Wikileaks

For all of you who are put off by the length of my posts this one should make you happy.  I make no promises about the length of future posts.

Wikileaks is in the process of dumping their third mass of internal U.S. government documents.  I have not been able to figure out the publication schedule on this dump.  I know they have posted a number of the more juicy ones but I don't know when the remainder of the rumored 250,000 posts are due out.  Nevertheless . . .

This is the third major dump of U.S. documents.  The first dump was on Afghanistan.  The second dump was on Iraq.  This dump appears to be a bunch of internal U.S. State department documents.  Now, I am all for doing something about excessive secrecy.  There is a need for some secrecy.  But 99% of everything that is classified is not classified because it needs to be.  A large percentage of classification is CYA.  Someone doesn't want the embarrassing stuff to leak out.  Something is rotten in the state of Denmark and someone doesn't want the rottenness to be put on public display. An even greater source of unnecessary classification is bureaucratic.  No one wants to authorize stuff to be declassified.  It is always seen as being safer to classify as much as possible.  You wouldn't want to be the person who was responsible for the one in a million document that should have remained classified to have been released, even if it means classifying 999,999 documents that shouldn't have been.

People forget that the Clinton administration declassified tons of stuff and generally improved the situation by making it harder to classify stuff and easier to get things declassified in a timely manner.  The George W. Bush administration promptly reversed that decision and cranked the classification machine up way past where it had been before Clinton got in.  And one of the failures of the Obama administration is that it has retained the Bush policies.  So, seen as a push back to over classification, Wikileaks has been a breath of fresh air.  99% of what they have published has been stuff that ranged from "shouldn't have been classified" to "mildly embarrassing".  They haven't been as assiduous as they should have been at scrubbing things like names that can and will be used by bad guys to do bad things.  But nobody gets it 100% right.

The U.S. government is not the only organization that is guilty of over classification and that deserves to be embarrassed.  Pretty much every government in the world does the same thing to a greater or lesser extent.  And, whatever flaws you attribute to the U.S., and I attribute a lot of flaws to the Bush administration and some flaws to Obama, there are several much worse actors out there and many that are just as bad.

So, if the Wikileaks people have more material from the U.S., my advice is to not publish it.  Your credibility is on the line here.  The next thing you need to publish is a big dump of stuff from someone else.  If you don't have any stuff from someone else, that's a major problem and you need to put ALL of your efforts into fixing that problem.  You need to especially target governments or institutions generally seen by the U.S. as bad guys.  You need to put some balance into your program.

There are two ways to look at Wikileaks.  The way they would prefer to be seen is as a high minded anti-secrecy operation.  The second way is as an anti-American organization with some kind of political axe to grind.  It is now up to them to provide some evidence that the former view is the correct one.  Unless they do a large dump of somebody elses' dirty laundry next then the the only reasonable conclusion is that the latter characterized is the correct one.

(added 11/30/10) Web posts indicate that Wikileaks has a bunch of documents from a big U.S. bank.  The speculation is that the bank is Bank of America.  There are a lot of Wall Street people that should be in jail.  And I am confident that a number of them work at BofA.  So if this document dump eventually leads to jail time for some of these people, that's a good thing and Wikileaks would deserve some credit.  But it's not enough.  It is still necessary for Wikileaks to demonstrate that it is not just on some kind of anti-US jihad.  And to do that it must do a non-US document dump.  While I believe there are a number of bad actors at BofA that are currently getting away with their villainy, BofA is still a US entity.

Space Shuttle - RIP

The last Space Shuttle launch is scheduled to happen within a year.  I have never been a fan of the Space Shuttle so it couldn't happen too soon for me.  What follows is a quick history of rocketry in general and the Shuttle in particular with an admittedly U.S. bias.

The rocket was invented by the Chinese several hundred years ago.  Various efforts to transform the rocket from a novelty into a useful and practical device, e.g. for use in warfare, were generally unsuccessful until recently.  That all changed with the work of Robert Goddard and a small number of associates operating on a shoestring budget.  Goddard developed the scientific foundations of rocketry in the early part of the twentieth century.  He launched a number of rockets, primarily in the 1930's, to turn his theoretical work into practical devices.  Unfortunately, the only ones paying attention were a bunch of Nazi Scientists, most notably Werner von Braun.

Von Braun and his team refined Goddard's work and turned it into a practical military device, the V-2 rocket used against the British in World War II.  The V-2 would have been more successful except for a British intelligence effort called "Double Cross".  Double Cross convinced the Nazis that they were scoring direct hits in downtown London when, in fact, the rockets were actually landing in the suburbs to the east.   In spite of this, the V-2 was a clear demonstration that rockets could actually be put to practical use.  And the obvious practical use was to carry nuclear weapons.

As a result of this several countries, most notably the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (Russia), launched efforts to build large rockets for military and other purposes.  The U.S. put its efforts on a slower path because they had airplanes (e.g. B-52 bomber) that could be used to effectively deliver nuclear weapons.  The USSR, without this option, put more effort into their program with the result that the USSR launched the first Satellite, Sputnik, in 1957.  The USSR was also behind in efforts to miniaturize nuclear weapons so they aimed for rockets with heavier "lift" capacity than comparable early US efforts. This resulted in a number of other USSR space "firsts" like the first man in space (Uri Gagarin).  The USSR reaped a PR bonanza for its efforts.  Understanding that the USSR would continue to rack up "firsts" for at least a couple of more years, President Kennedy set a US goal of "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely" in a speech on May 25, 1961.  The goal would take about ten years, giving the US a chance to catch up and go ahead in the "space race", an important aspect of the "cold war".

NASA configured the Mercury (one man flights), Gemini (two man flights), and Apollo (three man flights) programs into a path to achieve the "man on the moon" goal.  Apollo resulted in the first manned moon landing on July 20, 1969.  The "man on the moon" stunt was essentially a PR stunt, in terms of reasons for the political backing necessary to find the money to make it happen. And by July of 1969, when the landing happened, Nixon had taken over from Kennedy and then Johnson as US President.  Nixon, unlike his two Democratic predecessors, was not a fan of the space program.  But it was immensely popular so he had to come up with a follow on to Apollo.  The obvious choice was a "man on Mars" program but this was way too expensive and likely not feasible.  The fall back option was a permanent moon base.  Again this was fantastically expensive but probably barely feasible.  It was certainly too expensive for Nixon's tastes.  So the next fallback option was a space station.  This lacked "sex appeal", as had the moon base, but even this limited objective was deemed too expensive.   So the Nixon administration proposal was the Space Shuttle.  The theory was that whatever follow on manned space project was selected, the Space Shuttle would be useful.

So the Space Shuttle was chosen because it was the cheapest alternative.  And one justification was to make spaceflight cheaper.  But more justification was needed for public consumption.  So the other official objective was to make spaceflight ecologically friendly.  Up to this time all rockets were "one off" proposals that spewed out vast amounts of pollution.  This seemed wasteful.  So how about creating a reusable space vehicle?  It would save on resources because it would not have to be built over from scratch.  And this would help make it cheaper to operate.  That's what the Nixon administration came up with.

The concept for the base vehicle was a "space capable" DC-9 (commercial airplane).  But there was not enough room inside for all the rocket fuel.  So a cheesy external tank was added to hold the fuel.  Well, this made the whole thing less efficient so two cheap "strap on" solid fuel external rockets were added.  That gave the whole vehicle enough power to get off the ground.  And the strap on rockets were supposed to be reusable too.  The result was an abortion.  The "engineering" that went into the basic design was awful.  But the engineering to actually make the abortion work was awe inspiring.  

I can not overemphasize the amount of genius engineering that was necessary to make the Shuttle work at all.  But the result of slapping all this together was that the Shuttle failed to achieve any of its design objectives.  It quickly went massively over budget.  It went over budget both with respect to time (it was years late) and cost (its actual cost was several times the original estimate).  At one point the cost problem got so bad that NASA promised that operationally it would be so cheap that the US no longer needed traditional  ELV (Expendable Launch Vehicle) rockets.  This allowed NASA to steal the money that would otherwise have been used to purchase them to plug into the Shuttle budget deficit.

Eventually construction was completed and the Shuttle went into service.  But it turned you that the nightmare was just beginning.  The Shuttle was NOT economical to operate.  It turns out that spaceflight is very hard on hardware.  So instead of an airplane like (roll it in, gas it up, clean the johns, replenish the in flight meals and booze, and roll it out) process after each flight the Shuttle needed extensive maintenance.  So it couldn't be turned around quickly.  It was not just a matter of paying for another batch of fuel.  A lot of parts need to be replaced or refurbished, and all this required a large, well trained and therefore expensive, support operation.  Shuttles were way more expensive to fly than the ELV rockets they competed with.  So the flight rate has never even been half of what was initially predicted.  And they are down frequently for some major fix so they are not dependable.  And they are bloody expensive to operate when they are working.  A typical flight cost between $600 million and $1 billion dollars.  You can buy several ELV launches of even the largest expendable rockets like the Delta IV, Atlas V, or Ariane 5 for the price of one Shuttle launch.

And they are not safe.  We have had two tragedies. The first one was caused by the famous "O-ring" problem with the strap on external rockets.  This problem was not caused by any inherent problem with the Shuttle.  Rather the problem was a direct result of NASA trying to keep costs as low as possible.  Everything about the Shuttle was way more expensive than it was supposed to be.  So NASA only funded the "necessary" and not the "nice to do but not absolutely necessary".  The O-ring problem was only a "potential" problem and not an "actual" problem.  Until, of course, the O-ring problem eventually became an actual problem with disastrous results.

The second tragedy, however was a direct result of the design.  The Shuttle uses liquid Hydrogen and Oxygen for fuel.  Both of these are very cold.  So insulation is critical.  But it must be thin and light.  Insulation is sprayed on various things.  Its primary job is to insulate so its strength is minimal.  The Shuttle itself is also built as flimsily as possible to save weight.  Now in a standard "stack of tubes" rocket design, if something falls off it tends to drift away from the vehicle slightly and, therefore, not hit it.  But the Shuttle has all these things that are beside each other so when an object drifts slightly away from one part it can run not into empty air but into another part of the Shuttle.  And, since the Shuttle is as flimsy as possible, when it hits, it can do a lot of damage, even if "it" is a light fluffy piece of foam.  And that's what happened.  A piece of foam broke off, hit another part of the Shuttle, and knocked a big hole in it.

Besides these two problems that resulted in tragedies the Shuttle has had a large number of less serious problems.  These have led merely to costly (both in time and in money) delays.  An obvious solution to the "problem" of the Shuttle is to replace it with a better design.  And this NASA has tried to do in the last few years.  President George W. Bush initiated the "Orion" program to develop two more traditional vehicles to replace the Shuttle.  But Orion has run into schedule and budget problems too.  An obvious alternative is to "man rate" one or both of the Delta IV/Atlas V.  This seems the most sensible approach to me but has not been adopted for political reasons.  And even man rating the Delta IV/Atlas V would run into a lot of money.  What's going on here?

It turns out that Goddard did his work too well.  For instance, he figured out that Hydrogen/Oxygen is the best fuel for a "chemical" rocket.  You have to go with some kind of Science Fiction approach that does not depend on chemicals for fuel to do better.  He also patented the multi-stage rocket concept in 1915.  There was a lot of tough engineering work necessary to go from his primitive devices of the '30s to the V-2 of the '40s to the Sputnik of the '50s to the Saturn 5 of the '60s.  And, in my opinion, the Shuttle of the '70s is no improvement on the Saturn 5 of the '60s.  But the only fundamental advance over Goddard was the adoption of ceramics for insulation.  The other advances were important and difficult to achieve but they were not fundamental.  And there have been no fundamental advances since.  The Orion rocket designs were based on modifications of components from the Saturn 5 or the Space Shuttle.  There was no new breakthrough technology or even design.  The design was a classic "stack of tubes".

We now have massive computer resources available to assist in the design.  We have advances in materials.  The metals available now are stronger and more heat resistant than the metals used in the Saturn 5 but not to the degree that results in a fundamental difference.  Likewise, the ceramics available now are better but not to a fundamental degree.  And there is no new design idea that makes a fundamental difference.  So we can do the job better than we could then but not a lot better.  And that means that modern rocket design is better but not a lot better than what was available in the '60s.  And, most importantly, rocketry is not a lot cheaper.

The latest idea is to privatize the whole endeavour.  The idea is that NASA is stupid and inefficient.  There is a case to be made that NASA is stupid.  But most of the stupidity can be traced to two factors.  The first is politics.  NASA must site facilities and do work in many locations in order to spread the money around for political reasons.  This is a stupidity forced on NASA by external forces.  The second source of NASA stupidity is budgeting.  NASA has repeatedly done stupid things because it has not had the money to do things right in the first place.  The first Shuttle disaster is a classic example of this.  But NASA has been running the manned space program on the cheap, as in too cheap, since about 1970.  The cost of a PR spectacular is just too high.  No one will pay it.  And there is just no "hard nosed business" reason for the manned space program.  There never has been one.

We will see if privatization is effective is solving NASA's twin "stupid" problems.  I don't think it will.  Privatization is a very good cover for pretending that space spectaculars can be had "on the cheap" so I expect that the pressure to drive NASA's manned space budget even lower will increase as the shift to privatization progresses.  If privatization is substantially cheaper then the budget will go down enough to more than compensate for any increased efficiency.  Now I think there is room for cost saving.  A private operation that does not need to spread the work around to the districts of powerful members of congress can save some money.  And theoretically the private sector can squeeze out "CYA" costs.  But the private sector also wants to make a fat profit (NASA makes none) and pay its senior executives fat salaries and bonuses (a lot more than current NASA senior managers are making).  So what's the balance point?  I think privatization can possibly save 10-20%.  And 10-20% is not enough to make a big difference.  I think privatization will ultimately be used to kill off the manned space program.

People don't understand just how expensive the manned space program is.  The US has sunk over $100 billion into the International Space Station (ISS).  We have gotten some PR benefit.  But due to budget problems, almost no scientific work has been done on the ISS.  One justification for the Shuttle has been that it could be used for scientific purposes.  But almost no scientific work has been done with the Shuttle because science has always been cut out of the program to solve budgetary problems.  So the only payoff for the Shuttle has been PR.  Like the ISS, there has been only a small amount of PR benefit from the Shuttle.  And that has to be balanced against the fantastically high cost.

The cost of a single Shuttle launch is about the same as the New Horizons mission to Pluto.  New Horizons will cost about $650 billion over the lifetime of the mission (2001 - 2015).  It will do the first flyby of a "dwarf planet".  We know almost nothing about dwarf planets in general and Pluto in particular.  The scientific payoff will be tremendous.  And, given the place Pluto plays in culture (think the Disney cartoon dog, for instance), it will also generate a large amount of PR benefit.  Another unmanned program, the Spirit/Opportunity mission to Mars, cost far less than a single Shuttle launch.  But if you say "Spirit and Opportunity" to a significant segment of the public they will recognize them as Mars rovers and have a very positive opinion of them.  So the "Spirit/Opportunity" mission is another unmanned mission with a large scientific and a large PR payoff.

Contrast this with the manned space program.  Most of the public no longer follow Shuttle launches.  Among those who do, a significant segment is interested in the "car crash" aspect (is something going to go horribly wrong).  Interest in the ISS is also at an all time low.  I am interested in these kinds of things and I can't tell you who is currently aboard or what they are doing.  So the PR payoff has been low for the manned space program for a long time now.  People are generally in favor of a manned space program, Science Fiction movies are popular, but that general approval does not translate into any kind of political will.  The only people who really care are the contractors.  There principle interest is in a paycheck.  People in congress who represent space heavy districts care.  But what they care about is the payrolls and political contributions, not what the manned space program actually achieves.

Nearly all of the scientific benefit from the space program and nearly all of the PR benefit of the space program have come from the unmanned side, especially in the last 20 - 30 years.  Given the lower cost of unmanned missions compared to manned missions, and given the much higher scientific payoff of unmanned missions compared to manned missions, and given even the higher PR payoff of unmanned missions compared to manned missions, I expect the payoff to continue to favor unmanned missions over manned missions by a large margin.

And given the high cost and meager returns both in science and PR, why do we even continue to have a manned program?  I think it is because no politician wants to be known as the one who killed off the manned space program.  But privatization provides an out.  There has been some squawking about privatization but not enough to seriously affect its trajectory.  Once NASA has handed over responsibility for manned space programs to private industry it becomes possible to do a "death by a thousand cuts".  You just keep cutting the money you hand over to private contractors.  When a specific project is killed it is due to "private sector incompetence or greed" rather than some bad thing a politician did.  So the manned space program dies but no politician is arrested (loses an election) for the crime of killing the manned space program.

The Social Network

I went to this movie yesterday.  There of lots of people with more expertise than I in the movie review business.  What I would like to do is make some observations from a long time "computer nerd" perspective.

The movie is primarily about Mark Zuckerberg and the early years of Facebook.  I don't do social networking so I have never been on Facebook.  And the computer business is in a continuous state of evolution so I am not familiar with the details of the technical wizardry Mr. Zuckerberg pulled off.  But I view that as an asset.  It gives me a little distance but some professional perspective.  So here goes.

The movie is a piece of fiction designed for consumption by a general audience.  Aaron Sorkin deserves tremendous credit for coming up with a great script.  The director, etc. and especially Jesse Eisenberg, the actor who played Zuckerberg deserve tremendous credit.  And the movie is grounded in a great deal of truth as Mr. Sorkin lifted a lot of dialog from transcripts of depositions and other proceedings of the several law suits involved.  What I know about this comes completely from the movie.

With the preliminaries out of the way, the first thing I want to remark on is the character of Mr. Zuckerberg.  In the movie he is portrayed as someone who has tremendous computer skills and very weak people skills.  I am sure this is an oversimplification of the real Mr. Zuckerberg.  But it is something I can relate to from personal experience.  I am similar.  My computer skills, while substantial, are not at the level of the movie Mr. Zuckerberg's and my people skills are somewhat better. Another feature he has is an unbelievable amount of drive.  I was never that driven.  I share the low priority he attached to money.  But he is much more conflicted than I am.  Money is how score is kept.  Money was very important to Zuckerberg, seen from that perspective.  He wanted to score big.  I never wanted to score that big.  My "enough" threshold is much more modest.

For people like myself and Mr. Zuckerberg computers are much easier to understand and deal with than people.  Computers have rules that they follow literally robotically.  The trick for dealing with computers is to understand these rules and use them to trick (or force) the computer to do what you want.  If you ask the right way the computer will do what you want.  If you ask the wrong way the computer will not get mad or hold a grudge.  Fix how you ask (the details of the code) and the computer will go and do what you want without complaint.  People don't work that way.  The "rule set" for people is much more complicated.  People are inconsistent, illogical, break the rules, hold grudges, etc.  So, setting sided the distortions and simplifications, I understand Mr. Zuckerberg.

So with an understanding of Mr. Zuckerberg, what are we to make of his relations with the Winklevoss twins and their associates?  Not much good!  They meet with Zuckerberg, Zuckerberg figures out quickly what they are looking for and agrees to collaborate.  Then, without making a contribution to their enterprise, Zuckerberg terminates the relationship after seeing their code and getting some kind of idea what their web site is supposed to do.  Viewed from the perspective of a socially maladroit nerd do his actions make sense and are they proper?  I can't see any justification for his actions.

First the code.  Zuckerberg characterizes it as of poor quality and says he didn't use any of it.  So what.  First I am going to talk about the code quality.  Ultimately code exists to implement a function.  Even if it is "poor" the real question is whether it is sufficient to the task.  "Poor" code may be sufficient to the task.  It doesn't mean good code wouldn't work better but it doesn't need to work better, it only needs to work.  And one of the tasks Mr. Zuckerberg was hired to do was to improve the code.  I find no reason to believe he didn't understand this.

Next to the functionality.  Zuckerberg characterizes what the Winklevoss twins had was not well thought out and different from Facebook.  Without comparing what they had with the initial version of Facebook I can't render a useful opinion on that.  But it is obvious that the two things were at least vaguely related.  Even if the Winklevoss twins' product was poorly conceived and Facebook was brilliant it still matters that they were related.

In science there is an apparently weird quotation about some theory being "not even wrong".  Scientists work with theories that are wrong all the time.  But sometimes a theory, while known to e completely wrong, can directly or indirectly give a scientist some insight about a "right" theory.  If a theory is so poor that not only is it wrong but it is so wrong it can not be used as a basis for finding an insight that moves the inquiry ahead it is said to be so bad it is "not even wrong".  In the same sense, if the Winklevoss twins' ideas were poorly developed and implemented they might still have provided some insight to Zuckerberg that ended up in Facebook.  So even if we assume that Zuckerberg's characterization of the Winklevoss twins effort is correct it still does not mean that Zuckerberg did not derive something of value from the association.

But beyond all this Zuckerberg voluntarily accepted certain responsibilities.  he was the one that decided on an incredibly simple verbal contract.  That contract bound him to make a good faith effort to provide value to the Winklevoss twins.  He did not do that.  He did do a quick review of the code and the concept.  If he had problems he should immediately made an effort to bring these issues to the Winklevoss twins' attention.  He did not.  Instead he started working on Facebook, knowing that would interfere with his ability to meet his obligations to the Winklevoss twins.  There is no reason to believe that he was not aware of this.  So I am in complete agreement that the Winklevoss twins had a right to sue him and had a right to substantial compensation. 

In a similar vein he misbehaved and it was appropriate that his friend Edwardo had a right to substantial compensation.  With that out of the way, let me move on to a more general issue.

Very few people are able to pull off what Zuckerberg pulled off.  There is a reason for this.  First, he was an incredibly gifted coder.  People who have the coding talent he has are extremely rare.  But they do exist and most of them do not have the kind of success Zuckerberg had.  That's because Zuckerberg had a second quality, drive.  Now I may lack this but others, especially if they are rewarded early in life, do.  So, while important, this is not that critical a component.  Zuckerberg has an additional skill.  He was able to visualize what Facebook should look like and how it should operate.  He might have gotten ideas form his friends, enemies, etc. but he was the one who figured out which were the important ideas and how to integrate them so they worked together.  This is something I am not good at.  I am good at writing code but not coming up with a "big picture" idea of what code should do.  The only ideas I had for code were system utilities of one sort or another.

Zuckerberg was like Bill Gates in this respect.  Gates had other abilities beyond just being able to write a lot of good code quickly.  Gates had a good business sense and trained himself to become a good salesman, something I think Zuckerberg never did.  What is necessary for success at the level of Gates and Zuckerberg is a lot of luck, a lot of drive, and multiple skills.  This combination is extremely rare.  It is a good thing that our society rewards people that have this very rare and valuable combination.  But I think we can encourage these people sufficiently for them to do what they do and for society to reap the benefit without compensating them at the multi-billion dollar level.

Enjoy the movie.

The most functional English Word

Plagiarism alert:  The bulk of this post is not my original work.  I got it from a friend of mine called Jeff.  I don't think he is the original author either.  If anyone can provide me the name of the original author I will be happy to provide a credit.  Finally, this post is dedicated to my mother.  This word is one of her favorites.

The most functional English word -

Well, it's shit ... that's right, shit!
Shit may just be the most functional word in the English language.

You can smoke shit, buy shit, sell shit, lose shit, find shit, forget shit, and tell others to eat shit.

Some people know their shit, while others can't tell the difference between shit and shineola.

There are lucky shits, dumb shits, and crazy shits.  There's bull shit, horse shit, and chicken shit.
You can throw shit, sling shit, catch shit, shoot the shit, or duck when the shit hits the fan.

You can give a shit or serve shit on a shingle.

You can find yourself in deep shit or be happier than a pig in shit.

Some days are colder than shit, some days are hotter than shit, and some days are just plain shitty.

Some music sounds like shit, things can look like shit, and some days you feel like shit.

You can have too much shit, not enough shit, the right shit, the wrong shit or a lot of weird shit.

You can carry shit, have a mountain of shit, or find yourself up shit creek without a paddle.

Sometimes everything you touch turns to shit and other times you fall in a bucket of shit and come up smelling like a rose.

When you stop to consider all the facts, its the basic building block of the English language.

And remember, once you know your shit, you don't need to know anything else!!

You could pass this along, if you give a shit; or not do so if you don't give a shit!

Well, shit, its time for me to go.  Just wanted you to know that I do give a shit and hope you had a nice day, without a bunch of shit.  But if you happen to catch a load of shit from some shithead........

Well, shit happens.

SETI

SETI stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.  I have been reading Science Fiction since I was a kid.  So I am very comfortable with the idea of space aliens.  So, I am all in favor of SETI, right?  Wrong!

The first possible reason to be anti-SETI is a belief that space aliens don't exist.  I don't subscribe to that idea.  I think there's a good chance they do exist but I'm not sure.  I think that puts me in line with what most people think.  There is a line of thinking recently popularized by Steven Hawking that it might be dangerous for space aliens to discover us because they would do bad things to us (cut to innumerable horror movie plots).  I think this is a possibility.  But its not my main reason to forgo the hunt.

My main reason for being against SETI is ignorance.  I don't think we know what we are doing.  There has been a conventional wisdom going back 60 or more years about how to go about the search.  It revolves around radio.  What you do is hook up a powerful radio receiver and listen.  The first serious attempts to do this happened in the '60s.  And almost immediately we got a "hit".  The Astronomers who got the hit dubbed it LGM-1, the LGM standing for Little Green Men.  So we discovered actual aliens in the '60s?  Well, not exactly.

It turns out that what the Astronomers found is now called a Pulsar.  A Pulsar is a peculiar type of star.  For reasons I am not going to go into it puts out a very powerful radio signal that repeats itself.  The repeat period is a few seconds or less so in effect it pings at us.  At the time no one knew that such a thing as a Pulsar could exist.  Now they are a common subject of study by Astronomers and we know that there are lots of Pulsars all over the place.  It took almost no time to figure out that that early signal was not from an alien and only a few years for a basic understanding of Pulsars to emerge.  But up until that time if you had played a recording of that first signal to most people they would have said "it's definitely a space alien".

So is one "oops" enough to doom the whole enterprise?  No!  But it does provide validation for the idea that we don't know what we are doing when it comes to looking for space aliens.  The search has gotten more sophisticated since.  But it is has stuck with the "look for an intelligent radio signal" idea.  Sticking with this idea for so long demonstrates a fundamental lack of imagination.  The theory has been and continues to be that we can detect "intelligent" radio signals over longer distances than just about anything else.  But even with radio signals, it's harder to look over large distances than you would think.

During the '60s and '70s this approach seemed very sensible.  The strongest signals we humans generated were radio and TV signals, for the most part.  The modulation technique (the way you added the "signal" to the broadcast) used for these signals was very simple because the complexity of the receiver had to be very low to keep the cost of radios and TVs down.  But now, only a few decades later, we use much more complex modulation techniques.  This is because it is now cheap to put a computer into something like a cell phone.  The complex processing the receiver can do means a lot of things are now possible.  But it also means that the signal now looks a lot more like noise than those old signals did.  So the amount of effort it takes to make sense of the signal is now a lot greater.  And this makes the signal a lot harder for some alien to pick out of the background.  Another thing that is happening is that the power of the broadcast signal is going way down.  This is so that we can use the same frequency over and over.  Now imagine an advanced civilization doing just what we are doing only more so.  It may be very hard to detect them by just looking for a strong simple radio signal.

In fact, we really don't know what to look for.  So I don't think we should actively look.  Does that mean I don't think we should look at all?  Again, no.  Consider the natives that first encountered Christopher Columbus.  Let's say they wanted to search for aliens, in this case people from Europe.  What would they do?  Well, they would have limited technology.  Their best bet would be to station lookouts on mountains.  These would be able to see perhaps 15 miles out into the ocean.  This would not work very well.

But consider what happened when Christopher Columbus showed up.  Were the natives in any doubt that "aliens" had arrived?  No!  They came in a giant canoe of alien design.  They wore alien clothes, spoke an alien language, and had alien technology.  The fact that the natives had no high tech toys in no way diminished their ability to determine that they were in the presence of aliens.  And to discover, or in this case be discovered by, aliens all they had to do was to go about their normal course of business.  Once the encounter happened, they were in no doubt that they were being subjected to an alien invasion.

So I think no special search is necessary.  As in the "Columbus" case, the aliens have the better technology so they can project evidence of their existence much further than we can.  And aliens are alien.  We will not have any problem figuring out that they are alien when they make their presence known.  Given this, I am opposed to spending public money on SETI.  Although non-zero, I consider the chances of an active search producing results to be so small that the expenditure of public money solely for a SETI search is unjustified.  However, if some SETI searching can be done "on the side" and at no additional cost, I am OK with that.  Paul Allen has provided funding for the Allen Telescope Array, which is affiliated with the SETI Institute.  As a private citizen, he can spend his money as he wishes.  I am not adamantly opposed to SETI funding because SETI initiatives have provided "spin off" benefits.  So the money spent has not been a complete waste.

(Added 1/6/2011) The January 2011 Scientific American contains an article on SETI entitled "Contact:  The Day After" by Tim Folger.  It is a pretty standard piece.  Quoting:  "SETI's instruments are designed to search for steady, periodic narrowband pulses -- carrier waves powerful enough to be detectable across many light-years."  Old fashioned radio signals consists of a "carrier" wave, the central frequency of the signal.  It is surrounded by "side bands", one at a frequency range just below the carrier frequency and one other just above.  But it turns out all the signal information is embedded in either side band.  So you can suppress the carrier and one of the side bands and you are left with a "single side band" (SSB) signal.  This saves bandwidth and transmitter power.  It just requires a slightly more complicated receiver.  So if our aliens are transmitting SSB signals the SETI search won't find them.  SSB is old technology.  A popular newer technology is called "spread spectrum".  It works just like you think it does.  These are just two specific examples of how our use of radio is moving from simple, SETI detectable, signalling to signalling that looks more and more like noise.  Who knows what we will be doing a hundred years from now.  But whatever it is, it will probably be hard to detect with a simple SETI search.   

the evolution of the relationship between God and science

First, some caveats:  (1) Although "evolution" appears in the title I am not going to talk about the creationism/evolution controversy in this piece.  (2) By "God" I mean specifically the Christian conception of God.

Now let me start in the middle with Sir Isaac Newton (1643 - 1727).  Most people are only familiar with him from fable and probably think of him as a confirmed atheist.  But he was, in fact, the opposite.  During his lifetime he was an orthodox Christian and actually wrote much more on religious topics than scientific ones.  He was well respected member of the community of theologians and other religious thinkers.  One of his great works, "Optics", contains a large section at the end laying out his thoughts about the relationship between "scientific" truth and "religious" truth.  He believed both were valid and that they complimented each other.  He recommended combining them to achieve some kind of super truth that was greater than either component alone.  Newton is only the best example of the many scientists who are also noted for their deeply held religious beliefs.

Now let me move to Copernicus (1473 - 1543).  Copernicus is famous in this context for his publication "De Revolutionibus", a work on Celestial Mechanics.  What does Celestial Mechanics have to do with religion?  Good question!  And unfortunately religious people had an answer.  Before Copernicus, the prevailing system was one named after Ptolemy, who was not a Christian, by the way.  The Ptolemaic system posited that there were a series of crystal spheres surrounding the earth in the heavens, one each for the Sun, Moon, the stars, etc.  But pure spheres did not work especially in the case of reproducing the motions of the planets.  So the Ptolemaic system postulated that the main spheres had smaller spheres attached resulting in something called epicycles.  By the time of Copernicus the Ptolemaic system had gotten quite elaborate and still didn't work very well.

Why did theologians care?  Well there were two key ideas in the Ptolemaic system that they ended up invested in.  The first was that the Earth was the center of everything.  The idea was that the earth was the home of "God's people".  They were the most important thing so they must be in the center.  The second idea was that the circle, and its three dimensional extension the sphere, were the most perfect shapes.  So God would naturally put the Earth at the center of things and he would use spheres to create the heavens because God was perfect.  This logical construct eliminated any other possibility so to consider any other possibility was heretical.

As I said, the Ptolemaic system didn't work that well.  So Copernicus came up with a different system.  He posited that although some things like the moon revolved around the Earth, most things revolved around the Sun.  Switching to this system greatly simplified Celestial Mechanics calculations.  And he was careful to say "I'm not saying this is how it is.  I'm only saying this is a way to make the mathematics easier to do".

But it turns out that the Copernican system is no great shakes either.  Tycho Brahe (1546 - 1601) embarked on a series of the most accurate celestial observations done before the advent of the telescope.  These observations demonstrated that neither the Ptolemaic nor the Copernican system worked that well.  Copernicus assumed that the orbits were circular and that the origin of the circle was at the center of the larger body.  In truth, orbits are elliptical and the origin is at the center of mass, which is sometimes significantly displaced from the center of the larger body.  There was a delay of from 3 to 60 years before the reaction of the religious establishment to Copernicus' ideas became heated.  But heated it eventually became.

The next player in this Celestial Mechanics game was Galileo (1564 - 1642).  Copernicus dodged the controversy by dying about the time "De Revolutionibus" was published.  Galileo was not so lucky.  The Galileo affair is complex so I am only going to point out a few aspects.  Galileo was one of the first to build and use telescopes.  One of the uses he put his to was to observe Jupiter.  In the process he discovered the "Galilean" moons of Jupiter (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto).  This Galilean system of a celestial body, not the Earth, with things orbiting it is a perfect counterexample to the idea that everything circles the Earth.  And, to make matters worse, Galileo indicated in a 1610 letter that many of his opponents refused to even look into a telescope to see if they saw the same thing Galileo did.  They were unwilling to examine the evidence Galileo advanced to support his position.  Galileo was censured for his ideas without a fair hearing because they challenged cherished religious beliefs.

All this Celestial Mechanics business now looks comical.  Why did they care?  Celestial Mechanics now looks like a bunch of obscure mathematics that has nothing to do with theology.  But at the time it had everything to do with theology, according to the theologians of the day.  Scientists (that's what we call them now) ended up involved in theological discussions even if they didn't want to.  This is in spite of the fact that the Bible has little or nothing to say on the subject.  Most people have at least heard of the Celestial Mechanics controversy.  Now I want to move on to a couple of subjects most people are not familiar with.  The first one had a much more obvious theological connection.   And initially Scientists were in complete agreement with the religious types as to the correct approach.

Chemistry is divided into two main branches: Inorganic and Organic.  Inorganic materials like rocks had no "life force" in them.  Organic materials like kidneys were parts of organisms like cows that appeared to have a life force in them while they were alive.  And the chemistry of inorganic materials appeared to be different than the chemistry of organic materials.  There seemed to be separate rules for each.  Why even the constituent components seemed somehow different.  You could make, at least in theory, any inorganic material by doing the "beaker, retort, chem lab" thing whereas this did not seem possible with organic chemicals.  Scientists of the time were comfortable with the idea that "only God can create living things".

But that did not mean that organic chemicals could not be investigated.  The idea was that you would end up with two sets of rules, the first set for inorganic chemicals, and the second different set for organic ones.  Now there was some overlap.  It was simple to make carbon dioxide using inorganic techniques.  Yet carbon dioxide was known to be strongly associated with living creatures.  But scientists figured that with careful work they would be able to tease out the rules of these "boundary" situations.

But then a totally unexpected thing happened.  In 1828 Wohler came up with a completely inorganic method for manufacturing Urea.  Until this time Urea was firmly seen as one of those mystical organic compounds that should follow different rules.  And within a short period of time many other compounds that had historically been seen as completely organic were synthesized using strictly inorganic methods.  Now we see organic chemistry as carbon chemistry and, other than its fiendish complexity, see no difference in the rules for inorganic versus organic chemistry.

As part of this "figure out the organic rules" process there were efforts to detect and characterize life force.  There have also been efforts to weigh the soul.  Supposedly it has been determined to weigh 21 grams by Duncan McDougall in 1907.  Modern techniques can easily and accurately measure a weight change in a human that is far smaller than 21 grams but no one has reproduced McDougall's results.  They now get no weight change at death.  Despite a lot of hard looking, scientists have also not found any evidence for the existence of a life force or a soul. A successful detection of any of these would instantly result in fame and fortune for whoever pulled it off.  So there is a real incentive to do it.

Finally, I want to move on to consider something that theologians and religious people have never had any interest in.  But it resulted in a profound change in scientific thinking to the detriment of religious beliefs among scientists.  This is something called the "lumeniferous aether".  There has been a long debate among scientists as to whether light is a particle or a wave.  The modern belief is that in some situations it behaves like a particle and in other situations it behaves like a wave.  So it is neither fish nor fowl.  But let's assume for the moment that we are examining light in a situation where it behaves like a wave.

Waves in sound are oscillations.  Something oscillates (vibrates) and eventually these oscillations reach our ear and we hear the sound.  So sound waves in particular and waves in general seem inextricably bound up in the idea of something vibrating.  And that's the idea behind the lumeniferous aether.  If light is a wave it must vibrate something.  Since we don't know what it is let's give it a name and start looking for it.  And that's what scientists did in the late 1800's.  And, even if you don't know exactly what it is you should be able to determine some of its attributes.  So Scientists started out with a simple idea.  It's everywhere, kind of like air.  Now with clever experiments you can find out how fast air is moving and in what direction using only sound, just by doing the right experiment.  So that's what scientists did.  They came up with clever experiments using light that would tell them the speed and direction of the lumeniferous aether.

One such set of experiments were done by Michaelson and Morley.  The speed of light is so fast it was hard to measure using equipment available at the time.  So they set out to measure the difference in speed of two beams of light.  Using a very clever setup they were able to detect tiny differences in the speed of two beams of light.  Then they set out to measure the speed of a light beam traveling in a North-South direction versus the speed of a light beam traveling in an East-West direction.  Now the earth rotates on its axis.  And it travels through space.  And as it goes around the sun it's direction changes 90 degrees every three months.  So it didn't matter which direction the lumeniferous aether was moving, the beams should travel at different speeds at least some of the time.  In the extreme case, the speeds should be different three months from now than they are now.

Michaelson and Morley did a bunch of experiments.  They did them very carefully.  And eventually others did the same or similar experiments.  Everyone got the same result.  The two beams always went the same speed.  Now it didn't matter what "lumeniferous aether" theory you subscribed to.  Every theory predicted that for at least some of the experiments, the speed of light would be different in one direction than the other.  Scientists could not think up a set of characteristics for lumeniferous aether that resulted in this "the speed of light is always constant" result.

Why does this matter?  Because after many years they concluded that there was no such thing as the "lumeniferous aether".  And Einstein made "the speed of light is always constant" a foundational idea of his theories.  Einstein and other Scientists came to a profound conclusion as a result of the lumeniferous aether episode.  They named this conclusion the "Occam's Razor" principle.  If you have multiple theories to chose from, always pick the simplest one that accounts for all the data.  A corollary of this is "don't assume the existence of anything not necessary for the theory to work".

The Occam's Razor principle leads Steven Hawking in his recent book "The Grand Design" to say "One can't prove that God doesn't exist, but science makes God unnecessary".  Scientists have been looking carefully for hundreds of years for evidence that God exists.  They haven't found anything.  Celestial spheres, life force, and the soul are examples of other things that scientists have carefully looked hard for over a very long time without finding anything.  As Hawking says, this does not mean that none of these things exist but it does mean that science has not found them.  And without evidence of their existence, science deems them "unnecessary".

Over most of the history of science most scientists have had sincerely held religious beliefs.  But the "Occam's Razor" revolution spawned by the failure of "lumeniferous aether" caused scientists to change their way of thinking.  And looked at in this new way there is no "need" for religion.  Without this need, an examination of the tenets of religions finds them not only unnecessary but nonsense.  So most modern scientists have reluctantly become atheists.

A Scientific Perspective on Religion

If you are a religious person and your faith is weak, stop reading!  If you think that Science is some kind of evil plot to hypnotise you into giving up your religious beliefs, be afraid, be very afraid.  I don't want it said that I am the cause of people turning away from their faith.  If you keep reading, the responsibility for what happens to your faith is your fault not mine.  You have been warned.

I have always been fond of the word "epiphany".  It's just a great word.  And, of course, it refers to something that happened to St. Paul on the road to Damascus.  Here's how the Bible (King James, Acts, Chapter 9, verses 3-7 with punctuation cleaned up) describes the event:

And as he journeyed he came near Damascus and suddenly there shined around about him a light from heaven.  And he fell to the earth and heard a voice saying unto him "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?"  And he said "Who art thou lord?".  And the lord said "I am Jesus whom thou persecutest.  It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks."  And he, trembling and astonished, said "Lord what will thou have me do?"  And the lord said unto him "Arise and go into the city and it shall be told thee what thou must do."  And the men which journeyed with him stood speechless hearing a voice but seeing no man.

That's the event that the word "epiphany" was coined to describe.  Now there is a bunch of more business.  And, in fact, it isn't Saul, later Paul, who gets the word, it's a guy called Ananias, but that's all detail.  The idea is that God chooses to talk directly to a mortal.  As a group these mortals are usually called prophets.  And this "epiphany to a prophet" mechanism is common to a lot of religions.

God talks to various prophets and we get the Jewish religion.  He talks to some more prophets and we get Christianity.  (I'm not sure where to slot Jesus into all this business but we're talking about a similar mechanism).  And the third "religion of the book" works the same way.  God talked directly to Mohammad and the result is Islam.  But it is not just religions of the book or ancient times.  God (through the angel Moroni) talks to Joseph Smith and we get Mormonism.  God talks to Mary Baker Eddy and we get Christian Science.  And still more recently God talks to L. Ron Hubbard and we get Scientology.

So is all this "epiphany" stuff unscientific?  Not at all.  Scientists' job is to figure out what the rules are, not create the rules themselves.  So if God created the universe, he can certainly include an "epiphany exclusion" rule.  And, since his is all powerful, he can certainly use this "epiphany exclusion" rule whenever and wherever he wants to.  And, trust me, scientists believe lots of things that are way weirder than an "epiphany exclusion" rule.  So if the "epiphany exclusion" rule is not unscientific (I know, double negative, but justified in this case), does that mean that Science has nothing to say on the subject?  No!  (Sorry for the second double negative but again justified).  Again, Scientists spend a lot of time trying to make sense of things that are a lot weirder than the "epiphany exclusion" rule.

The first thing to say from a Scientific perspective is that this happens a lot.  It is not the foundation of all religions but it is the foundation of a lot of them.  All of the above examples I have cited are what are generally called "western" religions.  But the rule is used in eastern religions too.  Buddhism is founded by the "prophet" (my characterization) Buddha.  There are probably others but I am too ignorant to be able to cite any.  Interestingly, Confucianism does not conform to the model.  Confucius did not claim any extraordinary knowledge.  He just said "we need to get back to that old time religion".  Since that old time religion already existed, he didn't need to create anything new so he did not need divine inspiration.

Getting back to the main point, there sure have been a lot of these prophets.  And they all say something different.  In fact, the general message of all prophets, with the possible exception of some of the first ones is "Those older prophets got it wrong.  Here's the real story."  This is definitely true of the 19th and 20th century prophets.  But Jesus fixed Judaism and Mohammad fixed Christianity, at least according to their adherents.  And with the modern prophets, the amount of doctrine that needs fixing becomes even greater.  The Scientology "origin story" (description of where we came from), for instance, bears no resemblance to the "origin story" of Christianity or any of the other religions of the book.  What can we make of all this?

It turns out that from a Scientific perspective, the situation is far from hopeless.  Christianity and a lot of other religions are "one God" religions.  They believe that there is one God and one world.  So let's assume that this is true for a moment.  Does it make sense that this one God, who created the one universe, would download (this is my shorthand for the whole "epiphany" process, no matter what the specific details are) different contradictory sets of facts into the minds of different prophets?

There is one hypothesis that is consistent with God doing this, that God is a liar and that the data he downloads is not all true.  Its a valid scientific hypothesis.  But if God is a liar then we can't depend on what he downloads into any particular prophet being true.  In fact, there is no prophet whose words we can depend on under this scenario.  If this scenario is correct then we need to develop outside means of verification for whatever prophets say.  And that outside verification system is Science.

Now most believers do not buy this hypothesis.  They believe that whatever God downloads is the truth.  So let's discard our earlier "God is a liar" hypothesis and adopt the alternative, namely "God tells the truth".  We still have the problem that there are a lot of prophets out there and, since they contradict each other, they can't all be telling the truth.  But, in fact, this gets us by a slightly different path to the same point.  Now it's not God who is lying but the prophets.  So we need a mechanism for determining which prophets are lying.  And again, the best mechanism is Science.  We can carefully examine the "revelations" of each prophet and see which ones are true.  And we quickly find problems with all of them.

Now there is a non-scientific approach that can be adopted.  We can "have faith".  Maybe God gave us some "faith based" mechanism that does not depend on Science to ferret out the truth.  Here I observe that no religion, hence no specific prophet, is believed in by a majority of the world's population.  So, at a minimum, we can say that the "faith based" approach is inefficient.  And if you drill down, if you ask not how many people are Christian or Muslim say, but how many people adhere to a specific strain of Christianity (say Methodist) or Islam (say Wahhabi) then the number of people that got it right shrinks to a small population, less than 1%.  And if you drill down further to the subsect level where everyone believes exactly the same thing then no religion claims the adherence of more than a tiny percentage of the population.  So God is very inefficient and he has not provided people with an effective mechanism for ferreting out the truth.  Now why am I supposed to believe in God?

None of the above depends on any specific beliefs in any specific religion.  The epiphany of St. Paul is used merely for explanatory purposes.  The argument does not depend on whether you believe in Christianity in general or in the truth of the epiphany of St. Paul in particular.  It is all the result of applying the scientific perspective to a large general class of religions.  And it does not depend on any specific scientific belief like Evolution.  The whole argument is constructed from a religious not a scientific perspective.  And that is the power of scientific thinking.  I believe that a lot of religious people understand this at a subconscious level.  And so they fear science for the very real reason that scientific thinking is a very powerful tool for undermining the belief in specific religions and religion in general.

Is Science a Religion?

The title of this piece is actually a cheat.  It was selected because it is more catchy than "Is Science Scientific?".  So, with that out of the way let me address the question.

There are two main pillars to Science:  data and mathematics.  Scientists collect data then they organize that data using mathematics and related tools into theories.  If there is a problem with data or if there is a problem with mathematics, Science is in trouble.  So let's look at each separately.

Data is, well, data.  But is it really?  How do we know that the data Scientists collect is true?  Scientists have a lot of reasons to believe their data but it is all "handwavium".  "Handwavium" is shorthand for a hand waving argument, an argument that is convincing to someone who already believes but is unconvincing to an opponent.  I won't review them.  Instead I will note that all "data" is filtered through the human nervous system.  The human nervous system modifies things in lots of ways.  Then it delivers it to the brain.  Frankly, we don't understand what happens in the brain very well.  So how do we know the result is "truth"?  We don't.  There are various properly done versions of this argument but instead I will refer you to the movie "The Matrix".  The conceit of this movie is that for reasons that don't actually make any sense a whole system has been set up to harvest energy from humans.  To make the system work computers control the nervous signals to humans and impose an artificial reality on humans.  Taken to an extreme there is really no way to prove that this is not happening to all of us in the "real world".  So that there is no Scientific way to prove that scientific data (or data of any kind) is true.

So there is a problem with data.  It turns out that there is also a problem with mathematics.  There is a long history of trying to make mathematics mathematical.  This undertaking culminated with a 1910 book called "Principia Mathematica" by Whitehead and Russell.  The title referred to the famous book with a similar name by Sir Isac Newton.  Whitehead and Russell attempted to do a proper job laying out the foundations of mathematics.  But people kept finding small problems with the work.  For some time most people were of the opinion that the problems could be fixed and eventually the endeavor would be a success.  Then in 1931 Kurt Godel published a paper that destroyed the whole thing.  What Godel showed was that for any "sufficiently complex" mathematical system there would always be propositions that could neither be proved  true nor false.  The most well known example of this is the statement "this statement is false".  If we assume the statement is false, then it is true.  If we assume the statement is true then it is false.  Thus it is neither true nor false.  So the whole project to put mathematics in a "firm mathematical foundation" is doomed to failure.  In short, mathematics can not be Scientifically proved to be true.

So we end up with the situation where the two pillars of Science are not Scientific.  So Science is not Scientific.  So all those people braying that "Science is just another type of religion" are right.  Is all lost?  In my opinion, no.  Science ultimately does depend on belief.  But there are pragmatic reasons to believe that Science is a dependable method for arriving at truth.  But, before going there let me make a digression.

I imagine a "truth" scale.  It has five regions.  At one end is the set of "things that are true and we can prove them to be true".  This is balanced by a region at the other end of the scale consisting of "things that are false and we can prove them to be false".  Back at the other end is a region more toward the center consisting of "things we believe to be true but can't prove to be true".  This is balanced at the other end of the scale by the region of "things we think are false but can't prove they are false".  And, of course, in the center we have the region of "things where don't know if they are true or false".

We would like for Science to be in the "things that are true and we can prove to be true" region.  But as I have shown above, Science is in the next region, the "things we believe to be true but can't prove" region.  It seems that at this point we haven't made any real progress but, in fact, we have.  If Science can't reliably show things to be "provably true" it turns out that Science is really good at proving things to be "provably false".  For instance, Science puts "Biblical Creationism" solidly into the "provably false" region.

So now let me get back to why it is reasonable to believe in Science even though we can't prove it is true.  Science has been demonstrated to deliver reliable truth over and over.  A simple example is cell phones, and technology in general.  Cell phones work because something called quantum mechanics works.  Quantum mechanics is really weird.  It is literally unbelievable and unnatural.  It is also extremely complicated.  But it works.  We know it works because cell phones work.  There are very few true believers who do not own and use a cell phone.  Ask them if they believe in cell phones.  They don't understand the question.  But if they did they would be forced to say "yes".  We know they would because they depend on them on a daily basis.  If you believe in cell phones you must believe in quantum mechanics.  Every time you get on an airplane you are putting yourself in a position where your life literally depends on Science being true.  The same is true for cars and many other aspects of the modern world.  Cell phones that work, airplanes, cars, the whole lot of it, is proof playing out before our eyes that there is truth to be found in Science.