Poppy Burning and Racism

This is just a quick blog to express my annoyance at one of the more stupid "copy and paste" messages going round facebook. I saw it posted by someone I was at school with who is a friend on facebook, though really I barely know her, and was so irritated I had to comment.

The message which bothered me was one like the red quote below (there are a few variants it seems), which may, if you read it in a naive way, not sound so offensive, but I imagine is designed to stir up anti-Muslim sentiment.

"Today we saw muslims break the 2 minute silence in central london, with banners holding "British Soldiers Burn In Hell" & the burning of a poppy... if you don't like us British people paying respect for our brave fighters, then you know where the airport is. disgusting, ... disrespectful bastards. copy and paste this if you're British and proud."

Here (slightly edited for clarity) is my response:

------ I assume you just want to show you care about people who made sacrifices to defend others in war, but that is not how this will be interpreted and it would be naive to believe that was why it was written.

First it's a tiny incident by a handful of idiots, with almost no impact until it gets reported etc, and I note no mention above of the English Defense League assaulting people at the same time. Secondly labeling them by religion is a subtle way of suggesting this behavior is a common characteristic of Muslims, it's not. We could equally label them by race or residency. How does "we saw people in Britain break the 2 minute silence" sound? Then there is the invitation to leave the country, reminiscent of a BNP rally and finally we have the "British and proud" slogan often used as euphemism for racism and xenophobia, so much so that you'll find a facebook group "British and Proud...BUT NOT RACIST".

I am fairly sure both the people who made the daft protest and whoever wrote this nonsense being copied and pasted into facebook want to stir up racial and religious divisions and people like you reposting this are helping them do this. Please stop.

I hope this doesn't makes me a facebook bully, but I was genuinely trying to change her mind and warn her about the connotations. It seems she has either defriended me or deleted her account. I feel a bit bad if it's the latter because I doubt that she realised how it might be interpreted and perhaps not everyone will read it the way I do, but I do believe that racial and religious hatred is likely the motivation behind creating such messages and hope if others pasting that post into facebook find this blog they will realise the connotations and delete it.

EDIT: Since some rage has been requested (see comments) I thought I'd add in this ~approriately themed song, by Machine Head "A nation on fire"



With the lines:
"The media it
Blinds out eyes
A people divided
And force fed lies
The black and white societies corrode
Warring, hating, blind, a rage explodes"

just put social in front of media and it works ;). sort of.

My drugs rant

It's well past time I wrote about this, given the title of my blog and the fact that support for the legalisation of drugs is probably the earliest political stance I adopted - I've held this view since I was a very young child, though it has evolved a lot since then and there have been times I doubted it. In part this is the reason I haven't written about it thus far, I've gotten bored by the arguments and having failed to find any significant flaw in the argument in many years of presenting it to people who disagree (and in some cases changing their minds) I am sceptical about what I will learn by doing this. But regardless here it is..


There is a short "cliffs notes" version of this here.

First this is not an argument to legalise all chemical substances and have no regulatory framework for anything. By "drugs" I only refer t0 well known substances which are used recreationally and by legalise I mean bring into a carefully regulated framework. Also really we should assess each drug individually but that would take too long. So be aware it is possible there are exceptions for each argument and while I'm not aware of a popular recreational drug for which the balance isn't tilted in terms of legalisation this doesn't preclude that possibility nor that such drugs couldn't in principle appear.

OK a libertarian principle which I ~ subscribe to is that you shouldn't make laws restricting consenting decisions between adults. I don't think that many people believe in this principle in it's entirety, at least not when they've thought through all of the consequences, but I suspect most think that it is a reasonable default and if you are breaking that principle then you should have some pretty powerful reasoning or evidence.

So why might people do this? One possibility is absolute moral values. If you fundamentally believe drug use is immoral (without reference to social or personal harm we can study) and think they deserve to suffer then I doubt I will persuade you otherwise. Based on those values the drug laws makes sense, though I do think your values are rather disgusting. However presumably everyone else is interested in the pragmatic results of this legislation and on that we can have a discussion. If drug prohibition leads to more deaths than under a regulated framework would you still support it? For this we will need to look at the evidence. Here I will outline the argument about how to use the the evidence and will at points give you my impression of what the evidence states. However I deliberately avoid quoting statistics and making many references to science papers because I am not an expert with the fairest overview and I want YOU to investigate yourself.

So some people are simply concerned with protecting vulnerable people from their own bad choices. Most recreational drugs have some health risks/dangers, as do many other activities people choose to do for pleasure (e.g. football, boxing, drinking, mountaineering, sex). If this the case we need to establish the extent of those risks and consider what is an acceptable reasonable choice. I am not a medical expert and will not get into details, especially since this is a general discussion but in general the health risks are far lower than is suggested by the tabloid press. It is my understand that the health risks of drugs like ecstasy, cannabis*, speed and even non infrequent use of powdered cocaine** are not usually considered to be significantly worse than those of alcohol and tobacco. Other drugs have more severe health implications associated with use, heroin users suffer high rates of overdoses and HIV infection for example. Remember each drug has different qualitative risks though (how do you compare the long term risk of cancer, with that of an allergic reaction leading to instant death or a risk of liver failure or infertility? and so on) so they cannot be compared directly, you need to examine each risk (by consulting experts or reading public communications by them) and consider how you personally weigh each of them.

Now it's possible that for you even with a realistic estimate of the health risks you still believe some or many drugs are too dangerous for their use to be a legitimate recreational activity and anyone who disagrees and wants to use them must be protected from themselves. But there are other considerations. You must also consider how much more dangerous the drugs are when sold in an illegal market under drug prohibition. Dangers associated with adulteration/contamination of the drugs, unsafe practices due to secretive use (e.g. needle sharing, makeshift pipes), increased risk of overdose due to unstable supply and unreliable purity levels are all a direct result of the drug laws. To be quantitative you need again to look at each drug and each risk individually, but I suggest that this increased risk is a very substantial, often overpowering the moderate risk of the drug itself. On top of this there is now the risk of arrest and incarceration created by the laws, which we need to also consider. Ruining someones life by throwing them in jail for several years to "protect them" from their decision to take a mild risk of getting tuberculosis does not seem very caring. Punitive responses to drug use can only be justified if the deterrent effect really works, i.e. substantially less people submit themselves to these risks you deem too great to tolerate. If we could reduce drug use to zero it wouldn't matter that they are much more dangerous when purchased in an illegal market. However that is spectacularly unrealistic.

So now we need to consider what impact if any drug laws have on usage. Let me delay that for a bit though because it will also be important in the other concern which may lead people to support drug laws.

Namely the wider social harm. So while the transaction for drugs and the use of them appears to only involve the user and his supplier, there may be others who are affected. Syringes lying in the street, "dangerous drug mad" people wandering the streets, theft to support their habit.

Is this reasonable? Well first certainly not all drugs have much wider effects. There is no wider social impact from a drug like ecstasy. It is not addictive, and therefore does not induce theft to pay for it, people who use it do not get typically get violent, it is swallowed in pill form, not injected so no needles lying around.

As for violence it may seem reasonable to believe that some drugs, e.g. cocaine can stimulate aggression and violent acts in the right circumstance due to their elevated mood, with the opposite effect from e.g. cannabis. However to make a case justifying drug prohibition we need evidence first that significant numbers of violent acts can be causally attributed to cocaine and an explanation of why deal with this and not alcohol which is associated with far more violence . While the first two points appear not to be satisfied, and thus sufficient to dismiss this argument for now, the latter is devastating. Alcohol leads to an enormous volume of violent incidents and health problems. Scientific drug experts have weighed up the overall harm (using subjective weightings for individual risk) of these drugs and classified them, finding alcohol to be the worst by far and this has been widely reported.

Although it is good that this has been reported in the media I find it disappointing that they have ignored the fact that there have been subjective choices made in combining qualitatively different social harms (e.g. injuries from drunken assault against used needles in parks or deaths from drunk drivers) . It should also be stated more strongly that this is the net harm from current use levels, not harm per user nor harm per single dose. Alcohol does so badly because it is used so widely, if we considered harm per user heroin, crack and crystal meth would dominate. Nonetheless the findings are still useful to consider, but it is really more important to look at the individual risk factors for yourself and in particular which might be solved by a reduction in users and which are a product of the drug laws themselves


As with health risks the wider social damage caused by the drug laws themselves is enormous. With violent gangs in charge of trafficking and supplying drugs to addicts and drug addicts committing crimes to support their habit, the relatively small number of drug addicts and criminals involved in supply have a disproportionately large impact on the rest of society. You can check the figures for yourself , the numbers are very very large and shocking.

It is indisputable that the effect per user must be greater under prohibition than under a regulated legal framework, and I am suggesting (but check for yourself) that in fact the harm per user which comes from the drug laws themselves is many times higher than any the harm from the drugs alone. So to support the illegality of drug use as a protection one must assume that the number of actual drug users is dramatically cut by the laws. I am aware of no evidence to support this.


One can use Portugal, Switzerland and Netherlands as well as the past history of the UK and US to get a feel for what happens when we change laws on certain drugs in liberal democracies. There is little there to give one the impression that things get worse when you liberalise. In fact to the contrary looking at countries where addictive drug use has been decriminalised (Portugal) or medical subscriptions provided for addicts (Switzerland) the uptake of these drugs has fallen. This result is anticipated by an understanding that since addicts cannot break their addiction when it is clearly in their own interest making it illegal will not stop them either. Instead their demand fuels an illegal market with high reward for the creation of new addicts as well as the supply of existing ones. The situation is not much better for soft drugs with evidence of only a small increase in uptake if any.

Of course these are real world cases and have all the problems in identifying actual factors behind any change, but given the huge and undisputed problems with contamination, criminal gangs and crime to pay the inflated prices created with drug prohibition, one has to maintain a rather strong prior belief that the number of addicts will massively shoot up to maintain a belief that harm is worse without prohibition.

I find it impossible to take seriously any politician claiming to advocate continued prohibition to save lives. This is simply not supported by the evidence, which suggests the reverse that the drug laws cost many lives and ruin far more. In my opinion there is no credible case for drug laws.

If you are a voter I suggest it is your duty to consider this issue. Consider these arguments and investigate the evidence. I am not not a medical expert and may be wrong or misinformed, but I recommend you find out what experts say on each empirical point raised here, and judge for yourself.

I really think you have to be either uniformed or hold a fairly extreme moral view to not come to the conclusion that we should legalise and regulate addictive drugs. People are dying while many voters remain ignorant of the issue, please help change this by informing yourself and possibly others.


*People may worry about cannabis because the media has put out a number of scare stories that it causes mental health issues. I am not a medical expert and therefore one should not rely on anything I say in this regard, but it is my understanding of the situation is that there is a link, known about for quite some time, between the cannabis and psychotic symptoms severe enough to lead to a schizophrenia diagnosis, and some evidence suggesting cannabis use predates onset of these symptoms (this ruled out the self medication hypothesis). This does not demonstrate a causal link as there may be a common cause, it is difficult to be sure that the people diagnosed with schizophrenia were not instead suffering from temporary drug induced psychosis and finally even if these studies are correct the incidence level is still very small and most people suffering from schizophrenia do not pose a serious risk to others. Note: I AM NOT AN EXPERT. PLEASE DO NOT RELY ON ME FOR INFORMATION ON HEALTH RISKS.



**Cocaine is addictive in the sense that users exhibit signs of dependency and distress when they try to break habitual usage though they does not appear to be the same physical withdrawal issues associated with opiates. Patters of of addiction may be different and less severe for powdered cocaine than crack, however addiction is a risk which should be considered seriously. And again: I AM NOT AN EXPERT. PLEASE DO NOT RELY ON ME FOR INFORMATION ON HEALTH RISKS.

EDIT: Just to add although I didn't discuss the nature of the regulated framework for the legalised use of drugs, I personally favour providing registered addicts with maintenance doses of their drug through national health services from a non-commercial provider, to remove any incentive to encourage addiction. For further discussion on what a regulated post drug prohibition framework could look like please see this article by Steve Rolles in the British Medical Journal.

My Drugs rant: cliffs notes

This is the short version of my drug rant, without details or caveats. The full version can be found here.

Generally people tend to accept that adults can choose to make whatever lifestyle choices they wish so long as they do no non-consensual harm to anyone else.

With drugs however you may worry that health effects are so severe people must be protected from themselves. First educate yourself about the severity of these risks, they are rarely as large as the tabloid press claims, secondly be aware of how much more severe they are under drug Prohibition, with contaminants, unsafe practices and unpredictable strength.

You might also worry about the wider social harm. But be aware that much of this, such as criminal gangs distributing, addicts stealing or committing other forms of crime to pay inflated prices for the drugs is a direct result of the drug laws themselves, and would not exist if the drugs were legalised and regulated. In my opinion these wider harms substantially outweigh other social problems associated with drug use.

While how you weigh these factors may vary, it is clear that the damage caused per user both to themselves and to society is far greater under prohibition than a regulated system with legal purchase and use. So to support the illegality of drug use as a protection from harm one must assume that the number of actual drug users is dramatically cut by the laws. There is absolutely no evidence to support this.

In fact to the contrary looking at countries where addictive drug use has been decriminalised (Portugal) or medical subscriptions provided for addicts (Switzerland) the uptake of these drugs has fallen. This result is anticipated by an understanding that since addicts cannot break their addiction when it is clearly in their own interest making it illegal will not stop them either. Instead their demand fuels an illegal market with high reward for the creation of new addicts as well as the supply of existing ones. The situation is not much better for soft drugs with evidence of only a small increase in uptake if any.

It is almost impossible to take seriously any politician claiming to advocate continued prohibition to save lives. This is simply not supported by the evidence, which suggests the reverse that the drug laws cost many lives and ruin far more. In my opinion there is no credible case for drug laws.

If you are a voter I suggest you it is your duty to consider this issue. Consider these arguments and investigate the evidence. I am not not a medical expert and may be wrong or misinformed, but I recommend you find out what experts say on each empirical point raised here, and judge for yourself.

People are dying while many voters remain entirely uniformed on the issue, please help change this.

Waffle on determinism, free will and morality.

In a blog by a particle physicist where the words 'particle' and physics' are most often conspicuous by their absence, this is the most absurd post yet. Previously I've offered thoughts on the philosophy of science when discussing science and religion in relation to Stephen Hawking and earlier Richard Dawkins, and ranted about political issues like unfair immigration restrictions, thrown out fully deserved abuse to Melanie Phillips. As a scientist, migrant worker and voter I can at least offer a useful "hands on" perspective on those issues, but today I'm writing about the determinism and morality, which have no relation to any expert knowledge I have nor any bearing on my life and, as you will see, a subject I have done no research on.

Maybe one day I'll get around to particle physics again, but for now those of you who prefer to read blogs on topics where the author actually has some expertise, I hear jester has restarted blogging at Resonaances and has interesting comments on a very new idea. Today I just want to throw this out to the wolves because I like writing and learning by getting corrected can be fun.

My position on determinism and free will is very simply. I do not consider a persons "free will" to require that their actions cannot be predicted. Put beer in front of me and you can predict I'll drink it, hand me tasty food and I'll eat etc, but these are still free choices, there are plenty of options available to me which I could choose had I different desires. That my desires are a function of a deterministic world and can be predicted (in principle) from before I was born doesn't change this. I am as I was made and these are my desires. It is not the predictability which removes free will but restrictions on your ability to act differently, were your wishes and desires otherwise. If I were a slightly different person who had a distaste for alcohol I could choose not to drink. However if someone was controlling me like a robot, then irrespective of whether I wanted to drink or not I would do as controlled. Only in the latter do I lose free will.

Although one can of course choose a different definition (my point is essentially semantic), this has always seemed much better matched to my intuitive notion of free will and I've found it difficult to understand why others consider free will to require non-deterministic behaviour. I really struggle to see why anyone would worry about deterministic behavior, since it doesn't stop you from choosing to do what you want. In fact it is non-deterministic behavior I find tricky conceptually. I am now very used to the probabilistic determinism of quantum mechanics, but true non-determinism still seems like a very strange idea.

Recently I've been wondering if the difference between my view of free will and others might come from attitudes to morality. That would explain why I missed it, as I don't believe in any morality.

My perspective is very simple, maybe too simplistic. I only think in terms of empathy and never refer to any form of morality. There are things I don't like happening and want to stop, like murder, but I never consider them to be "bad" or the people responsible "evil", terms I'm not sure I even understand. If someone is killed I fell empathy for the victim and his/her family. I also feel empathy for the murderer who has probably just screwed their life up, and the murderers family too. The only reason I want the murderer caught and jailed is to prevent further murders, by protecting the public and deterring others. Perhaps this is silly and inconsistent in some way I haven't considered, if so feel free to let me know :).

Due to this attitude I rarely consider moral implications of determinism, but lets consider the consequences for morals from god. If you have a deterministic universe controlled by god, then, while all your actions may be free choices according to my definition, since god set things up such that there would be no possibility for you to behave any differently, god also appears to be responsible. So how god can then judge your actions against His moral code. Of course religion needn't assume determinism, or that god makes moral judgements and I think there are ways round this issue even if it does, though I won't continue the theological meanderings further.

I am simply wondering if this is the real issue behind the supposed conflict between determinism and free will. Do people really mean the ability to make bad moral decisions against the will of god? Otherwise I really can't fathom why any would have conceptual difficulties with living in a deterministic universe.

If you managed to make it through this tortuously ill informed post and want to enlighten me or point me in the direction of actual philosophical literature which explodes or explores the ideas here, please do.

Hawking, Mlodinow, the media and god.

Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow have written a new book called The Grand Design. The publication of extracts from the book in The Times has unleashed a media storm with headlines like Stephen Hawking: God did not create Universe and Why God Did Not Create the Universe.

First lets be clear that they are not saying God is ruled out. While most (but not all) articles managed to avoid claiming that, the lack of clarifying details , sloppy phrases used and tedious discussions about what this might mean for religions allowed exactly such a confusion to spread.

Phrases like "God did not create the universe" do appear in many newspapers, implying that any universe creating God is ruled out by science. This is not what Hawking (or Mlodinow) actually said. In phrasing it this way the BBC, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Daily mail, CNN, and many more are misrepresenting what Hawkings and spreading misinformation. Richard Dawkins, a famous science communicator, also seemed to have an exaggerated view bof the statements religious significance in a debate. Some newspapers, like The Telegraph and The Huffington Post, report "there is no need for a creator" much closer to what Hawking appears to have actually said.

The other big confusion spread by the press is that this is a reversal of Hawking's previous position. For example the BBC state

In his 1988 bestseller, A Brief History of Time, Prof Hawking appeared to accept the role of God in the creation of the Universe. "If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we should know the mind of God," he said.

apparently missing that Hawkings was using god in a metaphorical sense, and was not suggesting that a physical creator god made up part of his understanding of the universe.

The actual statement which does appear to originate from Hawkins and Mlodinow is:

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

To me the god reference seems merely an attempt to express the grand scope of their claim. Hawking seems to think there is a now a theoretical framework which provides a satisfactory natural description of the universe coming into existence. Seeking natural models to describe physical reality is what theoretical physicists (religious, agnostic and atheist) do and from a science perspective this is a very interesting statement, and while I suspect I may not be as convinced as Hawking I nonetheless look forward to reading his view. But what about all the religious ruminations discussed in newspapers?

The first point to make, almost entirely absent in the newspaper coverage, is that Hawkins argument involves many elements not tested experimentally. Believers can still think that god created the universe without conflicting any observational evidence. They simply can't state there is no framework in science which could explain the universe existing to motivate their belief. Therefore there is still no inconsistency between science and a creator god.

Secondly God didn't really have a role in science prior to Hawking's statement, because to invoke god as a solution to existence involves infinite regression and of course makes no testable predictions. You may as well just postulate the universe exists as postulate god exists then created it. The absence of satisfactory physical model of how the universe came into existence motivates scientist to investigate the question, it does not motivate god. This does not mean one cannot believe in a creator god, but the motivation should not be the lack of a fully fleshed out competing theory.

So on the religion side nothing has really changed. But this has not stopped many angry responses from religious people. And for many others correcting these misunderstandings has been a huge distraction; Jon Butterworth paused while writing a paper to clarify the situation for channel 4 news.

So who is to blame? The press have certainly been irresponsible, both in misrepresenting Hawking and treating his words in a popular science book as prouncements of "What The Science Says", without ever wondering what scientific papers are behind the comments. So far it sounds like the media are entirely responsible, but it is difficult to be sure to what extent this was fed by a publicist promoting the book or even by the authors themselves. There is also the question as to what extent they explained that much of the physics used to construict this argument, like M-Theory is not confirmed experimentally. And while their words have be taken out of context perhaps Hawking and Mlodinow should have realised this might occur when they agreed to have the extracts published in The Times. I'll leave those questions to people who are more media wise than I am though.

Finally some brief, wild speculation on the physics. Since i don't actually know what the Hawking has really talked about in the book I am simply going to discuss some of the ideas which try to explain our universe and why I am skeptical that we really have a good explanation for everything. Sean Carrol made a nice video post trying to explain the physics which may have inspired Hawking's statement. My comments here are really tangential to this, based more on the idea of a theory of everything. Please read this with the 'rant' title of my blog in mind :) and remember I am talking a little outside my area of expertise now.

String theory is probably the best candidate for describing gravity at small scales, thus allowing a theory of everything. There is however an alternative of loop quantum gravity and also the possibility that we haven't invented the right model yet. M-theory is a unification of the 5 different types of superstring theories (the 'super' stands for supersymmetry, which is needed to describe matter as well as forces but don't worry too much about this) and a nice candidate for a theory of everything.

String theory now sadly seems to make few real predictions because there are 10^500 vacua with all kinds of different physics. Many string specialists talk about exploring the string landscape, and some think this is a positive development, but I find the lack of predictivity disappointing. Of course I am not a string expert and they might say I am missing the point.

Quite a long time ago Andre Linde proposed chaotic inflation where you have lots of "bubble universes" forming a multiverse. The model was not arbitrarily invented and was motivated by problems with the standard big bang theory. Unfortunately once again there are difficulties in testing many aspects of this model since the other universes are not observable. This model and the string landscape do fit together well and give a rather nice picture of how our universe might have appeared but the difficulty of testing these ideas remains.

Now if you hypothesise lots of possible physics in different universes then you can always end up with the features we need for life etc, even if the parameters look really fine tuned. Therefore some claim this is a "natural explanation" for all observable features of our universe.

However they are essentially invoking the anthropic principle (we are here and therefore our universe must have the parameters we require or we wouldn't be around to observe it). To me this is not an explanation, since it relies on an untestable hypothesis, much like god, to evade the question. This does not make the model wrong or even a bad idea, but I do not consider it a satisfactory explanation our universe without some experimental confirmation of the different universes, which seems to be a fundamental stumbling block.

Beauty, beliefs and GUTs

When I discuss a previous blog on the controversial topic of religion and science, the issue of belief without evidence sometimes comes up. Some people take the viewpoint that you should not believe in anything without evidence (I might caricature this as militant agnosticism :P), but this strikes me as a bit over constraining and does not really match how scientists actually behave.

Although we must try and objectively assess the evidence and make clear scientific statements about it, this does not mean we have to be opinion less about everything else. Indeed my experience of scientists is they are more likely to be opinionated (I am for sure ;) ) than opinion less. But even with regard to the science, when we are doing research at the frontiers of knowledge we do not yet have scientific evidence to know what will be the right approach, how nature will have solved the problem we are interested in. What motivates us in our work can be opinion based on our expectations about nature, and this is why different people look at different possibilities to solve the same problem.

In particle physics, for example, I have a (fairly dilute) belief in both Grand Unified Theories (GUTs) and Supersymmetry (SUSY). Others have a stronger belief, while some seem sure they are not realised in nature. Nonetheless everyone in the field knows that ultimately these are scientific theories which need to be tested. But where does our prior belief or theoretical prejudice spring from?

I have already talked briefly about motivations for supersymmetry so I will focus on GUTs here. As I previously discussed the Standard Model of particle physics describes three fundamental forces (strong, electromagnetic and weak) through gauge symmetries. The different forces have different 'strengths' by which the fundamental particles interact, and the fundamental particles are sensitive to different forces. Quarks, the particles which form hadrons like the proton and neutron, are sensitive the all three forces, while leptons, like the electron, to only the electromagnetic and weak forces. The fact that the strong force is much, well... stronger than other two explains why quarks are confined into hadrons and cannot be observed as free states.

So we have three (not counting gravity which is so weak we don't notice it) different forces with different strengths and fundamental particles which interact with different forces. This description matches the data incredibly well giving some of the most precisely tested predictions in all of science. But why do we have these different forces? Perhaps nature is simply like this, some scientists may well believe that is all there is to it. But for me this seems to leave nature looking rather arbitrary and messy.

Grand Unified Theories are a possible explanation for where these different forces come from. In these GUTs the different symmetries are embedded into a larger symmetry group which unifies all forces into a single unified one. All fields describing matter particles then transform together under this larger symmetry and interact via this single force. The different forces can then arise as a consequence of the breaking of this GUT symmetry. Additionally the larger symmetry of this gauge group means it has fixed charges, allowing for the possibility that the different values of electric charge we observe at low energies (unexplained in the SM) are fixed by the breaking of this GUT.

The simple elegance and beauty of Grand Unified Theories fits well into my expectations about nature. There is no proof that nature can be described in increasingly simple ways (the idea that it can is often called reductionism) but the aesthetic beauty of it appeals to me. As does my hope that I can explain or understand the forces and the electric charges we observe in nature.

This hope may seem in stark contradiction with the observation of three separate forces with different interaction strengths. However the vacuum is not empty but filled with 'virtual' particle and anti-particle pairs which are being created and annihilated and when particles interact across the vacuum such virtual particles are affected. For the case Quantum Electro-Dynamics (QED) the positively charged particles in the vacuum are drawn closer towards a negative charge and vice versa, and this effectively screens the interaction strength from the charges between two particles separated across the vacuum. The further apart the particles are the weaker the interaction strength. Since how close together particles can get in collisions depends on how energetic they are, interaction strengths depend on the energy at which the interactions take place.

For more complicated symmetries describing the weak and strong force there is a similar effect, but one also gets anti-screening from the gauge bosons so that interactions interactions can either increase or decrease with distance depending on the particle content of the model. This is the basis for having quarks which are confined into colorless hadrons at low energies while behaving like free particles at high energies, known as asymptotic freedom, for which the 2004 nobel prize for physics was awarded.

This also allows for the possibility that the separate three forces we observe at low energies have a common interaction strength at higher energies. This possibility is precisely realised in models with Supersymmetry at the TeV energy scale (the scale we are probing at the LHC), as is shown by the red lines in the figure to the left.

To motivate Supersymmetry I previously described the hierarchy problem and pointed out that this motivates new physics at the TeV scale based on our lack of understanding as to how two unrelated masses could be tuned to be incredibly close, but not equal. While this is not a fundamental proof of new low energy physics it is at least a physical question which we want to understand and the Supersymmetric solution is very elegant and therefore in my mind compelling.

I am personally very attracted to this picture of a simple Supersymmetric Grand Unified Theory at high energies which as we move down to lower energies has some of it's elegant symmetry spontaneously broken, leaving us with the complicated set of massive particles with different interactions which we have already observed. I find this idea beautiful, fascinating and compelling.

Others do not find it so convincing, but that is fine. This does not make either them nor me poor scientists who misunderstand the evidence, we simply have different theoretical prejudices based on our expectations of nature. Ultimately questions like this will be resolved by data and this is what we excitedly await from the LHC.

In search of reason: Melanie Phillips

So previously I briefly blogged about a rather repugnant attempt by Melanie Phillips to use Dawkins mistakes to slur all of science. I wrote about her in a colourful hyperbolic way, hopefully reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson, whose books I love. However as I acknowledged at the time this was not written in a way which would persuade any fans of Melanie Phillips or indeed anyone who did not already share my view of her. Let me address this now, because while my previous comments were cartoonish exaggeration, her writing is insidious and her suggestions dangerous.

We all remember the well known adage, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me. And there is truth in this in the sense that words rarely represent any direct physical threat, and this is part of the reason we support freedom of speech. Nonetheless words do have power because they can persuade people to change their ideas, make different life choices and interact with each other in different ways. Words can guide the most important decisions we make, such as whether or not to go to war and whether or not to invest in hospitals to save lives. Melanie Phillips' words direct people in the wrong direction in this respect and as such could cause a lot of harm if taken seriously.

I hope that people are able to evaluate arguments when exposed to reason and favour the more rational, while discarding those which don't make sense. But it is only hope really, I can neither be sure that people will favour logic over exciting rhetoric nor even that producing increasingly rational justifications will lead to a "correct" answer. Nonetheless I do wish it to be true and suspect that a presentation of rational arguments at least helps.

Science, however, is something more than this. It is based on objective experimental evidence, with postulates which are linked to empirical predictions by rigorous mathematics. No matter how silver tongued and slick a theorist, like me, presents his or her ideas, if they are falsified by the evidence we know they are not realised in nature and reject them.

Melanie Phillips has her own ideas and she thinks they trump science. It doesn't matter that scientists say, based on evidential studies, that there is no basis to believe that MMR vaccine causes autism , based on isolated case studies and her wisdom, she knows better. It doesn't matter that intelligent design (ID) cannot be falsified because it makes no specific predictions and can fit any evidence, Intelligent Designers are making scientific arguments and ID came out of science. Evolution "is not a fact. It is a theory with holes in it." It is irrelevant what the scientific consensus is and what Britain's chief scientist states, Melanie knows that "there is no firm evidence that warming is happening; even if it is, it is most likely to have natural, not man-made causes".

It is very difficult for people with science backgrounds to read Melanie's articles and not cringe. It is not just that she takes a contrary viewpoint on so many different issues, but the that she so forthrightly insists that the expert scientists are wrong and she is correct; her continued misuse and misrepresentations of scientific literature and her ridiculous claims that scientists are dogmatic and ignore evidence.

In addition to this she writes many articles on other subjects which I find offensive for non-scientific reasons. She frequently stirs up hatred towards Muslims, takes very strong pro-Israel stances and attacks not just those who take equally strong pro Palestine positions (which I would also criticise) but also moderate Jews who criticise some Israeli government policies (you can read her words first hand here and read the mission statement of the people she is insulting here). She also argues against gay rights, accused Obama of promoting revolutionary Marxism through community organisations and was a strong supporter of the war in Iraq.

It is ironic that I'm writing this to clarify why I dislike her after writing what should have been clearly exaggerated and comical description of her, and then read articles titled "Jews for genocide", which I do not believe was intended as a joke. I think she genuinely believes that criticising the Israeli occupation of Palestine and calling for human rights on both sides top be respected is equivalent to supporting genocide of Jews.

While I am sure there are many intelligent people who hold some (or all) of her political views I expect their arguments would be more nuanced and careful. Normally I would rather challenge those people rather than pick a soft target like Melanie Phillips because it is more interesting and intellectually challenging (and there is always the possibility they'd respond with something which changes my mind). To be honest I find what I have wrote here all rather obvious and boring, but felt the need to explain why I dislike her so virulently since a few people have asked me about this. So one time only, here you have it.

Anyone but England

Not posted in a while. Too busy, in part, because I've been watching the world cup in my spare time. A few Germans have asked me why I am not supporting England, while at the same time I've noticed some English people working themselves up into a fury when they find Scots cheering for their opponents, so I will talk about this.


When Andy Murray said he was supporting "anyone but England" (which he now claims was a joke) some were outraged. The Daily mail is apoplectic with rage at the selling of t-shirts with Murray's words as the slogan, with accusations of racism being thrown about. This sentiment is certainly based on the arbitrary nationality of the players but so is all support for your national team. Complain if you will that this is divisive and could encourage nasty nationalism, but please don't rant about Scotland fans supporting England's opponents while waving the England flag with a St George's cross painted on your face.

There are of course those who genuinely hate English people, but they are a very small minority and they don't represent the rest of us, just like English people who hate all foreigners don't represent the majority of England supporters. Beyond this there are many reasons why Scots don't support England.


The Media
In Scotland we broadly share a media with England and we watch the British/ English coverage of the world cup. The patriotic fervor built up in the newspapers and various sports comments are often over the top and jingoistic, especially in the build up to games with Germany and Argentina. The actual in game coverage is very England centric with the commentators making many references to England during the games and this can be annoying, especially (but maybe not only) if you are not English. The expectation that England should be the best team in the world and always succeed is ridiculously unrealistic (most o0f the time) and very annoying to constantly hear. Then when England play there is undoubtedly bias towards them from the commentators (true of Scottish commentators for Scotland games but not quite as bad), calling fouls when there was none and berating the other team for faking when they actually got clobbered. All of these complaints may well be true for most countries, but Scots don't have to listen it from them in order to follow the world cup or keep up to date with current events.

The Politics
There are large differences in political tendencies between Scotland and England, indeed between Scotland, Northern England, Wales and the South of England. It is the south if England which consistently votes conservative in large numbers and ensure that for Labour to get into power post Thatcher they had to move much further to the right. Since the all Tory MPs were vote out in Scotland in 1997 there has only been one constituency (Dumfries and Galloway) where the Tories have gotten an MP elected and this remains the case now that we have a Conservative government again. While of course only Tory voters can be blamed for this the geographical distribution of votes breeds resentment amongst Scots which can find release through sport.

Local Rivalry
I think above and beyond those motivations though it is just a local rivalry. Local rivalries are fairly common and Scotland definitely think of England this way, there even used to be an annual England-Scotland game. I doubt many Rangers fans cheer for Celtic when they are not playing each other, or vice versa, despite sharing a city. And I believe it is similar in England. Do Man City fans cheer for Man Utd? And I'm not sure how many English club fans cheer on their rivals English club rivals when they play in Europe

The History
Driving this rivalry is Scottish history. International football is about nationalism, as silly as that all is and England are the Auld Enemy. While English kids might grow up reading propaganda stories about Wellington fighting Napoloean or the great achievements of the British empire, Scots grow up with propaganda stories about Scotland fighting off the English to remain a "free" independent nation. Our heroes are William Wallace, Robert the Bruce and Bonnie Prince Charlie, all famous for wars with England. Our adopted national anthem, Flower of Scotland presumably references the battle of Bannockburn, one of Scotland's most famous victories over England.

So tomorrow I will be cheering on Germany and I can't understand why anyone would expect Scots to do anything else. But if this isn't enough for you and you still want to shout at me, call me bitter or fulliminate about how awful it is that we don't all support our fellow Brits, then in the words of Rab. C. Nesbit "Get it right up ye!"

Why God made YouTube

Recently I've been giving tutorials for Quantum Theory and since starting this blog I've been thinking a bit about physics communication. As a result I had a look at Leonard Susskind's lectures on Quantum Mechanics available on you tube and was reminded again just how nice they are.

I sometimes get annoyed with popular communicators in my field, though perhaps this is unfair because I am not their target audience. I might blog on my feelings on this at some point. However I have nothing but good things to say about Susskind's lectures and for non-physicists who really want to learn something I highly recommend them. They are not designed to teach undergraduates physics, but what he calls continuing students, apparently older students attending mostly from interest. They provide an incredible amount of insight with minimal (but seemingly sufficient) mathematics.

While I would never consider this minimal maths route appropriate for undergraduate students who need to really learn the mathematical techniques to understand derivations and perform the necessary calculations, as a supplement to a standard education these could be great and for people who are just interested in the subject this is one the few ways where you can really get the a proper understanding without actually going off and doing a physics degree.

All of the videos can be found at Stanford's you tube page and are linked from the wikipedia page on Leonard Susskind.

Melanie Phillips and Richard Dawkins

Melanie Phillips is a disgusting, puss filled, barely human wretch that every now and then crawls up from the underworld to spew faeces onto the pages of tabloid newspapers, magazines and sometimes our tv screens. Recently she wrote a vitriolic anti-science pile of poo here.

Normally I can't be bothered writing about such feeble minded drivel. I think mistakes like this are only worth discussing if there is a possibility I could be challenging an otherwise intelligent person's thinking. However what got my attention here me here is that she is using Dawkins' anti-religious rants to paint all scientists as irrational.

``For example, Professor Richard Dawkins' told me he was ‘not necessarily averse’ to the idea that life on earth had been created by a governing intelligence — provided that such an intelligence had arrived from another planet. How can it be that our pre-eminent apostle of reason appears to find little green men more plausible as an explanation for the origin of life than God?

The answer is that in certain areas science has overreached itself by trying to play God, and as a result has turned into an ideology.''

When I wrote my blog criticising Dawkins some people defended his inaccuracies saying they they wouldn't do any harm and they didn't understand why I was so annoyed. Well here is one reason why. It isn't the best example and I am sure there are plenty of others but i don't exactly read trash news very often and rarely get a chance to write about it, so I thought I'd take the opportunity here, along with a chance to try out a Hunter S. Thompson impression in the first paragraph.

Science Voting

The UK just had a general election during which there was an interesting attempt to create a pro science voting block by the Campaign for Science andEngineering in the UK (Case) and some science communicators. I don't know all the details of this since I live in Germany, I'm still largely blog unaware and don't even have a twitter account.

Nonetheless I noticed the scivote campaign backed by Case and that Brian Cox (whose style of popular physics communication is admittedly not always to my tastes) has been doing very good work raising public awareness of the funding crisis within physics, while Martin Robbins has been evaluating the various parties' science policies and Ben Goldacre has pushed for electing pro science MPs. Sadly this ended in bitter and dismal failure. Despite it's (lack of) immediate impact in this election it brings up interesting issues. What can or should scientists aim for in politics?

The first minimal possibility is a movement to only promote direct science interests -- i.e. funding, pay and support. For scientists funding, dominates. In the UK there are real dangers here due to the squeeze from recent economic problems. Additionally in my own field of particle physics this squeeze has come following a disastrous merging of funding councils which left particle physics burdened with liabilities from other research areas, and a push that research be justified in terms of immediate economic and social goals. For research into fundamental areas this is difficult as the economic and social benefits are in the long term and we cannot predict what technological applications will come from fundamental understandings of nature which we have not yet obtained. Nonetheless all technological progress is ultimately driven by fundamental research and without it society cannot advance.

Many physicsts have fought hard in this direction and it appears they at least had some success in influencing liberal democrat policy: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/thesword/2010/05/uk-election-lib-dems-plans-for.html.


The second possibility is to push governments to adopt an evidence based approach to policy making, where we clearly differentiate between the objective evidence based facts whhich should come from scientific experts and the values which should be specified by the representatives of the public. The lack of evidence informing UK policy came to prominance following the sacking of Prof David Nutt for offering his scientific opinion on the relative dangers of ecstacy and alcohol, which happened to offend the government and also previous tensions where the government ignored the scientific advice and reclassified cannabis to a class B drug.

Ultimately the framework of this discussion is meaningless since the aim of the drug classification is to rank them in terms of harm, while the true determining factor of whether or not drug laws or changes in penalties can be justified on a basis of protecting people harm needs to consider the effect of the laws themselves. Whether or not they actually reduce harm and if so to what extent. The evidence suggests drug laws fuel markets in addictive drugs, making more, not less, addicts and therefore more harm.

Nonetheless this restricted framework of drug classification based on harm, can be used to illustrate the kind of convolution between values and science I advocate. The harm rankings which were discussed by Nutt are in stark disagreement with current law. However one must be clear that some values go into such rankings because one is comparing different types of risk. How do you compare the risk of developing long term lung cancer with a risk of sudden death or blindness or developing mental health problems? So if we are to properly separate value judgments from the evidence, the scientists should provide quantisation on all the risks, while elected representatives of the people would provide weightings for the qualitatively different risks and the classification would be the result of combining these. This is not really how it currently works though and it is very hard to pick a reasonable set of values which could lead to the current drug classifications, given the science.

Many appear to want to go further still. As a third option a pro science movement might draw conclusions on issues where it seems clear most "normal" sets of values lead to to the same, or relatively similar policies. For example very few scientists would support the funding of homeopathy on the NHS. The technical science issue is whether or not homeopathy works, and it is clear that there is no evidence to believe it does work, many reasons to doubt it could and strong constraints on any impact beyond placebo in some cases. To believe, in spite of this, that homeopathy treatments should be funded by the public either requires a very strange love of giving people sugar pills or a strong belief that placebo benefits justify deceit coupled with an odd favoritsm for homeopathy over spiritual chanting or other equivalent options.

Finally it is clear that some science communicators want to go even further and promote issues where the values are shared by most scientists. For example in both animal rights issues and abortion I think many scientists may share similar opinions on these issues, and they have been cited as science reasons to vote for certain politicians. However there are clearly a wide range of fundamental values held on these issues and there is plenty of scope to use the same evidence, with the same understanding of it and draw dramatically different conclusions. If you fundamentally believe that an animal's life and comfort is of equal importance to a human's you will never support animal testing as a preliminary to human testing to protect humans from potential dangers. No matter how strongly you are aware of the scientific need to do them in order to save or help human lives. Similarly in abortion, while science tells us about the level of awareness and development of the life growing in the mothers womb, what weight you give to his/her life vs the impact on the mothers (and to a lesser extent fathers) life depends fundamentally on how you value it.

I personally really want to see the first and second options promoted. The latter is essentially already how the government is supposed to operate with science advisors, but it is obvious that something is badly broken in the system. If pro science lobby groups are going to pursue option three of taking policy stances against funding homeopathy and other obvious quack practices I am still comfortable as there does appear to be a need to rectify the current situation. I am a little worried though by the possibility of the forth option though, and while I agree with what is presented as the scientific viewpoint in both the animal rights and abortion issues I am well aware it is misleading to present them as uniform positions amongst scientists and feel it could be dishonest to cloak clear value based judgments like that under the name of science advocacy. I also wonder what else might get promoted in this way. I have already blogged on how Richard Dawkins has misrepresented what science can say and would not appreciate more of this.

I am not against science communicators offering their opinions on these issues or indeed joining political campaigns on them. But promoting issues like this (rather than simply informing the debate with the actual facts) should not be part of any science movement informing people which politicians' policies have the strongest evidence base, seeking to influence the election on this basis. Whether such a movement will ever properly emerge as an effective force still seems an open question though.


Anyway I know I'm new to this movement but .. um ... make me your leader? oh go on...

Hey you, you're a Nazi: A discrimination and immigration rant.

So I've been pretty busy lately and haven't posted, which is a bad start for the blog. So i thought I'd make the title suitable abusive to grab attention :). Nazi comparisons are generally thought poorly of because they are lazy and usually miss the complicated and specific ideas that characterise that ugly ideology. However I am not entirely joking as I will attempt draw out a specific similarity between an opinion that I imagine most readers will hold and specific (but horrifying) beliefs and actions of the Nazis.

Today I want to talk about restrictions on free migration and discrimination. I have always been puzzled by peoples differing attitudes towards nationality and race, and people's understanding of discrimination in general. It is widely accepted that treating people differently based on their so-called 'race' (by which I mean ethnic origin) and gender is unacceptable and many countries have laws prohibiting this. To some extent religion (which is sometimes included in the definition of race) is also protected by social and legal convention. When it comes to nationality however many countries have laws that require employers to discriminate on this basis when considering job applicants. Indeed restrictions on on immigration in general are a form of discrimination based on nationality. There are some reasons for this which I will discuss later, but I do think people are confused about why racism, and other forms of discrimination are inappropriate and why it is illegal and will discuss that first.

I have witnessed this confusion with religion. When someone makes offensive blanket statements of the nature "Muslims are terrorists so they deserve to be blown up" or "Muslims oppress women, so we should remove their civil liberties" etc and are accused of racism they defend themselves with the line "but Muslims are connected by religion, not racial identity". Regardless of whether the definition of racism is discrimination against "race, colour or creed" or the narrower one focused only on ethnicity, this rather misses the point. Either way they are being an offensive bigot.

These statements are inappropriate because of their blanket nature. Everyone in a particular group is treated as if they all share some common characteristic, simply because there is a perceived (true of false) correlation. Even if that correlation is true (and remember correlation does not imply causation) it is still unacceptable because how an individual is treated then depends on the actions or beliefs of other individuals, whose behavior they have no control over. We are effectively punishing them for things which they couldn't change and bear no responsibility for.

Muslims who do not supports terrorism should not be held responsible for a tiny number who carry such acts out, anymore than I should be responsible for the God Delusion written by Richard Dawkins just because we are both atheists and scientists. Similarly those specific Muslims who believe in the oppression of women should not be held responsible for the actions of more liberal Muslims who allow women to dress liberally, thus causing earthquakes, (do you see what I did there?) and of course needless to say vice versa.

The same logic applies to all forms of discrimination which are based on correlations rather than causation and as such all should be deemed socially unacceptable. Of course there are good historical and social reasons why we perceive certain types of prejudice differently. Someone making jokes about the French in the pub should not usually be regarded with the same disgust as someone making fun of 'niggers' because the intent is rarely the same. I myself often hurl racist abuse about English people ('racism' is correct here because they are in fact a race -- of cunts). It is not the same as someone shouting nigger because my intent and meaning are different, I am invoking distinctions between individuals, which I do not believe, for humor. Unlike jokes from racists, my humor does not derive from a shared belief but the ridiculousness of me holding it, and it is not an attempt to encourage such beliefs. This should not be confused with those people who genuinely hold grudges against English people.

There is a widespread social problem, in many societies, of discrimination and indeed violence against people because of the colour of their skin and that lead to specific laws against racism. Though qualitatively different (it's not visible, meaning you won't be as abused/intimidated by passing strangers etc) there is also a problem within Scotland of anti-English discrimination, which despite my earlier joke, is not based on race but nationality. While some individuals might genuinely harbor hatred for the French it is not a wide spread social problem that I am aware of, so it's understandable that governments don't have policies to deal with it. However even if some discrimination is not a widespread social problem, the individual experiencing it still gets disadvantaged through no fault of their own. The reasons why racism is socially unacceptable also apply, such discrimination is not acceptable.

Let me now return to the question of laws restricting immigration. These laws dramatically alter an individuals quality of life based on their arbitrary association. Just because there is a line on maps separating Spain from Portugal and Morocco does not mean that individuals from those countries would perform less well in a job in Madrid than, say, someone from Barcelona. Nor does it make them more of a security threat if they wish to visit Madrid. It is also not the case that individuals from Portugal and Morocco deserve or need less (or more, I have no idea how the welfare provisions of these countries compare) financial aid when unable to work.

So why do so many people support such discriminatory laws? There are various justifications put forward connected to linguistic, cultural and historical differences, but all such these arguments could equally be applied to minorities living within a country. Many nations are not monolingual, many have groups of people who typically have different values and ideas about how society should be run, but discrimination against such a group is nonetheless prohibited because people are still entitled to be treated as individuals. The differences mentioned above should only be used if they apply to a specific individual and only when relevant, i.e. it's OK to deny someone a job writing newspaper articles in English, if they do not know English, but not OK to refuse them a job (on that basis) where communication is not an issue.

The other defense is more pragmatic. It is a question of space, infrastructure and social services. If I proposed removing all restrictions on immigration in the UK tomorrow most people would say that this would lead to so much immigration that the UK infrastructure could not cope and the UK quality of life would be dramatically decreased with massive overcrowding and I believe, if done as an isolated nation at least, this is correct.

The question of jobs is another issue. Often politicians campaign on "British jobs for British people". But why would I care about the nationality? With a job offer there is automatically the statement that the immigrating individual will consume less than he provides (otherwise there wouldn't, or at least shouldn't be a job). That individual will benefit society. In addition since I don't personally feel any special empathy for people born in the same country as me I would be happiest if the person who got the job is one who would be most helped by it and that will typically be the person from the poorest background, most likely a person from abroad since the UK has relatively high quality of life.

Nonetheless the existence of a welfare state provides some pragmatic arguments for restricting low paid jobs going to people outside the country. If we are instead able to fill it that vacancy with someone from within, who was previously unemployed, then we no longer need to provide them with basic necessities like housing and enough money for food.

So it appears there is some truth to this argument, but it is not one from the principle. Perhaps we would tolerate racial discrimination or even segregation within a country if there were pragmatic reasons for maintaining it? The thought makes me want to vomit. I imagine defenders of apartheid in South Africa put forward similar arguments, which appear to have been falsified since, but nonetheless I doubt many would claim apartheid disgusts them because the pragmatic defence turned out to be wrong.

Similarly I am sure slavery could have been defended with claims that the economy and way of life would collapse in the US and Europe and I know it was defended in such a way in the Roman republic and empire. I have no idea if this pragmatic argument might be correct or not. Perhaps at the time abolishing slavery would have had catastrophic consequences for the Roman elite, and their way way of disintegrated. Maybe civilisation would have even been set back. That wouldn't change my stance, I am still disgusted by slavery and were I present in the time of the Roman republic with my modern mindset I would either stand up and oppose the slavery or be sickened by my cowardice and failure to do so (admittedly the latter is more likely :)).

Finally now I arrive at the point behind my title. I recently read The War of the world by Niall Ferguson where he describes not just the horrors of the holocaust and the Nazi's racial ideology, but also their expansionist plans and economic ideas. My understanding from the book is that Hitler believed that he needed to expand the German Reich because Germany required more living space and raw materials for the German people. To this end when they invaded countries to the east of Germany, like Poland and Russia, they did not only murder Jews to sate the hatred and disgust Hitlers rhetoric had inspired they also carried out ethnic cleansing on other perceived non-Germanic races, e.g. Slavic people, because they believed they needed the living space for Germans.

In this sense the pragmatic defense and practise of immigration controls can be compared to the Nazis expansionist ideology. The justification is very similar, arguing that one nation (or supposed race in Hitlers case) need a certain amount of space to have a reasonable quality of life. The outcome is also similar. If one compares infant mortality and average life expectancy (note this will also be strongly affected by the former, I couldn't find a post infancy life expectancy comparison), then one can see the dramatic variations depending on where you live, 180 per 1000 to 2 per 1000 and 30 to 80 respectively! By refusing to admit people into this country we condemn them (on average) to an early death. While this more passive role seems less cold blooded than the direct murder of millions of Slavic people, we know the consequences of our actions. Does anyone really doubt that when we refuse immigration to someone from a very poor nation or deport them back if they arrived here "illegally" that they will have a significantly higher chance of dying young? It may be called "economic migration" but in this case at least economics is life.

I am not saying that we can suddenly open our borders on our own, I cowardly bow to the pragmatic and selfish argument here, but we should recognise the abhorrence of the current situation. Freedom of movement and a free choice of where to live is not only a basic freedom, which one should expect for everyone, but it is also one which one which can save lives. We need to demand that the politicians we elect will allow more migration into our countries not restrict it further as all major parties in the wealthy western nations seem to propose. We need to insist also that they work together to bring a global end to restrictions on economic migration, as well as universal welfare provision so that there is lower safety net protecting everyone at the bottom, not just people in wealthy nations.

This is a lofty goal and I have no real plan to bring it about or even any proof to offer that it is at all achievable. It perhaps is my hippie moment, but nonetheless a change in attitude will help a lot and moderate increases in the legal migration into the wealthy nations is achievable and will help real lives. And at the very least people should see immigration laws for what they really are, discriminatory and destructive of life.

And until you commit to this, you are a Nazi.

Richard Dawkins is an Enemy of Reason.

Today it is Easter and I am about to use the exploitation by commercial companies of a particular group of odd religious people as an excuse to eat overly expensive chocolate. In celebration of this let me also post my critique of Richard Dawkins book the God Delusion, where he gives the false impression that these odd religious beliefs are inconsistent with science.

Since the release of The God Delusion there has been much criticism of Richard Dawkins, most coming from members of religious communities offended by his comments. I read it recently and as an atheist and a scientist I think I can offer a different perspective . I don't really care about criticism or mockery of religion. While he should not make fallacious arguments or misrepresent what people believe, as a non-believer, I am not in a position to judge if this is the case and would take no special offense at the misrepresentation of religion. However I think I can judge when he misrepresents what science can tell us and that tends to set me off on rants.

In his crusade against quackery from frauds and genuine believers who ignore established science and make claims which are ruled out by evidence, Richard Dawkins (or perhaps his producers) coined the phrase Enemies of Reason. I appreciated his attempt to draw attention to this problem and explain why science can show such claims to be bogus, just as I like reading the bad science blog / guardian column where Ben Goldacre exposes and mocks false claims and misrepresentations of science in the media. Science is something which I think is both fascinating and incredibly important for society and our well being, so I get really annoyed when people misrepresent it and confuse the public.

Unfortunately despite his good work communicating problems with the false claims made by proponents of faith healing, dowsing and homeopathy, Richard Dawkins himself is guilty of misrepresenting science. He has repeatedly argued that the 'God hypothesis' is a scientific one and that his conclusion is that god is false. He makes this claim explicitly in his book, The God Delusion, in public lectures he has given and in interviews. This is an absurd misrepresentation of science.

So why does he make this claim? Well lets follow the argument which is set out in The God Delusion, as well as the public lectures. First of all he clarifies that he is not actually saying science has proved god does not exist. He says instead that it is simply very unlikely. I wouldn't have understood the original statement any differently, science never provides mathematical proofs, we simply accumulate large bodies of empirical evidence which in some cases leave vanishingly small probabilities for our conclusions to be wrong.

Dawkins explicitly states that he thinks there is a very low probability of god existing:

"I count myself in category 6 [very low probability], but leaning towards 7 [Knowing for sure god does not exist] - I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden. "

So he must have a very strong body of empirical data which conflicts with all hypotheses of god then? Lets be clear here. For this claim to be true it is not enough to show that some or many god hypotheses are improbable because they poorly fit the data, one has to show that all such hypotheses are unlikely. If a single god hypothesis is not that unlikely then you cannot state that the existence of god is improbable based on a purely objective evaluation of the evidence.

Before we can really analyse such a statement we need to know what Dawkins means by god. I think any real ambiguity is removed when he also differentiates between theists, deists and pantheists,

"A theist believes in a supernatural intelligence who, in addition to his main work of creating the universe in the first place, is still around to oversee and influence the subsequent fate of his initial creation. In many theistic belief systems, the deity is intimately involved in human affairs. He answers prayers; forgives or punishes sins; intervenes in the world by performing miracles; frets about good and bad deeds, and knows when we do them (or even think of doing them). A deist, too, believes in a supernatural intelligence, but one whose activities were confined to setting up the laws that govern the universe in the first place. The deist God never intervenes thereafter, and certainly has no specific interest in human affairs. Pantheists don't believe in a supernatural God at all, but use the word God as a nonsupernatural synonym for Nature, or for the Universe, or for the lawfulness that governs its workings. Deists differ from theists in that their God does not answer prayers, is not
interested in sins or confessions, does not read our thoughts and does not intervene with capricious miracles. Deists differ from pantheists in that the deist God is some kind of cosmic intelligence, rather than the pantheist's metaphoric or poetic synonym for the laws of the universe."

Dawkins is very clear that he is arguing that both Deist and theist gods are improbable,

"The deist God is certainly an improvement over the monster of the Bible. Unfortunately it is scarcely more likely that he exists, or ever did. In any of its forms the God Hypothesis is unnecessary. The God Hypothesis is also very close to being ruled out by the laws of probability."

Exactly what his probabilistic threshold for actually ruling out such a god remains unclear. In science we set specific probabilities beyond which it will be accepted that a test has ruled out or verified some prediction, but such thresholds are a convention and can vary between disciplines. That is not a conflict or discrepancy between subjects, it is simply the case that we define verified and ruled out with varying degrees of stringency and scientists within a particular subject should know what is meant when those words appear. I interpreted Dawkins statement to mean almost entirely ruled out, i.e. vanishingly small probability, but even if he is being considerably more modest, this is still not a scientifically correct statement.

Dawkins criticizes agnostics who argue that there is not adequate empirical evidence to decide either way. He first argues that the existence of god is in principle scientifically testable,

"I shall suggest that the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other. Even if hard to test in practice, it belongs in the same TAP or temporary agnosticism box as the controversies over the Permian and Cretaceous extinctions. God's existence or non-existence is a scientific fact about the universe, discoverable in principle if not in practice. "

Actually if we are speaking about a deist god it may be in principle impossible to test such a hypothesis. It is not clear currently if we could ever have testable predictions from events 'preceding' the big bang, but equally I cannot be sure we will not. It may also be possible to come up with other ideas where the testability is in principle impossible. Regardless I view this as splitting hairs somewhat and I am happy to accept this statement is broadly correct and that Dawkins is working on the assumption that one day we might extend sciences reach beyond the big bang. However he must also be aware that currently we certainly have not done so. He continues,

"If he existed and chose to reveal it, God himself could clinch the argument, noisily and unequivocally, in his favor. And even if God's existence is never proved or disproved with certainty one way or the other, available evidence and reasoning may yield an estimate of probability far from 50 per cent."

This is very exciting. Dawkins has just stated that available evidence might yield a probabilistic discrimination between the hypothesis that god exists and the hypothesis that there is no god. Remember he is still including deistic gods here, so this is a truly sensational prospect. What is this evidence?

Dawkins runs through various supernatural predictions of Christianity:

"Did Jesus have a human father, or was his mother a virgin at the time of his birth? Whether or not there is enough surviving evidence to decide it, this is still a strictly scientific question with a definite answer in principle: yes or no. Did Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead? Did he himself come alive again, three days after being crucified? There is an answer to every such question, whether or not we can discover it in practice, and it is a strictly scientific answer. The methods we should use to settle the matter, in the unlikely event that relevant evidence ever became available, would
be purely and entirely scientific methods."

Regardless of the status of evidence on these claims, they are not general predictions of a god hypothesis. Falsification of these statements would not affect in the slightest any god hypotheses other than the tiny subset which specifically predict these things. I am not sure how central to Christianity these claims are, and whether or not most Christians believe these are factual events or stories in the bible to be interpreted in a different way, but I will leave that question to Christians. Please also note, the room for interpretation rendering any `predictions' malleable is why religious based creationism can never be considered a scientific theory, but equally this is why we cannot scientifically demonstrate a religion to be false when they reinterpret it's teachings based on scientific evidence.

However Dawkins claims it is not just a Christian god which is improbable.

``Nevertheless, let us follow Gould and pare our religion down to some sort of non-interventionist minimum: no miracles, no personal communication between God and us in either direction, no monkeying with the laws of physics, no trespassing on the scientific grass. At most, a little deistic input to the initial conditions of the universe so that, in the fullness of time, stars, elements, chemistry and planets develop, and life evolves....I suggest ... though less violent and clumsy than an Abrahamic God, is still, when you look at him fair and square, a scientific hypothesis. I return to the point: a universe in which we are alone except for other slowly evolved intelligences is a very different universe from one with an original guiding agent whose intelligent design is responsible for its very existence. I accept that it may not be so easy in practice to distinguish one kind of universe from the other. Nevertheless, there is something utterly special about the hypothesis of ultimate design, and equally special about the only known alternative: gradual evolution in the broad sense. They are close to being irreconcilably different.''

No matter how well you argue that all god hypotheses are in principle testable, until those tests are actually performed, science cannot make probabilistic statements about the existence of god. Two hypotheses which both fit current data equally well cannot be scientifically discriminated between. God hypotheses which make no currently testable predictions cannot be experimentally resolved from a hypotheses with no god.

This may be an unfamiliar concept since in science we tend to present only one theory as the best explanation of the data. However there is always infinite set of modifications which can be made to that theory which do not affect any known empirical measurements. If the two models cannot in principle yield different empirical predictions then the distinction between them is not a scientific one, but a philosophical one. If instead it might be possible to perform tests or make observations which can distinguish between them then this can be provide motivation for further research.

To select between scientifically equivalent theories we use Occam's razor, which states that the simplest theory that matches data is the best. However all are valid descriptions of nature, we just choose the simplest because it makes the description easier. It is true that in Beyesian probabilities occam's razor automatically appears, but such an effect comes through the subjective prior, which represents your prior belief in something before looking at the evidence, and therefore cannot be relied upon for purely objective statements. So while one might be tempted to suggest Occam's razor is a reason to disfavor god (a theory with no god is simpler than one with god) this does not give an objective reason to disbelieve . You cannot give an objective probabilistic distinction between two theories which make the same the testable predictions. If we could make objective statements like this then it would invalidate a lot of current research.

For example in particle physics the simplest model which fits all data is the 'Standard Model', which I introduced in my previous post. However we only have data over certain energy ranges (or distance scales) and currently we are trying to probe higher energies (shorter distances) than ever before with the Large Hadron Collider to see if there is physics beyond the standard model. There are very interesting and well motivated ideas like extra dimensions or supersymmetry which are less 'simple' than the standard model but many physicists expect will be discovered. There are also less well motivated ideas which nonetheless fit the current data. We cannot currently scientifically distinguish between them and the Standard Model because they all fit the data. Real science is curious about what nature is like beyond the range of tests we have done so far.

`` Like nothing else, evolution really does provide an explanation for the existence of entities whose improbability would otherwise, for practical purposes, rule them out. And the conclusion to the argument, as I shall show in Chapter 4, is close to being terminally fatal to the God Hypothesis''

Actually without a theory of evolution we cannot rule out the existence of complex entities, for fairly obvious reasons. Yet even if humans were not around as as a demonstration of the fallaciousness of such a statement, the absence of an understood mechanism to form complex entities does not prove no such mechanism exists and certainly does not demonstrate the non-existence of the complex entities themselves.

Nor is there a case, as the church perhaps once had it, that an absence of an understood mechanism suggests the existence of god. As Hume pointed out trying to use god to explain the existence of humans leads to infinite regress. Prior to Darwin there was simply a puzzle to which no-one had provided a satisfactory solution. Now thanks to Darwin we understand how it is possible for complex organisms to come into existence through the natural process of evolution, which is a remarkable achievement. Nonetheless this does not demonstrate that the only path to existence is evolution.

This already foreshadows the direction Dawkins will take. He will (without acknowledgment) switch from an evidence based discussion to an argument which is independent of scientific evidence, based purely on his inability to imagine how a god could exist. While I might agree that our inability to imagine how a god could possibly exist makes me doubt that there is one, it does not lead me to claim I can provide an objective probabilistic argument of there being no god.

``The view that I shall defend is very different: agnosticism about the existence of God belongs firmly in the temporary or TAP category. Either he exists or he doesn't. It is a scientific question; one day we may know the answer, and meanwhile we can say something pretty strong about the probability.

My definition of the God Hypothesis included the words 'superhuman' and 'supernatural'. To clarify the difference imagine that a SETI radio telescope actually did pick up a signal from outer space which showed, unequivocally, that we are not alone ... In what sense, then, would the most advanced SETI aliens not be gods? In what sense would they be superhuman but not supernatural? In a very important sense, which goes to the heart of this book. The crucial difference between gods and god-like extraterrestrials lies not in their properties but in their provenance. Entities that are complex enough to be intelligent are products of an evolutionary process. No matter how god-like they may seem when we encounter them, they didn't start that way. ''

So Dawkins is ruling out highly evolved alien life from his definition of god. He continues:

``The laws of probability forbid all notions of their spontaneously appearing without simpler antecedents. They probably owe their existence to a (perhaps unfamiliar) version of Darwinian evolution: some sort of cumulatively ratcheting 'crane' as opposed to 'skyhook', to use Daniel Dennett's terminology. Skyhooks - including all gods - are magic spells. They do no bona fide explanatory work and demand more explanation than they provide. Cranes are explanatory devices that actually do explain. ''

So he generalises and also does not admit beings originating from some 'version' of evolution he hasn't conceived of. He requires that to be a god there is no simpler antecedents. Such a god he states is highly improbable.

Essentially he is ruling out (as a 'god') any being he can imagine coming into existence. Well OK that's his definition and to be fair I doubt many religious people would be comfortable with the idea that their god had simple antecedents, but why is he so sure that what remains within his definition of god is improbable?

For this he gives us his ``Boeing 747'' argument.

``The name comes from Fred Hoyle's amusing image of the Boeing 747 and the scrapyard. I am not sure whether Hoyle ever wrote it down himself, but it was attributed to him by his close colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe and is presumably authentic. Hoyle said that the probability of life originating on Earth is no greater
than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747.''

Dawkins moves this imagery from a comparison with the probability of natural life to the probability of a 'god' spontaneously forming. Dawkins whole argument is simply that something as presumably complex as a god is highly unlikely to form spontaneously. That a god capable of creating us or the universe must be highly complex and Dawkins cannot imagine a mechanism by which such a god would be likely to form without simpler antecedents. That really is it.

Dawkins cannot imagine any way such a being could form. I must admit I cannot either, indeed that's part of the reason I am an atheist. It does seem a very challenging task to explain how a being capable of creating the universe could exist. However my point is not that I think atheism is irrational, which would be a strange position for me to adopt. My point is that one cannot claim that science demonstrates that god is unlikely.

First note that there is no experimental input into Dawkins argument. It is not in any way a phenomenological scientific claim of evidence. Instead he is trying to discredit the god hypothesis by a theoretical argument. This is not a scientific statement based on empirical evidence. There is no such evidence.

Dawkins without actually quite specifying the mechanism by which this god forms insists that it is highly improbable that this could happen. This is not the usual kind of probabilistic statement dealt with in science. Normally experiments are performed testing prediction of the theory and then one can make objective probabilistic statements about the likelihood of getting that data if the theory is true. If the probability is sufficiently small the theory is considered to be ruled out.

However this is not say that scientists are blind to other kinds of argument. There is one area of science where very analogous arguments are used in support of scientific theories, that is my own field that of particle physics. Indeed I am a strong proponent of such arguments.

Previously I explained how in particle physics the workload is spit up between theorists and experimentalists, and that when constructing models to explain questions we try to do so without actually introducing new questions (\'a la the infinite regression of the god hypothesis). . I also tried to describe one very important mechanism exploited by theorists to construct models which match nature, the Higgs mechainism, which allows us to create models which correctly predict the interactions of matter and have fundamental particles with masses. This predicts the famous Higgs boson which experimentalists are searching for at the Large Hadron Collider.

The simplest model with this Higgs mechanism which can describe all current observations is the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics, providing a very good description of nature at low (currently tested) energies. However some theorists are not convinced that it is a complete theory because we feel it introduces further puzzles which are left unexplained. One of these puzzles is known as the hierarchy problem which I discussed in the same blog entry .

Please recall that one of the unique properties of the Higgs boson is that it's mass is quadratically sensitive to new physics from high energies. Since we know that at very high energies some new gravitational physics must be introduced we expect the Higgs mass to receive quadratic contributions from this very high energy scale (called the Planck scale). However the Higgs mass is some 17 orders of magnitude smaller than this energy scale. In order for this to be the case, within the SM we assume that these contributions are canceled by a free parameter in the theory. While this is mathematically consistent, the enormous coincidence seems improbable and that is the hierarchy problem. Much like Dawkins criticism of his god hypothesis, theoretical physicists feel that there is no imaginable explanation for this free parameter to cancel so precisely with the Planck scale.

I also mentioned that theorists have come up with a number of solutions including one I really like, called supersymmetry, where these large contributions from high energies are forced to cance by a new symmetry of nature. These ideas introduce more new physics, which if correct will be observed in the same machine, the Large Hadron Collider, which experimentalists built to look for the Higgs.

I am mentioning this again partly because I think it is fascinating and very exciting, but also because there is parallel to Richard Dawkins argument. We talk about this improbability of a cancellation between the parameter and contributions from high energies, but only because we can see no reason why they are related. So if the parameter just takes a random value then the cancellation is so improbable as to be effectively impossible. While I believe this argument to be an important and compelling one, it is not a proof that the SM is incomplete at low energies. Our inability to imagine or construct a model at high energies where the parameter is tuned so closely to the Planck scale does not conclusively prove it is not so. I can make no objective probabilistic statement about whether such a model I cannot imagine could in fact be realised.

All I can say is that because I see no way it could happen and random chance is very improbable, I believe there must be an explanation at lower energies. As scientists however we will only rule out the SM as the complete low energy description of nature if it is falsified in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. In science it is the data which decides.

The theoretical arguments presented by Dawkins fall into a similar category. There is no way he can really state that just because he cannot imagine a god coming into existence without simpler antecedents that it is impossible. All we can say is that without knowing such a mechanism a god hypothesis does not provide a satisfactory explanation of human existence. Therefore Dawkins argument is simply a reformulation of Hume's criticism of god as an explanation for existence, as Dawkins almost seems aware in parts of his book.

``Design is not the only alternative to chance. Natural selection is a better alternative. Indeed, design is not a real alternative at all because it raises an even bigger problem than it solves: who designed the designer? Chance and design both fail as solutions to the problem of statistical improbability, because one of them is the problem, and the other one regresses to it. ''

There is nothing wrong with this, but it is simply neither new nor a clear objective reason. A scientifically minded and rational person may still believe that god exists. There is still no contradiction between science and a belief in god, despite Dawkins attempts to convince his readers otherwise.

Although I have no belief in god, and in fact actively disbelieve I neither come to this view from scientific evidence nor make objective probabilistic statements about it . My problem with The God Delusions is that Dawkins is giving people a false impression of what science can do, overextending it's remit, and this can be dangerous for public understanding.

A common misconception is that science keeps overthrowing its ideas and changing what it states, so that what we say is true today might be false tomorrow, but this is wrong. Science keeps progressing, but very well established knowledge is almost never overturned.

For example many people think Newtonian mechanics is wrong and Einstein's ideas overthrew it. This is wrong. Newtonian mechanics is a good and very well tested description of nature, for speeds much less than the speed of light and at macroscopic scales, which applies today. Einstein suggested it would break down when you move out of this regime and was subsequently proved correct. This does not falsify the vast body of evidence supporting Newtonian mechanics. So long as scientists are careful to state the regimes under which they have performed tests and not make statements with certainty about untested regimes, the methodology makes it unlikely that they will wrong.

Unfortunately this point is often missed. When Dawkins tries to extend science to the point of claiming that god is unlikely based on the theory of evolution, he feeds into this basic misunderstanding. We cannot extend scientific models beyond the empirical evidence base on which they are established and call it fact. Othertwise this can lead people to dismiss scientific evidence and ignore it's teachings. With this kind of rhetoric Dawkins pushes people towards the very pseudo scientific rubbish he rails against.

I do not understand why Dawkins has presented such an argument and falsely represented it as a scientific one, with clear probabilistic statements. I find it difficult to reconcile the intelligent scientist with this poorly thought out pretense of an argument. Perhaps his speculation about the arguments presented by theologians he has encountered, in fact reflects on him,

``I did not gain the impression that the theologians who mounted this evasive defense were being willfully dishonest. I think they were sincere. Nevertheless, I was irresistibly reminded of Peter Medawar's comment on Father Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man, in the course of what is possibly the greatest negative book review of all time: `its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself'.''

Dawkins likes to represent his views as those of the rational scientists opposing superstition and clear logical fallacy of the creationist / intelligent design movement. Indeed he spends a lot of time in his book explaining why the clearly ridiculous arguments of creationists are false. Readers may be given the impression that to disagree with Dawkins is to side with those people. That is not the case.

In reality the division is between rational people, religious, agnostics and atheists, both scientist and lay persons, who understand the importance of making evidence based statements and understand that one cannot claim a factual basis of knowledge without this and those like Dawkins and creationists who cannot tell the difference between their prejudices and scientific fact. Regardless of his motives due to the rampant misrepresentation of science and poor logic contained in his book, the God Delusion, I call Richard Dawkins an enemy of reason.