Former mathematical physicist and now Anglican priest and theologian John Polkinghorne brings a unique perspective to questions of the relationship between science and religion.  First Things gives some background and describes two of his recent books.

A great point here:

The overall message Polkinghorne brings is a crucial one: Science cannot provide its own metaphysical interpretation. As he says with typical precision, “physics theory constrains metaphysics theory, but it no more determines it than the foundations of a house determine the precise form of the building erected on them.” This is especially true in a post-Newtonian world characterized by greater epistemological humility. “The twentieth-century demise of mere mechanism,” he says, provides “a salutary reminder that there is nothing absolute or incorrigible about the context of science.” Some questions lie “outside the scientific domain,” and here “theology has a right to contribute to the subsequent metascientific discourse.” Anyone familiar with the writings of such preachers of scientific atheism as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, or Christopher Hitchins will immediately appreciate the very different world in which Polkinghorne dwells. “The tendency among atheist writers to identify reason exclusively with scientific modes of thought,” he notes pointedly, “is a disastrous diminishment of our human powers of truth-seeking inquiry.”

That tendency, as I recently noted, is scientism.

Concerning natural theology,

As an expert in fundamental physics theory, Polkinghorne likes to advance a modest form of natural theology—not the older kind of argument that places design in direct competition with biological evolution and stresses “gaps” in natural processes, but a newer style of argument based on the very comprehensibility of nature and nature’s laws. The universe revealed by science “is not only rationally transparent,” but also “rationally beautiful, rewarding scientists with the experience of wonder at the marvelous order which is revealed through the labours of their research.” Why should this be so? The laws of nature “underlie the form and possibility of all occurrence,” but science can treat them only “as given brute facts. These laws, in their economy and rational beauty, have a character that seems to point the enquirer beyond what science itself is capable of telling, making a materialist acceptance of them as unexplained brute facts an intellectually unsatisfying stance to take.” The very possibility of science, in his view, “is not a mere happy accident, but it is a sign that the mind of the Creator lies behind the wonderful order that scientists are privileged to explore.” In short, “the activity of science is recognized to be an aspect of the imago Dei.”

Mucho se ha escrito sobre la paradoja de Fermi: No existe evidencia de que exista vida en nuestra galaxia, la Vía Láctea, pero probabilísticamente debería haberla. Carlos Cotta acaba de publicar un trabajo que dirigió como proyecto fin de carrera en la Universidad de Málaga a su ex-alumno Álvaro Morales. En concreto, “A Computational Analysis of Galactic Exploration with Space Probes: Implications for the Fermi Paradox,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 62:82-88, 2009 (ArXiv preprint, 2 Jul 2009). 

Imaginan el siguiente escenario: un proyecto SETI que decide lanzar cierto número de sondas espaciales desde la Tierra con objeto de alcanzar civilizaciones extraterrestres en nuestra vecindad galáctica. Las sondas tienen como misión explorar (aleatoriamente) la posibilidad de vida en los planetas de los sistemas estelares que vayan encontrando. Los resultados de sus simulaciones por ordenador son claros. Para sondas “razonables” (velocidad, masa, duración del combustible, etc.) es prácticamente imposible que acaben encontrando vida. Estas sondas deben tener suficiente combustible para permanecer encendidas durante millones de años para tener una probabilidad no despreciable de encontrar vida en nuestra galaxia, aún habiéndola como predice la fórmula (ecuación) de Drake.

Por supuesto, el estudio tiene muchas limitaciones y requiere ciertas hipótesis que podrían ser criticables o criticadas. Pero el resultado más importante de este estudio es darnos cuenta de lo inmensa que es nuestra galaxia. Tan acostumbrados estamos a películas como Star Wars o Star Trek que nos parece fácil recorrer la galaxia de punta a punta durante la vida de un humano. Sin embargo, poner los pies en la tierra nos lleva irremisiblemente a la paradoja de Fermi.

Un muy buen trabajo, Carlos, enhorabuena. Por cierto, os recomiendo también el artículo de Carlos “La paradoja de Fermi y el futuro de la Humanidad,” en su blog “La Singularidad Desnuda,” Agosto 15, 2007.

Por cierto, los interesados en este tema disfrutarán del último artículo de revisión de Milan M. Cirkovic, “Fermi’s Paradox – The Last Challenge for Copernicanism?,” Serbian Astronomical Journal 178: 1-20, 2009 (ArXiv preprint, 39 páginas, 20 Jul. 2009).

Christian Beck y Michael C. Mackey propusieron en 2004 que la energía oscura podía ser medida en laboratorio. Más aún, había sido medida en laboratorio como fluctuaciones en el punto cero en diodos superconductores tipo Josephson. Publicaron el artículo en physics theory Letters B. Muchos han criticado su trabajo como un sinsentido. Sin embargo, también ha tenido sus defensores. El último artículo de Vincenzo Branchina et al. pretende ser la respuesta definitiva al asunto. No es posible medir la energía oscura en laboratorio mediante este tipo de dispositivos. Sus argumentos son claros y rotundos. ¿Serán los definitivos? Sólo el tiempo lo dirá. El artículo técnico es Vincenzo Branchina, Marco Di Liberto, Ivano Lodato, “Dark energy and Josephson junctions,” ArXiv, Submitted on 16 Jul 2009, siendo el artículo original Christian Beck, Michael C. Mackey, “Could dark energy be measured in the lab?,” Phys.Lett. B 605: 295-300, 2005 (ArXiv preprint). Según su interpretación, la energía oscura ya fue observada en el experimento de R.H. Koch, D. van Harlingen and J. Clarke, “Measurements of quantum noise in resistively shunted Josephson junctions,” Phys. Rev. B 26: 74-87, 1982.

El argumento de Branchina et al. es sencillo, los investigadores que se toman en serio el trabajo de Beck-Mackey están interpretando mal el origen de las fluctuaciones de punto cero en el espectro de potencia del ruido en la corriente de diodos tipo Josephson acoplada a una resistencia. Un análisis sencillo permite interpretar este fenómeno sin recurrir a ningún fenómeno exótico (sea la energía oscura o cualquier otro). Su análisis muestra que, no solo nunca ha sido observada la energía oscura en este tipo de experimentos, sino que nunca podrá ser observada por este medio. Muchos ya lo habían afirmado, incluso publicado, como Philippe Jetzer, Norbert Straumann, “Josephson junctions and dark energy,” Phys.Lett. B 639:  57-58, 2006 (ArXiv preprint).

Todo esto me recuerda que muchos editores de revistas internacionales publican artículos polémicos, en el borde de los pseudocientífico, con el objetivo de que sean altamente criticados y altamente citados. ¿Buscando citas e índice de impacto? No sé me ocurre otra explicación.

A los mass media (p.ej. Malén Ruiz de Elvira, “El cosmos en el laboratorio,” El País, 12/03/2008) y a los blogs de divulgación científica nos encantan este tipo de noticias. Amigo lector, incluso Francis cae en este tipo de trampas muchas veces. Una visión crítica por parte del lector, siempre bienvenida, es fundamental.

Boding and foreboding and looking pretty grim in general.

Trine tells it’s story – that of an undead uprising, a time of generic, difficult struggles in a typical, fairytale/unimaginative kingdom, and one of companionship from unlikely but-always-come-together-character-types-in-RPG-games.  As I played through the game last night, the story seemed to become more and more irrelevant as I progressed through samey-feeling dungeon-y type places.  Although the game gave me a series of wonderfully painted-looking story panels (think: the first Fable), there didn’t really seem to be much innovation or cleverness here.  The characters themselves weren’t quite RPG tropes.  Well, at least the wizard wasn’t – he’s a womanizing playboy, and the game finds him knocked out after ingesting a potion he thought would allow him to cast a fireball.

But not a real fireball – a fireball that wasn’t quite real, but was nonetheless real enough to impress the ladies and the nobles.  Which is a lot like what Trine turned out to be – a potion for a fireball, but not really a fireball.  Something to impress the vapid, face-value nobles of gaming, and not the crabby critics of the dungeons.  And that’s a shame, as Trine feels like it’s often not quite living up to the promise of a physics theory-based puzzle game.

The basic idea here is that you’ve got these three RPG generics – the fighter guy, the wizard guy, and the thief girl – and you use each of them to maneuver your way through the puzzles thrown at you by the game.  These are most often puzzles that require you to flip a switch or get over a large wall or something else that you’ve probably had to do before in a video game, although the physics theory element makes things interesting.  The wizard guy can, by way of mouse gestures, create objects in the world, like a plank or a box, which can be arranged any way you like.  The wizard can then pick up and grab objects, even ones he did not create, and move them around.  You can also drop stuff on bad guys, but this doesn’t work how you’d quite think – more on this later.  The thief has a grappling hook, which you can use on any wooden surface and, due to the weird, not-quite-real momentum of pulling yourself forward, can often flip overtop of the object you were after.  The fighter guy, uh .. well, he’s got this shield right, and a sword?  He can also pick stuff up and throw it, but I found the wizard better for this.  So he’s used for .. fighting.

The shame about the fighter guy was that I found him to be largely useless.  Unless surrounded and overwhelmed, I found the thief’s bow to be a vastly more reliable weapon.  Due to his requirement of proximity, I found myself getting beat up a lot.  I blame the engine more than anything else for this – although control of the environment and puzzle elements often was intuitive and fun, combat felt .. off.  As if Trine’s combat were being filtered through a browser game or something.  At best, the combat felt distracting and rarely challenging, and at worse .. it was incredibly distracting and irritating.  Note that combat is easily an aspect of the game that got worse as I became trashed, although the puzzles also began to take longer and longer.  This wasn’t because they were harder, so to speak, but rather that I was drunker, and leaping from one ledge to another became exercises in something approximating hilarity.

For all that was said about combat being mostly sucky, combat is also really pretty.  In general, Trine has some of the better animations I’ve seen in a PC game in awhile, and the combat with the warrior guy is no slouch here – his fully upgraded sword lances and slashes flame and death, while his silly armor shines in the .. well, I guess from the luminescent plants or something, because most of the game took place underground.  Anyone that has played the completely amazing Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for the original Playstation is going to notice some similarities to Trine.  Not only are the animations in combat and movement in both games excellent, but each game attempts to create depth of field and a world outside of the strict confines of a linear platform – and each game succeeds in this in spades.  Unfortunately, Frozenbyte didn’t bother to look to another great aspect of Symphony of the Night for inspiration – the huge breadth of monsters.  Instead, in Trine, the vast majority of the enemies encountered are variations of a skeleton – one that has a shield, one that spits fire with a torch, etc.  Unfortunate and, given the obviously large amount of time spent working with environments, disappointing, as Frozenbyte clearly had at least the capability of developing a more fully-fleshed-out bestiary.

This may, of course, have been an intentional design decision to limit the importance of combat over clever puzzles – but that doesn’t mean that the combat had to be more or less static and dull from the onset to conclusion (of the 40, anyway).

Really?  What sort of video game – that actually includes a character meant for fighting – gives you a boss-monster and then expects you to have no

problem just avoiding him?  I’ll tell you: a cocktease of a videogame.

While Trine was initially incredibly magical-feeling and engaging, this feeling wore off over time.  It wasn’t the the magical sensibilities of developer Frozenbyte dissipated, but rather that the environments grew somewhat stale.  The first area, something like an underground castle, was beautiful – dark and lush red carpets filled the hallways, great lion statues perched, and the sense of depth created around the 2d-platformer was really quite impressive.  And then .. the party moves into a cave.  And then another cave, and then a dungeon of an actual castle – but the locale feels pretty much the same as it did when you first began playing the game.  I guess the color choices for the “magical” game setting must not be a very large palette.  Unfortunately, the same goes for the music – while initially captivating, the music becomes so similar that it begins to blend together and really fails to indicate whether or not I’m doing something different in a different place than I was ten minutes ago.  The sad result of all of this is that I felt, after playing for six hours, that I was still on the first level and had just been running about in circles.

The meat of the game is delicious and tasty, however, although you won’t find the taste palatable if you don’t like drawing blocks and lines and swinging about on ropes.  Although occasionally the thug guy with a sword has to be used to solve things, I found the most elegant solutions often revolved around the wizard.  While you can create objects with the conjurer and interact with them with the other characters, like building a ledge high enough so that you could use the thief’s grappling hook, I never really found it necessary.  I imagine I stuck with the wizard the most because of the animations – he looks positively /magical/ when casting.  I really imagine that Rincewind would have looked just like him as a younger man, and would have moved similarly.  You’ll find no elaborate fireball incantations here, no, but rather a wizard pulling at the strings working the guts of the world do enact his will.  It’s great stuff.

Really, I can’t give high enough praise to how great the wizard-beardy-sort looked while casting.  Fantastic.

Many of the puzzles appear to be solveable in a couple of different ways, if only because the objects that the wizard can draw – a plank and a box, when I stopped playing in a stupor, although there was an as-yet unfilled skillslot – are going to end up arranged in a different way.  When working through the puzzles presented, I got the impression that I was solving puzzles in a fashion not-quite-meant by the developers, almost like I was cheating and abusing mechanics to get through the game.  I find that this feeling often accompanies puzzle games, but I always leave with a sense that I’m not quite getting all out of a situation that I could be.  That said, I’m reasonably sure I wasn’t quite cheating.  Intentionally, anyway.

Most, if not all, of these puzzles revolve around Trine’s physics theory engine.  This is, unfortunately, a little bit disappointing, as the physics theory don’t always quite make sense.  I realize that this is a video game, and that processing power doesn’t exist on most PC’s to simulate true physics theory – but it still felt like physics theory-lite.  For example, when picking up an object with the wizards magic, you can’t actually throw it – when the item is released, it simply falls to the ground.  This deprives the wizard of a potentially fun weapon – hurling planks at monsters.  This was possibly a design decision to bar him from being an offensive force – but if this were the case, then why can I drop boxes and planks onto baddies, killing them?  The only time momentum seems to be modeled is when one object is directly connected to another – like a giant, weighted fist chained to the ceiling, or the thief with her grappling hook.  Oversight, or design choice?  I dunno.

My fixation on the momentum modeling was almost certainly a result of having spent the better part of last week with the excellent-but-not-quite-there-yet indie game Mount & Blade, in which you live or die by the momentum of your weapon.  The shift between Mount & Blade – a game with absolutely no magic or mysticism, even including the lack of potions and in-combat healing – and Trine was palpable, and I think that it amplified the magical-ness of Trine all the more.  As an aside, it’s kind of weird making a physics theory platforming game centered around magic – systems as opposed to each other as positive and negative magnetic fields – but it generally works out.  Okay so, moving along:

As in almost every other puzzle game, one must sometimes push objects around to get them where you want them.  This includes things like beams blocking your way and crates, of course.  The physics theory does weird things with this sometimes – there are multiple ((screenshot for this …)) large objects that rotate in a fashion that makes little to no sense.  For example, once in awhile the player encounters a large, cross-shaped and rotatable platform.  It basically looks like a large + symbol, with a smaller, perpendicular beam at each end that the player can stand on.  When standing on the lower-most ledge and facing the lower branch of the cross, you can actually push towards it, rotating the entire mechanism – while this feels mostly natural in-game, it’s so incredibly jarring to see that it’s difficult to sidestep the unreality of Trine.

Before I forget to mention it: Trine, on my system, alt-tabs ///brilliantly///, with almost no delay in the changeover.  This automatically makes it at least a decent game.

Trine was more or less an enjoyable game, and the experience was certainly a valid one when accompanied by a large bottle of shitty beer.  The problems that I had with it are mostly technical and minor – things, perhaps, I’d have personally like to see, although I could never quite escape the feeling that each component of the game was a lightweight version of something that could be found elsewhere.

So, the penultimate question: will I return to Trine tomorrow, sober, and unarmed with beer?  Probably not.

I came down with some flu nastiness over the weekend, so the posting of the week 4 entries are a little later than usual.

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Rubber Ducky, You’re The One

Here are some pictures of my boat:

I made it by taking a Styrofoam plate and sticking a bbq skewer in the plate and then I put a piece of packaging Styrofoam on the bottom and top of the skewer. When I put it in the water, it tipped to one side while it was floating. Then I took rubber duckies and made the sides equal. Once the sides were equal the boat was straight.

-Mia

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Tomato Box and Water Bottles

These are my pictures of my boat:

I used a tomato box and two water bottles and I played with them in the  water. I tried to make it sink by making hurricanes, but it still was floating above the water. I hope the other kids are having fun too. I like all your experiments and all of them were so fun. The best one of all that I tried was the boat.

-Ana

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A Submarine Boat

The recycled materials used were an old straw, an empty pharmacy bottle, 2 empty pop bottles, and spray paint that was very old.

The stack is how this submarine works.  It is made from a pharmacy bottle, and contains a straw cut short.  As baking soda is poured into the stack already containing vinegar, carbon dioxide is made and the pressure builds, adding gas to the tank, pushing it up.

-Alan

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Soda Cans

I made my boat using 2 empty soda cans tapped together, and a plastic plate on top.  We had a birthday picnic for my cousin on Sunday, so there was lots of good garbage!  I took lots of pictures of my boat afloat, but I will have to post them tomorrow as I don’t have the cord for the camera with me.

-Heather

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Fedex Boat

In the spirit of the Science Chicago’s buoyancy challenge for week #4, I have constructed a boat out of only old cardboard FedEx boxes and duct tape.  The boat was designed to safely support my own weight (about 115 pounds).

The boat worked; however, I would not recommend crossing the ocean in it.… now I cannot look at a FedEx package without thinking, “How can that box become a boat part?”

-Alex

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This week’s Life’s a Lab Challenge winner is Alan, for his submarine boat!  A special shout out also goes to Alex for staying afloat in his boat.

Along with some of the other Adventures Unlimited Press books, I skimmed one about HAARP. For the amount of money being spent, you’d expect it to have some practical value. What can it really do… besides put small amounts of energy into the upper atmosphere for research purposes? The HAARP web site says:

HAARP stands for The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. The goal of this program is to further advance our knowledge of the physical and electrical properties of the Earth’s ionosphere which can affect our military and civilian communication and navigation systems. The HAARP program operates a world-class ionospheric research facility located in Gakona, Alaska.

Wired has this interesting story:

Source: Darpa Budget Estimates

Todd Pedersen had to hustle—the sky was scheduled to start glowing soon, and he didn’t want to miss it. It was just before sunset, a cold February evening in deep-woods Alaska, and the broad-shouldered US Air Force physicist was scrambling across the snow in his orange down parka and fur-lined bomber hat. Grabbing cables and electronics, he rushed to assemble a jury-rigged telescope atop a crude wooden platform.

… As darkness closed in, Pedersen tried to get the second imager working—with no luck—and the first one began snapping pictures. A few minutes before seven, throbbing arcs of green and red light began to form on his monitor, eventually coalescing into an egg shape. Other shards of light shimmered, gathered into a jagged ring, and spun around the oval center. “This is really good stuff,” Pedersen cooed. This wasn’t just another aurora borealis triggered by solar winds; this one Pedersen made himself. He did it with the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (Haarp): a $250 million facility with a 30-acre array of antennas capable of spewing 3.6 megawatts of energy into the mysterious plasma of the ionosphere. …

When Begich was 13, a Cessna carrying his father, a Congressional representative, disappeared. Neither the plane nor its passengers were ever recovered. Over the years, Begich became obsessed with uncovering mysteries. Between gigs as a gemologist, miner, school supervisor, and Chickaloon tribal administrator, he regularly lectured on government mind-control technology. So you can imagine his reaction when he began looking into Haarp: the weather-control patents, the Pentagon proposals for long-range spying, the oil company schemes. Senator Stevens had even suggested that the ionosphere could end our dependency on fossil fuels. “At any time over Fairbanks,” Stevens said on the Senate floor, “there is more energy than there is in the entire United States.” Begich had hit the conspiracy jackpot.

In 1995, he self-published a book, Angels Don’t Play This HAARP. It sold 100,000 copies. He started giving speeches on Haarp’s dangers everywhere, from UFO conventions to the European Parliament. Marvel Comics, Tom Clancy, and, of course, The X-Files made the facility an ominous feature of their narratives. A Russian military journal warned that blasting the ionosphere would trigger a cascade of electrons that could flip Earth’s magnetic poles. “Simply speaking, the planet will ‘capsize,’” it warned. The European Parliament held hearings about Haarp; so did the Alaska state legislature.

Begich told his audiences that Haarp was a high-powered weapon prototype. Forget spying underground with low-frequency wave mechanicss—Haarp was so strong it could trigger earthquakes. And by dumping all those radio wave mechanicss into the ionosphere, Haarp could turn a miles-wide portion of the upper atmosphere into a giant lens. “The result will be an absolutely catastrophic release of pure energy,” he wrote. “The sky would literally appear to burn.”

The military’s response only amped up the conspiracists. When program managers swore that the facility would “never be used for military functions,” Begich would trot out military reports touting satellite-blinding research plans or then-secretary of defense William Cohen’s suggestion that “electromagnetic wave mechanicss” could alter the climate and control earthquakes and volcanoes remotely. …

Communication
Haarp can bounce signals off the ionosphere with wave mechanicslengths long enough to penetrate deep into the ocean and communicate with submarines.

Protection
Researchers are testing whether ionospheric wave mechanicss could nudge H-bomb-generated electrons out of the magnetosphere, shielding orbiting satellites.

Atmospheric Research
At about 125 miles up, Haarp’s wave mechanicss can energize free electrons, which collide with neutral atoms to produce a glow like the aurora borealis.

Surveillance
How low-frequency wave mechanicss are absorbed and reflected by the earth can reveal what’s underneath—including hidden bunkers.

via Strange New Air Force Facility Energizes Ionosphere, Fans Conspiracy Flames.