Cosmology, Electromagnetism, Pseudoscience, Quantum mechanics, Relativity

Teh Burning Stupid: Relativity Edition

6 Comments

To put the “moral” at the beginning, let’s summarize. If you want to raise my blood pressure, one good way to do it is to write a completely wrong, back-to-front absurd tirade against all of twentieth-century physics. Anyone can slip a few errors into an essay, or even a few “fundamental” errors, but if you want the brass ring, you need at the very least to misrepresent the special theory of relativity, the general theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, the use of mathematics in physics and the scientific method. Bonus points if you confuse general relativity with quantum physics; a woop-woop-woop special prize for taking a non-true assertion and calling it a “fundamental premise” of quantum mechanics; and an extra cherry on top if you take three famous observations which support general relativity, lie about two of them and forget the third.

The story so far:

I might write an actual, non-linkfesty post about this. . . but then again, other corners of the Network are calling to me and reminding me of overdue obligations, so I might leave it to my colleagues.

UPDATE (6 December): gg now has Part 2 out on the blogonets.

UPDATE (16:47 o’clock): Tyler DiPietro dons the asbestos and joins the fun, followed quickly by Mark Chu-Carroll.

UPDATE (9 December): Flavin of the St. Louis Skeptical Society offers an essay.

Statistical mechanics, String Theory

Quote of the Moment

4 Comments

Jacques Distler:

The quark gluon plasma studied at RHIC is the least viscous fluid known to man.

Just how non-viscous is it? Well, the folks in the STAR Collaboration tell us that for the quark-gluon plasma, the ratio of shear viscosity to entropy density, [tex]\eta / s[/tex], is more than one hundred times smaller than that of water.

Barton Zwiebach has some videos on this subject which may serve as a good introduction for those with a moderate physics background.

Bibliophilia

Dawkins’ Book Endorsements

1 Comment

I just noticed that RichardDawkins.net is now advertising books in the left-hand sidebar, below the quotations and links to other skeptical and freethinking websites. These include Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell (2006), Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World (1995) and The Varieties of Scientific Experience (2006), E. O. Wilson’s The Future of Life (2001), A. C. Grayling’s Against All Gods (2007) and Michel Onfray’s Atheist Manifesto (2007). This sampling is significant for two reasons: first, if your reading has been limited to American glossy media, the latter two names will probably make you go, “Who?” Second, the implied endorsement of Sagan’s work is interesting, since many people (even some who should know better) have taken to canonizing Sagan as the anti-Dawkins of science advocacy. The same goes, to an extent, for E. O. Wilson.

The list of books is generated anew with each page load, just as with the other sidebar information, incidentally.

Transparency

Wikipedia and Creative Commons

2 Comments

This is pretty big news: Wikipedia, which has so far been licensed under the GFDL, is moving towards integration with the Creative Commons system. Two days ago, the Wikimedia Foundation requested that the GNU folks modify the GFDL to allow “mass collaborative projects” developed under the GFDL to migrate to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.

A time of troubles awaits in the near future, when Wikipedians will be asked to decide: relicense the encyclopedia under CC-BY-SA 3.0, or not? Even if the community says no, the new version of the GFDL will allow other content developers to mix material from Wikipedia and CC sources much more easily than was possible before.

(Via Peter Suber.)

Wobosphere fun

ED The Future

2 Comments

A growing number of older children are rejecting the doctrine of “parentism,” the idea that gifts could be left under the Christmas tree by Mom and Dad. Now, at ED The Future, Lacie Cuskin takes us into the new, alternative paradigm of “External Delivery.” Can gifts be arranged under a tree by random chance alone? Is “parentism” merely another tool in the War Against Christmas? Only Lacie Cuskin tells it like it is!

Evolution, Pseudoscience, Statistical mechanics

Anti-Matters

5 Comments

Starting your own journal is a time-honored way to make pseudoscience and outright antiscience look more respectable. Known loonball Paul Cameron did it in order to bolster his homophobia, and the walking dishonesty generators known as “creationists” have done it several times. (Ad hominem? Sure, if you like. But creationism is the morally bankrupt pursuit of the factually wrong, and I lost patience with it quite some time ago.) Now, Jason Rosenhouse reports, they’ve gone and done it again.

These journals invariably founder on their inability to find any scientists willing to write for them. Remember Proceedings in Complexity, Information and Design? It’s been moribund since November 2005. Or how about Origins and Design? That one went belly-up around the turn of the century.

The latest representative of the genre is Anti-Matters. It bills itself as “A quarterly open-access journal addressing issues in science and the humanities from non-materialistic perspectives.”

Apparently, “non-materialistic” science means attacking evolutionary biology with — wait for it — the Second Law of Thermodynamics! Some bad arguments just never die.

Man, I’m on an emotional roller-coaster here. “Ooh, Jason Rosenhouse has a new post! Joy joy. I wonder what it’s about.” Then I read, and: “Oh. Creationists blathering about the Second Law.

“Now I’m sad.”

Transparency

Sleep Tight!

3 Comments

All things considered, the antics of my government are still higher on my list of oh-god-we’re-all-gonna-die than quantum Zeno effects with dark energy. To illustrate why, I quote David Leppard in the Sunday Times:

A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it. […] Until now it was commonly assumed that US law permitted kidnapping only in the “extraordinary rendition” of terrorist suspects.

The American government has for the first time made it clear in a British court that the law applies to anyone, British or otherwise, suspected of a crime by Washington.

Yep. This is all gonna end well.

Via Warren Ellis.

Popularization

Good News

5 Comments

Having complained at some length about how the Philosophia Naturalis blog carnival seemed to have died, I am pleased to report that another installment has arisen. Volunteers are needed to host the next edition (sign up before Christmas).

Before you ask, “If you complain so much, why don’t you put that energy into hosting one yourself,” let me say that I’d be happy to run one of these shindigs, but given all the other blog-related stuff I’ve somehow committed myself to doing, you’d better not ask until mid-January. Lay a guilt trip on me the next time ’round.

I’m also curious if anyone has ideas for a different way to get multiple science bloggers to collaborate. I mean, a blog carnival isn’t much of a “collaboration” — it’s all retrospective, put together by somebody who’s more a secretary reading the minutes than an editor. Cosmic Variance recently had an open thread for cosmology questions, and Aaron Bergman did a similar thing for string theory. I wonder if this could be made into a regular affair, sort of an “Ask Professor Science!” tradition in which each month (or every N days, whatever) a different scientist-blogger hosts an open thread. If the event were well-advertised, each occasion could easily attract informed responses from many scientists other than the host, too.

Evolution, Network theory

On the arXivotubes

4 Comments

If I didn’t have to be modifying and debugging a network-growth simulation today, I’d be reading these papers. The first is not too far from one subject I’m researching right now. Axelsen et al. (arXiv:0711.2208) write about “a tool-based view of regulatory network topology”:

The relationship between the regulatory design and the functionality of molecular networks is a key issue in biology. Modules and motifs have been associated to various cellular processes, thereby providing anecdotal evidence for performance based localization on molecular networks. To quantify structure-function relationship we investigate similarities of proteins which are close in the regulatory network of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We find that the topology of the regulatory network show weak remnants of its history of network reorganizations, but strong features of co-regulated proteins associated to similar tasks. This suggests that local topological features of regulatory networks, including broad degree distributions, emerge as an implicit result of matching a number of needed processes to a finite toolbox of proteins.

The second, Gaume and Forterre’s “A viscoelastic deadly fluid in carnivorous pitcher plants” (arXiv:0711.4724, also in PLoS ONE), is pertinent to my eventual life goal of building an army of atomic super-plants.
Continue reading On the arXivotubes →

Group Theory, Popularization

Lent of Physics Blogging

10 Comments

For a while, we had a blog carnival of physics writing, Philosophia Naturalis. However, it looks rather moribund today: the last installment to date was on 4 October (at Dynamics of Cats), and the “next available hosting opportunity” was the first of November, which is already almost a month gone.

Combined with the recent description of the physics blogoweb as “an intellectual wasteland,” and we’ve got plenty of excuses to feel a little depressed.

Oh, and have you noticed that ScienceBlogs.com still can’t do math notation? So much for discussing science the way that, you know, actual scientists do. So much for reflecting the increasing quantitative aspect of the life sciences, discussing interdisciplinary work, or doing anything beyond the same old carping over innumeracy. Maybe they’re intimidated by that old “each equation cuts the readership in half” bromide. Or maybe they think that allowing the use of calculus and other such scary mathematics would be “bad framing.”
Continue reading Lent of Physics Blogging →

Evolution

Evolution and Turing Machines

8 Comments

I haven’t made any headway on the Grey Lady’s Top 100 Books of the Year, partly because I’ve been too busy reading what comes down the arXivotubes. For example, take Giovanni Feverati and Fabio Musso’s recent e-print, “An evolutionary model with Turing machines” (arXiv:0711.3580, 22 November).

The development of a large non-coding fraction in eukaryotic DNA and the phenomenon of the code-bloat in the field of evolutionary computations show a striking similarity. This seems to suggest that (in the presence of mechanisms of code growth) the evolution of a complex code can’t be attained without maintaining a large inactive fraction. To test this hypothesis we performed computer simulations of an evolutionary toy model for Turing machines, studying the relations among fitness and coding/non-coding ratio while varying mutation and code growth rates. The results suggest that, in our model, having a large reservoir of non-coding states constitutes a great (long term) evolutionary advantage.

Taking the broad view, it’s interesting that a large mass of genetic information might not directly code for phenotypic features while still having a long-term adaptive advantage. (Thinking about fitness over multiple generations gives me a headache: the mapping from phenotype to fitness value isn’t constant over time. Cluster a whole bunch of predators together, and they kill off all the prey, changing their environment and thereby making their own phenotype unfit. Some people really care about this; I just know it makes me want to go back to neutrino physics.) A few details of note:

First, Feverati and Musso evolve their Turing machines to specified goals: they want a machine which ends its operation with a tape containing a particular sequence of zeros and ones. In different trials, two distinct goal tapes were used, a tape representing the first 100 prime numbers and a tape holding the bits after the radix point in the binary expansion of π. (These goals were chosen in part because a periodic distribution is an easy thing for a Turing machine to make. I suppose we’re talking about maximizing Kolmogorov complexity, though the authors don’t make that connection explicitly.)

Second, the only form of mutation in their simulation was point mutation. More specifically, they randomly changed each entry in a Turing machine’s description with some probability [tex]p_{\rm m}[/tex]. Gene duplication and other such mechanisms were not implemented. States are added with a certain probability [tex]p_{\rm i}[/tex] per timestep; these states are non-coding until a point mutation elsewhere establishes a call to them.

UPDATE (28 November): A real biologist offers comments below. The number of people who know more than I do about any given subject is awfully impressive!

UPDATE (1 December): More here.

"no matter how gifted, you alone cannot change the world"