What would be an undeniable miracle?

In 1972, sci-fi writer and publisher Lester del Rey launched a challenge to three well-known authors of the genre: Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg and Gordon R. Dickson. All three should write a novella on a specific topic: the effect of an undeniable miracle (the sun standing still) on human society. The three authors responded to the challenge, and the three stories were published jointly in a book entitled The day the sun stood still. In this post we shall consider the first of the three, written by Poul Anderson, whose title is A chapter of Revelation.

In a post in his blog, Pablo (a.k.a. sinopinionespropias) specifies which, in his opinion, should be the characteristics of an undeniable miracle:

1.      It must be a prophecy.

2.      Its materialization should not depend on people.

3.      Your probability must be negligible and calculable.

4.      It must be as concrete as possible.

5.      It must maintain the same demonstrative force with the passage of time.

6.      It must make sense at all times.

Split brain

Roger Sperry

During the 50s of the twentieth century, the American neurobiologist Roger Sperry performed various investigations on animals, and human epilepsy patients who suffered repeated attacks, intense and persistent. As a solution to these attacks, he used the somewhat drastic (but possibly necessary) technique of cutting the corpus callosum, a bundle of nerve connections that connect the two hemispheres of the brain. The treatment was successful and provided Sperry with a number of subjects with whom he could experience what happens when the two cerebral hemispheres are disconnected from each other.

In his experiments, Sperry proved that the two cerebral hemispheres can act independently. He also discovered that their function is different: the left hemisphere is usually the seat of aggressiveness, logical processes, and the interpretation of written and spoken word. The right hemisphere is responsible for short-term memory, global thinking, artistic activities (as our response to music) and the analysis of spatial relationships. These investigations shed light on diseases and behaviors such as autism, depression, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease. In 1981, Sperry received the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, shared with David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel for a different research.

Physical Time and Inner Time

William Blake

We know that physical time goes on regularly, but inner time (our sensation of the passage of time) is very variable. The two times do not have to match. Sometimes, watching at our inner time, a minute can look like hours, while in other cases the hours fly away. An English poet, William Blake, expressed it well in a famous poem:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand 

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, 

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,

And Eternity in an hour

(Auguries of Innocence, 1803?)

There is a long history of literary works, in which a character enters aesthetic or religious ecstasy, or simply falls asleep, and on returning to reality discovers that many years have passed, sometimes centuries. This subgenre (called by scholars sleeper legends) has representatives in many literatures. In Spanish literature, it is reflected in the legend of the monk and the little bird, associated with the monastery of Leire. In this legend, a monk who enters in ecstasy while a bird is singing, discovers upon awakening that three centuries have gone by. Among medieval French lays there is a legend about the knight Guingamor, who arrived in a wonderful city and stayed there for three days, but when he left, he found that three centuries had passed. And in the United States literature we have the famous story by Washington Irving titled Rip van Winkle, whose protagonist falls asleep one night and wakes up 20 years later.

Fred Saberhagen versus the Turing Test

Alan Turing

In 1950, the English mathematician and chemist Alan Turing tried to define the conditions so that it would be possible to affirm that a machine is capable of thinking like us. For Turing, this will be achieved when the machine is capable of deceiving human beings, making them think that it is one of them. This test is called the imitation game. I have talked about this in a previous post in this blog.

In 1956, Arthur Samuel of IBM built a program to play the game called draughts or checkers. The program kept information about the moves in the games it had played, which was used to modify its future moves (in other words, it learned). In a few years, after playing many games, the program was able to defeat its creator and played reasonably well in official championships.

That same year, during a summer course held in Dartmouth College, John McCarthy and other computer pioneers coined the term artificial intelligence. Getting their hopes too high, they predicted spectacular advances for the next ten years, which did not take place in the time envisaged, but much later. I have also written about this in another post.

In 1963, science fiction writer Fred Saberhagen published the first story of his famous series about the berserkers, autonomous and intelligent space fortresses created by an ancient extraterrestrial civilization to exterminate intelligent life wherever it appears in the galaxy. This story, titled Without a thought, is an answer to the Turing Test and a brake to the unbridled hopes of the inventors of the term artificial intelligence. This is the plot of the story:

The Hubble-Lemaître Law

Georges Lemaître

Let us look at a little history.

In various places in the sky, but especially in the constellation of Cepheus, where the first case was discovered, there are some stars whose light intensity varies regularly, and therefore are called variable Cepheids. In 1908, the American astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt discovered that the period of these stars is linked with their real luminosity: the greater the luminosity, the longer the period. Therefore, by measuring their period, their real luminosity can be deduced.

In 1913, the American astronomer Vesto Melvin Slipher obtained the spectrum of what was then called the Andromeda nebula (the giant galaxy closest to ours) and discovered a blue shift that indicated (according to the Doppler effect) that the nebula moves towards us with a speed of about 300 kilometers per second, much higher than expected. Slipher then studied the light of other spiral nebulae and made the unexpected discovery that most of them, unlike Andromeda, show redshifts, that is, they move away from the solar system with great speed. In fact, he measured speeds above 1000 kilometers per second.

In 1919, the American astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble used the Mount Wilson telescope to photograph several spiral nebulae, including Andromeda, and showed that, actually, they were not nebulae, as had been believed, but huge clusters of stars. From then on they were no longer called nebulae, but galaxies, in honor of our Milky Way, which also belongs to the class of spiral galaxies. Galactos in Greek means milk.