UFO Religions

Archive for the ‘Theoretical Physics’ Category

I just came across my lecture from the 2003 God, Man, and ET Conference on YouTube. The event was hosted at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. I participated in the planning of the event. Aside from myself, the speakers were Dr. Hugh Ross, Dr. Paul Nelson, Richard Hoagland, and the late David Flynn.Cheryl Jones was MC and my good friend and former teaching colleague Doug Vardell served as moderator.

I had no idea it was on YouTube. You can watch it below (be patient, it takes 8-9 minutes to actually get to the lecture, and the whole thing is one hour and twenty minutes long).

I also found the panel discussion from the event (also over an hour long). Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Christianity, conference, David Flynn, ET, extraterrestrial life, fundamentalism, God, Heiser, Hoagland, Hugh Ross, judaism, man, Paul Nelson, religion

I just listened to a short podcast from the Skeptoid blog entitled, “Are We Alone.” It’s a good, succinct survey of the problems and obstacles to being optimistic about other inhabited worlds and intelligent civilizations — in terms of there being such a thing, our ever knowing it, and how our civilization and that one would ever detect each other. If you are a zealot about how there *must* be ET life, this might depress you (but a cold dose of reality is good for you). Nevertheless, the Skeptoid host still feels optimistic, but not because of any actual science. I know what he means. It just seems like there might be other worlds with life, but even so, the odds against there ever being contact are formidable. Have a listen!

Technorati Tags: drake equation, ET Life, extraterrestrial

I found this recent post entitled, “Is This the Dumbest Ever ‘Refutation’ of the Fine-Tuning Argument Ever?” worth the read (and a bit funny). It’s about some very poor thinking on the part of British philosopher Anthony Grayling with respect to his disdain of the fine-tuning argument often associated with the intelligent design movement.

I don’t often post things like this here, but examples like this are worth it. Part of the debate over the likelihood of ET life is linked to the debate over the alleged probability that other planets *must* be out there capable of supporting ET life. The other side is the “rare earth” view — that earth is alone (or probably alone) in being home to intelligent life and even complex life forms. That view is consistent with the fine-tuning argument, which posits earth is capable of supporting life because the universe is “fine-tuned” to make that possible. The term naturally implies intelligent design, but there are some fine-tuning proponents that don’t make God part of the equation.

Technorati Tags: aliens, extraterrestrials, fine-tuning

I like to post on things like this every so often to remind readers that science can be marred by, and married to, hype. I was reading through some recent posts by mathematician Peter Woit on his Not Even Wrong blog this morning and came across several items worth offering my own readers here. After all, the multiverse and associated ideas are inextricably part of the ET life and deep space travel issues. I like Woit because he insists that mainstream ideas be probed for internal coherence and not simply embraced for their (pardon the pun) symmetry on the surface of things. Reminds me a lot of my dissertation work on the “obvious” evolution of Israelite monotheism. Anything but.

For those new to Woit, he is a mathematician at Columbia University whose PhD (Princeton) is in theoretical physics. He is most known for his book, Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law.

The first of Woit’s posts that caught my attention was entitled, “The Ultimate Guide to the Multiverse.” Some excerpts:

Yet another cover story about the Multiverse can be found this week at New Scientist, which calls it The Ultimate Guide to the Multiverse. As just one more in a long line of such stories over the last decade, a trend that shows no signs of slowing down, one can be pretty sure that this is not the yet the “ultimate” one, nor even the penultimate one.

The content is the usual: absolutely zero skepticism about the idea, and lots of outrageous hype from the usual suspects (Bousso, Tegmark, Susskind, etc.) We’re told that scientists are now performing tests of the idea, even at the LHC. The LHC test has been a great success: Laura Mersini-Houghton used the multiverse to predict that the LHC would not see supersymmetry, and that prediction has worked out very well so far.

This past week also saw the premiere of the Multiverse episode of Brian Greene’s Fabric of the Cosmos series on PBS. It’s more or less an hour-long infomercial for the Multiverse, with the argument against it pretty much restricted to some short grumpy comments by David Gross about how he didn’t like it. Brian’s pro-multiverse argument was that many new advances in physics are all pointing to a multiverse, and he showed support for the idea as resting on a three-legged structure. One of the legs was string theory, and I’ve described elsewhere recently how circular reasoning makes this one very shaky.

The multiverse propaganda machine has now been going full-blast for more than eight years, since at least 2003 or so, and I’m beginning to wonder “what’s next?”. Once your ideas about theoretical physics reach the point of having a theory that says nothing at all, there’s no way to take this any farther. You can debate the “measure problem” endlessly in academic journals, but the cover stories about how you have revolutionized physics can only go on so long before they reach their natural end of shelf-life.

Another post of a couple days ago saw Woit defending himself against ad hominem attacks from mainstream string theorists: “String and M-Theory: Answering the Critics.” Again, some excerpts.

Mike Duff has a new preprint out, a contribution to the forthcoming Foundations of Physics special issue on “Forty Years of String Theory” entitled String and M-theory: answering the critics. Much of it is the usual case string theorists are trying to make these days, but it also includes vigorous ad hominem attacks on Lee Smolin and me (I’m described as having an “unerring gift for inaccuracy”, and we’re compared to people who campaign against vaccination “in the face of mainstream scientific opinion”).

Duff explains that his motivation for answering the critics is that we have been successful on the public relations front, supposedly responsible for the British EPSRC “office rejecting” without peer review grant proposals on string theory. I know nothing of this, but I think it’s clear to everyone that the perception of string theory among physicists has changed, and not for the better, over the past decade. One dramatic way to see this is to notice that at this point, US physics departments have essentially stopped hiring string theorists for permanent appointments (i.e. at the tenure-track level).

Duff’s article contains an appendix about this, in the form of a “FAQ”, where he explains that he approved the text of the press release headlined “Researchers discover how to conduct first test of ‘untestable’ string theory” which is misleading hype by any standard. Initially someone who was successfully misled in the Imperial media team added the subtitle “New study suggests researchers can now test the ‘theory of everything’”, which was later removed. Duff claims that Shelly Glashow, Edward Witten and Jim Gates told journalists that they didn’t agree with this because of the “theory of everything” subtitle, implying that otherwise they were fine with the “first test of ‘untestable’ string theory” business (except for Gates noting that in any case this is just supergravity, not string theory). It would be interesting to hear from the three of them if they’re really on-board with this “first test of ‘untestable’ string theory”.

Technorati Tags: multiverse, Peter Woit, physics, skepticism, string theory

I’m not sure if the death of the multi-verse theory described in this obituary is correct, or if correct, whether that kills off the possibility of any other universe (shy of all the layers of the multi-verse).  I’m also not convinced that “other universe” is an adequate synonym for “alternate plane of reality” even though we use the former phrase to mean the latter all the time. If these two concepts are not identical, then having no other universes would not necessarily be problematic for those who post ETs are from another dimension, or those Christians who opt for aliens as “spiritual entities” (demons for the most part; note that the “spiritual world” needs to be another plane of reality).  Perhaps there are several reality planes within our single universe – ? Or maybe the problem is *this particular theory* of the multi-verse.

Any thoughts on the terminology problem or the general issue?

Technorati Tags: multiverse, skepticism, string theory, superstring, SUSY, universes