A few days ago, I was pressure washing my deck. Very interesting, I know, but wait before you leave, I understood something cool thanks to this mundane activity…

Pressure washing, essentially, consists in violently bouncing a water jet against dirt, transferring it momentum and pushing it away. You don’t want to be in the trajectory, because it's no fun being hit by a fast-moving mix of cold water and dirt. Usually, that's not going to happen to the person doing the washing, because the jet is directed away from them, and even when it bounces off the object being cleaned, it's still moving away.

So it's always a surprise when you get to a corner and end up covered in disgusting stuff from head to toe. The reason this is happening is because a corner has very interesting properties.

Spoiler Alert: this post contains huge spoilers about the end of the TV show Devs.

Devs, starring Sonoya Mizuno, Nick Offerman, Alison Pill and other wonderful actors, is an amazing and aesthetically impeccable story that relies heavily on modern interpretations of quantum mechanics. You don't need to understand QM to enjoy the show, it's already fantastic even if you don't, but man does it have layers... An understanding of quantum mechanics certainly enhances the experience and allows you to understand the story in a much deeper fashion. I'll attempt to be your guide in this incredible journey.

The multiverse hypothesis is that what we used to see as the Universe (which is supposed to be all that there is) may be part of something larger, that includes other universes like, or unlike our own. This is not a hypothesis that was proposed to conveniently solve the Anthropic paradox (we don’t know why the Universe can support life at all whereas it could be a lot more hostile and sterile than it already is, as far as we can tell). It does solve that problem, but wasn’t proposed for that reason. It emerges, actually, in four different forms, as a necessary consequence of scientific theories for which we have very good evidence. Some levels of multiverse are more controversial than others, of course, but in this post, I want to bring forward another argument in favor of multiverses, based on symmetry.

Correlation is not causation. How many times have we heard that sentence? Too many times maybe, because we seem to be mithridatized by it. Nowadays, it seems like it’s nothing more than an easy way to discard inconvenient facts. It is true that correlation is not causation, but what does that mean?

In yesterday’s post, I explained how during my whole time as a physics student, I’ve never seen an example of a religious claim, positive or negative, creeping into the science teaching. It’s not that physical science is inconsequential to religious claims, it’s not. However, religion is off-topic in a science class, and there is only a conflict if someone brings religion into the classroom.

Here’s a great example of projection: many members of the religious right in the US are convinced that non-religious universities are indoctrination centers for the far left and atheism. Case in point, my fellow blogger Ambrose writes:

The reason that higher education in the sciences and philosophy purportedly reduces religious belief has as much to do with contemporary popular antitheistic indoctrination in those fields as any supposed increase in knowledge, much less baseline intelligence.

Here’s a good case study of how scientific information gets distorted. This article has sources, which is a little unusual (but they are not links, probably to discourage you from checking them out for yourself), but look at how they're used...

In my ongoing series of posts addressing the arguments from Michael, a militant Catholic, today’s post will examine the claim that the Bible’s cosmogony is unique among creation myths in that it talks about creation ex-nihilo. In Michael’s words:

Every culture known believed that the Earth, stars, indeed the entire universe has been present in all eternity. Creation stories abounded, but all the stories began with matter that preexisted

It’s quite amazing how often the Kalām Cosmological Argument, or some version of it, is still used by believers to justify their faith. It seems like a naive understanding of modern cosmology, coupled with confirmation bias, conspire to keep this tired argument on life support. In this series of posts, my intention is to explain some of the ways in which KCA is a terrible argument, one problem at a time. In this first post, I’ll focus on whether it’s reasonable to apply inductive reasoning to the universe.

Sometimes we ask the wrong questions, and answer them with bad answers. One particularly bad question is: “what was there before the Big-Bang?” There are many others, but this one requires a little mental gymnastics in order to get used to modern ideas of time and understand what the consequences are.