The Today.

I didn't do much today, except perhaps recover from the party. I somehow managed to sprain my back while at the party and by the time I got home last night it was in agony.

Today its been a bit stiff and sore, but nothing major. Hopefully it will be fully recovered by the morrow.

So, today I took it easy, watched some of the Voyager marathon and worked on my SF game universe. I guess you could say today was a good day for just vegging.

Oh, and as a BTW, I seem to have fixed one of our two VCR's that went wonky. It turned out that there were multiple problems, all simple to solve, but that the combination had me pulling my hair out two months ago when it died. So, maybe I should have a look at the other VCR sometime.

I woke up!

I seem to be awake, and drinking coffee, so all's right with the world. Later, I and taxlady shall head over to a Notary to do the paperwork needed to refinance our Mortgage. I'm doing my bestest to believe that this is a good thing.

After that, the first ever Montreal Sci-Fi/Fantasy meetup will be held at 8:00 pm at Chapters over here in the West Island. I doubt many folks will show, but then many members have probably long-since given up on a meeting actually ever happening.

Other than that, there's some actual work-like stuff I should do, but I'll have to fit it in edge-wise.

First Nations?

There has long been controversy over whether America's so-called 'First Nations' were actually the first. Now its beginning to look like an early group of Australians colonized North America long before the current native cultures arrived by land-bridge.

This comes as no surprise to me. In fact, I'm not so sure the previous group were the first either.

Wiggle Room?

Hmmm. The previous post by me got me to thinking about another idea for writing a book. I think I would call it something like "Wiggle Room -- The Interface between Hard Science and Creative Imagination".  Its based on the observation that Occam's Razor and the old adage that "Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence" are both present and opposing forces in Science. Traditionally the first always wins, but lately the second has been gaining ground.

Let me try to clarify that statement. When a scientist is trying to explain a series of observations, he builds a mental model that matches the observations. Then he uses the model to predict the outcome of some observation he has yet to make. If the observation doesn't match the prediction, then the model is wrong and needs to be modified or replaced. If the observation goes as planned, then the model gains some credibility and further predictions are made. No model is ever proved absolutely true, but eventually one gains so much faith in it that we label it a 'Scientific Law'. Note that even that is not a guarantee. In 1957 Chen Ning Yang and Tsung Dao Lee jointly won the Nobel Prize for disproving the "Law of Parity", a model which had withstood countless observations. This 'Law' stated that two experiments which are mirror-images of each other would give results which were mirror images of each other. It turns out that this is almost always true, unless exotic Kaon particles are involved.

Since scientific models only cover the observations that have actually been made, there is always room for a new observation to overthrow existing models, and open up a new area of research and investigation. On the other side of the coin, in the vast set of observations that we have not made is all the evidence for all of the phenomena that we currently do not model because we do not know about them. Since observations are ongoing, one should expect that we will regularly come across unexpected results and have to modify our models.

This is, in fact, what happens, but there is a strange disconnect going on. Scientists know that their models are only provisional. They know that, statistically, a large part of their current views of the universe are inadequate, incomplete or incorrect, yet it has traditionally been considered bad form to speculate on what might be that we don't know. This has often been labelled 'unscientific' or 'science fiction' despite the fact that you cannot make good choices about what experiments to perform unless you have explored the possible shapes of what you don't know.

That last phrase "the possible shapes of what you don't know" is key. Any proposed new model of the universe that contains a new phenomena has to not only explain all of the positive observations that have been made, but all of the negative ones as well. It has to explain how it is that we didn't already know this. Thus, the model that replaced the Law of Partity, often referred to as 'CPT (Charge, Parity, Time) Conservation', could NOT have claimed that the Parity Law was violated by electrons. We do "experiments" with electrons all the time. Everyone who's ever designed a circuit or built an electric gizmo would have noticed if the mirror image of a circuit didn't behave as expected. Kaons, however, are rare. They are hard to work with, and hard to detect. Heck, we didn't even know they existed until not long before the experiments that made them famous in the physics community. Thus, the fact that they violated parity conservation was surprising (to put it mildly) but not inconsistent with what we already knew.

This constrains the shapes of new theories. Take psychic powers, for example. I've read many an SF book which proposes that psychic powers will become an accepted scientific fact in the future. This not only flies in the face of all of the attempted observations, which saw nothing, but in all of the daily research that would have seen them if they existed. If psychic powers existed in even the rarest individual, then they would have left detectable imprints in (to name a few):

• sociology
• anthropology
• game theory
• neurobiology
• physics

The fact that all of these disciplines go about their usual modelling of the universe without taking psychic powers into consideration and still observe results consistent with their models means that the possible shapes of Psi abilities are very strongly constrained. In fact, they are so constrained that anyone seriously proposing such a thing would have to think long an hard to come up with anything consistent with what has already been observed.

Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of places where speculation is possible. Cosmology as a field deals with thing where our ability to make observations is so limited that statistical cosmologists estimate that we've dectected less than 1/3 of the interesting phenomena out there. High Energy physics is also on the frontier of what we can observe, and so is able to harbour all sorts of new effects that are just outside our current ability to see. Another place where much speculation is possible is in Archeaology and Paleontology, where we are piecing together a story from very disconnected fragments, and our observations are essentially random.

To get back to the book, "Wiggle Room" would look at the shapes of the gaps in our knowledge, the places where we don't have good observations. What parts of the planet, for which time periods, have very poor fossil records? What might be found tomorrow in those gaps? What can't we currently detect in the universe, but might exist anyway? What are the implications of different observations as we build higher- and higher-energy particle colliders?

The only problem with writing this book is that it would take a LOT of research, and in areas where good data is hard to find. That's one of the reasons I like the 'Verifier Method' I posted about earlier. It is a tecnique for mapping the gaps in our knowledge. For too long Scientists have ignored the shapes of their ignorance. Lately though, there has been signs of this being fixed. Maybe one day we really will have rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.