Neutrinos exceed the speed of light?

September 23, 2011 • 10:28 am

This news is all over the physics blogosphere: a particle may have exceeded the speed of light.  This, of course, is big news because no object is supposed to be able to do that, though “action at a distance,” as posited by Bell’s inequality and supported by some experiments, suggest that particle interactions (but not information) can exceed light speed.

According to the New York Times, neutrinos lauched at the CERN accelerator in Switzerland seem to have gone faster than light:

Even before the European physicists had presented their results — in a paper that appeared on the physics Web site arXiv.org on Thursday night and in a seminar at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, on Friday — a chorus of physicists had risen up on blogs and elsewhere arguing that it was way too soon to give up on Einstein and that there was probably some experimental error. Incredible claims require incredible evidence. . .

. . . According to scientists familiar with the paper, the neutrinos raced from a particle accelerator at CERN outside Geneva, where they were created, to a cavern underneath Gran Sasso in Italy, a distance of about 450 miles, about 60 nanoseconds faster than it would take a light beam. That amounts to a speed greater than light by about 0.0025 percent (2.5 parts in a hundred thousand).

Even this small deviation would open up the possibility of time travel and play havoc with longstanding notions of cause and effect. Einstein himself — the author of modern physics, whose theory of relativity established the speed of light as the ultimate limit — said that if you could send a message faster than light, “You could send a telegram to the past.”

Alvaro de Rujula, a theorist at CERN, called the claim “flabbergasting.”

Indeed.  Now how could this happen?  Wormholes!

John Learned, a neutrino astronomer at the University of Hawaii, said that if the results of the Opera researchers turned out to be true, it could be the first hint that neutrinos can take a shortcut through space, through extra dimensions. Joe Lykken of Fermilab said, “Special relativity only holds in flat space, so if there is a warped fifth dimension, it is possible that on other slices of it, the speed of light is different.”

Now I’m no physicist, but if neutrinos can go through wormholes, then information can be transmitted faster than the speed of light, which would truly be a monumental finding.

But of course—and this is my guess—the results could be an error or an artifact.  In fact, many physicists are dubious about this.  In the NYT piece, several of them immediately call for replication:

“My dream would be that another, independent experiment finds the same thing,” Dr. Ereditato [the research group leader] told the BBC. “Then I would be relieved.”

and

Alvaro de Rujula, a theorist at CERN, called the claim “flabbergasting.”

“If it is true, then we truly haven’t understood anything about anything,” he said, adding: “It looks too big to be true. The correct attitude is to ask oneself what went wrong.”

and

“These guys have done their level best, but before throwing Einstein on the bonfire, you would like to see an independent experiment,” said John Ellis, a CERN theorist who has published work on the speeds of the ghostly particles known as neutrinos.

Ahh. . . music to my ears: the pervasive doubt and calls for replication that follow a radical new claim about science.  Nothing is accepted until many independent observers can duplicate the observations.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if claims of “religious truth” were subject to the same strictures?

More stupidity from Andrew Brown: creationism doesn’t come from religion

September 23, 2011 • 5:17 am

I always wonder why the Guardian hasn’t yet put Andrew Brown out to pasture.  Can there really be people who like what he writes? Even if you’re an accommodationist or faitheist, his arguments are so egregious, so flagrantly abusive of logic and rationality, that it seems embarrassing to be on his side.

His latest piece, “At least creationists have given it some thought,”  perfectly displays his mixture of faitheism (remember, the man is an atheist) and obtuseness.  Its point is twofold: that creationism doesn’t have anything to do with religion, and that scientists and unbelievers who sneer at creationists are both ignorant and misguided. Although the first thesis  seems flatly wrong (how many creationists do you know who aren’t motivated by faith?), Brown sees two other causes:

Last year’s Theos study, for example, showed something like 40% of the UK’s adult population unclear on the concept [of evolution]. There are also stupefying numbers for the proportion of the British population who think, or who at least will assent to the proposition, that the Earth is around 10,000 years old.

This is quite clearly not a problem caused by religious belief. Even if we assume that all Muslims are creationists, and all Baptists, they would only be one in 10 of the self-reported creationists or young Earthers. What we have here is essentially a failure, on a quite staggering scale, of science and maths education. The people who think the Earth is 10,000 years old are essentially counting like the trolls in Terry Pratchett: “one, lots, many”. Ten thousand is to them a figure incalculably huge.

I don’t think this particular innumeracy matters nearly as much as the related inability to calculate that, say 29.3% annual interest on credit card debt is in many ways a much larger and more dangerous number than 10,000 years. But you can’t blame either flaw on religious belief.

Okay, so this is a failure of science education, not the teaching of religion.  But if that’s so, then why aren’t people (Brits as well as Americans) up in arms about issues of chemistry and physics? And why do these people see a Biblical form of instant creation, and a 10,000-year old-earth, as reasonable beliefs.  Did they just pull those notions out of their heads, or do they, perhaps, come from exegesis of an ancient book?

Nope, Brown’s second excuse is that children are “natural creationists”, so creationism just comes from their tendency (one elaborated by Pascal Boyer) to find willful agency in the facts of nature:

You could perhaps blame it on human nature. There is a lot of good research to show that children are natural creationists, who suppose that there is purpose to the world, and that we have evolved that way. That needn’t worry teachers terribly much.

Well, yes, research does tend to show that young children do attribute agency to much of nature.  But those children are often inculcated with religious belief from the time they’re able to understand language, and the particular form of creationism that many children espouse (if you’re a teacher in the U.S., you can vouch for this) is religiously based.  Further, it is the persistence of religiously based creationism into the adult stage—after all, by the time you’re 20 you’ve had plenty of exposure to the arguments for evolution—that damages science education..

So what is the evidence that creationism has something to do with religion.  Here are three bits, two obtained by some quick Googling.

Here are data from a 2009 Gallup poll showing the incidence of belief and disbelief in evolution divided up by how how often the respondent goes to church.  The effect of religion is clear:

Here are data from a 2009 Pew Forum.  Check out the size of the dark, olive-green bar, which is the proportion of people who accept unguided, natural evolution.  The data are divided up not only by denomination, including “unaffiliated,” but also by frequency of church attendance:



Finally, a graph I made myself from data taken from the European Union and the paper on acceptance of evolution (from the 2006 Science paper by Miller et al.) in 32 countries.  The negative correlation is clear and statistically significant (the circled point is the US, #31 out of 32—above only Turkey— in acceptance of evolution).  Now this correlation could mean several things, including that those countries whose residents learn and accept Darwinism become less religious, but I think that the explanation is the other way round:  in those countries whose citizens are most religious, people are conditioned by their religious teachings to reject evolution.

The last part of Brown’s article is bizarre: not only does he draw a sharp distinction between students who are creationist because they’re religious rather than intellectually lazy, but says that that distinction is important in helping student accept evolution:

The distinction I am making here is one between being wrong, as the biblical creationist or intelligent designer is, and not even getting that far, like the wholly irreligious child who leaves school thinking, if he thinks about it at all, that the Earth is around 10,000 years old, and dinosaurs and cavemen probably did live side by side.

The question, then, is which kind of pupil does more harm in the science classroom. Is it the passionately wrong child, or the dully indifferent one? Which would you rather argue with, and which argument would teach the rest of the class more? . . .

. . . But let’s assume a classroom that has already taught the fundamentals of learning: where facts are true, whether you like them or not, and where arguments are examined on their merits, and not on the political force behind them.In such a hypothetical classroom, is it really a catastrophe if some child comes in and says that he knows evolution is false and gives some wholly spurious scientific explanation?

First of all, I don’t know of any teacher who would suppress questions about creationism from a student.  When that happens (rarely) in my undergraduate class at Chicago, I try to deal with them honestly and respectfully, showing why the creationist assertions are wrong.  And what does it matter if those questions come from a student who is religious versus simply ignorant? Both provide those vaunted “teachable moments.”

At the end, Brown simply can’t resist getting in a lick at the atheist anti-creationists (read “Dawkins”) for their hauteur and arrogance:

The experiment I am describing has to some extent already been played out over the last 30 years, on the internet. There, the arguments between “scientific creationists” and real scientists have resulted in the creation of a vast collection of arguments and facts showing that evolution is in fact observable, and, in a word, true. . .

. . . So perhaps we could stipulate that this material could be produced without sneering at the intellect and character, and without the ambition to crush their egos as well as to prove them wrong – ah, but that would require a different kind of education, in another classroom.

Umm. . . has Brown really read the wealth of material produced by scientists, popular writers, and educators to support evolution and dispel creationist arguments? Has he read, for instance, Why Evolution is True?  I don’t think he’d find a lot of ego-crushing and sneering in there, or in most of the other material designed to show the student why evolution is true and creationism isn’t.

The man is maddeningly obtuse.

New York Times bestsellers

September 22, 2011 • 9:31 am

Well, this is a bit dispiriting.  Reading the Sunday NYT book section, I find among the 20 paperback bestsellers these three (with relative ranking and the paper’s description):

1.  Heaven is for Real, by Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent.  A boy’s encounter with Jesus and the angels.

8.  The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, by Kevin Malarkey [!!] and Alex Malarkey.  After a coma, an incredible story.

17.  90 Minutes in Heaven, by Don Piper with Cecil Murphey.  A minister on the otherworldly experience he had after an accident.

The kicker? These are on the nonfiction list!

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”  —Hebrews 11:1

Oy vey!: Jewish creationism.

September 22, 2011 • 5:35 am

From Failed Messiah.com (what a great name!) comes this report on a Jewish creationist exhibit:

And JPACNY’s (Jewish Political Action Committee’s) announcement, verbatim

Wednesday afternoon on the upper westside on Manhattan,home to New yorks largest secular Jewish community will witness a scene never seen anywhere before. Young Chareidi activists will display stuffed animals with their babys and cubs to proove evolution is a myth. This is the first time that such a program is going public as a means to do outreach to secular Jews especially before Rosh hashonah,the Jewish new year. It is being organized by a small very vocal group known as JPAC Jewish political Action committee. In the past JPAC had its anti gay marriage campaign carried by Associated press which posted pictures of a stuffed dog hinting that today man marrys man and soon man marrys dog. The picture was picked up by over 2000 newspapers worldwide. In fact the iconic dog used in that photo is once again going to appear this time to fight the ideas of evolution.

I’m not sure which is more embarrassing to me:  Jewish creationists who make really stupid arguments, or Jews who can’t write and spell.

Want evolutionary change? Wait a million years.

September 22, 2011 • 4:12 am

The question of the pattern of stasis (no change) versus gradualism (persistent and continuous change) in the fossil record continues.  A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Uyeda et al. comprises a huge survey and analysis of morphological change in animals (mammals, birds, squamate reptiles, and primates) over ten million years.  The purpose was to determine whether change between species in one trait—body size—accumulates gradually with the passage of time since species diverged, or whether that change is more episodic.  What they did was take a tremendous amount of data from three sources: current field studies of the rate of evolutionary change, fossil data showing change (again, this is all body size) through time, and estimates of rate of body-size divergence from living organisms whose divergence times can be estimated from molecular data.

Uyeda et al. then plotted the divergence in body size between related species (measured as proportional change, thus requiring a log scale) versus the divergence time. The graph below tells the tale: they see what they call a “blunderbuss” pattern, with not much change accumulating between species until they’ve diverged for about a million years, and then change occurring more rapidly and cumulatively after a million years.  I’ve put the caption at the bottom for those who want more information:

What we see here is that up to about a million years of divergence, there is some change between species, but it’s “bounded,” that is, it doesn’t tend to accumulate over time.  Then, after about a million years after divergence, body size starts changing without bounds, accumulating over time.  This pattern holds for the reptiles, primates, non-primate mammals, and birds.

There authors do all kinds of analyses, and test other explanations, but the pattern seems robust, and is not predicted by some models of morphological evolution, including models involving simple Brownian motion of body size (probably through genetic drift).  The best-fitting models involve a period of bounded evolution, in which body size is allowed to fluctuate, but between narrow limits, for a period, and then after that period multiple bursts of more extensive evolution can occur.

But what evolutionary process would keep a trait like body size fairly constant for a while and then, after a million years, allow rapid divergence?  The authors don’t have a firm explanation, but suggest this: for much of a species’ history, populations exchange genes, and each population might be drawn in different directions from others by natural selection. (Some populations may be selected to be large, others small.)  This genetic interchange among populations within a species keeps the species as a whole from undergoing wholesale change, although there are period of minor fluctuations such that the optimum body size of a species changes a bit for all populations, explaining the slight divergence over short time scales.  This optimum can reverse itself (sometimes it’s good to be big, perhaps when there is more food available; at other times, when there’s scarcity, it might be good to be small), but there’s no large directional change in selection pressures that would make all populations go in a single direction over a long period of time.

Why does big change happen after a million years, then?  The authors suggest that those big changes in natural selection that are persistent and affect all populations of a species, simply occur rarely. (Climate change is one factor that might obviously change body size in a directional way, but the author rule that out for several reasons.) As they say, “such significant, range-wide changes in selective optima may be sufficiently rare to explain the observed pattern of bounded evolution on time scales of <1 Myr [million years]”.  They also suggest that perhaps the range size of a species may also rarely contract to a small size—perhaps only a single population—that can respond to selective pressures without being held back by contervailing pressures in other populations, and then the (smaller) species can undergo rapid and unimpeded change.

I should add that the time scale for formation of a new species, though it varies greatly among groups, is typically on the order of 1-2 million years as well (Allen Orr and I give a table of this in the last chapter of our book, Speciation.) If speciation (which we consider to be the evolution of reproductive isolating barriers) is often a byproduct of changes in morphological traits like body size (themselves often driven by natural selection), then one might expect a similar “blunderbuss” plot of reproductive isolation versus divergence time.

We don’t have that information, and I’m not convinced that Uyeda et al. have the correct explanation for their data (to be fair, they offer only tentative explanations).  The “blunderbuss” pattern also needs to be tested for traits other than body size.  But if it holds, then we’ll have a new evolutionary phenomenon to explain.  We certainly haven’t run out of evolutionary problems!

______

Uyeda, J. C., T. F. Hansen, S. J. Arnold, and  J. Pienaar  2011.  The million-year wait for macroevolutionary bursts.  Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA  108:15908-15913.

(Here’s the caption from the figure for you science geeks who want more info:

Fig. 1. The “blunderbuss pattern”, showing the relationship between evolutionary divergence and elapsed time. Divergence is measured as the difference between the means of log-transformed size in two populations (ln za and ln zb) standardized by the dimensionality, k. Intervals represent the total elapsed evolutionary time between samples. Microevolutionary data include longitudinal (allochronic) and cross-sectional (synchronic) field studies from extant populations. Paleontological divergence is measured from time series, including both stratigraphically adjacent (autonomous) populations and averaged longer-term trends (nonautonomous). We supplement these data with node-averaged divergence between species with intervals obtained from time-calibrated phylogenies. Pairwise comparisons between species (small points) are also presented to give a visual sense of the range of divergence values across taxonomic groups. Dotted lines indicate the expected 95% confidence interval for the multiple-burst model fitted tothe microevolutionary, fossil, and node-averaged phylogenetic data.)

Dead man walking

September 21, 2011 • 12:46 pm

In four hours the life of Troy Davis will be snuffed out by the state of Georgia.  What will happen is something like this scene from Dead Man Walking (NOTE: besides the execution, there’s a bit of graphic violence, so don’t watch of you’re squeamish).

If we’re going to do this—and many people are happy that we do it—then it should be televised.  Those who favor the death penalty need to know exactly what it involves.

The ugly, vicious, fanatical side of atheism

September 21, 2011 • 6:19 am

A handful of atheists (15 to be exact) did a horrible, horrible thing in Huntington, Beach, California last week.  Did they throw acid in the faces of schoolgirls? Did they mutilate the genitals of young women? Did they threaten children who masturbated with the threat of hell? Did they make little girls wear cloth sacks, and not venture out without a male relative?

No, none of that. It was far worse.  Their crime? They ripped up pages of the Bible. No, not even pages of the Bible: some photocopies of Bible verses (watch the video here).   Actually, one particularly vicious and militant atheist did desecrate a single page of the scriptures.

But that was enough for author and rabbi Brad Hirshfield’s to write an intemperate column at the “On Faith” section of the Washington Post: “When atheism turns ugly.”  He argues that the destruction of texts is the opposite of free thought (note: they did not destroy any texts; they destroyed some photocopies), an act of fanaticism connoting a complete lack of respect for faith:

If atheists/agnostics/freethinkers/humanists object to being insulted and talked down to by people of faith, as well they should, perhaps they should refrain from the same behavior. While they may not draw on traditions such as “Love your neighbor as yourself,” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” or “Love your enemy,” there are plenty of parallel teachings in secular thought which are just as ennobling. . .

. . . The issue is making the choice to read as seriously those teachings which dignify the lives and faiths of those with whom we disagree, as we do those teachings which don’t. That we fail to do so, so often, says more about us than about the traditions we follow. It’s about the perennial need, felt by so many people, to undermine the beliefs of others in order to feel good about the beliefs which animate their own lives.

Note what Bruce Gleason of the atheist group actually said about the act (in the video):  “But we’re here just to demonstrate a point. We’re not here to desecrate the Bible; we’re not here to burn the Bible: actually, we think a lot of the part of the Bible are GREAT.  But they’re good for goodness’ sake, for humanity’s sake—not because they’re delivered by God. ”

Yes, we can read the Bible and the Qur’an seriously (after all, parts of the Bible are great literature, though I haven’t found great prose in the Qur’an), but we don’t have to read them as “true”, or treat them with respect.  Should we read the ridiculous tenets of Scientology, or the equally ludicrous tales of Mormonim—all palpable fiction—with respect?  Why?—especially if those fictions motivate pernicious social consequences in our world. Just remember the things that the words of the Bible have been used to justify: slavery, persecution of homosexuals, oppression of women, and so on.  We don’t undermine those beliefs in order to feel good about our atheism, we do it to help make a better world—one free of debilitating superstitions.

And Hirschfield draws the usual parallel between atheists and religious fundamentalists:

No, this was simply one more time when people fanatically attached to their own view of things felt that their sense of things was so true, it justified trampling on the views and sensitivities of others. More than anything, what these people proved was the old adage that the longer that parties are involved in a conflict, the more alike they become.

This is all very curious.  For there are many nonreliigous ideas to which people are equally attached, and yet attacking those ideas does not unleash accusations of fanaticism. Take the 2008 Republic Party platform.  I despise it and everything its adherents stand for, and would gladly tear it to bits in public.  Would Republicans then act with outrage, accusing me of being “ugly,” a “fanatic” or a “militant”? I doubt it: it wouldn’t even make the news.  Why not?

What this clearly shows, which we knew already, is that religion is different from all other modes of thought and belief.  It’s considered unseeemly and disrespectful to criticize belief in God, but not belief in the death penalty, low taxes for millionaires, or opposition to universal healthcare.  I don’t yet really understand this difference between religion and politics (readers might explain it to me), but it’s one of the prime motivating forces behind the New Atheism. Why do corporations, but not churches, have to pay taxes? New Atheists want, above all, to undo the undeserved respect attached to anything connected with faith.

When Rabbi Hirschfield fulminates against atheism, he might remember some of the things done in the name of Judaism, including biting off the foreskins of newborn Jewish boys (causing more than one case of sexually transmitted disease to the children), and, in the more conservative sects, turning women into second-class citizens, regarded as unclean during menstruation and forced to attend synagogue behind a screen.  And he might also remember what the word  “fanatic” really means.

I can’t resist showing again this well-worn cartoon: