Clocks. I was going to post about clocks.
I've got this stack of reading, some of which purports to debug the scientific craze for eschatalogical-type prediction, and some of which is just plain-ass crazy. I'll report back if I sort anything out. But yeah, clocks.
The Doomsday clock, of course, is misleading, because it's actually a representation of probability, whereas a clock is, to most observers, a representation of inevitability. There is no reason to believe that a functioning clock will not strike midnight exactly one minute after is strikes 11:59. But of course that's not what the Doomsday clock is saying. There's plenty of reason to believe the DOomsday clock will never srike midnight (though I still think it's pretty serious business- what up, Kashmir). If they were being less sensational, they'd probably just give us a standard probability scale where 1.0 is absolutely guaranteed to happen, and 0 is not ever going to happen, which I'm sure is what their computer models are actually calculating, and then you get a news conference full of very grim septegenarian physicists saying: "0.78" (or whatever the number would be, I'm going to go look it up in a minute).
But, oh yeah, clocks. The idea of the different rates of clocks is pretty exciting to me. Think of one very large, slow-moving clock representing the Universe reversing it's expansion process and heading back towards eventual implosion (the Stephen hawkings clock). Then a smaller, though still fairly slow-moving clock reprsenting our Sun expanding enough to swallow up our solar system, Earth included (the Sun clock). Then a smaller clock representing climate changes which could eventually render the earth uninhabitable to creatures like us at a faster rate than we could adapt, either genetically or technologically (the Al Gore clock). Then an even smaller clock represnting Doomsday in the nuclear sense, which would be even quicker environmental debacle than carbon-emission.
Alongside those clocks would be the religious/eschatological clocks: one for the Mayan calendar, one for the Second Coming, one for the Mahdi, others (let's go find some more). We might also need a clock for possible giant comet collision, which I guess would be on a clock in the sense that comets have rates of speed and somewaht predictable trajectories (i.e. you could "clock them").
Now, I want to add a fifth dimension on top of time- probability. For the Hawkings clock, the probability is 1.0 if his theory is right, and 0 or inscrutable if his theory's wrong. For the Sun clock, in that we've more or less witnessed stars gong supernova, I think the probability is a solid 0.99. For the Al Gore clock, I think everyone's got to admit the probabilities are much lower, and I want to do the research to get a better grip on what they'd be and how they map on to different outcomes (Nao had good stuff to say about this Wednesday night, that it's dumb to think climate change will just mean everyone falling over dead). For the Doomsday clock, I think it's really question-begging, as the probabilities are 1 if it happens and 0 if it doesn't, though it may be credible to say that we are, in some sense, inching up the probability scale every time we make or test a weapon.
For the eschatological clocks, the easy answer would be that they are also either 1.0 if true and 0 if false. This is because they rest on the assumption that the universe is ordained form the start, or that everything is just fate. So, it's absolutely certain that a.) Jesus is coming back to judge the living and the dead b.) the Mahdi is coming to do battle with evil on Earth c.)fire is going to rain from the sky and swallow the whole world (or however the Mayan version actually goes d.) Ganesh is gearing up to destroy the Universe again, etc. But what's interesting is that, after these fail, and I think one thing we should maybe do is rattle off the dates of all the failed predictions we can get our hands on, their probabilities don't, in the believers minds, go back to 0. The failure of the world to go up in smoke on Y2K didn't cause everyone to abandon their individual sechatological beliefs, they just went and crunched the numbers again. This made me think of the following paradox:
Each day that we wake up alive both disconfirms the apocalypse and brings us one step closer to it.
Now, this is easy to write off if you're an atheist like me, but if you add in other clocks besides the eschatological ones, the hawkings clock, the Sun clock, you have to start taking it seriosly again. I woke up today, which means no one dropped the bomb on me in my sleep, but it also certainly means I ticked off another millisecond on at least one of those clocks.
So, I guess the rephrased version of my first reherasal questions, "How (strongly) do you believe in the End?", would be:
"Which clock(s) do you live by?"
I'm shooting off of Cara's question Wed. night- "which is your science?" and the realization that none of these little branches of science are in charge of telling the whole story, and that they may in fact have competing and contradictory stories/interests.
