NASA goes back to space

Buzz Aldrin on the Moon
NASA Images at the Internet Archive

In the early 1960s, the Soviet Union took the lead in the space race. At the end of that decade, the United States took over with the Apollo Project, which in 1968 began to launch manned flights (Apollo 7), in 1969 put for the first time two men on the Moon (Apollo 11), and until December 1972 made five more lunar landings, the last of which was Apollo 17. Since then, mankind has not returned to the Moon, although there have been several unmanned automatic lunar landings.

From the 1980s, NASA changed tactics and began using space shuttles for its manned flights. These ships differed from the previous ones because the shuttle was reusable: when returning to Earth, it could land in a similar way to an airplane, rather than descending on the sea, like the capsules of the Apollo project. In all, five shuttles were built, named Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavor. 

The Library of Babel and the digits of Pi

One of the most famous stories by Jorge Luis Borges is The Library of Babel (La Biblioteca de Babel). This library contains all possible books. For this statement to make sense, we must specify the definition of a book. For Borges, each book is made of one million three hundred and twelve thousand characters, chosen among all the possible permutations of that length and built with a set of 25 basic characters (the space, 22 letters, and two punctuation marks).

The number of books in the Library is huge, for the number of permutations of a certain number of symbols grows according to the factorial of their length. The factorial of a number N is obtained by multiplying together all the natural numbers from 1 to N:

N!=1×2×3×...×N

The result of this operation grows disproportionately. Thus, 5! = 120; 10! = 3,628,800; 100!>9×10¹⁵⁷. The number of books in the Library of Babel does not grow so quickly, because each book contains many repetitions of the symbols, which decreases the number of possibilities, but consider what will be the factorial of 1,312,000, if the factorial of 100 is a number with 157 digits.

The number of books in the Library of Babel is huge, but it is not infinite. That set of books contains all the possible chains of that length, whether or not they make sense. But that means that it contains all the books that have ever been written; all that could ever be written; all translations of each book to all the existing or possible languages​​...

The dominant ideology dares to censor science

In one of the most read and controversial posts in this blog, What science says about human life, which had 92 comments in its Spanish version (so far the blog record), I explained how, for purely ideological reasons, supporters of abortion close the eyes to what science says, which asserts clearly (and has done so for a century and a half) that the life of every human being begins in the fertilization of the ovum by the sperm. Faced with this, abortionists insist on making false statements like these: a fetus is only a part of the mother’s body; a fetus is not a human being; a fetus is nothing but a set of cells (so what are the abortionists?).

A cover of The Lancet

Denouncing one more step towards the ideological control of scientific research, the British journal The Lancet, second in impact factor in the field of Medicine, has published an article accusing certain abortion NGOs and the government of the United Kingdom of interference in scientific research.

The scientists signing the article are part of a team working for the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which undertook the evaluation of a project aimed at reducing deaths due to unwanted pregnancies in 14 countries in Africa and Asia (i.e. the number of deaths caused by induced abortions). The project, which was allocated £140 million in funding, was sponsored by the United Kingdom's Department for International Development (DFID) and carried out by two major NGOs working on international reproductive health (an euphemism hiding the word abortion, although those organizations don’t hide it in their websites).

God’s action in the light of science

Cover of the book
Divine action & modern science
by Nicholas Saunders

As I mentioned in previous posts, neither the existence nor the non-existence of God can be proved by science. God, if He exists, cannot be the object of scientific knowledge. Consequently, from the rational point of view, the problem of the existence of God is philosophical rather than scientific. Several solutions have been proposed for this problem:

• Atheism: According to this solution, followed today by many, God does not exist and the existence of the universe would be a consequence just of chance. An additional problem, suggested by this theory, is that we really don’t know what chance is (see this post). Like dark matter and dark energy, it is just a name that tries to hide our ignorance.
• Pantheism: According to this solution, proposed by such distinguished names as Spinoza and Einstein, God is the universe. In other words, there is something in the universe that we cannot discover through scientific analysis, which explains in some way its own existence and ours. The contrast of this theory with the previous one is clear in Einstein’s words against the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics: God does not play dice. With those simple words, Einstein declared his disbelief regarding the concept of chance, used by many atheistic solutions to the problem. In this theory, the action of God in the world would take place only through natural causes, without any alteration (by means of compatibilist action).
• Deism: According to this solution, God exists and created the universe, but then He left it evolve alone. Originated in the eighteenth century, many French thinkers of the time (and a few later on, until today) adopted this theory. From this point of view, the problem of the action of God in the universe does not arise, because it denies that God acts in the universe.
• Providential Theism: According to this solution, God exists and created the universe, but then He doesn’t forget about it, but interacts with it in some way, directing its evolution. The problem of divine action only arises in the framework of this theory.

Is scientific research well done?

Tabby Cat
Oliver-Bonjoch, CC BY-SA 3.0

Sometimes, while reading items published by journals such as Science News, it looks like some research currently being carried out is platitudinous. Either it leads to the discovery of things everyone knows, or time and efforts are spent to investigate in fields that no one cares about. We know that many researchers are anxious to publish, and they must justify somewhat the funds they receive, but up to that point?

Let’s look at a very recent news (April 2019):

Cats recognize their name. A study suggests our feline friends can tell the familiar sound of their name from other words. A paragraph of this news adds: As for whether or not a cat understands what a name is, well, only the cat knows that.

Anyone who has had a cat (I had one half a century ago) knows that cats recognize their name. Was it necessary to do a research about this, probably spending public money, to discover something that everyone knows?