Atoms (part 3): The Illusion of Reality

In the first episode of this documentary series narrated by Professor Jim Al-Khalili, you learned about the battle between the Einstein and Neils Bohr schools of thought and the subsequent birth of quantum mechanics as the right discipline to explain the behavior of subatomic particles. In the second episode you learned how combining the incompatible disciplines of relativity and quantum mechanics we arrive at an explanation of how the elements that make up the universe, including you, were made. Yes, you are literally nuclear waste...

The heroes of today's episode are Paul Dirac, Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann. These giants of theoretical physics have consistently proposed increasingly outrageous mathematical models to explain the behavior of quantum particles that make Neils Bohr seem like a conservative! Funny thing... those outrageous models, which even seem to contradict logic (think the non-emptiness of emptiness, for instance), seem to explain the nature of reality better than any alternative hypothesis.

The universe is a lot stranger than you think. Philosophers have been showing us this fact for millenia, and scientists have taken up the baton and run with it like madmen. Not only are you and everything around you primarily made up of empty space (don't try to run through a wall, though)... that space is not even empty, even while it's empty. If that's not strange enough for you, and as you might gather from the kitty pics, today's documentary explains the weirdness behind Schrödinger's cat.

I wonder if there is some deep significance about Schrodinger's cat being named Dawkins... :)

Of course, I would count the cat as an actual observer, in which case there would be a definite answer as to whether it was dead or alive before we opened the box ;) but I get the point... sort of...

Watch related videos and documentaries:

The Elegant Universe, with Brian Greene (part 1, part 2, part 3)

E=mc2, Einstein and the World's Most Famous Equation

The Large Hadron Collider: The Six Billion Dollar Experiment

Einstein's Unfinished Symphony

Einstein's Equation of Life and Death

Richard Feynman on The Pleasure of Finding Things out

Or anything in the Elegant Universe tag... lots of goodies there.
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Bush Pardons Scooter Libby in Giant Turkey Costume

In an unsurprising act of avian solidarity, and after previously having commuted his original sentence for perjury and obstruction of justice in the investigation of the leaked identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame, lame-duck president George W. Bush has issued the traditional presidential thanksgiving turkey pardon to former Vice-Presidential Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby, who was dressed in a giant turkey costume.

I know what you're thinking... "if only Bush could decree preemptive pardons for Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales..." :)

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The Atheism Tapes - Colin McGinn

As promised months ago, I am starting to post the thought-provoking interviews Jonathan Miller conducted with leading atheist intellectuals while filming the fascinating documentary series Atheism: A Brief History of Disbelief. Among those interviewed, you'll find Colin McGinn, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Weinberg, Arthur Miller and Denys Turner.

In this first interview, British philosopher Colin McGinn explores some of the arguments for and against the existence of God, especially the ontological argument (although he seems to mix up Anselm's version and Descartes') and the problem of evil (watch the amazing movie God on Trial to learn more about this issue). Look out for McGinn's nice two-line refutation of the question-begging idea that miracles provide independent confirmation of the existence of God.

Click here to listen to Plato's Euthyphro.

Click here to watch an excellent debate between an atheist philosopher and a Christian apologist philosopher about whether there can be morality without God.

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Leonardo da Vinci (part 1)

Leonardo is widely recognized as one of the greatest geniuses to walk among us. His insatiable curiosity, combined with his truly artistic mastery, drove him to make important discoveries and contributions that would benefit and challenge humanity even centuries after his passing.

In today's documentary, we learn about the early history of Leonardo's fascinating life. Did you know, for instance, he was left-handed and wrote backwards from right to left? That was news to me too...

Prepare to meet the man, as well as some of the people who decide take his ideas seriously enough to build machines and gadgets based on his technical sketches. It is widely known that helicopters and other machines he envisioned could not have been built during his lifetime, but if we decided to build them, would they actually work? You are about to find out...

If you are interested in the science of light and vision, check out the documentary series Light Fantastic, or check out the biography tag to learn about the lives of other fascinating people.

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Chumbawamba - Charlie

I have wanted to post this song on the blog for a few months now, and I finally found it online: a beautiful celebration of the intellectual legacy of Charles Darwin

All of nature in its place
By hand of the designer, 
Comes our Charlie spins the world
From here to Asia Minor. 
In between the Platypus
And perfect Aphrodite, 
Charlie come with opposing thumb
To question the Almighty.

Over the river and over the sea
Through holy storm and thunder
Steer a course for a brave new world
Of common sense and wonder. 

See the dancing President
The congressman and teacher
Jumpin’ to the music of
The wealthy Midwest preacher,
Charlie come with a brand new dance
Get on the floor and follow, 
Find yourself a partner and
We’ll swing into tomorrow. 

Over the river and over the sea
Through holy storm and thunder
Steer a course for a brave new world
Of common sense and wonder.

Armed with truth we’re stepping out
Come join the worldwide party, 
Charge your glass and face the world
We’ll drink a toast to Charlie. 

Over the river and over the sea
Through holy storm and thunder
Steer a course for a brave new world
Of common sense and wonder.

Totally catchy, isn't it?

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Ant Civilizations

In the ant world, intelligence does not seem to exist at the individual level. By themselves ants are pretty dumb, and don't seem to know what they do or why they do it (listen to E.O. Wilson and Robert Krulwich discuss some of the funny things ants can be made to do if you get a bit creative and perverse).

When you have a colony, however, intelligence seems to emerge as a social phenomenon that cannot be understood simply in terms of the properties of the individual members of the population (check out this Emergence documentary to understand a bit more about this phenomenon).

In the video clip below, researchers devise a plan to understand and visualize the size, complexity and structure of an ant colony replete with its own natural air conditioning and ventilation system. Their findings are astonishing...

Check out more awesome (and frightening) ant videos here.

The Mark Steel Lectures - Karl Marx

The terms communism, socialism and Marxism have been thrown around a lot lately, especially during the presidential elections, as code words for some scary political movement we'd be better off hating rather than understanding and maybe learning something from. What we often forget is that there is a person behind the 'isms'; someone whose proposals were an intellectual and insightful response to the social and political realities that plagued society not only in the 19th century but even today and the foreseeable tomorrow.

Even if his solutions might not measure up, you might say Marx's keen observations are based on timeless truths of social interaction which, as such, we ought to learn to recognize in our seemingly progressive world, for there might be more that remains the same despite appearances to the contrary...

Check out more of these funny Mark Steel Lectures, or a great conversation with philosopher Peter Singer about Hegel's dialectical philosophy and its influence on Marx, or learn the details about the modern means of production in 'The Story of Stuff.'

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Time: Earth Time

In the episode about Cosmic Time, theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explored the history of the conceptual understanding of time. Today, he attempts to understand the different methods people have devised over time in order to accurately estimate the age of our planet, starting with James Ussher, the 17th century Irish archbishop who attempted to figure out the age of creation by adding and tracing back all the generations mentioned in the Bible.

Ussher's astonishing conclusion was that time itself began the 21st of September, 4004 BC. Although often ridiculed both for his approach and for the inaccuracy of his results, Ussher's ambitious project, as well as the intellectual and practical obstacles he needed to overcome (such as figuring out ways to make various disparate kinds of calendars compatible), deserves our admiration and respect.

Of course, Ussher's results are orders of magnitude wrong, but where are the clues to the age of our planet? Believe it or not, they are everywhere: inside your own body and that of all biological organisms, on the ground you walk on, and even in outer space. The question then becomes, which are the right clues and what do they tell us? The answers might surprise you...

I wonder whether those 200 million year-old bacteria are going WTF?...
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Stephen Colbert - Cheating Death

Since the start of his monumental collaboration with Prescott Pharmaceuticals, Stephen Colbert has been making history by consistently cheating death with his innovative solutions to health problems. In most cases, these death-cheating stunts have worked by killing the patients before death got to them...

This week he decided to solve women's health issues, first by diagnosing their physical ailments House-style, and then by fearlessly prescribing the ultimate hormone because, let's face it, if there's one thing women need more, it's hormones :)

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Cheating Death - Women's Health
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Meryl Streep

Which is scarier, fallopian tube tape-worm or Steve Tyler lip?
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God's Facebook Wall

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God on Trial

Why is there so much suffering in the world and what kind of God would allow it to happen? In this deeply moving and thought-provoking film, a group of Jewish concentration camp prisoners housed in the macabre facilities of Auschwitz, some of whom will be executed the following day, decide to put God on trial in absentia—go figure—and charge him with breach of contract. The charges, they believe, are supported by ample scriptural evidence strongly suggesting that God has established a consistent historic pattern of failing to honor the covenant He set up with the Jewish people in the Old Testament.

The film beautifully captures many of the ideas related to the philosophical problem of evil (the question of how the existence of an all-powerful and benevolent deity can be reconciled with the existence of unnecessary suffering), presenting with great eloquence most of the essential arguments provided by defenders and critics of God and religion, and boldly taking many of these arguments to their disturbing logical conclusions.

If you have rejected belief in God, many of these arguments will be familiar. For those of you who have never questioned your faith, these are the kind of questions that ought to be confronted in order to make sense of your own belief. When unquestioned, faith is cheap. If faith is to have any meaning, it must be grounded in doubt. The question is whether it can survive it...

And if the video above disappears, you can always try watching it here.
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The Vet Who Did Not Vet

Before he sold out to the forces of ignorance, bigotry and evil by choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate, John McCain had the general respect of the American public, even if he did not always have their votes. Once he chose the hockey mom to become the vice president of the most powerful nation in the world, it became impossible not to question his judgment and ability to make rational decisions.

I wish I had posted this video before the election, but the laughter is still worth it.

I wonder what McCain thinks of her now... any thoughts?
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John Searle - Reflections on Free Will

A few weeks ago we saw the Merovingian from The Matrix introduce the problem of determinism: causality governs everything in the universe, and since we are a part of the universe, it follows that it controls us too; hence, there is no such thing as freedom of the will.

In this lecture given at Google, and in his characteristic style, philosopher John Searle wrestles with the problem of free will and determinism. Searle argues that our conception of ourselves and the kinds of entities we are must be made consistent with everything we know about the nature of the universe as revealed to us by the scientific outlook. This attempt at a theoretically consistent framework presents some very intriguing philosophical puzzles, with consequences most, including Searle himself, would find unsettling and uncomfortable.

I love how Searle wants to teach French to the French :)
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Journey of Life - Seas of Life

Your body, and that of all living animals, is the result of an uninterrupted natural experiment that expands for around three and a half billion years and is driven by the evolutionary power of natural selection. It's easy to take our complexity for granted as normal, but how did our single-celled ancestors develop into the incredibly complex organisms we are today? Have you ever wondered, for instance, why you don't eat and poop out of the same orifice? That is a legitimate scientific question (I won't comment on 2 girls 1 cup...), and a problem our ancestors luckily evolved to overcome.

Today's fascinating documentary reveals the story of our aquatic ancestors, and those of other lineages, and the truly amazing and bizarre adaptive strategies that allowed them to survive in a world full of competition and ruthlessly hungry predators (think megalodon, for example).

As you'll see, the basic outline of your own body plan can be traced back not only to apes and other cute and cuddly mammals but all the way back to cold-blooded creatures like fish, sea squirts, flatworms, jelly fish and even single-celled organisms.

I'm having a hard time feeling the love connection for those slimy hag fish... :)p
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Obama: "To the Love of My Life..."

After the last eight years of the Bush administration, some people, myself included, have seriously worried that if Obama's political success translates into mature and responsible fiscal and social policy once he takes office, the world of political satire may experience the prospect of extinction...

Luckily, there's always Jon Stewart to put those worries to rest :)

What, did you think he was going to say Michelle?
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The Genius of Darwin - Part 2 - The Fifth Ape

After exploring in the previous episode the ways in which Charles Darwin brought to our awareness the idea that all living organisms on Earth are related to one another through our common ancestors, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins now sets out to understand the evolution of cooperation and altruism through his own theory of the selfish gene.

Genes, according to Dawkins, are the units of selection that perpetuate their own frequency in the population by making survival machine vehicles (like you and me) that cooperate with other survival machines in a process which ultimately benefit the genes. In other words, selfish genes give rise to the evolution of altruistic organisms.

Of course, if it's our genes that make us nice, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to want to rebel against them. I'm not even sure it makes sense to think it's possible. Why would we want to? Probably because that's what our genes are making us want, in which case they would still be in control...

To learn more about the evolution of cooperation and altruism, check out Dawkins' Nice Guys Finish First, or anything in the Dawkins tag.

Learn also how German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer explained the way in which nature constantly fools us all into acting against our own interests.

Also, and apropos of the current financial crisis, you might want to check out the Enron documentary The Smartest Guys in the Room.

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Obama Wins!

In a time of cynicism, indifference, bigotry and hatred, Barack Obama has managed to inspire the American public to become its better self.

In response, the American public has spoken, and it has spoken with a very clear message: it's time for change.

Let the change begin...

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Gunman Kills 15 Potential Voters in Crucial Swing State

The stakes in this election could hardly be greater, and hopefully every single vote will count. Of course, though, if some lunatic whack job were to go on a killing spree, The Onion knows exactly what kind of media coverage the news would receive, how the idiotic pundits would twist everything into 'in-depth' political analysis full of bar graphs and everything, and even what the candidates might do to ensure a few more votes... :)

Protect the Second Amendment, it won't protect you! :)

Why Dogs Smile and Chimpanzees Cry

Despite his great intellectual contributions to the worlds of science, philosophy and mathematics, the French philosopher Rene Descartes really screwed things up for centuries to come when, from his internal experience of himself as indivisible, thinking and rational, he concluded that his essence was immaterial and independent of any physical properties. One consequence of this line of thought was that since animals do not seem to be rational beings, they must have no minds and are therefore merely complex machines devoid of sentience. If you beat an animal, the noise emitted, on this view, would not be an indication of pain but merely the sound produced by the physical internal machinery of the animal. Unfortunately, this would become the intellectual justification for a great deal of cruelty for far too long.

At least since Descartes, it has been anathema in scientific circles to anthropomorphize animals and attribute to them emotions and rich internal lives the way we would to human beings. It wasn't until the 20th century, with the work of people like Jane Goodall and the application of evolutionary theories of mind, that we would come to understand that rather than standing apart and independently of nature, our own mental and emotional lives resemble those of other animals precisely because our common ancestors (all the way back to cold-blooded animals) would have had to evolve certain psychological adaptations in order to increase their own fitness.

In short, anthropomorphizing is a conceptual problem because we begin with the assumption that our own mental and emotional lives are the starting point. In reality, the richness of our mental and emotional lives is a result of our animal nature, which existed long before we ever came into the scene, as you can see in this very moving documentary. Your heart might break a few times...

I don't honestly know whether the kitty in the picture above is caressing the chick out of affection, or whether it's thinking 'you'll be my dinner soon'... :)

I'll post the continuation of this documentary soon.
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Umm... Oops?

Everyone is going to hate me now... seems the reason McCain won the election is because of me. Obama doesn't look too pleased... :)p

Come on, now... who doesn't love sleeping in?

Thanks to everyone who sent me that video!
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