Archive for the ‘General Science’ Category

Despite the slow activity over the past several months, Lintbox is back on track, and to prove it, we introduce the next panel discussion!

As the LHC became active over the fall, those opposing its activation grew louder and received considerable attention on various news outlets.  On top of this, public opinion polls found that the majority of Americans felt that the risks (though debunked) of activating the LHC far outweighed its potential benefits.  The Large Hadron Collider’s opponents argue that the possible dangers resultant of the massive particle collider’s activity, ranging from the creation of micro black holes to the catastrophic invention of the mythical “strange matter” may damage or even destroy the planet.  These arguments have been resoundingly shot down by the entire scientific community as both scientifically inaccurate and too unlikely to be even considered possible.  However, as with any debate, there remains some ground to explore. Read the rest of this entry »

I would highly recommend coming out to this event if you’re in the area. It only costs $5 for students if you pre-order or your tickets. More information can be found below:

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It’s always refreshing when the journalists actually get science news right. Regarding the Large Hadron Collider:

But there has been a struggle to explain to the public that, though this energy is vast from the perspective of a circulating proton, each collision between a pair of protons will release an amount of energy comparable to that of two colliding mosquitoes.

What next — the Vatican comes out in support of evolution? Madness!

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• Telegraph.co.uk: Large Hadron Collider: could it defrost a pizza?
• msnbc.com: Vatican: Guess what, Darwin? Evolution is OK

This article was linked to on Digg recently, and there has been some misunderstanding of its content. It concerns a discovery of a new catalyst that could make it possible to use sunlight to directly split water into hydrogen and oxygen. This might turn out to be quite important in the future (if we start using hydrogen as fuel, and if this turns out to be more efficient than other ways of producing hydrogen, etc.), but you can’t mention “water” and “energy” in the same sentence without certain people assuming that the useable energy is in the water itself. I know I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: water is already in its lowest chemical energy state. You cannot extract energy from water using chemical* means. That means no water-powered car engines, no water-powered batteries, etc.

Of course this discovery is interesting enough in itself. Storing solar energy for later use has always been a bottleneck in this particular form of alternative energy, so if you could store it as chemical energy in hydrogen, it could potentially surpass the standard lead-acid or lithium-polymer battery solution. However, this remains to be seen. For the time being, this technology is still in experimental stages.

*Other forms of energy are routinely extracted from water in order to generate electrical power, for example kinetic/potential energy in a hydroelectic station, or thermal energy at a geothermal plant. The hydrogen in water could also be used as fusion fuel**, thus releasing nuclear energy.

**Note that a fusion reaction would far surpass (by several orders of magnitude) the energy required to split the hydrogen and oxygen apart, thus avoiding the problem that makes it impossible to get a surplus of chemical energy from water.

I am a big fan of Consumer Reports magazine. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a consumer information and advocacy magazine. In each issue, it selects groups of products (e.g. computers, televisions, lawn mowers, refrigerators), and makes recommendations based on a battery of tests, surveys, and investigation of the product. It tests all of the products that it recommends, and usually has a very scientifically-minded approach to studying consumer goods.

However, the magazine is not limited to the analysis and recommendation of products, but also contains other supplementary material. Some of these things, like recall and safety notices, are often valuable in supplementing the content of the magazine. However, they can sometimes get into trouble in their supplementary sections, leading to problems like those in their latest issue. I took exception to two articles in particular: When to Buy Organic and How Did You Sleep Last Night?.

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Science and religion are similar in that they both seek to answer questions about natural phenomenon. They both try to come up with plausible explanations for how observable phenomenon appear. Whereas science tells us how inheritance and natural selection causes genetic variance in populations over time (evolution), religion tells us that a divine being (God) guides the development of species to a predetermined goal. Scientists firmly believe that their answer is the most correct model of evolution to date, whereas religious people believe creationism to be an equally compelling theory.

Where science and religion differ greatly is in how they go about answering questions about our world, and more specifically, how they go about evaluating and improving their theories for how the world works. Both theorize as to possible causes for natural events. Science explains natural phenomenon by way of many tiny interactions of universal forces that act upon each other to create complex systems, and religion usually explains natural phenomenon by way of one, or many, gods (usually omnipotent and omniscient beings that are both creators and designers of the universe). However, this is where the two processes differ. Once a theory has been arrived at, science goes on to ask whether it is the only possible theory, and if so, if it is the best possible theory. Scientific theory is constantly under evaluation, and the instant something with more predictive power comes along, the new theory is integrated into the body of scientific knowledge. Religion lacks this constant drive for self-improvement. It comes up with one answer, and sticks to it.

Now, some might argue that religious theory is perfect, because it was handed down by a god/gods in its present form, and therefore requires no improvement. There are two problems with this argument, though. The first, and most obvious, problem with this argument is that our interpretation of religious laws changes over time. Religious teachings now are not what they were 1000 years ago. And in some cases (like Judaism), a great deal of emphasis is placed on studying our interpretation of the holy texts and laws contained therein. Regardless of whether or not the laws are perfect, if we acknowledge that our interpretation can be flawed, then this leaves room for improvement.

If it is the case that religious teachings have always been right, and that we are capable of improving our interpretation of them (i.e. by studying them we can gain a greater understanding of what they mean), then it begs the question of why scientific findings (also a method of human learning and understanding) are diverging, rather than converging, on religious theory. Either there is something deeply flawed with the scientific method (which is always a possibility, but not something that has been shown yet), or the two types of knowledge should be growing closer over time. The fact that they aren’t seems troublesome, and given that both branches acknowledge the fallibility of human knowledge, science seems to be the only one correcting for this, by constantly questioning its own assumptions, and improving as a result.

I recognize that this probably won’t convince anybody who’s deeply religious (and let’s face it, if you’re deeply religious you probably aren’t reading this blog anyways), and some people are comfortable with not questioning their beliefs too deeply, but it’s such a small step that can have such a large impact on how you view the world. Never stop questioning your beliefs.

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s when people take science and corrupt it for their own political ends. In recent years, global warming has been – pardon the pun – a rather hot topic; hardly a day goes by when you don’t hear about it in one form or another. The environmentalists have championed the theory, the right-wingers have dismissed it as propaganda, and everything in between. For every Inconvenient Truth (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0497116/) there’s a Great Global Warming Swindle (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020027/). We have to be more energy-efficient. We have to drive hybrids. There’s not a scientific “consensus”. Etc., etc., etc.

It wears on one’s nerves. And though I’m surely to be labeled a “global warming denier” or something equally as asinine, I’d like to explore what it IS, and what it IS NOT.

Global warming was originally an extrapolation from a predictive climate model. Depending on how you tweak the parameters, the same model will predict global cooling, or global temperature-not-changing-at-all. Granted, it does make logical sense. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and levels are elevated due to human activity, therefore human activity is causing the Earth’s temperature to increase. But overly simplistic, albeit rational, explanations such as these have no place in an essentially chaotic system such as climate. (Side note: some models will predict that heating actually causes cooling in the long run: more heat causes more water vapour in the air, which causes more clouds, which reflect more sunlight away from the Earth, which causes the planet to cool)

Global warming is not something that can be tested scientifically. One big problem is that we only have one planet to “experiment” on. Even if we could somehow test multiple Earths in the laboratory, there are far too many variables to be able to pin down the effects of a single one. At the end of the day, it comes down to what is statistically likely. To put it more bluntly, the idea that humans are going to cause a significant increase in the average temperature of the planet is a guess. An educated guess, to be fair, and one that is backed up by historical data such as graphs of atmospheric CO2 levels and temperature:

So I’m certainly not trying to say that it is a “myth” or that it is “impossible” or anything of that sort. There is a clear correlation in that graph, which lends support (but certainly does not prove) to the idea that man-made cardon dioxide can increase Earth’s temperature.

But even if it turns out to be wrong, the rest of the environmentalist message is still absolutely correct. Use less electricity. Drive more fuel-efficient cars. We KNOW that pollution from car exhaust and coal power plants kills tens of thousands of people annually; there would be no downside to getting rid of that. And maybe global warming alarmism is what we needed to give us a kick in the “green” direction. Hell, if all it means is the demise of the hideously obnoxious Hummer H2, then it is absolutely worth it.

Just… seriously… it’s not a political platform, it’s not a news headline attention-grabber, it’s a bloody computer model. It’s not even scary anymore; sorry, fear-mongering media, you’ll have to find something new to frighten us with.

While we here in Canada celebrate Canada Day today, there’s yet another reason for jubilation!  One hundred and fifty years ago today, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace first read the theory of Evolution by Natural Selection to London’s Linnean Society, establishing a new paradigm in both the fields of biology and medicine and bringing new perspective to our perceived role on this planet, and, for that matter, the entire universe!

So happy Canada Day and happy Evolution day, everyone!

Link.

Table O’ Miracles

Science and religion have an unstable relationship. Oftentimes they are content to stay separate and do their own things. Occasionally, they clash over certain issues of public policy. However, are these two world-views actually compatible, and if not, which one is correct?

Let us look at the last part of that statement first. A favorite argument of the Young Earth Creationists and the Answers in Genesis crowd is to state that science and religion provide different worldviews– That the systems use different assumptions about our world and reality and are therefore destined to arrive at different conclusions.  Some go as far as to label science as a religion, and why shouldn’t they? Science is based on a bunch of presuppositions as is any other system of belief. So why is science a more legitimate worldview? Because it lets us get at the truth. In order to understand why science is not “just another religion”, we have to understand what science really is as well as the presuppositions upon which it is based.

Science can only reveal empirical truth, and not metaphysical truth. Some people see this as a shortcoming of science, but even if metaphysical truth existed, of what use would it be to us? Philosophy is an interesting intellectual pursuit, but even Descartes had the common sense to see that the way we view the world through philosophy fails to alter our worldviews when we leave our study and go outside afterward. Whether religious, scientific, or both, we all tend to judge the truth in the same way: By what matches our observations¹. The religious person still looks both ways before they cross the road, and they wash their hands before they sit down to eat dinner. From any moderate perspective, it is obvious that science and religion do not conflict in basic worldviews, as some extremists would have you think. In fact, science and religion are both dependent upon empiricism; the only main difference is that religion assumes that one can talk with god (an all-knowing supernatural entity that imparts divine wisdom).

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