Money, money, money…

Like almost any area of human endevour there is of course the critical matter of money – work needs people to do it and people inevitably face the old “food on table/roof over head” problem. Persuits such as science and mathematics rarely see immediate profit though they frequently eventually have uses and there are many examples of this. This timescale makes it almost imposible for private enterprise to play much role in funding these persuits (though, like any rule, there is the odd exception). This naturally forces taxpayers’ money to be used instead.

I don’t know how funding in other countries works, but currently in the UK the principal funding body for mathematics is the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (becuse pure mathematics is a branch of engineering, right?)

I say this since, over on Mathematics Under the Microscope, Sasha Borovic highlights the fact that a research programme he has been involved in for 25 years and has been extremely fruitious producing many results and yet has never recieved a single panny from EPSRC. He laments:

LMS (the London Mathematical Society) has a different philosophy: it funds people, not projects. The LMS grants are tiny in comparison with EPSRC, but if the outcome is measured in theorems per pound, the LMS grants are likely to be an order of magnitude more cost-effective than ones from EPSRC.

Why is this? Should government bodies change their policies accordingly? Is the situation similar in other countries and disciplines? Could this be taken further (e.g. funding individual papers)?

Comments, Commendations, Castigations…

your science needs YOU!

With all the excitement surrounding the imminant activation of the LHC it is worth remembering that you too can play your own little part in history’s biggest and bravest experiment (can you think of another instance of an entire subject area resting on the outcome of a single test?)

The idea of volunteer computing, getting ordinary people to donate their computing resources over the internet to help perform large calculations using for large science research projects, is not new. It is, however, worth noting that the LHC also uses this form of computing through the project LHC@home. (To run this you need to first download the frequently used BOINC application.) The LHC projects will collectively produce around15 Petabytes (15 million Gigabytes) of data each year and sorting it all out requires a hell of a lot of computing power. I urge as many of you as possible to download the software and get helping: yes kids – particle physics needs YOU!!! (Trying to do this on computors in your department or university network may create problems concerning administrative privilages, but you can at least spare a bit your laptop’s power, surely?)

With more relevence to mathematics, there have been several projects of this kind before, many of which are still active. The GIMPS have broken the record for finding the largest prime number known to man several times over. Other prime number related efforts include prime grid, the rieselsieve project and VTU. Those less interested in prime numbers can also assist with problems such the rectilinear crossing number problem, play with sudoku or even search for generalized binary number systems.

Go forth and calculate…

Bertrand Russell and The Big Bang

Bertrand Russel was an early twentieth centiury philosopher and logician responsible for much modern mathematics: it was his famous paradox that stimulated the development of axiomatic set theory (the ZF axioms underlying modern mathematics) and his his book “Principia Mathematica” coauthored with Alfred North Whitehead is widely considered by specialists in the subject to be one of the most important and seminal works in mathematical logic and philosophy since Aristotle’s “Prior Analytics”.

It is for this reason that I find it so strange that Russell’s philosophy seems so at odds with one of the most widely accepted ideas of modern physics: The Big Bang.
In his 1927 work “Why I Am Not a Christian” (published 1957) Russel addresses many aspects of christian dogma and thought. In particular when considering the existence of God he considers several of the arguments found in Christian teachings. The argument that concerns us here is the argument of the First Cause thus:

“Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the First Cause. (It is maintained that everything…has a cause, and as you go back in the chain of causes…you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of God.) That argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be. The philosophers and the men of science have got going on cause, and it has not anything like the vitality it used to have; but, apart from that, you can see that the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity. I may say that when I was a young man and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day…I read John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: “My father taught me that the question ‘Who made me?’ cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question `Who made god?’” That very simple sentence showed me…the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument.”

Now, modern physics, and in particular Quantum Mechanics, has certainly changed our view of causality since John Stewart Mill’s time. In particular the idea of a First Cause almost loses meaning. The first Moment Of Creation simply couldn’t happen since the very fabric of spacetime itself was still forming. In short we now have a physical evidence for a `First Cause’ of sorts, but not quite the kind of First Cause Russell would object to, I think. Do we think Russell would revise his views of God Creation or Science on the basis what we now know?

Comment, Commendations, Castigations…