Miscellaneous tidbits

[Brad Reddekopp]

From Bob Park's "What's New" column for this week:

CAUSALITY: CALIFORNIA COURT VINDICATES THALES OF MILETUS.
For eight years WN has tracked the case of the infamous Columbia Prayer Study http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN01/wn100501.html in which it was claimed that intercessory prayer doubled the pregnancy rate of women undergoing in vitro fertilization. It was, of course, a scam. A California physician, Bruce Flamm, thought Columbia should disavow the work, and the Journal of Reproductive Medicine should delete the clearly fraudulent paper; neither happened. The response of one of the authors, the wealthy owner of several fertility clinics in the US and Korea, was to sue Flamm for everything he had. Flamm never blinked. This week the Court of Appeals affirmed a lower-court decision tossing out the lawsuit. In doing so, the Court also vindicated Thales of Miletus, who in the course of explaining a total eclipse of the sun in 585 B.C. concluded that every observable effect has a physical cause.

[Atheist Statist]

every observable effect has a physical cause

A highly dubious conclusion.

[Brad Reddekopp]

every observable effect has a physical cause

A highly dubious conclusion.

Yeah. After all, what would a physics prof like Dr. Robert L. Park know about it...

[Atheist Statist]

Appeal to authority, eh? I can do that too:

The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.

[Brad Reddekopp]

Appeal to authority, eh?

From http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacie ... ority.html

An Appeal to Authority is a fallacy with the following form:

1. Person A is (claimed to be) an authority on subject S.
2. Person A makes claim C about subject S.
3. Therefore, C is true.

This fallacy is committed when the person in question is not a legitimate authority on the subject. More formally, if person A is not qualified to make reliable claims in subject S, then the argument will be fallacious.

Bob Park is a legitimate authority regarding physics. Therefore, using what I understand to be an acceptable understanding of the logical fallacy known as "appeal to authority", quoting Bob Park as an authority in physics on a matter that is about physics does not constitute commission of that fallacy.

I can do that too:

The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.

Not a physicist.

[Atheist Statist]

Bob Park is a legitimate authority regarding physics. Therefore, using what I understand to be an acceptable understanding of the logical fallacy known as "appeal to authority", quoting Bob Park as an authority in physics on a matter that is about physics does not constitute commission of that fallacy.

No, that is not a requirement for an appeal to authority:

There are two basic forms of appeal to authority, based on the authority being trusted.... The second form, citing a source who is actually an authority in the relevant field, carries more subjective, cognitive weight.... experts can still be mistaken, wilfully deceptive, subject to pressure from peers or employers, have a vested financial interest in the false statements, or have unusual views (or views that are widely criticized by other experts) within their field, and hence their expertise does not always guarantee that their arguments are valid.

Furthermore, and rather devastatingly for your case, the claim "every observable effect has a physical cause" isn't a physics claim anyway - it's a philosophical one. There is no law of physics that says that "every observable effect has a physical cause". It's even a fairly nebulous idea in philosophy:

For a variety of reasons this approach is fraught with problems, and the reasons explain why philosophers of science mostly prefer to drop the word “causal” from their discussions of determinism. Generally, as John Earman quipped (1986), to go this route is to “… seek to explain a vague concept — determinism — in terms of a truly obscure one — causation.” More specifically, neither philosophers' nor laymen's conceptions of events have any correlate in any modern physical theory.[1] The same goes for the notions of cause and sufficient cause. A further problem is posed by the fact that, as is now widely recognized, a set of events {A, B, C …} can only be genuinely sufficient to produce an effect-event if the set includes an open-ended ceteris paribus clause excluding the presence of potential disruptors that could intervene to prevent E. For example, the start of a football game on TV on a normal Saturday afternoon may be sufficient ceteris paribus to launch Ted toward the fridge to grab a beer; but not if a million-ton asteroid is approaching his house at .75c from a few thousand miles away, nor if the phone is about to ring with news of a tragic nature, …, and so on. Bertrand Russell famously argued against the notion of cause along these lines (and others) in 1912, and the situation has not changed. By trying to define causal determination in terms of a set of prior sufficient conditions, we inevitably fall into the mess of an open-ended list of negative conditions required to achieve the desired sufficiency.

[Brad Reddekopp]

What would be an example of a non-physical cause?

[Atheist Statist]

I think it goes without saying that the "physical" part is redundant. If not, the definition of "physical" may be expanded as needed.

[Brad Reddekopp]

Ah, I see. You're objecting to "cause", not to "physical".

I think that the point that Park was making with that reference was that causes are physical. The question of whether or not any visible effect is acausal is not relevant to the specific case Park was discussing.

[Atheist Statist]

Park's crusade against irrationality is commendable. However, his claim to have "vindicated Thales" is a little over the top. I actually doubt he's aware that causality is such a thorny topic in philosophy.

[Atheist Statist]

As for the "physical" part - I actually don't see much of a difference between a "non-physical cause" and "no cause" - at least not from an empirical standpoint. Gods and hidden variables are often presented as non-physical causes of various things, but they're usually empirically identical to non-existent causes.

[Brad Reddekopp]

Park does tend to be a little over the top. It's part of his charm.

[Brad Reddekopp]

The Leonid meteor shower peaks on November 17th this year. According to spaceweather.com, viewers in North American can expect to see 20 to 30 meteorites per hour while those in Asia can expect 100 to 300 per hour.

Sadly, the "earth weather" forecast for the region in which I live is for cloud cover on the 17th.

[Brad Reddekopp]

Monkey grooms deer, finds ticks, places ticks on itself in order to get other monkeys to groom it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l7cFleQztc

[Brad Reddekopp]

The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has picked up gamma ray flashes from lightning storms on earth. That's not new. Here's what is new to researchers: "During two recent lightning storms, Fermi recorded gamma-ray emissions of a particular energy that could have been produced only by the decay of energetic positrons, the antimatter equivalent of electrons." So, apparently, lightning sometimes produces antimatter? Research continues...

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic ... _lightning