Faster-than-light neutrinos observed again

November 19, 2011 • 1:13 pm

UPDATE (via Matthew Cobb): There’s a good take on this experiment, including what it would mean for physics if the speed of light were exceeded, over at Professor Jim al-Khalili’s site (he doesn’t buy the result and will eat his boxer shorts if it’s true).

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According to the New York Times, the same group (“Opera”) that found neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light have repeated the experiment and found the same anomalous result.  And they’ve eliminated one problem that might have made the first observation erroneous:

When these results were presented to a meeting at CERN in September, after a prairie fire of blog rumors, they were greeted by fierce skepticism. Among the problems with the original experiment, scientists said, was that the neutrinos were produced in bursts 10,000 billionths of a second long — much bigger than the discrepancy in arrival time.

Last month CERN retooled so that the neutrinos could be produced in shorter bursts, only 3 billionths of a second long, making it easier to match neutrinos at Gran Sasso with neutrinos at CERN, and the experiment was briefly repeated. The neutrinos still arrived early, about 62 billionths of a second early, in good agreement with the original result and negating the possibility, the Opera team said, that the duration of the neutrino pulse had anything to do with the results.

The details of both the first and second round of experiments are contained in a paper posted on the Internet at http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897 and submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics.

But problems remain, one being how the clocks were synchronized between Geneva and Italy—the 735 km. path taken by the neutrinos. I thought that had already been taken care of, but apparently not.  Nevertheless, physicists, including those who did the study, are still skeptical:

But the group admitted that many questions remain. “This is not the end of the story,” said Antonio Ereditato of the University of Bern in Switzerland, the spokesman for the collaboration, explaining that physicists would not accept the result that neutrinos could go faster than light until other experiments had come up with the same conclusion. “We are convinced, but that is not enough in science,” he said. . . .

I find this a bit weird.  The people who did the experiment should be at least as hard to convince as the physics community, for the possible problems are the same for all of them, and the researchers who publish the result have much more to lose.  Further, as Feynman said, “the first principle is that you not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Alvaro de Rujula, a CERN theorist, said there were two interpretations of the experiment. “One is that they have stumbled upon a revolutionary discovery; the other, on which I would place my bet, is that they are still making and not finding the very same error.”

With this kind of skepticism properly infusing our community, it’s no surprise that scientists take deep exception to the far less evidenced claims of theology.

Caturday Felid- Can your cat do this?

November 19, 2011 • 7:47 am

by Greg Mayer

Today’s New York Times has an article about something I didn’t even know existed: cat agility competitions!

Anthony Hutcherson training his cat. Photo by Doug Mills/NYT.

The cats must run an obstacle course of tunnels, steps, hurdles,  etc., and competitions are held at the major cat shows (which are better known for the judging of pedigreed cats; for the dog version, see Best in Show).  Some cats are well trained but others “make it clear to the eager onlookers that they could not care less.”

Trainer Jill Archibald has posted a number of training videos online at Monkeysee, and also on Youtube.

If there were a box-jumping-into event, Maru might be good at it.

A number of the cats featured in the NYT article are so-called ‘Bengal cats‘, which are not domestic cats (Felis catus), but hybrids between domestic cats and leopard cats (Felis (Prionailurus) bengalensis), which have undergone several generations of breeding and selection past the F1. I’m not sure if crossing with a wild species makes them better (more agile?) or worse (harder to train?) at competing than domestic cats.

Caturday Felids

November 19, 2011 • 6:18 am

by Greg Mayer

Alert reader Dominic has sent me a link to EarthSky, which features camera trap photos of five species of cats from the island of Sumatra. The  photos, taken by WWF-Indonesia, are further discussed at the WWF site. Here’s one of my favorites, a marbled cat, who seems to have noticed the camera, and isn’t entirely pleased:

Sumatran marbled cat

This clouded leopard, doesn’t just look unpleased, it’s taking action:

Sumatran clouded leopard

The pictures were taken in an area threatened with deforestation, and WWF is urging that the area be protected. Interestingly, of 404 cat photos, 226 were of  tigers; the rarest, at 4, was the marbled cat. We’ve had occasion previously to note here at WEIT the great use being made of camera traps for the study of rare and hard-to-see cats. The other species photographed are the tiger, Asiatic golden cat, and leopard cat (species account links are from the IUCN Cat Specialist Group). Bravo to WWF-Indonesia!

A secular humanist really, really wants there to be a creator

November 19, 2011 • 12:27 am

Last year I posted about Clay Naff, science writer, PuffHo blogger, and accommodationist who seemed to want to find Jesus in evolution. Now he makes a similar plea for creationism at Scientific American blogs, “A secular case for intentional creation.”

He first equates creationists and atheists in how they regard “the argument about the fundamental nature of existence”:

There are, however, two sets of people who want to shut the argument down. One is the drearily familiar set of religious fundamentalists. The other is the shiny new set of atheists who claim that science demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that our existence is accidental, purposeless, and doomed. My intent is to show that both are wrong. . .

The trouble with the “New Atheist” position, as defined above, is this: it commits the fallacy of the excluded middle.

And what is that “excluded middle”?  God, of course, even though Naff professes himself  a secular humanist who is agnostic about many things”:

Science indeed excludes many possibilities. The conservation laws rule out ghosts who deploy photons to be visible, electromagnetic force to hurl objects, and kinetic wave energy to moan. Miracles are bunk. Like LaPlace, we’ve no need for a Creator to explain how the world works. But we might in searching for our ultimate origins.

The claim I aim to rebut is that science forces us to conclude that life is accidental, purposeless, and doomed.

And the data that forces Naff to entertain the possibility of a creator? Simply that science can’t disprove the idea of a deistic creator-god, who made the universe and then went to lunch:

Until some evidence arrives, the pursuit of truth through science obliges us to entertain multiple hypotheses. When it comes to cosmic origins, that must surely include consideration of the idea that our Universe was deliberately created with a purpose in mind. Yet little authentically secular effort has gone into it.

I’m baffled at what kind of “authentically secular effort” could find evidence for a purpose in the universe. Naff goes on:

Indeed, any talk of teleology seems to infuriate Dawkins: “What is the purpose of a mountain? What is the purpose of a tsunami? What is the purpose of bubonic plague? Surely you can see that these are just silly questions? Same with the universe.”

They are indeed silly — if you assume that a supremely powerful and virtuous deity created the Earth. But that hardly exhausts the possibilities.

To name just one, it may be that the fundamental property of the Universe is information, and that life, the Universe and everything amount to a program running for an obscure purpose. That conceit is captured with mordant humor here.

Click the link; it shows a universe controlled by aliens for whom bad stuff is part of the plan.

So where does the goddy stuff come in? Naff speculates that, when our Universe comes to its inevitable end, the “Darwinian imperative” (i.e. to keep life going, which he sees as a human principle but is really only the result of differential gene replication) will force us to create another universe.  And if we can do that, then so others could have as well!  Ergo Jesus:

Swell, you may think, but what has this to do with secular creation? Simple: the Principle of Mediocrity. It tells us that when we have only one data point, we should assume that it lies near the middle of the distribution curve. That being so, if we take the above as granted we would be foolhardy to assume that we will be the first proud parents of a Baby Universe. The ability to procreate a Universe would suggest that ours was so created, and for a similar reason: to keep life alive.

And of course there’s a bit of amateur theology:

The extravagance and imperfections of the Universe are just what you might expect of imperfect creators doing the best they can with the materials on hand. SETI’s failure to date suggests they were none too extravagant! Indeed, nothing of which I am aware counts as evidence against this hypothesis.

To be fair, Naff says that his hypothesis is testable: we have to be able to create a new universe. (He adds that nothing has yet shown that this is impossible for us, but neglects the possibility that while it may be impossible for us, maybe it’s possible for a race of super-aliens, and those might as well be God.)

This is the craziest idea I’ve ever seen adumbrated in a respected scientific magazine.  The “excluded middle” tells us that it’s not crazy to assume that we could create a new universe, and that others might have as well, and those others might be creators of our own universe, aka God?

As P. Z. Myers said about stuff like this, assuming that a “middle position” is reasonable doesn’t mean you’re intellectually more honest: sometimes is just means you’re halfway to crazy town. And that’s exactly where Naff is.

Why on earth is this on the Scientific American site? Shouldn’t it be on BioLogos? Oh, I forgot—they explicitly posit God and Jesus rather than aliens.

Who has the largest huevos?

November 18, 2011 • 11:33 pm

Since Professor Cobb has seen fit to drag in matters scatological during my absence, I offer the following fun biology fact, taken from the Animal Diversity Web of the Univesity of Michigan’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. It refers to the North Atlantic right whale, Eubalaena glacialis:

Males tend to have the largest testes of any living mammal (weighing up to about 525 kg.), suggesting that sperm competition may play a significant role in determining mating success.

Larger testes, of course, connote larger amounts of sperm, which can be used to displace the sperm of a previously-mating male or simply to inseminate more females when there’s competition between males for females.

Speaking of the paternal apparatus, we might as well cite the world’s largest penis:

Blue Whale males have the biggest penises in the world, with sexual organs that can reach up to 8 feet long (2.4 meters). Blue Whales mate in warmer waters.

This doesn’t look like a blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) to me, but the organ is impressive:

If you’re interested in things penile, Wikipedia has a fascinating “Penis” entry, which includes this fact well known to biologists:

The record for the largest penis to body size ratio is held by the barnacle. The barnacle’s penis can grow to up to forty times its own body length. This enables them to reach the nearest female.

Here’s a video showing the male male portion of a hermaphroditic barnacle in action:

Jesus appears in a dog butt

November 18, 2011 • 2:39 pm

by Matthew Cobb

We are all used to seeing The Saviour pop up on pieces of toast, but this visitation surely takes the dog-biscuit. Why would an all-powerful being choose to reveal themselves in such a way (and place)? The ways of the Lord are mysterious indeed…

I was pointed to this photo at this hispanic site. Other sources are available, no doubt. And if you Google ‘Jesus dog arse’ (or ‘butt’) you’ll find several others. Photoshop may have been involved, but you know, you probably don’t want to look too closely.

A whole book on the evolution of eyes

November 18, 2011 • 11:58 am

Here’s a useful book that, besides teaching you science, promises to be a potent creationism-killer: it’s Evolution’s Witness: How Eyes Evolved, by Ivan R. Schwab.  Sadly, it’s $50, even with the $25 discount on Amazon, but you can look inside for free, and maybe ask your library to order it. It’s published by Oxford University Press, which has a record for high-quality books like this.

Remember that eyes have evolved anywhere between 40 and 60 times in animals, though the physical structure can reflect a homology of “initiating” genes: PAX6, for instance, is a key gene in initiating eye formation in both mice (and presumably other mammals) as well as fruit flies, even though insect eyes and vertebrate eyes, as structures, evolved independently.

Over at Science 2.0, Hank Campbell interviews Ivan Schwab, the book’s author.  Schwab is an M.D.: an ophthamologist at the University of California at Davis who is afflicted with the curiosity of a naturalist.  He speculates about when the first eye evolved, and has a unique answer to the perennial and misguided creationist question, “Of what use is half an eye?”