Two Favourite Phrases

Graphic interpretation of the test that resulted in the first
Higgs Boson detection at CERN LHC.

"I hate being right."

A day or two ago, CERN announced that further tests and analysis confirmed that their observation of a Higgs Boson several months previously was, in fact, the Higgs Boson, behaving in the way it was supposed to.

Secretly, scientists are always a little disappointed to be right - it's exciting enough to know that Higgs Bosons actually exist, since the math doesn't work without them existing, but it would have been much more exciting if it did something wierd in the process.

"Wierd" is one of the best possible reactions your brain can have to an observation, because it means that pursuing it will almost always mean learning something new about the world in which you live - knowledge being its own reward, of course.

Core structure of Penicillin

"Because I can."

The X-Ray was pretty good; so was penicillin. Neither were discovered with a practical objective in mind.

Science is a machine for discovery. There is rarely a practical reason, in this day and age, to ask "why". Some of our most important discoveries, from the tectonic to the prosaic, came by accident.

Penicillin is a favourite of mine - in spite of wide-spread allergies to the damn stuff, and the (predictably!) rising resistance of biotics to traditional antibiotics, Penicillin pretty much curbed the spread of a number of common diseases at the time. But it wasn't the only one. Radar technicians came up with the idea for the microwave oven - ivory soap was a result of over-mixing, post-its were a failed attempt at adhesive design by 3M. X-Rays, in particular, were recovered completely accidentally but are now one of the most commonly-used diagnostic tools in medicine. 

Direct Observation of Dark Matter Filaments!

The universe has a very high mass. So high, in fact, that all the detectable matter in the known universe cannot account for all the detectable mass in the known universe. The standard model of cosmology accounts for this with an interesting substance called Dark Matter - an invisible, undetectable particulate that has mass without being otherwise detectable in any way. The problem (to my mind), was that I could conceive of no way this could be tested. I mean, intangible mass was hard enough to swallow until I remembered that I'm continuously being bombarded with radiation that has mass and I have absolutely no way of detecting that without specialist equipment.


Someone built some specialist equipment and proved me wrong, however, and the announcement of the first direct observations of dark matter comes in the same week as the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs Boson.

I love being wrong. Hats off to everyone! I wouldn't be surprised if I dissected the experiment for Methodological Monday.

Methodological Monday: A Few SI Units

Methodological Monday is a new (and hopefully regular) feature talking about some aspect of the physical world and the direct ways in which we come to understand it.


Measurements impact and describe everything we do. They allow us to figure out when it's time to put a fresh tank of gas in the car, and, moreover, to build that car and refine the gas that fuels us. We here in the 21st century can measure distances so small that no useful information would be gained by measuring any smaller.

An Answer for MegaSage007

I have an answer to a challenge raised about three weeks ago, albeit indirectly, by a youtube user named MegaSage007 (Personal Website Redirect), which was directed largely to atheists. As a former agnostic atheist myself, and seeing as the question wandered into one of my favourite disciplines (astrophysics), I thought I'd take some time while I eat my ham sandwich to speak to his statement.

Divining Reality

Full Disclosure: This idea is a train-of-thought spinoff from Cam's recent entry over at her blog (article link), which addresses the difference between belief and reality, or, perhaps more accurately, outward and inward truth. It isn't intended as a response, but an application of the same basic argument to a different topic. Think of it as a non-rigorous thought experiment. The entry is excellent.

More often than you would think, I have heard people make absolute statements about a reality, as if saying something is real (or true), or unreal (or false), is enough to make it so... what I like to think of as the "Abra Kadabra" fallacy. (From the kabbalistic phrase "I create as I speak".) It most frequently takes as a basis one source or another, and in the circles I run in, it's either "the bible" or "science" standing in as the source, with appropriate variations (making it an Appeal to Authority).

The problem with this statement is that there are two realities: the natural and the supernatural. Some of us prefer not to dabble in matters supernatural, for very good reasons that I'm not going to pound the table over right now. And while we can make definitive statements about natural realities through empirical study (which is what science is for), we cannot make definitive statements about the supernatural. So we can make the argument, for example, that the universe is 13.5 Billion years old (give or take a reasonably small margin of error), but we can't make the argument whether God did, or didn't, create it. I can make the argument that the bible was written by men, because, of course, it was, but I cannot say if they were inspired by angels/the divine, or whether they were suffering from schizophrenia.  This is basically the root idea of empiricism.

The Divine is a personal reality, a supernatural conviction that each person must arrive at on his or her on (or not, as the case may be). So, while it is perfectly acceptable to correct those who misunderstand your belief (which is a natural force), it is not correct (nor polite), to tell them that their belief is logically untrue. Who is to say if there is or is not a God, or Gods, and which God or Gods is the "truth", when it is so subjective a thing?

In some senses, truth is mutable, but in those cases, the mutability is ambiguity. It is room to question, and questions are opportunities for growth.

Keep thinking. It's good for you, and it makes people nervous.

The Argument from "Duh"

WMAP Cosmic Microwave Background Map - NASA

Brief Aside: I have the slides for the presentation prepared in full, and I'm merely working out whether to give a narration or not. I know that most popular youtube videos on related subjects do use voiceovers, but I myself have a problem in (a) not knowing how to sync the voice to the slides, and (b)not having enough private time to actually do the recording. I hope to have the video up either way by week's end. Thanks for being patient.


I've seen one argument in particular cropping up lately, as I cruise for my daily fix of the nerdish in arguments over differing cosmologies. The argument is particularly prevalent among Young Earth Creationists in "debate" (which it can only loosely be called) with those who consider modern cosmology to be accurate, though it is by no means their invention, nor is it their sole province. The argument goes something like this:

Party A: You believe that the Big Bang began the universe, so what caused the big bang? or You believe that life began from nothing, so how did life begin?

Party B: The big bang "began" when a quantum singularity that contained all matter and energy in the universe began to expand. or Life began with the first self-replicating molecular systems.

Party A: So how did that happen? 

What do Potatoes have to do with Wheat?

Public Domain Image

Nutrition was required learning when I was studying the culinary arts, and it was actually a course I did fairly well in, and had a bit of an interest in. I'm a big proponent of the idea of nutritious food being more than the steam from the carrots and a lick of the salt-cube. (Undergrads Reference, for those who haven't seen the show).

There was one thing, though, that always bugged me about nutrition, and for a while I was starting to wonder how a bunch of comparatively uneducated tradespeople had bested governmental nutrition panels... and then I remembered that government committees have no place in science.

Below the jump, I'm going to go on for a bit about nutrients, and then I'm going to explain why I have it in for potatoes.

Beauty IS Complexity: Creation and Creating

We live on the third planet orbiting a star on
an outer arm of a spiral arm galaxy,
like this one. (Photo: NASA)

I realize that most reasonable Christians, or indeed people of any faith, aren't part of the young-earth creationism movement, or the anti-science crowd, for that matter. But a lot of people, Christian, Agnostic, Atheist, or otherwise, have trouble with responding to the following question.

How do you look at the complexity and beauty of our world and the things that live within it, and not see it as the work of an intelligent, creative designer?

As a public service, I'm going to answer that question as best I can, and go on a bit of a rant in the process.

Actually, We Don't Know Anything.

If I were to ask you how many states of matter there are, I would expect one of two answers, without knowing a thing about your age, and making the assumption you're in a non-physical-sciences field. You might say three, or four. I historically always went for "four".

Well, it turns out I'm not remotely correct abut that. There are the four that we've always heard of: solids, liquids, gasses, and plasma. There are also superfluids and super-solids. Plasmas are a sort of "class" of states of matter, including typical plasmas and quark-gluon plasmas. Then there are the extreme low-temperature states such as Bose-Einstein Condensates, Quantum Hall states and the so-called strange matter.

I bring up this rather non-exhaustive list to make a point. We really don't know anything. Not a thing. And that's fascinating, if only because it means there's always something new to learn, even about something we always used to say was "basic" and "certain". How then can you say to be certain?

I ask questions because I don't know. Here's something else I don't know: What do you feel like hearing about over the next week? Well, the ~65% of you who aren't programs hitting the website to spread around your domain names, anyway. I imagine "hitbots" can't leave comments.