God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (46 page)

87
. James,
The Religion Virus
, p. 172.

5. TOWARD THE NEW PHYSICS

1
. Sam Harris,
The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
(New York: Free Press, 2010), p. 25.

2
. Helge S. Kragh,
Entropic Creation: Religious Contexts of Thermodynamics and Cosmology
(Aldershot, Hampshire, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008).

3
. Ibid., p. 11.

4
. Ibid., p. 13.

5
. Here I use “particles” generically to refer to the fundamental objects, which may turn out to be strings, membranes, or whatever.

6
. Victor J. Stenger,
Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009), pp. 55–62.

7
. Victor J. Stenger, “Bioenergetic Fields,”
Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine
13, no. 1 (1999): 26–30,
http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Medicine/Biofield.html
(accessed December 22, 2010).

8
. For discussions on the arrow of time, see Huw Price,
Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point: New Directions for the Physics of Time
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Victor J. Stenger,
Timeless Reality: Symmetry, Simplicity, and Multiple Universes
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000); Sean M. Carroll,
From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
(New York: Dutton, 2010).

9
. An English translation can be found in H. A. Lorentz et al.,
The Principle of Relativity: A Collection of Original Memoirs on the Special and General Theory of Relativity
(London: Methuen & Co., 1923).

10
. Tom Roberts and Siegmar Schleif, “What Is the Experimental Basis of Special Relativity?”
http://www.xs4all.nl/~johanw/PhysFAQ/Relativity/SR/experiments.html#Tests_of_the_poR
(accessed December 21, 2010).

11
. Clifford M. Will,
Was Einstein Right? Putting General Relativity to the Test
, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1993).

6. PARTICLES AND WAVES

1
. Steven Weinberg,
Dreams of a Final Theory
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), p. 64.

2
. Diana Lutz, “Physicist Disputes ‘Quantum Mind’ in Debate Hosted by Deepak Chopra,”
Skeptical Inquirer
35, no. 3 (2011): 8.

3
. William Grassie,
The New Sciences of Religion: Exploring Spirituality from the Outside In and Bottom Up
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)0, p. 169.

4
. Ernan McMullin, “From Matter to Materialism and (Almost) Back,” in
Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics
, ed. Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregersen (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). pp. 13–37.

5
. Philip Clayton, “Unsolved Dilemmas: The Concept of Matter in the History of Philosophy and in Contemporary Physics,” in
Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics
, ed. Paul Davies and Neils Henrik Gregersen (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 38–62.

6
. Ibid., pp. 53–54.

7
. Victor J. Stenger,
Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009).

8
. Of course “perfect” is an idealization used in the model, just as in any model. While a perfect black body does not exist, the approximation does describe what is observed in many instances.

9
. Larry Laudan, “A Confutation of Convergent Realism,”
Philosophy of Science
48, no. 1 (1981): 19–49.

10
. P. A. M. Dirac,
The Principles of Quantum Mechanics
(Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1930).

11
. Victor J. Stenger,
The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From?
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006), appendix D.

12
. I use “submicroscopic” rather than “microscopic” to refer to the quantum regime since all of the objects one observes with a familiar laboratory microscope, such as microbes, still obey classical mechanics.

13
. Spins are conventionally expressed in units of h.

14
. Not all quantum mechanics follows in this fashion. Some quantum effects have no classical counterpart.

15
. For a complete history of QED, see S. S. Schweber,
QED and the Men Who Made It: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

16
. Fritjof Capra,
The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism
(Boston, MA [New York]: Shambhala [distributed in the United States by Random House], 1975).

17
. George Zweig, a graduate student at Cal Tech (California Institute of Technology) where Gell-Mann taught, curiously arrived at the same idea independently.

18
. The reason for the “chromo” in the name is that the quantity in the theory that is analagous to electric charge is called “color charge” because it has mathematical properties likened to the primary colors.

19
. F. Englert and R. Brout, “Broken Symmetry and the Mass of Gauge Vector Bosons,”
Physical Review Letters
13 (1964): 321; G. S. Gurainik, C. R. Hagen, and T. W. Kibble, “Global Conservation Laws and Massless Particles,”
Physical Review Letters
13 (1964): 585; Peter W. Higgs, “Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons,”
Physical Review Letters
13 (1964): 508.

20
. Clayton, “Unsolved Dilemmas,” pp. 54–55.

21
. Ibid., p. 55.

22
. Deepak Chopra,
Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine
(New York: Bantam Books, 1989); Deepak Chopra,
Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old
(New York: Harmony Books, 1993).

23
. Rhonda Byrne,
The Secret
(New York: Atria Books; and Hillsboro, OR: Beyond Words, 2006).

24
. Nicholas Saunders,
Divine Action and Modern Science
(Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

25
. Philip Clayton et al., eds.
Quantum Mechanics: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action
(Vatican City: Vatican Observatory Publications, 2001).

26
. Ibid.

27
. James Gleick,
Chaos: Making a New Science
, 20th anniversary ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 2008).

28
. Victor J. Stenger,
The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: How the Universe Is Not Designed for Us
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011), pp. 274–76.

29
. Victor J. Stenger,
The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995).

30
. Peter Godfrey-Smith,
Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 176.

31
. Ibid.

32
. Ibid., p. 237.

33
. Roger Penrose,
The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), pp. 12–13.

34
. Victor J. Stenger,
Physics and Psychics: The Search for a World beyond the Senses
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1990).

35
. The report by T. Adam, N. Agafonova, and A. Aleksandrov et al. in their article “Measurement of the Neutrino Velocity with the Opera Detector in the CNGS Beam,” preprint submitted to
Journal of High Energy Physics
, November 17, 2011,
http://xxx.lanl.gov/pdf/1109.4897v2
(accessed December 22, 2011), that neutrinos have been observed traveling faster than the speed of light is yet to be independently confirmed and, in fact, disagrees with earlier observations.

36
. A. Einstein et al., “Can the Quantum Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?”
Physical Review
47 (1935): 777.

37
. David Bohm, “A Suggested Interpretation of Quantum Theory in Terms of ‘Hidden Variables,’ I and II,”
Physical Review
85 (1952): 166.

38
. Alain Aspect et al., “Experimental Realization of the Einstein-Podolosky-Rosen
Gedankenexperiment
: A New Violation of Bell's Inequalities,”
Physical Review Letters
49 (1982): 91.

39
. David. Bohm and B. J. Hiley,
The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory
(London; New York: Routledge, 1993).

40
. David Bohm,
Wholeness and the Implicate Order
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).

41
. Clayton, “Unsolved Dilemmas,” p. 56.

42
. Phillipe H. Eberhard and Ronald R. Ross, “Quantum Field Theory Cannot Provide Faster-Than-Light Communication,”
Foundations of Physics Letters
2 (1989): 127–79.

43
. For more details, see Stenger,
The Unconscious Quantum
.

7. COSMOS AND CREATOR

1
. Barbara C. Sproul,
Primal Myths: Creating the World
(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979).

2
. For a philosophical perspective on theism and cosmology, see Hans Halvorson and Helge S. Kragh, “Theism and Physical Cosmology,” in
The Routledge Companion to Theism
, ed. Stewart Goetz et al. (scheduled for release June 12, 2012).

3
. Francis S. Collins,
The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief
(New York: Free Press, 2006), p. 67.

4
. Georges-Henri Lemaître, “Un Univers homogène de masse constante et de rayon croissant rendant compte de la vitesse radiale des nébuleuses extragalactiques (A homogeneous Universe of constant mass and growing radius accounting for the radial velocity of extragalactic nebulae),”
Annales de la Société Scientifique de Bruxelles
(Annals of the Scientific Society of Brussels), 47 (April 1927): 49.

5
. A. Deprit, “Monsignor Georges Lemaître,” in
The Big Bang and Georges Lemaître
, ed. A. Barger (Dordrecht, Germany: Reidel, 1984), p. 370.

6
. A. S. Eddington, “On the Instability of Einstein's Spherical World,”
Monthly Notices of the Royal Society
90 (1930): 668–88.

7
. Humason had started as a mule driver bringing supplies up the mountain.

8
. Marcia Bartusiak,
The Day We Found the Universe
(New York: Pantheon Books, 2009); Harry Nussbaumer and Lydia Bieri,
Discovering the Expanding Universe
(Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

9
. Our closest galaxy, Andromeda, is actually heading toward us and may collide with the Milky Way some day.

10
. The redshift is analogous to the decrease in pitch of an ambulance siren as it moves away from us. When moving toward us, the siren pitch is higher.

11
. I discuss some possible reasons for a zero cosmological constant in
The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: How the Universe Is Not Designed for Us
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011).

12
. Pope Pius XII, “The Proofs for the Existence of God in the Light of Modern Natural Science,” address by Pope Pius XII to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, November 22, 1951, reprinted as “Modern Science and the Existence of God,”
Catholic Mind
49 (1972): 182–92.

13
. Joseph Silk,
The Big Bang
, 3rd ed. (New York: W.H. Freeman, 2001).

14
. Robert Jastrow,
God and the Astronomers
, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), p. 107.

15
. Stephen W. Hawking and Roger Penrose, “The Singularities of Gravitational Collapse,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London
, series A, 314 (1970): 529–48.

16
. William Lane Craig and James D. Sinclair, “The
Kalâm
Cosmological Argument,” in
The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology
, ed. William Lane Craig and James Porter Moreland (Chichester, UK; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 101–201.

17
. David Hilbert, “On the Infinite,” in
Philosophy of Mathematics
, ed. Paul Benacerraf and Hillary Putnam (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), pp. 139–41.

18
. Craig and Sinclair, “The
Kalâm
Cosmological Argument,” p. 103.

19
. John Hedley Brooke,
Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives
(Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 28.