What does science say about miracles?

Victor Hugo

In his work Quatrevingt-Treize, a title usually translated as “Ninety-three” (it refers to 1793, the year of the Reign of Terror and the Vendée), Victor Hugo introduces a character named Cimourdain, a former priest who has lost his faith because of science:

Science had demolished his faith; the dogma had vanished in him... He knew everything about science and he knew nothing about life.

Apart from the fact that the second sentence is quite debatable (no one can know everything about science), the first raises the confrontation between science and faith, which began with the Enlightenment and reached its maximum philosophical effect in the nineteenth century, Victor Hugo‘s time. He is probably projecting his prejudices into a historical anachronism.

Conan Doyle’s mistake

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is famous as the author of the character Sherlock Holmes, the detective who relies on logic to solve the most abstruse cases, as in the famous quote from the story The adventure of the blanched soldier, included in the collection The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes:

When you have eliminated all that is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Apart from his mystery books, one of his science fiction novels is also very well known: The Lost World, published in 1912, whose protagonist is Professor Challenger, an unbearable scientist, who also appears in other stories by Doyle. This is the plot of The Lost World:

A group of explorers manages to reach an almost inaccessible mesa, lost in the Amazon rainforest, so isolated that dinosaurs and other extinct animals survive there, as well as two races of humans or primitive pre-humans (Pithecanthropus and Homo sapiens). After they manage to escape and return to England, Challenger gives a lecture about his findings, which nobody takes seriously until he exhibits a specimen of Pterosaur that he managed to take from the mesa in the form of an egg, later incubated.

Irreversible time: illusion, or simplification?

Ilya Prigogine

We know Einstein believed that the passage of time is an illusion. In a letter of condolence he wrote in 1955 he said: ...the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. To assert this, he relied on the fact that Newton’s equations of gravitation, his own equations of General Relativity, Maxwell’s equations (which apply to electromagnetic waves) and Schrödinger’s equation (which gives the wave function of a particle in quantum mechanics) are all symmetric with respect to time.

How then can we explain the fact that it seems so obvious that time goes from the past to the future? Usually, physicists who believe that time is an illusion explain it by saying that, at the microscopic level, time is actually reversible, but when we move to the macroscopic level, new, emerging phenomena appear, one of which is the irreversibility of time. Let's give an example:

According to the usual theories, the movement of the molecules of a gas is perfectly reversible. If we reverse the direction of time, all the particles behave exactly the same and continue colliding with each other, only they would move in the opposite direction. However, when we consider all the trillions of particles that make up a gas, we see irreversible phenomena arising, such as the fact that the gas always tends to occupy as much space as possible, while its accumulation in a corner of the container is much less likely.

The problem is that our physical theories are based on approximations. Mathematics is a very important tool for physics, but in mathematics there are several kinds of very different problems, which differ in their difficulty to be solved. Let us look at a few:

Freedom and prior censorship

Wikipedia Logo

On July 5, 2018 the European Parliament rejected, by 318 votes against 278, the proposal for the Copyright Directive in the European Single Market. In the days leading up to this vote, there were many public and private activities in favor and against the proposal, which after this defeat will have to be debated again in committee, probably with amendments. The most controversial points of the proposal, those that gathered most rejection, were incorporated in two articles of the regulation:

• Article 11: Establishes what has been popularly called the Google tax. It makes it compulsory, for those responsible for web pages, to request permission, and if the copyright owners wish, to pay a fee, for including a link to a news or copyright owner that has appeared in any of the media. The most favored by this article are not individual authors, but mass media (especially the press on the Internet), the main defenders of this measure.

The MEPs who defended this article argue that it does not affect individuals or the Wikipedia, although the latter felt so threatened, that it declared a strike for the first time in its history, so that access to the Spanish, Italian and French versions of the Wikipedia was closed during the day before the vote. The problem is, this article may be expressed so ambiguously that, although just now may not apply to individuals or to Wikipedia, there are no guarantees that in the future this cannot be done.