In still another post at PT (go here), I’m charged with committing a basic physics error in my book No Free Lunch, much to the delight of the gallery that comments there (based, by the way, on a deliberate misquote — see below). Too bad that Freeman Dyson agrees with me and not with them. Here, then, is the pearl: http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Omega/dyson.txt. Go trample on it. And having trampled on it, go email Freeman and get him to distance himself from my views even though the section of NFL cited merely expands on his and Frank Tipler’s ideas.

The light from the distant galaxies will be strongly red-shifted. But the sky will never become empty and dark, if we can tune our eyes to longer and longer wavelengths as time goes on. –Freeman Dyson

In addition, the author of the PT post deliberately misquotes me, juxtaposing two passages from my work without any indication that several pages of text intervene between the passages. Here is the passage attributed to me at PT exactly as it appeared there (at the very least, there should have been an ellipsis before “Certainly quantum mechanics …” as well as an indication that his actually is not the start of a sentence):

What’s more, the energy in quantum events is proportional to frequency or inversely proportional to wavelength. And since there is no upper limit to the wavelength of, for instance, electromagnetic radiation, there is no lower limit to the energy required to impart information. In the limit, a designer could therefore impart information into the universe without inputting any energy at all. Whether the designer works through quantum mechanical effects is not ultimately the issue here. Certainly quantum mechanics is much more hospitable to an information processing view of the universe than the older mechanical models. All that’s needed, however, is a universe whose constitution and dynamics are not reducible to deterministic natural laws. Such a universe will produce random events and thus have the possibility of producing events that exhibit specified complexity (i.e., events that stand out against the backdrop of randomness).

And now here is the full text with the two passages marked in bold. Note that the PT post simply kludges those passages together (you’ll have to scroll down quite a ways to see the connection). By the way, I’ve saved the page at PT just so that they don’t insert ellipses and say there never was a problem:

How much energy is required to impart information? We have sensors that can detect quantum events and amplify them to the macroscopic level. What’s more, the energy in quantum events is proportional to frequency or inversely proportional to wavelength. And since there is no upper limit to the wavelength of, for instance, electromagnetic radiation, there is no lower limit to the energy required to impart information. In the limit, a designer could therefore impart information into the universe without inputting any energy at all.

Limits, however, are tricky things. To be sure, an embodied designer could impart information by employing arbitrarily small amounts of energy. But an arbitrarily small amount of energy is still a positive amount of energy, and any designer employing positive amounts of energy to impart information is still, in Paul Davies’s phrase, “moving the particles.” [[In contrast to the PT post, the possibility of infinite wavelength, zero energy, and zero bandwidth therefore never arises. –WmAD]]. The question remains how can an unembodied designer influence the natural world without imparting any energy whatsoever. It is here that an indeterministic universe comes to the rescue. Although we can thank quantum mechanics for the widespread recognition that the universe is indeterministic, indeterminism has a long philosophical history, and appears in such diverse places as the atomism of Lucretius and the pragmatism of Charles Peirce and William James. Read More ›

Extracts from the introduction to Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement, edited by John Brockman, Vintage Books (go here for an earlier report about this book on this blog): Religious fundamentalism is on the rise under the rubric of “intelligent design.” ID imperils American global dominance in science and presents the gravest of threats to the American economy. This book is a thoughtful response to the bizarre claims made by the ID movement’s advocates. In actuality there is no debate, no controversy. What there is, quite simply, is a duplicitous public-relations campaign funded by Christian fundamentalist interests. The intelligent-design movement has made collective fools of large segments of the American public. Educated Americans are dumbstruck by the attempt Read More ›

I blogged yesterday about UTAustin professor Eric Pianka (aka “Dr. Doom”) and his advocacy of killing 90% of the world’s human population with airborne Ebola. Could Pianka be charged with terrorism/conspiracy to commit a terrorist act? What happens if a student actually takes his suggestion to heart and kills a bunch of people? Why shouldn’t we think that Dr. Doom himself would commit the act of human destruction he is advocating? How is what he is saying any different from somebody at an airport saying that he plans to plant a bomb there. Note: This is not a matter of saying he actually has planted a bomb but saying that he plans to plant one — that surely would be enough in the current climate to get him arrested. So what about Pianka? At what point do his remarks advocating human destruction constitute a terrorist threat that get him arrested? And if not arrested, how about committed?

As soon as this is posted, I’m going to have a chat with the Department of Homeland Security. [Called them — They are aware of it; it will be interesting to see if they do anything about it.] For your information, I’ve posted an article below by a reporter who was there at Pianka’s remarks (AP refused to pick up the story, so the page is presently overloaded).

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March 27, 2006
First Things
Joseph Bottum

Down in Waco, Texas, there is a Baptist school called Baylor University. It was never a major player in American academics, and with the strained situation in which American colleges found themselves at the end of the baby boom, Baylor had problems figuring out what it should do.

Certainly, the school played a regional role there in central Texas, but it lacked much national appeal. Its relations with the Baptist Christianity of its founding were strained, and the intellectual resources of its faculty and programs appeared thin. In the tight market of America academia, what reason had parents to send their children to a place like Baylor? The school seemed in flight from its niche market as a full-fledged Baptist institution, and for a purely secular education—well, surely one can do better than Waco.

In the mid-1990s, however, the school decided to do something about its problems. It began by hiring a dynamo of a new president named Robert Sloan. (First Things later published the talks given at his installation by Gertrude Himmelfarb and Richard John Neuhaus). It adopted a plan to achieve a new identity by 2012, and it went out actively seeking high-profile faculty—high-profile religious faculty, that is, for the plan involved positioning Baylor as a national center for religiously informed education.

The idea was that the school would simultaneously redefine its niche market and build a nationwide reputation. Philosophers, literary critics, legal scholars, sociologists: On and on the list went, a parade of new faculty members and new programs that suggested Baylor University was serious about trying to become the premier Christian research university in America.

Today, the plan is in tatters, and Baylor has apparently decided to sink back into its diminished role as a not terribly distinguished regional school. President Sloan is gone, the new high-profile faculty are demoralized and sniffing around for positions at better-known schools, energetic programs like the Intelligent Design Institute have been chased away [i.e., the Michael Polanyi Center — go here], and the bright young professors are having their academic careers ruined by a school that lured them to campus with the promises of the 2012 plan and now is simply embarrassed by them.

A case in point is Francis J. Beckwith, who was denied tenure by Baylor last week. Author of several books, including a new volume forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, he was associate director of the J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies, associate professor of Church-State Studies, and associate editor of the Journal of Church & State. You can find his accomplishments listed in more detail here and here. None of this, of course, proves that he deserves tenure, but it looks awfully impressive when compared with the publication records of other faculty members. Read More ›

Steve Rueland writes More of What We’re Up Against. Unfortunately Steve fails to assign the proper blame here. What he’s up against is a high school science teacher that failed to teach the letter writer the basic laws of physics. These are your schools, Steve. We’re trying to wrest control of the science curriculum from your ilk for failures of exactly this kind. You cannot call fairy stories of time and chance being able to create life and all living things “science” and then expect the same students to believe real physical science. Once they know science teachers tell fairy stories and pretend they’re as factual as gravity they lose all trust in science teachers. We can spoonfeed this stuff to you, Stevey, if you’d stop making faces and spitting it out.

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The Need for Heretics
Freeman Dyson, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey
Commencement Address, given at the University of Michigan, December 18, 2005

When the Princess Rosalba was baptized, in Thackeray’s story, “The Rose and the Ring”, her father, King Cavalfiore of Crim Tartary, gave a banquet, and all the royal guests came with fine clothes and expensive presents and flattering speeches. Then at the end of the line of guests came the Fairy Blackstick, an ugly old lady with a long nose, carrying nothing in her hands but a plain black stick. She waved her stick over the baby and said, “As for this little lady, the best thing I can wish her is a little misfortune”. The King was furious and ordered his servants to remove the Fairy Blackstick from the hall. But of course the magic was done, and the Fairy Blackstick’s present turned out to be more valuable than all the other presents put together. I will tell you at the end how the magic worked.

I am grateful to the University of Michigan and to you, President Coleman, for giving me the privilege of talking at this celebration. I find it strange that I should be talking here. In this company I am the Fairy Blackstick. You students are proud possessors of the Ph.D. or some similar token of academic respectability. You have endured many years of poverty and hard labor, and now you are ready to go to your just rewards, to a place on the tenure track of a university or on the board of directors of a company. And here am I, a person who never had a Ph.D. myself and fought all my life against the Ph.D. system and everything it stands for. Of course I fought in vain. The grip of the Ph.D. system on academic life is tighter today than it has ever been. But I will continue to fight against it as long as I live. In short, I am proud to be a heretic. But unfortunately I am an old heretic. What the world needs is young heretics. I am hoping that one or two of you may fill that role.

I will tell you briefly about three heresies that I am promoting. The first of my heresies says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing in their own models.

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In Academic, Heal Thyself we find more evidence of what happens when truth confronts ideology in academia. While many issues are rumored to have played a role in Mr. Summers’s resignation (including charges of favoritism in a messy legal case involving foreign investments), the controversy that will inevitably symbolize his presidency was the manufactured outcry early last year over his glancing reference at a conference to possible innate differences between the sexes in aptitude for science and math. The feminist pressure groups rose en masse from their lavishly feathered nests and set up a furious cackle that led to a 218-to-185 vote of no confidence by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences last March. Instead of welcoming this golden opportunity Read More ›

My initial posting prompted some excellent and thought-provoking comments and challenges, so I thought I would address some of them here in Q&A form since these topics should be of special interest to readers of this blog.

Comment: “If you could hypothetically adjust one of the cosmological constants to destroy all life then there’s no guarantee that you wouldn’t have a new form of life evolve…”

Response: As it turns out, when these constants are adjusted in either direction by the slightest amount, the process of the universe derails so catastrophically that life of any kind would be impossible. Read More ›

President’s Veterans Day Speech

By President George W. Bush

TOBYHANNA, PENNSYLVANIA — Thank you all for coming, please be seated. Thanks for the warm welcome. I’m glad to be back in Pennsylvania, and I’m proud to be the first sitting president to visit Monroe County — especially pleased to see so many military veterans with us today. Those who have risked their lives for our freedom have the respect and gratitude of our nation on Veterans Day and on every day. Read More ›

Guillermo Gonzalez has issued the following response to the attacks leveled at him following the June showing of the Privileged Planet at the Smithsonian: Read More ›

The Little Engine That Could… Undo Darwinism
By Dan Peterson

What critics of Intelligent Design theory can’t accept is that its proponents are making scientific, fact-based arguments.

The American Spectator, June 2005 Read More ›

DOBBS: New York, Kansas, and several other states are considering controversial proposals that would change the way our children learn about the creation of human beings, the earth and our universe. A relatively new theory, called intelligent design, suggests that Darwin’s theory of evolution can’t explain the existence of every life form on earth. Those who support intelligent design believe a higher being must have played some role. Now, proponents of intelligent design want evolution to be challenged in our classrooms. Read More ›