism (though most of their mass comes from interacting with gluons). To be clear, the Higgs boson is not the reason for all mass in the universe.

The Higgs boson is hoped to be the final piece of the Standard Model of physics. Further work will be done to establish that the discovered massive 125–126 GeV particle does indeed have the properties that have been predicted for the Higgs boson. However, even just finding a 99.9999% credible Higgs boson candidate makes scientists more confident that we have in the Standard Model a good picture of the universe at its smallest and weirdest scales.

 

_{Peter Higgs Image and Tear Metaphor Credit: Reddit}

This is a continuation of the story of Amber the electron. Amber’s story is a very important one because it is also the story of physics, the study of the fundamental aspects of our universe. You may learn about the first part of this story by reading ‘Quantum Queries: Is Ours A Clockwork Universe?’

 

Down In Amber’s World

Last time, we saw that up here in the world of familiar objects — bouncing basketballs, falling apples, orbiting planets — the laws that govern our universe make it tick like clockwork. Down in the world of Amber the electron, things can seem very different. We must use a different set of rules to explain the behavior of Amber the electron and similarly small objects like protons, neutrinos, and positrons. These are the rules of quantum mechanics, and objects governed by these rules can be called “quantum objects”. Amber the electron is a quantum object.

Back to the questions that started this discussion: Where’s Amber? And how fast is she going? Where is she headed? There are two things we must know about Amber before we can reasonably answer these questions.

First, everything we can say about Amber is contained in what is known as her wave function. The wave function is represented by the Greek letter Ψ (psi). Basically, Ψ contains everything that we can say of Amber.

Second, Ψ can be determined using Schrödinger’s equation (named after the colorful German physicist Erwin Schrödinger).

Schrödinger’s equation plays the same role in quantum mechanics as Newton’s Second Law does in classical mechanics. Recall that if we know the location and velocity of Bouncy the ball now, we can use Newton’s Second Law to determine his location and velocity at any other time. Likewise, if we know Amber’s wave function Ψ at any given moment, then we can use Schrödinger’s equation to determine Ψ at any later or earlier time. In other words, the way the wave function changes over time is also deterministic.

But wait, where is Amber? And how fast is she going? Where is she headed? Where will we find her at some later time?

To answer these questions, we now turn to the crux of the matter and possibly the source of all the weirdness of quantum mechanics. We turn to the meaning of the wave function, Ψ. What is Ψ anyway and what does it tell us about Amber’s whereabouts and howabouts?

Well, scientists have discovered that Amber’s wave function determines her probability density. Amber’s probability density gives us the likelihood of finding her in some place. To illustrate what this all means, let us use the well-known example of the hydrogen atom.

Suppose Amber is the electron of an atom of hydrogen. We can use Schrödinger’s equation to determine Amber’s wave function Ψ. Once we have determined Ψ, we can then use it to determine Amber’s probability density. In the context of atoms, the probability density of the electron is also called its electron cloud. Why is it called an electron cloud? Well, just take a look at the picture below.

 

The picture shows one of Amber’s possible probability densities, one of her potential electron clouds. (For those who remember their high school chemistry, the electron cloud shown above is what chemists call the ‘1s orbital’.) The darker regions represent regions in space where one is relatively likely to find Amber. Meanwhile, the lighter regions are the regions where finding her is relatively improbable. Notice how Amber’s probability density is diffused throughout space. That is why it’s called an electron cloud– like a cloud, it is not a firm, rigid structure but is instead spread out. Below are more possible electron clouds for Amber. (Chemists call them the 2p, 3p and 3d orbitals, respectively.)

 

So, does this mean that Amber is spread out? Well, let us check via experiment. Let us consider again the original electron cloud above. This time, we label some of the points in space. Let’s label them points A, B, C and D. Even before we perform the experiment to determine the whereabouts of Amber, we already know that Amber is more likely to be found in A than in B and less likely to be found in C than in D. Also, Amber is equally likely to be found in A as in D.

However, scientist found that after performing the experiment, they find Amber in a definite location. Say, you perform an experiment and find that Amber is in B. Two questions naturally arise. First, why in B and not A, where she was more likely to be found? Second, does the result imply that Amber was in B all along?

To answer the first question, we note that quantum mechanics is different from classical mechanics in being probabilistic instead of deterministic. In other words, quantum mechanics is about probabilities or likelihood. And in probabilities, an improbable event is still possible and can therefore happen, while a probable event does not have to occur. For example, when you throw a pair of dice, getting a 7 is a likely outcome while getting snake eyes is unlikely. However, when you throw a pair of dice, it is still possible, although unlikely, to get snake eyes instead of a 7. The probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics is what inspired Einstein to compare it to God playing dice with the universe.

 

Now it’s time to tackle the second and thornier question: If we perform an experiment to locate Amber and, as a result, find her in B, doesn’t that mean she was in B all along? There are three main answers to this question, and they represent the three main interpretations of quantum mechanics. They can be stated as follows:

1. The realist position says that Amber was in B all along. However, quantum mechanics was not able to tell us this. After all, quantum mechanics says that everything that can be said of Amber is already in Ψ. However, Ψ did not really tell us where we will find Amber, it merely gave us probabilities. Quantum mechanics is therefore incomplete – it does not give us a complete picture of reality. People subscribing to the realist position believe we need to discover what are known as hidden variables. Once these hidden variables are discovered, we can determine that Amber was indeed in B all this time.

2. The Copenhagen interpretation says that before the experiment, Amber was not in B, nor was she in A, C, D or in some other location. This interpretation tells us that her wave function gives us all we can know about her. This has a very interesting implication: if Amber was not in any place before the search, and was found to be somewhere after the search, that means that the act of looking for her somehow forced her to be somewhere! In the case of our example, that somewhere simply happened to be B, but it could have been A, C, D or some other location.

3. The agnostic position is to be silent about the whole matter. After all, who are we to say where Amber was before we actually searched for her? And it doesn’t matter whether you take the realist or Copenhagen interpretations because the equations of quantum mechanics give you the correct probabilities anyway.

After decades of furious research, many working physicists find themselves subscribing to the Copenhagen interpretation. (The Copenhagen interpretation got its name from the city of Niels Bohr, one of its main proponents.) And, surprisingly, the agnostic position is already eliminated by a relatively recently discovered theorem known as Bell’s theorem. Bell’s theorem basically says that it does make an observable difference whether Amber was in B all along or whether she was nowhere.  Also, very few working scientists are still hoping to find the hidden variables required by the realist position.

There are, in fact, other interpretations of quantum mechanics currently being considered by scientists. One of the more interesting of them is the many worlds interpretation.

4. The many worlds interpretation (MWI) says that all possible outcomes (finding Amber in A, B, C, D and all other possible locations) actually happen, but in different worlds! According to the MWI, what is objectively true is the Universe (with a capital U); it is where you find Amber’s electron cloud. When you try to look for Amber, the many worlds of the Universe decohere; that is, they get distinguished from each other. In one of those worlds, you find Amber in B, and in that world, she was in B all along. In another of those worlds, you find her in A, and in that world, she was in A even before you searched for her. And so it goes for the other possible outcomes (finding Amber in C, D, ect.).

If you are starting to find Amber’s world weird, know that this is only the tip of the iceberg. The world of Amber and her fellow quantum particles is governed by randomness. It is the opposite of the clockwork universe of classical physics.

 

Quantum vs. Classical

Now, one might think it strange that there are different rules governing the universe at different scales, classical mechanics for big things and quantum mechanics for very small things. How does one decide how big is big, anyway? Or how small should a thing be for it to be ruled by quantum mechanics? The truth is, according to the best scientific evidence we currently have, quantum mechanics governs the behavior of everything. Even Bouncy the basketball is governed by quantum mechanics! After all, Bouncy is also made of electrons, protons and neutrons, which are all quantum objects. Everything around us is made of quantum objects! However, for objects the size of Bouncy, classical mechanics is a good enough approximation. In fact, it is a superb approximation, to the point that we could use classical mechanics to predict Bouncy’s behavior without fear of being wrong. In other words, classical mechanics is an excellent estimate of quantum mechanics that is appropriate in the world of everyday objects. In the scale of things we see and touch, the weirdness that quantum mechanics displays on the small scale disappears.

Given these statements, this article is therefore about the fundamental rules that govern the behavior of everything around and within us. Ours is a quantum universe, and God does indeed throw dice on us all.

Up Next on Quantum Queries:

• What is the deal with Schrödinger’s cat?
• What is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle all about?
• What is a ‘quantum’ of anything?
• Why did Einstein find quantum mechanics so repulsive?
• What is tunneling and how will it render Moore’s law obsolete?
• What is entanglement and how is it related to teleportation?
• Can we test the truth of the many worlds interpretation?

Quelling Quantum Quackery

Along with ‘energy’ and ‘vibration’, the word ‘quantum’ is one of those scientific terms most dear to charlatans. Furthermore, quantum mechanics itself is home to terms and concepts that are easy target to quacks who like to sound scientific. Here’s a sampler of commonly abused words and concepts: entanglement, coherence and decoherence, the uncertainty principle, the many worlds, Schrödinger’s cat, action-at-a-distance, and quantum teleportation.

The ease at which impostors can abuse the terms and concepts of quantum mechanics cannot be blamed on one thing only. However, there is one factor that looms above the rest, and this is the lack of public understanding of quantum mechanics. In fact, one could say that it is a lack of understanding of physics, or worse, the lack of understanding of science as a whole!

This  is why I have decided to start the series ‘Quantum Queries’.  Through this series of articles, I would like to introduce the uninitiated but interested netizen to the amazing world of quantum mechanics. In this series we would tackle — in a way that I hope is entertaining and enlightening — some of the most vexing questions that surround the workings of the world around us. Below is a sample of some of the quantum queries that we will try to answer in this series:

• What is the deal with Schrödinger’s cat?
• What is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle all about?
• Is the many worlds theory true? And if it is, where are all these other worlds?
• What is quantum entanglement? And can it really be used for teleportation?

My hope is that this series will give its readers the skill to discriminate between genuine quantum physics and quantum baloney. What follows is the first article in this series. Enjoy!

 

The Quantum and the Classical

Meet Amber. She is an electron. Amber masses 9.11×10^-31 kilograms, a mass that makes “featherweight” sound really heavy. (Amber’s mass in decimal form is 0.000000000000000000000000000911 grams!)

Where’s Amber? Also, how fast is she going and where is she headed? Where can we find her later?

Well, answering these questions is not as easy as it sounds. This is because Amber’s behavior is governed by the rules of quantum mechanics, which are quite different from the rules that govern the behavior of familiar objects like falling apples, swinging pendulums or flying cannon balls. The objects familiar to us through everyday experience are governed by the rules of classical mechanics, discovered in the 17^th century by Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton.

How different are the rules governing Amber’s behavior from the rules governing the behavior of, say, a basketball? And where in the world is Amber? To answer these and related questions, let us first review the physics behind the behavior of everyday objects. Let us begin with the classics.

 

Back to the Classics

Meet Bouncy the basketball. Bouncy masses 145 grams. Scientists have discovered that they can describe Bouncy’s behavior using the rules of classical mechanics. When you hear physicists say, “Bouncy behaves classically,” this is what they mean.

So, where’s Bouncy? Also, how fast is he going and where is he headed? There are two things about Bouncy that are relevant in answering these questions. 

First, classical mechanics tells us that at any given moment, we can narrow down the range of Bouncy’s possible locations and speed as much as we want. For instance, it is possible that you at first only know that Bouncy is within Quezon Cityand has a speed somewhere between 1 kph and 4 kph. However, you can always find a way to narrow these ranges so that, after some investigation, you know that Bouncy is in the basketball court of the Araneta Coliseum and is going somewhere between 1.5 kph and 2.5 kph. Finally, it is possible that further investigation will lead you to conclude that Bouncy is, in fact, in the hands of PBA point guard LA Tenorio, and has a speed of 2.00 kph directed 45° from the horizontal. No one could blame you if you say that you have determined exactly where and how fast Bouncy was at that moment – there is practically zero uncertainty in Bouncy’s location and velocity. If you’re wondering how you could’ve known where and how fast bouncy was at a given moment, just imagine watching a replay of a PBA game. By analyzing the video, you can determine Bouncy’s location and velocity at any moment during the game. (For those who forgot their high school physics, velocity is just speed plus the direction.)

Second, classical mechanics allows us to predict where and how fast Bouncy will be at some later time. You can do this by using Bouncy’s classical equation of motion. An equation of motion is an equation that describes, well, the motion of an object. In classical mechanics, the equation of motion, also known as Newton’s Second Law, can be written as follows:

So let’s review what’s been said of Bouncy so far. First, we can be more or less certain of Bouncy’s location and velocity at any given moment. Second, if we know Bouncy’s location and velocity now, then we can use Newton’s Second Law to know his location and velocity in the future.

For example, consider the case where LA Tenorio is attempting a shot and Bouncy leaves his hands at the speed of 2.00 kph, projected at an angle of 45°.

Calculations using Newton’s Second Law will allow you to predict, up to a very high precision, where and how fast Bouncy will be after he leaves Tenorio’s hand. This means that you can forecast whether or not Tenorio will make the shot. Of course you can only do it if you are very fast in calculating. A supercomputer watching the basketball game could perform such überfast computation.

Since it is possible to determine and predict the precise location and velocity of everyday objects like Bouncy, classical mechanics is described as deterministic. Note that classical mechanics does not limit you to calculating Bouncy’s future location and velocity; you can also calculate Bouncy’s previous location and velocity. In other words, if you have enough computing capacity and knowledge of the present situation, you can know the location and velocity of classical objects like Bouncy for all time in the history of the universe!

 

But the following question will naturally arise in the curious reader’s head: How do we know thatNewton’s Second Law is to be trusted? How do we know that the whole of classical mechanics is correct? As always in science, the ultimate test of correctness is agreement with observation. And hundreds of years of observation have confirmed the accuracy of classical mechanics in describing the behavior of objects ranging from basketballs, cannonballs, and rockets to things the size of planets and stars.

In fact, for centuries the planets and stars themselves became the paragons of Newtonian physics’ sober splendor. The astounding predictability of the dance of the planets made the image of a clockwork universe indelible in the minds of generations of scientists.

 

One cannot therefore blame scientists for initially thinking that electrons like Amber will also behave like Bouncy and other classical objects, and that the universe will appear to tick like a grandfather clock at all scales. However, the shocking discoveries of the early 20^th century revealed to us that in the strange world of Amber and her fellow quantum objects, the clockwork dreams of classical physicists are regularly blown to smithereens.

 

Up Next on Quantum Queries:

• So, where is Amber?
• What is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle all about?
• What is the wave function?
• What does the many worlds theory tell us about our Universe?

The Talented Mr. Turing

If you are reading this from a computer, then you should thank the guy below.

His name is Alan Turing, and this 23^rd of June marks the 100^thanniversary of his birth. Turing was instrumental in the development of the modern theory of computation that serves as the basis for modern computer technology. He also laid down the foundations for the field of artificial intelligence. During the Second World War, Turing was also a critical figure in cracking the Enigma codeof the Nazis. Basically, he was both genius and war hero.

Despite these, when he admitted to being a practicing homosexual after the war, the British police had him punished for the “gross indecency”, a crime that is punishable either by imprisonment or chemical castration. Some historians believe his persecution to be one of the causes of his early death, a death that is to this day as laced in mystery as it is in cyanide.

It is indeed troubling that it was only less than a century ago that a law existed in Britain that criminalized homosexuality. What is more troubling is the fact that to this very day, similar laws persist in some parts of the world. Even in parts of the world where the law has moved past bigotry against homosexuality, there are still people who believe that Turing deserved his fate or that, at the very least, homosexuals like Turing do not deserve equal rights.

However, since it is Alan Turing’s 100^th birthday, it would be more appropriate if we discuss things on a note of hope. After all, Turing himself lived his life with his head ever held high.

Alan Turing was among the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. His talent revealed itself from a very early age. However, his was not simply a genius (he was elected to a fellowship at King’s College at the age of 23) but also a powerful character. For example, on his first day of school at the Sherborne School in Dorset, he discovered that there was a general strike, which meant that all means of public transportation was cut off.

Although his house was more than 96 kilometers away from Dorset, this did not stop him, and he bicycled his way to school. He was only 14 years old then! It’s a small wonder that he grew up to be a world-class marathon runner, almost qualifying for the British Olympic team in 1948.

What set him apart from previous major thinkers was his way of attacking problems, which represented a fundamental shift in perspective. In this regard, Turing was the Galileo of the previous century.

Before Galileo, physics was grounded by the insistence that the workings of the natural world can be divined purely by rational thought; most of pre-Galilean physics was armchair physics. Galileo showed us once and for all that the scientific method the two Bacons (Francis and Roger before him) talked about was a creative mix of logical reasoning and careful experimentation and/or observation.

One of Turing’s lasting contributions to scientific thought, to me, was his restating in a very practical and testable way many problems that have been previously regarded only in the abstract. Let me give just two of the many possible examples to illustrate this point. First, we consider Turing machines and second, we consider the Turing test. (For those who are more interested in Turing’s life than in his contributions, you may skip the next two sections without loss of appreciation for the succeeding ones.)

 

Turing Machines

Let us start with a fellow named Bertrand Russell. Aside from sex, sets and classes were old Bertie’s lasting interests. A class is basically a collection of objects with similar properties. In one of his studies, old Bertie analyzed the properties of what he called the “set of all sets” and the “class of all classes”.  This led him to the now famous Russell’s paradox. What is Russell’s paradox? Consider the class of all classes that do not belong to themselves. Does this class belong to itself? Mind effing, right?

Now, to avoid Russell’s paradox, some mathematicians and philosophers have resolved to be strict in their definition of sets and classes. They decided to call a collection of objects a set if and only if there is a clear-cut way of constructing it from scratch. This led them to restrict the number of rules one can use in arithmetic. And then along came Kurt Gödel who said that, roughly, such a restricted set of rules (what mathematicians and philosophers call a formal system) does not have the power to prove all true statements in arithmetic. He said this in his now famous Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. In other words, the incompleteness theorems imply that there are true statements in arithmetic that any formal system cannot prove.

All these are pretty abstract stuff. Enter Alan Turing and his Turing machines. Turing machines are abstract devices that can solve certain problems of arithmetic. Turing described the minimal requirements of his machine as follows: you have a very long (think infinitely long) strip of paper divided into cells, where each cell can contain a ‘0’ or a ‘1’, and a reader-writer that can read the content of each cell and print out a 0 or a 1 on an empty cell or replace the digit on a non-empty cell. However, since we have the benefit of computers, we can now think of Turing machines as simply idealized computer programs for solving specific problems.

Turing machines (think computer programs) are very important in mathematics and philosophy because they can be used to construct sets, which was the dream of philosophers and mathematicians. How? Think of the ‘0’ as a ‘no’ and the ‘1’ as a ‘yes’. If you want to construct the set of odd numbers starting from 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on, a Turing machine will give you the output 01010101…, meaning “No, zero is not an odd number; yes one an odd number; no; yes; no; yes; …”

Now for Turing’s punch line: you cannot find a Turing machine that can determine whether another Turing machine can solve a problem in a finite period of time or not. The problem with some Turing machines, you see, is that it can take them an infinite amount of time to solve a problem – in short, they can’t solve it. But how do we know whether a Turing machine can solve a problem or not? Perhaps we can build another Turing machine to tell us “Yes, this Turing machine can solve it” or “No, this bloke of a machine cannot.”

Alan Turing showed the world that we cannot have such a machine. For the sharp reader, you could see that this is intimately related to what Gödel said. Only, instead of being stated in a very abstract way, Turing placed it on firmer ground by giving us the image of Turing machines.

 

The Turing Test

Another example of Alan’s powerful insight is his restating the problem of intelligence, particularly the problem of artificial intelligence, in terms of what is now known as the Turing test.

To put things into context, note that Turing was very intellectually promiscuous. (Yes, it can have two meanings, and in the case of Turing both meanings apply.) He did not really care what “field” a certain study was in. If he was interested in it, he studied it. And so while studying math and philosophy (although he never considered himself a philosopher), he also studied computer science and artificial intelligence. His papers on computability laid the foundations of modern computer science.

He was also acutely interested in the very philosophical problem of intelligence. Some of the questions he wrestled with were, “What is intelligence? Can we ever build a machine that can ‘think’? How can we build a brain? How do humans understand anything?” However, Turing found these questions too vague and ill-posed. To formulate them in a way that is amenable to scientific scrutiny, he devised the Turing test.

Here’s how the Turing test goes. Our cast of characters contains three individuals: Person A, Person X, and Machine Z. Place each of these characters in an isolated room so that they cannot “see” each other. Connect Person X and Machine Z to Person A via a network. (Think the internet; imagine they are chatting via Skype or, if you are old school, via MIRC.) Person A then asks certain questions to Person X and Machine Z via the network. Turing said that we can conclude that Machine Z has artificial intelligence if Person A cannot decide with certainty which of his interlocutors is man and which is machine.

Philosophers, being people who have nothing better to do, are still arguing about the validity of the Turing test. But one can easily see that Turing’s take on the problem of artificial intelligence was a gargantuan improvement on previous attempts.

 

Turing’s Bombe

History will always remember Alan Turing as one of the critical figures in the British success in deciphering the Enigma code of the Nazis. During the Second World War, the Nazis used a machine called the Enigma machine to encipher the codes they used in wartime communication (such as communications between German U-boats). As one can easily see, figuring out what the Nazis were talking about is important in anticipating their next move and therefore beating them. During the war, Turing applied his genius to the problem of breaking the Nazi cipher. To do this, he invented and helped in constructing several deciphering machines; chief among these is what is now known as the Bombe.

 

The Passion of Turing

If you think that for all his achievements, Turing would be celebrated as a pride of the British people, then you’re wrong. Some time after the war, a burglary forced Turing to admit to the police that he engaged in homosexual activities, which simply means that he was enjoying himself. Apparently, many forms of enjoying oneself were illegal in 1952 Britain. For being a sexually active gay guy, Turing was convicted of ‘gross indecency’. And indeed, under the law of the time, homosexual acts were illegal in Britain. (Such unjust laws persisted in many parts of the Western world well into the twentieth century.)

For his “crime”, the police asked Turing to choose between imprisonment and “chemical castration”. He chose the latter; this involved being injected with estrogens that were supposed to lower his libido.

However, instead of being dejected, Turing continued to be a strong-willed individual, diligently carrying on with his many researches for about two years up until his death in 1954. Police investigations revealed that Turing poisoned himself with cyanide. However, some, including Turing’s mother, claimed that he was accidentally poisoned due to his own carelessness with chemicals. (Chemistry was one of Turing’s many obsessions.) This claim was spurred by the fact that a bitten apple was found near the site of Turing’s death. The police, however, never tested the said apple for cyanide.

 

Turing’s Lessons

Alan Turing’s rich and colorful life is something we should all learn from. I believe we should all try to embody his rarely-equaled passion for learning and his voracious appetite for understanding new things. His strong-willed reaction to his persecution for being gay should also be inspiration to those who continue to fight against laws and societies that attempt to repress and suppress diversity.

During the previous years, many people have urged the British government to issue a formal public apology for the treatment of Turing after the war. However, Lord McNally’s reaction to such calls seems, to me, to be most appropriate:

A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence. He would have known that his offence was against the law and that he would be prosecuted. It is tragic that Alan Turing was convicted of an offence which now seems both cruel and absurd—particularly poignant given his outstanding contribution to the war effort. However, the law at the time required a prosecution and, as such, long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times.

That means that Turing knew that his battle was against an unjust law, and he fought it by being who he was and by being proud of it. I therefore believe that the appropriate way to celebrate Turing’s centenary is to celebrate his achievements and his strength as well as the achievements of the LGBT community throughout the decades following Turing’s death. The mere fact that even some opponents of equal rights find Turing’s conviction unjust is already worth a little celebration.

Here are a few of my humble suggestions on how to celebrate Turing’s 100^th birthday:

• Eat an apple (just be sure it’s not laced with cyanide)
• Learn something totally new
• Learn more about computers
• Wear something colorful
• Share the story of Alan Turing to a friend who has not heard about him

Long before ‘facepalm’ became a meme, I had a conversation with a friend, a young teenage mom about 5 years ago, that made me literally put my palm to my face. We were talking about her baby boy.

Teenage mom: My son is always suffering from diarrhea. I don’t know why.

Me: Are you boiling the water you use for his milk?

Teenage mom: No…am I supposed to?

(insert massive facepalm here)

 

Common sense parenting isn’t common

For many of us, boiling water for a baby’s milk is standard operating procedure (SOP). Many people won’t even tell you that. You’re just supposed “to know”. The rationale is that babies’ digestive systems are still sensitive to too many pathogens, including “ordinary” free floating bacteria and viruses found in unboiled tap water. It doesn’t matter even if the water has passed through the usual microbiological tests and deemed 98 to 99% “safe”. For most babies, that’s still not clean enough. Having a brand new immune system, much of a baby’s immunity has yet to be developed. Moreover, immunity is acquired through the immune system’s memory cells, whose role is to store information on past pathogens. Babies, being brand new human beings, have not yet been exposed to enough pathogens, and have therefore not developed the required immunity to withstand even drinking water fresh from the tap.

 

Parental ignorance is not bliss 

Contrary to that adage, “ignorance is bliss”, a parent’s lack of information can easily harm the child. Recalling a time when I went with my dad to get rabies shots for a dog bite at the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM), I overheard a tragic conversation between a doctor and a mother with a young man of about 14.

The young man was brought in for some symptoms which the doctor diagnosed as rabies. The conversation went something like this:

Doctor: So your son was bitten by a dog a few months ago?

Mother: Yes…

Doctor: And you didn’t get him anti-rabies shots?

Mother: No…

Doctor: I am sorry but he’s manifesting some advanced stages of rabies infection. We have no other choice but to pray now…

I couldn’t bear to stand and listen to what came next because the mom started to weep while the thin and pale face of the boy took on a resigned look. I don’t even know if he survived.

Parents have no excuse to be ignorant. In this modern age, information is everywhere. Even information on medical and health-related concerns abound. There’s the Internet, Google, and cheap Internet cafes that can be used for as little as Php 10-15 an hour. There are also medical advisories and tips posted in public places and school bulletin boards. One can even opt to ask advice from veteran parents. There are also regular health and medicine-related shows on TV and even medical columns in the newspapers.

And if there’s cause for concern, there are free medical check-ups provided by PCSO, its satellite clinics, and many barangay clinics and hospitals offered by LGUs in their respective areas. There’s even the occasional medical missions organized by many NGOs, medicine retailers, pharma companies, and philanthropic organizations. The bottom line is, parents have little excuse to be actively ignorant. In fact, I would go as far as to say that only parents who are determined to be ignorant stay uninformed, to the possible detriment of their children.

And since parents are parents, they are granted automatic de facto rights, responsibilities, and obligations towards their children. If parental negligence results in a child’s death, parents can be held criminally liable.

 

Making money from ignorance 

Moreover, there are many wolves in sheep’s clothing ready to take advantage of parental ignorance, ignorance that is not solely limited to the lower socio-economic strata. There are companies who leverage on the media machine, money, and advertising savvy to take advantage of the good intentions of even more affluent parents.

One example is this new sound device that purportedly help parents “interact” with babies while these are still in the womb. Other asserted benefits for prenatal babies include babies turning themselves to the proper orientation so that they come out heads first. And a third articulated benefit is helping the unborn baby familiarize himself/herself to the parent’s and grandparent’s voices so as to bond with them.

How the makers of these products came by this “bonding” conclusion is beyond me. Granted, babies may be able to hear the sound in vivo, but the sound that passes through the amniotic fluid (in which the unborn baby is suspended in) is likely to be muffled since sound changes speed in a different medium.

 

In other words, sound behaves differently in air than it does through amniotic fluid. Moreover, even if the baby does respond to the sound, for example, the baby moves more often, it is doubtful whether this increased movement is caused by babies’ being able to distinguish between a person’s voice from any other sounds they hear. Why? Because babies lack the experience in contextualizing verbal information; they do not yet know what words mean, much less phrases or whole sentences. Thus, baby product companies that make such claims of these sound products are in a very precarious situation just in case someone challenges the company to prove its declarations.

 

Fake fathers

Baby product companies aren’t the sole exploiters of parents’ lack of information. The other major group comprise religious authorities. In the Philippines, a largely Catholic country, separation of church and state is an illusion and the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) reigns supreme and uncontested. The CBCP may be “spiritual” fathers to some but this fatherhood is merely metaphorical. The fact that they are not real parents makes one doubt if they can truly empathize with the plight of parents, specifically mothers, as reflected in their consistent antagonistic stance towards the RH bill.

 

Moreover, in the instance that pedophilic and sexually abusive priests do sire offspring, such a scandal will surely be swept under the rug and denied, including their parental responsibility. Worst, these priests just get shuffled between one country to another, to victimize more children and women in their wake while they exercise, ironically, their spiritual faculties to the faithful.

 

Despite eleven daily maternal deaths due to birth-related complications in the Philippines, the CBCP have kept to their guns, and they will continue to oppose the passing of the RH bill. And why should they not? Education, a critical component of the RH bill, will not only inform women, but it also has the potential to liberate and empower them from the shackles of religion, dogma, superstition, and ignorance.

The RH Bill connection

Despite the CBCP’s contentions, we direly need the RH bill. And mothers know this best of all. You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that families have limited resources, and in the case of poor families, more so. The more children indigent families produce, the more pressure is put on the scarce resources they already have.

One case in point is my teenage friend whom I introduced at the start of this article. While the two of us had our first child almost at the same time, I still only have one child while she now has five children (in the span of nine years), with the last one just turning three years old.

While I am gainfully employed with my freelance consulting work with long-term committed clients, and have a husband who also does paid projects at home, my friend can only occasionally sell ‘kakanin’ (ricecakes) and is married to a construction worker. While I consistently get paid an honorarium month in and month out, the husband of my friend earns only on a contractual basis. He has take-home money only when he is needed for some physical infrastructure project contracted to an agency. Thus, the primary source of family funds for my friend is not secure and seasonal at best. When the father doesn’t earn, my friend is forced to borrow from a “5-6″ local agent.

Every time I do get to see her (which is rare nowadays as we have moved far away), she is always complaining about how hard life has become. In fact, life for her has become even more challenging now than when she was still single. Last time I met her, she admitted to eating her neighbor’s dog food out of extreme hunger, just to ensure she produces enough milk for nursing her fourth baby.

My friend’s story, and other women’s similar stories, should convince us to we must push for the passing of the RH bill now. The bottomline is: who will make the final decision here? Will we listen to what the religious authorities who pretend to be our “spiritual parents” say, or do we choose to save the lives of our poor, our children, and our Filipino mothers?

–

Picture credits (used under Creative Commons)

1. lovelybabypictures.com

2. millcreekauthority.org

3. sydesjokes.blogspot.com

4. todayifoundout.com

5. shaanhaider.com

6. mazzum.wordpress.com

7. likhaan.org

Let’s get back to basics. The following is a case against a cosmological argument for the existence of God.

Intelligent (not “folk”) Christians will repeatedly tell you that faith and reason are both used in their theologies. Unlike the laity and the unwashed masses, they don’t rely completely on faith, or belief without evidence. Indeed, the Christian religion in its many forms has a long history of logical attempts, from Aquinas to Calvin, at trying to prove the existence of God and the plausibility of their doctrines. This is perhaps due to the fact that certain intellectuals in each tradition simply cannot reconcile their rationality with their religion’s doctrines.

Through tireless philosophical refinement of initially primitive and unimpressive doctrines such as the Genesis myth, we get sophisticated logical arguments such as Thomas Aquinas’ Five Ways. Seeing these attempts at logical proof, though, I am personally baffled by the intelligent theist’s recourse to faith. If God is provable through reason, of what use is faith? If faith is sufficient, why use imperfect human reason?

Philosophical arguments for God take various forms, such as the cosmological, ontological, and teleological arguments. There are, of course, many criticisms against most, if not all, of these. The cosmological (first cause) and teleological (purposeful design) arguments are empirical arguments, taking the world as it is and reasoning that there must have been a Creator.

One of the most interesting of these arguments, for me, is the Kalam cosmological argument. Unlike most arguments for God, it intends to at least be scientific in its attempt at proving that a personal God exists. Through its most vocal proponent, theologian William Lane Craig, the Kalam is used to argue that the universe must have had a cause. Formally stated, the Kalam appears as such:

(1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
(2) The universe began to exist.
(3) The universe has a cause.

 

Everything that begins to exist has a cause

Premise (1) asserts that everything that begins to exist has a cause. This statement evades criticisms such as those that Bertrand Russell put forward against Aquinas such as, “Who made God?” Since the Kalam argument states that everything that begins to exist has a cause, God, who is eternal and never began to exist, does not have a cause.

Physicists such as Victor Stenger have argued that not everything that begins to exist has a cause. When an electron increases in energy to an excited state and returns to its ground state, a photon appears. This appearance of the photon occurs spontaneously and is not a deterministic consequence. That is to say, in Stenger’s words, it is “without cause.” The same is true for the radioactive decay of the atomic nucleus. We can know the probability of decay but it is impossible to say exactly when the decay will occur.

 

William Lane Craig readily counters this by saying that that is not true causeless existence since nature, which God presumably made, is necessary for such events. However, Craig must now accept that probabilistic causes, if they are “causes” at all, are possible mechanisms for the beginning of the universe. This severely weakens the notion that a personal God predetermined the moment of creation with a purpose.

However, even accepting Premise (1) as true, we can move forward and still see that the Kalam argument ultimately fails in its misuse of time.

 

The universe began to exist

The discovery of the Big Bang model of the origin of the universe was very popular among theists. The Big Bang, they suggest, is proof positive that the universe began to exist. When Georges Lemaître first proposed the model, Pope Pius XII saw this as scientific evidence for creation, “it seems that science of today, by going back in one leap millions of centuries, has succeeded in being witness to that primordial Fiat Lux when, out of nothing, there burst forth with matter a sea of light and radiation, while the particles of chemical elements split and reunited in millions of galaxies.”

 

Theologians and apologists such as Craig and Dinesh D’Souza find that since the universe as we know it began 13.7 billion years ago in the Big Bang, then the universe began to exist and it had a cause for its existence. Craig, in the Islamic tradition of the Kalam, suggests that since the universe began to exist 13.7 billion years ago, then there must have been a “particularizer” to decide to begin the universe at that moment and not a moment before. And since this particularizer has the capability to decide and distinguish between moments, then this must be a personal kind of God with a mind analogous to ours (therefore not the deist’s God).

Remember, though, that Craig can no longer require this decision to create the universe to be particularized by a personal God since he must allow that probabilistic causes are possible causes for the universe. The mechanical circumstances necessary for atomic decay are all already in place, even though the effect of a decayed nucleus is delayed. The nucleus could decay in 2 seconds, it could decay in 100 billion years. This defeats the necessity of a personal God deciding to create the universe 13.7 billion years ago and not 12 or 20.

As James Still has seen, Craig’s view of time results in severe problems for the Kalam. It seems that in his view, time exists not in the physicists’ definition of time. Physicists use time in the relational view, where time exists relative to bodies in motion, like ticking clocks. This is integral to Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity, where the experience of time changes depending on velocity and the presence of mass. This effect has been confirmed and global positioning systems would fail without the corrections predicted by relativity. More importantly, general relativity shows that, if the universe did begin to exist, time itself began along with space, energy, and matter.

It makes no sense in the relational view of time to suggest that the universe could have had begun a moment before since there were no moments “before” the Big Bang, which is when time started ticking. Therefore, Craig seems to see time as absolute in his metaphysics. Personally, his view makes no sense to me. Perhaps he believes that events can be absolutely simultaneous regardless of frame of reference, which goes against special relativity. At the very least, we know that Craig clearly does not mean “time” in the way it is used by scientists.

It has been suggested that it is possible that the universe has simply always existed—a “brute fact,” in Russell’s words. This would remove any need for a creator since the universe did not “begin to exist.” However, Craig counters this by supporting Premise (2) with the following argument:

(4) An actual infinite cannot exist.
(5) An infinite temporal regress of events is an actual infinite.
(6) Therefore, an infinite temporal regress of events cannot exist.

Through this argument, Craig contends that it is impossible for the universe to have always existed since this would require an infinite temporal regress of events. Craig uses the example of Hilbert’s Grand Hotel to show that an actually real infinite would lead to absurdities.

Briefly, David Hilbert’s paradox of the grand hotel shows that if you have a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, it can accommodate an infinite number of guests. It should then be full after checking in an infinite number of guests. But, if another infinite number of guests should wish to stay in the hotel, one would only need to move the first set of guests to odd numbered rooms and the second group into even numbered rooms. You have now accommodated another infinite number of people in a supposedly full hotel. Craig argues that since this is a counter-intuitive result, then an actual infinite must be impossible.

It is important to note, however, that counter-intuitive results show up in science all the time. The greatest example of this is the discovery of wave-particle duality. A particle can be at many places at the same time. A particle can have many states at the same time. It is therefore not true that counter-intuitive results are necessarily impossible. However, we need not reject Craig’s use of Hilbert’s Hotel to see that Premise (2) in the Kalam is problematic.

Contrary to how Craig views the Big Bang model, the standard model of cosmology does not necessarily see the universe as beginning from a single infinitely dense point—a singularity. This prediction that the universe began as a singularity, via the Penrose-Hawking theorems, was because the Big Bang was erroneously viewed purely through the lens of General Relativity. Both Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking would later revise their position. Taking into account the physics of quantum mechanics, which would dominate at the extremely small scales of the earliest moments of the Big Bang, Hawking says, “There was in fact no singularity at the beginning of the universe.”

 

It is completely possible, as Hawking suggests in A Brief History of Time, that the universe has no boundary in time. This means that t = 0 (where t = time) is merely in the middle of a continuous line of imaginary time (a concept necessary to describe quantum tunneling), like how the South Pole is not the end of the Earth, but just another point along the longitudes. Trace the longitude going through the poles of the Earth and you get a finite but unbounded geometry—a great circle; the same could be true for four dimensional space-time. It therefore stands to reason that time need not have a beginning, as a singularity would suggest.

 

In any case, singularity or no singularity, the scientific relational view of time avoids the problem of an infinite addition of events leading up to today because, although the age of the universe is finite, it is also true that the universe is eternal and has always existed. There has never been a time when there was no universe.

 

The universe has a cause

Craig asserts through an absolute view of time that actual infinities cannot exist. This would also apply to God. God cannot have existed through an actual infinite addition of events going back to nowhere. To get around this, theologians can assert that God is eternal not in the infinite number of events sense but because he is timeless. Unfortunately for the theist, since God is timeless, there would also never have been a time when God did not create the universe. The eternal universe would also be timeless in the same sense.

If Craig is to retain his absolute view of time, he must also reject the impossible timelessness of God. God must have begun to exist and himself have a cause. We can repeat Bertrand Russell’s challenge, “Who made God?” If Craig is to accept the physicists’ relational view of time, he must also accept that the universe is “eternal” in the same sense that God is eternal. Premise (2) fails and God is then an unnecessary explanation for the universe’s existence.

As Paul Draper notes, another problem with the Kalam cosmological argument is that it equivocates two senses of the phrase “begin to exist.” The strength of the Kalam cosmological argument is that it purports to be a proof of God from the evidence. It uses inductive reasoning to show that since everything begins to exist from causes, then the universe must also have begun to exist from a cause. However, the things we see to begin to exist begin in time. The universe, if it began to exist, began with time 13.7 billion years ago. We have no experience, no valid intuition, of things, let alone universes, beginning with time. Craig therefore commits the fallacy of equivocation in reasoning from the example of ordinary objects that the universe must also have a cause. Even if we accept Premises (1) and (2), the conclusion of the Kalam cosmological argument remains invalid. The eternal universe remains a brute fact.

 

TL;DR

The Kalam cosmological argument was a very strong case for the existence of not just a supernatural creator, but a personal one with a mind and thoughts. Because of the supposed impossibility of infinities in the real world, there is indeed a real problem for the naturalistic existence of the universe.

All of these arguments, however, have been fatally challenged by what we know today about the universe. The necessity of a personal creator is refuted by the existence of natural mechanisms for probabilistic causes. This means that naturalistic causes need not have their effects occur immediately after. The eternity of the universe is also supported by the dependence of time on space. In other words, without the universe, there was no time. Without time outside the universe, there was never a time without a universe. Hence, the universe has always existed and a creator is unnecessary to explain its existence.

It was perhaps impossible to have been an intellectually satisfied atheist until the discovery of relativity and quantum mechanics. The refutation of the Kalam heavily depends on the evidence that supports these theories. This did not have to be how nature is. As we learn more about the peculiarities of the universe, the God-shaped hole at the end of the universe is all but plugged.

 

_{All images are public domain except image on quantum tunneling by Jean-Christoph Benoist. Licensed under Creative Commons.}