Adventures in Mormonism

I’m in Chicago for a patent trial (I’m an expert witness) and will tied up for another week or so. ..bruce..

One of the intriguing aspects of reality, as far as we are able to analyze and perceive it to date, is that it depends upon a relatively small set of dimensionless parameters. Here is a listed set, taken from the paper “Dimensionless constants, cosmology, and other dark matters” by Max Tegmark (MIT), Anthony Aguirre (UCSC), Martin J Rees (Cambridge), and Frank Wilczek (MIT) (Phys.Rev. D73 (2006) 023505):

And here are the derived physical parameters:

I got to this paper via an article in New Scientist (subscription required for full article) by one of the paper’s authors (Max Tegmark) who feels that our universe itself is a mathematical construct:

Here, I will push this idea to its extreme and argue that our universe is not just described by mathematics - it is mathematics. While this hypothesis might sound rather far-fetched, it makes startling predictions about the structure of the universe that could be testable by observations. It should also be useful in narrowing down what an ultimate theory of everything could look like….

So here is the crux of my argument. If you believe in an external reality independent of humans, then you must also believe in what I call the mathematical universe hypothesis: that our physical reality is a mathematical structure. In other words, we all live in a gigantic mathematical object - one that is more elaborate than a dodecahedron, and probably also more complex than objects with intimidating names like Calabi-Yau manifolds, tensor bundles and Hilbert spaces, which appear in today’s most advanced theories. Everything in our world is purely mathematical - including you.

Tegmark also feels that this hypothesis leads inevitably to the conclusion that multiverses exist that embody different combinations of dimensionless parameters; we just happen to be in one in which life as we know it can evolve. I’m impressed that Tegmark et al. in the “Dimensionless parameters” paper were willing to include “design” as one explanation for the “fine-tuned for life” values of the parameters, though (rightly) stating that physicists prefer the others:

So why do we observer these 31 parameters to have the particular values listed in Table 1? Interest in that question has grown the the gradual realization that some of these parameters appear fine-tuned for life, in the sense that small relative changes to their values would result in dramatic qualitative changes that could preclude intelligent life, and hence the very possibility of reflective observation. As discussed extensively elsewhere [list of footnotes], there are four common responses to this realization:

1. Fluke: Any apparent fine-tuning is a fluke and is best ignored.
2. Multiverse: These parameters vary across an ensemble of physically realized and (for all practical purposes) parallel universes, and we find ourselves in one where life is possible.
3. Design: Our universe is somehow created or simulated with parameters chose to allow life.
4. Fecundity: There is no fine-tuning, because intelligent life of some form will emerge under extremely varied circumstances.

Options 1, 2 and 4 tend to be preferred by physicists, with recent developments in inflation and high-energy theory given new popularity to option 2. (Tegmark et al., Phys.Rev. D73 (2006) 023505, pp. 1-4)

No great theological or philosophic intent to this posting, other than I tend to lean towards the “Design” answer. My intended college major during my senior year of high school was astrophysics; that came to a halt upon reading an article about the bartenders and cab drivers with PhDs in astrophysics, but I remain interested in the topic. On the other hand, as someone who has done real-world simulation work (cruise missiles, large space structures, the Space Shuttle flight simulators, and tectonic processes on Venus), I’m keenly aware of how model definition and parameter selection directly leads to your results. ..bruce..

[UPDATED 11/11/07 - 1804 MST] Added the actual Hugh Nibley quote below, which I moved to the start of the posting, and made a few additional edits for clarification and to reflect some of the information presented at the Younger Dryas Impact press conference.

[UPDATED 11/01/07 - 1027 MDT] Here is a link to YouTube videos of the Younger Dryas Impact AGU Press Conference. Based on what’s presented here, it would suggest (contra some of my initial speculation below) that the ‘Flood party’ left before the impact, given the scientists’ postulation of a large firestorm on the North American continent. More as I work through the videos. ..bfw..

The stories of the garden of Eden and the Flood have always furnished unbelievers with their best ammunition against believers, because they are the easiest to visualize, popularize, and satirize of any Bible accounts. Everyone has seen a garden and been caught in a pouring rain. It requires no effort of imagination for a six-year-old to convert concise and straightforward Sunday-school recitals into the vivid images that will stay with him the rest of his life. These stories retain the form of the nursery tales they assume in the imaginations of small children, to be defended by grownups who refuse to distinguish between childlike faith and thinking as a child when it is time to “put away childish things.” (1 Corinthians 13:11)

– Hugh Nibley, “Before Adam”, talk given to BYU students in 1980, reprinted in Old Testament and Related Studies — The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley: Volume 1 (Deseret Book/FARMS, 1986), p. 63.

This article in Dialogue by Clayton White and Mark Thomas addresses in an LDS setting what numerous other articles and postings have in more generic Christian and Jewish settings: the inconsistencies between classic Christian/Jewish interpretations of the Genesis Flood story and, well, pretty much every bit of geological, archaeological, and biological evidence we have for the time period in question (typically set around 2350 BCE). White and Thomas address the problems just from a biological point of view, but their endnotes indicate some of the other problems as well.

I have no real problems with the idea that a global flood could occur — in my opinion, a God Who created, perceives and runs the entire universe could probably come up with some easy (for Him) mechanism to schlep the required 1.4 billion cubic miles or so of H2O onto the earth and then drain it off again. Indeed, such a task would be no more difficult for Him than rinsing and mopping a floor is for us (and probably a lot easier). But, as many folks have pointed out, most recently White and Thomas, such an event would leave, well, catastrophic evidences worldwide.

Read the rest of this entry »

Gerard Vanderleun — who was just across the river from Manhattan, in Brooklyn Heights, when the WTC was hit — has posted his own memories of that day:

• The Wind in the Heights
• Notes made on September 11, 2001 — Brooklyn Heights

I’ll simply link to my posts from last year, as well as Bruce Henderson’s:

• In Memoriam: Robert David Peraza
• Remembering the WTC
• We Will Never Forget (Bruce Henderson)

This was an act of war — a simultaneous attack on our financial, military and political centers that cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars. Pity we have lost sight of that:

..bruce..

My last posting on this subject, since “September Dawn” has died a well-deserved death. Here are the figures for its third weekend in release: a grand total of $7,445 in all of 26 theaters, a 96% drop from last weekend. To give you some perspective, the #1 film this past weekend — also a Western, “3:10 to Yuma” — grossed an average of $5,292 in each and every one of the 2,652 theaters in which it played, for a total of $14+ million.

Having no desire to either support the producers of this film or subject myself to what Justin Chang in Variety (undoubtedly another crypto-Mormon) called “massacre porn“, I cannot directly opine on the merits of the film. But based on the reviews I’ve read, I think it’s not only clear that “September Dawn” is generally a wretched movie and historically distorted, it’s also unabashedly anti-Mormon. It’s a shame, because I think that a very thoughtful and provocative movie could have been made.

Next up, I’m waiting for a film version of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Oh, wait — someone’s already doing that. ..bruce..