http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-duck-dynasty-phil-robertson-sounds-off-on-gays-20131218,0,6319736.story

So, this hubub around Phil Robertson in the news ties in with what I was saying the other day about why it's not useful to reflexively label conservatives as racists. That still applies here - calling Robertson a racist doesn't actually explain what's wrong with what he said.

Besides the remarks about gay people, which other people are discussing elsewhere, Roberton also said this:

“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I'm with the blacks, because we're white trash. We're going across the field.... They're singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!... Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”

What's wrong with that? It's a viewpoint of a privileged position. He didn't see the misery of black people under Jim Crow because he couldn't see their misery. He had never lived in any other world where black people were true equals, so the dire injustice of the situation didn't stand out to him as anything but normal. It's most likely entirely true that he never heard a black person complain about their lot in life, but does he realize that if a black person had complained, their lives would have been in danger? The South during that time was filled with horrific tales of violence against black people who did dare to speak up.

This is how the privilege that white people enjoy also hurts white people. It allows white people to hold a view of the world that does not conform to reality, and then it protects white people from the consequences of misunderstanding the world so profoundly. Almost any other person who believed the things that Phil Robertson believes would likely never encounter an opposing view, nor suffer any consequences from believing something so absurd as the myth of black happiness under Jim Crow. It's only a very special set of circumstances that have put Phil Robertson in a place where his view of the world has been exposed.

This can give the impression that Phil Robertson is a rare specimen, and all that's needed here is to call him a racist, make him shut up, and congratulate ourselves that we're all beyond that now, so many years after Jim Crow ended. Yet, we live in a country where along every axis we can find not slight, but deep differences in the outcomes of black and white people. Everybody agrees, black and white people have the same capacity. Some will even strenuously insist that race is a complete myth. Of course they're speaking in biological terms, and in fact nobody of any intelligence anywhere seriously believes that race is a biological feature of humanity.

But we cannot reconcile these things. We cannot believe that black people and white people are humans of the same potential, and also to believe that black people and white people have an equal opportunity for success in this country. Now, I am sure that 99% of the people reading this, including myself, are absolutely dedicated to the belief that black people and white people are all humans of the same potential. So, there is only one escapable conclusion left to us: the idea that black people and white people in America are equal in terms of opportunity is a lie.

The fact that most of us have never truly tried to understand this doesn't mean we are racists, but it does mean that we are ignorant. Just like Phil Robertson here. White people aren't magically gifted with some kind of ability to see privilege, because privilege is always invisible to the privileged. White people have to work hard to see it, because privilege mostly helps white people. White people have to cultivate a desire to see it, because a failure to understand privilege will only rarely have serious consequences for a white person. Phil Robertson here is one of those people who suffers from all the common blind spots, but because the stars aligned just right, he's having to face up to the consequences of ignoring how the world actually is.

So, if there's anything we must do here, is we must realize that he's just like us. We can't just call him a racist and think that we are not like him. If you do that, you're not understanding your own privilege.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-duck-dynasty-phil-robertson-sounds-off-on-gays-20131218,0,6319736.story

A friend asks about the origins of the universe

Yea, that is where I began, with the article just titled "Universe". Then I googled universe creation and started to read other articles on the energy source for the cause to the Bang. Basically I am trying to help a friend here who is trying to wrap his brain around the idea of what existed the month before the bang and how it happened.

That helps a lot to have questions more specific, because cosmology is a huge subject. The questions you have are related to two specific areas of cosmology - "big bang" theory, and M-theory (an extension of string theory). Big bang theory is familiar to just about everybody. We live in an expanding universe. As we look out at neighboring galaxies, we see that they are generally moving away from us, and the further they are away from us, the faster they are moving away from us. We can measure this velocity by measuring the red-shift of the light that reaches us. That velocity corresponds to a distance in the universe. The Hubble Space telescope's primary purpose was to nail down the calibration of Hubble's law by measuring Hubble's constant, which it successfully did. That means for a given red-shift of light, we can calculate the distance to the object that emitted it, because we understand how space-time is expanding. Space-time is a term used to describe the three dimensions of space, and the one dimension of time. All this is probably at least a little familiar to you.

The big bang is an analogy for what happened. We use a metaphor of an explosion to describe the expansion of the universe, to try to understand what it was. The term itself was devised by Fred Hoyle, who did not believe in a big bang, and wanted to mock the expanding universe theories. It is important to understand that the big bang wasn't an explosion, but it was an expansion. The implication of an expanding universe is that at one time in the distant past, everything we see was contained in a single point of unimaginable density and temperature. That's the singularity from which the universe erupted.

The singularity isn't like a stick of dynamite which exists somewhere before it explodes. A stick of dynamite explodes inside the universe. The hot gasses rush out and push other objects away from the explosion. A stick of dynamite explodes into the universe, so it's natural to ask what is the universe exploding into? That's where the analogy falls apart. The big bang wasn't an explosion of the universe into something else, it was an expansion of the entirety of the universe itself. All of space-time was contained inside the singularity, which itself has no defined boundary to separate inside from outside. So, you can see, it's a problem even to describe space-time as being inside a singularity!

I can use another analogy to describe the kind of problem that this is. On our planet, we have the cardinal directions, NSEW. We can go a mile in any direction from where we are standing. We can decide to go North, but eventually we'll have to solve a big problem: what's North of the North Pole? In fact, the question is a nonsense question, it has no meaning because there is nothing North of the North Pole. Now consider that in order to understand what objects are inside or outside, you have to be able to reference a point in space. Points in space are inside or outside, and we can only know that if we have basic space-time to work with. If all of space-time is contained inside of a singularity, then there is no space-time outside the singularity. Therefore, the question of what is outside the universe is meaningless, and so is the question of what happened before the universe existed is meaningless too. These questions literally have no answers, and don't even make any sense.

Another analogy. In geometry, we have an ideal surface called a plane. A plane is two dimensions exactly, with no thickness at all. Asking where on a plane would the third dimension appear is similar to asking what comes before the big bang. A plane has only two dimensions, so it makes to sense to ask what the third dimension on a plane be. As soon as a plane has three dimensions, it's no longer a plane. Before the big bang, the dimensions of spacetime did not exist, which means there is no way to understand what's inside or outside, or what's before and after.

Now, that's half the story. You've probably heard about string theory. In physics, there is a really interesting problem with Einstein's relatavistic spacetime and Quantum mechanics. Both are true, in the scientific sense that they describe experiment and observation very well, but neither of them are compatible with the other. Relativity describes big things and fast motions. Quantum mechanics describes very small particles that act probabilistically. This bothers physicists greatly, because there's no reason why we should have two theories, we should have one theory which can replace both. That's why string theory was invented. It's a mathematical reconciliation of relativity and QM, which reaches way down underneath what we know about the basic structure of matter, underneath the smallest level of physical matter, quarks.

String theory is a complicated, beautiful system of differential equations which have many solutions, as many solutions as there are possible universes that exist. Stephen Hawking believes that string theory is a step forward in the understanding of the true nature of the universe, but critics have a very hard time with the fact that testing string theory is exceptionally difficult. In many cases, the energies required to provide meaningful tests would require particle accelerators far beyond our ability to construct. Nevertheless, string theory provides the best promise of a theory which can unify both relativity and quantum mechanics that we have right now.

To wrap your head around what string theory is, it's necessary to resort to analogies once again. String theory is a set of differential equations that describe not only our universe, but all possible universes. What does that mean? Thinking back to algebra, you'll probably remember that we used to graph lines, and that there is a formula that describes lines using the slope and the intercept: y=mx+b. The coefficient 'm' is the slope of the line, and is a real number. The intercept 'b' is the value at which the line crosses the y axis. When we provide specific numbers for this slope/intercept formula for a line, then we get a mathematical description of a single line on a graph. But, when we leave all the coefficients of the formula unspecified, then the formula effectively describes every possible line on a graph.

String theory is exactly analogous to our slope/intercept formula, except that instead of describing lines, string theory describes universes. By plugging in different numbers, we get different kinds of universes. String theorists have discovered combinations of numbers which result in low mass universes, high mass universes, universes with flat, convex or concave shapes of space-time  universes with high or low cosmological constants, universes with various numbers of dimensions, and so on. Endless permutations of these universes have been investigated, but the exact formulation which describes a universe with various constants that match our own universe eludes discovery so far. Not all of those theories are consistent though, only five theories have been discovered which are consistent, and all of those have ten spatial dimensions.

These five consistent different string theories are related to each other, and the latest development called M-theory unifies all of them into a single theory which describes an 11-dimensional universe. At this point, any further description of string theory would quickly go off the deep end. String theory is inherently mathematical in nature, and can only be properly understood through the language of mathematics. The important thing to get out of this description of string theory is that the nature of the universe certainly isn't three or four dimensional. Time and space are not all that exist. There is a higher order organization to the natural universe which is almost certainly multidimensional. In that higher order organization, concepts such as "before" or "after" or "left" or "right" don't have any more meaning than asking what's North of the North pole.

It's certainly not intuitive. Our brains can't understand these concepts easily, and even physicists have trouble describing exactly what an 11-dimensional object would look like. However, it's clear that higher order dimensions do exist, and events in 11-dimensional space offers explanations for possible causes of the big bang. Objects in 11-dimensional space are difficult to imagine, but physicists describe them as membranes, or "branes" for short. This area of study is extremely new and full of speculation, but collisions between branes would unleash enormous energies, which could have been a cause and source of the energy for the expansion of our universe. How accurate this picture is, or how often this happens is not well understood right now.

One last thought about this. It is tempting for humans to ascribe supernatural causes to certain events. I'm not just talking about Christians, but everybody. Looking for agency behind events is something that we humans do naturally. Ascribing agency is a powerful survival tactic, and it's very natural to look at an event such as the big bang and to think "the hand of God did that." We should resist that temptation though, because if we were content to look at something and be satisfied with that explanation, then we would not have bothered to investigate as far as we have. We would have simply accepted the cosmology of the Babylonians, or the Sumerians, or the Israelites, or the Chinese (in which the empire of China is so old that it already exists even in the very first stories!).  Science is a study of the natural universe, and can never reach a point where a supernatural (not natural) cause is assumed and the end of investigation is declared. Science is never going to be happy with answering a mystery with another mystery.

It is also instructive to consider that we can still easily find many people who are not scientists claiming that God was the force behind the Big Bang. It is is true that current science can only accurately describe and test the conditions of the universe up to a tiny fraction of a second after the big bang (actually, it's 0.000000000000000000000000000000001 second after the big bang where science picks up events accurately). But, as you can see, science does not stop investigating, and where some one saw the hand of God there are now string theorists glimpsing something much much different - 11-dimensional objects colliding in a higher order space!

BBC reporting gravitational waves discovered

The BBC is reporting that gravity waves may have been spotted emanating from a white dwarf pair. This has happened through visible light observations, and may be used to guide other experiments looking to detect gravitational waves directly through the distortion of the shape of space-time. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19408363

A scientific theory is often said to be a guess, a shot in the dark explanation. Nothing could be further from the truth. In science, a theory is a well-tested comprehensive explanation of why something works the way that it does. A theory isn't a guess, it's not random, it's not a shot in the dark. Development of a theory begins with facts - observations - things that we can see or measure directly. Based on the facts, scientists will conduct experiments to learn new true things about the world. These new true things can become facts too, if they are confirmed sufficiently. When scientists consider the results of their experiments and research, the final step to to provide a powerful explanation, and that explanation is called a theory. Thus, a theory is as far from a random guess as anything could be. A theory is an interpretation of scientific fact and experiment by experts. It represents the best understanding of how things work, developed over a period of years by experts.

A theory has several important requirements before it can be considered a good theory. It must explain all the known facts satisfactorily. It must have withstood years of withering attack from scientists attempting to tear it down and prove it wrong. It must be possible to prove the theory wrong in the first place. PREDICTION is an important feature of a theory, and that's what we're observing here. General relativity has passed over a hundred years of testing. Every predicted effect of the theory has eventually been found, and this gravity wave effect appears to be on the verge of actual observation. After a hundred years, you'd probably think that Einstein's theory is the best example of a scientific theory to ever be discovered. You'd be right, except there is one other with an even greater and longer record of success - the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.

Woolworths Counter

I heard there were crowds of people supporting anti-gay bigotry at Chick-Fil-A today. That reminds me of some other crowds of people supporting bigotry.

MIT Aircraft Systems Engineering

MIT Aircraft Systems Engineering course. The title is a bit misleading because the aircraft chosen as the course example is the Space Shuttle. This probably reflects the natural biases of the professor, Jeff Hoffman, a former NASA astronaut.

All the course videos are presented here, featuring many distinguished guest speakers who designed, tested, and operated the Space Shuttle.

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-885j-aircraft-systems-engineering-fall-2005/index.htm

New Blog

Welcome to my new blog, which is intended to be about science, but could be about much more than that.