Quantum gravity

I recently asked an eminent physicist [Don Page] a question about the relationship between Relativity and quantum mechanics. Here's the exchange:

I was reading an interview with Roger Penrose from 10 years ago:

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/sep/06-discover-interview-roger-penrose-says-physics-is-wrong-string-theory-quantum-mechanics

The idea of parallel universes—many worlds—is a very human-centered idea, as if everything has to be understood from the perspective of what we can detect with our five senses. 

The trouble is, what can you do with it? Nothing. You want a physical theory that describes the world that we see around us. That’s what physics has always been: Explain what the world that we see does, and why or how it does it. Many worlds quantum mechanics doesn’t do that. Either you accept it and try to make sense of it, which is what a lot of people do, or, like me, you say no—that’s beyond the limits of what quantum mechanics can tell us. Which is, surprisingly, a very uncommon position to take. My own view is that quantum mechanics is not exactly right, and I think there’s a lot of evidence for that. It’s just not direct experimental evidence within the scope of current experiments.

You have called the real-world implications of quantum physics nonsensical. What is your objection?

Quantum mechanics is an incredible theory that explains all sorts of things that couldn’t be explained before, starting with the stability of atoms. But when you accept the weirdness of quantum mechanics [in the macro world], you have to give up the idea of space-time as we know it from Einstein. The greatest weirdness here is that it doesn’t make sense. If you follow the rules, you come up with something that just isn’t right.

Of course, this debate has raged for decades, with competing interpretations of quantum mechanics.  Penrose offes an interesting criticism, but it seems to beg the question. What if the world we see around us isn't all there is because there's more than one universe? In that case, the theory shouldn't describe or predict just one outcome, should it? 

Suppose both theories are true, only Relativity is true for our universe while quantum mechanics is true for more than one universe, including ours? Maybe Relativity accurately describes the space-time structure of our universe, but the quantum world is more fundamental than the macro world, which is generated by the quantum world, and the rules for the quantum world transcend the macro world of our particular universe? Our universe represents one set of quantum outcomes, but there are others. The rules of Relativity are specific to our universe, unlike the rules of quantum mechanics. Both theories would be mutually consistent because they describe distinct, overlapping domains. Perhaps the quantum structure of a universe is variable, so quantum mechanics must be more flexible to accommodate the variance, which makes it probabilistic in reference to any particular universe, since it doesn't single out any particular universe.  Does that make any sense? 

I tend to agree with you.  Roger Penrose seems to be among what I think is a small minority (which does not prove that he is wrong, though on this issue I tend to agree with the majority) that spacetime and general relativity is more fundamental than quantum theory.  My tentative position is that quantum theory is universally true (at least as what I see as the most conservative option), and that it implies that general relativity is not universally true but has a limited range of validity, though that range does seem to include most of our observable universe (the part we can observe, taking the very early universe, where GR may not apply, not to be observable by us).

In Defense of the Simulation

In recent weeks, there has been a little bit of discussion about the universe as a simulation.  I wanted to toss a few pennies into the mix and give a defense of the idea.  This is not to argue that I believe the world is actually a computer simulation or part of the Matrix or anything like that, but simply to point out that the idea has more going for it than a lot of people first realize and it is wise to consider rather than just brushing it off as if it has no merit.

The first line of reasoning is something I’ve mentioned before.  It actually fits Elon Musk’s argument on why he thinks the universe is a simulation, and I’ve also heard Neil deGrasse Tyson make a similar claim.  It deals with the statistical likelihood of us being in a simulation and if materialism is true, I believe it is an airtight argument.  The line of reasoning goes like this:

We have already advanced our computer technologies to such an extent that we can do very complex simulations right now.  The rate of computing is increasing so quickly that it seems that in a very short amount of time, we will be able to do such things as fully replicate a human mind.  In fact, we will be able to replicate more than one mind at one time.  The instant we are fully able to replicate a human mind, given materialism, the simulated mind will be self-aware and thinking.  Ultimately, there will be no difference between the simulated mind and our own physical mind.  In fact, in 2013 researchers were able to simulate one second of biological brain processing time using 82,944 processors over 40 minutes.  In theory, again given materialism, that network would have been identical to a normal human being’s brain with the awareness of one second of time passing.

So we are on the cusp of replicating human beings in a digital environment.  If materialism is true, there will be no difference in the mental space of the machine and the biological components.  In fact, materialism stipulates that we are all biological machines as it is.

But here’s where the math comes into play.  If the minds we mimic are indistinguishable from our own, and our own minds are the types of minds that design simulations, then it stands to reason that the digital minds we create are also going to create their own simulations.  And if we are able to simulate ourselves to such an extent that we are indistinguishable from our simulations, then so too our own simulations will be able to create their own simulations that are indistinguishable from themselves.  In short, if it is possible for us to do this, then it is a statistical certainty that we actually have already done this, as have the minds that we have created, and so on.

Given the fact that billions and billions of simulated worlds have therefore been created, the math game is simple.  There is one “real” world and billions and billions of simulated worlds that are indistinguishable from that “real” world.  Thus, the odds that you are in the one “real” world are billions and billions to one against.  Therefore, you are statistically certain to be in a simulation.

As stated throughout, the above line of reasoning only works if materialism is true.  Additionally, it relies on us actually getting to the pivotal point where we can actually replicate a mind exactly like our own.  But this line of reasoning is not the only line of reasoning leading toward the simulation conclusion.  So let me look at the second line of reasoning, which is the quantum world.

The world “quantum” comes from the fact that energy is dispensed in indivisible packets called quanta.  Similar to the concept of atoms, there is only so far you can subdivide until you reach the foundational limit.  But in the realm of pure number, the quanta does not make sense.  You can easily divide numbers on and on and on, until they reach an infinitesimal value, and even at that point you can still divide it an infinite number of times more.

But while you could do that in mathematically theory, in the real world you cannot.  The real world is quantized.  At first glance, it doesn’t make sense why that should be so.  However, those who have studied computers understand this quite easily.

If you use computers for math functions, you quickly realize there is a limit to the size of values.  You cannot divide an infinite number of times because at some point the computer runs out of the resources to hold the data needed to divide further.  Therefore, there is a fundamental limit in place, the absolute smallest amount of data you can go to, which is of course the bit, 0 or 1.

This means that computers, fundamentally, are quantized.  It is impossible to get around this.  The quanta is built into the foundation of how computing works.  So, while it is not apparent why such restrictions would be so in the “real” world, it is extremely obvious why they would be so in a simulated world.

We can even extend this metaphor further when we consider the role of observation in the way that experiments play out.  The most famous example of this is the double-slit experiment.  Briefly, for those who may not know it, when trying to determine if light was a particle or a wave, researchers shone a beam of light through a single slit and onto some photosensitive paper (i.e., a film plate).  What showed up is what you’d expect if light was made of particle-like photons.  However, when light was shone through two slits set a short distance apart, what appeared on the photosensitive paper showed interference zones, which happen with waves.  This held up even when the light was dimmed down so that it was only releasing one photon at a time.  Each photon would make a single distinct point of impact, much like a particle would, but over time the design that built up showed the interference pattern of a wave.

Even this is not truly the most remarkable aspect of this experiment, however.  When scientists tried to determine which of the two slits a single photon went through, the simple fact that they were observing the experiment meant that what appeared on the photosensitive paper no longer showed interference.  In other words, by trying to observe which slit a photon went through, the photon no longer acted like a wave at all: it behaved as if it had always been particles.

Why this happens is still not understood.  Clearly, the act of observing the experiment interferes with the experiment and changes things, but it is not clear why putting a measurement device on one slit and not the other changes the behavior of particles going through the slit without any measurement device too.  And if you really want to melt your brain, look up the quantum eraser experiment, wherein by “erasing” the data that one would have learned by the observation so that you cannot use it, the interference pattern reemerges.  Yes, this means that whether or not the interference pattern emerges is completely dependent upon whether or not you can know which slit the photons pass through.  If you can know, there is no interference; if you can’t know, there is interference.

Again, this behavior seems quite confusing and not intuitive at all, at least in our “real” world.  But if you were designing a simulation, it would make perfect sense.  I know this because at one point I was going to design a simulation that would pit two countries in a war against each other.  A player would control one of the countries, controlling the army’s budget and things of that nature.  But because I was thinking of countries with populations of millions, it quickly became apparent that it would be too calculation intensive to replicate millions of units for each country.  Instead, I could use statistics to compress the data.

Each country would have a birth and a death rate.  Therefore you’d have a certain number of citizens at a certain age, with a certain number who could have children, and a certain number in the work force, and so on.  One could easily just make up a bunch of actuary tables to accomplish this.

But the problem is that it would be a very boring game.  If you’re playing the game, you want something rendered on screen.  But what would render?  Easy: what the player is looking at.  So if you zoomed into a specific city looking at specific people in a specific building, then those individuals would be actualized.  Where they come about was based on the statistical likelihood of what would be there, but once rendered they would become definite objects.  At least up to the point when the player was no longer looking at them, at which point they would go back to being nothing but a probability.

What struck me when I was musing on this was that’s exactly how sub-atomic particles seem to behave.  When you’re not looking directly at them, they behave in a statistical manner, having a probability of being in a specific location at a specific time.  But once you “zoom in” and look at them directly, they become definite, specific entities.

This even gave rise to a form of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, because you could only see what was on your screen.  What wasn’t rendered was only probability.  And that meant that if you tracked a single entity with enough precision that it was on your screen, you had no knowledge of what was near it that could affect it (such as an enemy soldier that might “kill” that entity).  And if you zoomed out enough to see what was near it, you would lose the specificity of the location of that entity.

In designing this simulation, this behavior was needed because it would save computer processing time in not having to keep track of millions upon millions of individual entities.  It seems reasonable that if we are in a simulation, the same thing would be in effect now, even if the fundamental computer running our software is trillions of times more advanced than what we have today.

My final stream of evidence involves a similar concept, which is the relativity of time, mass, and length.  We know that time slows down (relative to stationery objects) the faster that an object moves, up to the speed of light where time stops completely.  Equally, the mass of an object increases up to infinity when it is at the speed of light (this is why photons, which move at the speed of light, have to be mass-less, because if they had any mass it would have to be infinite).  Additionally, the length of an object shrinks, relative to a stationery object, the faster that it moves.

All of these things are linked together, therefore, and it’s almost like there is a governor attached.  Again, we see similar things in simulations.  Calculations have caps in place to keep the simulation moving smoothly.  If you use more resources in one area, you have to free them up in another area, or else the whole thing gets bogged down.  This sort of limitation is exactly what we see in computer systems today, put in place to keep things from blowing up and becoming useless.

In conclusion, I’ll just say this.  I’m not advocating that we actually are in a simulation.  By no means.  But if I were going to design a simulation of the universe, the way I would have done it leads toward the very things that we see in the universe around us.  So make of that what you will.

Quantum gravity

Ever since the development of quantum mechanics in the 20s,  there's often thought to be two conflicting pictures of the physical world: the subatomic domain is indeterministic while the macroscopic domain is deterministic. Put another way, Relativity is deterministic while quantum mechanics is indeterministic. Despite some of the best minds in science laboring to reconcile the two theories, the conflict remains intractable. Or so I frequently read. 

In fairness, I've overstated the issue. Some interpretations of quantum mechanics are deterministic. The hidden variables interpretation is deterministic. But from what I've read, Bell's theorem, while it didn't rule out hidden variables, made life very confining for the possibility of hidden variables.

The many-worlds interpretation is deterministic. Every alternate possibility that's physically possible must play out. Hence, the multiverse. That's my understanding. 

But for whatever reason, there are prominent physicists who are dissatisfied with that interpretation.

You can also have antirealists like Stephen Hawking who don't think there's a real conflict because quantum mechanics is just a mathematical model. Likewise, I don't think Bas van Fraassen believes in "theoretical entities" like elementary particles. 

I myself don't have a stake in this issue. Physical indeterminism is compatible with theological determinism. 

What I'd like to briefly discuss is a general principle. Are physical determinism and indeterminism irreconcilable? Can both be true in different respects? 

There are, for instance, situations where the initial state may be indeterministic, but cross a threshold into determinism. For instance, the way a chess game begins doesn't predetermine how it will end. At the outset there may be an infinite number of pathways to victory or defeat. But as the game progresses many pathways are (literally) taken off the table. There comes a turning-point in the game where it's no longer possible for both players to win. One is bound to lose. In x number of moves, he'll be checkmated.

Good players can see that coming and concede defeat before it happens. So something that was initially indeterministic can become inevitable.

Another example is gridlock. At one time of day there may be multiple viable routes out of town, but if all the arterials become too congested, there comes a point where the hapless driver can't go forward, backward, right, or left. 

To take a final example: consider the floor plan for a house. Suppose you begin with square footage. Say you have 5000 sf to play with. At that initial stage the possible floor plans are endless. Could be one story, two stories, three stories. Could be square, rectangular, hexagonal, and so on.

However, as you begin to pencil in rooms, that reduces available space for additional rooms. Likewise, the location of some rooms increasingly limits where to put other rooms. As the process continues, you narrow down the range of options. There comes a point at which earlier choices select for the remaining choices. They literally squeeze out alternative configurations. 

So, as a genera principle, I don't seen an inherent conflict between physical determinism and indeterminism. But it may well be that the relationship between Relativity and quantum mechanics isn't analogous to my comparisons.

A theory of everything

http://frame-poythress.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/PoythressVernSemioticAnalysisOfTheObserver.pdf

The ethics of mature creation

The problem with the mature creation view is that the phenomena that indicate "coherent age" contains information about the past which would not be otherwise present if the past was unreal. Take the example of distant starlight. Holding the mature creation view would indicate that the light from any stellar body beyond about 10,000 light-years away consist of photons created in transit. Therefore, such light is not truly indicative of what is happening in the stellar bodies. But when the light portrays for example a supernova, taking the mature creation view must say that the supernova did not actually happen since the light containing the information about the supernova was created in transit. How is this not deceptive, to indicate an astronomical event which did not actually happen? 

http://puritanreformed.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-problems-with-mature-creation-view.html

i) I think Daniel does a nice job of framing the issue. I find his objection somewhat ironic, for even though I'm more sympathetic to OEC than he is, I am, at the same time, more sympathetic to mature creation than he is. Indeed, I think that mature creation is true to some degree. It's just a question of how much. And once you allow for mature creation, it's not easy to identify a cut-off point that isn't arbitrary.

ii) The charge of deception is the classic charge against mature creation. However, I rarely if ever find any critic discuss the nature of deception. What are the necessary conditions of deception? 

a) Normally, deception is defined as making a false statement with the intention to deceive. However, even a true statement can be deceptive. Take a lawyer who asks a "simple question" to elicit a "simple answer." Giving a true answer will be misleading because it lacks sufficient context. 

Moreover, it's possible for the speaker to make a true statement that he mistakenly believes to be false. 

b) Is a false expectation is a necessary condition? Someone can only be deceived if he expected the truth to be different. 

c) However, the issue of false expectation raises another issue: who bears the onus? is it speaker's duty not to foil the listener's expectation, or listener's duty not to have that expectation in the first place? 

It's hard to state a universal principle. If a listener has a reasonable expectation, then perhaps there's a the prima facie onus on the speaker not to foil the listener's expectation. 

Yet that's overdrawn. Even reasonable expectations can be wrong. We're fallible. So it would be extreme to say it's unethical to ever contradict a reasonable expectation.

If, however, the listener has an unreasonable expectation, then it's his fault, and not the speaker's, if the speaker foils his expectation. 

d) Put another way, the truth can be deceptive if the listener has a false expectation. But if his expectation was unreasonable, then he only has himself to blame. 

Did the speaker deceive you? Or did you deceive yourself by entertaining a false expectation? 

So one consideration when considering the ethics of deception is a justified or unjustified expectation. Was the speaker a deceiver, or was the listener self-deceived? 

iv) Take parents who adopt a newborn. They don't tell him that he's adopted. And they don't tell him he's not adopted, either. They just don't say.

They don't tell him when he's a child because they fear that would foster a sense of insecurity and rejection. They don't tell him when he's an adolescent because that's an emotionally unstable period of life. There never seems to be the right time to tell him. 

So he grows up believing these were his biological parents. Is that deceptive? If so, is that unethical? 

v) Does everyone have the same expectations about anything? Is there such a thing as a uniform human expectation? If not, then isn't deception or self-deception inevitable? Isn't a communicator bound to deceive some people some of the time?

Unless everybody has the same expectations, it doesn't seem possible to avoid deceiving some people. There's no intention to deceive. Rather, deception is the ineluctable side-effect of native listeners. 

a) For instance, there are literal-minded people who never get satire. They always read it straight. Did the satirist deceive them? Is satire unethical because some people take it seriously?

b) Likewise, there are naive people who are easily surprised by things that don't surprise cynical people. Is it the speaker's duty to avoid confusing naive people? Or is it the listener's duty not to be so naive? 

c) What about optical illusions? In a sense, they're only illusory if you don't recognize that they are optical illusions. But does every observer have that level of sophistication? Aren't some observers fooled by optical illusions?

Or take an audiovisual illusion–like seeing lightning before you hear thunder. We understand that because we know that lightwaves travel faster than soundwaves. Even though it's the same event, it seems to be separated in time. The effect is observer-relative. Depends on whether you witness the storm overhead or at a distance. But a prescientific observer doesn't have that interpretive framework. 

Scientific theories like Relativity and quantum mechanics have counterintuitive implications for time and space. They contradict common sense expectations. Take the twin paradox, Schrödinger's cat, or quantum nonlocality. Would it be unethical for God to make a world like that?

vi) At the risk of belaboring my stock illustration, a period movie set "contains information" about past nonevents. These include period stage props. Antique replicas. 

Even if the movie is based on a true story, there will be fictional details to fill in the gaps. Perhaps the director builds a set of Dodge City, based on historical photographs. But all he has are pictures of the facade. Even though the interior may be an accurate reconstruction of 19C saloons, that's not what the Long Branch Saloon really looked like inside. If you went back in time, that's not what you'd see. 

Likewise, here will be extras playing bit characters who never existed. Moreover, Dodge City never existed at the location of the movie set. And the 19C town doesn't exist in the here and now. 

vii) Now, Daniel might raise the obvious objection that when we watch a movie set in the Old West, we know this isn't really the past. Rather, it's an artistic recreation of the past. So it's not deceptive. Not dishonest. 

But that depends on the viewer. Does a young child who watches a Western know that? 

Falling apples

I’m going to comment on some statements by John Byl:

Let me note first that the above diagram is more a reflection of the ignorance of modern scholars than of ancient civilization. Ancient man was a much keener observer of the night sky than modern desk-bound scholars. They were well aware that the stellar sky rotates daily. Hence it cannot be a solid hemisphere held up by pillars fixed on the earth. Further, they were well aware of months and seasons. Hence the sun and moon were not fixed in a stellar shell. They were also well aware that the sun and moon were much more distant than flying birds.

http://bylogos.blogspot.com/2010/02/genesis-and-ancient-cosmology.html

Here Dr. Byl is taking issue with the cosmography which liberals like Peter Enns and Paul Seely impute to Scripture. However, let’s compare this criticism with something else Byl has written:

Closely related to these geometrical models are some unusual conceptions of the universe. For example, Fritz Braun (1973) asserts, based on his interpretation of biblical texts, that the Earth should be inverted. The Earth's surface is the inside of a hollow sphere enclosing the Sun, Moon, and stars. Heaven is at the center of the inverted universe, thus making this model literally theocentric (see Figure 4).

However, this model is not that easily dispensed with. It can be devised so that disproof is impossible.      The above tests take for granted that the normal laws of physics hold. In particular, light is expected to travel in roughly straight lines and rockets, in the absence of forces, are expected to move at a constant velocity. But what if this is no longer the case?

     

The hollow Earth model can be derived from the more usual picture of the universe via a simple mathematical transformation called a "geometric inversion". The procedure is very simple. For each point in the universe, measure its distance r from the center of the Earth and move the point

along the center-to-point line to a new distance 1/r. The result of this operation is that all objects originally outside the Earth (e.g., mountains, houses, clouds and stars) are now inside, and vice versa (see Figure 5). Inversion is a conformal transformation, which means that local shapes are preserved.

The laws of physics are also inverted, with consequences that may seem strange for those accustomed to thinking in terms of the more conventional universe. For example, light now travels in circular arcs. Also, a rocket launched from the Earth to outer - or, rather, now "inner" - space will shrink and slow down as it approaches the central heaven, never quite reaching it (see Figure 5).

     

Consequently, Braun's inverted universe is observationally indistinguishable from more conventional models of the universe. Yet, although the two models are empirically identical, they involve quite different ways of viewing reality. Braun's model reflects his theological beliefs. Again, the mathematical model functions here to connect a particular worldview with observations, thus making that worldview more viable.

Note that, if we were to take a point on the Earths’ surface as the center of inversion then we would get a flat Earth (i.e., this is the stereographic projection of geography). As you travel to the edge you become infinitely large at the edge, so that you re-appear at the right (see Figure 6). Again, this model is observationally undisprovable.

www.csc.twu.ca/byl/modelstest.doc

So, in principle, the apparent sphericity of the earth could be an optical illusion. A flat earth and a spherical earth are empirically equivalent.

But if it’s possible to save appearances in reference to a flat earth, then to say the ancients were “well aware that the sun and moon were much more distant than flying birds” could also be an optical illusion.

Another interesting line of thought is pursued by Peter Leithart (A House for My Name 2000), who sees many similarities between Genesis 1 and the building of the temple. God's universe is described as His three-storied house. Also G.K. Beale (The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism 2008) contends that Genesis is expressing its theological conceptions of the universe, understood to be a huge temple for God (p.163). Hence the architectural depictions of the temple-house are to be understood figuratively. He argues that Israel's temple is a small model of the cosmos, which is a huge temple. (for more on this see the post Cosmology and Heaven). Beale specifically (pp.196-201) rebuts Seely's notion of a solid raqia.

http://bylogos.blogspot.com/2010/02/genesis-and-ancient-cosmology.html

i) Yet the hermeneutical approach taken by Beale isn’t confined to a flat-earth/triple-decker universe. Isn’t that equally applicable to geocentrism? Both could be architectural metaphors which foreshadow the temple and the tabernacle. Yet Byl defends geocentrism. Can he deploy Beale against Enns without having the same approach undercut his commitment to geocentrism?

ii) Apropos (i), assuming (ex hypothesis) that there’s prima facie Biblical evidence for geocentrism, isn’t there, by the same token, prima facie Biblical evidence for a flat earth or triple-decker universe? Does Byl subscribe to a flat earth? If not, where does he draw the line, hermeneutically speaking?

This denies the perspicuity of Scripture and exaggerates the difficulty of reading Gen.1-11. Contrast this with Sproul's own earlier (2006) words ("What is RC Sproul's Position on Creation"):

For most of my teaching career, I considered the framework hypothesis to be a possibility. But I have now changed my mind. I now hold to a literal six-day creation, the fourth alternative and the traditional one. Genesis says that God created the universe and everything in it in six twenty-four-hour periods. According to the Reformation hermeneutic, the first option is to follow the plain sense of the text. One must do a great deal of hermeneutical gymnastics to escape the plain meaning of Genesis 1-2. The confession makes it a point of faith that God created the world in the space of six days.

Is Dr Sproul now repudiating his Reformation hermeneutic of following "the plain meaning of the text", thereby reverting to his earlier hermeneutical gymnastics?

http://bylogos.blogspot.com/2012/07/rc-sproul-waffles-on-creation.html

i) That’s a valid critique of Sproul on his own grounds. Byl has caught him in an inconsistency. So that’s fair as far as it goes.

ii) However, that doesn’t mean the rest of us should define perspicuity in terms of the “plain sense” of the text. Is “the plain sense of the text” equivalent to “Reformed hermeneutics”? Suppose you were a 14C Western European. To you, the “plain sense” of Jn 3:5 is baptismal regeneration. To you, the “plain sense” of Jn 6 is transubstantiation.

That’s because you’d be conditioned by your Catholicism. What’s “plain” to one reader isn’t plain to another. “Plain meaning” is really a disguised form of reader-response theory. What’s plain to the reader. By definition, that’s relative. Person-variable.

That’s in direct contrast to the grammatico-historical method, which is concern with ascertaining original intent. What the text would mean to the author. What it ought to mean to the original audience.

iii) What about perspicuity? Does that mean the Bible is equally clear to everyone? Surely that’s overstated. There are parts of Scripture that would be more intelligible to the original audience. In that respect, Scripture serves a specific purpose for the original audience, and a general purpose for subsequent generations. There are lots of oblique topical references which at this distance we’re not likely to catch. But that’s fine, because God doesn’t intend all Christians to need all that. Parts of the Bible can serve different purposes for different people at different times and places.

We may find certain verses in 1 Corinthians (to take one example) a bit obscure. But they weren’t obscure to the Corinthian Christians. So they served their immediate purpose in reference to the situation of the Corinthian Christians. But in the providence of God, 1 Corinthians retains a long-range purpose in the life of the church. It doesn’t all have to be equally clear to everyone to accomplish the multifaceted purpose God assigned to it.

This can even be true at a purely individual level. In the life of a Christian, as he passes through the lifecycle, some parts of the Bible are more significant to him at some points in life than at others–where his situation parallels something in Scripture.

First, Dr Sproul--like many others-- misunderstands geocentricity. The issue was not whether the Sun was the center of the solar system, as Sproul puts it. Rather, the issue was whether the earth--or the Sun--was in a state of absolute rest. Since science can deal only with relative motion, this issue must be settled via extra-scientific considerations. There can therefore be no valid scientific objections if the Bible takes the earth to be fixed in an absolute sense. Science has not disproven Biblical geocentricity (See my post A Moving Earth?).

Historically, the issue was not whether the sun or earth was the center of the solar system, as many people mistakenly believe. Rather, the question was whether the sun or earth was fixed at the center of the universe. Most geocentrists held also that the fixed earth was non-rotating: the sun and stars rotated about the earth every 24 hours.

At one time, when Newtonian mechanics still reigned, it was widely believed that the earth had been proven to be moving in an absolute sense. Since 1915, with the advent of Einstein's general relativity, scientists know better.

Indeed, how could science possibly show that the earth really moves? Any astronomer will tell you that the earth’s absolute motion cannot be proven. To determine absolute motion we need an absolute reference point. What point should we choose? the sun? distant galaxies? But how do we know that, say, the sun, is at absolute rest? After all, even with a telescope, we can observe only relative motion. We get exactly the same observations whether we assume the sun moves around the earth or vice versa. To determine absolute motion we must go beyond the observations.

Nor do mechanical considerations help. Einstein’s general relativity, too, uses only relative motion. Whether we consider the earth to be fixed or moving, we end up with exactly the same physical consequences. According to Einstein, writing in 1938, the two sentences “the sun is at rest and the earth moves” or “the earth is at rest and the sun moves” simply reflect two different choices for coordinate systems, both equally valid. If Einstein had no scientific objections to a fixed earth, why should we?

Much the same points have recently been made by George Murphy ("Does the Earth Move?", Perspectives in Science and Christian Faith 63 (June, 2011):109-115. Murphy, however, argues that, although the center of the earth could be fixed, the earth itself must be rotating, else objects further than Neptune would be moving at speeds greater than the speed of light, which relativity prohibits. On this point Murphy is mistaken. The relativistic constraint that objects can't move faster than light refers only to motion with respect to the local background space--or aether. The aether itself may move at any speed. Thus, if the entire universe--including the aether-- revolved about the earth, this would not violate relativity.

In this regard, it has been shown that, in general relativity, the universe rotating about a fixed earth produces Coriolis and centrifugal forces, the bulge at the earth's equator, and all other phenomena generally adduced to prove that the earth is rotating (see D. Lynden-Bell, J. Katz and J. Bilak, “Mach’s Principle from the Relativistic Constraint Equations”, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 272 (1995), pp. 150-60). The two reference frames--fixed earth or rotating earth--are thus scientifically equivalent.

In short, Dr. Clark's reasoning reveals an out-dated knowledge of science. Ultimately, one's choice of an absolute standard of rest must be based on extra-scientific considerations, based on philosophical or theological factors. A geocentric biblical frame of reference is thus beyond any scientific disproof.

http://bylogos.blogspot.ca/2011/07/moving-earth.html

Two issues:

i) I believe Dr. Byl is an antirealist in his philosophy of science. In particular, an instrumentalist:

www.csc.twu.ca/byl/instrumentalism.htm

In that case, he doesn’t think general relativity is true. So when he invokes general relativity to defend geocentrism, that’s presumably for the sake of argument.

But unless all inertial reference frames are actually equivalent, how does general relativity lend support for geocentrism? If general relativity is just a useful fiction, then where does that leave the reality of the situation?

ii) Moreover, Byl is arguing for an absolute frame of reference–the earth. Wouldn’t that be more Newtonian than Einsteinian?

Clarification on Relativity

There appears to be some confusion over my previous post on Relativity so I want to produce some further clarification. First, we know that Einstein’s version of the train was used to destroy the concept of “simultaneity” because what is observed on the moving train as being simultaneous was not observed as being simultaneous outside the train. In reality what this demonstrated is that time itself is fluid; there is no objective time. Time, apart from frame of reference, is meaningless. Far from being a defeater to my argument (as Paul C. seems to think), this was my point.

Brian Greene gives his own example of this experiment:

Imagine that the leaders of two warring nations, sitting at opposite ends of a long negotiation table, have just concluded an agreement for a ceasefire, but neither wants to sign the accord before the other. The secretary-general of the United Nations comes up with a brilliant resolution. A light bulb, initially turned off, will be placed midway between the two presidents. When it is turned on, the light it emits will reach each of the presidents simultaneously, since they are equidistant from the bulb. Each president agrees to sign a copy of the accord when he or she sees the light. The plan is carried out and the agreement is signed to the satisfaction of both sides.

Flushed with success, the secretary-general makes use of the same approach with two other embattled nations that have also reached a peace agreement. The only difference is that the presidents involved in this negotiation are sitting at opposite ends of a table inside a train travelling along at constant velocity. Fittingly, the president of Forwardland is facing in the direction of the train’s motion while the president of Backwardland is facing in the opposite direction. Familiar with the fact that the laws of physics takes precisely the same form regardless of one’s state of motion so long as this motion is unchanging, the secretary-general takes no heed of this difference, and carries out the light bulb-initiated signing ceremony as before. Both presidents sign the agreement, and along with their entourage of advisers, celebrate the end of hostilities.

Just then, word arrives that fighting has broken out between people from each country who had been watching the signing ceremony from the platform outside the moving train. All those on the negotiation train are dismayed to hear that the reason for the renewed hostilities is the claim by people of Forwardland that they have been duped, as their president signed the agreement before the president of Backwardland. As everyone on the train—from both sides—agrees that the accord was signed simultaneously, how can it be that the outside observers watching the ceremony think otherwise?

Let’s consider in more detail the perspective of an observer on the platform. Initially the bulb on the train is dark, and then at a particular moment it illuminates, sending beams of light speeding toward both presidents. From the perspective of a person on the platform, the president of Forwardland is heading toward the emitted light while the president of Backwardland is retreating. This means, to the platform observers, that the light beam does not have to travel as far to reach the president of Forwardland, who moves toward the approaching light, as it does to reach the president of Backwardland, who moves away from it. This is not a statement about the speed of the light as it travels toward the two presidents—we have already noted that regardless of the state of motion of the source or the observer, the speed of light is always the same. Instead, we are describing only how far, from the vantage point of the platform observers, the initial flash of light must travel to reach each of the presidents. Since this distance is less for the president of Forwardland than it is for the president of Backwardland, and since the speed of light toward each is the same, the light will reach the president of Forwardland first. This is why the citizens of Forwardland claim to have been duped.

When CNN broadcasts the eyewitness account, the secretary-general, the two presidents, and all their advisers can’t believe their ears. They all agree that the light bulb was secured firmly, exactly midway between the two presidents and that therefore, without further ado, the light it emitted travelled the same distance to reach each of them. Since the speed of the emitted light to the left and right is the same, they believe, and in fact observed, that the light clearly reached each president simultaneously.

Who is right, those on or off the train? The observations of each group and their supporting explanations are impeccable. The answer is that both are right. … The only sublety here is that the respective truths seem to be contradictory. An important political issue is at stake: Did the presidents sign the agreement simultaneously? The observations and reasoning above ineluctably lead us to the conclusion that according to those on the train they did while according to those on the platform they did not. In other words, things that are simultaneous from the viewpoint of some observers will not be simultaneous from the viewpoint of others, if the two groups are in relative motion.

This is a startling conclusion. It is one of the deepest insights into the nature of reality ever discovered. Nevertheless, if long after you set down this book you remember nothing of the chapter except for the ill-fated attempt at détente, you will have retained the essence of Einstein’s discovery. Without highbrow mathematics or a convoluted chain of logic, this completely unexpected feature of time follows directly from the constancy of the speed of light, as the scenario illustrates. Notice that if the speed of light were not constant but behaved according to our intuition based on slow-moving baseballs and snowballs, the platform observers would agree with those on the train. …

The constancy of the speed of light requires that we give up the age-old notion that simultaneity is a universal concept that everyone, regardless of their state of motion, agrees upon. The universal clock previously envisioned to dispassionately tick off identical seconds here on earth and on Mars and on Jupiter and in the Andromeda galaxy and in each and every nook and cranny of the cosmos does not exist. On the contrary, observers in relative motion will not agree on which events occur at the same time. Once again, the reason that this conclusion—a bona fide characteristic of the world we inhabit—is so unfamiliar is that the effects are extremely small when the speeds involved are those commonly encountered in everyday experience. If the negotiating table were 100 feet long and the train were moving at 10 miles per hour, platform observers would “see” that the light reached the president of Forwardland about a millionth of a billionth of a second before it reached the president of Backwardland. Although this represents a genuine difference, it is so tiny that it cannot be detected directly by human senses. If the train were moving considerably faster, say at 600 million miles per hour, from the perspective of someone on the platform the light would take almost 20 times as long to reach the president of Backwardland compared with the time to reach the president of Forwardland. At high speeds, the starting effects of special relativity become increasingly pronounced.

Greene, Brian. (1999). The Elegant Universe. New York: Vintage Books. 34-37 (all italics in original)

Now we have three different examples (Einstein’s, my own, and now Greene’s), all of which really state the same thing. The sequence of events that one observes is dependent upon the relative motion between the observer and what is being observed. While Einstein and Greene both dealt strictly with concepts of simultaneity, it doesn’t take much thinking at all to change this into my own example where we have an event that occurs before another event according to one frame of reference occur after the other event in another frame of reference. In fact, in Greene’s second book (The Fabric of the Cosmos), he gave an illustration of this regarding cuts in the “space-time loaf.” Unfortunately, I’ve loaned that particular book out for the moment. But I will reproduce my own version of cutting the space-time loaf here.


In this picture, we have three events that occur separated by vast distances in space and time. For example, we could say that A is ten million light years from B, and likewise B from C (these are just arbitrary values for the sake of demonstration). We could also say that it takes 10 million years to go from “blue” to “red” to “green.” (Thus, time is going right to left.) Thus, the vertical axis of this diagram represents distance, the horizontal axis represents time.

Now from the perspective of one observer, all the “red” events at A, B, and C occur simultaneously. This observer has a “timeslice” that is directly perpendicular (in our graph). But from another perspective, the “green” event of A is simultaneous with the “red” event of B and the “blue” event of C. This “timeslice” is at a roughly 45 degree angle (both in space—that is distance—and in time—he is in the “future” if time is flowing from right to left).

Now let us give the graph some non-controversial meaning (although you must take note that the graph will not be to scale under these circumstances). Take line A as the life of a star that goes supernova (at green), line B is the life of a star that dwindles to a dwarf star (at green), and line C represents events that occur on Earth until Global Warming melts us (at green). Let’s further say that on Earth, the red dot represents the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the blue dot represents the construction of the Great Pyramids. The red and the blue dots of the two stars are adjusted accordingly to be arbitrary events that occur at the correct time-scale.

Now obviously the observer that views perpendicularly sees that at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, both stars had the same amount of time left before reaching their ends. However, the observer at the 45 degree angle sees that the supernova star has actually gone supernova while the Great Pyramids are being built!

Now let us give it a little more controversial meaning (again, the graph is not to scale under these circumstances). Let us deal only with lines A and C. Let line A represent the bullet of a gun and let line C represent the finger that pulls the trigger. Line A is: “blue” = bullet loaded, “red” = bullet fired, “green” = bullet kills target. Line C is: “blue” = trigger finger in killer’s pocket, “red” = finger pulls trigger, “green” = finger rubbing killer’s nose. Now in this instance, the distance between line A and C is very, very short. But since a man’s finger and a bullet can never occupy the same space at the same time, there will always be some distance—even if it is only an atom’s length! As a result, the distance to the observer at the 45 degree angle (to both space AND time!) is going to be very, very far away. But the results are the same.

In one perspective, the trigger finger pulls the trigger at the instant the bullet is fired. But in the other perspective, we have the bullet being fired when the killer’s finger is in his pocket. Now the distance to this observer is probably outside the dimensions of our universe and far, far into the future from now. But that observation point does exist in theory. In theory, viewing any two events at the appropriate “timeslice” of the spacetime loaf will yield contradictions in cause and effect. Naturally, these are on such a large scale that for all practical purposes we can ignore them.

So once again, we can relate this back to what I’ve said about the logical before. Cause and effect is determined by what logically must occur before another thing can happen, NOT by what temporally occurs. Usually the logical and temporal correspond, but when it does not we have evidence that we have to adjust our frame of reference. There will be some frame of reference where that cause will temporally precede its effect, but that might not be our observational frame of reference. Our frame of reference, taken at face value, would cause us to be mistaken.

By the way, I also point out that this is the basis of the Lorentz transformation equations anyway. Those equations in essence seek to show the relationship between various frames of reference. And the point isn’t that cause and effect are destroyed at all—that’s never been what I claimed. Rather it’s the fact that cause and effect are temporally meaningless when there is no objective time; instead, they can only remain logically meaningful.

Logical precedence is not bound by frame of reference; it is the objective quality that causes must precede effects. Temporal “before” are strictly bound to frame of reference; it will always be a subjective quality. On Earth, it usually matches the objective frame of reference because the relative speed between observer and observee remains very small.

Hopefully that helps clear it up a bit.