Friday 31 January 2014

Repulsive Gravity

Everyone knows that gravity is attractive, right? Since Isaac Newton, the universal law of gravitation states that the force of attraction between two bodies is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Einstein's theory of relativity superseded this for extreme cases, but in most cases, agrees very well with it.

But suppose that gravity was really repulsive; i.e. instead of attracting bodies together, the basic gravitational force actually pushed? Let me explain before you write me off as a completely bonkers. Imagine that gravity consists of a homogeneous, isotropic flux of particles throughout the universe. Let's call them "gravitons", although they would be quite different from the gravitons that scientists are currently searching for, and have not yet found. My gravitons produce a small push on matter when they are absorbed, deflected, reflected, or otherwise interact with it.

Now consider a single object, say a planet, alone in the universe. The gravitons would push against the planet's surface, and some would be absorbed, deflected, or reduced in energy as they passed through. The result would be that anything resting on the surface would be pushed against it (i.e. "down") more than they would be pushed away from it ("up"). The reason is that the gravitons coming up through the planet would be fewer or weaker than those impinging on the surface. So anything on the surface would be pressed down toward the centre of the planet, just as if they were attracted to it.

Now consider adding a second object to this thought experiment, say a second planet some distance away. Each planet would absorb, redirect, or weaken some of the gravitons passing through, and some of those would be in the direction of the other planet. Thus, each planet would feel a push toward the other planet; that is, the push coming from the direction of the other planet would be slightly less than the push from the opposite direction. In this way, the two planets would seem to be "attracted" to each other, when in reality, they are merely being pushed closer together.

Assuming that the gravitons are absorbed, deflected, or weakened in proportion to the amount of mass in the body they are passing through, and assuming that ordinary objects like stars and planets absorb only a very small fraction of the impinging gravitons, then it can be shown that the resulting push behaves just like Newton's law of gravity; i.e. the differential push felt between the two planets, or any two bodies, would be proportional to the product of their masses, and the inverse square of the distance between them. In this way, gravitons could push objects, yet result in a net attraction between them.

This concept might be seen as a simple way to explain the apparent attractive action-at a-distance behaviour that puzzled physicists before Einstein. No need for action at a distance, the action is all in the gravitons pushing on the matter they encounter on their way through the universe. Given the same net result, repulsive gravity can account for orbiting moons and satellites, and most other gravitational effects we observe in the solar system and universe around us.

In principle, repulsive gravity could explain the accelerating expansion of the universe. If these gravitons push everything they encounter, then over very long distances, where the attraction effect of the differential push becomes negligible, then bodies would tend to be pushed further from each other, especially if there was some "boundary effect" for the universe due to its finite age and the speed of light limitation on distances travelled. This concept might also help explain the "dark matter" or "dark energy" problems that cosmologists struggle with. If gravitons interact only as a weak gravitational force, yet have even a tiny mass, they could significantly change cosmic theories and models.

Of course, the repulsive gravity concept runs into severe limitations and difficulties when examined more closely. Even picogram quantities of matter are subject to the force of gravity in apparently smooth ways, so the interaction of gravitons with mass would have to be very fine and continuous, implying a huge flux of very small gravitons. Moreover, the wide dynamic range of the force of gravity, from these barely perceptible levels to the huge forces associated with neutron starts or black holes, would require a huge flux and a very low level of interaction for normal sized masses and bodies. It seems unlikely that a graviton flux model could accommodate these extremes.

Worse would be the effect of absorbing or weakening the gravitons. For them to produce any force, they would need to carry some amount of energy, which would be reduced during these interactions. That energy dissipation would have to show up somehow, presumably by heating the bodies that absorb them in ways that do not agree with the measured energy balance for planets. It might be possible to get around this by saying that the gravitons are not absorbed, but merely deflected or reflected, thus losing no energy, yet still applying a push as they change their momentum. But that probably raises questions about resulting flux density non-isotropy for other nearby objects.

There are doubtless other effects of actual gravity (which have been very precisely measured), especially the relativistic ones, that probably cannot be accounted for in this approach. Thus, it seems unlikely that the concept of repulsive gravity will go beyond my few notes here. Indeed, perhaps in Newton's time, some unknown physicist thought of this and quickly abandoned the idea once he had thought through the mathematics and consequences. Oh well, so much for my idea, but it was still an interesting thought experiment.

Saturday 25 January 2014

The Limits of Science

Sometimes in discussions or debates regarding science and faith, origins, or atheism vs. religion, people give the impression or even state explicitly, that science explains life, the universe and anything worth knowing, or if not quite yet, then for sure eventually. That sort of hubris, known as "scientism", is unfortunately widespread in the popular media and certain groups of people, even including not a few actual scientists. This view often but erroneously puts Christians and others who believe in a spiritual realm on the defensive.

When looked at closely, scientism is not science at all, but a metaphysical or philosophical position, based on beliefs that cannot be proven, and which are often not even recognized or understood by the person voicing them.

To partially correct this tendency and argue against scientism, I offer the following list of things that science cannot explain or has been unable to understand over the centuries, sometimes despite trying hard, and notwithstanding claims to the contrary. Each one comes with a link to some article or page. You can find more about any one of these by appropriate Internet searching.

1. Science has no fundamental understanding of time.
What is time? Why does it pass, and in only one direction? Is the past real? Is the future fixed? Time has confounded physicists and philosophers alike for millennia. Relativity's "space-time" does not solve the problem, it just repackages it and makes it more mysterious. Cosmology struggles with the "problem of time" and the "arrow of time".  http://preposterousuniverse.com/timecourse/

2. Quantum mechanics and general relativity are incompatible.
Both are superb theories that explain a lot in their own realms, and have been thoroughly tested in great detail. But the two are incompatible with each other, and various attempts to combine them into one large coherent theory of physics have not yet been successful. This is not a problem for most scientific research, but clearly something very fundamental is lacking in our understanding of physics.
http://www.askamathematician.com/2009/12/q-howwhy-are-quantum-mechanics-and-relativity-incompatible/

3. Science cannot explain the extreme fine tuning in the universe.
In order to make matter, stars, planets and life possible, the initial conditions for the Big Bang, along with the laws of physics and the fundamental physical constants of the universe had to be just so, sometimes to ridiculous levels of precision. However, from a physics perspective many of these parameters seem to be arbitrary and could have been different, so how did they get their values? http://www.aish.com/ci/sam/48937152.html

The main hypothesis to avoid the concept of a Creator doing the fine tuning, is the "multiverse" concept, but that idea is fraught with difficulties, does not really solve the "God problem", and has zero evidence in its favour. Indeed, it is not clear what evidence we could possibly find to support it. Thus the multiverse is not a scientific theory and science is left with the biggest mystery of all.

4. Science does not know what makes up 96% of the universe.
How can you pretend to understand how things all work if you only understand 4% of the 'stuff' in the universe? Science has evidence for "dark  matter" that seems to outweigh the "normal" understood matter that we see in galaxies, gas clouds, stars, etc., by a factor of three or more. While cosmologists are searching, and have managed a rough map of how its mass must be distributed in some places, scientists have not found any candidates for this type of matter, despite having tested various theories.

Worse than that, most of the mass/energy in the universe appears to be in the form of "dark energy" that reveals its existence only through the accelerating expansion of the universe, and some constants in physicists equations. No one knows what this is.
http://science.time.com/2013/02/20/telescope-to-hunt-for-missing-96-of-the-universe/

5. Science has no credible account of biogenesis, how life began on earth.
Even the simplest life form needs an enormous amount of internal machinery to make it live and reproduce. This machinery requires a large amount of information to specify it, as well as the machinery to turn that information into the machinery itself. The Darwinian process of random change plus natural selection cannot explain how this information arose before life existed.

Various "origin of life" attempts have been made to explain how life might have begun, but they all fall far short of explaining where this information came from. The basic probabilities for natural processes do not credibly support the necessary minimum. Experimental attempts to create life from basic materials have been quite unsuccessful at producing anything close to a self-replicating entity. And studies show that the chemical deck is severely stacked against any naturalistic mechanism.
http://www.nature.com/news/debate-bubbles-over-the-origin-of-life-1.10024

6. Science cannot explain consciousness.
Everyone knows he or she is conscious, but science has a hard time even defining the term, much less explaining it. Naturalistic scientism tries to "explain" it by voting it out of existence; you just think you are conscious, but it is just an "emergent property" of your neurons firing in ways that will eventually be understood. But the internal sense of being yourself, of understanding a concept, of thinking an abstract thought are not explained. The concepts of truth, beauty, morality and love could also fall into this category. "Artificial intelligence" has not produced anything like a conscious computer, and Gödel's theorem suggests that it cannot.
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580394,00.html

7. Science does not answer the free-will vs. determinism question:
We all assume we have free will, the ability to make up our minds and choose courses of action based ultimately on our own thoughts. Sure there are outside influences, and our background and subconscious play their parts, but if we seriously believed we didn't have free will, our lives would be absurd jokes. Scientism, being stuck with naturalistic beliefs, needs to assume that there is no such thing as free will, and then somehow has to live as if there is. The debate becomes quite complicated.
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/history/

8. Science cannot explain why the universe is understandable:
Why should mathematics work to capture physics and how the world works in a few equations? Indeed, why do logic and reasoning work at all? And why is man able to explore, measure, theorize about and even explain at some level the world he experiences. Why are their physical laws? Indeed, why is there anything at all? Scientism just takes all this for granted.
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Why_Math_Works.pdf

9. Finally, science cannot tell you what you should do.
Science can study what is and how things in the natural world interact and work, and has done a great job of that over the centuries. But nothing in science can tell you what you ought to do tomorrow, or how you should live your years here on the Earth. That is up to you, using your conscious mind and based on your own circumstances, metaphysical beliefs and values.
http://www.aaas.org/page/can-science-answer-our-ethical-dilemmas-exploring-ought-dichotomy

This is not an exhaustive list, there are, of course, many detailed things that science does not know about the world. Science does advance, learning, discovering, analysing and theorizing, but the above are questions that science per se either cannot address, or will continue having problems delving into for a long time. So, I am not against science, indeed, I study it eagerly, but I am against scientism, especially when it presents itself as scientific.

So the next time someone claims that science can explain everything, that science proves atheism, or that science refutes spirituality, toss some of these items their way. True science is inherently humble, recognizing its limitations and ignorance, and sticking to areas it can properly investigate. Scientism is none of those things and needs to be called out when it pretends to be science.

Monday 20 January 2014

One Key to a Good Marriage

Having been blissfully married now for more than 37 years, I would like to share something that seems to me a good way to build a successful marriage. We always hear about the importance of communications, commitment, respect and other good advice, but I have observed that an appropriate division of labour or roles is one easy way to foster and maintain a healthy marriage.

Having separate defined responsibilities in the marriage and home has some great benefits. Both spouses can focus their skills, effort and attention on a subset of household tasks, rather than trying to be good at all of them; a simpler arrangement. We don’t both have to worry about everything, I get to do the things I am good at, and my partner in life gets to do the ones she is good at. Of course there will be some tasks or roles that both or neither are good at and those can be divvied up to balance the work load, each taking on “60%” of the tasks to ensure that 90% get done most of the time.  :-)

More important, division of labour builds mutual dependency, appreciation and even admiration for each other as my spouse does things I do not or cannot do well, and I get better at doing the things I do well – the best use and application of available talent! Dependency is important to see the marriage through rough spots. If I cannot see how I could get by without my spouse, then I am less likely to entertain the thought of doing so. Watching your spouse do things for you that you would not do well yourself also provides opportunities for gratitude and appreciation – always a good thing in marriages.

On the flip side, having separate responsibilities helps avoid some serious marital difficulties. For example, squabbles over whose turn it is to take out the garbage, confusion and anxiety about when and how the vacuuming was last done, grumbling about whether or how well the grass was mowed, pointless disagreements about how something should be done, and even competition with your spouse on multiple trivial fronts. These petty issues can lead to disgruntlement, resentment and estrangement if allowed to fester, or when fed every week. Best to avoid them altogether.

Of course, as a married couple, you should still do some tasks together, and an occasional role-swapping will help build your relationship as you come to appreciate what is involved in your spouse’s tasks. This is also important so that you can pick up other duties when necessary, as when your spouse leaves you with the kids for a few days, or to be with her aging parent, is away on business, sick in bed, or heavily into volunteer work.

In our marriage, we have found that this division of labour works extremely well. Thus I thought I would share the concept to see if it could be helpful advice for others.

Later Addition: 
If you are young and not yet married, then you should marry earlier rather than later in life. No I don't mean as a teen. Rather I mean don't wait until your thirties to get hitched, for a variety of reasons. At 24 years, you are still figuring out who you are, constructing your personality and life habits after getting out on your own. Thus, your persona and ways of doing things are still malleable or flexible and you can adapt to your spouse, who will be different from you in so many ways. If you wait until 35, then your life will (usually) be much more settled in terms of habits, career, living processes, preferences, etc., and you will find it harder to change and adapt, as you must when you get married. Marrying early allows the two to become one much more easily and closely, growing together their living skills and adjusting to each other -- certainly a good thing for a happy marriage.

For those who are already married, you can pretend you are young enough to change radically, be willing to do so, and thereby build a closer relationship and a stronger marriage.

OK, so maybe engineers should not be giving marital advice?

Saturday 18 January 2014

On Global Warming

I don't like the term "climate change" as that seems too vague. Of course the climate is changing; it has always been changing. And what possible evidence could one present to "disprove climate change"? In any case, the "climate change" issue usually devolves to the warming effects of CO2 on the Earth's global climate, and whether this is caused by human activities.

Therefore, for what it's worth, here is my current position on Anthropogenic Global Warming, summarized in four simple questions and my own brief answers:

1.  Is global warming occurring?
Well probably yes, over several decades, although rather slowly, in fits and starts, and with some uncertainties. Oh by the way, it was already warming before humans began releasing huge quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere, albeit at a slower rate.

2.  Are human CO2 emissions causing the warming?
Perhaps, at least some of it. Although not an expert, I have seen enough of both sides to claim that 50% +/-40% of the current global warming is caused by human activity, but it is not all CO2 related: there are localized heating effects like city "heat islands", jungle deforestation, and nuclear power plant heating that must produce some of the warming. And then there are also various natural processes and cycles which have their effects. Thus, there are lots of drivers behind global warming, of which CO2 is but one.

3.  Are increased CO2 and global warming a problem?
For some people and ecosystems yes, for sure, but for others, it will probably be beneficial. Significant sea level rise (unlikely to occur in this century) would cause problems in many places, but higher CO2 levels may increase plant productivity everywhere, and northern regions may become more hospitable. We should not presume that the climate we have grown accustomed to should always remain the same. The world have been both much warmer and much colder in the distant past. Whether any long-term global warming is overall a good or a bad thing, I cannot say.

4.  Is there anything we can do about it?
To be pessimistic, given the failure of the Kyoto Accord and subsequent international meetings, it seems unlikely. Even the European countries who were pushing most for changes have seemingly backed away from their own plans and targets. Some of the proposed schemes for reducing CO2 levels are unrealistic, ineffective, or even dangerous in my opinion. Nevertheless, fossil fuels will eventually run out or become expensive again, and renewable energy sources will continue to expand. Some regions have already reduced their CO2 emissions, so the changes people want will eventually happen, just not as fast as some would prefer.

Having said all this, however, I also believe that most of the practical suggestions made for individuals and organizations to reduce their environmental impact and use of fossil fuels are probably good things for people to do anyway: reject, reduce, re-use, live within our means, be good stewards of what God has entrusted to us, buy a smaller house, take the bus or ride a bike, use electricity carefully, reduce our consumption, improve efficiencies, and so on. Let's leave the political hype alone and focus on areas we can agree on and do something about!

If you want to investigate both sides of the issue further, here two key web sites. Both have very long reports with lots of data, or you can just read their summaries to get their gist:
http://www.ipcc.ch/index.htm
http://climatechangereconsidered.org/
For a later article I published on this topic (similar content), see:
https://www.ngtimes.ca/thoughts-and-balance-on-climate-change/

Finally, I am open to change and reserve the right to adjust my thinking without prior notice. 😃

Friday 17 January 2014

Introductory Remarks


 
I was going to call this blog by a longer name, but Google had "THOPID" available, so I thought that would be easier to remember, both for myself and possibly for others. My name is Ed and this is where I hope to capture my THoughts, OPinions and IDeas (hence the address) for future reference and likely sharing. Inspired by Blaise Pascal's Pensées, this will be a collection of how I think on a variety of subjects. In addition to the thopids, it will also include speculations, observations, analyses, and discussion about whatever I feel like writing.

I have collected many of these as paper notes over several years and decided I should write them up to go beyond my own head. I do not guarantee originality; I expect that much of what I write has been written by someone else at some point, but I hope there may be a few interesting or even useful insights here. Some entries will be just idle thoughts, and I certainly do not believe everything myself. I will add entries as I think of and capture them, thoughts being tricky things to capture properly.

As for me, I will say for now that I am a Christian, a husband and father, an engineer, and now happily retired, in approximately that order of importance. My postings will doubtless reflect those attributes. I also read a lot of science, sci-fi, philosophy and other magazines and books, so get a vast assortment of mental input to contribute to my musings and meanderings, some of which will bubble up and become crystallized here.

One last note: please ignore the posting dates. Very few of my posts are timely or sensitive to the passage of years, so they may all be considered "current" in some ways. This blog format collects them by date, so that is what I am stuck with. Pleasant readings!