Deus Ex Radioactiva

When you get down to a very small level, sometimes refered to as the quantum level, the universe becomes a strange place, at least to our human sized preconcieved notions of How Things Work. Radioactive decay is an example of this sort of weirdness: we can never tell when a particular atom is going to decay, but if we have a big pile of them, we can say how long it will take for half of them to have undergone decay with pretty good certainty.

Let's assume for a moment that the Christians are right: God exists and He's a vicious tyrant bent on forcing His creations to live in eternal pain, but who has nonetheless managed to convince a handful of those creations that He is loving and kind and just, mainly so that they will go out and visit unspeakable horrors on His other creations.

It would not be unthinkable that a creature that clever would be able to set up the universe in such a way that His own presence would be undetectable. How might He go about doing that? Why, with quantum mechanics, of course! You see, He would make everything run according to some probabilistic law: the outcome of any particular event would be completely unpredictable, but the pattern of those outcomes would become quite apparent given a large enough sample set. In this way, He could intervene by changing the outcome of a single event without violating His own laws.

The result of this would be a completely undetectable God who was able to alter the universe in large and detectable ways. In fact, given the current body of evidence, this is about the only way God could exist. So there you have it, Christians: your God is the ultimate jerk who uses only your belief in Him to determine where you spend all enternity while covering His tracks and making it completely impossible to detect Him until Judgement Day. And to me, that sounds a lot like "He beats me because He loves me."

Bitter Much?

I'm TAing Nuclear Engineering this semester. I was kind of worried about it because I don't actually know all that much about nuclear physics or engineering. Well, it turns out that the undergrads know basically nothing about it, so I didn't have anything to worry about.

Right now we're in the section on dosing. I was reading through a textbook almost as old as me. My supervisor loaned it to me, noting that the name scrawled on the inside front cover is his supervisor's name.

The author felt it would be useful, in discussing the deleterious effects of ionizing radiation on the human body, to do a quick rundown of cellular biology. I came across this passage which I found quite comical:

The germ cells, which are also called gametes, function only in reproduction. It is the union of the gametes from different sexes that is the starting point of a new individual. The gametes also carry the hereditary material of the species that makes children look more like their parents than their neighbors[sic], and ensure that the evils of mankind pass with little change from generation to generation.

How's that for unbiased scientific writing? That passage was in a textbook! Well, John R. Lamarsh, I shall see that history remembers you as a great nuclear engineer and misanthrope.

And hey, maybe I just found a new role model.