Thirteen months in one year?

After talking about days and hours, this is the turn of the month. Like the day, it corresponds to a natural cycle: the revolution of the moon around the Earth. As we know, seen from the Earth, the moon does not seem to rotate around its axis and always shows us the same face. However, if we take as a reference point a star or the sun, a rotation can be seen. An observer located on the sun would see successively all the points on the surface of the moon, therefore would see it rotating around itself. It could also be observed that its period of rotation is the same as its revolution around the Earth. This is why it always shows the same face towards our planet.

The 24th hour

Melting Clock
Sculpture by Dalí

I have tweaked the title of the well-known novel by the Romanian writer Constantin Virgil Gheorghiu (The 25th hour), because in this post I am going to talk about the hours. As with the days, which we talked about in the previous post, there are different types of hours.

Each type of time is defined by dividing the length of the corresponding day by 24. Thus there are as many types of hours as there are days: lunar hour, sidereal hour and mean solar hour. But in addition to these three, there are two more: the true solar time and the official time (see the attached table). The first is a consequence of the fact that the true solar day differs from the mean solar day by up to a quarter of an hour, approximately. For that reason, when ship captains wanted to calculate the geographical longitude of their position by observing the moment when the sun passed through the meridian, they had to apply correction tables based on the date. If we divide the length of each true solar day by 24, we will get the true solar hour, which of course is equal to 60 minutes just a few times a year.

Works and Days

I have taken the title of this post from Hesiod's book. Although I won’t talk about works here, I will talk about days. The word day has two different meanings: the whole day (24 hours) and the part of the day when there is sunlight. Thus, it could be said that

day = day + night

which seems absurd, for a mathematician could deduce that the night does not exist. Instead of that equation, and to make it clear that there are two kinds of days, we should use this expression:

day₁ = day₂ + night

Here, day₁ is a natural cycle, the period of the Earth's rotational motion around its axis. But then a problem arises: when can we say that the Earth has made one complete rotation around its axis? The problem is, to define the period of a moving object, it is necessary to have a reference point. The results will be different depending on which point is chosen.

My 10 Favorite Scientific Discoveries of the 20th Century

In a post published two weeks ago, I commented on an article in Science News that tried to answer this question: which were the ten most important scientific discoveries of the last century? Some of my readers asked what is my personal opinion. This is my answer.

To begin with, I will point out that scientific research can advance in four different ways:

1. Theoretical science, which tries to discover fundamental laws in the universe.
2. Experimental science, which confirms or falsifies theories by carrying out experiments.
3. Observational science, which instead of experimenting, observes. Astronomy, for instance, uses these methods, as experimentation is almost never possible.
4. Technology, the practical application of science, whose goal is to build devices that work.

Will we be able to build conscious beings?

I use the term conscious beings, because the term conscious machines has materialistic connotations that I do not share, while artificial intelligence has been burned and abused by generalist media.

Before trying to answer this question, I want to make a few previous clarifications:

1. We are now capable of building conscious beings: our children. Four billion years of evolution have led to the appearance of a type of beings (us) endowed with self-awareness and capable of reproducing. This was a natural process, which we have not designed ourselves, but has been given to us since before we existed. However, when someone poses the question in the title of this post, it is usually interpreted thus: will we be able to build artificial conscious beings, by means other than natural, devised and developed exclusively by ourselves?

The top ten scientific discoveries of the century

The magazine Science News has reached in 2021 one hundred years (a century) of existence. To celebrate this anniversary, the magazine has published a list of what, according to its author, are the ten greatest scientific advances made between 1921 and 2021. This is the list, ordered according to the opinion of the article’s author about the importance of the discovery (from highest to lowest):

Giordano Bruno, martyr of science?

Giordano Bruno’s original name was Filippo Bruno. He was born in Nola, in 1548, and died in Rome, in 1600. He was an Italian philosopher and writer, but not a scientist, for he never practiced any science. So why is he often named (incorrectly) as a martyr of science, who for his scientific ideas was condemned and executed by the Inquisition of the Catholic Church?

What follows is based on a summary of his life taken from my dictionary titled 1000 Great Scientists, published in Spanish in 1996. To disprove this mistaken idea, I decided to include him in the list of scientists.

At age 15 he entered the Dominican order and later was a professor in Naples, but in 1576 he had to flee, accused of heterodoxy. He traveled through Italy, Switzerland, France, and England, achieving considerable success with his philosophy lessons in Paris and Oxford.

The Incredible Shrinking People

As I mentioned in my previous post, Isaac Asimov wrote the novel Fantastic Journey, based on the script of the science fiction film of the same title; not the other way around, as many people believe. In the film and in the novel, a submarine and its crew are reduced to microscopic size and injected into an artery of a comatose human being, to perform an operation in his brain from within, which would be impossible from the outside.

Will it ever be possible to do something like this in the future? Or are there limits to what technology can achieve?

Artificial intelligence or computer algorithms?

John MacCarthy

The term artificial intelligence appears frequently in the media. It is usually used to refer to a computer application that behaves in a way that appears to be intelligent. But is it really intelligent? Or is this a case of meaning displacement, the application of a more appealing term to something not really new?

The term artificial intelligence was invented by John MacCarthy in 1956, in a seminar that took place at Dartmouth College in Hanover, U.S.A. At that time, the participants made exaggerated predictions about the imminent advances they expected in this field, some of which have not been fully performed 65 years later. Now the predictions are even more ambitious, but it is quite likely that none will come true in the short term, and that some will never come true.

The end of science?

The magazine Science News has just turned 100 years old. It began with the year 1922. From the beginning, it has numbered its magazines by semesters, rather than years, so the issues of the second half of 2021 bear the number 200. It is one of the longest-lived magazines of scientific information in existence. But its evolution in recent decades is worrying, and does not bring us to be optimistic about the current state of world science.

A World Government?

Economists speak of economies of scale, by which they refer to the idea that the larger a company, the lower the production costs, and therefore the higher the profits. The consequence of accepting this idea is the belief that companies must get bigger and bigger to make better use of resources, so their number would become smaller. It is not often taken into account that this leads to problems such as declining product quality, an almost inevitable consequence of the loss of competition. There is also an optimal design point, which if exceeded leads to cost decreases being reversed, and becoming increases.

After publishing his famous book Small is Beautiful, Ernest Schumacher received a letter that read as follows:

The crucial point is that as a monolithic organization increases in size, the problem of communicating between its components goes up exponentially. It is generally reckoned that the maximum size of a productive scientific research team is twelve; over that size everyone spends all his time finding out what everyone else is doing. (Cited by Joseph Pearce in his book Small is still beautiful).

Pearce says that the same idea of economies of scale has spread to politics of scale, which would inevitably lead to a world government:

[D]emocracy becomes subject to the theory of progressive centralization. Individuals delegate their democratic functions to a local council; the local council delegates its functions to a county council; the county council delegates to the regional council or state government; the regional council or state government delegates to the national government; the national government delegates to a continental union; and finally, so the theory implies, the continental union will delegate to a world government…

If, however, this theoretical world government should ever become a reality, it will almost certainly call itself a democracy. People will have a vote even if they don’t have a voice. The problem, therefore, is not whether democracy is the way forward—because almost everyone believes that it is—the problem is undemocratic “democracy.” The challenge for the future is how to make democracy democratic.

Throughout history there have been various attempts to form such a world government. We can mention Napoleon Bonaparte, who tried to unify Europe by replacing the top rulers with members of his own family and generals of his army; Adolf Hitler, who wanted to found an Empire that would last 1000 years; Stalin, Mao Zedong and other communists, who believed that communism would eventually prevail throughout the world, leading to a communist world government, and didn’t care about the death of millions, as long as their ideology succeeded. Some think that this world government is about to be created, based on the current Western dominance in the United Nations. But is it advisable to create a world government?

I am personally skeptical, and have proved this in several of my futuristic science fiction novels, where the World Government almost always plays the role of the villain.

•         In Under an Orange Sky (1993, 2016), the world government wants to launch the terra-formation of Mars, despite the fact that this would cause the death of all Martians, intelligent beings inhabiting the subsoil of the planet.

•         In the continuation of the previous book, Descent into the Hell of Venus (1999, 2016), some of the dangers of the World Government are explained in the following words: Although the world is theoretically united, there are still conflicts everywhere, civil wars, we could call them, but everybody knows that these are the worst, cruelest and most inhuman of all wars. There is also the possibility that said World Government is occupied by a dictator who’d use it for his own benefit.

•         Finally, in Operation Quatuor (2014), the World Government is one of the main antagonists of the novel. As one of the characters explains: The government has managed to stop the population increase. Now they want to reduce it, so they have established forced abortion for those who already have a child, and compulsory euthanasia for those over ninety years of age.

Starting from the principle that everything created by man can be misused, a world government would probably become an extremely dangerous tool, which would overshadow even the predictions of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty Four, where the world government has not even been built, as the world was divided into three superpowers (Oceania, East-Asia and Eurasia) in permanent war against each other, all of which have turned into a suffocating dictatorship.

The same post in Spanish

Thematic Thread on Politics and Economy: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca

Malignant growth

Ernest Schumacher

Joseph Pearce is the author of the book Small is still beautiful, whose title clearly indicates the influence of Ernest Schumacher's best-known work, Small is beautiful. In this book, Schumacher proposes the idea that large companies and organizations are not the most efficient way to achieve human happiness, which in fact should be the goal of every economic activity, rather than increase the profits.

Pearce addresses the question of the Gross National Product (GNP), usually used to measure growth. GNP is often taken as a measure of success: the higher its growth, the better the economy is supposed to be. In Pearce's opinion, this way of measuring economic success is not appropriate for the needs of society, because it presents the following problems:

How are we measuring the effects of the pandemia?

Politicians and the media are usually measuring the effects of the COVID-19 disease pandemic, caused by a coronavirus, by the number of positive cases detected, either the day before, or in the previous 14 days (number of cases per 100,000).

I believe that this is a mistake, as it makes it very difficult to make comparisons along the evolution of the pandemic, for the number of positive cases detected clearly depends on the number of tests carried out (the more tests, more positive cases will be detected), and since the number of tests carried out varies constantly, the data they provide cannot be compared.

Is science opposed to faith?

Charles Darwin

The opposition between science and faith is a nineteenth-century invention. And it was not scientists who invented it, since most of them were believers. Those responsible were atheist philosophers such as Marx, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. I count Marx among philosophers, even though he abhorred philosophy, which he considered dead (he said in the Manuscripts), just as Stephen Hawking did a century and a half later, as I commented in this post. I once said that Marx would have been horrified to know that he is studied today in the history of philosophy, for he did not consider himself a philosopher, but an economist.

The nature of the physical world

Arthur Eddington

The Nature of the Physical World is the title of a landmark work in the history of popular science. Published in 1928, it compiles the Gifford lectures given in Edinburgh by its author, Arthur Eddington, in 1927. Eddington was then famous, having been the scientist who, in 1919, on the occasion of a solar eclipse, organized the expedition that proved one of the predictions from Einstein's theory of General Relativity: the deflection of light when passing near a star. It was said of him that he was one of only three people in the entire world who understood General Relativity. In addition to this, Eddington was a pioneer researching on the origin of the energy of stars, for he was the first to propose that it came from the fusion of hydrogen to form helium.

Biological evolution and cultural evolution in the history of life and man

The title of this post is the translation into English of a book of mine, published in 2017 by the publisher CEU Ediciones. As its name implies, the book is divided into three main parts, the first of which (the first four chapters) reviews the origin, evolution and history of life (biological evolution), while the second (chapters 5 and 6) focuses on the origin, evolution and history of man (cultural evolution). Finally, the third part (chapters 7 to 9) compares both types of evolution, emphasizing their similarities and differences; reviews the current situation of human evolution; and offers some ideas about the future.

As is often the case, this book did not come out of nowhere, but rather builds on previous works of mine. Especially in the first part, some of the titles of some chapters and subchapters may be familiar to the readers of my blog, because they are similar to some of my posts:

Physics and Free Will

In the January 2021 issue of Physics World appeared an article entitled Why free will is beyond physics. This article, written by British science writer Philip Ball, is clearly anti-reductionist and says things like these:

“Free will” is not ruled out by physics – because it doesn’t stem from physics in the first place.

If physics can disprove free will, then it must override everything else too, even evolution.

But is free will really undermined by the determinism of physical law? I think such arguments are not even wrong; they are simply misconceived. They don’t recognize how cause and effect work, and by attempting to claim too much jurisdiction for fundamental physics they are not really scientific but metaphysical.

Chance and certainty

In a comment to the Spanish version of a previous post of mine, JL advised me to read the book entitled Chance and Certainty, by Georges Salet, who wrote it to prove that the origin of life and its subsequent evolution are impossible, if we apply the calculus of probabilities. In addition, he challenged me to refute at least one of the arguments proposed by the book, in the following words:

The work contains hundreds of arguments and demonstrations; if you, or anyone else whose help you ask, are able to refute a single argument or demonstration, I will readily admit that life can indeed arise spontaneously.

Salet's book is out of print and very hard to come by. I am grateful to another comment contributor, who provided me with the opportunity to read this book. I can therefore accept JL's challenge.

Is there a future for scientific research?

In recent decades, the trend to give preference to applied research over basic research has been clear in the Western countries. Yes, there are special calls for funding basic research projects, but we should clarify what those in charge of allocating research budgets understand by basic research.

This is the Wikipedia definition for basic research: scientific research with the aim of improving scientific theories for better understanding and prediction of natural or other phenomena.

Collective hallucinations and the Fatima miracle

C.S. Lewis

In two previous posts in this blog I have mentioned the miracle of Fatima: What does science say about miracles and Abduction and the no-miracles argument. In the first post I proposed a trilemma (similar to that by C.S. Lewis) that can be applied, in general, to all miracles, considered as historical facts:

1. Either that fact actually happened, i.e. the witnesses told the truth.

2. Or the fact did not occur, and the witnesses deliberately lied.

3. Or the fact did not occur, but the witnesses did not lie, they were simply wrong, or had been the prey of a collective hallucination, or some equivalent explanation.

The problem of the cosmological constant

Albert Einstein

The value of the cosmological constant Λ in Einstein's equation has gone through many vicissitudes and alternatives:

The end of the universe

Will the cosmos expand indefinitely, or will its expansion stop one day? What could stop it? It is clear only gravity could do it. The expansion of the universe, which makes galaxies separate, goes against the gravitational attraction, which tries to hold all bodies together.

If we look at Einstein's cosmic equation of general relativity, the question of whether gravity will succeed in stopping the expansion of the universe depends on the relative values and signs of the three terms in the equation. Depending on them, three things can happen:

COVID-19 vaccines

The four main vaccines against COVID-19 can be classified into the following groups:

a)      Astra Zeneca and Janssen: Adenoviruses genetically modified to produce a protein, a part of the coronavirus causing COVID-19. This protein should give rise to the manufacture of antibodies to fight it, which would also attack the virus if it is present. These vaccines can cause blood clots that can even lead to death.

b)      Pfizer and Moderna: A messenger RNA molecule that synthesizes a coronavirus protein. These vaccines can cause heart ailments, according to studies conducted in Israel and other countries.

The limits of technology

Exponential curve

Transhumanists claim that technology is about to reach singularity: exponential growth towards infinity that will allow us to achieve goals such as immortality, strong artificial intelligence, the hybridization of machines and human beings, and much more. They thus make the same mistake made by the members of the club of Rome when in 1975 they predicted that the world's population would grow exponentially and reach catastrophic values ​​by 2020. It is the same mistake made by Malthus at the end of the 18th century, for the growth curves of natural systems are never exponential, but rather follow the logistic curve, as I have pointed out more than once in this blog.

To this criticism, transhumanists (such as Ray Kurzweil) argue that the human species is capable of linking two or more logistic curves, so that, even if real processes follow this curve rather than an exponential, growth would continue and the singularity could be reached, maybe a little later, but it will come anyway.

Those who say this are dreaming, and show they don’t know ​​mathematics. I show here two linked logistic curves, and compare them to exponential growth. It will be seen that the beginning of the two curves is quite similar, up to the point of abscissa 8.5. However, from that point, the differences are disproportionate. At the point of abscissa 10, the exponential curve reaches the value 3, while the logistics has not yet reached the value 1. At the point of abscissa 30, while the logistic curve reaches the value 2, the exponential would be at about 1446 million. So, claiming that several linked logistic curves equal one exponential, is mathematical folly.

Kurzweil also says that research in quantum computing should very soon send us into a new linked logistic curve. This shows that he does not know, or does not want to be aware, that quantum computing, if achieved, will make it possible to speed up the resolution of certain types of problems (NP-complete problems), but won’t let us solve new problems, such as I pointed out in another post. Although it is true that solving this challenge could send us up to a new logistic curve linked to the previous one, this advance won’t be as momentous as the media and some scientists would have us believe.

It is evident from the comparison made that, to approach exponential growth, it would be necessary to concatenate an enormous number of linked logistic curves, a number tending to infinity, which would require a time tending to infinity. But is it possible to link a very large number of logistic growths, or would we find a limit, if we tried?

Arnold J. Toynbee

Arnold J. Toynbee, in his monumental 12-volume Study of History, pointed out that human civilizations go through a stage of growth, during which they are subjected to several successive challenges that they usually manage to overcome, although as a rule each challenge solved causes new problems, and thus opens the way to the next challenge. Furthermore, he argues that the number of challenges that a civilization can successfully solve is usually not large: after defeating three or four, each of which may cost one to several centuries, it usually fails in the next one and collapses. Toynbee points out that Western civilization went into political collapse in the early 20th century, with the two world wars. In this he agrees with the diagnosis of Oswald Spengler, who reached the same conclusion in the interwar period.

It is true that the scientific-technological history of our civilization may not exactly coincide with its political history. However, I don’t think its decline is very far, as I have been predicting here. So, announcing that in the next hundred years we’ll reach singularity (as transhumanists do) is not doing science, but dreaming. At most, these musings could be the subject of science fiction novels, but nothing more.

Certainly, the limits of technology are practical, not theoretical, and further advancements could allow them to be transgressed. But the hopes of transhumanists in this regard are so exaggerated that they will probably never be achieved.

The same post in Spanish

Thematic Thread of Science in General: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca

The limits of biology

The limits of biology are practical, rather than theoretical, although some biological problems are so difficult, that it seems unlikely that we’ll be ever able to solve them. Among these problems, I will select the following:

·         The origin of life. The possibility of replicating an experiment is one of the fundamental principles of scientific method, as it is applied in the experimental sciences. No discovery is considered valid until it has been confirmed by an independent team. If an experiment cannot be replicated, it is not considered scientific.

The origin of life took place only once in the history of the Earth. Obviously, it cannot be replicated. Therefore, it is not a scientific fact, but a historical fact. Historic facts are treated in a different way than scientific facts: documents are sought that confirm that the fact did happen and describe how it happened. The credibility of these documents is then estimated. In the case of the origin of life, the documents would be fossil remains, but it’s practically impossible to find them, so it’s very likely that this problem will never be solved.

The limits of physics

There are two kinds of limits in scientific research:

1.      Theoretical or intrinsic limits: when these limits exist, no matter how many scientific discoveries may be made in the future, they won’t be exceeded.

2.      Practical limits: they appear when, in theory, a problem can have a solution, but there are practical reasons that make it impossible, at least for the time being. In these cases, we cannot affirm that the problem won’t be solved in the future.

Sometimes we don’t know if a given limit is theoretical or practical. In these cases, what will happen in the future is open. If the limit turns out to be theoretical, it will never be exceeded. If it is practical, it will be exceeded if our technical capabilities exceed the technical needs for its resolution, being possible that this will never happen. Take, as an example, the inherently difficult math problems I mentioned in the previous post.

The limits of mathematics

Kurt Gödel

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege, a professor in the university of Vienna, undertook an ambitious goal: formalizing the arithmetic in a set of axioms and deduction rules, in such a way that every true theorem would be deductible from the axioms by a finite number of applications of the deduction rules. The result was a monumental book, Grundgesetze der Arithmetike (1893-1903), which introduced, among other things, a basic formalization of set theory and a cumbersome notation, quickly replaced by Peano’s, which we are using now.

Unfortunately for Frege, when the second volume of his book was about to be published, he received a letter from Bertrand Russell, proving that his formulation of set theory entails an inconsistency. In Frege’s set theory, some sets are not member of themselves (as the set of all integers, which is not an integer), while other sets are members of themselves (as the set of all infinite sets, which is an infinite set). Russell then defined this set: the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. It is easy to see that this set leads to a paradox: if it is a member of itself, it cannot be a member of itself, and vice versa. Russell’s paradox wreaked havoc with Frege’s work, who had to add a hasty appendix to his book and then abandoned his research on the fundamentals of mathematics.

Conscience, Self-conscience and Artificial Intelligence

Ramón López de Mántaras

In an article published on 3/22/2021, these words are attributed to Josu Bilbao, head of the ICT area of ​​IKERLAN:

In three years, artificial intelligence will make an intelligent dialogue with machines possible.

We have seen many similar predictions since the term Artificial Intelligence (AI) was invented over 60 years ago. In most cases (if not all) those predictions have been too optimistic. Is the same going to happen here?

I have consulted with one of the world's leading experts in the field of the automatic analysis of natural language, a technique used to implement the type of applications referred to in the article I am commenting, and he told me this:

It depends on how "intelligent dialogue" is defined. If it is restricted to a specific domain, for example, controlling your home automation systems using Google Home, that can be done now with a success rate above 70%, while ten years ago it was science fiction. If you want to have a philosophical conversation where your interlocutor understands what he is saying, rather than generating texts from a language model, this is too optimistic.