Quantum Non-Linearity

Saturday, October 02, 2010

Answers in Genesis Screws It up Again

NOTE:

Lisle has responded to the “Missing gravitational field” question as follows

I’ve seen this criticism but I haven’t responded yet. It is very easy to refute. I plan on doing a series on this blog on the topic of ASC, in which I will refute this and other criticisms made by those who have not studied the topic.....

I had already planned to deal with this in detail in a future blog entry. But the short answer is: no, ASC does not require a gravitational field. It is simply a coordinate transformation from the ESC. And coordinate transformations do not introduce any real forces.

[Circa 2012 - Lisle's plan apparently never came to fruition. We continue to wait on his good pleasure]

That in turn is very easy to refute: Lisle well knows that you can do all sorts of arbitrarily bizarre things with coordinate transformations: e.g. the direction and gradations we assign to the time coordinate are just matters of convention and yet physically speaking the time coordinate has a natural direction and natural units. This is where Lisle’s mistake lies.

NEWS UPDATES:

Latest news August 2012: http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/latest-news-on-jason-lisle-and-asc.html

Latest News May 2014: http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/yec-star-light-problem-recent-news-on.html

Latest News September 2014: http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/waiting-for-lisles-next-move-and-its.html

Also relevant:
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/arbitrariness-in-mature-creation-theory.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/mangling-science-continuing-our-diet-of.html

Young Earthism's biggest problem:
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/no-progress-on-young-earthisms-biggest.html
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2018/07/no-progress-on-young-earthisms-biggest.html
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2020/02/no-progress-on-young-earthisms-biggest.html

Another Young Earthist Screws up Badly

Quantum Non-Linearity: Epistemology, Ontology, Creation and Salvation

ORIGINAL POST

"Answers in Genesis" have recently published their latest “solution” to a problem that Young Earth Creationists have worried for as far back as I can remember – the star light travel time conundrum; basically, how does light from stars billions of light years away reach Earth in less than 10,000 years? I suspect that this particular “solution” will not be the last word on the subject and give it a few more years another attempt will be made when the short comings of this latest attempt are all but forgotten. In this blog entry I indicated that I was eagerly awaiting the publishing of a paper by AiG writer Jason Lisle revealing this cutting edge science. Jason Lisle claimed on his AiG blog that the paper was being “peer” reviewed. It is likely that this meant it was being reviewed by other YECs. The YEC community forms such a marginalised and persecuted group that they don’t even bother to submit their work to the wider scientific community. The only way they can live with themselves is by accounting for their wholesale rejection as a product of a corrupt scientific community. Putting this with the fact that the wider scientific community are in the main pulling together on the overall cosmological picture we have a situation that is fertile ground for conspiracy theory. But I digress.

The start of the Lisle’s paper has a section on “mature creation” – there are in my view many problems with this philosophy, but I’ll save a critique of “mature creation” theory for a separate blog entry. However, there are two points in the paper with which I do agree. Like myself Lisle rejects the notion that God would create photons in mid flight within a radius of 6000 light years of Earth. He rejects this on the basis that this would require fictional events, such as super novae, being embedded in the light signals rather than being generated by real events; the alternative compromises the integrity of the created order. I also agree with Lisle’s view that the Bible writers would most likely have thought of events as taking place when they saw them happening, and thus as far as events in the heavens are concerned they would have timed them as seen. In defense of this view Lisle points out that the Biblical writers didn’t know the distance to the stars and therefore could not use any other convention for designating the time of an astronomical event than the time of its appearance. But it is quite possible that the Biblical writers may not even have conceived that sight had anything to do with a signal that passed from A to B, or perceived that there is an issue with the timing of observed events; it may be that in their perception seeing was a naturally instantaneous process indifferent to distance. So even when Lisle gets something right he may have got his reasoning wrong: It may be that the ancients thought about sight in a way that is incommensurable with our own concept of the transfer of a signal. Treating the book of Genesis as if it contains lists of prepackaged scientific facts is a very dubious exercise given that the ancients may have had very different conceptual structures to our own. But I digress (again)

Let me now look at the core content of Lisle’s paper. This paper appears to be a sophistication of an idea he mooted here; namely, that it is possible to simply define the timing of events as and when they are seen to occur. It then follows that all events on the inverted light cone extending into the past are coincident, by definition. There is nothing to stop one adopting such a definition; it is quite possible to define coincidence in this fashion. If one does then this means that an event occurring at any distance from Earth is defined as happening when it is seen. Lisle is at pains to point out in his paper that this “Anisotropic Synchrony Convention” (or ASC for short,) as he calls it, is a purely conventional step:

The anisotropic synchrony convention is just that—a convention. It is not a scientific model; it does not make testable predictions. It is a convention of measurement and cannot be falsified any more than the metric system can be falsified.

But given the conventional nature of this step Lisle also admits that it is possible to revert back to Einstein’s synchrony convention:

Einstein synchronization does have its place. In particular, Einstein synchronization is isotropic; the speed of light is stipulated to be the same in all directions. This greatly simplifies the equations of Special Relativity, thereby making Einstein synchronization the preferred convention to be used when doing physics computations.

Much as the metric system is easier to use in physics calculations than the English system, no one would suggest that students learning Special Relativity for the first time should use anything other than the Einstein synchrony convention. One consequence of the Einstein synchrony convention is that all observers agree on the timing of distant events if the observers have the same velocity—regardless of the position of the observers. Conversely, ASC would have all observers agree on the timing of events if the observers have the same location, regardless of velocity. Since Relativity is concerned with velocity reference frames, it is very useful to select a synchrony convention in which velocity alone (irrespective of location) sets the timing of distant events. The mathematical advantages of the Einstein synchrony convention are clear.

So far so good – I don’t see anything wrong here. I agree on the conventional nature of the choice of synchrony method. I agree that the choice is often based on convenience – in particular ASC is convenient for an Earth based frame. I also agree that ASC is more likely to be consistent with the arcadian mindset of the Biblical writers. The underlying mathematical reason for the arbitrariness of the synchrony convention is that we are free to choose the coordinate system we use. As I pointed out in this blog post, where I discussed Young Earth Creationist’s Gerardus Bouw geocentric views, it is possible to even define a coordinate system that makes the Earth stationary with everything in the universe revolving round it; and this is certainly a useful co-ordinate system for the man in the street. However, in the case of Bouw he goes on to suggest that this geostationary coordinate system is justified by his rewritten version of physics; so Bouw is actually saying that a geocentric cosmos is not just conventional but physical as well. Unlike Bouw it at first appears that Lisle is merely proposing a convention, namely a coordinate system that assigns a time coordinate to astronomical events as they are seen. But - and here is the inevitable “But” that you knew was coming eventually - Lisle’s paper carries a subtle error; he effectively builds in an observable physical condition into his “convention” and he is not aware that he is doing it. This is the offending passage:

The act of choosing a synchrony convention is synonymous with defining the one-way speed of light. If we select Einstein synchronization, then we have declared that the speed of light is the same in all directions. If we select ASC, then we have declared that light is essentially infinitely fast when moving directly toward the observer, and ½c when moving directly away. Under ASC, the speed of light as a function of direction relative to the observer (θ) is given by cθ = c/(1-cos(θ)), where θ = 0 indicates the direction directly toward the observer. (My emphasis)

There is nothing to stop one choosing a synchrony convention which assigns events a time coordinate defined by the arrival of their signal at the Earth’s surface. But to define an Anisotropic Synchrony Convention is one thing; to then imply that anisotropy in the one way speed of light is also a matter of convention is entirely another thing. Let me explain.

Lisle correctly points out the practical and theoretical difficulties in measuring the one way speed of light with any rigor because of issues relating to the synchronization of two clocks that are separated by the distance over which the speed of light is measured. It is much easier, therefore, to measure the two way speed of light; that is by using one clock and timing light over a there and back journey. But the issue here, of course, is that it is conceivable that the speed of light on the outward journey may be different from that of the return journey; how would we know? For this reason a physicist called Edwards rehashed special relatively by simply assuming that only the two way speed of light, which is in fact the average speed over a there and back journey, is a constant equal to c. In spite of the possibility that the speed of light in one direction may be different from its speed in another direction Edwards found that provided the two way speed averaged to the value c then all the results of special relativity still applied. In my last blog on this topic I referenced a paper by Chinese physicist Jian Qi Shen who has done some work on the Edwards space-time. In the last page of his paper Jian Qi Shen writes down the metric for the Edwards space time thus: (written for the special case of a null geodesic in this instance, hence = 0)

Where X is a parameter that is dependent on observer velocity and effectively measures the anisotropy in the speed of light as seen by that observer. The crucial point is that X is constant for the observer and does not vary from place to place. Let Jain Qi Shen continue the story:

In other words there is no gravitational field in the Edwards space time because the anisotropy in the speed of light is constant; in the Edwards space-time the anisotropy in the speed of light does not change its direction as one moves from place to place. Under these circumstance one can by convention choose the one way speed of light without having any observable effect on special relativity and other physical circumstances. But - and here is the big "but" – one cannot choose a one way speed of light that varies its direction from place to place without introducing a space curvature; that is, without introducing a gravitational field. And it is precisely an anisotropy in the speed of light that varies its direction from place to place that Lisle thinks he can achieve merely by definition:

The act of choosing a synchrony convention is synonymous with defining the one-way speed of light.

Given that Lisle requires the speed of light in the direction of Earth to be all but infinity, then this means the anisotropy in the speed of light is radially directed toward the Earth, thus implying that the anisotropy changes its direction from place to place. Therefore Lisle’s “convention” is not a mere coordinate system redefinition because he cannot take this step without his model being physically different, a difference that entails a gravitational field. In my last blog on this subject I assumed that Lisle would spot this and that he would be forced to postulate some kind of geocentric gravitational field. But it seems that neither Lisle nor his AiG reviewers have spotted it. For Lisle’s YEC cosmos to work it must be pervaded by some kind of geocentric gravitational field. But since he does not see that a gravitational field is required to give him a light speed anisotropy that changes direction he therefore sees no reason to postulate a source of this field. We cannot detect an anisotropy in the speed of light if its direction and magnitude is constant, but as soon as we try to “define” an anisotropy that is spatially variable we find we cannot do so without introducing a gravitational field. Therefore the act of choosing a synchrony convention is not synonymous with defining the one-way speed of light. In short Lisle’s paper is fundamentally flawed. But this is not the only error in the paper, although it is probably enough to be going on with for now. If I get time I may look at the other problems in Lisle’s work.

In the YEC community the scientific quality of its papers is less crucial than the role they serve in the wider YEC culture. The average fundagelical supporter who doesn’t understand science can, if challenged on the issue of Star light travel time, simply point to papers such as Lisle’s with the misplaced confidence that the matter is in hand. From his perspective this paper comes out of the stable that runs the impressive Ken Ham Creation Museum, a museum where no expense has been spared and whose lavish (if tacky) exhibits must stun and awe the average Christian fundamentalist. When one is immersed in such a heady patriarchal culture it must feel that it just can’t be wrong. Any challenge to such an awe inspiring source must look as though its coming from somewhere near the gates of hell and need not be engaged; after all, it’s in the hands of people like Jason Lisle and his AiG reviewers – what better authority and assurance can one ask for? Thus, whether right or wrong, Lisle's work serves to act as an important community myth.

11/08/2012 For the latest news see here:
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/latest-news-on-jason-lisle-and-asc.html

13/10/12 The latest news on Jason Lisle's ASC....

The lasest news on ASC in relation to the above blog post comes in the comments section of this post on Jason’s blog. Here we read:

Isaac Roland says:

August 31, 2012 at 1:41 pm

Dr. Lisle,

Have you responded to a critique of your AIG article at

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/10/answers-in-genesis-screw-up-again.html ?

Dr. Lisle says:

September 11, 2012 at 6:18 pm

Nick L. says:

September 12, 2012 at 11:07 am

I’m looking forward to that series of entries.

At that point I had to step in to encourage Jason to make a response and tell him I too am very much looking forward to that series of posts. Yes it certainly is “very easy to refute” if Jason is telling us that he is simply making a coordinate transformation on the Einstein space. But as we shall see there is far more to it than that! As I said in my reply on Jason’ blog: Your move Jason ....... so let’s wait and see what Jason has to say!

While I was there, however, I started to do some ground work by talking about the consequences of ASC when one simply uses it as a coordinate transformation; because even here there are issues to contend with. In fact Lisle’s correspondent “Preston” eventually said what I wanted him to say and he inferred a duration of 28 billion years. In due time I hope to also look at the issues which arise even when one interprets Lisle’s ASC model in purely coordinate transformational terms. I’ll hand it Russ Humphreys’ model: It may not work but it is far more respectful of astrophysics than Jason Lisle’s evil abortion.

I’m not really on talking terms with YECs and this is why I was loathe to show up on Lisle’s blog; we are dealing here with religious fundamentalists, the West's equivalent of the Taliban, who are busily corrupting and subverting science and Lisle and his followers are typical culprits. It was no surprise when “Preston” (The anti-gay bigot I mention in the comments section of this post) told me:

Mr. Reeves, Your war is with God, and you’ve already lost. You should read your bible and believe it and repent before it’s too late. A lake of fire and eternal suffering await those who reject God till the end.

What charming people my work brings me into contact with! This response is just all too typical of human conceits. Assuming that all but one's own religious culture are for the burning is the view of every sect between here and Salt Lake city!

Addendum 14 July 2013

Last September (2012) I added a few comments to a post on Jason Lisle’s blog entitled Arbitrariness and Inconsistency – the Opposites of Rationality (and Dated 3 August 2013). This comment thread had got people talking about Lisle’s ASC model solution to the YEC star light problem and somebody had linked to this blog post on the subject. Lisle responded to this commenter which in turn rather forced my hand into responding myself.

It is clear from one of Lisle’s comments, a comment I reproduce below, that he thinks of his ASC model as only employing a mere coordinate transformation. As you can read below he promised that he will in due course bring out some posts on the subject of gravity. However, for the purposes of the thread below I stayed true to the perception that Lisle’s ASC model entails just a case of changing the coordinate system.

Most of the comments I added to Lisle’s blog, along with a lot of the other useful material, has since been deleted by Lisle. Because I don’t want this material lost I reproduce it here. Although I also discuss the age of the Earth generally with one of Lisle’s YEC followers, my main focus was on Lisle’s ASC model solution to the YEC starlight problem. Challenging Lisle’s perception of his model in relation to gravity is the work for another day, so in this particular connection I focussed on the timing of the arrival of light from the vicinity of the Earth at galaxies billions of light years away. I know and Jason Lisle knows that in his asymmetrical cosmology this event occurs billions of years after the creation of those distant galaxies and billions of years after the creation of the Earth. This thread brings out this fact about his model.

Rational Wiki contributor Sam Trenholme also commented on Lisle’s blog. Sam introduced a thought experiment involving a mirror, an experiment that very elegantly and clearly brings out the asymmetry/geocentricity of Lisle’s cosmology, but unfortunately this comment was also deleted about a week after its first appearance.

Note: I've since annotated the thread below with a few further comments and these can be seen in bold between square brackets. I've added them in order to help interpret what’s going on. Notice at no point does Lisle acknowledge my presence. This behaviour probably has some fundamentalist basis in righteous indignation; I've met this kind of behaviour before as I have moved amongst Christian sectarians.

Isaac Roland says:

August 31, 2012 at 1:41 pm

Dr. Lisle,

Have you responded to a critique of your AIG article at
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2010/10/answers-in-genesis-screw-up-again.html
?

· Dr. Lisle says:

September 11, 2012 at 6:18 pm

[My Comment: Jason Lisle actually put this so called “refutation” in one of his other comments, a comment that I have included below.]

o Nick L. says:

September 12, 2012 at 11:07 am

I’m looking forward to that series of entries.

§ Timothy V Reeves says:

September 13, 2012 at 1:20 pm

…and so am I! My blog admin alerted me to this link! Now Jason, I think I have an inkling of what you are going to say: In fact there is probably only about one or two things you can say, and it is that I’ve been preparing for! Now, if I was to follow your example then at this point I might engage in a bit of posturing myself and claim that “You haven’t studied this topic”! Your move Jason!

Sorry that no big scientific names have moved in and really taken your proposal seriously. I must apologise that I’m not an interlocutor with a societal high status myself but can only offer to test your proposal from the perspective of an enthusiastic amateur (although with the appropriate background) within the mainstream Christian tradition; so that means I am a creationist in the general sense.

It’s long ago now (well, not long ago if you are using Jason’s notification based co-ordinate transformation! Haha!), but I went through a period of Christian fundamentalism myself and read “The Genesis Flood” from cover to cover ultimately finding it unconvincing. However, on emerging from Christian fundamentalism I’ve kept tabs on YEC developments.

BTW: As far as I’m aware geocentrist Gerardus Bouw does define a stationary reference frame which he anchors in what I think he calls “the plenum”- although I have to admit that I haven’t studied his one-man rewrite of physics that closely (and don’t intend to.)

[My comment: Next, I start talking generally about YEC with this guy called Nick….]

§ Nick L. says:

September 13, 2012 at 9:49 pm

I’m not gathering a lot of information from your post, Timothy, outside of the fact that you’re an Old-earth Creationist. I assume then that you have a number of rescuing devices ready to explain the many scientific evidences that contradict your view; thus, there is probably no point in venturing into a discussion of the lunar recession rate, the erosion rate of the continents, the shrinkage rate of the Sun, the existence of short period comets, or any of the other scientific evidences I find supportive of a young earth.

Since that’s the case, can you share how you support your Old-earth view Biblically? I find absolutely no evidence in the Genesis narrative supportive of Old-earth creationism. On the contrary, all I find are clear reasons to reject OEC in favor of YEC.

The most powerful reason for embracing YEC, in my opinion, is the problem of death before sin in an Old-earth view. How do you reconcile the Bible’s clear teaching against death before sin and the necessity of such events in an Old-earth view?

Incidentally, I can’t help mentioning that you’re entirely incorrect when you state that no ‘big-name’ scientists have embraced the Young-earth view. Organizations like the Institute for Creation Research and the Creation Research Society boast memberships by dozens of PhD scientists. The ranks of Creationism are getting progressively stronger, while the supporters of traditional evolution are becoming fewer and more fractured. Well-known figures like Richard Dawkins are now abandoning traditional evolutionary models of the origin of life in favor of even more radical ideas like panspermia. As Jason states in one of his blog entries, evolution is truly becoming an endangered species.

§ Timothy V Reeves says:

September 14, 2012 at 4:50 pm

Thanks for the reply Nick.

Yes, there is little point in discussing those items because I don’t want to embark on an in depth analysis deep inside the entrails of this blog; I take that sort of thing back to my own blog. To this end, however, perhaps you are the very man to help me out on some questions.

Regarding lunar recession rate, Sun shrinkage, sedimentation etc, etc Some of these (such as Sun Shrinkage, if it exists) are all but useless in returning duration information because the (possibly chaotic) mechanisms that drive them are the subject of speculation. However, using a (very) crude model I used the moon recession rate to return an Earth duration limit of not greater than half a million years, a figure well in access of 6000 years. What I would like to know (because I have yet to come across it in my study of YEC culture) is this: Are there any YEC models out there that return durations that limit Earth age to not greater than 10,000 years? I’m interested in getting a listing of YEC models that return duration information in this “not greater than” format so that I can see how these are distributed on the time axis.

I actually regard the treatment of Biblical evidence by YEC as one of its weakest links because YEC is not using the right historical model to interpret scripture: Especially when ancient narratives reach back to pre-human times (such as we see in Genesis 1) we must factor in the vagaries and polemical purposes of the mythological/metaphorical imagination (though managed and inspired by The Sovereign Will)

But regarding early Genesis I have another question: How do YEC’s literal interpretations juxtapose Satan’s fall and Man’s fall in cosmic history? Which comes first? And who is the serpent?

I think you need to read again what I said regarding “big-name” scientists; I thought I was simply remarking on a fact that is not contentious: Viz: Jason’s specific proposal (to my knowledge) has not been given the kudos of serious critical attention by any (non-YEC) “big noises”; if it had it is unlikely that Rational Wiki would have had to resort to linking to my article! However, you seem to have read into the word “proposal” the whole YEC Weltanschauung and this has inadvertently connected with the YEC self-worth complex, triggering off in you the need for a marginalized subculture to find reasons to believe in itself. I’ve touched a nerve here! Boasts? You’ve got it in one!

I understand that you won’t be aware that I have no emotional commitment to currently accepted theories of the mechanism of evolutionary change (not to be confused with natural history) and even Big Bang. But one thing I say with confidence is this: Cosmic durations are a lot greater than 6000 years. i.e.YEC is false.

§ Nick L. says:

September 15, 2012 at 10:36 pm

Timothy,
Thanks for the response.

First, yes, there are several models that limit the age of the earth to various numbers far closer to 6,000 years than the lunar recession rate. The first example that comes to mind is the work by Dr. Thomas G. Barnes. I will quote from A Scientific Analysis of Genesis by Edward F. Blick, PhD: “Physicist Dr. Thomas Barnes in a remarkable study has noted that the Earth’s magnetic field has been decaying exponentially since it was first measured in 1835. His analysis shows that its half-life is about fourteen hundred years. Based upon a half-life of fourteen hundred years, the Earth’s magnetic field would have been equal to that of a magnetic star just ten thousand years ago. Dr. Barnes indicates that the only reasonable source for the Earth’s magnetic field must be free circulating electrical currents in the Earth’s iron core. He concluded that the heat generated by these currents flowing against an electrical resistance would have been too large for life to have existed on Earth more than ten thousand years ago; hence, life has been on Earth less than ten thousand years” (84). A few more models that fulfill your requirements: the influx of radiocarbon into the Earth system limits the age of the Earth to somewhere between 5000 and 10,000 years. The development of the human population of the Earth comes out to roughly 4000 years, which, as I’m sure you’re aware, is entirely consistent with the YEC model of the Noachian Flood roughly 4000 years ago. The decay of short period comets limits the age to less than 10,000 yrs. The accumulation of peat in peat bogs limits the age to less than 8,000 years. And the formation of river deltas limits the age to less than 5,000 years, again consistent with a Noachian flood 4000 years ago.

While those should be enough to keep you busy researching for a little bit, the point really isn’t how close to 6,000 years we can limit Earth’s age to. The real point at hand is that there are a plethora of models out there that disprove the vast ages REQUIRED for evolution. Regardless of whether or not you accept or deny any particular model mentioned (or any of the others you’re familiar with), if even ONE of them escapes the criticism of evolutionists unscathed (as the majority of them have), evolutionary theory is undone.

I’m not sure where you find Scriptural support of the idea of incorporating “mythological/metaphysical” factors into our interpretation of Scripture. I think it’s fairly clear what the writer of Genesis was trying to convey, and that is that the heavens and the earth and all that is in them were created in six literal, 24 hour days. Again, I must ask what Scriptural proof you have that shows otherwise.

As for the fall of Satan, the Bible implies it took place after the creation of man and before the fall. God concluded that His entire creation was “very good” at the end of Genesis 1, and this judgment seems hard to understand if Satan and one-third of the angelic host was already in rebellion. There are also passages that refer to Satan in the Garden of Eden prior to his fall. Obviously, however, he fell before he took on the form of a serpent and beguiled Eve.

§ Timothy V Reeves says:

September 16, 2012 at 11:46 am

Thanks for that info Nick; very helpful.

I think Barnes’s ideas have come in for a lot of criticism: As per Sun shrinkage the models used are in a state of speculative flux: I’ve heard of models of the Earth’s interior that flip the poles with a period of about 1 million years. It’s all very reminiscent of the “moon dust” debacle. Likewise I’m not impressed with the population argument which neglects chaotic population fluctuations in small stressed hunting communities.

However, I haven’t looked into the influx of radiocarbon, comets, peat bogs and river delta’s so I’ll take those away with me. But as always one finds attempts by either side of the debate to make absolute statements is scuppered by many adjustable variables and a general open endedness of the phenomena concerned.

But in any case there seems to be a paradox in YEC: On the one hand one finds YECs using age calculations and the rational assumptions on which they are necessarily based positively and yet in other contexts YECs are negative about age calculations: Unless of course the YEC strategy is a negative one of simply subverting science by dwelling on inconsistency…. which may be what you are trying to get at in your second paragraph. BTW: Just in case you are thinking about it: I don’t accept the philosophy that attempts to make a clear demarcation between “historical science” and “operational science”; they in fact form a seamless whole.

Of course you won’t find “meta-information” about the mythological/metaphorical in the Bible any more than you will find information about the fundamentals of language and grammar, common sense physics and philosophy, the wider historical context of the Middle East, basic ideas about human beings etc etc – all of which are part of a huge open ended meta-database that we bring to the Bible’s black and white pixel information in order to appropriate meaning.

Thanks for the information on the fall of Satan and his angels. That essentially confirms what I was given to understand in my fundamentalist days. In fact it’s still my understanding. Trouble is it leaves us with a wild card: The history of Satan’s fall and its consequences.

Another question for you Nick. I did a quick search for Jason’s views on colliding galaxies. Jason’s ASC model, as we shall see, is very strictly limited in what it can do as it is a transformation consistent with Einstein. This means that average light speed is a “conserved” quantity of c. Consequently there’s a hemisphere of solid angle where light speed is either c or less. So how does he deal with colliding galaxies? I only found some second hand references where it was said that Jason claimed that colliding galaxies were created in collision. Are you able to point me at any quotes from Jason himself?

Looks to me as if the formatting here is eventually going to restrict us to one word per line.

§ Kenny says:

September 22, 2012 at 1:18 am

Dr. Lisle mentions them in the second to last paragraph (before the footnotes) in his article on ASC.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/arj/v3/n1/anisotropic-synchrony-convention

§ Timothy V Reeves says:

September 30, 2012 at 3:41 am

Thanks v. much Kenny. I must have read that and forgotten it!

[My Comment: In the following comment Lisle is responding to a comment by someone called “Preston” – a comment not published here - who asks for help in understanding his ASC Model. This leads into the important discussion I'm looking for]

Dr. Lisle says:

September 19, 2012 at 8:56 am

Exactly right regarding the experiment, and ASC from earth’s point of view. The interesting thing is that from the stars’ point of view, the earth would be created after the stars. Whereas, from earth’s point of view, the stars are made later – on day 4. They have different positions, and therefore different definitions of “simultaneous.”

· Timothy V Reeves says:

September 19, 2012 at 9:15 am

The interesting thing is that from the stars’ point of view, the earth would be created after the stars

…and now Jason can you please tell Preston this: From the point of view of a typical galaxy how long after its creation does the Earth appear be to created? Don’t worry about significant figures – a log value will do!

[My Comment: What I’m getting at above is this: I know, and Lisle knows that his ASC model implies that stars very distant from the Earth will only see the Earth millions of years after their creation! “Preston” eventually twigs this fact and says so in a comment I have reproduced below, but in the meantime “Kenny” chimes in…]

o Kenny says:

September 19, 2012 at 4:28 pm

Timothy,

For galaxies that would first see earth, under ASC, it would appear to be created 8-16 minutes after the galaxy/stars.

Only the galaxies which see the sun aproximately between them and the earth will see the earth. The sun’s light has to travel to the earth and then bounce off of it. In this configuration, the light from the sun moves towards the earth (depending on the angle of the observing galaxy in relation to the light’s motion) at somewhere between c and 1/2c. At c, the light takes about 8 minutes to reach earth and at 1/2c the light will take 16 minutes. After the sun’s light bounces off of the earth, it travels towards observers, in those galaxies, instantly.

[My Comment: Kenny has completely missed the point and gone off at a tangent. When Earth light does arrive at those distant galaxies the inhabitants in those galaxies can use ASC to claim that it arrived all but instantaneously. But what Kenny hasn’t seen is that when that light does eventually arrive at those galaxies they must have been hanging around for billions of years!]

§ Kenny says:

September 19, 2012 at 4:52 pm

Timothy,

I just want to be clear that I’m coming at this from a hypothetical position, because the earth is too small to be seen from another galaxy.

With this in mind, there would be galaxies that would see the earth as soon as THEY were created. If from their point of view the earth was transiting the sun they would instantly see the earth as a black spot crossing in front of the sun. Since the sun’s light is traveling directly towards the observing galaxy, the sun’s light and the dark spot would appear instantly.

I believe Dr. Lisle’s last statement had in mind the idea of the light first reflecting off of the earth. Therefore, to the some stars, the earth appears to be created after them.

§ Timothy V Reeves says:

September 19, 2012 at 4:57 pm

So Kenny, am I to understand that that is the answer which convinces you?

[My Comment: Yes Kenny really just can’t see the wood from the trees! Lisle’s model has completely fazed him!]

§ Kenny says:

September 20, 2012 at 7:41 pm

Timothy,
No! I’m an old-earth creationist. I was just what telling you what Dr. Lisle’s ASC theory would say.

I also wanted to correct myself. Because the earth is a sphere, a more correct statement would be that most galaxies would see some evidence for the earth between insatntly and 16 minutes. There would be a large fraction that would not see earth until it revolved around the sun to a point that it reflected some of the sun’s light in their direction.

§ Timothy V Reeves says:

September 21, 2012 at 12:32 pm

Thanks for the reply, Kenny

I think Jason will tell you (and at one level I agree with him) that he is simply using a (Biblical) coordinate transformation on a straight Einstein space-time. However, gravitational issues do emerge eventually (as we shall see in due time). But running with Jason’s maneuver as simply a coordinate transformation, questions still arise that threaten his ASC model. I’ll look at these at some date on my blog.

So you’re old Earth like me! I have lot of respect for William Dembski and friends (and also Hank Hannegraph) although I wouldn’t say I’m entirely at one with the way ID is being handled by his community. However, sad to say that as far strict and particular fundamentalists are concerned a state of war exists between us!

§ Preston says:

September 21, 2012 at 6:17 pm

Mr. Reeves,
Your war is with God, and you’ve already lost. You should read your bible and believe it and repent before its too late. A lake of fire and eternal suffering await those who reject God till the end.

[My Comment…..Now there’s a man who knows he speaks for God! Preston is a classic fire and brimstone heretic burner! However, in spite that we find it is this guy “Preston” who makes the kind of observation I'm looking for]

Preston says:

September 19, 2012 at 7:55 pm

Hi Dr. Lisle,

Thanks for the feedback – its encouraging to think at least I’m on the right track.

When you say “from the stars’ point of view, the earth would be created after the stars”, is that because Observer B’s time reference frame always precedes Observer A’s time reference frame by 2*distance/c?

As an example let me choose a galaxy B 14 billion light years away. Galaxy B is created on earth day 4. The following day when God creates observer Adam, he immediately sees galaxy B. From galaxy B’s perspective, even though incoming light travels instantaneously, B will not see the earth for 28 billion years. [My comment: Excellent, well done Preston!] This is because B always instantly sees incoming light, and that incoming light always lags B by 2 * distance / c. Is that correct?

Oftentimes, different conventions are explaining the same thing. For instance a building may be designed using both metric units or English units, but the finished buildings will be identical. In this case though the synchronization is by convention, the things being described are very different. We see light from all the stars and galaxies from closest to furthest away at exactly the same age. If big bangers adopted ASC, they would still expect to see all the stars and galaxies at ages ranging from 0 to 14 billion years old. Because they think the universe is roughly 14 billion years old and they think that somewhere in the universe stars are currently forming. Is that correct?

Thanks very much! [and thank you Mr. Preston!]

Best regards,

Preston

· Preston says:

September 19, 2012 at 8:16 pm

Correction – two days later God created observer Adam.

Also, just considered how ASM explains the light not being created in transit from either earth or the star’s perspective. The light over the full billions of light years distance really does contain information about actual events. [My emphasis]

o Dr. Lisle says:

September 20, 2012 at 8:32 am

Yes – that’s it exactly.

[My Comment: Yes – that’s it exactly, Bravo Preston! Interestingly, as far as I can tell the above comment by Preston has been erased by Lisle.]

[My Comment: See below: At last Kenny twigs……]

o Kenny says:

September 20, 2012 at 7:56 pm

Wait a minute Preston,

Dr. Lisle, did you just tell Preston that his statement was correct?

“As an example let me choose a galaxy B 14 billion light years away. Galaxy B is created on earth day 4. The following day when God creates observer Adam, he immediately sees galaxy B. From galaxy B’s perspective, even though incoming light travels instantaneously, B will not see the earth for 28 billion years. This is because B always instantly sees incoming light, and that incoming light always lags B by 2 * distance / c. Is that correct?”

This statement would only be correct if galaxy B were relying on its own light output to reveal the earth. This is because galaxy B’s light would travel away from it, in the direction of the earth, at 1/2c. Then it would reflect off of the earth back towards galaxy B instantly.

As I pointed out to Timothy, the sun’s light will reveal it, to galaxy B and most other galaxies, between instantly and 16 minutes.

[My Comment: If only Kenny would keep out of it! But it only goes to show that people can so easily fail to see the asymmetry in Lisle's model. Yes, galaxy B can use ASC to claim that light has arrived instantaneously from Earth, but observers in this galaxy won’t see this event until they have been hanging around for billions of years!]

§ Timothy V Reeves says:

September 21, 2012 at 6:32 pm

Good! I see above that 28 billion years has popped out of the space-time wood work!
Yes; since Earth’s creation signals from Earth have only got about 3000 light years into space! That means right now a good part of the universe can only see about half a universe! BTW Kenny: Don’t mix coordinate systems: We’re currently defining “now” in terms of signal reception at the surface of the Earth, as per the Biblical example.

§ Kenny says:

September 22, 2012 at 1:32 am

Timothy,

Maybe I am misunderstanding you, but the discussion is about the signal reception at a distant galaxy, not earth. In ASC it does not matter where an observer is, light follows the same rules. If it is traveling towards a galaxy, the light is seen in an instant. I cannot think of a place where you would only see part of the universe.

Dr. Lisle told me earlier: “Under ASC, relative to any observer, inward directed light is instantaneous, and outward directed light is ½ c. This is always the case (in vacuum) and is true for any given observer, whether on the moon, on earth, whether at A or B.”

[My Comment: So I have a go at explaining it to Kenny…..]

· Timothy V Reeves says:

September 22, 2012 at 11:26 am

Hi Kenny.

It goes like this.

If we use Earth as a reference planet for ASC we are using a coordinate system whereby we date events as and when their signals reach Earth. For example, if a signal from the planet Alderaan in a galaxy far, far away (14 billion light years according to Preston) made Earth fall last Wednesday at 6pm, then all events that occurred on the line of sight as the signal passed by are dated, by convention, as 6pm last Wednesday. This is a perfectly legitimate way of dating events. But using this otherwise valid coordinate convention we find that electromagnet signals leaving Earth do so at a velocity of c/2, implying that signals from us, as our brother in Christ Preston has informed us, won’t reach Alderaan for 28 billion years!

Now, it is possible for us to use instead planet Alderaan as the ASC reference planet to date cosmic events. That is, we assign cosmic dates as and when electromagnet signals from these events make planet fall on Alderaan. In which case we find the infinite asymmetry in light speed skewed toward Alderaan, although in contrast we then find that signalsfrom Alderaan take 28 billion years to reach Earth!

But in the above scenario we are using two different coordinate systems: One system uses Earth as the reference planet to date events and the other uses Alderaan as the reference planet to date events. It’s bad practice to use both systems at once as this leads to inconsistency and confusion. However, whichever coordinate system we choose to use we find that one or the other returns a duration of 28 billion years for outgoing signals to reach the planet that is not the reference planet…….Unless..… unless we postulate that one of the planets fails to get light from the other. As we seem to be receiving light from 14 billion light years away I assume Alderaan isn’t seeing light from us – which may explain why we get Star Wars and Alderaan doesn’t.

Did you read Mr. Preston’s comment about the lake of fire? Typical! And then he wonders why I talk about a state of war! That’s exactly the kind of behavior I have in mind when I use the expression “state of war”!

§ Kenny says:

September 22, 2012 at 12:59 pm

Timothy,

Preston clearly said, “From galaxy B’s perspective, even though incoming light travels instantaneously, B will not see the earth for 28 billion years. This is because B always instantly sees incoming light, and that incoming light always lags B by 2 * distance / c. Is that correct?”

So, he wants to know what galaxy B will see, not what observers on earth will see. What you are describing is what we will see. From our perspective, light from earth has not reached galaxy B, but from galaxy B’s perspective, our light reached it long ago.

If Preston had asked, “from earth’s perspective, has galaxy B seen us yet,” then I would agree.

You are using earth as the reference point, but Preston did not do this.

§ Kenny says:

September 22, 2012 at 1:14 pm

Timothy,

ASC works the same for everyone, everywhere. Light leaving galaxy B will be seen by galaxy B at 1/2c, but will be seen by us as infinite. Light leaving earth will be seen by us at 1/2c, but by galaxy B as infinite. If you look at my first couple of posts, Dr. Lisle states this, when I asked him about light reflecting off of the moon.

[My Comment: Below I throw in a comment for lake of fire fundie, Preston!]

· Timothy V Reeves says:

September 21, 2012 at 7:04 pm

Hello Mr Preston,

And I suppose William Dembski and Hank Hannegraph also get thrown into the Lake of fire? I treat your empty and conceited religious threats with utter contempt in the light of the precious Grace of God to all those who call on the name of the Lord (Acts 2:5) and have received the Spirit of adoption (Rom 8:15). Start reading your Bible in the Spirit.

o Kenny says:

September 22, 2012 at 1:32 pm

Yes, I saw Preston’s comments. You are claiming to be a Christian by faith in Jesus, so he has no reason to doubt that.

I take the creation days as literal long periods of time and that Genesis is describing real history. I for one have never been convinced by the appeal to ancient near eastern “parallels” or their ways of thinking. Their creation texts are not at all like Genesis one.

I would get into the exegesis of Creation days 1, 2 and 4, but I want to get this ASC thing settled in my mind.

§ Timothy V Reeves says:

September 23, 2012 at 9:53 am

Hi Kenny,

The core issue here has very little to do with what B (on Alderaan) or an observer on Earth actually see; rather it’s about the coordinate systems these observers employ to label points/events in the “space–time manifold” (to use the technical term). Therefore to my mind both yourself and Preston are getting the wrong end of the stick.

In fact it is quite possible for our Alderaan observer to use Earth as a reference planet and vice versa! A reference planet is not defined by the presence of an actual observer but by the use of that planet to time cosmic events; Viz: Using Jason’s ASC cosmic events are timed using the arrival time of signals from those events at the surface of the reference planet.

My point is that one can’t mix coordinate systems; yes one can use Alderaan or Earth as a reference planet – in that sense ASC will work from any point in the cosmos; as you have said above it works for all! But when timing events one must state which ASC-coordinate system one is using – either that centered on Alderaan or that centered on Earth. When one uses a particular ASC reference system one finds, as Preston has discovered, that points/events still pop out of the space-time manifold separated by durations of billions of years!

However, whether or not these points/events in the space-time manifold are regarded as a reality or are just theoretical is all down to how Jason handles them in his ASCmodel. (As opposed to ASC pure and simple). And that’s where I get interested because this is where we are going to find issues with Jason’s ideas along with that of gravity.

Re: My claim to being a Christian My claim to saving spirituality is nearly as worthless as Brother Preston’s vacuous and threatening fulminations. More to the point is what God claims about me: Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies…. Romans 8:33

§ Kenny says:

September 23, 2012 at 5:48 pm

Timothy,
I completely agree. Again, my only point was that Preston switched his coordinate from Adam on earth to “galaxy B’s perspective.” And that he ignored the sun, which is a light source, so that galaxy B would actually see us instantaneously. From Adam’s perspective, 28 billion years is correct.

§ Timothy V Reeves says:

September 23, 2012 at 6:46 pm

So, I think we’ve got that sussed!

[My Comment. Oh no he hasn't sussed it! Below we find Kenny still completely confused. My first comment below is a response to a comment by Kenny – not published - where I attempt once again to bring clarity]

· Timothy V Reeves says:

October 21, 2012 at 11:03 am

Heck Kenny, you need to realise that ASC is a coordinate transformation so that it doesn’t predict anything. Moreover, when the light from us arrives at that distant galaxy it is 28 billion years into our future! The big question then, is how does Jason handle these space time coordinates with huge assigned duration values in his ASC model, a model that does make predictions although not always testable. Is Jason going to postulate that points exist in the space-time manifold that have these assigned time values? If he doesn’t allow them then it means that light from us is still creeping out to that distant galaxy, a galaxy which has yet to see us and will in fact never see us! In short Jason has to posit a quasi-geocentric cosmology in as much as it is asymmetrically skewed around planet Earth or thereabouts!

o Atticus Sheffield says:

October 21, 2012 at 5:11 pm

Oh dear.

[My comment: Too right!]

o Kenny says:

October 21, 2012 at 10:39 pm

Timothy,
Please read what we have been talking about. Dr. Lisle and the others have said that if A sees the clocks as synchronized, then B will say that 2 seconds have passed on his own clock, and will actually see his own clock 2 seconds ahead of A’s clock.

I was pointing out the same for earth and galaxy B. For earth to say that galaxy B’s light arrived instantly, then galaxy B would say no, it took 28 billion years to get there. I.E. the universe, from galaxy B’s perspective is 28 billion years old.

No one was talking about earth’s light reaching galaxy B. At least not this time around.

o Kenny says:

October 21, 2012 at 10:46 pm

No one was talking about earth’s light reaching galaxy B. At least not this time around.

By the way, I see that you brought this same thing up on Sept. 22.

· Timothy V Reeves says:

October 22, 2012 at 11:35 am

Hi Kenny,

I entirely concur with the logic that Jason has used to explain it to you above. But I note that you say this:

“B knows there is no light travel time from her clock to A. Therefore, she assumes that A is really synchronizing the clocks.”

This is not a case of “B knowing” rather it is a case of “B defining”; in this case defining a coordinate system where she is on the reference planet and this means that the light travel time from her clock to A is fixed by a defined speed of c/2.

What you’ve got to understand is that the one-way speed of light can be defined. Either you define the speed of light recession as c/2 or as infinite -you can’t define it as both c/2 AND infinite – that’s a contradiction in terms.

You are still mixing up coordinate systems, and that is why you are arriving at paradoxical conclusions. When you’ve got this sorted we can then move on to the question of whether 28 billion year temporal displacements exist in the space-time manifold of Jason’s ASC model

o Timothy V Reeves says:

October 22, 2012 at 11:53 am

Rather appropriate that this blog post is about consistency, because inconsistency in use of coordinate systems seems to be at the heart of you problem Kenny!

[My comment: So that was the end of that! Kenny appeared to not see that there is an issue over the existence of space-time coordinates with time labels running into billions of years – I suspect Lisle would claim that these coordinates have no observational relevance to us, as he’s only concerned with the first 6000 years of the Universe's existence. But what this issue does bring out is the high geocentricity of Lisle’s ASC model.

Moreover, the question of gravity is still outstanding and elsewhere in this particular comment thread Lisle gives his “refutation” of this criticism of his ASC model. I reproduce that “refutation” below: It starts by somebody challenging Lisle with a “missing gravitational field” and this is how Lisle replies to that challenge]

Dr. Lisle says:

August 9, 2012 at 1:33 pm

….I had already planned to deal with this in detail in a future blog entry. But the short answer is: no, ASC does not require a gravitational field. It is simply a coordinate transformation from the ESC. And coordinate transformations do not introduce any real forces. [My emphasis]

[My Comment: That comment is now nearly a year old! Watch this space!]

Addendum 29/08/13
See the following link for further consideration of Lisle's comment thread in relation to his contentless ASC model. In particular I raise the question of why he tolerates in-transit-signal-creation to "explain" interacting star masses but is loathe to use this device to "explain" the origins of deep space signals arriving at earthly eyes. This is likely down to Lisle's deep commitment to his fundamentalist sub-culture and its literal (mis-) interpretation of the Biblical texts.
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/arbitrariness-in-mature-creation-theory.html

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Free Will and Determinism

Scientific investigations into choice

Somebody recently asked me the following question:

....what about free will, how do you think that plays in, given that neurons and synapses are Newtonian in that they are composed of a set of functions/algorithms that can used by neuroscientists to describe their patterns?

Here is my brief answer:

We all have the first person experience of making choices. But when these choices are examined from a third person perspective they can only be experienced as “external observer” perceptions, perceptions upon which the third person bases his theoretical constructs such as neurons and synapses. The first person “I story” is one of a complex stream of conscious qualia but the third person “You story”, which is the story of “me” when seen from the perspective of “you”, is a story of the dynamics of aggregates of material elementa. (although there is nothing to stop the third person "empathising in" the first person perspective from the "You story")

I’m not at all adverse to the idea that the third person perspective of mind, a perspective that only directly perceives mind as the dynamics of material elementa, may ultimately be accessible to a full description by some version of quantum theory. But even if this is true we must realise that quantum theory is merely a descriptive map; that is, a map composed of formal tokens, a map which is not the “thing-in-itself”, but merely a representation of it. For example we may succeed in constructing a perfect computerised simulation of a car using the formal tokens of 1s and 0s, but the simulation is never the car itself no matter how good it is. Likewise it is conceivable that some version of quantum theory applied to aggregates of particles perfectly describes the mind of man, but it can never be the mind of man itself. Though formal tokens of some conjectured complete theory of mind may have a point by point conformity with human consciousness, those tokens are, when all is said and done, only a representation of reality, not the reality itself, a reality that includes a rich first person story of consciousness composed of such things as a sense of purpose, meaning and choice.

The formal theoretical model, for obvious reasons, is not the thing it depicts, but the formal model does bring out one important lesson. Such complex things as “choice” and “purpose” are not going to be found down at the level of small numbers of material elementa but rather they will be found and defined at the aggregate level; that is in the organisation of large quantities of material elementa in all its complex dynamics. Choice and purpose are features of complex configurations of elementa and therefore an intricate object like “choice” is not defined for individual elementa such as neurons.

Important Caveats

When thinking about this subject it is best not to speak in too confident tones about the ultimate accessibility of the human mind to theoretical description. Several caveats must be borne in mind:

1. Quantum Mechanics, as currently understood, only provides probabilistic description. If this situation persists then in the sense I suggested in this post the mind, like any other dynamic aggregate of elementa, is humanly speaking a system that is indeterministic.

2. Even if the mind is accessible to a complete quantum description, it may nevertheless be such a complex organised aggregate that it is beyond the human mind to self-describe itself.

3. We need to keep an open mind about the apparent completeness of our theories: There is no guarantee that quantum theory provides the complete theoretical tool box for the third person perspective.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Fullerenes – an Example of Reducible Complexity.

A large fullerene: notice the smattering of pentagonal tiles giving rise to a spherical shape.

Having chanced upon a picture of a fullerene sphere (See above) on the internet, the question of how such structures can come about, given the providence of physics alone, suddenly dawned to me. How could a fullerene form incrementally carbon atom by carbon atom? To ultimately connect up into a sphere the carbon hexagons and pentagons have to tile in such a way as to form a sphere. Thus if we envisage an atom by atom formation of the structure it at first sight seems that the atoms need to somehow know in advance just what fullerene they are constructing so that they can arrange themselves accordingly.

So how do fullerenes form without the hands of some intelligent agent directly arranging the atoms appropriately? The only way I could think of was some kind of quantum tunneling straight through to the potential well of the structure thus allowing it to spring into sight as a fait accompli in one quantum jump. However, this is unlikely because as structures get larger the volume of the multidimensional space they occupy increases rapidly. The sought for structure then occupies such a small volume element in that space that a quantum jump to it is then highly improbable.

However, it seems that Nottingham University has come to the rescue. Using an electron microscopy technique that allows them to actually watch the formation of a fullerene, they have come up with the fullerene formation scenario. A short article on the Nottingham University Web site contains this crucial passage:

In their collaborative study the direct transformation of a graphene sheet into a perfectly formed fullerene ball has been observed for the first time - a process that for more than two decades was thought to be impossible. They observed that the fullerene ball is formed by removing carbon atoms one-by-one from the edge of the graphene sheet. Pentagons of carbon atoms can then form at the edge of the sheet allowing the graphene sheet to curve into a bowl shape. Eventually, as the graphene sheet continues to lose carbon atoms the complete fullerene ball is formed.

(See http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/Chemistry/News/FullereneformationinNature.aspx )

It looks, then, as though the "long standing puzzle" of fullerene “irreducible complexity” has or is being solved; there is, after all, an incremental path through to these structures. The providence of Physics I call that.

A Meccano Fullerene - Pity I don't have enough Meccano strips in my set to make it.

Determinism and Indeterminism

Wolfram's Ideas Have Some Implications For Indeterminism

Somebody recently asked me to comment on the nature of determinism and indeterminism. Here is my answer:

Here is some waffle re. your questions:

Let’s assume every physical thing constitutes a pattern or structure of some kind and that the job of physics is to come up with a description of these objects using generating functions or algorithms. The functions/algorithms used to describe these physical patterns or structures constitute a theory. On this view, then, something like Newtonian theory is composed of a set of functions/algorithms that can used to describe the patterns of the world around us.

If we take on board this rather sketchy model of physics (which is in fact the way I personally understand physics at the moment) some things obviously follow. The class of compact or small algorithms/functions is relatively limited for the fairly obvious reason that small objects are by definition constructed with a relatively small number of parts and therefore these parts can only be juxtaposed in a limited number of ways. In contrast the physical objects theories attempt to describe may be huge in comparison. Thus for obvious combinatorial reasons the number of possible physical objects is far greater than the number of physical theories that can be constructed.

However, the ideas of Stephen Wolfram have some interesting implications here. He believes that the majority of relatively small algorithms can, if given enough time, compute everything that can be computed. If I understand Wolfram aright then this means that if given enough time any given (finite) physical pattern/structure can be described by a physical theory if “theory” in this context is understood as a kind of algorithm or function. Admittedly Wolfram’s ideas are conjectural but if they hold true it means that there are no finite objects out there that cannot be described using a theory. If a theory is given enough computation time it will eventually describe any stated physical system. The problem of the mismatch between the number of succinct theoretical systems and the huge number of physical objects that can be described is surmounted because we allow physical theories indefinite amounts of execution time to come up with the goods.

If Wolfram is right (and I have gut feeling he is), and if we define indeterminism as a physical system that cannot be described with an algorithm or function, then it seems that on this basis there are NO (finite) systems that are indeterminate – all systems can be calculated from a basic algorithm given enough execution time. Therefore, if we want a definition of determinism/indetermism that does justice to the fact that some systems seem less humanly tractable than others we need to change the definition of determinism.

In spite of the fact that (according to Wolfram) everything is in principle deterministic it is clearly not so from a practical human angle. Some objects are, from our perspective, “more deterministic” than others and therefore my proposal is that determinism and indeterminism are not a dichotomy but the two ends of a spectrum.

Some physical objects have a pattern that is highly ordered and we can quickly rumble the algorithm that can be used to calculate it with a relatively short execution time. We can then use the algorithm to “predict” between the dots of observation and therefore in this sense the pattern is deterministic. However, as the pattern becomes more and more complex, locating the algorithm that will describe it becomes more and more difficult because of the increasing difficulty of finding an algorithm that will describe the pattern in a convenient execution time: Most highly complex physical systems will only be generated after an impractical execution time and thus humanly speaking the system is indeterminist. Thus physical systems move from a deterministic classification to an increasingly indeterministic classification as they require longer and longer execution times to be generated by an algorithmic "theory". In this connection I suspect that the randomness of quantum mechanics is, from human point of view, practically indetermistic.

Finally to answer your question:

....is it true that for a model to *completely* predict everything within a system it would have to be at least as large (in terms of information content) as the system it was predicting, or is there a case in which a model could *completely* predict everything within a system but not be at least as large (in terms of information content)?

I’m not going to answer this question in terms of “information content” as we would get embroiled in the technical definition of information, but instead I’ll answer it from an intuitive and human stand point. One of the benefits of mathematical theorising from a human point of view is that in most cases the theory is not as large and complex as the system it is “predicting”. Think of the Mandelbrot set and compare it with the algorithm used to generate it: It is very easy to remember the algorithm but not a bit for bit map of the set itself. If physics is to the structures it predicts as the Mandelbrot algorithm is to the Mandelbrot set then in terms of bit for bit data storage the models of physics, like the Mandelbrot algorithm, are in human terms much smaller than the objects they compute. However, it seems that there are many objects out there, like history and God, that are not humanly theoretically “compressible” and therefore they will ever remain narrative intense subjects.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Dumb Design

.....coming to a Dumb Design blog near you

This post by GilDodgen on Uncommon Descent betrays a measure of extremism typical of some parts of the anti-evolution movement. One doesn’t even necessarily have to actually accept evolution to see that Dodgen has a caricatured and distorted view of evolutionists. Here are the salient issues raised in the post:

1. Dodgen was once a militant atheist. That’s the first warning sign: This man isn’t the sort who is going to believe things by halves and probably thinks everyone else should be as highly convicted and polarised as he is.

2. Dodgen titles his post Why Secular and Theistic Darwinists (sic) fear ID. So where does this implied accusation leave Christians like Sir John Polkinghorne, who is an evolutionist and justifies his claim to being an Intelligent Design Creationist because he sees the providence of God in the conditions required to make evolution a fruitful process. Thus does Dodgen try to drive a wedge between Christian evolutionists and their belief in the providence of God.

3. Dodgen is at his worst when he defines evolution in way that would no doubt have warmed his heart when he was an extreme atheist: God-guided evolution” was an oxymoron, since “evolution,” as defined in the academy and by its major promoters, is by definition undirected and without purpose. Like all theories evolution purports to describe reality using a set of principles that succinctly embody information about the patterns displayed by the structure of reality. As I have often remarked on this blog evolution must be highly resourced by information to work; this information, if it exists, is found in the layout of configuration space. This information provides a probability envelop that can be said to direct evolution in the sense that this envelop constrains what is possible. Only the descriptive information embodied in this envelop is within the terms of reference of evolutionary theory but terms such as “intentional” and “purpose” are not within evolutionary theory’s remit. Once again notice how Dodgen’s comments have the effect of denigrating and defaming Christian evolutionists by accusing them of aiding and abetting those who propose a purposeless, godless universe.

I don’t think people like Dodgen are theoretically competent enough to deal with the matter of evolution, whatever its status. He still has cognitive legacies from his extremist past to cope with and these impair his judgment (in fact he’s still an extremist, so nothing has changed there). If evolution is false then apparently Dodgen simply doesn’t have the where-with-all to equip him for the job of refuting it and he should be fired.

Wednesday, September 08, 2010

The Narrow Cosmic Performance Envelope

The Cosmos must have a very particular performance envelope if evolution is going to get anywhere very fast. (i.e. 0 to Life in a mere 15 billion years)

Brian Charlwood has posted a comment on my Blog post Not a Lot of People Know That. As it’s difficult to work with those narrow comment columns I thought I would put my reply here. Brian’s comments are in italics.

You say //So evolution is not a fluke process as it has to be resourced by probabilistic biases.// so it is either a deterministic system or it is a random system.

I am not happy with this determinism vs. randomness dichotomy: To appreciate this consider the tossing of a coin. The average coin gives a random configuration of heads/tails with a fifty/fifty mix. But imagine some kind of “tossing” system where the mix was skewed in favour of heads. In fact imagine that on average tails only turned up once a year. This system is much closer to a “deterministic” system than it is to the maximally random system of a 50/50 mix. To my mind the lesson here is that the apparent dichotomy of randomness vs. determinism does no justice to what is in fact a continuum.

A deterministic system requires two ingredients:

1/ A state space

2/ An updating rule

For example a pendulum has as a state space all possible positions of the pendulum, and as updating rules the laws of Newton (gravity, F=ma) which tell you how to go from one state to another, for instance the pendulum in the lowest position to the pendulum in the highest position on the left.

Fine, I’m not adverse to that neat way of modeling general deterministic systems as they develop in time, but for myself I’ve scrapped the notion of time. I think of applied mathematics as a set of algorithms for embodying descriptive information about the “timeless” structure of systems. This is partly a result of an acquaintance with relativity which makes the notion of a strict temporal sequencing across the vastness of space problematical. Also, don’t forget that these mathematical systems can also be used to make “predictions” about the past (or post-dictions), a fact which also suggests that mathematical models are “information” bearing descriptive objects rather than being what I can only best refer to here as “deeply causative ontologies”.

A random system is a bit more intricate. It can be built up with

1/ A state space

2/ An updating rule

Huh? Looks the same. Yeah, but I can now add the rule is updating. Contrary to deterministic systems, the updating rule does not tell us what the next state is going to look like given a previous state, it is only telling us how to update the probability of a certain state. Actually, that is only one possible kind of random system, one could also build updating rules which are themselves random. So you have a lot of possibilities, on the level of probabilities, a random system can look like a deterministic system, but it is really only predicting probabilities. It can also be random on the level of probabilities, requiring a kind of meta-probabilitisic description.

If I understand you right then the Schrödinger equation is an example of a system that updates probabilities deterministically. The meta-probabilistic description you talk of is, I think, mathematically equivalent to conditional probabilities. This comes up in random walk where the stepping to the left or right by a given distance are assigned probabilities. But conceivably step sizes could also vary in a probabilistic way, thus superimposing probabilities on probabilities. i.e. conditional probabilities. In the random walk scenario the fascinating upshot of this intricacy is that it has no effect on the general probability distribution as it develops in space. (See the “central limit theorem”)

Anyway, these are technical details, but let's look at what happens when we have a deterministic system and we introduce the slightest bit of randomness. Take again the pendulum. What might happen is that we don't know the initial state with certainty, the result is that you still have a deterministic updating rule, but you can now only predict how the probability of having a certain state will evolve. Now, this is still a deterministic system, the probability only creeps in because we have no knowledge of the initial state.

But suppose the pendulum was driven by a genuine random system. Say that the initial state of the pendulum is chosen by looking at the state of a radio-active atom. If the atom decayed in a certain time-interval, we let the pendulum start on the left, if not on the right. The pendulum as such is still a deterministic system.

But because we have coupled it to a random system, the system as a whole becomes random. This randomness would be irreducible.

This would classify as a one of those systems on the deterministic/random spectrum. The mathematics of classical mechanics would mean that any old behavior is not open to the pendulum system, and therefore it is not maximally random.; the system is constrained by classical mechanics to behave within certain limits. The uncertainty in initial conditions, when combined with mathematical constraint of classical mechanics, would produce a system that behaves randomly only within a limited envelope of randomness; the important point to note is that it is an envelope, that is, an object with limits, albeit fuzzy limits like a cloud. Limits imply order. Thus, we have here a system that is a blend of order and randomness; think back to that coin tossing system where tails turned up randomly but very infrequently.

So, if you want to say that there is a part of evolution that is random, the consequence is that the whole of it is random and therefore it is all one big undesigned fluke.

No, I don't believe we can yet go this far. Your randomly perturbed pendulum provides a useful metaphor: Relative to the entire space of possibility the pendulum’s behavior is highly organized, its degrees of freedom very limited. Here, once again, the probabilities are concentrated in a relatively narrow envelop of behavior, just as they must be in any working evolutionary system – unless, of course, one invokes some kind of multiverse, which is one (speculative) way of attempting maintain the “It’s just one big fluke” theory. Otherwise, just how we ended up with a universe that has a narrow probability envelope (i.e. an ordered universe) is, needless to say, the big contention that gets people hot under the collar.

Monday, September 06, 2010

Epistemic Humility

The Taleb paradox: He may be abrasive and arrogant, but he knows a thing or two about Epstemic Humility. See here

A couple of Web posts of interest:

1. Human Cognitive Limits

I was interested in this Times Online article by Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees which is entitled We may never discover how the universe ticks. In the article Rees writes:

But we should be open to the prospect that some aspects of reality — a unified theory of physics, or a full understanding of consciousness — might elude us simply because they’re beyond human brains, just as Einstein’s ideas would baffle a chimpanzee

2. The logical limits of a purely descriptive paradigm

This post on Uncommon Descent refers to Mathematician Oxford John Lennox' rebuttal of some of Stephen Hawkin’s recent claims. Lennox is quoted as saying:

But contrary to what Hawking claims, physical laws can never provide a complete explanation of the universe. Laws themselves do not create anything, they are merely a description of what happens under certain conditions.

….which is very much in line with the comments in my last post about the descriptive role of physics; physics can only go as far as a maximally “compressed” descriptive narrative of the Cosmos and therefore provides no ultimate logical necessity. Since the “data compression” operation of physical description aims to reduce content down to the “simple as possible”, that content will not contain its own explanation; it is simply too simple for that. As far as the search for Aseity is concerned physics, with its program of progressive reduction to the elemental, is likely to be proceeding in exactly opposite direction; for there is only one other place to look for self-explanation, and that is in the a-priori complex, probably the infinitely a-priori complex. Therefore, understanding the concept of Aseity may elude us for the same reason Rees has given us: Viz: simply because it is beyond human brains, just as Einstein’s ideas would baffle a chimpanzee.

Sunday, September 05, 2010

Not a Lot of People Know That.

The 64 billion dollar question: Is physics mere description or is it intentional causes?

In this post on Cornelius Hunter’s blog, “Darwin’s God”, Hunter remarks on an insect that appears to have bifocal lenses:

Take a close look at this organism—a very close look. Now answer these questions: Are you an evolutionist? Was this bug created by random mutations? Is it a Lucretian concoction? For evolutionists the answer is yes, all organisms must be such concoctions, and in so saying they are their own accuser—this is not about science.

And then there is the complaint that those mutations really aren’t random. So the mutations knew what to design? Of course not, but, but … But what? Of course the mutations are random with respect to the design. And that is the issue at hand.

Or there is the retort that natural selection remedies all. Those mutations aren’t random at all, they have been selected by a reproductive differential. But of course this after the fact selection does not dictate which mutations should occur. All selection does is kill off the useless mutations. The fact that most mutations don’t work doesn’t help matters as evolutionists imagine, it just reduces the chances of evolution’s miracle stories. The mutations are still random, there are simply fewer (far fewer) of them to work with because most don’t survive.

When evolutionists complain that mutations really aren’t random one gets the feeling that Hunter thinks they are playing against the rules of their own game. But as I have made clear before in this blog, if evolution has occurred in exactly the way conventional evolutionists claim, then for it to produce the results in sufficient time (~ a few billion years) the cosmic system must be highly constrained and therefore far from random; that is, physical laws have to eliminate so many possible states that among the possibilities remaining the class of evolutionary outcomes must be large enough to return a realistic probability of evolution. The physical laws would have to achieve this result by insuring that the class of viable organic structures form a connected set in configuration space (Something I have said many times in this blog). This would imply that this class of structures is not evenly distributed in configuration space; for if they were they would be too thinly dispersed for evolution to jump the intervening spaces between different organisms via stepwise diffusion. This connected object in configuration space would have to be implicitly encoded by the laws of physics. To the ID theorist’s objection that the laws of physics could not encode such a complex, information rich object, my reply is that the alternative object they are proposing is as equally complex and information rich; for, conversely, if as the ID theorists insist the class of viable organisms is not connected (that is, organisms are “irreducibly complex”), then this highly complex information rich disconnected structure would also be implicit in physics. Interesting meta-questions here are these: What subset of elegant physical laws implies a reducibly complex of set of organic structures? What is the size of this subset relative to the class of all elegant physical laws?

I have said things like the foregoing many times in this blog. It amounts to saying this: Whatever way we look at the aspect presented to us by the visible cosmos, we cannot get away from the fact that its probabilities are highly skewed in favour of life, whether or not life has evolved. But it seems that not a lot of people know that; folk opinion is that somehow evolution makes creating organic forms a trivially logical outcome; that is, it is thought of as a kind of “creation made easy” story. But it simply isn’t easy: In the greater scheme of all possible physical regimes, those regimes that favour evolution are so rare as to be miraculous. In fact I submit that the computational complexity of locating a system that entails evolution is far greater than that of directly locating viable organisms. Not a lot of people know that.

The fact is that evolutionary logic has the effect of obscuring the highly weighted probabilities that necessarily resource it. Therefore those who dislike a bias in the probabilities because it smacks of “creation” will naturally be attracted to evolutionary theory because it obscures the bias. So perhaps Hunter is right to complain about those evolutionists who want to have their cake and eat it: They want a system which generates organic configurations that is both random and yet not random.

There is an extreme irony in all this because there is a back handed acknowledgement by anti-ID evolutionists of the ID theorist’s contention that a probabilistic skew betrays the contrivance of intelligent agency, effectively "loading the die". The anti-ID evolutionists find great difficulty in coming to terms with skewed probabilities and thus default to evolution because at first sight it seems to satisfy the requirement of providing a physical system whose probability weightings have not been “rigged” by an intelligence. But, in fact, evolutionary theory has the effect of hiding probabilistic weightings in a huge hinter land of physical logic. For example, when genetic research workers look at what seems be an apparently short evolutionary route between two organism in terms of genetic changes, evolutionary change looks deceptively easy. But what is very easy to miss here is that in actual fact the two organisms are embedded in a huge field of possibilities, a field that must be explored in order to move from one organism to the other. Unless the logic of real physics cuts this space down considerably the size of the exploration space between two organisms separated by N genetic jumps is, in big ‘O’ notation:

O( EXP(N)),

… an expression that entails a very large number. Thus, if it is not appreciated that some kind of underlying physical regime is required to reduce the size of this space in order to make it a tractable search problem, evolution can give the false impression of being a logically trivial outcome tantamount to “creation from nothing”. Thus, Hunter is probably right when he says:

Indeed, evolutionists insist that evolution must be true—a fact every bit as much as the fact that the earth is round, that the planets circle the sun, or even gravity. Yes, there must be no question about evolution. Religion drives science, and it matters.

When it finally does sink in that a working version of evolution (At least as far as cosmic durations are concerned) demands a very high level of probabilistic weighting, the first port of call for those who feel uncomfortable with a system “rigged” in favour of life is, of course, the multiverse. The multiverse spreads the butter of probability evenly over of a huge field of platonic possibilities and this makes it look as though there is no “somebody” out there who “cares” enough to “fix the figures”. The sheer size of the required multiverse is testament to the unimaginably enormous space of platonic possibility. For the multiverse must be big enough to generate enough random trials to eventually produce living configurations.

But even then the multiverse hits another problem: A system of laws that generates an enormous number of trails with no bias toward particular outcomes seems an incredibly powerful resource given that it is logically unwarranted; for it doesn’t answer the inevitable question about its own origin. Thus even an object as complex as the multiverse does not have the property of aseity.

Physics is a passively descriptive system: It provides the generating algorithms that embody information about the configuration of our cosmos. If we are looking for “causes” that go deeper than mere succinct descriptive mathematical entailments, physics will not deliver: Physics provides no answers to the question “why?” if that question is posed with motives that subliminally expect answers in terms of the intentional causes of a creative sentience. Thus, if we are not going to give ourselves the option of assuming that a highly complex sentient object with the property of aseity is an a priori and irreducible feature of existence we must accept that in the final analysis the flat descriptive world of physics, once it has done its job of compressing a full description of the cosmos in the smallest possible mathematical narrative, leaves us facing an impenetrable wall of descriptive brute fact. Therefore physics has no way of satisfying those who are nagged by a deeply felt curiosity arising out of the intuition that “causes” go much deeper than mere compressed description.

Wednesday, September 01, 2010

The Attack of the Internet Boids

No pranks, thanks: The 4chan user boids may swoop down on anyone, anytime.

I've just had my attention drawn to the 4chan web site phenomenon. Here is article on BBC news about it. It seems to be a web site that propagates a kind of organized trolling. One particular example of this “trolling in unison” that amuses me just a little bit is this one reported by the BBC:

Using the "Anonymous" persona, its tactics have included urging users to google the phrase "Scientology is a cult", pushing it to the top of Google Hot Trends, as well as staging real-world protests. In response, the Church of Scientology has labeled them "terrorists" guilty of "hate crimes".

In fact if you put “Scientology is....” into Google you get a recommendation with a general form of :

Scientology is (expletive deleted)

That should give the Scientologist lawyers a way to earn their crust. I wonder if they will dare to nobble Google and attempt to rig its recommendation algorithms?

However, chan4 users dish out mob justice and that can go over the top. The cruel women who was caught by CCTV dumping a cat into a wheelie bin was outed by the many eyes and ears of 4chan users and she has since more than paid for her crime. Also, amongst other pranks, YouTube has been flooded with pornographic videos by 4chan users acting in unison.

It’s instructive to compare 4chan with the readers (or “raiders” as I call them) of PZ Myers' blog, Pharyngula. At Myers prompting his many readers descend on some of the meaningless internet polls and give the poll creators a result they don’t want (but often the result they deserve). They also gave the hegemonic Real Catholics a nasty shock after PZ published Real Catholic, Michael Voris' video denunciation of democracy.

All in all it’s a lesson in system theory and self organization. We are probably dealing with a power law effect here: I suspect that the number of 4chan users dwarfs even PZ Myers readership; as one might expect if the distribution of web site user populations follows a power law. The users of 4chan are behaving like boids: The individuals follow a dynamic based on a relatively simple reaction to total group behavior and yet what emerges is single collective identity that has a modicum of intelligent behavior. Given that their eyes and ears are everywhere they are a force to be reckoned with. However, it’s a form of mob rule and their justice will be gut justice and not very discerning or even very just for that matter. Given the nature of this kind of mobsterism one can see why “An eye for an eye, a tooth for tooth…” actually advanced the cause of justice in the wild Middle East, circa 1250 BC.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Problems in Young Earth Creationism Part 4: Star light travel Time; the Umpteenth YEC ‘Solution’

YECS: Hunting for the star light equivalent of warp factor 9.9 drive

If this keen looking YEC blogger is anything to go by then it looks as if it is back to drawing board on the star light travel time problem at Answers in Genesis. In part 2 of this series I discussed the theory of AiG writer Russell Humpheys who posited an asymmetrical big bang with a centre of gravity in the vicinity of the Earth. This model implied that the Earth found itself in a gravitational well as the universe expanded and it was hoped that this well would slow down time on Earth to the point where a few minutes or hours on Earth equated to billions of years worth of light travel time in the rest of the cosmos. But the signs are that this theory is now water under the bridge: AiG theorist Jason Lisle is claiming he has paper in peer review which allows star light to reach our shores “virtually instantaneously”.

In this web article at creation.com Jason Lisle, writing pseudonymously as “Robert Newton”, may give clues as to the direction his thoughts are taking. There Lisle toys with idea of the difference between observed time and calculated time: Observed time is the time when an astronomical event appears to happen as seen from Earth whereas calculated time is the time the event occurred in the past calculated with the formula Time = Distance of event/Speed of light.

So, using this distinction Lisle moots the idea that when the stars are created on Day 4 in the Genesis 1 account the Bible is using observed time rather than calculated time. However, in order to remain consistent with calculated time Lisle suggests that creation was a sequence of concentric phases starting at the edge of the universe and working inward until about 6000 years ago the Earth was created. In Lisle own words:

Since the Bible indicates that the stars were visible on Day 4, we now compute the (calculated) time at which they were created. Alpha Centauri (a star 4.3 light years away) must have been created about 4.3 years 'before the beginning' (before Day 1) in order for its light to have reached Earth on Day 4 of the Creation Week. Likewise, a star 10 light years away must have been created about 10 years before Day 1. A star one billion light years away must have been created about one billion years 'before the beginning' and so on. So, we see that more distant stars were created earlier than nearby stars. The time of creation depends on the distance from Earth. So what appears to be simultaneous according to observed time, now appears to be spread out over a long period of time. Which view is the 'correct' picture? They both are—each according to the chosen convention of time measurement.

But how can a star be created before the beginning? We must remember that the Bible's statement 'In the beginning' (Genesis 1:1) is a measure of time, and therefore must be the 'beginning' as measured according to observed time. So although the beginning of the universe occurs simultaneously everywhere on Day 1 according to observed time, the beginning of the universe (just as with the stars) occurs at different calculated times depending on the distance from Earth. Day 1 occurs much earlier for places in the universe that are more distant from Earth than nearby places.

So, we present the following picture of Creation as described in Genesis, but converted from observed time to calculated time—first, God creates the most distant sections of 'space'. This occurs billions of years ago. About14 four days later, stars are created in those areas of space. As time passes, this creation process moves inward; space is created nearer to Earth, and stars are created four days later. About 4.3 years before Earth is created, 'the beginning' occurs for the space near Alpha Centauri. Four days later Alpha Centauri is created. Finally the Earth is created, but the starlight has not yet reached Earth; God provides a temporary light source. Four days later, God creates the Sun, the planets and the moon. At this point, (thanks to God's innovative method of creation) all the light from all the stars reaches Earth at exactly the same time. This may seem an unusual method by which to create a universe, but then is there a 'usual' method by which universes are created? This method is compatible with the Word of God; and it is compatible with all astronomical observations of which I am aware. The God who created space and time should have no difficulty creating and placing the stars where and when He desires.

Well, I wouldn’t call that an “innovative method of creation” but a rather a contrivance to ensure that the AiG dogmatism of a 6x24hrs creation period remains in place. In any case according to this theory parts of the universe, in terms of their own local time, are billions of years old and will therefore display “old universe” features such as an “old Earth” geology wherever there are planets subject to geological processes: This, I suspect, will look like theological equivocation and casuistry to religious ultras who much prefer the more straightforward creationism where God said his magic words of creation 6000 years ago and the whole caboodle popped into existence in the space of a few days. Notice also the geocentric touch and feel about the model Lisle is mooting – the Earth is near the centre of a sequence of concentric phases of creation. This does have some similarities with Russell Humphreys’ solution: Both solutions imply a geocentricity where concentric circles have increasing age (measured locally) as one gets further from Earth; although in Lisle’s model the mechanism of concentricity is down to creative fiat rather than a concentric gravitational warping of space time.

I have a hunch, however, that in his latest paper Lisle has something a little more subtle up his sleeve. Hints of this, perhaps, can be gleaned from the creation.com web article I have referenced. In this article Lisle notes the practical and theoretical difficulties of synchronizing two separated clocks. Because of these difficulties the only sure fire way of measuring the speed of light is to use only one clock to measure this speed by sending light from the clock on a path that reflects back to the clock – thus, experimental determinations that measure the speed of light using a “there and back” journey are referred to as the “two way” speed of light. But if we measure the speed of light in this way how do we know that the speed in one direction is the same as that in the other? Well, we can’t be sure about it, for given this experimental technique it is conceivable that the speed of light in one direction is different to the other even though the average speed is measured as c. In 1963, on this basis, a physicist called Edwards re-hashed relativity by only postulating that the two way speed of light was a constant equal to c. Edwards found that without making a commitment to the one-way speed of light, all the results of special relativity still held. This paper by Chinese physicist Jian Qi Shen introduces and develops Edwards ideas.

OK, so strictly we can only really be reasonably sure of the “two way speed of light”. Conceivably, then, the speed of light could be anisotropic. In fact in the extreme case the speed of light could be nearly infinite in one direction and travel from A to B almost instantaneously. Or, another way of looking at it: If the one-way speed of light is an unobservable then perhaps the one way speed of light is a meaningless quantity and we can just simply postulate that the time light takes to travel in one direction is almost instantaneous….. Wait a minute….Did I just say instantaneous? Are you thinking what I am thinking? Perhaps the light from those distance stars gets to Earth instantaneously! Eureka!

Not so fast. Let’s look at this a little more closely. If the speed of light from the stars to the Earth is very large or perhaps even infinite then that means the speed of light from the Earth to the stars is around c/2 as required to preserve a two way speed of c. In theoretical terms what this effectively means is that the light cones are radially skewed toward the Earth in a way not unlike they are around an object with a gravitational field such as a black hole (See the diagram below). In fact in order to produce a near instantaneous journey from the stars to Earth all light cones must be lying on their sides in the general direction of Earth! Thus if I am anticipating Lisle correctly then he will be obliged to centrally place the Earth in a circularly symmetric gravitational field; perhaps he might even be suggesting that the Earth is near the middle of some sort of cosmic sized black hole! Such a solution takes us back to a geocentric cosmology not unlike that of Humphreys’ cosmology. If this is how Lisle is doing things then one might expect this cosmic gravitational field to have cosmic predictions that could be tested.

Is Lisle suggesting Earth is in or near a Black Hole?

Anticipations apart I suppose I will have to wait and see what Lisle comes up with. But in the meantime let me round up the different solutions to the star light travel time problem proposed by YEC theorists; at least the ones I’m aware of. If anyone knows of any other attempts please let me know.

Attempt 1: Photons of light were created in mid flight no more than 6000 light years from the Earth. This is the YEC “mature creation” fall back solution. It was proposed as a possible solution by Whitcomb and Morris in their 1961 book “The Genesis Flood”. Its untestability makes it an epistemic brick wall. YECs who want to do science have all but dropped it.

Attempt 2: Variable speed of light: This idea has been enthusiastically mooted by some YEC creationists but this article at the Institute for Creation Research doesn’t think much of it and neither does AiG, the latter appropriately categorizing it under its “Far out Claims” page, where it gets lumped together, in fact, with the "Moon Landing Conspiracy"!

Attempt 3: 5D spherically symmetric expanding universe. (See here) I haven’t investigated this one fully, but it seems to be a geocentric cosmology which like Humphreys’ model entails galaxies billions of years old measured on local time but only a few thousand years old when measured using the much dilated Earth Time.

Attempt 4: An asymmetrical big bang entailing the Earth to be in a time dilated gravitational well – This is Russell Humphreys solution; see part 2 of this series.

Attempt 5: The Bible uses observed time. A solution mooted by Jason Lisle as above.

Attempt 6: Anisotropy in the Speed of light (?). Lisle’s new solution currently in peer review. I can’t wait!

Notice how there has been a drift toward geocentricity. The ~~abominable~~ incorrigible Dr Bouw, YEC geocentrist, will be pleased; he is a long time advocate that the cosmos physically, not just spiritually, revolves round the Earth (literally!)

It looks as though the YECs are trying to produce as many possible solutions in the hope that at least one will be right; a million star light travel time solutions can’t all be wrong! That’s one way to do science I suppose, but the underlying subliminal motive is, I suspect, a negative agenda of science subversion. It is sufficient for the purposes of the YEC cause to simply throw doubts on the scientific consensus by muddying the waters with a plethora of possibilities that in the purview of their supporters is enough to demonstrate science to be riddled with arbitrary, even prejudiced assumptions. In short a kind of subliminal conspiracy theory ethos underlies the modern YEC movement. Because the modern YEC community is completely hung up on the 6x24hrs hypothesis and can’t back out without becoming an even bigger laughing stock, this hypothesis is assumed to be utterly secure and therefore everything must revolve round it. The social inertia of the YEC movement keeps them going: They can all slap one another on the back at their conferences and commiserate about how worldly and corrupt the assumptions of science have become.

Technical Note

The final page of Jian Qi Shen’s paper sums things up well. Here he makes some remarks that are worth noting. He derives the metric for the Edwards space-time. He expresses this metric in terms of what he calls the “Edwards parameter” designated as X (X will vary with the velocity of the observer). This parameter is a measure of the anisotropy in the speed of light, or if you like just how much the “light cone” is “leaning over” in space-time. Here then is a screen shot of the last page of the paper:

(Read the last page of this paper here)

The important points Jian Qi Shen brings out are as follows:

At first sight the Edwards space-time looks to be a curved space-time. However, it is not a curved space-time because the metrical tensor does not vary from place to place; this follows because X, the skew of the light cone, is a constant for a given observer. As Jian Qi Shen points out, starting from the Edwards space time one can get back to an overtly flat space with the appropriate coordinate transformation. Curved space-times, that is, space-times where gravitational fields are present, only exist when there is a differential on the skew of the light cone; that is when that skew varies from location to location – technically speaking, when the “Riemann curvature tensor” doesn’t vanish. It is for this reason that I anticipate that Lisle will have to posit a cosmic gravitational field because he needs the anisotropy of the speed of light to vary from place to place. He requires this because the skew in the light cones must be radially directed toward the Earth regions of the cosmos. This will mean that X is no longer a constant for a given observer, thus giving rise to a gravitational field.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Millennium Problem Solved? Read All Abaht It!

Some interesting news for complexity theorists is breaking on Good Math, Bad Math.

THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.

Quantum Non-Linearity

Saturday, October 02, 2010

Answers in Genesis Screws It up Again

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Free Will and Determinism

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Fullerenes – an Example of Reducible Complexity.

Determinism and Indeterminism

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Dumb Design

Wednesday, September 08, 2010

The Narrow Cosmic Performance Envelope

Monday, September 06, 2010

Epistemic Humility

Sunday, September 05, 2010

Not a Lot of People Know That.

Wednesday, September 01, 2010

The Attack of the Internet Boids

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Problems in Young Earth Creationism Part 4: Star light travel Time; the Umpteenth YEC ‘Solution’

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Millennium Problem Solved? Read All Abaht It!

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION