Philosophy of Science

The Philosophy of Science class should not be offered to arts students; that includes philosophy students. Sorry to all of you arts students out there with an interest in the sciences, but seriously, the class is not for you. We've had less than a dozen lectures and every one has moved at a snail's pace because the prof has to explain what should be well known to any science student; like how to make a statistical inference, or why you can't derive causation from statistical correlations. I can even tell that the prof is bitter about it, though perhaps more resigned to it than bitter. He just drones on in his thick german accent about causation pathways, waiting for the next art student to ask a dumb question. Today it was some girl who I recognized from my Science and Religion class as one of those people who try to learn about science so that she can someday tear it down for Jesus but has never spent ten seconds in a biology lab or even taken a geology course. We were using smoking and heart attacks as a situation that could have either a direct causal relation or a common cause (we could have been using ice cream and homicide, but we were using this instead) and this girl tried to say that smoking doesn't cause heart attacks because not all people who smoke have one. WHAT!? Is this girl just opposed to all things reasonable? Of course not everyone who smokes is going to have a heart attack, that doesn't mean that smoking doesn't increase your risk! Perhaps I should introduce her to a bar of Uranium. Hey, there's only a small probability that any one of the atoms therein would radoactively decay, and that would only result in a meaninglessly increased chance of death.

On he positive side of the class however, the prof did bring up and interesting question; can you demonstrate a causal relionship if you can't change he information that is being carried. For example, if you shine a light on a screen, and move he flash light, the dot of light will move. That the dot is on the screen is cause by the light passing from the bulb to the screen. You can put a color filter on the flashlight to change the color of the dot, thereby changing the information that you have sent. But there is no mark that you can put directly on the dot itself that will move with the dot, this is why the movement of the dot is not caused by some quality of the dot, but by the movement of the flashlight. The prof also made the argument that there cannot be a causal relation for the movement of the dot from the dot itself because it is possible to make the dot move faster than the speed of light, and information (according to relativity) is limited to that speed. According to him, you can make the dot of light travel faster than light speed by having a screen thousands of km away and rotating the flashlight quickly. This got me thinking; first of all, either the prof is not up on quantum physics (otherwise he would have said that when the dot reached light speed, the individual photons would sease to look like a coninuous beam of light and would fall at disjointed points along the screen) or he's dumbing things down for he arts students who would need 10 minutes just to wrap their heads around light as photons. Second, there is informaton that can travel faster than light. It's been shown that if you create a particle and its anti particle, then change the rotation of one, the other will always change its rotation at the same time simultaneously, no matter where it is in the universe. Hense, even if they are at oppsited ends of an infinite universe (impossible by definition, I know) then the information traveling between them would travel faster than light. So much for relativity. My questions are these: Is there a way to alter the information traveling between a particle and its antiparticle such that the mark will be carried along? Is the act of changing the spin of the particle the mark itself on information that's always traveling between them? If you tried to simultaneously accelerate the spin of a particle and decelerated the spin of its antiparticle equally and in opposite directions, what would happen? Come on you physics people, fill me in here.