Coffee! Greatest sci-fi special effects

Greatest special effects here.

Also from the Science Channel, how to build your own time machine and skip awful, anti-productive meetings.

Wow. Three years of my life back. There was a time when I thought the sweetest word in the whole universe was "adjourned."

(Note: If you follow me at Twitter, you will get regular notice of new posts at Colliding Universes. I usually wait till I have five.)

He who knows something gains respect. He who knows everything ...

Well, the Canadian Science Writers’ Association conference at Science North in Sudbury wrapped up yesterday, and today I got a chance to tour SNOLAB, the underground neutrino detector in the active Creighton Mine, which is currently retooling for SNO Plus, the hunt for dark matter.

Just for now: The Solar Neutrino Observatory (SNO) Lab is 2 kilometres underground, and then about two kilometres walk through an active nickel mine, followed by a serious shower and change into clean room gear. SNO's main recent experiment is now finished, and the lab is being retooled. But 16 science writers were allowed to tour Sno Plus, Canada's entry in the race to find a dark matter particle. More on all this great stuff later; I won't spoil it for you now.

The scientists I met and listened to there had something in common with the fascinating scientists who spoke at the Dynamic Earth on May 24 in the morning, on life forms of the oceans' abyssal plain, understanding dark matter, and extraterrestrial mining.

All took a great deal of time to explain what they were doing, and any that I approached with further questions were happy to answer them. But they were very clear about the fact that they do not remotely know all the answers and that no one does. I still have no idea what their political or religious opinions are, and do not care, any more than I suppose they want to hear mine.

I came away with great respect for them because I feel I can trust their information. Like the best journalists, they know the limits of their craft. Wish I could say the same for all.

Science and culture: God as an "unnecessary hypothesis?"

In "Theology After Newton", physicist Stephen M. Barr notes:

In Newtonian physics, change and movement were explained by the inertia of bodies and the forces bodies exert on each other. And since God is not a material body, many people thought that the new science had relegated him to the sidelines. At most, he was allowed to act in the distant past, as an all-foreseeing designer, a conception of God that Pannenberg criticizes as leading, on the one hand, to deism and, on the other hand, to a clash between predestination and human freedom. Even worse, the belief that took hold after Newton-that everything could be explained naturalistically, through physical forces and mathematical laws--seemed to make the existence of God an "unnecessary hypothesis," as Laplace put it. As theology lost its explanatory role, its assertions came to be seen as lacking empirical content and therefore as untestable.

Some theologians took refuge in fideism or a "flight to commitment," such as Karl Barth's "altogether unsecured obedience" to the Word of God. Others retreated to the position that theological language is "performative" rather than "informative." Yet others reduced the gospel to social action. The result has been a situation in which theology is marginalized and seen as largely irrelevant to life and thought. Society and its institutions grew secularized, and intellectual life did as well: the study of history and science undertaken without concern for a wider context of meaning. (First Things)

I've been known to call this "flight to commitment" by a ruder name: "aimless Jesus-hollering."