The Beard is a Key Symbol of Masculine Amish Identity & Attackers Cutting it

Myron Miller and his wife, Arlene, had been asleep for an hour when their 15-year-old daughter woke them and said that people were knocking at the door.

Mr. Miller, 45, a stocky construction worker and an Amish bishop in the peaceful farmlands of easternOhio, found five or six men waiting. Some grabbed him and wrestled him outside as others hacked at his long black beard with scissors, clipping off six inches. As Mr. Miller kept struggling, his wife screamed at the children to call 911, and the attackers fled.

For an Amish man, it was an unthinkable personal violation, and all the more bewildering because those accused in the attack are other Amish.

“We don’t necessarily fight, but it’s just instinct to defend yourself,” Mr. Miller recalled.

The attackers, the authorities said, had traveled from an isolated splinter settlement near Bergholz, south of the Miller residence. Sheriffs and Amish leaders in the region, home to one of the country’s largest concentrations of Amish, had come to expect trouble from the Bergholz group. It is said to be led with an iron hand by Sam Mullet, a prickly 66-year-old man who had become bitterly estranged from mainstream Amish communities and had had several confrontations with theJeffersonCountysheriff.

But the violent humiliation that men from his group are charged with inflicting on their perceived enemies throughout this fall, using scissors and battery-operated clippers, came as a bizarre shock.

The assaults — four are known to the authorities — have stirred fear among the Amish and resulted in the arrests, so far, of five men, including three of Mr. Mullet’s sons, on kidnapping and other charges. Officials say that more arrests are possible.

In the first incident, on Sept. 6 in the town ofMesopotamia, a married couple who had left the Bergholz community four years ago, Martin and Barbara Miller, were attacked at night by five of their own sons and a son-in law, along with their wives, all of whom had elected to remain with Mr. Mullet, according to the victims. The gang left the father with a “ragged beard,” as a sheriff’s report described it, then turned on their mother — who is Mr. Mullet’s sister — and chopped off large patches of her hair.

The beard is a key symbol of masculine Amish identity. The women view their long hair, kept in a bun, as their “glory,” and shearing it was “an attack on her personal identity and religious teaching.

The men accused in the attack were released on bail. The elder Mr. Mullet has not been charged, although he remains under investigation.

Federal prosecutors are considering whether to pursue federal hate-crime charges, according to theClevelandoffice of the F.B.I.

The prosecutions are unusual because the Amish do not believe in revenge and prefer to settle disputes internally. The couple inMesopotamia, Barbara and Martin Miller, have refused to testify, telling officers that they will “turn the other cheek.”

But others are cooperating with law enforcement.

“We want to see these people behind bars so this cult can be torn apart before it ends up like most of them do,” said Myron Miller, who lives in Mechanicstown. Many Amish regard Mr. Mullet as a danger to the wider community and above all to the 120 people in the settlement, including dozens of children growing up under his sway.

Mr. Miller now has a trimmed two-inch beard. He and his wife believe that the attack was retribution because, years ago, they helped one of Mr. Mullet’s sons leave Bergholz.

Mr. Mullet, through the front door of his large white house at the center of his Bergholz settlement.

Mr. Mullet said that the recent attacks resulted from “religious differences,” and that he had not ordered the attacks, though he had known that they were taking place.

The remarks enraged other Amish. “It’s not a church issue, it’s plain revenge,” Arlene Miller said.

Many Amish say they no longer consider Mr. Mullet to be Amish or even a true Christian. While the Amish have a long history of schisms, clusters of congregations tend to have cooperative ties, and the fact that Mr. Mullet’s group is not linked to any other is a sign of their renegade status, said David McConnell, an anthropologist at theCollegeofWoosterwho studies the Amish.

In 1995, when Mr. Mullet bought land in Bergholz, he was already known as a loner with a provocative attitude. But his conflicts with outsiders have increased in the last decade, according to Sheriff Abdalla and local Amish leaders. One follower was convicted of threatening to kill the sheriff after losing a custody battle; one of Mr. Mullet’s sons went to prison for molesting a 12-year-old girl.

Mr. Mullet’s central religious grievance apparently stems from his effort about five years ago to excommunicate families who had moved out. A group of Amish leaders told him that he did not have proper grounds to do so, and he has stewed with resentment ever since, according to the sheriff.

The Sept. 6 attack on Mr. Mullet’s sister and her husband sent ripples of anxiety through the Amish community.

Mrs. Miller told the officers that she and her husband had quit Bergholz but that their children had remained and had become involved with what she called a cult.

Further episodes on Oct. 4 finally led to the arrests. A group of men were accused of attacks at two different homes after attending a horse auction, roaming over several counties in a hired trailer with a puzzled driver.

The first victims that night were a 74-year-old Amish bishop and his son inMountHope. Later that night, members of the same group allegedly assaulted Myron Miller.

Mr. Miller grabbed at the face of one assailant, and later found clumps of beard, not his own, on the ground, which the sheriff collected for evidence.

“It just terrified me that these guys were actually pulling me out of my house,” Mr. Miller recalled. “My whole family was terrified.”

What Do You Do with Warren Jeffs: Prophet of Fundamentalist Church of Jesus?

Warren Jeffs, the “prophet” of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), the nation’s largest polygamist Mormon sect, was sentenced in August 2011 to life in prison for the rape and sexual assault of two of his underage wives.

Jeffs had taken a total of 78 plural wives, including 12 whom he married at age 15 or younger. During the trial inSan Angelo,Texas, the defendant’s nephew, Brent Jeffs, also described being raped by his uncle when he was five years old, a testimony that left three jurors in tears.

The jury deliberated for only 30 minutes before convicting the elder Jeffs.

I helped write Brent’s 2009 memoir, Lost Boy, which tells his story of overcoming the trauma of growing up in the FLDS with three mothers and 19 brothers and sisters, then leaving the church as a teen. I spoke with him about his recovery and his uncle’s trial.

Did you have a chance to confrontWarrenyourself?

I actually got to walk right up to him and say, ‘You finally got what you deserved.’ He just looked at me and looked down at the ground and they hauled him off. It was awesome! Talk about closure.

They had just put shackles on his feet and hands, and to see him come out with shackles on his feet. I thought, Man, you know what, you had your time. Now it’s time for you to have justice served and you’re going to see what it feels like to suffer.

But when all of the witnesses came to testify during the sentencing phase, he couldn’t face anybody. He was put out into a room in the hall. I don’t know if they had audio, but he couldn’t face us.

What do you want to tell other survivors of sexual abuse?

There’s a lot of healing on a lot of different levels. I think there are three levels of healing. The first is to recognize what you went through and how you feel. Second would be going to see someone for therapy, to try to get rid of all that pain and baggage. And last, if at all possible, is to face that person and either have justice served or be able to say what you want to them.

For me, that was like the chapter was done, it was very cool.

Were you able to attend much of the trial?

I was filled in on what was going on and I was able to sit in the courtroom when they were doing the closing arguments and for the verdict.

How did you feel when the verdict came down?

Oh, my God! I knew it, I had a feeling about it. I knew that the jury was only out for 30 minutes and then they came back with guilty, guilty, guilty, all the way around. I thought, Finally, everyone can see what kind of monster this guy really is. I felt 10 feet tall walking out of that courtroom.

How did your family respond?

They’re all extremely relieved and proud of me and of everything I’ve done and stood up for. I called my family and they put me on speakerphone and I said, ‘I did this for us, not just for me, but for all his victims, anyone who he’s ever hurt.’ I powered through it all because this is something that matters to everyone who he hurt.

What’s the important thing for people who are suffering from sexual abuse to do?

For me, the biggest thing was recognizing it and talking about it. You don’t have to talk about it with everybody, but find somebody or even a few people to talk to. Maybe talk to others who have been victimized as well. Share your story and have them talk back to you. Don’t feel like you’re the only one this happened to and beat yourself up. That was huge for me.

It did take a long time. I took my time. You don’t need to rush into anything. I went [to therapy] for a couple of years and I remember finally going in one last time and saying, This monster is off of my back. This anger and sadness, all of this finally melted away. That’s what helped me to do the book and talk on TV.

I knew that I was a survivor and I knew in my heart that it wasn’t my fault, and I could stand tall. That just empowers everyone else to stand up for themselves, too.

What would you say to someone considering leaving the FLDS?

My arms are open to anyone who wants to talk about it, who even has a question, to helping anyone in making that leap or stepping outside that lifestyle into this world. It was extremely hard for me, and [it helped] to get advice on how to life live outside those walls. I want to reach out to anyone who’s willing to talk.

Unfortunately, inColoradoCitywhich is on the border of Arizona and Utah, where many FLDS members live, they have no Internet or access to the outside world.

I think Lyle Warren Jeffs’ brother, who will take over leadership will fill their heads with the idea ofWarrenbeing a martyr. He took huge blow for the people, he’ll say. On the other side of the coin, this trial made such a big impact, I’m sure word will get down to people in the community, and they might realize that what this guy did is horrible and maybe they don’t want to be a part of that.

I’d also say, Just follow your heart and go with it. The most important thing is finding out who you are and what you want. It’s time to take charge of your life — it belongs to no one else.

Making Bible More Accessible to Modern Readers

We didn’t know Jesus being called the “Son of Man” was so confusing. But the publishers of the Common English Bible translation want to clear up anything and everything that can confuse those inclined to dive into the Bible, so “Son of Man” now reads “the Human One.” Not exactly poetic, but arguably modern.

In an effort not only to make the Bible more accessible to modern readers, but also to appease both conservative and liberal denominations, the multi-denomination publishers of the new Bible translation—the Common English Bible Committee, an alliance of five publishers—out digitally now and in print in the next few weeks didn’t just toss together a few new catchy phrases, though. They took the task seriously.

With more than 200 biblical scholars and church leaders representing more than 20 denominations, the committee translated straight from the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts, says associate publisher Paul Franklyn. When field-testing showed passages appeared confusing, project staff worked in modern phrasing. USA Today notes the committee was made up of “a coalition of Protestant denominational publishing houses owned by the United Methodist Church, one of the nation’s largest denominations, and the Disciples of Christ, Presbyterian Church U.S.A., Episcopal Church and the United Church of Christ.”

Along with switching out Jesus’ well-known descriptor, the new $3.5 million Bible translation that took four years to complete, also tossed out “alien” and “foreigner” in places (read Exodus 22:21) in lieu of “immigrant”; shifts toward a more gender-neutral approach (“brother or sister” versus just “brother” when Jesus teaches to “warn,” not “rebuke” in Luke 17:3-4); adds in plenty of contractions; uses words such as “insulted” instead of “defiled” (1 Samuel 17:45); and eases up the language of the Lord’s Prayer (found in Matthew 6:9-13) by switching out “hallowed be thy name” for “uphold the holiness of your name,” among other shifts.

To help catch a few eyes along the way, the CEB includes maps from National Geographic. There must be some proven science showing everyone loves a great map.

All the academic work has the Christian community talking (and reading), as the Fuller Theological Seminary in May made the new translation required reading for its students. New copies of the paperback edition will come out in August.

While the vocabulary may deviate slightly, the meaning coming from the Son of Man or the Human One remains the same. Ultimately, it’s all still the Bible.

Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/07/20/new-bible-translation-aims-for-common-language/#ixzz1SjCMFEOr

Why Are Jews Persecuted?

By Jayne Gardener

I always used to wonder what it was about Jews that made people throughout history despise them. If they were indeed “God’s chosen” I thought, they had to be the unluckiest people in the history of the world. Why were they persecuted throughout history?

Why had the Nazis herded them into cattle cars and taken them to “extermination camps” to dispose once and for all of the “Jewish problem?” I suddenly recognized that if Hitler had developed a “Final Solution” to the Jewish question, that there had to have been a “Jewish Problem.

” Could the Jews have in any way behaved in such a manner that would make the countries in which they resided turn against them, or were they just unfortunate, innocent victims? I set out to find answers for my questions, mainly turning to the Internet, but also reading various books on the subject. What I found became increasingly disturbing to me. I had not known that throughout history, the Jews had been expelled from 79 countries, some countries more than once.

I had not known that many of the claims they made about the Holocaust that I had believed unquestioningly for so long were in fact fraudulent. The books I had read and the movies I had seen about the “Holocaust” and wept over were nothing but thinly veiled attempts to garner unwavering sympathy for the state of Israel and an excuse to extort billions of dollars from Germany and 1.25 billion dollars from the Swiss banks.

I discovered that a book I had read many times as a teenager and cried about, Anne Frank’s Diary, had been at least partially written by someone other than Anne Frank.

I learnt that the confessions at the Nuremburg Trials and the executions of so many German “war criminals” were extracted under torture and the defendants were being tried, judged and condemned by their very accusers.

I learnt about the “false flag” operations, especially the Lavon affair and the tragedy of the USS Liberty, an American ship that was attacked by the Israelis during the 1967 war. 34 young American men were killed and many more wounded. To add insult to injury, the Israelis claimed that it was simply an unfortunate case of mistaken identity, something the survivors of the Liberty have always vehemently denied. They, however, were threatened with court martial if they were ever to tell their stories.

I learnt about the Jonathan Pollard spy case and other incidents of Israeli Jews spying against their supposed “closest ally.”

I became shocked and horrified as I learnt about the treatment of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories at the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces and the Jewish settlers. Israel purports to be the only democracy in the middle east, but it’s only a democracy for Jews. Non-Jews are not considered equal.

I was saddened to see pictures of innocent Palestinian children burnt beyond recognition or suffering from serious gunshot wounds after being targeted by the IDF for no other reason than that they are Palestinian.

I found out about the Jewish history of avariciousness, larceny, lying, manipulation and their questionable and usurious business practices.I learnt about their roles in the radical homosexual movement, the radical feminist movement, the pornography industry as well as their over-representation in the abortion industry.

I discovered their role in organized crime, in the slave trade, in the civil rights movement and in Communism, an ideology that is responsible for the deaths of untold millions and the repression of many millions more.

I learnt that it was Jewish supremacists behind the war against Christianity and Christmas. It is they who want God out of the Pledge of Allegiance and all symbols of Christianity removed from public life. They have driven Christianity from the public schools despite Christianity being the majority religion. They have taken Christmas out of the public school calendar despite the fact that it is a statutory holiday and it is named Christmas.

I read about the anti-Gentilism and hatefulness of the Babylonian Talmud and their utter disrespect for, and hostility towards Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary and Christianity and Christians in general.

I learnt about their “chutzpah” in claiming that Gentile lives were worth no more than the lives of barnyard animals but that they considered Jewish lives to be akin to God Himself. It’s okay to steal from a Gentile or to kill a Gentile, but Jewish lives are sacred.

I learnt of their control of the majority of wealth, the media and academia despite them making up less than 2% of the population (even lower in Canada). They are behind the ridiculous political correctness movement and hate crime legislation that was drafted so as to silence anyone who might figure out their agenda and attempt to shed light on it. Men like German Rudolf, David Irving and many more, previously recognized as great historians, were arrested, charged with hate crimes and incarcerated simply for having made academic inquiry into a specific period of history. Other so called “revisionists” or “holocaust deniers” have been intimidated, harassed, assaulted and smeared simply for trying to get at the truth.

I found out that the Jews are responsible for our wide open immigration policies that have created the nightmare we call “multiculturalism,” “diversity,” inclusiveness” and “pluralism.” It is mostly they who push for race mixing and miscegenation, knowing fully well that it would eventually lead to those of white European descent being minorities in their own countries and the eventual extermination of white European DNA.

It is patently clear that the war in Iraq is due solely to Israel wanting to hobble her enemies by destabilizing their governments in order to achieve hegemony in the Middle East.

It would be unthinkable for Israeli Jews to die for this cause, so they manipulated the US into the war with the help of the Jewish Zionist “Israel firsters” in the Bush administration in order that the blood of way too many young American men and women is shed instead.

It is they who control the Middle Eastern foreign policy of the most powerful country in the world, the USA. It is they who control congress, the senate and the puppet president. They have such control in movies and television that we are now subjected to endless programs and Hollywood movies that mock Christianity, Christian values and degrade the traditional family. After sober reflection on what I had discovered about Jewish supremacy and Zionism, I had to abandon all my previously held notions as to the history of Jewish persecution. What I have trouble understanding is why they continue this behavior in whichever society they live, knowing that eventually they will overplay their hand and their perfidy will be exposed yet again.Has history taught them nothing?

As more and more people become aware of what is going on and who is responsible for it, anger is going to rise as it already has in the former Soviet Union and eastern European countries. They may control television, movies and the print media, but they don’t control the internet. At least not yet. Blogs and websites devoted to “outing” the Jewish supremacists will ultimately be their downfall.

If everyone who sees this information passes it on to at least one more person, the crimes and misdeeds of the Jewish supremacists and Zionists will be exposed. Please, do your part. Pass it on. Our world, as we know, is counting on you.

Now lets count which Islamic Country Aids and HelpsIsrael…..and … When was the last time you heard Taliban spoke against the Jew Nation? When.. and how many attacks have they pulled so far…..

“What if the Bible is found Blasphemous?”: Khaled Ahmad

Khaled Ahmed wrote an article titled “What if the Bible is found blasphemous?” in March 21, 2006 in Daily Times.

The first paragraph of the article is as follows:

“Most Pakistanis are not aware of the dangers our law against blasphemy might entail. The law says no prophet shall be insulted and awards death for the offence. This means that prophets in the Juaeo-Christian-Islamic tradition are all protected. But do we know what the Bible says about Old Testament prophets? What if the stories of the Bible are taken to court and found blasphemous? Will we then have to burn the Bible and kill all the Christians who read it?”

What Khaled Ahmed feared five years ago is probably going to turn into a reality.

Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (Sami-ul-Haq group) leader Maulana Abdul Rauf Farooqi held a press conference along with scholars on May 30. He said that Terry Jones’ blasphemous act against the Holy Qur’an had crushed the spirit of the Muslims and that they were angry over it.

He said that there are portions in the Bible that are blasphemous and insult holy prophets of Islam. He urged the Chief Justice of Pakistan Chaudhry to take suo moto notice of these blasphemous contents under Section 295-C of Pakistan Penal Code, declare the Bible as a blasphemous literature and ban it. He said that if the CJ would not take notice then he would file a writ. He said that he was ready to accept any punishment if he could not prove that the Bible was a blasphemous literature.

Asif Aqeel

Director Community Development Initiative

83-S Block, Model Town Extension

Cell: +92-0300-400-1650

Office: +92-042-583-2641

Fax: 92-042-583-2642

 

What Will Happen When Computers Will Become More Intelligent Than Us?

On Feb. 15, 1965, a diffident but self-possessed high school student named Raymond Kurzweil appeared as a guest on a game show called I’ve Got a Secret.

On the show Kurzweil demonstrated the computer, which he built himself — a desk-size affair with loudly clacking relays, hooked up to a typewriter. The panelists were pretty blasé about it; they were more impressed by Kurzweil’s age than by anything he’d actually done.

Kurzweil would spend much of the rest of his career working out what his demonstration meant. Creating a work of art is one of those activities we reserve for humans and humans only. It’s an act of self-expression; you’re not supposed to be able to do it if you don’t have a self. To see creativity, the exclusive domain of humans, usurped by a computer built by a 17-year-old is to watch a line blur that cannot be unblurred, the line between organic intelligence and artificial intelligence.

That was Kurzweil’s real secret, and back in 1965 nobody guessed it. Maybe not even him, not yet. But now, 46 years later, Kurzweil believes that we’re approaching a moment when computers will become intelligent, and not just intelligent but more intelligent than humans. When that happens, humanity — our bodies, our minds, our civilization — will be completely and irreversibly transformed. He believes that this moment is not only inevitable but imminent. According to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it is about 35 years away.

Computers are getting faster. Everybody knows that. Also, computers are getting faster faster — that is, the rate at which they’re getting faster is increasing.

So if computers are getting so much faster, so incredibly fast, there might conceivably come a moment when they are capable of something comparable to human intelligence. Artificial intelligence.

All that horsepower could be put in the service of emulating whatever it is our brains are doing when they create consciousness — not just doing arithmetic quickly or composing piano music but also driving cars, writing books, making ethical decisions, appreciating fancy paintings, making witty observations at cocktail parties.

If you can swallow that idea, and Kurzweil and a lot of other smart people can, then all bets are off. From that point on, there’s no reason to think computers would stop getting more powerful. They would keep on developing until they were far more intelligent than we are. Their rate of development would also continue to increase, because they would take over their own development from their slower-thinking human creators. Imagine a computer scientist that was itself a super-intelligent computer. It would work incredibly quickly. It could draw on huge amounts of data effortlessly. It wouldn’t even take breaks to play Farmville.

It’s impossible to predict the behavior of these smarter-than-human intelligences with which (with whom?) we might one day share the planet, because if you could, you’d be as smart as they would be. But there are a lot of theories about it.

Maybe we’ll merge with them to become super-intelligent cyborgs, using computers to extend our intellectual abilities the same way that cars and planes extend our physical abilities.

Maybe the artificial intelligences will help us treat the effects of old age and prolong our life spans indefinitely. Maybe we’ll scan our consciousnesses into computers and live inside them as software, forever, virtually. Maybe the computers will turn on humanity and annihilate us.

The one thing all these theories have in common is the transformation of our species into something that is no longer recognizable as such to humanity circa 2011. This transformation has a name: the Singularity.

The difficult thing to keep sight of when you’re talking about the Singularity is that even though it sounds like science fiction, it isn’t, no more than a weather forecast is science fiction. It’s not a fringe idea; it’s a serious hypothesis about the future of life on Earth. There’s an intellectual gag reflex that kicks in anytime you try to swallow an idea that involves super-intelligent immortal cyborgs, but suppress it if you can, because while the Singularity appears to be, on the face of it, preposterous, it’s an idea that rewards sober, careful evaluation. People are spending a lot of money trying to understand it.

The three-year-old Singularity University, which offers inter-disciplinary courses of study for graduate students and executives, is hosted by NASA.

Google was a founding sponsor; its CEO and co-founder Larry Page spoke there last year. People are attracted to the Singularity for the shock value, like an intellectual freak show, but they stay because there’s more to it than they expected. And of course, in the event that it turns out to be real, it will be the most important thing to happen to human beings since the invention of language.

The Singularity isn’t a wholly new idea, just newish. In 1965 the British mathematician I.J. Good described something he called an “intelligence explosion”:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

The word singularity is borrowed from astrophysics: it refers to a point in space-time — for example, inside a black hole — at which the rules of ordinary physics do not apply. In the 1980s the science-fiction novelist Vernor Vinge attached it to Good’s intelligence-explosion scenario. At a NASA symposium in 1993, Vinge announced that “within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create super-human intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”

By that time Kurzweil was thinking about the Singularity too. He’d been busy since his appearance on I’ve Got a Secret. He’d made several fortunes as an engineer and inventor; he founded and then sold his first software company while he was still at MIT. He went on to build the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind — Stevie Wonder was customer No. 1 — and made innovations in a range of technical fields, including music synthesizers and speech recognition. He holds 39 patents and 19 honorary doctorates. In 1999 President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Technology.

But Kurzweil was also pursuing a parallel career as a futurist: he has been publishing his thoughts about the future of human and machine-kind for 20 years, most recently in The Singularity Is Near, which was a best seller when it came out in 2005.

A documentary by the same name, starring Kurzweil, Tony Robbins and Alan Dershowitz, among others, was released in January. (Kurzweil is actually the subject of two current documentaries. The other one, less authorized but more informative, is called The Transcendent Man.) Bill Gates has called him “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.”

In real life, the transcendent man is an unimposing figure who could pass for Woody Allen’s even nerdier younger brother. Kurzweil grew up in Queens, N.Y., and you can still hear a trace of it in his voice. Now 62, he speaks with the soft, almost hypnotic calm of someone who gives 60 public lectures a year. As the Singularity’s most visible champion, he has heard all the questions and faced down the incredulity many, many times before. He’s good-natured about it. His manner is almost apologetic: I wish I could bring you less exciting news of the future, but I’ve looked at the numbers, and this is what they say, so what else can I tell you?

Kurzweil’s interest in humanity’s cyborganic destiny began about 1980 largely as a practical matter. He needed ways to measure and track the pace of technological progress. Even great inventions can fail if they arrive before their time, and he wanted to make sure that when he released his, the timing was right. “Even at that time, technology was moving quickly enough that the world was going to be different by the time you finished a project,” he says. “So it’s like skeet shooting — you can’t shoot at the target.” He knew about Moore’s law, of course, which states that the number of transistors you can put on a microchip doubles about every two years. It’s a surprisingly reliable rule of thumb. Kurzweil tried plotting a slightly different curve: the change over time in the amount of computing power, measured in MIPS (millions of instructions per second), that you can buy for $1,000.

As it turned out, Kurzweil’s numbers looked a lot like Moore’s. They doubled every couple of years. Drawn as graphs, they both made exponential curves, with their value increasing by multiples of two instead of by regular increments in a straight line. The curves held eerily steady, even when Kurzweil extended his backward through the decades of pretransistor computing technologies like relays and vacuum tubes, all the way back to 1900.

Kurzweil then ran the numbers on a whole bunch of other key technological indexes — the falling cost of manufacturing transistors, the rising clock speed of microprocessors, the plummeting price of dynamic RAM. He looked even further afield at trends in biotech and beyond — the falling cost of sequencing DNA and of wireless data service and the rising numbers of Internet hosts and nanotechnology patents. He kept finding the same thing: exponentially accelerating progress. “It’s really amazing how smooth these trajectories are,” he says. “Through thick and thin, war and peace, boom times and recessions.” Kurzweil calls it the law of accelerating returns: technological progress happens exponentially, not linearly. Then he extended the curves into the future, and the growth they predicted was so phenomenal, it created cognitive resistance in his mind. Exponential curves start slowly, then rocket skyward toward infinity. According to Kurzweil, we’re not evolved to think in terms of exponential growth. “It’s not intuitive. Our built-in predictors are linear. When we’re trying to avoid an animal, we pick the linear prediction of where it’s going to be in 20 seconds and what to do about it. That is actually hardwired in our brains.”

Here’s what the exponential curves told him. We will successfully reverse-engineer the human brain by the mid-2020s. By the end of that decade, computers will be capable of human-level intelligence. Kurzweil puts the date of the Singularity — never say he’s not conservative — at 2045. In that year, he estimates, given the vast increases in computing power and the vast reductions in the cost of same, the quantity of artificial intelligence created will be about a billion times the sum of all the human intelligence that exists today.

The Singularity isn’t just an idea. it attracts people, and those people feel a bond with one another. Together they form a movement, a subculture; Kurzweil calls it a community. Once you decide to take the Singularity seriously, you will find that you have become part of a small but intense and globally distributed hive of like-minded thinkers known as Singularitarians.

Not all of them are Kurzweilians, not by a long chalk. There’s room inside Singularitarianism for considerable diversity of opinion about what the Singularity means and when and how it will or won’t happen. But Singularitarians share a worldview. They think in terms of deep time, they believe in the power of technology to shape history, they have little interest in the conventional wisdom about anything, and they cannot believe you’re walking around living your life and watching TV as if the artificial-intelligence revolution were not about to erupt and change absolutely everything. They have no fear of sounding ridiculous; your ordinary citizen’s distaste for apparently absurd ideas is just an example of irrational bias, and Singularitarians have no truck with irrationality. When you enter their mind-space you pass through an extreme gradient in worldview, a hard ontological shear that separates Singularitarians from the common run of humanity. Expect turbulence.

In addition to the Singularity University, which Kurzweil co-founded, there’s also a Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, based in San Francisco. It counts among its advisers Peter Thiel, a former CEO of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook. The institute holds an annual conference called the Singularity Summit. (Kurzweil co-founded that too.) Because of the highly interdisciplinary nature of Singularity theory, it attracts a diverse crowd. Artificial intelligence is the main event, but the sessions also cover the galloping progress of, among other fields, genetics and nanotechnology.

At the 2010 summit, which took place in August in San Francisco, there were not just computer scientists but also psychologists, neuroscientists, nanotechnologists, molecular biologists, a specialist in wearable computers, a professor of emergency medicine, an expert on cognition in gray parrots and the professional magician and debunker James “the Amazing” Randi. The atmosphere was a curious blend of Davos and UFO convention. Proponents of seasteading — the practice, so far mostly theoretical, of establishing politically autonomous floating communities in international waters — handed out pamphlets. An android chatted with visitors in one corner.

After artificial intelligence, the most talked-about topic at the 2010 summit was life extension. Biological boundaries that most people think of as permanent and inevitable Singularitarians see as merely intractable but solvable problems. Death is one of them. Old age is an illness like any other, and what do you do with illnesses? You cure them. Like a lot of Singularitarian ideas, it sounds funny at first, but the closer you get to it, the less funny it seems. It’s not just wishful thinking; there’s actual science going on here.

For example, it’s well known that one cause of the physical degeneration associated with aging involves telomeres, which are segments of DNA found at the ends of chromosomes. Every time a cell divides, its telomeres get shorter, and once a cell runs out of telomeres, it can’t reproduce anymore and dies. But there’s an enzyme called telomerase that reverses this process; it’s one of the reasons cancer cells live so long. So why not treat regular non-cancerous cells with telomerase? In November, researchers at Harvard Medical School announced in Nature that they had done just that. They administered telomerase to a group of mice suffering from age-related degeneration. The damage went away. The mice didn’t just get better; they got younger.

Aubrey de Grey is one of the world’s best-known life-extension researchers and a Singularity Summit veteran. A British biologist with a doctorate from Cambridge and a famously formidable beard, de Grey runs a foundation called SENS, or Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. He views aging as a process of accumulating damage, which he has divided into seven categories, each of which he hopes to one day address using regenerative medicine. “People have begun to realize that the view of aging being something immutable — rather like the heat death of the universe — is simply ridiculous,” he says. “It’s just childish. The human body is a machine that has a bunch of functions, and it accumulates various types of damage as a side effect of the normal function of the machine. Therefore in principal that damage can be repaired periodically. This is why we have vintage cars. It’s really just a matter of paying attention. The whole of medicine consists of messing about with what looks pretty inevitable until you figure out how to make it not inevitable.”

Kurzweil takes life extension seriously too. His father, with whom he was very close, died of heart disease at 58. Kurzweil inherited his father’s genetic predisposition; he also developed Type 2 diabetes when he was 35. Working with Terry Grossman, a doctor who specializes in longevity medicine, Kurzweil has published two books on his own approach to life extension, which involves taking up to 200 pills and supplements a day. He says his diabetes is essentially cured, and although he’s 62 years old from a chronological perspective, he estimates that his biological age is about 20 years younger. But his goal differs slightly from de Grey’s. For Kurzweil, it’s not so much about staying healthy as long as possible; it’s about staying alive until the Singularity. It’s an attempted handoff. Once hyper-intelligent artificial intelligences arise, armed with advanced nanotechnology, they’ll really be able to wrestle with the vastly complex, systemic problems associated with aging in humans.

Alternatively, by then we’ll be able to transfer our minds to sturdier vessels such as computers and robots. He and many other Singularitarians take seriously the proposition that many people who are alive today will wind up being functionally immortal.

It’s an idea that’s radical and ancient at the same time. In “Sailing to Byzantium,” W.B. Yeats describes mankind’s fleshly predicament as a soul fastened to a dying animal. Why not unfasten it and fasten it to an immortal robot instead? But Kurzweil finds that life extension produces even more resistance in his audiences than his exponential growth curves. “There are people who can accept computers being more intelligent than people,” he says. “But the idea of significant changes to human longevity — that seems to be particularly controversial. People invested a lot of personal effort into certain philosophies dealing with the issue of life and death. I mean, that’s the major reason we have religion.”

Of course, a lot of people think the Singularity is nonsense — a fantasy, wishful thinking, a Silicon Valley version of the Evangelical story of the Rapture, spun by a man who earns his living making outrageous claims and backing them up with pseudoscience. Most of the serious critics focus on the question of whether a computer can truly become intelligent.

The entire field of artificial intelligence, or AI, is devoted to this question. But AI doesn’t currently produce the kind of intelligence we associate with humans or even with talking computers in movies — HAL or C3PO or Data. Actual AIs tend to be able to master only one highly specific domain, like interpreting search queries or playing chess. They operate within an extremely specific frame of reference. They don’t make conversation at parties. They’re intelligent, but only if you define intelligence in a vanishingly narrow way. The kind of intelligence Kurzweil is talking about, which is called strong AI or artificial general intelligence, doesn’t exist yet.

Why not? Obviously we’re still waiting on all that exponentially growing computing power to get here. But it’s also possible that there are things going on in our brains that can’t be duplicated electronically no matter how many MIPS you throw at them. The neurochemical architecture that generates the ephemeral chaos we know as human consciousness may just be too complex and analog to replicate in digital silicon. The biologist Dennis Bray was one of the few voices of dissent at last summer’s Singularity Summit. “Although biological components act in ways that are comparable to those in electronic circuits,” he argued, in a talk titled “What Cells Can Do That Robots Can’t,” “they are set apart by the huge number of different states they can adopt. Multiple biochemical processes create chemical modifications of protein molecules, further diversified by association with distinct structures at defined locations of a cell. The resulting combinatorial explosion of states endows living systems with an almost infinite capacity to store information regarding past and present conditions and a unique capacity to prepare for future events.” That makes the ones and zeros that computers trade in look pretty crude.

Underlying the practical challenges are a host of philosophical ones. Suppose we did create a computer that talked and acted in a way that was indistinguishable from a human being — in other words, a computer that could pass the Turing test. (Very loosely speaking, such a computer would be able to pass as human in a blind test.) Would that mean that the computer was sentient, the way a human being is? Or would it just be an extremely sophisticated but essentially mechanical automaton without the mysterious spark of consciousness — a machine with no ghost in it? And how would we know?

Even if you grant that the Singularity is plausible, you’re still staring at a thicket of unanswerable questions. If I can scan my consciousness into a computer, am I still me? What are the geopolitics and the socioeconomics of the Singularity? Who decides who gets to be immortal? Who draws the line between sentient and nonsentient? And as we approach immortality, omniscience and omnipotence, will our lives still have meaning? By beating death, will we have lost our essential humanity?

Kurzweil admits that there’s a fundamental level of risk associated with the Singularity that’s impossible to refine away, simply because we don’t know what a highly advanced artificial intelligence, finding itself a newly created inhabitant of the planet Earth, would choose to do. It might not feel like competing with us for resources. One of the goals of the Singularity Institute is to make sure not just that artificial intelligence develops but also that the AI is friendly. You don’t have to be a super-intelligent cyborg to understand that introducing a superior life-form into your own biosphere is a basic Darwinian error.

If the Singularity is coming, these questions are going to get answers whether we like it or not, and Kurzweil thinks that trying to put off the Singularity by banning technologies is not only impossible but also unethical and probably dangerous. “It would require a totalitarian system to implement such a ban,” he says. “It wouldn’t work. It would just drive these technologies underground, where the responsible scientists who we’re counting on to create the defenses would not have easy access to the tools.”

Kurzweil is an almost inhumanly patient and thorough debater. He relishes it. He’s tireless in hunting down his critics so that he can respond to them, point by point, carefully and in detail. Take the question of whether computers can replicate the biochemical complexity of an organic brain. Kurzweil yields no ground there whatsoever. He does not see any fundamental difference between flesh and silicon that would prevent the latter from thinking. He defies biologists to come up with a neurological mechanism that could not be modeled or at least matched in power and flexibility by software running on a computer. He refuses to fall on his knees before the mystery of the human brain. “Generally speaking,” he says, “the core of a disagreement I’ll have with a critic is, they’ll say, Oh, Kurzweil is underestimating the complexity of reverse-engineering of the human brain or the complexity of biology. But I don’t believe I’m underestimating the challenge. I think they’re underestimating the power of exponential growth.”

This position doesn’t make Kurzweil an outlier, at least among Singularitarians. Plenty of people make more-extreme predictions. Since 2005 the neuroscientist Henry Markram has been running an ambitious initiative at the Brain Mind Institute of the Ecole Polytechnique in Lausanne, Switzerland. It’s called the Blue Brain project, and it’s an attempt to create a neuron-by-neuron simulation of a mammalian brain, using IBM’s Blue Gene super-computer. So far, Markram’s team has managed to simulate one neocortical column from a rat’s brain, which contains about 10,000 neurons. Markram has said that he hopes to have a complete virtual human brain up and running in 10 years. (Even Kurzweil sniffs at this. If it worked, he points out, you’d then have to educate the brain, and who knows how long that would take?)

By definition, the future beyond the Singularity is not knowable by our linear, chemical, animal brains, but Kurzweil is teeming with theories about it. He positively flogs himself to think bigger and bigger; you can see him kicking against the confines of his aging organic hardware. “When people look at the implications of ongoing exponential growth, it gets harder and harder to accept,” he says. “So you get people who really accept, yes, things are progressing exponentially, but they fall off the horse at some point because the implications are too fantastic. I’ve tried to push myself to really look.”

In Kurzweil’s future, biotechnology and nanotechnology give us the power to manipulate our bodies and the world around us at will, at the molecular level. Progress hyperaccelerates, and every hour brings a century’s worth of scientific breakthroughs. We ditch Darwin and take charge of our own evolution. The human genome becomes just so much code to be bug-tested and optimized and, if necessary, rewritten. Indefinite life extension becomes a reality; people die only if they choose to. Death loses its sting once and for all. Kurzweil hopes to bring his dead father back to life.

We can scan our consciousnesses into computers and enter a virtual existence or swap our bodies for immortal robots and light out for the edges of space as intergalactic godlings. Within a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe. This is, Kurzweil believes, our destiny as a species.

Or it isn’t. When the big questions get answered, a lot of the action will happen where no one can see it, deep inside the black silicon brains of the computers, which will either bloom bit by bit into conscious minds or just continue in ever more brilliant and powerful iterations of nonsentience.

But as for the minor questions, they’re already being decided all around us and in plain sight. The more you read about the Singularity, the more you start to see it peeking out at you, coyly, from unexpected directions. Five years ago we didn’t have 600 million humans carrying out their social lives over a single electronic network. Now we have Facebook. Five years ago you didn’t see people double-checking what they were saying and where they were going, even as they were saying it and going there, using handheld network-enabled digital prosthetics. Now we have iPhones. Is it an unimaginable step to take the iPhones out of our hands and put them into our skulls?

Already 30,000 patients with Parkinson’s disease have neural implants. Google is experimenting with computers that can drive cars. There are more than 2,000 robots fighting in Afghanistan alongside the human troops. This month a game show will once again figure in the history of artificial intelligence, but this time the computer will be the guest: an IBM super-computer nicknamed Watson will compete on Jeopardy! Watson runs on 90 servers and takes up an entire room, and in a practice match in January it finished ahead of two former champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. It got every question it answered right, but much more important, it didn’t need help understanding the questions (or, strictly speaking, the answers), which were phrased in plain English. Watson isn’t strong AI, but if strong AI happens, it will arrive gradually, bit by bit, and this will have been one of the bits.

A hundred years from now, Kurzweil and de Grey and the others could be the 22nd century’s answer to the Founding Fathers — except unlike the Founding Fathers, they’ll still be alive to get credit — or their ideas could look as hilariously retro and dated as Disney’s Tomorrowland. Nothing gets old as fast as the future.

But even if they’re dead wrong about the future, they’re right about the present. They’re taking the long view and looking at the big picture. You may reject every specific article of the Singularitarian charter, but you should admire Kurzweil for taking the future seriously. Singularitarianism is grounded in the idea that change is real and that humanity is in charge of its own fate and that history might not be as simple as one damn thing after another. Kurzweil likes to point out that your average cell phone is about a millionth the size of, a millionth the price of and a thousand times more powerful than the computer he had at MIT 40 years ago. Flip that forward 40 years and what does the world look like? If you really want to figure that out, you have to think very, very far outside the box. Or maybe you have to think further inside it than anyone ever has before.

 

Pope: Not All Jews Responsible for Jesus’ Death

When Pope Benedict XVI writes that the Jews were not responsible for the death of Jesus, what’s important is less the passage itself than the man who set it down on paper.

By tackling the subject in a book to be published March 10, Benedict, who has struggled in his relations with the Jewish community, doesn’t so much state something new — the affirmation that the Jewish people as a whole were not responsible for the crucifixion is an old one, uncontroversial in the modern Catholic Church — as lend the idea the ecclesiastical equivalent of a celebrity endorsement.

“The significance is in the author,” says Joseph Sievers, professor of Jewish history at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. “He brings together an awareness of the issues in the texts themselves with the history of how these texts have been interpreted through the last 2,000 years.”

Indeed, the Catholic Church has considered the Jewish people free from blame since at least 1965, when the Second Vatican Council wrote that while “the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.”

The difference this time is that rather than being buried deep in a document of dense text, where it can easily be overlooked or ignored, the argument is being laid out by a man whose every word is pored over as an indication of church doctrine.

“Most Catholics don’t read the church’s documents,” says Rabbi David Rosen, director of interreligious affairs at the New York–based American Jewish Committee. “The book will certainly be far more widely read.” Benedict’s most recent book, Jesus of Nazareth, was a best seller when it was published in 2007. The passage about the crucifixion will appear in its sequel, Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection.

In excerpts provided to the press this week, the Pope walks the reader through the gospels to explore who Jesus’ accusers really were. Noting that the Gospel of John describes them as “the Jews,” Benedict explains that there’s no way the writer meant the entire population of Israel. After all, he notes, John himself was a Jew, as were Jesus and the rest of his followers. “This expression has a precise and rigorously limited meaning,” Benedict concludes: “the temple aristocracy.” The Gospel of Mark expands the circle of accusers to “the masses,” who Benedict explains were supporters of Barabbas, the brigand chosen by the crowd to be released instead of Jesus. “In [the Second Vatican Council's text], this was all said in one sentence, but here it’s spelled out and worked out in great detail,” says Sievers.

The Pope pays special attention to a passage in the Gospel of Matthew that is often used to stir up anti-Semitism. In that passage, Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect overseeing the crucifixion, washes his hands and declares himself to be innocent of the death of Jesus: “Then the people as a whole answered, ‘His blood be on us and on our children!’ ” Benedict argues that the phrase “the people as a whole” is ahistorical. “How would it have been possible for the entire population to have been present at that moment to ask for the death of Jesus?” he writes. The blood of Jesus, he adds, should not be seen as a call for revenge, but spilled in the name of reconciliation: “Not a curse, but redemption, salvation.”

The Pope’s statements have been broadly welcomed by Jewish organizations. “It deepens and gives historians context crucial in having the doctrine expressed in [the documents from the Second Vatican Council] translated down to the pews,” said Abraham H. Foxman, U.S. director of the Anti-Defamation League, in a statement. “Pope Benedict has rejected the previous teachings and perversions that have helped to foster and reinforce anti-Semitism through the centuries.” On Thursday, Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, called on the Pope to take a step further, reinforcing what he’s written in an official letter, or encyclical. “Many in the Catholic world have continued to espouse ideas of Jewish guilt,” Lauder said in a statement. “Refuting their fallacious arguments in a personal book, whilst right, is probably insufficient. This must become official church doctrine, from top to bottom.”

The Man with 39 Wives, 94 Children & 33 Grand Children

Ziona Chana lives with all of them in a 100-room mansion

His wives take it in turns to share his bed

It takes 30 whole chickens just to make dinner

He is head of the world’s biggest family – and says he is ‘blessed’  to have his 39 wives.

Ziona Chana also has 94 children, 14-daughters-in-law and 33 grandchildren.

They live in a 100-room, four storey house set amidst the hills of Baktwang village in the Indian state of Mizoram, where the wives sleep in giant communal dormitories. You treat this place like a hotel: With 100 rooms the Ziona mansion is the biggest concrete structure in the hilly village of Baktawng

Mr Chana said: ‘Today I feel like God’s special child. He’s given me so many people to look after.

`I consider myself a lucky man to be the husband of 39 women and head of the world’s largest family.’

The family is organised with almost military discipline, with the oldest wife Zathiangi organising her fellow partners to perform household chores such as cleaning, washing and preparing meals.

One evening meal can see them pluck 30 chickens, peel 132lb of potatoes and boil up to 220lb of rice.

Coincidentally, Mr Chana is also head of a sect that allows members to take as many wives as he wants.

He even married ten women in one year, when he was at his most prolific, and enjoys his own double bed while his wives have to make do with communal dormitories.

He keeps the youngest women near to his bedroom with the older members of the family sleeping further away – and there is a rotation system for who visits Mr Chana’s bedroom.

Rinkmini, one of Mr Chana’s wives who is 35 years old, said: ‘We stay around him as he is the most important person in the house. He is the most handsome person in the village.

She says Mr Chana noticed her on a morning walk in the village 18 years ago and wrote her a letter asking for her hand in

Another of his wives, Huntharnghanki, said the entire family gets along well. The family system is reportedly based on ‘mutual love and respect’

And Mr Chana, whose religious sect has 4,00 members, says he has not stopped looking for new wives.

‘To expand my sect, I am willing to go even to the U.S. to marry,’ he said.

One of his sons insisted that Mr Chana, whose grandfather also had many wives, marries the poor women from the village so he can look after them.

Why Go to the Mosque?

If you’re spiritually curious, there is still hope! Why Go To Mosque?

A mosque goer wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper and complained that it made no sense to go to mosque every Friday. ‘I’ve gone for 30 years now,’ he wrote, ‘and in that time I have heard something like 3,000 sermons. But for the life of me, I can’t remember a single one of them. So, I think I’m wasting my time and the Imaams are wasting theirs by giving sermons at all.’

This started a real controversy in the ‘Letters to the Editor’ column, much to the delight of the editor.

It went on for weeks until someone wrote this clincher: ‘I’ve been married for 37 years now. In that time my wife has cooked some 32,000 meals. But, for the life of me, I cannot recall the entire menu for a single one of those meals, But I do know this… They all nourished me and gave me the strength I needed to do my work. If my wife had not given me these meals, I would be physically dead today. Likewise, if I had not gone to mosque for nourishment, I would be spiritually dead today!’ When you are DOWN to nothing…. God is UP to something! Faith sees the invisible, believes the incredible and receives the impossible! Thank The God for our physical AND our spiritual nourishment!

Universe Began 13.7 Billion Years Ago

Cosmologists are agreed that the universe began with a big bang 13.7 billion years ago. People naturally want to know what caused it.

A simple answer is nothing: not because there was a mysterious state of nothing before the big bang, but because time itself began then – that is, there was no time “before” the big bang.

The idea is by no means new. In the fifth century, St Augustine of Hippo wrote that “the universe was created with time and not in time”.

Devout Christians often feel tricked by this logic. They envisage a miracle-working god dwelling within the stream of time for all eternity and then, for some inscrutable reason, making a universe (perhaps in a spectacular explosion) at a specific moment in history.

That was not Augustine’s god, who transcended both space and time.

Nor is it the god favored by many contemporary theologians. In fact, they long ago coined a term for it – “god-of-the-gaps” – to deride the idea that when science leaves something out of account, then god should be invoked to plug the gap.

The origin of life and the origin of consciousness are favorite loci for a god-of-the-gaps, but the origin of the universe is the perennial big gap.

In his new book, Stephen Hawking reiterates that there is no big gap in the scientific account of the big bang.

The laws of physics can explain, he says, how a universe of space, time and matter could emerge spontaneously. And most cosmologists agree: it can happen as part of a natural process. A much tougher problem now looms, however.

What is the source of those ingenious laws that enable a universe to pop into being from nothing? Traditionally, scientists have supposed that the laws of physics were simply imprinted on the universe at its birth, like a manufacturer’s mark. As to their origin, well, that was left unexplained.

In recent years, cosmologists have shifted position somewhat.

If the origin of the universe was a law rather than a supernatural event, then the same laws could presumably operate to bring other universes into being.

The favored view now, and the one that Hawking shares, is that there were in fact many bangs, scattered through space and time, and many universes emerging therefrom, all perfectly naturally.

The entire assemblage goes by the name of the multiverse.

Our universe is just one infinitesimal component amid this vast – probably infinite – multiverse, that itself had no origin in time. So according to this new cosmological theory, there was something before the big bang after all – a region of the multiverse pregnant with universe-sprouting potential.

A refinement of the multiverse scenario is that each new universe comes complete with its very own laws – or bylaws, to use the apt description of the cosmologist Martin Rees.

Go to another universe, and you would find different bylaws applying. An appealing feature of variegated bylaws is that they explain why our particular universe is uncannily bio-friendly; change our bylaws just a little bit and life would probably be impossible. The fact that we observe a universe “fine-tuned” for life is then no surprise: the more numerous bio-hostile universes are sterile and so go unseen.

So is that the end of the story? Can the multiverse provide a complete and closed account of all physical existence? Not quite.

The multiverse comes with a lot of baggage, such as an overarching space and time to host all those bangs, a universe-generating mechanism to trigger them, physical fields to populate the universes with material stuff, and a selection of forces to make things happen.

Cosmologists embrace these features by envisaging sweeping “meta-laws” that pervade the multiverse and spawn specific bylaws on a universe-by-universe basis. The meta-laws themselves remain unexplained – eternal, immutable transcendent entities that just happen to exist and must simply be accepted as given.

According to folklore the French physicist Pierre Laplace, when asked by Napoleon where a ‘prime mover’ fitted into his mathematical account of the universe, replied: “I had no need of that hypothesis.” Although cosmology has advanced enormously since the time of Laplace, the situation remains the same: there is no compelling need for a supernatural being or prime mover to start the universe off. But when it comes to the laws that explain the big bang, we are in murkier waters.

Excerpt from Stephen Hawking Book

A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls. The measure’s sponsor explained the measure in part by saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality? 

The goldfish view is not the same as our own, but goldfish could still formulate scientific laws governing the motion of the objects they observe outside their bowl. For example, due to the distortion, a freely moving object would be observed by the goldfish to move along a curved path. 

Nevertheless, the goldfish could formulate laws from their distorted frame of reference that would always hold true. Their laws would be more complicated than the laws in our frame, but simplicity is a matter of taste. 

A famous example of different pictures of reality is the model introduced around A.D. 150 by Ptolemy (ca. 85–ca. 165) to describe the motion of the celestial bodies. Ptolemy published his work in a treatise explaining reasons for thinking that the earth is spherical, motionless, positioned at the center of the universe, and negligibly small in comparison to the distance of the heavens.

This model seemed natural because we don’t feel the earth under our feet moving (except in earthquakes or moments of passion). 

Ptolemy’s model of the cosmos was adopted by the Catholic Church and held as official doctrine for 1400 years. It was not until 1543 that an alternative model was put forward by Copernicus. So which is real? 

Although it is not uncommon for people to say Copernicus proved Ptolemy wrong, that is not true. As in the case of the goldfish, one can use either picture as a model of the universe. The real advantage of the Copernican system is that the mathematics is much simpler in the frame of reference in which the sun is at rest.

These examples bring us to a conclusion: There is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality. Instead we adopt a view that we call model-dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations. This provides a framework with which to interpret modern science.

Though realism may be a tempting viewpoint, what we know about modern physics makes it a difficult one to defend. For example, according to the principles of quantum physics, which is an accurate description of nature, a particle has neither a definite position nor a definite velocity unless and until those quantities are measured by an observer. In fact, in some cases individual objects don’t even have an independent existence but rather exist only as part of an ensemble of many.

Electrons are a useful model that explains observations like tracks in a cloud chamber and the spots of light on a television tube. Quarks, which we also cannot see, are a model to explain the properties of the protons and neutrons in the nucleus of an atom. Though protons and neutrons are said to be made of quarks, we will never observe a quark because the binding force between quarks increases with separation, and hence isolated, free quarks cannot exist in nature.

Model-dependent realism can provide a framework to discuss questions such as: If the world was created a finite time ago, what happened before that? Some people support a model in which time goes back even further than the big bang. It is not yet clear whether a model in which time continued back beyond the big bang would be better at explaining present observations because it seems the laws of the evolution of the universe may break down at the big bang. If they do, it would make no sense to create a model that encompasses time before the big bang, because what existed then would have no observable consequences for the present, and so we might as well stick with the idea that the big bang was the creation of the world.

A model is a good model if it:

1. Is elegant
2. Contains few arbitrary or adjustable elements
3. Agrees with and explains all existing observations
4. Makes detailed predictions about future observations that can disprove or falsify the model if they are not borne out.

The above criteria are obviously subjective. Elegance refers to the form of a theory, but it is closely related to a lack of adjustable elements, since a theory jammed with fudge factors is not very elegant.

To paraphrase Einstein, a theory should be as simple as possible, but not simpler. As for the fourth point, scientists are always impressed when new and stunning predictions prove correct.

On the other hand, when a model is found lacking, people still often don’t abandon the model but instead attempt to save it through modifications. Although physicists are indeed tenacious in their attempts to rescue theories they admire, the tendency to modify a theory fades to the degree that the alterations become artificial or cumbersome, and therefore “inelegant.”

In our quest to find the laws that govern the universe we have formulated a number of theories or models, such as the four-element theory, the Ptolemaic model, the phlogiston theory, the big bang theory, and so on. Regarding the laws that govern the universe, what we can say is this: There seems to be no single mathematical model or theory that can describe every aspect of the universe. Instead, there seems to be the network of theories, With each theory or model, our concepts of reality and of the fundamental constituents of the universe have changed.

Excerpted from the book The Grand Design
Copyright 2010 by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow
Posted by arrangement with Bantam Books, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc.