“According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fiber optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the timing of the neutrinos’ flight and an electronic card in a computer. After tightening the connection and then measuring the time it takes data to travel the length of the fiber, researchers found that the data arrive 60 nanoseconds earlier than assumed. Since this time is subtracted from the overall time of flight, it appears to explain the early arrival of the neutrinos. New data, however, will be needed to confirm this hypothesis.”

More here.

Assuming this is the reason for the results, and it does seem likely, because it’s a lot easier to believe a bad wire than all of Relativity needing to be overthrown; we can chalk this up to science. Cause this is how science works… An odd result is announced, studied and then explained.

I wonder if there’s a similar analog to this sort of process in Theology. I suppose it would be declaring a certain view to be a “dead-end” – what is technically termed “heresy”. But that process hardly goes as quickly as this scientific process has. And the consensus will probably never be as broad in theology as it tends to be in science either.

So, it was a loose wire in the end after all.

And just like that, the Communications people at the Episcopal Church offices in New York release a new application on the iTunes store called “Wayfarer”! (I swear, I had no prior knowledge of this – hopefully this happened because the people at “815″ were reading the same trends I was reading.)

From an email announcement I received:

The Episcopal Church Office of Communication has launched its first iPad app, Wayfarer.

Available as a free, quarterly iPad app downloadable at iTunes, all the content can also be viewed in an Internet browser here or http://WayfarerStories.com.

“Wayfarer features compelling stories told through video, photographs and words,” noted Lynette Wilson, Wayfarer producer.

Wilson, who is also an editor/reporter for Episcopal News Service, addressed the appropriateness of the name. “We chose to name the app Wayfarer because we intend to tell a wide spectrum of stories about people, possibilities and action across a broad landscape,” she said.

“This is an exciting moment – it represents our entry into mobile content, appealing both to Episcopal and broader audiences,” noted Anne Rudig, Director of Episcopal Church Office of Communication. “As the title suggests, each issue of Wayfarer has been shot in a different far-flung location.”

Full story here.

Good on ‘em. Hopefully we’ll have a phone version soon for the iPhone, Android (in whatever flavor this can be installed on) and whatever else people are using.

But this is hopefully just the start!

And go download the app if you can, give it a good rating and share the news.

“Mobile is a not just another device, but involves a new way of thinking that takes into account the power and immediacy of smartphones and tablets. Forrester nicely distills a lot of the trends and what it means for companies going forward. First, take a look at some of the facts, figures and projections laid out by Forrester:

1 billion consumers will own smartphones by 2016 with U.S. users owning 257 million smartphones and 126 million tablets. By 2016, 350 million employees will use smartphones, with 200 million of them bringing their own.

Mobile spending will reach $1.3 trillion by 2016 or 35 percent of the technology economy with the app market generating $56 billion by 2015.

Apple, Google and Microsoft are expected to control 91 percent of the U.S. smartphone market and 98 percent of the U.S. tablet market by 2016.

Businesses are expected to double their spending on mobile projects by 2015.

Forrester says companies need to realize that mobile apps serve as a new front end for engagement systems. Apps are increasingly context aware, fed by the cloud, sensors, history and social data. That requires companies to reconsider how they deploy apps for customers, partners and employees around this enhanced form of engagement. Mobile apps from companies can’t just log data, they need to harness all the power of mobile and social to help people get specific jobs done in a particular context, connect with people and access information at the exact time they are making decisions.”

From here.

It’s that first bullet point that should make people in the church world take notice. Just as congregations are starting to understand how critical their websites are to communicating their identity to the world, websites are being by-passed by new tools. Sure a website can be read on a smart-phone, but who does? The page served up is optimized for a a 1024 pixel wide display, often uses flash (shudder) because that’s what the designer knows, and has tiny little buttons (for phone use) to get more information.

Very few congregations have started to optimize their sites for mobile. Actually very few episcopal bloggers have either. (I did about a year ago, and it’s part of what drove me to abandon type-pad for wordpress. We installed a mobile friendly version of our site at our cathedral too – which was relatively easy because of some earlier design decisions we made)

Optimizing for mobile is probably more than just adding a server-side script that serves up a mobile friendly template though. Because people (myself included) tend to use mobile apps that are purposed designed for the phone to access information. I’m much more likely to use my iPhone twitter application to read the news than I am to load the twitter mobile site. I’m more likely to use an iPhone newsreader app to follow websites than I am to open them one by one. And that’s because the user interface is just that much easier.

There are very few Episcopal churches right now that have their own phone application. We don’t. I’m not sure that’s the right place to spend money for what it’s worth. But I do think we need to be intentional about thinking through how people will use their mobile devices on a Sunday morning.

Facebook checkins? (Okay – do you have a Facebook place page?) Google+ (Do you have Google places page?) 4 Square? What about someway to let people download material to their phone once they’ve checked in? What material makes sense? What about photos? Should we be encouraging people to geo-tag?

Would it make a difference to have a mobile device aware proxy server on our guest wi-fi network? So that when you join the network for instance, you’re automatically served up a page that has info about the congregation, parking, schedules, contact info, etc – sort of like what often happens in hotels or airports?

Is there some way we can make use of the unique sensors in phones to enhance Sunday mornings? (I have no idea how, but it seems a waste not to wonder about such a thing…)

Let’s figure that smart-phone adoption rate continues a-pace. Just like we saw the adoption of email and websites and recognized that the Church needed to adapt, we probably need to do the same regarding mobile too.

Shoot me any cool ideas you have. I think this needs to be done soon.

Seems to me that something has had to change. Does that change effect the way that the Episcopal Church is viewed by other parts of the Anglican Communion?

And maybe this is why there has been such a deep affinity between the Russian Orthodox and the Anglican Church. We are both formed out of a Constatinian world view.

Just off the top of my head I can’t see how it can’t. But I need to think a bit more about this.

I suppose some of that comes from the illusion of simplicity that Newtons' Three Laws of Motion present. Just three simple short statements. Sure they complicated quickly, but still… there's just three of them. The thing is that they aren't really completely true. The math is only solvable in a few easy cases. And there's no way to account for chaos. As scientists say, "Nature is not easily persuaded to yield its secrets; we have to work hard."

It's the same with faith. And that's a lesson we can hear embedded in the mysterious Messianic secret that is broadly expressed in the Gospel reading today. Why should we expect religious questions to be easy if natural science ones are hard?

It is as my rabbi friend told me. God expects us to search for the Truth.

MP3 File

But this month’s exhibit is probably my favorite of the six years I’ve been here. It’s a sculpture and painting exhibit that focuses on mathematical forms commonly seen in nature. The exhibition reminds me that there are times when we have our words fail us, and we find ourselves using metaphor to express that which we can’t express.

We talked a bit about that use of metaphor on the retreat I attended in Tucson last week. Science as well as theology often strays into metaphorical language. We seek to explain the things which cannot be easily explained. It’s not unlike the task of a poet I suppose. And so at our retreat, focusing on the fusion of Science and Theology we read a lot of poetry. I imagine if we’d held the retreat here at the Cathedral, we would have used the artwork presently on exhibit.

I’m including some pictures of the objects. If you’re ever here in Phoenix during the month of March I hope you’ll stop by and see them in person. We’re open all day Monday through Friday, 9 AM until 4 PM.

Particulars of the exhibit:

“Flower, Leaf & Metal”
an exhibition of art by
Annie Waters, Catherine Ruane and Kevin Caron
narrating quiet observations of nature’s ephemeral cycles through line, form and color

More info here.

Mary Midgley writes in review of Sheldrake’s book:

“The unlucky fact that our current form of mechanistic materialism rests on muddled, outdated notions of matter isn’t often mentioned today. It’s a mess that can be ignored for everyday scientific purposes, but for our wider thinking it is getting very destructive. We can’t approach important mind-body topics such as consciousness or the origins of life while we still treat matter in 17th-century style as if it were dead, inert stuff, incapable of producing life. And we certainly can’t go on pretending to believe that our own experience – the source of all our thought – is just an illusion, which it would have to be if that dead, alien stuff were indeed the only reality.

We need a new mind-body paradigm, a map that acknowledges the many kinds of things there are in the world and the continuity of evolution. We must somehow find different, more realistic ways of understanding human beings – and indeed other animals – as the active wholes that they are, rather than pretending to see them as meaningless consignments of chemicals.

Rupert Sheldrake, who has long called for this development, spells out this need forcibly in his new book. He shows how materialism has gradually hardened into a kind of anti-Christian faith, an ideology rather than a scientific principle, claiming authority to dictate theories and to veto inquiries on topics that don’t suit it, such as unorthodox medicine, let alone religion. He shows how completely alien this static materialism is to modern physics, where matter is dynamic. And, to mark the strange dilemmas that this perverse fashion poses for us, he ends each chapter with some very intriguing “Questions for Materialists”, questions such as “Have you been programmed to believe in materialism?”, “If there are no purposes in nature, how can you have purposes yourself?”, “How do you explain the placebo response?” and so on.”

The essay goes on to describe some of Sheldrake’s proposed solutions to the problem. Essentially he’s casting about for the next paradigm in a Kuhnsian sort of way that will allow us to break through to the next big organizing metaphor of scientific thought. None of the ones listed seem very compelling to me, but most of them coming out of biological imagery are not familiar to me, so I suppose that’s the reason I don’t warm to them.

I do rather like his idea that we move from the idea of regularities of behavior to habits. Apparently Sheldrake cites Neitsche, Whitehead and James (among others) as proponents of the idea. If I understand it, at least in terms of Whitehead’s thought, it’s sort of similar to moving from localized views of matter to process views of matter. Or thinking about momentum rather than location in a Heisenberg sort of formulation. (Or Hilbert space I suppose.)

But the key take away remains, what we call “facts” are actually much less well defined than we tend to imagine in the common mind. And that’s worth hammering on again and again. That’s the delusion that Sheldrake seems to be pointing out.

A friend pointed out to me that the state of the art thinking about DNA and the genome is that they’re less the blueprints of life as they are the poems from which life emerges. There’s a lot more improvisation going on than we expected. Life is not encoded, it is invoked – would be a way to say it I guess.

Except, that’s not true anymore. Or it hasn’t been at least since the beginning of the 20th century. Science in the 18th and 19th century was based on materialism. And Werner Heisenberg, he of the Uncertainty principle, believed that was a good way to demarcate the shift from one scientific world view to another, was to use the dominate scientific metaphor for matter as boundaries. Science in the 20th century moved from materialism to a quantum field metaphor.

Why the shift and how deeply has the new metaphor penetrated our common thinking? Mark Vernon deals with that question in an essay in the Guardian:

“Of materialism, [Heisenberg] wrote:

“[This] frame was so narrow and rigid that it was difficult to find a place in it for many concepts of our language that had always belonged to its very substance, for instance, the concept of mind, of the human soul or of life. Mind could be introduced into the general picture only as a kind of mirror of the material world.”

Today we live in the 21st century, and it seems that we are still stuck with this narrow and rigid view of the things. As Rupert Sheldrake puts it in his new book, published this week, The Science Delusion: “The belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith, grounded in a 19th-century ideology.”

That’s provocative rhetoric. Science an act of faith? Science a belief system? But then how else to explain the grip of the mechanistic, physicalist, purposeless cosmology? As Heisenberg explained, physicists among themselves have long stopped thinking of atoms as things. They exist as potentialities or possibilities, not objects or facts. And yet, materialism persists.”

That many outside the “academy” are still caught up in 19th century paradigms isn’t just the case in Science of course. In theology and biblical studies, people are still using the atomized bible of the Princeton Method to prove logical assertions about divinity. Even though we know that an atomized reading the Bible is just wrong. The fundamental unit of the bible seems to be the story, not the verse.

It’s striking to me how many of the major culture war battlefields of our present day are ultimately based on the perceived conflict between Science and Religion. The irony though is that most of the conflict seems to be based on using an older interpretation of Science (materialism) or Theology (Biblical atomism) and not on the current broadly accepted scholarly paradigms.

Perhaps one of the first steps in moving people back from the battle lines would be to help spread the meme that Science is no longer based in materialism. (And that Theology is not done by proof-texting too, but I think we can start with Science first.)

Any ideas how to do that? Other than blogging about it of course… Heh.

I’ll probably have much more to say about the organization over time and the new friends I’ve made this week. (There’s something wonderful about being a room with people who are struggling to do the same sort of thing that you’ve been trying to do. Both to discover that there are others, and to learn so many new insights from their journeys.) But I wanted to share the quote from G.K. Chesterton about Fairy Tales. I’m sorry to admit that I’d not known of it previously.

The form I heard this week in one of the meditations led by a society member was:

Fairy tales are more than true — not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.

It’s not Chesterton directly apparently, it’s an epigrammatic form first published by Neil Gaiman in 2004.

But there’s a world of metaphor waiting to be unlocked in it.

So that’s my task today and tomorrow. To contemplate the mystery of the metaphor of the dragons who can be beaten.

N.B.: I’m adding a new category to this blog that I’m titling SOSc – my plan is to use it for posts that discuss the task of integrating Religious and Scientific cosmologies (world views)

We are entering an era in which we are effectively going through a economic phase change. In physics, when we move through a phase change, physical characteristics of the material begin to go “critical” and fluctuate wildly the closer we get to the transition. According to economists, the same thing is happening with oil prices. And it’s not going to stop for a long while.

John Timmer, writing on Nobel Intent points out what follows:

“That has some pretty significant consequences. Of the 11 recessions the US has experienced since World War II, 10 have been preceded by a sudden change in oil prices. The US isn’t alone, either. Italy’s entire trade deficit, which has contributed to its financial troubles, can be accounted for by the rise in imported oil. The world, it seems, has allowed its economies to become entirely dependent upon fossil fuels. “If oil production can’t grow, the implication is that the economy can’t grow either,” the authors write. “This is such a frightening prospect that many have simply avoided considering it.”

And it’s not just oil that poses problems. US coal production peaked in 2002, and the global peak has been predicted to hit as soon as 2025. The last time global coal reserves were evaluated, in 2005, the total was cut by more than half compared to previous estimates. Fracking has boosted the production of natural gas dramatically, but even here the authors find some reasons for concern. Recent reports suggest that shale gas reserves have been overestimated, and many fields that have been in production for a while have experienced large declines in production.

The commentary concludes that we simply can’t rely on any fossil fuel to provide a stable and economic source of energy for more than a couple of decades. And, given the economic shocks that result from rapid changes in energy prices, that’s a serious problem. “Economists and politicians continually debate policies that will lead to a return to economic growth,” the authors note. “But because they have failed to recognize that the high price of energy is a central problem, they haven’t identified the necessary solution: weaning society off fossil fuel.”"

More here.

So what for churches? Big floor-space buildings are going to become increasingly expensive to heat and cool. So are homes. Apparently the era of large homes is over – and for the first time in years, the average floor space of new construction is decreasing.

Episcopal church buildings, built for the most part in the early part of the 20th century (or the latter part of the 19th) are pretty well adapted to an era of high energy prices. They’re small. They have high ceilings and small windows. Sometimes they have thick rock walls. They tend to be in areas where significant numbers of people can get to church without too much transportation expense.

But that’s also a bit of curse. The small size means that average attendance might necessarily be less than 200 people a Sunday – because that’s the most you can seat at one time. But that would put a congregation squarely into a class of congregations (transitional and maybe pastoral size) where the present economics are wrecking havoc with sustainable business models of congregation life. Such congregations can barely afford full-time seminary trained clergy. But with the move to the 1979 prayer book, and Eucharist being the “primary act of Christian worship on a Sunday” the need for regular clergy has increased. It’s those congregations that are feeling the squeeze right now.

But they’re also the most likely to flourish in the new high-energy cost economy. The question is how to move to a new way of providing for the needs of the congregation? I suspect that it’s going to require multiple actions to discover. We’ll need to actively conserve energy costs. Health insurance costs are going to have to be contained somehow. Congregational staffing is going to have to be rethought. Perhaps we’ll move to an à la carte clergy model in some places. I expect congregations will share resources more intentionally both in the diocese and with local ecumenical groups. Stewardship is going to look different too I think. People are not going to know from year to year how much gas and oil are going to cost, and until people can move closer to work that’s going to deeply effect family finances. Maybe endowments will help?

Got any other ideas? ‘Cause the time for ideas is now. We’ve arrived.