Interesting links between Daniel 7, Newton and Christology

A couple weeks ago I continued my study of Daniel. While Catholics and Theologians (who generally don’t believe in supernatural revelation) clearly agree that Daniel was written about 50 years before it was used religiously in the Dead Sea community, many religious Protestants (including the denomination I was raised in and am a member of, Adventists, and Newton) are inclined to identify the fourth beast as Rome and the blasphemous little horn as the Middle Ages Catholic Church.

I haven’t yet read Newton’s writings about Daniel or detailed discussions of them, but in the sermon it was mentioned that the 3 barbarian groups which are identified as being extinguished by the early Catholic Church were Arian (and so not Trinitarian). Newton identified Trinitarianism as the great Apostasy and his date for the return of Christ in 2060 was based on the year for a day principle from the point where he identified Trinitarianism as becoming dominant in the Christian Church.

The Millerites, from whom the Adventists descended (along with other denominations like the Jehovah Witnesses and the Church of God (7th Day)), came up with the date of 1844 as the end of Daniels prophecy using the year for a day principle. Adventists were born out of the Great Disappointment when Christ did not return. While the Bahá'í also identify 1844 as the fulfillment of Daniel's prophecy, it isn't clear to me that the interpretation is preferred for any reason other than that it fits the life of the Báb.

Note that while many Adventists are not Trinitarian, most are and I am and was raised Trinitarian. I hope to write a blog post about Trinitarianism at some point in the future.

Psalm of Daniel

This year my church has had a sermon series on Daniel. I decided to reread it, perhaps for the first time in over a decade, and while I didn't get past chapter 7 or so I was initially struck by the praise in Daniel 2. Daniel was a wiseman, one of the educated of his time and in some way the middle eastern antecedent of a scientist, and he praised God for the knowledge that was bestowed on him.

NRSV (Daniel 2:20-23)

“Blessed be the name of God from age to age,
    for wisdom and power are his.
21 He changes times and seasons,
    deposes kings and sets up kings;
he gives wisdom to the wise
    and knowledge to those who have understanding.
22 He reveals deep and hidden things;
    he knows what is in the darkness,
    and light dwells with him.
23 To you, O God of my ancestors,
    I give thanks and praise,
for you have given me wisdom and power,
    and have now revealed to me what we asked of you,
    for you have revealed to us what the king ordered.”

As I have sought knowledge and understanding as a scientist, I have prayed for insight (and occasionally even for wisdom). I feel that in some small measure that I have been given some. I think it is important, as a scientist and a Christian, to acknowledge God's place in my seeking and appreciate finding in Daniel a biblical model to identify with.

Other Blogs

Sometimes you come across someone that has not only done what you wanted to do, but also has succeeded far more in every way. I realized that it was the case for me when I came across Aron Wall's blog a couple of years ago.

I strongly recommend his blog, named UNDIVIDED LOOKING.
Before that, I came across a nice presentation of his about the Fine Tuning argument for the existence of God.

He is a much more successful physicist, a particle theorist (which was my original interest), regularly updates his blog and blogs about Christianity and Physics. We even had some overlap at the University of Maryland, but I think that we didn't meet as I spent most of my time at Jefferson Laboratory starting in January of 2006.

Evolution of Humans

I read How humans tamed themselves with interest and I have not read the related scientific article(s). But the obvious thing that came to mind, as a parent, is that there is an another obvious hypothesis.

We were tamed by being parents. Our children do not take 6 months or 1 year or even 3 years for basic functionality and not the level of functionality needed to care for themselves until they are somewhere near 12 years old. Orangutans are usually cared for until they are about 6 years so that is pretty long.

When you are caring for someone, and it requires a group not just one person, then you have to put aside violence and work together. And (less domestic) individuals who don't do that, would end up being less successful, and be less likely to have children.

Artificial Intelligence

As someone who has worked closely with Machine Learning Algorithms for this decade, I have been very suspicious of calling them Artificial Intelligence. The ones that I use: Support Vector Machines, clustering (Nearest Neighbor),  Boosted Decision Trees and (Deep Convolutional) Neural Networks do not look anything like Intelligence as we define it among humans. At least to me.

I have only followed at a distance the game playing machine learning algorithms like AlphaGo. That seemed to be interesting but the state space was still so small that it didn't seem so different to me. It (could be) just memorizing precise patterns and matching them and applying the correct response. They use reinforcement learning, which is something that I haven't spent much time thinking about.

I haven't had the time (with parenting, politics and my own projects in mathematics and physics) to follow the field closely. I was interested though when they announced that they were going to tackle Starcraft 2. I think that the best players end up knowing the game very well, but for me as an amateur it was an example where I needed to deal with new information and to display some intelligence. Although when I did my best in competitive play is when I had responses, which could be considered sort of automated, that I learned.

While the DeepMind AI did get defeated when hampered similarly to a human, it is still an impressive showing.

What I would like to see is taking the same AI (not the same network, but the same reinforcement trained AI) and have it play Warcraft 3 or Defense of the Ancients or even Civilization 6. There would need to be some mapping of controls and limitations, but if intelligence is actually being trained then the AI should be successful there after being trained on Starcraft 2.

After all the state space of Real Life is by some considerations effectively infinite. The fact that the computer can be trained to find patterns at a much increased rate to humans doesn't necessarily make it more intelligent, rather it is if a trained algorithm can be put into a real time situation and adapt and find/relate patterns to be successful in a new situation.

I haven't really read the papers, so when I get time to do so I should be able to think more intelligently on this topic.

The Vox article https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/1/24/18196177/ai-artificial-intelligence-google-deepmind-starcraft-game which shows that the Starcraft 2 state space is (probably?) too large to be completely mapped for the machine learning algorithm and so it is displaying strategy and tactics and not just exact situational responses.

Neutrino Beams

I am very supportive of DUNE. We need a flagship particle physics experiment, and DUNE is the best one we are getting in the next 10-15 years. In addition to measuring the CP violating phase, it also will provide a reasonable supernova neutrino observatory.

Despite my support of DUNE, neutrinos are very difficult to pin down and part of this is the fact that the current method to produce a neutrino beam produces neutrinos with a broad energy spectrum. That is why I was very interested a few months ago to read Mono-energetic neutrinos with enough energy to produce a muon.

I was very interested in a neutrino factory and other neutrino beam ideas, but this sounds very promising, and may turn out to be necessary to really utilize our neutrino detectors and observatories.

Thinking about "Science has a problem, and we must talk about it"

I initially was writing this as a response to Backreaction: Science has a problem, and we must talk about it but I thought about it again when reading Backreaction: Don’t ask what science can do for you. Warning, this post contains a bit of biography.

The subject of this post is one that I have thought about for some time. It is also presented clearly in PhD comics PhD: Intellectual Freedom' .

A little bit of biographical context is that I was interested in pursuing fundamental physics theory research when I arrived at graduate school at the University of Maryland in 2002. By late 2004, I had lost interest, not because I had lost interest in the field but because it seemed like the theory side was well provisioned. I was sure that we were going to find supersymmetry (and dark matter) at the LHC, and that that would show us which of the already explored theories was the correct one. It just seemed like there wasn't much that needed to be done until the experimental data was there.

After I short period exploring condensed matter theory, I became an experimentalist. In 2009, with PhD in hand and no intention of staying focused on nuclear physics I joined IceCube and shortly jumped into dark matter searches. From my more mature perspective, it seemed like the theoretical approach was more like a shotgun approach with countless theories posited one of which was surely the correct one.

Now, however, I am less sure. It seems that the theories and models explored often share similarities, the most important being that it is easy to get a publication from that exploration. Theories which are difficult to explore often get ignored. I understand why, if someone needs papers to get a position and papers to get tenure and papers to get grant renewal... why should they do anything else other than study the theory space where they are comfortable and where there is a community? And if the community happens to die for some reason, it is probably easier to join another than to invent a new one.

In 2013 I took my current position in Chile primarily for personal reasons. In the first semester there, before I had a course to teach, I gave a couple of introductory lectures about astrophysics, neutrino physics and nuclear physics. During the neutrino physics lecture, after my presentation of neutrino oscillation, I was asked a question about if the neutrino could interact outside of weak interactions. I thought for a few moments and then said that of course it could also interact with a graviton in a quantum gravity interaction and then it wouldn't appear to oscillate. This formed the beginning of https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ahep/2015/381569/ although I and my collaborator ended up including a lot of other ideas and calculations which had initially been planned for followup papers.

So I returned to fundamental physics theory and I thought I had an ideal setup. I was in a situation where I could, depending on the semester, take care of my experimental, teaching and administration requirements (including frequent applications for grant renewals) with 50-75% (75-90% if I had tenure) of my time and could pursue other interests during the rest of my time. This hasn't always been fundamental physics but science isn't only fundamental physics. And I didn't have to worry about being slow or pursuing something where there is no community.

My personal situation has intruded again and I see failings in my setup. But I think the general point stands: at least grant renewal and probably even tenure should not require 100% or 110% effort but should be pretty much given (at some level) for every productive professor/scientist. This probably means grant amounts will decrease. An alternative of making general grant funding for senior tenured professors, after one or two renewals, depend on working in a new area would probably result in only senior professors at elite institutions getting senior grants which seems to create bad incentives.