Hisstory of science: Copernicus to get new tomb

From the excellent magazine, Touchstone, much recommended by me:

Bishop Finds Copernicus - competition for sarcophagus

The bones of a man, which later proved to be those of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), were found in 2005 using geo-radar scanning among the graves in front of one of 20 altars in the 14th century Frombork Cathedral. Final proof was provided last November when forensic experts made an exact DNA match between a tooth from the skull and hairs found in a 1518 book, Calendarium Romanum Magnum, which Copernicus used for many years. Jacek Jezierski, Roman Catholic auxiliary bishop from Poland’s Warmia archdiocese, who organized the search for the remains of Copernicus, said a competition would be launched to design a sarcophagus for Copernicus in time for his reburial during the cathedral’s 750th anniversary in 2010. (ENI 12/15/08)

Copernicus, who would never have endorsed it, became associated with the infamous "Copernican Principle", fronted by late twentieth century science popularizers like Carl Sagan - according to which Earth is nothing special. That is not what Copernicus was trying to do.

Get more. Subscribe to Touchstone.

Fine tuning

I haven't been able to post recently, due to the demands of a recent freelance job, but my friend Wintery Knight advises me that this and this are useful defenses of the fine tuning of our universe. Personally, I haven't the least doubt that our universe is fine tuned, and I am hardly interested in hearing about a zillion imaginary flopped universes as an alternative explanation.

Many years ago, a missionary doctor told me that most Africans - in the nation he was proud to serve - had little use for communists or communism because the communists said there is no God - so we can do whatever we want.

The Africans generally said, "Everyone knows there is a God. Every reasonable person can see that. The world we live in shows it clearly. What people want to know is how to get in touch with him, and get help for our problems."

I think the Africans had the better of that argument.

Extraterrestrial life? Well, maybe, but I am not putting any money on it

Apparently, Alan Boss thinks that the Kepler mission will find planets crowded with life:

I'm a bit skeptical myself, much as I would like it to be true. A vacation in another solar system would be just the thing, but ...

The thing is, Boss cannot promise more than bacteria (or - this might be wiser - archaea?), and the difficulty is (this much should be obvious): Extraterrestrialists tend to agree that bacteria (or at least archaea) could travel on asteroids.

So they might all tend to look somewhat like this. Maybe the started on Earth ...

Somewhat disappointing for a person of my "Take me to your leader" generation.

Bill Dembski blogged on this here ("Cook the primeval soup for billions of years and voila!").

Here's the YouTube:

Science fiction: The latest fun reads from The Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy

Here's Colonel Spitfire and the 7th Brigade Part One and Colonel Spitfire and the 7th Brigade Part Two.

Jason Rennie, who does not look like the graphic here, writes,

This weeks installment of Sci Phi Journal is the first two part story and is written by Dr Chris Drohan. It is quite a weird story, but I also quite like it. I’d be interested to see what others think. Warning, there is a bit of reasonably graphic violence in this week's story.

Relearning Touch

This weeks installment of Sci Phi Journal is a story called Relearning Touch by up and coming author Melvin Cartegena, and it is read by podiobooks author Arlene Radasky.

You are invited to send feedback to editor@sciphijournal.com or post in the comments section or on the forum.

Rennie makes these stories available as sound files as well as text files in various formats, for your listening or reading pleasure.

You can also discuss the stories on an online forum, if you wish. But if you are up all night, don't blame me. I only provided a link. You did all the rest.

Plasma theory: An alternative to the Big Bang?

A friend writes to say,

Timothy Eastman advocates plasma theory as the most promising alternative to a big bang cosmogony. A good book on this subject is by Eric Lerner Ph.D., a science journalist who titled it The Big Bang Never Happened. It's a fascinating study, because if the Big Bang is abandoned, some of the biggest stars in our firmament (Hubble, Lemaitre, Guth, Dirac, Hawking, Rees, and more) will have to start from scratch.

I think the Big Bang probably did happen, and I am not threatened by people who think otherwise, so I suggest reading what these people have to say.

Cosmology: If the universe has free will, where do I go to file a claim for damages?

In "The Strong Free Will Theorem," John H. Conway and Simon Kochen (Notices of the AMS, Volume 56, Number 2, February 2009) argue that elementary particles have free will:

Some readers may object to our use of the term “free will” to describe the indeterminism of particle responses. Our provocative ascription of free will to elementary particles is deliberate, since our theorem asserts that if experimenters have a certain freedom, then particles have exactly the same kind of freedom. Indeed, it is natural to suppose that this latter freedom is the ultimate explanation of our own.

[ ... ]

We introduced the term "semi-free" in [1] to indicate that it is really the pair of particles that jointly makes a free decision.

This explanation seems to overlook the specific role of the human mind in making what we think of as free decisions. Or is that the point?

Must electrons have free will because humans cannot have it unless electrons do?

Mathematicians must read and evaluate this paper. I can't.

Science: Bell's inequality the most profound fact ever discovered?

In response to this post ("Quantum theory: Finally facing up to its threat to special relativity"), friend Malcolm Chisholm writes to say:

I have been wondering when you would blog about Bell's inequality.

Bell's Inequality has its foundation in traditional logic (stuff developed by the scholastic guys of the Middle Ages). It states the following

The number of objects which have parameter A but not parameter B plus the number of objects which have parameter B but not parameter C is greater than or equal to the number of objects which have parameter A but not parameter C.

So for instance, if you have a class of students, then

The number of girls who are not blond plus the number of blond students who are under six feet tall must be greater or equal to the number of girls who are under six feet tall.

This will always be true. It is amazing. You can do it for all kind of populations that possess 3 attributes in the macroscopic world that we inhabit. And yet it can be applied to the domain of quantum entanglement to prove that everything in the universe is utterly connected at a very fundamental level. It really is the most profound fact ever discovered in science

Here is a link for more (and it's Canadian!).

Well, he knows how I will love that!

If Bell's inequality is indeed the most profound fact ever discovered in science, it is interesting (at least to me), that Bell started out wanting to disprove it. He was a follower of Einstein and shared the Einsteinian suspicion of quantum physics.

I read his book and toward the end he finally concedes defeat, in the nicest possible way. I recall it as somewhat touching.

Here's more about Irish physicist John Bell, pictured above. Here are his collected works, Foundations of Quantum Mechanics.