Monthly Archives: December 2013

Which Side Are You On?

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Journalist Edward McClelland lays it on the line at Salon in “The ‘Middle Class’ Myth: Here’s Why Wages Are Really So Low Today”.

Some key points:

In the relatively recent past, an “unskilled” worker straight out of high school could get a union job and earn enough to buy a car and rent an apartment.

Workers aren’t simply paid according to their skills. They’re paid based on how much they can get from their employers.

The anti-union movement’s biggest victory hasn’t been the elimination of existing union jobs. It’s been preventing the unionization of other jobs.

Companies claim that low-paid jobs were never meant to support a family or lead to a career, but that’s simply a way to justify paying low wages. And they can do that because they don’t have to deal with unions.

Today’s workers have to stop thinking of themselves as middle-class, just because they don’t work in a factory or they went to college: “Unless you own the business, you’re working class”.

“The smartest people I ever met were guys who ran cranes in the mill…They were smart enough, at least, to get their fair share of the company’s profits.”

It’s an excellent article and not very long. 

While we’re on the subject, Pete Seeger sings “Which Side Are You On?”, written in 1931 by Florence Reece, the wife of a union organizer, during Kentucky’s Harlan County War.

PS – Wikipedia says Florence Reece took the melody from a Baptist hymn. Pete Seeger was only 12 in 1931.

A Guide to Reality, Part 7

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In the final pages of chapter 2 of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions, Alex Rosenberg turns to some big, persistent questions he believes are now answered by physics.

– Where did the universe come from, how long ago, and where is it going?

Rosenberg accepts the standard view that the universe began with a “big bang” about 13.75 billion years ago (13.80 according to the latest Wikipedia update). The universe started out extremely hot and extremely dense and has been expanding ever since, creating spacetime, subatomic particles, the elements, stars and galaxies along the way. The expansion seems to be speeding up, but it’s not clear why.

Rosenberg gives the impression that the universe began as a tiny sphere, reaching the size of an orange in much less than a second. The physicist who answers questions at the “Ask a Physicist” website, however, says that the universe didn’t really explode from a tiny point, despite what every documentary and planetarium show implies. He says we should think of the early universe as being like an infinite, very hot, very dense rubber sheet that suddenly began to stretch (although he admits that it’s hard to picture something infinite becoming larger without doing the math). 

One aspect of the big bang that’s always bothered me is its location. Physicists often imply that it didn’t have a location, since spacetime didn’t exist before the big bang occurred. Rosenberg, however, says there is a small region of space where the cosmic background radiation is more intense than anywhere else. He refers to this as “the source of the big bang”. The “Ask a Physicist” physicist says that the oldest light we can detect came from somewhere 46 billion light-years away, much further away than the 14 light-years we would expect from the age of the universe (the difference is the effect of cosmic expansion). So if there is a region of space some 46 billion light-years away that appears to have been the location of the big bang, I have dibs on running the first snack bar and gift shop.

– Where did the big bang come from?

Rosenberg favors one of the leading theories:

The best current theory suggests that our universe is just one universe in a “multiverse” – a vast number of universes, each bubbling up randomly out of the foam on the surface of the multiverse, like so many bubbles in the bathwater, each one the result of some totally random event.

Of course, I have no idea whether the multiverse theory is correct, but it doesn’t seem right to assume that whatever happens in the multiverse is totally random. Most physicists believe that events at the quantum level in our universe are random, but others think that there might be non-random causes underlying the quantum level. Even if quantum events in our universe are random, why assume randomness to be the rule in other universes or in the larger multiverse? Maybe randomness or apparent randomness is simply a feature of the universe we live in.

Rosenberg is certain that everything that happens at the quantum level in our universe, everything that happened in the pre-big bang universe, everything that happened before that in the multiverse, and even everything that is happening in the multiverse right now is fundamentally random. But this seems like conjecture on his part, especially since nobody knows what physical laws were in effect before the big bang or are in effect in the multiverse (if such a thing even exists). 

– Why is there something rather than nothing?

Some philosophers, scientists and theologians consider this to be the deepest question of all. According to Rosenberg, the answer is:

No reason at all. It’s just another quantum event. What science and scientism tell those who hanker for more is “Get over it!”

If Rosenberg is simply telling us what today’s best science has to say about the origin of all existence, he’s probably right. Either there has always been something (there never was a first cause or a prime mover) or one day something simply happened to pop into existence. Rosenberg’s project, however, is both to explain what science tells us and to convince us that scientism provides the answers we need to live without illusions (“the methods of science are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything” and “science provides all the significant truths about reality”). I think it would be more rational to confess that we don’t know and may never know why there is something rather than nothing. Science might be the most reliable way to secure knowledge, but it hasn’t given us knowledge of everything.

– What is the purpose of the universe?

As should be expected by now, Rosenberg’s answer is short and to the point. There isn’t any purpose to the universe at all. He points out that physicists have been tremendously successful at explaining natural phenomena without resorting to purposes (what philosophers call “teleological” explanations). Smoke doesn’t rise because its purpose is to get higher. Rosenberg is sure that the universe wasn’t created as someone’s science experiment and we aren’t all living in some kind of enormous virtual reality contraption. He’s probably right, but it seems to me that he’s going beyond science here. The best that can be said in support of his position is that, according to the best science we have, the universe functions without purpose. Contemporary physicists don’t need to invoke purpose or purposes to explain what happens in the universe. Furthermore, there is no reason to suppose that future physicists will need to invoke purpose to explain why there is a universe, assuming that they are ever able to come up with an explanation at all.

– Why does the universe have the laws of nature and the physical parameters that make intelligent life possible?

It’s often pointed out that if the laws of nature or the basic physical parameters (like the charge on an electron) were slightly different, the stuff we’re made of couldn’t exist, so neither would we. Physicists have come up with different explanations for this fact of life (the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin offered a theory called “cosmological natural selection” in his book The Life of the Cosmos). Of course, some thinkers have concluded that God must have designed things this way to make a nice home for people like you and me. Having accepted the multiverse theory as the best theory we have, however, Rosenberg concludes that we’re just lucky. Given that a multitude of universes have arisen from the multiverse, it stands to reason that some of them are like ours. We won the cosmic lottery. 

Maybe he’s right (although some days I don’t feel like a winner). Personally, I’m reserving judgment.

Coming up in part 8: “How Physics Fakes Design”.

An Itch Better Left Unscratched

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Do you ever scratch an itch and later regret it?

Way back in 1969, when I was a senior at a suburban California high school, I missed the notice about reserving a copy of the yearbook. Maybe I was distracted. Maybe I was home with mononucleosis. So when the yearbooks were distributed later that year, I didn’t get one.

Being 17 and relatively unassertive, it didn’t even occur to me to ask if there were extra copies available.

This has bothered me ever since, not in a big way, but in an itchy way. That’s why I looked on eBay recently to see if anyone was selling a copy of La Mirada High School’s 1969 edition of La Capa (why anyone would use the Spanish words for “the layer” or “the coating” as the title of a high school yearbook is a good question, but probably says something about the quality of language instruction at La Mirada High in the 1960s).

Surprisingly, someone who specializes is selling such things was.

My used copy of La Capa arrived two days ago. It once belonged to a sophomore named Lenny. So far as I know, we never met, but I hope his yearbook didn’t end up on the open market because he’s no longer with us.

After a brief look and some excited sharing, I put my new possession aside until this morning.

Having paged through it now, I’m wondering: 

Who the hell were all those people? Only a very small percentage of them looked familiar at all.

What motivated the La Capa papparazzi to document the activities of a small social elite?

Why didn’t I participate in the amazing assortment of clubs and activities that La Mirada High offered? (Apparently, I was vice-president of one organization, but you couldn’t prove it by me.)

Why didn’t I talk to the completely charming Debbie Anderson as much as possible? Especially since I was considered intelligent back then (there are clearly different kinds of intelligence, some more valuable than others). 

And how could I ever have been that skinny?

I’m convinced it would have been better to have kept my $50 (including shipping) and avoided this excursion down memory lane. The past is past for a reason. 

A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time by Adrian Bardon

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Someone thought it would be a good idea to call this book A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time, no doubt as an allusion to Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. The book’s focus isn’t historical, however. It’s a brief introduction to the philosophy of time, with chapters devoted to the nature of time, its direction, its passage, and a few other standard topics. Professor Bardon’s explanations of the issues are almost always clear and the book is relatively easy to read.

The most interesting aspect of the book is Bardon’s strong preference for the “static theory of time”. That’s the counter-intuitive view that the apparent passage of time is an illusion, or, more precisely, that it’s merely the result of our human perspective. The static theory isn’t new. The Greek philosopher Parmenides argued for it 2,500 years ago. J. M. E. McTaggart unhelpfully gave the name “B-series” to this conception of time, distinguishing it from the more familiar “A-series” or “dynamic theory of time” that most people accept, according to which time passes as events move from the future to the past:

The static theorist believes in change, but only understood in a way that doesn’t commit one to the passage of time: Change, on the static theory, is to be understood as merely referring to the world being timelessly one way and timelessly another way at a subsequent moment.  

The B-series places every event in the history of the universe on an unchanging timeline. On this view, it‘s appropriate to describe every event as either earlier than, later than or simultaneous with every other event. But there is no special significance to the present moment (the “now”). It’s no more descriptive to say that an event is happening “now” than to say that a location is “here” or a direction is “up”. The idea that some events are in the past or future compared to the present moment is an illusion. So far as our “block universe” is concerned, all moments in time are equally real, not just the present one.

The static view of time isn’t universally accepted, but it’s popular among physicists and philosophers. One reason Bardon accepts it is that he thinks McTaggart’s arguments for the static theory and against the passage of time are “devastating”.

I think they’re confused. For example, McTaggart and Bardon hold that it’s self-contradictory to say that an event like the 1960 World Series used to be in the future and is now in the past, since by doing so we are attributing contradictory properties (being past and being future) to the same thing (a particular event). But being past or future are relational properties that vary with time. Saying an event was future and is now past is akin to saying a person was married and is now divorced, hardly a contradiction.

Bardon also presents Einstein’s theory of special relativity as a reason for doubting that time passes. Physicists have confirmed that two observers moving at great speed relative to each other will perceive time differently. For this reason, there is no place in physics for saying that two events are truly simultaneous, or which of two events happened first, except from a particular point of view: 

If there is no privileged vantage point from which to determine the “truth” of the matter – and the whole point of relativity is that there is not – then temporal properties like past, present and future cannot possibly be aspects of reality as it is in itself. They must be subjective and perspectival in nature.

Yet the theory of relativity pertains to how events can be observed or measured, given the constant speed of light. It doesn’t tell us how reality is “in itself”; it tells us how reality is perceived. Just because we can’t always know when two events occurred doesn’t mean there is no truth to the matter. A truth can be unknowable.

Furthermore, if relativity implies that there is no objective A-series past or future, it also implies that there is no objective B-series “earlier” or “later”. Bardon tries to draw a distinction between relativity’s implications for the dynamic and static theories of time, but it isn’t convincing. Perhaps the book would have been better if Bardon hadn’t so clearly taken sides.

Crime in the Suburbs, Part 2

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Here’s a heart-warming story from the police blotter section of our local paper:

On Nov. 25, between 8:45 and 9 a.m., someone took items from an unlocked vehicle. Reported stolen were a Tory Burch purse valued at $500, a Louis Vuitton wallet worth $900, numerous gift certificates worth $200, credit and debit cards [and] two checkbooks.

It’s good to see the wealthy giving to the less fortunate, especially now, “the most wonderful time of the year”. Â