Tests of the existence of other universes

When Louis de Broglie first proposed in 1924 that particles had wavelike properties, the technological challenges to investigating the idea were so immense that the prospects for testing it seemed to lie very far into the distant future, if at all. But one of the features of science is that however incredible an idea may seem when it is first proposed, if it gains credibility and acceptance from the scientific community as a whole, it will only be a matter of time before someone finds an ingenious way to try and test it. So it was with de Broglie’s idea. It was such so beautiful in the way that it unified waves and particles in a symmetric way in quantum mechanics, that it spurred creative thinking and within just three years C. J. Davisson and L. Germer were able to construct an experiment that confirmed it, resulting in de Broglie receiving the Nobel Prize in 1929, an incredibly rapid pace of advance.

So it is with the multiverse idea, that entire universes can be created spontaneously from the vacuum and thus our own universe may be just one of an enormous number (as many as 10500) of universes, each having their own laws and structure. This idea not only does not violate the laws of science, it is not even a new theory, being in fact a prediction of other theories.

As with de Broglie’s hypothesis, when the multiverse idea was initially proposed there seemed to be no way to test it. But now people have come along with suggestions of how to do it, by looking for disk-like patterns in the cosmic microwave background that may be the telltale relics of collisions of other universes with our own.

Science is such fun.

The coming godless generations

Adam Lee points to data that show the rapid rise of nonbelief among young people, and points to stories of young people challenging the religious privilege that their elders took for granted.

Most of the student activists I named earlier have faced harassment, some from peers, some from the teachers and authority figures who are supposed to be the responsible ones.
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But what’s different now is that young people who speak out aren’t left to face the mob alone. Now more than ever before, there’s a thriving, growing secular community that’s becoming increasingly confident, assertive, and capable of looking out for its own.
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The Secular Student Alliance, a national organization that supports student atheist and freethought clubs, is growing by leaps and bounds in colleges and high schools. (This is especially important in the light of psychological experiments which find that it’s much easier to resist peer pressure if you have even one other person standing with you.) Student activists like the ones I’ve mentioned are no longer just scattered voices in the crowd; they’re the leading edge of a wave.

All these individual facts add up to a larger picture, which is confirmed by statistical evidence: Americans are becoming less religious, with rates of atheism and secularism increasing in each new generation.
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[T]he more we speak out and the more visible we are, the more familiar atheism will become, and the more it will be seen as a viable alternative, which will encourage still more people to join us and speak out. This is exactly the same strategy that’s been used successfully by trailblazers in the gay-rights movement and other social reform efforts.

This is why it is important for atheists to not rest on our laurels just because we have won the argument. We have to continue to be a very visible and vocal presence in public life, so that those who are hesitant to speak realize that atheists are everywhere and that they have a support network.

I myself have been heartened by the number of people in my own institution who tell me that my atheist presence via this blog has helped them.

Victory for atheists in Little Rock

I wrote earlier about how a bus company in Little Rock, Arkansas asked for prohibitively high insurance for an atheist group to place the message “Are you good without God? Millions are” on its buses, claiming that they feared vandalism by religious people, providing an unintended ironic commentary on religion.

Now a federal judge has ruled in favor of the atheists saying that the bus company’s policy violated the free speech rights of atheists.

Radioactive heating of the Earth

Recent measurements show that about half of the 40 trillion watts of heat radiated continuously by the Earth comes from radioactivity taking place in its mantle and crust, while the remainder is due to the primordial heat that was created at the formation of the Earth and is located mainly in the core.

Historians of science are aware of the importance of the discovery of the radioactivity as an ongoing source of the heating of the Earth. Before the immense amount of heat associated with radioactive decay was discovered around 1903, physicists like Lord Kelvin had calculated the age of the Earth by treating it as an initially hot body that was steadily cooling. They concluded that it could not be older than 100 million years and could be as low as 20 million years. This made it very difficult, if not impossible, for the theory of evolution by natural selection, because it was a slow process that required long time scales. This was seized upon by religious people to argue against the evolution and in favor of the special creation of species by god. (See my series on the age of the Earth for a more detailed discussion of this.)

The discovery of radioactivity had two revolutionary impacts. It created an awareness that radioactivity was an ongoing source of the heating of the Earth that undermined all the earlier calculations of Kelvin and others, and it provided an important new tool for measuring time that opened the gates to new discoveries that rapidly pushed the age of the Earth to more than four billion years, giving plenty of time for evolution to take place.

Mournapalooza 2011

Political cartoonist Ted Rall warns us what expects on September 11 as the tenth anniversary of the collapse of the World Trade Center comes around.

I have written before about this weird obsession with public grief in which the media and politicians try to suggest that all of us are, or should be, overcome with grief and emotion by simply remembering a past event. This may be true for those who actually lost loved ones but I suspect that for the rest of us it is just another day that would have passed normally if it were not thrust in our faces by a massive media blitz that wallows in cheesy sentiment.

I myself will ignore all coverage of this staged event.

Escaping the suffocating embrace of religion

NPR had a couple of interesting religious stories recently.

One of them was about how more and more evangelicals are deciding that the Genesis story of Adam and Eve simply cannot be true in the light of modern science and how this is tearing the community apart.

Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University and a senior fellow at the BioLogos Foundation, and John Schneider who taught theology at Calvin College are just two evangelical Christians who say that “it’s time to face facts: There was no historical Adam and Eve, no serpent, no apple, no fall that toppled man from a state of innocence.”

This is viewed as heresy by the traditionalists who insist that those beliefs form an indispensable part of being Christian.
[Read more…]

Such people are scum

One of the most sickening cases of recent times was that of a Pennsylvania judge getting bribes from a builder of juvenile prisons, in exchange for which the judge sent thousands of children, many of them first-time offenders convicted of minor crimes and some as young as 10, to the private jails.

About 4,000 of those convictions have now been tossed aside because he violated the constitutional rights of the accused, including the right to legal counsel and the right to intelligently enter a plea. The judge was portrayed as not only corrupt but as “vicious and mean-spirited” who “verbally abused and cruelly mocked” the children whom he sent to jail.

His trial has ended with the judge being sentenced to 28 years in prison.

Another judge accused of a similar crime has pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing.