Finnegan’s Awake: How Biocentrism Games the Improbable History of Science

2010-05-31
By

First Star Trek predicted the normalization of racial diversity. Then it was cell phones. Now it’s a “theory of everything.”

Is there anything Star Trek can’t predict?

In an episode called “Shore Leave,” first broadcast in 1966, the crew of the Enterprise visited a planet where any thought — even an idyll one — would cause its physical creation. So whenever somebody had a dangerous idea — of a hungry tiger, for instance — an advanced computer acted instantly to manifest the thought into a physical reality. Trouble was, the landing party not aware that they needed to control their thoughts, and as a consequence, hilarity ensued.

Now, in a new book called Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, author Robert Lanza proposes that physical reality is a process in which observation and perception dynamically precede the presence of time and space.

If your knees are jerking on reading this thesis, it’s fair to point out that Dr. Lanza’s credentials are impeccable. U.S. News & World Report has called him a “renegade thinker” and a “genius.” He’s been interviewed by Discover magazine and has been widely published in prestigious scientific and medical journals. President Jimmy Carter wrote the forward to his book One World: The Health & Survival of the Human Species in the 21st Century. Dr. Lanza is also an adjunct professor at the Institute of Regenerative Medicine, Wake Forest University School of Medicine. In 2005, as the vice president of Medical and Scientific Development for Advanced Cell Technology, Inc., Dr. Lanza appeared before a Senate subcommittee to speak in favor of the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act. Some of Dr. Lanza’s books are required reading for students of biomechanics, including Principles in Tissue Engineering, recognized as the definitive reference in the field.

Dr. Lanza writes Biocentrism autobiographically, but also as a straight-up synthesis of his formative experiences and professional drive to solve the puzzle of life — evolution and everything.

Biocentrism was written with the help of Bob Berman, a veteran astronomer and journalist. Berman edits the astronomy section of The Old Farmer’s Almanac. He is a former Discover magazine columnist and is currently the editor of Astronomy magazine’s  “Strange Universe” column. As the reader discovers, modern cosmology strongly reinforces the implications of biocentrism.

Dr. Lanza begins his book with its denouement: “The world is not, on the whole, the place described in our schoolbooks.”

The world appears to be designed for life, not just at the microscopic scale of the atom, but at the level of the universe itself. Scientists have discovered that the universe has a long list of traits that make it appear as if everything it contains — from atoms to stars — was tailor-made just for us. Many are calling this revelation the “Goldilocks Principle,” because the cosmos is not “too this” or “too that,” but rather “just right” for life. (p. 83)

“Goldilocks” is a recognized natural phenomenon covered under the anthropic principle — a term first coined by Australian physicist Brandon Carter at a 1973 symposium in Kraków to honor the 500th birthday of Nicholas Copernicus.

Nowadays science identifies this phenomenon as the observation selection effect, wherein a “selection bias” must be factored in to cosmological measurements.

The gravitational constant is perhaps the most famous [example of the Goldilocks Effect], but the fine structure constant is just as critical for life. Called alpha, if it were just 1.1x or more of its present value, fusion would no longer occur in stars. (p. 87)

The Rare Earth hypothesis narrows the field of habitation down again, until the possibilities become too extreme to believe. In fact, the long odds against your reading this article are so remote as to be practically impossible. Yet, here we are, evidently snug inside the safe wave of the physical present.

You can look it up: “the Goldilocks phenomenon.”

By the late sixties, it had become clear that if the Big Bang had been just one part in a million more powerful, the cosmos would have blown outward too fast to allow stars and worlds to form. Result: no us. Even more coincidentally, the universe’s four forces and all of its constants are just perfectly set up for atomic interactions, the existence of atoms and elements, planets, liquid water, and life. Tweak any of them and you never existed. (p. 84)

The trouble with the Goldilocks principle is that it ultimately infects any sample that may be subjected to the scientific method. And according to the authors, scientific observation is simply not immune to the indirect effects of the observation selection effect or to its quantum cousin, the uncertainty principle. As it turns out, the upshot for science is that when a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, as a matter of fact it makes no sound at all.

Thus, when the scientific community chooses to ignore the impact of the OSE on practical puzzles like the theory of evolution, a fateful choice is made.

But science is a limber beast, and ignoring Occam’s Razor is not a long-term solution to the dilemma posed by the OSE. In fact, at least two problems in evolutionary biology could be informed by selection bias:

Exhibit 1: Abiogenesis. To this moment, there is no standard biological or mechanical theory to explain life’s origin. There is factually no mechanism known to science that could explain how living things could have formed through random mechanical processes. Famed biologist Francis Crick and the astronomer Fred Hoyle favored the theory of panspermia, where extraterrestrials are credited with seeding earth with its first life. But Panspermia merely passes the buck. How did life begin?

Exhibit 2: The Fermi paradox. Human sentience at this point in the evolution of the universe is explainable only if life is commonplace. Yet there is a mathematically conspicuous absence of observable extraterrestrial life. So where are they?

Fortunately, science holds a built-in capacity for change as no other human institution. Surprising as it may seem now, fifty years ago the Big Bang was a just another red pill that the scientific establishment could not swallow.

In those days the steady state theory of the universe was the standard model for cosmology. Any notion that the universe had a “beginning” was just an idiocentric fossil of religious mythology. By the middle of the twentieth century, good scientists could safely dismiss “In the Beginning” as an obsolete metaphor.

Then in 1964 a couple of commercial astronomers came accidentally upon evidence that the universe did indeed have a beginning in time and space. And in 1978, Arno Allan Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson won the Noble Prize for discovering the microwave signature of the Big Bang.

Even so, the great Sir Fred Hoyle went to his death in 2001 still insisting on his trusted steady state.

But the minds of young scientists change quickly, and the oldsters die away as they should. So now the Big Bang is old news in modern cosmology.

What a mad, mad, mad, mad, world.

And now in Biocentrism, Robert Lanza has proposed a millennial reorientation of science in which reality is redefined as an outcome of consciousness.

In his book, Dr. Lanza identifies seven principles of biocentrism:

1. What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness. An “external” reality, if it existed, would — by definition — have to exist in space. But this is meaningless, because space and time are not absolute realities but rather tools of the human and animal mind.

2. Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be divorced from one another.

3. The behavior of subatomic particles — indeed all particles and objects — are inextricably linked to the presence of an observer. Without the presence of a conscious observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability waves.

4. Without consciousness, “matter” dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.

5. The structure of the universe is explainable only through biocentrism. The universe is fine-tuned for life, which makes perfect sense as life creates the universe, not the other way around. The “universe” is simply the complete spatio-temporal logic of the self.

6. Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive changes in the universe.

7. Space, like time, is not an object or a thing. Space is another form of our animal understanding and does not have an independent reality. We carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells. Thus there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which the physical events occur independent of life.

The Copernican revolution displaced the Earth as the center of creation, and placed it instead as a small blue planet circling an average star in a rather run-of-the-mill galaxy that we call the Milky Way. But Nicholas Copernicus’s concept of a heliocentric universe was so shocking to society and the establishment of the time, that he could not safely publish his findings until he was on his death bed.

Now five hundred years after Copernicus comes another idea that’s just as maddening for the righteous defenders of “scientific orthodoxy:” a phenomenological discovery that consciousness creates its own reality.

The signs of Jungian synchronicity appear everywhere over time and space, beginning with the Big Bang and ending with this improbable moment. Yet science today remains hyper-vigilant against any reasonable hypothesis that does not honor the vaunted principle of mediocrity.

Meanwhile, back on a reportedly uninhabited planet in the Omicron Delta region, Dr. Leonard McCoy has just witnessed the unexpected passage of a rather large but well-dressed white rabbit, followed quickly by little girl named Alice.

On witnessing the phenomenon, Dr. McCoy picked up his mobile phone to convey the story to Captain Kirk, still in orbit aboard the Enterprise.

Kirk took the call on speaker.

“On this supposedly uninhabited planet,” McCoy reported in his dry Dixie tone. “I just saw a large rabbit pull a gold watch from his vest and claim that he was late.”

“That’s pretty good, Bones.” Kirk laughed. “Alright. I’ve got one for you. The rabbit was followed by a little blond girl, right?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” said McCoy. “They disappeared through a hole in a hedge.”

The captain didn’t stop laughing until Dr. McCoy physically showed him the rabbit tracks and the girl’s footprints.

Then Kirk became suddenly decisive. “You follow the rabbit,” he ordered, frowning at the inexplicable marks in the soil. “I’ll backtrack the girl. I’ll meet you round the other side of the hill.”

“Good,” Dr. McCoy replied, rocking back a little on his heels. “I’ve got a personal grudge against that rabbit, Jim.”

You said it, Doc.  And Goldilocks, too.

Mike LaSalle writes on science, religion and the popular media. He is the publisher of MensNewsDaily.com

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  • Jabberwocky from home

    The truth is probably somewhere in between the Rare Earths Hypothesis and the Principle of Mediocrity. I don’t see anything particularly revolutionary about the idea that the observer cannot be separated from that which is being observed, but biocentrism appears to be taking this idea to its logical extreme, which is silly. Although space and time are indeed illusions of the mind, those illusions, like those of desert illusions, have a manifest reality of light and vapor so to speak. Time is a measure of entropy, and space is a measure time. The reality of space and time is not as it appears, but it is still real, just in an unperceivable form to human cognition.

  • Kris W

    I have a feeling this guy would get along with Bishop Berkeley fairly well, because it seems like he is making a very similar argument. And the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle is probably more a product of inferior technology than anything else.

    It is something that will require some further reading; but from my own view, to view the environment you exist in as a part of yourself, or to deny that “reality exists” is to walk down the path of non-sentience(I have a theory in regards to sentience, in order to be truly sentient you have to have 1) self awareness, 2) awareness of the environment aka reality will be around long after your gone, and 3) awareness of others inside the environment{not to be confused with viewing others as a part of the environment, that would be a key indicator of being a psychopath).

    The truth of the matter is Human intelligence and most likely most intelligence is based upon pattern recognition. So we are capable of seeing patterns in everything. The patterns people see that enable them to stick around tend to survive, perception of patterns that get people killed tend not to.

    As the old riddle goes, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”, basic logic and reason would say yes.

    And where does our concept of time come from? It is not a purely Human construct, but a construct based upon gravitational rotation of the Earth, Moon, and the Stars.

    I strongly urge everyone who reads this article about Bio-centrism to look up the Philosopher Bishop Berkeley, and then take a very good look at the arguments of John Locke, Hume and later Philosopher Kant(ignore existentialism though, that seems to be the philosophy of psychopaths and the deluded).

  • http://avoiceformen.com/ Paul Elam

    @ Jabberwocky,

    Mike has been working the glitches out of the spam filtering. There were times that I had to go in and approve my own comments, but it seems to be improving. I trust it will work itself out, but it does bring up the question….

    If no one else observes your comment, was it ever really made? :)

  • DCM

    So if things weren’t as they are they’d be otherwise.

  • http://knol.google.com/k/the-anthropic-principle# island

    Jabberwocky said:
    “The truth is probably somewhere in between the Rare Earths Hypothesis and the Principle of Mediocrity.”

    Excellent!… and you’re right, Lanza is a theoretical extremist who has repackaged John Weeler’s flawed interpretation and claimed it as his own.

    What a joke.

    Check out my linked website on the anthropic principle.

  • patrick

    This is the basics of very old philosophies from the people that brought you Buddah.

    To think that a westerner finally starts putting things together is now somehow worthy of the “Genius” title because of these claims is what’s surprising. No – you didn’t actually come up with anything new.

    You’re just trying to justify the bringing of preconceived notions humans ordinarily have in their observations of anything earthly that occurs.

    In Dzog Chen, for instance, having an open mind – an empty mind actually – is what serves sentient beings best. But this is far from new, fresh thinking.

    I must admit, I’m going to print and re-read this and follow up with the links that are provided because I’m interested in the “agenda” that westerners are bringing to the observational post – at least how Lanza wants humans to perceive life.

    And btw – other than the catchy title – what in the hell does this article have to do with Finnegan’s Wake?

  • keith

    “physical reality is a process in which observation and perception dynamically precede the presence of time and space.”

    would seem valid, when compared to an altered state, altered from what seems to be the question. this statement suggests that physical reality is not singular but counted by the number of perceptions.

    I told my optometrist I didn’t need glasses, since 55% of my visual perception is internal and fabricated in my mind. He agreed, saying that the extra effort of processing would prove tiring. I said I could use the extra exercise to ward off dementia later in life. He said he never looked at it that way.

    At the motor vehicle testing center, while testing my vision, the attendant said, sir, of the 14 letters on the top line I have asked you to identify, you have not been able to get one correct. obviously your vision is impaired. wait a minute I said. I was able to identify that there is fourteen letters on the top line, obviously I can see, have you considered the possibility that I am illiterate.

    unfortunately, physical reality is only in question when it is disputed. it would be much bigger if it was always in question.

    I’m just harmonic dissonance migrating entropy

    WITH BEER!!!

  • http://www.google.com/profiles/mike.lasalle Mike LaSalle

    Patrick -

    The reference is not to Finnegan’s Wake, but to the character of Finnegan, who appeared in the Star Trek episode I mentioned in the article. Finnegan was one of the apparitions generated from Captain Kirk’s imagination. Finnegan’s Awake, meaning: the imagined thing has become real and independent from the imaginer.

    The other alternate reference to Finnegan’s Wake has to do with the idea of cycles, which is the macro theme of Joyce’s novel….

    As you know, the novel begins,

  • riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

    • How is it that the last line of the novel comes before the first?

  • A way a lone a last a loved along the

    • Time doesn’t matter. Causality is a frakking illusion.

  • keith

    @ Patrick

    I have discovered that “the empty mind” leads to intuitive insight. This is a problem with western thought, since it clashes directly with political correctness, democapitalocracyism, and my hair color.

    Herman Hesse alluded to this in his novel Magister Ludi Master of the Glass Bead Game. Carlos Castenada also in Don Juan A Serperate Reality.
    In which he suggested (stated) that reality is a perspective fabricated at the point of assemblage and in order to see one must locate the point of assemblage and relocate it. Or how bout hypnosis. How bout prophecy and revelation. How bout the power of suggestion. How bout prefabricated reality. How bout fate and destiny.

    I agree with you this is not new, but so what. Lanza has the McBranding it takes to deliver the burgers. He’s a McGenius.

    What bothers me about this is not the free thinking, but the migration to religio-science. The father has been replaced by government bureaucracy. Religion is being replaced with a form of science which is proving to be a political animal. This animal brought us Y2K, the .com bust and most recently GLOBAL WARNING otherwise known as “this is a Spanish inquisition”. Scary stuff.

  • Stephen Jarosek

    My initial knee-jerk reaction to Island’s comments regarding John Wheeler was “what are your credentials?” But then I saw his reference to his website on the anthropic principle, and my heart gladdened with the thought that here we have someone who knows what he’s talking about and he’s about to explain himself. But alas, after attempting to read this unnecessarily convoluted, insufferable passage, I’m back to my knee-jerk reaction. Multiverse theory, btw, also elicits that same sort of knee-jerk reaction from me. I’m not too sure where Wheeler stood on this, though it is well established that Everett, one of his students, was the initial proponent of this wacky line of reasoning. But I digress.

    Sorry Island, but I can’t continue to suffer through this indecipherable blather. The first hint of assaulting my sensibilities came in annoying phrases like “Copernican-like projections of mediocrity”. What does that mean? There is nothing complex or tricky about either the strong or the weak anthropic principle. Carter’s strong anthropic principle simply states that if the universe did not have the observed properties capable of generating life, then we would not be here to bear witness to them. I’m not sure what your article divulges that I did not already know. I searched in vain for that explanatory nugget that you seemed to be promising.

    Either way, I see where your line of reasoning is headed. From what I am able to make of this convoluted passage with its stillborn tangents, it seems to be along the lines of the neo-Darwinian interpretation of natural selection accounting for life as a progression of happy accidents. This will lead us inexorably to Richard Dawkins, selfish genes, epigenetics and that vast, white-washed edifice that, in my humble opinion, belongs at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

    Ultimately, whether one accepts my opinion or that of Island, we are stuck with opinions. There is no way of circumventing this, because we are unable to create a control universe where we can test to compare what happens when variables are adjusted or removed. Every scientist is motivated by an agenda and the opinion that they are right, and will provide the framework to justify their reasoning. While I don’t know what “Copernican-like projections of mediocrity” means, it does possess the strong whiff of agenda, a preconception as to what Island believes the answer should be.

    What I do know is that our mainstream life-sciences have failed us. The runaway, unchallenged success of feminism provides compelling proof of its failure. So what’s wrong with our life sciences? Isn’t it time for a review?

  • Roeland de Bie

    Biocentrism is more then Robert Lanza\’s notion on the relation between observer and object world, though he may have a point there. Biocentrism should be the way to look at humankind in all its aspects as an integral part of the Earth Life System. Let us see where such an analysis may lead us to. Some 28 years ago, after a visit to J.E. Lovelock, who then had published \”Gaia, a new look at life on earth\”, I wrote to the scientific magazine Nature about my ideas on what I named \’biocentrism\’. In this letter to Nature,(published Vol 295, january 7, 1982)I reacted on an article by G.K O\’Neill about the the probability of the development of space colonies and asked if it was reasonable to make an association with the idea of an overall \”organism\”. If future space colonies are some sort of copies of the Earth Life System (Gaia)could they then be seen as “offspring” or “children” ?. This letter, entitled ‘The ultimate Question’ ended with \” It is a question that goes beyond science, and gives us a choice between heroic antropocentrism and a more objective but difficult to accept biocentrism.\”

  • http://knol.google.com/k/the-anthropic-principle# island

    “But then I saw his reference to his website on the anthropic principle, and my heart gladdened with the thought that here we have someone who knows what he’s talking about and he’s about to explain himself.”

    And you can rest assured that I know more about this subject than anyone you will meet, sonny.

    “But alas, after attempting to read this unnecessarily convoluted, insufferable passage”

    That must be why it was picked for the front page and top knol award, right?

    “Sorry Island, but I can’t continue to suffer through this indecipherable blather. The first hint of assaulting my sensibilities came in annoying phrases like “Copernican-like projections of mediocrity”. What does that mean?”

    Did you try reading the quotes from Brandon Carter to this effect?… I didn’ think so…

    The cosmological extension of the Copernican principle derives a “mediocre” a priori statistical distribution of values of observables, but this is not what is observed and is the reason for the anthropic physics that defines the “Goldilocks Enigma”.

    “I’m not too sure where Wheeler stood on this…”

    Yet you see fit to give your “opinion” anyway… so I’ll tell ya what… come back when you get it figured out.

    And here’s a little wake up call for you, genius… the article is FACTUAL in nature… there is no “opinion” to it… duh.

  • http://www.google.com/profiles/mike.lasalle Mike LaSalle
  • But when you look at CMB map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us?
    That’s crazy. We’re looking out at the whole universe. There’s no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun — the plane of the earth around the sun — the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe.
    -Lawrence Krauss

    “That’s Crazy”… “There’s no way”… Really, Larry?… Are you sure that it isn’t more-like… willful ignorance and denial? AKA, “Anticentrist Dogma”.

    Or isn’t it actually compounded supporting evidence for the life-oriented cosmological structure principle that we already have theoretical precedence for?

    • Let me get this straight: The structure of the entire universe is somehow correlated with the plane of the earth’s orbit around the sun? Did I read this right?

  • http://knol.google.com/k/the-anthropic-principle# island

    Hi Mike, yes, it is a naive direct observation, and that’s also what the strong AP predicts if the universe is bounded, per Brandon Carters original paper:

    http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/29210

    http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/gif/1974IAUS…63..291C/0000292.000.html

    Also, see:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_principle#Ecliptic_alignment_of_cosmic_microwave_background_anisotropy

    “Other possibilities are (i) that residual instrumental errors in WMAP cause the effect (ii) that unexpected microwave emission from within the solar system is contaminating the maps.[9]“

  • Roeland de Bie

    The meaning and definition of the word “biocentrism” is not be dictated by Robert Lanza because he wrote a book with the title “Biocentrism. How life and conscciousness etc”. His point is very near to what the anthropic cosmological principle (read: John D.Barrow and Frank Tipler) is about. But there is more to the term ‘biocentrism’.
    For example:
    The word biocentric was already used by Lawrence Henderson. See Wikipedia: (Lawrence Joseph Henderson (June 3, 1878, Lynn, Massachusetts – February 10, 1942, Cambridge, Massachusetts) was a physiologist, chemist, biologist, philosopher, and sociologist. He became one of the leading biochemists of the first decades of the 20th century.):
    In his classical book The Fitness of the Environment (1913) we find “an inquiry into the biological significance of the properties of matter” (Henderson). He saw the properties of matter and the course of cosmic evolution intimately related to the structure of the living being and to its activities. He concluded: “the whole evolutionary process, both cosmic and organic, is one, and the biologist may now rightly regard the universe in its very essence as biocentric”[1].

    References
    ^ Steven J. Dick: Life on other worlds: the 20th-century extraterrestrial life debate. page 261. Cambridge University Press, 2001
    Ferry (1942), “LAWRENCE JOSEPH HENDERSON.”, Science 95 (2465): 316–318, 1942 Mar 27, doi:10.1126/science.95.2465.316, PMID 17752667
    Talbott, J H (1966), “Lawrence Joseph Henderson (1878-1942).”, JAMA 198 (12): 1304–6, 1966 Dec 19, doi:10.1001/jama.198.12.1304, PMID 5332544
    Hankins, T. L. Blood, dirt, and nomograms: A particular history of graphs. Isis 90, 1 (1999), 50-80.

  • Stephen Jarosek

    @ island:

    That must be why it was picked for the front page and top knol award, right?

    I haven’t heard of this big knob award before. Is this something that scientists are supposed to take seriously?

  • http://knol.google.com/k/the-anthropic-principle# island

    “I haven’t heard of this big knob award before. Is this something that scientists are supposed to take seriously?”

    No, it indicates that the factual information is also easy enough to read that even you *should* be able to understand it, and, therefore, does not warrant lame and insulting terms like; convoluted, insufferable, indecipherable, blather… etc, BS that is designed, like this last comment of yours to attack my credibility.

    But this was too obviously my point to anyone that can actually read in context, so you had to make it into something else in order to launch your latest dud.

  • Stephen Jarosek

    oh island you don’t appear to have a sense of humor. Maybe I should have inserted a smiley :-)

  • http://knol.google.com/k/the-anthropic-principle# island

    Anyway, the term “bio-centric” is essentially self-explanatory, and it means that something, (like the universe), has life-oriented characteristics. Unlike geo-centrism, life doesn\’t have to inhabit the exact center of the universe, and that is also what the goldilocks enigma predicts is going to be the observation, as every similarly balanced planet in every similarly evolved galaxy that formed during the “golden age” is expected to have similarly evolved life.

    This is in line with Jabberwocky’s intuitive insight:

    Jabberwocky said:
    The truth is probably somewhere in between the Rare Earths Hypothesis and the Principle of Mediocrity.

    And it also similar to the Wikipedia statement:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_principle#Ecliptic_alignment_of_cosmic_microwave_background_anisotropy
    “It would be somewhat surprising if the WMAP alignments were a complete coincidence, but the anti-Copernican implications suggested by Krauss would be far more surprising, if true.”

    Coincidence?… I think not… ;)

  • http://knol.google.com/k/the-anthropic-principle# island

    Now, here’s some food for thought:

    A strong life-oriented cosmological structure principle, (which is a true cosmological principle that resolves the mystery of the flat yet expanding universe from first physics principles), might be something as simple as an energy conservation law which requires that carbon based life arise and evolve over a specific region of the observed universe, and at an equally specific time in its history as a necessary function of the thermodynamic process.

    Something *LIKE* this, for example only:
    http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2004/09/30/2003204990

    The fact that a near-static yet expanding universe maximizes work by wasting less energy to heat death than the quantum prediction for a wide-open expanding universe does… would seem to be in agreement with my point and is also highly indicative of the direction that physicists should look in for a solution to this LONG standing unresolved problem… if only they weren’t still to this day pre-disposed to a Copernican conclusion for every reason that has nothing to do with science. This last part was also Carter’s point.

  • http://www.google.com/profiles/mike.lasalle Mike LaSalle

    Here are the relevant lines from wiki:

  • Lawrence Krauss is quoted as follows in the referenced Edge.org article:

    But when you look at CMB map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That’s crazy. We’re looking out at the whole universe. There’s no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun — the plane of the earth around the sun — the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe.

    It would be somewhat surprising if the WMAP alignments were a complete coincidence, but the anti-Copernican implications suggested by Krauss would be far more surprising, if true. Other possibilities are (i) that residual instrumental errors in WMAP cause the effect (ii) that unexpected microwave emission from within the solar system is contaminating the maps.

    • So here we have a prime example the Observation Selection Effect. At this time, science offers three possible solutions:

    1. It’s just another inexplicable coincidence. Nothing to see here. Move along. Move along.
    2. Unholy weird instrument error is FUBARing the data.
    3. Uncharted radiation from within the solar system is causing a kind of optical illusion.

    Is this about right?

    Man, these are some tired choices. Why not add “swamp gas” to the list, just to round it out?

  • Jabberwocky

    Hey Island! I’d like to bounce some ideas off of you. I looked at your link but can’t find any contact info. My email is jbbrown513@hotmail.com. Send me a line if you are open minded enough to consider partaking in a dialogue with me. I’m an Aspergic who used visual-spatial thought as my primary mode of cognition for most of my youth and have a highish IQ. I spent a much of my teenage years ruminating on the nature of the universe and now have a fairly developed theory I like to share with people. I’ve debated with physicists before, and although I don’t necessarily sway them to my belief system, they generally find it interesting and I think they enjoy the thought exercise. (Paul Elam can verify that I’m not a wacko..well, I am a little wacko…but in the good way)

  • Stephen Jarosek

    @ Mike LaSalle:

    It would be somewhat surprising if the WMAP alignments were a complete coincidence, but the anti-Copernican implications suggested by Krauss would be far more surprising, if true. Other possibilities are (i) that residual instrumental errors in WMAP cause the effect (ii) that unexpected microwave emission from within the solar system is contaminating the maps.

    What if there was no big bang? What if the universe was more along the lines of Einstein’s predicted static universe? How might the CMB map and WMAP be reinterpreted? What would we expect to see if the universe were static?

    The red shift of galaxies is the foundation upon which the big bang model was established. But a “tired light” hypothesis, now debunked, suggested that the red shift could be accounted for within the context of photon entropy. That is, as a photon makes its way across the vast distances, it will bleed off energy, which would result in red-shifting light proportional to distance travelled. The tired light hypothesis has been officially debunked, but with all the things that are continually being discovered and revised in our time, I’m not so sure that we’ve seen the final word on this.

  • Stephen Jarosek

    Island, given your understanding on these topics in astrophysics, how would carbon based life appear and evolve? What theoretical framework are you presuming to be in operation in the genesis and evolution of life?

  • Stephen Jarosek

    While we are on the topic of things cosmic, here’s a couple of clips that might be of interest:
    http://hubblesite.org/hubble_discoveries/hubble_deep_field/

    This one, waxing a bit more lyrical, is very popular:
    http://www.youtube.com/user/tdarnell#p/u/28/fgg2tpUVbXQ

    As we look at these clips, contemplate the following:
    1) A Hubble Deep Field image covers an area of sky that the Hubble folk describe as being “as small as the size of President Roosevelt’s eye on a dime held at arm’s length.”
    2) Roughly 500,000,000 stars per galaxy amounts to, very roughly, the number of grains of sand required to fill a bedroom.

  • http://knol.google.com/k/the-anthropic-principle# island

    Hi Mike, you get the idea. Either, they can “explain it away” or they **assume** without reason that they will eventually explain it away, rather than to ever consider the implications of the observation for what it appears to mean. That’s basically the point of my article, and I’m convinced that liberal physicists would rather do without a final theory than to admit that there may be some significance to life. This is known begrudgingly to physicists as “Copernican-ism”… which is their unobserved and theoretically unjustified religious belief in meaninglessness and mediocrity. Even Brandon Carter’s own “strong” multiverse interpretation derives this contradiction to the observation, and he has been backtracking on the AP since the day after he formalized the principle.

  • http://knol.google.com/k/the-anthropic-principle# island

    Jabberwocky, I’ll send you an email, but my understanding comes from a complete theory that physicists have never been able to refute, so I’m probably not very open to other ideas as long as this remains the case, because it only serves to convince me that I’ve hit the proverbial nail on the head, only nobody wants to hear it.

  • http://knol.google.com/k/the-anthropic-principle# island

    “Island, given your understanding on these topics in astrophysics, how would carbon based life appear and evolve? What theoretical framework are you presuming to be in operation in the genesis and evolution of life?”

    Hi Stephen. I think that the universe can and will produce anything that is within its physical means if there is simply a strong enough physical need for it, so I would go with some form of abiogenesis. I’m sorry if that doesn’t work for people in this forum.

  • Stephen Jarosek

    island:

    Hi Stephen. I think that the universe can and will produce anything that is within its physical means if there is simply a strong enough physical need for it, so I would go with some form of abiogenesis. I’m sorry if that doesn’t work for people in this forum.

    I was heavy-handed in my criticism of your article. There is nothing wrong in your article’s line of reasoning and indeed, I came around to realizing that it was interesting and relevant. But I was disappointed in the unjustified criticisms you levelled at Wheeler and Lanza, and I reacted without thinking. I’ve been expecting too much from the men’s movement. I guess I’ll have to look elsewhere for a solution. Cutting edge science and grassroots politics don’t appear to mix. They should, but they don’t. Still, my reasoning was sound. Necessity (men’s rights) is the mother of invention and, well, men are usually the pioneers and the inventors.

    But anyway, back to the science… abiogenesis doesn’t help us here unless you have a framework in place to account for how life comes from non-life. Unresolved gaps that are ignored are dangerous because they permit whole edifices to be constructed without regard to deeper principles. This is most evident in our mainstream life sciences where patches, such as epigenetics, are applied to account for new observations that need explaining. For each new, unexpected observation a new patch is invented, and the need for a comprehensive review of assumed principles is averted. Huge cultural and financial investments have been made in our mainstream life sciences, based on principles that are inherently flawed. And the edifice continues to grow and become ever more entrenched, requiring more patch-work and more gods-of-the-gaps to explain the inexplicable. We finish up with a clunker, a Frankenstein’s monster covered in band-aids and immobile.

    People like Wheeler and Lanza are addressing the deeper issues. Sometimes they might cross lines that I find unacceptable (e.g., parallel universes). Sure, our innovators are not always perfect, but they are often on the right track. These deeper issues need to be dealt with, otherwise it’s just more edifices without substance. And unsupported edifices, sooner or later, will crumble.

    So… how are you supporting your abiogenesis? Do you have axioms and some kind of theoretical framework in mind that meshes it all together? Or do you see your edifice rising up on its own, on the assumption that others will provide the answers that fill the gaps?

    The global, unrestrained success of feminism provides compelling evidence that our mainstream life and social sciences don’t have what it takes. There is no time like the present for a review. We have the necessity and we have the creative, thinking men contributing great ideas online. What more do we need?






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