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Relativity Confirmed Under Normal Laboratory Conditions

Einstein’s theories of relativity have fundamentally changed the way scientists view reality. This bothers some, which is why you can find creationists who desperately try to fight against them. These attacks often strike a chord since most people (even many scientists) know little about these revolutionary theories. Partly, this is because the theories are difficult to understand. In addition, they often deal with things that are not a part of everyday experience, such as extremely high speeds or unusual gravitational fields. Nevertheless, both theories are immensely important to some everyday items. For example, if you use a GPS device for navigation, that device would not work properly if the global positioning system did not use relativity correctly.

To understand what I mean, you first need to know that Einstein proposed two separate theories of relativity. Special relativity deals with systems that move relative to one another with a constant velocity. General relativity deals with systems that move relative to one another with a variable velocity. In each theory, Einstein’s only concern is that the laws of physics must work the same in both systems, regardless of the fact that they are moving relative to one another. While this seems like a common-sense idea, it leads to conclusions that make little sense.

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Another Confirmation of Quantum Mechanics

Some Christians don’t like quantum mechanics. More than 20 years ago, one Christian writer called it “the greatest contemporary threat to Christianity.”¹ Eleven years ago, R. C. Sproul wrote a book entitled Not a Chance: The Myth of Chance in Modern Science and Cosmology. In that book, he attacked quantum mechanics. A Christian group called “Common Sense Science” champions an absurd model of elementary particles in order to get away from quantum mechanics.

Why all this Christian angst directed against quantum mechanics? Well, some Christians think that quantum mechanics is inconsistent with their view of God. For example, one of the fundamental conclusions of quantum mechanics is that the behavior of elementary particles and atoms is statistical, not mechanistic. This means that even if you knew everything there is to know about an atom, you could not predict exactly what that atom would do. You could make statistical statements like, “There is a 12% chance that it will do this and a 45% chance that it will do that.” However, there is no way to pin down exactly what an atom will do, regardless of how well you know the atom and everything that is affecting it.

This, of course, bothers many Christians, especially those of the Calvinist persuasion. Indeed, in the book I mentioned above, Sproul really seemed to think that quantum mechanics was somehow a threat to God’s sovereignty. If nature really is statistical at some level, then even God would not know exactly what His creation will do, and that just doesn’t work for a Calvinist!

Others don’t like quantum mechanics because, inherently, it doesn’t make sense. There is a lot in quantum mechanics that goes against common sense (as you will see in a moment), and since some people are under the mistaken view that science has to be rooted in common sense (as demonstrated by the website linked above), they think that there must be something wrong with quantum mechanics.

The problem is that when quantum mechanics is tested against the data, it passes with flying colors. Thus, even if you don’t like quantum mechanics, you must appreciate its scientific value. The experiment I will discuss below the fold is another clear example of this.

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A Small Brain Does NOT Mean A Low Intelligence

As I mentioned in a previous post, because they are not willing to understand that it has been designed by an incredibly intelligent and powerful Designer, evolutionists are forced to look at nature in a ridiculously simplistic way. Take the naive evolutionary idea that brain size correlates with intelligence. Because evolutionists can’t appreciate the incredible design that went into producing brains, they generally assume that the smaller the brain, the lower the intelligence of the organism. Nearly a year ago, I reviewed The Design of Life , which discusses some powerful evidence against this silly notion. Recent research ¹ on bumblebees has just added more evidence to the pile.

In the research, the investigators wanted to know how a bumblebee decides the order in which it visits flowers. It has been observed for quite a while that bees tend to visit the flowers they have identified as good food sources in a predictable order. In other words, they don’t fly “willy nilly” amongst the flowers they visit. Instead, the have a planned flight route. This has been called trapline foraging, because human trappers typically follow a preplanned route when checking the traps they have set.²

The question the authors wanted to address was how the bees arrive at their preplanned “trapline” route. Do they just visit the flowers in the same order in which the flowers were originally discovered, or is there more thought given to the process? In the end, the researchers were able to show that there is a lot of thought devoted to the process.

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Thank God for Whale Poop!

spermwhale — Sperm whales are amazing divers (Scarred Giant by artist Chris Harman, click picture for reference)

Whales are incredible creatures. They are perfectly designed for a life in the water, even though they breathe air. They can dive to depths that would kill human beings, because their ribcage and lungs are designed to change as they dive deeper. This allows the whales to adapt to water pressures that are simply incredible. Sperm whales, for example, can dive more than a mile underwater.¹ At that depth, the pressure the whale experiences is well over 150 times atmospheric pressure!

Many whales have an intricate method of communication that allows them to be highly social. Most social mammals rely on visual cues for communication, but because the water they live in inhibits the effectiveness of visual cues, whales mostly communicate with vocalizations. Dolphins, for example communicate with clicks, whistles, and other sounds. A few years ago, researchers learned that dolphins use their whistles to identify other dolphins by name. Two dolphins that are “talking” might even refer to a third dolphin by name as a part of their “conversation”!²

Well, it seems there is another thing to add to the ever-growing list of what makes whales so amazing: they also have great poop!

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Climate Heretic Dr. Judith Curry

jcurry — Dr. Judith Curry is the latest scientist to be branded a heretic by the climate community.
(Image from Wikipedia)

Dr. Judith A. Curry is the chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology. She is a member of the National Research Council’s Climate Research Committee, and she currently has 144 refereed publications to her credit. An active climate researcher, Curry is considered an expert on hurricanes, atmospheric modeling, polar climates, and air-sea interactions. She is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and has won awards from both NASA and the American Meteorological Society for her excellent climate research. She has also been officially branded a heretic by Scientific American.. What horrible offense has caused her to be labeled this way? She actually started thinking for herself rather than blindly following the reports of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Curry’s story is a classic one and is very similar to my own in many ways. She says that when she reviewed the parts of the IPCC’s third report that were related to her expertise:

I told them that their perspective was far too simplistic and that they didn’t even mention the issue of aerosol impacts on the nucleation of ice clouds. So it’s not so much as finding things that were wrong, but rather ignorance that was unrecognized and confidence that was overstated.

In other words, she had doubts about the IPCC’s report when it came to the areas in which she had serious expertise. However, when push came to shove, she says:

I had decided that the responsible thing to do in making public statements on the subject of global warming was to adopt the position of the IPCC. My decision was based on two reasons: 1) the subject was very complex and I had personally investigated a relatively small subset of the topic; 2) I bought into the meme of “don’t trust what one scientists says, trust what thousands of IPCC scientists say.”

As time went on, however, she began to question her supposedly “responsible” position.

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How Bacteria Talk

Evolutionists have always wanted a “simple” life form to exist. After all, to make the leap from nonliving chemicals to living systems, there must be something that is alive in every sense of the word, but at the same time, is reasonably simple. For a long time, evolutionists wanted bacteria to represent that “simple” life form.

As I make clear in my biology textbook, however, there is no such thing as a simple life form, and that holds true for bacteria as well. The more we learn about them, the more we learn how complex they really are. One of the surprises that has emerged in the past few decades is that bacteria actually talk to one another. They have an incredibly complex means of communication, but Dr. Bonnie Bassler (a professor at Princeton University) does an excellent job of describing it in the following video:

Even though it is 18 minutes long, it is worth watching. She not only tells you how important bacteria are to nature and to you, she explains bacterial communication in a very easy-to-understand manner.

What I find interesting about it is how she and I take such a different view of what the data really mean. She says that because we now know bacteria have one language to talk to other members of their own species and a second language to talk to the bacterial community as a whole, it is clear that bacteria really “set up the rules” for communication between cells. Thus, the communication that makes your cells able to work together so that you survive is simply a more advanced version of what bacteria were able to evolve billions of year ago. I look at the same data, however, and see incredible evidence for design. Just as a common genetic code tells us there is a common designer for creation, the fact that cellular communication is common amongst all the cells in creation tells us that cellular communication is the result of a preplanned design.

Regardless of how you look at what these data mean, the facts are amazing, and Dr. Bassler does an excellent job of communicating them!

Genes aren’t Everything

These calves are identical twins
(Image in the public domain)

It is commonly assumed (quite incorrectly) that an organism’s genetics determine pretty much everything there is to know about the organism. For example, many people think that because identical twins have identical genes, they are nearly identical. Of course, ask a few identical twins whether or not they are identical people, and you will soon find out how naive a view that really is. Indeed, even something as straightforward as fingerprints are not identical between identical twins. If fingerprints are not even identical between those who have identical DNA, it is likely that very few traits are governed solely by genetics. Thus, there is clearly an interaction between an organism’s genetics and its surroundings. Genetics might give you a predisposition for some traits, but your environment will play a role in whether or not that predisposition is actually followed.

However, what if there is something more than genetics and environment? Could there be something else that affects an organism’s traits? Vicki R. Nelson and her colleagues decided to investigate this question in a rather elegant way, and the results they obtained were rather surprising.

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Here’s What You Do When A Fossil Find Contradicts Evolution

Many trees produce resin, a thick liquid that typically oozes from wounds in the tree. While some scientists view resin as a waste product of the tree, resins have been shown to protect certain trees from insects, fungi, and other pests.¹ Thus, resin is probably something purposefully produced by the tree.

If resin hardens, it forms amber, which is considered valuable both as a component for jewelry as well as a means by which fossils can be preserved. The photo above, for example, shows a spider that has been remarkably well-preserved by amber. It is assumed that the spider was trapped in a tree’s resin, and then the resin hardened around the spider. Because this forms a nearly airtight container, decomposition is greatly reduced, allowing for the formation of an incredibly well-preserved fossil.

Not surprisingly, different kinds of trees will produce different kinds of resin, which leads to different kinds of amber. Currently, there are five known classes of amber, based upon the specific chemical compounds that make up the amber. It has been generally thought (quite reasonably) that the chemicals in the amber are reflective of the kind of tree that originally produced the resin. However, that thinking will have to change in order to preserve the hypothesis of evolution.

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Go to the Ant

Crematogaster — This little ant scares elephants! (Image from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Acacia_collinsii3.jpg)

Proverbs 6:6 tells us, “Go to the ant, O sluggard, Observe her ways and be wise.” As this verse suggests, scientists who have studied the ant have learned all sorts of wonderful things. I mentioned previously the remarkable mutualistic relationship between Crematogaster (also called Cregaster) ants and certain Acacia trees. The trees provide food and housing for the ants, and the ants fiercely attack anything that tries to eat their tree. As I discussed in a follow-up post, scientists who thought they would “help” Acacia trees by fencing them in to protect them from large herbivores like elephants actually ended up hurting the trees. In the end, the scientists could not improve on the protection that the ants provide the tree naturally.

This intrigued the scientists who were bested by the ants, so they wanted to find out whether or not it is really possible for the tiny Crematogaster ants to actually defend the tree from the world’s largest land animal. Thus, they conducted a follow-up study, and the results were incredible!

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Marvelous Monarch Medicine

Monarch butterflies are not only beautiful, they are truly marvelous creatures. Consider, for example, their annual migration. The story begins in a fir forest in Mexico, where monarch butterflies from eastern North America blanket the trees. They slow down their biological processes so that they can last through the winter months, and then in February or March, they start the 3,000-mile journey back to Eastern North America.¹

However, none of them makes the entire trip. Instead, they lay their eggs and die along the way. The new monarchs that hatch develop into adults and then continue the journey. These monarchs typically live only about two months in total, at which point they lay their eggs and die. This continues until August, when the members of the current generation, none of which has ever seen the fir forest in Mexico, make the trip back there. Individuals often end up landing on the same tree in which their forefathers spent the winter!² How do these intrepid travelers know where to go? That matter is still under investigation.

It turns out that this migration is just one of the marvels of the monarch. Current research indicates that monarch mothers are also able to medicate their offspring!

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