Quo modo Deus exstat?

Michelangelo -The Creation  of Adam (Wikipedia)

Major is the family dog, recently taken to sheep-worrying/killing. The father will have to put it down. Owen, the godless younger brother, petitions his religious-curious older sister.

“'If you prayed for Major not to get shot would he not get shot?' said Owen in a demanding voice.

The thought of praying had never crossed my mind.

'You prayed you wouldn't have to thread the sewing machine any more and you didn't.'

I saw with dismay the unavoidable collision coming, of religion and life.

He got up and stood in front of me and said tensely, 'Pray. How do you do it? Start now!'

'You can't pray,' I said, 'about a thing like that.'

'Why not?'

Why not? Because, I could have said to him, we do not pray for things to happen or not happen, but for the strength and grace to bear what does. A fine way out, that smells abominably of defeat. But I did not think of it. I simply thought, and knew, that praying was not going to stop my father going out and getting his gun and calling, 'Major! Here, Major -' Praying would not alter that.”

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‘Age of Faith’, in ‘Lives of Girls and Women’, Alice Munro (p. 145).

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Aged ten, I ask my father if he believes in God. “No I don't,” he says, “There is no way heaven could be big enough for all the people it would need to contain.”

A parish meeting in Andover, a Q&A. Hesitantly, a parishioner asks the priest, “Father, where is heaven?” The priest, equally hesitant, talks about quantum theory and the strange spaces within the atom. I cringe with embarrassment.

Rod Liddle writes in his Sunday Times column about asking a CofE bishop whether he believes in God. “Blessed if I know, Rod,” comes the reply, confirming Liddle’s sardonic take on England's institutional religion.

A liberal states their deepest attachment and loyalty: to democracy and the rule of law. But in what sense do those things actually exist? I ask. They don't understand the question.

Buddhists believe that the self is an illusion.

Freighted, that term ‘illusion’.

It appears that Buddhists believe the self is a process, an epiphenomenon of more basic physical and mental state transitions. Is that what ‘illusion' means?

It's natural to think naively that existence is a simple, obvious notion. Stones exist, your body exists. If something exists, you can poke or paint it. But most ‘things’ we deal with in life are not like this: contracts, democracy, numbers, freedom, oppression, patriotism, any -ism. Welcome to the social construction of reality and the ubiquity of reification.

Catholicism is more a framework than a set of definite precepts. It's not reducible to biblical literalism. Orthodoxy will tell you that the true nature of God is mysterious. Most Catholics opt for some manner of ontological realism but I'm more deontological…

"Where is heaven, Father?"

Some seven or eight years ago I attended a Catholic event with Clare at the church in Andover. I think it was a lecture on some theological issue or other, or maybe a talk on the Missions. In any event it was a dark night and the church was packed.

At some stage in the evening the priest, an elderly, kindly man with a poor public speaking style, took questions from the audience: a kind of 'ask me anything'.

A quavering voice - evidently an elderly Irish woman - piped up from behind us: "Father, where is heaven?"

My jaw dropped: in this day and age?

The priest was, however, up to the job. He explained that previous orthodoxy had held that heaven was beyond the sky. However, NASA had sent a great many rockets and heaven was nowhere to be seen up there. However, modern physics was very strange with quantum effects between the atoms which no-one understood. Possibly it was here that heaven was located.

There was no follow-up question.

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It made me think though. If heaven is nowhere to be found in this spacetime universe, could it really be found in Hilbert space? Perhaps in the primordial substance before spacetime geometry had ever congealed?

Let's ask Carlo Trugenberger: "Emergent 4D Quantum Geometry from Critical Space-Time Graphs".

"After a brief introduction to the problem of quantum gravity and the main solution approaches on the market I will focus on my new proposal of a quantum gravity model in which the fundamental degrees of freedom are information bits for both discrete space-time points and links connecting them.

"The Hamiltonian is a very simple network model consisting of a ferromagnetic Ising model for space-time vertices and an antiferromagnetic Ising model for the links. As a result of the frustration between these two terms, the ground state self-organizes as a new type of low-clustering graph.

"I will provide ample evidence that this simple network model has two critical points, an ultraviolet fixed point corresponding to fluctuating information bits and an infrared fixed point corresponding to an emergent geometric phase with space-time dimension 4.

"The model predicts that, at small scales, the space-time dimension decreases until space-time itself completely dissolves into a disordered soup of information bits.  The large-scale dimension 4 of the universe is related to the upper critical dimension 4 of the Ising model and to illustrate the dimension decoupling mechanism I will solve a toy version of the model in the mean field approximation.

"At finite temperatures the universe graph emerges without big bang and without singularities from a ferromagnetic phase transition in which space-time itself forms out of a hot soup of information bits."

So heaven might be 'a hot soup of information bits' (but perhaps that's the other place). Perhaps we could link this idea with Eternal Inflation to get a contemporaneous theological ontology.

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How do we know that our current universe has three spatial dimensions? Because Clare needed a minimum of three strings to deploy her self-made bird feeder (two pie dishes from Poundland).

Three strings = three spatial dimensions

The designer shows her grasp of string theory

As I carefully explained to her, the argument works best in polar coordinates.

Classic pix: If looks ... (2006)

It's June 2006 in the kitchen of our house in Andover - and here's an expression to cherish ...

.. and here closer up ..

... if you're not behind the camera. What's the opposite of 'have a good day'?

Something for the Bank Holiday weekend

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At this time we're living at Penton Corner, on the outskirts of Andover... Next year we will move to Wells, Somerset.

It must have been 6.15 p.m. when Clare popped her head round the door and said "Come and look at this ...".

"Another rabbit?" I said with resignation as I eased myself out of the chair, but she shook her head. I guess I should have realised she wasn't using her 'look-what-the-cat-brought-in' voice.

The ground-floor toilet ceiling had that curious dimple with which I'm wearisomely familiar, a kind of six millimetre three dimensional Gaussian with a small drop of water dangling from the bottom. Other ominous patches were visible in the surrounding plaster. Yes, we were in plumbing hell again.

I bounced upstairs, Clare following with a torch, to a rendezvous with the boiler, which is caged in a network of unlabelled copper pipes, gauges and valves which ongoingly taunt me with their vast incomprehensibility.

Squashed between the cylinder and the wall, as accessible as the fan belt in a sixties mini, was a cone-shaped cutaway section of pipe. What looked like overflow water was gurgling and chuckling as it spattered down, stray drops running down the outside of the pipe and onto the sodden floor beneath.

To a first approximation, and speaking strictly as a layperson, prima facie evidence of a leak.

Nothing for it but to invoke our maintenance contract with British Gas. Clare got on with the job while I tried to deal with matters in my hopelessly impractical way, lodging a fan heater at an awkward angle to dry out the flooring, and shoving some kitchen roll in to catch further run-off.

Someone is apparently coming tomorrow afternoon.

And to that point, the day had been going adequately well. I spent a small fortune at the opticians on varifocal plus reading glasses, complete with differentially-hued photo-reactive lenses. Brown for general and grey for reading - matches the frames although this seems to have been by accident.

Then this afternoon: two solid hours of reviewing orbital angular momentum and spin, taking copious notes and trying to figure out whether the act of applying quantum operators corresponding to observables to state vectors ever maps, as such, into any procedure performed in an actual experiment.

As I understand it, the utility of the operator lies in defining eigenfunctions and eigenvalues which, so to speak, establish the set of possible observables when an experiment is 'subsequently' carried out. The operator then bows out, its job being done.

Experiments are all about computing the evolution of the state vector and then reading off amplitudes (leading to probabilities) in the basis of the chosen observable at the space-time locations of interest.

What a puzzle quantum mechanics is, and how much easier than plumbing.
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Update 9 p.m. The cat just caught a rabbit which, by dint of frantic chasing around, we have managed to let escape into the back garden. The cat is under house-arrest for twenty minutes. Clare is looking increasingly frazzled ...