James Webb Telescope FINALLY Proves The Big Bang Theory Is Wrong?

 

The Science Delusion by Rupert Sheldrake - A review

                                 

                                  The Science Delusion - Sheldrake 

                                The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke

We must find a new way of understanding human beings

• 
• • Mary Midgley
  • The Guardian, Friday 27 January 2012 09.00 GMT

Dogs: do they really know when you're coming home? Photograph: Laurie and Charles/Getty Images

The unlucky fact that our current form of mechanistic materialism rests on muddled, outdated notions of matter isn't often mentioned today. It's a mess that can be ignored for everyday scientific purposes, but for our wider thinking it is getting very destructive. We can't approach important mind-body topics such as consciousness or the origins of life while we still treat matter in 17th-century style as if it were dead, inert stuff, incapable of producing life. And we certainly can't go on pretending to believe that our own experience – the source of all our thought – is just an illusion, which it would have to be if that dead, alien stuff were indeed the only reality.

 

We need a new mind-body paradigm, a map that acknowledges the many kinds of things there are in the world and the continuity of evolution. We must somehow find different, more realistic ways of understanding human beings – and indeed other animals – as the active wholes that they are, rather than pretending to see them as meaningless consignments of chemicals.

Rupert Sheldrake, who has long called for this development, spells out this need forcibly in his new book. He shows how materialism has gradually hardened into a kind of anti-Christian faith, an ideology rather than a scientific principle, claiming authority to dictate theories and to veto inquiries on topics that don't suit it, such as unorthodox medicine, let alone religion. He shows how completely alien this static materialism is to modern physics, where matter is dynamic. And, to mark the strange dilemmas that this perverse fashion poses for us, he ends each chapter with some very intriguing "Questions for Materialists", questions such as "Have you been programmed to believe in materialism?", "If there are no purposes in nature, how can you have purposes yourself?", "How do you explain the placebo response?" and so on.

In short, he shows just how unworkable the assumptions behind today's fashionable habits have become. The "science delusion" of his title is the current popular confidence in certain fixed assumptions – the exaltation of today's science, not as the busy, constantly changing workshop that it actually is but as a final, infallible oracle preaching a crude kind of materialism.

In trying to replace it he needs, of course, to suggest alternative assumptions. But here the craft of paradigm-building has chronic difficulties. Our ancestors only finally stopped relying on the familiar astrological patterns when they had grown accustomed to machine-imagery instead – first becoming fascinated by the clatter of clockwork and later by the ceaseless buzz of computers, so that they eventually felt sure that they were getting new knowledge. Similarly, if we are told today that a mouse is a survival-machine, or that it has been programmed to act as it does, we may well feel that we have been given a substantial explanation, when all we have really got is one more optional imaginative vision – "you can try looking at it this way".

That is surely the right way to take new suggestions – not as rival theories competing with current ones but as extra angles, signposts towards wider aspects of the truth. Sheldrake's proposal that we should think of natural regularities as habits rather than as laws is not just an arbitrary fantasy. It is a new analogy, brought in to correct what he sees as a chronic exaggeration of regularity in current science. He shows how carefully research conventions are tailored to smooth out the data, obscuring wide variations by averaging many results, and, in general, how readily scientists accept results that fit in with their conception of eternal laws.

He points out too, that the analogy between natural regularities and habit is not actually new. Several distinctly non-negligible thinkers – CS Peirce, Nietzsche, William James,AN Whitehead – have already suggested it because they saw the huge difference between the kind of regularity that is found among living things and the kind that is expected of a clock or a calcium atom.

Whether or no we want to follow Sheldrake's further speculations on topics such asmorphic resonance, his insistence on the need to attend to possible wider ways of thinking is surely right. And he has been applying it lately in fields that might get him an even wider public. He has been making claims about two forms of perception that are widely reported to work but which mechanists hold to be impossible: a person's sense of being looked at by somebody behind them, and the power of animals – dogs, say – to anticipate their owners' return. Do these things really happen?

Sheldrake handles his enquiries soberly. People and animals do, it seems, quite often perform these unexpected feats, and some of them regularly perform them much better than others, which is perhaps not surprising. He simply concludes that we need to think much harder about such things.

Orthodox mechanistic believers might have been expected to say what they think is wrong with this research. In fact, not only have scientists mostly ignored it but, more interestingly still, two professed champions of scientific impartiality, Lewis Wolpert and Richard Dawkins, who did undertake to discuss it, reportedly refused to look at the evidence (see two pages in this book). This might indeed be a good example of what Sheldrake means by the "science delusion".

DRS in the parallel universe

JANUARY 1, 2014
Jon Hotten in Cricinfo 

India may not use DRS, but the decisions they receive from umpires today are tinged with a DRS worldview  © Getty Images

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The theory of multiple universes was developed by an academic physicist called Hugh Everett. He was proposing an answer to the famous paradox of Schrödinger's Cat, a thought experiment in which the animal is both alive and dead until observed in one state or the other.

Everett's idea was that every outcome of any event happened somewhere - in the case of the cat, it lived in one universe and died in another. All possible alternative histories and futures were real. It was a mind-bending thought, but then the sub-atomic world operates on such scales. Everett's idea was dismissed at first, and wasn't accepted as a mainstream interpretation in its field until after his death in 1982. Like most theories in physics, its nature is essentially ungraspable by the layman - certainly by me - but superficially it chimes with one of the sports fan's favourite question, the "what-if". And after all, the DRS has produced a moment when a batsman can be both in and out to exactly the same ball. 

There came a point during the fourth Test in Melbourne, as Monty Panesar bowled to Brad Haddin with Australia at 149 for 6 in reply to England's 255, when Monty had what looked like a stone-dead LBW shout upheld. Haddin reviewed, as the match situation demanded he must, and the decision was overturned by less than the width of a cricket ball.

In the second Test in Durban, Dale Steyn delivered the first ball of the final day to Virat Kohli with India on 68 for 2, 98 runs behind South Africa. The ball brushed his shoulder and the umpire sent him on his way. India don't use DRS, and so the on-field decision stood.

When the fans of the future stare back through time at the scorecards of both games, they will look at wins by wide margins - eight wickets for Australia and ten wickets for South Africa. They might not notice these "what-if" events.

Yet it's worth a thought as to what might have happened should England have had another 50 or 60 runs in the bank on first innings, and India the in-form Kohli at the crease to take the morning wrath of Steyn. Test cricket has a capacity to develop thin cracks into chasms as wide as the cracks in a WACA pitch, and the game is full of subtle changes that discharge their payload further down the line.

The thought that somewhere out there is a universe without DRS for England and with it for India is no consolation to the losing sides, but such moments highlight the ongoing flux within the system.

As soon as Kohli was fired out, Twitter was filled with comments along the lines of: "Bet they wish they had DRS now", but as one voice amongst the clamour noted: "India don't deserve poor umpiring because they don't want DRS."

That point had weight. Even in games without the system it retains its impact because it has reshaped the way umpires and players approach the game. India will, for example, still have batsmen given out leg before wicket while stretching well down the pitch in the post-DRS manner, because the worldview of the umpire has been changed by what he has seen on its monitors. Players bat and bowl differently, and umpires give different decisions, because of what DRS has shown them.

The retirement of Graeme Swann was something of a milestone in this respect. His career would have been significantly altered had he not been such a master of exploiting the conditions created by DRS. He knew how to bowl to get front-foot LBW decisions. In response, batsmen have had to adapt their techniques when playing spin bowlers.

In this way and in others, DRS has become knitted into the fabric of Test cricket, whether it is being used or not. Were it to be withdrawn now, its effects would still exist, and irrevocably so.

But India's aversion still has its merits. It's now thuddingly obvious that DRS will never be used for its original purpose, the eradication of the obvious mistake. Instead, it has, in a classic case of function-creep, become the sentry of the fine margin, inserting itself into places where its own deficiencies are highlighted. The Ashes series in England was inflamed by a malfunctioning Hotspot. The Ashes series in Australia has revealed that umpires no longer seem to check the bowler for front-foot no-balls.

The outsourcing of DRS technology remains a paradox worthy of Schrödinger. TV companies have to pay for it, and the developers of the system have a commercial reason to stress its accuracies. Such truths sit uneasily with the notion of fairness and impartiality. Similarly, players have been radicalised into ersatz umpires, having to choose whether or not to have decisions made. Such randomness also impinges on impartiality.

It's hard to think of something more implacable as a piece of machinery, and yet cricket has found a way to politicise it, and it's this, at heart, where India's objections lay. They have a point.

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Is it time to rewrite the laws of physics?

By Tom Chivers in The Telegraph  

'Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so,” said Ford Prefect in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. For the past century, mainstream physics has agreed with him. To most of us, it seems obvious that the world is moving steadily forward through time, from a known past, through an active present, into a mysterious future. But, as Einstein said, “physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one”.

“Mainstream physics basically eliminates time as a fundamental aspect of nature,” explains Prof Lee Smolin, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Ontario, Canada. “It does that in various ways, but the most common is the so-called 'block universe’ picture, which is derived from general relativity.”

Under this system, what is actually real is not our passage through time, but the whole of reality at once. “Imagine taking a movie of your life,” says Prof Smolin, “and laying out the frames on a table, and saying: that is your life. There is no now, there is no change.”

He thinks that it is high time – so to speak – this view was overturned. In his new book Time Reborn, he makes the case that time is a fundamental reality of the universe, and that without it, too many of the big questions of physics are left unanswerable.

The question of what time is, and whether it is real or illusory, is an ancient one. Even before Plato, Greek philosophers were debating whether, as Heraclitus said, you cannot step in the same river twice, that all is flux and change, or whether Parmenides was right and that change is an illusion, that the universe simply exists as an unchanging lump.

The first person to address the issue in depth, according to Dr Julian Barbour, author of The End of Time, was St Augustine. He was baffled by it, and said as much. “What then is time?” Augustine wrote. “If no one asks of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.” Still, he did make an attempt to explain it, coming to the surprisingly modern conclusion that there could not have been time before the world, because there would have been no change, and without change, time is meaningless.

Sir Isaac Newton, a thousand years later, disagreed. He held the common-sense view – instinctively shared by the rest of us – that time is absolute, marching on regardless of the doings of the stuff of the universe. It was Einstein who showed that it was no such thing. According to his theories of relativity, time and space are part of an interwoven fabric: the presence of matter changes both, stretching the fabric like a weight on a sheet.

His theories are counterintuitive – arguing that someone who is travelling ages slower than someone who is standing still, and that time goes faster the further we get from the surface of the Earth – but at least, in his universe, there is such a thing as time.

“Einstein, in a way, makes time something real – with the idea of space-time, he makes it as real as space,” says Dr Barbour. But there is a fundamental difference, which leads us to one of the great problems with our concept of time: “We get the impression that we are always moving through time, when we can perfectly happily sit still and have no impression that we are moving through space. That’s a very big mystery, because the laws of physics work exactly the same way whether you run them forwards or backwards.”

Clearly, that is not how we perceive the world. We see babies be born, grow old and die; water flowing downhill; and wood burning to ash. “If you drop an egg on the floor, it breaks, and there is no way you can put that egg back together again,” says Dr Barbour.

This is due to a property called entropy, or disorder. The second law of thermodynamics dictates that the universe will move from ordered, low-entropy states to disordered, high-entropy states: ice will melt and coffee will cool, until everything is the same temperature, and everything is mixed together in an undifferentiated mass. “According to the fundamental laws of physics as we know them, it shouldn’t make any difference which way you look at them. And yet it is clearly the case that entropy increases,” Dr Barbour says.

That leaves an awful lot of questions unanswered – which is where Prof Smolin’s ideas come in. “The second law dictates that any system in disequilibrium should come quickly to equilibrium,” he points out. “But our universe, even though it’s more than 13 billion years old, is very far from equilibrium.”

This is due to particular facts about the laws of physics – such as the strength of gravity, or the precise set of particles we observe – and the very specific way that the universe began. But Prof Smolin points out that we still do not know why those laws are as they are, or why the universe should have started in its particular way: “There seems to be no simple principle that picks out the standard model of particle physics from a vast number of equally likely possibilities.” Uncountable billions of other universes could have existed in which there would be no stars, no planets, and no us.

Prof Smolin’s point is that, for modern physics, in which time is treated as an illusion, this question is unanswerable. “The initial conditions and laws, in the block universe model, are just part of the universe. It would be like asking a computer to explain the program it’s running.” But if we treat the laws as things that could have been different had history gone differently, or that can change with time, “then time has to exist prior to those laws, and then it has to be real in a way that the block universe doesn’t allow”.

There is a risk with much of theoretical physics that it strays into a realm of philosophy, away from the science of experiment and reality. Prof Smolin insists that this is not the case: his idea of “real time” includes hypotheses that make testable predictions. One such experiment might be to use quantum computers, which, in theory, will be able to detect the evolution of physical laws. Dr Barbour (whose book tends to support the time-is-an-illusion school of thought), says that observations of astronomical phenomena called gamma-ray bursts might also show violations of Einstein’s laws at the universe’s smallest scale – although so far, he says, they have proved remarkably robust.

If Prof Smolin is right, he believes that it will have implications far beyond academic physics. “A lot of our thinking about many things, from the nature of being human to political and environmental problems, are poisoned by the belief that the future is already determined and that we can’t find truly novel solutions,” he says. “For example, in economics, the insistence that the laws are formalised in a timeless mathematical setting, like Newtonian physics, leads to some incorrect ideas, which helped contribute to the economic disaster of 2008.” A model of the world in which “the future is open, and the universe can discover novel structures, novel ideas, creates a very different idea of our possibilities” – and could lead to some very different thinking.

Whether he’s right or not, only time itself will tell. Certainly, physics has done away with the concept of time for so long that simply saying that it is real feels almost revolutionary.