Whatever Works

The U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey (USGS) has a wealth of infor­ma­tion on earth­quakes. They also host a large data­base of events from all over the world. The data are public.

I wanted to play a bit, so I down­loaded the list of earth­quakes with a mag­ni­tude higher than 4.5 that hap­pened in the world between 1973 and July 2011. I was curi­ous about the dis­tri­b­u­tion of the events accord­ing to their mag­ni­tude and depth. I made a few plots I found interesting.

Now it’s the moment for a dis­claimer. Like all datasets, this one too suf­fers from all kind of selec­tion biases, but I don’t know exactly which ones (couldn’t find this info on the USGS’ web­page). In addi­tion, the errors in the deter­mi­na­tion of the mag­ni­tudes and depths are not pro­vided for any of the events. Care should be thus exer­cised when inter­pret­ing the plots.

Fig­ure 1 shows the dis­tri­b­u­tion of the earth­quakes as a func­tion of their mag­ni­tude (on the Richter Scale) and depth. The color bar rep­re­sents num­ber of events (base 10 log­a­rith­mic scale). The bin­ning used (for all the plots) was ~0.2 mag­ni­tude and ~7 km. Fig­ures 2 and 3 are his­tograms: num­ber of events at dif­fer­ent depths and mag­ni­tudes, respec­tively. I point out that the most promi­nent fea­tures that appear in all these dia­grams and are dis­cussed fur­ther are not arti­facts due to bin­ning; I made sure of that by test­ing dif­fer­ent bin­ning schemes.

Fig­ure 1

Fig­ure 2

Two clus­ters of data points are appar­ent in Fig­ure 1. It seems that the major­ity of the events hap­pen at two depth ranges: 0–250 km and 500–650 km. This can be seen eas­ily in Fig­ure 2 as well: the his­togram shows the bimodal dis­tri­b­u­tion of earth­quakes with respect to the depth at which they were pro­duced. I was intrigued and there­fore searched on the net for an  expla­na­tion. This is how I found a paper (Green, 2007, PNAS, 104, 9133) con­tain­ing a very illus­tra­tive draw­ing (see Fig. 1 therein). The so called “shal­low earth­quakes” hap­pen­ing at depths between 0 and ~70 km are pro­duced in the lithos­phere. The “inter­me­di­ate earth­quakes” (~70–300 km) take place largely in the upper man­tle, while the “deep earth­quakes” (~300–700 km) are in the man­tle tran­si­tion zone (~400–650 km) towards the lower man­tle. I am not a geo­physi­cist, so don’t take my word for it, but my impres­sion is that at the moment it is not clear what are the exact mech­a­nisms and con­di­tions for pro­duc­ing earth­quakes at depths below ~100 km and so the his­togram in Fig­ure 2 does not have a sim­ple expla­na­tion. By the way, com­pare this his­togram with that in the ref­er­ence above and note the slightly dif­fer­ent para­me­ters rep­re­sented on the ordinates.

Fig­ure 3

Other inter­est­ing fea­tures in Fig­ures 1 and 2 are the two event peaks at the depths of 10 and 33 km. A very sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of earth­quakes seem to be pro­duced at these depths. I reit­er­ate that these peaks are not bin­ning arti­facts, these two par­tic­u­lar val­ues of the depth appear as such in the raw data. I don’t know if this is real or an effect of the unknown biases affect­ing the data. A few other peaks, at ~500 and ~600 km are also appar­ent, but their trust­ful­ness is harder to asses.

Finally, Fig­ure 3 does not require much dis­cus­sion as it pretty much shows what we expected: higher mag­ni­tude earth­quakes are less numerous.

The BioL­o­gos Foun­da­tion is the off­spring of Fran­cis Collins. That Fran­cis Collins. The Fran­cis Collins who suc­ceeded James Wat­son as direc­tor of the National Human Genome Research Insti­tute, the orga­ni­za­tion that led the Human Genome Project. Collins left BioL­o­gos in 2009 when he was appointed direc­tor of the National Insti­tutes of Health in the USA. But what is BioL­o­gos? It is not some sort of great sci­en­tific ini­tia­tive as one might per­haps naively expect from such a leg­endary fig­ure. No, BioL­o­gos “explores, pro­motes, and cel­e­brates the inte­gra­tion of sci­ence and Chris­t­ian faith”, with money from the John Tem­ple­ton Foun­da­tion, of course.

The mem­bers of the BioL­o­gos Foun­da­tion “believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God” and that the “evo­lu­tion, prop­erly under­stood, best describes God’s work of cre­ation”. They describe them­selves as hav­ing a view point most sim­i­lar to the so called “the­is­tic evo­lu­tion”, the belief that evo­lu­tion is the way by which God cre­ated and devel­oped the world, and some­how planned the appari­tion of humans (btw, the idea that the evo­lu­tion has a goal is total non­sense within the mod­ern evo­lu­tion­ary syn­the­sis, sim­ply because there is no evi­dence for that and plenty against). They are crit­i­cal of the intel­li­gent design move­ment and are very care­ful to delimit them­selves from the old Earth cre­ation­ists. How­ever, the name “the­is­tic evo­lu­tion” is just a PR stunt, as if we con­sider the core beliefs, the the­is­tic evo­lu­tion looks just like another flavour of old Earth cre­ation­ism. The only major dif­fer­ence is that the the­is­tic evo­lu­tion­ists do not believe that God directly inter­vened in the process of evo­lu­tion. Oth­er­wise, they do believe in a super­nat­ural cre­ator of the Uni­verse (and not any cre­ator, but pre­cisely the Judeo-Christian God), vir­gin birth, mirac­u­lous heal­ing, com­ing back to life from death, and the rest of the non­sense hold dear by the old Earth creationists.

But I am not going to dis­cuss the inani­ties present on their web site. Some of them are actu­ally really hilar­i­ous, like the recent arti­cle about the his­toric­ity of Adam and Eve. I will focus shortly instead on the claim of the BioL­o­gos Foun­da­tion of rep­re­sent­ing the “middle-way” in the con­fronta­tion between sci­ence and religion.

The BioL­o­gos posi­tion on ori­gins sits part­way between two fun­da­men­talisms: on the “left” end of the spec­trum is the fun­da­men­tal­ism of peo­ple like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Den­nett who are com­mit­ted to the belief that the only reli­able form of knowl­edge comes from sci­ence, and that alter­nate ways of know­ing must be either rejected entirely or com­pletely sub­or­di­nated to sci­ence. On the “right” end of the spec­trum is the fun­da­men­tal­ism of those who insist that reli­able knowl­edge can only be found in an ultra­lit­eral inter­pre­ta­tion of the Bible, and that alter­nate ways of know­ing must be com­pletely sub­or­di­nated to this way of read­ing the Bible.

BioL­o­gos takes both the Bible and sci­ence seri­ously and believes that since God authored both, they must com­ple­ment each other and be in har­mony. We reject the two fun­da­men­talisms men­tioned above. Sci­ence is not the only way of know­ing, but an ultra­lit­eral inter­pre­ta­tion of the Bible must also be rejected.

This is ridicu­lous. BioL­o­gos defines their own posi­tion as being the mid­dle way, then implies it is the most rea­son­able posi­tion sim­ply because it is the mid­dle way. They say they believe God “authored” the bible and the sci­ence (?!) so they must both “com­ple­ment each other and be in har­mony”. That’s the mid­dle way, that’s the most rea­son­able posi­tion. Just because they believe so. There­fore the new athe­ists and the young earth cre­ation­ists are the extrem­ists because they depart from the mid­dle way. This is the kind of rot­ten rea­son­ing the whole BioL­o­gos site is full of.
These peo­ple are miss­ing one impor­tant pil­lar that should actu­ally be at the base of the dia­logue between sci­ence and reli­gion: real­ity check. But that would ren­der any such a dia­logue futile.

Mean­while BioL­o­gos is truly lying in the mid­dle… Cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance at its best… What­ever works…

In 2002 an Ital­ian par­ent com­plained that all the class­rooms in the State school her chil­dren attended had a cru­ci­fix on the wall. She con­sid­ered that this was con­trary to the prin­ci­ple of the sec­u­lar­ism of the State. After 4 years of legal fights within the Ital­ian courts her com­plaint and sub­se­quent appeal were dis­missed on the incred­i­bly ridicu­lous ground that “the cru­ci­fix was both the sym­bol of Ital­ian his­tory and cul­ture, and con­se­quently of Ital­ian iden­tity, and the sym­bol of the prin­ci­ples of equal­ity, lib­erty and tol­er­ance, as well as of the State’s secularism.”.

The par­ent lodged a com­plaint with the Euro­pean Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in 2006. In 2009 the ECHR con­cluded that the pres­ence of the cru­ci­fix in the State school was a vio­la­tion of Arti­cle 2 of Pro­to­col No. 1 (right to edu­ca­tion), and of Arti­cle 9 (free­dom of thought, con­science and reli­gion) of the Euro­pean Con­ven­tion on Human Rights:

“The pres­ence of the cru­ci­fix – which it was impos­si­ble not to notice in the class­rooms – could eas­ily be inter­preted by pupils of all ages as a reli­gious sign and they would feel that they were being edu­cated in a school envi­ron­ment bear­ing the stamp of a given reli­gion. This could be encour­ag­ing for reli­gious pupils, but also dis­turb­ing for pupils who prac­tised other reli­gions or were athe­ists, par­tic­u­larly if they belonged to reli­gious minori­ties. The free­dom not to believe in any reli­gion (inher­ent in the free­dom of reli­gion guar­an­teed by the Con­ven­tion) was not lim­ited to the absence of reli­gious ser­vices or reli­gious edu­ca­tion: it extended to prac­tices and sym­bols which expressed a belief, a reli­gion or athe­ism. This free­dom deserved par­tic­u­lar pro­tec­tion if it was the State which expressed a belief and the indi­vid­ual was placed in a sit­u­a­tion which he or she could not avoid, or could do so only through a dis­pro­por­tion­ate effort and sacrifice.

The State was to refrain from impos­ing beliefs in premises where indi­vid­u­als were depen­dent on it. In par­tic­u­lar, it was required to observe con­fes­sional neu­tral­ity in the con­text of pub­lic edu­ca­tion, where attend­ing classes was com­pul­sory irre­spec­tive of reli­gion, and where the aim should be to fos­ter crit­i­cal think­ing in pupils.

The Court was unable to grasp how the dis­play, in class­rooms in State schools, of a sym­bol that could rea­son­ably be asso­ci­ated with Catholi­cism (the major­ity reli­gion in Italy) could serve the edu­ca­tional plu­ral­ism that was essen­tial to the preser­va­tion of a “demo­c­ra­tic soci­ety” as that was con­ceived by the Con­ven­tion, a plu­ral­ism that was recog­nised by the Ital­ian Con­sti­tu­tional Court.

The com­pul­sory dis­play of a sym­bol of a given con­fes­sion in premises used by the pub­lic author­i­ties, and espe­cially in class­rooms, thus restricted the right of par­ents to edu­cate their chil­dren in con­for­mity with their con­vic­tions, and the right of chil­dren to believe or not to believe. The Court con­cluded, unan­i­mously, that there had been a vio­la­tion of Arti­cle 2 of Pro­to­col No. 1 taken jointly with Arti­cle 9 of the Convention.”

The com­plete judg­ment is avail­able, in French only, here.

The Ital­ian Gov­ern­ment was not happy with the deci­sion and at the begin­ning of 2010 sub­mit­ted a refer­ral request. The ECHR was hold­ing a hear­ing today, June 30^th. Ten other gov­ern­ments par­tic­i­pated with writ­ten obser­va­tions as third par­ties at the hear­ing: Arme­nia, Bul­garia, Cyprus, Greece, Lithua­nia, Malta, Monaco, Roma­nia, the Russ­ian Fed­er­a­tion and San Marino.

This is truly out­ra­geous. Each and every one of the gov­ern­ments of these coun­tries show absolutely no respect for the Euro­pean Con­ven­tion of Human Rights. Each and every one is a shame for the progressive-minded Europe. Each and every one spits on the prin­ci­ples that shaped Europe into one of the great­est defend­ers of human rights in the world. And all this in the name of reli­gious dogma.

Deepak is one of the most famous and active pro­mo­tors of pseudo-science and there­fore I think he needs no intro­duc­tion. Enough to say that he has for­mal med­ical train­ing, but quit­ted prac­tic­ing med­i­cine in the 80s and ever since he has been involved in var­i­ous pseudo-scientific activ­i­ties related to alter­na­tive med­i­cine, tran­scen­den­tal med­i­ta­tion, mind-body rela­tion­ship, uni­ver­sal con­scious­ness, etc.

Deepak’s lat­est is an arti­cle in The Huff­in­g­ton Post, a safe har­bour for all kind of nuts and quacks, from home­opaths to anti­vaxxers. The topic is sup­posed to be the Higgs boson and its con­nec­tion to reli­gion, but in fact it’s just another oppor­tu­nity to spread more con­fu­sion and false­hood about an unre­lated sub­ject, though so dear to Deepak: the quan­tum physics/consciousness relationship.

From the begin­ning it is clear that Deepak doesn’t seem to know much about the Higgs boson. To him, the Higgs boson will help answer­ing a few ques­tions, such as:

How does mat­ter form from the imma­te­r­ial? What gives par­ti­cles their mass, and how do they stick together?

Indeed, the detec­tion of the Higgs boson will put to rest the issue about why the par­ti­cles have the masses we observed. But it has noth­ing to do with the “prob­lem of cre­at­ing mat­ter out of empti­ness” (what­ever “empti­ness” mean), or with the forces that keep the par­ti­cles together (we have well estab­lished the­o­ries about the so called weak and strong nuclear forces). There is no excite­ment among physi­cists in con­nec­tion to find­ing the “mech­a­nism for how the tan­gi­ble world arises from the intan­gi­ble”. This is pure gibberish.

Fur­ther on, the Higgs boson doesn’t oper­ate at the Planck scale as the arti­cles states. The Planck scale is about 10¹⁶ TeV, cor­re­spond­ing to a Planck length of about 10^–35 m, which is, by the way, 100 bil­lion bil­lion rather than “mil­lions of times smaller than the nucleus of an atom”. The max­i­mum expected mass of the Higgs boson is about 1 TeV/c².

A few para­graphs fol­low that are hard to grasp. An amal­gam of sci­en­tific words and New Age vocab­u­lary that mean exactly noth­ing; empty words with no infor­ma­tional con­tent. Then Deepak makes the forced con­nec­tion between the Higgs boson, quan­tum physics and consciousness:

Phys­i­cal forces can­not explain such exquis­ite order, much less the mean­ing we derive from it, which is why God came into being. The God par­ti­cle deliv­ers the tini­est bits of the clock but not the maker. I do not mean that an actual per­son in the sky made the uni­verse. Keep­ing strictly with the sci­en­tific world­view, the maker must be imper­sonal, intel­li­gent, uni­ver­sal, invis­i­ble, yet man­i­fest in the vis­i­ble world. The only viable can­di­date is consciousness.

The Higgs boson par­ti­cle rep­re­sents a tiny step­ping stone toward a the­ory of cre­ation that rests upon con­scious­ness as the pri­mal stuff of the cos­mos. Many the­o­rists are already get­ting there; it’s been sev­eral decades since the con­cept of a self-aware uni­verse has been in play.

Some­day it will be com­mon­place to con­cede that the intan­gi­ble, imma­te­r­ial domain of quan­tum physics is con­scious. In that world of vir­tual par­ti­cles, non-locality, and inde­ter­mi­nacy, things don’t exist with shape, hard­ness, or color. Their exis­tence is a fleet­ing dis­play of ten­den­cies, and the super­po­si­tion of pos­si­bil­i­ties. It will be a major real­iza­tion for sci­ence to rec­og­nize that all of these ten­den­cies and qual­i­ties are ten­den­cies of consciousness.

So Deepak doesn’t under­stand how the phys­i­cal world works, there­fore the phys­i­cal laws can­not explain the appar­ent order of the world. The Higgs boson will be a small step towards reveal­ing “the maker”, which is not “an actual per­son liv­ing in the sky”, that would be silly, but “keep­ing strictly with the sci­en­tific world­view, the maker must be imper­sonal, intel­li­gent, uni­ver­sal, invis­i­ble, yet man­i­fest in the vis­i­ble world”, the maker is, obvi­ously, “the con­scious­ness”. If you thought there is no need for a maker, or that the maker is one of the many gods of the so many mytholo­gies, the Fly­ing Spaghetti Mon­ster, the Pink Ele­phant, Chuck Nor­ris, or somebody/something else, you were wrong. Because Deepak says so. Because he knows so well the “sci­en­tific world­view”. Right… So every­thing was cre­ated by this con­scious­ness with very abstract and incon­sis­tent qual­i­ties, which is “the pri­mal stuff of the cos­mos” and which man­i­fests itself at the quan­tum scale. Only if those elit­ist sci­en­tists would real­ize and accept this soon…

And there we are fur­ther on, assaulted with (frag­ments of) thoughts about the dif­fer­ent inter­pre­ta­tions of the quan­tum mechan­ics. Basi­cally the next para­graphs in the arti­cle con­tain some sci­en­tific back­ground taken from Wikipedia spiced with Deepak’s own pseudo-scientific com­men­tary and inter­pre­ta­tion. Just like in the case of the Higgs boson, he doesn’t seem to know much about quan­tum physics either. In fact, he didn’t even under­stand the con­cept of observer, essen­tial for his rhetoric (I almost wrote argu­ment), which makes it for a few hilar­i­ous moments in these end­ing para­graphs. The bot­tom line is that he doesn’t like the Copen­hagen inter­pre­ta­tion, nor the Many World inter­pre­ta­tion, which are accepted by the major­ity of physi­cists, some­how because they don’t seem to imply what he is after. He prefers the de Broglie-Bohm inter­pre­ta­tion of the quan­tum mechan­ics and the Penrose-Hameroff model for the emer­gence of con­scious­ness, because he thinks, wrongly, that they con­nect the “indi­vid­ual con­scious­ness” with the “uni­ver­sal con­scious­ness” (what­ever these beasts are). Oh, well…

Sat­ur­day, June 12^th, queen Beat­rix of the Nether­lands opened the Low Fre­quency Array (LOFAR) radio tele­scope in a cer­e­mony that took place near the loca­tion of one of the stations.

The cen­tral sta­tion of LOFAR. Photo: Top­foto Assen

LOFAR breaks away from the tra­di­tional means of doing radio astron­omy. Instead of clas­si­cal dish anten­nas, tens of meters in diam­e­ter, it uses sim­ple dipole anten­nas… thou­sands of them spread over a large area. Two dif­fer­ent types of ele­ments are used: Low Band Antenna (LBA) and High Band Antenna (HBA) func­tion­ing in the fre­quency ranges between ~30–80 MHz and ~120–240 MHz, respec­tively. Basi­cally these receivers have a field of view (FOV) cov­er­ing almost the whole sky. The dipoles are orga­nized in sta­tions com­pris­ing about 96 LBAs and 48 HBAs each. 36 sta­tions are spread over an area of about 100 km² in the north of the Nether­lands. In addi­tion to these, inter­na­tional LOFAR sta­tions are oper­a­tional (in Ger­many), under con­struc­tion (in UK, France, Swe­den) or expected to receive fund­ing (in Poland, Italy).

LOFAR LBA antenna

LOFAR HBA antennas

The sig­nals from each sta­tion are dig­i­tized and sent to a cen­tral pro­cess­ing unit, the Blue­Gene super-computer located in Gronin­gen. Given its dig­i­tal nature, LOFAR can be “steered” elec­tron­i­cally to look at mul­ti­ple objects in the same time.

LOFAR rep­re­sents a big step for­ward in radio astron­omy. Its novel design will allow for the first time to observe the low fre­quency sky con­tin­u­ously, 24/7, at an unprece­dented res­o­lu­tion and sensitivity.

LOFAR is bound to pro­duce great sci­en­tific advances. A few areas of research have been defined, domains in which LOFAR will very likely play a major role. These Key Sci­ence Projects (KSPs) are:

• * Epoch of reionisation
• * Deep extra­galac­tic surveys
• * Tran­sient sources
• * Ultra high energy cos­mic rays
• * Solar sci­ence and space weather
• * Cos­mic magnetism

But the impor­tance of LOFAR goes beyond its unique tech­ni­cal capa­bil­i­ties and poten­tial for sci­en­tific dis­cov­er­ies. LOFAR is a pathfinder for the
next big radio astro­nom­i­cal project: the Square Kilo­me­ter Array (SKA). The tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tions incor­po­rated into LOFAR, the expe­ri­ence gained by run­ning such a facil­ity, the sci­en­tific out­put, will all help shape the final design and goals of SKA.