What Is Reality: Reviewing The Grand Design, IIIAfter the general patterns established last chapter, I was surprised to see a change of pace in Chapter 3. One might get the impression that scientists drawing a dichotomy between natural and supernatural explanations are headed inexorably towards a declaration of scientism and a denigration of religion. That wasn’t the case here, well… at least not as explicitly as in some other books of similar nature. Of course, we’ve still got five chapters to go.
The Rule Of Law: Reviewing The Grand Design, IIChapter 2 of The Grand Design is titled The Rule of Law, and the authors give us a brief history of the concept of natural laws. If nothing else, it was an excellent vacation from what would have been an mundane bus ride otherwise. It was a good chapter, with a little bit of everybody: Aristarchus, Ptolemy, Aristotle, Galileo, Epicurus, Pythagoras, Democritus, Kepler, Newton, Descartes… even Thomas Aquinas and William Dembski get a brief mention [okay, I’m kidding about Dembski, and that’s no offense to him]. The authors gave a valiant effort at summarizing the history of natural law in a few pages, and they do a mighty fine job if you ask me.
On So-Called “Vacuum” FluctuationI'm going to put off further development of the CCH's competitor in favor of this short post about so-called "vacuum" fluctuation.
Furthermore, the uncertainty principle implies that a particle can never be at rest, but is subject to constant fluctuations even when no measurement is taking place, and these fluctuations are assumed to have no causes at all. In other words, the quantum world is believed to be characterized by absolute indeterminism, intrinsic ambiguity, and irreducible lawlessness.
–David Pratt, Consciousness, Causality, and Quantum Physics
In recent attempts to mitigate the apparent necessity of the Unmoved Mover, D has posited creation ex nihilo as a viable alternative:
Reader Poll: The Optics Of RainbowsToday's post is just a quick one for the physics and optics students out there, who are welcomed to freely speculate. Actually, everyone is freely welcomed to speculate! Also, I'd really appreciate any links to people, websites or books that can provide useful information, so if anything comes to mind, by all means share!
I'm trying to get some kind of consensus on a recurring question I've got. We perceive rainbows because of a neat little process called chromatic dispersion by which white light refracts through water droplets in the atmosphere. The white light actually refracts twice: once upon entrance which separates the light into its constituent colors, and again upon exit which amplifies this separation. When a terrestrial observer sees a rainbow in Earth's atmosphere, what they're really seeing is the separation of incoming white sunlight into the familiar colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.
My question is: if Earth were enveloped by a "shell" of solid water, would this affect the rainbow-creating process? Would terrestrial observers on Earth still be able to see rainbows?