Song About the Pope

An accurate song about the Pope for once. Warning: coarse language.

An Atheist's Xmas Song

White Wine in the Sun by Tim Minchin.

Vick's Picks

Here are some of my favorite sites and news events to read about.

BBC News reports that passive smoking (e.g., 2nd hand smoke) kills and has killed 600,000 this year alone.

FBI thwarts idiot bomber in Portland Oregon from trying to practice the stupid art of terrorism.

An impromptu Star Wars reenactment on the NYC subway. Hilarious!

A little DJ Lubel to outrage your grandmother and conservative Christians.

One of the best interviews you'll ever read about learning anxiety with MIT's organizational psychologist Edgar H. Schein (from the Harvard Business Review, 2002).

Big Think present Dr. Kaku's Universe (Physics).

BBC Newsnight special with Christopher Hitchens.

Q TV interview featuring my secret Crush of actress/singer Amanda Lee (aka Mandy Moore).

Finally, YouTube personality Natalie Tran, funniest woman blogger on the Internet if not the world!

That's a wrap folks! Enjoy.

Hell = Evil God--Period

It's simple math folks. If *hell is real, then the God who created it is undeniably evil. No ifs ands or buts about it.

There are currently 6.9 billion humans living on this planet. Of this the largest religious majority consists of nearly two billion Christians (1.9 billion to be exact). Now whether or not all 1.9 billion Christians prescribe to Orthodox Christian thought and (coincidentally enough) every single one of them just happen to be genuine believers is a different matter. Most Christians will be the first to tell you other Christians are false, fake, wannabe heretics. But assuming there are actually that many genuine Christians (even as we know this is impossible based on diversity of Christian belief alone), but giving the statistic the benefit of the doubt, this means that 71% of the world's population do not believe in Christianity, Jesus, or the Christian concept of God.

According to Christian doctrine (e.g., the Bible) this means 71% of the world's population (currently) will be going straight to hell (not to forget the countless billions already presumably enjoying their unjust sentence there). That's over five BILLION people on a one way ticket straight to hell! Unbelievable doesn't even begin to describe such a preponderance of absurdity.

Now this raises an titanic ethical dilemma. How could an all "loving" God consign five billion people to hell simply for not believing in him enough? Think it through for a moment. According to Christianity those who don't believe in God will not be saved and will be sentenced to everlasting torture and punishment for the crime of ancestral sin (never mind that such a concept is irrational and incoherent to begin with).

All those innocent lives... simply forfeit. Christians like to affirm that if they knew God then they'd know the truth and so they'd believe and be saved (I should know--I used to preach it myself). Not only is this a ethnocentric point of view but it represents a myopic worldview which stresses the narrowest vision and sponsors a crude xenophobia. Never mind that Christianity has spread all over the world, they're not there because they want to embrace other cultures or understand them, they're there because they want to convert you. Why? I have it on good understanding is that because, in actuality, they are terribly afraid that they'll be alone in heaven (after they die), stuck for an eternity with--to borrow the phrasing of Richard Dawkins--a jealous, petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully--that is to say--the Christian God.

As for all that Jesus talk, you can keep it to yourself, Jesus doesn't do himself any favors by boldly supporting hell, even threatening those who refuse to follow him with it, so let's cut the B.S., shall we? If Jesus was truly loving he'd practice original forgiveness instead of original sin--let's not kid ourselves--the guy is as big of a prick as his father--albeit a bit of a sadist.

The bottom line is this--if there is a hell, then God is an evil bastard--period. No sane person can reason their way out of this conclusion--it's a logically sound argument--only unsympathetic, lacking in compassion and empathy, self-righteous truth deniers would even attempt to say otherwise. God is a bastard coated bastard with bastard filling... I mean the math doesn't lie. And anyone who thinks God is great, all loving, and concerned for our well being either failed math class or is delusional. Meanwhile the Pope is worried about the utilization of condoms while refusing to pursue and prosecute child rapists in his employ. Are you frackin kidding me? It seems the whole damn enterprise is fraudulent. 

I think it's high time we admit the truth--hell is an imaginary place. It's as imaginary as Candy-Land or God. Take your pick.

This important message has been brought to you by your friendly neighborhood atheist.

Nazianity: Spare Us Your Moralizing (ProfMTH)

A great video about how Christianity requires submission, obedience, subjection, and honor giving to Government(s). Historically speaking, Christian doctrine, in effect, empowered Nazi Germany by allowing Christian Germany to go along with the Nazi agenda. Yes, Christianity supplied not only the wellspring of centuries of antisemitic propaganda to fuel Nazi antisemitism but also was the backdrop which allowed for such prejudices to go unchecked by deliberately instructing Christian Germans to submit, obey, subject themselves to, and honor Hitler's Nazi Germany!

Epistemology 101 Part 2: Truth Claims

Epistemology: [mass noun] (Philosophy) the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion.

As a Matter of Fact: The Nature of Truth Claims

Debate usually consists of two parts. First there is the Dialectic, or the argument in which the debater tries to vindicate (or validate) their claims, and then there is Rhetoric, or the part of the debate in which the debater attempts to compel you to agree with them. The goal is to get others to agree with you that your truth-claim is also a fact-claim. This is true of the religious debate as well. “Language, including religious language, is partly about propositions, fact-claims, or what we might call “truth-talk”,” affirms the anthropologist David Eller (Eller 2007, p.57).

When it comes to truth claims, or “truth-talk” (i.e., claims which are talked about as being true) the burden of proof always falls on the person making the claim. If for example I said I had a unicorn in my house, it would be up to me to prove to you that this statement was true. If I could not prove to you that what I claimed was indeed the case then my argument would be meaningless. In other words, if I could not offer any evidence to prove to you that I had a unicorn in my house then you would not be obligated to believe my claim. The truth claim would be falsified by my failure to provide any empirical basis for sustaining a belief in the unicorn.

Now supposing I brought pictures of the unicorn standing next to my study desk, although this constitutes as evidence in support of my claim it does nothing to make the claim believable let alone truthful. Alone this form of evidence would be pretty weak, after all, I could have used Adobe Photoshop to take a picture of a horse, add in a fake replica of a horn, and paint it up just the way I liked before offering it to you. Even as this evidence would be fraudulent, again, the burden of proof lies on me to prove beyond a reason of a doubt that I have a unicorn. Pictures alone may not convince you, and so you’d have every right to remain skeptical. Therefore, when trying to affirm a truth claim as factual—you need to do more than provide the bare minimum evidence required for believability, you need to establish a context in which the claim is not only believable but verifiable. If the claims I am making cannot be checked and confirmed, then it’s a good bet that they are fallacious claims, and that my unicorn exists only as a figment of my imagination.

Now suppose I made a more audacious claim than that. Suppose that I have dodged the burden of proof by making my unicorn an invisible pink unicorn. Obviously this doesn’t help my case for two reasons. First, instead of offering any tangible evidence I have made the claim even more tenuous by placing it even further out of the realm of empirical support. Any real chance of confirmation just became unlikely, because an invisible pink unicorn is an imaginary entity, and so the claim that such a thing exists becomes a metaphysical claim. Secondly, this makes any discussion about the nature of my invisible pink unicorn an ontological discussion designated to the realm of theology, and as we saw in the previous article, ontological discussions fail the epistemic standard of what it means to be reasonably and rationally true.

Epistemically Viable: Rational vs. Irrational Belief

Epistemology of belief does not end with mere facts and proofs, however. Any truth claim is, in essence, a prediction. If the meteorologist on the evening news claims it will rain tomorrow he is basically making a prediction—usually based off of scientific data about global climate and weather change. In this sense a truth claim is not only something which can be believed, but it is also something that is making a prediction, i.e. that at the appointed time that we discover this truth the prediction will be fulfilled. Therefore, tomorrow if it should rain as predicted by the news weatherman then the claim is epistemically valid. The prediction was accurate.

However, if a claim makes no valid prediction (including predictions which cannot be counted due to the fact that they are metaphysical in nature and cannot be checked) then the belief in such a claim can never be a matter of factual truthfulness, but rather, a matter of the will to believe. The epistemologist Hamid Vahid puts it more clearly, stating, “In the betting context, however, the pertinent sense of “rationality” or “reasonability” is epistemic since the winning side is determined on the basis of the truth of its prediction.” (Vahid 2008, p.137)

Thus when someone says they believe something is true, we will be more likely to find the claim reasonable and rational if the truth of its prediction can be confirmed. If the truth of its prediction cannot be confirmed then it is more likely to be a false or baseless claim.

As human beings our minds have been conditioned by experience and interaction with the natural world. Therefore we either believe a proposition based on good evidence or else we reject it when the evidence is lacking. As the Stanford University philosopher Michael Bratman reminds us, “Reasonable belief is, in an important way, context-independent, at any one time a reasonable agent normally either believes something (to the degree n) or does not believe it (to that degree). She does not at the same time believe p is relative to one context but not relative to another.” (Bratman 1999, p.123)

The claim that “God exists” or that “God is real” is not epistemically viable as such a claim is not context-dependent, rather belief is context-independent (I'll explain more on this shortly). What this means is that it can never be factually true from an epistemological point of view—at least not without empirical support. The claim that God is real is true in the sense that the believer holds the belief of God’s existence as a matter of truth, but these reasons are rarely ever good and so usually fall into the designation of faith. In order for the claim “God exists” to be factually true it would need confirmation, and only after the prediction has been vindicated could the statement gain epistemic credibility as a truth claim.

Just to clarify, context-dependent and context-independent are cognitive science terms related to recognition memory. Recognition memory can be subdivided into two components: recollection and familiarity, sometimes referred to as "remembering" and "knowing." Recollection involves remembering in detail a particular stimulus, including the context in which it was previously experienced. In contrast, familiarity only requires knowledge of the stimulus’s features – the basic realization that one has encountered the stimulus before. Thus, the fundamental distinction between the two processes is that recollection is context dependent whereas familiarity is context-independent. Another distinction is that familiarity is generally an unconscious or automatic process whereas recollection is a conscious effort.

Remembering involves a conscious effort of retrieving information. When you take a history exam you are making a great effort to remember people’s names, places, and dates related to the context of a certain time period or important historical event. When you burn your hand on a stove, for example, when you are older and come across a hot burner you instantly recollect that hot stoves burn and cause pain. This recollection is intuitive—you know that you will get burned again so you avoid contact with the hot burner.

A recent study conducted by Sam Harris and colleagues at UCLA and the University of Southern California found that comparing religious with nonreligious statements reveals that religious thinking is more associated with brain regions that govern emotion, self-representation, and cognitive conflict whereas thinking about ordinary facts, in both believers and nonbelievers, is more reliant upon memory retrieval networks. Activity in the brain's anterior cingulate cortex, an area associated with cognitive conflict and uncertainty, suggested that both believers and nonbelievers experienced greater uncertainty when evaluating religious statements. The study goes on to explain the case for belief being content-independent.^[i]

So when believers declare that they know God exists, they aren’t claiming to actually have met God, they are stating that given their experience they believe God is real. This may be described as “experiential knowledge” but it is not “epistemic knowledge” in the sense that it isn’t about the nature of the claim so much as it is about the nature of the experience which compels a religious person to make the claim in the first place. Recollection, on the other hand, has an epistemological basis. It is a matter of the nature of knowing about something, therefore retrieving the information which will qualify the statement as factually true. Therefore when making a literal claim about the existence of God, for example, it is not factually true to say “God exists” because there is no information about God we can retrieve, but it is factually true to say “No gods exist” for the same reason. Atheism, and more generally nonbelief, is therefore epistemically valid positions to take, whereas religious belief is often unfeasible and not epistemically quantifiable and as a result cannot be determined true.

Conditioned to Believe

Belief being content-independent means that we are intuitively detecting elements of truth which relate to our everyday experiences and then finding the best inference, and thereby finding reasonable provocation to believe in any proposition which seams to make sense (given our experiences). Thus a religious person will be more inclined to feel the statement that “God exists” is a true statement because it coincides with their religious or spiritual experiences as a person of faith. Therefore it is perfectly reasonable for a Christian or a Muslim to espouse great affirmations in the existence of God or Allah and the underlying truths of their respective religions. The problem, however, is this: cognitive science reveals that reasonable beliefs are not always rational.

Take for example the following: I find it perfectly reasonable to believe that my wife is the most beautiful (attractive) woman on the planet. My life experience, the context of being married to her and enjoying her reciprocal love and company, all condition me to believe such a claim is truthful just as it is reasonable. But in actuality it is not a perfectly rational claim. Why not? Because of a couple very important factors not to go overlooked. First of all, I have not met all the women who live in the world and so could never be positively certain that I would not find another woman more attractive, and also I nurture a strong bias when it comes to thinking about my wife and other women. This bias is obviously unreasonable in determining whether or not my wife is, in point of fact, the most beautiful and attractive woman alive for these following reasons:

1)                         I love and respect my wife and don’t want to hurt her feelings (even if one day I should come to find another woman more attractive, no matter how doubtful a scenario it is). This means I will inevitably favor her over other (perhaps) equally beautiful women.

2)                         As the adage goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. In other words, because of my genetic make up, my past experiences of which have conditioned me to find certain features more attractive than others, and my proclivity toward finding almond shaped eyes, dark hair, and soft facial features more attractive my personal taste is for Asian women—who I find more attractive than Caucasian women. Yet this is strictly a matter of preference and personal taste. Other people find other types of features more or less attractive.

3)                         Based on my understanding of fidelity, a cultural component to monogamous relationships, I am culturally conditioned to desire only my wife (even as my biological desire for other women seeks to interfere with my cultural conditioning). Therefore, it serves me as a means of assuring that my wife will mutually return my emotional commitment to her as the only woman in my life who I will deem the most attractive. Failing to do this would be detrimental, and although it does nothing to prove to you that my wife is the most attractive woman in the world, it does everything to convince me of that fact. I believe it because I find it reasonable, even though it’s not entirely rational.

When religious believers say they believe in God, I don’t doubt them for a second, but much like the previous example with my wife, we must realize they are not making a rational judgment but rather an emotionally biased one. Therefore the claim “God exist, he is real, I know it in my heart,” is not an epistemically valid truth claim. It’s a profession of belief. It is an emotional consideration one is inured to favor over other possible truths since they have been culturally conditioned to find such a claim both meaningful and emotionally satisfying (to them).

Likewise, when it comes to the religious claim that God is the source of morality or the belief that you need religion to be morally good, these are not truth claims about God, ethical behavior, or the influence of religion but rather they are conditioned beliefs one finds reasonable because they relate to their personal (subjective) experience(s). In order for the claim to have an credence whatsoever the first claim, e.g. that God is real and a source of goodness, must be confirmed. But this brings with it the original objection that this is not a factual claim which can be epistemologically verified—it is not rational. Although it may be “reasonable” for the adherent of faith to believe in such, it still remains epistemically unverified, makes no real world predictions, and therefore is an invalid truth claim. In other words, the claim is false even as there is reason to believe (or rather, desire to believe) the claim is true. This is the problem with religious belief as I see it. Thus any claim that revealed religion or faith is true, or that morality comes from God, are not truth claims, but instead, are appeals to authority. Thus nonbelievers are well within their right to reject such claims and consider them false.

Jean-Pierre Changeux has made an interesting comment in relation to the claim to authority and the way our brains process information in his engaging book The Physiology of Truth: Neuroscience and Human Knowledge. Changeux suggests that

By removing the possibility of appeal to supernatural authority, it places the full burden of moral responsibility on our shoulders as human beings. The search for the neurobilogical bases of consciousness and rationality, far from impoverishing our conception of human integrity, offers an unprecedented opportunity to properly value the multiplicity of personal experience, the richness of cultural diversity, and the variety of our ideas about the world. More than this, by making it possible to regard moral norms as distinctive expressions of a general disposition to ethical behavior, it suggests new ways in which the rights of individuals may be harmonized with their obligations to the social community of which they are members. (Changeux 2002, p.28)

Morality, then, does have a naturalistic basis, and so the appeal to religion is unnecessary—except for the fact that the religious have been conditioned to think that way.

In conclusion, the epistemology of truth makes it abundantly clear that religious claims about the existence of God, morality, and the like are not factual truth claims but are emotionally conditioned beliefs. Thus when it comes to being vindicated in ones claim, whether in a religious debate or any other dialectic, we now can better detect what is true and what is (most probably) false. Now that neuroscience provides a working model of morality and explains how our brains function we can better distinguish between genuine truth claims and professions of belief. Consequently, this helps us to do away with erroneous religious and supernatural claims, such as “God exists” and “Morality comes from religion/God,” and gives us incentive to start looking toward science to better explain such phenomenon and hopefully aid us in discovering the real answers.

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“Where Religious Belief And Disbelief Meet” Science Daily online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091005092302.htm

Gallivanting Through the Universe on a Unicorn! An Interview with Mike D. aka "The A-Unicornist"

I recently sat down (at my computer) and had a great online exchange with Mike Doolittle who runs the amazing blog called The A-Unicornist. Mike is one of the most intelligent and clear thinking writers you'll read online, so I was truly honored that he took the time out of his schedule of work, rock, and blogging to have an engaging discussion with me. As we geeked out over things cosmological I couldn't help but feel a little envious of his knack for clarity and easy to understand explanations--whereas I feel I'm always struggling to state things precisely Mike is a natural. Check out his blog if you get a chance and enjoy the discussion!

FYI: Just a couple free-thinking laymen shooting the breeze about things they are passionate about. We're by no means experts or professionals here (just so you know), but we both love science, especially the area known as cosmology--the study of the cosmos and our origins. So without further delay, onto the interview.

1.      Do you have a particular area of interest with regard to cosmology? I personally am fascinated by M-Theory and the fantastic possibility of parallel dimensions.

I'm most fascinated by String Theory, just because it is by far the best candidate we have for a quantum theory of gravity. Crazily enough, while other theories incorporate gravity, String Theory actually predicts gravity. Granted it's a retro-diction, but it's still a pretty impressive piece of mathematics. A unified theory of physics still seems very elusive, but the Large Hadron Collider may be able to test some of the predictions of String Theory, like supersymmetry. It's a pretty exciting time to be into physics, especially because this will probably be the largest particle accelerator we get for a long time. To get to significantly smaller scales we'd need an impossibly huge particle accelerator. To probe the Planck scale directly (where we might be able to observe the one-dimensional strings of String Theory), we'd need one larger than the solar system. But in the next few years I anticipate the LHC making some very big discoveries.

2.      Do you have any favorite physics books which are a must read and if so what are they?

I loved Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe", and of course Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" is a must-read. Some of the other books I've read, like Lisa Randall's "Warped Passages", are a little more technical and esoteric. But if you're just being introduced to cosmology, both Brian Greene and Stephen Hawking have written some very readable books that nicely illustrate where we are and what some of the possibilities are for the future. I would actually recommend to most people that they get started with lectures. TED Talks has some great lectures on physics that introduce general concepts without getting too technical.

3.      Do you have a favorite cosmologist, astrophysicist, or theoretical physicist? Who are they and why do you like them?

Well I love Hawking. He's undeniably brilliant, and he's a great writer. Brian Cox, the "rock & roll physicist," is also very entertaining just because of the clarity and palpable excitement he speaks with. Brain Greene has a knack for explaining complex things in terms mortals like me can understand. Neil DeGrasse Tyson is fantastic too, for his sense of humor and his ability to express the poetry of some really amazing facts – like the fact that the very atoms that comprise us were cooked from lighter elements in ancient stars that exploded their enriched guts across the galaxy. The universe is literally inside us. That's a very profound and humbling thought to me. 

4.      What, in your mind, has been the most noteworthy find or discovery in the past fifty or sixty years of cosmological investigation? What would you like to see discovered?

It's difficult to pick one. We've discovered fundamental elementary particles, called quarks. It was amazing because scientists had predicted their existence back in the 60s, but we didn't actually observe them until the 90s at Fermilab here in the U.S. In the last decade we've confirmed within a 2% margin of error that the universe is geometrically flat, which has big implications for cosmology. We have strong evidence that dark matter and dark energy are real, even though we don't know much of anything about what they are or what they do. And for future possibilities, the unification of the five versions of String Theory into M-Theory was a big mathematical accomplishment, though there's still a lot of work to be done just in terms of developing the theory, much less empirically testing it. I'd love to say that I'd like to see a unified theory of physics, but I think more pragmatically there are some interesting concepts with regard to extra dimensions (that's spatial dimensions – not to be confused with other universes) that may be tested with the LHC, and I'd love to see us confirm the Higgs boson and supersymmetry, as well as develop a working understanding of dark matter and dark energy. Those are real possibilities within the next ten years, whereas a quantum theory of gravity... well, who knows. We've been at it for nearly a century, and it's always seemed just out of reach.

5.      What theory do you think is the most misunderstood in physics/cosmology? Which is the most misrepresented by religious?

Without a doubt, the answer to both questions is the same: the Big Bang. I've often heard it described as an "explosion in space"; it wasn't anything like that – it was the expansion of the very fabric of space-time. Edwin Hubble noticed that distant galaxies were all getting farther away from each other, which means they must have been closer together in the past. When we extrapolate that backward billions and billions of years, we reach a point where the equations of Einstein's General Relativity break down, in what's known as the cosmic singularity. This is what's often called the "beginning" of our universe. The Catholic church, back when the Big Bang was formulated, got pretty excited because it seemed to confirm the Bible. This misconception continues to this day. The singularity is just an artifact of General Relativity, and shows us the limitations of that model of physics. If we use quantum theories, the laws of physics do not break down. The universe gets to a very small size – Planck size, or 1.616 x 10^-35 meters, and we just don't know what happened before that. But most modern cosmological theories, including String Theory, do not predict a singularity or a "beginning" to the universe. Instead, they reshape our understanding of time itself.

6.      How would you go about dealing with someone who is obviously ignorant about cosmology (and science in general) and keep confusing abiogenesis, evolution, and cosmology as one and the same? What would you say to them or would you just brush them off as a lost cause?

That depends. Some people are ignorant, but have a natural curiosity. You can work with that. I mean, that's me! There's so much I have yet to learn. Others have a rigid adherence to dogmatic viewpoints, and they usually aren't worth the trouble. Before you can talk to them about cosmology, you have to address the issues causing them to be resistant to new knowledge.

7.      I find it strange that Intelligent Design proponents will deny evolution but be in full support of the big bang theory and fine tuning, etc. Where do you think the fault in reasoning is taking place and what is the best fix for such a glitch?

I don't know that there's an easy fix at all. If someone is in the new-agey Deepak Chopra school of thought, it's usually just a misunderstanding of science and you just have to steer them in the right direction; you know, remind them that Deepak Chopra isn't actually a physicist and introduce them to popular science books by reputable physicists. But if someone is adhering to a specific dogma the way ID'ers tend to be evangelical Christians, you have to address that first by for example talking about the Bible – is it historically reliable, is it logically coherent, etc. Beliefs tend to arise as a sort of network of experiences, knowledge and biases. I remember arguing til I was blue in the face with an evangelical Christian friend of mine about evolution. Then we started talking about the Bible – he started looking at the Old Testament more critically, with all its scriptures where God commands stonings, subjugation of women and genocide, and that created the cognitive dissonance he needed to start examining everything more critically. Now he's an atheist and loves learning about evolution. A direct approach isn't always the most productive.

8.      I personally feel that modern cosmology has helped to make religion obsolete (especially archaic creation myths). Would you agree with this assessment? If so why or why not, and which ideas or theories specifically relate to this concern?

It's funny you say that, because "A Brief History of Time" is actually what pushed me into atheism. Even after I lost my faith in Christianity, I still held on to a very vague concept of a higher power. I was sort of a "deistic agnostic". It wasn't any theory in particular that changed my mind, but Hawking's exposition helped me recognize the fact that the idea of God really fails in every conceivable way as a hypothesis for explaining anything worth explaining – the origin of the universe, our morality, our evolution, even our sense of meaning in life. But I didn't recognize my philosophical folly until I became better acquainted with science. Cosmology is really about the biggest questions of all – why are we here, where did we come from, that sort of thing. Once you can see why "God did it" isn't a good answer to those questions, it inspires a great sense of wonder, curiosity, and most of all humility.

9.      What are your favorite Science Fiction film(s), television series, and/or book(s)? If you have more than one please list them and briefly explain what you like about them.

I don't read much fiction, though a good friend of mine has promised to loan me "Ring World", a favorite of hers. But I am a complete nerd when it comes to sci-fi movies and TV. Right now I'm working through Battlestar Galactica, and it's just fantastic. I enjoyed Caprica for its brief run, and I'm really into Stargate Universe. Movies, I love everything from "Contact" to the new "Star Trek". I'm such a geek though that when I watch stuff like that, I'm always thinking about what is and isn't plausible. For some reason artificial gravity really annoys me. It's funny how, like in SGU, the whole ship can get shot up or be almost totally drained of power, but gravity always works just fine.

10.   Where do you think the future of cosmology and physics know how will take us? In other words, what are your predictions for the future and beyond with regard to the course we now traverse?

I wish I knew. It's easy to take something like GPS systems for granted, but they wouldn't work unless we took General Relativity into account. But Einstein could never have imagined back in the 1920s that his equations would be used to synchronize satellites with our cell phones. Right now, with the Large Hadron Collider, we're on the cusp of some potentially transformative discoveries in physics. It could lead to advances in quantum computing, nanotechnology, medicine, neurology, and who knows... maybe we'll even get that whole interstellar travel thing down. The LHC cost over $10 billion to build, and a lot of people questioned the wisdom of that investment when the world is faced with so many urgent problems. But were it not for quantum mechanics we would not have many things that have transformed our lives, including computers and the internet. It might seem ironic, but I think part of the excitement of physics is really just having no concept of where our discoveries will take us. Sometimes just exploring the mysteries of the universe is one of the most important things we can do.