Miss Perfect and I observed the condensation on the window on a lovely morning.
“That’s odd,” said I. The streaks of water only start from a certain place.”
“The droplets must have some kind of critical mass at that part of the condensation cloud,” said Miss P.
“Or could raindrops be hitting the window only at that point?” I wondered.
We noticed that the condensation was on the inside of the window.
“Critical mass, then,” said I. “But how do we explain the bar with no streaks on the left?”
“Very strange,” said Miss P.
“Well,” said I, “I think we’ve exhausted the natural explanations and it’s time to resort… to the supernatural.”
“It must be the Window Fairy,” said she.
“Indeed,” said I. “There’s no other explanation. Now some may say that it’s just condensation. But who do they think created condensation in the first place?”
Miss P. agreed. “The Window Fairy works through condensation, in her infinite wisdom. Or his wisdom. We don’t know yet whether it’s a boy or a girl.”
“Let’s not get speculative,” said I. “It may not be important to our salvation.”
“There is still much we do not know about the Window Fairy,” said she. “But we trust that our understanding will grow as he or she reveals more about him or herself.”
I nodded. “We aren’t arrogant like scientists, thinking we know everything. One day, they too will know the truth as we do.”
21 July 2008 at 10:44 am
It’s a little hard to judge the sun’s angle and direction, but how’s this hypothesis to destroy the fairy:
The shadows cast by the outside structures cause the irregular pattern. Experiment: observe or calculate the shadow from sunrise and see if it’s a statistically significant predictor.
But as for the broader allegory… I’ve been toying with this one for a while.
I have a dragon in my garage (just like Sagan). But the Scarff Corollary is that my dragon’s existence is observable in a particular way: He causes atoms to spotaneously undergo radioactive decay throughout the entire universe (or maybe with a lag according to His lightcone, who can tell?). He chooses according to very regular rules, but He’s still responsible. The one downside is that He’s not influencable, but this doesn’t invalidate His existence.
Right now this theory is as good as any other Scientific Theory (TM): it’s waiting to be rejected, and the competing models are equally ridiculous.
At this point you probably propose Occam’s razor as a means of discriminating, but either you use it informally (you think Dragons aren’t very simple even though most 4-year-olds could understand them more readily than Standard Model + Quantum mechanics) or you do it formally with an Information Criterion, which can be easily won by the careful specification of the dragon model.
Maybe I’ve chosen the wrong place to debut my dragon, but what do you think?
21 July 2008 at 1:54 pm
Gee, I’ve never been a dragon slayer, but I’d like to try.
On Occam’s Razor. ‘Simplicity’ does not necessarily mean ‘easy to understand’. In fact, the razor isn’t really about simplicity as such, though this is a useful way of describing it. The money quote is ‘Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem’: Do not multiply entities more than necessary. Your dragon is an entity (regardless of how intuitive it is), and a superfluous one at that.
Formally, how many bits does it take to encode a dragon model anyway?
Before I believe in your quantum dragon, I’d like you to propose a mechanism.
22 July 2008 at 5:27 am
Well, it’s a premature conclusion calling my dragon superfluous. Radioactive decay is one of the few sources of entropy that is spontaneous (without cause). c.f. fluid molecule ‘random’ movements which are near-deterministic given Newtonian physics and the (very high information entropy) state of the current system.
Do not multiply entities more than necessary. This is still pretty subjective and informal (what’s an entity, what’s necessary), not really much better than KISS.
My dragon corresponds exactly to the exponentially-distributed time-to-decay random variable. The entropy of this distribution is 1 + lg (mean lifetime). For free neutron beta decay this is 10.79 bits. All consistent with high school physics observations and theory without adding funny constraints.
What the dragon really gets at is whether you’re willing to concede that there are truly non-deterministic processes. This is pretty well accepted nowadays, but it breaks a lot of conventional thinking that supposes observed changes in a system have a cause and therefore a mechanism (caught you here!). So in the traditional mindset, you end up creating an entity.
However, you have to be careful or you could start assigning non-deterministic processes to everything, like condensation patterns on your window.
The conceit with the dragon is that there’s extra information that people associate with dragons because of the almost-universal cultural conditioning (their adorable fire-breathing faces, their wormy bodies) that have nothing to do with the decay model. But I never said my dragon had those attributes. As a pure entropy source, He’s no worse an explanation for a decay event than any other.
22 July 2008 at 6:48 am
Nicely done, but I’m sure you’ve already thought of the following:
– Is your dragon falsifiable?
– How do you know that your dragon has the properties that it has?
The first question suggests that your dragon is not a scientific theory in a Popperian sense. The second suggests that your knowledge about your dragon is closer to revelation than experimentation, and is therefore somewhat religious in character.
You certainly found an area of uncertainty though. No wonder all those ‘What the Bleep’ folks commit quantum abuse with such regularity. Quantum mechanics is the refuge of a scoundrel.
22 July 2008 at 11:20 am
I see you’ve recognised the wonderful design features of my dragon. I’ll bite anyway 😉
Re falsifiability: prove that the dragon can’t be falsified. Unlike Sagan’s, mine is tied to an measurable variable that could have an observable stimulant. I’ll add the constraint that the dragon’s rules are fixed, just to make it hard for you.
Re properties: it was a cute face to get the cult rolling. If you distill it to the physics (so drop that it’s mine, that it’s in my garage, that it has anything to do with dragons-as-we-imagine-them) it’s just the determinism question.
Explaining non-deterministic processes is the essence of divine entities; I was just providing one that is consistent with modern physics (since the popular gods aren’t and are therefore too easy to dismiss).
Bleep looks terrible, but I thought beta decay was neat because it’s a pretty accessible QM result at the macro scale and therefore isn’t subject to so much pseudoscience.
6 December 2009 at 12:33 pm
While musing over your debates about religion and quantum physics, fairies and dragons, I suspect that the window simply got a little STEAMED UP overnight…