Saturday, December 30, 2017

One Year Anniversary


Exactly one year ago today I posted my first blog entry. On this anniversary, I want to thank those who encouraged me to write a blog and those who have read my blog over the last year. I have had about 66,000 page views during that time. Certainly this is a modest number given the scope of the worldwide internet. Nevertheless, I have appreciated my readers from all over the globe including people from Ukraine, Italy, Canada, Russia, Israel, Brazil, India, Germany, France, Australia, the U.K., Georgia, Indonesia, and of course the U.S.A., and other places. I appreciate those who have commented about the blog both publicly in the comments section and privately to me in email and other contacts. Please feel free to contact me in the future with questions, thoughts, and ideas. The worldwide reach of the internet is remarkable and given the nature of my job with worldwide collaborations at CERN, I so much appreciate the global nature of science and Christianity.

I hope that this blog has helped some of you gain a better understanding and appreciation for science, Christianity, and their intersection and commonality. Over this year the subjects that were most visited were on Facts and Faith, the Big Bang, the Anthropic Principle and Fine Tuning, The God Particle, A Universe from Nothing, and A Small Big Universe. These are all linked from the home page of this blog.

I've found that I have the time and enough ideas to post about twice a month, but I would appreciate any suggestions from my readers as to subjects you would like me to explore. With your new ideas I might be able to post more often. As new discoveries are made in physics I'll relate those and convey any connections I see to theological ideas. I have a few other projects I'll report on later in the year, as well.

If you have found this blog helpful, interesting, entertaining, insightful, or anything else, I would appreciate it if you would tell your friends and others about it. Often when I speak about science and Christianity someone will let me know that they have been wanting to hear from someone who can convey truths about both subjects in a simple and understandable way. I have been told that is a strength of mine. I'm sure there are many others not acquainted with this blog who would like some reasonable answers to questions they may have about science, Christianity, God, and reason explained in understandable terms. If you know such people, please point them to this blog.

This is a great season for an anniversary. It is the season we celebrate the birth of Jesus. Coincidently, my birthday is also during this holiday week. So it is a great time to celebrate the one year anniversary of my blog. I hope to continue to write insightfully over the next year with topics that are relevant and interesting. Thanks for joining with me.

Dr. Michael G. Strauss

3 comments:

  1. Congratulations Dr. Strauss. Keep it up. I tell people about your blog all the time. Merry Christmas, Happy Birthday, and Happy New Year. And I think of topics all the time I would love to hear your thoughts on. Gravitational waves from the neutron stars being the most recent I can remember...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dear Dr Strauss

    As I'm sure you know, in the past 20 years or so, Quantum Mechanics has become the ultimate bluff for those seeking to avoid the philosophical implications of the principle of causality (whether you'd formulate it in an Aristotelian, Cartesian or Newtonian manner). And so we hear lots of guff about 'something from nothing, no physical trigger' etc, and any attempt to question these assertions are met with a variant of the phrase 'Quantum Mechanics is counterintuitive so shut up'.
    Now I'm only a layman but after doing some digging to me it seems that what they're really saying is:
    a) We can't explain this phenomena e.g. spontaneous emission of a photon from a hydrogen atom using a classical model
    b) We have a possible idea of what explains this on a quantum model e.g. the fluctuations in zero-point energy in the Quantum Electrodynamic field.
    c) What we really mean by spontaneous isn't that there is no physical trigger, but that due to the uncertainty principle we can't predict exactly when the electron will go from an excited state to a ground state or when virtual particles will appear.

    My question is why do so many physicists (who are obviously intelligent men), casually toss around words like 'something from nothing, no physical trigger' when it's obvious that fluctuations in the zero point energy of quantum fields are not 'nothing'? Because to me it strikes of intellectual dishonesty, I've been a Christian for 10 years and have always managed to mix my Faith and Science (for which I have always had a passion), but men such as Lawrence Krauss, Victor Stenger and Robert Orter have dented my trust in the integrity of the scientific community.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for your comments and questions. Of course I can't address the motivations that people might have for tossing around their ideas. I do think that there is a mystery to quantum mechanics that we don't have a complete picture of. The mathematics does make only probabilistic predictions. There may be underlying reasons that we just don't know about but there may not be. I don't think either answer undermines God's omniscience or character. Some scientists are philosophical naturalists and require a natural solution to every problem even when the natural solution borders on the ridiculous. Of course, some ridiculous ideas have been shown to be true. As a scientist I find that all of the discoveries of nature, those that seem intuitive and those that don't, ultimately give support to the biblical idea of God.

      Delete