Posted inReality Science

Interesting theory of quantum weirdness (if you’re into this sort of stuff)

I felt a need to add the parentheses in the title of this post, because I realize that I'm more interested in how the quantum realm works than most people are.   So if you read on, be warned that while I find this theory tantalizing, because it deals with the "measurement problem" in quantum mechanics in a creative fashion, you might find this to be the most deadly boring blog post in the history of humankind. (Hey, if so, at least I've accomplished something rare.) In the February 3, 2024 issue of New Scientist, or as folks in Great…
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Posted inReality Science

Nature uses quantum mechanics. But we humans don’t understand how.

There's been a lot of scientific progress in the 10,000 or so years of human history, most of it in the past few centuries. But the natural world still has a lot of mysteries.  I find this highly appealing. It shows that if someone is attracted to the unknown, there's no need to embrace religiosity or the supernatural. Just look around at the world that surrounds us, and indeed is us. What you'll see are quantum phenomena. Not directly, because the quantum realm typically is well hidden, manifesting only in atomic and subatomic processes that are far beyond the ability…
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Posted inScience Universe

The big bang shows the limits of human intuition

Almost everybody has heard about the big bang. That marked the beginning of our universe some 13.8 billion years ago, which has been expanding ever since. But it is very difficult for most of us, me certainly included, to get a solid understanding of what the big bang really was. That's because our common sense intuitions of reality, which are founded in everyday experience, aren't of much help in domains of science such as quantum mechanics and big bang cosmology. Religions appeal to those intuitions by making the creation of the universe into something our minds can easily grasp. Like,…
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Posted inBooks Reality Science

We can’t grasp reality as it is, only as we know it

My new favorite book, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, had such a provocative title, as soon as I saw it recommended in The New Yorker I knew that I'd have to buy it. Wow. It's a work of literary genius, based on my reading of the first part of it. The author, William Egginton, is a humanities professor, but he clearly has an excellent grasp of modern science also. The front cover has a one-sentence summary of what the book is about. A poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explored the greatest…
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Posted inFundamentalism Science

“I could be wrong” is what separates openness from dogmatism

Two wonderful sayings that every person should embrace are "I don't know" and "I could be wrong." Each points toward openness, humility, and a rejection of dogmatism. My favorite, though, is I could be wrong. One reason is that there are so many things that each of us doesn't know. The number of things we know is far, far, far exceeded by the things we don't know. This makes I don't know a commonplace statement. But I could be wrong is about a belief we hold that seems true to us, yet there's at least some chance we're incorrect about…
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Posted inComments Science

Denying scientific truth isn’t welcome on this blog

I've loved science since I was a child. Way back when (late 1950s) I crammed a card table into my bedroom closet, hung a light over the clothes rod, and happily conducted science experiments via chemistry sets and science kits delivered every month, thanks to my mother, who also deeply admired science. (I wrote about this in a 2007 post, "Thanks for the chlorine gas, Mom (cough, cough).") Since, I've retained my love of science, even though I ended up getting a B.A. in Psychology and a Master's degree in Social Work. But then I completed the course requirements for…
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Posted inScience

Nature’s imagination is far greater than imagination of humans

This is my favorite quote from the early chapters of a book by theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss (The Edge of Knowledge:Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos) among the passages that I shared in a recent blog post. Because this, to me, is the most fascinating aspect of the cosmos: that it keeps surprising us. The imagination of nature is far greater than the imagination of humans. In my own work, every day I am surprised if I am not surprised. So true. I love the eminently scientific notion that nature surpasses the imagination of us humans. Of course, Krauss, being an…
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Posted inScience

Lawrence Krauss discusses the methods and mysteries of science

Lawrence Krauss is a notable theoretical physicist who I'd heard of, but I didn't really know much about him until I watched a three hour You Tube video of Krauss interviewing Robert Sapolsky about his book, Determined, which explores the illusion of free will. If you're into this sort of thing, and have some time to spare, the interview is fascinating. Sapolsky (on the left) and Krauss talked about their personal lives and approach to science before getting into Sapolsky's book. I loved how these Jewish atheists each had mothers who dearly wanted them to become medical doctors, even after…
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Posted inFree will Science

Emergent complexity helps explain how the brain works

I was planning to set aside Robert Sapolsky's book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, having finished it, including an appendix that I wrote about a few days ago. I called that post Neurons and synapses are what we are. That's absolutely true. If anyone doubts this, hire an unethical doctor to scoop out all of your neurons and synapses from your head and see if anything of you remains. (Spoiler alert: you'll surely be brain dead and almost certainly totally dead also.) But here's the obvious thing: we aren't just neurons and synapses. We're so much more.…
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Posted inCoronavirus Science

Anti-science views of conservatives led to many more COVID deaths

I'm a strong believer in science. Everyone should be. Not just because science is our best means of knowing reality, and that's a very good thing. Also because ignoring science can be dangerous to your health. Very dangerous, according to Peter Hotez, MD, Ph.D, who wrote a book that I'm about half through reading: The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist's Warning. Hotez is the founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, where he co-directs the Texas Children's Center for Vaccine Development. His book, which I'm enjoying a lot despite the bleak theme,…
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Posted inReality Science

I’ve finished “The One.” It ended up kind of ho-hum.

Well, some books end with a rousing crescendo. Others end with a deflating sense of ho-hum. I can't say that Heinrich Pas' The One: How an Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics was totally in the latter category for me, but it was close to it. I've been writing about the book because I'm fascinated by quantum mechanics and have read quite a few books that explore the possible meaning of this field, apart from the undeniable success of the mathematics of it -- which makes possible so much of our modern technology. Pas deserves a lot of praise…
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Posted inReality Science Universe

Religion hates mystery. Science loves mystery.

Recently there's been a comment conversation on this blog about the religious philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, a medieval Christian. I've never been interested in his theology, since like most avid religious believers, Aquinas wants to use philosophy to defend his faith, not to engage in a search for truth. Wikipedia has a cogent criticism of Aquinas by Bertrand Russell. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already…
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Posted inReality Science Universe

New Scientist story by Heinrich Päs about quantum oneness

I got excited when I saw the cover of the most recent issue of New Scientist that appeared in our mailbox a few days ago. Ooh! "A bold new way to think about how the universe fits together" Bring it on! When I turned to the cover story, which is called Reality Reconstructed in the print edition, I saw that the author was Heinrich Päs, the theoretical physicist who wrote The One: How An Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics, which I've written previous blog posts about here, here, and here.  As noted in the third post, Päs devotes…
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Posted inReality Religions Science

Einstein: “It is the theory which decides what can be observed”

Here's my third post about Heinrich Pas' book The One: How An Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics, the previous posts being here and here. In my reading I've reached a sort of interlude in-between the first and last parts of the book, each of which deal fairly directly with a monistic interpretation of quantum mechanics, which explains The One title. But two intervening chapters, "The Struggle for One" and "From One to Science and Beauty," focus on the historic struggle between monism and dualism in Western thought (there's very little mention of Eastern thought, which also has monistic and dualistic…
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Posted inBooks Reality Science

The “many worlds” of quantum mechanics arguably is a “single world”

Here's my second post about Heinrich Pas' book The One: How An Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics, the first post being here.  I realize that probably I'm more interested in quantum mechanics than most people visiting this blog, so I'll do my best to make my posts about the book as simple as possible. Which isn't easy, since quantum mechanics is confusing at best and totally mystifying at worst -- at least for those of us who aren't professional physicists, and even they readily admit that much about quantum mechanics is difficult to grasp. The so-called "measurement problem," for…
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Posted inBooks Reality Science

“The One” is a fresh look at the meaning of quantum mechanics

There's been two big problems with attempts to fathom the meaning of quantum mechanics (the commonly used term by scientists in that field, rather than quantum physics). New Age types, along with other mystically-inclined fans of quantum mechanics, make too much of what quantum mechanics means -- spouting indefensible notions of how we create our own reality, consciousness pervades the cosmos, and such. Physicists, along with others who work with the applications of quantum mechanics, typically make too little of what quantum mechanics means -- proclaiming that all that counts is the astoundingly precise mathematics underlying this field, often encapsulated…
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Posted inBuddhism Science

Buddhism and quantum physics both point toward One

I feel a duty to report on how the subject I've been writing about recently, Rob Burbea's book about Buddhist teachings, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising, ends. There wasn't a big surprise in the final pages. Burbea had been steadily building a case for emptiness being the foundation of both inner and outer reality, so it wasn't a shock when the final chapter concluded, in a thoroughly Buddhist fashion, that the world as it seems (distinct separate objects) and the world as it really is (empty of inherent existence) amount to the same thing. Burbea writes: We…
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Posted inReligions Science

Detection of gravitational wave “orchestra” shows power of science

Since I subscribe to the online edition of the New York Times, I get frequent notifications of new stories on my iPhone. Some interest me. Some don't. This morning it was a pleasure to be sent a story about how scientists were able to discover a background hum of gravitational waves, building on the first detection of these waves in 2015. I've made a PDF file of the story, "The Cosmos is Thrumming With Gravitational Waves, Astronomers Find." It's well worth a read, having been written by a science reporter with a Ph.D. in particle physics. I'll share a few…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Science

Artificial intelligence likes me. Here’s what ChatGPT said about Brian Hines.

On my HinesSight blog, yesterday I wrote about how I'd finally gotten around to trying ChatGPT, the online chatbot offered by OpenAI, a company whose goal is A.G.I. -- artificial general intelligence that can do anything a human can do. I got the idea to look into ChatGPT after listening to part of an interview MSNBC's Ari Melber did with hip hop artist Erykah Badu where Melber read to her ChatGPT's answer to his query, "Discuss Erykah Badu's contributions." That answer from the artificial intelligence chatbot was really impressive. You can see that part of the interview in the video…
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Posted inBooks Science Spiritual practice/meditation

How a physicist embraces both science and spirituality

I embrace science. I also embrace spirituality, so long as "spirit" isn't viewed as something supernatural, but as a word that points to a deep personal understanding of existence that is compatible with science. So when I heard about physicist Alan Lightman's book, The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science, I knew that I wanted to read it. (I included an excerpt in this post.) Now that I've finished the book, it met my expectations, though I didn't learn anything astoundingly new. Lightman does a good job of explaining how we can feel a sense of belonging to…
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