It's the Real World

What On Earth . . . .?

Quantum physics has captivated not just physicists, but laymen.  Why?  Because it's so weird.  No-one can explain it.  

Playwright Tom Stoppard provides this description of what appears to be happening in the world of electrons and sub-atomic particles.

The particle world is the dream world of the intelligence officer.  An electron can be here or there at the same moment.  You can choose.  It can go from here to there without going in between; it can pass through two doors at the same time, or from one door to another by a path which is there for all to see, until someone looks, and then the act of looking has made it take a different path.

Its movements cannot be anticipated because it has no reasons.  It defeats surveillance because when you know what it is doing you can't be certain where it is, and when you know where it is you can't be certain what it's doing: Heisenberg's uncertainty principle; and this is not because you're not looking carefully enough, it is because there is no such thing as an electron with a definite position and definite momentum; you fix one, you lose the other, and it's all done without tricks, it's the real world, it is awake.  [Cited in Jeremy Bernstein, Quantum Leaps (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 85f.]

Matter appears to have a life of its own--hence Stoppard's description of it being "awake".

The Smallest Is Not the Simplest

More Time, Please

We have made reference to the discombobulation taking place in the Academy over the speculative theories of Evolutionism.  No-one takes Darwinism seriously any more.  OK--that's a bit of an exaggeration, but the greatest advocates for it these days are more likely to be non-scientists, publicists, politicians or media starlets [using the term in a gender neutral sense.]

The Chattering Classes find comfort and solace in continuing to embrace Evolutionism: scientists not so much.  One reason for the scientific discomfort arises out of the labs where electron microscopes are deployed to investigate living cells.  Electron microscopes represent a technological advance, allowing researchers to study heretofore hidden aspects of living cells.  It has produced an entirely new scientific discipline: microbiology.

The Evolutionist paradigm has (allegedly) primitive lifeforms being simple and basic.  As chance does its wondrous work, eventually the primitive life form becomes more and more complex.  Higher life forms self-evolve into being.  Amazing! said the elephant.  This just-so story, repeated endlessly and illustrated with sparkling pictures of amoeba evolving into glorious racing horses, has to be most certainly true, because it looks so marvellous, glorious, and grand.  It turns out it's nothing more than a fairy story.  But in previous generations scientists embraced it with all the fervour of religious devotees.  Besides, it helped them find work.

Now the disciplines and discoveries of micro-biology have exploded the myths.

Relearning the Basics

Stumped

At the heart of quantum mechanics is a paradox--some would say an antinomy--which just does not "make sense".  The world of sub-atomic reality (at least at present) remains a mystery.  At the heart of the problem is the assertion--based on experimentation and observation, coupled with mathematical formulations--that:

Light is both a wave and a particle, and it is both a wave and a particle at the same time.  This conclusion embodies a mystery, one that no subsequent analytical efforts have dissolved.  [David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretension (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p. 92.]

To which Berlinski mischievously appends

The mystery will not appear entirely unfamiliar to Christians persuaded of the threefold aspect of the deity.  If light is a particle and a wave, religious believers might observe, God is a Father, a Son, and a Holy Ghost.  This is not an analogy that has captured the allegiance of scientific atheists.  [Ibid., p. 93.]  

It seems as if the very building blocks of matter exist by means of an antinomy which appears rationally inexplicable.  At least to our minds.  Matter appears random at root--but, and here is another paradox--upon such foundations the order and regularity of the cosmos is built.  Go figure.

Letter From America (About Facing the Truth)

Doctor’s Conversion From Atheism to Christianity 

Inspiration for a Central Character in Major Hollywood Film

TheBlaze

Apr. 3, 2014 11:51am  

Billy Hallowell 

Martin Yip is one of the main characters in “God’s Not Dead,” the Christian movie thatstunned observers with its impressive performance at the box office about a student who debates an atheist professor on the existence of God.  Yip’s character, an atheist who converts to Christianity after meeting protagonist Josh Wheaton on campus, is actually based on a real-life doctor who went through a similar experience decades ago.

Dr. Ming Wang, an eye surgeon in Nashville, Tenn., was studying in the U.S. when he became a follower of Jesus.  His story, captured in the 2013 book “God’s Not Dead” (the book preceded the film), began in China, where he grew up with parents who taught at a medical school, according to the Tennessean.
Watch Wang share his story on TBN below:

Rational Irrationalism

Quantum Mechanics and the Big Bang

The reviewer for the Dallas Morning News must have been having a bad hair day.  He or she declared that Leon Lederman's The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question (New York: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006) was "the funniest book about physics ever written."  If that were true, physics must be world's apart from sophisticated humour.  Closer to the truth is Lederman's penchant for geeky humour, which often falls flat and is overdone.  Hardly humorous, unless the author was engaged in self-parody, which would be another matter entirely. 

But, humour aside, as a book about particle physics, Lederman's The God Particle is pretty good.  It covers all the usual "stuff".  The micro-world of the atom is counter-intuitive and abnormal (as far as our human experience is concerned).  Federman writes

So forget about normal; expect shock, disbelief.  Niels Bohr, one of the founders, said that anyone who isn't shocked by quantum theory doesn't understand it.  Richard Feynman asserted that no one understands quantum theory.  (Op cit., p. 143f)

 The overwhelming impression for the non-specialist lay reader is of extreme complexity in the micro-world of matter.

Foundering Rocks, Part III

 Lip Service in the Academy

In the scientific community the vast majority of scientists accept evolutionism on the basis of authority.  "I believe evolutionism to be true because everyone else does" is the actual epistemic state of play of this bizarre theory.  After all, evolution calls for billions of years in order to work its "magic".  In terms of the theory, no-one is able to be around that long.  Proving the theory to be true by means of scientific experimentation is impossible from the get-go.

It has been intriguing to watch experimental physicists strive mightily, expending great effort and expense to prove their theories about the state and nature of the atom and the existence, behaviour, and function of sub-atomic particles.  The Hadron Collider is just one example, albeit the largest, of experimental equipment built to confirm or deny the kaleidoscope of theories about how atoms are and work.  But when it comes to evolutionism, nada.  There ain't no Darwinian Collider.

Foundering Rocks, Part II

The More We Know, The Harder it Gets

The burgeoning science of biochemistry, aided by the technological ability to study bio-molecules that has been developed of the past fifty or so years, has been startled with the complexity of living cells.  Not only are they complex, the actions they perform and the results they produce are "mission critical".  Failure is not an option in many cases. 

Most, if not all, of these complex functions are taken for granted by human beings.  Take one very ordinary function: blood clotting.  Biochemistry has established that this ordinary function is far, far more complex than ever previously thought.  The huge scientific challenge for evolutionists is to demonstrate how it came to be--by means of natural selection. They need to demonstrate how natural selection actually worked.  To date, even though the vast majority of biochemical scientists profess to be evolutionists, the silence is deafening. 

Michael J Behe endeavours to explain the complexity of the clotting "system" and the subsequent problem for evolutionary theory:

Foundering Rocks

The Devil Is in the Details

One of the great mythical mantras of our age is the evolution of life.  It really has been a matter of repetition making certain.  Repeat the mantra endless times, confirm that everyone else is chanting the same mantra, and hey presto, it must be true.  However, the appeals to numbers and to authority have always been fallacious--and remain so to this day.

One thing has changed, however.  Scientific analysis and research have discovered far, far more about life than was once known.  Michael Behe, a molecular biologist who has rejected Darwinism as a viable theoretical explanation for life  summarises recent discoveries and their implications for Darwinism.

More Time Please . . .

Irreducibly Complex

How often have we heard the refrain, "It's more complex than we thought."  We have heard it in evolutionary biology, sotto voce of course.  The narrative of evolutionists is that primitive life forms are simple; if they are simple, it is an evidence of their age and early positioning on the evolutionary tree.  Man is the most complex  creature: therefore, a late development on the evolutionary tree--at least, that's what the "just-so" story of evolutionism would have us believe.

A problem in the narrative arises when it becomes evident that some of the allegedly oldest and most primitive creatures on the planet are also incredibly complex.  Take, for example, the "most primitive" deep sea dwellers.  Their large compound eyes are far, far more complexly constructed than initially assumed.

Another evolutionist narrative is that due to evolutionary forces human beings have a lot of "junk" in their systems.  This is "stuff" which once was useful, but as evolution took place, became redundant or superseded and so was made inert.  The appendix and tonsils are organs which evolutionists in days gone by have interpreted in that way.

So with research into human genetics.