Doomsday predictions aside, everything seems to be running at the speed of light over at CERN. We didn't see blackholes swallowing Europe orbit by orbit and neither have we seen or heard of any weird entities spawning from dimensional rifts.
So, after billions have been spent to find particles a fly wouldn't even notice, what have we got? A very expensive toy comes to mind.
However, like a parent smiling when a kid figures out how to fix a toy and make it better, I'm betting God has a tear in His eye as He watches us try to understand stuff that really won't make Africa bloom or wars end.
It's a toy.
With that in mind I'm starting my very own LHC project. The Lego Highspeed Collider. It'll only take a few billion Lego blocks to construct over a few decades but I should be able to get them free from Lego right?
Friday, September 12, 2008
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Does God Play Dice?
I was reading an article on Wikipedia one day. The french Mathematician, Physicist and Philosopher Blaise Pascal once said, "The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing."
This came from the guy who helped create two major new areas of research. One of which was Pascal's Wager posits that it is a better "bet" to believe that God exists because the expected value of believing (which he assesed as infinite) is always greater than the expected value of not believing.
This led me to an article by Stephen Hawking, the renowned British physicist and author of the bestseller "A Brief History of Time". Being a fan of science fiction and science books in general (and any books written for lay readers for that matter), his public lecture of the same title as this post (available in pdf format) noted that God does not only play dice but He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can’t be seen (italics mine).
The question was originally posed by Einstein, and he believed that physical events can be predicted or determined given a set of initial conditions. One of the popular problems at that time was predicting the position and speed of a particle. Quantum mechanics says that events occurring at the sub-atomic levels are governed by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (HUP), that is, you cannot pinpoint both the particle’s speed and position at the same time. It can only be represented by a wave function or in simpler terms, you can only tell a particle’s position and speed in terms of probabilities. What it implies is that, nature will not allow you to determine exactly where and how fast a particle is. That is the limit on what man can observe. In effect, what it says is that the very act of observation contributes a great deal to what can be observed. Observation shapes reality.
Add to the mix two or more particles to be observed such that if you measure one attribute of a particle, you will know the attribute of the other particle (such a scenario called quantum entanglement). To dispel Einstein’s belief that there is uncertainty or "hidden variable" to particles being observed, John Bell dropped a bomb and developed Bell’s Theorem proclaiming that the "hidden variable" concept is an an illusion. Whereas HUP practically says that observation shapes reality, Bell’s Theorem on the other hand says any "more complete" theory of reality is just that: a dream.
If God is at work, He might be working at the level of the atom or in the case of chaos theory, manifests His work through the proverbial flap of the butterfly that might have caused the hurricane. While chaos theory might focus on cause and effect, complexity theory describes the stage where all these happen which is the universe. The complexity of the universe led Arno Penzias, one of the co-leaders of the COBE satellite team that has discovered the microwave background radiation (thought to be the afterglow of the Big Bang), to remark that his discovery is like seeing the hand of God. Where God’s work is unseen in the very fabric of the universe or even in the human brain, it is man’s nature to be awed by such things or dismiss it outright in the company of Biblical fallen angels.
This came from the guy who helped create two major new areas of research. One of which was Pascal's Wager posits that it is a better "bet" to believe that God exists because the expected value of believing (which he assesed as infinite) is always greater than the expected value of not believing.
This led me to an article by Stephen Hawking, the renowned British physicist and author of the bestseller "A Brief History of Time". Being a fan of science fiction and science books in general (and any books written for lay readers for that matter), his public lecture of the same title as this post (available in pdf format) noted that God does not only play dice but He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can’t be seen (italics mine).
The question was originally posed by Einstein, and he believed that physical events can be predicted or determined given a set of initial conditions. One of the popular problems at that time was predicting the position and speed of a particle. Quantum mechanics says that events occurring at the sub-atomic levels are governed by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (HUP), that is, you cannot pinpoint both the particle’s speed and position at the same time. It can only be represented by a wave function or in simpler terms, you can only tell a particle’s position and speed in terms of probabilities. What it implies is that, nature will not allow you to determine exactly where and how fast a particle is. That is the limit on what man can observe. In effect, what it says is that the very act of observation contributes a great deal to what can be observed. Observation shapes reality.
Add to the mix two or more particles to be observed such that if you measure one attribute of a particle, you will know the attribute of the other particle (such a scenario called quantum entanglement). To dispel Einstein’s belief that there is uncertainty or "hidden variable" to particles being observed, John Bell dropped a bomb and developed Bell’s Theorem proclaiming that the "hidden variable" concept is an an illusion. Whereas HUP practically says that observation shapes reality, Bell’s Theorem on the other hand says any "more complete" theory of reality is just that: a dream.
If God is at work, He might be working at the level of the atom or in the case of chaos theory, manifests His work through the proverbial flap of the butterfly that might have caused the hurricane. While chaos theory might focus on cause and effect, complexity theory describes the stage where all these happen which is the universe. The complexity of the universe led Arno Penzias, one of the co-leaders of the COBE satellite team that has discovered the microwave background radiation (thought to be the afterglow of the Big Bang), to remark that his discovery is like seeing the hand of God. Where God’s work is unseen in the very fabric of the universe or even in the human brain, it is man’s nature to be awed by such things or dismiss it outright in the company of Biblical fallen angels.
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