Hello, all,
One of the first things K and I noticed about our new apartment after we moved in was: there sure seem to be a lot of flies around here! And of course, being in France we have no screens on our windows, and no AC, so one is forced to open the windows for circulation and let the bugs in.
Thanks to a couple of generous relatives who responded to our request, we now have Bounce sheets that magically repel the biters from us while we sleep - before we'd wake up each summer morning with a new welt or three. The kids included.
Still the ubiquitous presence of house flies and fruit flies in our kitchen is a nonstop annoyance. We had to go out and by flyswatters. One particularly caught my fancy - it even had a video playing in the store to go with it (in French, of course). It was an electrified swatter that looked like a miniature tennis racket. All you had to do is put in a couple AA batteries, press the button on the handle and yow! you'd get a shock just touching the criss-crossing wires. Great fun while it lasted, which was about a couple hours. You could swing it and drop a fly out of mid-air to the ground skittering across the floor. And then after two hours, nothing. I had to return it. Do they have these in the states, and do they work better? Someone let me know, please...Meanwhile I've reverted to the old reliable plastic swatter, with a smiling sun in the center of it, gets 'em most of the time.
We thought that perhaps the flies were coming from the trash that's collected in bins behind a locked door directly below our kitchen window - seemed pretty obvious. But in actual fact one day K noticed a lot of flies hanging around the tree outside our window. They must like the fruit on the tree.
Anyway, she told me that when she was a kid her mother used to try to kill insects, and if she didn't get them right away she would yell at them to "die right!"
Well, you'd think that's what atheists and some scientists keep yelling at God, because they seem to keep trying to "kill" Him. And he just ain't dying right. He don't stay dead. (Hear that, Nietzsche? Oh wait, Nietzsche can't hear that, Nietzsche is dead!)
Case in point: just today (well, by now, yesterday), none other than the distinguished scientist and professor at Cambridge Stephen Hawking came to CERN to give a talk. In case you live under a rock, he's one of the most preeminent names in the particle physics, relativity and cosmology fields. This is the guy in the wheelchair with ALS, who has to use a voice synthesizer in order to communicate. He's easily become a pop culture icon, even appearing as himself in a Star Trek: Next Generation episode (the benchmark by which all celebrity is measured - well, that and the Simpsons...). Back before K and I were dating, she and her roommate had the "SR friends" over for a night of watching his video, "A Brief History of Time". K was very interested to hear that he was going to be at CERN, but couldn't get away to see him because of the kids.
I myself intended on going to the main auditorium to see him live, in person. And I thought that if I gave myself a half-hour in advance, I should find a seat, no problem. Boy was I wrong. My office-mate came back with his fiancee 45 minutes before the speech saying that they were blocked from entering the main auditorium by security, who told him the auditorium had already been filled to capacity for over an hour. So much for my dream of trading high fives with him on camera...So we went to one of several satellite conference rooms where they were also showing the talk.
Fortunately for K (or not?), CERN was also going to "webcast" the speech on the internet, so she could still see him. And guess what - you can still see the talk for yourself! It's recorded and waiting for you to see it, right here. But wait! Before you click that link, be warned: it's geared towards physicists, so the majority of the talk contains technical details you probably wouldn't be interested in. (K bailed in the middle of the speech.)
What you might be interested in are the beginning and end of the speech, and also the general flow of it. It is quite dramatic to see him wheeled into the auditorium and prepared by his attendants, and then to see him give this lecture. It's less than half-an-hour long, and occasionally punctuated by very long pauses, lasting up to a minute. I don't quite understand why. His own website reportedly states that he can manage 15 words/minute when talking spontaneously, but his synthesizer can talk full-speed from a prepared text, which I assume this was.
And then there's the content. What amazes me is that he so baldly and repeatedly states his purpose as being that of eliminating the need to invoke a supernatural agent in explaining the creation of the universe. So in actual fact I'm sure he would protest that he's not trying to "kill" God. To scientists it always seems to me that their chief interest in God is to use Him as a concept in explaining something - or finding a way not to. After all, the principal charter of a scientist is to explain things, and what bigger "thing" is there to explain than the universe? How we came to be? Before, when faith in God informed scientists like Newton and Pascal and many others, the validity of scientific exploration itself was predicated on the existence of a Supreme and intelligent Lawgiver; whereas today God is apparently an embarrassment and an inconvenience, and science has been redefined explicitly to exclude Him altogether from any explanation bearing the imprimatur of scientific authority.
At the beginning of the 20th century (after Nietzsche's famous declaration), the favored model of the universe was the "steady state" model. In order to avoid invoking an eternal God, why not just say that the universe is eternal instead? No creation, no God needed to explain it. But in fact, the 20th century answered that question to many scientists' discomfort, Einstein not the least of them. His own theory of general relativity said that the universe could not be simply static, and it could not exist forever, because gravity would eventually collapse it, no matter how long it took. Then Hubble came along and demonstrated by astronomical observations that the universe was expanding as if from a huge explosion, the so-called "Big Bang." No more steady-state theory; apparently the universe had a beginning after all.
To make a long story short ("too late!") zoom ahead to the present: apparently scientists have now found a way to recover the steady-state model - not by saying that the universe was eternal; that ship has sailed and it's not coming back. But who needs the universe when you have quantum fields? Just find some other inanimate object - even a theoretical construct - and say that always existed! And this is apparently the core of Hawking's speech. I don't profess to understand most of it - in fact I intend to dig out my QFT textbook and look over the chapter on path integral formulations again, rewatch the video a couple times to see if I can understand more.
The only other thing that astounded me as much as his professed purpose was the fact that nobody asked a single question when it was over. It is perhaps because of a couple things a fellow Christian physicist explained to me subsequently: first that the audience was composed mostly of students who had time to burn waiting for the talk, and less of the other renowned physicists that could ask an intelligent question; secondly that it actually takes him more like 15 minutes to compose a one sentence answer to any question you ask. But I can't imagine that the whole audience would have known that up front.
Me, I'm thinking: what a golden opportunity. I would've liked to ask: "how is postulating the pre-existence of a scalar quantum field any more verifiable, any more scientific, than postulating the pre-existence of a supernatural agent? How does postulating the existence of infinite alternative universes to explain fine tuning help the cause if these other universes can't be observed or otherwise verified?"
Stay tuned for an update from August, it's still in process. Once it shows up, it will appear before this blog entry, the only entry from August of this year. Today is "Jeûne genevois", or the Genevan Fast, and CERN is closed today. The history of it is of mild interest if you're into that sort of thing...
Today, it suddenly occurred to me, is also the 1st anniversary of the day that the LHC switched on, and we all toasted each other to a year of productive data-taking... Maybe someday I'll write a book: "When bad things happen to smart people (don't blame God! It was a quantum field fluctuation!)"
Take care,
-PKBGD
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