The ethics of a scientist.

Science has no ethics.  The ethics have to be imported from outside science.

It seems that the best proof of this is found in the example offered by Lawrence Krauss in his debate where he altered the evidence.

In debate, this is a serious offence.  In law, it is a crime.

For physicist Lawrence Krauss, apparently, it's just strategy.

Free-thinkers sure don't like to be challenged.

Critic of Lawrence Krauss "disinvited" from debate on "nothing":

The annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate is the American Museum of Natural History’s biggest public event, drawing a sold-out crowd for an evening billed as bringing together “the finest minds in the world” to debate “pressing questions on the frontiers of scientific discovery.” 

But this year’s installment, to be held on March 20 under the heading “The Existence of Nothing,” may also be notable for the panelist who disappeared. 

Among the speakers will be several leading physicists, including Lawrence M. Krauss, whose book “A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing” became a cause célèbre in the scientific blogosphere last spring after a scathing review in the New York Times Book Review by the philosopher David Z. Albert. 

But Mr. Albert will not be onstage, having been abruptly disinvited by the museum several months after he agreed to take part. 

The tone of the dustup between Mr. Albert and Mr. Krauss — summed up by one blogger as “an ongoing cosmological street fight” that had broken out “broad media daylight” — would have certainly left those who saw both men’s names on early publicity material anticipating something closer to a wrestling match than dispassionate scholarly discussion. 

In his review Mr. Albert, who also has a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, mocked Mr. Krauss’s cocksure claim to have found in the laws of quantum mechanics a definitive answer to the vexing question of the ultimate origins of the universe. (So where did those laws come from? he asked.) Mr. Krauss countered with a pugnacious interview in The Atlantic, in which he called Mr. Albert “moronic” and dismissed the philosophy of science as worthless.//

Lawrence Krauss admits that when he said that science "proves" that the universe came from "nothing," he really didn't meant it.

Apparently, Krauss is walking-back the nonsense bit of "shock advertising" that he used to sell his book. On the other hand, after being shown repeatedly to be an intellectual buffoon on the subject, he doesn't get any credit for admitting the obvious.

Science Writer John Horgan writes about Lawrence Krauss's claim that everything came from nothing - and then interacts with Krauss in the comment section:

I’m nonetheless going out on a limb and guessing that science will never, ever answer what I call “The Question”: Why is there something rather than nothing? You might think this prediction is safe to the point of triviality, but certain prominent scientists are claiming not merely that they can answer The Question but that they have already done so. Physicist Lawrence Krauss peddles this message in his new book A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (Free Press, 2012).

Krauss’s answer is nothing new. Decades ago, physicists such as the legendary John Wheeler proposed that, according to the probabilistic dictates of quantum field theory, even an apparently perfect vacuum seethes with particles and antiparticles popping into and out of existence. In 1990, the Russian physicist Andrei Linde assured me that our entire cosmos—as well as an infinite number of other universes—might have sprung from a primordial “quantum fluctuation.”

I took this notion—and I think Linde presented it—as a bit of mind-titillating whimsy. But Krauss asks us to take the quantum theory of creation seriously, and so does evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. “Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages,” Dawkins writes in an afterword to Krauss’s book. “If On the Origin of Species was biology’s deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see A Universe From Nothing as the equivalent from cosmology.”

Whaaaa…??!! Dawkins is comparing the most enduringly profound scientific treatise in history to a pop-science book that recycles a bunch of stale ideas from physics and cosmology. This absurd hyperbole says less about the merits of Krauss’s derivative book than it does about the judgment-impairing intensity of Dawkins’s hatred of religion.

Philosopher David Albert, a specialist in quantum theory, offers a more balanced assessment of Krauss’s book in The New York Times Book Review. And by balanced assessment, I mean merciless smack down. Albert asks, “Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from?” Modern quantum field theories, Albert points out, “have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.”

Krauss and Horgan "get it into it" in the comments:

2. lawkrauss 9:38 am 04/23/2012

Thank you Caleb.. I must say that this kind of silly piece from an author who also “went out on a limb” 20 years ago to say physics was over is rather telling… it is just about as cogent.. and demonstrates more an unwillingness to seriously consider the ideas I and others have raised than a desire to create some interest in his blog..
Link to this

3. jhorgan 10:43 am 04/23/2012

Caleb and Lawrence, thanks for your comments. Larry, I’ll always be grateful to you for helping bring me up to speed on modern cosmology a dozen years ago when I was researching an article for Scientific American. And what’s disappointing is that, apart from the discovery of the acceleration of the cosmic expansion, which was certainly a big surprise, nothing has really changed since then. You and/or your popularizing colleagues–Hawking, Greene, Kaku, Susskind–are still marketing various unsubstantiated versions of inflation, multiverse theories, string theory, vacuum energy, anthropic principle, etc. What’s ironic is that, although you don’t have any more evidence for these speculations, your marketing of them has become more aggressive, a trend that I predicted in The End of Science. Even Caleb implicitly acknowledges that your book’s title oversells its actual content, and yet you accuse ME of hype. Come on Larry, face it, physics, at least in its grandest mode, is in big trouble.(emphasis added.)

Which prompts a walk-back from Krauss:

6. lawkrauss 11:09 am 04/23/2012

John.. first, I didn’t make any definitive claims.. and I get offended when people claim I make such.. second I tried to indicate how much has changed in the last 22 years.. that is the purpose of the book.. things are dramatically different than they were then, and I went through a very careful analysis to describe these changes….. the analysis of fluctuations in the CMB, the discovery that the universe is flat.. these are REAL empirical discoveries that both impact upon and add credence to many of our ideas..
Link to this

7. jhorgan 5:37 pm 04/23/2012

Larry, so you’re saying that you’re not claiming to have answered the question posed by your book’s title? You’re just tossing some ideas around, and you don’t expect anyone to take them too seriously? OK, that’s a useful clarification. It also means that things have not progressed in the last 22 years, in spite of what you just asserted. I think you better tell Dawkins, before he embarrasses himself further.(emphasis added.)

At which point, Krauss apparently takes a powder and doesn't respond.

Complaining about unfairness when he's taken at his word seems to be part of Krauss's ouvre.

"The strong scent of intellectual dishonesty."

Bill Vallicella asks "Why do some physicists talk nonsense about nothing?"

The cause of the inquiry is Lawrence Krauss's claim to have refuted the metaphysical principle that "out of nothing nothing comes" (ex nihilo nihil fit) by claiming that a specific kind of "vacuum" - i.e., quantum vacuum - is a roiling, frothy nexus of energies out of which things "pop" into existence.

Vallicella writes:

There is no point in quoting any more of this stuff since it is obviously gibberish. What is not obvious, and indeed what is most puzzling, is why anyone who is supposedly intelligent would spout such patent nonsense. Or is he joking? Pulling our leg? Trying to sound 'far out' to sell books? It surely sounds like a weird joke to hear that nothing boils and bubbles and 'morphs' and is unstable with particles popping in and out of existence. If a virtual particle popped out of existence would it be even more nothing than the nothing that it was a part of?

If I tell you that I met nobody on my hike this morning, it would be a bad joke were you to inquire, "And how is Nobody doing these days?" 'Nobody' is not the name of a person or the name of anything else. If you are confused by 'I met nobody on my hike,' then I will translate it for you: 'It is not the case that I met somebody on my hike.' The same goes for 'nothing.' It is not a name for something.

The point, of course, is that nothing is precisely nothing and not a weird something or even a non-weird something. Krauss is not stupid, and he is presumably not joking. So he is using 'nothing' in some special way. He and his colleagues are free to do that. He and they are free to stipulate a new meaning for an old word. But then he is not using it in the sense in which it figures in the old principle, ex nihilo nihil fit, 'out of nothing nothing comes.' Whether true or false, the meaning of the principle is clear: if there were nothing at all, nothing could have come into being. This obviously cannot be refuted by shifting the sense of 'nothing' so that it refers to a bubbling, boiling soup of virtual particles.

The strong scent of intellectual dishonesty is wafting up to my nostrils from this bubbling, boiling cauldron of Unsinn.

If I make a tasty hamburger out of a lump of raw meat, have I made something out of nothing? Sure, in a sense: I have made something tasty out of nothing tasty. In a sense, I have made something out of nothing! But one would have to have hamburger for brains if one that ought that that refuted ex nihilo nihil fit.

"Not only can something arise from nothing, but most often the laws of physics require that to occur." This is just nonsense. Whatever the laws of physics are, they are not nothing. So if the laws of physics require that something arise from nothing, then the laws of physics require that something arise without there being laws of physics.

Not only is the quoted sentence nonsense, it contradicts the rest of what Krauss says in quotation #2 above. For he says that there is a sense of 'nothing' which implies the absence of physical laws. So we are supposed to accept that physical laws require the emergence of something out of nothing even if there are no physical laws?

So you've got this situation in which nothing at all exists, and then something comes into existence because the physical laws (which don't exist) "require" it. Bullshit! Sophistry for the purpose of exploiting rubes to make a quick pop science buck.

How you can tell who lost the debate.

Lawrence Krauss explains how William Craig is a "liar" and how he was too nice to Craig:

I believe that if I erred at all, it was in an effort to consider the sensibilities of the 1200 smiling young faces in the audience, who earnestly came out, mostly to hear Craig, and to whom I decided to show undue respect. As I stressed at the time, I did not come to debate the existence of God, but rather to debate about evidence for the existence of God. I also wanted to demonstrate the need for nuance, to explain how these issues are far more complex than Craig, in his simplistic view of the world, makes them out to be. For this reason, as I figured I would change few minds I decided also to try and illustrate for these young minds the nature of science, with the hope that what they saw might cause them to think. Unfortunately any effort I made to show nuance and actually explain facts was systematically distorted in Craig's continual effort to demonstrate how high school syllogisms apparently demonstrated definitive evidence for God.


Let me now comment, with the gloves off, on the disingenuous distortions, simplifications, and outright lies that I regard Craig as having spouted. I was very disappointed because I had heard that Craig was more of a philosopher than a proselytizer, but that was not evident the other evening.

Of course, he offers his candor to the amen corner at P.Z. Myers' blog.
Rather than claim that he was bested by Craig's Jedi mind-tricks, Krauss would be well advised to take a step back and listen to what he was saying.

For example, Krauss started the argument arguing against "logic."  Myers has tweaked Krauss's argument for him - Krauss wasn't arguing against "logic" as such, he was arguing against the idea that one can ascertain empirical truths purely from logic.

OK, fair point, that was kind of the argument that Krauss made, but Krass wanted to stretch the cash value of the argument to indict all metaphysics, which put him in the silly position of sounding like he was saying that only scientifically provable statements count, which, of course, isn't scientifically provable.

Hello, contradiction.  Worse still, he apparently doesn't understand that when he says things like that he is actually doing metaphysics, not science. 

Second, Krauss argued that we really can't know anything until we go out and check it scientifically because reality is strange and you never can tell what the truth is. 

Krauss' cash value here is to argue that Craig's argument that nothing can't cause something can't be accepted because it hasn't been scientifically proven, and, hey, reality is strange.

First, how stupid is this.  If there is one thing we can be sure of it is that "nothing cannot cause something."  Even Krauss knows this because everything he called "nothing" and said "caused something," he had to admit was actually "something."

Which makes him look rather much like someone trying to deceive to score debate points.

Second, notice how the "reality is stranger" claim gets jettisoned when it comes to a bit of strangeness that Krauss doesn't like.  Hence, when it came to the resurrection of Jesus, we don't get Krauss saying "well, heck, that could have happened because, you know, reality is strange and who am I to say that there couldn't possibly be one case of 'spontaneous ressurection' among trillions of deaths."  Nope, there we get told that we shouldn't believe that kind of thing because we know that kind of thing doesn't ever happen and we need "extraordinary evidence to prove extraordinary claims."

But remember he thinks that "nothing could cause something," which would certainly count as one heck of an extraordinary claim.

So, he strains at gnats and swallows camels, and he thinks he's the rational one.