Episodes
Friday Jun 30, 2023
Ep 147 - Daniel Shields on Nature and Nature’s God
Friday Jun 30, 2023
Friday Jun 30, 2023
Paul felt it was important to put Daniel's book title in the episode title, but Bill's suggested title is too good not to place somewhere:
TSSM: NEW BOOK EXPLORES MEANING IN MOTION
- In this new episode of the “That’s So Second Millennium” podcast, your host Paul Giesting, assistant professor of mathematics and sciences at Wyoming Catholic College, interviews his faculty colleague, Dr. Daniel Shields, assistant professor of philosophy. Shields’s book, Nature and Nature’s God: A Philosophical and Scientific Defense of Aquinas’s Unmoved Mover Argument, has just been released by Catholic University of America Press and is available for purchase here.
- This discussion is tailor-made for these two Catholic scholars who bring broad scientific and philosophical knowledge, plus fervor for conversations at the intersection of multiple disciplines, to their research and teaching. It is also tailor-made for the “TSSM” podcast, which seizes this golden opportunity for a curtain-call while remaining on official hiatus. The podcast generated about 150 episodes between 2018 and 2022, with co-host Bill Schmitt. They focused on the intersection, incorporating everyday life and the pursuit of virtuous wisdom—past, present, and future.
- Shields makes reference to Dr. Robert C. Koons, professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. Koons wrote a review of Nature and Nature’s God, praising its integration of natural philosophy and metaphysics. The book combines scientific knowledge with insights into the writing of St. Thomas Aquinas.
- Shields and Giesting go into depth on Aquinas’s proofs for the existence of God, especially his favored “first way”—arguing our cosmos filled with motion needs an “unmoved mover” at its origin (and beyond). The discussion elaborates on the idea that God keeps everything in motion.
- The book, Shields explains, goes on to apply natural philosophy and metaphysics to such subjects as statistical mechanics, contemporary cosmology, and even biology.
- Through it all, Shields and Giesting make mention of many historical figures, from Aristotle to Copernicus to Newton to Maimonidesto Helmholtz. Present-day references include Brother Guy Consolmagno, SJ, known as the Pope’s Astronomer, and quantum physics scholar Sean Carroll.
Monday Mar 11, 2019
Episode 050 - Craig Lent: decoherence, entropy, and faith
Monday Mar 11, 2019
Monday Mar 11, 2019
0:00 - Three issues: entropy, decoherence, Schrodinger vs. Dirac equations
2:30 - Schrodinger uses a non-relativistic Hamiltonian, with a p^2/2m kinetic energy
3:00 - Dirac equation absorbs special relativity by shifting from scalar to spinor field
4:00 - Quantum field theory as a further extension, accommodating fields that include many particles
5:00 - Field Lagrangian and all the particles and interactions in the Standard Model
6:00 - Even "everyday" gravity is in some sense accommodatable in the theory, just not extreme gravity capable of "separating out the vacuum"
8:00 - Decoherence, not to be confused with the measurement problem
9:00 - Decoherence arising from the interaction of a simple system with other systems
10:00 - Reduced density matrix begins to look classical
11:00 - Zurek and the work on decoherence: states that are "chosen" to survive interaction with the environment
11:30 - Measurement problem not solved by this work
12:30 - Entropy: the proposal that entropy is most fundamentally lack of information
progress from the special case of thermodynamic entropy, to statistical mechanics,
to von Neumann's quantum definition, to Shannon's information theory
21:00 - Craig's career: why is an engineer so interested in the fundamentals of physics?
24:00 - Journey of faith
30:30 - People of Praise in Indianapolis
31:20 - Final thoughts
Monday Mar 04, 2019
Episode 049 - Craig Lent: physics and humanity
Monday Mar 04, 2019
Monday Mar 04, 2019
0:00 - Introduction
1:00 - The power of physicalism/reductionism: a tremendously powerful method
2:00 - Course on physicalism and Catholicism; Sean Carroll's least hysterical "poetic naturalism"
3:00 - The lack of evidence for "emergence" in the sense of "downward causation"
3:30 - Soft and hard emergence
10:15 - Materialism vs. physicalism and reductionism: philosophical materialism
13:00 - Are human beings exhausted by this account of reality?
14:00 - The break with the mechanical universe of 19th century physics underappreciated
15:00 - Laplace's demon
16:30 - Thermodynamics
17:30 - Future not contained in the present
19:00 - Einstein & hidden variables
20:00 - Bell inequality experiments
24:00 - Entanglement
26:00 - Human experience: both, as physical, but also as having choices
27:00 - Quantum physics on many body systems
28:00 - The hard problem of consciousness
29:00 - The explanatory gap
31:00 - The tendency to explain the brain as "just like" some recent piece of technology
33:00 - Complexity of neurons, the continuing relevance of physical laws amid the complexity
35:00 - Continuing relevance of quantum effects at the level of neurotransmitter molecules, etc.
36:00 - Quantum effects in weather and rock mechanics
Monday Dec 03, 2018
Episode 036 - Anne Hofmeister on Galactic Rotation, Math, and Glass
Monday Dec 03, 2018
Monday Dec 03, 2018
The times below are continuations from the last episode. My opening is about 1:30, and then we start with galaxy motions at "26:00".
26:00 Galaxy motions
27:00 Galaxy rotation curves: do not match Keplerian orbits
28:00 Galaxies spin more like records (laggy soft records); mass distribution is nothing like the Solar System
29:00 Hurricanes as a better analogy for galaxies
30:00 Stars in a galaxy move in local organization
32:00 Nebulas
34:00 The opposite extreme: rigid body rotation
35:00 Gravitational attraction between stars creating coherence
36:00 Curiosity that gravity and electrical forces are both inverse square laws
37:00 Poisson's equation
38:00 Summing densities in Poisson's inhomogeneous term is physically meaningless; intensive quantities can't be summed that way
40:00 Gauss' theorem: flux through a surface and quantity within a volume
41:00 Summing is for extensive variables
42:00 Pressure an ambiguous variable
43:00 Future work
44:00 Thermal expansivity: Giauque
45:00 Problems with the glass transition measurements done in the past: need to completely drive out water from the experimental charges
48:00 Wrapup
Monday Nov 26, 2018
Episode 035 - Anne Hofmeister Shakes Up Earth Science
Monday Nov 26, 2018
Monday Nov 26, 2018
TSSM goes heavy: hard-hitting journalism from one of science's great controversialists, Anne Hofmeister. Intrigued? Disagree? Write me an email (giesting@alumni.nd.edu) or look her up at Washington University in St. Louis' EPS department website.
The times below are keyed to the start of the interview and ignore my opening (just over 2 min).
0:00 Introduction
1:00 Anne's background (sorry, this part Anne was talking so quietly that I can't seem to fix it with Audacity, but bear with us; we moved the microphone and figured some things out and it gets better)
2:00 Spectroscopy and heat transfer
3:00 Thermal conductivity experiments and their pitfalls
5:00 Criticism of the history of thermodynamics and heat transfer; identification of light and heat
6:00 Problems with equilibrium and elastic collisions in theories of thermodynamics
8:00 Criticism of phonon theory
10:00 Electron and vibrational transfer of heat decoupled; metals and heat transfer
13:00 Garnet
14:00 Earth's interior: convection, the Rayleigh number
15:00 Viscosity
16:00 The Earth's mantle: nearly all solid
17:00 Plate tectonics without mantle convection
18:00 An even more radical idea: heat is being trapped inside the solid Earth
19:00 [there was a distortion I had to cut]
20:00 Implications: heat generation is in the crust (this part is widely known!)
21:00 Implications: the core is melting, not solidifying?
22:00 The geodynamo and magnetic field
23:00 The core: buffered at the temperature of melting high pressure iron
24:00 Magnetic modes diagram for the planets: spin and magnetic field