They have a very interesting second to last section on anthropological climate change, and some interesting ideas on ways to combat it (as opposed to the “let’s just revert to medieval times” ala Kyoto). So I had a look around for more information on the topic. Which brought me to read a post on climateprogress.org, an “authority” blog written by Joe Romm which is essentially pro Kyoto.

Disagreeing is a good thing. We shouldn’t take things at face value, and most certainly shouldn’t simply believe things simply because they are in the press or published on the Internet.

My issue is, if Joe is right, and has the science to back himself up, why does he need to resort to schoolground name calling. I started reading his posts hoping to get an alternative view, but all I saw was what looked like to demented rantings of a spoilt child. Super Freakonomics says some bad things about (for instance) Al Gore, but at no point do they stoop to calling him an idiot, or making up derisory nicknames for him. Bjorn Lomborg didn’t do that in “Cool It” either. They didn’t need to – why does Joe I wonder.

Yet again, a pro Kyoto voice that simply is not willing to listen to any alternative. THAT’s why for some people (I’m one of them) the anti carbon movement is more a religion than a science. A shame, because I’m willing to listen to rational arguments. I’m not listening to someone who tells me this is how it is “you just need to trust me”. Asking me to trust you is telling me you have a secret, ulterior agenda.

Trust is for religion. Proof is for science.

If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s no-one there to see it, does it fall at all?

Quantum mechanics tells us that in fact it falls, and it doesn’t fall. Both states exist as possibilities until someone comes walking through the forest to look at the tree. As soon as they observe the tree, the wave function collapses and the tree decides whether or not it fell yesterday, last week or last year. If it turns out it did fall, it rushes back in time, and falls. The observer just sees a tree that fell at some time in the past.

If you think that’s confusing, just check out quantum tunneling!

To begin with, you have to accept what Albert Einsteins theory of relativity tells us. The universe is not a three dimensional object (like the Earth) but a four dimensional object (the fourth dimension being time). There are theoretical physicysts who tell us there are in fact even more than four dimensions, but that’s not important here. The problem with a four dimensional universe is that it’s not something you can visualize in your head – your (and my) understanding of the world we live is is that it is three dimensional. The Earth is a big sphere. It’s finite and unbounded because we know how big it is, but we also know we can walk around it in a straight line and never get to the end (unbounded).

To make this even simpler to think about, we can go down to just two dimensions – a clock face. As the minute hand travels around we can start at 12 o-clock, and move through each of the twelve hours on the face until we get back to twelve o-clock again. But there is nothing stopping us at that point – the hand can continue to go around and we can start to see that the twelve o-clock position is not only twelve, it is also zero at the same time. Not only that, we can start the clock from any position we like, and that position will become the zero position after a complete revolution. the twelve o-clock position has no real significance per se.

My universe is the same as the clock face. You can start from anywhere you like, travel away from that point and eventually you’ll simply come back to where you were. You’ll never come against and edge or boundary, you’ll just end up back where you started. What with the universe being a four dimensional object, you’ll also not even be aware that you have come “full circle” because you won’t in fact have travelled in a circle – you’ll have followed a “straight line” through space and time to all intents and purposes.

So there you go – just because it doesn’t have and edge, this is not a reason to believe the universe to be infinte. By the same token, just because we don’t know what it is, it is not reasonable to assume there is no “biggest number”. Just like the clock face, the biggest number exists, and in a rather neat way to describe it, it also just happens to be zero (think back to 12 o-clock – it’s the Alpha, and the Omega all at the same time). I like this idea – it has beautiful symmetry.