Tuesday, January 1, 2019

Magic Numbers

Rule of Thumb: any group struggling to eradicate religion from society is merely trying to replace it with a new one.

One corollary is that the new religion can't be called a religion. The normal example is the communist regimes, which replaced a belief in an all-powerful god with belief in an all-powerful state. In modern times, many believe that science invalidates supernatural religions like Christianity. Per the rule from above, they aren't eradicating religion so much as clearing out the competition for their preferred pantheon of belief systems: scientism, utilitarianism, and materialism. It is common to hear acolytes use openly revealing phrasings, such as "I believe in science." In this arrangement, scientists are not just technical practitioners, but constitute a priestly caste.

Supposedly, science eliminates the need for silly superstitions like water turning into wine, or God speaking existence into being. Yet their beliefs are even more superstitious. The Big Bang Theory is yet another creation myth, which happens to have been proposed by a Catholic priest and seems to provide a viable implementation of Genesis. On the first day, God said, "Let there be light." In BBT, the universe begins as an infinitesimal point of pure energy and infinite temperature. Modern scientific dogma is littered with magic, and BBT is no exception. For one, pure energy is a theoretical state of matter. Second, an infinite temperature is undefined. Think of it, temperature is the measure of the movement of particles. What does it mean to have infinite motion? Luckily, the concept of temperature is undefined without condensed matter anyway, but then the notion of infinite temperature in the primordial universe is double-undefined. That's okay though, astrophysicists are accustomed to charging forward in the face of undefined mathematics, such as seen in the singularities of black holes. They are like the Chuck Norris jokes of celestial objects - they can count to infinity and divide by zero. So the singularity in the early universe should be no different. Right?

Well that's another funny thing, is that the singularity of the early universe - which was very explodey - actually behaved in just the opposite manner of black holes - which don't even let light escape. Contradiction? Don't worry, Ethan Siegel - professor of astrophysics, renowned science blogger, and senior contributor at Forbes - has tackled this very question.
Somehow, the way that the fabric of the Universe was expanding at the earliest moments we can conceive of balanced out this tendency of the matter and energy to gravitate and collapse.
Well, there's your answer. And to think you doubted science...for shame! Repent!

Of course, that excerpt unfairly omits the additional complexity of the article, where he goes through the normal explanation that, if you change space to spacetime, you can violate basic mathematics wherever necessary to make your theory work. (Seriously, you might want to think about going ahead and meeting a priest in a confessional. You know, just in case....)

We don't need to dive into the infinitely murky depths of black holes to see the modern magic in action. Even day-to-day, standard and boring Newtonian physics contains a little spell. Newton's Law of Gravity contains a term known as G, the gravitational constant. The downward force the Earth exerts on you at any time depends on two variables - your weight and your elevation - and two constants - the mass of the Earth and G. What is G? 6.674×10−11 N·kg–2·m2. Where does it come from? Nobody knows. The number itself is determined by experiments on Earth. There is no theoretical explanation given for its value and it has been tough for experimenters to accurately pin down, with some suggesting it may actually vary over time and even location. Which means it's not really a constant, although close enough for normal use. Whenever you see these universal constants, you should interpret them as "we don't know." Why does an electron have its particular mass? We don't know. Proton mass? We don't know. Speed of light? We don't know. Women be shopping? We don't know.

It's not just internet cynics like me making fun of the seemingly arbitrary constants. Many in the industry are confounded as well. Consider this article from Quanta magazine - later picked up by Scientific American - that tells of scientists becoming so disenchanted with exquisitely tuned yet unpredictable constants that they proposed the existence of an infinite number of universes, each with a different set of values for the universal constants. Thus, our universe has the proper ones by random chance. It is modern physics in a nutshell. When you can't explain something, propose wildly exotic and unprovable theories. When the standard cannon contains dark energy, neutron stars, and big bangs, you've got to think big. Others have made an alternative claim that the perfect constants prove the existence of God. Liberals typically hold a "conservatives are dumb because science" mentality, yet never consider that the proposals of science sometimes require a far greater faculty for faith than an old-fashioned belief in the Almighty.

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