Words in Science

A pretty convinced article on "climate change" in the October Physics Today makes an excellent point about the unusual way scientists use words (and how this keeps them from communicating effectively to the public). They provide this marvelous table of examples.

Terms that have different meanings for scientists and the public
Scientific term	Public meaning	Better choice
enhance	improve	intensify, increase
aerosol	spray can	tiny atmospheric particle
positive trend	good trend	upward trend
positive feedback	good response, praise	vicious cycle, self-reinforcing cycle
theory	hunch, speculation	scientific understanding
uncertainty	ignorance	range
error	mistake, wrong, incorrect	difference from exact true number
bias	distortion, political motive	offset from an observation
sign	indication, astrological sign	plus or minus sign
values	ethics, monetary value	numbers, quantity
manipulation	illicit tampering	scientific data processing
scheme	devious plot	systematic plan
anomaly	abnormal occurrence	change from long-term average

In light of these ambiguities, perhaps all parties can agree on this formulation:

The theories of climate-change scientists have bias and the data themselves have been manipulated as part of a scheme growing from deficient values. Everyone is doubtful that recent actions of climate change scientists are anomalous. The Earth has witnessed a positive trend toward enhanced temperatures. The unanimity of climate-change scientists comes from an excess of positive feedback within that community.

The larger point that the article misses is that scientists, including physicists, use words with a specialized meaning all the time. Missed meanings help journalists to sensationalize and sell science to a public that's been hyperstimulated to the point of insensibility. Often this suits the scientists very well, because selling science to the public ensures government support. For example, "dimension" as in "time is the fourth dimension" is a surefire way to sex up an article. It conjures images of walking in time the way we walk down the street, whereas a dimension is really nothing more extraordinary than a parameter in a mathematical expression, and time by nature is really quite different from space.

Other times these words invade our vocabulary to such an extent that we don't even realize how they have changed our conception of the world. This is true especially in physics. Some examples follow.

Science – used to mean any sort of knowledge, now it's restricted to the modern empirical study of the natural world, especially those objects that succumb most readily to quantitative treatment and prediction and control.

Physics – from phusis, the Greek for "nature" – used to refer to all natural philosophy, now it is restricted to the mathematical principles of mechanics as proposed most forcefully in Newton's Principia, whose full title is The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. (As an expression of the mechanical philosophy, it really tries to do away with nature.)

Force – usually means an external cause or power, but in physics something insidiously dissimilar. In modern physics, there is in reality no inside or outside, and forces are not really causes in the full sense. One of our most fundamental experiences of ourselves is as causes, e.g., we are the causes of our locomotion, as in walking. But since in Newtonian mechanics, self-motion is not allowed, we need to invoke "reaction forces" to "explain" animal locomotion. So the sidewalk is what pushes you along. Thus, forces are not causes in any simple sense.

Causality – in physics this word typically refers to the idea that cause must precede effect, so that two phenomenon that succeed each other in less time than it takes light to travel between them cannot have a cause-effect relationship.

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Richard C. J. Somerville and Susan Joy Hassol, "Communicating the science of climate change," Physics Today 64:10 (October 2011), p. 48.

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Note: Been really busy trying (fruitlessly it turns out) to save my job this semester, but figured I should post this in at least the same calendar year as the article it refers to.

Science & Faith Conference

Franciscan University is holding a conference on "Can Science Inform Our Understanding of God?" Friday, December 2 through Saturday, December 3. Dan Kuebler is one of the organizers.

Lots of prominent speakers, including:

• Edward Feser
• William E. Carroll
• Benjamin Wiker
• Mark Ryland
• Steve Barr

Topics:

• What is the precise relationship between faith and reason?
• What is the status of the Intelligent Design movement?
• What are the uses and abuses of scientific investigations?
• Where lie the boundaries between science, philosophy, and theology?
• What role do philosophical and theological positions have in scientific explorations?

Of course, it's taking place in Steubenville, OH, about an hour west of Pittsburgh.

The Limits of the "Cosmic Speed Limit"

No doubt you've seen the news of the reported observation of neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. Aside from throwing out a century-old law of physics, it sounds like a credible result. Of course, the result will have to be duplicated by other groups before we count it confirmed.

Luboš Motl explores some possible measuring errors. I myself am rather doubtful that there's a problem with GPS. After all it's the military that put it up and for these guys accuracy is a matter of life and death. On the other hand, the military could for security purposes be leaving in some consistent errors in the interpretation of GPS for us civilians (a natural analog of the "GPS blurring" they removed some years ago).

For my part, I don't have expertise to evaluate their experimental procedure or analysis, but I can communicate some pointers about what it might mean.

First, it would likely be good news, because it means new physics. The Standard Model of particle physics works, but there's widespread dissatisfaction with it. It produces all the right numbers, but it fails to provide a deeper understanding, or at least the unification that physicists have come to associate with it. (Observed by Lee Smolin in The Trouble with Physics, but it's hardly unique to him—we physicists are always seeking after the new.)

Second, to understand what this result could mean, it helps to step back and examine the terms that we use. Notice that what we mean by such concepts as "distance" and "speed" are purely electromagnetic (EM). Phenomenally, it's through our knowledge of the hard surfaces of solid bodies we establish distance and even the passage of time. And of course, another unquestioned assumption is that light is a "thing" or body, in the exact same sense as other bodies. People have lost sight of the fact (no pun intended) that light is that by which we see, not that which we see, except in a different sense of the word.

We have no direct experience of strong and weak nuclear forces; our experiences of these are mediated by electromagnetic interactions. We do experience gravity directly, but would have no notion of space to be aware of it, were it not for EM. There's no way to shield gravity or to create zones of gravitational neutrality, because there is no second gravitational "charge." In fact the entirety of what we mean by force (from Newton's Laws of Motion) as such is entirely EM.

Neutrinos, while not vector bosons, in some sense carry the weak force, that is, they only interact weakly. The weak force is supposed to have been unified with EM, but meanwhile previous results from CERN seem to be endangering the plausibility of that argument.

It could be that the "speed of light" only applies to electromagnetism. Regardless of the durability of the OPERA result, it's good to remember how small our universe of experience actually is, even augmented by scientific apparatus.

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Geoff Brumfiel, "Particles break light-speed limit: Neutrino results challenge cornerstone of modern physics," Nature (22 September 2011).

The OPERA Collaboraton, "Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam" Arxive (22 Sep 2011) arXiv:1109.4897v1 [hep-ex].

The Inhumanity of Teilhard de Chardin

Once upon a time, among comments on Albert Camus's The Plague, Thomas Merton wrote a trenchant critique of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin¹:

The current apologetic reply to Camus’ dismissal of Catholicism goes something like this: Camus was exposed to Augustine when he was not ready for him. He paid too much attention to Pascal and to “sick” Christianity like that of Kierkegaard. And of course he was not favorably impressed by the French Catholic collaborationists and their jeremiads over sin and punishment at the time of the Nazi occupation. But it would have been a different story if Camus had been able to read Teilhard de Chardin.

Is it that easy? To begin with, let us state the question more exactly. It would be impossible to say whether or not Camus, under this or that set of “favorable circumstances,” would ever have become “a believer.” Such surmises are usually nonsense. The problem with Camus was that he simply could not find Christians with whom he was able completely to identify himself on every level. The closest he got was with some of the French priests in the resistance, and evidently that was not close enough.

What would Camus have liked about Teilhard?

Obviously, first of all, he would have been happy with Teilhard’s com­plete acceptance of nature and of material creation, Teilhard came as close to developing a Christian mystique of matter as anyone has ever done; and Camus, in some of his essays, extols the material, the phe­nomenal, the sensible, the experience of the fleeting moment, in quasi-mystical language.

A study of Teilhard’s writings and especially of his own spiritual de­velopment shows us to what extent he rebelled against the mentality we have seen in Paneloux: the self-righteous, censorious repudiation of a beautiful world created by God’s love. Writing from the trenches in World War I. Teilhard confessed, in a letter to a friend, that even in the midst of war he was meditating and keeping notes on the “real prob­lem of my interior life”—“the problem of reconciling a passionate and legitimate love of all that is greatest on earth, and the unique quest of the Kingdom of Heaven.” He explicitly rejects any concept of the world as “only an opportunity to acquire merit.” Rather he sees it as a good creation, coming from the hand of God and given us “to be built up and embellished.”

[215] It is of course typical of the spirituality of Paneloux to regard the created world merely as something to be manipulated in order to amass an abstract capital of merit. Paneloux is a spiritual profiteer, and his kind of Christianity is a reflection of the social establishment, with which it exists in a symbiotic unity. Of such Christianity, Teilhard says it makes one less than a man and a traitor to the human race. Those who observe it from the outside are repelled and “blame my religion for it” That is precisely what Camus does in his portrait of Paneloux. Teilhard’s criti­cism of this false supernaturalism is that in trying to divert man’s capacity to love and turn it aside from concrete human reality to the purely abstract and spiritual, it deadens and distorts man. “The capacity to love cannot with impunity be dissociated from its object: if you try, mis­takenly, to cut off our affectivity from love of the universe, are you not in danger of destroying it?” This is what has happened to Paneloux: a good, sincere, strong-willed man, with a strong tendency to intellectualize, he has fallen a victim to an abstract and inhuman spirituality. His power of love has atrophied. His affectivity has been channeled into will-to-power and rigid authoritarianism. When he tries to recover the warmth of love, he ends in a self-immolation which is part heroism and part algebra, an irrefutable conclusion to an argument which no one is able to understand.

Teilhard, on the contrary, wants to transform and divinize the human passions themselves. “I shall put the intoxication of pagan pantheism to Christian use, by recognizing the creative and formative action of God in every caress and every blow … I would like to be able to love Christ passionately ... in the very act of loving the universe.” And he asks: “Is there communion with God through the Earth, the Earth becoming like a great Host in which God would be contained for us?”

Camus’ basic sympathy for the element of Greek theoria in Mediter­ranean culture would incline him to accept this “Christian gnosis” up to a point. He could identify with the “passionate love,” if not with the theological elaboration. Teilhard also completely and totally accepts man; and the God of Teilhard is not simply a remote judge and creator, but a God who seeks to complete his epiphany in the world of man by bring­ing all humanity to convergence and unity in himself, in the Incar­nation. The Incarnation for Teilhard is, then, not just an expedient to take care of sin and bring the kind of “grace” that Paneloux was happy about. The Incarnation is ultimately the full revelation of God, not just in man but in the “hominization” of the entire material world.

Camus would have heartily agreed with Teilhard’s love of man and [216] with his aspiration toward human unity. But it is rather doubtful whether he would have been able to accept the evolutionary and historical scheme of Teilhardian soteriology. To be precise, it is likely that Camus would have had a certain amount of trouble with the systematic progress of the world toward “hominization” and “christification” by virtue of laws im­manent in matter and in history.

The point cannot be adequately discussed here, but anyone who wants to investigate it further had better read Camus’ book on Revolt (L’Homme révolté), which he wrote after The Plague and which he thought out at the same time as The Plague. This study of revolt, which precipitated the break between Camus and the Marxists (especially with Sartre), is a severe critique of Hegelian and post-Hegelian doctrines which seek the salvation and progress of man in the “laws of history.”

Camus was suspicious of the way in which totalitarians of both the left and the right consistently appealed to evolution to justify their hope of inevitable progress toward a new era of the superman. In particular, he protested vigorously against their tendency to sacrifice man as he is now, in the present, for man as he is supposed to be, according to the doctrine of race or party, at some indefinite time in the future. In Camus’ eyes, this too easily justified the sadism and opportunism of people who are always prepared to align themselves on the side of the executioners against the victims.. In other words, a certain superficial type of eschato­logical hopefulness, based on evolution, made it easy to ignore the ex­termination camps, the pogroms, the genocide, the napalm, the H-bombs that so conveniently favored the survival of the fittest, got rid of those who no longer had a right to exist, and prepared the way for the epiphany of superman.

At this point, it must be admitted that one of the most serious criti­cisms of Teilhard bears precisely on this point: an optimism which tends to look at existential evil and suffering through the small end of the telescope. It is unfortunately true that Teilhard, like many other Chris­tians, regarded the dead and wounded of Hiroshima with a certain equanimity as inevitable by-products of scientific and evolutionary prog­ress. He was much more impressed with the magnificent scientific achievement of the atomic physicists than he was with the consequences of dropping the bomb. It must be added immediately that the physicists themselves did not all see things exactly as he did. The concern of a Niels Bohr and his dogged struggle to prevent the atomic arms race put Bohr with Rieux and Tarrou in the category of “Sisyphean” heroes that are entirely congenial to Camus. After the Bikini test, Teilhard exclaimed that the new bombs “show a humanity which is at peace both internally [217] and externally.” And he added beatifically, “they announce the coming of the spirit on earth.” (L’Avenir de l’homme)

No matter how much we may respect the integrity and the nobility of this dedicated Jesuit, we have to admit here that at least in one respect he resembles his confrere Paneloux. True, they are at opposite extremes of optimism and pessimism; but they do concur in attaching more im­portance to an abstract idea, a mystique, a system, than to man in his existential and fallible reality here and now. This is precisely what Camus considers to be the great temptation. Lured by an ideology or a mystique, one goes over to the side of the executioners, while arguing that in so doing one is promoting the cause of life.

There is no question whatever that Teilhard believes in the “new man,” the homo progressivus, the new evolutionary leap that is now being taken (he thinks) beyond homo sapiens. Science certainly gives us a basis for hope in this development, and perhaps Camus needed to have more hope in the future of man than he actually seems to have had. Perhaps Camus was too inclined to doubt and hesitate. Perhaps his “modesty” tended too much to desperation. Perhaps there was much he could have learned from Teilhard. But it is not likely that he would purely and simply have agreed with Teilhard’s statement in Peking, in 1945, that the vic­torious armies of Mao Tse-tung represented “the humanity of tomorrow” and “the generating forces and the elements of planetization,” while the bourgeois European world represented nothing but the garbage (le déchet) of history. No doubt there may be good reason to think that a “new humanity” will arise out of the emerging Third World. Let us hope that it will. But Camus would not be so naïve as to identify this “new humanity” with a particular brand of Marxism, or to pin his hopes on a party which announced its own glorious future as a dogma of faith.

Both Camus and Teilhard firmly took their stand on what they con­sidered to be the side of life. Both saw humanity confronted with a final choice, a “grand option,” between the “spirit of force” and the “spirit of love,” between “division” and “convergence.” Man’s destiny is in his own hands, and everything depends on whether he chooses life and creativity or death and destruction. Teilhard’s scientific mystique and long-range view, extending over millennia, naturally did not delay overlong to worry about the death of a few thousands here and there. Camus could still pause and have scruples over the murder of an innocent child. He refused to justify that death in the name of God. He also refused to justify it by an appeal to history, to evolution, to science, to politics, or to the glorious future of the new man.

In short, Teilhard de Chardin's devotion to the powerful generalities of modernity blinded him to the plight of particular men living in the world.

Note

1. Thanks to Patrick Henry Reardon, whose mention of this analysis in the last issue of Touchstone alerted me to its existence.

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Thomas Merton, "The Plague of Camus: A Commentary and Introduction," The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, ed. Patrick Hart (New Directions Publishing, 1985), 214-217.

Patrick Henry Reardon, "A Many-Storied Monastic: A Critical Memoir of Thomas Merton at Gethsemani Abbey," Touchstone (September/Octobober 2011), 50-57.

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Note: These past couple months I've been completely occupied with an important project; it will take another few months to see it through to the end.

Physical Intuition, Not Mathematics

I ran across an excellent passage in one of Feynman's "extra" lectures about the need to develop physical intuition in learning physics:

Now, all these things you can feel. You don't have to feel them; you can work them out by making diagrams and calculations, but as problems get more and more difficult, and as you try to understand nature in more and more complicated situations, the more you can guess at, feel, and understand without actually calculating, the much better off you are! So that’s what you should practice doing on the various problems: when you have time somewhere, and you’re not worried about getting the answer for a quiz or something, look the problem over and see if you can understand the way it behaves, roughly, when you change some of the numbers.

Now, how to explain how to do that, I don’t know. I remember once trying to teach somebody who was having a great deal of trouble taking the physics course, even though he did well in mathematics. A good example of a problem that he found impossible to solve was this: “There’s a round table on three legs. Where should you lean on it, so the table will be the most unstable?”

The student’s solution was, “Probably on top of one of the legs, but let me see: I’ll calculate how much force will produce what lift, and so on, at different places.”

Then I said, “Never mind calculating. Can you imagine a real table?”

“But that’s not the way you’re supposed to do it!”

“Never mind how you’re supposed to do it; you’ve got a real table here with the various legs, you see? Now, where do you think you’d lean? What would happen if you pushed down directly over a leg?”

“Nothin’!”

I say, “That’s right; and what happens if you push down near the edge, halfway between two of the legs?”

“It flips over!”

I say, “OK! That’s better!”

The point is that the student had not realized that these were not just mathematical problems; they described a real table with legs. Actually, it wasn’t a real table, because it was perfectly circular, the legs were straight up and down, and so on. But it nearly described, roughly speaking, a real table, and from knowing what a real table does, you can get a very good idea of what this table does without having to calculate anything—you know darn well where you have to lean to make the table flip over.

So, how to explain that, I don’t know! But once you get the idea that the problems are not mathematical problems but physical problems, it helps a lot.

This passage makes a point similar to the one in Glen Coughlin's introduction to his translation of Aristotle's Physics: that knowledge and thoughts about the physical world are prior to the abstract knowledge of modern mathematical physics:

To understand Newton's argument for universal gravitation, one must have experience of weight in things and in oneself, of the motion of the stars and planets and moons. Knowing calculus is not enough. This hybrid science [mathematical physics], then, comes after the consideration of nature through non-mathematical means.

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Richard P. Feynman, Michael A. Gottlieb, Ralph Leighton, Feynman's Tips on Physics: A Problem-Solving Supplement to the Feynman Lectures on Physics (Boston: Pearson, 2006), 52-53.

Aristotle, Physics, or Natural Hearing, trans. Glen Coughlin (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2005), xii.

Academia, Encapsulated

A baccalaureate Mass I recently attended featured this hymn at the offertory:

I.

For the splendor of creation that draws us to inquire,
for the mysteries of knowledge to which our hearts aspire,
for the deep and subtle beauties which delight the eye and ear,
for the discipline of logic, the struggle to be clear,
for the unexplained remainder, the puzzling and the odd:
for the joy and pain of learning, we give you thanks, O God.

II.

For the scholars past and present whose bounty we digest,
for the teachers who inspire us to summon forth our best,
for our rivals and companions, sometimes foolish, sometimes wise,
for the human web upholding this noble enterprise,
for the common life that binds us through days that soar or plod:
for this place and for these people, we give you thanks, O God.

 

The tune was Holst's Thaxted (a.k.a. central section from Jupiter in The Planets, a.k.a. "I vow to thee, my country"). It seems to have been written by Rev. Carl P. Daw, Jr. in 1989.

What an apt way to give thanks to God for the grandeur and folly of academia!

Inward and Outward Activity

I haven't posted for quite a while now since I've been very busy with work. I'm also preparing a paper for a conference this summer, for which I've thrown aside many extra activities. I probably won't be posting again for another month or so.

In the meantime, I thought you might find interesting this great quotation from David Bohm on rest mass as inward movement, and light as pure outward movement:

In this connection it must be noted that every form of energy (including kinetic as well as potential) contributes in the same way to the mass. However, the “rest energy” of a body has a special meaning, in the sense that even when a body has no visible motion as a whole, it is still undergoing inward movements (as radiant energy, molecular, electronic, nucleonic, and other movements). These inward movements have some “rest energy” E₀ and contribute a corresponding quantity, m₀ = E₀/c² to the “rest mass.” As long [91]as the energy is only “inward,” the rest mass remains constant, of course. But as we have seen, internal transformations taking place on the molecular, atomic, and nuclear levels can change some of this to-and-fro, reflecting “inward” movement into other forms of energy whose effects are “outwardly” visible on the large scale. When this happens, the “rest energy” and with it, the “rest mass,” undergo a corresponding decrease. But such a change of mass is seen to be not in the least bit mysterious, if we remember that inertial and gravitational masses are merely one aspect of the whole movement, another aspect of which is an equivalent energy, exhibited as a capacity to do work on the large scale. In other words, the transformation of “matter” into “energy” is just a change from one form of movement (inwardly, reflecting, to-and-fro) into another form (e.g., outward displacement through space).

It is particularly instructive to consider how, in this point of view, one understands the possibility for objects with zero rest mass to exist, provided that they are moving at the speed of light. For if rest mass is “inner” movement, taking place even when an object is visibly at rest on a certain level, it follows that something without “rest mass” has no such inner movement, and that all its movement is outward, in the sense that it is involved in displacement through space. So light (and everything else that travels at the same speed) may be regarded as something that does not have the possibility of being “at rest” on any given level, by virtue of the cancellation of inner “reflecting” movements, because it does not possess any such inner movements. As a result it can exist only in the form of “outward” movement at the speed c. And as we recall, the property of moving with the speed of light is invariant under a Lorentz transformation, so that the quality of the movement as purely “outward” does not depend on the frame of reference in which it is observed. (On the other hand, movements at speeds less than c can always be transformed into rest by a change to a reference frame with velocity equal to that of the object under consideration).

Bohm's insights here have significance when combined with Hans Jonas's insights on "mediacy."

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David Bohm, The Special Theory of Relativity (New York: Routledge, 1996), 90-91.