Quantum Physics

A-ha! It all makes perfect sense now! (Click to embiggen.)

(Original here.)

(*with apologies to Steely Dan)

So, a couple days ago, I was hitting some of my usual haunts, and on MeFi came across a link to something truly amazing: the most advanced personal energy system available today!

Personal energy system? Huh? Some kind of new sports drink? Maybe a reworked diet fad? Or a new way to charge your, uh, personal massagers?

Nope. They're talking Sympathetic Resonance Technology! Wow! Even the name is impressively scientifical! What is Sympathetic Resonance Technology? I'm glad you asked:

The Q-Link’s fundamental technology can be understood by imagining a tuning fork that vibrates at a certain pitch. Similarly, the Q-Link’s Sympathetic Resonant Technology™ (SRT™) is tuned to optimize the human energy system through resonance. As it interacts with your biofield, it leads to a rebalancing and restoration according to your individual needs.

When I was a kid, I just loved the idea of psychic abilities - just about any variety that I came across in the science fiction I read made me jealous, wanting that power, wondering whether or not there wasn't some such latent skill in all of us, waiting to be tapped. That's one of the reasons that I construct a plausible explanation for psychic abilities (and why they haven't been reliably manifest) in Communion of Dreams - it's just such a great idea, and so deeply embedded in most human societies, that it almost seems like there has to be something to it.

Roy Abraham Varghese, theistic apologist and god-bothering author from the "Institute of Metascientific Research", was recently interviewed by the Dallas Observer. Varghese is widely credited as "the man who won over Anthony Flew", and is now currently working on a book called "There Is A God" with Flew.

Varghese is an interesting character because his contention is that without a meta-intelligence, all science devolves into incoherence if you drill-down deep enough, or pull back far enough.

It's a lot of pseudo-scientific nonsense of course, a philosophically slick update to the theistic evolutionist's mantra.

More below the fold...

Evolution is a fact. It happens. It has happened. It continues to happen.

This is not in question. Those who protest either don't know what the heck evolution actually is, or they are lying to themselves and to you.

What I would like to talk about today is the perception that people have about what evolution is and is not, as well as what I believe we can do about it.

I have been arguing the creation/evolution debate for a long, long time. Back in 1986 I jumped into the infant online world with both feet, learning how to think critically and how to construct arguments. I have been an atheist since I was about 17 years old. I have been interested in science and the scientific method for much longer than that. The idea of a personal invisible imaginary friend seemed ridiculous to me even at the age of ten.

So, when the virtual world of the the new online services presented itself to me, I was floored. Here was a pure realm consisting of exact meaning. A world where people talked to each other almost mind-to-mind - cutting away the traps and the pitfalls that usually accompanied face to face conversation. Nervousness, apprehension, emotion, forgetfulness, shyness - none of this mattered when you were composing your thoughts off line in a text editor. You were able to edit and vet your words, making sure that they flowed well and made sense.

But those things which so attracted me to online text-based communication seemed to make others dumber than they would have been otherwise. Time and again I witnessed ostensibly intelligent people stumble and rush through a message or a rebuttal, making themselves sound like fools due to incoherent rambling, spelling and grammar errors, and faulty, fallacious reasoning.

It's almost as if they didn't care how they were perceived when they were online.

I didn't understand it then, and I don't understand it now. Online communications in this day and age - YouTube notwithstanding - is primarily text based. That is to say that if you cannot form cogent and thoughtful sentences, spelled correctly with the meaning coming through crystal clear, then why the hell are you arguing online - using text to try and get your meaning across to the other guy?

But that is neither here nor there - except as a base for my thoughts about evolution and the way that I have observed that people look at it.

More below the fold...

OK, the layet be a little wonky, but check out this version o' Pharyngula. Knowin' how PZ likes his pirates, I hope he don't mind. An' if ye want t' play around with yer fav website (a 'Daffy' version of UTI, anyone?) in a 'different voice', check out The Voices o' Many.

Jim Downey

This is actually a post of my brothers that I thought was interesting.

In the middle of the fit everyone is having over religion, I struggle to gain my own understandings and insights into spirituality. I wonder if things like the theory of evolution, abortion, and gay rights were issues a decade and a half ago, and I was just too young to notice or care about them,
or if they're a new phenomenon and I'm caught in the middle trying to sort things out for myself - because very few - if not no one - seems to be making enough sense for me to listen.

Don't get me wrong, I know the Earth is a few billion years old (not a few thousand), I know everyone (woman or otherwise - sexually or otherwise) should have a choice on what to do with their body -- I know that everyone follows their own path. My confusion lays with the growing number of atheists, scientists, and scholars who are very much ready to throw the baby out with the bath water and reject anything religious outright.

To be able to go though life with the idea that we are alone, that we are a chance genetic mutation, that when we die that's the end of our existence -- is unacceptable to me. I know in the very core of my being there's more to the story than we've been able to scientifically uncover thus far.

Douglas Adams was right all the time. According to an article in Seed, the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything is indeed 42. More precisely, since the 1920s, there has been a sequence of immense importance in number theory, and lately in quantum mechanics; however, the sequence itself had only two known terms - the first was 1, and the second was 2. Now a rigorous proof from mathematical physics has shown that the elusive third term is 42. Clearly, Deep Thought's 10 million years of calculations were unnecessary (or were the physicsts who proved that the third term is 42 part of Earth, the computer built to figure out the ultimate question?).