Category: Uncategorized

Abbotsford

Abbotsford is Sir Walter Scott’s home, at Melrose in the Scottish Borders. The place is fascinating. Scott’s library is intact, and it is enormous. In fact I suspect that Scott’s books are worth as much as his house.

I learned something new about Scott. He had a favorite cat who often sat on his desk when he was writing. There is a portrait of the cat in the house; her name was Hinse. Any writer who had cats is sure to have at least one cat character in his novels. I need to do some research on that, and I can’t think of a better place to get started that tomorrow’s trip to Edinburgh for a lecture at the Sir Walter Scott Club.

I have many photos, and I’ll have more later. I have only an iPhone to work with while traveling, so I’ll save my photos until I’m back at home with a proper computer and Photoshop.

I plan to visit Berwick Upon Tweed on Friday.

The cosmology of Giordano Bruno


Source: Wikimedia Commons

Heresy. S.J. Parris. Doubleday, 2010. 448 pages.

I want to talk not so much about the historical novel by S.J. Parris as about Giordano Bruno and why he deserves our attention 424 years after his death (burned at the stake for heresy).

I’ll quote from the Wikipedia article:

“He is known for his cosmological theories, which conceptually extended to include the then-novel Copernican model. He practiced Hermeticism and gave a mystical stance to exploring the universe. He proposed that the stars were distant suns surrounded by their own planets (exoplanets), and he raised the possibility that these planets might foster life of their own, a cosmological position known as cosmic pluralism. He also insisted that the universe is infinite and could have no center.

“Bruno was tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition on charges of denial of several core Catholic doctrines, including eternal damnation, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and transubstantiation. Bruno’s pantheism was not taken lightly by the church, nor was his teaching of metempsychosis regarding the reincarnation of the soul. The Inquisition found him guilty, and he was burned alive at the stake in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori in 1600.”

Giordano Bruno’s life shows us how some people (a tiny minority, usually) can be right about many things many years before it can be proven. And then there is the ugly corollary: Some people can be wrong about many things (a huge majority, usually) many years after those things have been proven false. It’s important to keep in mind that, though Bruno had a scientific mind, it was philosophy, rather than science, that he was doing with his theories. Bruno’s philosophy, though, was grounded in the best science of his time.

Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres had been published in 1543. Copernicus, who used telescopes and mathematics, was doing science. Even though it was philosophy that Bruno was concerned with, he was not just wildly speculating. The reasoning involved in forming scientific hypotheses is always disciplined by the rigors of philosophy. This is as true today as it was in Bruno’s time. Today’s cosmological theories come from a collaboration between scientists and philosophers of science.

The history of ignorance is as horrifying as the history of knowledge is inspiring. From the Wikipedia article on Bruno:

“The Vatican has published few official statements about Bruno’s trial and execution. In 1942, Cardinal Giovanni Mercati, who discovered a number of lost documents relating to Bruno’s trial, stated that the Church was perfectly justified in condemning him. On the 400th anniversary of Bruno’s death, in 2000, Cardinal Angelo Sodano declared Bruno’s death to be a “sad episode” but, despite his regret, he defended Bruno’s prosecutors, maintaining that the Inquisitors “had the desire to serve freedom and promote the common good and did everything possible to save his life.” In the same year, Pope John Paul II made a general apology for “the use of violence that some have committed in the service of truth.”

The service of truth?? Even today, popes still don’t get it. It was its monopoly on dogma that the church was serving.

But about the novel. S.J. Parris has written a series of seven novels about Giordano Bruno. They’re mystery novels. The first in the series, Heresy, is set in Oxford in 1583. (Elizabeth I had come to the throne in 1558.) I had just finished reading all seven of C.J. Sansom’s Shardlake novels, the last of which is set in 1549. The Shardlake novels left me very much in the mood for staying in that period. S.J. Parris is a pseudonym for Stephanie Jane Merritt.

I have not been able to find much material on how Stephanie Merritt did the research for her Bruno novels. I doubt that she was as thorough as Sansom was with his Shardlake novels. But there is this quote from Merritt on her web site:

“At university I specialised in medieval and Renaissance literature and got to know the writers of the Tudor period, which was how I discovered Bruno’s story. For a while I was tempted to go into academia in that area, so I think I always had a desire to write about that era in some form. But I’m glad I found a way back to it through fiction — it’s a lot more fun having the freedom to imagine myself into that world.”

Bruno was right about a great many things. Even his panpsychism is taken entirely seriously by cosmologists today, though some contemporary philosophers argue that it was pandeism that Bruno advocated rather than panpsychism.

Imagination, knowledge, and heathens

Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions. Sabine Hossenfelder, Viking, 2022. 248 pages.

Physicists, I suspect, come in two flavors.

The first flavor, lacking imagination, are a little too quick to tell us what is impossible. Maybe they are more interested in understanding what we confidently know than in bravely expanding the boundaries of what we confidently know. Sabine Hossenfelder, I suspect, is such a physicist. She is popular on YouTube. No doubt she has helped many non-physicists better understand physics. But it would be very surprising if she ever discovers, or even hypothesizes, anything new. She just doesn’t seem to be wired that way.

The second flavor of physicists are driven by a burning curiosity. They know what we confidently know just as well as the first flavor. But they apply their efforts to trying to penetrate the mysteries of what we don’t know. The big mysteries today are in theoretical physics, which has been stuck for a century, mainly because no one has yet figured out what gravity is and how gravity fits with the well-supported theory of quantum mechanics.

Albert Einstein famously said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” What he meant by that is frequently misunderstood. He is not belitting the importance of knowledge. He is talking about the process of how new knowledge is acquired. (I’m appending Einstein’s quote, in context, at the bottom of this post. It comes from an interview with the Saturday Evening Post in 1929.)

In science, the word speculative is not a dirty word as long as the speculation is consistent with what is confidently known, and as long as the speculation is testable. That’s pretty much the definition of hypothesis, after all. Some scientific discoveries may fall into our laps as accidents and serendipity. But other scientific discoveries start as speculation — a hypothesis — that, when tested, passes the test.

I was charmed by the two pages at the beginning of the book with the heading “A warning.” Hossenfelder writes: “I want you to know what you are getting yourself into, so let me put my cards on the table up front. I am both agnostic and a heathen. I have never been part of an organized religion and never felt the desire to join one.”

In that way, at least, she and I are kindred spirits. I often refer to myself as a heathen, though I avoid the word agnostic because of a certain freight it carries. The freight that goes with the word heathen, however, I very much embrace. The word refers, of course, to a heath — rough, uncultivated land, almost always associated with Britain, where heather and gorse grow. Heathen was an insult, like hayseed, or hick — ignorant people who lived in forsaken places and who stubbornly held out against imperial religions such as Christianity.

This book then, is devoted to telling us whether some popular beliefs are, or are not, consistent with physics as we currently understand it.

Her first question is about whether the past still exists. Someone asks her this question, actually, in a somewhat different way. He asks whether there is some reality in which his grandmother is still alive. This question is all tied up with something that is just as mysterious as gravity — time. Her answer here may be surprising to some people. But it’s important, because most of us underappreciate just how strange contemporary physics is. She concludes:

“According to the currently established laws of nature, the future, the present, and the past all exist in the same way…. There is nothing in these laws that distinguishes one moment of time from any other. The past, therefore, exists in just the same way as the present. While the situation is not entirely settled, it seems that the laws of nature preserve information entirely, so all the details that make up you and the story of your grandmother’s life are immortal.”

She takes on other questions, such as: Why does time move in only one direction? Are there “many worlds,” with copies of ourselves in those other worlds? Do we have free will? Is the universe conscious?

I have listened to smart people endlessly debating the matter of free will. Such discussions are almost as unbearable to me as discussions about religious doctrine. I am very much rooting for the case that we do have free will. That case, though, is strongly tied up in the question of what consciousness is, and whether consciousness has some mysterious relationship to the unpredictably of quantum mechanics — specifically, what physicists refer to as “the collapse of the wave function.” (Think Schrödinger’s cat.)

You knew I was going to mention Roger Penrose, didn’t you?

Hossenfelder of course describes Penrose’s ideas about consciousness and how consciousness arises from quantum activity inside the brain. She evens interviews Penrose at Oxford. Her conclusion about Penrose’s hypotheses: It is “highly speculative, … but at present it is compatible with what we know.”

Penrose’s hypotheses, by the way, closely relate to other ideas such as panpsychism and whether the universe is conscious. Hossenfelder’s conclusion about whether the universe is conscious: “It’s a speculative hypothesis, but if it’s correct, then the universe might have enough rapid-communication channels to be conscious.”

If Penrose is right about how consciousness arises in the brain, then it’s a very safe bet that the universe is conscious.

My guess is that many people who derive their existential comforts from religion would abandon religion and embrace physics, if they knew more about physics. As I see it, it is 100 percent guaranteed that religious doctrine about the nature of our being and the nature of the universe are completely wrong. Thus I am a heathen. Religion, though, provides susceptible people with the comfort of certainty, through a concept that I detest: faith. I’m sure I’m not the only person who finds religious faith horrifying, since I’m also a person who finds religion to be completely wrong.

With physics, there is no certainty. We must admit what we don’t know, that there are things we will certainly not know in our individual lifetimes, and probably even things that human beings will never know. If you can live with the uncertainty, and if you can appreciate hypotheses (such as Penrose’s) that would show the universe to be quite a magical place, then physics — not religion or agnosticism — is the way to go.

From Albert Einstein’s interview with the Saturday Evening Post in 1929:

Einstein: “I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am. When two expeditions of scientists, financed by the Royal Academy, went forth to test my theory of relativity, I was convinced that their conclusions would tally with my hypothesis. I was not surprised when the eclipse of May 29, 1919, confirmed my intuitions. I would have been surprised if I had been wrong.”

Post: “Then you trust more to your imagination than to your knowledge?”

Einstein: “I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

Illusions Perdues

How often do we get lavish period pieces based on a novel by Honoré de Balzac? I came across this on Amazon Prime Video. According to the Wikipedia article, the film (2021) lost money, though its rating on Rotten Tomatoes is 93/93. It’s a long film — two and a half hours.

According to the Wikipedia article, Balzac’s first novel (1829) imitated the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott. Illusions Perdues (Lost Illusions), however, which was published in serial form between 1837 and 1843, was nothing at all like Walter Scott. Nor was Paris anything like Scotland. The only Balzac I’ve ever read was Le Père Goriot. I’ve ordered a copy of Illusions Perdues and will see if I have any French circuits left.

A very thoughtful piece of piano music is heard several times during this film — Franz Schubert’s Impromptu No. 3 in G♭ major, opus 90. After you hear excerpts in the film, you’ll want to hear the whole piece. The finest performance of this piece I’ve found on YouTube is by Khatia Buniatishvilli:

For extra credit, and to compare performances, here it is played by Alfred Brendel (a recording of which is used in the film). Brendel, by the way, is 93 years old and is still with us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7rP-9QXEtY

My rabbit hole


AI image by Adobe Firefly. Click here for higher resolution.

Do we all have old friends who have gone down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories? I certainly do. Arguing never works, does it? The only way I could think of to tell someone that they’ve disappeared down a rabbit hole is to acknowledge that we all have our rabbit hole, furnished in whatever way suits us best. This is what my rabbit hole might look like.

By the way, it is just remarkable how quickly AI imaging has become available. I subscribe to the Adobe Creative Suite, which now includes AI imaging tools.

Down the rabbit hole

Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics. Edited by Shan Gho. Oxford University Press, 2022. 520 pages.

First, a disclaimer. I am by no means qualified to review a book like this. The book is a mix of theoretical physics and the philosophy of physics. Theoretical physics goes way over my head, though I do think I can glimpse the gist of it. The philosophy of physics, though expressed in dense language, is not as dependent on mathematics and differential equations as theoretical physics. A patient and persistent reader can pretty much make sense of the philosophy of physics.

I read books like this even though I cannot completely understand them. I am more than satisfied to settle for understanding as much of it as I can understand. During the past forty years, there have been many excellent books written by scientists for ordinary people, because those scientists wanted as many people as possible to know where science, particularly physics, is headed. I often refer to Roger Penrose as my favorite physicist. He has written several such books. However, in the last ten years or so, as far as I can tell, there have been fewer such books. Thus, if we’re looking for an update on what has been happening in contemporary physics, we need to listen in on what physicists are saying to each other, and then try to follow that as best we can.

This book is a collection of seventeen papers by different authors. The papers cover the leading theories for understanding “the measurement problem,” which seems to involve conscious observers of how tiny particles behave. I won’t try to define the measurement problem here other than linking to the Wikipedia articles on the measurement problem and Schrödinger’s cat. If physicists can solve the measurement problem, that would resolve some profound questions about just what sort of universe we live in.

The thing is, all the theories pretty much go down a rabbit hole. That is not surprising, because what scientists observe in quantum behavior is so strange (think Schrödinger’s cat). It has been almost 90 years since the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment was proposed, and we still don’t know what’s going on.

Another disclaimer: Many physicists find the ghostliness of some of the theories repugnant. Not me! The more ghosts the better. I’m rooting for the ghosts.

Here’s an example of the distaste for ghosts, in this book’s chapter written by Michael Silberstein and W.M. Stuckey. They are writing about the mysterious nature of matter at the quantum level:

“Rather, panpsychism only makes matter weirder and seemingly less natural. It’s like learning that there are fairies in the world, but then being told to relax because we have decided they are just brute features of fundamental physics.”

Relax? OK. Some philosophers don’t like fairies. But we still don’t know whether there are fairies lurking in fundamental physics. Whatever Silberstein and Stuckey may think, I find the idea of fairies comforting rather than threatening.

One thing I get from this book is that the leading theories all seem to involve some version of panpsychism, the idea that the universe is conscious on some level. Roger Penrose’s theory, my favorite theory, is a panpsychist theory, though it regards objects such as electrons as “proto conscious” — not really conscious but capable of consciousness if organized into a larger unit and somehow “orchestrated,” which is what Penrose and Stuart Hameroff think happens inside the brain to generate consciousness. Nor is Penrose’s invocation of a Platonic domain without theoretical grounding in quantum mechanics. Before a “wave function” “collapses” because it has been observed or measured, it exists as a wide range of uncertainties that have a wide range of probabilities. After the wave function collapses, it is in, and stays in, a known and fixed state, or “eigenstate.” The theory is that certain possible states, ideal states, are favored by the probabilities — hence Platonic. Or, to say it a little differently, there may be natural probabilities that dispose nature to unfold toward ideal Platonic states. Thus, if there exists a Platonic bias in the structure of the universe, we get beauty of form, and we conscious creatures can perceive and work to realize the ideals of the true and the good, the just and the fair.

Some of the theories described in this book are as repugnant to me as fairies are to some people. One such theory is the “many worlds” theory. Many people take the many-worlds theory seriously, though to me it seems to be a ridiculous way of disposing of the measurement problem.

One theory described in this book is a somewhat modified version of the Penrose-Hameroff theory of “orchestrated objective reduction,” a theory that I have been trying to follow for years. The Penrose-Hameroff theory is mentioned in a number of the chapters, and always with respect. Penrose wrote Chapter 13 of this book, and Stuart Hameroff wrote Chapter 14.

The book makes no such judgment, but I might say that Penrose-Hameroff are out ahead with the most plausible — and, to me — the most attractive theory. It’s also the only theory that takes us into the brain and proposes a testable, falsifiable theory on how consciousness arises in the brain. Thus I don’t feel like I am out on a limb in having Penrose-Hameroff as my favorite theory, only because it appeals to me on aesthetic and intuitive rather than scientific grounds, where I am hardly qualified. I want a Platonic universe that is filled with ghosts (and fairies!), and it is entirely possible that we do live in a Platonic universe that is filled with ghosts and fairies. There would be an actual arc of justice in a Platonic universe, because of physics’ influence on nature and consciousness, disposing nature and consciousness toward Platonic ideals.

But we still don’t know.

UFOs, Pooh, and Webster’s

Encounters: Experiences With Nonhuman Intelligences. D.W. Pasulka, St. Martin’s, 2023. 248 pages.

This book didn’t do it for me. Because I’m a UFO witness (seeing is believing!), I understand UFOs as material phenomena that should be investigated by the material sciences. D.W. Pasulka, who is a religion professor, sees UFOs as the focus of some kind of new religion. That’s an interesting angle, especially for those who think there is nothing real about UFOs. To many of us, though, it’s a kind of insult.

I’ve written here previously about the UFO I saw, so there’s no need to go into that now. I certainly don’t deny that there is something religionlike about UFOs for those who have never seen one and to whom their existence is a matter of faith. And it is certainly true that, if you’ve ever had a good look at a UFO (as opposed to mere lights in the sky), then that changes you forever, in the same way that Pasulka describes quite well, using the testimony of, say, astronauts who have seen the earth as a globe silently suspended in a vast but starry emptiness. Some of those astronauts have seen things out there that oughtn’t to be out there.

We UFO Truthers are still waiting for the truth. It would be ever so nice if it happened in my lifetime. The question, to me, isn’t whether UFOs exist. It’s who they are, where they come from, why they’re here, and what they can tell us about the universe beyond our solar system.

It’s very strange that I never read Winnie the Pooh as a child. School libraries certainly had copies of it. My guess is that I was a snob reader as a boy and that I considered Winnie the Pooh as beneath my grade level. But every home library should have a copy of Winnie the Pooh. I bought this copy on eBay. It’s the 1961 reprint edition, with the same illustrations (by Ernest H. Shepard) as the 1926 first edition. My copy has a charming bookplate, inscribed in a child’s hand as belonging to a boy named Gabriel. On the title page is a note to Gabriel that shows that the book was a Christmas gift in 1971. The book has some stains and is a bit frazzled around the edges, as a Winnie the Pooh book ought to be.

Winnie the Pooh, by the way, has been in the public domain in the U.S. since 2022.

My second book rebinding job was a worn-out Webster’s dictionary. Eggheaded nerds like me don’t often make things with our hands. But it’s a rewarding (and useful) activity. I can’t rescue cats, because Lily would never tolerate another cat in her house. But I can rescue old books.

It would have been ever so nice, when I built my house 15 years ago, if I had been able to afford a proper chimney. But a brick chimney on a house that is more than 30 feet tall would have cost a fortune. Not having a chimney foreclosed on the possibility of ever having wood heat (though I do have a propane fireplace that vents to the outside). Heating with wood would be very bad for air quality if everybody did it. And not everybody lives down in the woods as I do. But I have enough hardwood trees on my land to heat with wood without ever having to sacrifice a live tree. Elderly trees regularly fall over, especially in storms. Plus, my neighbors all own more woodland than I do. A nice thing about rural culture here is that downed trees are still seen as a kind of commons. If a tree falls, someone can always be found who needs the firewood. If a tree falls on a public road (as often happens), someone will quickly get it out of the way and turn it into firewood.

As a liberal prepper, one of the things I’m required to worry about is what I would do if the electric grid ever went down. Except for my propane fireplace, my heat sources rely on electricity. In a place this rural and dense with forests, power failures are common, though I’ve never had one here that lasted more than a day. Plus the propane fireplace does not have the capacity to heat the whole house in really cold weather. For a long time I had wanted a good wood stove to stash in the basement. If it was ever needed, it would be possible to make a makeshift but safe chimney out of metal pipe. I finally got my wood stove, and it’s a beauty, several years old but never used. It’s enormous, made from heavy steel plate (with a cast iron door). The stove was locally made by a welder who either died or went out of business before all the stoves he’d made had been sold. A neighbor of mine bought four of the surplus stoves at a steep discount, and I was able to get one of them. Its flat top is plenty big enough to cook on.

Wood stoves would not be practical in lots of places. But here in the woods, where everybody has chain saws and hydraulic wood splitters, wood stoves are eminently practical — as long as you have a chimney.

Send in the ghosts


The Helix Nebula, a highly ordered part of the galaxy 650 light years from earth. Source: Wikimedia Commons, Spitzer Space Telescope.

People, I think, sort roughly into two categories: Those who want to live in a universe in which some magic and an occasional ghost are possible; and those who insist that magic and ghosts can’t possibly exist.

One might think that scientists are always in the second category, but that’s not necessarily so. It might be going too far to say that Erwin Schrödinger believed in pantheism, but he was certainly interested in it. Werner Heisenberg was probably a Platonist. Roger Penrose writes explicitly about a Platonic realm. As for Albert Einstein, it’s difficult to figure out when he was being metaphorical, but he famously found some parts of modern physics “spooky.”

A few days ago, I came across an article at Axios Science, “Scientists propose a ‘missing law’ for evolution in the universe.” The article is about a new paper by a group of scientists and philosophers, “On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems.”

In a universe with no spooks, everything is tending toward disorder (entropy). But in spite of this ever-increasing chaos described by the undisputed second law of thermodynamics, random occurrences over billions of years eventually produced stars, galaxies, and kittens, without any assistance from anything spooky.

The paper proposes that there is a missing law that is a kind of opposite of the law of increasing entropy. This missing law asserts that, when material things combine in such a way that they are new, stable, and do something interesting, then, over time, complexity increases and evolves, even in nonliving systems.

Just for fun, I searched the paper for the word “Platonic” and actually found one occurrence. That’s in the citations, a paper named “The protein folds as Platonic forms: New support for the pre-Darwinian conception of evolution by natural law.”

If there is such a thing as evolution by natural law, then it is so slow that it may not seem very spooky. But think of it this way. If there was a ghostly, Platonic kitten eons before a living material kitten finally evolved, then a missing law like this might provide a way for that ghostly Platonic kitten to conjure itself into material existence.

I’m a very skeptical sort of person. But as science sorts this out, I’m rooting for the ghosts.


Imaginary AI image created by DALL-E-3