21/2/2007
The Social Comedy of Science
Why
do the names of scientists always sound like
the names of concentration camp commanders?
This particular piece of Gothic horror is
called Funkhouser. Why does science have
such a bad image? Certainly all of them are
rather like figures from the film
Night
of the Living Dead. Germanic,
authoritarian, humourless, pompous to a
fault, they blithely announce the "truth"
about life death and all things north of
Watford Gap. Despite its desperate cultural
advertisements, science unconsciously still
conjures up the world of Mary Shelley's
novel,
Frankenstein. It is needles and
vampires, zombies, torture, and test tubes
and "facts" all the way. It makes you thank
God for creating legions of brainless dolls
such as Britney Spears as a defensive
non-cerebral antidote against the
well-behaved sons and daughters with their
earnest
clean
kitchen endeavours to sort out the universe
in terms of Weights and Measures and Rules
and Regulations.
Scientists are corporate conformist robot-dolls.
Here's a prime sample trying to work out the brain of God, no less. Sounds exactly like some some paragraph-heading from Charles Fort's Book of the Damned, or a pastiche straight out of Rabelais or Moliere.
As well as the attempt to reduce human beings to strips of bar coding, there is the small matter of the destructive spoiling by "science" of all land, sea, and air of planet earth. Despite such things, some people people still have faith in these well-qualified spoilt brats from the lower middle class. Their "profound" theories about the universe are called "clever" as their doting mums pat them on their meritocratic heads, and the world showers honours upon them. As a social group, their claims for reality are no more believable than those of Aboo-Derby of Iran (we can never spell his name).
If scientists had existed in Chaucer's time, he would have them trotting along with his Canterbury pilgrims, such as the Reeve, the Pardoner, the Miller, and the Knight. Chaucer might have called their language Docubox, this being being a mixture of footnote-talk and something new to the 1300s called the Facts of the Situation.
Anyway, here is the latest attempt to count the number of grains of sand in the universe. This has to be done very quickly before the whole house of cards falls down upon the thinking head.
CB
This number
is God's iq.
It's an apt comparison if you believe the
davinci code.:-)
It's the number of bits in the future de
sitter hologram dark energy horizon
projecting matter as its image back from the
future
It from bit
Sent from my iPhone
On Feb 19, 2008, at 6:44 PM, MPOGO@aol.com
wrote:
Cosmic coincidence spotted
An absurdly large number could hold the key
to universal mysteries.
Philip Ball
This unimaginably large number keeps popping
up in descriptions of the Universe.
The secret of the Universe is not 42,
according to a new theory, but the
unimaginably larger number 10122. Scott
Funkhouser of the Military College of South
Carolina (called The Citadel) in Charleston
has shown how this number — which is bigger
than the number of particles in the Universe
— keeps popping up when several of the
physical constants and parameters of the
Universe are combined1. This ‘coincidence’,
he says, is surely significant, hinting at
some common principle at work behind the
scenes.
The number first turned up when, more than a
decade ago, physicists discovered that the
expanding Universe is accelerating. This
implies that there is a force that opposes
gravity on very large scales, which
physicists call dark energy. It is
quantified by a parameter called the
cosmological constant.
One interpretation of dark energy is that it
results from the energy of empty space,
called vacuum energy. The laws of quantum
physics imply that empty space is not empty
at all, but filled with particles popping in
and out of existence. This particle ‘fizz’
should push objects apart, just as dark
energy seems to require. But the theoretical
value of this energy is immense — so huge
that it should blow atoms apart, rather than
just causing the Universe to accelerate.
Physicists think that some unknown force
nearly perfectly cancels out the vacuum
energy, leaving only the amount seen as dark
energy to push things apart. This
cancellation is imperfect to an absurdly
fine margin: the unknown 'energy' differs
from the vacuum energy by just one part in
10122. It seems incredible that any physical
mechanism could be so finely poised as to
reduce the vacuum energy to within a whisker
of zero, but it seems to be so.
Five more times
Now Funkhouser says that this is not the
only appearance of this vast number among
the parameters of the Universe. He lists
five other instances in which the ratios
between various cosmic quantities turn out
to be equal to 10122, give or take a factor
of ten (which matters very little at such
huge scales, and could be due to errors in
our understanding of the numbers involved).
For the rest of the story click here: Funkhauser