The Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom

The title of this post is from 1st Corinthians 1:22, by Saul of Tarsus, known to Christendom as St. Paul. It is an acute observation by Paul, who was both Jew and Greek (and who, as a Roman citizen, could "appeal to Caesar"), of the difference between the third world outlook of his birth religion and the European rationalism of the Hellenistic Near East in which Christianity emerged. (Why the scriptures of the new religion are written in Greek when its founder spoke a third world language is a topic for another article.)

However the subject today is the wonders (i.e., signs) and wisdom of science.

Irene Klotz remarked on a little-noted side effect of the recent apparent discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC): It could portend, in what hopefully will be the far future, the "collapse of the vacuum."

“If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it’s bad news,” said [Joseph] Lykken, who also serves on the LHC science team. ...
“This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there’ll be a catastrophe,” Lykken said.
“Essentially, the universe wants to be in different state and so eventually it will realize that. A little bubble of what you might think of an as alternative universe will appear somewhere and then it will expand out and destroy us. So that’ll be very dramatic, but you and I will not be around to witness it,” Lykken told reporters before a presentation at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston this week. 

What is this collapse? Over a decade ago the following appeared in an article about possible doomsday scenarios:

Collapse of the vacuum In the book Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut popularized the idea of "ice-nine," a form of water that is far more stable than the ordinary kind, so it is solid at room temperature. Unleash a bit of it, and suddenly all water on Earth transforms to ice-nine and freezes solid. Ice-nine was a satirical invention, but an abrupt, disastrous phase transition is a possibility. Very early in the history of the universe, according to a leading cosmological model, empty space was full of energy. This state of affairs, called a false vacuum, was highly precarious. A new, more stable kind of vacuum appeared and, like ice-nine, it quickly took over. This transition unleashed a tremendous amount of energy and caused a brief runaway expansion of the cosmos. It is possible that another, even more stable kind of vacuum exists, however. As the universe expands and cools, tiny bubbles of this new kind of vacuum might appear and spread at nearly the speed of light. The laws of physics would change in their wake, and a blast of energy would dash everything to bits. "It makes for a beautiful story, but it's not very likely," says Piet Hut of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey. He says he worries more about threats that scientists are more certain of--such as rogue black holes. 

The universe may be safe for the time being, but science as the systematic study of the testable may currently be at risk by the mind-set of string theory.

First, string theory has not posed any new predictions which can be tested, which any scientific theory must do. (As Lawrence Krauss wrote, "Science isn't fair. It's testable.") In other words it is, as Karl Popper argued, "falsifiable." There isn't even a formulation of string theory. Lee Smolin writes in The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, "We are left with as many as 10^500 distinct string theories, ... more than all the atoms in the known universe. ... String theory cannot be disproved."

Second, the feedback from reality characteristic of science, exemplified in formulability and testability, is absent from string theory, so that it lacks the objectivity of science. "How do you fight sociology?" asks a chapter of Trouble With Physics. Genuine science would answer, "with the evidence." But string theory has come to resemble cultism more than science. Smolin notes that many times, "someone invariably asks, 'Well, what does Ed [Witten, a pre-eminent theorist] think?'"
 
The need for string theory is itself occasioned by a rift at the very heart of science. In Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, Physicist Lee Smolin described a situation in which "The Holy Grail of modern physics is a theory of the universe that unites two seemingly opposing pillars of modern science: Einstein's theory of general relativity, which deals with large-scale phenomena (planets, solar systems and galaxies), and quantum theory, which deals with the world of the very small (molecules, atoms, electrons)."

As a customer review notes:

Quantum theory radicalizes our assumptions about the relationship between observer and observed but pretty much buys into Newton's ideas of space and time. General relativity changes our notions of space and time but accepts Newton's view of observer and observed. This situation is deemed unacceptable by most physicists . . .

The fundamental worldview of quantum theory and that of general relativity cannot be reconciled. You might say we have a little problem here.

Another hiccup of science practice today is the recurrent claim that science "proves" that free will is an illusion. A post in Andrew Sullivan's blog asks, "Is free will compatible with physics?":

Sean Carroll:

If there were a vast intelligence — since dubbed Laplace’s Demon — that knew the exact state of the universe at any one moment, and knew all the laws of physics, and had arbitrarily large computational capacity, it could both predict the future and reconstruct the past with perfect accuracy. While this is a straightforward consequence of Newton’s theory, ...

Jerry Coyne, also responding to Pigliucci, thinks determinism should change our understanding of morality:

It’s my contention that, in light of the physical determinism of behavior, there’s no substantive difference between someone who kills because they have a brain tumor that makes them aggressive (e.g., Charles Whitman), and someone who kills because a rival is invading their drug business.  We need to reconceive our judicial system in light of what science tells us about how the mind works. And that’s why discussing the bearing of neuroscience and philosophy on free will is far more important than our usual academic discourse.

A year ago, a New Scientist article asserted:

Early last month, a Nobel laureate physicist finished polishing up his theory that a deeper, deterministic reality underlies the apparent uncertainty of quantum mechanics. A week after he announced it, two eminent mathematicians showed that the theory has profound implications beyond physics: abandoning the uncertainty of quantum physics means we must give up the cherished notion that we have free will.

Note how the author psychologizes the position criticized, as if the possibility that free will is valued constituted evidence against it. This fails the test of scientific objectivity.

The problem with these "scientists" is that they are are acting if science is an a priori discipline. It is as if a colleague of Newton's time were to declare, based on his understanding of "known science," that the postulates of quantum mechanics and general relativity are disproved by science. This colleague would have been elevating his understanding of scientific theory above genuine science, where practice--experimental result--trumps theory.

Science seeks those areas of reality which are deterministic. When successful, this approach produces valid predictions. But nothing about this approach proves that all of reality--and behavior--is deterministic. Unless a scientific experiment can be devised which provides a definitive test of free will, science cannot be said to either prove or disprove free will.

To conclude, a wonder of science (well, mathematics):

e^(πι) = -1

(e to the power of pi-times-i equals minus one) where e is the base of the natural logarithm, π is the ratio of circumference to diameter, and ι is the square root of -1. This formulation shows a profound relationship between fundamental constants of nature.