Month: June 2014

A Physicist Defends Philosophy

Sean Carroll responds to the common criticism of his fellow physicists that philosophers “care too much about deep-sounding meta-questions, instead of sticking to what can be observed and calculated”:

Here we see the unfortunate consequence of a lifetime spent in an academic/educational system that is focused on taking ambitious dreams and crushing them into easily-quantified units of productive work. The idea is apparently that developing a new technique for calculating a certain wave function is an honorable enterprise worthy of support, while trying to understand what wave functions actually are and how they capture reality is a boring waste of time. I suspect that a substantial majority of physicists who use quantum mechanics in their everyday work are uninterested in or downright hostile to attempts to understand the quantum measurement problem.

This makes me sad. I don’t know about all those other folks, but personally I did not fall in love with science as a kid because I was swept up in the romance of finding slightly more efficient calculational techniques.

Don’t get me wrong — finding more efficient calculational techniques is crucially important, and I cheerfully do it myself when I think I might have something to contribute. But it’s not the point — it’s a step along the way to the point.

The point, I take it, is to understand how nature works. Part of that is knowing how to do calculations, but another part is asking deep questions about what it all means. That’s what got me interested in science, anyway. And part of that task is understanding the foundational aspects of our physical picture of the world, digging deeply into issues that go well beyond merely being able to calculate things. It’s a shame that so many physicists don’t see how good philosophy of science can contribute to this quest. The universe is much bigger than we are and stranger than we tend to imagine, and I for one welcome all the help we can get in trying to figure it out.

A Poem For Sunday

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“A Walk in the Forest” by John Clare (1793-1864):

I love the forest and its airy bounds
Where friendly Campbell takes his daily rounds,
I love the breakneck hills that headlong go
And leave me high and half the world below,
I love to see the Beach Hill mounting high,
The brook without a bridge and nearly dry.
There’s Bucket’s Hill, a place of furze and clouds,
Which evening in a golden blaze enshrouds:
I hear the cows go home with tinkling bell
And see the woodman in the forest dwell,
Whose dog runs eager where the rabbit’s gone—
He eats the grass, then kicks and hurries on,
Then scrapes for hoarded bone and tries to play
And barks at larger dogs and runs away.

(From “I Am”: The Selected Poetry of John Clare, edited by Jonathan Bate © 2003 by Jonathan Bate. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Photo by Chris Morris)

How To Lose A Generation (Or Two)

Responding to efforts to permit bakers, caterers, photographers, and others to refuse to do business with gay people for reasons of religious liberty, Jonathan Rauch begs believers to reconsider – for their own good. He argues that “when religion isolates itself from secular society, both sides lose, but religion loses more”:

[T]he desire to be left alone takes on a pretty aggressive cast when it involves slamming the door of a commercial enterprise on people you don’t approve of. The idea that serving as a vendor for, say, a gay commitment ceremony is tantamount to “endorsing” homosexuality, as the new religious-liberty advocates now assert, is a far-reaching proposition, one with few apparent outer boundaries in a densely interwoven mercantile society. It suggests a hair-trigger defensiveness about religious identity that would have seemed odd just a few years ago. As far as I know, during the divorce revolution it never occurred to, say, Catholic bakers to tell remarrying customers, “Your so-called second marriage is a lie, so take your business elsewhere.” That would have seemed not so much principled as bizarre.

His take on where all this will lead, and what an alternative might be:

I wonder whether religious advocates of these opt-outs have thought through the implications. Associating Christianity with a desire—no, a determination—to discriminate puts the faithful in open conflict with the value that young Americans hold most sacred. They might as well write off the next two or three or 10 generations, among whom nondiscrimination is the 11th commandment.

There is, of course, a very different Christian tradition:

a missionary tradition of engagement and education, of resolutely and even cheerfully going out into an often uncomprehending world, rather than staying home with the shutters closed. In this alternative tradition, a Christian photographer might see a same-sex wedding as an opportunity to engage and interact: a chance, perhaps, to explain why the service will be provided, but with a moral caveat or a prayer. Not every gay customer would welcome such a conversation, but it sure beats having the door slammed in your face.

This much I can guarantee: the First Church of Discrimination will find few adherents in 21st-century America. Polls find that, year by year, Americans are growing more secular. The trend is particularly pronounced among the young, many of whom have come to equate religion with intolerance. Social secession will only exacerbate that trend … For religious traditionalists, it is a step toward isolation and opprobrium—a step bad for society, but even worse for religion.

Jesus vs John Galt

In an apparent bid to best all other Hathos Alert nominees (see our Awards Glossary here), the third installment of the film version of Atlas Shrugged will feature cameos from Ron Paul, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck. Elizabeth Stoker interprets the news as one more sign of “a bizarre ongoing project undertaken by Rand-entranced members of the political right to jam Christianity and Randian ‘Objectivism’ together.” She longs for the days when conservatives like William F. Buckley, Jr. and Whittaker Chambers rejected Rand’s brand of libertarianism:

Buckley, like Chambers, didn’t capitulate to Rand and her philosophy; they understood correctly that there is no room for Objectivism in a coherent, genuine Christianity. While Rand’s ideal human is self-interested and self-sufficient, the Christian person is devoted to serving others and is always in need: of God, forgiveness, grace, mercy, and the love of Christ. The ideal Randian person, on the other hand, is entirely capable of managing and perfecting his own satisfaction, a far cry from the Christian understanding of a person as perfectable, but not through his own means.

Of course, that aspect of Christianity is a problem for those who prefer to think of themselves as John Galt–esque supermen. Indeed, the disturbing trend of trying to force Christianity to accommodate Rand’s antithetical philosophy is likely a result of her seductive appeal to the very egoism Christianity warns against. It’s a shame conservatives like Paul, Beck, and Hannity have lost the courage of conviction that motivated Buckley and Chambers (among others) to call a spade a spade when it came to Rand; the resulting “philosophy,” if it can be called that, amounts to a vitiated version of Objectivism as well as a pathetic Christian testimony. That Paul, Beck, and Hannity intend to peddle this mess to their broad audiences bodes poorly for a right wing that once knew better.

Quote For The Day

“A society which advances economically must become unstable and collapse through that advance unless, through an equal advance in psychology, it can gain a proportionately self-conscious knowledge of its inner nature. This ‘law’ stated in familiar historical language becomes: The Society which does not make and continue to make religious discoveries as radical as its material discoveries, must rapidly increase in ill-distributed wealth and power; will generate increasingly neuroses, ill-will and violence; and must finally (if it can so long long escape internal anarchy) become wholly militarized, devote itself to destruction and collapse,” – Gerald Heard, The Source of Civilization (1935).

By Almighty Amazon

Earlier this month Suzi LeVine, the new American Ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein, took the oath of office with her left hand on a Kindle “opened” to the 19th amendment of the US Constitution. The episode prompted Hannah Rosefield to look back at where the tradition of using texts, especially the Bible, in such ceremonies began:

The earliest Western use of oath books in a legal setting dates to ninth-century England when, in the absence of a structured royal government, certain transactions were conducted at the altar, the participants swearing on a gospel book. Three centuries later, English courts adopted the practice, requiring jury members and individuals in particular trials to take an oath on the Bible. An unnamed thirteenth-century Latin manuscript, now held in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, sets out the method and the significance of the act. By placing a hand on the book and then kissing it, the oath-taker is acknowledging that, should he lie under oath, neither the words in the Bible nor his good deeds nor his prayers will bring him any earthly or spiritual profit. In time, this became standard legal procedure—all witnesses swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—and made its way into American courts. British witnesses today still take their oaths “by Almighty God,” as American oath-takers conclude theirs with “so help me God.”

Our Father Issues In Heaven

Robert Hunt takes aim at Mary Eberstadt’s contention in her recent book, How the West Really Lost God, that the breakdown of the conventional family has led to secularization, offering an alternative account of the institution’s ambiguous place in the Christian tradition:

It is hardly surprising that the biological family is a key assumption of both Jewish and Christian scripture. Yet scripture also understands that the family can also be a broken and even oppressive institution. The most memorable families in the Bible are the most dysfunctional. Indeed, with the exception of Ruth and Boaz all the families in the Bible are dysfunctional. Even Jesus was raised by his stepfather.

It is precisely in God’s care of the widow, the orphan, the childless, the outcast, the adulterer, the prostitute, and even the murderer that God’s full nature as lover and redeemer of the world are revealed.

Thus it is these for whom care is demanded by scriptural ethics, and these are among the first gathered into the family of those who call God father and Christ brother. Only God’s love for all these broken and incomplete families rescues the common trinitarian symbolism from itself being exclusive and oppressive. It isn’t the family that brings (or pace Eberstadt fails to bring) these refugees from the family to God, it is God that makes family a possibility even for them.

The root of this failure in Eberstadt’s analysis may be that she does not consider the role of fictive kinship and its importance in the formation of the early Christian community. Her promotion of the specifically biological family as fundamental to healthy Christianity leads her to ignore the ways that Christians have understood what Jesus means by “being born again by water and the Spirit.” And so she also fails to consider alternative families that are so central to Christian history, and particularly Catholic and Orthodox history. Convents and monasteries, and even though she doesn’t see it, brotherhoods like her oft mentioned Opus Dei are surely as critical to the church as the biological family unit, something which even a sociologist can see and any historian should note.

Previous Dish on Eberstadt’s book here.

Hangover Helper

Researcher Richard Stephens offers the straight dope on your morning-after misery:

Do we know what causes hangovers?

Not completely, but there’s definitely some fairly good evidence. One component is the way that alcohol is metabolized. When you drink alcohol, there’s an enzyme in the body that breaks down the ethanol in alcohol into metabolites – after you’ve had a drink of alcohol and felt drunk, once you start to feel sober again, that’s because your body has metabolized the ethanol. But once the ethanol has been metabolized, there are usually other alcohols in smaller quantities in alcoholic beverages. One such compound is methanol, and when the body metabolizes methanol, it metabolizes it into toxins – formaldehyde and formic acid. And those make you feel ill, sort of poison you a little bit.

So one part of a hangover is the production of formaldehyde and formic acid, which comes online about 10 or so hours after you’ve been drinking. And the interesting thing about that is that the enzymes in your body that break down alcohols would prefer to break down ethanol first and methanol second. And it means that when you’re in a hangover phase, if you drink more alcohol you’ll actually stop your body from breaking down methanol and the things that are making you feel ill, and instead go back to working on the ethanol and leave the methanol intact. So there is a biological basis for the hair of the dog. And that’s one of the possible risk factors for why hangover might be a risk factor for alcoholism rather than a natural block for it.

Alcohol Up Close

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Michael Davidson uses his microscope to capture images of alcoholic drinks (like tequila, seen above):

Michael Davidson used a high-powered microscope at the Florida State Research Foundation to photograph your favorite beverages and cocktails. Who knew that alcohol could be so incredibly beautiful?

We have been assured that the images have not been retouched and the crystallized drinks on the microscope slides haven’t been dyed, which we admit is a little unbelievable, considering the vivid colors of the images…. It’s all in the cross-polarized light microscope, which refracts light through the crystal, creating a mixture of gorgeous colors.

See more of these images here.