Odds and Ends and Tallahassee

Quote of the Day:

"Isn't it great to live in a society where the penalty for lying to a congressman can be up to 30 years in jail, but the penalty for a congressman lying to you is another two years in office."

-- Peter Schmuck, Baltimore Sun sports writer, concerning the indictment of Roger Clemens

Bonus Quote of the Day:

“Any entity – no matter how many tentacles it has – has a soul.”

— Guy Consolmagno, one of the Vatican’s astronomers, on whether he would baptize an alien.

 
It's a Good Thing He Ain't Bush:

The Obama administration has urged a federal appeals court to allow the government, without a court warrant, to affix GPS devices on suspects' vehicles to track their every move.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/09/public-privacy/

An Irish Emigration Song, paraphrased

And it's good-bye Mick, and good-bye Pat, and good-bye all you lassies.
The anchor's away and the gangplank's up.  I'm bound for Tallahassee. 

Four frolicsome days teaching statistics!  Woo-hoo. 

The Hermeneutics of Stephen Hawking

This is the true quill, because I got it neu from Hermen himself. 

Physicists, when they are off the reservation, say the cutest things.  Many of them hold philosophy in contempt because "there are never any final answers" in philosophy.  Unlike physics, where the phlogiston...  I mean, the impetus....  Well, you know what I mean.  But as Mary Midgley said, "People who refuse to have anything to do with philosophy have become enslaved to outdated forms of it." 

Actually, final answers only come from mathematics.  Physics, appears final to the extent it appears mathematical.  That was Descartes' original programme: could we but reduce science to mathematics, we could reach scientific conclusions with all the certainty of mathematical ones.  Well, Popper put a stop to that nonsense.  It gave us new nonsenses, but that is another matter. 

But physics is the most mathematical of the natural sciences.  In the sense of the Scientific Revolution, that makes it the most scientific of the sciences and recently, carried away by a fit of mathematical certainty, the estimable Dr. Stephen Hawking wrote:

"As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

One is initially struck by several points.

Horatio Strikes Back

Skepticism about the variation in the fine structure inconstant.  (h/t John Farrell)  Pretty much correlates with which telescope was used.  Hence, with which folks made the observations.  This makes my little pointy quality engineer ears perk up.  Scientists are notoriously careless about issues of measurement system reliability.  (cf. surface station temperature measurements.) 

Scientists take all the fun out of science, double-checking and questioning results that fly in the face of orthodoxy.  Pfui, sez I.  Now we have the inconstancy denialists. 

I had begun to wonder whether the directionality had to do with the solar system's motion through the aether, aka black matter.  Or that of the spiral arm.  After all, if there really was a directional difference that just happened to coincide with which galaxies could be seen with which telescope, the two would be confounded. 

Stranger Things, Horatio. Stranger Things.

A team of astrophysicists based in Australia and England has uncovered evidence that the laws of physics are different in different parts of the universe. 

The report describes how one of the supposed fundamental constants of Nature appears not to be constant after all. Instead, this 'magic number' known as the fine-structure constant -- 'alpha' for short -- appears to vary throughout the universe.

"After measuring alpha in around 300 distant galaxies, a consistency emerged: this magic number, which tells us the strength of electromagnetism, is not the same everywhere as it is here on Earth, and seems to vary continuously along a preferred axis through the universe," Professor John Webb from the University of New South Wales said.

Skiffy Connections?

If the laws of physics turn out to be merely 'local by-laws', it might be that whilst our observable part of the universe favours the existence of life and human beings, other far more distant regions may exist where different laws preclude the formation of life, at least as we know it."

And if we have a far future intergalactic space opera (with Space Princesses, of course) what happens to the electromagnetic equipment on the ship?  Are neural impulses electromagnetic?  Any physicists out there?

Add this to the dark energy and "lithium-free bubble" comments earlier, our local neighborhood begins to look a lot more user friendly than the rest of the Stuff out there. 

How Long Do Some People Remember Historical Dates?

Jan Sobieski.  

On September 10, 1683, the papal legate sang a great outdoor mass on the Kahlenberg, west of Vienna, for King Jan III Sobieski and his 16,000 troops. The king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been named commander of the field army of some 85,000 troops, including not only the Polish–Lithuanian contingent, but also troops of the Habsburg Monarchy, Bavaria, Saxony, Franconia, Swabia, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and the Zaporozhian Cossacks -- collectively: the Holy League.

This is Kewl

Now for a word from our sponsor