The case of Galileo

The case of Galileo is one of the most widespread modern historical myths, widely used by anti-Catholic propaganda, along with the anti-Spanish Black Legend. It surfaces even in the most unexpected places. For example, in the book A Song for Nagasaki, an excellent biography of Takashi Nagai, scientist, convert, and atomic bomb survivor, whose beatification process is underway, his biographer Paul Glynn, an Australian Catholic priest, states twice that Nagai's conversion was delayed due to his concern about the atrocities committed by Catholics throughout history, and cites four: a) the Crusades; b) the Inquisition; c) the genocide of native Americans in South America; and d) the case of Galileo. It is curious that Nagai says nothing about this in his autobiography, and it is surprising that a Catholic priest would fall for such historical fallacies.

New Ways to Scam the Unwary

Wallet scam
Spanish film "Los Tramposos"

About 30 years ago, I received my first attempt at the Nigerian scam: a letter from someone unknown to me offering me the chance to participate in a capital evasion operation involving several million dollars, which they proposed depositing into my bank account, offering to share the profits in return. Of course, I didn't reply, although I kept the Nigerian stamp that came with the letter. I suppose that if I had replied, they would have asked for access to my account to make the transfer, and instead, it would have been emptied.

Since then, I've received dozens of similar attempts, since a certain time via email, always originating from some African country. This scam is, in a way, similar to the wallet scam, because in addition to the swindler, the victim also tries to commit fraud; in one case against the supposed mentally challenged person offering the alleged money, in the other against the governments affected by the capital evasion.

The inconstant constant

Georges Lemaître

In a previous post, The Hubble-Lemaître Law, I explained how Georges Lemaître discovered in 1927 the expansion of the universe, but as he published in a French-language journal, it didn't make a great impact, and for almost a century the discovery was attributed to Edwin Hubble, who published in 1929 in a much more widely circulated English-language journal. This injustice was corrected on October 29, 2018, by the International Astronomical Union, and I echoed the renaming of the law in my post, published three days later in this blog.

The Hubble-Lemaître Law says this: The farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is receding from us. Its recessional velocity is proportional to its distance. The constant of proportionality is called the Hubble constant, which has the dimension of 1/time. In the International System of Units, this dimension would be expressed as seconds⁻¹ or 1/second, but in practice, its definition (speed/distance) is used, with the following units: km/s/Mpc, which means: the increase in the recessional velocity of a galaxy (in km/s) as its distance from us increases (measured in Megaparsecs). One Megaparsec (Mpc) is one million parsecs, and one parsec is equal to 3.2616 light-years.

A Radio Telescope on the Moon

One of the most interesting radio frequencies for radio telescopes is that emitted by hydrogen atoms when excited by an energy input. Upon returning to its ground state, the atom emits a photon with a frequency of 1.42 gigahertz. This frequency corresponds to the microwave region, which ranges from 300 MHz to 300 GHz. If we focus a radio telescope on a cloud of gas and dust in our galaxy, which is composed mostly of hydrogen, this frequency is easy to detect.

But what happens if we try to detect this frequency in very distant regions of the universe? The expansion of the universe affects these waves by lengthening them (that is, decreasing their frequency), in the same way as the frequency of the cosmic microwave background radiation, which was initially in the visible and infrared regions of the spectrum, is now in the microwave region, with its peak at a frequency of 160.2 GHz.

A Language Model Trained with Populscience

Since this blog has almost 550 posts, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to find the information you're looking for, my friend Manuel Márquez suggested allowing readers to ask questions to a Language Model (LLM) trained with the blog's content. I thought it was an excellent idea, so I used Google's NotebookLM tool, and you can use it from now on.

One of the features this product offers is the automatic generation of blog posts. To test it, as an experiment, I requested it to generate one, without specifying a particular topic. Of course, I’ll go on writing my posts without the help of the LLM. Before publishing it here, I corrected it manually, because there were many references to my name (which I removed), and also some curious errors, such as making its title 5 Keys to the Universe, 'AI,' and Evolution and then dividing the text into six points. The following is the resulting post, which summarizes the content of this blog in just two pages:

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6 Keys to the Universe, 'AI,' and Evolution

1. The False Separation Between Laboratory and Faith. It is a popular belief that science has "killed" God, relegating faith to the corner of outdated mythologies. Scientific discoveries not only do not contradict faith, but they provide clues that make the theistic explanation of the cosmos far more plausible than blind chance.

2. "Fine-Tuning": The multiverse is more philosophy than science. Modern science has observed that the physical constants of the universe are "fine-tuned." If the force of gravity or the charge of the electron varied by a certain percentage, the cosmos would be a barren wasteland. Faced with this unsettling reality, many atheist scientists have turned to the "multiverse" as a philosophical lifeline: if infinite universes exist, sooner or later one would appear where life is possible by sheer statistical chance. But the multiverse is not science, it’s rather an agnostic refuge. Being unobservable and irrefutable by definition, it belongs to the realm of philosophy. Faced with the speculation of infinite invisible worlds, the option of a Designer seems more economical and logical.

The fact that God made the universe makes this universe more probable. [...] Belief in the existence of God makes our universe more likely, because this is exactly the universe that God would have created.

3. The Myth of Strong “AI”: Why Will a Machine Never Have “Common Sense”? Faced with gurus like Ray Kurzweil and the “Singularity”—the idea that humanity will create a machine-god, the Antichrist of ideas—computability imposes insurmountable barriers. Turing deflates the expectations of transhumanism:

•         The Impossibility of Asimov’s Laws: It is mathematically proven that the First Law of Robotics (“a robot may not injure a human being”) is impossible to implement. Reducing it to the Turing halting problem, it is computationally impossible to predict, in general, whether an action (or inaction) by a superintelligent AI will cause long-term harm.

•         Syntax vs. Semantics: Machines manipulate signs (syntax), but they do not understand meanings (semantics). Following John Searle, an AI can perfectly simulate feelings, but "simulating" is not "having" consciousness.

•         Lack of Intentionality: Consciousness is not a byproduct of data complexity. Without intentionality, the machine remains a tool, not a subject.

4. The "Fifth Level": Where evolution is headed. Life is organized into levels of complexity where altruism is key to survival. The leap from the lower to the higher level occurs when individuals unite to form a superorganism: from nucleic acids to multicellular beings. In this process, "cellular selfishness" is equivalent to cancer, while the health of the whole demands the surrender of the parts. But what separates us from the rest of creation? The chimpanzee is like water at 99.99 °C; it displays "vapors" of intelligence and tools. However, humankind has crossed the critical point of 100 °C, producing a phase change toward the "vapor" of self-awareness.

Humans study chimpanzees; chimpanzees do not study humans.

A new leap will lead to the Fifth Level: a superorganism identified with Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point.

5. The Trap of Scientism: When scientists engage in bad philosophy. Stephen Hawking claimed that "philosophy is dead," and then dedicates entire chapters to proposing purely philosophical theories. Many modern atheists make glaring semantic errors:

•         Nothing vs. Void: When Hawking or Krauss say that the universe arises from "nothing," they are actually referring to the quantum vacuum, which possesses space, time, and energy. Absolute "Nothingness" does not exist; the vacuum is "something" that requires a cause.

•         Limits of the method: Science studies matter. God, by definition, is immaterial. To claim that science can "prove" His non-existence is like trying to measure the weight of a feeling with a kitchen scale.

6. Chance vs. Pseudo-chance: The Designer's invisible signature. Chaitin's Theorem demonstrates that randomness is undecidable. Mathematically, it is impossible (in general) to distinguish whether a set of data is the result of blind chance or an extremely complex pseudo-random algorithm. This means that science, due to its own limitations, can never rule out the possibility that evolution is actually a "script" or algorithm designed by an Intelligence. What we perceive as chance could be the invisible signature of a Designer who uses randomness as a tool of creation. Design and chance are, in the eyes of the laboratory, indistinguishable.

Conclusion: Toward the Omega Point and Orthogonal Time

The vision of this blog culminates in an optimistic and bold perspective on the end of times. It introduces the concept of "orthogonal time": an axis perpendicular to our linear chronology. From this perspective, the moment of death is not a wait in an endless line, but rather the entrance to a dimension where the Roman centurion, the medieval monk, and the 21st-century programmer arrive at the Omega Point in the same "instant."

Science has not closed the door to God; it has simply begun to glimpse the astonishing complexity of the mechanism.

The same post in Spanish

Thematic Thread on Anniversaries and Organization: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca

The Use of “AI” Tools

The second entry for the word tool in the Merrian-Webster dictionary states:

Something… used in performing an operation or necessary in the practice of a vocation or profession

Since the origin of the genus Homo, human beings have used tools, which together with skeletons or fossilized bone fragments are one of the main sources of information about our ancestors. Monofacial and bifacial pebble tools seem primitive today, but during human prehistory they served as weapons and tools and surely helped us survive.

Information technology, which has developed significantly during the last century, has provided us with many useful tools. Throughout the 21st century, these tools have become increasingly “intelligent,” tackling tasks that until very recently could only be performed by humans. But when using them, we should keep in mind some very general ideas, which should always be applied, but not always are:

The Kingdoms of Cladistics

In the previous post, I discussed cladistics, the new way of classifying living things based on their position in the tree of life, and mentioned some of the difficulties that arise when trying to adapt the previous classification system, based on the taxonomic tree and Linnaeus's classic categories—kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species—to cladistics.

There are more difficulties. For example, let's consider the concept of kingdom, Linnaeus's highest taxonomic category. Traditionally, living things were divided into two kingdoms: animals and plants. These two kingdoms were clearly separate, with very different characteristics. Thus, animals were defined as organic beings that live, feel, and move by their own impulse, while the plant kingdom were beings that live but do not feel and do not move. It was acknowledged that these definitions were imperfect, because there were exceptions, such as sponges, which barely move but are animals, and some plants, like mimosas, which seem to sense certain stimuli and move in response.