This is being posted as my response to the Compatibility of Science and Religion debate.

People always argue that science and religion do not deal with the same phenomena, or the same aspects of human life. Mang had already done so so in this debate:

“Religion and science fulfill different aspects of human needs. In that sense they are orthogonal or at least do not occupy the same space or set.” - Mang

I disagree with this point entirely. Religion makes scientific claims: miracles, prayer, virgin birth are examples. These are ideas at odds with science and if you take them literally then you must rationalise them as either being metaphors or being against physics or biology. If they are metaphors then your religion is dealt a blow (virgin birth, for example). If they go against physics then they directly contradict science and you have some cognitive dissonance going on!

Religions generally all believe that there is a God or collection of gods in charge of the universe. This is a hypothesis that can be tested in science. If God is ‘up there’ interfering with our daily lives then we should be able to test that. If God set the universe in motion then we will be able to test that at some later time in future history.

You might argue that God is ‘outside testing’. This is surely incorrect since God must act upon things to make things happen. Prayer for example, can be tested and in fact has been. This leads me another point, which is that religion is willing to use science to prove itself.

The idea that religion and science do not overlap in our lives is easily bunked by the existence of prayer experiments, but also by the turin shroud, for example. If someone dug up the body of Jesus would religion back off saying ‘nothing to do with us’? If the prayer experiments had proved that prayer works (they didn’t by the way), then it would have been held aloft as proof of religion working. Rather what we actually have are religious people trying to explain why the experiments wouldn’t work.

Another point to tackle is a response to part of Todd’s comment.

“In many ways religion and science are quite similar: they each define a human culture, they each espouse a certain orthodoxy among adherents, they each inspire passion and sometimes ill feelings between practitioners who don’t operate the same way, they each reveal the best and the worst of human beings.” - Todd

This is true of all human endeavours. It is not something special about science or about religion that creates this similarly, it is something about people. Politics, social clubs, theatre groups, office staff, classrooms and even blogs all have different styles of operation with in-groups and out-groups.

It doesn’t achieve anything to try to say that science is just like religion based on the fact that both operate in similar social ways. They are innately different.

So to finish (for now) I would like to put to it you all that science and religion are incompatible as world views. In our everyday lives, most of us only dabble in the shallow end of theology or of science, never finding a need to really decide between religion and science. I think though, that when faced with the deep questions, you have to choose. Trying to fit both into your world, won’t work in the end. If it seems to be working, then you haven’t fully understood at least one of them.

I leave you with a cartoon spotted on Digg recently:

Originally posted in August 2007.

There was a New Scientist feature last week on Boltzmann Brains. Now I hadn’t heard of these before, and so I thought it may be worth a blog post. A Blotzmann Brain is an intelligent, self-aware entity which arises as the result of a random fluctuation in the entropy of the universe.

I have put this post back on the front page for a while as it has generated some comments since the New York Times ran an article on the same topic (Link)

Lugwig Boltzmann suggested, by invoking the anthropic principle, that we are all here thanks to an extremely unlikely low-entropy fluctuation. If you consider the notion of a virtually infinite inflationary universe then such an organised blip is not only possible but eventually inevitable.

This leads to an interesting conclusion. Our planet sits here with myriad trillions of extremely organised organic beings, not to mention billions of intelligent human brains (mostly). If we can exist here, representing a very high order system indeed, then any lower order systems must also exist in greater numbers. An example of a lower order system would be a Boltzmann Brain, simply a conscious being floating in the universe, able to know what it is.

So are we in fact outnumbered in this universe of ours by Boltzmann Brains? If so then Cosmology is heading for trouble. Much of cosmology is based on the idea that we are typical observers in a typical part of the universe. If the Boltzmann Brains are sitting out there in their trillions, all over the dark void of empty space then we are not typical, they are. Does this change the nature of cosmology, or of the nature of the universe as we understand it.

Let me add one final odd point to this peculiar topic. It is far more likely that rather than a solar system and a planet on which sit six billion individual, intelligent brains, the universe would actually create a singular brain pre-programmed with false memories and experiences, unaware of its true nature as giant floating head. So maybe our individual experience is not so different to that of a Boltzmann Brain after all.

Over on the Cosmic Variance blog, there is a post covering the question of whether the Universe is a big computer, or as CV puts it, maybe its more like a computation. A very interesting read and the Quirks and Quarks show, which they mention, is also a podcast worth tuning into.

Link to Cosmic Variance post

Link to Quirks and Quarks Podcast

A religious debate may be brewing in the comment thread on my 10 Things post. All views welcome…

What is it that making my blood boil? No, its not the holy wrath of God seeking revenge on my pro gay-rights, pro-choice, left-wing morals; its the Right Reverend Graham Dow, Bishop of Carlisle. Or should say I the Right Reverend Stupid Head? I could do worse but so far this blogs been pretty clean.

Apparently according to this moron, the recent floods in the UK are due to the wrath of God because “we are reaping the consequences of our moral degradation”.

The sexual orientation regulations are part of a general scene of permissiveness. We are in a situation where we are liable for God’s judgment, which is intended to call us to repentance.

Yes indeed the Christians are at it again! I read about this one on the telegraph website but had heard it earlier on the radio too. To be fair, the Telegraph is just one of the papers stupid enough to dignify this man’s views with publication. I mean they could have published the rantings of the man that lives underneath Cardiff’s Student Union building whom I encountered today (he told me he could fly!), but then my example doesn’t have fancy robes and a hat.
The Bishops not all bad though - he does manage a smidgin of humanity. He expressed his sympathy for those who have been hit by the weather, but apparently the problem with “environmental judgment is that it is indiscriminate”.

Always the way, eh? You want to reap your wrath on a civilization of unholy lower beings foe being too permissive but despite your omnipotence you just can’t do anything but flood the place. Doh! Maybe next universe you’ll install a ‘delete all sinners’ application during boot up.

Besides, it seems I may know my Bible better than the Bishop since I could vaguely recall this from Genesis 8:21-22, when God tells Noah that he’s sorry and it won’t happen again, which is close as God 1.0 came to apologies.

I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.

Well I’ll leave it there. I could rant all day. I’ll just leave you with one picture. Its something which I just found on Google Images and just in case the Bishops happens across my lowly blog he might find it useful since he has clearly never seen it before: its the water cycle from GCSE geography and science.

Why is my subject of research worthy of study?

This is a question I am going to try and answer in the next week. The science of star formation is something which involves money, time and great effort. Is that expenditure by the taxpayer, the telescope operators and even the scientists and themselves worthwhile?

I want to ask myself this for two very good reasons. The first is that if I cannot justify to myself why star formation is a worthy pursuit then why am I doing my PhD? Secondly, there is a competition and I can win £1000. So lets get cracking.

To begin with I need to clear about what I mean by star formation. Wikipedia’s description is found below and is what i would generally agree with. I assume by its presence on Wikipedia that this statement is generally accepted as it has remained unedited for some time.

As a branch of astrophysics, star formation includes the study of the interstellar medium and giant molecular clouds as precursors to the star formation process and the study of early type stars and planet formation as its immediate products. Star formation theory, as well as accounting for the formation of a single star, must also account for the statistics of binary stars and the initial mass function.

Initially I thought about tackling this by comparing my area of research to other disciplines, such as a few questionable fields in sociology or the study of mating habits of unknown beetles. Alas this approach won’t hold water ultimately since the act of placing star formation on some fictional scale of importance still doesn’t answer the direct challenge of proving its value to the world.

The next logical place to argue from is the statement that star formation theory benefits the word at large. This seems more promising. If we understand where stars (and thereby planets) come from then we understand where our own Sun and the Earth have come from. Everybody (mostly) accepts that the planet didn’t just pop into existence for our benefit. The process by which the solar system, including the building blocks of life, came about 5 billion years ago is knowledge that would be fundamental to our understanding of our place in the world.

Even I have to say that what I have just said sounds a bit dreamy. The astronomers I have met are not in general on a soulful quest to understand their place in the cosmos. not the ones I have so far encountered. But when I think about it, I guess I am. My interest in astronomy started with back garden stargazing, which I enjoyed because it let me think about my place in world I didn’t understand. Understanding the distances to Mizar and Alcor and the radius of the Sun and the sheer number of galaxies in the sky let me in on a really good secret: we are very very small. Its a secret i still think most people haven’t been let in on.

I have always been a bit of a thinker. By that I don’t mean that I have always been academic, but rather that I like to think about life, the universe and things like that. I ponder God and more recently the lack of it over cups of tea and this doesn’t seem to be regular. So if I am unusual in this respect then surely this cannot be the reason that star formation is worthy of any of society’s time and energy. To simply please someone’s personal quest to understand his place in reality is no reason to spend millions of pounds.
Could it be that my own interest in star formation and the motives for it are not unusual? I have encountered a great deal of bravado in the astronomical community, which I did not expect. Perhaps many of the people I meet are socially unwilling to proffer any personal reasons for their interest in astronomy. It does seem uncharacteristic of those i have met so far to get emotional about their research. In fact scientific dispassion is almost encouraged. If it were the case that there were thousands of people who wanted to know for their own reasons, would that constitute worthiness? Maybe.

As I write, I come to the conclusion that ‘worth’ is based in my view on some kind of odd equation. Could it be that personal reward multiplied by persons rewarded is the value of something to society? If a thousand people want to know and will be pleased by knowing something that makes it worthwhile. If one person will live if we know something and die if we don’t then that too is worthy, hopefully more so. However this argument is so subjective it cannot possibly be the reason for studying star formation.

An argument from the basis of unknown benefits could be invoked for space studies in general. You could say that understanding star formation may not seem beneficial right now, but who knows what it may reap in the future! again this seems a very weak argument in the face of things such as cancer research or education and health institutions.

Anyway, i am no master of words so i will stop there for a while and come back with Part 2 at a later date. However I would very much like to hear from anyone with an opinion on this subject. If you study astronomy or another field which doesn’t seem obviously or directly like it helps humanity then how do you justify your work? This doesn’t just apply to the sciences. If you reviewed films for a living then are you really bettering the world? If you were the editor of Heat magazine, could you justify that as worthwhile?

Please feel free to comment. Why do any of us do anything? More specifically though why is astronomy beneficial to the world, and star formation in particular? Questions, questions, questions…

A recent Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) is shown above. The point was to illustrate that star trails really are evidence of our rotation as a planet.

Are photographs of star trails really evidence of the Earth’s rotation about its axis? Yes they are, and science journalist Trudy E. Bell discovered that there is a simple way to demonstrate this, if you have the stomach for it.

Trudy Bell went to a local playground where a merry-go-round or whatever you may call it, sits underneath a tree. After being spun up she took a long exposure photo of the tree and gets an image extremely similar in nature to those seen of concentric star trails. But is this proof that our planet is spinning? I cannot decide.

I was once asked by a religous man to prove that the Earth goes about the Sun. Everything I tried to think of he dismissed as requiring some other assumption which I would then have to prove. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe it was true, but he wanted to illustrate that maybe there are things taken for granted like our rotation on our own axis that perhaps we ought to prove to ourselves once in a while.

Just because these pictures look the same though does not mean tis is the same thing. you would get just the same image if the tree rotated above the merry-go-round, wouldn’t you?

I can’t think of how to prove it - if you can then please let me know…

I’ve just had another ‘Philiosophy of Science’ meeting where we were talking about social responsibility. The topic of the Manhattan Project came up and the Hiroshima and Nagisaki bombs as well as the Challenger Distaster and Columbia. We ended up discussing how many people die every year globally and how it compares to the number killed in individual events. The whole ‘how many people die everyday’ thing got me Googling and I found this:

http://esa.un.org/unpp/p2k0data.asp

Its a site from the United Nations that gives you lots of population stats including, for the 2000 to 2005 period:

Deaths ~ 150,000 people/day
Births ~ 350,000 people/day
Net Popoluation Increase ~ 200,000 people/day

In 1950 the figure for net change was approximately ~ 110,000 people/day. So just to place it into a rather peculiar (and possibly perverse) context, the Hiroshima bomb, which killed around 140,000 people, therefore in a single act reduced the global population in one day. I wonder when else this has happened in history?

It means that 9/11, was merely background noise in mortality terms. Car accidents on the other hand kill 1.2 million annually (~3,300 daily) which means that the car itself (or rather the driving of it) is the equivalent of having a World Trade Centre-esque attack every single day. So I am lead to ask where’s the War on Cars?

The point is not to marginalise death but rather to get people talking about it context. I find it very odd that quite so many people die every day. Yet this is obvious and natural. The Challenger distaster which killed seven people had a national impact, yet that many people die globally every three minutes.

I’m confused, which I’m liking more and more these days…

Yesterday was the weekly Philosophy of Science Meeting which is held in the Chart Room* next to my office here at the University. We were discussing the idea of a tribe of isolated people who might have a complete understanding of the way the world works. In their view, the sun might rise because they eat a certain type of food or rain might be brought down by a dance held on particular days of the year. These things would be done, the sun would rise, the rain would fall and so the world would have been explained as fully as it needed to be.

The question raised in response was whether these peoples’ view of the way the world works (i.e. their science) be any less valid than our own? We assume we both have self-consistent long-standing viewpoints and that they both serve our needs to date.

I said that our science was better and more complete than the tribe’s. However my position was attacked on the basis that I wasn’t understanding the tribe properly. My opponent’s said I was worrying about the content of their science rather than form. However my point was more about truth than scientific. I argued that we know more than the tribe about the way the universe works. Here I mean universe as in everything that exists and all the rules of nature and not just in the astronomical sense of knowing about space.
We argued the point for a while but didn’t come up with anything very definite since everyone was very bogged down in the ‘primitive’ nature of this tribe. It was also a real tribe that was being discussed and so on the basis that no one in the room actually knew anything about them in any detail it wasn’t a discussion based in anything real.

So I proposed a thought experiment to perhaps make clear the question which I wanted to pose:

Imagine that there is an alien world somewhere out in another galaxy. Not necessarily a specieis of bipedal mammals but merely an intelligent race that has progressed on their own world to some level comparable to our own. We assume that they have a society and that they are trying to learn things about the universe also.

Now the hows and whys aren’t so important but somehow we end up communicating with them. That is to say that we are not polluting the experiment by assuming that we have developed the same communication technology, but we can talk with them on some level.

What would we have found to be common about the universe?

I argued, as an example, that this alien race would have a concept like our idea of prime numbers. Maybe they would have discovered the atom or the speed of light although they may call them different things. My point was that there are some immutable truths in the universe that are invariant of culture or scientific methodology.

The group seemed to generally disagree. We talk about the comparisons of religion and science a lot and so one of them poised a question to me. He asked what I would think if this alien world were to have a story where by a man is executed on a cross to save the souls of all the world. Would it therefore convince me that the story of Jesus is true. When I said no, they deemed me a hypocrite. However my response was that such a story is an historical event and thus would be a remarkable coincidence. However if they believed in God, I said, that would be interesting.

But where as two planets believing in a God would be worthy of study (perhaps something about consciousness leads to a feeling of God, or maybe there actually is one) two planets finding the same prime numbers is not a coincidence. It is a fact of reality that these numbers are indivisibly by anything other than themselves.

Anyway, I have rambled long enough. just thought it would be interesting to share.
*Chart Room is a very grand name for what is essentially just a room.