Tag Archives: conway hall

Lawrence Krauss Sprinkles Stardust at the School of Life

I’d heard of Alain de Botton’s School of Life  and its  “good ideas for everyday living“; I just hadn’t been to one of their ‘Sunday Sermons’.

Lawrence Krauss at Conway Hall 16th October 2011. Photo by Tim Jones
Krauss 2.0 ?

So arriving at Conway Hall yesterday to hear theoretical physicist and all-round science communicator Professor Lawrence Krauss talk about Cosmic Connections, it was an unexpected but not disagreeable surprise to find David Bowie and a seven foot spandex-clad devil stirred into the mix.  I for one can’t think of a better preparation for contemplating one’s insignificance in a miserable futureless universe than a good singalong to Space Oddity.

Conway Hall (Photo:Tim Jones)
Conway Hall (Photo:Tim Jones)
Lawrence Krauss at Conway Hall 16th October 2011. Photo by Tim Jones
“You are stardust; it is literally the most poetic thing I know about in all of science”

On the face of it, Krauss’s ultimate message is a bit grim: that our expanding, accelerating, universe will eventually dilate into cold, empty, blackness.  But, more positively, he’s saying we should take all that as read and concentrate on our perspective: understand what we really are and how we connect with the universe.  Then the journey to oblivion doesn’t look so miserable afterall; it looks fascinating – even poetic.

Lawrence Krauss at Conway Hall 16th October 2011. Photo by Tim Jones
Stardust meets Starman

Krauss’s consciousness-raising / cheer-up therapy centred around three less than obvious connections we have with the cosmos:

First off – we are the universe.  We’re made of stars.   The heavy elements that make us up could only have been made in stars, and they could only end up as part of us if they were blasted out of exploding stars: the supernovae.

Crab Nebula
You were here…

Call me a romantic, but I like the imagery.  Bits of me: hands and feet, arms, legs, head, brain – they didn’t just pop up a few decades ago, but have been flying around for billions of years and will be around for billions more.  I’ve been inside an exploding supernova – several most likely.

Lawrence Krauss and the Devil. Photo by Tim Jones
Straight on at purgatory, then right at the second circle….

devil photo Tim Jones
What the….

Next came the connectedness of life, with a nice story of Krauss sitting to write a physics paper, aware  he’s breathing the very atoms breathed by Einstein as he formulated his own theories (inspired inhalation?).  We’ve all got a bit of Julius Caesar in us it seems – literally.  And on the larger scale of the solar system, the exchange of possible life-bearing rocks between the Earth and other planets, including Mars, could mean we’re all extra-terrestrials without even knowing it.

Lawrence Krauss at Conway Hall 16th October 2011. Photo by Tim Jones
“The future is miserable”

Krauss’s final illustration challenges our perception that aspects of reality we normally consider outlandish and irrelevant to our day-to-day life do indeed have a direct influence on us.  The mundane activity in question is navigation by Global Positioning System (GPS), where the consquences of not correcting for satellite speed (Special Relativity), and height above the Earth (gravity effect/General Relativity), on measurement of the requisite nano-second scale signal transit times, would in only a day be sufficient to put ground track navigation out by several kilometres.

“Ground control to Major Tom”
Lawrence Krauss at Conway Hall 16th October 2011. Photo by Tim Jones
“Bits of Mars are falling on Earth all the time”

I really like this GPS example and the way Krauss presented it.  There was no such thing as GPS when I was at school, so all we got were stories of atomic clocks losing time when they were shot round the world on fast planes, or hypothetical astronauts of the future going on fictional journeys.  To be able to relate relativistic effects to a very real navigational error that normal folk can recognise and care about is brilliant.

Who’d have thought Sunday sermons could be such fun?

Lawrence Krauss and Tim Jones Photo Sven Klinge
It’s important to help struggling authors….

Photographs copyright Tim Jones.

Final photo: Thanks Sven Klinge.

Update 4th Dec. 2011 Video of the event:

Lawrence Krauss on Cosmic Connections from The School of Life on Vimeo.

Also of interest? – Lawrence Krauss recently on Materials World with Quentin Cooper (about 15 mins in)

 

 

Darwin, Dennett and Dumbo’s Magic Feather

Since I  posted this blog, the BHA have issued a video of the whole event. So for a summary – read the blog; for the whole smash…here it is!

Disney’s Dumbo the Elephant got rid of his magic feather.   He realised it was  just a temporary crutch that gave him the courage to be all that he could be.

For philosopher Daniel Dennett, speaking on ‘A Darwinian Perspective on Religions’ , religion is just like Dumbo’s feather – a crutch we can do without.   This is a summary of the British Humanist Association (BHA) event I  joined earlier this month at South Place Ethical Society’s Conway Hall in London.

Daniel Dennett speaking at the BHA event at Conway Hall
Daniel Dennett speaking at the BHA event at Conway Hall (photo Tim Jones)

Chairing this second lecture in the BHA’s  Darwin 200 special lecture series, Richard Dawkins  introduced  Daniel Dennett as the scientists’ philosopher; someone who takes time out to keep up to date with the scientific literature.  And strangely perhaps, it is Dennett the philosopher, not Dawkins the scientist, of these two champions of atheism, who tends to take the more studious, less obviously attacking,  line on religion.

Daniel Dennett with Richard Dawkins at Conway Hall (photo Tim Jones)
Daniel Dennett with Richard Dawkins at Conway Hall (photo Tim Jones)

Taking to the podium in cheerful good humour, prompted in part by the obvious similarity between his own bearded visage and that of the cardboard Darwin cut-out standing stage left, Dennett launched enthusiastically into the reverse engineering of religion.

What was in store for the world’s religions?  Would they sweep the planet?  Would they die out rapidly or drift out of fashion –  like the smoking habit ?  Or would they transform themselves into creedless moral entities – keeping up the good work but without the mumbo-jumbo?    Whatever the future holds  for religion, Dennett’s mantra is that if we are going to have any steer over it, we had better  understand it – from a scientific point of view.

A Darwinian Perspective on Religion (Photo Tim Jones)
A Darwinian Perspective on Religion (Photo Tim Jones)

Dennett treats religion as a Darwinian phenomenon.  Human beings put a lot of energy into it – so what’s the biological justification behind it?

Religions, Dennett argues,  are the inevitable product of word evolution.   He see words simply as memes that can be pronounced.  Memes – the name coined by Dawkins  to describe units of cultural information transfer that are  in some ways similar to genes.   Further, words and letters represent a digitisation of language, meaning they can be accurately replicated – even without understanding, because of their consistency with a semantic alphabet.  So however crazy an idea expressed in words might be, it can still multiply irrespective of its meaning being understood or making rational sense.

How might the first word memes have come about?   Using a Darwinian analogy,  Dennett likened the first word memes  to wild animals evolving through natural selection in which “evolution is the amplification of something that almost never happens” .   As such, it would only have taken someone to give an arbitrary  name to a strange noise in the woods one day (fairy, goblin, monster etc.), for that name to eventually get around a wider community.  The seeds of superstition would have been sown.   Some  notable memes, by virtue of a special repulsiveness  or  attractiveness, would have survived into folklore.   It is these memes, Dennett said, that are “the ancestors of the gods” at the core of the world’s religions.

Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett (Photo Sven Klinge)
Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett (Photo Sven Klinge)

But that was only phase one.  When these ‘wild memes’ are purposefully looked at, studied, and manipulated by people, they become more powerful.  Some humans (e.g.priests) might dedicate themselves to keeping such memes alive and thriving,  even when by themselves they are no longer very convincing.   The modern religions resulting from this process and  that still survive today represent a tiny fraction of all past religions, and are analogous to surviving languages or species.

Good design means these husbanded memes have inbuilt mechanisms for survival.  For example, many religions make man a ‘slave to the meme’ – it’s called subservience.

Dennett described an interesting possible influence of the placebo effect in our cultural religious development.  Human susceptability to ritual may be a result of our reproductively successful ancestors being the ones who – through receptiveness to placebo – enjoyed the health benefits of shaman ritual.   Other self-maintenance devices built into  modern religions include the glorification of incomprehensibility, warnings not to engage with reasonable criticism (on the basis that you’re talking to the Devil, and he’s a better debater than you), and the idea that a belief in a god is a pre-condition for morality.

And that brought Dennett near to his close, and us full circle to Dumbo, and the argument that we have religion because we need it.  Dennett argued we no longer need the crutch represented by Dumbo’s feather.   Indeed, it’s harmful to hang on to religion, what with the likes of cult suicides and  death sentences for blasphemy.   But religion is most harmful  as a threat to a rational world view.   And how does religion differ from other factors that disable rationality, such as drugs or alcohol?  Only religion, Dennett said, “honours the disability”.

Also Interesting – Dennett’s debate last year with Robert Winston

Dogs Are Spies From Venus

Contrary to popular belief, dogs are in fact spies from Venus.  So maintained University of London philosopher Steven Law at today’s Centre for Inquiry London ‘Weird Science’ event at Conway Hall.

Ben Goldacre (left) and John Law
Ben Goldacre (left) and Stephen Law at ‘Weird Science’ today. Photo:Tim Jones

In doing so, he applied the same faultless logic and interpretation of evidence used by young earth creationists, defending their belief that the universe is only 6000 years old.  Say no more.   And that was pretty much the tone for a day of  talks on the science of the weird, wacky, and flaky variety, from Ben Goldacre (”Bad Science” in the Guardian), Professors of anomolous psychology Richard Wiseman and Chris French, and philosopher Stephen Law.

Conway Hall (Photo:Tim Jones)
Conway Hall (Photo:Tim Jones)

Before sharing what a great show this was, let me digress for a bit on CFI London itself.   CFI London are at pains to explain in their FAQ that they don’t see science and reason as the be all and end all, but their positioning, and the topics they choose to discuss, for me at least force the issue of the incompatibility of science and religion.  Once you engage in a discussion on human psychology and the concept of what it means to be rational, the polite separation of science and religion becomes difficult to maintain.  It will be interesting to see how CFI’s event programme and various potential allegiances with secular interests develop.

Anyhow – it was a great show.  Richard Wiseman, hotfoot from an evening debunking mediums with his mate Derren Brown, illustrated how easily our perceptions can be fooled and our attention directed.   Familiar gestalt switch examples, like the rabbit-duck picture, made an appearance, along with excerpts from Richard’s various TV appearances, including a hilarious debunking of firewalkers, and these clips: the amazing floating cork, and the colour changing card trick.

You might remember Chris French, a psychology professor from Goldsmiths, as the guy who organised the dowsing trials on Richard Dawkins’ ‘Enemies of Reason’ TV show.  French re-lived with us that demonstration of the refractoriness of dowsers’ belief in the face of out and out debunking, and shared the results of a study that aligned personality traits with the likelihood of belief in conspiracy theories.  Those more prone to belief tend to (a) have low trust in people, (b) feel alienated from society, (c) are quick to make assumptions from partial evidence.

Richard Wiseman
Richard Wiseman at ‘Weird Science’ today. Photo:Tim Jones

Writer, broadcaster, and medical doctor Ben Goldacre, while outspoken and opinionated, sticks to subject areas he knows something about.  That’s why he doesn’t address environmental issues and such like in his column and blog; their complexity not lending itself to case-based, winnable on evidence, 650 word analyses.

Ben shared his trademark disgust at alternative medicine and quackery, but majored on the rise and demise of medicine – through the Golden Age from the 30’s to the 70’s – after which the low hanging fruit dried up and major breakthroughs fizzled out.   His point – we should all get real that our level of understanding of much desease and suffering is still pretty minimal and (my words) – shit happens.   Although Ben’s book ‘Bad Science’ is still hot off the presses, his words reminded me of another honest text with a medical flavour – ‘The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine’ by doctor and Telegraph columnist James Le Fanu; check it out.

Ben Goldacre
Ben Goldacre at ‘Weird Science’ today. Photo:Tim Jones

Mainstream newspapers, and particularly their ‘humanities graduate’ editors (I’m sure he’s not talking about scientifically trained SciComs Grads here) got it in the neck big time, as did the various PR and press agencies that feed them.  Why, when literary criticism of the highest intellectual level gets column space, do we not see science coverage of the same professional calibre?  Goldacre also, admirably, subscribes to the BBC Horizon dumb down theory. (There are still Horizon dumb down deniers out there – believe it or not.)

Ben’s closing comments were encouraging  – but not for mainstream conventional print journalism.  He saw no solution to the dire journalistic picture he’d painted – it’s simply what the market wants.  But the rise of the blog is changing everything, cutting out a middle man who is adding less and less value.  And if we doubt a blog’s content? – check the source references; all good blogs provide the links.