[Buddha-l] Rice & Dragons

[Luc Tartar]

I missed the beginning of the thread, so that I do not know why it is
called Rice & Dragons

On Apr 14, 2012 at 17:28, Richard Hayes <rhayes at unm.edu> wrote
> I am pretty much in agreement with something Paul Tillich wrote in 1958. In the context of discussing how religion in America had lost much of its credibility, he said that it was not science that killed religion. Rather, it was religion that killed religion by losing sight of complexity and metaphor and interpreting traditional narratives as literal stories capable of only one conclusion. American Christianity pretty much killed itself off by gravitating more and more to simple-mindedness. All science had to do to emerge victorious was show up.

However, it should not stop anyone from pointing out errors made in
science, and doing so has nothing to do with supporting or not one of
the simple-minded religious points of view.

I shall retire from teaching at the end of the spring semester and
(after moving to Switzerland for living with my wife) one of my plans
is to write books for explaining some of the brainwashing which has
taken place in science, and I find the situation quite analogous to
that created by some religious people, or by some politicians: I
suppose that Machiavel must have known (and perhaps he even wrote it)
that for a better control over his subjects, the prince should keep
them brainwashed by propaganda.

I plan to use a title similar to "a brief history of time" by Stephen
Hawking, mentioning that I have not read his book and that I have no
plan to read it, because he obviously chose to be a brainwasher
instead of being a teacher: it is stated that since most people have
trouble with equations, the only one he writes in the book is "e =
mc^{2}".

The symbol ^{} means that the quantity between { and } is raised as a
superscript, and the formula is read as "e equals m c square", and it
is wrongly attributed to Einstein (should I say "of course"?) since he
wrote it in 1905, and it had been written before, by De Pretto (an
Italian industrialist interested in physics) in 1903, and by (Henri)
Poincare', in 1900. I mention his first name since in France his
cousin Raymond is more known, because he was "prime minister" at a
time, and president of the republic at an another time (under the 4th
republic, when the president had no real power); the last letter of
the name has an acute accent, but é may not appear well in some
screens, and \'e is a TeX notation which may not be well known (the
command \' puts an acute accent on the next symbol). The way
Poincar\'e found this formula is that he thought that if a charged
particle feels the so-called Lorentz force (which appeared first in
some work by Maxwell) this action must come with a reaction (by the
physical principle of conservation of momentum), in the same way that
if a sailing boat turns under the wind it must make waves (in the sea
and/or in the air): he then deduced from his technical computations
that the density of energy of the electromagnetic field is equivalent
to a density of mass, according to the formula "e = mc^{2}".

I apologize for the use of technical terms, but it serves to show that
there is a body of knowledge which can (more or less easily) be
acquired by studying (here up to college level math/physics), in order
to at least know what each term means, and some new terms are needed
in their definitions. The way we teach scientific questions is to
start at level zero and teach more complicated questions from year to
year, until one arrives at teaching basic differential calculus
(unknown to Galileo in the 17th century, invented by Newton around
1700, and perfected by Leibniz), and once one knows ordinary
differential equations one can understand classical mechanics (the
18th century point of view about mechanics) and learn what
conservations of linear momentum, of angular momentum, and of (total)
energy mean in classical mechanics; then, once one knows partial
differential equations, one can understand continuum mechanics (the
19th century point of view of mechanics) and learn what these
conservation laws are in continuum mechanics and electromagnetism. At
this point, one could follow what Poincar\'e was doing in 1900 (the
detail of which I have not read).
Fortunately, by describing examples which are often observed, one may
give an intuitive idea about questions like action versus reaction.
However, those who have not learned enough of the technical questions
may easily make errors, since even those who have learned about these
technical matters also make errors!

The big-bang theory is full of brainwashing. First of all, there is
mathematically no way to decide if there was a beginning or if there
was none, but most people have been brainwashed by various religions
about a creation, so that they cannot imagine that we may live in a
universe having always existed.
It may be on Buddha-L that I read that the question "if there was a
creation or not" had been asked to the historical Buddha, who would
have answered that it has no importance for attaining nirvana.
In mathematics, there is a technical notion, that some properties are
"undecidable", i.e. that they are neither true nor false (but if in a
mathematical theory a property is both true and false, then all
statements in that theory are both true and false, so that one calls
the theory contradictory, and one throws it to the garbage, since it
is utterly useless): maybe what the Buddha thought is that it is like
an undecidable property, so that one may assume that there was a
creation, or one may assume that there was none, and it should make no
difference at all (in particular, there is no reason to kill people
because they do not think like us, but anyway, there is no reason to
kill people at all!).

The mathematical reason why one cannot decide about a beginning or
not, is that nothing (containing energy) can travel faster than the
speed of light (denoted c, which is about 300,000 kilometers per
second), and this is the accepted understanding following the
experiments of Michelson and Morley around 1887 (who found that the
speed of light is the same in all directions) and after some ideas of
FitzGerald and of Lorentz, Poincar\'e found the general form for
changing variables (space and time) from a first frame to a second
frame (moving at a fixed velocity in the first frame) and he
introduced the principle of relativity, that since there is no
universal time there cannot exist instantaneous forces acting at a
distance (like gravitation), and he developed the theory of (special)
relativity (before Einstein, of course!).
In a universe having existed forever, there could then occur important
concentrations of energy (near a point at a given time) creating in a
kind of "big-bang" a kind of "smaller universe with a beginning"
inside the large universe, and many of such "smaller universes" could
exist at the same time, but very far apart from each other in their
beginning (but later two such smaller universes may interact when they
come in contact), and the same event (like that of a French
mathematician writing on Buddha-L) could occur in the entire universe
without a beginning and in many smaller universes with a beginning, so
that the French mathematician could not care less if he lives in a
universe with a beginning or not (there is no way to be sure that he
writes the same things in all the realizations of this event, of
course).

One may say "OK, suppose that the tenants of the big-bang theory admit
that they had implicitly made the hypothesis that there was a
beginning without saying it, maybe what they have written is then true
under this hypothesis".
Probably not, because they say that there were temperatures of
millions or billions of degrees just after the big-bang, and they
forget to mention that the laws physicists use for describing matter
at millions of degrees have just been invented by playing games which
nature should have no interest in following: this guess comes from the
fact that, although physicists have boasted since the 1950s that they
were going to control fusion (which would probably solve the energy
crisis, and permit to close all the nuclear plants based on
"controlled" fission, and stop producing all these dangerous nuclear
wastes), some of them write now that they expect to arrive at this
goal in the second part of this century, but they avoid explaining
that the reason one builds high powerful lasers (the size of
buildings) for shooting on little beads full of deuterium and tritium
is to ascertain what the physical laws for matter at millions of
degrees really are, since one cannot trust the ones which physicists
had postulated before.

I apologize for such technical considerations which many Buddhists may
not care much about, but in order to show that science uses its own
brainwashing methods, I could not just stay at a too simplistic level.

For criticizing the (Christian) creationist point of view, my
understanding of the beginning of Genesis is that it is mostly about a
group (since elohim is a plural) putting order in our corner of the
universe, where there was utter chaos (maybe because of a previous
catastrophic event). I do not see any reason to believe that the
eventual creation of earth mentioned in the first line had taken place
recently, compared to the time of the creation of a new line of
hominids which is described immediately after.
The redactors of the Bible, which I think worked in Babylon at the
time of the exile, before and after the Persians became the world
power, probably started from the oral traditions of many remnants of
tribes and must have then glued them together for creating a unified
history; since they lived in a urban environment, the redactors did
not recognize that the oral traditions were mentioning tribes, which
keep the name of the founder long after he died, and they ordered them
in a continuous narrative, although some links may have been missing
from the oldest known tribe to the more recent events, but there is
nothing wrong with the oldest tribe mentioned to have lived six
thousand years ago: that the creationist believe that this is the age
of the universe (even a smaller universe as I described above) seems
due to the fact that they pretend that the text mentions when the
earth was created.

There is however a probably important error made by the scientists
concerning the carbon 14 dating method: archaeologists are adamant
that they must apply the dating to a previously living organism (oil,
wine, grain, found in jars, leather or pieces of cloth found in
graves, wood) for dating correctly a layer, and that the dating for
stone objects give unreliable results; on the contrary, geologists
only work with stones and talk about ages of millions of years, so
that one may wonder if their data are reliable.
I think that the idea of carbon 14 dating relies on the hypothesis
that all living organisms start with the same amount which then decays
at a given rate after the organism dies; if stones inherit the same
amount when they are at the surface, it could be that when they are
buried and submitted to huge pressures or high temperatures, which
happens for geological strata, the rate of carbon 14 becoming unstable
must increase a lot, so that such a stone may appear much older if one
assumes classical rates of decay; of course, one expects geologists to
claim that there is no such change, but it will be a postulated law,
like for the properties of plasmas at millions of degrees, and it is
perfectly reasonable to think that there is no reason to accept that
any postulated law must be exact.

I apologize again for the length of the argument.

Luc Tartar, a mathematician who likes to check what he is told

-- 
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends
on the unreasonable man." George Bernard Shaw
---
"L'amour des parents va à leurs enfants, mais l'amour des enfants va à
leurs enfants." Talmud de Babylone
---
"Peggio è l'invidia dell'amico che l'insidia del nemico." proverbio Italiano