Optimism Makes Us More Adaptable, Says Carver

No, that's not me I quoted in the title. But Prevention magazine, in an article titled, 9 Traits Optimists Have In Common, quotes extensively from noted University of Miami psychologist Charles S. Carver, who says that optimists, compared to pessimists, tend to be:

• More resilient
• Less likely to quit
• Quicker to forgive
• Less stressed

and five other more or lesses than. Yay! (I tend to be pretty optimistic. Although I can’t vouch for the “sounder sleepers” item; I don’t sleep soundly at all. But I think a lot of the other traits quoted in the article fit.)

And now maybe I should read the linked article, 7 Reasons You're Tired All The Time. (I wonder if optimists are more tolerant of listicles. Hm. Nah.)

Charles S. Carver, by the way, is my big brother. Ironically, I think he’d probably call himself a pessimist, but that may just be my view as the younger sib.

Do the Funky Conch Hop

A conch is a kind of snail, right? And snails don’t jump; they ooze, right? Well, not always, it turns out. Here, from Science News, is a story about the motion of Gibberulus gibberulus gibbosus, aka hunchbacked conch.

To quote: “The sea snails save their jumping for conch emergencies, such as when they detect dissolved body odor from the deadly cone snail Conus marmoreus. Cone snails glide rather than jump. But if a cone snail gets close enough, it harpoons the conch with a long, venom-delivering proboscis that is as agile as an elephant’s trunk. Then it reels in the paralyzed conch like a fish on the line. Such threats favor epic jumping in spite of the conch circulatory system...” [more]

Watch this conch jump. (It’s small in the screen, so click in the lower right corner to maximize.)

Braided Clouds, from Space

This NASA image caught my eye on The Atlantic’s website. (Click the link if this embed code doesn't work. Ah, nope, it doesn't. Click the link.) Cloud vortices off Heard Island, south Indian Ocean, from NASA's Aqua satellite.

Cloud vortices off Heard Island, south Indian Ocean. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this true-color image of sea ice off Heard Island on Nov 2, 2015 at 5:02 AM EST (09:20 UTC). A cloud vortex- the circular pattern seen here- is produced by the flow of air in the atmosphere. Heard Island (visible in the lower right portion of the image) is located in the Indian Ocean, about two-thirds of the way from Madagascar to Antarctica. The island is uninhabited by humans, although it is home to many birds and seals. Heard Island is rugged and mountainous, and is mostly covered with ice. It is also home to an active volcano, Mawson Peak. The island has been a territory of Australia since 1947. Credit: NASA/Goddard/Jeff Schmaltz/MODIS Land Rapid Response Team #nasagoddard

A photo posted by NASA Goddard (@nasagoddard) on Nov 2, 2015 at 1:31pm PST

The Cat’s Still Alive (and Dead)! — Schrödinger Sessions

Not really Schrödinger's cat, but she is in a box.

I’ve just come back from an incredible weekend at the Schrödinger Sessions: Science for Science Fiction, at the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland, near Washington, D.C. The JQI staff hosted just over a dozen SF writers, and for several days stuffed our heads full of information about quantum physics. It was head-exploding. But in a good way!

Here are some of the things we learned from Chad Orzel, Steve Rolston, Chris Monroe, and others:

• How to become quantum (which only works if you are very small, much smaller even than I was when I was at my low weight).
• How (if you can master the first step) you can be in two places at one time—and also how to collapse that state so that you’re just in one.
• How to trap a single charged atom (ion) in a vacuum trap and cool it to just a whisker above Absolute Zero. (And we leaned over and didn’t touch! equipment that does just that.)
• How to quantum-entangle two or more particles in the above-mentioned apparatus. (Okay, I still don’t really understand how to do that.)
• How to make light disappear with two polarized filters, and reappear with the addition of a third. (I sort of understand that.)
• That sometimes the answer to the question “Why?” is “Just shut up and calculate.”
• That probability is not a definition of a thing, but a statement of our knowledge of a system.
• That probability is not a definition of knowledge after all, but of our ignorance about a system.
• That there are two rules of quantum mechanics:

1. Quantum objects are waves, and can be in states of superposition (more than one position at a time).
2. Rule #1 holds as long as you don’t look!

Professor James Gates (familiar from countless PBS documentaries) told us why he doesn’t buy the extra dimensions suggested by most string theorists.
Professor Raman Sundrum (of the Randall-Sundrum Model) told us why he does, and furthermore why it’s possible we’re living in a holographic universe.

I learned that quantum physicists say "I don't know" a lot.

There was tons more, presented by a bunch of professors. I hope I can remember it. Or most of it. Or some of it.

Part of it, in fact, plays right into what I’m trying to do in The Reefs of Time. So I really hope I can remember that part.

Maybe I’ll buy the book by Chad Orzel, one of the workshop leaders, How to Teach [Quantum] Physics to Your Dog.

Down in there is a glowing cluster of verra verra cold ytterbium atoms.

 

 

 

Space-X Explosion: Even the Students Feel the Pain

Julia Powell, age 15, is in high school. Her group’s science experiment was on its way to the International Space Station aboard the Space-X rocket when it was blown to smithereens by the failure of the Falcon 9 booster last Sunday.

That’s got to hurt.

What’s got to hurt even more is that it was the second time her experiment was blown up in a launch failure. Yes, she and fellow students had their first space-bound experiment aboard the Antares rocket that exploded on launch last October.

Those students are learning just how hard spaceflight can be. But God bless them, they’re not giving up. You go, girls and guys.

Riding a Comet!

The successful landing of Philae on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by the European Space Agency is a welcome bright spot in this month’s space news. Bright for science, and bright for the spirit of exploration. Well done, ESA!

As I type this, I don’t know if Philae has yet run out of battery power. In case you’ve been living in a mine this week, Philae dropped across space to a landing, but took a few unfortunate bounces and ended up resting on a precarious spot with too much shadow for its solar cells. I wish we could send it a light! I’d even contribute my Stanley car jumpstart battery, if it would help. Well, I’m sure Philae’s clever scientist-parents will make the most of it. And I can’t wait to find out what they learn. [Update: Apparently it has run out of battery power, after drilling into the comet, but before sending data back. Ow, that hurts. But there may be opportunity for it to recharge slowly, in the coming months, and maybe come back to life for a while. Let's hope.]

It’s amazing how little we knew about comets until we started visiting them in robotic person. We used to think they were basically dirty snowballs. Now we see that they’re much more like asteroids, but with some snow and ice to provide outgassing for the halo.

As I looked at the pictures of the comet, I found myself thinking of John Bandicut, fictional space pilot in my novel Neptune Crossing. John had to smack just such a comet really really hard, to keep it from hitting Earth. Looking at those pictures of a real comet, I reflected on how Bandie was one mongo brave dude to do such a thing. Even if he did have alien science working for him, and was half out of his mind with silence fugue. When I wrote the scene, I knew he was brave. But I don’t think I knew just how brave.

Thanks, Bandie, for riding that other comet!  (Even if you are fictional, and in the future.)

I like XKCD's view of the landing:

http://xkcd.com/1446/

Fusion Power from Skunk Works?

Ever since the 1950s, the promise of unlimited power from controlled nuclear fusion has been just around the corner—or, to be more precise, about fifty years in the future. It's still fifty years in the future, according to most experts.

Well, the people at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works (creators of the famed SR-71 Blackbird spy plane), say they're going to do it a lot faster. Here's a talk by Charles Chase, of the Skunk Works. You can skip the first half of it, if you know more or less what fusion research is all about.

http://www.dvice.com/2013-2-22/lockheeds-skunk-works-promises-fusion-power-four-years

A lot was left unsaid, obviously, such as how close they have come to break-even—i.e., more energy coming out of the system from fusion reactions than is being put in. I'm skeptical of the claim, myself, but I would love to be proven wrong. For one thing, the application to space travel could be fantastic.

I guess we'll wait and see. Usually the Skunk Works doesn't advertise what they're up to. Why is this different?

Heaven and Science

My friend Rich Bowker posted an interesting examination of a Newsweek cover story entitled... well, let me quote Rich:

So Newsweek has a cover story called Proof of Heaven: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife. It’s a pretty standard near-death experience story, with a couple of twists: it’s told by a neurosurgeon, and it took place during a coma during which his brain supposedly wasn’t functioning:

There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.

--read Rich's whole post--

Rich goes on to cite a rebuttal in Huffington Post by physicist and vocal atheist Victor Stenger.

Because I cannot leave well enough alone, I decided to chime in. And here's the comment I left on Rich's blog:

After reading both the Newsweek article and the Stenger "rebuttal" of it, I'd have to say I find both pieces of writing wanting for rigor. Dr. Alexander's piece is interesting and provocative, but, to be sure, not "proof" of anything except that he had an extraordinary personal experience. Was his experience a glimpse of an objectively real extra-dimensional existence? It seemed so to him. You call it "pretty standard-issue stuff for near-death experience (NDE) stories," which it is. But you can't discount the possibility that the reason it's standard issue is because many people have glimpsed the same otherworldly view, and it's actually real. (It could also be because that's the sort of image that the brain circuitry produces under certain stressful conditions.)

Bottom line, I don't know any way the rest of us can know if it was real or not, nor is it clear to me how--even theoretically--one could scientifically study his particular case, unless there turned out to be EEG recordings or something that could shed light, perhaps by recording a burst of brain activity at some crucial point. Even that wouldn't really prove anything. So we're left with the evidence of his subjective experience, which I would say is not without value, but also not a smoking gun. One wishes he had asked those questions about alternative explanations. Maybe he does, in his book.

So Stenger asked the questions for him. And if you wonder if Stenger has a dog in this race*, it's instructive to look at the titles of some of his books: God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist and God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion -- neither of which fills me with confidence about his objectivity on the question. He dismisses Alexander's account as "the classic argument from ignorance," and goes on about the "God of the gaps" view, but I don't think that's a fair characterization of Alexander's account at all. In fact, I don't find Stenger's argument at all more objective than Alexander's. Stenger has a clear axe to grind, and Newsweek and Alexander give him an easy target by claiming "proof of Heaven" when what Alexander has is powerful experiential evidence (powerful to him) that cannot easily be tested.

You're right; it's not proof of Heaven--any more than science shows that God does not exist. Both claims go way beyond the bounds of science.

What to do? Maybe SF has something interesting to say on the subject. Oh wait--it does. Connie Willis's novel Passage.

*I seem to recall that Stenger was one of the authors I complained about in my own critique of the New Scientist's "God Issue" last Spring. I complained because he presented very little science, but did so in a most authoritative voice. And I have to say, the more I read and think on the subject, the more convinced I become that the scientists who speak most authoritatively on questions of philosophy and theology seem to be the ones who fail to recognize when they've stepped out of bounds of science.

Curiosity Descent Caught on Camera by Mars Orbiter

I can never seem to catch our animals, or for that matter, my family members, on camera when they're in the act of doing something interesting. I always get something blurred, or dull, a few moments later. But NASA does a better job. The Mars Orbiter, with split-second timing, caught this photo of Curiosity on its way down to the planet's surface.

The inset is a close-up of the landing craft hanging from the huge, supersonic parachute that helped slow Curiosity to a safe landing speed. If this doesn't win an award for best action photography, I don't know what will.

  Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

Details here and here.

Mars Landing in an Hour and a Half!

I'm in my office, working. But Curiosity lands on Mars at about 1:30 a.m. Eastern time, and I don't intend to miss it. It doesn't seem that it's going to be carried on any of the two thousand channels Comcast offers, so I have NASA TV set up via several different URLS, in different browser windows.

In Firefox, I've got a feed paused at http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/mars/curiosity_news3.html and another at http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/nasatv/

In Chrome, I've got http://www.ustream.tv/nasa set up. At least one of them ought to work!

Just to get in the mood, I rewatched the Seven Minutes of Terror. 

Sally Ride, 1951 – 2012

America's first woman astronaut died Monday at the age of 61, of pancreatic cancer. Sally Ride was an inspiration to millions, and not just girls and women. I remember what a triumph it felt to me, back in 1983, when she rode Challenger into space, ending once and for all the perception that American space travel was solely the domain of men. Nowadays, women fly missions all the time, and sometimes command them. It's easy to forget that as recently as the early 1980's, women were simply not part of the NASA equation. The Soviet Union had sent a woman, Valentina Tereshkova, into space twenty years earlier, but that had not signaled a general welcome of women into the Soviet space program. In the case of Sally Ride, it really was the shattering of a glass ceiling. After the loss of Challenger in 1986, Dr. Ride was named to the presidential commission that investigated the cause of the tragedy. She later went on to found Sally Ride Science, an organization devoted to supporting girls’ and boys’ interests in science, math and technology.

Here was a woman who made a difference. It's sad to see her passing. Godspeed, Sally Ride.

Watch Curiosity Land on Mars in Realie Vision!

NASA's latest wonder-probe to Mars, Curiosity, is scheduled to land on Mars at 10:31 p.m. EDT, on the night of August 5th. Be there, and don't even think about being square. NASA has worked out a way for folks online to experience the event using some kind of 3D software on their computers, and even on their Xbox game sets. Who says NASA doesn't have a sense of wonder? Go here to see all the different activities they've worked out for folks to do in connection with the Mars landing, or here to get set up with the Unity Web Player to experience the landing to full effect. They're encouraging people to start getting set up now, so everyone isn't crashing the servers getting set up on the night of the 5th. Go here if you want to learn more about the mission.

Just how exciting could this landing be? After all, we've landed on Mars before. But not like this. Take a look at this video to see just how difficult this feat really is. If this doesn't get you pumped, better check to see if you still have pulse. Pop it up to full screen if you can.



If you have trouble viewing it on this page, go to the source.

Relativistic Baseball

While we're on the subject of baseball (and that is not a subject you'll very often find me talking about--no offense, Red Sox), I have to mention this XKCD page: Relativistic Baseball. 

Have you considered what the effects might be if a pitcher could throw a baseball toward the plate at just under the speed of light? No? Why ever not? Well, the creator of XKCD has, and you owe it to yourself to read his eye-opening and funny analysis. Suffice to say, the effects on the surrounding habitable zone are not pretty. There is surely an SF story in this somewhere.

What Is Reality?

My vision is all foggy right now, from having my pupils dilated by the eye doc.* That makes it hard to do any real work, so I decided to use the first hour of my enforced leisure to... well, leiszh, as Julia put it. I checked the DVR and saw that it had recorded the first episode of a new science show called Stephen Hawking's Grand Design. This episode was about the meaning of life. (Which we all know is 42, but never mind that.)
*That's no longer true, but it was true when I started writing this.

Now, my admiration for Stephen Hawking as a physicist and science communicator knows few bounds, and I was as geek-happy as anyone when he made his appearance in Star Trek: the Next Generation. But I wonder if he oversteps his area of wisdom when he speaks as a philosopher. In fact, in the opening to the show, he makes the statement, "Philosophy is dead." Because physics killed it. Because everything in the universe is defined by physics, so (he implies) the soft disciplines need not apply. Strong statement. Does he support it? He tries. His approach is unabashedly reductionist. 

The show went on with a moderately interesting overview of all of the ways physics rules. Lots of pretty graphics, and nothing you don't already know. I started to feel that I was listening to Sheldon Cooper of Big Bang Theory discourse on the supremacy of theoretical physics. Having established that physics rules over everything from quarks to the cosmos, Hawking proceeds to ask whether free will really exists. How can it? he asks, when our impulses and actions are governed by physics, when our actions and even our feelings can be influenced by electrodes in our brains, giving only the illusion of our own control. Ah, but what about chaos and unpredictability? Does that allow free will, or at least explain our perception of it? I don't think he gave us a yes or no—or if he did, it was while I was in the kitchen getting a slice of pizza.

I kept waiting for him to bring quantum uncertainty into the question, but that never came up. That surprised me, because from a mechanistic, physical point of view, quantum uncertainty seems to be an elephant in the room in any discussion of free will. If we're all just a collection of particles behaving according to physics, what does it mean if we fundamentally cannot predict or even measure completely the behavior of an individual particle? Perhaps a topic for another time, but it felt like an odd omission to me. Still, that wasn't my problem so much as his assertion that particles and firing neurons are the sole explanation of consciousness and mind. Do I object to it as a hypothesis? No. But is it fact, scientifically provable fact? Of course not. We're far from being able to prove such a thing. I doubt we ever will. In fact, I don't even think it's true. (That's a personal opinion, not a scientific assertion.) 

Hawking avoids any discussion of God or spiritual dimension, though it's easy to infer that he simply regards these matters as outside the bounds of reality. He does talk, though, about differing subjective views of reality. He offers the charming example of a fish peering out through a distorting fishbowl (or a guy peering through foggy vision?). He goes on to say that it's entirely possible that we're all just code running inside a gigantic, cosmic computer. How would we know? (But wait—wouldn't that, if true, render moot all of the previous discussion of physics controlling everything?)

It comes down in the end, he says, to finding the "best fit" among models of reality. What model "best fits" the evidence? Fair enough. But it seems to me that that's where his physics and his philosophy get tangled up. His best fit seems to include "scientific" assertions that really haven't been proven by science, and probably can't be. I'm thinking, maybe Hawking should stick to the physics he does so well, but not claim for it powers beyond its reach.

"We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality." —Albert Einstein

Venus Video Montage

Mars shouldn't get all the glory. I used to travel to both planets regularly in my head, via the great stories I read. One of my favorites, when I was about twelve, was the Tom Corbett Space Cadet book, Revolt on Venus.

Venus just made the last transit across the face of the sun that will be visible from Earth this century. Here's a lovely montage of video images in various wavelengths taken and edited together by NASA. Who says NASA has no poetry in its soul? You can make it full screen for best effect.

View on youtube

And just for fun, here's a time-lapse shot from the last transit, in 2004, showing the International Space Station and Venus making a transit across the face of the sun, almost as if in formation.

by Tomas Maruska

We're Doomed!

Scientists have confirmed: the Andromeda galaxy (M31) is on a collision course with our own Milky Way galaxy. When the centers of the two galaxies collide, or even shear past each other if it's a near-miss, there's going to be an awful lot of cosmic smacking around happening. Eventually the two galaxies will probably merge, turning two beautiful spirals into a huge elliptical blob. It's hard to say what will happen in our corner of the action, about two-thirds of the way out from our galactic center. It's possible that it'll just be a mind-blowing light show. But I'm not counting on it.

This could happen in the next four billion years. We've still got time to pack. But we're fools if we don't get working on that star drive right now.

Here's an artist's conception of what it might look like, mid-tango. See it bigger at Astronomy Picture of the Day. And see what the stages of the collision might look like here, where you can also read more about it.

APOD

Seems to me there should be a good science fiction story in this. Probably more than one.

Mind Control

Mind over machine. Science fiction has predicted for decades that one day we would be able to control things by hooking our brains up to computers that would just make it all happen. And now it has happened: a paralyzed woman has used her mind to control a robot arm and make it bring a coffee cup to her lips to drink. This is not just cool; it is a promise of incalculable benefit to severely handicapped people everywhere, hopefully in the not-too-distant future.

The work was developed by scientists at Brown University, the Providence VA Medical Center, Harvard Medical School and other institutions. The AP story gives more information.

NASA Cuts: What Is Obama Thinking?

Congress is right now considering future budgets for the funding of our space program, and it's got me extremely worried. The Obama administration has proposed deep cuts, especially for planetary sciences. This is crazy, stupid, and short-sighted, and I call upon Congress to turn this thing around—please! Let's continue funding our world-class space program, especially for space and planetary sciences, which since the Apollo days have been the capstone of American scientific exploration. The U.S. has already pulled out of one important international planetary mission, based just on the proposed budget. It would be a travesty to cancel other cutting-edge space missions.

It's practically a given most of the American public thinks we spend a lot more on the space program than we actually do. In fact, NASA's budget has always been a drop in the bucket compared to the Defense Department's. Even at the height of the relatively extravagant days of the Apollo Moon landing program, the space program only accounted for a few percent of the federal budget. Since then it's been sharply cut back. And now they want to cut it back even further. This despite the fact that every dollar spent on space helps to stimulate the economy, maintain our leadership in science and technology, inspire young scientists and engineers—and that's in addition to advancing our knowledge of the universe, and laying the groundwork for a future spacefaring civilization.

The Obama budget would put the brakes on all of this. And when you put the brakes on a programs like this, you don't just slow things down, you cause enormous disruption to long-range endeavors and put highly trained people out of work, people whom you might not be able to get back a few years down the road. I'm an Obama supporter, but this may be his administration's single most misguided action.

To voice your support of space exploration, contact your Congress critter. One way you can do that is by signing on with the message from the Planetary Society, which you can dispatch to your representatives here.

Cameron Dives the Mariana Trench!

Filmmaker James Cameron (Avatar, The Abyss) has become the third human in history to travel seven miles down into the deepest part of the ocean—the Challenger Deep, in the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench. He's the first to do it alone, as leader of the Deepsea Challenge mission.


I was eleven when the Trieste made the first, two-man, dive in 1960. I've often wondered why nobody ever went back (just as I've wondered why we haven't returned to the Moon). Well, now this team has done it, and it's the first of a planned series of dives. Whereas the Trieste got just twenty minutes of bottom time and never returned, Cameron and the submersible Deepsea Challenger spent a couple of hours there, gathering samples and shooting 3D video. Here's the first of many video clips about the National Geographic sponsored mission:

View on mission website

When I blogged, just days ago, about two separate planned expeditions, I had no idea that Cameron's dive was imminent. And I almost missed it when it happened. The story was buried in the Boston Globe, and it's too early for it to be in any of my science mags. In my previous forays to the Deepsea Challenge site, I'd failed to notice the prominent box where you can sign up for email updates. I've fixed that. But I can't help wondering: Why aren't stories like this front-page news? If I were running the world, they would be! Because, by God, this is exciting stuff. What a time to be alive!

New Scientist and God

New Scientist is my favorite magazine, where science is concerned. They cover lots of cool science, and even have a science fictional streak I admire. But when they venture into questions of God, faith, and religion, they invariably leave me frustrated and disillusioned. The editors approach such questions with such programmatic atheism that any hope for fruitful and open discussion quickly dies. So it was with a certain reluctance that I opened the latest issue: The God Issue: The Surprising New Science of Religion.

Was I greeted by surprising new science? Not really. Did it live up to the promises on the cover? (The idea that launched a thousand civilizations / God's existence put to the test) Not even close.

The bias was pretty upfront, starting with the headline on the opening editorial:

Know your enemy

The new science of religion tells us where secularists are going wrong

They don't mean where secularists are going wrong in their evaluation of religious belief, but where they're going wrong in their efforts to eradicate it. "Religious claims still wither under rational scrutiny and deserve no special place in public life. But it is a call for those who aspire to a secular society to approach it rationally — which means making more effort to understand what they are dealing with." In other words, know your enemy. And in the opening page to the features section: "Only by understanding what religion is and is not can we ever hope to move on." By move on, they seem to mean, discard religion for a more enlightened way of thinking.

So we know where they stand.

But what about the articles? They're a mixed bag. The first, by Justin L. Barrett, is a pretty interesting discussion of how babies and young children learn and develop mental models of "agents" that influence things in the world. There seems to be a built-in predilection for attributing events they see to an "agency," or a higher power. The thesis here is well summarized by the closing lines: "[Children] have strong natural tendencies toward religion, but these tendencies do not inevitably propel them towards any one religious belief. Instead, the way our minds solve problems generates a god-shaped conceptual space waiting to be filled by the details of the culture into which they are born." Not a bad article.

It's followed by several others, including one that discusses how religions may have helped create social structures that brought us out of the Stone Age. I'm not sure I learned much from it, but it wasn't a bad article, either. The collection hits its low point, however, with "The God Hypothesis," by Victor J. Stenger, which proposes to discuss the existence or nonexistence of God by reference to empirical evidence. No empirical evidence is offered, however.  What we get instead is a warmed-over collection of statements that this or that aspect of theology has been tested and found wanting. A feel-good piece for atheists: no actual information, no details about what studies have been done or how they were designed. Finally, there's a discussion of the position of Alain de Botton that atheists ought to seek out and adopt the "useful bits" of religion, such as ritual gatherings for the purpose of community building. Fine by me, but not exactly news. Haven't the Unitarians been doing this for quite a while now?

Personally, I'm agnostic on the question of whether God's existence can be proven or disproven by science, or by logic. Most people I know who believe in God do so because of personal experience, personal encounters that have little to do with abstract logical constructions. (Or in my own case, the logical questioning had to bring me to the point of saying, "Okay, this is possible." And then the experiential part began.) When you've had that kind of experience, the question of "proof" starts to seem tedious and irrelevant. But that doesn't mean I think science should stop looking. 

I think the real problem with this particular publication is that the editors, who so excel in other areas of science journalism, are blind to their own biases about the relationship between science and religion. They keep writing as though they've got the whole thing covered, yet seem clueless about what the actual religious experience is. If they could let go—just for once—of the notion that religion is their enemy, perhaps they could genuinely explore questions such as the role faith plays (or does not play) in mental health, or healing, or personal development, or community building, or intellectual inquiry. I'd even be happy if they could, without demonizing, examine why some religious movements (such as certain conservative Christian streams in the U.S.) so resolutely obstruct the input of science in public policy. I agree this is happening, and it's bad; I disagree with the assumption that religious belief per se is the problem. They might even spend some time talking to scientists who are also people of faith, and see what we can learn about how some pretty rational people integrate those two modes of thought.

Maybe these questions don't belong primarily in a science magazine, though I don't see why not. But I do wish the editors of New Scientist would recognize that what they're putting in the mag now isn't so much science as dogma pretending at science.

Maybe the true enemy isn't religion, but intellectual prejudice.