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William Lane Craig Debate

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Last week I participated in a dialogue with Princeton philosopher Hans Halvorson, sponsored by the Veritas Forum here at Caltech. We were talking about “physics and philosophy,” but the primary issue was theism and naturalism — Hans’s research specialty is philosophy of physics, especially quantum field theory, but he’s also a theist and often writes about science and religion. It was a fruitful discussion (I like to think), as we ended up agreeing about many points, even though we started from very different premises. He agreed with me, for example, that purported fine-tuning of cosmological parameters isn’t a very good argument in favor of the existence of an intelligent designer.

Next month I’ll be doing something related, although under quite different circumstances. On February 21 I’ll be debating William Lane Craig at the Greer-Heard Forum, an event sponsored by the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. It will actually be a two-day event; a debate between Craig and me on Friday night, and follow-ups on Saturday from other speakers — Tim Maudlin and Alex Rosenberg for Team Naturalism, Robin Collins and James Sinclair for Team Theism. Registration is open! I believe the whole thing will be streamed live online, and it will certainly be recorded for posterity. [Update: Here is the video.]

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William Lane Craig (or WLC as we call him in the business) is of course a very well-known figure, largely for his many public debates, on theism/atheism as well as on various other specific theological issues. As far as debating goes: he’s very good at it! If his debates were being judged by a panel of experts as in an intercollegiate debate tournament, he would have a very good record indeed. This has led many people to conclude that atheists just shouldn’t debate him at all, or at least not until they have devoted 10,000 hours to learning how to be a good debater.

Daniel Dennett warned me that, as soon as word got out that I would be debating WLC, I would be deluged with opinions and unsolicited advice. Which is great! Always happy to hear other perspectives, although I don’t promise to actually follow any of the advice. I won’t reproduce the various emails I’ve received, but here are a few very different perspectives online: Jerry Coyne, Luke Barnes (and another), and Wintery Knight. (WK is relatively restrained, but others predict “pummelings,” presumably for me.)

Just so we’re clear: my goal here is not to win the debate. It is to say things that are true and understandable, and establish a reasonable case for naturalism, especially focusing on issues related to cosmology. I will prepare, of course, but I’m not going to watch hours of previous debates, nor buy a small library of books so that I may anticipate all of WLC’s possible responses to my arguments. I have a day job, and frankly I’d rather spend my time thinking about quantum cosmology than about the cosmological argument for God’s existence. If this event were the Final Contest to Establish the One True Worldview, I might drop everything to focus on it. But it’s not; it’s an opportunity to make my point of view a little clearer to a group of people who don’t already agree with me.

The guy is a very polished public speaker, and he is certainly an expert in this format. But I have the overwhelming advantage of being right. If I thought WLC were right, I would just change my views. Since I don’t, my goal is to explain why not, as clearly as possible.

The general consensus in some corners seems to be that I will be crushed. I guess we shall see.

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Greatest Hits

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Blogging is a real-time, often informal affair, and most posts aren’t meant to be interesting forever. But some might be. Here I’m collecting some of my most useful or interesting blogging over the years, originally at Blogspot and later at Discover magazine). In 2012 I went solo again, moving back here. For other kinds of writing see my CV, or writings.

Late-Universe Cosmology

Early-Universe Cosmology

Relativity

Quantum Mechanics

Particles/Fields/Strings

Other Science

Meta-Science

Philosophy

Religion

Academia

Politics

Other

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A Year Well Blogged

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‘Tis the season when bloggers, playing out the string between Xmas and New Year’s, fill the void with greatest-hits lists from the year just passed. But a question inevitably arises: how does one decide which posts to include? There are many different criteria, and preferring one to another might lead to very different lists. This is what’s known as the measure problem in blogospheric cosmology.

This year I’ve decided to confront the problem pluralistically. Thus: here we have five different Top Five lists, chosen according to completely different criteria. Let us know if your favorite Cosmic Variance post of the year somehow managed to not be on any of the lists.

First, the most crude and common measure, the posts with the most page views this year.

Next up, an equally quantitative and misleading measure of popularity: the top five posts by number of comments. …

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School Decision Time

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The day is approaching fast when grad-students-to-be need to be making decisions about where to choose. Probably undergrads, too, although I confess that I have no real idea what the calendar for that looks like.

So, good luck with all that decision-making! Here are links to our previous posts about the topic.

Not too much to add to the discussion there, but here’s an opportunity to chat about the process. My own strong feeling is that how successful you are in school (grad or undergrad) is much more up to you than up to the institution. Most places have more good opportunities than anyone can hope to take advantage of in a limited period of time. Take the initiative, don’t wait for good things to come to you, and have fun!

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Lunar laser ranging

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Greetings from Toronto, where I’m visiting UofT to talk about dark energy, the arrow of time, and other obsessions of mine. Which has prevented me from as yet writing the long-awaited second installment of “Unsolicited Advice,” the one that will tell you how to choose a graduate school. It is that time of year, after all.

Lunar Radar Ranging In the meantime, check out this nice post at Anthonares on Lunar laser ranging. The Apollo astronauts, during missions 11, 14, and 15, were sufficiently foresighted to bring along reflecting corner mirrors and leave them behind on the Moon’s surface. Why would they do that? So that, from down here on Earth, we can shoot lasers at the lunar surface and time how long it takes for them to come back. Using this data we can map the Moon’s orbit to ridiculous precision; right now we know where the Moon is to better than a centimeter. This experiment, called Lunar laser ranging, teaches us a lot about the Moon, but it also teaches us about gravity. The fact that we can pinpoint the location of the Earth’s biggest satellite and keep track of it over the course of years provides us with a uniquely precise test of Einstein’s general relativity.

You might think that general relativity is already pretty well tested, and it is, but clever folks are constantly inventing alternatives that haven’t yet been ruled out. One example is DGP gravity, invented by Gia Dvali, Gregory Gabadadze, and Massimo Porrati. This is a model in which the observable particles of the Standard Model are confined to a brane embedded in an infinitely large extra dimension of space. Unlike usual models with compact extra dimensions, the extra dimension of the DGP model is hidden because gravity is much stronger in the bulk; hence, the gravitational lines of force from an object on the brane like to stay on the brane for a while before eventually leaking out into the bulk.

The good news about the DGP model is that it makes the universe accelerate, even without dark energy! This is one of the things that I talked about at my colloquium yesterday, and I hope to post about in more detail some day. The better news is that it is potentially testable using Lunar laser ranging! The claim is that the DGP model predicts a tiny perturbation of the Moon’s orbit, too small to have yet been detected, but large enough to be within our reach if we improve the precision of existing laser ranging experiments. People are hot on the trail of doing just that, so we may hear results before too long.

Not to get too giddy, the bad news about DGP is that it may be a non-starter on purely theoretical grounds. There are claims that the model has ghosts (negative-energy particles), and also that it can’t be derived from any sensible high-energy theory (see Jacques’s post). I haven’t examined either of these issues very closely, although I hope to dig into them soon. Maybe if I could quite traveling and sit down and read some papers.

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Grad School Open Thread

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Today is Grad School Recruitment Day at Caltech, from which I surmise that there must be dozens of readers of this blog who are currently puzzling over where they might want to spend the next years of their lives. And hundreds of readers who went through this puzzling at one point themselves, or will face it in the future. So, since “work” is preventing me from blogging very much, here is a place to share stories and questions; we’ve previously given advice, but you can never get too much. (Professors, did you know that these students are talking about you behind your back on the internet? A brave new world etc.)

My grad school story: I was an astronomy major at Villanova as an undergrad, but knew that I really wanted to do physics. Nobody in my department was really qualified to give advice about grad schools in theoretical high energy physics or cosmology, but there was a big book put out by the AIP that listed programs and the people working in each specialty; not sure if the book still exists, or whether it’s been replaced by a website. So I applied to five different places, all top-notch; got into three, waitlisted at one, and rejected at one. (I had a not-completely-unheard-of profile: small undergrad school, great letters, good but not perfect grades and GRE’s, vague and untutored desire to unify all of theoretical physics.) I wanted to stay on the East Coast for personal reasons (= “girlfriend”). Sadly, the school that rejected me (Princeton) and wait-listed me (Harvard) were the ones on the East Coast that I had applied to. So I visited Harvard myself to plead my case; to no avail, of course (I wouldn’t recommend doing this — it won’t work and can annoy people), but I was told that if I could get an outside fellowship they would accept me. And then I did get an outside fellowship, from the NSF; but Harvard still wouldn’t accept me. Apparently that was a bit of a tactic. So I called up the astronomy department and asked if they would let me in. They were a bit surprised that physics wouldn’t accept me, given that I was free, but happily took me on. Which explains why I have no degrees in physics, even though all of my subsequent employment has been in physics departments.

Did it matter that I went to an astronomy department rather than a physics department where my interests would have been a more natural fit? Absolutely — I hung out with people who chatted about redshifts in their spare time, not with people who chatted about Feynman diagrams, and that lack of immersion in a crucial subject has undoubtedly been a handicap. But I was generally in a good situation (you can’t really complain about being at Harvard), and I made the most of it — took many physics classes, spent time talking to professors, wrote papers with other students and mathematicians as well as my advisor, went to MIT and ended up collaborating with people there as well. If you go to someplace that is decent enough to offer opportunities, it will be up to you to take the initiative and make your time there a success.

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Maharishi Mathematics

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It’s that time of year when eager young students are deciding where to embark on, or to continue, their higher educations. You can see our advice-giving posts on choosing an undergraduate school and choosing a graduate school.

But there are a lot of options out there, and it would be a shame to overlook any of them. So we’d be remiss not to mention the unique opportunities offered by the Maharishi University of Management. Founded by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, spiritual advisor to the Beatles, and led by John Hagelin, highly-cited theoretical physicist and occasional Presidential candidate, the MUM offers a — did I already mention “unique”? — set of experiences to the enthusiastic student. And that’s not even counting the Yogic Flying!

Here, for example, are some of the course descriptions for the undergraduate major in mathematics.

Infinity: From the Empty Set to the Boundless Universe of All Sets — Exploring the Full Range of Mathematics and Seeing its Source in Your Self (MATH 148)

Functions and Graphs 1: Name and Form — Locating the Patterns of Orderliness that Connect a Function with its Graph and Describe Numerical Relationships (MATH 161)

Maharishi Vedic Mathematics: Mathematical Structure and the Transcendental Source of Natural Law (MATH 205)

Geometry: From Point to Infinity — Using Properties of Shape and Form to Handle Visual and Spatial Data (MATH 267)

Calculus 1: Derivatives as the Mathematics of Transcending, Used to Handle Changing Quantities (MATH 281)

Calculus 2: Integrals as the Mathematics of Unification, Used to Handle Wholeness (MATH 282)

Calculus 3: Unified Management of Change in All Possible Directions (MATH 283)

Linear Algebra 1: Linearity as the Simplest Form of a Quantitative Relationship (MATH 286)

Calculus 4: Locating Silence within Dynamism (MATH 304)

Complex Analysis: Transcending the Real Numbers to a Simpler and More Unified Numbering System (MATH 318)

Probability: Locating Orderly Patterns in Random Events to Predict Future Outcomes (MATH 351)

Real Analysis 1: Locating the Finest Impulses of Dynamism within the Continuum of Real Numbers (MATH 423)

Set Theory: Mathematics Unfolding the Path to the Unified Field — the Most Fundamental Field of Natural Law (MATH 434)

Foundations of Mathematics: The Unified Field as the Basis of All of Mathematics and All Laws of Nature (MATH 436)

Now, sure, any old university will be offering courses in real analysis and set theory. But will they learn about the unified field, and locate the finest impulses of dynamism? “Vector calculus” sounds kind if dry, but “Unified Management of Change in All Possible Directions”? Sign me up!

Nobody ever said the Maharishi wasn’t a good salesman.

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