Alif Wahid

The Clarity of Doubt

I feel that the English language cannot accommodate a strange sort of logical consistency, which is implicit in what I can only label as the clarity of doubt. The premise on which this stands is that of a choice between not knowing the answer to an open question and believing in a manifestly wrong answer to said question. As a result, doubt is the necessary condition in order to reach sufficient scepticism that plays the decisive role in filtering out much of the ambient noise that one is immersed in. The seemingly antithetical nature of this conception is not new, since Descartes explained this a few centuries ago (not to mention the ancients before him). But he did not write in English.

My frustration lies in the subjective observation that virtually everyone I have ever come across in person, for whatever reason, prefers the illogical choice of believing in the wrong answer to an open question. What is worse is the stigma associated with and the peer pressure inflicted on anyone demonstrating the virtues of doubting, dithering, deferring, etc. I say virtues because these are the actions that give one the kind of clarity that leads to an honest admission of the full extent of one’s ignorance (regardless of whether it is guilty or blissful in nature). The boundary of one’s empirically falsifiable knowledge is all that demarcates the burden of belief within from the clarity of doubt beyond. Thus the logical choice of doubting over believing is deductively obvious to too few of us, sadly.

A surprisingly large number of people seemingly do not understand the astronomical difference between “I don’t know” and “I don’t care”. Seriously, there’s at least a light year separating these two statements :P Anyhow, the point is that “I don’t know” is an honest admission of guilty ignorance given the finite amount of time that we have for gaining new knowledge and the consequent need for prioritisation. But it NEVER implies “I don’t care”, which is an honest admission of blissful ignorance due to the inherent laziness of being irrationally happy :P Therefore, it goes without saying that engineers, scientists, doctors, artists, and the likes, intuitively utter “I don’t know”; whereas lawyers, accountants, politicians, journalists, and the likes, instinctively utter “I don’t care”. Now, to be fair, I haven’t exactly arrived at this conclusion in a scientific manner ;-) So it’s entirely possible that I’m wrong. However, if ever a hypothesis had to be rooted in anecdotal evidence then this is it folks!

Where did universal constants come from?

I’m referring to things like the fine-structure constant denoted as alpha, vacuum permittivity denoted as epsilon naught, vacuum permeability denoted as mu naught, speed of light in vacuum denoted as small c, and a few others along those lines. Some of these constants are obviously dimensionless and correspond to just numbers of some kind that are the same everywhere and anywhere. So I’ve been pondering where these exact values came from? What is characteristic about the universe that we are in (assuming there’s only one for the moment) such that these exact values are to be found wherever we go? Is it possible that if the initial conditions prior to the big bang were slightly different then these constants would have turned out different?

I don’t have an answer unfortunately :( Hence the joy of pondering. However, I have read that string theorists believe that under certain circumstances a universe can form with different values for these fundamental constants. I don’t understand enough about string theory to delve deep but it sounds appealing to me since the arbitrariness of these universal constants is puzzling to say the least. I’ve also read religious folks who tried to hijack this as yet another piece of scientific evidence hinting at the existence of a supernatural creator. That sort of attitude is obviously missing the point since it accepts free will on one hand as a divine gift but then refuses to exercise that same free will on the other hand :P Even if these universal constants seem arbitrary right now there’s no reason that with enough scientific inquiry they will remain that way in the future. That’s just how science works.

I’ve been pondering this in light of the OPERA results claiming superluminal neutrinos (which I don’t think exist but the experiment is very worthwhile nonetheless). Why the exact value of the speed of light in vacuum is what it is? Why can’t it be slightly more, say another metre faster per second? From Maxwell’s equations, the speed of electromagnetic waves propagating in vacuum is defined as a simple relationship involving the vacuum permittivity and the vacuum permeability. The former is related to the electric field and the latter is related to the magnetic field. Thus it turns out that when you measure permittivity and permeability and calculate the speed of electromagnetic waves in vacuum, what you get is equal to the speed of light. Consequently, one way to think about light is that it behaves like an electromagnetic wave.

Anyhow, I really don’t know where to go looking for an answer (assuming that one actually exists, since I don’t think there’s a definitive answer to this question). Feel free to chip in with suggestions. Any good book or paper I should read?

Discovering David Bohm

I picked up couple of paperbacks at the good price of NZ $30 each from the clearance sale at Borders on Queen Street, Auckland (the franchise has gone bankrupt right across Australia and New Zealand, quite sad actually since I frequented their great stores countless times). Both are David Bohm’s books and both are classics that I’ve been eyeing up for some time. First one is a collection of essays entitled Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980), and the second is his general exposition of The Special Theory of Relativity (1965) compiled from his lectures on that topic (he worked with Einstein at Princeton after the second world war, prior to being persecuted by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1950).

I’ve actually read the second one in high school as my first introduction to Special Relativity before I tried to digest Einstein’s original paper (i.e., an English translation) from 1905 during my undergrad years at The University of Auckland (needless to say that I failed miserably in that endeavour). The first essay from Wholeness and the Implicate Order is titled “Fragmentation and Wholeness”. As I was reading it at Borders while trying to decide whether to buy or not, Bohm’s words just jumped off the page and shape shifted into the kind of enlightenment that only I could see gesturing back at me furiously, in spite of being surrounded by dozens of oblivious blind strangers. Here’s a prescient etymology that I didn’t know about.

It is instructive to consider that the word ‘health’ in English is based on an Anglo-Saxon word ‘hale’ meaning ‘whole’: that is, to be healthy is to be whole, which is, I think, roughly the equivalent of the Hebrew ‘shalem’. Likewise, the English ‘holy’ is based on the same root as ‘whole’. All of this indicates that man has sensed always that wholeness or integrity is an absolute necessity to make life worth living. Yet, over the ages, he has generally lived in fragmentation.

He goes on to explicate the scientific method and the meaning of theories versus hypotheses with eloquence of the rarest kind, especially considering that it is coming from a theoretical physicist! I haven’t finished the book yet, obviously. But my next few days are clearly planned out for me while Auckland is getting bathed in unadulterated sunshine :)

Ontology vs. Epistemology

An interesting thought occurred to me while queueing at the bank today (first time in nearly three years that I’ve physically visited a bank branch, since I do everything online). I had to tell the bank people that even though I no longer live in NZ, I still physically exist by virtue of the fact that I’m currently visiting NZ and physically present in front of them with my passport. Anyway, expected incompetence aside, it was a busy branch at a major mall. So the noise level was intolerably high and I forgot to pack my iPod :( I had to block out all of the random voices surrounding me by conjuring up an excess of philosophical pondering.

For reasons that I don’t know at the moment, I simply kept on thinking about the two obvious ways of phrasing the atmosphere at the bank. First, “This is noisy”, and second, “There is noise here”. The two uses of “is” are quite different even though ordinarily I never notice the distinction. The first statement is epistemological in the sense that it is an assertion of what I perceive the atmosphere to be. On the other hand, the second statement is an assertion of what I observe the atmosphere to be, which makes it ontological.

The detachment of the ontological statement is subtle with respect to the subject matter, i.e., noise. But it is a distinct mode of thinking and expressing a thought in the English language. I do recall someone telling me, a long time ago now, that in certain languages these two statements would be expressed with different words entirely (i.e., not using the same verb as in the English “is”). Unfortunately I only speak English and have no idea which other languages treat ontological and epistemological statements separately. Anyone got an example?

This makes me wonder whether it is possible to accurately infer a person’s perspective from the subtle ways that he/she uses the verb “is”? Can this indifferent mentalilty of English speakers make them less aware of how other people think and express their thoughts differently? Do cultural barriers exist partly due to linguistic ambiguities such as this?