I was very surprised to see this article on Slashdot claiming that recent numerical analysis of the collected writings of Plato “will transform the early history of Western thought, and especially the histories of ancient science, mathematics, music, and philosophy” (at least their claims aren’t grandiose) — maybe I’m naïve, but I thought Slashdot could generally be trusted to vet their submissions more thoroughly than this. Apparently they aren’t the only ones not bothering to verify their subject before reporting — it was also covered today by the Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Register, Mumbai’s Daily News and Analysis, as well as UPI, Geekosystem, and ScienceDaily.

First a primer on the numerological Bible Code: The premise is that, if you arrange the original Hebrew letters of the Bible in a rectangular array, then every 10th letter, or every 37th letter, or every 15th letter on alternating lines (take your pick) spells out something interesting. Basically, it’s an example of religious literary pareidolia of a pattern-seeking brain: If given enough essentially random noise, any desired pattern (or, at least, some interesting pattern) can be pulled out of it with a sufficient amount of work. And the Bible, when rendered into ancient Hebrew (which doesn’t contain vowels, word breaks, or punctuation) and when arranged in a rectangular grid and read at any arbitrary letter spacing and direction, yields any predictions one wishes to make — the end of the world, the rise of Hitler, the assassination of Kennedy; whatever! Good Math, Bad Math has excellent take-downs of the practice here, here, here, and here, as well as numerous other places.

The Slashdot piece — and the original journal article — is claiming something similar: That Plato, the “Einstein of Greece’s Golden Age” whose “work founded Western culture and science” left a bunch of Da Vinci Code-esque secret messages that “are set to revolutionise the history of the origins of Western thought.” I’m sorry, but when a university press release makes claims like that about its own researchers, I’ve got to call bullshit. Further:

The hidden codes show that Plato anticipated the Scientific Revolution 2,000 years before Isaac Newton, discovering its most important idea – the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. The decoded messages also open up a surprising way to unite science and religion. The awe and beauty we feel in nature, Plato says, shows that it is divine; discovering the scientific order of nature is getting closer to God. This could transform today’s culture wars between science and religion.

Well, shit! As long as we’re not taking our research too seriously! “It also cures cancer, gets your whites whiter, and freshens your breath!” (OK, I made that last bit up.) But it does also claim that these ground-breaking results were published in “in [a] leading US journal.” Mm-hmm. Let’s just check into that, shall we?

This “study” was “published” in the “journal” Apeiron, which I’ve never heard of, but which is described by Wikipedia as covering “studies in infinite nature” [emphasis in original, and I have no idea what that means], publishing “theoretical and experimental work in a wide variety of fields within physics,” and being “especially noted for publishing alternative theories of cosmology, relativity and quantum mechanics.” Oh shit — alarm bells sounding. Furthermore:

Apeiron is applying a peer review system involving internationally established researchers, most of whom, however, cannot be regarded as mainstream. Apeiron has become a forum for “dissident” researchers and opinions not accepted by the conventional system.

Again, emphasis in the original. I did not thoroughly go through the history of the article, but there were some interesting tidbits in there (for instance, the final clause of that last-quoted paragraph was originally “mostly on the plea of speculation and fringe science.”) Also, this “leading US journal” (seriously, I know the UK has a low opinion of us, but come on!) doesn’t appear on the first page of a Google search for “Apeiron,” and it’s webpage looks like it was designed by a third-grader on GeoCities in 1996. I mean seriously, what credible journal quotes Anaximander of Miletus on its front page? Read: “I couldn’t get published anywhere reputable.” [Note: I've since found out that this article may be published in UT Austin's Philosophy Department journal also titled Apeiron, though I haven't been able to confirm it, as I can't find its articles online.]

Well, OK, let’s not be too hasty in judgement — what does the article itself have to say? Well, first of all, it’s practically impenetrable postmodernist deconstructionist bullshit. Next, it frequently tries to associate its Platonic numerology to Pythagoreanism and the Golden Mean — red flag alert! Next, the article is pretty much nothing but numerological BS about dividing various dialogues into 12ths and deriving some significance from that. It makes lots of mention of the fact that many historical authors included mathematical relationships in their writings. And it’s true that, for instance, Dante’s Divine Comedy had three 33 canto books plus and introduction, to make 100 sections; that each book ended with the word “stars”; and that the work was filled with many other numerical gimmicks and symmetries (as well as hidden literary meanings that couldn’t be safely politically expressed at the time). And Homer, Vergil, Ovid, and Shakespeare used line length (an obvious thing for a poet to do) to “encode” meaning — though I think it would be more fair to say they used cultural shorthand to convey an obvious message to their readers, not that they were secretly trying to get messages out past religious or societal censors. However, how much information do you think could be conveyed if, say, you decided at the age of 25 to have an overarching plan that contained your ultimate meaning in all of your writings for the next 50 years. If, as this paper claims, it’s in vague “meanings’ of each 12th part of each of your works, the answer is: not a whole hell of a lot.

And that’s the most surprising thing about this paper: There are no results! I mean, not a damn one result that accounts for all these grandiose claims! The paper can basically be summed up as saying: 1) Many of Plato’s dialogues can be divided into 12 sections of equal numbers of lines. If you use the right scribal copy (the oldest manuscripts for many of Plato’s dialogues are from 895AD — but that’s OK: I’m sure nothing got corrupted in 1300 intervening years). And translation. And break points. 2) Some of these same-numbered sections in different dialogues have similar themes. 3) Greek music theory used a 12-note scale! 4) Also, Golden Ratio! 5) Therefore Plato was a secret Pythagorean encoding universal truths too powerful to be exposed to the Ancient world.

“This is the beginning of something big. It will take a generation to work out the implications.”

Yeah, good luck with that.

It’s the birthday of Newton, inventor of physics! He wrote daring equations; confounded his critics!

Actually, the date on the calendar when Sir Isaac was born was Christmas Day, 1642 – hence “Newtonmas.” However, England at the time was still on the Julian calendar, while most of the rest of Europe had converted to the Gregorian. Thus, it was ten days behind in its reckoning of the date at that point, and what was Jan. 4th, 1643 for Rome et al. was Dec. 25, 1642 for the Brits. (Also, it gives me an excuse for procrastinating and writing this post ten days late.)

I recently wrote about the Royal Society of London’s 350th anniversary, for which they’ve made available 60 seminal scientific articles from that span to celebrate the occasion. Over the holidays, I killed some time on and in various airplanes and airport lounges reading some of these, and I thought I’d write a little bit about one in particular: Namely, an article that was, so far as I can tell, the first one that Newton ever published, the beginning of his glorious scientific career, and one of the most impressive papers I’ve ever read.

In this 13-page article, the 29-year-old Newton solves several of the most baffling and long-standing mysteries about the nature of light at the time. He did so through a very simple and straightforward application of the scientific method; through clear and simple reasoning, he was able to come up with an impressively large number of explanations. There is nothing complicated in the paper – no partial differential equations or Ricci tensors; it involves shining lights through pieces of glass and some basic algebra and geometry. This is research that a smart 7th grader should be able to conduct for a science fair today.

But part of its genius was Newton’s ability to observe the simple and deduce the profound where no one ever had before; to step back, disregard common wisdom, and tackle things simply and one step at a time. All with no equipment other than two triangular glass prisms and a window shade. From so simple a beginning, he was able to deduce that:

1.) Prisms diffract light, because circular incident beams emerge creating oblong spots.

2.) That a second prism will reverse the refraction of the first and recreate the spot of light.

3.) That these light rays traveled in perfectly straight lines.

4.) That intervening objects, reflections, or transmissions do not affect the color of this light.

5.) That single colors of light from the prism can’t be individually refracted or combined back into white light;

6.) but that the entire range of colors can. Thus, white light is composed of individual rays of different colors, and these colors are differently refractable.

7.) And the inherent color of all objects is due to their selectively reflecting one or more of the individual colors incident on them – i.e., color is not something an object adds to the light, but an inherent property of the light itself.

8.) Also, this is why rainbows exist. Explained here for the first time.

You’d think that’d be enough for one paper for most people, but

9.) he also takes a two-page sidestep to reinvent the frakking telescope! Yeah, this 29-year-old pauses to say, “Oh, by the way, this is why all existing telescopes produce colored rings around objects, and always will. But if you design them this way instead, the problem will go away.” And all large telescopes today still use this design.

10.) Oh, and another thing: There was no known way to make mirrors for this new kind of telescope of sufficient quality to make them better than the lenses, even with the color problems. That’s OK – he just takes some time off from Cambridge, because of the plague, and invents a new way to polish perfect mirrors . . . at the same time he was inventing calculus!

I’m 31, and I can barely understand the calculus this guy invented on a school break (of course, he wasn’t constantly distracted by the latest iPhone app or YouTube video).

To be fair, I should also point out that Isaac Newton was also a giant anti-skeptic: he was a religious fanatic, producing in his lifetime more writings on theology than science; a huge crank, devoting half a century to alchemical and occult pursuits; and a cantankerous old bastard that no one liked, who prossibly died a virgin. (However, to be fair to my being fair, alchemy was largely inseparable from chemistry at the time, theological pursuits were nearly universal among natural philosophers, and being a completely unlikable jerk has no bearing on whether or not you are correct.)

Anyway, happy 367th birthday, Izzy!

A number of very interesting articles have come across my desktop over the last week or so:

Evolutionary biologist extraordinaire and former still-productive centenarian Ernst Mayr has an article in this month’s Scientific American (discussed on last week’s podcast) titled “Darwin’s Influence on Modern Thought” – it’s actually a reprint of an article from 2000, and is available online for free for a month in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. His thesis: That, of all the great minds shaping the last 100+ years of radical change and advancement, modern thought has been most influenced by Charles Darwin.

Clearly, our conception of the world and our place in it is, at the beginning of the 21st century, drastically different from the zeitgeist at the beginning of the 19th century. But no consensus exists as to the source of this revolutionary change. Karl Marx is often mentioned; Sigmund Freud has been in and out of favor; Albert Einstein’s biographer Abraham Pais made the exuberant claim that Einstein’s theories “have profoundly changed the way modern men and women think about the phenomena of inanimate nature.” No sooner had Pais said this, though, than he recognized the exaggeration. “It would actually be better to say ‘modern scientists’ than ‘modern men and women,’” he wrote, because one needs schooling in the physicist’s style of thought and mathematical techniques to appreciate Einstein’s contributions in their fullness. Indeed, this limitation is true for all the extraordinary theories of modern physics, which have had little impact on the way the average person apprehends the world.

The situation differs dramatically with regard to concepts in biology. Many biological ideas proposed during the past 150 years stood in stark conflict with what everybody assumed to be true. The acceptance of these ideas required an ideological revolution. And no biologist has been responsible for more—and for more drastic—modifications of the average person’s worldview than Charles Darwin.

Mayr discusses the secularization of modern science (as opposed to the theological Victorian gentleman natural philosopher) being largely due to Darwin, and the effects that the removal of the special creation of Man from his former unique position had on both philosophers and common thought.

[Darwin] developed a set of new principles that influence the thinking of every person: the living world, through evolution, can be explained without recourse to supernaturalism.

I ran across an old Isaac Asimov column from The Skeptical Inquirer in 1989 titled “The Relativity of Wrong” in which he critiques the common postmodern fallacy that, because all science is ultimately incorrect at some level, it can all equally be discarded in favor of whatever pseudoscientific drivel or quasi-quantum twaddle one prefers. Asimov points out that claiming that the theory “the earth is spherical” is equally as wrong as the theory “the earth is flat” is, in fact, stupid.

[W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

So the next time someone with a crackpot theory tries to claim that “Einstein will be proven wrong, too!”, remind them that yes, he almost certainly will; but he is going to be proven wrong at the sixth or seventh decimal place.

The Royal Society of London is providing free access to some of the most famous papers from its three-and-a-half centuries of publishing in celebration of its semiseptcentennial in 2010. Included in the lot are Robert Boyle’s description of the first blood transfusion (from the year of the Great Fire of London); Robert Hooke inventing artificial respiration in 1667; Isaac Newton’s 1672 description of the theory of light and colours; van Leeuwenhoek’s first use of the microscope; Edmund Halley viewing eclipses; Ben Franklin’s description of his famous kite experiment; the description of Bayesian probability; Watson and Crick’s structure of DNA; and Maxwell’s theory of the electric field (the birth of Relativity):

The most obvious mechanical phenomenon in electrical and magnetical experiments is the mutual action by which bodies in certain states set each other in motion while still at a sensible distance from each other. The first step, therefore, in reducing these phenomena into scientific form, is to ascertain the magnitude and direction of the force acting between the bodies, and when it is found that this force depends in a certain way upon the relative position of the bodies and on their electric or magnetic condition, it seems at first sight natural to explain the facts by assuming the existence of something either at rest or in motion in each body, constituting its electric or magnetic state, and capable of acting at a distance according to mathematical laws.

Good stuff! Plus, there are a few dozen other gems including the invention of aspirin, the smallpox vaccine, and penicillin.

They’ve been busy over there. Good work, Royal Society – keep it up!

And now for something completely different.

Well, now that we’ve seen what the scientific method can accomplish, what about the unscientific method?

Crackpot, young-earth creationist, and convicted felon (and proprietor of Dinosaur Adventure Land – “Where Dinosaurs and the Bible Meet!” [Meat?]) Kent Hovind‘s doctoral dissertation has been leaked to the public. This after years of refusal by him and his alma mater (Patriot Bible University) to allow it to be subject to review and scrutiny. You know, like academic standards in any reputable institution would require.

And what does this horrible piece of dreck look like? No title (?); 100 pages; one figure; no tables. And zero references. Zero.

I guess this guy must be an expert on whatever he’s talking about.

These honest questions deserve an honest answer. I believe we have been lied to about the age of the earth. Satan, the father of all lies, has come up with this one to try to make a fool of Jesus Christ. Jesus said in Matthew 19:4 that the creation of Adam and Eve was the beginning. I believe that Jesus was right.

Anyone taking bets on which group is more useful to humanity?

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about a recent article, which proposes that the Higgs boson doesn’t want to be detected, and that some superior force is preventing it. Whether the culprit is Nature, causality, paradox, Galactus, or rogue Time Lords from Raxacoricofallapatorius, the authors claim that “unlucky” events seem to be conspiring to prevent detection of the Higgs. The gist is that, despite 45 years of intensive searching, the Higgs has gone undetected. And, even though several experiments have had the potential of detecting it, all have (so far) failed to do so, sometimes in seemingly suspicious ways.

Briefly, the Higgs boson is the last remaining undetected particle in the Standard Model, which unites all non-gravitational interactions in the universe. It would be the particle that explains why other particles have mass, by creating a molasses-like field that gives other particles traveling through it inertia. Now, the mathematics describing the laws of physics work equally well with time moving in either the forward of backwards direction – i.e., you can calculate a baseball’s final position after leaving the pitcher’s hand, or you can determine its starting position by observing it entering the catcher’s mitt. The paper’s authors conclude that, since we never seem to find the Higgs boson in the catcher’s mitt, any historical trajectory that would cause the detection of the Higgs boson is forbidden, and therefor we must always find ourselves in a present where something has conspired to prevent it. Furthermore, the authors suggest an experiment to determine whether the future is determined to prevent detection of the Higgs: Cut a million-card deck, where one card says “Don’t turn on the LHC,” and, if that card comes up, don’t turn on the LHC! (Why perform this experiment at all? Because, if we don’t give the future [or the Time Lords] a “pressure valve” – an easy way to prevent Higgs production – more drastic preventative measures may be required, such as catastrophic failure of the LHC, or production of planet-devouring black holes.)

A lot of the buzz has been backlash and loud outcries, as if the article were crankish; however, the article itself seems to have been submitted in all seriousness – it was produced by extremely well-respected physicists, the proposed mechanisms are well within established physics (or, at least, non-forbidden physics, which, according to Murray Gell-Mann, means that they’re compulsory), and it was published in an acceptable venue and manner (i.e., not a Pons & Fleischmann press conference).

I am not criticizing the authors of the paper or claiming that their article was fallacious. Speculative ideas – even wildly speculative ideas – have a distinguished tradition and a valuable place in the scientific process. Quantum mechanics in particular is notoriously non-intuitive – Niels Bohr once said, when asked if an idea was crazy, “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

The problem with this (admittedly fun) paper is that the data set proposed to speculate interference from the future is incredibly sparse: The cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider after an expenditure of several billion dollars, the shutdown of the LEP just before possible Higgs detection, and the malfunctioning of the LHC upon startup due to electrical shorts. And this also doesn’t take into account the extreme difficulty of detecting the Higgs, nor the extreme expense and complexity of the machines and projects constructed to do so. The LHC is probably the largest, most complex, most intricate machine ever built by mankind – I hardly think it requires such unlikely speculation to explain why it failed during its first trial run; I’m sure it will have many more technical glitches over its lifespan, some serious and some severe.

Of course, since the LHC has now once again been fully cooled to below the temperature of deep space, and particles have now been injected into the main ring in anticipation of the first collisions in a few weeks, I guess the proof will soon be in the pudding.

Seen in this week’s Science, a definition of hydrogen:

a colorless, odorless gas, which, given enough time, turns into people.

Awesome. From Los Alamos physicist Steen Rasmussen.

It reminds me of Carl Sagan’s quote from Cosmos:

In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

And that, of course, gives me the excuse to post this: