Where Do Spirits Meet Electrons?

I enjoy reading physicist Sean Carroll because he is a penetrating thinker and good communicator. A recent blog post of his hits on a theme that raises fundamental issues of concern to Mormons. First, let's set the backdrop. We're all familiar with the following statement from Joseph Smith, canonized as D&C 131:7-8:

There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes; We cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter.

In Church discourse the term spirit can mean several things, but let's focus on personal spirit body.

According to scripture and Church teachings our spirit exists independent of the body but is united with the body at birth and again at the resurrection. In it's independent state it has thoughts and emotions, and is in the "likeness" of the body (whatever that means). Although the notion that spirits are made of a type of matter is a distinctive LDS belief, practically our conception of the spirit is very much like that of popular culture: it looks and is shaped like the body, and is the core source of our thoughts and decisions. A few degrees into folklore is the common belief that following death our spirit will have many of the same cravings and desires that we have in life, such as addictions.

Back to Carroll, I'm actually going to quote from two different blog posts interchangeably (here and here) because they are related.

Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there’s no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die. If you claim that some form of soul persists beyond death, what particles is that soul made of? What forces are holding it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter?

If you believe in an immaterial soul that interacts with our bodies, you need to believe that [the Dirac equation, which describes the behavior of electrons] is not right, even at everyday energies. There needs to be a new term (at minimum) on the right, representing how the soul interacts with electrons. (If that term doesn’t exist, electrons will just go on their way as if there weren’t any soul at all, and then what’s the point?) So any respectable scientist who took this idea seriously would be asking — what form does that interaction take? Is it local in spacetime? Does the soul respect gauge invariance and Lorentz invariance? Does the soul have a Hamiltonian? Do the interactions preserve unitarity and conservation of information?

Among advocates for life after death, nobody even tries to sit down and do the hard work of explaining how the basic physics of atoms and electrons would have to be altered in order for this to be true. If we tried, the fundamental absurdity of the task would quickly become evident.

I suppose we non-physicists can just blithely say that there is more physics out there to discover (like dark matter), and I'm sure that Carroll would be thrilled if that prospect looked like a reality. (Just today I saw an article about the doldrums particle physicists are in because the Standard Model has been validated in such detail that there seems little to get excited about on the horizon.) But even still, are the laws of physics in a rock different than in a brain? And who hasn't wondered where in the spectrum of life a spirit gets involved (proteins, viruses, bacteria, plants, worms, and so on)? It seems like the best answer these kinds of questions can garner is a shrug of the shoulders. (Maybe I need to look harder?)

None of this is truly novel; beginning in the Renaissance anatomists tried to figure out where in the brain the soul was located, eventually giving up. Carroll has just put the question in a straightforward fundamental form. Perhaps a lot of how we think about spirits is wrong--a combination of speculation and misinterpreted experience that has been propagated in our culture for ages. (Sometimes I think that we are so used to our embodied state that we seriously underestimate what "bondage", as the scriptures put it, the lack of a body is.) Be that as it may, it appears that spirits will unfortunately remain something we have no scientific right to believe in for the foreseeable future.

---

Continue reading...

Yellow Rain: The Chemical Attack that Probably Didn't Happen

Current events in Syria--the alleged use of sarin gas--have brought the opaque methods of intelligence gathering to the national attention again. This seems like as good a time as any to briefly recount the story of "yellow rain."

In 1981 the United States accused the Soviet Union of having backed the use of chemical weapons on the Hmong people, who had allied with the U.S. during the Vietnam War. Hmong refugees described aircraft spraying a yellow liquid over them, which was followed by sickness and death. Yellow spots on leaves and other materials were collected and sent to the U.S. and elsewhere for analysis, with a lab at the University of Minnesota confirming the presence of trichothecene mycotoxins, toxins produced by fungi. Combined with eyewitness testimony, including both victims and a defected Lao pilot, these results formed the foundation of the U.S. accusation. The Soviets dismissed the accusation as a lie.

Things took a strange turn as scientists, doctors, and others began investigating. The yellow spots were found to contain local pollen, other labs were unable to reproduce the initial chemical analysis, and the eyewitness testimonies turned out to be shaky. It turns out that yellow rain, as it was called, was most likely bee feces from the mass defecation of swarms of bees, but the chaos of war combined with bias and differences in language and culture turned a strange natural phenomenon into evidence of chemical warfare. The U.S. has never withdrawn the charge, and of course there are a number of documents that remain classified, including a CIA critique produced a few years ago.

I don't think anybody would put it past the Soviets to facilitate chemical warfare, but there seem to be significant problems with the evidence behind the original accusation. Although a definitive conclusion may never be forthcoming, outside of the government the sentiment is largely (but not exclusively) one of skepticism.

You can read a 2008 book chapter by one of the leading scientific skeptics here.

Radiolab did a fascinating episode on yellow rain that turned out to be somewhat controversial because the Hmong interviewees felt attacked by the journalists.

Does any of this have anything to do with the current situation? I don't know; probably not. Mostly I find it interesting on its own. But then again, it might.

---

Continue reading...

The Oceans Are Still Part of the Globe

There are a lot of news stories out today about a new study that explains the recent 'pause' in global warming. The background is that the rate of surface temperature warming over the last 10-15 years is lower than in decades previous, which has led some to claim that global warming has stopped or slowed down. The new study says that this can be explained by a natural cycle in the Pacific Ocean that has been burying some of the heat, thus masking the true warming.

Adopting the term 'pause' or 'hiatus,' as almost all of the stories do, is a little problematic and may lead to confusion, I think. So a couple of clarifications are in order.

1. While it is true that the short-term rate of warming has been lower than before, there is still a good case to be made that this is statistical noise, due to natural variability, in a long-term trend. If you look at the temperature record, you can find other similar 'pauses' in the middle of clearly upward trends. See the figure below.

2. Typical graphs (like the one above) show surface temperatures. But oceans are part of the globe, too! So slowing of surface temperature warming does not mean that global warming has slowed. If you move a big pot of hot soup from your kitchen counter to your refrigerator, the ambient temperature of your kitchen may fall for a little while. However, putting the soup in the refrigerator does not magically make the heat go away. It will eventually be dissipated back into the kitchen.

When you put this all together, you get something like the following: The new study suggests that global warming continues, but that natural cycles in the Pacific Ocean have pulled some of the heat from the surface, which may be the main reason that surface warming appears to have slowed. This cycle is temporary and the heat may be returned to the surface.

More here and here.

---

Continue reading...

Why I Still Dislike Intelligent Design

Over at Interpreter, Gregory Smith has written a longish review of several books on the theme of evolution and religion. I haven't read his review in detail, but my skimming (and past experience) suggests that Smith has what I take to be a pretty healthy view on the issue. One of the books reviewed was written by William Dembski who, although I don't hear much about him anymore, was once one of the leading lights of Intelligent Design at the Discovery Institute. Several of the comments below Smith's review are supportive of ID, with one person wondering why LDS scientists don't align with ID more than they do.

It has been a while since I have mentioned ID. Although it hasn't gone away, it is much less of a public issue lately than it used to be. Nevertheless, I thought I would take a moment to review why I do not accept ID (something I first articulated here.) For fun, I have arranged it in a question-answer format.

Q: Isn't Intelligent Design a scientific idea?

A: ID is more of a religious/cultural movement than a scientific one. Defenders of ID complain about ID being lumped together with young-earth creationism and assert that it has secular intellectual merit on its own. However, it is a matter of historical record that the ID brand, so to speak, was formulated as a response to court rulings prohibiting the teaching of creationism in public schools, and as a weapon in an ideological battle against naturalism. The scientific component of ID has always been minor, which is to say that scientific research has not been a focus of ID proponents. ID is mostly polemics, and it was the Discovery Institute that sought to introduce ID into public schools notwithstanding the fact that it had scant support in higher education and among professional scientists. When the background of ID and its proponents are considered, it becomes clear that ID is a religiously/ideologically motivated movement.

Q: Don't some scientists advocate Intelligent Design?

A: There are a few practicing scientists, such as Michael Behe, who openly advocate ID, but most ID proponents tend to be non-scientists (e.g. lawyers, philosophers, mathematicians, etc). Others have an educational background in science, but did not pursue a career in science. For example, as a member of the Unification Church with a Ph.D. in religious studies, Jonathan Wells went on to obtain a Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology with the specific intent of fighting against 'Darwinism,' and has spent his career doing so. Again, ID is not really a scientific movement.

Q: OK, but if we put aside motivations and history, couldn't Intelligent Design have some merit?

A: Sure, any part of this world and life on it might have been designed, but ID arguments for such have been unconvincing. Usually the arguments boil down to simple disbelief that things found in nature could have been produced by nature. Many biological features that appear designed can be understood in the light of normal biological principles, although the exact step-by-step history may forever remain unknown. That is simply not good enough for ID proponents like Michael Behe, who once demanded each mutational step,

And not only a list of mutations, but also a detailed account of the selective pressures that would be operating, the difficulties such changes would cause for the organism, the expected time scale over which the changes would be expected to occur, the likely population sizes available in the relevant ancestral species at each step, other potential ways to solve the problem which might interfere, and much more.

In other words, ID is impossible to falsify. So sure, it could be true on some level, but so could many other unprovable or unfalsifiable propositions.

Q: Well what is the harm in just having another perspective to consider?

A: None, as far as it goes. However, in advancing their arguments, ID proponents seem to chronically either misunderstand or deliberately misrepresent mainstream science. One gets the sense that they must do this in order to make their arguments look strong by comparison. As Nick Matzke recently wrote in a review of Stephen Meyer's latest book,

To anyone familiar with [the science], it is simply laughable and pretty much insulting to see Stephen Meyer proclaim throughout his book that fossils with transitional morphology don’t exist, that the Cambrian body plans look like they originated all-at-once in one big sudden step. These statements don’t respect scientific process, they don’t respect the peer reviewed literature, they don’t respect the intelligence and knowledge of people who actually do know what they are talking about, they don’t respect the hard work of all the scientists that went out in the field and found these fossils, and then spent countless hours preparing them, describing them, inspecting them in microscopic detail, coding them in a morphology database, and analyzing them, all with care and effort and detail never taken by any creationist/IDist writer in any effort of comparative biology. And most importantly, Meyer’s statements don’t respect the data. They don’t follow the evidence wherever it leads, mostly because Meyer is ignoring most of the evidence.

In my experience, Matzke's critique applies more generally to many ID proponents. They not only spread an idea that is scientifically dubious, they damage scientific understanding in the process.

Conclusion:

My basic conclusion is that ID proponents are, to be frank, mostly a bunch of hacks and cranks. The hacks have all the characteristics we see in political hacks: they stick to a central message, they never admit to being wrong about anything substantive, and they distort facts and knowledge to support their talking points. It is therefore entirely appropriate that the main driver of ID is a think tank. The cranks are less evil, just obtuse. They seem simply to enjoy being in an intellectual insurgency, while overestimating their grasp of science. Neither group is interested in genuine scientific and intellectual inquiry. This is not to say that all people who are attracted to ID are hacks and cranks; I have no doubt that many who find ID persuasive are thoughtful and honest people. But this is certainly how I feel about the leaders of ID at the Discovery Institute.

So there you have it.

---

Continue reading...

Science Makes Us Less Dumb

I came across a nice essay in praise of the scientific method. It's actually an excerpt from a new book, You Are Now Less Dumb, by David McRaney. The tone is similar to a friend giving us a good-natured ribbing for how dumb we can be. Here's a snippet.

The people who came before you invented science because your natural way of understanding and explaining what you experience is terrible. When you believe in something, you rarely seek out evidence to the contrary to see how it matches up with your assumptions. That’s the source of urban legends, folklore, superstitions, and all the rest. Skepticism is not your strong suit. In the background, while you crochet and golf and browse cat videos, people using science are fighting against your stupidity. No other human enterprise is fighting as hard, or at least not fighting and winning.

When you have zero evidence, every assumption is basically equal. You prefer to see causes rather than effects, signals in the noise, patterns in the randomness. You prefer easy-to-understand stories, and thus turn everything in life into a narrative so that complicated problems become easy. Scientists work to remove the narrative, to boil it away, leaving behind only the raw facts. Those data sit there naked and exposed so they can be reflected upon and rearranged by each new visitor.

Boyd Petersen told a story of the time Hugh Nibley joked that he had found a mistake in the Book of Mormon. Whereas Alma 42:10 says that "man is carnal, sensual and devilish," Nibley said, "They left out stupid."

Embracing a scientific attitude toward the world and trying to become less dumb is a bitter-sweet quest. The sweet part is being able to learn and hopefully better recognize truth and error. The bitter part is coming to terms with the fact that many people apparently like being dumb, and will resist your efforts to help them be less so.

---

Continue reading...

Save the Date: Interpreter Symposium on Science & Mormonism

The Interpreter Foundation (Daniel Peterson and other FARMS cast-offs) is sponsoring a symposium, Science & Mormonism: Cosmos, Earth & Man, November 9 at the Utah Valley Convention Center. It looks like a great line-up, including David Bailey, Steve Peck, and (tentatively) Michael Whiting. Admission is free but seating is limited, so register if you want to attend.

Alas, I will not be there because I don't live near Utah. Events like this sometimes make me wish I did. Let's hope that transcripts will be made available!

---

Continue reading...

Joseph Smith and Symmes's Hole

Today, Slate.com's history blog calls attention to the attempt in 1818 by John Cleves Symmes, Jr to assemble an expedition to the North Pole. (If you click over you can see a copy of the circular he distributed.) Symmes had come to the conclusion that Earth is hollow inside and perfectly habitable. He traveled Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New England promoting his theory, gaining a small following in Cincinnati. Rejecting Newton's theories of gravity, his ideas mostly brought ridicule. Nevertheless, Symmes was an entertaining and convincing presenter; apparently he even convinced a group of Harvard students who had to be disabused of the nonsense by their professors. He died in 1829, apparently from stomach problems.

Over the course of Church history a variety of ideas have circulated as to the location of the lost Ten Tribes. It's more of a fringe thing now, but you can still find people who think that the Ten Tribes live inside a hole at the North Pole. Typically D&C 133 is cited as evidence along with an alleged corroborating statement by Joseph Smith, who is reported to have compared Earth to the shape of a kettle, with the Ten Tribes living inside. Is this the legacy of "Symmes's hole?"

Symmes was not the only person to have postulated a hollow Earth, but he promoted it heavily. I don't know whether he passed through Joseph's neighborhood, but I can envision Joseph and friends attending one of his lectures and coming away impressed. Even more plausible, given Symmes's following in Ohio, is that early converts in Kirtland brought the idea to Joseph's attention. The first volume of the LDS newspaper, Evening and Morning Star, published June 1832 in Independence, Missouri, contained a reference to "the theory of Capt. Symmes" in connection to a report of some kind of sink hole. However, the story appears to have been reprinted from a New York publication, so whether the LDS readership would have understood this reference is a matter of speculation, as far as I can tell.

I don't know whether Joseph actually espoused the hollow Earth theory, but a part of me likes to think that he did. He had a creative and hungry mind; I'm willing to grant him some space to speculate and think out loud, without feeling like I have to conform my every opinion to his.

---

Continue reading...

Pitch Illustrates Geological Time in a Lifetime

Perhaps my favorite feature of Provo Canyon (right) is the bent rock layer toward the southern end of the canyon. How can solid rock bend like that? How, indeed. Young-earth creationists point to these kinds of geological features as evidence that the strata were laid down during Noah's flood, adding that no human alive was there to observe the process. It's easy to imagine wet earth bending and then solidifying into rock, which is perhaps one reason why this view of geology is common in the U.S. But things aren't always as they seem.

In 1927 a professor in Australia heated pitch--basically asphalt--and put it into a funnel. Pitch shatters if struck with a hammer, yet it also flows as a liquid...very slowly. In the intervening time, drops of pitch fell from the funnel about once per decade. Predicting when exactly that drop would fall was difficult, and until a couple of weeks ago the actual drop had never been witnessed. (It had been missed by as little as 15 minutes.) However, this time was successful; the drop was observed by both human and electronic eyes. Go read this Atlantic article for a more complete and interesting tale.

Seeing the pitch drop helps make the folding of rock layers in Provo canyon and elsewhere easier to imagine. When exposed to heat and pressure, they become more malleable than we would otherwise think, and over millions of years the rock can be bent and folded. Of course imagination does not constitute evidence, but a little real-life demonstration can help make abstract concepts, developed based on multiple lines of evidence, more concrete (ha!).

So the next time someone expresses incredulity at the proposition of rock layers bending and folding, point them to the pitch drop experiment. And as a bonus, when they say that you weren't there millions of years ago to observe geological processes, you can point out that for almost 70 years nobody was there to see the pitch drop either.

---

Continue reading...