A Physicist Clumsily Ponders the Big Questions

Leonard Mlodinow is a Cal Tech physicist who co-authored the book The Grand Design, a widely read but unconvincing embrace of a particularly extravagant form of string theory which has no observational support. The book ends by assuring us that the theory the authors favor is the theory that Einstein was looking for. That is a lame appeal to authority, rather like arguing, “If Abraham Lincoln were alive today, he would endorse my economic theory.”

Mlodinow has also co-authored the book War of the Worldviews, in which he debates various deep topics with Deepak Chopra, the widely-read author of numerous books. The format of the book consists of alternate chapters by Mlodinow and Chopra, usually taking opposing standpoints on various big questions.

Early in the book (page 17), Mlodinow bombastically asserts, “Science can answer the seemingly intractable question of how the universe came into being, and there is reason to believe that science will eventually be able to explain the origins of consciousness, too.” But he does nothing to back up these statements. There is actually no reason to think that science ever will be able to answer the question of what caused the universe to come into existence, and quite a few scientists have admitted that fact. Later on (page 181), Mlodinow admits, “We still aren't close to discovering the basis of 'mind' or consciousness as an emergent phenomenon based on interactions among neurons,” a statement that undermines his previous statement that “ there is reason to believe that science will eventually be able to explain the origin of consciousness.”

Compare Mlodinow's swaggering statement to the much earlier but far wiser statement by the great scientist Isaac Newton: “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” That statement – a statement of great humility – is still appropriate today, as we discover more and more that we don't understand.

In a nine-page chapter on “Is There Design in the Universe?” Mlodinow has a chance to use his physics expertise to rebut those who have argued that the physical constants and laws of our universe seem tailor-made for the appearance of intelligent creatures such as us. But he chooses to say nothing about such reasoning, and does not mention any of the many cases of fine-tuning or cosmic coincidences widely mentioned by other physicists in the context of discussions of the anthropic principle. But what is the reason for the order that allowed us to exist? Mlodinow has an answer (page 116): “The gift of life is not, then, the gift of a god, or of a 'universal consciousness'; it is a gift from the sun.”

This is a laughably weak answer for several reasons. The first reason is that the existence of life and stable matter depend on something a lot more than just the sun: a whole series of coincidences and apparent fine-tuning such as the precise equality of the proton charge and the electron charge (to twenty decimal places), the nearly identical masses of the proton and the neutron, the just-right strength of things such as gravitation, the vacuum energy density, the strong nuclear force, and nuclear resonances. The second reason is that while a sun like ours is a very important prerequisite for life, the existence of our sun depends crucially on various favorable physical constants that existed with their current values billions of years before the sun existed. It has been shown that stars like the sun would not exist if several physical constants such as the speed of light, the gravitational constant, or Planck's constant were slightly different. One does not explain such coincidences by mentioning the sun, something that those coincidences helped to make possible. Our sun is one of the fortunate end results of primordial cosmic fine-tuning, not any explanation for such fine-tuning.

Mlodinow goes on to lamely argue for a version of determinism: “The evidence so far supports the view that the physical arrangement of all atoms and molecules, and the laws of nature that govern them, determine our future actions in the same way that they determine the actions of the sun” (page 131). This is a statement similar to the famous statement made by Laplace in the 19^th century, that if one could determine exactly the position and motion of all atoms, one could foretell the exact future of the universe. But such an outlook has been completely invalidated by quantum mechanics, which tells us that there is a huge amount of uncertainty baked into everything on the subatomic level. Modern physics does not support the idea that arrangements of atoms and molecules lock in your future decisions. That's a good thing, because the idea that you do not have a free will is a morally poisonous idea which would have disastrous consequences if everyone embraced it. 

When it comes to the possibility of any such thing as a soul, Mlodinow says this: “All science can really say is that if it existed, we think its effects on the material realm would have been noticed, and that, until now, there has never been any credible evidence for it.”

This is the standard story-line of many a physicist, one in which multiple lines of evidence accumulated over many decades are completely disregarded: evidence of ESP that has been carefully accumulated by scientists for well over 70 years (particularly in recent ganzfeld experiments); evidence of thousands of near-death experiences which have been accumulated for more than 40 years; evidence of remote viewing that was funded by the US government for well over a decade; evidence of an abnormal ability of the mind to influence human health; evidence that humans can inexplicably influence random number generators; as well as evidence of apparitions that have been reported throughout human history (a very-old fashioned phenomenon that simply refuses to go away, and needs some kind of explanation that neither physics nor psychiatry has yet provided).

Like many modern physicists, Mlodinow has a kind of double standard. He dismisses all of the extensive evidence suggesting that there may actually be something like a soul or some paranormal human abilities, because it conflicts with his world view based on reductionist materialism. But he embraces a version of string theory not supported by any evidence, even though such a theory (with its gigantic baggage such as multiverse associations and the idea of many hidden dimensions) ends up being far more extravagant than the simple hypothesis of a human soul.

If Mlodinow aspires to work part-time as a“worldview warrior,” he needs to come up with some more convincing answers.

Double-Fudging Their Way to the BICEP2 “Breakthrough”

I like a double-fudged ice cream sundae, but I don't like double-fudged scientific studies, particularly when they claim to be of epic importance.

The BICEP2 study was released a few weeks ago to great fanfare. The press release for the study announced breathlessly that it was evidence for the theory of cosmic inflation, the theory that the universe underwent exponential expansion during a fraction of its first second.

But the study involved at least two big fudges – cases in which curves were squashed or stretched unnaturally and unreasonably for the sake of getting observations to fit in with the favored storyline that evidence had been found  for cosmic inflation. Before discussing each of the fudges, let me give a little background information.

The Difficulties of Looking for Primordial B-Mode Polarizations

The idea behind the BICEP2 study is to look for a particular type of radiation called b-mode polarization. Scientists predict that if a period of cosmic inflation had occurred in the universe's first second, it would have produced this type of radiation. But before the BICEP2 study many scientists commented on the extreme difficulty of finding evidence for cosmic inflation through such a process. The main problem is that quite a few other astronomical phenomena can produce this same type of b-mode polarization radiation. Among these other phenomena are: various types of dust, synchrotron radiation and gravitational lensing. 

The problem is illustrated by the graph below. The red line shows the b-mode polarization predicted to occur from synchrotron radiation. The blue lines shows the b-mode polarization predicted to occur from dust. The dotted green line shows the b-mode polarization predicted to occur from gravitational lensing. The solid green line shows the the b-mode polarization predicted to occur from cosmic inflation, using a version of that theory compatible from the most recent findings from the Planck satellite.

From the scientific paper here

The problem is that any lines that are higher-up in this graph are stronger signals that will drown out any signals that are lower in the graph (just as a 100-decibel sound of a passing motorcycle will completely drown out the 30-decibel sound of a child whispering). So if we use the curves in the chart above, there would seem to be basically zero chance of ever being able to confirm a theory of cosmic inflation by measuring b-mode polarizations (the technique used by the BICEP2 study).

To try to overcome such problems, the BICEP2 study resorted to some fudges I will now list.

Outrageous Fudge Number 1: Shrinking the Gravitational Lensing Model

The BICEP2 study has a graph showing a projection of the expected amount of b-mode polarization from gravitational lensing. But the projection is a shrunken, low-ball projection. It is nowhere near as high as the projections made by some previous scientists.

Here is the BICEP2 graph in which they project gravitational lensing (the solid red line):

You have to look closely at the little lines on this logarithmic graph to figure out two things: the assumption being made about where gravitational lensing starts, and the assumption being made about where it peaks. The assumptions being made by the BICEP2 study are these:

Starting point for gravitational lensing: 50 multipole ( l )

Peak of gravitational lensing: .05 (close to 10^-1).

The problem is that this is a shrunken estimate, an extreme low-ball projection. The first graph in this post (in which l is the multipole) gives a very different, much-larger projection:

Starting point for gravitational lensing: 2 multipole

Peak of gravitational lensing: .2

In fact, most of the estimates that you will find (made prior to the BICEP2 study) match this much larger estimate for gravitational lensing. Indeed, the most recent POLARBEAR observations support these larger estimates, by showing the peak of the gravitational lensing at a much higher point than the peak in the BICEP2 graph.

Why is this important? If the larger estimate of gravitational lensing is correct, then all of the BICEP2 observations can be explained by assuming gravitational lensing (not cosmic inflation) as the source of the radiation. For example, if the larger projection of gravitational lensing is correct, then we have a model of gravitational lensing similar to the green line below, which can explain all of the BICEP2 observations without requiring any cosmic inflation in the universe's first second.

To force their observations to fit a theory of cosmic inflation, the BICEP2 study chose to present a shrunken, low-ball estimate of gravitational lensing.

Outrageous Fudge Number 2: Shrinking the Dust Projection

When they estimated the amount of b-mode polarization produced by cosmic dust, the BICEP2 team almost admitted that they didn't have what they needed to make an accurate projection:

The main uncertainty in foreground modeling is currently the lack of a polarized dust map. (This will be alleviated soon by the next Planck data release.) In the meantime we have therefore investigated a number of existing models and have formulated two new ones.

The team then present a graph showing some models they selected, models that minimize the amount of dust, and suggest that dust is no big problem when trying to measure signals from cosmic inflation. The low-ball models selected are inconsistent with some previous estimates, which estimate that dust should be blocking all or most of any b-mode polarization produced by cosmic inflation.

See, for example, this scientific paper, which on page 2 predicts a level of dust polarization many times greater than the amount projected by the BICEP2 study (as does this graph from a scientific conference). The relevant graph is shown at the beginning of this blog post.

 

It was almost rather like this:

Previous scientists: How on earth can we find a signal from cosmic inflation with all this cosmic dust all over the places we're looking for the signal, dust that blocks what we're looking for?

BICEP2 scientists: Dust? What dust?

Of course, the BICEP2 study needed to shrink and low-ball the dust projections, to clear the field for their triumphant announcement of evidence for cosmic inflation, and to try to rule out dust as the source of their observations. This was another biased case of artificially stomping on a data curve to get observations to fit a favored explanation of the data.

In an attempt to rule out dust as the source of their observations, and bolster their case for cosmic inflation (in the universe's first second) as the source of their observations, the BICEP2 team ran some simulations (using lots of subjective, hand-picked inputs) that they say show that their observations have characteristics “atypical” of dust. That is very lame and unconvincing reasoning – rather like arguing that a particular light seen in the sky is an alien spaceship because it has characteristics “atypical” of an airplane. The graph of their simulations (Figure 8 in the study) still shows a perfectly decent chance that dust or synchrotron radiation is the source of their observations, not cosmic inflation.

The End Result: A Half Fit

We might expect with these two examples of curve fiddling that the end results would match the favored model exactly. But no: even with these heroic efforts, the BICEP2 graph below only shows 5 out of 9 data points matching the favored model, with several of the data points far off of the model. 

Can We Trust the Claimed Data Points?

When a study is based on simple data observations, you can trust the observer to record the observations correctly, unless you think he might be careless or prone to fraud. For example, if a scientist measures the temperature on a particular day, you pretty much have to trust him, unless you think he might be faking it. But in a case such as the BICEP2 study we have a very different situation. The scientists took raw data, and subjected it to an extremely complicated process of transformations, summaries, and modeling. The process was almost like the process shown in the visual below:

Source: wikiuniversity, Howard Community College

Can we be confident that the BICEP2 team got this extremely complicated process right, and that the data points shown in their final graph are correct? No, we cannot be. This is because it is rather clear from these examples I have shown that the BICEP2 team had a strong experimental bias. Evidently they wanted very much to make their observations match a storyline that the observations came from primordial cosmic inflation. Given this very strong partiality, there are any number of ways in which things could have gone wrong because of experimental bias. At any number of points in the incredibly complicated data transformation process, the scientists may have made decisions influenced by their desire to end up with results favoring a theory of cosmic inflation, decisions that more objective and impartial scientists would not have made.

We need studies like the BICEP2 study to be performed by objective, non-biased scientists without any favored agenda (scientists with an attitude of “let the chips fall where they may”), rather than scientists who seem determined to hammer square pegs into round holes, in order to fit some desired preconceived storyline.

Postscript: See this link for a National Geographic story on how the BICEP2 results may be due to dust, not cosmic inflation. I'm not accusing any on the BICEP2 team of deliberately misleading anyone. I merely think that their desire to have an inflation-related result (good for their own careers) has influenced their paper, leading to some presentation and interpretation decisions that might not have been made by a more impartial set of writers. 

Post-postscript: I didn't originally mention the pathetic way the BICEP2 paper handled the issue of synchrotron radiation.  Synchrotron radiation is a widespread phenomenon that produces the same b-mode polarization observed by BICEP2.  This type of radiation can be produced by many types of high-energy violent events inside and outside of our galaxy. Rather than making any substantial attempt to show that synchrotron radiation is not the source of their observations (which would require many pages), the BICEP2 paper (in sections 9.2 and 9.3) has the skimpiest treatment of the topic, using only 6 sentences to address it. This discussion calls section 9 of their paper "the most ridiculous handwave of all time in the whole history of physics."

Post-post-postscript:  Today a physicist has on his blog a post that says the BICEP2 team made some big error in their dust projection (an error along the same lines as I insinuate in this post). He says, "However, at this point, there seems to be no statistically significant evidence for the primordial B-modes of inflationary origin in the CMB [cosmic microwave background]."

Yet another postscript: see this post for a discussion of a talk at Princeton University in which a scientist gives a presentation that gives a devastating blow to the inflated claims of the BICEP2 study. The scientist gives projections of dust and gravitational lensing which show how such common phenomena (not from the Big Bang or cosmic inflation) can explain the BICEP2 observations.

The Main Argument for a Simulated Universe is Self-Destroying

The theory that we live in a simulated universe continues to attract attention, and it seems like a month never goes by without a web site producing a headline such as: Do We Live in a Simulated Universe? But the argument given for such a possibility is basically the same old argument that has been circulating since Nick Bostrom advanced it quite a few years ago.

The argument goes something like this:

1. The universe is billions of years old, and contains billions of galaxies, each containing many millions or billions of stars.
2. It is therefore likely that advanced civilizations arose on many planets long ago.
3. Such advanced civilizations would have fantastically advanced computing powers, including the ability to create incredibly complicated simulations so realistic they would be indistinguishable from reality.
4. Even if only a small fraction of such civilizations created such simulations, the total number of simulations they would create would be incredibly high, probably many times higher than the total number of planets containing civilizations similar to ours.
5. We therefore should conclude that we are probably living in such a simulation, rather than living on a real planet in a non-simulated universe. 
   
   
   
   Artistic depiction of a culture living on a moon revolving around an alien planet
   
   

There are a number of problems with such an argument, some of which I mentioned in a previous post entitled Why You Are Not Living in a Computer Simulation. One of the objections I made in that post is that it is very doubtful that any extraterrestrial civilization could produce a simulation matching the reality we observe. Some have estimated that such a simulation could be produced by creating a planet-sized computer. I doubt the feasibility of creating a computer that large. I also think it is very doubtful that even a computer the size of the sun would be enough to produce a simulation of what we observe, given the nearly infinite number of combinations that are possible, assuming that free will is real. 

 

In this post I will discuss a different objection to such an argument for a simulated universe, an objection I did not previously make. The objection I refer to is simply that the basic argument for a simulated universe is an argument that is self-destroying. This is because the argument reaches a conclusion that ends up destroying some of its premises.

To understand the concept of a self-destroying argument, let us consider a much simpler example. Consider the following argument:

1. John was born in the city of San Ansales in the United States.
2. Everyone born in the city of San Ansales looks like a Mexican.
3. People who look like Mexicans must have been born in Mexico.
4. Therefore John must have been born in Mexico.

This is a self-destroying argument, because the conclusion ends up destroying one of the premises used to derive the conclusion. If the conclusion is correct, and John was born in Mexico, then he cannot also have been born in the United States; and if he was not born in the United States, the whole argument falls apart.

The argument for a simulated universe discussed above is also a self-destroying argument. The argument reaches a conclusion that we are probably living in a simulated universe. But if we are living in such a simulated universe, there is no reason to believe in the first three premises of the argument. If we are living in a simulated universe, there is no reason to believe that the universe is billions of years old, no reason to believe that there are many other planets, and no reason to believe that there are other civilizations vastly older than ours.

If you assume that you are living in a simulated universe, what can you conclude about the existence of entities other than yourself? Almost nothing. You cannot conclude that observations of entities outside our planet correspond to an actual reality, because all such observations may simply be part of the fictional simulation. You cannot conclude that there really is a planet Earth, because your observations of our planet may merely be part of the simulation.

Shockingly, if you assume that you are living in a simulated universe, you cannot even assume that the people you observe with your own eyes are real people who exist, either physically or as people who are experiencing a simulation that partially matches the simulation you observe. You may have observations of your mother, but if you assume that you are living in a simulation you cannot assume that your mother really exists, and cannot even assume that your mother is at least experiencing some simulation similar to the simulation you are experiencing. What you perceive as your mother could be just a part of the simulation, like a CGI character in a video game or a movie. Or course, if you are living in a simulation, you also cannot assume that any of the people you see on the street really exist, either in a physical form or even in the minimal form of minds that are actually experiencing consciousness.

There is no reason to think that simulators creating a simulation would follow some “rule of simulation” which says that any human perceived in a simulation must also be experiencing his own simulation. So if you are in a simulation, there is no particularly good reason for believing that anyone else is experiencing the simulation other than yourself.

So once you have assumed that you are living in a simulated universe, you are only entitled to assume two things: that you exist at least as some form of consciousness, and that some unknown external agent exists that is producing the simulation you are experiencing.

Given such a radical situation, in which you can't even assume that anyone else you perceive really exists outside of your mind, it is very clear indeed that once you assume that you are in a simulation there is then no reason to believe that there exist other stars, other planets, and other alien civilizations, nor is there any reason to believe that the universe is old enough to have produced technically advanced civilizations on other planets.

This, then, is why the basic argument for a simulated universe is self-destroying. It starts out with some fairly plausible premises. But once it reaches its conclusion, that conclusion destroys the very premises used to reach that conclusion.

We can have no basis for assuming that there really are highly advanced extraterrestrial civilizations capable of simulating our experience unless we believe that we live in a real, material, non-simulated universe. But if we believe that, we cannot possibly use the likelihood of such civilizations as a basis for assuming that we live in a simulation.

3 Ways We Are Financing Our Own Ruin

The United Nations is out with a new report emphasizing the future perils from global warming. The report mentions problems being created right now by global warming: increased wildfires in North America, decreased food production in South America, and increased risk of diseases in Africa. The report highlights the many risks we will face in the future because of global warming. Among those risks are the risks that droughts will cause a huge portion of the United States to become a dry “dust bowl” before the end of the century, like the Dust Bowl of the 1930's.

Rusting silos in a Kansas "Dust Bowl" of 2085 A.D.

Secretary of State John Kerry made a statement emphasizing the dangers discussed in the report. "There are those who say we can't afford to act. But waiting is truly unaffordable. The costs of inaction are catastrophic," Kerry said.

Sounds like our government is going to seriously tackle the global warming problem, right? No. The truth is that in three huge ways our government is helping to finance our own environmental ruin. Let me list these ways.

Way Number 1: The Subsidizing of Heavy Auto Use

A significant fraction of global warming is caused by auto pollution, and the government exacerbates that type of pollution by heavily subsidizing auto use, as if it wanted us all to drive more.

Norman Myers and Jennifer Kent are the authors of the book Perverse Subsidies: How Tax Dollars Can Undercut the Environment and the Economy. They say that “the US car culture is supported by myriad direct subsidies,” and start out by listing various subsidies amounting to about 15 billion dollars a year. Then the authors considers the cost of road-building, road maintenance, bridge building, and bridge maintenance. This has a cost as high as 135 billion dollars a year. A part of this is directly paid by auto owners, in the form of highway tolls and bridge tolls; but most of it is paid by general taxes paid even by people who don't drive.

The authors also consider the cost of the roughly 3.5 million auto injuries and 40,000 auto fatalities that occur each year. The cost of that ranges between 33 billion and 360 billion, a large fraction of which is paid even by non-drivers. This is because a huge fraction of the people who are injured in auto accidents are covered by tax-funded health insurance programs such as Medicaid and Medicare (or other health insurance programs partially supported by tax dollars). There are also many thousands of people who get respiratory diseases from auto pollution, and many of them have their treatment covered by government healthcare programs.

Adding up the total cost of all subsidies for the US car culture, Myers and Kent reach an estimate of about 695 billion dollars per year.

Way Number 2: The Subsidizing of Meat Eating

A huge fraction of global warming is caused by all the agricultural overhead needed to support meat eating. A recent report estimates that by 2050 half of all agricultural emissions of global warming pollution will be due to the raising of beef and lamb – even though such food will amount to only 3 percent of human calorie intake. Cattle also make a huge contribution to global warming by emitting methane, which is a global warming pollutant much worse than carbon dioxide.

In the United States, meat eating is heavily subsidized. You do not pay the real cost of meat when you go to McDonald's and shell out a few dollars for a Big Mac. Of the roughly 200 billion dollars spent to subsidize agriculture between 1995 and 2010, two thirds of it went to crops used for animal feed or tobacco or cotton. Only 50 billion dollars went to support the growing of crops directly eaten by humans.

We also subsidize meat eating indirectly, by means of government funding of health insurance that very often goes to pay for diseases that are worsened by meat eating, diseases such as coronary heart disease and diabetes.

Way Number 3: The Subsidizing of Extravagant Houses

A significant fraction of global warming is caused by people who live large, and buy and maintain large houses. Newly built large houses have an extremely high environmental cost. Even when you buy a large house from someone else, you end up committing yourself to high energy expenditures for heating and cooling.

Our government worsens the environmental cost of living large by continuing policies that encourage people to buy big houses. The main example is the mortgage tax deduction, which encourages many people to buy bigger houses than they would normally buy.

A Tax Policy for Minimizing Global Warming Pollution

How could we reverse these policies, and adopt a tax policy that would encourage people to live in a way that helps preserve the environment? The answer is simple: end the subsidies, and make people pay the true cost of habits that are putting our planet in peril.

For autos, we could add a large tax on each gallon of gasoline (along with some corresponding measure to cover electric car users). So that drivers end up paying the real cost of driving, you might see a price of 7 dollars a gallon or 10 dollars a gallon at the gas pump, with most of that being a tax that would pay for all the costs of car culture. In regard to meat eating, besides ending subsidies for the growing of animal feed, we should have a federal meat tax that makes people pay the true environmental price of eating meat. In regard to house buying, we should end the mortgage tax deduction, and also enact a federal tax on house sales that discourages extravagant living. Such a tax could be based on family size. For example, a family of 4 might pay no federal house-buying tax if they were buying a house for $325,000 in Vermont, but they might pay a significant tax if they bought a house for $500,000.

If such taxes placed an unfair burden on the lower and middle classes, they should be matched by raising other taxes on the rich. 

 
No doubt many will react very negatively to such ideas. Yesterday we had a very well-reasoned post on a major site, one entitled The Economic Case for Taxing Meat. The comments on the post were almost all extremely negative. Everybody's attitude seems to be: What? You want ME to sacrifice a little? God forbid!

If people in this country had taken that attitude during World War II, there would now be Nazi swastikas flying over all of our post offices.