Convergences

As regular readers of this blog will know, I am curious about a wide range of things; not so wide as to include the Kardashians, but wide. I am deeply interested in the natural world, including the smallest and largest parts. I am curious about free will and how we developed self-awareness about how thoughts form and how we remember things. Many philosophical and religious topics are included in this cesspool of curiosity: the idea of morality being subjective or objective, whether gods exist or not, and so on.

Recently I have run across linkages between many of these topics than makes my thinking about them clearer. For example, you may have heard about brain plasticity, that the physical structure of the brain is changed as we experience things. Well, it has now been shown that one cause of brain plasticity is our thoughts. An argument against free will has been that thoughts aren’t physical causes so they cannot cause other things to happen, so free will is an illusion. But we now know that that is not so, even though we are still more than a little unclear as to what thoughts actually are, thoughts can change the structure of the brain and hence are physical causes, and free will is still on the board of possibilities

Recently cosmological studies have offered the possibility that the expansion of the universe is not only not speeding up as was the current thinking but slowing down. There are several ongoing efforts involved in the science of the very large. One prominent question is: is the universe finite or infinite? Since the definition of the term universe (at least one such) is “all existing matter and space considered as a whole.” It is a bit hard to consider it being finite. If one does, one ends up with the question, ‘Well, then what is outside of it?”

If the universe is infinite, and it seems to me that it is, then it cannot possibly be expanding or contracting, not as a whole, but possibly locally to various locations. Couple this with the relativity concept of “space-time” which is a mathematic concept cobbled together to make certain aspects of relativity theory coherent. But the concept of space-time itself is incoherent, so how does it make anything else more coherent? Time is not a thing and neither is space, so how can either contract or expand? Also, what does it mean to join them together? How is that done? Whenever one gets nonsensical outcomes or incoherent predictions, that usually is the indicator that it is time to go back and re-think things as we have somehow gotten off track.

I suspect that Einstein’s reputation as a titanic genius and the claim that maybe only two or three physicists could actually understand his General Theory of Relativity when it was first published left people sitting in the position from which asking questions or challenging schemes results in “who do you think you are” questions and if the majority of your audience doesn’t understand the theory, how are they going to understand your objections?

Current the LCDM Theory of the Cosmos (Lambda Cold Dark Matter, aka The Big Bang Theory) is considered the best available theory of why things are as they are in the realm of the very vast. I just read an article by a physicist stating why the LCDM theory is the best explanation of current data. But, while not an expert, I know that the LCDM theory includes a number of conjectures that are currently unproven (cosmic inflation, dark matter, dark energy, etc.) and since they were conjectured to explain why the LCDM theory didn’t work in certain cases, I don’t think it appropriate to use those conjectures as the best explanation of some of the facts (or really, any of the facts). Theoretical conjectures are speculative and shouldn’t be part of any proof, until their actual existence has been verified.

The LCDM theory was proposed way back in the 1930’s to explain data acquired by Edwin Hubble. These involved red-shifted lights put out by stars and galaxies. Since hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, the light emitted by hot hydrogen has a well known fingerprint and some of those fingerprints were out of place, being farther toward the red end of the visible spectrum as when seen in lab experiments. Here is a truncated history of redshifts:

Vesto Slipher was the first to discover that most spiral galaxies have redshifts, while Edwin Hubble later discovered the relationship between redshift and distance, which led to Hubble’s Law. The concept of redshift was first explained in 1848 by Hippolyte Fizeau, who observed the Doppler effect for light waves.

In 1848, he observed the shift in spectral lines of stars, explaining it as the Doppler effect for light, sometimes called the “Doppler–Fizeau effect”. In 1912, he discovered that most spiral “nebulae” (now known to be galaxies) had a redshift, indicating they were moving away from us. Following up on Slipher’s work, Hubble found a linear relationship between a galaxy’s redshift and its distance from Earth. He correctly interpreted this relationship as evidence that the universe is expanding. 

The Doppler Effect is dependent upon waves traveling through a medium and light is said to be moving through a vacuum between galaxies, so it isn’t that prominent of an explanation. And as to the universe is expanding being a conclusion of Hubble’s work, Hubble himself rejected that interpretation of his data in his lifetime, yet it is still bandied about that “He (Hubble) correctly interpreted this relationship as evidence that the universe is expanding (my emphasis)” which seems somewhat of a slander at this point.

So, now we are arguing about whether something that cannot be shown to be able to expand or contract is expanding slower or faster than before. (Egad!)

And then I read this:

“An analogy is a comparison that emphasizes similarity over dissimilarity. All analogies stand or fall on the appropriateness of the selection of the characteristics that are deemed to be similar.

…

“… analogy is crucial to the whole process of knowing. It is impossible for us to consider the unfamiliar without reference to the familiar.

…

“An analogy, like an assumption, must lead to understanding and accurate prediction or it will be discarded as useless. Thus, it is common for people to discard analogies that run counter to ‘common sense,’ or that predict an outcome with which they do not agree. Consequently, a particular analogy often finds acceptance only after the necessity of it becomes clear in the broad social context. Humans, for example, were not considered similar to other animals until the scientific and commercial advantages of the analogy outweighed the religious objections.”

(Source: The Scientific Worldview, Second Edition, by Glenn Borchardt, p. 141-142

Most people think of science as being hard and fast but it is, in my experience and vast readings, a quite pragmatic effort. No one seeks “truth” or “proofs;” we are just looking for a way forward, trying things to see if they work. Often as not when we find something that works we take a whack at why it seems to work We are nowhere near as successful at that than most people seem to think.

Evolution haters keep trying to undermine that theory without producing any new data or producing a new interpretation of the existing data that better explains it. They never get very far because the amount of data explainable by the theory of evolution is mountainous. Are there still weakness in the theory or parts that don’t work as well as we would like? I would assume yes, because this is a major and very large theory, and all theories have weak points, etc. The opponents of this theory just can’t muster the effort to delve into the weak points and find something valid. This is because they are only looking for conjectures and analogies that pass the “common sense test” to undermine people’s understanding of the theory itself. One of my favorites is “I ain’t evolved from no monkey.” This appeals to folks who don’t want to have monkeys sitting around the Thanksgiving table and is odd enough that mating with monkeys comes to mind. The only problem is that no one claims humans evolved from monkeys. Humans are Great Apes (gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans) and we evolved alongside all of the other Great Apes because we shared ecological niches with them. While monkeys are on the family tree, all animals are on the family tree because we all evolved from single cell organisms over billions of years. But monkeys are not close to us at all. This argument appeals to those who can’t distinguish between a monkey and an ape, of course. Religion has always had emotional appeals and rejected intellectual appeals, except in academic circles. (The Catholic Church rejected Aristotle until Thomas Aquinas “adjusted” Aristotle’s ideas so that they dovetailed with those of the Church. Aristotle himself wouldn’t recognize those points as coming from himself, they are so far removed from his thoughts, often 180 degrees opposite to them. For example, Aristotle thought the universe was infinite and eternal. When Aquinas was done, Aristotle’s ideas supported the created, young universe of the church.)