Free Physics Lectures Online

Ooh, boy! Only I can get excited about this. But a friend and former colleague with a science background sent me this link to the public lectures of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Subjects covered include natural laws and probability, Einstein, the Big Bang and more. For those moments in life when one's thinking drifts towards pure contemplation of ultimate causes.

Scientists: Earth May Be in a Special Place After All

Just when you've gotten used to the Copernican universe, they go and change back again to something anthropocentric. Sheesh!

A Bigger Bet on the Large Hadron Collider

Cribbing from the style of InstaPundit.com, I'm writing a short item here (rather than my usual long-winded ones) highlighting an interesting piece in First Things.

In it, physicist Stephen Barr suggests that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has to do more than discover the Higgs boson particle to be interesting. That's pretty much a given. Rather, it should also shed light on why the Higgs boson, in the Higgs wave, in the Higgs field, doesn't make life impossible. For Barr at least, to discover, via the LHC, some countervailing force to the Higgs stuff, if I may, provides support for an "anthropic" or human-life centered view of our little region of the multiverse. Hmm, can God be far behind?

P.S. To my students who might be visiting my blog. Please forgive yet another story about the LHC. I assure you I'm not a physics geek masquerading as a philosophy teacher.

The Final Explanation of Everything . . . Not!

As discussed in the previous post, numbers seem to be at the bottom of everything in physics. As Stephen Hawking noted, "a physical theory is a mathematical model."

Father Stanley Jaki has been arguing for years that Kurt Gödel's famous mathematical theorem says something very important about such physical theories, and their ability to provide a complete explanation of reality.

By complete, I mean one that says there is nothing more, and what is has to be here and behave in a fixed, deterministic manner. And that because it is necessarily this way, it is not contingent upon God.

"It should also be obvious," notes Jaki in an important essay entitled "A Late Awakening to Gödel in Physics," "that the more advanced is a physical theory the more mathematics it contains and the more advanced is the mathematics. From this the ground for connecting Gödel's theorem with physics readily follows.

"For insofar as Gödel's theorem states that no non-trivial system of arithmetic propositions can have its proof of consistency within itself, all systems of mathematics fall under this restriction, because all embody higher mathematics that ultimately rests on plain arithmetic. Then it follows that there can be no final physical theory which would necessarily be true at least in its mathematic part."

You may have a physical theory, but because it is based upon mathematics, you cannot know that it is final, and you can never show that the universe is a certain way "necessarily."

The essay goes on to bemoan the fact that many prominent physicists have not picked up on this little inconvenience to their search for a final answer to the universe.

Particularly ironic, as Jaki notes, the close relationship between Einstein - who searched for a unified field theory -- and Gödel, whose work showed he'd fail.

As Jaki notes in another essay entitled "Reflection on Einstein's Theories," "the application of Gödel's theorem to cosmology shows that a disproof of the contingency of the universe is impossible. The mental road to the extracosmic Absolute remains therefore fully open."

Interesting to ponder.

A Philosophically Rich Slice of Web Television

Here is a marvelous video discussion on Fora.Tv with Leonard Susskind, one of the fathers of "String Theory." What will you learn from it? Some very interesting ideas from physics:

• That when you get to the "basement" of the world as Susskind calls it, you find material reality evaporating into numbers.
• That at the bottom of everything you discover multiple dimensions of reality, maybe up to 11, which makes you wonder why we only have three (or four!).
• The "multiverse" theory of the universe, which suggests that our world is but one emanation from the multiple potentialities that those basement numbers possess.

Also contained in this rich discussion is insight into the origins of the "Intelligent Design" theory, as championed these days by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, and its intellectual roots in philosopher William Paley's "watchmaker" argument for God. It states that basically some things are so complex (such as the "eye") as to not be reducible to bits of matter coming together randomly a la evolution.

Susskind takes issue with Intelligent Design. Call it his "argument from intellectual curiosity." He doesn't deny the existence of God. But, basically, he won't stop looking to reduce things, because he is naturally curious, and perhaps because there is a risk to science in doing so.

I can completely respect his point of view. He strikes me as intellectually honest. However, listen carefully as he describes the Darwinists' refutation of intelligent design of the eye. It sounds not so much as a description, but as enormous guesswork. See # 16, Q2. There is something odd about accepting that much guesswork as "satisfactory."

All in all, however, this is a fantastic presentation, and a demonstration of the cultural potential of the Web. Congratulations to ForaTv for capturing it.

Deutsch on Uniqueness and Knowledge in the Universe

Here's another fascinating TEDTalk, this time from physicist David Deutsch, who examines the question of what is typical and not typical about humanity in the universe, and shows the connection between the mathematical properties of the universe and our minds. Recorded in 2005 in the U.K. About 20 minutes.

Einstein on Mystery

As part of a great online exhibit from the American Institute of Physics about the life and works of Albert Einstein, one section contains his views of the relationship between science, philosophy, art and religion. Einstein notes:

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed."

I think this sums up the mindset one would hope to find in any philosopher, theologian or scientist. Check out this online exhibit when you get a chance. It's very interesting.