Matin Durrani, writing
in Physics World, analyzes the 25 Nobel Prizes awarded during the 21st
century and selects those that he believes to be the five best. His criteria
are based on looking for prizes that meet the following conditions:
·
It
must be easy to understand.
·
The
awarded theoretical or experimental work was an exceptional effort (a tour-de-force).
· It opened new paths for science.
Blindness is one of the most terrible conditions that human beings can experience, since those of us who can see depend on sight for almost all of our daily activities. Therefore, aids for the blind have always been given special consideration. These aids include texts written in Braille, Braille printers, electronic magnifying glasses, mobility aids, books and other texts read aloud, talking watches, and many more. A 2008 article published in Communications of the ACM summarizes the state of these aids at that time. In particular, Chieko Asakawa has been working in the field of mobility aids for the blind for years, having published at least ten articles on the subject between 1998 and 2019.
A new book of mine has just been released with the
same title as this post. It was published in Spanish by CEU Ediciones, and in
English by Amazon.
There is a fairly widespread idea that we shouldn’t
speak about Christian literature as a literary genre, except perhaps in
fantasy, where the Christian character of such famous literary works as J.R.R.
Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings or C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia cannot be denied. In science fiction, the matter
is not so clear. However, no one doubts that atheist literature does exist.
My book starts from the premise that an evident Christian
literature exists in both genres, and demonstrates this by analyzing a series
of authors and literary works, without neglecting anti-Christian literature, to
which almost a third of the work is dedicated.
My predilection for fantasy and science fiction has been clear in this blog, given that over almost 12 years I've dedicated 34 posts to those two genres in literature and film; in other words, more than 6% of the posts.
In October 30, 1988, the Sunday supplement of La Vanguardia (a major Spanish newspaper) published an article I had written, commemorating the 90th anniversary of the publication as a book of Herbert George Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds. (It had been published in instalments the previous year). That year also marked a half-century after Orson Welles’s radio adaptation of that novel, which caused panic in part of the United States, because many people didn’t realize it was an adaptation of a novel and thought that the Martians were invading Earth.
This year marks the 127th anniversary of the publication of this novel, perhaps the best-known of works of H.G. Wells. A generation after Jules Verne, Wells is the second great precursor of a literary genre (science fiction) that enjoyed enormous expansion in the 20th century. In light of this anniversary, I wonder: Why do these celebrations always take place when the number of years is a multiple of 25? Why can't the 127th anniversary be celebrated?
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| William Crookes |
One of the most surprising scientific figures of
the second half of the 19th century in England was William Crookes (1832-1919),
whose scientific career was spectacular, although his activities related to
spiritualism, which was then in vogue in England, were also widely known.
Here's a list of Crookes's scientific achievements:
· An expert in spectroscopy, in 1861 he discovered a new chemical element, thallium, number 81 on the periodic table, located in the same column as boron, aluminum, gallium, and indium, whose chemical properties it resembles. Thallium was discovered simultaneously and independently by the French chemist Claude-Auguste Lamy, who is considered a co-discoverer, although it was Crookes who named it, from the Greek word θαλλός, meaning green twig, in reference to the green line in its spectrum that helped him discover it. This discovery led to his appointment as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1863.
A post I published in this blog in 2017 ended with this paragraph:
Why are
human beings conceived with trisomy of chromosome 21 (Down syndrome) denied the
right to life, to the point that, in many Western countries, in practice they
are not allowed to be born?
In another post, published in 2015, during the first year of this blog's existence, I calculated the probability that the triple and quadruple screening tests, then in use to detect trisomy of chromosome 21 (the cause of Down syndrome), would produce false positives. The conclusion was this:
In several previous posts (see one here), I have argued that multiverse theories are not science, as they cannot be proven false, but rather science fiction, purely imaginative creations. Further proof of this is that the idea of the multiverse did not originally arise from science, but from science fiction. Some of my reading this summer has helped me complete the proofs for this assertion.
The most common form of the multiverse, the M-theory multiverse, appeared for the first time in science fiction literature in a short story by Clifford Simak, published in 1939, which the author later developed into a novel, Cosmic Engineers, published in 1950. In this novel, the protagonists must confront the invasion of our universe by malevolent intelligent beings from another universe, who want to destroy us. To defend themselves, Earthlings establish an alliance with a civilization made up of artificial intelligences created by long-gone extraterrestrial beings, who warn them of the threat from the other universe.
Technological companies are investing huge amounts of money to develop humanoid robots for use in the home. One such company, Figure AI, claims that the introduction of humanoid robots into the home will revolutionize elder care and the performance of routine household tasks. Goldman Sachs predicts that the humanoid robot market could be worth $38 billion by 2035.
In an article published in IEEE Spectrum, Maya Cakmak of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington describes a study conducted with students on the acceptance of the introduction of humanoid robots in the home. Their survey concluded that people generally prefer special purpose robots over humanoids. They see special-purpose robots as safer, more private, and ultimately more comfortable to have in their homes… a Roomba for cleaning, a medication dispenser for pills, a stairlift for stairs… Humanoids were described as bulky and unnecessary, while specialized robots were seen as less intrusive and more discreet.
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| My hallucinations by August Natterer |
Since ChatGPT appeared in late 2022, I have been warning that the answers provided by Large Language Models (LLM; I refuse to call these tools Artificial Intelligence) are unreliable and should be treated with the utmost caution. Often, these answers seem plausible and are written linguistically correctly, but they are false. These types of answers have been called hallucinations.
This is not surprising. It is a logical consequence of the algorithm used by these programs, which I described in another post in this blog, which I simulated by means of a program with only 18 instructions. The algorithm works by adding words extracted from the most frequent ones that follow the previous words, chosen from billions of files taken from the Internet. It is evident (just think about it) that this algorithm cannot guarantee that the answers these tools provide are true.
 |
| Comparison of MOND and Newtonian rotation (Wikimedia) |
Nine years ago, I published here a post entitled Dark Matter or New Theory, where I pointed out that the motion of stars in galaxies does not match theoretical predictions. The problem can be solved in two ways:
1.
Assuming
that galaxies have much more mass than we can see. The mass we cannot see was
called dark matter, where the word dark means that we don't know what it is.
2. Assuming that Newton's laws should be corrected in the outer part of galaxies, where the acceleration of stars is very small. Various corrections to Newton's equations have been proposed that would satisfactorily solve the problem, which are called MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics) theories.
The Three Body Problem is a gripping science fiction novel by Liu Cixin, which contains a wealth of information about ancient and modern Chinese history. But I fear it distorts science. And my first golden rule of good science fiction is not to distort science. I think distortions are dangerous because uninformed readers can be led to believe that certain false things are true.
I’m not worried about the assumption that string theory is true. It could be, although it has lost a lot of backing in recent years. But the description in the novel of the three-star system Alpha Centauri has nothing to do with reality, even though that description is crucial to the plot.
ChatGPT and similar tools, called LLMs (Large Language Models), are being used with greater frequency in our
daily lives. Google, for instance, has integrated its GEMINI tool with its
search engine. Sometimes, when the program behind the search engine deems it
appropriate, the question asked is sent to GEMINI, and the response of the LLM appears
first, albeit with this warning at the end, in small print:
AI
responses may include mistakes.
Of course, they may include mistakes! These responses are not generated by understanding the question, but by using information previously obtained from the Internet, and applying an algorithm based on extracting words that typically appear in that information after the previously generated words. See a post in this blog where I explained that algorithm. Since the information extracted from the Internet can be true or false, and the algorithm can introduce new falsehoods where none existed, the answers obtained may be correct, partially correct, or completely wrong, therefore Google's warning is valid.
 |
| George Boole |
To continue with the previous post, I’ll add here a few more cases of bad translations between English and Spanish, many of them due to the existence of false friends between those languages. In other cases, the English word is used as-is, although there is a Spanish word that can be used instead.
· Heard on the radio news: Meteorology is to blame for the spread of this fire. I suppose we must sue the meteorologists.
According to Wikipedia, Meteorology is the scientific study of
the Earth's atmosphere and short-term atmospheric phenomena
(i.e. weather), with a focus on weather forecasting. Apparently, saying that excessive heat or dryness
is to blame for the spread of the fire is too vulgar, and the news needs to be
phrased in a more scientific way.
· DNA (deoxyribonucleic
acid) is a molecule that contains the genetic information of living beings. The
idea of identifying it with the properties that define a different entity,
such as a cultural construct or a society, is an ingenious metaphor, but
through overuse and repetition it becomes hackneyed. We hear frequently about
the DNA of a football club, or the DNA of a company, or the DNA of the work of
an artist.
· A variation on the previous case consists of using the word genome instead of DNA with the same meaning, as in this example, which appeared in an article in the Spanish newspaper El País with the following headline: The household genome: the new consumer battle is fought at home.
Some physicists sometimes act as if the hypotheses they propose to explain the mysteries of the universe are always true. But a hypothesis is nothing more than a proposal to explain a natural phenomenon, and it cannot be considered a confirmed theory until it has provided one or more surprisingly accurate predictions. This last detail, which is essential, is usually omitted.
In 2020, I read two popular books on cosmology and particle physics (the two branches of physics are closely related):
 |
| First photo of a black hole |
Einstein’s general theory of relativity allows for the existence of objects with infinite density (singularities). There are two types:
1.
Black holes,
accumulations of matter in a null volume, either at the center of a galaxy, or
as the result of a supernova explosion.
2.
The universe, at its initial moment (the Big
Bang).
A star like the sun is in equilibrium because the gravitational attraction, which tends to make it contract, is equal to the expansion caused by the nuclear reactions taking place inside the star. When a star much larger than the sun exhausts its nuclear fuel (first hydrogen, then helium, then other elements), as there are no longer nuclear reactions to stop the contraction, the star implodes. When the implosion rebounds, the star throws large quantities of matter into space: a supernova explosion, which for some time makes the star brighter than a whole galaxy. But there is always a remainder of matter, which gives rise to a new type of object.
 |
| S.Augustin, by Louis Comfort Tiffany Lightner Museum |
Since ancient times, man has been interested in the enigma of time. Even though we all experience time, time is an enigma. As St. Augustine said in his Confessions (B.XI C.XIV): What is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to a questioner, I don’t know.
As I said in another post, the explanations devised to solve the enigma of time are of two types: those that consider it cyclical, with or without multiple repetitions, which would allow the passage of time to be represented geometrically by a circle, and those that consider it linear, which represent it by a straight line. In turn, this last case is divided into several: one can accept, or not, that time had a beginning; and one can accept, or not, that there will be a final moment of time. Combining these two alternatives, we have four different cases. So in total there are six possibilities, which we will analyze next in the light of modern cosmology:
 |
| Georg Cantor |
According to Georg Cantor, one of the first to
study the concept of infinity in depth, there is not just one concept of
infinity, but three different ones. Let's see how he expresses it:
The actual infinite arises in three contexts: first when it is realized in the most complete form, in a fully independent other-worldly being, in Deo, where I call it the Absolute Infinite or simply Absolute; second when it occurs in the contingent, created world; third when the mind grasps it in abstracto as a mathematical magnitude, number, or order type. I wish to make a sharp contrast between the Absolute and what I call the Transfinite, that is, the actual infinities of the last two sorts, which are clearly limited, subject to further increase, and thus related to the finite. (Georg Cantor, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, Springer, 1980. Translation taken from Rudy Rucker, Infinity and the Mind, Princeton University Press, 2004).
 |
| John Maynard Smith |
As I have said several times in this blog, the theory of evolution is now well established. However, it is far from explaining everything. Many mysteries still remain. I listed some of them in a previous post. A book by J. Maynard Smith and E. Szathmáry, The Major Transitions in Evolution (Oxford University Press, 1995), describes them in more detail.
One of these problems refers to the changes of level that have taken place in the history of life, which I made the central idea of my book The Fifth Level of Evolution. As its title implies, during evolution, things have not happened in an orderly or stable manner. At various points, there were changes of state (similar to those in physics) where evolution passed a critical point that made it possible to reach higher levels and opened up huge new fields in the configuration space. These points are the following:
 |
| Paul Davies |
Paul Davies came to the fore among scientists who devote time to popular science with his 1992 book The Mind of God, written in response to Stephen Hawking’s final words in his popular best-seller A Brief History of Time. In another post I talked about another of his popular books, The Eerie Silence. Here I am going to discuss two other books he has written.
The Last Three Minutes (1994): This book on popular science is a little behind the times, as it predates the standard cosmological model, but explains well the state of cosmology when the book was published, and many of the things it says are still valid. It says something very interesting: that the Big Bang theory by Lemaître (whom Davies does not name) should have been accepted long before its two surprisingly accurate predictions gave it a boost in the sixties, because there is another argument supporting it, that scientists of the 19th century should have noticed, but didn’t: If the universe were infinitely old, it would have died by now. It is evident that something that moves to a stop at a finite rate cannot have existed from all eternity. By the way, there is an error in this paragraph: Davies ignores the difference between what is eternal and everlasting, which was solved fifteen centuries ago by Boethius. And there is a major flaw when he says that the radius of the visible universe is 15 billion light-years, because he does not take into account the expansion of the universe. The correct radius is about 43 billion light-years.
In several posts, I have pointed out that it is impossible for science to prove that God exists, just as it is impossible to prove that God does not exist. The reason is that the object of scientific inquiry is the material world, and God is not part of that world and is therefore beyond the reach of science.
In a
previous post, I criticized a book that attempted to do the former, from
the perspective of believers. In this post, I will criticize another book that
attempts to do the latter, from the atheist perspective. It is M-E: The God
Within, by Joseph R.
Abrahamson.
Although the author claims to rely on the principles of logic and the scientific method, he makes significant errors that indicate his lack of in-depth knowledge of these disciplines. The argument he presents as proof that God does not exist, although not explicitly stated in the book, can be deduced from reading it and can be summarized as follows:
The Standard Cosmological Model has introduced in physics two new concepts that didn't exist before:
 |
| Drosophila melanogaster |
Despite what I said in the last paragraph of my previous post, there are still well-intentioned people who oppose the theory of evolution (although this is very rare among biologists), and sometimes offer arguments to defend their way of thinking. I will consider some of those arguments here and offer my answers.
Answer: The claim that evolution has not been successfully reproduced artificially is mistaken. We have been doing this for thousands of years through artificial selection, which gave Darwin the idea of natural selection. We have been doing it for decades in the laboratory in a controlled way, as this Wikipedia article explains: Experimental evolution. And this has been done not just with bacteria, which have a very short life cycle, but also with higher animals.
In three previous posts (this was the latest), I wrote more or less the following words:
The
scientific theory of evolution is strongly supported by data from other
sciences, such as embryology, comparative anatomy, paleontology, biogeography,
and molecular biology (DNA analysis).
Since, despite everything, there are still those who doubt the scientific nature of this theory, in this post I will expand on the previous paragraph, explaining in a little more detail the scientific data that favor evolution.
 |
| Tree of Life |
The theory of evolution, in its current form, asserts that the transformation of species (the evolution of life) depends on five factors:
1.
Spontaneous variations in the genome (mutations, genetic
recombination,
and other events that modify the genome).
2.
Spontaneous variations in the environment. This factor is often overlooked, as the
environment is usually quite stable, although sudden changes sometimes occur
that can have huge consequences.
3.
Inheritance,
through which the variations that occur as a result of the first factor are passed on to offspring and are subject to the action of natural selection.
4.
Natural selection, which means that those individuals whose genome is best adapted to the
environment will leave more offspring (at least statistically).
5. The basic laws of the universe, which are currently represented by quantum theory and the theory of relativity.
In chapter 6 of his book ¿Qué es la Antropología? (What is Antropology, 2020), Francisco de Paula Rodríguez Valls writes:
Human
beings would be speciesist if they acted according to the logic of survival by
using the power of his faculties in his own benefit. All the other species
would do that, of course... Human beings are the only species that may
not be speciesist by taking care of the entire planet. By putting their power
at the service of the entire kingdom of life.
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, speciesism is prejudice or discrimination based on species, especially
against animals. It can also refer to the assumption that humans are
superior to other species.
This is a recently coined word, one of those neologisms associated with the ideology of political correctness, which insists that we shouldn’t upset anyone, neither with our actions, nor with our words, nor with our thoughts. Starting from a laudable anti-racist stance, they extended it to increasingly exaggerated and absurd situations (there are many examples), and in particular to all other animal species, based on the ideological premise that no species is superior to any other, which, as I have explained several times in this blog, is highly debatable.
 |
| Stephen Jay Gould |
One of the most spectacular controversies to have arisen in biology at the end of the 20th century was that between two famous biologists: the American Stephen Jay Gould and the British Simon Conway Morris. The controversy began with the former's book, published in 1989, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, to which Conway Morris responded in 1997 with another book, The Crucible of Creation. As the subtitle of Gould's book indicates, both biologists based their work on the discoveries of the Cambrian fauna of the Burgess Shale (Canada), which I referred to in another post, and which was discovered and studied precisely by Conway Morris.
In his study, Stephen Jay Gould focuses in particular on the surprising and abrupt diversification that took place 550 million years ago and left its mark on the Burgess Shale fauna to argue that evolution is dominated by the effects of chance, so that, if we rewound the history of life and repeated the evolutionary process, the results would not resemble anything we have now. As a corollary, if there is animal life on other worlds, around other stars, it won’t resemble anything on Earth. And if there is intelligent life outside Earth, their physical appearance will not resemble ours.
All living beings, from microbes to humans, live in water or contain water. All chemical reactions that take place inside cells are carried out in water.
Liquid water is an extraordinary compound, with
strange properties. It has one
of the highest specific heats of all substances. This means that when heat is added to or removed
from a body of water, the temperature varies more slowly than in any other
liquid. This is important for living beings, as water acts as an environmental
stabilizer. Also, it is the
non-metallic liquid with the highest thermal conductivity, so local temperature variations are balanced very
quickly.
Most liquids contract when they solidify, but water is an exception. It has its maximum density at a temperature of 4°C. The density of ice is lower, 0.92 times lower, so ice floats on water. So, when the temperature drops, water freezes from top to bottom, while other liquids solidify from bottom to top. This also has important biological consequences. In polar seas and in fresh waters of cold regions, when the temperature drops below the freezing point, the surface layer of ice insulates the water below from the cold, so that it never freezes and the beings that live there can remain alive and active, despite the harsh environmental conditions.
Is it a coincidence that life on Earth is based on carbon? Is this the only element capable of becoming the basis for life? Could there exist, somewhere in the Universe, a type of life different from ours, whose chemical composition is not based on carbon? On what atom or group of atoms could a chemistry of comparable complexity to organic chemistry be built, in theory?
There are 91 different chemical elements on Earth.
Others have been generated artificially in the laboratory, and it is suspected
that they can be produced in small quantities inside a giant star that becomes a
supernova, but their life is short, because they are very radioactive and
disintegrate quickly, transforming into more stable elements. Therefore, the
search can be reduced to the 91 natural elements. We will select from these
those that meet the following two conditions, essential to be able to be the
chemical basis of life:
In the previous post I mentioned that science does not provide proof of the existence of God, but it does give inklings. In a book I wrote, which was published in Spanish in 2013 with the title ¿Es compatible Dios con la ciencia? Evolución y Cosmología (Is God Compatible with Science? Evolution and Cosmology) I described a list of those inklings. Here I will summarize a few of them. The first three are scientific, the others are not.
1. The universe is a physical object. During the 19th century, atheist philosophers denied that the universe is a concept applicable to a concrete object that exists outside our mind. The universe is usually defined as the set of everything that exists. According to those philosophers, such a set does not exist, since the concept of the universe is an invention of the human mind, which does not correspond to any physical object. Therefore, it would not be necessary to look for its origin (its cause) outside our mind. This argument was disproved in the 20th century: Einstein’s theory of general relativity leads to a cosmological equation that applies to the universe, which implies that the cosmos has real existence, that it is a physical object.
