Quantum paradoxes

The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics causes paradoxes, at least apparent, when one tries to apply it to the macroscopic world. These two are the best known:

• Schrödinger’s cat paradox. A live cat, a radioactive atom, a vial filled with hydrocyanic acid, and a device that breaks the vial if the radioactive atom decays are placed in an opaque box. If the vial is broken, the cat dies. If it isn’t broken, the cat lives. While the box is closed, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics tells us that the radioactive atom is in a superposition of states, decayed and intact, until someone checks it, at which point the superposition of states collapses into one of them. But then, while the box is closed, the cat must be in a superposition of states: alive and dead. Can a cat be alive and dead at the same time? Intuition denies it, but the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics asserts it. As its name indicates, this paradox was proposed in 1935 by Erwin Schrödinger, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics.

The aliens are coming!

Before the 20th century, some philosophers considered the possibility of the existence of intelligent aliens, from outside the Earth. We can cite Lucretius (De Rerum Natura, book II, 1st century BC), Nicholas of Cusa (15th century), and Giordano Bruno (16th century). The idea was happily adopted by science fiction writers, such as Lucian of Samosata (Vera Historia, 2nd century) and Cyrano de Bergerac (Comic History of the States and Empires of the Moon, 1656), of whom I spoke in another post.

During the 19th century, public attention focused on possible intelligent inhabitants of other bodies in the solar system, especially the moon and Mars. In 1835, The Sun newspaper published in New York six false reports declaring that flying men had been discovered on the moon. It is said that nine out of ten Americans believed it. In fact, The Sun had published a science fiction novel as though if it were real news, making reference to existing people, such as the astronomer Sir John Herschel. Near the end of the century, The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1898) raised the possible existence of Martians, at the time of the scientific controversy over the canals of Mars, which was not finally solved until 1965.

Impossible? Perhaps not!

Lord Kelvin

Throughout the history of science there have been proofs that something is impossible. These proofs are usually true in mathematics, such as that it is impossible to generate the number π with a ruler and compass. Despite which, many amateurs continue to assert that they have made it. I myself have had to face one of these “proofs”.

Another similar case is the proof, this time related to physical science, that it is impossible to build machines with perpetual motion, because they oppose the first or the second principle of thermodynamics. Also, in this case many amateurs insist that they have made it. In these cases, one should not waste time looking for the error, which is known to exist.

Genes arising from nothing?

I have been asked me to clarify a recent piece of news that has hit the popular science press with headlines like the following:

New genes found that can arise from nothing. (Phys.org, 12/8/2023)

The tenacity of the media (and some scientists) to abuse the concept of nothing is unbelievable. They don’t know that nothing does not exist, and that nothing can arise from what does not exist. This is something that pre-Socratic Greek philosophers did know. (The first to assert this was Parmenides). Twenty-five centuries later, modern man, so proud of the advancement of science and technology, makes the same mistake once and again. In these posts I have often criticized the phrase, common today, that the universe arose spontaneously from nothing, which atheists often formulate to deny the creation and, therefore, the existence of God. This phrase does not belong to science (because current theories do not let us go back to the moment of the Big Bang). As philosophy, it’s just a flagrant proof of ignorance.

The mystery of the cosmological constant

Alexander Friedmann
(Александр Фридман)

This post completes a previous post with a similar title:

The problem of the cosmological constant.

First of all, we should define three different concepts that could be closely related:

1. Vacuum energy: due to the constant appearance of pairs of particles and antiparticles that immediately mutually disintegrate, so they are undetectable through direct experimentation. Their appearance is a consequence of the uncertainty principle: ΔE×Δt<ħ/2, which implies that a particle with energy ΔE can appear spontaneously during a time Δt<ħ/(2ΔE), which is smaller for larger ΔE. Thus, a virtual electron would last less than 4×10^-21 seconds. A proton, whose mass is 1837 times greater, would last 1837 times less. By applying quantum field theory to all the known particles, the energy of the vacuum can be estimated.
2. The cosmological constant: introduced by Einstein in his cosmological equation, which in the format devised by Alexander Friedman is expressed as follows: The symbol Λ is the cosmological constant. Einstein proposed a negative value, to compensate for a cosmic expansion, in which he initially did not believe. Today it is thought to be positive, which would explain the accelerated expansion of the universe discovered in 1998.

3. Dark energy: an unknown agent that would cause the accelerated expansion of the universe.

They bark, therefore we ride

Illustration by Gustavo Doré

In September 2003, reading the book On the Will in Nature (1836) by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, I found the following words in page 40 of its Spanish translation by Alianza Editorial:

…according to those verses by Goethe: “The dog would like to come with us from the stable: the echo of its barking proves that we are riding.”

I immediately thought that this phrase must be the origin of the Spanish proverb they bark, therefore we ride, which used to be attributed to Don Quixote. Since I didn’t remember having read it there, just in case, I found a digitalized version of Don Quixote and looked up the phrase in question. It was not there. Next I did a Google search of the phrase, which came up with about sixty references, all of which stated that it was a phrase from Don Quixote. I also looked for the German translation of Goethe’s phrase as quoted by Schopenhauer, and got five references to Goethe’s poem Kläffer (Barker, 1808). Therefore, at that time the information used by Google to search for that phrase in Spanish was totally wrong, while the information written in German was correct, although less abundant.

Pope Francis, Technocracy and Artificial Intelligence

The last Apostolic Exhortation by Pope Francis, entitled Laudate Deum and published on October 4, 2023, dedicates a chapter to the technocratic paradigm that has been imposed throughout the world, to which the following definition applies: a certain way of understanding human life and activity [that] has gone awry, to the serious detriment of the world around us. It refers mainly to the degradation of the environment in relation to climate change of anthropogenic origin, although the phrase used can be interpreted broadly, since there are many more ways to degrade the environment, in addition to releasing gases into the atmosphere.

But it doesn't stop there. The next paragraph says this:

21. In recent years, we have been able to confirm this diagnosis, even as we have witnessed a new advance of the above paradigm. Artificial intelligence and the latest technological innovations start with the notion of a human being with no limits, whose abilities and possibilities can be infinitely expanded thanks to technology. In this way, the technocratic paradigm monstrously feeds upon itself.

Chance, design and artificial life

In previous posts in this blog I have mentioned my experiments on artificial life: the simulation in a computer of processes similar to those that take place in living beings. Artificial life should not be confused with synthetic life: construction of artificial living beings in the laboratory.

One of the most used tools in artificial life (and in other related fields) are genetic algorithms, which simulate biological evolution within the computer, and make it act on the entities that are the subjects of the research. In these experiments, a mixture of chance and necessity (the title of Monod’s book mentioned in the previous post) is used. Chance is usually applied with a pseudo-random number generator that modifies the operation of the rest of the algorithm, which represents necessity.

Different types of chance

Jacques Monod

When we don’t know why something happens, we usually say that it is due to chance. But this statement is ambiguous, because there are two different types of chance:

• Epistemological chance, where the cause of what’s happening is well-known, but so complex that it remains outside the scope of our knowledge. Almost all games of chance (dice, roulette, lottery jackpot) are examples of this type of chance. Rolling dice conforms to the laws of mechanics, but the conditions are so complex that we cannot predict the result of each roll. This type of chance is what Jacques Monod called operational uncertainty in his book Chance and Necessity (1970):

This term is used... in relation to the game of dice, or roulette, and the calculation of probabilities is used to predict the result of a play. But these purely mechanical and macroscopic games are not "the result of chance" except because of the practical impossibility of controlling the throwing of the dice or the ball with sufficient precision. It is evident that a very high precision launching mechanism is conceivable, and would make it possible to largely eliminate the uncertainty of the result... The same thing happens, as will be easily seen, in... many phenomena where the notion of chance and the calculation of probabilities are applied for purely methodological reasons. (My translation into English).

Sin, Redemption and Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury wrote a story titled The Man that can be summarized thus:

In its expansion through the galaxy, the human species encounters many extraterrestrial intelligences. The captain of an interstellar Earth ship arrives on a distant planet and hears about something recently happened there. Little by little he discovers that God has become man on that planet and has granted them Redemption, although not in a bloody way. The captain wants to meet him, get in touch with him, but it’s too late: he has left (at least, he thinks so). Then the captain decides to dedicate his life to traveling to other planets in the hope of finding Christ on one of them.

Narciso Ibáñez Serrador adapted this story for the radio, and in doing so he changed a few things: the title, which became The Triangle, and the form of Redemption: they kill the Redeemer by nailing him to a triangle, rather than a cross.

Extraterrestrial intelligence and original sin

C.S. Lewis

These speculations may seem irrelevant, since we do not know if extraterrestrial intelligence exists. In fact, the probability of its existence is 50%, as I explained in a previous post, by which I mean that we know nothing, that we might as well flip a coin to decide. However, some serious theologians and science fiction authors have raised this question, so it may not be absurd to discuss it here.

Jean Jacques Rousseau asserted that man is good by nature, but society makes him evil. All the evidence we have refutes him. In every attempt made to correct this situation by modifying social structures, for example, in the French Revolution (which introduced the guillotine); in the Russian Revolution (which introduced the Gulag); and in German National Socialism (which introduced gas chambers); things have gotten worse. It is clear that we are prone to evil by nature, although we may also be capable of great heroism. That inclination to evil is a consequence of what we call original sin.

Are cities and companies biological structures?

Geoffrey West

The book Scale: The universal laws of life and death in organisms, cities and companies, by Geoffrey West, from the Santa Fe Institute, which I discussed in the previous post, asserts that cities and companies are subject to laws very similar to those that apply to living beings. They are general laws, applicable to all entities of these types, regardless of their origin. West explains it this way:

Remarkably, analyses of such data show that, as a function of population size, city infrastructure—such as the length of roads, electrical cables, water pipes, and the number of gas stations—scales in the same way whether in the United States, China, Japan, Europe, or Latin America. As in biology, these quantities scale sublinearly with size, indicating a systematic economy of scale but with an exponent of about 0.85 rather than 0.75...[F]ewer roads and electrical cables are needed per capita the bigger the city. Like organisms, cities are indeed approximately scaled versions of one another, despite their different histories, geographies, and cultures, at least as far as their physical infrastructure is concerned.

Strange curves and biological structures

Von Koch's Snowflake Curve

In general, geometric objects are usually classified according to the number of their dimensions, like this:

• Points have zero dimensions.
• Lines (straight lines or curves) have one dimension.
• Surfaces have two dimensions.
• Volumes have three dimensions.

Furthermore, mathematicians often work with objects that have more than three dimensions, which are very difficult for us to imagine.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Swedish mathematician Helge von Koch discovered a strange curve (the von Koch snowflake), which has the following properties:

Three questions without scientific answers

Although I have spoken about some of these things in other posts, I’ll put together here three questions that, for now, don’t have a scientific answer, and perhaps never will.

• Did the universe begin to exist at the Big Bang, or was there something before? This controversy is much older than many think. Three quarters of a millennium ago, Thomas Aquinas wrote this in his Summa Theologiae (Part I, Question 46):

It cannot be proven by demonstration that the world has not always existed.

In other words, according to Aquinas, the question of creatio originans (that the world had a beginning) cannot be solved by human reason. It should be noted, however, that creatio ex nihilo (the fact that the world was created) would be within the reach of reason. In other words: reason would let us reach the conclusion that the universe was created, but we cannot prove that it had a beginning.

Two errors about human intelligence

Stephen Jay Gould

In a previous post (Information and intelligence) I mentioned that intelligence (the ability to manipulate the available information and create new information) is a concept that is difficult to define, related to difficult terms, such as understanding, reasoning, planning, imagination, creativity, critical thinking and problem solving.

In his book The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould points out two important errors related to the scientific treatment of intelligence:

• Reification, a word descending from the Latin Res, thing: our tendency to convert abstract concepts into entities. In the case of intelligence, we try to turn this unapproachable concept into something more understandable and measurable.

Ten years of Divulciencia-Populscience

Next Monday marks ten years since the creation of my blog Populscience (called Divulciencia in its Spanish version). In this time, I have published 438 articles in both languages, plus another fifteen only in Spanish and eleven only in English.

You may remember that in the post I published one year ago to celebrate the nine years of existence of the blog, I included a figure that seemed to indicate that, after reaching a maximum of about 6,000 visits per month in October 2018, this number slowly decreased until reaching about 3000 visits (one half) in January 2023.

One year later, the figure is this:

Some problems in Automatic Natural Language Generation

Alan Turing

ChatGPT and similar tools have more than met the Turing test, for they are capable of fooling many human beings (I don’t know how many, but certainly more than 30%) into believing that there is a mind behind such simple algorithms. But, quoting Evan Ackerman (Senior Editor of IEEE Spectrum):

The problem with the Turing Test is that it’s not really a test of whether an artificial intelligence program is capable of thinking: it’s a test of whether an AI program can fool a human. And humans are really, really dumb.