Philosphicalising

Philosophers. Aren't they just so cooL?

Today, friends, let us do philosophy. There are a good many question in modern philosophy, ranging from “Will that Melvyn Bragg bloke ever shut up?” to “Is the cake really a lie?”. Some of these questions are timeless classics (“Why has my wife left me?”) while others are new, and as yet fairly un-thought. I can’t tell you about the new ones, because even by reading them, you’ll be forced to think them, and research philosophers have not yet discovered which ones are safe to be thought by laymen and women.

There are, of course, over-thought questions. Is the cat dead or alive? Doe we have free will? Is the king of France bald? The answer to the last question is no. Both the current king and queen of France have full heads of hair, although their son is going through a bit of skinhead phase at the moment.

Perhaps the most famous, and most over-thought question is the question of the tree in the forest. If it falls, will it make any sound? The philosophers here have made a fundamental error in assuming that there is still enough forest left for this question to work – these days most forests are within at most a hundred yards of a major tourist attraction or logging industry. However, the question still seems to receive as much thought as it did when new. This is plainly an injustice. There are so many other tree-forest related questions that barely get a look in as a result, and they really deserve more thought. So today I shall present to you a round-up of the best alternatives to the tree-forest-sound (or TFS) philosification.

The most popular replacement to the TFS philosification is of course the tree-forest-god problem. If a tree falls in a forest, does God exist? Alas, this has been puzzling theological philosophers for many centuries now. The history is the TFG problem is quite illustrious – it was thought up just a few years after explorers found the first forests, and but weeks after the concept of God was first invented. From then on in, it became a rich person’s plaything. Many kings kept a personal philosopher in their palaces to stimulate them with this particular conundrum.

The issue was finally solved in 1932, where a philosopher by the name of Wendy showed that the existence of God is not affected at all by the felling of trees in the forest, much to the appreciation of the logging industry, who had been receiving petitions from nervous religious folk for a while. The proof is long and complicated, although extremely elegant to other philosophers.

Another well known philosophisation is Jemimah’s Conundrum. This basically asks if, when a tree falls in a forest, did it do it of its own accord. Essentially, the question ponders whether trees have free will. This question was actually solved a few weeks after creation by a tree who had, at the time, been working in the same philosopherication department as Jemimah. The tree, who was later granted the right to call itself sentient and to thus receive a minimum wage, showed that trees are actually the only beings in the universe who can decided their own destiny. His proof is currently disputed by many senior academics on the grounds that the grammar in the original paper was terrible, but then the writer was just a tree.

There are also much less famous alternatives to the TFS philosification. Arguably an undeserved example of these is the Tree-Forest-Compensation problem. If a tree falls in a forest and lands on a something, who pays compensation, and who do they pay it to? This has always been a bone of contention amongst research philosophers and theoretical philosophers. The latter argue that the question is irrelevant, and not a part of the true study of philosophy. The latter, many of whom have been injured or had possessions crushed by falling trees as a result of being sent on research assignments, say that theoreticians should pay the costs incurred by any of their research partners. Usually as part of the price for their actual research. Thus the question has not yet been solved.

It is also important to remember the Tree-Forest-Field theory. This is basically a theory that says that if a tree falls in a forest, it is not in a field. This has been quite hotly debated as, unlike most philosophical conundra, there appears to be no proof of it. Indeed, Professor Michael Crabapple Snr once proved that there is no proof of the theory, but this was then shown to be false after Professor Michael Crabapple Jnr proved a few years later that there can be no proof that there is or is not any proof of the theory. Counterexamples have been shown – there are a few dubious photographs of trees in fields that float around whenever important philosophers meet to discuss this problem. However, some theoreticians would argue that the theory only applies at the moment of the tree falling. However, TFF skeptics argue that a self-consistent theory must apply at all times, and so the theory must be false.

Other less-popular philosophilisationings include the Tree-Forest-Forest conundrum which states that a tree that falls in a forest is acceptable proof that a forest exists, somewhere. This lead to Greenpeace’s Operation No Forests, which attempted to prove that all the forests had been destroyed by stopping all trees from falling. It was foiled just a few minutes after it began when a tree fell in a forest a few miles away from the Operation’s base camp. It could be heard for miles.

There is also, of course, the I Can’t Believe It’s Not A Tree-Forest-Sound Question question which is sponsored by a popular butter brand. It asks what sound a tree would make if it fell in a forest, assuming that it would make a sound at all. Most papers written on the subject agree that it would be a loud version of the sound a twig makes when it falls over, but popular philosopher Jeremy Clarkson has suggested that it would sound “a bit like a bombshell”, and another professor has suggested that it could sound like the “ringing of a thousand bells in perfect harmony – an immaculate chorus of beauty”, although she’s considered to be a bit crazy even by philosopher standards.

Physics Isn’t Working…

A Neutrino in a Bubble Chamber - The subatomic equivalent of a jacuzzi...

Physicists across the world are aghast. Not content with blowing up a fuss the first time round, the physicists at the OPERA collaboration in Switzerland have had the indecency to repeat their results using a more accurate method, and have stumbled on a potentially profound, but nonetheless fairly irritating discovery. They are fairly sure now that physics isn’t working.

To summarise, because physics tends to be small-town news, the OPERA collaboration have fired neutrinos at a detector and, despite using extremely sensitive equipment, checking their calculations carefully, and praying to all the gods they have ever known, the team have, for the second time, found that neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light. Truly, they are quaking in their boots.

It is very easy to imagine that physicists are heroes among men, warriors for a valiant truth, who will strike out against fallacies and untruths. However, physicists tend to be rather conformist. It’s not nice to be working on a minor theoretical aspect to the conductivity of superfluids in zero-gravity ionic-array structural solvents, only to find that one of the modelling assumptions you’ve made turns out to be wrong. Plus there’s a bit of hero-worship going on. Einstein was quite a cool physicist, and, let’s face it, how many times have you looked at Stephen Hawking and thought ‘wow, he’s totally rad man’?

Indeed, after a long and arduous freedom of information request, and five minutes of extremely quick easy phone-hacking, I can now produce a transcript of the initial meeting where the OPERA collaboration team realised that, for the second time, something was going wrong…

“So, ah guys, we got the results, and, well, I’m sorry to say that we’ve done it again.”

“What, our neutrinos went faster than light? I thought we had rigged the experiment so that they couldn’t do that. It was embarrassing last time…”

“Yeah, clearly it didn’t work. The fundamental laws of the universe are clearly having an off day. Does anyone know if something weird has happened? I dunno, a temporal instability, or the Merkel and Sarkozy agreeing on something? I wonder if something has triggered the collapse of the universe?”

“You know, why don’t we just pack the whole thing in? Blame it on a dud satellite and campaign for an improvement to the GPS service.”

“I invented a new form of mind-wiping machine the other day, we could try using that. And if you want to get your memories back, you just reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.”

“Neutrons don’t have a polarity.”

“They don’t? Bother. I’ve just discovered a new impossible thing.”

“What was the point of this whole experiment anyway?”

“You know, I’m not actually sure. I was just trying to see if I could aim for Berlesconi’s head.”

“Well I was trying to destroy the pope.”

“Wait a second, who are you?”

“I’m, ah, Richard Dawkins.”

“But you’re a biologist!”

“I am? Ah, sorry, probably the wrong room. Never mind…”

“Who actually published the results? We should have kept things a but quieter. Apparently physics has even been mentioned on Radio Four! Physics? On the BBC? I thought they dealt more with the social things. Why people congregate around the water cooler, and all that.”

“Oh, sorry, that was me. I had an intern in, and I clearly didn’t explain to them about the whole impossible thing, so they went ahead and published.”

“Ah well, nothing we can do, really. Just got to grin and bear it. Does anyone want a cup of stone cold tea in a mug that they haven’t washed since the early 90′s? Good, I’ll go and get some then.”

As the physicists file dejectedly out of the room, the only positive thing in their lives being ionised nuclei, a solitary figure, half shrouded in think, velvety shadows sits. A white cat rests in a box on his lap, in a state of perpetual uncertainty. The person smiles, and his teeth glint slightly in the dim light.

“Excellent,” He says, his accent a combination of old Soviet Union and German Nazi. “Everything is going to plan…”

Bad Physics

Image via Wikipedia

So physics is broken.  Or at least that’s what you’d think having heard much of the comment on the news yesterday that researchers have detected neutrinos appearing slightly earlier than expected.  So early that they appeared to break the speed of light, a feat which contradicted Einstein’s theory of relativity, which is much respected, and indeed provides a cornerstone to much modern physics.

 

In some ways, therefore, this could be a big discovery.  But researchers are more wary.  Indeed, as stated repeatedly on the CERN website, and by physicists worldwide, they want someone to check their figures.  Having published their report online for free, they’re looking for other knowledgeable experts to be able to point out the additional error in, for example, the GPS system that they used, or the fact that they failed to take into account a random solar flare.

 

The experiment they did was quite simple in some ways.  They made a lot of tiny particles called neutrinos at their laboratory in CERN, and fired them at Italy, presumably aiming to take out Berlesconi on the way.  These particles are almost undetectable, and pass through us from space all the time.  However, in Italy they have a device that can detect neutrinos.

 

The experiments have taken place over several months, and are certainly not rarefied instances like Fleischman and Pons’ cold fusion.  The setup has been checked repeatedly, with a timing mechanism that is as accurate as it could plausibly get using modern technology.  The distance is a long enough to minimize error as much as possible.  The whole experiment should work.

 

Yet accidents happen.  Take, for example, the time that the LHC‘s forefather, the LEP, was brought down because a researcher had left a pair of empty beer bottles in the path of the electron beam.  There could quite plausibly be something completely obvious that they are missing.  In an extremely complex procedure, we can’t assume that they will have got it perfect first time, which is why they are passing the research on in the hope that others will find a reason.

 

For the public, this is a great time to understand the ideas behind theories, laws, proof and other such scientific terminology.  Especially when areas of the Christian right wing are moving to attack much of verified science, we all need to know what these terms mean.  When we say, for example, that Darwin’s theory of evolution is only a theory, that’s because science does not deal in absolutes.  When Einstein published his theory of special relativity, it was only an idea.  But as these ideas are tested, with a lot of rigour involved, we realise that we can describe the world this way, and also that it makes predictions about the way our world works.

 

This is an example of a theory in dispute – and a great and time-honoured theory as well.  If theories such as this can be disputed, of course so can evolution and the big bang.  But then we don’t have evidence that disputes them.  And, as shown here, the first thing we should do isn’t to immediately start dismantling the older theory.  We must ensure that our new evidence is up to scratch first.  And if it is, we must look for alternative explanations – string theory might perhaps give us some of those.  If we can find none, then yes, Einstein will be overturned.