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ISIS Burns 8000 Rare Books and Manuscripts in Mosul

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NasikElahi shared this with you

This is the ultimate sign of insanity of ISIL and its reign of terror. To burn down historical records is to deny their very humanity. No Muslim or human being can condone such actions.

“Lee Smolin And Status Of Modern Physics” Interview by Jose Boswell

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Lee Smolin argues that it is not the timeless laws of universe that controls it but the ‘current moment’ that dictates the future moment. A thought provoking interview( F. Sheikh).

Adam’s Opticks: Hi Lee, central to your thesis as outlined in Time Reborn, and in its recent follow-up The Singular Universe (co-authored with Roberto Mangabeira Unger) [5], is a rejection of the “block universe” interpretation of physics in which timeless laws of nature dictate the history of the universe from beginning to end. Instead, you argue, all that exists is “the present moment” (which is one of a flow of moments). As such, the regularities we observe in nature must emerge from the present state of the universe as opposed to following a mysterious set of laws that exist “out there.” If this is true, you also foresee the possibility that regularities in nature may be open to forms of change and evolution.

My first question is this: Does it make sense to claim that “the present moment is all that exists” if one has to qualify that statement by saying that there is also a “flow of moments?” Does the idea of a flow of time not return us to the block universe? Or at the very least to the idea that the present moment represents the frontier of an ever “growing” or “evolving” block as the cosmologist George Ellis might say?

Lee Smolin: Part of our view is that an aspect of moments, or events, is that they are generative of other moments. A moment is not a static thing, it is an aspect of a process (or visa versa) which generates new moments. The activity of time is a process by which present events bring forth or give rise to the next events.

I studied this idea together with Marina Cortes. We developed a mathematical model of causation from a thick present which we called energetic causal sets [6]. Our thought is that each moment or event may be a parent of future events. A present moment is one that has not yet exhausted or spent its capability to parent new events. There is a thick present of such events. Past events were those that exhausted their potential and so are no longer involved in the process of producing new events, they play no further role and therefore there is no reason to regard them as still existing. (So no to Ellis’s growing block universe.)

AO: Can you help me understand what you mean by a “thick present”? I’m confused because if the present moment is “thick” rather than instantaneous, and may contain events, it seems like you’re defining the present moment as a stretch of time, which looks like a contradiction in terms. Similarly, when you say that the activity of time is a process I’m left thinking that events, activities and processes are all already temporal notions, and so to account for time in those terms seems circular.

LS: I can appreciate your confusion but look, think about it this way: the world is complex. What ever it is, it contains many elements in a complicated network of relations. To say what exists is events in the present does not mean it is one thing. The present is not one simple thing, it is the whole world, therefore it contains a vast complexity and plurality. Of what? Of processes, which are dual to events.

AO: One of your main objections to the idea of eternal laws comes in the form of what you diagnose as the “Cosmological Fallacy” in physics. Your argument runs that the regularities we identify in small subsystems of the universe — laboratories mainly! — ought never to be scaled up to apply to the universe as a whole. You point out that in general we gain confidence in scientific hypotheses by running experiments again and again, and define our laws in terms of what stays the same over the course of many repetitions. But this is obviously impossible at a cosmological scale because the universe only happens once.

But what’s wrong with the idea of cautiously extrapolating from the laws we derive in the lab, and treating them as working hypotheses at the cosmological scale? If they fit the facts and find logical coherence with other parts of physics then great… if not, then they’re falsified and we can move on. As an avowed Popperian yourself, are you not committed to the idea that this is how science works?

In addition, wouldn’t the very idea of “laws that evolve and change” make science impossible? How could we ever confirm or falsify a hypothesis if, at the back of our minds, we always had to contend with the possibility that nature might be changing up on us? Don’t we achieve as much by postulating fixed laws and revising them on the basis of evidence as we might by speculating about evolving laws that would be impossible to confirm or falsify?

LS: To be clear: the Cosmological Fallacy is to scale up the methodology or paradigm of explanation, not the regularities.

Nevertheless, there are several problems with extrapolating the laws that govern small subsystems to the universe as a whole. They are discussed in great detail in the books, but in brief:

  1. Those laws require initial conditions. Normally we vary the initial conditions to test hypotheses as to the laws. But in cosmology we must test simultaneously hypotheses as to the laws and hypotheses as to the initial conditions. This weakens the adequacy of both tests, and hence weakens the falsifiability of the theory.
  2. There is no possible explanation for the choice of laws, nor for the initial conditions, within the standard framework (which we call the Newtonian paradigm).

Regarding your questions about falsifiability, one way to address them is to study specific hypotheses outlined in the books. Cosmological Natural Selection, for instance, is a hypothesis about how the laws may have changed which implies falsifiable predictions. Take the time to work out how that example works and you will have the answer to your question.

Another way to reconcile evolving laws with falsifiability is by paying attention to large hierarchies of time scales. The evolution of laws can be slow in present conditions, or only occur during extreme conditions which are infrequent. On much shorter time scales and far from extreme conditions, the laws can be assumed to be unchanging.

https://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2015/02/13/lee-smolin-and-the-status-of-modern-physics/

 

Monthly Lecture For Sunday, Februrary 22, 2015

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( Please Note Below New Time And Lunch to be Served)

Thinkers’ Forum USA Affiliates!

You are cordially invited to the next monthly Lecture of TF USA.

Speaker:         Babar Mustafa

          Topic: “Animation Of Matter”

Moderator:   Dr. Fayyaz Sheikh

When:

Sunday, February 22, 2015

Duration:

Start Time:          11;00 AM

End Time:            1;00 PM

Lunch Served After Lecture

Location:

Dr. Shoeb Amin’s office

48 New Main Street

Haverstraw  NY   10927

Synopsis

Animation of Matter
 
How life originated? This question has two different answers. First one which is more popular is that God created it and that is the end of discussion for the “how” part for most people. Second one is that it evolved from one first life. The evolution part from first life onwards is well established since Darwin in mid19th century presented the theory of natural selection. I personally am convinced one hundred percent that life did evolve from rudimentary and very basic, to the present level of complexity. It is all quite understandable and not really hard to get the idea of evolution except the emergence of the very first life on its own.
It is also speculated that this very first life might have originated elsewhere and travelled through space embedded in meteorites and hit earth and with favorable conditions here thrived and evolved. If we look at certain facts about our empirical self, about the stuff that we, humans and all other life including animals and plants, it becomes quite clear that no, there is no reason to think that life originated elsewhere because the six basic elements that life is composed of existed here before life originated and these elements are all around us. These six elements are common denominator of all life, accounting for 99%of the dry weight of every living thing. Life is known to be carbon based. Carbon formed in the core of the stars, when those stars exploded it spread all over. Other five major elements are – hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, phosphorous and Sulfur.   
Life as we know now seems too complex and I agree it is hard to imagine it having emerged on its own but what about the life at the earliest stages, some three thousand five hundred million years ago i.e. 3.5 billion years ago? Was it the same as it is now? The fossil records do not confirm it and the environmental conditions that science figures out existed at the time earth was formed do not allow this life to have existed. Early atmosphere of earth didn’t have oxygen enough to sustain this life for example. So if we consider life having evolved from humble beginnings it all makes sense.
It has been scientifically determined that all this diverse life began to spread about 600 million years ago in the Cambrian era (known as the Cambrian Explosion) when single cell life became highly complex and Eukaryotic cells evolved and oxygen levels increased sufficiently. Eukaryotic cells are what animals (including humans) and plants are made of. It took two and a half billion years for this complex cell to evolve from basic Prokaryotic cells (of what bacteria are made of). And it took about one billion years for the Prokaryotic cell to emerge first. It is no easy task to figure out things that happened billions of years ago but thanks to science we have pretty good methods to figure out the past to a great degree of accuracy and hopefully will be able to understand more in the future. The evolution of life from Prokaryotic cell life onwards is understood quite well but the question of that very first life is still not known with complete understanding yet. I came across some information regarding this in a book “Microcosmos” where Carl Sagan’s son Dorion Sagan writes (co-authored with Lynn Margulis, his mother – both highly educated), how life could have originated from the basic elements that I mentioned earlier, considering the properties of those elements. I have picked out some parts of their book and tried to keep it to layman’s level for the purpose of simplicity:
Carbon atoms, being very light and with four valence electrons (i.e. electron in outer most shell available to pair with another available electron) and due to this property virtually all the molecules that we are composed of are carbon based.  Carbon atoms in their highly agitated states during the hot wet and molten Archean conditions, combined rapidly with hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous and sulfur to generate a vast diversity of substances.
A hydrocarbon chain linked to a group of phosphorous and oxygen atoms manifest an electrical charge on the end bearing the phosphate group and no charge on the other end. The chemical as whole attracts water on its charged end and repels it on the non-charged end. Such chemicals, called phospholipids, tend to lineup side by side with each other, the non-charged ends pointing away from the water while the charged ends point down into it. (This is essentially what happens when a drop of oil enters water, instantly forming a film.) These and other types of lipids tend spontaneously to fold into drops, secluding materials on the inside from those on the outside. They have also been shown to form double layers when waves bring two water surfaces, filmed with lipids, together. When this happens, the charged ends of the sheet of lipid molecules point towards each other sandwiched between the non-charged ends. In this way the first membranes were formed – the first semipermeable boundaries between “inside” and “outside, the first distinction between self and non-self.
The membrane makes possible that discrete unit of the microcosm, the bacterial cell. Most scientists feel that lipids combined with proteins to make translucent packages of lifelike matter before the beginning of life itself. No life without a membrane of some kind is known.
Probably not once, but several times, amino acids, nucleotides, simple sugars, phosphates and their derivatives, formed and complexified, with energy from the sun within the protection of a lipid bubble, absorbing ATP (Adenosine triphosphate) and other carbon nitrogen compounds from the outside as “food”. Fairly complex structures have formed spontaneously from lipid mixtures in the laboratory.
Bubbles of lipids split in two at first simply from the strain of surface tension, each half carrying on its internal activity. The protocells simply broke down and disappeared, while others formed in some other tidal pool, each with a slightly different “modus operandi”. Once able to stay itself, a structure on its way to becoming living must reproduce itself. Before cells, life and non-life may have been indistinguishable. The first cell like systems were what the Belgian Nobel Prize- winning physicist Ilya Prigogine has termed “dissipative structures” – objects or processes that organize themselves and spontaneously change their form. With the influx of energy, dissipative structures may become more instead of less ordered. The sort of information theory that has been so useful in communication technology applies solely to information which consists almost entirely of confirmation. In dissipative structures, information begins to organize itself; pockets of elaboration arise. 
 It seems silly to postulate a single dramatic moment of magical lightning when DNA and RNA spontaneously formed a cell and life began. Many dissipative structures, long chains of different chemical reactions, must have evolved, reacted and broken down before the elegant double helix of our ultimate ancestor formed and replicated with high fidelity. Indeed, living forms based on totally different types of replicating molecules may have arisen and developed for a while before disappearing altogether. But because they are the common denominator of all life today, it is clear that at some point lipid membranes containing RNA and DNA began to flourish. The numbers of these tiny bacterial spheres increased and diminished in a process of ebb and flow. At some point some time before 3,500 million years ago, the evolutionary tide reached the level of life as we know it: that of the membrane-bounded, 5000-protein, RNA-messaged, DNA-governed cell.  The Earth’s microcosm, the age of bacteria, had begun. The time it took because of nature’s hit and trial or natural selection of first one billion years for Prokaryotic cell to emerge and then two and a half billion years for the Eukaryotic cells justifies the inner complexity of these cells.       
Most of the mechanism at microscopic level is a function of positive and negative charge of the matter. An atom or a molecule with unequal number of electrons and protons becomes ions – more electrons make it negatively charged and more protons make it positively charged.  The layers of lipids that make membrane of a cell separate these charge differences across the membrane and embedded ion channels and sodium pumps in the membrane open or close when charge gradient increases. The solutions inside our cells, and those of all other organisms on earth, are high in potassium ions (+ve) and low in sodium ions (-ve). These ionic differences are exploited to generate the electrical pulses in our nerve and muscle cells for, like water trapped behind a hydroelectric dam; they are an effective way of storing potential energy. Open the gates and these ions try to redistribute themselves to try and establish equal concentrations on either side of the membrane.
The origin of rapid motion in bacteria seems to be connected to a rotary device that is unknown in cells with nuclei. A flagellum, or whip like strand, is attached to the disk-shaped base of the bacterium. The round base known as the “proton motor’, actually spins around, also propelled by changes of electric charge.
This gives me an idea how cell membranes could have formed, began splitting and replicating or reproducing and moving and it is all of atomic nature, flow of currents and now we know quite precisely how nerves and muscles operate, how neuron circuits in our brain work digitally etc. There is a clear pattern of increasing complexity from simplicity.
It will be a fair question to ask that if we know how matter became alive, how come we cannot produce a living cell in a laboratory now.  A few hundred million years of molecular activity is a long, long time. Scientists have been working only a few decades to provide conditions conducive to the origin of laboratory life and have come very far. It is not inconceivable that one day a living cell will be spontaneously generated in the laboratory. We should remember that it wasn’t more than 500 years ago when Copernicus settled the matter that sun didn’t revolve around earth but it was vice versa. We are here, having started from humble beginnings, a collection of atoms and molecules and bacteria and we are conscious, have emotions and our brains capable of figuring this all out. Whatever life is, it is amazing and very precious.   

‘A Letter in My Purse’: From Slain Poet Shaimaa El-Sabbagh

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Shaimaa El-Sabbagh was an Egyptian activist and poet. She supported the Military take over by General Sissi to overthrow the Muslim Brotherhood. Unfortunately Shaimaa El-Sabbagh, a mother of 5 year old son, was killed by the same Military regime when she went to lay flowers in Tahrir Squre. The raw images of her needless death shocked the whole nation. Below is one of her poem. ( F. Sheikh)

‘A Letter in My Purse’: From Slain Poet Shaimaa El-Sabbagh

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Shaimaa El-Sabbagh, the activist who was shot dead at a rally in Tahrir Square yesterday, was also a poet:

A letter in my purse

By Shaimaa El-Sabbagh, trans. Maged Zaher
————————–
I am not sure
Truly, she was nothing more than just a purse
But when lost, there was a problem
How to face the world without her
Especially
Because the streets remember us together
The shops know her more than me
Because she is the one who pays
She knows the smell of my sweat and she loves it
She knows the different buses
And has her own relationship with their drivers
She memorizes the ticket price
And always has the exact change
Once I bought a perfume she didn’t like
She spilled all of it and refused to let me use it
By the way
She also loves my family
And she always carried a picture
Of each one she loves

What might she be feeling right now
Maybe scared?
Or disgusted from the sweat of someone she doesn’t know
Annoyed by the new streets?

If she stopped by one of the stores we visited together
Would she like the same items?
Anyway, she has the house keys
And I am waiting for her

Maged Zaher is a 2013 “Genius” award winner who both writes and translates poetry. His most recent collection is Thank You for the Window Office, and his most recent translation The Tahrir of Poems.