the Unbelievers

Richard Dawkins has been branded a sexist in recent months by prominent bloggers I hold in high regard. A new film titled "The Unbelievers" is not helping his image much. In it, Woody Allen is cast as an advocate of the scientific world-view. How is this advancing a scientific perspective? How is putting a near-pedophile out there as a front-man for science helping? Come on.

 Despite all this I can not deny the impact Dawkins has had on my world-view through his writings. If nothing more than convincing me to read the Origin of Species cover-to-cover my intellectual interactions with him have been worth it. This coupled to my positive encounter with Lawrence Krauss this past summer at Chautauqua Institution leads me to share this preview with you all. As an unbeliever myself I predict this film will be a gateway to many stimulating discussions and stimulating discussions are what I live for.

Lawrence Krauss "science teachers should get paid more"

I had the privilege of meeting Lawrence Krauss last summer at Chautauqua Institution. I like him more every time I hear him speak. His ideas in the video below are no exception. But I am wondering if PZ has a point when he says "You can't buy good teaching." I do think all teachers should be paid more. However, in my opinion the free market has no place to operate in the classroom. If it did we might have home-ec sponsored by coca-cola, and social studies funded by Halliburton. No thanks.

Lawrence Krauss at Chautauqua

Lawrence Krauss sat down to record On Being with Krista Tippett at Chautauqua Institution in July 2012. I wrote this post after attending. I am glad to have found the entire interview and Q&A session available to watch on you tube. I'm curious to hear your thoughts. I realize the video is long but it is certainly worth the time.

 

Lawrence Krauss - words of wisdom

"Too often in the media, speculative ideas are treated on the same footing as well-tested ones. As a result, it is sometimes hard to tell the difference between them. This is particularly unfortunate when firmly grounded ideas that are known to accurately describe the physical world (such as evolution and the big bang) are passed off as mere theoretical whims of a group of partisan scientists.  One of the most useful tasks a popular exposition of science at the forefront can achieve, it seems to me, is clearly differentiate that which we know yields an accurate description of nature on some scale from those things we have reason to suspect one day might do so. And the worst thing such an exposition can do is confuse the two."

                                                   ~Lawrence M. Krauss

                                                        from Hiding in the Mirror

I had the good fortune of meeting Lawrence Krauss last Friday as he recorded the radio show "On Being" with Krista Tippett at Chautauqua Institution here in Western New York.  He was happy and irascible in front of a large crowd of religious people in the open-air "Hall of Philosophy." 

Throughout his interview he drove home his point over and over that God and science do not mix, that science is the best method for learning and religion is a collection of childish myths and we all need to grow up. The gasps from the crowd were priceless. 

Krauss took the opportunity to explain how the discovery of the Higgs boson affects our understanding of the universe. A subtle point not covered by many popular outlets is that the Higgs field barely interects with photons. This accident of our existence explains how photons can travel at the speed of light while the rest of matter is slowed by the strong nuclear force and the newly verified Higgs field.  

While speaking of the Higgs Krauss urged the audience to embrace the ecstatic awe discoveries like these can provide without the need for faith. He stressed the satisfaction that comes from a secular humanist view of the universe.

Krauss pointed out that faith leaves humanity helpless in making policy decisions. He proposed policy be decided based on evidence. A strangely novel suggestion in the current political atmosphere. He said it bothered him greatly that McCain and Obama choose to have a presidential debate on faith rather than issues that actually matter like approaches to human health and disease, energy, and the environment. What did we learn from the faith debate in 2008? That both candidates had it. So what?!?!

When you do not base you moral and ethical decisions on evidence you end up with the republican party!

One of the best moments of the day was when an elderly woman asked Dr. Krauss "what can science tell us about love?" He responded with a wonderfully humanist answer I will paraphrase from memory.

Science can tell us a lot about love starting with chemistry and physiology. From a scientific world-view a person can approach love honestly. I can tell you that I am deeply in love right now. When I feel love I am seeing and sensing shared values in another human being. Of course I am sexually attracted to the  person but on a deeper level I see myself in her. I see the ideals, the things I aspire to most in her. That reflection can easily come from a scientific approach to love.

After the interview I picked up a copy of his book Hiding in the Mirror and was pleased to see him described as a "writer-scientist" on the back cover. From now on I aspire to be a "writer-scientist" myself. Too often I think people who go from doing science to writing about science feel the need to re-label themselves "science-writers." I see no need for this re-branding. We are all scientists!

Though I did want to ask him many different questions I choose the one most important to me. I asked him if he supports Open Access. He replied with gusto.

"Yes, of course. In fact astrophysics pioneered open access with the invention of the ArXiv. I see journal articles as for archival purposes. I don't even read journals anymore, just the ArXiv."

As a biochemist I had not heard of this resource and was happy to look it up and experience it first hand.  With this awareness fresh in my mind I was shocked to see the ArXiv all over science news this week. A law newly passed in the UK requires all research publications made possible with tax-payer funds be made openly available to the whole world online. The astrophysics ArXiv was used as an archetype for how to make this happen.  Brilliant!

While I do look forward to a world with wider and wider open access I approach this world with Lawrence Krauss and his words of caution in mind. Carl Sagan had something to say about this as well.

"We wish to find the truth, no matter where it lies. But to find the truth we need imagination and skepticism both. We will not be afraid to speculate, but we will be careful to distinguish speculation from fact.

For our collective understanding of the universe to mature we need to have a lot of ideas. This means there will be countless bad ideas. The trick, I think, will be not to get caught in an eddy in the river of knowledge. Dogma, fear, and superstition have proved themselves sure paths into those stagnant waters. 

I applaud Lawrence Krauss for encouraging us to grow up.

Why Higgs matters? Lawrence Krauss explains

Image courtesy of CERN.

By Lawrence Krauss - Slate

Who would have believed it? Every now and then theoretical speculation anticipates experimental observation in physics. It doesn’t happen often, in spite of the romantic notion of theorists sitting in their rooms alone at night thinking great thoughts. Nature usually surprises us. But today, two separate experiments at the Large Hadron Collider of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva reported convincing evidence for the long sought-after “Higgs” particle, first proposed to exist almost 50 years ago and at the heart of the “standard model” of elementary particle physics—the theoretical formalism that describes three of the four known forces in nature, and which to date agrees with every experimental observation done to date.

The LHC is the most complex (and largest) machine that humans have ever built, requiring thousands of physicists from dozens of countries, working full time for a decade to build and operate. And even with 26 kilometers of tunnel, accelerating two streams of protons in opposite directions at more than 99.9999 percent the speed of light and smashing them together in spectacular collisions billions of times each second, producing hundreds of particles in each collision; two detectors the size of office buildings to measure the particles; and a bank of more than 3,000 computers analyzing the events in real time in order to search for something interesting, the Higgs particle itself never directly appears.

Continue reading at Slate.com.

The difference between religion and science

Lawrence M. Krauss, particle physicist at Arizona State University explains how scientists can get excited about being wrong. This is a major difference between science and religion. Clearly explained by philosopher Karl Popper, the falsifiability of an idea in science makes the idea more rigorous while in religion falsifiability weakens the power of church authority. Bully for Lawrence Krauss slipping in this major point at the 2012 World Science Festival in New York City.

Brian Greene and Lawrence Krauss discuss Higgs field