An uneven match

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Surely a sane voice- you can't match up something that is constantly put to test against something that is trusted to be true, no matter what kind of evidence turns up-

Has Stephen Hawking ended the God debate? - Telegraph:

"Hawking's view appears to be that the belief in a God-created universe can be supplanted by a belief in M-theory, a good candidate for a fundamental theory of nature at its finest level. Experts assure us of the potential of this theory and I for one am quite prepared to believe them.
One problem with the theory is that it looks as though it will be extremely difficult to test, unless physicists can build a particle accelerator the size of a galaxy. Even if the experimenters find a way round this and M-theory passes all their tests, the reasons for the mathematical order at the heart of the universe's order would remain an unsolvable mystery.
Even religious scientists – and there are still a few – never use the God concept in their scientific work. Perhaps it is time for a moratorium on the use of the concept in popularisations, too? This would avoid mixing up scientific and non-scientific statements and put an end to the consequent confusions. I think it wise for scientists and religious believers to keep out of each other's territory – no good has come out of their engagement and I suspect it never will."

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• CosmicLog: Is the grand design within our grasp? (cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com)

Tha nature of laws

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"In his new book, Stephen Hawking reiterates that there is no big gap in the scientific account of the big bang. The laws of physics can explain, he says, how a universe of space, time and matter could emerge spontaneously, without the need for God. And most cosmologists agree: we don't need a god-of-the-gaps to make the big bang go bang. It can happen as part of a natural process. A much tougher problem now looms, however. What is the source of those ingenious laws that enable a universe to pop into being from nothing?"

Stephen Hawking's big bang gaps | Paul Davies | Comment is free | The Guardian

There is always something that needs explanation: even if you have explained all the process, there is still the natural laws: how come they are the way there are? In fact, why should there be laws at all?

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• "Bad News, Religious People: Stephen Hawking Says God Didn’t Create the Universe" and related posts (nymag.com)

Appearance and Realtiy

I've always been interested in the perception-reality mismatch, and here is a telling experiment-

Looks Can Deceive: Why Perception and Reality Don't Always Match Up: Scientific American:


"The Witt-Proffitt team published another report on the observation, well known in sports lore, that baseball players perceive the ball to be larger when they are hitting well and smaller when they are on a losing streak. Since then, Witt, now a professor at Purdue University, along with her student Travis Dorsch, has pursued this intriguing link between how success (or lack of it) in a task affects one’s perception of the world.

In their experiment, 23 volunteers had to kick an American football through the field goal from the 10-yard line. After a warm-up, participants were asked to judge the height and width of the goal by adjusting a handheld, scaled-down model of the goal made out of PVC pipes. They then each performed 10 kicks. Immediately after the final kick, participants repeated the perceptual measurement.

The result was striking. Before kicking, both groups had the same perception of the size of the goal (incidentally, an inaccurate one: everybody underestimated its actual width-to-height ratio). But after 10 kicks, the poor performers (those who scored two or fewer successful kicks) saw the goal as about 10 percent narrower than they had before, whereas the good kickers (those who scored three or more) perceived the goal to be about 10 percent wider. How well you have performed over the past few minutes influences the way you see the world! Not just metaphorically, but on a physiological level—it changes your actual perceptions.

After more data mining, the two psychologists discovered that the people who missed the goal because they tended to kick the ball too short perceived the crossbar as being higher than did their more successful peers, whereas those who missed because they kicked wide judged the upright field posts to be narrower."

The Value of Error

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This is a great piece of writing that asks us to look at our errors on a regular basis: they are not shameful failures, but portals of success-

We need to change how we think about our errors : Johann Hari:

"Error is an essential step in the process of finding the right answer. Every scientist leaves behind a trail of disproven hypotheses and papers shot to pieces by colleagues. He doesn’t see them as shameful, but as part of a process that was bringing him closer to the truth through experimentation. Similarly, James Joyce, thinking about all the drafts he wrote that failed, said “a man’s errors are his portals of discovery”.

But error may be even more fundamental than that. From the moment we are born, human beings are creating theories about the world, based on limited evidence. It’s how we survived: if our ancestors hadn’t generalized that all lions are dangerous, you wouldn’t be reading this. Errors are often simply this necessary impulse reaching too far, or misfiring. So the impulse that makes us wrong is also the impulse that makes us human."

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The Greatest

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A strange calculation makes out the figure of $15 billion to be the lifetime prize money made by a Roman Charioteer- a Spaniard called Gaius Appuleius Diocles.

Greatest of All Time by Peter Struck - Roundtable | Lapham’s Quarterly:

"The very best paid of these—in fact, the best paid athlete of all time—was a Lusitanian Spaniard named Gaius Appuleius Diocles, who had short stints with the Whites and Greens, before settling in for a long career with the Reds. Twenty-four years of winnings brought Diocles—likely an illiterate man whose signature move was the strong final dash—the staggering sum of 35,863,120 sesterces in prize money. The figure is recorded in a monumental inscription erected in Rome by his fellow charioteers and admirers in 146, which hails him fulsomely on his retirement at the age of “42 years, 7 months, and 23 days” as “champion of all charioteers.”

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