All Things Seen and Unseen

Sean Carroll argues forcefully for the Many Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, first articulated by Hugh Everett.

The formalism of quantum mechanics, in this view, consists of quantum states as described above and nothing more, which evolve according to the usual Schrödinger equation and nothing more. The formalism predicts that there are many worlds, so we choose to accept that. This means that the part of reality we experience is an indescribably thin slice of the entire picture, but so be it. Our job as scientists is to formulate the best possible description of the world as it is, not to force the world to bend to our pre-conceptions.

 

One of my favourite broadcasters on the history of science, Lisa Jardine, happens to be the daughter of Jacob Bronowski, one of the strongest intellectual influences on my teenage years. One of my teachers diagnosed correctly that I wanted to be another Bronowski. I haven’t managed that but my adoration continues. Yesterday I found myself dipping once again into the Ascent of Man. Today I came across a sound file of a recent lecture given by Lisa Jardine, ‘Things I never knew about my Father‘, talking about discovering her father’s secret dossier held by military intelligence during World War II. Fascinating and disturbing stuff.

 

 

 

In the course of reading an interesting article by Andrew Crumey, ‘The Sun Does Not Rise‘, about science, religion, and magical thinking I learned an interesting ‘fact’. The scare quotes are just because I only have Crumey’s word for it. For what?

How many colours are there in the rainbow? My answer was seven: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Apparently, before Newton’s work on optics the man in the street would have said 5. Moreover Newton’s addition of orange and indigo were the result of theoretical commitments rather than observation:

Newton’s wrong guesses are, however, as interesting as his correct ones. A well-known example is his conviction that light is made of particles, not waves. What he had in mind were solid ‘corpuscles’, not the photons of modern physics, but it’s still tempting to see him as having been half right. And in trying to explain the splitting of white light into a spectrum, he came up with the beautiful notion that the width of the coloured bands matches the mathematical proportions of a musical scale. People had traditionally counted no more than five colours in a rainbow, but for his theory to work Newton needed more, so he introduced two ‘semitones’, orange and indigo, and we’ve been counting seven colours in a rainbow ever since. Generations of schoolchildren have learned mnemonics that colour-code light, such as ‘Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain’, which have as much to do with physical reality as the signs of the zodiac.

Newton’s harmonious vision was a fossil from a very deep layer of intellectual history: the doctrines of the semi-legendary Pythagoras who, apart from discovering that theorem about the square on the hypotenuse, supposedly also had a leg made of gold and could appear in two different places at once. The Pythagorean view that ‘all is number’, and that the motion of the planets was linked to musical principles (the ‘harmony of the spheres’), was also endorsed by the German mathematician Johannes Kepler, whose Harmonices Mundi (‘The Harmony of the World’, 1619) tried to explain the solar system in terms of music and geometry, and correctly proposed what we now call Kepler’s third law of planetary motion.

There’s plenty more in this vein.

One of my theological interests is in the theology of creation — creation understood both as noun and verb — and through that, the theology of imagination.

Imagination ties together my theological and spiritual interests. I believe it is crucial to giving a rich account of discernment. I wrote a piece some time ago for Thinking Faith on the Faithful Imagination outlining some of those ideas.

Now the Scientific American blog reports a new venture, The Imagination Institute ‘dedicated to making progress on the measurement, growth, and improvement of imagination across all sectors of society’.

Our ability to overcome the constraints of the present environment and travel to distant places and hopeful futures all in the mind is a skill that is hugely neglected in today’s society. With our intense focus on enabling students and employees to master what is, we are missing out on the huge opportunity for them to also imagine what could be.

That ‘all in the mind’ worries me!

The executive director of The Imagination Institute is Martin Seligman– founder of the field of positive psychology. The lead scientific consultant is Marie Forgeard, and I am the scientific director. Our board of scientific advisors consists of psychologists Angela Duckworth, Rex Jung, Dean Keith Simonton, Robert Sternberg, and Philip Tetlock, novelist Richard Powers, and Major General (ret) Robert Scales. We also are building up an excellent team of researchers here at the University of Pennsylvania, including Jeanette Elstein and Jane Reznik.

To help achieve its mission, the Imagination Institute is holding a grants competition titled Advancing the Science of Imagination: Toward an “Imagination Quotient” to test, validate and develop measurement tools and interventions for imagination and perspective (download Request for Proposals). In 2015, up to fifteen (15), two-year grants in the range of $150,000 to $200,000 will be awarded to scholars from around the world.

The awards are intended to generate new scientific information in order to further clarify the construct of imagination and its measurement for the purpose of advancing an understanding of the human mind and its role in the optimization of human potential and flourishing.

Very interesting. I wonder whether it will engage with imagination in its fullest sense. In my article, Faithful Imagination, I say:

Whenever the imagination poses a choice, faith is implicated – and not just when the subject matter is explicitly religious as in the Exercises. Something akin to discernment is going on within our artist and our scientist too, some faith is being deepened or not. I do not mean this in the trivial sense that religious pundits sometimes use when they accuse scientists of relying on their own version of faith: this goes deeper. Whenever the imagination gets involved – which is everywhere – we are faced with the question of quality, of value. Where does value come from? We are inclined to be split between a scientific imagination that systematically omits value from the world – despite the pattern-perceiving acts upon which science is built – and the imagination of the humanities that conjures a profusion of possible culture-relative values. But the naturally religious imagination – which has rather been marginalised for the last few hundred years – insists that value is to be discovered in the world in a way that moves the human heart. Or, perhaps better, between the world and the human heart when they are engaged together in imagination. The religious imagination insists that imagination does not just run wild but that imagination is always faithful or unfaithful to something real, and that we can register the difference in how it moves the heart.

It would be a shame if the Imagination Institute focussed so closely on the psychology of imagination that it missed it cosmic dimension.

Hot on the heels of the periodic table of fictional elements: an infographic of ‘the solar system’s solid surfaces stitched together’ from the guys at xkcd.

I like the tiny spot on the ‘western’ border of Titan best.

Ever wondered where Dilithium is related to Flubber or Unobtanium? Someone has put together a ‘periodic table’ of fictional elements that is worth a chuckle.

Just launched: Whewell’s Gazette: a weekly digest of all the best of
Internet history of science, technology and medicine. Full of good stuff. Curated by The Renaissance Mathematicus.

 

Philosophy Bites has an interesting podcast with Roger Scruton discussing his understanding of the sacred. In particular he draws upon our experience of each other to help us grasp a sense of the sacred.