Media manipulation: the Nobel Prizes and religion

James Peebles

The 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics has been assigned to cosmology and divided among three scientists: James Peebles, a Canadian, who receives half the prize for his theoretical work; and Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, who have shared the other half for having discovered the first planet outside the solar system that revolves around a star in the main sequence.

The theory of the Big Bang was proposed in 1931 by George Lemaître, as a consequence of the extension to the past of the Hubble-Lemaître law. In 1948, Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman predicted that, if the Big Bang theory is correct, there must be a cosmic background radiation with a temperature close to 5 Kelvin. In 1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the existence of such cosmic radiation, whose temperature turned out to be close to 3 Kelvin. That same year, Robert Dicke, James Peebles and other collaborators reasoned that the radiation discovered by Penzias and Wilson is precisely the signature of the Big Bang predicted by Alpher and Herman. During the 70s, Peebles was one of the leading theoretical cosmologists who studied the field of the formation of the great cosmic structures (galaxies and groups of galaxies). For these works he has now been awarded the Nobel Prize.

Harry Potter and the multiverse

In the previous post in this blog, I discussed the current absence of great men in many fields of human activity; in particular, in science. Shortly after writing that post, an interview with Sabine Hossenfelder in a major Spanish newspaper (La Vanguardia) made me see that I’m not alone in denouncing the crisis of science, at least in the field of theoretical physics, which includes theories about the multiverse, about which, a few weeks ago, I published another post.

Sabine Hossenfelder is a German theoretical physicist. She has lately become news by publishing a book: Lost in Maths: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (2018), where she asserts that theoretical physics has progressed practically nothing in the last 60 years, and advocates dedicating public funds to research the fundamentals of quantum mechanics, rather than squandering them on colossal particle accelerators or in research on baseless lucubration, such as string theory and multiverses.

Why we have no great men today

G.K. Chesterton

First, a clarification: I won’t let myself be dragged by political correctness. I’m not going to change the title of this post to “great human beings.” For me, the word “man” (equivalent to the Latin homo) still has a main generic meaning, different from the meaning whose Latin antecedent is vir (male), opposed to woman or female.

The absence of great men is a common place today and affects almost all fields:

Updated UN data on the world population

In a post published in this blog in December 2015, Julio A. Gonzalo and I analyzed the data on the world population provided in 2012 by the UN, along with their future forecasts until the year 2100. A few months ago, the UN has updated those data and forecasts with the figures available in 2019. As seven years have elapsed, it is possible to compare the forecasts made in 2012 with the real situation just now.

The scientific mistake in Tökland

The mystery of Tökland Island is one of the best-known novels of the Spanish writer Joan Manuel Gisbert, which in 1980 won him the Lazarillo Award.

In the first part of the book, a millionaire is trying to find the right person, who in the second part should help him unveil a tremendous secret, and so he builds an underground labyrinth in the depths of the fictional Tökland Island, offering a grand prize to the person who will manage to solve all the problems posed by the successive rooms of the maze.

At first, all who try to solve the challenge posed by the maze fail ignominiously. At last, the protagonist of the novel decides to attempt the adventure, but as he does not trust himself to solve every problem alone, he prepares a team of collaborators, specialists in various fields, who will contact him from a ship that will remain close to the island, and while he goes through the labyrinth will help him solve the problems he finds there.

The limits of quantum computing

Alan Turing

In an interview in a major Spanish newspaper (La Vanguardia) published on July 27, 2019, David Pérez García, a researcher in quantum physics, says this: We are just in the beginning of some technologies that we still don’t know how far they will go. He is right, because the future is hardly predictable, but when it comes to quantum computing we tend to think that these computers, if they are viable, will let us solve problems quite different from those that can be addressed by the traditional computers to which we are used. In this context, however, mathematics can help us distinguish between what can be done, and what is completely impossible.

Although quantum computing is a fairly modern concept, its theoretical foundation was established by Alan Turing during the 1930s. Let us review a little of what he showed, for in this way we can correct a few optimistic ideas spread by the media, often driven by experts who approach the issue from very different points of view, compared to Turing.

The optimism of Teilhard de Chardin

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Teilhard de Chardin’s vision of the future is essentially optimistic, perhaps too much. In his book The Phenomenon of Man he outlines his vision of the future evolution of human beings, which he presents as a process of increasing convergence towards a unifying center with the appropriate name of Omega Point.

By studying the unifying process that should take us to the next stage (or the final point) of our evolution, Teilhard distinguishes three different areas: