Davies' Dubious Defense of a Double Standard

In my blog post several days ago I complained about what I called a double standard followed by many a modern physicist. The double standard is that theoretical physicists spend huge amounts of time speculating about strange, far-out concepts such as spacetime wormholes, time travel, parallel universes, string theory and multiverses (things for which there is no observational support), but the same individuals dismiss as nonsense many possibilities such as ESP for which there is a great deal of evidence (much of it accumulated by scientists and documented in scientific papers that have been published for decades). That evidence includes compelling ganzfeld studies that show a success rate of about 31% greatly in excess of the expected success rate of 25%. For example, this study says, “if one considered all the available published articles up to and including 1997 (i.e., Milton and Wiseman’s 30 studies, plus 10 new studies), 29 studies that used standard ganzfeld protocols yielded a cumulative hit rate that was significantly above chance (31%).”   An ESP study involving only artistically gifted people reported a success rate of 50%, twice the success rate expected by chance.

Schematic depiction of ESP

The very next day I read a book The Eerie Silence by physicist Paul Davies that contained a passage that almost seemed to have been written in response to my blog post. He discussed exactly the same discrepancy I discussed, using the same term that I used (“double standard”) to describe it; however Davies tried to defend this double standard.

Before trying to rebut this reasoning by Davies, let me make clear that I am a longtime Paul Davies fan. I have enjoyed many books he has written, and in 19 cases out of 20 I find his reasoning to be convincing. But in the example I will now discuss, I think Davies fails to come up with a convincing argument.

Davies starts out like this:

The point about modern physics is that weird entities like dark matter or neutrinos are not proposed as isolated speculations, but as part of a large body of detailed theory that predicts them. They are linked to familiar and well-tested physics through a coherent mathematical scheme. In other words, they have a place in well-understood theory. As a result, their prior probability is high.

Davies is on extremely dubious ground here. Neutrinos are predicted by the Standard Model of Physics, but dark matter is not at all predicted by that theory. There are no particles of dark matter mentioned in the Standard Model of Physics. Physicists believe in the likelihood of dark matter not for theoretical reasons but because of observational reasons, because they need dark matter to help explain certain observations. Exactly the same thing can be said about ESP.

Dark matter is not at all “linked to familiar and well-tested physics through a coherent mathematical scheme.” It is instead a completely mysterious alleged thing that we basically know nothing about. We have zero tested equations that describe dark matter, and also zero equations that describe ESP. That really leaves dark matter and ESP in the same ballpark.

In the case of a similar and equally important mysterious phenomenon – dark energy – we can say that there is a strong theoretical basis for believing that there is something like dark energy. However, the problem is that the theory (quantum field theory) tells us dark energy should be at least a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times more powerful than it is. This is the widely discussed “vacuum catastrophe,” often referred to as the worst prediction in the history of science. Scientists continue to believe in dark energy, even though their theories are almost infinitely out of whack with our observations about how much dark energy exists. So is dark energy something that is “linked to familiar and well-tested physics through a coherent mathematical scheme”? No it isn't. You can't use such language when the theory gives an answer that is wrong by a factor of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000. So any claim of theoretical rectitude can't be used for dark energy – but scientists continue to believe in it.

In truth, neither dark matter nor dark energy is part of “well understood theory.” They are mysterious things that we do not have any well-established theory for (at best we have half-baked, super-speculative or “way off the mark” theories). The same thing can be said about multiverses, parallel universes, time travel and wormholes.

I may also note that Davies errs when he suggests that the “prior probability” of something is “high” when it can be “linked to familiar and well-tested physics through a coherent mathematical scheme.” With sufficient ingenuity, a physicist can create all kinds of bizarre, improbable theories that are linked in some way to existing physics. Inventive physicists have done that, creating a thousand and one conflicting theories of time, space, particles, and forces, including countless different varieties of string theory, inflation theory and quantum gravity. The fact that you can somehow link your theory in with existing physics does not show it has even one chance in 100 of being correct. As Davies himself says in another book, “It is easy to construct artificial universe models, albeit impoverished ones bearing only a superficial resemblance to the real thing, which are nevertheless mathematically and logically self-consistent” (Information and the Nature of Reality, page 68).

Regarding ESP, Davies says the following:

Telepathy is not obviously an absurd notion, but it would take a lot of evidence for me to believe in it because there is no properly worked out theory, and certainly no mathematical model to predict how it works or how strong it will be in different combinations. So I assign it a very low (but non-zero) prior probability. If someone came up with a plausible mechanism for telepathy backed up a proper mathematical model which linked it to the rest of physics, and if the theory predicted specific results – for example, that the 'telepathic power' would fall off in a well-defined way as the distance increases, and would be twice as strong between same-sex subjects as mixed-sex subjects – I would sit up and take notice. I would then be fairly easily convinced if the experimental evidence confirmed the predictions. Alas, no such theory is on the horizon, and I remain extremely skeptical about telepathy in spite of the many amazing stories I have read. 
 

Here Davies professes quite a demanding set of criteria before we can believe something: (1) that we should only believe something if it is predicted by some mathematical model; (2) that this model should be “linked to the rest of physics”; (3) that the model should make specific numerical predictions that can be confirmed. Does it make sense to advance such a set of criteria as a prerequisite for believing in something? It certainly does not.

One reason is that a very large fraction of all things that we do believe in (inside and outside of the sciences) do not satisfy such a set of criteria. But we accept such things nonetheless because we have observations that compel us to believe in them. I refer to things such as love, hate, psychological discomfort, newly discovered species, gamma ray bursts, and earthquakes. Consider, for example, when a biologist discovers a new species of animal in Brazil. It is not at all something predicted by some mathematical model, but it is accepted as a new scientific finding nonetheless. Even in the hard physical sciences we have things that are accepted even though they are not at all predicted by existing models. A recent example is the discovery of the acceleration of the universe's expansion, which left scientists stunned, having been predicted by no popular theory.

What Davies describes here is a model of verification that is sometimes followed (but often not followed) in the world and physics and astronomy, but such a model of verification is actually uncommon in many other sciences. Sciences such as psychology, geology, and biology make relatively little use of mathematical models and prediction. If you pick up a textbook on zoology you will see almost no equations or mathematical models anywhere. In such sciences there is no standard at all that some new scientific conclusion must be supported by some mathematical model.

As for Davies' idea that ESP would need to be supported by some theoretical model “linked... to the rest of physics,” such a prerequisite does not make any sense. It amounts to saying, “I refuse to believe in something unless it is similar to things I have already learned.” I may note that some of the greatest advances in physics and astronomy occurred when scientists started to postulate things that did not fit in with the previous framework of ideas. When quantum mechanics was introduced, it did not fit in at all with physics as it had been previously understood. When the Big Bang theory was introduced, it did not fit in at all with the previous cosmological ideas of scientists such as Einstein, who favored the idea of an eternal, static universe.

Davies suggests the idea that we should not take an observed phenomena seriously unless we have a theory of how it works, one that makes good predictions. That is a misbegotten principle that scientists themselves do not follow. When scientists observe a new type of phenomenon, they accumulate observations for the phenomenon, and at the same time start working on theories to explain the phenomenon. It may be decades or centuries later that a theory arrives that finally explains the phenomenon. An example is pandemics. The phenomenon was studied for centuries before scientists such as Pasteur finally came up with a decent theory to explain it.

It would have made no sense around 1600 to have said, “Don't believe in pandemics – we don't have a good theory to explain it.” Another example is lightning. Scientists observed it for a long time, but did not develop a decent model to explain it until the 18^th century. It would have made no sense around 1500 to have said, “Don't believe in lightning – we don't have a good model to explain it.”

What Davies' criteria amounts to is a kind of plea that he should be excused from taking something seriously whenever that thing does not have characteristics that allow him to study it in the way that he is most familiar and comfortable with studying things. That's a lame type of reasoning. We can imagine the same type of reasoning being used by a biologist: “I refuse to believe in galaxies or other reputed deep space-objects, because I cannot view them through my microscope, or place them in my test tubes, or study them in a cage or an aquarium.”

A wiser approach is that we should take a phenomenon seriously whenever we have repeated compelling evidence for its existence, regardless of whether we have familiar off-the-shelf methods for studying the phenomenon, and regardless of whether the phenomenon comfortably meshes with our preconceptions.

Cosmic Heartbreak: A Science Fiction Story

Steve noticed her immediately on the first day of the ten-day National Parks tour. Her name was Lyra. She was young, blonde, and gorgeous. He sat next to her on the tour bus, and started up a conversation with her about the places they were going to see. She spoke very gently and rather slowly, in a strange accent Steve had never heard before.

Steve noticed that there were funny little gaps in her knowledge. When she told her he was a computer programmer, she sounded as if she had no idea what a computer programmer does. When he asked her about where she had grown up, she sounded very evasive. But Steve didn't care. All she had to do was look at him with those big beautiful eyes, and Steve would fall into a kind of trance, no matter what she was saying.

They went everywhere together on the tour. They started out at the Grand Canyon, and took a donkey ride near the rim. Then they went on a vehicle that went driving around Monument Valley. In the last half of the tour they hiked through the glories of Bryce Canyon National Park and Zion National Park. Somehow the beauty of the surroundings amplified the beauty of her face. To Steve she seemed like all the beautiful things in the world rolled into one.

By the time the bus started back to Las Vegas, Steve had made up his mind. He decided this was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and he had to act immediately. After all, he reasoned, Las Vegas is the traditional place for impulsive weddings.

When the tour ended and everyone got out of the bus, Steve begged Lyra to wait for him in front of the fountains at the Bellagio resort. He told her he'd be right back. Spotting a nearby jewelry store, he quickly bought an engagement ring, and rushed back to the fountains outside the Bellagio.

“Lyra,” Steve said, “I know we've known each only ten days, but it seems like I've known you all of my life. I know the Real Thing when it comes along, and this is the Real Thing. I've fallen hopelessly in love with you. Will you marry me?”

Lyra looked at him with sad eyes, and then said, “I'm afraid that's not possible.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“It's because I'm not one of your kind,” said Lyra.

“I don't care about your class or your religion or your ethnic background,” Steve said.

“No, I mean...I'm not a human being,” said Lyra.

“What are you talking about?” he said.

“You know I'm a tourist,” said Lyra. “But I'm not just a tourist from another country. I'm a tourist from another planet.”

It took a while before he finally believed this incredible story, but she finally convinced him. She and seven other aliens were here on planet Earth for only a few weeks, for the sake of seeing its most beautiful sites. She had to return soon to a place in the desert where a spaceship would descend from the sky, to take them back to their mother ship orbiting planet Earth. Then the aliens would all leave the solar system forever.

“But can't you stay with me here on this planet?” Steve asked sadly. “It's a beautiful planet – we can see all of it together.”

“I have taken this human form only temporarily,” said Lyra. “Soon I must return to my original bodily form, or I will die. That form is not one that you could ever love. It is a strange, alien form utterly unlike your own. If you were to ever see my real body, it would fill you with horror and disgust.”

“I feel so heartbroken,” said Steve. “The memory of you will haunt me forever. I'll never be able to get over you.”

“Do you mean that if one of your species becomes romantically attached to another person,” said Lyra, “and that person goes away forever, then that causes long-term anguish for the first person?”

“Of course it does,” said Steve.

“That's interesting,” said Lyra. “But don't worry, I can fix that.”

Lyra put her hands on Steve's skull, and she concentrated deeply for ten seconds. Then she took her hands away.

Steve looked around like someone who had awoken from a sleep. How on earth, he wondered, had he got to this location? His memory was all blurry and fuzzy. All he knew was that he was standing next to the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

“Hi, my name's Steve,” said Steve. “Somehow I have the vague feeling that we've met somewhere before.” He kind of winced after saying this, as it sounded like the stalest pick-up line ever. 

 

“No, we've never met,” said Lyra, “and I don't talk to strangers.” She walked away and never saw Steve again.

Steve was left with a very puzzled look on his face, wondering how he had spent the last ten days. 

 

 

NASA's Unbelievable Explanations for the Martian "Lights"

On two consecutive days, photographs from Mars seemed to show an unusual light on the horizon. Let's look at these photographs, and consider whether NASA's explanations for them are plausible.

The first photograph was taken by Navcam: Right B (NAV_RIGHT_B) onboard NASA's Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 588 (2014-04-02 09:04:28 UTC):

Below is a closeup of the unusual part of the image (which appears on the top left corner). 

The second photograph was taken the next day by Navcam: Right B (NAV_RIGHT_B) onboard NASA's Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 589 (2014-04-03 10:00:03 UTC).

Below is a closeup of the unusual part of the image, which appears on the top left corner.

Both photographs show what appear to be flashes of light on the surface of the horizon, with an orientation perpendicular to the horizon. It is as if the lights were shining straight up from the surface in the direction of the sky, without any diagonal slanting.

Three explanations have been put forth for the images by Justin Maki, a NASA imaging scientist. The first explanation is that the lights are reflections from a rock on the horizon. The second explanation is that the apparent lights are caused by a vent hole in the camera apparatus. The third explanation is that the apparent lights are caused by cosmic rays.

First, let's look at the cosmic ray explanation. This was immediately seized upon with great matter-of-fact dogmatic certitude by Nancy Atkinson at the Universe Today site (www.universetoday.com). But it is easy to show that cosmic rays don't work well as an explanation for both of the photographs.

A cosmic ray is a particle from deep space that sometimes appears as a little streak on a photograph. But a cosmic ray can come with equal likelihood from any direction, as suggested by the visual below.

Cosmic rays can arrive from any direction

Also, a cosmic ray might appear as a streak anywhere on a photograph. It is therefore very unlikely that a cosmic ray would cause what looks like a streak of light that appears on the horizon directly perpendicular to the horizon.

One can calculate the chance of this with a little math. Let's divide up the area shown in the photograph into about 50 vertical slices, one of which corresponds to the horizon line. The chance of a random cosmic ray matching the horizon line is therefore roughly about 1 in 50. The chance of the ray having an orientation directly perpendicular to the horizon is about 1 in 20. So the chance of you having a random cosmic ray appearing as something on the horizon and perpendicular to the horizon is about 1 in 50 times 1 in 20, or about 1 in 1000. The chance of such a coincidence occurring on two consecutive days is less than 1 in 1000 times 1 in 1000 (in other words, less than 1 in a million). Not impossible, but very, very unlikely.

Now let's look at the vent hole explanation. This explanation suffers from exactly the same problem as the cosmic ray explanation. If a little vent hole were causing a tiny bit of sunlight to leak into the camera, it is extremely unlikely that we would coincidentally have two consecutive days in which there appeared what looks like a flash of light on the horizon and perpendicular to the horizon.

The vent hole explanation is even more implausible than the cosmic ray explanation, because once you have adopted the vent hole explanation you are then wedded to the theory that there is a camera defect. Such a camera defect would have to keep on showing up again and again in photographs, but there is apparently no evidence of such a defect in photographs after April 3, 2014.

What about the third theory, the theory of a rock that is reflecting light? There are two reasons why such a theory does not hold water. The first is that Mars is much farther away from the sun than Earth. Ask yourself: have you ever seen a rock far away on the horizon reflecting light? You probably never saw that, and your chance of seeing it on Mars is much smaller, as the sun appears as a much smaller object in the Martian sky. Rocks are dull, non-reflective objects that do not reflect light to a significant degree. Glass and metal reflect light well; rocks do not. The only type of rocks that reflect light reasonably well are wet, round rocks like the rocks at the seashore; and such rocks presumably do not exist on Mars.

Try a Google image search for “rock glint” or "rock reflection" and you will find not one single good example of one. When we don't see rocks strongly reflecting sunlight on Earth, how could they be strongly reflecting light on Mars?

Another reason why the rock reflection theory is not plausible is that glints of light caused by reflections typically appear as star-shaped glints, not a straight upward line as shown in the photographs.

In short, none of the three theories that NASA has advanced holds up very well to scrutiny. We do not currently have a good explanation for the images that appear to show lights at the horizon.

I am not suggesting that this necessarily means that the lights are caused by some alien activity. There are numerous unusual possibilities, and not all of them involve aliens. The apparent lights could have been caused by geysers or the geological phenomenon known as a dust devil (a swirling column of dust). There could be some unusual phosphorescence going on, or some unusual outgassing of chemicals. I have no idea what exactly caused these image features that look like lights, but it is clear that the explanations given thus far by NASA are not persuasive. 

Postscript:

We have additional possible photos of lights on Mars in this photo (in the upper left corner)  and this photo.
 

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.