John Polkinghorne at St Paul’s

John Polkinghorne's signature on The God Delusion

On Friday, Halley Soc welcomed Dr John Polkinghorne to St Paul’s to talk on how science and religion work together. Lest this post turn into an enormous dissertation I will attempt to digress as little as possible from what he said, and merely restate some of his main arguments (the things that I wrote down) and explain why I think he’s wrong. All quotations are paraphrased since I didn’t write down every word he said. Apologies if I’ve misinterpreted some of the things he said.

He began by stating that religion is a search for truth, and that both science and religion rely to an extent on belief:

Both science and religion are a search for truth, and both rely on motivated belief

In my opinion, while science is a genuine search for truth, religion is in many cases the opposite. Looking at evidence, God seems to be no more than a convenient gap-filler for what humans do not know. When Pasteur turned up, disease was no longer a manifestation of God’s wrath but merely the action of millions of tiny microbes, and was treated with medicine instead of prayer. On the subject of belief, while science relies on believing measurements made by humans and machines, religion relies mostly on what a book full of contradictions is interpreted to say – which seems to be just about everything.

He subsequently said something about religion being a human version of science:

Science treats humans as objects. Humans are obviously not objects, thus need something else: religion

I think humans are objects. Just because we classify ourselves as intelligent life with complex emotions, we are governed by exactly the same laws as everything else. Emotions are simply manifestations of neurones firing and hormones and chemicals being released in the body (I’m no biologist but I’m pretty sure it’s something along those lines). However complicated the brain is, I believe there’s nothing to separate the mind from the brain than a different paradigm – fundamentally the mind is a function of the state of the brain. Humans are objects after all. Saying they are different things are a bit like saying the Newtonian paradigm contradicts the Hamiltonian one.

He used this argument to create an argument about beauty, specifically music:

When we hear music, we hear its beauty, and can appreciate that. This implies there is something other than science, and we call this other thing God

As above, beauty and emotions relating to it are merely functions of the brain, abstractions relating to certain neurones firing. Beauty is not an inherent part of the universe – we merely interpret it to be.

He then said that science and religion help each other:

Science helps religion by telling the world how the world works, about truth

‘Truth’ is the exact word he used (I wrote it down enclosed in quotation marks). If science tells religion the truth, his first statement must be false: religion can’t be told the truth and come up with it at the same time. More importantly and indeed disturbingly, he insists that religion can explain evolution:

God made the world so that creatures can evolve: rather than making homo sapiens with five fingers he created a world in which life can make itself. Life evolved from a ready-made world

Apparently it is more likely that we are living in a computer simulation than in a ‘real’ world (c.f. several New Scientist articles). So God is a computer programmer with a genetic algorithm. In a way I can believe that, after reading the articles. There’s still no justification for practising religion though – merely believing in a probability of there being a form of ‘god’, and only tenuously.

He then said Newton is proof of God:

Evolution cannot explain Isaac Newton: there is absolutely no evolutionary benefit for humans to be able to understand the cosmos

I think he’s made a mistake here. Of course there’s no evolutionary benefit for the ability to understand the universe and invent calculus, just as there’s no evolutionary benefit for a dolphin to be able to jump through hoops (I’m not intentionally comparing Newton to a dolphin). What allowed Newton to discover his laws was his intelligence and a high degree of intuition, undeniably qualities beneficial to an animal; qualities which enable it to survive better.

He fell back again to a beauty argument:

Science and Maths are beautiful: Mathematical equations and the way everything fits together is just so beautiful that it cannot exist without God. Quoting Wigner, ‘Mathematics is so unreasonably effective’. God must have made it that way

Personally I think there are three good reasons why science and maths yield such beautiful equations. The first is statistics. It is statistically likely that there will exist some beautiful equations, and some not so beautiful ones. Beautiful ones include e^iπ+1=0. Not so beautiful ones include the quadratic formula, or indeed the quartic formula. The second reason is that science and maths are based on very simple rules which can themselves be described as beautiful. Simplicity of certain solutions and results stem from the fact that the basis is fundamentally simple – there are many hidden fundamental underlying patterns interspersed throughout the sciences, which means you tend to end up with something quite nice. The third reason is that aesthetics are a human invention. Beauty doesn’t really exist – humans just assign that quality to certain things. So saying beauty proves god is circular: “God made man to invent beauty to prove God”.

The last part of his talk involved a well-known argument for intelligent design:

Life as we know it can’t exist without the parameters of our universe.

I have all sorts of objections to this and could get into the anthropic principle and keep going forever. He said ‘life as we know it’, citing specifically carbon-based life. He also said if those parameters were tweaked just slightly, we couldn’t exist. It’s possible though that a radical change in one or more of the parameters might still yield intelligent life. Who knows, that life might not even need photons.

Someone asked a question about the multiverse theory, a popular method to get round this problem. He replied that this is too speculative an idea. I asked whether he thought, if the idea of multiple universes (a part of many theories such as M-theory and the many-worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics) was too speculative, that God is too speculative. He said something about there being evidence for God and none for multiple universes. I asked him what he thought of David Deutsch’s idea that quantum computing is evidence for the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics as the computing power is too great to come from one universe. His reply:

I think it’s perverse for David Deutsch to say such a thing. All you need is the Copenhagen interpretation

So multiple universes are ridiculous to even consider, but God is; and spooky action at a distance is fine?

Many things he said contradict things I believe and conclusions I have come up with. I remain no more convinced that religion is worth practising and that God exists. Furthermore, after all this argument why theology in general is maybe a good idea, he became specifically Anglican, a branch of religion that requires him to believe all sorts of ridiculous assertions made by the bible. He said he has his reasons but wasn’t prepared to delve into them with the little time that he had. My suspicion is that he and I will never agree. But to commemorate the occasion (a famous person coming to St Paul’s), I managed to get his signature on my copy of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion in which he is (probably) referred to as a crackpot (image is at top of post, and on my Flickr photostream). Score…

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Physics: the new soft subject?

After something of a torrent of stuff (1) (2) filtering through the blogosphere on the subject of science exams, I feel I should add my two cents, as this is a subject I’ve been peeved about for a long time.

I’ve sat some very good exams in the past: good in the sense that those exams required me to think, and truly understand an aspect of the subject. As I said once, examples of such good exams are found in the field of competitions: olympiads, challenges, etc. The fundamental idea behind all of these exams is separating the exceptional from the good, a task which normally requires deep, searching and crucially original questions: the entire point of the unseen translation in classics is to test the ability of a candidate to solve a problem, not to bash it or quote a formula or set phrase you learn in the subjunctive to impress examiners.

I’ve also sat some very bad exams in the past (at this point a civilised, rant-averse reader may want to look away). The first question in last year’s Biology iGCSE was

why would people want to build a road through a forest?

to which I was tempted to write

because they are greedy bastards who want to destroy the environment

until I realised that the marker would probably fail to appreciate the sarcasm and the exact wording of my answer probably wouldn’t have been on the mark scheme anyway. One part of last year’s English exam was very literally making a summary list (in prose) of thirty things a text says; grammar for that question was apparently optional, according to the mark schemes of sample papers. What I think the setters of these exams don’t get is that there is a huge difference between a difficult paper and a paper on which marks are difficult to obtain. Since the 4th form, we’ve all been forced to tolerate having to write highly formulaic and long-winded answers to ridiculous questions similar to

why is pressure useful? [10 marks]

(not a real example but one which captures the essence of a poorly set question which has no clear indication of what is required of an answer) which attempt to cover all the points that may or may not be present on a mark scheme. The setting of vague wordy questions in science papers to make them deliberately more ‘tricky’ while not adding any extra science material inevitably leads to baffled and unimpressed science teachers being forced to teach in a style they are bursting to fight against: the style of teaching set phrases and the dreaded ‘exam technique’ which leads to exams easily doable by non-physicists. This unfortunate result of teaching ‘Physics the (i)GCSE’ rather than ‘Physics the science’ leads to a generation of uninspired and bored students who get the impression that creativity (in terms of original ideas and intelligence and unconventional solutions) is actively anathematised in the real world like it is in exams; such students (I included) end up being afraid to be original or deviate at all from what might be written on the mark scheme: lateral thinking becomes a bit like taboo. In fact knowledge of a subject outside of the syllabus might, as a direct consequence of the mark scheme, work against a candidate: I remember a Biology teacher desperately trying to make us unlearn something he had mistakenly taught us in a previous lesson because it was off the syllabus and would not be on the mark scheme with the likely consequence that we would lose marks for writing it. My Maths teacher once said

it’s always better not to have good ideas in exams

The sad fact is that he speaks the truth. Making life easy for examiners working from a mark scheme should not be the point of education, yet it is: I find myself far too often having to second-guess what the mark scheme says for a question (counting up marks and trying to write enough regurgitated points), rather than use my brain for once and work out a good solution. What someone said about blogging applies to exams too: “answers should be written, not defecated”. The mark schemes I’ve seen don’t seem to agree.

A pile of practice exam papers. I think exams should be less about learning answers to questions, and more about finding answers to questions.

Another problem with the science education system in the UK is that exams require almost zero understanding of the subject. My Physics teacher conveniently furnished us once with an example of where an exam required students to take on trust a patently false fact: a short circuit turns off the bulb because ‘current takes the path of least resistance’. Clearly this is nonsense; the real reason is to do with internal resistance, however only at AS do we learn that fact. This lack of requirement of understanding leads to the disastrous consequence that students end up learning and regurgitating copious amounts of learnt facts, phrases, dates, names and definitions, an activity which, after a certain point I find (and think I am not alone in doing so) excessively boring and fundamentally unproductive. I think being confined to an essentially fairly basic syllabus while having to, as a result of the ease of the exam, score close to 100% to look different from less able candidates, is severely limiting on both teacher and student. These constraints have certainly taken their toll, certainly on me at any rate. I felt embarrassed to tell my relatives in Singapore last year what I was learning at school at that time. Potometers indeed. As I wander around the internet and tap into IRC conversations in #math and #physics, I feel increasingly inadequate in my knowledge of my subjects. I have never even heard of most of the maths involved in these conversations, and my woeful mathematical knowledge of forces and fields in Physics is still severely lacking (but I can recite equations at you all day long to prove my AS worthiness). And this is even after doing (a bit of) reading around the subject. If the international standard of science (on IRC) is so high relative to the UK, there is need for worry, and lots of it.

The situation in the UK probably stemmed from something that happened a generation ago which meant that education standards were radically lowered. One of my Physics teachers (in fact the same one I’ve been talking about throughout) told us that half the members of the Physics dept aren’t actually qualified teachers! Apparently, generally speaking, in the UK people who train to be Physics teachers simply don’t know enough physics to teach us and would ‘get ripped apart’ (to use his words) in a school like ours. So the root of the problem may be that in state schools they are obliged by law (I think) to recruit from that pool of trained physics teachers rather than trained physicists. The problem then propagates into today’s education sector from the lack of science teachers who actually know science. Public sector education ended up with the short end of the stick, and the government has been forced to make exams accessible to people who haven’t got access to proper teaching. My hypothesis thus provides a perfect explanation for Ken Zetie’s post: you now don’t even need to be taught Physics to pass a Physics paper! Britain has found the ultimate solution: eliminate the need for teachers altogether. Well done, Gordon – you’re a genius! To make things even better, Gordon in his infinite wisdom has decreed that 50% of Britons need to have a degree, successfully defeating the entire point of university degrees (in the employment world): to create an academic elite. Brown is now giving away invitations to join a group of the ‘academic above average’, scrapping the ‘academic elite’. I personally don’t really see the point.

There is light at the end of the tunnel however. The current Physics course that we’re doing at AS has been very well chosen, despite the fact that the front cover of every exam paper looks like it’s in Welsh (it’s a Welsh board). The syllabus covers lasers, cosmology, a bit of quantum physics and particle physics; topics which allow an enthusiastic teacher like Mr Sammut to expand the boundaries of the teaching scheme and teach in great detail how and, crucially, why things _really_ work. Tying in with a point made in TomTurnerUK’s post, voluminous and broad textbooks are actually a fantastic way to encourage learning (though I agree that teaching straight out of a textbook is a sin). The textbook we’re given is an IB textbook, and covers everything from special relativity to Feynman diagrams in non-trivial detail – certainly in more detail than we need for AS. My opinion is that a textbook should be taken by the student as a recommended resource for expanding his knowledge outside of the classroom, and if a good book is used in that way, it can be extremely effective.

Our (quite) large Physics Textbook covers far more than the syllabus requires and is an excellent resource for learning Physics outside of the classroom

Anyways, despite a glimmer of hope, I still fear for the UK. And for the US for that matter, after reading this: apparently only 53% of adults in American scientific organisations know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun. Now I don’t feel so bad about not understanding Black-Scholes. Theo and I were joking about the LHC breaking down and a hypothetical situation in which there are just a few non-scientist technicians standing around with multimeters and headtorches scratching their heads, which was clearly not the case at the time. I dread to think of a possible future in which that joke becomes reality.

I should probably also put a disclaimer on my blog like Tom, come to think of it, but I’m too lazy to do it now. Don’t start flaming me or my school or my cat (I haven’t got one anyway) in the meantime.

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Why File Sharing Isn’t Bad for the Economy

I notice from my Slashdot feed that the RIAA have been giving up on a lot of cases recently. For one they failed to extract $222K from someone who shared 24 files on Kazaa. There was also a case (the same one maybe?) in which the defendant subsequently turned on the RIAA following his success in court and sued. There have been two cases that I know of since the beginning of the Christmas holidays in which lawsuits have been dropped by copyright firms. Fairly recently a Dutch study (thank you Slashdot) found that actually file sharing is good for the Dutch economy. Then someone wrote a book/blog post/ebook/news article about the concept of free stuff in an economy and how it works really quite well. It appears that the whole DRM thing is rapidly turning on its head, against law firms and in favour of open source and freebies. Here’s a concise exposition of all I’ve gathered that seems to make sense regarding this phenomenon.

17,000 illegal downloads don’t equal 17,000 lost sales

- US District Judge James P. Jones

Mike Henley, a former member of CompSoc, pointed out something that I think makes a lot of sense. If music downloaders suddenly no longer could download it for free, I suspect many of them would just stop downloading full stop. The reason they download is more because it’s convenient than any reason concerning the price: there are simply so many good deals out there that good music is already available for decent prices. Therefore it can be deduced that they are actually not harming the industry – they aren’t reducing demand and removing themselves from the market by downloading for free since the market wouldn’t contain them in the first place.

- Me

I think everyone who’s outraged about people downloading and enjoying stuff that they should be paying for and blaming them (amongst Maths, public schools and gnomes) for the economic downturn should really consider the fact that, As Michael observantly pointed out in a comment, most people who currently download for free just wouldn’t buy music in the first place if the download option didn’t exist. If you don’t know you’ll definitely like a product, why risk £12.99 buying it? This judge has definitely got it right.

The way I see it (not why it’s right/wrong but why it’s taking place) is that a new market for music is being created involving mostly bittorrent and uploaders. The ‘product’ is really a few megabytes of data – an mp3 file. The cost to the producer (warez-bb.org uploader for example) of sharing this product is approx. zero. (compare £10 with the millions recording companies must spend on equipment, overheads, disks, labour etc) Chances are they downloaded it themselves in the first place. Every time someone downloads the share, nobody has to pay to get it copied. So there are no production costs, and ‘competition’ (kudos is the new dollar – believe me it’s true – warez-bb forum uploaders survive on the number of thanking replies they get) results in a price of zero and a well-archived and user-friendly method of obtaining free music.

Dutch Study Says Filesharing Has Positive Economic Effects

- Slashdot

Interesting as the economics of this may be, I’m not prepared to learn Dutch. However from what I can deduce: those who opt to download are probably more exposed to online marketing and are thus more likely to buy products that can’t simply be downloaded for free – concert tickets, firefox.com gadgets… To make things better, the actual act of transferring data via downloading costs both parties virtually nothing. A CD on the other hand would involve paying for the media, case, P&P, etc.

I’m reading a book (yes, another one – still haven’t finished the other[s]) called ‘Wikinomics’. It’s about open source and collaboration. I think it’s fairly clear that the internet is bringing a whole new business model to the world (there was an article in the FT on this but I didn’t bookmark it) which revolves around goods and services which the consumer doesn’t actually pay for. Google deliver unbelievably powerful search power to millions (billions?) of users around the world, for free. How nice of them. In fact, our young enterprise idea was (still is come to think of it) based on this system of providing free stuff and using advertising/sponsorship to earn the actual income.

Finally, it’s probably a safe bet that the RIAA and MPAA are fighting a losing battle. Digital music and films are just so easy to copy and distribute that whatever crazy measures ISPs, Microsoft, Sony, the RIAA, the MPAA and Apple dare put into place, a workaround will be found, probably within minutes, and probably in a secret underground hacker convention in Germany or China. Besides, lawyers aren’t exactly popular, especially if employed en masse and paid an unreasonable fee to crucify people like you and me.

I think I’ll leave you with a thought from xkcd.com:

Inward Bound

I’m reading a book at the moment recommended by Mr Sammut (awesome Physics teacher for those who don’t know him) – it’s Inward Bound, ‘of matter and forces in the physical world’ written by Abraham Pais, and although written in the style of a set of memoirs or a history of Science, it is designed to contain many mathematical and scientific assertions rather than to descend to the style of populist ‘appreciation of science’.

As its title suggests, the book is largely about Physics on the micro scale, tracing the path from the discovery of the electron all the way to that of the W and Z particles, the gauge bosons of the weak nuclear force. In brief, it steps through X-rays and radioactivity (including beta radiation, linking with electrons), spectroscopy, nuclear Physics, quantum mechanics, QED, while constantly describing the path of scientific progress from the beginnings of civilised science as we know it today to the recent discoveries of the book’s publishing date of 1986.

Flipping to a random page near the beginning of the book I already see familiar relativistic equations involving the Lorentz constant beginning to appear around p90 (of about 600) and Schroedinger’s awesome equation involving the best Greek letter ever, Psi, at around p256. Scanning pages in its vicinity, I notice asterisks appearing in the equations – any book that discusses complex conjugates of wavefunctions must be good!

While looking forward to a meaty meal from a Physics book, I can’t help but point out the superfluously copious quantities of popular science books. While genuinely interesting to read about how xyz always picked his/her nose while conducting experiments and how abc always wrote figures to a certain number of sig figs except on Sundays, such details really do not interest me. Granted, these are invented examples, but fundamentally what I look for in a book about Science is, unsurprisingly, the Science, and the history and anecdotal asides around the topic should be used at most as structure and supporting material (respectively) rather than form the backbone of any truly scientific work of literature. Often have I found myself opening up a book titled something promising that might give me a real insight into why and how the world works expressed in the natural language of physics – maths, and instead been confronted with pages and pages of black text, entirely absent of equations, numbers, diagrams etc. While it may be possible to draw endless parallels between branes and slices of toast, nothing at all like that can be proven truly elegantly without using maths.

This is what I find fundamentally annoying about popular books. They aren’t, I assert, bad books – in fact I really enjoyed reading Simon Singh’s writings – but they are simply inadequate to satisfy my curiosity: they are about science appreciation rather than science understanding, the latter of which is what I and in fact many of my peers are really after. They say ’scientists have done this with GPS because of relativity’ or ‘the equations blow up in your face when you try to combine the two theories’ without actually explaining any of the maths behind relativistic calculations or relativity v quantum mechanics, and I find this profoundly infuriating – I intensely dislike taking someone’s word for something without finding out about the maths and logic and science behind it. Thank God (or should I say Xenu?) for the internet, whence all information flows. This is the fault I find with many popular science books – they underestimate their audience. In apparent desperation to make what they perceive an uneducated audience ‘understand’ a concept, especially a complicated one best expressed in equations, the very concept is reduced to an analogy, stripping from the arguments all that I find exciting about Physics – the maths and the rigour with which concepts are exposed, proven and developed, and the ‘understanding’ reduced to an appreciation of how similar the enthalpy of a system is to a bouncing ball.

Perhaps I’m being a little unfair. Perhaps the problem doesn’t lie in the way popular scientific literature is written – there must be a reason it’s popular. But after reading about five such ‘popular bestsellers’ I feel I’m starting to get saturated. I know enough funny (or otherwise) anecdotes about how certain discoveries were very nearly not made. I know enough about Einstein’s quirks and his pain and anguish as he refused to believe a wholly probabilistic model of the universe. I now want to read in-depth information about Physics, not the surrounding paraphernalia (sp?). I simply think there are too many intelligent scientists who end up writing material for the ‘general public’ which for some reason is assumed to be not very intelligent just in order to make some money, and, as I might have said when still doing Spanish GCSE, es una lástima.