An anecdote on obscurantism

You know what I realized earlier?  It's been over a year since I've talked about the ontological arguments for a god.  Perhaps it is because I think the last post I wrote summarizing the flaws in the modal ontological argument is about as clear as I can manage.

In the course of blogging about the ontological arguments for years, I attracted a handful of self-described philosophers who argued with me rather persistently, perhaps because I am one of the few people on the internet who is willing to discuss what is wrong with the ontological arguments in detail, rather than what is wrong with them in the big picture.  Of course, I found out that most of these self-described philosophers were unable to speak of logic without making the most basic of errors, even when it was irrelevant to the argument.

Buried somewhere in the archives, buried in dozens of long comments, buried in jargon and symbols, is a joke I thought so funny that it's stuck with me over a year later.  It starts like this:

What can you do to make an already obscure argument even more difficult to understand?

As I explained before, the basic modal ontological argument has just a few steps:

Premise 1: If God exists, then God necessarily exists.
Lemma: If God possibly exists, then God exists. (proof omitted, as it is irrelevant to this post)
Premise 2: God possibly exists.
Conclusion: God exists.

But what if we were to make this argument instead? The difference is in bold.

Premise 1: If God exists, then God necessarily exists.
Lemma: If God does not exist, then God does not possibly exist.
Premise 2: God possibly exists.
Conclusion: God exists.

It's the same argument, only the lemma has been replaced with its contrapositive.  Every if-then statement has a logically equivalent contrapositive statement.  For example:

If Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal.
Contrapositive: If Socrates is not mortal, then Socrates is not a man.

The contrapositive of the contrapositive statement is the original statement.  So whenever we make an if-then statement, we have two choices in how to say it.  Why not choose the one that is most clear and intuitive to lay audiences?  Often times the two statements can each be unclear for different reasons, but that's not the case here.  The lemma as originally stated is shorter, allows the conclusion to use modus ponens rather than modus tollens, not to mention that it flows more naturally from the proof I omitted.  So why replace it with its contrapositive?

That's more or less what one of the philosophers did.  It's a very small thing that hardly matters, but I couldn't help but think... why?  Why take these tiny steps to make an obscure argument just a tiny bit more obscure?  I asked him, and he said it was the simplest way to state the argument.  He also seemed to have trouble understanding whenever I stated the argument the other way.  I found all of this hilarious.

Some might say this is to be expected, since obscurantism is what philosophers are trained to do.  I suspect that the person simply didn't understand the argument well enough to spot a purely unnecessary step that was added in.

Summer research: High-Tc Superconductors

As you know, I am currently working on my physics Ph.D. with a specialization in condensed matter.  I am finally starting research this summer, next week in fact.  My research project is on one of the hottest topics in condensed matter physics, High-Temperature Superconductors.

I've written about superconductors before, but in case you're too lazy to read that...  *clears throat*

Just like many liquids freeze below a certain temperature, there are some materials which change into superconductors below a certain temperature (that temperature is called Tc).  They won't look any different, but they have awesome properties like zero electrical resistance and magnetic levitation (which are used in MRIs and maglev trains respectively).  For the earliest discovered superconductors, Tc was 30 degrees above absolute zero (-243 Celsius), but so-called High-Tc Superconductors have a Tc as high as 135 degrees above absolute zero (-138 Celsius).  Which is still very cold.  Many physicists seek to understand High-Tc Superconductors with the dream of discovering superconductors at room temperature.

More specifically, I will be investigating superconductors through the use of the ARPES method.  ARPES stands for angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy.  ARPES involves shooting a photon at the material, and looking at the electrons that pop out.  It's a lot like the photoelectric effect experiment which won Einstein his Nobel prize.

But ARPES is a little more sophisticated, because it doesn't just measure the energy of the electrons that come out, it also measures the angle at which they come out.  The angle tells you about the electron's momentum.  And so we can plot graphs of energy vs momentum.  This is a graph of the electronic band structure, which is of such great importance that I don't know how to properly convey it.  One of these days I will write a better explanation for lay people.  For now, remember those energy bands which were so crucial to the understanding of conductors, insulators, and semiconductors?  Those energy bands are merely a simplified form of the electronic band structure.

Note that I haven't yet fully described my research project; ARPES plus Superconductors is way too broad for a single research project.  But that's just as well, as I don't start until next week.  Perhaps I will write more then, and say something about what exactly I'm doing in the lab.

Though, if it's anything like previous summers, I will probably never fully describe my research here, and instead opt for inside jokes.