I’ve just finished reading Sean Carroll’s From Eternity to Here, in which he discusses several theories of time. Specifically, he surveys past and current thinking regarding the “arrow of time” and its relationship to entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

I’d recommend the book to anyone who is interested in the concept of time and has a fairly good understanding of physics.

What struck me most about the book was the question that can’t be answered: why was the entropy of the early universe as low as it was, when we wouldn’t expect it to be? As we know from the second law, entropy always increases within a closed system. So we’re left with the possibility that either (1) the beginning wasn’t the beginning or (2) the universe is not a closed system.

This immediately made me think about the higher dimensional membranes (P-branes) that have been suggested by String Theory/M-Theory scientists. The basic idea is that our universe exists on the three-dimensional surface of a higher dimension membrane, and that there are possibly an infinite number of these membranes floating around. This is one variation of the multiverse idea.

It’s possible that our universe was formed by the collision of two membranes. This collision caused the big bang, inflation, etc. The totality of creation is in fact eternal, universes like ours are just local patches of space time that result from collisions between branes; or, as Sean Carroll suggests, baby universes that “pinch off” like bubbles from other universes. This pinching off could result from black holes or wormholes as well, I believe. The collision process or bubbling process occurs over and over again.

These ideas solve some important problems: (1) why was the entropy of our universe low at the beginning and (2) why does our universe appear finely-tuned for the emergence of intelligent observer. The answer could be that we’re just in one of possibly an infinite number of universes, so it’s not surprising. See also The Cosmic Landscape by Leonard Susskind. What this means is that (1) time, and space, did exist before the conventional beginning and (2) the multiverse is eternal. This would be consistent with the second law and the Copernican Principle.

Unfortunately for the religious, this doesn’t leave much room for a creator… the “god of the gaps” is getting smaller all the time. People will always need religion, but invoking it to explain cosmology is going to get harder as we continue to deepen our understanding of the universe.

Following on the success of the movie Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr. and friends have another winner with Iron Man 2. We went to to see the movie this weekend and enjoyed it immensely. One thing I always have to remind myself with movies like this is that they are based on comics and therefore should be exempt from too much critical thought.

Iron Man 2 had all the action, special effects, humor and fun of the original. The 125 minutes running time went by very quickly. It will be in our DVD or digital movie collection as soon as it is available.

Today we visited the annual art fair at the incomparable Laumeier Sculpture Park and visited Rick Martin of Martin Design Works.

Last year we picked up a pair of his candle holders. This year we couldn’t resist getting one of his mesh screen sculptures for the living room.

Rick’s a very nice guy and a gifted artist. I believe he’s from the Denver area, and seems to frequent the midwestern art show circuit.

I highly recommend checking out his work.

I’ve recently watched the following movies and recommend them to anyone:

• Burn After Reading – Clooney, Malkovich and Pitt in a hilarious, yet somewhat pointless, comedy. You can tell these guys were having fun making this movie.
• Tropic Thunder – a hilarious comedy about a group of actors making a war movie which takes aim at Hollywood. Stupid a times, but hard to resist.
• Slumdog Millionaire – I was skeptical at first, but I really enjoyed this award winner.

Today I posted a selection of photos from our balloon ride this past weekend. We flew over St. Charles county with the good people from Balloons Over St. Louis. Take-off was around 7:00 AM, just after sunrise; it was a beautiful although somewhat foggy morning. It was a great time, and I’d recommend it for anyone.

Check out the photos page to see the new album,

Over the weekend I watched Michael Moore’s Sicko. Everyone in America needs to watch this movie and reflect on its message.

I plan on posting a full review and commentary on the movie when my circumstances allow, hopefully later this summer.

JasperReports (see http://www.jasperforge.org) is an open-source, Java-based reporting platform. I’m here to tell you that it deserves some serious consideration.

At one of my companies, we’ve been looking for a reporting mechanism for our PHP/MySQL application for some time now. Crystal Reports was not an option, since it doesn’t run on our server platform (Mac OS X) and its licensing costs are prohibitively expensive. Plus, we really wanted to stay all open-source.

JasperReports has a front-end report designer, iReport, which is also Java-based and runs nicely on both Windows and Mac. It’s similar to the Crystal client, although much more light weight. iReport creates report files in XML, which are then compiled into a binary format for use by the reporting server. The server itself is a java web application which fills the report from the datasource and creates the output, which can be HTML, XML, CSV, Excel, PDF, ODT or even Flash. There is also a viewer applet which can be embedded in a web page for inline viewing, printing or export.

In order to use the JasperReports framework, because our application is based on PHP, we had to implement the PHP-Java bridge. We chose Tomcat as the Java application server, again because it is lightweight, open and well-supported and runs nicely on the Mac. This all works out quite nicely.

My next personal goal is to figure out how to integrate JasperReports into a .NET environment.

I just finished reading The Language of God by Francis Collins.

Collins, who headed the Human Genome Project, presents his theory of “theistic evolution” or “BioLogos”. While the book does have some logical inconsistencies, and tends to be preachy at times, it’s worth a read for people who are interested in the current conflict between science and religion.

Collins roundly rejects young earth creationism and intelligent design, and exhorts his fellow believers not to fear science. His stresses that Biblical texts, especially the Genesis creation stories, should not be read as history but rather as moral allegory or myth. He also encourages scientific thinkers not to reject religion.

Collins defines the basic tenets of theistic evolution as:

1. The universe came into being out of nothingness, approximately 14 billion years ago.
2. Despite massive improbabilities, the properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life.
3. While the precise mechanism of the origin of life on earth remains unknown, once life arose, the process of evolution and natural selection permitted the development of biological diversity and complexity over very long periods of time.
4. Once evolution got under way, no special supernatural intervention was required.
5. Humans are part of this process, sharing a common ancestor with the great apes.
6. But humans are also unique in ways that defy evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature. This includes the existence of the Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout our history.

The only point that might make scientists uncomfortable would be the last one. That obviously requires a leap of faith . The knowledge of right and wrong, and the search for God, may one day be explained by physiology. Altruism has been observed in other species, and so shouldn’t be used as an argument for man’s higher nature. That’s a sort of “god of the gaps” argument that I find troubling.

The Language of God is an easy read and despite its flaws provides a convincing argument that religion and science need not be at odds.

Today IBM made available (via download) Release 8 of Lotus Notes and Domino.

If yoy currently use Notes, you will love the new version. Read more at the Notes home page.

The Mac version is expected to ship in 2008, after Apple has released Leopard.