Ernest Alba's Blog

The Crushing Defeat of Science at the Hands of Religion

One of the side effects of scientific discovery is the inevitable flood of new questions and new problems. Much of it involves the details of how a phenomenon occurs. Because of the discourse and speculation that follow discovery, science can be seen by the public as unreliable. Nothing is further from the truth. Theories must undergo a tremendous amount of discourse and reflection by scientists in order to flesh out a version that properly accounts for the given evidence and experimentation. That is the nature of science. In no way does it mean that the fundamentals of a given theory are incorrect. It just means there is a lot more to learn about the fundamentals. But, again, people dislike so much discourse. The discourse creates doubt that the theories provided by scientists are correct. Science, most of the time, can't provide simple, solid answers.

So, they place faith in religion which does provide concrete answers. Unfortunately for them, religion can't help them when they suffer a heart attack or when their parent is diagnosed with breast cancer . It can't answer the questions their children may have about how trees grow from seeds, the way hummingbirds can hover in mid-air, or the proverbial question, why is the sky blue? It can't explain why animal species go extinct, why genes are capable of mutating, or why the bones of hominids millions of years old resemble closely the bones of modern humans. Science can. There is much more to be discovered, there are many unanswered questions, and there are a lot of holes in the theories. But those holes can't be closed by religion. They can only be closed by science.

We can pretend all we want that science doesn't provide answers, but in the end, we still get check-ups at the hospital, we still buy technology, we still exercise in order to maintain a healthy body, and we still find ourselves using all of these theories and facts that scientists, engineers, and doctors have observed, documented, and created. Every aspect of our lives, everything we do was and is made possible by the scientific body of knowledge that has been amassed over thousands of years by people. The evidence for scientific discovery as the path towards enlightenment is overwhelming. It is how we've gotten to where we are. It is how we will reach our final destination, whatever that may be.

It's all in how you look at it

We often hear of ethnocentrism and the unfair light in which we paint cultures different from ours. We are, thus, careful about what we choose to believe about other cultures because, in fact, it may not be true. Ironically, part of our ethnocentricity is our failure to realize that other cultures can be ethnocentric as well. Take, for example, the European nations during the time of imperialism and colonialism. The Western countries, if you remember, were beginning to explore "uncivilized" countries and claiming them in the name of God. They were bringing the light of freedom and democracy to the uncivilized masses. From the viewpoint of those colonizing Western powers, an important 'difference' between Western culture and various colonized cultures was the alleged singular openness of 'Western culture' to historical change - cast as 'progress.' Colonized cultures were conversely often represented as victims of a static past of unchanging custom and tradition, virtually immune to history. These colonized cultures were placed outside of history, at least until the advent of colonialism.

In those eventually colonized cultures, as in some Orientalist views of certain colonies, to the degree that colonized societies were seen by Western colonialists as open to and affected by change, the changes were regarded as symptoms of cultural 'decline' and 'degeneration.' That is, China, for example, considered itself to be at the height of civilization, perfect in cultural richness, tradition, government, and technological innovation. Any change from that would be interpreted as a sign of cultural deterioration. Britain, meanwhile, would call it progress. See? It's all in how you look at it.

Feminism Facts

Women's movements are predominantly governed by middle class women.
Feminism is not the outcome of a linear process of socioeconomics change. Instead, they tend to be weak where state control permeates civil society and strong where state control is or has been relaxed.
Until women abandoned the myth of global sisterhood and acknowledged profound differences in women's lives and in the meanings of feminism cross-nationally, there was great resentment between women from the First and Third worlds.
A key issue for women's movements is whether economic reform is accompanied by an increase or decline in female employment.

Why Feminism is so hard to spread

The widespread belief that its inspiration, origins, and relevance are bourgeois or Western.
Fear that it demands a total transformation of the social order
the notion that feminists are "man haters"

Number Theory

Proof, a movie starring Anthony Hopkins, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Hope Davis, is about a math proof. After a retired mathematician dies, a notebook is found in his locked desk drawer. In the notebook is one of the most important proofs in the history of mathematics. This particular proof solves a problem in number theory that had, until then, never been solved. This post isn't about the movie or the proof; it's about number theory.

What is number theory? Simply put, it's the study of integers. Integers include all positive numbers, their negatives, and zero. They don't include fractions and decimals. One might ask how can mathematicians study just numbers. What's there to know about them? I mean, you use them to count and to order. What more is there? Well, a more pointed question might be: What more can you do with them? Some basic properties of numbers are:

You can add them: a+b=c
You can subtract them (subtracting is adding): a+(-b)=d
You can multiply them: a*b=e
You can divide them (dividing is multiplying): a*(1/b)=f

OK, well, we learned how to do all that stuff in elementary school. Why, then, is there a branch of mathematics about it? Well, consider the following:

The Pythagoreans, an ancient sect of mathematicians, said that a number is perfect if it equals the sum of its positive divisors, excluding itself. For example, 1+2+3=6 and 1+2+4+7+14+28. But 10 is not perfect because 1+2+5=8 not 10 and 12 is not perfect because 1+2+3+4+6=16 not 12. Euclid was able to create a formula that would find all even perfect numbers. But are there any odd perfect numbers? We know there aren't any between 0 and 10^300, but mathematicians have yet to prove that there exist no odd perfect numbers.

What about this?

Are there infinitely many primes p such that p+2 is also prime? For example, 3 is prime which means it is only divisible by itself and 1. 3+2 equals 5, which is also prime. Conversely, 13 is prime, but 13+2 is not. And 97 is prime, but 99 is not. In 1966, Chen Jingrun showed that there are infinitely many primes p such that p+2 is the product of, at most, two primes. So if 13 is prime, which it is, then 15 must be the product of two primes (in this case, 5 and 3).

Proofs usually have two parts

A proof that something exists.
A proof that nothing else exists.

Without these two crucial parts, a theorem is not complete, and, therefore, worthless. In the words of the greatest contributor to mathematics in history, Carl F. Gauss, "(1/2)*proof=0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible."

There are many more questions we can ask about the properties of numbers. What are their relationship to one another; are there patterns in operations involving numbers; how do they act when under certain conditions. And, though this may seem meaningless to the average person, these questions are important because they bring us closer to understanding where we are, what we are, and who we are. These patterns, rules, and properties belong to the universe we inhabit. Just as we toddled around our home when we were infants, so we continue in our quest to explore, to know, and to understand our larger home.

Richard Smalley dies at 62

I can't properly give this man credit for his accomplishments. Please click here for a better eulogy. This Nobel Laureate and Nanotechnology pioneer taught at Rice University since 1976. I first read about this man in my high school chemistry book, and then had the privilege of visiting Rice University and seeing him in flesh and blood, working in his laboratory. I knew at the time who I was seeing, and that moment was one of the pivotal moments of my life. It steeled my resolve to follow in the footsteps of the great scientists that have contributed to our knowledge of the universe. Professor Smalley was a great loss not only to the world, but also to me.

Richard Feynman

One of the most admired and influential physicists of the 20th century, Richard Feynman was a great man in more ways than one. He was obviously highly intelligent, but he was also charming, funny, and an eloquent orator. He is probably the greatest lecturer Caltech has ever seen, and one of the best students to pass through the halls of MIT. I believe MIT recognized that fact when they named him a Putnam Fellow the same year he graduated. His graduate work at Princeton layed the foundation for the "path integral" approach in quantum physics and Feynman diagrams. He was eccentric and free-spirited. A few of his many, many dictated words are below.

To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature...If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks.

When you are solving a problem, don't worry. Now, after you have solved the problem, then that's the time to worry.

The wonderful thing about science is that it's alive.

Dear Mrs. Chown, Ignore your son's attempts to teach you physics. Physics isn't the most important thing. Love is. Best wishes, Richard Feynman.

from wikipedia.org:

It is also worth recalling a question Richard Feynman raised while exploring the capabilities of mechanical calculators at Los Alamos, during the Manhattan Project. In a letter to his wife, Arline Feynman, he pointed out that the decimal expansion of the fraction 1/243 repeats in a rather amusing way:

1/243 = 0.00411522633744...

This letter irritated the censor reading mail between Los Alamos and the outside world, who feared that strings of numbers may communicate technical secrets. Gleefully, Feynman pointed out that if you actually do divide 1 by 243, you do get that string of digits, so there cannot be more "information" in the long string of numbers than there is in the single number 243. This illustrates how "information" can be a subtle concept; is there more information in pi, for example, than in the definition of a circle?

Hopefully, now that you're thinking, I can lay one more on you. Philosophers think deeply about abstract questions. Albert Einstein asked the question "Did God have any choice in creating the Universe?" Averroes proposed that not even God could create a triangle whose internal angles did not add up to 180 degrees. Carl Sagan believed that "the idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard, who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by God, one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying...it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity."