Geek Ramblings

One new thing which has struck me about Lent this year is that it is a time to seek a new vision, a direction to go for the future.

Jesus, having been affirmed by God - "You are my Son, whom I love, with you I am well pleased" - goes out into the wilderness to discover how to live out that affirmation. Likewise we, being reminded in the run-up to Easter just how much God loves us, have the opportunity in Lent to take time out to seek our response, our direction for the rest of the year, maybe longer.

This blog has changed a lot over the years. It seems to me that it has recently been tending toward geekiness, and that this is the trend to continue.

By 'geekiness' I mostly mean: enthusiasm, knowledge, enough understanding to realise that there is far more I don't know than I do, and an attitude that considers this to be wonderful news - there is always going to be more to learn!

I am a Bible geek, and I have written a lot about that. I am also a science geek: there's been a lot less about that recently; I think I should enthuse about science more in future. Also I am a computer geek: I do write a bit about that already, so I'll just see what comes up in that area.

I also love reading or hearing other geeks (by the above definition) enthuse. Not specifically in 'my' subjects, but whatever their area of expertise and geekiness may be. Enthusiasm can and should be infectious. I have rather lost track of other blogging geeks over the years; this coming year is a good time to invest some (scarce) time and (scarcer) energy in finding some more. Any suggestions in the comments below would be greatly appreciated.

What have you discovered over this Lenten period? About yourself or about this world? Are you an enthusiast? If so, what can you do with that enthusiasm? Do share below, start a conversation, "it's good to talk".

Three Person IVF

Channel 4 News did a piece on this last night, ahead of today's vote in the House of Commons on the issue. They had two spokeswomen for the new procedure and one against. The one against came over badly, although I think the edge to her voice was mostly down to nerves - the other two seemed much more practised speakers.

The issue is about preventing some very nasty diseases caused by faulty mitochondria - tiny organelles in the cell which are mostly responsible for generating the cell's energy. They are not a part of the cell nucleus, so they are not affected by the normal mixing of genes in sexual reproduction, although each does have its own small parcel of DNA. Instead they are passed directly from a mother to all her children. When mitochondria go wrong this can lead to whole families having some horrible diseases.

One thing that I don't like about media presentations of the issue is that they are less than clear about the procedures involved. The proposed amendments basically allow two different sorts of intervention in the IVF process: 'egg repair' (shown above) and 'embryo repair'. The former takes a donor egg, removes the nucleus and replaces it with the nucleus from the mother's egg. The resulting egg is then fertilised with the father's sperm.

'Embryo repair' is superficially very similar: essentially you do the same thing but with two embryos rather than two eggs. Media presentations, including Channel 4's last night, show 'egg repair' and don't mention the embryo option. The BBC - to its credit - did show both options, near the bottom of its online piece. Other reports I have seen get it completely wrong and talk about moving the healthy mitochondria into the mother's egg to replace the damaged ones; this is not what is proposed.

So what's the problem? Surely preventing horrible diseases is good. Isn't this really just another step on from standard IVF?

The issue with 'embryo repair' is straightforward, I think. It is not really repairing an embryo, so much as creating one embryo solely to be used as a carrier for another embryo's genetic material. Essentially creating embryos for use as spare parts. That is a big ethical jump, one that I find both obnoxious in itself, and scary in the options it opens up: why not remove an embryo's brain and grow it to full term as a source of replacement liver and kidneys for a rich old man, for instance? Also there are major safety concerns with what is essentially cloning technology.

'Egg repair' - again you're not actually repairing anything, more transferring a nucleus into a fresh egg - is trickier. One big objection being made is that it may not be safe. IVF itself turns out to have odd side effects which are only recently being successfully addressed, and that is a far less drastic operation.

The weakness in that argument is that having a child the 'natural' way is pretty much guaranteed to be unsafe, to pass on the mitochondrial disease. Although it is very likely that there would be unexpected side effects in the early years of such a procedure, the probability of them being worse than the original disease is low, I suspect.

The main British church groupings have spoken out against the procedure: Roman Catholics here; the Church of England official statement is here. There was recently a warning about interactions between mitochondrial and nucrlear DNA in New Scientist here; although in general British scientists seem decidedly gung-ho about leading the world in this area.

An issue briefly raised in Channel 4's piece is that this would, at best, only prevent mitochondrial disease in children conceived in this way, it is not a cure for existing sufferers. You could get the same effect if those who know they have faulty mitochondria simply did not have children. The response highlighted that this really is the old issue around IVF of 'a woman's right to have children' if she wishes.

Personally, I hope that MPs reject the 'embryo repair' option today. But on the general principle of 'three-parent' babies, I think we live in a complex time for families, and it would be better for individual Christians and local churches to focus on the point that people matter to God. All sorts of people: people with families and people without; people with genetic impairments and those without; people conceived with and without scientific help. Each and every individual person matters deeply to God; hopefully they also matter to us.

Darwin's Fish

At heart I am a scientist, by inclination and by training. I think science is wonderful – literally full of wonder: look at snowflakes, or rainbows, or the Milky Way, or Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, or wave-particle duality. It’s an amazing world we live in, yet science remains earthed by its insistence that anything real must have a perceptible impact on the world.

And I am a Christian, by conviction, conversion, commitment – a follower of Jesus and a believer in God. I reckon God is wonderful: look at snowflakes, rainbows, the Milky Way, or at the Christmas story, or the idea of the Trinity. God is amazing, yet faith in Him is earthed in that real faith always makes a positive difference in the world.

The old story is doing the rounds again that science contradicts faith, or disproves it somehow. It’s nonsense: there are plenty of us around, scientist believers, and for us, far from science and faith being contradictory, they complement one another. A purely material scientific view of the world can be fascinating but it’s incomplete, flat. Likewise a purely religious view can also be fascinating, but incomplete and flat. It’s when you bring the two together that you get a rounded, living picture of the amazing world we live in.

To take it further: I believe in the truth of the Bible, and I believe in the truth of Darwinian evolution. One helps us understand the other. One is a message from God, the other God’s handiwork: of course they go together – God’s words and God’s actions, both important, one shining a light on the other.

I do like the top picture above, showing an engineer 'fish' tinkering with its own evolution. That essentially is how evolution works, and it is marvellous. Whether you think that's just the way the universe is, or whether you think it's the way an amazingly creative God made it, it is still wonderful. I guess the main difference is whether it is personal - and whether it is purposeful - or not.

But I also like the rainbow 'Darwin fish' further down. I don't believe in a black and white world, not even with added shades of grey. To me this is a world filled with colour: I step out in Caversham and I see an infinite number of shades of green, not to mention all the other colours of the rainbow. It's not just a wonderful world, it's an incredibly diverse and beautiful world, for all its problems.

I hope that every one of you can see and feel the wonder and beauty of our world: believer in a creator God, or not; scientist, or not. May the grace and beauty of it all be a blessing to you wherever you go and whatever you do throughout the week.

Proving God

How can you prove that God exists? As someone who trained as a scientist and works as an engineer, I'd say the easiest way to prove something is to see the difference between when it is supposedly present and when it is absent. Except that the classical Christian understanding of God is that he is not just the creator of the universe, but its sustainer too: the one who keeps everything going. So if God stopped doing what he does, then the universe would end. As tests go that's a bit drastic, especially since we wouldn't be around to see the result.

So one could say that the primary evidence for God's existence is a universe that exists and functions in an orderly and comprehensible way. But that is also the prerequisite (presumably) for the existence of intelligent creatures who can look at their universe, describe it mathematically,  and wonder about the existence of God. An orderly universe is barely perceived; in many ways it is just background. Telling the difference between a universe created by God and one which just happens to exist and to be friendly to sentient life is tricky.

Maybe we need a bit more information about God, so we can deduce whether the universe reflects his/her/its supposed characteristics. At first sight that should be easy, for the God described in the Christian Bible is one whose primary characteristic is love. If God is love - and light and life and all that sort of thing - then we would expect a universe, and a world, powered by love.

I trained as a physicist, and a physics view on the universe is filled with 'wow' factors: with wonder at the amazing variety and scale of creation; at the way that it manages to be both simple in overview and fascinatingly complex as we look deeper (it is so implausible that we should be able to describe an infinite universe with simple mathematical laws); and at the apparent 'fine-tuning' which means this world in this universe is incredibly well-suited to intelligent human beings, who can look at, wonder at, and measure all the amazing things around us.

However, I am also very interested in biology, in the natural living world. There the dominant driver is death ... death and reproduction specifically. The living world around us is filled with violence and with insidious and cruel parasites. The 'circle of life', of Lion King fame, is all about living things consuming other living things, around and around again. Yet ... there is also great beauty and great wonder in our natural world. It is not a simple, unambiguous place.

As for people: look at the news, and look at what is going on in your community. There are people doing wonderful, heroic, caring things; and there are people comitting appalling acts of selfishness, cruelty and ugliness.

The Bible explains the inconsistency by saying that God originally created the world to be "very good", but that - somehow - it all went wrong, and death came onto the scene.  It tells us that God has a plan to put it all right, through Jesus, and that in due course that plan will be fulfilled. In the meantime "creation groans", we are told, as it waits for "liberation from its bondage to decay", because God is "not wanting anyone to perish". So there is hope, with the Biblical God, that the world will be made right but, in the meantime, the evidence for a God of love remains as ambiguous as the world itself.

There are a number of philosophical arguments which claim to prove God's existence intellectually, you can find a good summary here. As an ex-atheist - indeed, as a 'grubby-fingered engineer' - I find them unconvincing. Others disagree, so they are worth a look.

Which brings us to personal experience. In my self-description above as an ex-atheist, the 'ex' bit is mainly because I had a powerful experience of God's presence. That is not scientific evidence for God's existence - it's not predictable, nor reproducible, nor even objectively measurable - but it is still evidence. Many other people have also experienced God's presence for themselves. Yet there are also many, amongst those who believe in God and who follow Jesus, for whom God's presence is a vague and uncertain thing: not everyone has had an intense experience; I suspect it is a majority who have not.

Yet for many who follow Jesus - or who believe in God in a less-defined way - there is still a definite feeling of something or someone who is with them, especially when life is at its hardest; someone or something who cares for them and is on their side; perhaps some source of hope that things will get better, that present troubles are not the last word, or, failing that, just a 'hand' to cling to when all else fails.

Perhaps the most convincing evidence, if looked at fairly, is the church, the community of Jesus' followers. Don't get me wrong, I am all too aware that there are terrible problems with organised religion, and fallible people get things wrong, and cruel and evil people use churches as a cover for their cruelty and evil. But behind all that, at a grass-roots level, there are large numbers of people giving their time, money and skills to help other people, often people who are neglected and considered worthless by the wider societies we live in.

Non-religious people care for others as well, of course, as do people of non-Christian faiths, but I would argue that the sheer numbers and dedication of people striving to help unrelated people in God's name is, in itself, a miracle and a sign that more is going on in this world than can be explained in material terms alone.

Wave Particle Duality For Beginners

I started off trying to do a post about determinism, and it's religious equivalent, predestination. But I soon found I was having to spend too many words trying to describe wave-particle duality and quantum uncertainty, so I'll try hiving that off into this post. So here we go, one of the deepest, most mysterious and least understood areas of modern physics, explained for the intelligent non-scientist in a little under 750 words! And a jolly nice picture of a t-shirt to boot.

So, what's wave-particle duality all about? Essentially it just says that things (more later about what 'things') sometimes act like a waves - spreading out, reflecting, refracting, diffracting, interfering with other waves, that sort of thing - and sometimes act like particles, travelling in straight, narrow lines, bouncing off one another, and so on, rather like billiard balls (or pool balls).

Victorian-era scientists 'knew' that light was a wave and that atoms and electrons were particles. They also 'knew' that the job of scientists was pretty much over, as all scientific principles had been discovered ... this was before electronics, before the nuclear atom, before relativity, before television. It's amazing what people 'know' sometimes. Around about a century ago several (mostly young) scientists spoilt the party by discovering that the world is a lot stranger than anyone had realised.

A guy called Max Planck threw the first spanner in the works by showing that when a body (such as the filament of a light bulb) emits light, it does so in discrete lumps, known as photons, whose energy depends only on the frequency of the light. Then Albert Einstein showed that when light was absorbed by metal, kicking out an electron in the photoelectric effect, it was also absorbed in photons. Essentially light is created as particles, travels in waves, and is absorbed as particles again. This was revolutionary and took a long time to be accepted. Nevertheless, when the experiments were carried out that is what they showed: light behaves as waves in some circumstances but as particles in others.

Particles rule okay? Well, no, not really. A few years later, Neils Bohr - who didn't actually believe in photons - showed that electrons in an atom orbit around a dense, positively charged, central nucleus, but they can only do so in certain discreet orbits. So the electron can't zoom around any old where. Years later Louis de Broglie showed that these allowed orbits could be explained if the electrons behaved like waves which were only stable if their orbit was a whole number of wavelengths. I.e. at the end of one orbit around the nucleus the wave function was exactly back where it started. He generalised this to say that all moving particles can be described as matter waves, a hypothesis which was later demonstrated to be true when electrons were fired through a diffraction grating, resulting in a wave interference pattern. So, electrons, amongst other things, behave as particles in some circumstances but as waves in others.

All very well and good, but where does determinism come into it? Well, the essence of determinism is that the laws of nature are completely predictable: if you could know the exact properties of every entity in the universe at any one time, you could predict their properties at every other time. In other words, determinism says: "everything is fixed and you can't change it".

Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg extended de Broglie's work and made it more precise. In doing so they had to deal with a difficulty in the transition from wave-like behaviour to particle-like. A wave is spread out whereas a particle is at a single location. Somehow the wave function of a matter wave must 'collapse' into a particle at a point. They showed that the matter wave acted as a probability distribution: the actual position in which a particle appeared was random, more likely where the matter wave was biggest, less likely where it was smaller, but still essentially indeterminate.

Einstein and de Broglie both hated this randomness; Einstein famously said that "God does not play dice with the universe". The trouble is that as the years go on and as quantum theory becomes more refined and more tested, that fundamental randomness remains. The transition from wave behaviour to particle behaviour is inherently unpredictable.

Our best scientific description of the universe is that its behaviour is not predetermined; there is room for free will.