Month: December 2011

Piveting off a post by Massimo Pigliucci, Sean Carroll describes the conundrum:

Back in 1814, Pierre-Simon Laplace was mulling over the implications of Newtonian mechanics, and realized something profound. If there were a vast intelligence — since dubbed Laplace’s Demon — that knew the exact state of the universe at any one moment, and knew all the laws of physics, and had arbitrarily large computational capacity, it could both predict the future and reconstruct the past with perfect accuracy. While this is a straightforward consequence of Newton’s theory, it seems to conflict with our intuitive notion of free will. Even if there is no such demon, presumably there is some particular state of the universe, which implies that the future is fixed by the present. What room, then, for free choice? What’s surprising is that we still don’t have a consensus answer to this question.  

Jerry Coyne, also responding to Pigliucci, thinks determinism should change our understanding of morality:

It’s my contention that, in light of the physical determinism of behavior, there’s no substantive difference between someone who kills because they have a brain tumor that makes them aggressive (e.g., Charles Whitman), and someone who kills because a rival is invading their drug business.  We need to reconceive our judicial system in light of what science tells us about how the mind works. And that’s why discussing the bearing of neuroscience and philosophy on free will is far more important than our usual academic discourse.

Ted Sabarese created a series of photographs titled Evolution, to display humans and their fishy dopplegangers. He explains:

With all the recent, fiery controversy between evolution, creationism, intelligent design, science, religion, the political left, right, etc., I thought it might be provocative to throw my visual two-cents into the ring. The images beg the question, is it really so difficult to believe we came out from the sea millions and millions of years ago?

Saberese explains his process, including whether the fish or the model came first. Rick Paulas wonders whether it could inspire a PETA campaign:

You look at a disgusting, beady-eyed rat and become fearful. Or look at a cockroach scurrying across your bathroom floor and, besides a shiver of disgust, have a strange admiration for the survivor. And a photo of a dodo bird will still make you melancholy. But a fish? Look at it and feel nothing. There's no PETA-led protest to get us to adopt them, and even the staunchest vegan will "accidentally" eat the occasional tuna-fish sandwich. They are the lowest of the low. And that's because, more than any other creature, simply because of their inability to share the air we breathe, they are the furthest from our species. Or are they?

Clive Crook has a beaut. Money quote:

Germany’s demands are bad finance, bad fiscal policy, and bad constitutional design. You don’t fix this mess by ruling out forceful action until closer integration has been achieved. You don’t repair Europe’s underlying political dysfunction by increasing the distance between government and governed.

Here's the deputy prime minister and head of the Liberal Democrats today:

Money quote:

The Deputy Prime Minister said any further withdrawal from Europe would mean the UK is "considered irrevelant by Washington and a pygmy in the world". "I will now do everything I can to make sure this setback does not become a permanent divide," he said. Mr Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, is considered one of the most pro-European politicians in Britain. However, he dismissed suggestions that the Coalition would break up. "It would be even more damaging for us as a country if the coalition Government was to fall apart," he said. "That would cause economic disaster for the country at a time of great economic uncertainty."

My live-blog is here; our reax from the web is here.

Louis C.K. explains evolution, the Ice Age and love:

Charles Simic hasn't found it, even in his old age:

I’m having trouble deciding whether I understand the world better now that I’m in my seventies than I did when I was younger, or whether I’m becoming more and more clueless every day. The truth is somewhere in between, I suspect, but that doesn’t make me rest any easier at night. Like others growing old, I had expected that after everything I had lived through and learned in my life, I would attain a state of Olympian calm and would regard the news of the day with amusement, like a clip from a bad old movie I had seen far too many times. It hasn’t happened to me yet. 

Question? askandrew@thedailybeast.com Video archive here.

In reviewing two new war histories, Joanna Bourke contemplates our moral dilemma:

[T]here is a danger that by focusing on the individual experience the broader context is lost. Readers end up knowing what certain events meant to specific people, rather than how these events acquired their meaning. The books aspire to create an affective connection between sufferers in the past and readers today. Affective history is a welcome relief from the language of disinterestedness that used to characterize much military history but, served alone, it fails to provide new perspectives and understandings, beyond “the horror, the horror”.

Frank Close, an Oxford physicist, explains the purpose of the Large Hadron Collider:

We're creating in the laboratory the conditions that the universe experienced about a trillionth of a second after the big bang. There are observations that have taken us to a billionth of a second after the big bang, so we've been pretty near. You might think, "Oh, why would we want to get nearer?" It's because the stuff that you and I are made of was created in that cauldron of the big bang's aftermath, and there are puzzles yet to be solved. For example, why is anything left today?

Antimatter is real, and matter and antimatter annihilate when they meet. So why didn't the newborn universe annihilate itself after the big bang. There must be something that tipped the balance. What that is, we don't know for sure, but some hints are beginning to emerge from the Large Hadron Collider.