Drowning in the Sea of Information

Seth Lloyd, over at Discover Magazine, writes a fascinating story, You Know Too Much, about the exponential increase of information in general, and science in particular, that we are subjected to in today’s world. Its fascinating to me not just because he uses one of my posts as an illustration of “The development of the scientific history of the universe, which now threatens religious creation myths” … its fascinating because he makes some excellent points about the glut of information that floods into our consciousness every day and the ways we must deal with it.

The powers of 10 …

In other posts, I’ve talked about the unimaginable size of the universe. “Feeling Insignificant Yet?” talks about how big some of the other planets and stars are in comparison to us and our home planet, and in “And you thought size mattered …” I noted that as unimaginably huge as the sizes of distant stars were, the distances between them makes them seem like specks in the night. But there’s another side to that incredible vastness as well … within each and every one of us are entire universes composed of atoms and molecules that make up the cells that combine to form us.

Past and Future Paradigms

I haven’t raved lately about Modern Mechanix, that ultra-modern purveyor of the yesterday’s tomorrows for us, but day in and day out they put up articles from the past that are both fascinating and challenging, making us think about yesterday, as well as today and tomorrow. One of the key themes there that I find so compelling is the idea of showing the “mistakes” of the past, the eddies and backwaters of history’s rivers. Whether its the electric harpoon and its efficient aid in the whaling industry, or the plans for the “do-it-yourself dive helmet,” many posts at Modern Mechanix use real examples from the past to remind us the things that didn’t quite work out as planned in all cases.

Primates on display at the Adelaide Zoo

The Adelaide Zoo in Australia has recently come up with a wonderfully innovative PR project, called the Human Zoo, putting 6 people into an old orangutan cage on display to the public. Each group of human volunteers stays in the enclosure for a week, and is subject to the same crowds as any of the animals, with the same level of privacy, the same feeding schedule, the same kind of interaction from Zoo staff. The current group of six (group 2 is currently in the enclosure as I write this) range in age from 20 to 42, and include a social work student, and a TV production manager, all of whom volunteered to give up their week to live inside the enclosure.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

That quote is usually attributed to Mark Twain, but whatever the provenance, most of us are well aware that statistics can be used to mislead us as much as they can enlighten us. There are some classic ways that stats can be used to mislead us … attempting to correlate data that has no relation is one of the most common methods. Anyone who took a first year stats course at university remembers the examples of using stats about the number of pregnant women who eat apples to show that eating apples is correlated to causing pregnancy, or using data about the number of alcoholics in a given district and the number of churches in the same district to show a correlation between churches and drunkenness. Both ‘correlations’ are examples of common fallacies that statistics can hide.

But even when fairly simple sounding claims are made, we need to look a little deeper … A good example of this is in DNA matching for evidence in criminal trials. We’ve all heard the common claim from expert witnesses in trials … a DNA match is a 1 in a billion chance, sometimes its even expressed as 1 in a trillion. We tend to think this means that the chances of 2 people matching DNA profiles is very small … in the way we typically understand the phrase “1 in a billion” with a population of 6 billion people, there should, in theory, be 6 occurrences of a 1 in a billion event. For a 1 in a trillion event, we wouldn’t normally expect it to occur in a population of 6 billion.

The roots of fundamentalism

On the Big Picture with Avi Lewis this week, he had the Canadian premiere of Richard Dawkins‘ documentary, The Root of all Evil, discussing the dangers of religion in general. Unlike other authors on the subject, Dawkins doesn’t separate the radical fundamentalists in a religion from the moderates … in fact, he makes the point that moderate people in a religion actually give cover to the fundamentalists, and allow them to claim more honourable motives than they would otherwise be able to.

There’s no doubt Dawkins makes some excellent points, and looked at from a certain perspective, its pretty easy to see history as endless stream of religious atrocities committed by one particular group on another. Very few groups are immune, historically speaking, and very few groups are immune from charges of fundamentalism rising from a literal reading of their theological treatises. From that perspective, Dawkins’ argument is pretty convincing.

The trouble is, Dawkins doesn’t look deeply enough at things, IMO. He dismisses the notion that religions like Christianity can, and have, produced good as well as evil, largely by equating moderates with the extremists. He seems to ignore the fact that prior to a few hundred years ago, the ONLY place any human encountered the notion of tolerance, or love of fellow man, was in theory through their religion, and while in practice, that tolerance was usually less than advertised, the fact remains that prior to the Enlightenment, the only place it existed, even in theory, was in religious thought.

Further, Dawkins seems to ignore his own fundamentalism. He speaks very eloquently for the scientific method, and he explains pretty clearly (and accurately) how that method applies to empirical information gathering in the “real world.” He contrasts this with attempts by religious fundamentalists explain the empirical world through theological study, and he quite rightly shows the difference between the two method, and why the latter will rarely produce the right answer. But at the same time he does this, he ignores the greater truth, the truth that science and religion explore many of the same questions, but they do so using vastly different tools, and expecting different results. Dawkins dismisses religion’s tools, and only endorses science’s tools, and in that way he betrays his own scientific fundamentalism.

A look at evolution is probably in order here. Much of Dawkins argument is with Creationists who take the Genisis account of Creation literally, and in that, I have to say I fully support him. He seems to take great delight in trying to convince Creationists of how wrong they are, but he never once steps outside of the Creationist camp to talk to a Christian who views the Genesis account differently. His own fundamentalism forces him to continue attacking the nasty Creationist, while ignoring more moderate voices.

The fact is, Genesis is not incompatible with scientific explanations for the ‘beginning of the universe we know today.” Taking a large scale view of time, from the Big Bang through the evolution of humans on Earth, the structure of Genesis largely matches the structure of the scientific story. Genesis may get the time-line wrong (or perhaps the tools that theologists use to explore these questions aren’t so interested in specifically accurate time-lines, caring instead for getting the ideas right), but given that it comes from verbal ‘stories’ that are well over 4000 years old, it gets the sequence of events pretty accurately.

Back in May, in these pages, I did a piece comparing Genesis with scientific origin theories. I won’t re-post it here … you can go back and read it there if you like, but the fact is that Genesis and Science largely agree on WHAT happened, just not on when or how it happened, and again, these discrepancies speak to the different tools theology brings to the question vs science. Science doesn’t ever speak to WHY something happens … science will tell us in great detail the sequence of events surrounding the big bang, but it will not tell us so much about why the big bang happened. Likewise, evolution talks about the process of life developing on our planet, but has very little to say about how that process gets started, definitively. In many ways, science asks “What happened” and theology asks “Why did it happen” … but the “it” in question here is the same for both sides.

I took the title of this post from the Dawkins documentary, obviously, and I did it for a reason. The very argument Dawkins uses to advance his case that religion is the root of all evil is as fundamentalist a position as the Creationists advance, to my way of thinking. A Creationist looks at science and says “My Holy book says something different, and so I will completely reject everything about your methods and conclusions.” Trouble is, Dawkins seems to say exactly the same thing to the Creationists … “My scientific method says something different, and so I will completely reject everything about your methods and conclusions.” Frankly, I tend to think that fundamentalism, not religion, is the root of all evil, and that fundamentalist scientists can be as dangerous to the world as fundamentalist preachers.

NASA TV – Live Shuttle Video update

NASA TV

I posted a link awhile back to a live feed of the space shuttle.  That link was through Yahoo and it no longer appears to work, however the link at the top of this post is direct to NASA.  It should always stay active.  Canadian astronaut Steve MacLean will be space walking on Wednesday, working to help secure some solar cells to the space station.

So if you are here looking for live space shuttle video feeds, go to NASA TV here …

Is it SMART-1 to crash into the moon?

As planned, at 0542 UT, the spacecraft SMART-1 crashed into the lunar surface.  The planned crash should allow scientists to examine the composition of the lunar surface in the crash location by examining the dust kicked up by the crash.  No one was really sure how visible the crash would be, or whether backyard telescopes would be able to see it or not.  In hindsight, it appears as though only the most powerful backyard telescopes had a chance of picking up the faint crash, so most backyard astronomers likely missed the live show.

Fortunately, the CFH Telescope in Hawaii (CFH=Canadian, French, Hawaii) recorded the images for everyone to see.  The picture I am linking to below is a shot of the actual impact zone precisely as the probe slammed into the surface, but the link will open a page with more detailed before and after shots of the crash.  There’s also a movie version of the crash, but I don’t know how long the link will stay active, as its on a page where the lead story changes.

While this was a planned crash, it wasn’t the point of this mission.  For 16 months, SMART-1 mapped and studied the lunar surface and composition from orbit, and even that mission had ulterior motives, being essentially a useful way to test a new ion-powered engine that may someday propel humans to Mars.  With the ion-drive successfully tested, and with a wealth of data about the moon, the final phase of its mission came to an end this morning, in a giant impact on the lunar surface.  The impact of the mission generally, however, will be felt in the space community for decades, IMO.

Pluto’s demotion to Dwarf Planet

Last week, I wrote some comments about the IAU discussions to expand the definition of planet to include not only Pluto, but its moon Charon, and other, smaller bodies. The actual vote has occurred, and rather than expanding the definition, they’ve chosen to restrict it further by creating a new term, dwarf planet. Pluto, Charon, Ceres, the newly discovered Xena … all qualify for the new designation.

Leaving aside the human rights issues about the use of the term dwarf, it seems an excellent way to solve the controversy, though not everyone seems happy with the new designation. ““Pluto gets no respect, man,” John Neal, 23, said. “I mean, I took an astronomy class in college, and I still don’t know anything about it.” The fact remains that Pluto has never had the same properties as the other planets, being the smallest of the bunch. If it were hanging out down here by the sun, in a roughly circular orbit, like the rest of the small, rocky planets, then we could be forgiven for thinking of it as a smaller version of our own planets. But out at the edge of the system, its brothers are the massive gas giants … it never seemed to fit into the natural order of things.

So this change is probably a long time coming. I’m not sure dwarf planet is precisely right … as I said in the other post about Pluto, I’m not convinced Pluto formed at the same time as, or the same way as, the other planets, for a number of reasons … but IMO, Pluto has always looked different from the rest of the solar system. Now, with Pluto downgraded, time to get rolling with my “Titan for Planet” campaign.

And You Thought Size Mattered …

A few weeks ago I posted an entry, called Feeling insignificant yet?, on the relative size of the planets in our solar system, and the relative sizes of neighbouring stars. The purpose of the post was to show how insignificant the size of Earth is, in comparison to other bodies, and to remind people that not everything in the universe operates on a human scale. The universe itself is so far beyond the human scale, its damn close to incomprehensible, and the size comparisons in that post were a good way to show some relative differences in size.

But it leaves people with the impression that size actually matters when we talk about these things. And despite the mind-boggling sizes of the bodies described by “Feeling Insignificant Yet?” they are not, in fact, terribly relevant. They are impressive numbers to the human scale, but in universal terms, even the super-giant stars like Betelgeuse and Antares are barely perceptible specks of dust in a vast ocean of nothing.

I’ve tried to put together some pictures to illustrate this, and while they aren’t as colourful as the pictures of the planets, I’ve come up with the idea of concentric spheres in different scales to illustrate the vast distances between various heavenly bodies.

The above picture shows the inner solar system, to scale. The Sun, at the centre, is the only body in this image who’s diameter is visible at this scale … the tiny spec at the centre here illustrates the size of the sun. Next out, we see the orbit of Mercury, and while popular science tends to show Mercury as orbiting essentially on top of the sun’s surface, we can see that based on the size of the sun, the orbital distance of Mercury is quite large … the Earth is only 3 times farther from the sun than Mercury, so seen from the surface of Mercury, our sun would likely look only 3 times bigger than when viewed from the surface of the Earth. Its worth noting that the scale here doesn’t allow me to show any of the planets, just their orbital path around the sun … remembering how much bigger the sun was than the rest of the planets, the distances between planets dwarfs even that huge size.

For comparison, the size of the sun compared to other planets … remember, on the obital diagram above, the big ball of gas in this picture is but a tiny dot.

As indicated, this diagram of the outer planets is at a scale of about 1:20 against the inner solar system model I drew above. The tiny circles in the middle, inside Jupiter’s orbit, represent a scaled down version of the inner solar system model … as you can see, at this scale, the sun is no longer visible. Pluto, for the record, is about 5 billion km from the sun, on average, and while most text books show Pluto with a hugely eccentric orbit (and in fact it IS eccentric in comparison to other planets), the ACTUAL eccentricity works out to a minor-major axis ratio of 97%, meaning at this scale, even Pluto’s highly eccentric orbit shows as roughly circular to the naked eye. Its worth noting that on this diagram (the Outer Solar System), super-giant Antares would be quite visible, having a diameter roughly 3/4 the size of Jupiter’s orbit … it would show up here as somewhat larger than the inner solar system.

This is our local stellar neighbourhood, ranging from Sirius 2, our virtual neighbour at 8.6 light years away, to Aldebaran, some 66 light years away. One light year is defined as the distance light will travel in a year, and comes in at roughly 9 trillion km … as a way of comparison, the orbital distance of Pluto is roughly 5 billion km, so the distance from the Sun to Pluto (the entire expanse of the last graphic) is about 1/2000th of a light year. On the diagram above, the scale is too large for any stars to be visible for size, and given that the smallest circle is over 16 light years across, our entire solar system is too small to be visible.

And so we get to the final picture in our series, with many of the same stars as the end of “Feeling Insignificant Yet?” We see

Ultimately, the size of the planets IS impressive, but its nothing in comparison to the distances between them. The T-shirt I ended “Feeling Insignificant Yet?” with showed the Milky Way galaxy at about 100000 light years across, and its worth remembering that the distance to Rigel is about 775 light years, less than 1/100th the total size of our galaxy.

Space, says the introduction to the guide, is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how hugely, mind bogglingly big it is. And so on.
Douglas Adams, Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Doug got it bang on with that one … and you thought size mattered.