Psybertron Asks

Why did nobody ever mention the hills ? Brisbane is a new location for me. Culturally and architecturally reminded me of Melbourne meets Perth meets Alabama with a tasteless church on every corner, except everywhere is uphill to/from everywhere else. I’ll either get fit or ….

After three consecutive nights in the air, my first night in town, last night, was 12 hours solid sleep, but tonight was a recce of Fortitude Valley.

Ric’s Bar had genuinely live music, others had karaoke despite the “live” billings on the Wednesday night. But a very full gig guide to look out for,

Openers at Ric’s were Udays Tiger. Guitar and Drums, with loops of both under control of the guitarist’s feet. Interesting, creative and rough, but very effective – had me in mind of QOTSA. Vocals a bit low in the mix, and a bit strained for my taste, but I will look out for them again.

First it giveth, then in taketh away. The “headline” were At Sea. Equally interesting but less satisfying 5 piece. Bass, lead and rhythm guitarists need to get in sharper tune, if their layered textures are going to work without discord. Rhythm guy seemed want to be at 11 to everyone elses’ 9 and the vocals – interesting goth female – suffered again. Same drummer in both acts. A version of Morning Dew had me singing along (only non-original I noticed), but sadly only the trad two-verse version. The point of the cold-war version is that after the flash in the sky there is no more morning dew.

Such short sets. All over by 10:30pm.

Must look up Gav whilst I’m in town.

From David Morey via Horse at MoQ Discuss, an NPR blog from Marcelo Gleiser with an interesting little quote from Robert Pirsig’s ZMM.

The cause of our current social crises is a genetic defect within the nature of reason itself. And until this genetic defect is cleared, the crises will continue. Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a better world. They are taking it further and further from that better world. Since the Renaissance these modes have worked. As long as the need for food, clothing and shelter is dominant they will continue to work. But now that for huge masses of people these needs no longer overwhelm everything else, the whole structure of reason, handed down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate. It begins to be seen for what it really is�”emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and spiritually empty. That, today, is where it is at, and will continue to be at for a long time to come.

Reason has a genetic defect. Got it ?

Not sure I agree that the major reputable news organizations are necessarily a-political, but nevertheless interesting look at the politically biased reporting of numbers at the recent John Stewart and Stephen Colbert “Sanity” event.

I’ve been in crowds of a quarter of a million a couple of times, and that’s quite an event. Restores your faith, etc. (Hat tip to Clive Andrews / Mark Whitaker / Peter Owen on Facebook.)

For what it’s worth I don’t believe Harry should suffer any “punishment” for expressing his opinions the way he did. (I actually think Gomes was at fault, and Spurs have to live with their own cock-up. Clattenburg could have made a more judicious call, even though he was technically right in what he did. Fools and farces, rules and wise men etc … )

… still claim that the cement design was not at fault in the Deepwater Horizon Macondo Well blow-out ?

That is, whoever was at fault for accepting the design and its testing – lab testing and in-situ negative pressure testing – the “cement job” failed. The design includes the whole implementation and testing process in my book.

The problem of scientific privilege when it comes to knowledge is pretty much the raison-d’etre of the Psybertron blog since 2001. Scientism. Originally, this arose from concerns in business & organizational management …. my manifesto says:

” … management mistook itself for a science.”

Of course the imperative to make a blog of it was the realization that the organization, management, governance, even democratic self-governance of human activities in general, including science and academia themselves, were suffering the same mistake. Western rational arrogance prompting mid-eastern irrational terrorist reaction of 9/11 was simply the final straw that catalysed the action. Those same circumstances have also created the whole god vs science debates of the past decade. (Still current in the church and state separation debates of the US mid-term elections right now.)

This week’s Thinking Allowed was accompanied by Laurie’s comic newsletter “My Life as a Management Consultant” …. the joke, the gibberish, the ring of truth supported by sounding or claiming to be “scientific”, even science itself.

“Science’s First Mistake �” Delusions in Pursuit of Theory”
by Ian Angell and Dionysios Demetis.

Ian Angell interviewed by Laurie Taylor in the second item in this week’s program, some snippets that caught my attention.

Gravity, even just causation in general is a myth. Causation is in your head. It is one of the delusions of science. Delusion in pursuit of theory.

The so far so good fallacy of seeing science as simply contingent, where as it is plain wrong. Jumping from the top of a ten story building and shouting “So far so good” to witnesses on each floor. (Steve McQueen in The Magnificent Seven)

The model changes the world, there is no linear model. Game theory behaviour in action. If DNA is valid forensic science, then any rational criminal simply spreads confusing foreign DNA samples over their crime scene.

The nonsense of scientific models of economic processes. The nonsense – thorough absurdity – of scientific denial of religion. The nonsense of CERN and LHC, and unified theories.

Our model has distinct “objects”, for cognitive reasons, but the world itself does not. Objectivity is a myth. Even numbers.

Julian Huxley (?) “Attempts to prove the truth of religion scientifically is like attempting to explain that the world is round musically.”

Every topic the subject of countless posts here on Psybertron. Excellent.

[Post Note …. and in fact Ian Angell has a WordPress blog too …. Reality Revisited …. where the book can also be downloaded. Reading this article from his LSE web page you might not see him as agnostic as he claims to be, but he is clearly riled-up against scientistic smugness.]

When watching last week’s BBC Horizon, I was disappointed to see the singularity and inflation still at the root of big bang theories. That’s despite the fact that two key subjects were brought up very early – causation itself (which is actually not discussed further), and the logical problem with the idea of time itself before the universe existed, if the whole universe (including time) does start with the big bang. So I watched it again.

OK, good to hear that it is mainstream to think that the current “universe” is a region of space-time that arose (through a big-bang event) in a pre-existing super-multi-universe …. hooray, multi-verses are no longer a quantum hack, they are indeed connected by time and n-dimensional space and the laws of physics. (Interesting that people just put aside the “first-cause” problem – in accepting pre-existing / always-existed super-universe and of many possible adjacent and successive universes, no beginning, no end, but hey, ho.) Weak to suggest this is an evolutionary / Darwinian model simply because this (each) universe has an ancestor, chicken and egg, unless there is also some evidence of genetic inheritance, but an attractive analogy. [Post Note : genetic inheritance is one part of Rick’s argument – see links below. The new universe does inherit from the state (asymmetries / constants / boundary conditions / etc.) of physical laws from the previous one in which the bang occurs – so no mystery on meaningless coincidences (except first-cause of course).]

But why, oh why, to keep looking for radical speculative solutions to the “cause” of the big bang, without going back to existing known physics explanations, that were only dropped to make way for inflation / size and dark-matter / energy / cosmological-constant discrepancies in deriving the standard model ? (Negative gravity, events inside black-holes, collisions between branes, you name it ?)

Mersini-Houghton’s wave solution sounded the most convincing, but not clear why string-theory was mentioned ? Insufficient material in the programme to know anything about the actual theory she is using other than first-principle-wave-equations with no physical boundary conditions. [* Post Note: Boscovich UFT ?]

(Roll-call : Kaku, Linde, Singh,  Smolin, Turok, Penrose, Nichol, Giaimi, Mersini-Houghton)

Actually I only went back to this previous edition of Horizon on-line because of a random Facebook contact with Rick Ryals today, that led me to look back at his three key knols and the various arxiv references from there (below). Having got rid of the “preposterous” conjectures, the cosmologists need to wind back to fundamental physics in the one consistent super-multi-universe again. We’ve got so focussed on the “creation” god vs science debate in the current climate, that we have failed to notice that the workings of the current super / multi-universe are no longer dependent on any attempt to explain something from nothing. Cosmologists have forgotten that they’re not really physicists. Something rather than nothing is still a massively interesting question, but not a scientific one thank god.

Physics is science, and cosmogeny is metaphysics or theology again. Phew!

Rick’s links …. the order of reading is important …
Or if you can read only one, read How Politics Kills Science

Rick Ryals’ – Einstein’s Universe, No “Biggest Blunder”
Rick Ryals’ – Goldilocks Enigma, Cosmological Constant from First Principles 
**>> Rick Ryals’ – Anthropic Principle, How Politics Kills Science
Brandon Carter’s – seminal work on Anthropic Principles
Richard Lieu – cosmology is groping in the dark unscientifically
Larry Kraus – the energy of empty space that isn’t zero
P Z Myers, Jerry Coyne & Sam Harris – Religion Pollutes Science
Peter Rowlands’ Dirac ReWrite – From Zero to Infinity

And that Larry Kraus quote, quoted by Rick from the above,

“… there appears to be energy of empty space that isn’t zero! This flies in the face of all conventional wisdom in theoretical particle physics. It is the most profound shift in thinking, perhaps the most profound puzzle … … when we look out at the universe, there doesn’t seem to be enough structure �” not as much as inflation would predict … … when you look at CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background) map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That’s crazy. We’re looking out at the whole universe. There’s no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun �” the plane of the earth around the sun �” the ecliptic … … telling us that all of science is wrong and we’re the center of the universe, or maybe the data is simply incorrect, or … maybe there’s something wrong with our theories on the larger scales.”

“Our” theories notice. Our position as observers on earth IS privileged (as observers that is, observers that had to be here because of the laws of physics, but not because of us as creators, except insofar as we “construct” our world-view, yes, even you physicists and theologians; philosophers already knew it).

[Post Note : updated Rick’s links since Google Knol went down, and highlighted the key link.]

Of no great significance … but last weekend we had a Class of 72 reunion of Guisborough Grammar School, and next weekend “we are flying down to Rio” for a conference and a few days R&R. Yesterday that “Rio” meme led me to dig out and play Roxy Music’s Virginia Plain. Today I see Bryan Ferry interviewed about his latest album Olympia, which of course mentions that original hit and ends with a photo of Ferry performing Virginia Plain, in the summer of ’72.

[Post Note: piling on the coincidences … Steve Brooks someone I’ve not seen in almost 40 years until the reunion two weeks ago, mentioned above, turns up at a Hamsters gig in Normanby last night. Turns out he’s not only a long term Hamsterhead, he’s also the owner of a left-hand drive US sports car; an AC Cobra in his case. Great performance by  Sza Sza’s 17 year-old nephew Matt Billups on drums standing in for Rev Otis, whose heart-op looks like it was successful yesterday. Only caught half the set, due to flying in from my Oslo trip, but they were on form. Last time I saw them – other than the Mad, Bad & Dangerous gigs with Wilko – was at The Brook in Southampton, and they seemed stale and tired, so it was great to hear Slim on form.]

A couple of years old, this New Scientist article on how brain activity is on “the edge of chaos”, in a state of “self-organized-criticality”. Neatly joins up two adages, of life being just complicated enough and the sweet spot being at the edge of chaos.

Hat tip to Johnnie Moore for his link via this Transversalinflections blog, which picks up on the analogue (in the original article) to the firing of neurones being akin to the periodic avalanches on a progressively growing sand-pile. Designing to meta-stability being an art. A question of scalable efficiency in massively granular & connected systems …. maximum effect for the smallest input …. a whole world in a grain of sand. (The tennis player returning the unreturnably fast service, the mis-timed leg-breaker in football, the control systems of unstable aircraft, etc …)