Archive for the ‘Science’ Category

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Chasing the sources: a Newtonian mystery

Published by peter on 2009-08-06 in History, Prophecy and Science. 0 Comments

As is well-known to historians (although less so among scientists), Isaac Newton was a devout religious believer, an alchemist, and a seeker after ancient wisdom about God and the cosmos.   He was a Unitarian, a belief not permitted at the time, and so he kept his religious views very, very close to himself and to a small circle of intimates.  When his friend and fellow FRS, Nicolas Fatio de Duiller, publicly supported the millenarian French Protestant sect, the Camisards (aka The French Prophets), in London in the first decade of the 18th century, Newton kept in touch with him to learn of their prophecies, and came close to publicly supporting them also.
So when an historian writes the following it is very plausible, at least to people aware of Newton’s religious beliefs and interests:

Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was also enamored of Egyptian wisdom, as we shall see in the next chapter, even if it is not clear that he accepted the Hermetic tradition.  It was essential for his theory of gravitation to have an accurate measure of the world’s circumference, and for that he needed to calculate exactly a single degree of latitude.  Newton was convinced that there was no need to send a team of surveyors to plot distances on the ground, as the French were doing.  It was rather easier to determine the exact length of an Egyptian cubit, which ancient authors insisted was directly related to a degree of latitude.   This information could be obtained from the dimensions of the Great Pyramid, which was always believed (perhaps rightly) to enshrine perfect units of length, area and volume, as well as pi.  Sadly, the results of the Pyramid experiment did not fit Newton’s calculations, but, instead of scrapping the theory, the great scientist blamed the surveyors instead.   As luck would have it, the French astronomer Jean Picard (1620-82) succeeded in 1671 in measuring perfectly a degree of latitude in Sweden, so Newton could prove his theory of gravitation without the Egyptians.” (Katz 2005, page 31)

The reference the author David Katz cites for this story is Shalev 2002.  But consulting that reference, we do not see mentioned the story Katz relates here.  Instead, we find this sentence (on page 574):

As Robert Palter has argued in his critique on Bernal’s Black Athena, there is no evidence to show that Newton related his interest in the Egyptian cubit to his physics and geodesy.”

with the reference being to Palter 1993, pages 245 and following.
What is going on here?  Has Katz mistakenly cited the wrong source for the story above, something easy enough to do in academic writing?   Perhaps Katz could tell us.  I hope it is a simple mistake in citation, and not something more sinister.
References:
David S. Katz [2005]: The Occult Tradition:  From the Renaissance to the Present Day.  (London, UK: Jonathan Cape).
Robert Palter [1993]:  Black Athena, Afro-Centrism, and the history of science. History of Science, 31: 227-287.
Zur Shalev [2002]:  Measurer of all things: John Greaves (1602-1652), the Great Pyramid and early modern metrology. Journal of the History of Ideas, 63: 555-575.

Argumentation in public health policy

Published by peter on 2009-08-03 in Argumentation, Consumer Behaviour, Culture, Decision theory, Game theory, Intelligence and Espionage and Science. 0 Comments

While on the subject of public health policy making under conditions of ignorance, linguist Louise Cummings has recently published an interesting article about the logical fallacies used in the UK debate about possible human variants of mad-cow disease just over a decade ago (Cummings 2009).   Two fallacies were common in the scientific and public debates of the time (italics in orginal):
An Argument from Ignorance:

FROM: There is no evidence that BSE in cattle causes CJD in humans.
CONCLUDE:  BSE in cattle does not cause CJD in humans.

An Argument from Analogy:

FROM:  BSE is similar to scrapie in certain respects.
AND: Scrapie has not transmitted to humans.
CONCLUDE:   BSE will not transmit to humans.

Cummings argues that such arguments were justified for science policy, since the two presumptive conclusions adopted acted to guide the direction and prioritisation of subsequent scientific research efforts.  These presumptive conclusions did so despite both being defeasible, and despite, in fact, both being subsequently defeated by the scientific research they invoked.   This is a very interesting viewpoint, with much to commend it as a way to construe (and to reconstrue) the dynamics of scientific epistemology using argumentation.  It would be nice to combine such an approach with Marcello Pera’s 3-person model of scientific progress (Pera 1994), the persons being:  the Investigator, the Scientific Community, and Nature.
Some might be tempted to also believe that these arguments were justified in public health policy terms – for example,  in calming a nervous public over fears regarding possible BSE in humans.   However, because British public policy makers did in fact do just this and because the presumptive conclusions were subsequently defeated (ie, shown to be false), the long-term effect has been to make the great British public extremely suspicious of any similar official pronouncements.   The rise in parents refusing the triple MMR vaccine for their children is a direct consequence of the false assurances we were given by British health ministers about the safety of eating beef.   An argumentation-based  theory of dynamic epistemology in public policy would therefore need to include some game theory.   There’s also a close connection to be made to the analysis of the effects of propaganda and counter-propaganda (as in George 1959), and of intelligence and counter-intelligence.
References:
Louise Cummings [2009]: Emerging infectious diseases: coping with uncertainty.  Argumentation, 23 (2): 171-188.
Alexander L. George [1959]: Propaganda Analysis:  A Study of Inferences Made from Nazi Propaganda in World War II.  (Evanston, IL, USA: Row, Peterson and Company).
Marcello Pera [1994]: The Discourses of Science. (Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press).

On knowing

Published by peter on 2009-07-13 in Argumentation, Religion and Science. 0 Comments

I have long thought the many of the members of the cult of militant anti-religionists — people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens — have been assailing a straw-man.   Their target is religious belief of a particularly narrow, fundamentalist kind, and as Terry Eagleton among others have noted, this target is a gross caricature of most of the people who practice or believe religious ideas.   The main argument of the anti-God cult is usually that religious beliefs are held without evidence.
First, as the writer Karen Armstrong discusses today, for most people, religion is about doing, not about knowing.   It’s really only philosophers and their street-brawling imitators who obsess over beliefs.   Indeed, because doubt and scepticism are integral parts of most of the world’s religions, religious practice may not necessarily start with belief, but in fact end with it:  Belief can be what comes after you practice spiritual exercises long enough, not necessarily what causes you to practice them. People do zazen or yoga not because they are already enlightened, but to achieve enlightenment.
Second, the issue of evidence is problematic in these diatribes against religion.   It is simply not the case that there is no evidence for religious or spiritual ideas, or that such ideas are only supported by the irrational or the feeble-minded.   Most people who proclaim any adherence to religious or spiritual ideas will assert they have evidence for a realm beyond or outside the material world.   This evidence is usually of the form of direct personal contact with a spirit world or with spiritual entities, as for example, in the experience of Janet Soskice or the physicist Oliver Lodge.  Anyone who has spent any extended period in Africa or in East Asia will know people — sober, rational, and intelligent — who have had, and continue to have, what they experience as direct contact and interaction with spiritual entities.
Of course, such direct, personal evidence is usually not replicable at will, nor observable to others.  That makes it invalid as the basis of science, which is a shared undertaking, but does not make it invalid as evidence for personal beliefs or actions.   Knowledge of the existence of things unseen can be obtained by merely being in the presence of such entities, as the Sufi philosopher and founder of Illuminationism, Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi (1155-1191) argued in the 12th century. Knowledge-from-being-in-the-presence-of is a valid form of knowing, just as knowledge-from-tasting is.  Our subjective personal tastes in food and drink, say, or our subjective experience of being in love, are also not observable to others, but that does not invalidate them as evidence for our beliefs or as a rational basis for our actions.    When I say I prefer coffee to tea, this is an inference based (usually) on my personal, subjective reactions to the tastes of the two different liquids.  Only I know whether this inference is based on true reactions or not; if I am a sufficiently-clever actor, no one will ever be able to conclude anything about my reactions to the respective tastes other than what I claim.
It may be that experiences understood subjectively as contact with spiritual entities can be replicated in the laboratory by stimulating particular parts of the brain, as recent experiments appear to show.  But it does not follow from such research that all religious experiences are due to similar mental stimulation, just as using implanted electrodes to create the subjective experience of the taste of coffee would not thus imply the non-existence of coffee.
In closing then, I wonder which is more rational:  to commit to certain religious beliefs (or undertake a spiritual practice) based on one’s personal subjective experiences with the divine OR to devote one’s career to studying mathematical models of additional space-time dimensions, dimensions for which  there is as yet no evidence whatsoever, not even any subjective personal experience?  If Dawkings and Hitchens were really worried about irrational beliefs, they should be attacking the practitioners of String Theory and M-Theory.
References:
Mehdi Amin Razavi [1996]: Suhrawardi and the School of Illumination.  London, UK:  Routledge.
POSTSCRIPT (2017-06-04): In a New Yorker profile of business author Clayton Christensen, he is quoted regarding his daily reading of The Book of Mormon:

One evening in October, 1975, as I sat in the chair and opened the book following my prayer, I felt a marvelous spirit come into the room and envelop my body. I had never before felt such an intense feeling of peace and love. I started to cry, and did not want to stop. I knew then, from a source of understanding more powerful than anything I had ever felt in my life, that the book I was holding in my hands was true.” (Page 90)

Larissa MacFarquhar [2012]: When Giants Fail. The New Yorker. 14 May 2012, pp.84-95.

How environment shapes cosmology

Published by peter on 2009-07-01 in History, Mathematics, Prophecy and Science. 0 Comments

Further to the post below about the relationship between language and thought, a friend has just remarked to me that the absolute (East-West-North-South) spatial reference system in the language of the Kuuk Thaayorre is in fact a relative system, relative to the magnetic poles or (since they are unlikely to have known about the poles) relative to the movements of the sun.  Accordingly, such a language would have been unlikely to have developed in parts of the world with continuous cloud cover.   Which observation brought to mind a famous article by French mathematician and physicist Henri Poincare, where he considered what type of mathematical physics humans may have  developed if the earth had been always covered in cloud:  no theory aiming to predict the return of meteors, no models of planetary motion, not much study of ellipses and related number theory, and perhaps a theory of gravitation long delayed.  (Thanks:  DW).

The birds

Published by peter on 2009-05-19 in Science. 0 Comments

Scientists at the University of Florida have discovered what is known to every Australian schoolchild: that some birds can recognize humans who have threatened them in the past, and that they bear grudges.  For the scientists, it was mockingbirds, but for Aussie kids, it’s magpies, who can attack people viciously when there are young birds in their nest.  But not everyone is attacked, which suggests that magpies can distinguish and recognize people.

The decade around 1664

Published by peter on 2009-03-29 in Culture, History, Matherati, Probability theory, Prophecy, Science and Uncertainty. 0 Comments

We noted before that one consequence of the rise of coffee-houses in 17th-century Europe was the development of probability theory as a mathematical treatment of reasoning with uncertainty.   Ian Hacking’s history of the emergence of probabilistic ideas in Europe has a nice articulation of the key events, all of which took place a decade either side of 1664:

  • 1654:  Pascal wrote to Fermat with his ideas about probability
  • 1657: Huygens wrote the first textbook on probability to be published, and Pascal was the first to apply probabilitiy ideas to problems other than games of chance
  • 1662: The Port Royal Logic was the first publication to mention numerical measurements of something called probability, and Leibniz applied probability to problems in legal reasoning
  • 1662:  London merchant John Gaunt published the first set of statistics drawn from records of mortality
  • Late 1660s:  Probability theory was used by John Hudde and by Johan de Witt in Amsterdam to provide a sound basis for reasoning about annuities (Hacking 1975, p.11).

Developments in the use of symbolic algebra in Italy in the 16th-century provided the technical basis upon which a formal theory of uncertainty could be erected.  And coffee-houses certainly aided the dissemination of probabilistic ideas, both in spoken and written form.   Coffee houses may even have aided the creation of these ideas – new mathematical concepts are only rarely created by a solitary person working alone in a garret, but usually arise instead through conversation and debate among people each having only partial or half-formed ideas.
However, one aspect of the rise of probability in the mid 17th century is still a mystery to me:  what event or phenomena led so many people across Europe to be interested in reasoning about uncertainty at this time?  Although 1664 saw the establishment of a famous brewery in Strasbourg, I suspect the main motivation was the prevalence of bubonic plague in Europe.   Although plague had been around for many centuries, the Catholic vs. Protestant religious wars of the previous 150 years had, I believe, led many intelligent people to abandon or lessen their faith in religious explanations of uncertain phenomena.   Rene Descartes, for example, was led to cogito, ergo sum when seeking beliefs which peoples of all faiths or none could agree on.  Without religion, alternative models to explain or predict human deaths, morbidity and natural disasters were required.   The insurance of ocean-going vessels provided a financial incentive for finding good predictive models of such events.
Hacking notes (pp. 4-5) that, historically, probability theory has mostly developed in response to problems about uncertain reasoning in other domains:  In the 17th century, these were problems in insurance and annuities, in the 18th, astronomy, the 19th, biometrics and statistical mechanics, and the early 20th, agricultural experiments.  For more on the connection between statistical theory and experiments in agriculture, see Hogben (1957).  For the relationship of 20th-century probability theory to statistical physics, see von Plato (1994).
POSTSCRIPT (ADDED 2011-04-25):
There appear to have been major outbreaks of bubonic plague in Seville, Spain (1647-1652), in Naples (1656), in Amsterdam, Holland (1663-1664), in Hamburg (1663), in London, England (1665-1666), and in France (1668).   The organist Heinrich Scheidemann, teacher of Johann Reincken, for example, died during the outbreak in Hamburg in 1663.   Wikipedia now has a listing of global epidemics (albeit incomplete).
 
POSTSCRIPT (ADDED 2018-01-19):
The number 1664 in Roman numerals is MDCLXIV, which uses every Roman numeric symbol precisely once.  The number 1666 has the same property, and for that number, the Roman symbols are in decreasing order.
 
References:
Ian Hacking [1975]:  The Emergence of Probability: a Philosophical study of early ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference. London, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Lancelot Hogben [1957]: Statistical Theory. W. W. Norton.
J. von Plato [1994]:  Creating Modern Probability:  Its Mathematics, Physics and Philosophy in Historical Perspective.  Cambridge Studies in Probability, Induction, and Decision Theory.  Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press.