For a pair of entangled particles in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics (QM), the measurement of one particle seems to establish a chain of simultaneous causes. Such a chain renders standard QM inconsistent with the reductionism of Einstein, who sought explicitly to permit only temporally ordered causal chains. Halloween is over (and All Hallows Day is here!), but, in a comment over on my post about the philosophy of science, my brother wrote to ask about an experiment regarding spooky action at a distance. I just recently read an article claiming that Chinese physicists were able to place a lower bound on the 'speed' of action-at-a-distance. According to the article the 'speed' has a lower bound of 10,000 times the speed of light....
Could you comment on this article and suggest how one ought to approach a claim like this?
Yes!
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| | My favorite physics problem from my undergraduate days is Problem 7 on Page 470 of Physics by Tipler (Worth Publishers, Inc., 1982). I provide the problem here along with my solution.
Hovering over the pit of hell, the devil observes that as an engineering student falls past him (with the terminal velocity), the frequency of his scream falls from 842 to 820 Hz. (a) Find the speed of descent of the student. |
| The recognition that a scientific theory is not properly regarded as a truth allows one to see that the Catholic Church is not opposed to science. Galileo would have avoided a confrontation with the Church if he had recognised, as modern philosophers of science recognise, that Copernicanism, like any scientific theory, can be proved false but not proved true.
My thinking on the relationship between Catholic doctrine and what we usually call "science" has developed over the years.
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I checked out Tumblr today. My friend Tad has recently started a blog there. Although my reason for picking Weebly over Tumblr initially was almost nonexistent (that is, the choice was almost completely arbitrary), I am sticking with Weebly because - Tumblr seems not to offer any important features that Weebly lacks, and
- it seems that the profanity over on Tumblr is easier to stumble over. The setup process required me to choose three blogs there to follow. Among the various choices were so many starting with the F word as to make running into them apparently unavoidable.
Because Tad uses Tumblr, I can feel certain that Tumblr must be cooler than Weebly, but I suppose that I must accept my station in life. Some, like me, have never been destined for coolness. Despite my awkward discomfort with the cool, I'd probably have switched to Tumblr if it offered easy integration with Google+. This evening I met with some folks over at St. Francis. Our semiweekly meeting to discuss Catholic doctrine and modern science is now officially back in session. Today, I presented the distinction that Dodds makes between - modern science, which, starting roughly with Galileo and Descartes, narrowed the notion of causality down from the thick, classical conception of the four causes to a thin, pale shadow of efficient causality and
- contemporary science, which, starting roughly with Einstein and Heisenberg, began to open up the philosophy of science again to consider other types of causality.
Finally, I wrote another paragraph for my upcoming post on conscience and the law. | |
While out on my noon walk under a gray sky, I read some of my noon-walk book. Not quite cold enough to freeze water, the air was still cold enough for gloves and a hat on a 30-minute walk. On this outing, I managed to read the section on quantum indeterminism in Chapter 4 of Unlocking Divine Action by Michael Dodds. It seems to me that the case for a consistent view of special, non-interventionist, objective, divine action is made much better in terms of quantum indeterminism than in terms of the previous section's treatment of emergent phenomena from complex systems.
I'm already falling behind. I started a long (still unfinished) post yesterday about conscience rights but didn't post anything.
Last night, I took Ethan and Ben over to the house where I have weekly practice for the choral quartet. Ben was well behaved in playing with the other children. I could have left him at home with Ethan, but I feel that I don't spend enough time with my kids. At least by taking them with me I spent a bit of time with two of my children in the car, and they had an adventurous outing to a new place.
I'm singing several hours per week these days. Well, I'm mostly just making noise. For the instructor for my weekly voice lesson, I am working on opening my first formant, but because of my lack of muscle coordination, I tend to mispronounce my vowels (in the second formant) when I work on the first formant. So I spend a lot of time just trying to sing scales with different vowels. I don't know if I'll ever learn how to sing properly. Anyway, there is now an extra level of challenge in singing because I am trying to be conscious of a proper configuration for my throat down near the vocal cords.
I think that my new and perhaps goofier sound (goofier because I don't know how to contract muscles properly) is disturbing to the leader of the quartet, but she has been charitable to me so far.
After returning late, I read books to the younger children before a far too late bed time. That didn't leave much time for writing. I started writing some thoughts on balancing the conscience rights of individuals in a pluralistic society. I plan to have it out by the end of the week.
For my first math-related post, I think that I'll do a little simplistic analysis of the temperature of an object out in space near the Earth's orbit. But that will probably have to wait until next week.
| I want to make it a discipline to write at least a short blog entry every day. Here is the first one. I shall start by writing a bit about my day. Then I shall write a little about what I'd like to do with the blog.
What I Did Today Today, I sang as the tenor voice in the Renaissance quartet at Guardian Angels Catholic Church. We performed Guerrero's Ave Maria for communion at the later two of the three morning Masses. For the first Mass, I also sang by myself the communion antiphon chant. Practicing and performing with the quartet is one of my favorite things right now.
I did not make confession yesterday, and so I did not receive communion today.
After eating lunch with the family, I spent the afternoon and evening at work trying to catch up. I am behind schedule on my current project. I get some fraction of my overtime paid right now.
| To Do Here are some topics, each of which I have been thinking about and should like to write about: - What "science" is. Despite my Ph.D. in physics and my current job as an engineer in the aerospace industry, I am not a scientific realist. This seems to put me out in the cold, outside the main stream of thought. I am drawn to scientific instrumentalism, however, for at least a couple of reasons: (A) It is not possible to demonstrate that a scientific theory is true. (B) The rejection of scientific realism seems to open an avenue for dialogue between someone who finds current scientific theories compelling and someone else who, for religious or other, non-scientific reasons, adopts positions at odds with current scientific theory.
- The challenge that the Christian doctrine of the Fall presents to a scientific world view. Although the typical Christian who accepts both the Fall and a scientific world view sees no conflict between them, it seems to me that, on close inspection of the situation, conflict can be avoided only if either (A) one posit an unsatisfyingly ad-hoc notion of preternatural grace or (B) one be open to the possibility that the Fall is much more radical an event than traditionally imagined. I find the second option interesting to explore. My starting point is to assume that even the suffering and death of animals is evil and did not occur before the Fall. The basic idea is that the physics that would well describe the universe before the Fall must be radically different from the physics that well describes the universe in its fallen state because every living thing must die in the fallen universe. Yet the same physical theory seems well to describe the universe almost back to the beginning of time, in any event back to a time long before humans appeared on Earth. So the Fall would seem to have an effect on all of time, all the way back to the beginning. It would be as though Adam and Eve, after sinning in the Garden universe, suddenly found themselves in a different and unfriendly universe, on the surface of a planet in bodies that had formed over millions of years of bloody struggle for survival. It would be as though time in the fallen universe runs along a different dimension than "time" when the universe had the form of Eden. Or perhaps there was not time in Eden in the same sense as there is time in the fallen universe.
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I set up an account on Weebly to see if I could make a Blog post that uses MathJax.
Here is a test: \( a^2 = b^2 + c^2 \).
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