Tagged: science
On Measuring the “Speed” of “Not-Space”
If you think that anyone whose profession is anything actually to do with astrophysics is eye-balling “not-space” out there in outer space, you’re foolish and not to be trusted.
I haven’t kept up with the the improvements in monitoring “not-space” (by which I mean to capture everything that is literally not empty space, like rocks and “processes” such as stars), but here is a short history, followed by a picture from a popular science book from the early 1900s on the topic.
Can you picture holding a small prism in such a way to cast a rainbow on the wall or floor? Good. Now please do the same with a second prism. Thank you. Now measure the difference between the two rainbows, as intricately and completely as possible. That is how “scientists” actually determine what the “not-space” is, how fast it is moving, and how far it is from us etc.
Here’s the example from a real astrophysicist.
This is from Sir James Jeans’ The Universe Around Us.
To be sure, no one is watching bright spots with their naked eye, videos of bright spots with their naked eye, looking through telescopes for a long time, or anything like that when determining anything about “not-space” in outer space.
The Game of Telephone: Why You Need To Read More
The game of “Telephone” among famous scientists does not start and stop with Newton and the apple that he never wrote about.
Check this out.
Bertrand Russell was born in 1872. In 1897 he would have been 25 years old. In 1897 he published a fellowship-winning thesis. It was entitled, “An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry.”
Read this.
Those words were published in 1897 (same year as Russell’s first book) by William James. (See highlighted parts.)
Now read this.
Those words were published by Stephen Hawking in 1988. (91 years after Russell was 25 years old and published his thesis; 91 years after James’ words were published.)
Sure. I grant you that it is possible that Russell gave lectures to little old ladies in 1897, despite his being 25 years old and having only published a thesis on geometry that no little old lady would ever be interested in (or aware of). But that only solves the lesser problem. How does “rock” become “turtle”?
Seriously.
Obviously the nature of the situation is Hawking placed the importance of “truth” well below standards when deciding how to open his best-ever-selling book (that is seriously flawed for more than this reason).
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This is why you need to read, and read, and read, and read, and read. The solution is more reading.
Shaking My Head/Nerd Alert!, A Review of A Brief History of Time, By Stephen Hawking
The Spiderman of physicists, Stephen Hawking, introduces the second edition of his book with, “The success of A Brief History indicates that there is widespread interest in the big questions like: Where do we come from? And why is the universe the way it is?”
Just past halfway through the book, in his chapter titled, “The Origin and Fate of the Universe”, he suggests, “The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.”
In the final chapter (before the Conclusion), he writes, “We would then be able to have some understanding of the laws that govern the universe and are responsible for our existence.”
In the final paragraph of the book (excluding three brief and meaningless portraits of Einstein, Galileo, and Newton) he suggests, “However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we should all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist.”
Firstly, for context, the second bestselling book in that chart is—self-help/dating/pop-psychology. Third is a cookbook. In other words, while I love that Metallica’s Black album is the bestselling album since certain record-keeping data began, while I think they deserve all possible head-banging praise from us mortals, the number two is Shania Twain. Put another way, Mr. Hawking got his 15 min of fame, surely. But his staying power is yet to be seen—and I wouldn’t bet on it. Additionally, “pity” is a very real motivator. My money says give mobility of limb back, and the Brit’s wouldn’t have paid to see the five foot man-eating-chicken carnival act.
Next, close as you look, you will find no written record of a belief that life unfolds arbitrarily. Instead, you will find people have always believed in order—but they got the order wrong. Pointedly, then, Hawking and contemporary physicists are in nowise special. They’re just doing their best like everyone before them.
Thirdly, “govern” and “responsible for” are not synonyms. You want to tell me that the sensation when an elevator starts up and the sensation of being stuck to the ground are indistinguishable? Great. But the idea that the aforementioned sensation(s) are responsible for my being is laughable. Get outta here!
Lastly, no, thank you. This idea that I have to wait upon “my betters” (or anyone) to finish their navel-gazing before I can opine as regards the nature of existence is just silly. Telescopes and microscopes are cool. But truth is not some distant or small object.
Previous authors, like Einstein, Jeans, and Eddington, among many, many others, wrote in order to explain what they were doing. Hawking, conversely, writes to announce his conclusions. The effect of their books could not be more striking.
It reminds me of the time I met an unmarried Major while I, too, was single (though a lowly First Lieutenant) in the Air Force. He was such a loser. He did precisely what he wanted all the time—and loved every minute of his life. Nobody liked him. He had no friends. To add one dollop of paint to the portrait, I’ll share this. When we drove around the base in Iraq in the big van, he would lie down on a bench seat for fear of the enemy targeting him because he was a Major. The point is not his earnestness, the point is the unhinged-ness. Anyhow, I recall thinking, immediately after meeting him, “I must get married.”
Likewise, had I read Hawking before Einstein, Eddington, and Jeans, and their predecessors, I would have never picked up another popular physics book. As it stands, my foundation is unshaken (thankfully) and the topic still interests me. But Hawking does not.
Should you read this best-seller? Nope. Life is too short. Start with Einstein’s The Evolution of Physics.
It’s Like Movie Stars Complaining About Discrimination
As I keep reading essays and books essentially on “the definition of science”, I can’t help asking, “Where does the conflict with religion come in?” I can readily admit that I feel the conflict, but after spending any time in contemplation on the supposed conflict, I resolve everything to, “It’s comparing apples and oranges”. The only conflict is between bad religion and bad science. The real deal of either each stands alone and never the twain shall meet.
This new thought (in the post’s title ⤴️) about the conflict occurred to me just now.
So let me get this straight. The authors of all the mainstream science textbooks that are endlessly promoted and in use (or their conclusions are—which is the same) by all major educational institutions, these authors uniformly decry religion as, in general, something that holds humans back. Or that it stunts the development of knowledge and civilization etc.
Yeah. Okay. I believe you. Just like I believe the claims of millionaire celebrities that they’re victims of discrimination.
Gimme a break.
How Do Flat Earth Lunatics Account for the Darkness Between the Stars?
I befriended and consequently wished I had never befriended my first Green Beret at seminary. Suffice it to say, going from US Special Forces immediately to four years of Christian undergrad followed immediately by three years of Christian graduate studies is a bad idea. (All curious souls should be asking, “How does one pay for 7 years of schooling?” Good question. The answer is, “Post 9/11 GI Bill has 36 months of coursework and if you are collecting at least 10% disability ((most vets are)) you get another 48 months!”)
As I had flown operators like him around Iraq, while the rest of the seminarians hadn’t, he and I naturally bonded easily. (I fully aim to cause you to think of the Tesla Green Beret as I relate this experience with one.) He was intense. So am I. Yet I couldn’t help but feel weird around him knowing that at any time he had the upper hand and I was quite literally at the mercy of his mental faculties. He expressed once that one of the softer professors displayed a fear of him, which my friend chuckled off as if he was perfectly harmless.
But then the moment came when he texted me a flat earth meme. From that SMS until a mere couple of weeks later, he couldn’t release. My last text to him was, “I do not care what conception of the universe is in your mind, but I do believe that we should be able to change topics.” And his last text to me (in response to mine) was, “We cannot talk about anything else until you get that (effing) ball out of your head.”
Faithful readers know that I have posted either two or three anti-Flat-Earth-Lunatic posts on here with the purpose of giving easy to use conversational strategies to destroy these lunatics. The first post posited the employment of economics, first question being, “Have you ever started a business?” Last question being, “So you’re telling me hundreds, no thousands of workers (concrete for a rocket pad itself requires the use of Quickbooks to run accurate payroll for all involved) are being duped to work for nothing, but you can’t persuade anyone to give you their money?”
A second post offered, “Have you ever looked at the night sky through a telescope?” And if miraculously they answer “yes” you move to, “At your convenience, I am available these dates, please show me how to identify a planet from a star. They all look the same to me.” And today, I would offer a slight variation to this angle by suggesting we ask, “So, which brand of telescope you rocking these days?”
Recently, with all my reading, I am more and more anti-FELs. Not just for your reading pleasure, then, here is a third method of attack (or consider it training for your children and family).
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Me: “It’s not the stars that baffle me. It’s the dark.”
FLE: “Huh?”
Me: “I’m talking about the night sky. People are always ooooing and awwwwing at the stars—even creating horoscopes to this day based on them—but that’s not the awe-inspiring part of the night sky by my thinking.”
FLE: “Hmm. Umm. You know the earth is flat though, right?”
Me: “No it’s not. But seriously, think about the dark part of the night sky. The part in between the stars. You can see it right?”
FLE; “Sorry, I was looking at my phone. There’s this video right here that proves the earth is flat. What? Sure. Yes. Well, no. I mean, have I showed you where the Bible says the earth is flat? What do you do with that? You’re a Bible-believing Christian, yes?”
Me: “I think you did. But just look at it all. All that dark. What do you suspect accounts for it? Is it the black paint on Ptolemy’s sphere? Is it countless tubes of nothingness pointed from the bounds of infinity directly at the earth of all places? I mean, it stands to reason that since we can only ever see more and more stars with bigger and bigger telescopes—wait a minute. Have you ever looked through a telescope?”
FEL: “Gee. Look at the time!”
Me: “You want me to believe the earth is flat and yet you believe the dark you see unaided is actually darkness, even when using a telescope? Ha. Haha. Aaaaahahahaha. Okay. I’ll stop. Now what were you saying about some video?”
FEL: (Crickets. And then assuredly they return to not looking through telescopes.)
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You’re welcome, Blog-O-Sphere.
Just Finished a Book By Einstein; Christopher Nolan is Wrong
The title of the book is The Evolution of Physics.
Given there is still plenty of daylight, but my brain could use a break, I decided to revisit Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Why not, right?
In it, the woman asks, “Can you explain quantum mechanics to me? It seems baffling.”
Nolan has Oppie answer, “It is.”
He continues, “This glass— This drink— Our bodies— are mostly empty space, groupings of tiny energy waves bound together-”
She interrupts, attention laser focused, “By what?”
“Forces of attraction strong enough to convince us ‘matter is solid’.”
I do not know where Nolan got his material. I can imagine that he read Oppenheimer’s own writing and deduced this or—cringe—Oppenheimer even said this. I can imagine it, but I don’t believe it.
The problem with that definition is it neglectfully forgets a key point—or two, to be precise.
First, and this is directly from Einstein, it isn’t merely “tiny energy waves” but should say, “empty space, groupings of invisible energy waves.” And second, add “and energy particles”.
In full, and I hope to bring out for us lay folks the full sense of what I read in the clearest possible manner, if defined by Einstein, according the format Nolan introduced, the answer to “What is quantum mechanics?” when asked by a thin woman as a come-on (sapiosexual) at a bar is, “This glass, this drink, our bodies are mostly empty space—groupings of invisible energy waves and energy particles bound together by forces of attraction strong enough to convince us ‘matter is solid’.”
Put shorter—for illustrative purposes because I know this is uncommon—“Our bodies are invisible.”
Paraphrasing Einstein, for this claim to be true and/or accurate (the claim that “‘our bodies are invisible’ is quantum mechanics”) this claim must be tempered with, “when moving near the speed of light and observed indirectly.”
Now. You. Know.
On the Ol’ “Horse Running Beside the Train in which a Horse Moves to the Front” Thought Experiment
I can’t quite remember his name with certainty, but he lived in the house with the green shutters at the tip-top of the hill. He was right across the street from the bus stop.
One day he says “If nothing can move faster than the speed of light, explain this…” Then he gives the supposedly Einstein-derived thought experiment in which you imagine a train moving at the speed of light, inside which is a horse who moves from the back of the train to the front, and then add to this scene a horse beside the train who is pacing the horse in the train.
I took his point to be the classic midwestern point of “Einstein is wrong” sentiment (falling within the broader category of “bein’ smart ain’t nuttin’”), because the horse beside the train is obviously going faster than the speed-of-light train.
But I am working through Einstein’s own The Evolution of Physics and the truth is far different. Whether the kid knew it or not (it is possible I totally misread the moment), the thought experiment is not the one Einstein proposes (at least in this book) but does capture the concept—being relativity. In short, the speed of light is the limit. The horse beside the train is not going faster than the speed of light. This is Einstein’s discovery or theory or whatever you want to call it.
As with all knowledge, it is the presuppositions that matter and the thought experiment is based on the presuppositions of mechanical physics, whereas—it would seem—reality is not. (Reality is not based on mechanical physics—at least not entirely.)
And, yes, like you, I do have a bit of “so what, Albert?” in me. But then I remind myself that the point of my reading is not to “learn to care”, but to learn so that I can call out BS when I see it.
Teachers Receive Stricter Judgment
Do not, many of you, become teachers, my brothers, knowing that we will receive a stricter judgment.
For all the experimentally-derived information not found in the books of the Bible, it sure does contain many easily deduced sentiments.
For my part, I have been elbow deep in Natural Science essays of late, essays whose subject matter has ranged from stars to candles, from chalk to mountains, and from monkeys to conservation of energy. Essays, I say. Maybe 20 total. About 450 pages worth. And these by the actual discoverers of the subject. I have not been reading a textbook written by some no-account hack with bought-and-paid-for letters after their name, just essays written by the men whose genius advanced material life on this planet so rapidly in the last 400+ years.
After the last two essays which covered such basic topics as the “law of periodicity” and the “law of conservation of force”, of which such simple words like “period” and “foot-pound” were defined—words which none of you (or I) could define upon request, but which we employ at our leisure—I started to get angry.
I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself—I am certain that I have now read more than most ever have or will on from the field of Natural Science. And that thrills me. Instead, I was thinking of my kids and all other kids. They are sitting in schools right now, staring at the periodic table and completely unaware why it is so-named. They are, if lucky, in an auto-tech class turning wrenches, and applying torque, without being able to define what it means that the limit for that bolt is 120 foot-pounds—or from where the expended 120 foot-pounds of energy get replenished.
Before you get all “Well, Pete, you’re forgetting that not everyone…” on me, I want to re-iterate these are kids who are in school! What else are they doing if not learning? And, keep in mind I have already suggested a mere 500 pages would advance their knowledge to within reach of the current peaks of human knowledge of natural science.
Also to be clear, I am suggesting these essays would be the course. Have a teacher lead the kids through them and then see what the kids want to do. I cannot be persuaded that they would choose to stop there. It is a sure bet that their curiosity would be piqued and each would willingly follow the most interesting path they saw available to continue down.
As it stands, “hydrogen will bond with…” inspires hardly anyone and we act little different than the uneducated nations and “emerging” cultures which leave a child to himself as we declare, “Oh look at that! He’s gonna be a football player for sure!”
Since obtaining a step-son from another culture, worlds away, I have seen nothing but the distribution of participation trophies which the adults and kids assign as symbolic displays of new expertise in subjects of which they both are ignorant and of abilities of which they are both wanting.
My step-son’s skin is dark, so this was to be expected as the whites in education are utterly brainwashed into thinking BIPOC folks are genetically inferior.
But I have unfortunately watched this occur all across the spectrum. The entire field of education is one big gold star for trying. The underlying sentiment has become, “You are too stupid to understand the hard stuff, so let’s just stay in the shallow end.” The obvious trouble with this idea is the people doing the hard stuff disagree.
Education, hear me clearly, is directly opposed to the priesthood. If you believe there is some special class of human that children cannot generally achieve, you cannot also believe in education. You might as well burn books. This is no different than how you cannot believe both in a geocentric and heliocentric model of the universe, or girls can become boys and boys can become girls.
In the end, in all my “this is wrong”, I found myself reminded of the scripture I opened with. Most Christians would limit James’ warning to spiritual matters. I disagree. Teachers will be more strictly judged. Teachers are being judged. We are all being judged by their failure.
American Wives Are Humanity’s Low Pressure Systems. What Happens If Equilibrium Is Withheld?
If I was teaching meteorology to pilots, then my first lesson would include a tub of water, with a movable divider holding an amount of water at bay from filling the tub entirely. (Picture a tub half full, with an actual divider keeping the water to the left half. The right half is dry.)
I would then ask, “If we define high pressure as where the water is, then how would we label the area where the water isn’t?”
The motivated and slightly piqued students would answer, “Low pressure.”
“Good,” I would rejoin.
Then I would call the room’s attention to the tub and, with comedic flare, withdraw the divider. All would see the high pressure water rush towards the area of previously low pressure, crashing against the walls before quickly calming to a standstill.
“If you can admit that that just happened, and trust that it isn’t limited to the apparent lateral movement as this tub seemed to indicate, but vertical as well (which, if you consider what you witnessed fully, then you will be forced to conclude that water did move in the available three dimensions entirely), then you can understand every other concept of meteorology—and make sound weather calls throughout your life as a pilot.”
The high pressure seeks balance. It must find the balance it seeks. This is meteorology.
What about relationships?
“Feeling low” is probably the simplest description of “depression” (itself still in the same semantic domain as “low”). We all have experience, whether first or second-hand, with people feeling low.
What happens if the “high pressure” doesn’t rush in?
More often than not, people who demonstrate the need for help receive help. But what happens if they do not receive it?
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I refuse to believe that life on earth is about high pressure rushing to lows. I just refuse. It especially bothers me when the lows self-declare. Contrary to the smut pushed by “mental health crisis” hypsters, there are objective markers that life is not only “okay”, but that life is so good that you have actually not one damn thing to complain about.
I feel like I can distinguish this refusal from the “Am I my brother’s keeper?” domain. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe anyone riding high owes their entire existence to coming down. “Misery loves company” is my counter. “Don’t bring me down”. “Look at the lilies of the goddamned field.”
Another Conversational Strategy Tip For Utterly Silencing Flat Earth Lunatics
As I’ve mentioned, these guys bug me so much because they often are very similar to me in other ways—and yet the earth is a sphere.
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You: “Yeah, that’s bullshyat. Let’s back up a little bit. Can I ask you a simple question?”
(As most of the time all they do is interrupt and spew their dump truck evidence, with this move you’ll have them irresistibly tee’d up.)
FEL: “Sure.”
You: “Have you ever looked through a telescope at the night sky?”
(Crushing. On the off chance they have, simply continue with…)
You: “Would you mind taking the time to teach me how to distinguish planets from stars the next clear night? I don’t have a telescope, but surely you do. I am available any night.”
Captain’s Log 