An ancient apocalypse at Osiris?

NASA and Nature revealed yesterday that the first direct spectroscopic observations of extrasolar planets have been made - of the repeat favorite HD 209458b (unofficially a.k.a. Osiris) and HD 189733Ab (getting reported as HD 189733b).

From today's issue of Nature: "A spectrum of an extrasolar planet"

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v445/n7130/abs/nature05636.html

NASA press release:

http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2007-04/release.shtml

The results were totally off the wall. Here's the best part:

"Superposed on this continuum is a broad emission peak centred near 9.65 microm that we attribute to emission by silicate clouds."

Silicate clouds in a gas giant are of course previously unheard of, and I would assume, not yet having read the full Nature article, are dynamically unstable. What would put a silicate dust cloud into the outer atmosphere of a gas giant at 0.045 AU semimajor axis - but a terrestrial planet! One that got too close and plunged headlong into a Jupiter, getting tidally shredded through the Roche limit.

I'm sure it's been depicted in some science fiction novel at some point - but here is evidence of it happening for real. Jeez, can you just imagine? How I would have loved to have sat in a stadium seat with a soda and popcorn to watch that one - from a craft at an appropriate distance.

Also a nice new wet towel to throw at the next person who waxes illogical on the anthropic principle.

I have to wonder if significant amounts of silicate dust in the outer atmosphere is a short-term, dynamic feature, with a characteristic persistence time in only the millions of years after collision of another terrestrial body before the denser rock settles into the inner depths, and we are happening to see Osiris in an era when it relatively recently ate one or more of its rocky brethren. Otherwise, perhaps the rocky material in the HD 209458 system was disrupted from accumulation into planetary-sized bodies from the beginning, a magnification of our own asteroid belt likely due to the constant gravitational pestering of Jupiter in the formation of the solar system; there would have been ample opportunity for either kind of disruption if an almost-Jupiter sized body migrated from the outer solar system to just a few million miles above the star's surface, although Osiris has had plenty of time to settle into its hot-as-hell orbit with eccentricity of about zero.

But, this planet has all kinds of strange new properties; we need to learn more. And each new discovery should be a fresh reminder of the foolish lack of imagination in old models that assumed planets outside our own solar system would be minor variations on the templates of the already familiar planets.

Actually Mr. President, that's the Third Great Snooze Button

Joel Achenbach at washingtonpost.com achieved this week's High Point in Blogging with a post that made my brain smile.

After discussing a report on observing galaxies at a new record proximity to the origin of galaxies and stars, and a new book on our second-most underappreciated Founding Father of America, George Mason, Achenbach ties such hallmark Enlightenment legacies into contrast with George Bush's world:

The president says we are having a Third Great Awakening...

Here are a few things we didn't know when Jonathan Edwards & Co. ushered in the First Great Awakening:

1. The world is billions of years old.
2. There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy and at least tens of billions of galaxies and the whole shebang is expanding at an accelerating rate and there may even be other universes outside our own.
3. Life evolves and all living things come from a common ancestor.
4. Continents drift.
5. Complicated stuff involving Relativity.
6. Really complicated stuff involving Quantum Mechanics.
7. Stuff so complicated it cannot even be alluded to.

Maybe the real awakening will come when, after staring into a telescope at a galaxy 12.88 billion light years away, and studying the world around us, we finally grasp our humble place in the universe and our good luck in having evolved in a place that has remained habitable for something like four billion years. And then we'll decide to take better care of it.

Thank you Joel!

Clinical trials by for-profit companies are unscientific by definition

The Post reports on findings of systemic error in pharmaceutical trials sponsored by companies making the drug being tested, which lie squarely in the definition of Cargo Cult science. No one fluent in science can possibly be surprised by these results. The only question is why supposedly scientific experiments to compare the efficacy of different products are still given any thought at all; why the government acknowledges them, why any supposed scientist puts his name on them, why any supposed scientific or medical journal publishes results from them, when they are unscientific by definition. By that I mean, the definition of science includes at its core taking all possible steps to eliminate bias, to proactively investigate all possible sources of bias and do everything you can to root them out, out of recognition that human perception is slippery, and will always - always - skew interpretation of experimental results.

The Great Master said it best:

“But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in Cargo Cult Science… It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty – a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid – not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked – to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

“Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can – if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong – to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. …

“In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.” (Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, pp. 209-210.)

The new Mars probe is now imaging the planet at 2.49 meters per pixel

Gorgeous.

See here for more.

What is the epistemology of the most influential person who is unaware of the meaning of the term?

I was reading the letters in response to Slavoj Zizek's intriguing op-ed in the New York Times, when an insight on the Bush administration dawned on me. The first letter-writer, apparently a reverend, pulled up the boring old canard that of course atheists can be just as atrocity-prone as religious fanatics (wow, quite a stirring defense of the faith sir), because look at the Nazis and the Soviets! To which the all-too obvious reply is, it is not religion that enables people to regard their fellow mankind as sub-human, and to act like sub-humans themselves - it is dogmatism.

The Nazis and Soviets were just as dogmatic as the Catholic and Protestants of the thirty-years' war, as the witch-burning Puritans, as the disgustingly anti-Semitic Ferdinand and Isabella and Martin Luther, as the Wahhabists and Taliban and al Qaeda, as the Iranian clergy-fascists and purely Orwellian cult of the Dear Leader of Pyongyang. The Nazis and Soviets happened to be ruled by dogmas without traditionally religious themes, but that is just surface gloss.

The core of all dogmatism, that each of those societies and leaders of societies hold in common, is emotional-instinctual epistemology. They decide what to believe is true based on what instinctually and emotionally feels true. They are societies built on truthiness.

At the opposite of dogmatism, is the reliance on rational epistemology: deciding what to believe is true based only on what you can reason out in your mind, based on systematically gathered observational evidence, actively working to contradict and re-test assumptions and ideas, with an awareness of the trickiness of human perception and the tremendous capacity of the human mind to fool itself and to want to fool itself. Rational epistemology is the root of science, of law, and of democracy. It is a lot tougher than instinctual epistemology, because the latter is our natural state, while the former requires education, cleverness, devotion to curiosity, and hard work.

Once you accept your epistemology, everything else falls into place. Having chosen one option, you perceive and understand the world according to a set of arbitrarily accepted axioms initially selected for their emotional appeal, and compartmentalize away or simply deny or ignore all objective evidence that does not confirm your axioms, though you seize upon and proclaim the truth of any selective evidence you can interpret to support your pre-set beliefs.

Or having chosen the other option, you engage in a continual feedback loop of learning more about the world around you, and using your increasing understanding to continue to learn still more, you are able to tolerate ambiguity and learn from your mistakes, you are intellectually honest and humble in the face of all that still remains to be discovered. Rational epistemists will always have the intellectual humility to acknowledge the absence of claims to absolute authority and the potential validity of unfamiliar observations and experiences related by others; and to use reason to pursue the truth together. Yes: actual, objective truth. Which is why there is no such thing as American and Arabic and Japanese and African physics and biology (despite the navel-lint-picking of the (emotional-instinctual-epistemological) Strong program). There is only physics and biology.

(This also despite my law school mentor, who taught that there is no truth, there are only arguments. Shows what comes from not starting with a physics degree I guess.)

Part of the fallout of this is that, because the initially seized-upon assumptions of the instinctual epistemists are arbitrarily selected or imposed, instinctual epistemists are doomed forever to remain in insoluable conflict with one another.

It seems like the political fault lines in America have split generally along that rift between the epistemologically rational and the epistemologically instinctual. That is a far more relevant picture for today's political divide than the tired old hag of left and right. There is certainly no shortage of emotional-irrational epistemists on today's left - but the modern Republican party has enforced and achieved an astonishingly pure hegemony of emotional-irrational epistemology, in which reason-based epistemology is emphatically unwelcome.

This is true despite a variety of emotional-instinctual epistemologies working side-by-side within the modern GOP establishment; not only the fundamentalist Christian epistemological group, but also the Reaganomics trickle-down fundamentalist believers, the anti-science "intelligent design" and "global-warming-is-a-conspiracy" fundamentalist believers; the simple "liberals(or)gays-are-the-source-of-evil" hate-driven fundamentalist believers; etc.

As for what type Bush is, I think that's a trick question. This is just my impression, but I don't think he really has core beliefs of his own; I think his pride in leadership by delegation extends to delegating decisions on what basic assumptions to base his worldview on. I think that's the only explanation for his strange transformation from moderate, easy-going governor; that was just due to his temporary absorption of the worldviews of the lieutenants he happened to surround himself with in Austin. His very different nature after becoming president was a reflection of the very different nature of the people he surrounded himself with in Washington: mainly Cheney and Rumsfeld, although he had enough room to internalize all the modern GOP emotional-instinctual epistemologies listed above.

The proper question then is, what flavor is Cheney and Rumsfeld's epistemology, which they also imbue onto Bush as his primary mindset. I used to have sort of an impression that they have a rational epistemology. Then in the last few days, I read Zizek's essay and the letters responding to it, and Don Rumsfeld's defense of the good Iraq war. Then it came to me: Cheney and Rumsfeld's epistemology is emotional-instinctual after all, based on axiomatic internalization of Leo Strauss. That’s why they are perfectly certain that they are always right, that they know better than everyone else; that their own ideas about how many troops to send in to Iraq or what the reception would be like or how to rebuild the country were infallible to the point that all contradictory experts' ideas were worthless. That’s why they see themselves as the heroes of a struggle to defeat the very concept of terror and rid the world of evil, and why they believe in the need for an all-powerful executive, for a disregard of “quaint” concepts of constitutional rights, and for an absolute right to govern in secrecy – all despite a wealth of contradictory evidence and despite any obstacle of existing law. The axiomatic, irrational Straussian worldview is the root cause of the antidemocratic thrust of this administration.

Of course, it’s just a hypothesis; we need more objective evidence to rationally evaluate the idea…

(* As for Rumsfeld's column in the Post, I found myself agreeing with much of it: the rationale for a free and democratic Iraq is as compelling today as it was three years ago. I remain deeply disappointed by the Michael Moore wing of administration critics who ignore the fact of atrocity and terror as a way of life for twenty million Iraqis before we invaded. No matter how many phones have been tapped, America today is a land of tremendous freedom and dignity compared with the truly atrocious Iraq under Saddam. The problem with Rumsfeld's column is I don't believe it represents what he really believes - otherwise they would not have distorted the evidence to make the case for war; they would not have ignored the well-attested need to go in with two and a half times as many troops; they would not have flushed away five years' worth of expert State Department planning for rebuilding the country; and above all, they would not have permitted, and apparently encouraged, the savage abuse of detainees - which was not only despicable, but strategically stupid, in surrendering the claim to clear moral superiority to the previous regime and in inspiring ordinary Iraqis to hatred against the occupation. If we had had leaders who avoided each of those mistakes and did the invasion right, Iraq would be peaceful and prosperous right now with almost no U.S. troops remaining.)

UPDATE: Eugene Robinson is one of many, I'm sure, who is also busy wondering about Cheney and Rumsfeld's perception of reality.

The mind of god tied around his neck: Michio Kaku handwaves to Neverland

The misguided Michio Kaku was on the radio today promoting his new book by declaring superstrings to be The Mind Of God that Einstein sought, and that the strings define physics as the harmony of the universe, chemistry as the melody, and the universe as a symphony. It's high time for Berkeley to revoke his Ph.D. for crimes against public understanding. What do any of those poetic claims have to do with any actual theoretical framework for explaining quantum mechanics?

He feels no need to interrupt his flights of flourishing hand-waving to distinguish between actual discoveries, well-supported theories, and speculative theories that have made no falsifiable predictions supported by subsequent observations that might distinguish the theory from competing possibilities, and to make clear that superstrings belong squarely in the third category. Sure, you can't get the general public to understand non-commutative geometry and anti-de Sitter space in the space of one radio show - but trying to do so would be less unhelpful than making authoritative pronouncements that spontaneous inflation of our universe out of the multiverse shows that the judeo-christian creation and the buddhist timelessness of the world both had part of the truth. Yech.

He led straight from superstrings into the discovery of dark energy without a hint that dark energy, like all other recent important new physics discoveries, spectacularly failed to have been predicted by any flavor of string theory; or, conversely, that all predictions that have been made by superstring theory have been either impossible to observe or were confronted with contradictory evidence (proton decay...) in which case the predictions were tweaked to remove the possibility of observation. Or, that despite more man-hours of study prior to any confirming observation than any other theory in the history of physics, it still hasn't adequately incorporated spacetime, instead just assuming spacetime to be a flat background for stringy particles. I.e., it still hasn't gotten past, or even to, the "assume the chicken is a sphere" stage; even a sphere has the same fundamental physical basis as a chicken.

We've known that space and time can't be treated as a flat background for 80 years. Superstrings are not the height of today's physical knowledge; they are eighty years behind the times, and counting.

And don't even sully yourself to read Kaku's arguments that we must remove RTGs from space probes to keep from exposing outer space to dangerous radiation. Seriously, Berkeley, maybe at least an apology for granting this guy his degree?

(P.S. - An automated Google ad on a search on Kaku produced this delightful Zen koan: "How You Can Master Holographic Time To Gain Extreme Wealth & Success!"

Still, does the ad's love of hyperbole match Kaku's own?)

Wieseltier's going down!

As a former book review editor, I can only wonder where The New York Times came up with Sam Tanenhaus, its book review editor, the guy who mistakes reviewers incapable of anything more than ranting slurs for those who offer actual, thoughtful criticism - as I mentioned in this earlier post. Several other bloggers have caught onto Leon Wieseltier's review of Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett - including Lindsay Beyerstein and coturnix at Majikthise, the Mad Scientist at The Daily Trascript (of RNA), and Brian Leiter at Leiter Reports.

The Mad Scientist hits it on the head:

Wieseltier attacks Dennett's reasoning by reasoning that reason can't be used to study religion. What the bloody hell??? In other words, please don't ask rational questions.

That sums it up pretty well: it's really a choice not of what to believe, but how to believe: to rely on emotional or spiritual feelings to decide what is true, or to accept as truth only that which is supported by objective observation and rational analysis. To pursue a reasoned critique of Dennett would only be giving in to Dennett's commitment to reason - whereas Wieseltier's preference for emotionally discerned "truth" leads him to believe the only criticism needed is a huffing, puffing appeal to emotion.

Turning to Dennett's book, without having read it yet (soon...), it would be ridiculous with all we know at this point, not to investigate the potential evolutionary origins of the widespread human impulses to religious belief and the collection of behaviors that make up religion.

Next comes jalapeño oxygenate

El Wapo reports on the rise of ethanol. The critics of ethanol are sounding pretty dumb these days. If we added an accurate national security and foreign trade balance externality fee to gasoline, methanol would become cheaper overnight. Direct the fees toward a national security and foreign trade balance externality credit on methanol sales, and it would be no contest. And by the time economies of scale in dual or triple use motor engines have matched those of gasoline-only engines, we would be set for life. Also pair it with hybrids, and make permanent the income tax credit on original purchase of a hybrid, and add one for dual/triple-use.

For the most cogent summary of the coming methanol/ethanol revolution, read here.

In case I'd felt tempted to subscribe to The New Republic

Here is a terrific example of a flourishy, flailing critique, devoid of persuasiveness or meaningful analysis: the review by Leon Wieseltier of 'Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon' by Daniel C. Dennett, in the New York Times.

Wieseltier, apparently entrusted as the literature editor for The New Republic, opens by flopping down the old red herring that rational, rather than faith-based, epistemology, is just another faith: "Scientism, the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical, is a superstition, one of the dominant superstitions of our day... For a sorry instance of present-day scientism, it would be hard to improve on Daniel C. Dennett's book. 'Breaking the Spell' is a work of considerable historical interest, because it is a merry anthology of contemporary superstitions."

Why do religious believers think the ultimate put-down for scientific epistemology is to allege that it is just another faith? Are they themselves arguing that a belief system would be shown to be worthless if it is based on faith?

But repeating a claim over and over doesn't lend any actual meaning to empty words. What makes the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions a superstition? How is a superstition defined, and how does the worldview of science compare with that definition? When will any of these faith-based epistemologists actually try to lay out a reasoned argument for why the scientific method should be just another faith?

But I guess expecting a reasoned argument is precisely to expect them to switch sides. Who needs a reasoned argument when you can just make a proclamation with lots of expressions of earnest conviction? Who can argue with the truthiness they feel about the validity of faith over science as a means to understand the world?

Try this on: a superstition is a belief prompted by an inner feeling that can't be confirmed by objective observation of the results of external, real-world phenomena. The scientific worldview is precisely that which rejects such beliefs that define superstition. The belief that science is somehow actually a superstition, rather than the diametric opposite of the mental state that fosters superstitions, is itself prompted by an inner feeling that can't be confirmed by objective observation of the results of external, real-world phenomena. You lose; science wins.

Looking deeper, what would make an otherwise (presumably) educated person, who probably accepts the scientific explanations for how his computer and his statins work, rather than endowing CPU's and hypolipidemic agents with disembodied spirits, insist on outrage when scientific epistemology is not restrained from examining human thoughts and behavior and beliefs? Perhaps a persistent discomfort with accepting that we ourselves are defined by the physical structures of our bodies and brains, without requiring a mystical quickening spirit, or that our persistent motivations to find belief in a supreme being, despite the absence of any evidence for spirit selves or gods, and the presence of overwhelming evidence that it is in our nature to hold to beliefs in those concepts. The epistemology of faith, forever malleable by definition of being unrestrained by external evidence, allows one to hold on to the comforts of spiritual beliefs. And so the mode of deciding what is true is selected to allow for the truths axiomatically insisted upon.

I reject the very concept of belief. The word "belief" is just a euphamism for internal emotions mistaken for evidence of the state of the external world.

I cringe every time I see one of those "People of Faith for Kerry/Edwards" bumper stickers (which are still around). How about "People of Skepticism for Kerry/Edwards"?

(Though, god forbid Kerry the Incoherent should be nominated again.)

[UPDATE] - Brian Leiter has picked up on this too, with a more detailed demolition of Mr. Wieseltier's work, in an excellent post entitled "Why review a book of philosophy when you can sneer at it?"

[UPDATE AGAIN] - Majikthise has also listed a number of other interesting responses to Wieseltier.

And if anyone hasn't yet read Majikthise's revelatory paper on normative naturalized epistemology, DO IT NOW for reason's sake. It is the natural sciences - especially physics - that have taught us not only the truth about the world around us, but that has also taught us how to discern actual truth - no mean feat for the wayward-tending imagination of the human mind.