A common lament which I have heard from the scientific community is that, in the words of Dr Lawrence Krauss--as cited by Professor Scott Carson--"U. S. adults are less willing to accept evolution and the big bang as factual than adults in other industrial countries." Such a lament--so common amongst the "scientific community" (which roughly includes scientists, philosophers of science, and a crowd of what can only be called scientistic groupies) in the States--generally centers on these two particular theories and the opposition they receive from "religion," by which is largely meant Christians in general and the fundamentalist or evangelical types of Christians in particular. The lament is squarely pointed, first at the "young earth theorists" (anybody who believes that the universe is less than billions of years old), and secondly (more broadly) at the "Intelligent Design" proponents (anybody who suggests that no theory of non-theistic evolution can explain all of the intricate details of life in its varied forms today). Although I am neither a young-earth creationist nor an intelligent Design proponent, I can at the same time find some fault with the worldview which Dr Krauss pines for.

Disclaimer: This is a bit speculative on my own part. As a disclaimer, I am a physicist, but I study lasers and plasma physics, not astronomy and astrophysics. Thus, I have some knowledge about General Relativity, the Big Bang, black holes, etc, but this is not the subject matter of my particular expertise. Nevertheless, I got to musing about this stuff, and thought it was kind of interesting.

In the Beginning...

A question has been posed concerning the universe's existence and the specific requirement that it has a beginning. It is sometimes asked, "what happens before the Big Bang?" Alternatively, it may be made as a statement:
There is no point in time when the "stuff" that comprises the universe did not exist. Why must it have a cause? Or, why must a finite being be caused by something else in order to exist?

The background of the statement is the assumption that time is inextricably interwoven with space, so that both space and time came into existence with the beginning of the universe. Thus, time itself cannot be older than the universe: no universe, no time. The Big Bang is the first event, before which nothing occurred; indeed, "before" is a meaningless concept (since it implies a progress of time) until after the Big Bang.

As a simple example of how this can make sense, image that the universe has a sort of "time line" along which it travels. There are, indeed, several "arrows" which give the "direction" of time: as time increases, the universe expands; as time increases, entropy increases; etc. The assumption being that time t=0 is the Big Bang, as as t approaches a value of 0, the universe by necessity approaches the instant of the Big Bang and its initial extent (which is not necessarily zero), and entropy by necessity approaches its minimum value (perhaps somewhat larger than zero).

A frequent homework or test question presented to physicists-in-training is to derive the final relationship between objects, forces, or concepts from “first principles.” The idea for the physicist is to see where such a relationship comes from, beginning with “basic physics” principles—Newton’s Laws or Maxwell’s Equations, for example. Such first principles are generally well-established and ubiquitously accepted within the physics community, and are sometimes thought of as the most basic concepts in physics, from which all the other laws of physics can be derived.

Philosophical arguments and political discourse rely on similar “first principles,” as outlined by Aristotle (among others) in his Rhetoric. This is to say nothing of theological discussions, legal cases, and even the act of teaching (or learning): all must begin with a basic set of principles (or other assumptions), which must be true if the rest of the argument is to hold merit: the first principles are the base upon which rests the conclusion, and it cannot stand of these principles are in error.

How much do we take "on faith" in our everyday lives? This question arose in my mind yesterday as I sat through a colleague's talk in my research group's meeting. He was talking about a phenomenon which has been named "optical bullets," and I began to wonder why these are scientifically interesting. The talk in question is to be delivered at the upcoming meeting for the American Physics Society's Division of Plasma Physics. Though I wondered about the importance of optical bullets, I next came to realize that they must be interesting if for no other reason than that Professor Downer was interested in them. In other words, I can place trust in their importance, because a prominent member of the scientific community is also interested in them.

“When people cease to believe in God, they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.”

So wrote the ever-witty writer G.K. Chesterton, the apostle of common-sense and prophet of the century to come. As men turn increasingly away from belief in a supernatural God, they are increasingly places their trust in the natural sciences, and particularly in physics. Physics is, after all, the basis for most of the other natural sciences, for it is the laws of physics which govern the motions and even formations of the stars in the cosmos and the rate of reaction amongst molecules; and in turn these may govern biology and geology, and the atmospheric and oceanic sciences. Indeed, physics is the most exact of the sciences, perhaps because it is the most exactly mathematical; as such, it has no limits amongst the things with material, quantifiable properties.

I just got out of this weeks Atomic, Molecular, and Optical physic seminar; often the seminar deals with topics directly related to AMO physics (obviously), though we do usually have one or more out-of-department, out-of-field speakers each semester. Today was such a day, and we welcomed Professor Michael Webber of the Mechanical Engineering department. Professor Webber came to speak to us a bit about alternative energies technologies, a fascinating topic to be sure. He certainly gave a good talk--focusing largely on the technological hurdles which must be overcome for a number of potential energy sources. The talk itself was somewhat controversial--there was plenty of lively discussion and argument during the seminar and its question and answer session. Much of the argument centered on the use of wind energy (we've had another talk here recently in which the professor argued that wind is not the final answer, and that it is not a very effective solution for much of Texas in general).

The late scientist-philosopher Stanley L Jaki once remarked that philosophically speaking, the second most difficult word to grasp is nothing. Every living person has some concept of nothing, though those concepts may vary a little. The idea is certainly a vague one, not easily pinned down; it is certainly difficult to describe in terms of materialism and the rigid formalism of mathematics.

What happens when an unstoppable force meets an unmovable object? Or more properly phrased, what happens when an unstoppable object collides with an unmovable object? This question seems like a bit of a logical stumper, until one realizes that it is sheer nonsense. An unmovable object and an unstoppable force cannot simultaneously exist. Within in the bounds of the laws of physics and of mathematics, neither object can exist, for an unmovable object would necessitate an infinite amount of inertia, and thus infinite mass; and an unstoppable object must have an infinite amount of momentum, which is possible only if the object has infinite mass or is traveling with a speed of c, that is, at the same speed as light traveling in a vacuum.

When St Thomas Aquinas addressed the question of God's existence he could think of only two arguments against his position. On of those arguments was more against the ability of humans to know for certain that God exists, and thee other was the problem of evil (or suffering). Fast forward through the centuries to today, and modern atheists have added little to the problem of evil; at times, they have split suffering and evil into two categories, though generally suffering is classified as a form of evil; and occasionally attempts have been made to refute this or that argument for the existence of God (though a great many of these have been circular at best). Even the "scientific atheists," from Darwin to Russell to Weinberg, Dawkins, and the other "New Atheists" have based their atheism not on science but on the problem of evil.

In which Fr Dwight Longenecker discusses fideism as opposed to rationalism. The two tendencies which he discusses are really opposite extremes between which is balanced the Catholic version of epistemology. We know that faith and reason are complementary, and thus that they do not contradict each other.

Of particular interest is this bit: