The former chief drug advisor to the UK government, who was sacked from that post in 2009, has published a study that examines the harm to the individual and to society of various drugs.
Heroin, crack cocaine, and crystal meth are the most harmful to individual users but the widespread use (and abuse) of alcohol is what makes it the most harmful to society, followed by heroin and crack cocaine.
In 2007, the American Physical Society issued a short but strong statement stating that the evidence for global warming is incontrovertible. It is no secret that there is a very small but vocal minority within the APS membership that disputes the idea that global warming has a significant human-based cause and who were upset with the APS’s strong stand. Because of the fuss they created, the APS issued a longer clarifying statement in 2010 providing some context and the basis of their reasoning. Both statements can be read here.
A minor kerfuffle has now broken out because a physicist named Hal Lewis has resigned from the American Physical Society in protest at its stance on climate change. (Thanks to Chaz for the link.)
I am not sure why it is significant when a retired 87-year old physicist whose work during his research career had nothing to do with climate change resigns from the APS in protest. He is not a ‘top’ physicist in that although I do not doubt that is competent in his specialized field and known within it, I would guess that most physicists have not heard of him. The claim in some global warming skeptic circles that Lewis’s resignation letter is the equivalent of Martin Luther nailing his theses to the church door that sparked the Protestant reformation is laughable. I predict that it will not cause even a ripple within the physics community.
Lewis is not like Freeman Dyson, for example, another 87-year old physicist who is also a global warming skeptic. Although he too has no background in climate science, at least Dyson is very well known among physicists and any theoretical physicist in any field around the world would likely know his name and have some awareness of his work.
I agree with Lewis that money is having a negative effect in general in that it may be distorting the direction of research, but there is no evidence to support his charge that it has influenced the APS’s stance on climate change.
The APS has issued a statement in response to the Lewis resignation.
The mathematician who founded the discipline of fractal geometry has died at the age of 85. To see some of the beautiful patterns generated by fractals, see here.
Recently religious apologists have taken to harping on the question “How can something come from nothing?” because they think that science cannot explain how the universe came into existence. Of course, their own answer that “God must have done it!” is not an answer at all since it merely shifts the problem to that of how god could come into being from nothing.
Stephen Hawking has recently published a book that says that we can indeed understand how the universe came into being without invoking god. The idea itself has been known for sometime but when Hawking says it, it generates a lot of media attention. Cosmologist Sean Carroll explains Hawking’s ideas in a three-minute video.
In short, science has not proved that there is no god (because such proofs are impossible) but has shown is there is no need for god.
(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)
For previous posts in this series, see here.
As is often the case when I am writing about something, I get a little carried away and the series seems to go on forever. But we have actually reached the last post in this series where I want to look at the broader implications of what all these scientific advances with the Big Bang theory means, particularly for religion. I hope that those who stuck with me through to the bitter end have obtained a deeper understanding than they had before.
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(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)
For previous posts in this series, see here.
As I wrote earlier, the state of play is that according to our best estimates, the Big Bang theory predicts that the universe is flat and consists of 72.1% dark energy and 23.3% dark matter, with the remaining 4.6% being all the other matter that we are familiar with and know exists.
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(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)
For previous posts in this series, see here.
In the previous post, I showed that the creation of the universe does not, as is sometimes thought, violate the law of conservation of energy, otherwise known as the first law of thermodynamics.
Another supposed problem that disappears under close examination deals with entropy. Entropy is a quantity that has a precise definition in science but whose meaning has not become as familiar to the layperson as other scientific terms like energy. It can be loosely related to what we call the level of disorder or the loss of information or the amount of ‘useless’ energy (i.e., energy that cannot be utilized to perform work). So for example a system that is more disordered (a sock drawer in which the socks have been unceremoniously dumped) has a higher entropy than an ordered system (where the socks are neatly arranged in matching pairs.) Similarly a state in which information decreases or the amount of useless energy increases can be said to be a state in which entropy in increasing.
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(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)
For previous posts in this series, see here.
Although the universe is mostly empty space (leaving aside for the moment dark energy and dark matter), there is quite a lot of matter in it. Some of it is in dense clumps that we call planets, stars, and galaxies. The rest is far more dilute and consists of interstellar gases and dust. And quite a lot of it is in the form of massless photons. So the question naturally arises: where did all this stuff come from? Doesn’t it require a massive input of energy right at the beginning that violates the law of conservation of energy (also known as the first law of thermodynamics), one of the bedrock principles of science? The answer is simple: No.
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