Why polls and surveys fail

Polls and opinion surveys often predict results that never happen. Is there a scientific reason that can explain it? I think so. The problem could be that the mathematical theories behind the polls are misapplied.

A branch of statistics is called sample theory. It was invented to solve the problem of estimating whether the products of a factory are well made or defective, without having to analyze them one by one, which would be too costly.

Let us say, for example, that a factory produces one million screws a day. In theory they should be checked one by one, but since that is impossible, only one part is analyzed. Which part? This is what sample theory tries to solve.

Suppose we analyze just 2000 screws, and find that one of them is defective (0.05%). Can we extend this result to the million screws and assert that in that population there will be approximately 500 defective screws?

What is immortality

Pieter van Lint - Allegory of immortality

Immortality is in fashion. Every few weeks, the media publish news or interviews related to this matter. In addition to the one I mentioned in an earlier article, let's look at two others, quite recent:

•         We will live 1000 years (Aubrey de Gray, May 1, 2016).

•         Man is about to attain immortality and artificial intelligence, which will turn him into Homo Deus (Yuval Harari, September 11, 2016).

But first we must define what we mean by immortality; otherwise, we will hardly know what we are talking about. As one reader pointed out in my previous article, living 1000 years is not the same as being immortal. If you live 1000 years and then die, you are not immortal, you have just lived longer. This applies, whatever the duration of life. Living 1000 million years and then dying would not be the same as being immortal.

Those who believe that someday we will be immortal do not put all the eggs in the same basket. In recent years, three different ways have been proposed to achieve immortality:

The three trunks of the tree of life

The tree of life

As time goes by and more and more genomes of living beings of very different types are sequenced, we are learning a lot about the tree of life. This is a summary of what we know:

• From the fact that all current living things use the same genetic code (with very minor variations) it follows that all the living beings we know, current or extinct (including viruses), descend from a single ancestor, unknown, of course, because there is no trace of in the fossil record, and if we found it, we would not recognize it. This hypothetical common ancestor has received the curious name LUCA, the acronym of Last Universal Common Ancestor. The first living creature should be placed at the very origin of the tree of life (in the root). Many biologist also think that this common ancestor appeared over 3000 million years ago, near the hydrothermal vents found on the mid-ocean ridges that separate the plates of the earth’s crust, where the magma in the mantle tends to rise to the surface.

A global conspiracy?

Isaac Asimov

In 1976, at the peak of the pessimistic forecasts about the catastrophic rise in global population, foreseen by the first report of the Club of Rome (1972), Isaac Asimov published a science fiction short story (The winnowing), which suggested a (highly unethical) way to stop this catastrophic increase in population. This is the summary of the story:

In 2005, the unstoppable population growth causes famine in the third world countries. To contain it, the world authorities (the UN), controlled by the developed world, decide to apply a triage to the world population. To do this, a scientist (who does not want to do it, but is threatened with reprisals against his family) is ordered to develop a protein, poisonous for 70% of the population, but harmless for the remainder, depending on each individual DNA, so that its effects will be dramatic, but random. The protein will be introduced in the food sent to alleviate famines, so as to bring the world population down to more manageable levels. The project is not applied exactly as planned, because the biologist who must develop the protein gives it to eat to the world leaders without their knowing, so that 70% of them will die. As the protein has been adapted to the scientist’s DNA, by eating it he commits suicide, thus escaping the consequences of what he has done.

The problem of Achilles and the tortoise

Zeno of Elea

Zeno of Elea, a follower of Parmenides, is mainly remembered for his paradoxes which try to prove that movement does not exist, especially the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, which asserted that it would be impossible for Achilles to catch the tortoise in a race, if he had accepted a starting handicap.

We know that Achilles runs faster than the tortoise (otherwise he could not catch it and the paradox would make no sense). As he has taken a handicap, when Achilles starts to run the tortoise will already be at a certain distance, at point A. When Achilles reaches point A, the tortoise will have advanced to point B. When Achilles reaches B, the tortoise is already in C, and so on, ad infinitum.

The time Achilles needs to catch the tortoise will be the sum of the times it takes him to reach points A, B, C... The total time is, therefore, the sum of an infinite series of numbers. The problem is that Zeno thinks that the sum of an infinite series of numbers must be infinite, so Achilles will never catch the tortoise (this is the conclusion of his reasoning). This, however, is not true: there are many infinite series whose sum is finite. One of them is precisely the series that computes the time needed by Achilles to catch the tortoise, according to Zeno’s reasoning.

Alternatives to the Big Bang

The Big Bang theory has a problem, which can be explained by the following set of questions:

• The farthest we can see is the cosmic microwave background radiation, which originated about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. We cannot see directly what happened before, because it is hidden behind that radiation.
• It is true that we cannot see, but we can deduce what happened in those first 380,000 years by applying the standard physical theory, i.e. general relativity. It is also possible to check those deductions, for they offer predictions, such as the average composition of the cosmos, which fit well with the experimental data.
• The problem is, general relativity does not take us to time zero, the Big Bang itself. This theory can be applied only from 5×10^-44 seconds after the Big Bang (the Planck time), as quantum effects were predominant before that time, and we do not have a physical theory that unifies quantum mechanics with general relativity.

Did the universe have a beginning?

Georges Lemaître

This question has fascinated scientists since 1931, when the Belgian astronomer, physicist and priest Georges Lemaître formulated the theory of the primordial atom, which since 1950 was known as the Big Bang theory. According to this cosmological theory, as the universe is expanding, if we move back in time we must come to a point (13,800 million years ago, the cosmologists tell us) when it would have gone through a singularity, with a volume tending to zero, while pressure and density would tend to infinity. Could this have been the beginning of the universe?

In 1951 Pope Pius XII, in a speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, said the following words:

A mind illuminated and enriched by modern scientific knowledge, calmly evaluating this problem, is led to break the circle of a matter entirely independent and autochthonous, either uncreated, or because it has arisen by itself, and to rise to a creative Spirit... It seems really that present science, by jumping back over millions of centuries, has succeeded in being witness to that primordial “Fiat lux”, when out of nowhere burst forth, together with matter, a sea of light and radiation, while the particles of the chemical elements split and were reunited into millions of galaxies