Scientific theology: a new history of creation
Chapter 4: A scientific word view
1. Faith and science
2. Some scientific shocks
3. Relativity
4. Quantum mechanics
5. Learning a language: the scientific method in action
6. All information comes from sensation
7. The scientific method - muddling through
8. Learning: the search for symmetry
9. Truth in science
10. The problem of animal heritage
11. A scientific revolution
12. Science and survival
13. The scientific faith
14. Work and play
15. Classifying and counting
16. Classical thermodynamics
17. Statistical mechanics
18. Catastrophe
19. Probability, symmetry, continuity and creation
4.1: Faith and science
It is common to contrast faith and science. The difference, they say, is that science deals in fact whereas faith, by definition, deals with things unseen. Since they are unseen, what we say about them cannot be checked by observation, and observation is essential to science. Jerry Coyne (2015): Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible
We can look it this from another direction. We have faith when we have a lot of congruent facts. Without any physical argument, the fact that (in most places) the sun rises every morning and has done so since time immemorial gives us faith that it will rise tomorrow. On the other hand, science proceeds by conjecture and refutation. Both are often expensive and difficult, so funding bodies must have faith that the money they spend on any particular scientific project will yield information of significant value. Experiences has shown that the benefits of scientific work are unpredictable, but that the benefit arising from our successes can easily outweigh the cost of the failures. Funding of science - Wikipedia
There is a lot of fact based faith in the ancient religions, wisdom accumulated in oral and written traditions since human societies began consciously discussing their lives. There is also a lot of doctrine about things unseen which is open to question. From a scientific point of view the Christian history of salvation is an hypothesis to be tested against any relevant data we can gather. Salvation History - Wikipedia
Faith is good and necessary. We cannot personally test everything. We have to listen to the older generation, at least a bit. Faith and science are better that either alone. We have faith that the Sun will rise every morning, but our faith is bolstered by a scientific understanding of the dynamics of the Solar System. The Sun will only stop rising when the Earth stops turning, and if the Earth stops turning someone will notice. In general it is easier to believe things if we can see not only the evidence for them, but also how they work. A good story must fit together. Joseph Paul Forgas: Why are some people more gullible than others?
The purpose of this book is to introduce the possibility of scientific theology. The first step toward this is to see that the Universe plays all the traditional roles of god. This, to me at present is an article of faith, a hypothesis. A consequence of this faith is that all my experience becomes experience of god. If my hypothesis is found to fit the facts, my faith is strengthened. If many people were to read this story and tell me that their experiences of the world point in the same direction, would begin to feel that I am on the right track and my hypothesis has begun to move toward the a status of a theory, like evolution. At present, I feel, that the gulf between theology and science is so great that most people I meet seem to think why bother, theology can never be a science. They seem to have totally accepted the sceptical view that God is an intrinsically mysterious and invisible figment of the collective imagination.
My hypothesis might sound a bit circular: I identify god and the Universe in order to justify the establishment of a science which is based on the identification of god and the Universe. This however, is the always the nature of hypothesis. First dream it up, then use it to guide documentation and testing.
How am I decide if my hypothesis is true? Just looking at the world does not really seem to show if it created itself or was created by some agent other than itself. We need some criteria, or as Aquinas might say, some principles per se nota from which to argue.
We begin with an argument for the eternal existence of something:
Nothing comes from nothing (an axiom)
But there is something (an empirical observation)
Therefore there has always been something, QED.
Aristotle believed that the the world was eternal. Aquinas believed that God was eternal and the world was created. Eternity of the world - Wikipedia
The Catholic Catechism teaches that God created the world out of nothing. My hypothesis then implies that God created the world out of themself, since nothing comes from nothing, something only comes from God. This is a logical foundation for claiming that the world is divine. Catholic Catechism: §296 The Mystery of Creation
Logical arguments are only good if the premises are true and the inference is valid. In the previous chapter (3.3, 3.4) I have touched on some difficulties that make it hard to believe that both God and the Universe exist as separate entities. Do these difficuties carry much weight? They depend on the picture of God that Aquinas has drawn from Aristotle and the scriptures. Is this credible?
In the rest of this book I hope to present a detailed picture of a Universe that uses the starting point that Aristotle bequeathed to the Catholic Church through Thomas Aquinas: a first mover of pure activity that is capable of doing anything that does not involve contradiction. This mover is capable of evolution. First it provides variation: it can try anything. Second: selection is enforced upon its trials by an axiomatic constraint on existence: contradictions cannot exist. In other words, the activity of this mover meets the criterion for divine omnipotence set down by Aquinas. McInerny & O'Callaghan: St Thomas Aquinas, Aquinas, Summa I, 25, 3: Is God omnipotent, Hoffman & Rosenkrantz: Omnipotence
Back to top4.2: Some scientific shocks
The message of this chapter is that when we are guided by fact rather than established opinion, reality often turns out to be more remarkable than we thought. Truth is often stranger than fiction. Of course one of the ploys of fiction is to establish false faith in the reader and then reveal a startling truth. Writers like Agatha Christie have sold billions of books using this approach, which shows how much we enjoy it. Science has a utilitarian side, but just discovering things is often pleasure enough. And it is very rare that a scientific discovery does not ultimately contribute to our collective wealth.
Consider a series of surprising discoveries that have showed us our place in the Universe. To begin with, many thought the Earth was flat. Obvious enough. Indeed, if it was spherical, we could expect the people on the other side to fall off. The Earth is a sphere, however, and we are all glued to the surface by gravity. Many people took a long time to come to terms with this fact.
Then we learnt that the obvious fact that the heavens revolve around the Earth is false. This appearance, we now know, is caused by the rotation of the Earth on its own axis. Why don't we feel this motion? Because the world is so large, steady and relatively slow moving that we do not feel the rotational forces acting upon us. We can demonstrate the Earth's rotation with a Foucault's Pendulum. Further, careful measurements of the shape of the Earth show that it has an equatorial bulge due to the centrifugal force generated by its rotation. The case is closed by the geostationary satellites that are essential to modern communication. Foucault pendulum - Wikipedia, Geostationary orbit - Wikipedia
Then we found that the Earth orbits the Sun, rather than the other way around. This discovery caused trouble for Galileo with the Church authorities, who thought the word of God recorded in the Bible meant otherwise. He had to deny the evidence of his own eyes (gathered with a telescope of his own making) in order to save his life from the murderers of the Holy Inquisition. Inquisition - Wikipedia
The next big step forward was bringing the heavens down to earth. Many of the ancients thought the heavens were made of something special, a fifth element not found here in the sublunary region. They were convinced, among other things, that circular motion was perfect so that it was fitting that all the heavenly bodies moved in perfect circles. This constraint led to the invention of very complex geometrical arrangements to explain the wandering motions of the moon and planets. Aether (classical element) - Wikipedia, Deferent and epicycle - Wikipedia
Johannes Kepler, using data collected by Tycho Brahe, himself, and others, showed that the orbit of Mars is an ellipse. This solved many of the problems that arose out of the ancient insistence on circular orbits. He was eventually able to formulate Kepler's Laws which relate the period of a planet to the size of its orbit. Kepler's work contradicted the notion that the planets were carried by celestial spheres, making the spheres superfluous. Kepler's Astronomia Nova - Wikipedia
Kepler's laws provided a foundation for Isaac Newton's law of universal gravitation. Newton stated three laws of motion that remain the foundation of classical mechanics. Newton's work showed that the same laws of motion held in the heavens as on Earth, making the ancient distinction between the heavens and the Earth unnecessary. In addition these laws are very simple, suggesting that the structure of the Universe is intelligible. Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica - Wikipedia, Newton's Laws of motion - Wikipedia
The next major scientific shock to hit the learned world came from Charles Darwin's book The Origin of Species. It had been assumed since time of Genesis that God created all the living things on Earth and that they have stayed the same from generation to generation ever since. Not so. We can also see evolution of species in the breeding of plants and animals, and we see it all the time in the technological world. Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species
Meanwhile, James Clerk Maxwell was opening up a whole new field of study: electromagnetic radiation. Classical mechanics deals with the motions of massive bodies like planets and car wheels. The other main component of our world is radiation which we know best as the sunlight which bathes the Earth. Maxwell discovered that radiation is an electromagnetic wave. Our eyes are sensitive to light, which is just a tiny fragment of the electromagnetic spectrum which extends in principle from frequencies close zero to frequencies approaching infinity. J. Clerk Maxwell: A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field, Electromagnetic Radiation - Wikipedia
Maxwell wrote that . . . we have some reason to believe, from the phenomena of light and heat, that there is an aethereal medium filling space and permeating bodies, capable of being set in motion and transmitting that motion from one part to another, and of communicating that motion to gross matter so as to heat it and affect it in various ways. This conjecture is wrong. Less than fifty years later, the young Einstein did away with Maxwell's aether and started a scientific revolution which has totally changed our view of the Universe.
None of these things were discovered by philosophers sitting in armchairs, but rather by practical people trying to deal with practical problems, like how to tell the time, how to navigate, how to breed better animals and plants for agriculture, when to plant crops, how to make better steel, and so on and on.
Back to top4.3: Relativity
We leap over a multitude of further new developments and refutations of old ideas to the two which underlie our current picture of the Universe, relativity and quantum mechanics.
When he was young Albert Einstein imagined travelling alongside a light beam. From this standpoint, the light should seem stationary, but that disagrees with Maxwell's equations. He needed a transformation which would make light look the same no matter how fast he was travelling relative to the source of the light. Albert Einstein: On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, Walter Isaacson: The Light Beam Rider
The result is special relativity. The Lorentz transformation at the heart of this theory makes sense of the equation c + c = c, where c is the velocity of light. Newton modelled a world in which space and time were not coupled to one another. He could imagine the instantaneous transmission of gravitational information through space. Special relativity takes into account the fact that it takes time to travel a distance. The time it takes to cover a given distance depends on the speed of travel. Using the velocity of light as the conversion factor, Einstein bound space and time together. His ideas is quite easy to understand. We all learn that we have to allow travelling time if we are not to be late for whatever.
The consequences of special relativity are profound. Einstein realized that momentum and energy behave mathematically just like space and time, and so found the most famous equation of them all, E = mc2. This relationship between mass and energy completely reshaped our ideas of mechanics and opened our eyes to both the enormous amount of energy stored in matter and the possibilities of nuclear energy. Special relativity - Wikipedia
Special relativity applies to inertial systems, those that obey Newton's first law: a body at rest remains at rest and a body in motion continues to move in a straight line unless acted upon by a force. A reference body with this property is called an inertial frame. Anything moving in an inertial frame is weightless (although it still has mass and energy). Special relativity uses the Lorentz transformation to transform between inertial frames. Lorentz transformation - Wikipedia
What about accelerated frames? Einstein saw that special relativity was incomplete, and set out to remedy the situation. His 'happiest thought' came in the Patent Office in Bern when he realized that a freely falling person would not feel their own weight, they are in inertial motion. This meant that he could use inertial frames as a starting point to find a transformation which transforms between bodies in any form of motion. The result is the General theory of relativity which has revolutionized our understanding of the large scale structure of the Universe. It introduced us to black holes and the initial singularity within which the Universe is believed to have expanded to its present size. As a consequence of relativity, we can only see the part of the Universe which is within our 'event horizon'. Beyond the horizon, the Universe may be infinite in size, a handy feature for those of us who want to make it divine. Misner, Thorne & Wheeler (1973): Gravitation
The mathematics embodied in Einstein's special and general theories is not new. The Lorentz transformation at the heart of the special theory was about 20 years old when Einstein used it. The differential geometry at the heart of the general theory began life in a paper by Bernhard Riemann, written in 1854 but not published until 1868, two years after his death. Einsteins greatest contribution lay in the physical insight which led to these applications of the mathematics. Bernhard Riemann - Wikipedia
Like Parmenides, 2400 years before him, Einstein was concerned with invariance. He was looking for the unchanging features of our moving world. The relativities are classical theories, built on the notion that the eternal God created the Universe once for all time. Charles Darwin broke this mould, but Einstein, like Isaac Newton, was looking for fixed points. At the heart of relativity is the idea that the world in itself is the same no matter where we look at it from or how fast we are moving relative to what we are looking at. There is objective truth. Quantum mechanics casts some doubt on this idea. Although Einstein contributed significantly to quantum mechanics in its early days, he was never happy with it. Abraham Pais: Einstein and quantum theory
Back to top6.4: Quantum mechanics
The biggest scientific shock of all is quantum mechanics. Since the days of Aristotle most writers have thought of the Universe as continuous. This is despite the fact that everything we see is a discrete object of one sort or another. Democritus of Abdera was one of the few who modelled the Universe as atomic, that is made of little 'uncuttables' (Greek a tomoi). Even Democritus, however, thought that the atoms moved in continuous space and time. Historically, the apparent continuity of motion has dominated physics. In our quantized world, however, motion is like walking: it steps along one quantum of action at a time. From my point of view this is very helpful, since ultimately I want to identify the world with the mind of god, a logical process. Logic proceeds stepwise. Democritus - Wikipedia
Classical mechanics is based on continuous processes in continuous spaces. It describes the phenomena well at large scales, but does not explain how things work in detail. Classical mechanics - Wikipedia, Quantum mechanics - Wikipedia
The limitations of classical mechanics began to appear in the middle of the nineteenth century when people began to study electromagnetic radiation, which includes radiant heat and light. In 1861 Gustav Kirchoff proved that the spectrum of the radiation emitted or absorbed by a hot body depended only on the temperature of the body. This started a search for the actual relationship between temperature and spectrum. Spectroscopists gathered data, and theoreticians searched for an explanation of the data. Kirchoff's law of thermal radiation - Wikipedia
After many unsatisfactory tries, quantum physics was born in 1900 when Planck found that the interaction between electromagnetic radiation and matter was quantized, like the integers, rather than the smooth continuous function that classical physicists had expected. Tradition has it that he made the quantum assumption as an act of desperation. The important thing is that it worked and set off a trajectory of development that has now continued for 120 years and is having a profound influence on our technology. I hope to carry this into theology. Black-body radiation - Wikipedia, Thomas Kuhn: Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity 1894-1912, Planck's Law - Wikipedia
It took nearly thirty years to develop Planck's observation and insight into quantum mechanics as we now know it. It now appears to describe the world almost exactly to the limits of our computational and observational ability. Few physicists would expect it ever to be found radically wrong, although there remain unsolved problems about the relationship of the quantum world to the classical world. Paul Dirac: The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, John von Neumann (2014): Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Measurement in quantum mechanics - Wikipedia
If motion is not continuous, the mathematics of continuity no longer applies. So let us introduce logical continuity, the sort of continuity which makes an argument or a story continuous.
Logical continuity is embodied in the idea of mathematical proof and formalized as the propositional calculus used by computers. Turing formalized the notion of proof in his Turing machine, a machine which performs a deterministic sequence of logical operations moving from some initial state (the premisses) to some final state (conclusion). He showed that such a machine was capable of performing anything which could reasonably called a computation. Further, a turing machine could have an initial state that led to no final state. Such initial states establish the mathematical existence of incomputable functions. Logical continuity and computers play a central role in the development of this story. Martin Davis: Computability and Unsolvability, Propositional Calculus - Wikipedia, Turing machine - Wikipedia
Back to top4.5: Learning a language: the scientific method in action
When we are very young we are a helpless load of trouble, but by smiling and laughing, being irresistibly cute, and smelling good (most of the time) we enslave our carers and mostly survive. These characteristics of newborns seem to be common across mammalian species and serve in each case to attract adult care. All these skills are part of fitting in, of learning to exploit our environment.
Our minds and bodies are tuned to learning languages. Generally they come to us easily. We learn languages by an application of the scientific method, listening (observing) and testing what we have learnt. We spend hours trying to get our babies to repeat our words and sentences and are happy when they say their first words. We learn the languages of animals, vegetables and minerals in the same way. Much of this is body language, like learning to throw and catch a ball, get dressed and do up buttons, laces and zips. Later we learn to work the hundreds of tools and appliances that fill our homes, and to deal with the thousands of circumstances that confront us in the wide world. It is the general task of science to understand and document all the languages of the world, human and non-human. de Boysson-Bardies: How Language Comes to Children
Imaginative fiction is a wonderful thing. Children have an infinite capacity play games, to make up stories, and take up roles. This continues into adulthood for all of us who write stories and design things, sifting through mountains of possibilities to find the best way to go. But success in life also depends upon having a clear understanding of the facts. This is the role of science. We can make up languages, but if we are the only speaker it is fun but practically useless. Science is a mixture of fiction and fact. It seems that the best fictions are rooted in the facts, and we tend to praise authors and actors for the realistic foundations of their fictional creations. We try to make up fictions that comfortably fit the facts but carry us beyond them.
The scientific method applies across the board. If a language is completely unknown to us, as it is to a newborn baby, we must begin by listening closely and watching the speaker, to get clues to the meaning of the sounds the speaker is making and their relationship to the other information available.
Mother says I am going to feed you now, and presents a breast, a bottle or a spoonful of food. When this scenario is repeated often enough, the correlation becomes clearer, and 'I am going to feed you now' becomes closely associated with the supply of food. After thousands of similar scenarios in thousands of different contexts, the baby will be speaking the language of their carers.
Once a baby has a minimal grasp of the language, what they already know can be used to extend their knowledge. So children are incessant questioners. What does this mean? What does that mean? What is this? What is that? Adults, like Yahweh in the Garden of Eden, are sometimes exasperated by this curiosity and try to control it. Once children were to be seen and not heard. Now the adults have little hope without, as in the bad old days, turning to violence. The development of language, like most learning tasks, is a virtuous circle. The more you do it the better you get.
Language learning is unconscious. Science is a conscious community effort to implement the same principles. Everything is trial and error. Even intelligent design is trial and error, as anyone who has tried to design something knows. From the first moment there is a continual flow of failures and better ideas until one arrives at a stable design. Even then, as soon as one starts production, new revisions will be found necessary. We learn from our mistakes. The history of engineering is a history of disasters. Boilers explode, planes crash, bridges collapse, dams burst. The causes are usually unforeseen circumstances coupled with inadequate design, poor construction, and (quite often) corruption induced by greed.
Our survival depends upon practical skills, manipulating the world and ourselves to obtain food, shelter and security. This is not always an easy task, and most societies depend on centuries of experience shared from person to person and generation to generation to learn to make a living from their environment.
Learning the language of the world, like learning a human language, is made possible because the animals, plants, and physical conditions which we depend upon for our existence have certain relatively fixed features which we can use to predict and exploit their behaviour. These features of human life have analogies in all other animate and inanimate elements of the world.
Back to top4.6: All information comes from sensation
The foundation of science is observation. Some things, like birds, are relatively easy to watch. Others, like the global temperature record stored in the Antarctic ice sheet, can only be read with a large investment in logistics, instrumentation and expertise. Ultimately, however, all the outputs of our instruments are sensed by us, and become the input to our effort to understand what is happening. British Antarctic Survey: Ice cores and climate change
We wouldn't be writing books or even speaking to one another if we did not have knowledge, so knowledge has been a matter of interest to philosophers and writers in general for a very long time. Two of the principal questions that arose in the beginning and remains of interest to this day are where does knowledge come from? And can we trust it?
For theologians, one of the most important philosophical writers was and remains Plato (428 - 347 bce). Plato's usually wrote in dialogue form, and it is not always easy to discern which opinions are actually his. However it seems reasonably clear that he followed many ideas of Socrates, and Socrates believed that much of our knowledge is innate, planted in our minds before we are born. Jerry Samet: The Historical Controversies Surrounding Innateness
The alternative was promoted by Plato's student Aristotle. Plato was a member of the ruling class, and one can imagine his thought was motivated by a desire to find a clearly ordered and perfect mind behind the phenomena. The perfect world of heaven has served as the epitome of a well run state in many cultures, providing a place in life for everybody, from high to low.
Aristotle was more of a naturalist, happy with the endless complexities of reality, aware of Darwin's 'tangled bank'. He understood that our senses collected information from our environment in real time. The information collected by the senses is processed by the mind to become knowledge, an understanding of what is happening that can serve as the foundation for a response. We are sensing and responding all our lives through billions of sensors in our bodies and responding through our billions of muscle fibres. Between sense and muscle lies the processing power of billions of neurons. Charles Darwin
Nevertheless, we can also see the truth in Plato's position. From one point of view we are a blank slate, born without knowledge. We cannot speak at birth, and there are a lot of others things we do not appear to know. On the other hand we are born with the ability to learn, and this itself is a form of knowledge, innate knowledge. It is built into the physical network structure of our bodies, as we will see in chapter 7. This structure has been refined down to the atomic level by billions of years of evolution since life began on Earth. Earth is itself built on the 10 billion years of cosmic evolution that preceded the emergence of the solar system.
All information comes from sensation, and sensation is a form of communication. Communication does more than transmit information from one place to another, it creates information, since the basic function of communication is copying. As you read this some sort of copy of what is in my mind as I wrote finishes up in your mind as you read.
Now is this process restricted to what we call living systems. Information is closely related to entropy, that is a count of states. To increase entropy is to increase the number of states which is an act of creation. The engineers who design heat engines are somewhat saddened by the fact that entropy always increases because this has the effect of diluting the amount of mechanical energy they can win from their fuel.
We have already referred to the quantum measurement problem which lies at the interface of the invisible quantum word of probability amplitudes and the world of physical particles that we can capture and measure. Since the whole world is a quantum world, measurement is in effect identical to one quantum system communicating with another. In his book on the mathematical foundations of quantum theory, John von Neumann notes that quantum measurement increases entropy. Here he put his finger on the fact, deep in the physical world, that communication is creation. von Neumann (2014): Chapter 5 (link above)
Back to top4.7: The scientific method - muddling through
The scientific events recorded above are a tiny fraction of the scientific information that we have collected since our species began. All of these discoveries share a common feature that we call scientific method. This method is not something cut and dried. It usually requires the application of creative imagination to new situations. Our trust in a result arises from careful review of previous results and methods used by people who are themselves working on similar problems. We call this peer review. Peer review is an ubiquitous feature of all attempts to arrive at the truth, from engineering to justice. Fortun & Bernstein: Muddling Through: Pursuing Science and Truths in the Twenty-First Century
There is a moving front in science running somewhere between known knowns, and unknown unknowns obscured in the realm of speculation. People are looking for the next step forward, building on what is known to demonstrate new connections. Often the next step comes through looking at things from a different point of view:
Here and elsewhere in science . . . that view is out of date which used to say 'Define your terms before you proceed.' All the laws and theories of physics . . . have this deep and subtle character, that they both define the concepts they use . . . and make statements about these concepts. Contrariwise, the absence of some body of theory, law and principle deprives one of the means properly to define or even to use concepts. Any forward step in human knowledge is truly creative in this sense: that theory, concept, law and method of measurement — forever inseparable — are born into the world in union. Misner, Thorne & Wheeler: Gravitation, page 71 (link above)
In effect, creation lifts itself by its bootstraps since imagination can transcend the immediate present. Much scientific progress is a matter of chance. There is a certain probability that someone will solve every problem sometime. The more people are working on a given problem, the more probable a solution becomes. This explains our habit of throwing money (which eventually means workers) at any problem facing us, either to solve them or to produce sufficient spin to hide them. What we do know, however, is that the foundation of real solutions to our problems is observation, imagination and testing.
Back to top4.8: Learning: the search for symmetry
All religions strive to find out what their gods want and exhort their followers to accede to the will of god. The payoff, they hope, will be some quid pro quo. Because most ancient gods were modelled on contemporary queens, kings and warlords who were mostly somewhat narcissistic, the gods usually want to be worshipped. Israel's Yahweh is shamelessly up front about this:
And God spake all these words, saying,I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Exodus 20:1-3
In the divine Universe, the task of science is quite similar. We want to find out what we must do to make our lives prosperous and happy. We have achieved a lot in this direction. We live in the midst of an explosion of knowledge and technology which improves many aspects of our lives, transport, communications, health care, and so on. But many of us are still unhappy. There is still a lot of violence in the world. More hidden violence, like slavery, family violence and the abuse of children is being revealed every day. Much of this derives from ancient cultures which must be revised.
The beauty and power of knowledge is that we compress the enormously complex world we inhabit into something dense and abstract that we can store in our minds. This is made possible by symmetry. Once we know one hydrogen atom, we know them all, because they are all the same. In politics, the rule of law works because we are all equal, that is symmetrical, before the law. Of course the rule of law is not universal. Many still enjoy privileges (private laws) which entitle them in some way to enjoy more of the world's resources than the rest of us. In the light of the universal declarations of human rights, this is a perversion in need of correction. United Nations: Official UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights Home Page
Atoms are relatively simple beings, and their behavioural repertoires are somewhat limited (even though infinite). More complex creatures have many more options and so they are less predictable. Nevertheless, to know one horse is to know them all to some degree, although they come in a vast number of colours, sizes and temperaments. There is no absolute symmetry in the world: every symmetry is broken. The symmetry of the ideal Platonic horse is broken to give us each individual horse. The same goes for people.
The network model of the Universe to be presented in the next chapter is greatly simplified through the symmetry of communication. Every act of communication has the same fundamental nature, defined by the theories of communication and computation. What changes is the content and context of the messages. Communication theory - Wikipedia, Theory of computation - Wikipedia
Back to top4.9: Truth in science
The first phase of the scientific method is imagination, wondering how to deal with a problem, dreaming up ways to decode the data at hand. The mathematical foundation of imagination is Cantor's theorem, that tells us that by ordering a small repertoire of things, numbers or behaviours, we can develop an almost infinite repertoire of new possibilities. Left alone with a computer, children will often, by trying everything, achieve states rarely reached by more experienced users. Cantor's theorem - Wikipedia
We learn by doing and we learn by hearing. Learning by doing can be a slow and dangerous process, sometimes wasteful. Our efforts will be successful if we do everything right. If we make an error our effort will fail. Science is basically a matter of learning by doing.
The good thing is that reality is not deluded or deceptive, so that the feedback we get from the world is to be trusted. Because it is reliable, we can learn from it and do things with a good chance of success. We can built bridges on the known strengths of materials and we can cook meals given the known properties of foodstuffs. In general, if we perform identical actions we get identical results. This is not always true, because there is uncertainty in the world. But uncertainty is not falsehood and we can be certain that the world will not lie to us. The first article of scientific faith is that the world is consistent.
We can trust the physical world, but what about ourselves? The evolutionary paradigm explains the difficulty here. Resources are limited, populations (from a breeding point of view) are unlimited. So we are bound to compete with one another and, as a matter of fact, deception often turns out to be a valuable competitive tactic.
For many people this is not a comfortable position. Lying or spinning the truth creates a tension we call cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a disintegrating force and the aim of science is to overcome it by showing that apparent contradictions do have rational explanations if we look carefully enough. A discovery is in effect a new channel of communication between two points in the world: for instance the connections between fuel and fire, or between certain microorganisms and disease. Cognitive dissonance - Wikipedia
Learning by listening to other people can be quick but problematic. Here the learner must be awake to all the sorts of delusion and deception. At a simple and harmless level, this is just a matter of games and jokes. So parents are inclined to perpetuate the myth of Father Christmas, either just for fun or as a tool to get the children to behave. In my case I was deluded and deceived for a long time by the Catholic story which permeated my education from a very early age.
Everywhere we find silver tongued salespersons, politicians and confidence tricksters, charlatans, snake-oil vendors, influencers and others like. A dangerous species of this genus are wealthy persons and corporate organizations which can convey truth or falsehood to a large number of hearers, depending on the result they are seeking. They will tell you that things that are bad for you are good for you, and vice versa. They will tell you that the car they are selling you is environmentally friendly, when it is not. They will deny that carbon based fuels cause atmospheric warming, while we know that it does. Banerjee, Song & Hasameyer: Exxon: The Road Not Taken, Volkswagen emissions scandal - Wikipedia
Tricky speech can be countered with critical evaluation of what is being said. The cigarette company says smoking is good for you; the medical profession says it is borderline fatal. An important critical principle is represented by the Latin tag: cui bonum? Who benefits? If it is the speaker, we may do well to be critical. Why are they trying to talk us into doing something for them like buying their dud product or believing their faked accounts? Gareth Hutchens: Corporate wrongdoing now endemic in Australia, Washington Post: Fact Checker: In four years, President Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims
In adversarial situations, like the relationship between predator and prey or between nations at war, deception becomes an essential means of gaining an advantage. One of the keys to successful deception is secrecy and one of the keys to secrecy is encoding messages in a manner that can only be decoded by friends. Cracking codes, and seeing through deceptions, like learning languages, is also a matter of science: imaginative trial and testing by observation to see if we are on the right track. Hodges: Alan Turing, Andrew Hodges: Turing website
Back to top4.10: The problem of animal heritage
Many features of our behaviour have been built in to us during our evolution, the way we breathe, the way we walk, the way our hearts beat, the way we eat. Although different cultures may treat these necessities in different ways, the basic structure is pretty much the same in everybody. This makes it possible for the average doctor to treat the most of the conditions they encounter anywhere in the world. A few will need specialist attention, and we rely on the doctor to know the limit to his expertise.
Although many people would like to deny it in the interests of human dignity, we started about ten million years ago as a pretty average animal, nevertheless special in its own way, for it was to become us. Paleontologists and geneticists have been able to create an evolutionary tree for our species Homo sapiens. They have documented our gradual evolution from a simian primate. Human evolution - Wikipedia
Ancient bones reveal the details of our physical evolution. Among thousands of changes, these bones reveal our gradual development of two legged walking, changes in our anatomy that enabled the development of speech and above all increases in brain size. They can also reveal some information about our behaviour, but do not tell us a lot about the evolution of human psychology and social behaviour. Cummins: The Evolution of Mind
As in all science, we can only view history through evidence available in the present, so much of our research about the development of mind is based on the studies of animals and humans. By ranking the animals in evolutionary order and studying ourselves as we develop from children to adults we can discern the development of the different mental traits to be found in the human repertoire.
Apart from revealing the evolution of our anatomy, bones can also reveal evidence about disease and violence. The incidence of disease and violence gives us clues to the conditions of life and the social relationships of a particular place and time. Talheim Death Pit - Wikipedia
We can also conjecture something about the way people thought from architecture, sculpture, artefacts and their treatment of the dead. In some cases we see reverent burials, often with property for use in the afterlife. In the other cases it would appear that violence had been done to the remains to prevent them from coming back to trouble the living. Maev Kennedy: Medieval villagers mutilated the dead to stop them rising, study finds
The theory of evolution provides an explanation for the incidence of violence: In a location with a fixed supply of resources life is in effect a zero sum game. Insofar as the available resources can only support a certain population, any increase in population above that number will lead to some people being deprived. In this event, we can expect most individuals and populations to use whatever means are available, including theft and violence, to ensure that they do not miss out. It may be judged better to die fighting for resources than to starve.
The exponential nature of reproduction and the variable nature of climate guarantee that there are hard times. There appears to have been no equivalent selective process in good times to put an upper limit on our desires. Aquinas recognised this when he postulated that the only thing that can completely satisfy the human desire for happiness is the vision of God. This explains the behaviour of many of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet: even though they are billionaires and gifted with enormous political power they want more, and they will use their power to go after more at the expense of people less fortunate than themselves. In the divine world we are always in the presence of god. What we must learn is to respect and appreciate what we see.
Unlimited desire seems to be the biggest problem we have inherited from our evolutionary past, and it can be seen as the root of many of the world's problems. It applies at many social levels from individuals through corporations to governments. Here we are interested in the implications of this human trait for theology, that is in the general theory of life on Earth. From a practical point of view we can be pretty sure that dinasaurs did not consider the effects of their reproductive efforts upon their environment. We have reached a point where we must take seriously the fact that Earth has finite resources and we must look after them if we are to survive.
The struggle for resources is still a source of violence, but there are many other causes more psychological than material, including the lusts for wealth, power, status and honour. In many societies individual thoughts and actions are closely policed. Historically the Catholic Church is one of the largest and most invasive institutions to practice thought control, limiting people to a narrow range of acceptable beliefs which often set them against one another. Honour killing - Wikipedia
One of the major causes of homicide globally is domestic violence which can be imagined to arise when one person tries to control another, usually a man trying to enslave a woman. The World Health Oranization estimate that Globally, as many as 38% of murders of women are committed by a male intimate partner. World Health Organization: Intimate partner and sexual violence against women
Theological, religious and political ideas are also subject to evolution and we might hope that with increasing education killing for psychological reasons might be minimized. The answer to the resource problem has four facets. The first, which we have practised on a huge scale, is to exploit new resources so that survival is no longer a zero sum game. The second is to improve the sharing and efficiency of our use of resources. The third is to recycle all material resources. The fourth is to turn to renewable sources of energy, that is all forms of solar energy.
In general human social evolution seems to be moving to decrease all the sources of deliberate violence through law enforcement and the mitigation of the forces of poverty and ideology that lead to war. We owe much of this improvement to the ancient religions which pursue meliorist policies, at least with regard to their own adherents. Conflicts at the interfaces of various religious and political groups are still frequent. To overcome these we must replace the sectarian nature of individual cultures with a global scientific outlook while respecting non-violent individual differences. Pinker: The Better Angels of Our Nature
4.11: A scientific revolution
Science is a cooperative activity, so that even though the findings of science may contradict the beliefs of Christianity, the peace, cooperation and leisure time made possible by Christianity has served as an incubator for science. Many early scientists were clerics with guaranteed incomes and plenty of spare time.
We can see the origins of modern science in the introduction of Aristotle to the embryonic universities in Christian Europe. This coincides with a rapid increase in Christian knowledge of the Islamic world arising from the Crusades. Greek texts that had been preserved in the Muslim world became available to the Christian academy.
Some might claim that the dominant position of Aristotle's work in medieval universities hindered the development of science. On the other hand, his empirical approach to knowledge is more scientific that the scholastic understanding of science as applied logic. Aristotle made a clean break from his mentor, Plato, who, following Socrates, thought that our knowledge was derived from the invisible ideas, and that learning was simply a matter of becoming conscious of the unconscious knowledge implanted in us at our creation. Recovery of Aristotle - Wikipedia
Aristotle insisted that all knowledge comes through the senses, and Aquinas agreed with this position. The middle ages saw the gradual rise of practical technology for mining and metallurgy, agriculture, and engineering and the gradual breakdown of the barriers between intellectual and practical pursuits. The universities grew out of the monasteries which were in a sense agribusinesses, connecting agricultural workers to an educated population to their mutual benefit.
Aristotle was able to work his way from the physical world to the invisible drivers of the stars and planets heavens through his theory of potency and act. This model led him to the first unmoved mover, responsible for all the motion in the Universe. In the mind of the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle's unmoved mover metamorphosed into the model of god which has stayed central to Christianity ever since.
The historical transition from deductive to inductive science is highlighted by the Galileo affair. The Church insisted that its interpretation of scripture carried greater weight than the observations of people like Galileo who saw that the Earth revolved around the Sun, rather than vice versa. An investigation started by Pope John Paul II in 1981 found that the Church had been unduly harsh in its condemnation of Galileo's discoveries. M. Sanchez de Toca: A Never Ending Story
Science has grown vigorously since Galileo's time, and has been the source of much public good. It still feels much political pressure however. On the one hand big science, like space exploration, is very expensive, and so requires strong political connections to get the budgets it needs.
On the other hand, our scientific understanding of the Earth and its ecosystems tells us that much of our economic activity is effectively a cancer on the planet. Like a cancer, we are destroying the global organs of planetary survival by replacing natural ecosystems with artificial substitutes and widespread pollution, often deliberate. Without the services provided by the global ecosystem the planet will become so impoverished that it will no longer be able to support us in comfort.
Science is two edged. It has enabled us to capture fossil energy and expand our footprint on the planet from a few million people consuming only their own metabolic energy to seven billion people, each consuming an average of 100 times more than their metabolic energy. On the other hand, it tells us that this course of development is ultimately a dead end. We depend on the Earth for our lives yet we are killing it.
It is an unfortunate fact that much scientific expenditure is for military purposes, seeking to create better weapons. Physics, in particular, has reapt hundreds of billions of dollars from its role in developing nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. Since the end of the war in the Pacific, nuclear weapons have become the gold standard of aggressive politics. Even today, when it is clear that such weapons are militarily useless, the politicians of major nuclear powers are upgrading their weapons and the nuclear aspirants are struggling to join the club. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute: World nuclear forces
Back to top12. Science and survival
We might call the Christian history of salvation an 'outside story'. Christian theologians think that they can look at the world sub specie aeternitatis, ie take a god's eye view of things. Christianity also tells us that the world was made just for us, that we are children of their god and that this god is a loving father who will always look after us. Like spoilt children we can feel entitled to do whatever we like on Earth God will take care of us. Sub specie aeternitatis - Wikipedia
We have now reached the point where significant proportion of the population believe that the scientific approach is the most certain way to acquire truth. Overall, we can trust our senses more than we can trust the words of others who may be ignorant, politically motivated or even intending to deceive. Here we are going for a complete break with the hierarchical version of Catholic theology, seeking to totally overhaul the Catholic notion of God.
In recent decades, the fossil fuel industry has been strongly motivated to deny the influence of releases of methane and carbon dioxide on global temperatures. We are reaching a stage now where such 'denialism' has become a subject of ridicule among people who undertand the issues. Unfortunately the cigarette industry, following the lead of the Nazis, the Soviet Union and other repressive regimes, has taught other corporate enterprises that big spending on carefully designed propaganda can influence opinion, and ultimately influence voting in democratic parts of the world. Ari Rabin-Havt: Trump's outrageous lies come straight from big businesses' playbook
The empirical point of view is applied most thoroughly in the so called 'hard' sciences like physics, chemistry and biology, but the 'softer' sciences like ecology, psychology and sociology also rely heavily on observation to collect data. Their difficulty is often that the complexity of their subject matter make it hard to establish clear correlations between different events. As instrumentation and computing machinery radically increase our ability to collect and correlate data, we are in a position to make the soft sciences harder. Psychology, for instance, is now greatly assisted by the technologies developed to measure brain function.
The evidence based approach has long been heavily emphasized in the administration of justice. This is symbolized by the 'scales of justice'. Not only do we use scientific forensic methods to reconstruct what has happened at crime scenes, but we use juries in the courtroom to assess the credibility of witnesses with a view to establishing the facts of a case.
In the scientific domain, the equivalent of the courtroom jury is the peer review. In the divine Universe, all science is knowledge of God. Knowing God, we are better equipped to harmonize our actions with the nature of divine creativity, with the advantage that our lives become more comfortable and secure. Unlike the mainstream sciences, theology is still largely a captive of religious institutions so that creative thought in the theological realm can often lead to personal disadvantage ranging from silencing to sacking and in extreme cases murder.
Back to top4.13: The scientific faith
Our faith is that the events of the world fit together, that they are mutually consistent, although this is not always obvious. This consistency operates at three levels. The first is the metaphysical or theological belief that God, the heart of everything, is self consistent. Science shares this belief with most religions. The second logical or linguistic belief is that we can understand the world using self consistent formal models. Since we take mathematics to be the total of consistent symbolic arrangements, we take the logical consistency of mathematics as our standard for judging both theology and the world. The third is the belief that the observable world is consistent within the bounds of uncertainty. We know we have come to a true explanation of events when we have consistency at all three levels, theology coupled to observed reality through logic and mathematics.
Some speak of the end of science, but the reality seems to be the opposite. Every new discovery raises a host of new questions, requiring further work, more discoveries, more questions. The Universe is constructed in exquisite detail right down to the level of the quantum of action. Just the blink of an eye requires a trillion trillion quanta of action, all minutely orchestrated to achieve this movement. Horgan: The End of Science
Because evolution is so fundamental, we see it everywhere from atoms to galaxies and beyond. The evolution of the Earth and the inhabitants thereof is just a tiny episode in the overall evolutionary process of the Universe. This point of view is consistent with the traditional notion expressed by Newton: This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being. The only difference is that this intelligent and powerful being is the Universe itself.
Our faith that the world is consistent is the foundation of the hope that we can deal with the problems that face us. The world is a very complex system. Our outstanding success at improving human health around the globe, for instance, has lead to the problem of rapidly rising population. Our success at lifting people out of poverty has the overall effect of increasing our consumption of the resources needed to construct habitable cities.
The general answer to these problems is clear. We must control our 'footprint' by a combination of population control, renewable energy sources and recycling materials to the maximum extent possible. The motivation for this comes from the realization that our world is divine and must be treated accordingly. Ecological footprint - Wikipedia
4.14: Work and play
God created the world in six days and on the seventh day they rested. They may have spent the holiday playing with their friends, but the Bible is silent on this. Most of us make a fairly clear distinction between work and play. Work, we might say, is disciplined behaviour aimed at achieving some goal. But this definition might serve equally well for many sorts of play, at least those we call sport. So what is the difference?
Because sharp definitions are not possible, we imagine a spectrum, running from work to play. The work end is defined by the existence of deterministic processes that must be followed to get the desired result. Such procedures, like arming a nuclear weapon, must be performed in a controlled and testable manner so that the completion of the transition from unarmed to armed (and vice versa) is reliably known and its state can be verified.
A gymnast performs a similar routine, executing a sequence of moves to be judged by a panel against an ideal for that routine. Here we are moving toward play. An element of uncontrollable uncertainty enters, particularly in ballistic moves where small errors of judgement cannot be corrected mid flight and may lead to bad landings.
Toward the further end of the spectrum are the imaginative games that children play, dynamically negotiating roles and then playing them out, limited only by imagination and sufficient consistency to make an interesting story. The logical extreme of the spectrum in the complete absence of external control on the system of interest. Insofar as it is all that there is, the divine Universe meets that criterion, so the life of god be thought of as pure play limited only by internal consistency. This book is written in a similar spirit, letting the imagination roam to transfinite dimensions, as we shall see in the model developed below.
In real life, one might define work as what pays. We do it for the income, in cash, kind or some other contribution to our welfare. This approach covers a certain amount of the work done by human agents on Earth, but probably more than half the basic work of human survival is voluntary, often motivated by necessity, often done by women. We maintain our habitat not for cash, but to maintain the consistency of local systems, ie clean nappies, clean dishes, children off to school and so on, effectively ad infinitum.
Whether paid or voluntary, maintenance is essential for survival, and when it fails in our ageing bodies, death follows. From this point of view, living is work and death comes when the operations of survival can no longer be effectively executed.
In the Sermon on the mount, Jesus encouraged his followers not to worry about material goods:
And why take ye thought for raiment?
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow;
they toil not, neither do they spin:
Matthew 6:28
Jesus was not to know the enormously complex physiology of the lillies and every other plant, collecting solar energy to fabricate water and carbon dioxide into living tissue while releasing oxygen into the atmosphere. In the divine universe, everything works (and plays). Matthew 6:28 - Wikipedia
4.15: Classifying and counting
On the whole scientist are looking for an objective view of the world, one which is independent of personal feelings, beliefs and points of view. Science is seeking public, not private knowledge. One way to achieve this is by using public rather than private methods of measurement. One of these, as old as ownership, is classification and counting. As long as there is a clear and accepted differentiation between horses, camels, cattle, sheep and goats, graziers can state their wealth by counting how many of each species they own. Similarly bankers can count money, shopkeepers and warehouse managers can state how many of each line of stock they are carrying. The accountants who work for these businesses devise systems of representation and applied arithmetic to keep track of goods as they flow in and out of a business. Many of the oldest known documents are cuneiform tablets written by accountants. Clay tablet - Wikipedia
Counting is used for discrete objects. The other quantities of interest to scientists and business people are continuous: masses, land areas, distances, and times. We adapt counting to the measurement of continuous quantities by establishing standard units of each quantity to be measured, seconds for time, metres for distance, kilograms for mass, and so on. There was probably a time when every human community had its own systems of units, but international science and trade have gradually eliminated most of these in favour of generally accepted measurement system of units for science, engineering and trade known as the International System (Systéme Internationale, SI). These units are defined to high precision and are closely linked where possible to natural units like the speed of light and Planck's constant. International System of Units - Wikipedia, 2019 redefinition of SI base units - Wikipedia
Quantum mechanics tells us that the world comprises vast number of discrete events. Because they are discrete, these events can be counted. Also because they are fundamental, measured by Planck's quantum of action, they are in effect the alphabet of the language of the Universe. They are our basic communication link with the Universe which made us.
We gather information about systems by 'binning' and 'counting'. The bins characterise the phenomena. There may be just two bins, corresponding to say male or female or spin-up and spin-down, or a large number, corresponding perhaps to the different socio-economic states of various people. Having found a way to separate our subjects of interest into different bins, we then count how many there are in each bin. This sort of data is the basic input to science. When we find, by counting, that a certain of number of people in the 'heavy smokers' bin get lung cancer, we can then use statistical methods to calculate the probability that smoking is associated with cancer.
The basic technology of high energy physics is to accelerate particles to very high energies with a machine like the Large Hadron Collider, arrange for them to collide with one another and then collect, classify and count all the particles that arise from the collision. In the case of the LHC one of the collection, classification and counting devices is the 7000 tonne ATLAS. The data collected is checked against the current modelling of what is happening in the collision to see if the theoreticians are on the right track. Large Hadron Collider - Wikipedia, Atlas Detector - CERN
We make similar observations on one another. We have a large vocabulary of bins to describe our relationships with one another, and when discussing these relationships we may comment on how many of our friends fit into each of the chosen categories, happy, sad, suicidal, stupid, sensitive, etc. We see a lot of this going on in the comment sections of web pages. Although some might characterize this as mere gossip, it often carries important information which should be noticed, and serves as a social binder or bonding agent. Eryn Newman
Counting, through the collection of statistics, is the input to government. Through their bureaux of statistics, governments gain an abstract view of the state of their communities and can form political ideas about what they must do to maintain their popularity and power. Governments also like to hear good news, so there may be pressure on the scientific inputs to government to get the right (wrong) answers. Such corruption is a fundamental cause of failed nations. Acemoglu & Robinson: Why Nations Fail.
Back to top4.16: Classical thermodynamics
Theology and astronomy are the oldest sciences, closely connected by the belief that what happens in heavens controls what happens on Earth. In the Christian story, Heaven is the abode of an invisible God, and that God has total control of everything. Another view, possibly more ancient, is that the motions of the visible planets control us. This belief, which we now call astrology, provided strong motivation for rulers to invest in physical astronomy, the careful measurement of planetary and stellar motions, and the related efforts to understand and predict planetary motion. Astrologers apply these results in their work, hoping to discern the fate of their employer. Astrology - Wikipedia
Aristotle was interested in both theology and astronomy. His study of the first mover of the heavens had a theological aspect that fed into Christianity through the world of Aquinas. He also believed that the perfection of the heavens demanded that their motions be circular. This motivated a complex system of epicycles to explain the wandering behaviour of the planets and the moon. It was not until Kepler demonstrated that the orbit of Mars is an ellipse that the a solution to the mystery of planetary motion became possible, leading to Newton's law of universal gravitation.
Although the control of fire is considered to be a major step forward in human technology, and fire was considered to be one of the four sublunary elements, there does not seem to have been much interest in the study of heat. Hero of Alexandria (c. 10 - c. 70 CE) was a Greek experimenter and engineer who devised a steam powered reaction turbine called an aeolipile and a wind turbine, but nobody appears to have thought much about heat until engineers in the 17th century began to devise the first practical engines for converting heat into mechanical energy. Hero of Alexandria - Wikipedia
Thermodynamics began as a study of these heat engines to understand how they worked and what they could do. Their most remarkable feature is the conversion of the invisible submicroscopic random motion of the molecules in hot bodies into the mechanical and electrical energy that powers almost everything we do. From the point of view of this essay the importance of thermodynamics, and the statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics which grew from it, is that it exhibits the creative relationship between random and deterministic processes. This relationship has enabled the Universe to create itself from a very simple beginning identical to the classical God. Hero of Alexandria - Wikipedia
The amount of energy in a substance is proportional to its temperature. A heat engine is a device for moving heat energy from a hot substance to a cold substance while extracting some of the energy difference as mechanical energy. our most familiar heat engines are the internal combustion engines in our motor vehicles, lawnmowers and chainsaws. Much of our electricity is generated by steam and gas turbines in our power stations. Refrigerators are also heat engines, consuming mechanical energy to move heat from a cold reservoir inside the fridge to a hot reservoir, outisde. The largest and most important heat engine on the planet is the atmosphere, which uses temperature differences caused by solar energy to create winds and ocean currents.
Heat engines were the essential foundation of the industrial revolution. They have greatly enriched our lives by enabling us to perform physical tasks which cannot possibly be achieved by human or animal muscle, work like flying or motoring at 100 km per hour. They are being rapidly replaced by photovoltaic devices which use the energy in solar photons to create electric currents, and wind turbines which extract kinetic energy from wind so that eventually almost our whole mechanical economy will be electrified. It is essential that carbon burning sources of energy be eliminated as soon as possible because the carbon dioxide released by such sources is causing a dangerously rapid rise in global temperature.
Physiologically, each of us consumes about 10 megajoules of energy per day to live, provided by our food. In advanced economies each of our lives is assisted by about 100 times as much energy, a gigajoule per day. Fortunately the energy in sunshine and wind is many times greater than the needs of any conceivable civilization.
With the advent of steam engines, engineers began to wonder just how much mechanical energy a heat engine could extract from a given amount of heat. The first step toward this goal was the ability to measure energy.
From a historical point of view, we might identify a fundamental breakthrough in classical physics as the discovery that energy is conserved. People had long thought that there must be things that did not change in our moving world. We now know that the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant. An isolated system is one that does not exchange energy with its environment. This law, that the energy in a system is indifferent to the passage of time gives us an eternal (invariant) basis for the building a model of our world. We call it the first law of thermodynamics.
The discovery of the conservation of energy was not possible until it was realized that heat is a form of energy and that energy comes in two forms, kinetic and potential. Kinetic energy is the energy associated with motion. Potential energy is stored energy often found where systems are bound together by communications like gravitation or electromagnetism. Heat is also a form of stored energy but the discovery that heat is the kinetic energy of the moving particles in any macroscopic sample of matter had to await Einstein's explanation of Brownian motion. Albert Einstein (1905): Investigations on the Theory of Brownian Movement, Brownian motion - Wikipedia
All these invisible particles are in perpetual motion. The energy of the motion is measured by temperature, faster motion means higher temperature. There is an absolute zero of temperature (about -273 degrees Celsius) but it is inaccessible because it is impossible to bring the particles in a macroscopic sample of matter to complete rest. Nevertheless the measure of temperature appropriate for the study of heat engines is the Kelvin scale which uses this natural zero.
By measuring the heat energy going into an engine and the mechanical energy coming out, they found that only a fraction of the heat energy appeared as mechanical energy. Could a perfect steam energy convert all the energy in the coal into mechanical energy? The answer, provided by the second law of thermodynamics, is no. This answer, the Carnot efficiency, also set a standard of efficiency for engineers to aim for.
The major step in understanding the heat engine was Sadi Carnot's invention of the Carnot cycle. The important feature of the Carnot cycle is that it is reversible. It can transform between heat energy and mechanical energy in both directions. This transformation operates between the microscopic world of quantum phenomena and the macroscopic world of planes, trains and automobiles in which we live. Carnot cycle - Wikipedia
The Carnot engine takes in heat at a high temperature, transforms some of this heat into mechanical energy and excretes the remaining energy at a low temperature. Operated in reverse, it will take in heat at a low temperature, and using the mechanical energy input to it deliver the plus the mechanical energy input at a higher temperature. Ideally the entropy of the high and low temperature sources is the same, so that the entropy of the mechanical energy output from or input to the engine is zero.
The efficiency, ε, of a heat engine working between a high temperature T1 and a low temperature T2 is given by the equation below. The temperatures here are measured in Kelvin.
η = (T1 - T2) / T1
η can only reach 100% if T2) is zero. Since the exhaust temperatures of internal combustion engines are about 1000 K and the combustion temperature maybe 2000 K, the best efficiency we can ever expect is about 50%, sometimes reached by large diesel engines.
The Carnot cycle is reversible because it conserves entropy. Entropy is a measure of complexity, which can be computed by counting the number of different states available to a system. We might think of the number of states as the amount of information encoded in the system, sometimes known as its variety. A transformation from one state to another and back again is only possible if no information is lost in the process. Since the ideal Carnot cycle conserves entropy, no information is lost when the cycle is operated. The past state can be reconstructed from the future state. In real life, of course, our approximations to the ideal Carnot cycle are imperfect. Imperfection introduces noise into the system so that reversibility is lost.
In information technology, the equivalent of the Carnot cycle is the lossless coder-decoder, or codec, a computational device the encodes and decodes messages. A lossless codec preserves all the information in its input so that its output represents the same amount of information as the input, and the output may be decoded to reproduce the input exactly. We will see the same situation in the evolution of an unobserved quantum system where the evolution of the state vector |ψ> is mathmatically deterministic and therefore reversible. Codec - Wikipedia
Mechanical energy has zero entropy because it has only has only one state, which is equivalent to saying that it is deterministic. The determinism of mechanical energy lies at the root of all our engineering and technology. The Carnot cycle extracts a deterministic feature out of the random motions of a vast number of particles. This ability to get order out of chaos is also the foundation of evolution.
The second law of thermodynamics tells us that the entropy, that is the complexity, of the Universe never decreases, an indication of its creative power. Heat energy is always associated with entropy. Higher temperatures correspond in general to lower entropy per unit of energy. Mechanical energy effectively has zero entropy, corresponding to a (formally) infinite temperature.
Many of the ecosystem services provided by the Earth can be understood through thermodynamics. The basic inanimate transport mechanisms on Earth are winds, ocean currents and rivers. All these mechanical processes are driven by solar energy. In terms of the Carnot cycle, the hot source is the Sun, whose surface approaches 6000 K and the cold source is space, whose temperatures is about 3 K.Wind - Wikipedia
Warm air is lighter that cold air, so when the air is heated by contact with warm land and water it rises, to be replaced by air blowing in from elsewhere. This process is in effect a heat engine, using heat to produce the kinetic energy of wind. Winds drive ocean currents (and wind turbines). Similar heat engines, whose hot source is at the centre of the Earth and the cold source is at the surface, drive the major magma flows within the Earth which provide the Earth's magnetic field and drive continental drift and the volcanism that makes the surface of Earth fertile. Tectonics - Wikipedia
Rising air cools and, if its moist, the cooling leads to the formation of clouds and raindrops. Rain on the high country serves as a major geotectonic force, shaping the landscape. These processes, involving phase changes, can be understood statistically, but because they are often quite complex they lead us into an extension of thermodynamics known as statistical mechaincs. Rain - Wikipedia Back to top4.17: Statistical mechanics
Thermodynamics as a science proceeds without any knowledge of molecules and molecular processes. It is one of simplest and most important sciences of matter. Einstein was deeply moved by its power:
A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability. Therefore the deep impression that classical thermodynamics made upon me. It is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced will never be overthrown, within the framework of applicability of its basic concepts. Albert Einstein (2000): Thermodynamics - Wikiquote
Thermodynamics grew into statistical mechanics when people sought to understand the behaviour of macroscopic phenomena in terms of the microscopic atomic and molecular world. Two of the leading figures in this transition were James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) and Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906). Maxwell is best known for his study of electromagnetic radiation and the discovery of the Maxwell equations. Boltzmann set out to understand the molecular basis of entropy. James Clerk Maxwell - Wikipedia, Ludwig Boltzmann - Wikipedia
Atoms and molecules are very small and exceedingly numerous. Eighteen cubic centimetres of water, a soup-spoonful, contains Avogadro's number of molecules, approximately one followed by 24 zeros. Avogradro did not know this number but it is named for him because he proposed that certain volumes of any gas (at a certain temperature and pressure) would contain the same number of particles. Jean Perrin was given the Nobel Prize in 1926 for his estimation of the number. Avogadro constant - Wikipedia
Students of condensed matter wished to apply Newtonian mechanics to solids, liquids and gasses, but the vast number of particles involved meant that they could not be treated as individuals, like the planets. Statistical methods were required. This was made possible, at least in dilute gasses, by imagining all the particles as little elastic balls that collided with one another and the walls of their container and obeyed the laws of conservation of energy and momentum. The total kinetic energy of all the particles in the gas at constant temperature was held constant, and all the collisions were understood to conserve momentum. Kinetic theory of gases - Wikipedia
This approach enabled the computation of the velocity distribution of the particles of a gas at a given temperature. It is quite high: in still air at room temperature, the mean speed of a molecule is about 500 metres per second, that is 1800 km per hour.
Boltzmann was interested in finding the molecular basis of thermodynamic entropy. He introduced the idea that entropy is a measure of complexity, which is a count of the number of different ways the particles within a substance can be arranged, that is a count of permutations. Using this approach he derived a mathematical expression for the Boltzmann entropy. He assumed that all the particles in the substance of interest were statistically independent and arrived at the formula carved on his gravestone S = k log W where S is the entropy, k is Boltzmann's constant which relates the measured entropy to log W and W is the count of the number of ways the molecules in a substance can be arranged which Boltzmann called the number of complexions. Boltzmann's entropy formula - Wikipedia
On the whole reality is not so simple, and forces exist between particles even where they are not in contact. Quantum mechanics is necessary to understand the phenomena that result. One of the consequences of forces acting between particles are phase changes. There are many different phase changes observed in nature. Here we mention just three, the interplay between gas, liquid and solid as the temperature and pressure of a substance are varied. Phase (matter) - Wikipedia
The changing phases of water play an central role in the global climate and local weather. This happens because large amounts of energy must be supplied to transform ice into water and water into steam. The same amount of energy is released when steam condenses and water freezes. As steam is cooled, the water molecules move more slowly and get closer together until become bound together by a quantum force that holds them at a constant distance from one another, but does not control their motion. The result is liquid water.
Further cooling reveals forces which control the direction of binding, so solid crystalline structures are formed and we have ice. These changes are quite simple in principle, but very complex in practice, and reveal many properties of matter which we can take advantage of to obtain technical effects like those necessary for refrigeration and solid state electronics. The forces associated with phase changes are the principal set of algorithms governing the transition between the atomic world and the macroscopic world in which we live.
The second law of thermodynamics says that overall entropy never decreases. Here we take this to be an expression of the creative power of the universe. We explore this in more detail in the next chapters.
4.18: Catastrophe
Much of the discussion in this essay centres around the interface between the continuous classical world and the digital world built upon the quantum of action. An action is a process that takes some system from some initial condition to a final condition. It is the execution of change. In practical terms is involves the annihilation of an initial state (eg sitting down) and the creation of a final state (standing up).
Although we may imagine a motion as a continuous process, the observations of physics tell us that there is a scale, measured by Planck's constant, below which any continuous process that may be conjectured cannot be observed. This is one of the most important and counterintuitive discoveries of physics, because it provides the key to see the Universe not as dead matter, but as embodied software of unlimited complexity.
The mathematical theory of invisible sudden changes was invented by Rene Thom and is called catastrophe theory. We can distinguish two sorts of systems in the world, which we call linear and non-linear. We understand linear systems by linear functions whose output is directly proportional to their input. We write f(x) = ax + b where a and b are constants. Catastrophe theory - Wikipedia
All other systems are non-linear, their output depends in all sorts of ways on their inputs, and sometimes a small change in input can produce an unlimited change in output, a catastrophe. So we might imagine a ball rolling toward the edge of a cliff. Things remain more or less linear until it reaches the edge, then its motion suddenly changes.
In general we like to avoid catastrophes like bridges falling down and the failure of relationships of all sorts. In a sense, they are unavoidable, since every change requires annihilation and creation. What we look to avoid is large scale destructive catastrophes like plane crashes. We avoid these things by studying them, and every time something unexpected happens, we hope that it is studied closely so that we can look out for it and prevent it next time.
Engineering danger out of our culture is the principal task of government, which should try to steer the ship of state as closely as possible to an ideal course. A scientific view of the world, rather than one based on untested fiction, can assist this task. A consoling thought is that usually, when a big disaster is studied carefully, it is revealed that a lot of smaller things (often revealed by "whistleblowers") went wrong before the big one occurred. If people had been alert to the small problems, the big one might have been averted. In the scientific world, attention to detail is critical. Government - Wikipedia
4.19: Probability, symmetry, continuity and creation
Traditional theology maintains that God has a very fine grained plan for the Universe they created. God created this world especially to bring intelligent creatures like ourselves and angels into existence to glorify them and enjoy the beauty of their divine existence. In the traditional story this did not work out well. Many of the angels became demons and the first people were disobedient.
We have already detailed some of the difficulties arising from this hypothesis and the idea that God is absolutely simple. An alternative has arisen from work that suggests that the general theory of relativity points to singular origin for the world which is formally identical to the traditional God, that is eternal, absolutely simple pure activity and the source of the Universe.
Because this source is singular and simple, its entropy must be zero so that from a cybernetic point of view it has no power to control its future. Insofar as it is active, it must act at random. Mathematically the meaning of the term random is defined by the axiomatic theory of probability published by Kolmogorov. Andrey Kolmogorov: Foundations of the Theory of Probability
We may understand probability as closely related to continuity and symmetry, a region in which there is no control. A probabilistic system of events in one in which there is no particular reason why one thing should happen rather than another. The only constraint we require is that the sum of the probabilities of all the possible events is 1. So when we toss a coin we attribute the the fact that the coin ultimately comes to rest heads up or heads down as a random event and we know that it is certain that the outcome will be either heads or tails and not both. Of course, in a deterministic world we can imagine that if we know exactly how the coin is tossed, air resistance and many other variables, we should be able to compute how it would land. In other words, the appearance randomness in this case may be attributed to our ignorance.Quantum theory also exhibits randomness. This worried Einstein, one of whose best known statements is "God does not play dice". He felt that quantum mechanics is incomplete. His opinion is probably wrong. It may be that randomness is intrinsic to quantum mechanics precisely because it describes a fundamental level of structure in the world which is too simple to exercise deterministic control over the outcome of events. It is close to the initial singularity. In this book I like to think of quantum mechanics as a mathematical description of the basic processes of computation and communication in the universe (to be described in detail in the next chapter).
We have learnt that the best way to implement a computer is by exploiting binary numbers and propositional logic because they represent the level at which mathematics and logic meet. The unit of information in computation and communication is the bit, a measure of the distance between yes and no, p and not-p, true and false, or as the medieval logician, poet and lover Peter Abelard put it, sic et non. Peter Abelard - Wikipedia
The quantum equivalent of the classical bit is the qubit, q, which we interpret as a mixture of sic and non represented by the quantum vectors |0> and |1>. We write q = a|0> + b|1> where we interpret |0> and |1> as orthogonal vectors in Hilbert space ant the + symbol as vector addition. The two elements of a qubit are coupled by the Pythagorean constraint a2 + b2 = 1, where a and b are complex numbers.
The qubit is an abstract mathematical expression which may be thought of as representing a spinning coin. The qubit is not so much a thing as a probability distribution. The meeting of two quantum systems is called an observation or measurement in which they reveal a shared quantum state appearing as a particle or particles. In the case of the coin, this is equivalent to landing and coming to rest, revealing heads or tails. A qubit like a spinning coin has an infinity of states represented by the values of a (or b) but an observation will yield only |0> (with probability |a|2) or |b> (with probability |b|2) where the sum probabilities is normalized to 1.
We take the view here that every strong correlation that we observe in the world points to the operation of computable functions. Where there are no correlations, we can assume that computable functions do not exist leading to uncontrolled randomness. There is nothing so see there, because as we shall see below, communication is only possible where suitable computable functions are available for encoding and decoding messages. As we shall see, the mathematical term continuous points to a situation where nothing happens, that is creativity is absent and there is no causality.
Energy is conserved because it represents such a low layer in the universal structure that it is indifferent to all the ways its symmetry can be broken to create particular forms of energy. From the point of view of energy, these are all random events. Continuity is exploited by Noether's theorem, one of the fundamental theorems of mathematical physics, which gives meaning to the laws of nature or symmetries which make the world comprehensible by showing, in effect, that laws are where nothing happens. Noether's theorem - Wikipedia
The network model proposed in the next chapter proposes a structure for building up the universe universe layer by layer in a manner analogous to the construction of computers and computer networks, starting with simple logical operations and arriving at structures that can compute anything computable. Rather than being planned a priori however, the lower layers of the universe act at random because of uncertainty. Their random efforts are then subjected to a selective process that annihilates inconsistencies, creating a consistent universe.
(revised 28 June 2021)