“wonder-igniters”

“Finding slug eggs, making the bulb light up, getting the microscope to focus, seeing cells for the first time, nurturing a seed, harvesting a tomato, catching the mealworm beetle as it “hatches” out of its pupa, making a “floater” sink and a “sinker” float, building a taller block building, getting a marble to run through a maze. Discovery that is the result of an imaginative act– one’s own “wonderful idea”– is a powerful thing. I believe that when children experience their own agency in this way, they learn that they can change the world.” – Abbe Futterman, teacher.

The above is just part of an interview with an artist-turned-science teacher named Abbe Futterman. She’s the sort of teacher I’d like my girls to experience. Science teaching, I believe, is so much about art, so little, really, about science itself. The science teacher is not a scientist, but an artist. We create art that creates itself.

I love teaching. I also love learning about science. But I’ve had the nagging suspicion for some time now that these two things are actually quite distinct. And I think that my own personal journey through science, which has taken me to places as different as the interior of the nucleus, the wondrous creatures of the Burgess Shale, and the bizarre and surprising moons of Jupiter, is just that, personal, valuable to me because it reflects my own choices, exciting to me because it is my own wonder I’ve ignited. It’s not a path anyone else could or should take. Everyone’s wonder will be, must be, their own.

My job as a teacher is to throw out many sparks. What I find amazing, wondrous, thrilling, may not do a thing for a particular learner. And that’s ok. It only takes one spark to set off that “wonderful idea,” the idea that will start the learner on her own path of discovery. When she looks back, she may never know that it all began today, with one little spark that I, in my wild flailings, happened to throw in just the right place at just the right time. And that’s ok, too.

“A sense of wonder,” Richard Fortey said, “cannot be purchased over the counter at the superstore. Nor can it be wheeled out of the corner cupboard at the behest of some curriculum or other. Instead,” he wrote, “it steals up on the child unexpectedly.”

I believe that when we encourage our learners to discover, we are encouraging them to be artists. Scientists are artists, creating their own models of the world. Science, like art, like music, like dance, like theater, and like writing, is one of the things people do. But our learners are not really doing science, not yet, not with the rigor and the insistence on skepticism that science so rightly demands. Instead, they are fiddling, tinkering, trying things out, exploring what’s interesting, what might happen if I mix this with that, if I hold this next to that, if I connect this piece with that piece. All these things are ways of changing the world, leaving a mark, making a difference.

The teaching I want to do is about inspiration. It’s about lighting a fire that will burn and burn and burn. It’s about starting my learners on a journey, maybe waving occasionally as we pass one another along the way, but always remembering that it’s their journey, not my own. Those stirring moments of discovery come not from me, but from my learners, from their own “wonderful ideas.”

It’s not about me, it’s about them. The good news is, I get to have a great time along the way, sharing my own passion as a tool for igniting theirs. That’s the sort of teacher I want to be.

If you want to read the entire Abbe Futterman interview, it’s here.

Neutrinos again

OK, I can’t help it. I wrote about neutrinos once before, but they’re too cool and I can’t leave them alone.

I’ve been reading about IceCube, a neutrino telescope at (literally, at) the South Pole. What in the world is a neutrino telescope doing there?

Well, it’s using the Earth. The idea is this. Neutrinos hardly interact with matter at all. Even the Earth is hardly a barrier to them. So by staring not up but down, into the incredibly thick and pure ice of the South Pole, what you’re actually doing is staring in the direction of neutrinos that have just passed through the Earth via the North Pole. Anything else, any other particles, would have been absorbed by the Earth long before they reached you, so you’re looking at the northern sky with a filter that only lets neutrinos through.

OK, so great. Neutrinos go through the entire Earth. Surely they’ll go through your little experiment just as easily. The IceCube neutrino telescope is a cubic kilometer, but that’s nothing compared to the Earth.

True, but remember that there’s lots and lots and lots of neutrinos. Almost all make it through the Earth, but that still leaves a huge number that interact with the Earth. And almost all make it through IceCube, too, but a smaller number interact with the ice.

Notice that the neutrinos that interact aren’t somehow weaker or slower than the rest. All these neutrinos are identical (though there are three different types, but there’s a twist there, too! See, aren’t neutrinos cool?). Just because a neutrino “made it” through the Earth doesn’t give it any better or worse chance of making it through IceCube.

So what does that mean, make it through? Or, more to the point, not make it through? What exactly happens to these little neutral ones?

Now the story gets really cool. Amazing, really.

Every once in a great while, a neutrino will slam into a neutron. When this happens, the neutron spits out something. The something depends on which kind of neutrino hit it. An electron neutrino causes an electron to come out (leaving a proton behind). A muon neutrino causes something else, a sort of electron on steroids, to come flying out. It’s called a muon.

OK, I have to tell this story. When the muon was first discovered, a physicist (one of my favorites) named I.I. Rabi, said, “Who ordered that?” The muon didn’t make any sense at the time. It was the wrong weight to be anything predicted. It seemed to have exactly the properties of the electron, except for two. It was much heavier than the electron, and it quickly decayed into (you guessed it) an electron. So what good was it. Who ordered that, indeed?

Later, scientists found that they could use muons from cosmic rays to verify Einstein’s relativistic time dilation, but that’s another story. This is about neutrinos!

Anyway, if the neutrino makes a muon, something amazing happens. The muon comes flying out of the atom at breakneck speed (if muons had necks). It’s going so fast, in fact, that it is actually faster than the speed of light.

Wait a minute, you just mentioned Einstein, and now you’re breaking the one law that everyone knows Einstein proved. Thou shalt not go faster than the speed of light.

Yes, but . . .

No buts, it’s your rule, now you have to obey it.

But wait.

OK, what?

Einstein said nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. Light, it turns out, travels just that fast. In a vacuum. But in ice, light goes a lot slower. And the muon can go faster than light in ice. Einstein is still intact, but the muon still does something remarkable.

Just as an airplane going faster than sound creates a sonic boom, a muon going faster than light creates a luminal boom! That’s right, a sonic boom for light. And it gets better. That luminal boom comes out as light we can see. And . . . ta daa . . . it’s blue!

That’s the blue glow you see around nuclear power plants. It’s really there, and it’s caused by particles moving faster than the speed of light in water. How cool is that?

So now you’ve got this ice, you’ve got these muons made by muon neutrinos, you’ve got this blue glow. The ice below the South Pole is probably the purest and clearest in the world. There’s nothing to compete with this blue light, and it just lights up that ice, traveling a great distance through the crystal clear solid water. And when it comes to a detector (called a DOM for Digital Optical Module), that detector grabs the blue glow and stores it away. You’ve just detected a neutrino!

OK, so what? So you’ve just detected a neutrino. Big deal.

It is a big deal, and here’s why. Neutrinos weigh almost nothing. Almost. We now know that they have a tiny, but real, mass. Why? Because of Einstein again. Any particle with zero mass travels at the speed of light, but any particle with a real mass, no matter how tiny, travels slower. At the speed of light time stops. But at less than the speed of light, time ticks away, however slowly.

Remember I mentioned the other twist about neutrinos? Here it is. Neutrinos can change back and forth, from one type to another. We know that now, but didn’t know it just a few years ago, and that caused a big worry. It seemed the Sun was making far too few neutrinos. Since neutrinos come directly from the Sun’s core, while visible light takes a long, long time to reach the surface, some scientists worried that perhaps the Sun’s core was dying. Instead, the answer is that the Sun is making the right number of neutrinos, but we were only able to detect one of the three kinds coming out. Since the Sun only makes one of the three kinds, it must be the case that the other two kinds (called the muon neutrino and the tau neutrino) pop into existence as the other kind pops out – in other words, the neutrinos turn one into the other.

So what does that have to do with mass? If the neutrinos were massless, then time wouldn’t pass for them, and they’d have no time to change one into the other. The fact that they can and do proves that they have mass.

Again big deal. Right? Wrong.

The big deals are many. First of all, neutrinos don’t weigh much, but there are a lot of them. A lot of them. Suddenly their mass becomes important for lots of things, including supernova explosions.

But there’s more than that. No theory we currently have shows why or how the neutrino should have mass. The mass of the neutrino points toward new physics. It’s like that cloud on the horizon of physics at the end of the 19th century that led to radioactivity, special relativity, quantum mechanics, and the modern world.  The 20th century’s cloud was the neutrino mass, and the more we learn about these amazing, ghostly particles, the closer we will come to seeing what wonders await behind this cloud. I for one can’t wait to see.

Sunset

There is magic in a sunset.

We’ve always known it. We watch. We sing. We dance. We try to understand. And we hope that the Sun will return.

I live in Central Ohio. It’s January. If that isn’t depressing enough, the local paper ran an article in the Sunday travel section about just about my favorite place in the world, the Gulf Coast of Florida. I had to read it, just as you have to touch that sore spot in your mouth with your tongue. You just can’t help yourself.

The writer tells of a drum band and a dancer on Casey Key, celebrating the setting Sun with music and dance. Take a look, and you’ll see why they were celebrating.

The author describes musicians sitting in the sand, “drums wedged between their legs. In the center of the circle, a shaman dressed in a white sleeveless shirt and a fancy topper blessed the circle with two feathers from a great blue heron. A belly dancer swung her hips and snaked her arms toward the reddening sky.”

What is this but a question, thrown toward the setting Sun? What are you? Why do you set each evening, and return each morn? From where does your incredible power arise – the power to conquer death, to melt the winter and bring on the spring, to come again, day after day after day? How long have you been, and how long will you be? Were you, like me, born, and will you, like me, someday die?

This same scene must have played out millions of times on beaches all over the world in the hundred or so millennia since humans first found themselves awake and aware in this wondrous and surprising universe. I believe I am a member of the luckiest generation of all those millennia, because we can answer some of the questions. Far from destroying the magic, the answers open new wonders never before dreamed and reveal mysteries never before imagined.

The Sun is a star, only close up. The stars are Suns, only very far away. Within the Sun an element called hydrogen smashes together, 1 + 1 + 1 + 1, the ancient rhythm, to create helium, and with it energy, prodigious energy, energy enough to bring the Earth to life. It does so because a single helium atom, plus the other particles produced in the collision, weigh a tiny bit less than the four original hydrogens. That tiny bit of mass turns into enormous amounts of energy. And there was light. And it was good.

But the light will not last forever. Billions of years from now, when its hydrogen runs low, our Sun will swell and cool, a red giant filling the inner solar system with its girth. Then helium will come together to form carbon, the same carbon of which you are made. When the Sun finally dies, it will spray this carbon and other elements out from itself, filling the universe with its seed. In the same way, billions of years ago, through violent death throes and quiet fadeaways, other stars filled the universe with the carbon and other elements that would one day form your very own cells. Ancient stars live within you.

And still the mystery. Why should helium weigh a little less than four hydrogens? Why should carbon form from helium (it almost doesn’t, and its formation is one of the most amazing stories the universe has to tell)? Why should stars exist at all? Energy only passes through stars – it is not created by them. Thirteen billion years ago, the cosmic fireball filled the universe with usable energy – why? What caused this first cause? What came before? Was there a before?

And what is all this, too, but a question thrown at the universe. What are you? And what are we who ask?

Science is a song and a dance. I do not wish to replace the shaman and the belly dancer. I wish to add to their questions with my own. I wish for science to take its rightful place alongside music, alongside art, alongside dance and love and life and rhythm, as a way for us to celebrate the Sun.

Someday I will be there. And I will join the belly dancers and the drummers. And I will tell the story science tells.

In the meantime, I’ll watch the sunset.

 

and she smiled

You’ve heard of the Peter principle? It’s the idea that in every organization workers are promoted until they achieve a job they can’t do. Then they stay there.

My job involves a lot of meetings. I’m not very good at meetings. My mind wanders to topics not remotely related to the meeting.

But I think I am pretty good at teaching. Today I got a rare chance to teach. I was stationed at a cart with a cloud chamber. A group of fifth graders came over, three girls, one boy, and their adult chaperone. We talked about atoms, how amazingly small they are, how separating water into hydrogen and oxygen (always exactly 2 hydrogens for 1 oxygen) gives a clue about the reality of atoms. Then we looked at the cloud chamber.

Inside the cloud chamber is a lantern mantle coated in thorium. When the thorium decays, it releases an alpha particle. Several more alpha and beta decays transmute the thorium finally into lead. The ethanol in the atmosphere forms a cloud behind the decay particles, showing their paths with white, wispy lines.

Here’s a great movie of a cloud chamber in action.

As my learners watched the paths of these bits of exploded atoms, we talked about what was happening and why. Why did one atom decay today, in this moment, after waiting silently for billions of years? Why did the ethanol form those wispy clouds? What happened to the particles afterwards?

I talked to my learners about helium, about how virtually all the helium on Earth comes from radioactive decay, and how every time they hold a helium balloon in their hands what they’re really holding are the leftover bits of exploded radioactive atoms.

Then we talked about where thorium comes from, how, billions of years ago, a giant star exploded, and in the explosion energy was stored in a new kind of atom, an atom called thorium. We talked about how that thorium atom drifted in space for maybe billions of years, until it finally found itself swept up in the formation of a young planet we would one day call Earth. We talked about how when that atom exploded it released, finally, that stored-up star energy, captured there so many years ago.

The boy asked, “Don’t exploding stars form nebulae?”

“That’s right,” I said, “Those clouds around ancient stars contain all the elements the star forms in its lifetime, including the elements that make up you.”

And now I looked one of the girls in the group, the quietest one, directly in the eyes and said, “The very atoms that make up you were born billions of years ago in a giant star. You are one of the things stars can make.” And the girl smiled.

And that’s why I do what I do.

Genes are Lumpy!

I love sobering thoughts. Here’s one. Around the year 1900, Charles Darwin’s (and AR Wallace’s) theory of variation and selection was virtually forgotten. What is today hailed (rightly) as the greatest intellectual achievement of 19th century science was all but discarded by the beginning of the 20th century.

Why? Because given the world as it was known then, it couldn’t have worked.

I often encounter natural selection described as a beautiful, simple idea. “How could I have been so stupid not to think of it myself,” is the sentiment described. The fact that no one, not Newton, not Descartes, not Aristotle nor Galileo nor Hypatia nor Euclid, thought of it first indicates that it’s not so simple. The fact that the beautiful, simple idea was later discarded is even better evidence.

These days there’s an evangelical named Ray Comfort who is criticizing evolution with what he thinks is a simple, beautiful argument. He’s right; it is simple and beautiful, but also wrong. It is wrong because the facts of the real world take us somewhere else. It is wrong in the same way the rejection of natural selection by 1900 was wrong. It is wrong because it is ignorant of another simple, beautiful idea. Genes are lumpy.

Comfort’s argument goes like this. “Evolutionists” say that elephants evolved from non-elephant ancestors. But the first elephant (for Comfort the first is always a male) had to find a wife. Isn’t it an odd coincidence that just when the male elephant came along, a female elephant evolved, too? But if not, with what creature did the elephant mate?

If you don’t know anything about genetics, this might be a convincing answer. And in fact it was (in different form) the argument that in part caused the rejection of natural selection the first time around.

To choose another example, suppose a white moth were to appear in a population of black moths. That white moth would have to mate with a black moth. If (as was believed at the time) inheritence is blended, their offspring would be grey. These grey moths in turn would overwhelmingly mate with black moths, resulting in even darker offspring, and so on. In this way, any unique traits would disappear almost as soon as they arose.

Ah, but genes don’t blend in this way. Instead, here’s what might happen. A white moth mates with a black moth. Their offspring are ALL BLACK! White has disappeared, not over several generations, but instantly. But isn’t this a backwards step? Patience, grasshopper.

Now the all-black moths mate. Occasionally, two black moths  that each have a white parentwill mate. In this cross, one out of four of their offspring will be white! The white trait, hidden in the first generation of offspring, reappears in the second.

If you’ve taken a biology class, you probably recognize this. It’s a common piece of pedagogery, and reveals the pea plant experiments of Gregor Mendel, a contemporary of Darwin whose work was forgotten in his lifetime. Big deal, right?

The big deal (so often missed in introductory material on this subject) is that this discovery, that genes are discrete (I prefer the word “lumpy”), gave natural selection the tool it needed to work! The result is the world you see around you. Because unique traits could survive as discrete lumps of genetic material, even hiding in generations, all manner of variability could eventually appear, spread, and fluorish.

So what does all this have to do with Comfort and his elephants? The point is that Comfort would be right – if inheritance blended. But it doesn’t. Genes are lumpy. An elephant ancestor needn’t be an elephant to carry elephant traits. It can carry genes for elephant-like traits, and those genes can hide within the genome. When those genes come together in the right individual, the traits (completely accidentally) can make that individual more likely to survive, and so the traits are passed on. Eventually, the traits become common in the population, and you have elephants.

The point is not so much that Comfort and the 1900-era biologists were wrong. Being wrong is part of learning. The point is that scientists, by working out sometimes simple, beautiful relationships, such as Gregor Mendel and his peas, can reveal not just a deep truth, but can show us just how and why it is true. This knowledge, gained through long, hard, arduous work, is now available to everybody. You can know things that Aristotle never could have imagined, not because you’re smarter, but because you are alive, here and now, in a world positively brimming with simple, beautiful, and true ideas.

Now that’s a sobering thought.

Science Doesn’t Matter – Ain’t It Grand!

As I often do, I am listening to a science book on CD as I drive to and from work. Yes, I’m falling behind on all the important politics and news of Britney Britney and Menudo, but for me those few minutes of audio immersion in science are some of the best of my day.

It struck me today as I listened, though, how none of it really mattered, and that it was great. The speaker was talking about the invention of things like the steam engine, the airplane, and the automobile, and how little role science or scientists played in those inventions. Later on, of course, that changed, as inventions like nuclear reactors, the transistor, and the laser were driven almost entirely by science. It would be ridiculous to look around at the modern world and deny the role of science.

Yet most people have no idea how a nuclear reactor, a transistor, or a laser works. Some, like doctors, may need to know what a laser does, but knowing the science behind it is virtually irrelevant to actually using the thing. And here’s my point: for most people, the science behind the thing doesn’t matter.

There are things that do matter. I’m in the process of selling my house. I have to know things, like what an interest rate is, how to negotiate a selling price, how to read and sign my name. I’m working on various grants at work. I have to know how to spell, how to talk to people without making them dislike me, how to answer e-mail. I’m trying to sell a new book. I have to know how to write a cover letter, how to look for an agent, and how to accept rejection. But for none of these things does science matter. Yes, if I were a working scientist, science would really matter. But if I were a working auto mechanic, then auto mechanic-y stuff would really matter. If I were a baker, then . . . etc. etc.

Educators make a huge mistake when they try to convince their learners that science is Important, that it Matters. No it doesn’t. It’s wonderful and exciting, but it doesn’t matter in the same way that knowing how to read, count, or talk to people matters. If you’re trying to find the right combination of ingredients to make a room temperature superconductor, then science matters. But for most of us, science doesn’t matter, not really, and that is wonderful. It frees us up to just have fun, to know science for what it is – a grand exploration of the world, for no better reason than the world exists and is begging to be explored.

Let’s see what we can discover next!

Neutrinos

Something I heard shook me. There are 60 billion neutrinos from the Sun passing right through your thumbnail every second.

Neutrinos are one of my favorite topics. They say something about science and what we know. Here’s the story.

Alpha decay and beta decay are both types of radioactivity. Other than that, they’re about as different as two processes can be. Alpha decay involves the ejection of an alpha particle, really a helium nucleus. Alpha particles are two protons and two neutrons, and throwing them around is the equivalent of tossing bowling balls around in the subatomic world.

Beta decay involves the ejection of an electron (or a positron in special circumstances). Compared to an alpha particle, a beta particle – an electr0n – is just a bit of fluff. Though they usually penetrate deeper than alpha particles, they don’t carry nearly the oomph.

That’s the obvious difference between the two. But there’s a more subtle difference, beautiful and deep. Alpha decay is, for any particular decay of an isotope, always exactly the same. If you get an alpha from U-238, the energy of that alpha is always the same. There are some isotopes that can decay in different modes; yet even so, the emission spectrum is always discrete, like the light from a laser, rather than continuous, like a light bulb. If you know where an alpha particle came from, you know its energy.

Beta decay isn’t like that. The spectrum of electron energies from beta decay is more like the spectrum from an incandescent bulb. There’s an upper limit, but between that limit and zero, the electrons take on all sorts of values.

This bothered scientists when they discovered it. Why should beta decay have this strange property? Where did the extra energy go (or, alternatively, where did it come from)? Given this evidence, some scientists were prepared to give up the conservation of energy.

A desperate alternative was tried instead. Perhaps, it was suggested, an invisible, electrically neutral, non-reactive particle came flying out of beta decay along with the electron. This invisible particle could carry that extra energy. Voila! The conservation of energy was saved!

Enrico Fermi named the particle “neutrino”, Italian for “little neutral one.” Cute.

It seemed like a trick, fixing the books. We can’t find the extra energy? Fine, we’ll just make up a story. Here it is, in a place we can never find it. Quite convenient, and also not very scientific.

So things stood for decades. Physicists had a neat solution, but also a big problem. Where was the evidence for the neutrino? There was none. The calculated properties of the neutrino meant that a single particle would, on average, travel through several light years of solid material before interacting. Hence the 60 billion through your thumb every second. Even if you’re exceptionally odd, your thumb is nowhere near as thick as a light year, so you have little chance of stopping any particular neutrino.

Ah, but the power of large numbers means that with lots and lots of neutrinos, occasionally a few will do something unusual. Just as the average U-238 atom will last 4.5 billion years, but some are always defying the odds and decaying anyway, a few neutrinos will also defy the odds and get absorbed, even in relatively small amounts of matter.

But how do you know that you’ve caught a neutrino?

In 1955, two scientists named Fred Reines and Clyde Cowan decided to try it. They filled a tank with cadmium chloride and surrounded the tank with detectors. They were looking for two gamma rays flying away in opposite directions. This would indicate that an electron and positron had been annihilated. And that would mean that a proton had just absorbed a neutrino, in the process shooting off a positron and turning itself into a neutron.

The details aren’t that important, though they are fascinating and maybe I’ll write about them later. The important point is that Reines and Cowan found the neutrino. It was really there!

This is astonishing. First, scientists noticed something that they didn’t expect – the continuous spectrum of beta decay. The observation violated one of the physicists’ most cherished ideas, the conservation of energy. To fix it, they created out of wholecloth this invisible particle with virtually no properties. But then, their patch turned out to be a real thing! This, to me, shows that physics has in some sense found out something true about the universe.

Science isn’t just observation and classification. As this example shows, science can actually touch on something we might call truth. The neutrinos point the way. The truth is out there. Think about that next time you gnaw on your thumbnail.

Non-Overlapping Magisteria

This has been gnawing on me ever since the Templeton Lecture at COSI. Today I was reminded of it again by a brilliant piece on YouTube by Feynman.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeCHiUe1et0

And then I read again the essay by Gould on Non-Overlapping Magisteria.

 I adore Stephen Jay Gould. He and I share many things (besides a first name) – a passion for baseball and It’s a Wonderful Life, a love of quirky history, and a commitment to the idea that evolution isn’t just true, but marvelously pointless, that the real message of evolution isn’t survival of the fittest, but rather unrepeatable contingency. Gould taught me evolutionary biology, afternoons in the school library reading his marvelous essays. Certainly he taught me far more than my creationist 10th grade biology teacher ever did. When Gould died, it affected me, just as Carl Sagan’s early death affected me. (I remember the day Feynman died, because my quantum mechanics professor talked about it in class, talked about how Feynman had touched his life and career, but I didn’t really know of Feynman at the time. Now I look back and realize that death was the greatest loss of these three great losses.)

Gould’s NOMA essay, and the longer work Rock of Ages on the same topic, both hurt me. When I read them, I felt like Gould was not being honest, either with himself or with the world at large, and I didn’t understand why. It was like discovering that a long-trusted friend was actually stealing money, or was a Baltimore Ravens fan.

The idea of NOMA sounds so PC, so reasonably middle ground on its face. But when you dig into it, as you might a pretty, fluffy dessert, you discover there’s nothing there. NOMA suggests that both science and religion respect one another’s boundaries, that they deal with separate realms and that therefore one has nothing to say about the other.

Balderdash.

Science cannot be bound. Science must be free to investigate all things. Perhaps there are some things that science can never know. But we won’t know that until we investigate! Starting out with a blanket prohibition is out of bounds. And for NOMA to have any meaning, it must create these prohibitions.

For instance, in the essay Gould quotes the pope as saying that science can’t speak to the ensoulment of humans. Why? What does “ensoulment” mean? If it means any change, any change at all, then it becomes the object of scientific exploration. Is there any evidence for humans having a soul? Some would point to a moral sense. Fine. A moral sense is a physical manifestation. We can investigate it. We can determine if any rudimentary moral sense exists in animals. We can find out if a moral sense, via reciprocal altruism, might have had survival value to early humans and pre-humans. We can investigate what’s going on in the brain when we think about morality.

The point isn’t that science will find the answers; the point is that science can, will, and must look for these answers. Prohibiting such a search violates NOMA right off the bat. But any such prohibition is out of bounds, not just this one. The beginning of life, the “cause” of the Big Bang, and the eventual fate of the universe are all examples of fields that religion might be tempted to claim. Religion can’t have them. Science must be free to roam.

What we’re left with, then, is a religion with nothing left to do. If by definition it can’t affect the natural world, then what’s left? Of what possible consequence could it be to the actual world?

Suppose someone says they’ve received a message from God. That message must have been received by something in the body, a single neuron, perhaps. Science can investigate that neuron, find out what exactly happened at the moment the message was received. Was it electromagnetic? A gravity wave? A neutrino pulse? What? If it was nothing, then it couldn’t have affected the neuron, because the neuron is a physical object in the universe, and the thoughts it engenders are real, physical things. If it was something, then scientists could (in theory, at least) investigate the source of the signal. Perhaps they’d trace it to an ancient planet circling a faraway star in Pisces. Or maybe not. The point is, they could investigate the claim, and that makes it a scientific question.

The only way NOMA works is if religion completely folds, surrenders all territory with absolutely no resistance, admits to no affect whatever on the natural world.

And if that happens, we have to be courageous and ask the next question. What good is it?

 

Negative Entropy – a great blog!

I’ve been reading an interesting blog by three local skeptics. They posted a fantastic review of the evolution discussion (better than mine), and they’ve got lots of other fun and thought-provoking things to read there, too. Enjoy.

http://negativentropy.blogspot.com/

Uncertainty

Back in my sophomore year at college, I saw one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.

It was an equation on the blackboard in my quantum mechanics class.

Yes, you’re right. I was popular with the ladies.

My professor, Dr. Bill Reay, showed the class that day exactly where the uncertainty principle comes from. It wasn’t how Heisenberg derived it, but it was a beautiful derivation based on two things: one, classical wave mechanics; and two, the crazy idea that electrons can behave as waves.

As soon as that idea is unleashed on the world, uncertainty comes along automatically. It is amazing in its beauty and simplicity. I wrote about it once before, but I want to try again.

First imagine an electron as a wave. What in the world does that mean? Well, an electron as a particle would occupy one discreet place in space. It is there absolutely, and is absolutely nowhere else.

If you give an electron wave properties, it still has to behave like an electron. Electrons are generally one place and not another. Sort of. Think of an electron as a “wave pulse.” Here’s a picture.

The key thing to realize is that the electron is mostly still in one general place. The line (which could represent space as easily as time) stretches off to infinity in both directions pretty much on zero. So there’s (pretty much) no electron back there <– or up there –>, only in the middle is there a good chance of finding the electron.

Now that the electron is a wave, though, some strange things start to happen. We make the wave pulse by adding up lots of waves together. This is called superposition. The superimposed waves essentially cancel everywhere except in the general area where the electron is. But each of these superimposed waves has a slightly different wavelength. It’s the difference in wavelength that causes the canceling, and that wavelength difference gives us a range of uncertainty about the electron.

Suppose we make that wavelength difference smaller. What happens to our wave pulse? It spreads out! We’re less certain of the location of the electron if we know its wavelength better. Suppose we make the wavelength difference greater? Now we can locate the electron better, but we know much less about its wavelength. These two variables, position and wavelength (and for an electron, wavelength matches up with momentum), are like silly putty. If you squash it one way, it comes squirting out somewhere else. There’s an inherent uncertainty in an electron (and any other particle-wave) that you just can’t get rid of. That’s the uncertainty principle!

This is to me the beauty and wonder of quantum mechanics. It is exactly classical mechanics, with this one, historical, bizarre idea. Particles have a wavelength! Once you get that, all the weirdness of quantum mechanics, living/dead cats, quantum entanglement, the double slit experiment, all of it, comes along for free. From just one weird thought. Now THAT is beautiful.