My son finds decision-making challenging at times (OK, who doesn’t?) and eeny, meeny, miny, moe helps him break his internal deadlock. Actually, it did until he realized it was deterministic and he could decide the outcome by choosing where to start. So now he waves his hand around while he sings a song for a while, then opts for whatever he’s pointing at when the song ends. I’m not sure it’s actually a random process, but it seems like it must be closer than the original version. Plus he finds it satisfying which is valuable by itself. And based on a recent study of the value of randomness in group tasks, my son just might be onto something.
[Read more…] about Science Corner: Artificial Intelligence Deploys Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe
randomness
Science Reader Question: Evolutionary Project Management
A few months back, I received some questions here on the blog about evolutionary biology and its implications for Christian theology. They probed broadly and deeply, covering original sin, the problem of evil and many of the topics everyone asks about and indeed have been asking about since long before anyone conceived of a theory of evolution. These questions warrant more detailed answers than a few comments can provide, so I will be taking a look at them in some depth over the next few weeks. Looking ahead, I expect that will include some discussion of the upcoming film X-Men: Apocalypse, since Apocalypse is obsessed with survival of the fittest and since the film declared its theological ambitions already. I’ll start this series with the questions I received previously, but feel free to chime in with others as we go along.
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Science Corner: BioLogos Conference Recap, Pt 2
Earlier this summer, I had the privilege to attend BioLogos‘ Evolution & Christian Faith conference. Last week, I shared some of the talks from the conference, with an emphasis on theological topics. This week, I want to highlight some of the scientific topics. I had a hard time choosing, especially since these recordings allowed me to catch up with talks I wasn’t able to attend in person. There are even more talks available here, covering areas I haven’t even begun to address, like science education. [Read more…] about Science Corner: BioLogos Conference Recap, Pt 2
Science in Review: Quantum Foam Fluctuation, Roll for Initiative
I’ve always been sympathetic to Einstein’s famous assertion “God doesn’t play dice with the world.” In my public health training, I regularly and fruitfully used statistics and probability theory. Ideologically, they struck me as concessions to pragmatism. Human beings are too complex, their measurable attributes innumerable; we cannot know enough about them to accurately describe their full condition at any moment. We appeal to the law of large numbers to save us from our finitude. Somewhere behind those statistics are objective truths about the health of each individual in the public. As with people, so with photons; underneath those probability waves, surely there must be a bedrock of certainty.
When I read about this result in Big Bang cosmology, I was intrigued. I discovered that an interpretation of quantum physics with certainty at its core does exist, and has existed for some time. It was never widely adopted, and has become less popular in recent years. This new cosmological result resurrects it, or at least its central and most controversial element — a guiding equation that makes the properties of a single particle dependent on every other particle in the universe. This results in nonlocal effects which are considered irreconcilable with the locality of other physical phenomena. Â It also gives each particle a definite location and velocity. The probability wave still limits how precisely those quantities can be measured, meaning this version of quantum physics gives all the same results as fundamentally probabilistic interpretations.
Having been intrigued, I began to wonder. Why am I so opposed to a fundamentally probabilistic reality? [Read more…] about Science in Review: Quantum Foam Fluctuation, Roll for Initiative