Information and knowing

We live in an age of information.  It is not just money that changes hands around the globe, but information.  We send and receive emails, texts, twitters... we write on our blogs.  There are whole fields of study devoted to information  - information theory, information science, economics of information - just to name a few.  It is easy to create and difficult to quantify; essential and practical yet somehow intangible.  Have you ever thought about the role of 'information' in your life?

Faith, Science, and Some things I've been Reading.

Once again I will be quoting today from some things in my recent readings which have me thinking.

First: This summer I read The Soul of the American University by Marsden (a book I highly recommend to my friends in graduate school. I'm actually surprised to realize I haven't written a post specifically about this book yet. Anyway...) In chronicling the academic scene in the late 1800's, Marsden tells of how American thinkers saw no conflict between religion and science:

Strict biblicists committed to the Common Sense philosophy took for granted that one reasonable and unifying outlook must triumph in public life as much as did those who hailed scientific progress and a higher evolving religion. The stakes they thus set were remarkably high; in fact they were all or nothing. (215)

Much has, of course, changed since then, and I noticed today that Willard has a good description of the current situation:

To understand why the negative prejudice [that science rules God out conclusively] is so strong now, just reflect on how the entire system of human expertise, as represented by our many-tiered structure of certification and accreditation, has a tremendous vested interest in ruling God out of consideration. For, if it cannot do that, it is simply wrong about what it presents as knowledge and reality -- of which God is no part. (331)

Thus while I would still agree with the 'old' way of thinking that there is no conflict between my faith science (in fact the two complement each other!) I would not assume that one universal and God-centered worldview will come to dominate. In fact, as Willard suggests, it makes sense to assume that the opposite would happen. Understanding this distinction and addressing it is, I think, important for every person who professes faith in God.


On a different but definitely related topic:
I really appreciated some of Polkinghorne's statements in his book One World (I'm putting my favourite part in bold - it is so true!). He concludes his discussion of the post-enlightenment world:

At the same time the human psyche has revealed its shadowing and elusive depths, the physical world has denied determinate objectivity at its constituent roots. [...] [Heisenber's] uncertainty principle proclaims the unpicturability of the quantum world [...] the fitfulness inherent in quantum theory breaks the bonds of stric t determinism...

That in itselve is no great cause for religious rejoicing [...] Our century has seen a recurrent cult of the Absurd which is destructive of true understanding. To acknowledge the limits of rationality, objectivity and determinism is not to relinquish a belief in reason, a respect for reality or a search for order.

It may however lead to a greater openness to the variety of the world and our experience of it, an acceptance that beside the insights of science, expressible in the quantitative language of mathematics, there are the equally necessary insights of religion, expressible in the qualitative language of symbol. (5)

Quantum Mechanics (Part II) Uncertainty and an Unfortunate (?) Cat

Today I will briefly comment on some of the most commonly referenced (and likely most misunderstood!) quantum ideas in popular culture.

You may have seen the play/film Copenhagen, about Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. The play mostly investigates the idea of psychological uncertainty; not only do memories claim different 'facts', but even the attitudes and memories of the persons involved change with each retelling. This is compared to the uncertainty principle of QM, in which the momentum (closely related to the speed something is moving) and the position of a particle cannot be exactly specified. While this is a good film, the definition of uncertainty leans more toward the English language use of it (not able to know something for certain) rather than the mathematical definition.

According to the theory of QM, electrons are best described by wave functions. For waves on a pond, the medium being "waved" is water. For sound, it is air. For electrons, it is probability density. Particles are described by waves "superimposed" on top of each other, with the peaks and valleys of some waves sometimes adding and sometimes canceling each other out. The direct result of this method of describing matter is the precise mathematical relationship:

∆x∆p≥ℏ/2

which reads: "the uncertainty in position, times the uncertainty in momemntum is greater than or equal to h-bar over two" While this is a strange and important result, it doesn't mean that we have reached a limit of understanding; rather, we have seen that the universe behaves in this predictable way which includes a fixed uncertainty.

You may have seen this talk by Rob Bell from "Everything is Spiritual", in which I believe this idea of uncertainty is taken a bit too far:

While it is interesting to compare our understanding of God to his creation, it is dangerous to say that there is something about the physical world that it so mysterious that "all [scientists] can come up with" is something they cannot "conquer or put in a box". You see, scientists are not trying to conquer anything. They are trying to describe and understand the wonders of the natural world. It is fun to draw parallels between God and the forces and energies of nature, but we must be cautious of saying we have found something only explicable by God. What will happen when this "gap" is filled in by some deeper theory? Let's not lose our sense of wonder, but let's not get overzealous with our theology.

Schrodinger, trying to understand and explain this idea of adding or "superimposing" wave functions and how this relates to the uncertainty principle, came up with his famous cat-in-a-box illustration:

Of course, this is just an illustration and wouldn't actually work in real life, but it does explain a little bit about how weird this understanding of matter really is. Isn't it wonderful that our world is so complex and surprising?

Whatever is Quantum Mechanics? (Part I)

I frequently get blank looks when I mention Quantum Mechanics, so I thought I would take a moment this week to explain what it is, without actually going into the actual theory of it. The benefit of your reading this will be that, in addition to understanding my life a bit more, you will probably find that quantum will pop up in unexpected places and you will at least be intelligent about it, if not find that it helps you understand our world a bit better. Out of curiosity, and because it is often a good place to start when looking at things on the most general level, I checked what Wikipedia had to say about the topic. Here is what I found:

Quantum mechanics is a set of principles underlying the most fundamental known description of all physical systems at the submicroscopic scale.

Have you finished reading that three times? It's a bit of a mouthful, so I will try to make it more clear. Quantum mechanics explains how atoms behave. Atoms make up most of what we see every day, so QM (as I will refer to it from now on) explains why things (matter, mostly) are the way they are.

QM is surprising. For centuries, it was thought that Newtonian physics (what you learned in high school) explained the world we see. In fact, Newtonian physics is a pretty good approximation that explains our world. But if you get down small enough, things start to become weird. Imagine something moving down a hill, for example: me when I'm rushing to class in the morning. It's all one continuous motion of moving-down-hill-ness. As I go down the hill, I gain speed because the energy I had just by being at the top of the hill is being turned in to "kinetic" energy. Electrons are not like this. They are more like someone leaping down stairs. The energy still changes, but it is done in stages, with each stage having a fixed distance between it and the previous one.

This brings us to why it is called Quantum mechanics in the first place. Think of our English word "quantity". Matter and energy comes in discrete quantities, or quanta. If you think about this for a bit you will realize how surprising this really is.

*****

Next week, if you are interested, I will talk more about things of which you may have heard, such as "the uncertainty principle" and "Schrodinger's Cat".