Here is an
obituary posted on cosmic variance today by a former student of Wheeler, Daniel Holz.

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One beautiful Fall day seventeen years ago I wandered into an office and my life profoundly changed. I was an undergraduate at Princeton, and was looking for a thesis advisor. Jadwin Hall was an intimidating place. Plenty of names familiar from my textbooks. Nobel laureates scattered about. And we were expected to just barge into their offices, and ask to work with them.

One office door was always open. As you walked by you could peek in, and see its occupant hard at work. Hunched over his notebook, scribbling away. Or standing by his bookcase, deep in thought. Most often at the blackboard, chalk in hand. This was John Archibald Wheeler, one of the legends of modern physics. He did foundational work on quantum mechanics, collaborating with Niels Bohr on some of the earliest work in nuclear fission. He invented the S-matrix. He played important roles in both the Manhattan project (atomic bomb) and the Matterhorn project (Hydrogen bomb). He made major contributions to general relativity, co-authoring with Charlie Misner and Kip Thorne the bible of the field. He was legendary for his way with words, coining such terms as wormholes, quantum foam, black holes, and the wave function of the Universe (the Wheeler-DeWitt equation). He trained generations of students; one of his first was Richard Feynman.
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John Wheeler died this morning.

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Here is his wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler

[ 14 April 2008: Message edited by: The Wizard of Socialism ]

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Originally posted by remind:
Only the good die young it seems.

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Originally posted by 500_Apples:

John Wheeler was 96...

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Originally posted by The Wizard of Socialism:
I'm sure John Wheeler was a swell fella. You're the one who brought up James "blacks are less intelligent than whites" Watson. Request denied.

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Originally posted by kropotkin1951:
Duh you think Remind didn't know that?

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It's possible.

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Originally posted by kropotkin1951:
I didn't say nice things about Pinochet. Does that make me a bad person. If you haven't noticed this is a progressive board not a praise American scientist's board.

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1) We're not discussing Pinochet.
2) It doesn't matter whether a scientist is American or Canadian.
3) Progressives don't need to be luddites.
4) This is the Humanities and Sciences board. People come here to discuss the humanities and the sciences.
5) You're coming off as a bad person with that comment.

[ 14 April 2008: Message edited by: 500_Apples ]

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Originally posted by 500_Apples:
It's possible.

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If she had an understanding of the man she would not have written that.

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Originally posted by kropotkin1951:
I have little respect for anyone who makes bombs designed to kill the maximum number of civilians. Can you show me where he apologized to the world for this horrendous crime against humanity. If he did apologize like others did who were complicit in this the worst war crime of all time I will forego my criticism since I know nothing about his alleged racism.

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alleged racism? I looked that up on google and there doesn't seem to be any examples. All I saw was a link to this thread.

Albert Einstein sent a letter to the president around 1938, advising him to build the bomb before the Germans do. Both the Germans and Japaneses had atomic bomb programs, but the USA finished first. You may be very judgmental about it, but it was a legitimate fear during 1938-1944 that the Germans would get the bomb first. They did have great technology. If it had happened, those of us alive would be speaking German.

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Originally posted by remind:

Of course I would have, I just did.

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I doubt you know a lot about the man's work but I'm prepared to be surprised. Let's see if you do:

1) What are the governing equations of general relativity?
2) What is an S-matrix?
3) What is quantum foam?

[ 14 April 2008: Message edited by: 500_Apples ]

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Originally posted by kropotkin1951:
I have little respect for anyone who makes bombs designed to kill the maximum number of civilians. Can you show me where he apologized to the world for this horrendous crime against humanity. If he did apologize like others did who were complicit in this the worst war crime of all time I will forego my criticism

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Here's a comment from writer Patricia Rife:

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I loved John with all my heart! I was the biographer of Lise Meitner and in 1995, phoned him from University of Hawaii — “Do you remember me? I interviewed you ten years ago for my dissertation on Lise Meitner, and you were departing for Copenhagen — after being interviewed for NOVA by Carl Sagen! And I spilled a coke on you right after our video interview — how embarrased I was!” “Oh yes” - he replied, always the optimist, always the student of Bohr, broad-minded, cheerfully American “you are the beautiful historian! I would be happy to write the Foreword to your book on Meitner! Now let me tell you some stories about fission…” And then he would truly be off, sharing insights no historian may have ever known or written carefully about….

Johnny, we all loved you, we admired and respected you, but moreso, you were our ‘link’ to the Copenhagen Circle, the times before the war, and the reason we all work so hard for world peace. It was YOU who encouraged me, whispering in my ear “Now you keep up your good work, and always take a stand for peace!”

We will miss you — have a safe journey into the cosmos!
Patricia Rife

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And from Carlo Rovelli:

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My debt to John is immense. For the tremendous beauty of his ideas. For the sweetness with which he received me, talked to me, and asked me questions. Because most of my physics has been walking along his path. For a letter he wrote to me so long ago, which is still hanging on the wall of my office. Because John wanted to really know how the world is, and how we should change our thoughts to understand it. Because I think that that was the right path for physics. For his eyes when I met him last time. And for the things he told me at this last meeting, and I couldn’t hear his soft voice anymore. And so much I wanted to hear more from him. Dear, dear John, thanks for all this. Carlo

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And one more, from John Baez:

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I fell in love with quantum gravity as an undergrad after reading the last chapter of
Misner, Thorne and Wheeler’s Gravitation. This chapter was clearly written by Wheeler. He made quantum gravity seem like the coolest thing imaginable.

Years later I met him at a conference and was too tongue-tied to say anything more than hello. He looked at my name tag and asked if I was related to Joan Baez. I’m afraid that’s the only conversation I ever had with him, though he affected me tremendously.

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Originally posted by martin dufresne:
It would be interesting to know if Wheeler ever made amends for his work on the A and H bomb and its unnecessary use against the Japanese civil population by his country, truly one of the greatest crimes against humanity in recorded history. It is also interesting to me - I am writing a screenplay about this - why nuclear physicists are essentially treated as saints in our culture. Is there a link between both phenomena? Do we revere those who threaten us most?

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They're saints because they seem like the brightest collection of individuals who have ever lived. Feynman, Von Neumann, Einstein, Oppenheimer, Fermi, Bohr, Wheeler... unbelievable. Those people are giants and we are midgets. Look on wikipedia for their accomplishments sometime, they're incredible. I also recommend reading Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman. My experience and those of my peers when learning quantum mechanics was.... how could these people be so fucking smart? They all made massive contributions outside of the Manhattan project, and without them the world would be way less advanced than it is.

Honestly, if I were alive in ~1940 in North America, living in fear of the Germans who were persecuting Jews and conquering Europe and allied with Stalin and his iron first over Russia, in fear of Japan which was conquering the Pacific, in a country suffering from the great depression... I would want to join the Manhattan project and contribute, in a hurry.

You may feel the A-Bomb was unnecessary, but a lot of people with strong and educated opinions felt that the cost was smaller than the cost of an invasion would have been. But even if they're wrong, that wasn't on Wheeler's mind when he signed up.

******

I'd love to hear more about your screenplay, when will it be on show?

[ 14 April 2008: Message edited by: 500_Apples ]

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Originally posted by Proaxiom:
One could point out that the fruits of the labour of Wilbur and Orville Wright has enabled the killing of vastly more people than the Manhattan project did.

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Excellent point.
All technology can be used for both good and evil.
The Chinese used gunpowder to make fireworks.
The Wrights conquered flight for the sake of flight, not to create fighter jets or to accelerate global warming.
The Manhattan project was suggested so as not to be bombed into oblivion by the Germans.

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News of the death of John Wheeler came yesterday, and many people have already written detailed, touching and informative pieces about the man, his life and scientific achievements. See for example here, here, and here. With Wheeler gone, physics loses one of its very few living contacts with the early days of quantum mechanics, since his career reached back to the early thirties when he went to study with Bohr.

My most extensive contact with Wheeler was surely through learning GR from the marvelous textbook he co-authored on the subject. By the time I got to Princeton as a student, he had recently left for the University of Texas, in order to evade Princeton’s mandatory retirement age policy. He still was a presence in the department though, returning to give talks (I remember one that was an advertisement for the importance of the notion of a complex: “the boundary of a boundary is zero!” was the slogan). My only conversation with him was at a meeting organized between graduate students and a visiting committee of people evaluating the department. I recall a very friendly older man who came up to talk to me, and listened attentively to my going on for quite a while about how things could be improved. Only after we had finished speaking and he had left did I realize who I had been talking to. My overwhelming feeling immediately was that if I had realized this earlier I’d have much more enjoyed keeping quiet and getting the chance to ask him a few questions.

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http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=678

[ 14 April 2008: Message edited by: 500_Apples ]

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Originally posted by remind:
apples, I understand you worshipped him however, we have every right to express our opinion of the man and we definitely have a right not to be called ignorant for it.

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Imagine there was a RIP Tommy Douglas thread,

And someone came in, who knew nothing about Tommy Douglas five minutes before, and said "He supported eugenics and said homosexuals should get psychological treatment. Did he end up apologizing? I can have little respect for such a person!"

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Originally posted by The Wizard of Socialism:
Well if I also praised raving racist James Watson in the same post, I'd like to think someone would call me on it. Just like I did to you. But the question remains: what is it about James Watson you find so damn groovy? Do you agree with his ravings that blacks are less intelligent than whites? Do you dig his hypothesis that darker skinned people have higher libidos? Do you think his support of eugenics is bitchin? If not, why have you not denounced him like every other halfway decent person in the world?

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...

When people look up James Watson in the encyclopedia a thousand years from now, it won't be because of his the historical irrelevancy that are his racist conclusions on people of African ancestry such as myself.

If I made a mistake when listing James Watson and Francis Crick, it's that I neglected to include Rosalind Franklin among the list of dead giants, and didn't realize that Crick was dead rather than alive. I just realized I also forgot Emmy Noether and Bertrand Russel.

Big picture please. The discovery of DNA was very important, definitely a great advance of the last hundred years. My guess wizard is that possibly you only ever heard of Watson due to the racist comments and so you think they're of relative importance. I wasn't making a list of nice people - notice Mother Theresa was not in there. I was making a list of intellectual titans. Did you know why I listed Crick and Watson together?

********

Do you read Shakespeare? Do you think he was a literary genius? Doesn't it bother you how he portrayed Jews in the The Mechant of Venice ... are you not a half-decent person?

[ 14 April 2008: Message edited by: 500_Apples ]

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Originally posted by 500_Apples:
Imagine there was a RIP Tommy Douglas thread,

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And someone came in, who knew nothing about Tommy Douglas five minutes before,

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and said "He supported eugenics and said homosexuals should get psychological treatment. Did he end up apologizing? I can have little respect for such a person!"

How would you feel about such a post?

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Dead is dead by the way.

And freedom of conscience is still freedom of conscience.

[ 14 April 2008: Message edited by: remind ]

That Watson is an objectionable person seems to be fairly universally acknowledged. That he is smarter than hell and is responsible (with others) for a very significant advance in our understanding of the world is undisputed.

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Originally posted by jrootham:
Remind, don't play dumb. It doesn't become you.

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This is all less than admirable thread drift.

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Originally posted by Remind:
Who knew nothing of John Wheeler 5 minutes before?

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[ 15 April 2008: Message edited by: 500_Apples ]

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That was a beautiful remembrance.

John Wheeler has long been my favorite physicist. I discovered him while reading popular physics books as a teenager, when again and again I would come across crazy-sounding quotations by Wheeler about the foundations of physics and quantum theory.

I’ve collected many quotations by and about John Wheeler over the years, and have added today some new ones that I had not yet come across. I hope you don’t consider this spam, but I thought you or your readers might be interested in perusing them: quotations by or about John Wheeler..

If that URL gets mangled, the last link at http://strangewondrous.net/search is also a query for everything by or about him.

Science has lost one of its greatest practitioners; those who knew him have lost a great man. My condolences to his family and friends.

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Originally posted by 500_Apples:
It is the opinion of kroptokin and remind that anyone of a brilliant mind who worked to stop Hitler from conquering the world (aka involvement in the Manhattan project and nuclear weapons development) was necessarily an evil person who doesn't deserve to be mourned.

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Now, the statements you have made regarding the his alleged helping in the defeat of Hitler, are a completely different subject matter in respect to the veracity of said position.

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It's obvious the history and philosophy of science is not your strongest field,

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as you weren't able to describe anything substantive about his work,

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and you think the scientists who worked on the Manhattan projects were terrible human beings.

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[ 15 April 2008: Message edited by: remind ]

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Originally posted by kropotkin1951:
500-RoadApples

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It is the opinion of kroptokin and remind that anyone of a brilliant mind who worked to stop Hitler from conquering the world (aka involvement in the Manhattan project and nuclear weapons development) was necessarily an evil person who doesn't deserve to be mourned.

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and your criticizing other people for their knowledge of history? The Manhattan project didn't have anything at all to do with "stopping Hitler." The war in Europe was won without nucleur weapons. Japan was on the verge of surrender when the bombs were dropped. It doesn't matter how much you speculate what might have happened if the Germans or Japaneese had developed the bomb, the fact is they didn't. If you want to praise anyone for stopping Hitler you might wish to thank the Russians.

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5) You're coming off as a bad person with that comment.

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You may be very judgmental about it,

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who may not be interested in ignorant armchair criticism of some on this board

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They're saints because they seem like the brightest collection of individuals who have ever lived

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are you not a half-decent person?

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I violently objected to the injection of philosophical views that I held in contempt in the Physics classroom and now, looking over some internet descriptions of debates in the philosophy of physics, I am coming to see that even the most mathematical science is far from being immune to the ideological battles raging on in the world. I remember the disappointment I felt when I heard an interview with Fenymann, for example, and his schoolboy chatter about social problems. However, my admiration for someone like Einstein have only grown with time, whether by his joint Manifesto with Bertrand Russell, or his fending off attempts to recruit him to the Zionist cause, and so on.

There isn't much about Wheeler's philosophy of physics in the wiki entry, other than a stray remark about the Participatory Anthropic Principle (PAP), or other versions of the anthropic principle, which can be taken to be supporting intelligent design or supporting multiple universes, etc.. It's not clear to me what Wheeler's philosophy of physics was, beyond obedience to the "shut up and calculate" school of "thought". I really hope I'm wrong here, BTW.

Perhaps a fan of Wheeler can make a few intelligent remarks about Wheeler's philosophy of physics. It's clear he was an outstanding teacher of physics, and was an innovator in the science for which he received many richly deserved awards. However, my idea of a really great scientist is someone like Albert Einstein, or Paul Sweezy, or Marie Curie (who blazed a trail for women scientists), and so on. It is no longer enough to be a great mind to be really great. One has to be a great fighter for humanity as well, to get the highest accolades and honours in my view.

At the time of the inception of the Manhattan project Nazi Germany was definitely the target. That was before the attack on Pearl Harbour.

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Originally posted by jrootham:
Careful with the revisionist history there. Here we must distinguish between the Manhattan project and Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

At the time of the inception of the Manhattan project Nazi Germany was definitely the target. That was before the attack on Pearl Harbour.

Leo Szilard and other physicists tried to stop the attacks on Japan. Wheeler was not in that group.

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I am perversely of 2 minds on that work. The question arises: If the H bomb hadn't been invented (and it was a near run thing) would the A bomb been actually used after WWII?

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Originally posted by Nanuq:
So who decides what problems scientists should or shouldn't be working on? There's a place for basic research as well as applied research. And you can't condemn a scientist if his/her research is used for military purposes. All research is, sooner or later.

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Nanuq: And you can't condemn a scientist if his/her research is used for military purposes. All research is, sooner or later.

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That's just wrong. And, as a Canadian, you should be able to rattle off something like this ...

The Discovery of Insulin

United States Patent 4799429 for Edward V. LaBudde: Programming circuit for individual bomblets in a cluster bomb

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Originally posted by kropotkin1951:
I don't see the distinction. Designing and building bombs of mass destruction that are specifically designed to murder hundreds of thousands of civilians and terrorize the rest is nothing IMO to be proud of.

...

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I was objecting to the argument that seemed to assert that the Manhattan project should not have been started because the Japanese were about to surrender.

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faster than you can say "Banting and Best

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Originally posted by Nanuq:

Er, you did know that Frederick Banting went into military research in the 1930s, right? It's how he died actually.

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When the Second World War broke out, he served as a liaison officer between the British and North American medical services and, while thus engaged, he was, in February 1941, killed in an air disaster in Newfoundland.

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Originally posted by jrootham:
Well, he did work on the H bomb. That says something.

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Leo Szilard and other physicists tried to stop the attacks on Japan. Wheeler was not in that group.

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However, he seems not to have raised any objections to its use after it became apparent that it wasn't needed anymore, and furthermore he signed on to the hydrogen bomb project with the full knowledge of what a simple fission bomb could do (surely he'd seen the pictures!) so that's a lot harder to forgive. He was no Robert Oppenheimer.

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In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of mankind, we urge the governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them.

Max Born
Percy W. Bridgman
Albert Einstein
Leopold Infeld
Frederic Joliot-Curie
Herman J. Muller
Linus Pauling
Cecil F. Powell
Joseph Rotblat
Bertrand Russell
Hideki Yukawa

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Next to these greats Wheeler is was an ethical lightweight. Sorry, that's how I see it.

Pugwash and the Russell-Einstein Manifesto

[ 15 April 2008: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

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Originally posted by N.R.KISSED:

What I asserted was that the Manhattan project did not stop Hitler nor was it integral in defeat of the Japaneese. So maybe you might wish to careful about jumping to conclusions before accusing people of "revisionist history".

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That is a revision of your earlier post. The question about whether the Manhattan project should have been started (or whether an individual should have worked on it) must be considered in terms of what was known at the time. Noting that it was unnecessary after the fact is not a reasonable argument.

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Originally posted by N.Beltov:
Next to these greats Wheeler is was an ethical lightweight. Sorry, that's how I see it.

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Could you link to where he went into military research?

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Originally posted by N.Beltov:
By adopting such a dualistic approach one can safely avoid addressing the global problems that we're faced with in our time, and the role that "the greatest minds" have in solving, or NOT solving, those problems. Einstein and Russell didn't just call for peaceful resolution of conflicts without nuclear weapons; they also joined others who called for scientists to cease being ethically indifferent to the consequences of their efforts and asserted that this ethical duty was inextricably connected to their merit as scientists.

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My personal ethics are very goal-oriented and empirically-motivated, as such I can't bring myself to agree with you.

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Originally posted by N.R.KISSED:
What I asserted was that the Manhattan project did not stop Hitler nor was it integral in defeat of the Japaneese. So maybe you might wish to careful about jumping to conclusions before accusing people of "revisionist history".

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The purpose of the Manhattan project was to get the nuclear bomb before the Germans did. If you study twentieth century science, you will see that Germans absolutely dominated physics in the first 20 or 30 years of the century. The fear they'd get to it first was a legitimate fear.

The following is some actual history:

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In 1938 many people feared that Hitler would build an atomic bomb after word spread that German scientist had split the uranium atom (fission). However, one of Hitlers mistakes was his persecution of Jewish scientists. This persecution resulted in numerous scientists seeking asylum in the United States. One such scientist was Albert Einstein. Einstein, abandoning his belief in pacifism, urged then president Franklin Roosevelt to develop an atomic bomb before Hitler did. Eventually Roosevelt agreed and the United States attempt at building the atomic bomb was codenamed The Manhattan Project.

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Originally posted by Agent 204:
The fact that people signed on to the Manhattan project is forgiveable, in that at the time it was seen as necessary to stop the Nazis. I still would like to think that I wouldn't sign on to such a project, but to someone who's politically unsophisticated it might seem like the right thing to do.

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I think that's a really arrogant thing to say.

How was it politically unsophisticated to desire stopping the nazis? Their goal was to conquer the world with their allies and purify the races, to brainwash the masses and to have central command. When one is fighting for survival against such an enemy, one has more options available which pass the ethical test.

Here's an example, Britain was losing the air war in 1940 or 1941, very badly. They couldn't repair their radar towers and such fast enough. What did Winston Churchill do? He ordered a bombing of German cities. Why? So that Hitler would get angry and bomb English cities... which would give the people working at radar towers and such time to rebuild. He willed the deaths of some of his own people. Was it an ethical decision? Of course it was, because he didn't have a lot of choices, and the only other alternative was to surrender, a situation where way more people would have died.

*****

We have a great privilege, those of us who are alive in the 2000s and living in prosperous Canada. What is that great privilege? The freedom to behave as saints. The liberty to be good people, it's nice.

[ 15 April 2008: Message edited by: 500_Apples ]

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Originally posted by N.Beltov:
Well, the OP had this: "There goes one of the top minds of the twentieth century." I don't think it's been shown that Wheeler, despite his remarkable accomplishments, belongs to the group of "greatest minds" if he lived at the same time as Einstein and was, nevertheless, unable to join him and Russell in 1955 in signing the following document

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Originally posted by kropotkin1951:
My view is that the ends do not justify the means.

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That's just a bumper sticker slogan people say to feel good about themselves.

Every conscious action humans do in the real world is intended to achieve some goal. When I eat a cookie it's for the pleasure it gives me. When I shave in the morning it's to look more professional and be more confident. There is no exception really. Subconscious actions are different, but there are derived from evolution and are maintained because they fulfill a goal, i.e. breathing is a means to achieve the ends of having energy and surviving.

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I feel like I want to go boxing now, to wash away the fear we won't be able to match them.

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[ 15 April 2008: Message edited by: martin dufresne ]

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The casualty fraction from armed conflict in the past fifty years is probably lower than at almost any point in human history, and possibly the lowest.

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[ 15 April 2008: Message edited by: martin dufresne ]

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Originally posted by N.Beltov:
I must admit that I took a road less traveled and really stop studying Physics seriously after 2nd year Mechanics. Not that I didn't have the Math for it - I did - but I had other interests.

I violently objected to the injection of philosophical views that I held in contempt in the Physics classroom and now, looking over some internet descriptions of debates in the philosophy of physics, I am coming to see that even the most mathematical science is far from being immune to the ideological battles raging on in the world. I remember the disappointment I felt when I heard an interview with Fenymann, for example, and his schoolboy chatter about social problems. However, my admiration for someone like Einstein have only grown with time, whether by his joint Manifesto with Bertrand Russell, or his fending off attempts to recruit him to the Zionist cause, and so on.

There isn't much about Wheeler's philosophy of physics in the wiki entry, other than a stray remark about the Participatory Anthropic Principle (PAP), or other versions of the anthropic principle, which can be taken to be supporting intelligent design or supporting multiple universes, etc.. It's not clear to me what Wheeler's philosophy of physics was, beyond obedience to the "shut up and calculate" school of "thought". I really hope I'm wrong here, BTW.

Perhaps a fan of Wheeler can make a few intelligent remarks about Wheeler's philosophy of physics. It's clear he was an outstanding teacher of physics, and was an innovator in the science for which he received many richly deserved awards. However, my idea of a really great scientist is someone like Albert Einstein, or Paul Sweezy, or Marie Curie (who blazed a trail for women scientists), and so on. It is no longer enough to be a great mind to be really great. One has to be a great fighter for humanity as well, to get the highest accolades and honours in my view.

Humanity is at a precipice. Who can deny this? The greatest minds must work on the greatest problems, else they're not the greatest minds at all.

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Hi N. Beltov,

I'm not denying that Wheeler held many conservative viewpoints. He was definitely to the right of his colleagues who were and are for the most part liberal. What I'm saying is that this doesn't matter. I do not judge William Shakespeare to be a non-great because people found one of his plays anti-semitic. Shakespeare was a brilliant writer, and the combination of his work and the King James Bible helped push the English language forward. His plays are still played and studied today. Gauss was a huge asshole but damn what a hero of humanity he's proven to be. I'd wager Beethoven was one as well. All that really matters to me is spectacular contribution to a challenging field. Shakespeare, Gauss, and Wheeler are such people. And yes even Feynman, with whom you disagree on politics. He got a nobel prize for QED, came up with Feynman diagrams, was responsible for the Challenger disaster review, he learnt mayan hieroglyphics, the Banjo and picked all the locks at los alamos.

You seem to object to the "shut up and calculate" school of thought. This was most likely not Wheeler's school as can be seen from some of the quotes in the page I linked to. But even if it were, since it's a very successful school, it's earned its place. The idea behind it is that sometimes you can't see twenty heads and so you should just calculate and see what happens.

I take exception with your perspective that social ethics is somehow a supreme field, that it is a veto field, and that if one is not expert in the leading views of social ethics one is not a great mind. A lot of fields are important, not just social ethics. And physics is on any reasonable person's shortlist of the most important fields.

[aside]The anthropic principle is not about intelligent design. It is a counterargument to ID. It arose from the observations that the parameters of the universe seem fine tuned to support life, if the parameters were most other real numbers there would be no structure in the universe. ID advocates say this means God fine tuned the parameters. The anthropic principle is simply the proper statistical interpretation, that if the parameters were not fine tuned for life, we would not be around to comment.[/aside].

For those who seem to feel nuclear physics is evil,

It's lowered the number of deaths from war on the planet, it's enabled nuclear electricity and one day fusion power which are both cleaner than most energy production, and it allows radiation therapy, cat scan and MRIs, which are some of the cornerstone of modern medicine. Overall, nuclear physics has clearly reduced the number of deaths.

You could start by having a read of Paul Baran's essay The Commitment of the Intellectual.

Baran in his essay discusses a number of things, including exposing the use of the notion of the separation of means from ends as a way to "contract out" one's moral and ethical values somewhere else: Smith's invisible hand, God, whatever ... It's a kind of spiritual capitulation.

And then there's this ...

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Baran: what marks the intellectual and distinguishes him from the intellect workers and indeed from all others is that his concern with the entire historical process is not a tangential interest but permeates his thought and significantly affects his work.... Indeed, it is precisely this effort to interconnect things which, to intellect workers operating within the framework of capitalist institutions and steeped in bourgeois ideology and culture, necessarily appear to lie in strictly separate compartments of society’s knowledge and society’s labor—it is this effort to interconnect which constitutes one of the intellectuals outstanding characteristics.

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Furthermore

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Even more important is to realize the implications of the practice, studiously cultivated by bourgeois ideologists, of regarding the so-called “values” held by people as lying outside the purview of scientific scrutiny. For these “values” and “ethical judgments” which to the intellect workers are untouchable data, do not drop from heaven.... In fact, the defetishization of “values,” “ethical judgments,” and the like, the identification of the social, economic, psychic causes of their emergence, change, and disappearance, as well as the uncovering of the specific interests which they serve at any particular time, represent the greatest single contribution that an intellectual can make to the cause of human advancement.

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There's lots more. Read carefully. Baran's essay is well representative of my views. Hell. Baran's essay has helped me formulate my views.

2. example of philosophical views in physics that I object to ...

I've written about this on babble already, but I had, for example, the annoying experience of a first year Physics prof, (using Tipler rather than Halliday and Resnick, by the way) giving us a hand out in which the 4 equations that, taken as a whole, are called Maxwell's Equations in the form of a page with the words ...

And God said ....

(the 4 equations)

and then there was light.

so he managed to smuggle his religious views into the physics class. I, of course, was furious. There are plenty more examples like that, although they were in Mathematics as well.

.............

Babbler Cueball tried to make use of a quotation from Neils Bohr in which Bohr's philosophical views were taken to be gospel, presumably because Bohr was such a fine physicist.

You can read about it in the debate that Cueball and I had in the following thread

French Theory in America

There's no need to read the whole thread if you don't want to ... just read our argument. Cueball was arguing with several people at once and I was only one of the arguments, and a side one at that. I did, however, provide a link to a more detailed description of what's wrong with Bohr's philosophical views as it relates to physics.

That's a start.

Maybe afterwards you can actually outline some philosophical views on physics by Wheeler that are unique to him and not characteristic of physicists as a whole.

[ 15 April 2008: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

It's a nice notion, looking at the world as a big picture. I don't think it's very effective. In history the people who were most spectacular at their job were so because they really liked their job, not because it gave them a noble purpose, except maybe for the top politicians. To do well in music you need to love the music and do it for music's sake, et cetera.

ETA:

Teachers do that in every discipline. It was done in my English skills and in sociology of gender, in religion classes and in human nature philosophy, as far as I recall.

Good night.

[ 15 April 2008: Message edited by: 500_Apples ]

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When people look up James Watson in the encyclopedia a thousand years from now, it won't be because of his the historical irrelevancy that are his racist conclusions on people of African ancestry such as myself.

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quote:

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Originally posted by martin dufresne:
Well when people look up John Wheeler, a thousand years from now, I am betting they will find him alongside other Western physicists who didn't do all in their power to weld Pandora's box firmly shut when they learned the duration of plutonium's half-life, the way we have done with the smallpox virus.

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The problems are radiation are drastically overstated. It's part of the scare campaign of the media. Remember, when nuclear resonance imaging came out, people were so irrationally afraid, they had to change the name to magnetic resonance imaging. I'd much rather have that isolated plutonium around than the comparable amount of COPDs, global warming and lung cancer we get from our carbon addiction.

The coral reef are doing very well under Bikini Atol. The coconuts somewhat less.

[ 16 April 2008: Message edited by: 500_Apples ]

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It's a nice notion, looking at the world as a big picture. I don't think it's very effective.

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Baran is saying that your worldview has to be integrated, a whole.

This idea in Baran probably comes from Lukacs, who, in History and Class Consciousness, said that "totality" defined Orthodox Marxism.

The problem is whether this "totality", or whole, is built up of small bits of empirical information, or whether it is the whole which determines the parts.

If you decide on the "whole" first, and then cut facts to fit, then you are a captive of your system just as any religious thinker is.

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jeff house: Baran is saying that your worldview has to be integrated, a whole.

This idea in Baran probably comes from Lukacs ...

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Um, no. He says it's from Hegel ...

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Paul Baran: This principle “the truth is the whole”—to use an expression of Hegel—carries with it, in turn, the inescapable necessity of refusing to accept as a datum or to treat as immune from analysis, any single part of the whole.

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Baran is objecting to "contracting out" the evaluation of any of the parts. Furthermore, he explicitly rejects the demand for universal or absolutely valid solutions, independent of time or place or context. It's not enough to "tell the truth" he says ...

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Baran: For the problem is not merely whether truth is being told but also what constitutes truth in any given case as well as about what it is being told and about what it is being withheld Even in the area of the natural sciences these are important issues, and there are powerful forces at work shunting the energies and abilities of scientists in certain directions and impeding or sterilizing the results of their work in others. When it comes to matters related to the structure and dynamics of society, the problem assumes central significance.

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Truthfulness and courage, says Baran, are what's needed by the intellectual to be an intellectual. He rejects rationalizations for ethical neutrality and argues: "An intellectual is thus in essence a social critic ..."

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Jeff House: If you decide on the "whole" first, and then cut facts to fit, then you are a captive of your system just as any religious thinker is.

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Originally posted by angrymonkey:
I think that the pursuit of knowledge is greatly in the interest and benefit of society as a whole. And I would be interested in seeing someone weeding out ethical science from non ethical science.

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There's no such thing as unethical science. That's like saying there is unethical knowledge.

There is unethical technology (like BitTorrent?). And unethical research, in which people are harmed by the research methods. But science is value neutral.

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Originally posted by viigan:
Tell that to the victims of Chernobyl.

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The Chernobyl reactor was very poorly designed.

Advocates of nuclear power, including Patrick Moore, the founder of Greenpeace, point out that in more than 50 years of nuclear power generation in western countries, there is not a single fatality attributed to the production of nuclear energy.

It might be an expression of pessimism, but I think it's a disaster waiting to happen, and its consequences are ridiculously far reaching. There's always the factor of human error, and when it happens in a nuclear power plant, it might wipe out an entire city, or two. In my opinion, the benefits do not outweigh the possible costs.

"There's no such thing as unethical science. That's like saying there is unethical knowledge."

I'm tempted to agree with you on this statement, but wouldn't it depend on how this science is conducted and how the knowledge is obtained? Nazi scientists contributed to our pool of knowledge, but how they came by this knowledge was obscenely immoral and inhuman.
Ethics should play a role in science, if only to return the brightest minds of our societies to work for the benefit of humanity, instead of the defense industry where they can grow lethal diseases in petri dishes, and new and improved ways of killing more people for less money.
I understand that knowledge can be used for both good and evil, but in this case, they were engaged in finding ways to decimate entire populations.
The argument that it was to end WWII is really a farce. There was no need to drop the bombs, and the Nazis we feared so much really ended up in the employment of the CIA.

[ 16 April 2008: Message edited by: viigan ]

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Originally posted by viigan:
There's always the factor of human error, and when it happens in a nuclear power plant, it might wipe out an entire city, or two. In my opinion, the benefits do not outweigh the possible costs.

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It is possible to design systems whose safety does not rely on any level of competence in the human operators (that's what 'fail-safe' means). But it is true that there is always some level of risk.

On the other hand, if the benefit is mitigation of global warming by displacing fossil fuel-based generation, the risk would have to be significant in order to discount nuclear power.

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I'm tempted to agree with you on this statement, but wouldn't it depend on how this science is conducted and how the knowledge is obtained? Nazi scientists contributed to our pool of knowledge, but how they came by this knowledge was obscenely immoral and inhuman.

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That's what I meant by 'unethical research'.

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I understand that knowledge can be used for both good and evil, but in this case, they were engaged in finding ways to decimate entire populations.

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In line with what has already been mentioned on this thread: If the Nazis had been doing the same research in parallel, would the American development of nuclear weapons have been ethical?

Well, Germany was out of the war by the time the US decided to drop the bombs on Japan. At the point that the bombs were dropped, the Japanese were effectively defeated, and I think that there has even been some conjecture that the Americans were aware of an impending surrender but nuked them as a show of force to the Soviet Union. The second bomb was certainly overkill, in the truest sense of the word. I have misgivings about our brightest minds being harnessed to an industry whose goal is our destruction. It seems that the pattern has been solidly set, so I'm a little reticent to applaud a brilliant man who choses to use his talents for the bad of mankind. Goebbels, Hitler, Kissinger and many others have displayed uncanny genius in their relative fields of expertise, but we don't celebrate their genius as seperate from its devastatitngly brutal use and its results.

I don't think that defense scientists who have made our world a terrifying place in so many ways, should be exempt from this criticism.
Uranium tipped shells were also considered a minor breakthrough for conventional warfare, and it's certain that the scientific community that developed them was aware of the lasting after effects on the environment and the people that continue to live in the area. In my opinion, they should be considered dangerous criminals, not role models for aspiring scientists.
The sell on weapon breakthroughs, then and now, has always been that 'we're saving lives'. I think that the twentieth century and the spill over into the twenty-first has proven otherwise.

[ 17 April 2008: Message edited by: viigan ]

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Originally posted by Proaxiom:
Advocates of nuclear power, including Patrick Moore, the founder of Greenpeace, point out that in more than 50 years of nuclear power generation in western countries, there is not a single fatality attributed to the production of nuclear energy.

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Utter propaganda.

quote:

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Young children living near to German nuclear power plants develop cancer and leukaemia more frequently than children living further away from them. There is a 60% increased rate of cancer and approximately 120% of leukaemia. These are the findings of the «Epidemiological Study of Childhood Cancer in the Vicinity of Nuclear Power Plants» (KiKK Study), commissioned by the German Federal Office for Radiation Protection (BfS).

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http://www.ippnw-europe.org/article/IPPNW_Physicians_Issue_Warning.html

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Only after massive pressure and over 10,000 letters of protest to the authorities and ministries did the Federal Office for Radiation Protection (BfS) accept the necessity for further studies .

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... which draws attention to one of the many ways that science is perverted; good research is prevented from taking place, and the only research made available is the partisan research of selective data used to justify socially inappropriate (in this case, socially lethal!) policies.

There are also more subtle ways to skew the data:

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The increase was to be found only when operational nuclear power plants were taken into account, not the decommissioned plants, nor the research reactors. The increase was only found amongst infants under the age of 5 years old.

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... which just goes to prove that unethical science has plenty of examples that are easy enough to find.

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The authors of the study were at first surprised by the results they had arrived at. They quickly pointed out that the raised levels of childhood cancer and leukaemia in the vicinity of nuclear power plants could not be explained by radioactive emissions. They claimed that the doses of radioactivity calculated to be in the vicinity of nuclear power plants are below the average dose from natural background radioactivity. Since this is not compatible with current radiobiological thinking, they did not rule out the possibility of coincidence as an explanation.

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That's right. "Coincidence" was claimed as an explanation for the higher rates of leukemia among children. But science is still ethically neutral?

Good scientists know that there's no immunity from social criticism and ethical evaluation for anything human beings do.

quote:

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Originally posted by viigan:
"In line with what has already been mentioned on this thread: If the Nazis had been doing the same research in parallel, would the American development of nuclear weapons have been ethical?"

Well, Germany was out of the war by the time the US decided to drop the bombs on Japan. At the point that the bombs were dropped, the Japanese were effectively defeated, and I think that there has even been some conjecture that the Americans were aware of an impending surrender but nuked them as a show of force to the Soviet Union.

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The questions I asked were relevant to the ethical considerations around developing the weapons, not using them.

Besides that, the bombs were used with the aim of forcing Japanese surrender without having to invade Japan itself, which would have incurred high casualties.

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Originally posted by N.Beltov:
... which draws attention to one of the many ways that science is perverted; good research is prevented from taking place, and the only research made available is the partisan research of selective data used to justify socially inappropriate (in this case, socially lethal!) policies.

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You are trying to claim that science is not ethically neutral by pointing out scenarios in which scientific inquiry is being restricted.

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That's right. "Coincidence" was claimed as an explanation for the higher rates of leukemia among children. But science is still ethically neutral?

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You, triciamarie, and the authors of the linked article are providing an example of confirmation bias.

You already believe that the generation of nuclear power causes cancer. Confirmation bias means that you will give extraordinary weight to a single study because it agrees with what you already think.

Thus it is easy to set aside the problems with it: no one can find the level of radiation that would be necessary to cause the rate of cancer that the study finds exists. Does this mean our understanding of the effects of radiation on biology are wrong?

Maybe it does. However, the study considered 37 deaths across an entire country over a 24 year period. Current understanding of radiation and cancer is built on thousands of studies and experiments.

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Proaxiom: Thus it is easy to set aside the problems with it: no one can find the level of radiation that would be necessary to cause the rate of cancer that the study finds exists. Does this mean our understanding of the effects of radiation on biology are wrong?

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For some dangerous substances, there is no "safe" level, as you undoubtedly know very well. And, furthermore, when the citizenry is in danger of being exposed to dangerous, life-threatening, or possibly transgenic substances, then the prudent thing to do is not to expose the public to any of it. It's called the precautionary principle. Look it up.

The entire population of North America, for example, thanks to the obscene influence of the agri-food industry, is being used an guinea pigs in regard to GMOs. There are no proper long term studies, there is no control group, and, therefore - conveniently for this industry I might add - there is no way of determining the horrific consequences of this massive social experiment on the population. Science in service of profits is a stupendous monster which may very well succeed in wiping out life on planet earth.

But, hey, if you want to stick to your delusions of ethical neutrality, contracting out moral values, the compartmentalization of knowledge and the "Shut up and calculate" school of thought, then knock yourself out. There are lots of rich corporations that are in complete agreement with you.

[ 17 April 2008: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

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Originally posted by N.Beltov:
For some dangerous substances, there is no "safe" level, as you undoubtedly know very well.

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That's not really true. At some point the effects of a substance become statistically indistinguishable from zero.

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And, furthermore, when the citizenry is in danger of being exposed to dangerous, life-threatening, or possibly transgenic substances, then the prudent thing to do is not to expose the public to any of it. It's called the precautionary principle. Look it up.

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The principle is impossible in practice, because science can never absolutely prove an action or a technology is safe. It could be used to argue against the use of any technology at all.

In any case, it is mostly advocated when we have minimal evidence one way or the other. There is a great deal of knowledge about radiation and its effects.

What it absolutely cannot be taken to mean is that a small amount of evidence of harm should be given overwhelming weight against a large amount of evidence against. This is what gets us things like the thimerasol-autism controversy, where speculation fueled public paranoia that has done no good for anyone (because the link does not exist), and harm to many (in the form of children not being vaccinated against diseases because their parents are irrationally afraid of mercury poisoning).

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But, hey, if you want to stick to your delusions of ethical neutrality, contracting out moral values, the compartmentalization of knowledge and the "Shut up and calculate" school of thought, then knock yourself out. There are lots of rich corporations that are in complete agreement with you.

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Proaxiom:That's not really true. At some point the effects of a substance become statistically indistinguishable from zero.

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There is no safe level for dioxions and furans. Do you happen to work for a company that promotes the use of such substances or are you shilling for free?

NO SAFE LEVEL FOR DIOXINS ...

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The response to bad science is good science. There is no other answer.

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And good science is distinguished from bad science by not jettisoning ethical values for cash, for example, which was precisely my point.

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Originally posted by viigan:
"The problems are radiation are drastically overstated. It's part of the scare campaign of the media."

Tell that to the victims of Chernobyl.

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Chernobyl was due to engineering problems, not due to nuclear physics. It would never happen in a modern reactor, and indeed, every accident which has taken place was in a case of antiquated engineering.

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Chernobyl was due to engineering problems, not due to nuclear physics...

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quote:

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Originally posted by martin dufresne:
If it had only been engineering problems, reaction to the accident would have been something like "Phew, there sure is a lot of steam on the windows today."
By that standard of denial and minimization, Hiroshima & Nagasaki are a case of half a million people 'having been in the wrong place at the wrong time'...

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Hiroshima and Nagasaki were due to politics. If nuclear attacks are due to science, then cities would be bombed in a manner uncorrelated to politics. But in fact hiroshima and nagasaki were nuked and no other cities, at about the same time and about the same place, so that correlation implies politics.

They may have faced the most powerful weapons, but they didn't suffer the greatest deaths. Dresden saw half as many people die. More recently, 800, 000 Rwandas were killed by... machetes! Should we go back in time and blame the inventor of the knife? No, he was just trying to eat.

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Originally posted by viigan:
Science may have replaced God for modern humanity

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I now see that you have an agenda.

*****

You have to be kidding.

"... which led to the reduction of deaths from MAD"

Yes, mutually assured destruction saves lives. Why didn't I think of that? Until it happens, of course, in which case we won't be around to continue the discussion, while our cretin politicians and their scientists will be holed up in a mountain somewhere waiting for the opportune moment to re-emerge and dominate the mutated, crippled survivors.

"...800, 000 Rwandas were killed by... machetes! Should we go back in time and blame the inventor of the knife? No, he was just trying to eat. "

Precisely; he was trying to eat and they're trying to find ways to obliterate a civilian target more thoroughly. As tragic as the Rwandan genocide may be, it is the result of the direct action of men. In the case of nuclear power or ICBMs we have to worry about human errors as well as malfuntions in the systems. If this, or better yet, WHEN this happens, it's going to make the Rwandan figures, and those of the Holocaust look lke a minute loss by comparison.

The advantages of learning more about the Big Bang theory don't seem worth the potential cost to human life and the utter destruction of the environment for a long ass time to come.

[ 17 April 2008: Message edited by: viigan ]

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Originally posted by N.Beltov:
And good science is distinguished from bad science by not jettisoning ethical values for cash, for example, which was precisely my point.

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Good science is distinguished from bad science by even treatment of evidence and strict adherence to reason. Deliberately introducing a bias -- like arbitrarily deciding that evidence supporting a nuclear power/cancer link should be given far more weight than evidence against it -- is not good science, even when done with an earnest belief that the results will help people.

[ 17 April 2008: Message edited by: Proaxiom ]

I had a long conversation yesterday with a guy who established and used to run the helicopter trauma unit at a major teaching hospital in Detroit. He treated a couple of our clients and takes an interest in WSIB claims. I called him up to talk about the Board's practice of lowballing NEL (lump sum payment) awards, often by ignoring or misinterpreting evidence of neurological impairment.

He told me an anecdote from when he was at Harvard medical school back in the 50's. One of his lab professors would sometimes greet students with a question about what they intended to prove today? The student would tell him, and his response would be, "well if that's what you're planning to prove, you will do it".

His point was, an examiner's personal ideas and objectives do affect the outcome reported in the lab, just as they do in conducting NEL evaluations based on so-called evidence-based, objective medical assessment.

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Originally posted by triciamarie:
I just think it's bizarre that there is this opinion out there that just because you're Practicing Science, that your personal points of view or other influences can't possibly have any effect on what you choose to study over the course of your career, or how you study it, or how you interpret the results -- or the degree to which your work should be considered valuable, and by whom.

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That would be bizarre, if anybody held such an opinion. I have never encountered a person who thought that way, though.

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His point was, an examiner's personal ideas and objectives do affect the outcome reported in the lab, just as they do in conducting NEL evaluations based on so-called evidence-based, objective medical assessment.

How is that different in any other area of science?

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Are we back to criticizing scientists for not being good scientists, and then pretending that that constitutes a criticism of science as a whole?

Nobody considers any scientist infallible. Many of the greatest have been wrong on some very important points.

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Originally posted by triciamarie:
He told me an anecdote from when he was at Harvard medical school back in the 50's. One of his lab professors would sometimes greet students with a question about what they intended to prove today? The student would tell him, and his response would be, "well if that's what you're planning to prove, you will do it".

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Once again you confuse things.

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Other scientists would later express misgivings about continuing to work on the bomb after Hitler had been defeated. Not Mr. Wheeler. In a 2003 interview, he said: "I've been told that the largest hospital ever built in the history of the world was built on an island near the Pacific to take care of the casualties expected in the invasion of Japan … it was never used. And I've been thanked by at least half a dozen men who were slated to take part in the first invasion wave."

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No word from the National Post on what the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have said.

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He went on to work on the hydrogen bomb, sharing Edward Teller's hopes for creating a weapon that would make war between superpowers so terrible as to be unthinkable. Like Mr. Teller, he was anathematized by "peace" advocates for the rest of his life -- but as in the case of the elusive black hole, he was closer to being right than those who stood against him.

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The 'hopes' spoken of here are dreams of doom.

If this National Post editorial is correct about Wheeler's actions and legacy, I'll stick with my opinion that Joseph Rotblat made the better choice about the Manhattan Project and the nuclear bomb, a bomb that threatens us all with extinction to this day.

[ 18 April 2008: Message edited by: sgm ]

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Originally posted by Proaxiom:
Besides that, the bombs were used with the aim of forcing Japanese surrender without having to invade Japan itself, which would have incurred high casualties.

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They easily could have dropped either of the bombs on the Japanese naval facility on Truk Island the center of Japanese naval operations throughout the war, and still a Japanese naval facility at the end of the war. Neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki qualified as military targets at all even though there was a small naval yard at Nagasaki the official reason that Hiroshima was classified as a military target was that it was a "troop transfer" center... just like any city in Japan that had a railway yard.

More so, the other problem with your highly speculative assertion that is in fact a moral judgment and political speculation, is that Truman gave Leslie Groves a nine day window of operation for the use of the devices.

In fact Groves only waited 3 days to drop the second bomb, even though he could have waited another 6 in order to wait for a political reaction from Tokyo, and Hirohito. They did not bother. No they were desperate to drop the second bomb as a test and in order to prove that they had lots of them, and in fact the expeditious detonation of the second device most likely had everything to do with detonating it before the Japanese made a serious peace offer.

Your second "speculation" is more interesting, but dressing up the dropping of these bombs as a "life saving" meassure when there are numerous indications that some seriously cynical agendas were operative above and beyond saving the lives of GI's in the act of asserting that "pure science" exists, indicates, I should think the opposite, even in your defence.

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Originally posted by Proaxiom:
If you see "discussion" as a competitive exercise, the objective of which being to emerge at the end with the same knowledge, insight, and opinions as you went in with, then why do engage in it, exactly?

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Not so, Proaxiom. I have gained considerable insight from some of the contributions to this thread. Have you?

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Originally posted by 500_Apples:
Once again you confuse things.

General practitioners and most doctors for that matter are not scientists. They are to biology as engineering is to physics.

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Whether or not medical students identify as scientists, if they're conducting controlled experiments in a laboratory, I'd say they're performing science, wouldn't you?

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Originally posted by triciamarie:

Whether or not medical students identify as scientists, if they're conducting controlled experiments in a laboratory, I'd say they're performing science, wouldn't you?

...

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Nope. It's not question of controlled experiments, it's the purpose of the experiment. Undergrads basically do those to practice technique.

Medicine is biological engineering. Research in engineering has a different purpose than research in science. In engineering the questions are: does this work? is it the best way?