Porcelain Unicorn

A genuinely touching mini-movie.




This story has won a 2010 short film award. The dialogue, "What is that? It's a unicorn. I've never seen one up close before. Beautiful. Get away, get away. I'm sorry," was pre-determined for all 600 contestants.

The people's runner up was Baby Time which is somewhat less serious. ;-)

Thanks to Gene, porcelainunicorn.com

Interview: Is climate change caused by solar inertial motion?

The questions were asked by Mr Vítězslav Kremlík M.A., a historian and a blogger at klimaskeptik.cz; see original URL

An interview with Ing. Ivanka Charvátová, CSc. from the Geophysical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Prague). The story of one politically incorrect scientific discovery.

(Translation of the original Czech interview published at Osel.cz in May 2011 - link - also by V. Kremlík)



Motion of the barycenter of solar system relative to the Sun.

Your field of study in the Geophysical Institute is solar inertial motion (SIM). Could you explain what it is?

It is a movement of the Sun around the barycentre (centre of gravity) of our solar system. This motion is due to the varying position of the planets, especially the giant planets.

Already Sir Isaac Newton in his PRINCIPIA (1687) intuitively came to the following conclusion: “… since that centre of gravity (centre of mass of the solar system) is continually at rest, the Sun, according to the various positions of the planets, must continually move every day, but will never recede far from that centre.” This effect is not insignificant. The Sun moves across an area the size of 4.3 solar radiuses, i.e. 0.02 AU or 3.106 km. As a coincidence, the average solar speed is around 50 km/hr. Just like the speed of a car driving downtown. The first study about SIM was written by P.D. Jose in year 1965.

You are the author of quite a breakthrough in this field of study. What is it?

First I studied the SIM periodicity and in 1987 I came to survey the geometry of this motion. I discovered the solar motion can be classified into two elementary types. Motion along a trefoil-like trajectory governed by the Jupiter-Saturn order. And another motion type which is chaotic. This gave us a precise homogeneous basis, upon which it became possible to study the solar-terrestrial and climatic variability. You may find it comforting that no matter how the Sun wiggles, every 179 years it comes back to a regular trefoil path. It is important to note, that the periods of chaotic motion coincide with the long-term minima in solar activity such as the Wolf Minimum (1270-1350), Spörer Minimum (~1430-1520), Maunder Minimum (~1620-1710) or Dalton Minimum (~1790-1840). During the trefoil periods the ST-phenomena are stable – the sunspot cycles are 10 years long, volcanic activity is muted and in the middle of the trefoil period there is a temperature maximum down here on Earth.




Later I discovered also a 2402 year long cycle of solar motion. After the lapse of this period the Sun always enters a segment, when for almost 370 years it moves continuously along the trefoil trajectory. This is when the natural conditions are stable, there is a long-term thermal maximum. The latest symmetry of the motion trefoils was around 25 AD. The NASA scientists called this 2402 yr cycle as “Charvatova Cycle”. The prospective solar motion can be calculated in advance (celestial mechanics), which gave us brand new solar-predictive capabilities. So far our predictions exploit the observation that the same solar motion trajectory tends to generate similar phenomena. (I was the only one in the whole world who got the 23rd sunspot cycle prediction right). The physical mechanism is not known yet.



Figure 1: The trajectory of the Sun centre divided into two basic motion types: trefoil trajectory according to JS-ordering (top) and disordered (chaotic) (bottom). The Sun returns to a trefoil trajectory, which always lasts for 50 years, once every 179 years. The chaotic segments correspond to long-term minima of solar activity (see above). The dark yellow circles in the top images represent the Sun.

What made you study solar motion?

In the 1980s the director of our institute was academic Václav Bucha. At some conference abroad he met the renowned American geologist and climatologist Rhodes W. Fairbridge, who was currently studying solar motion along with J.H. Shirley from JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), NASA, Pasadena. Mr. Bucha could smell important topics miles away, so we decided to research this too.

Did the world notice your discovery?

Even before my major discovery came, Prof R.W.Fairbridge contacted me after I published an article about SIM periodicity in Paris. It was published under my former name Jakubcová. He and J.H.Shirley published an article in Solar Physics at the very same time. R.W.Fairbridge wrote me a very friendly letter of praise. There was a communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia in that time, so any post coming from the Capitalist West was inspected by censorship. Surely you can imagine what a fuss there was about this letter. Not only it had NASA on the envelope, but on top of that Prof Fairbridge mentioned in the letter, that he knew Prague because he had been here in 1968 during the Prague Spring at some Geology Conference. And he mentioned to have seen the “eastern visitors”, the tanks of the occupants invading Czechoslovakia. He and Jim Shirley were so excited at my trefoils that when they edited the Encyclopaedia of Planetary Sciences in the early 1990s they invited me to write the main article on “Solar Motion” there. I was the only author from the whole Eastern Block in that very Encyclopaedia. And I was the most cited one.

Did you two meet in person?

No, we did not. But we maintained very lively correspondence. He used to send me articles that were not available in my country. He also invited me to write an article to the Proceedings published on the occasion of his 80th birthday anniversary (published in the Journal of Coastal Research.)

Another well known researcher who studied solar motion is Theodor Landscheidt. Do you know each other?

We do not and I believe he is not alive any more. We agree that in the first half of the 21st century the solar activity might be lower and even the temperatures might go down. But he does not cite me and I cite only one of his studies.

Apparently there are lots of scientists who explain climate change by other factors, not merely by CO2. However in the Czech Republic, where you live, most people know only one climate sceptic. Your president Václav Klaus.

Oh my. I would rather not comment on that. I only browsed through his book “Blue Planet in Green Chains” in the bookshop.

There are many climate sceptics in the world, they have their organisations, especially at the American or Canadian universities. Many professors of theirs have contacted me. For instance Prof. O. Manuel, the former chief researcher of the Apollo project. They even published a book “Slying the Sky Dragon“, where they document the scandals of the climate change research and thus also the uncertainties in the temperature measurements of the last 40 years or so.

The UN climate panel (IPCC), which is so harshly criticised by your president Klaus, has had lots of scandals lately. Have you heard about Climategate?

Of course. The director of CRU (Climatic Research Unit) P.D. Jones had to step down.

What does the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4 2007) say about solar motion?

Nothing at all. They are allergic to SIM. Their whole research fails to consider the solar-terrestrial phenomena (solar, geomagnetic, volcanic activity etc.) and they take into account only temperatures since 1860. However in Europe we have a number of continuous instrumental temperature data sets dating back to mid 18th century. The Jesuits started the measurements. With my colleague we processed these data and we showed their relation to solar motion and published an article on it in the Climatic Change journal, Stanford University. In mid 18th century the temperature was as high as in 1940 (both in the middle of a trefoil). But was there any industry, air pollution? No. They even fail to take into account the climate reconstructions (temperatures, proxy data) derived from tree-ring width 18O or 10Be isotopes in ice cores etc., though they are already available for periods deep in the past and are of good quality at least for the Holocene period.

But how do they explain why every 180 years there is a long-term temperature maximum? How do they explain the significant temperature maximum around 1000 AD, when even Greenland was settled? How do they explain the long-term minima?


They don’t. They pretend it did not happen.

Explaining climate change by other factors, not only by greenhouse gases, it is almost a heresy in our times. Were you aware of this when you discovered the trefoils of yours?

In 1987 when I realised there are trefoils in the solar motion (note: there are trefoil symbols in the gothic cathedrals too), I shivered. I realised immediately, that it is connected with almost everything, that nobody was going to do the work unless I do and that I would have to face unbelievable enmities. I raised my hands to the sky and I almost cried: “Why me?!” On top of that, it was exactly 300 years after Sir Isaac Newton, in his PRINCIPIA, formulated his intuitive conclusion about solar motion.

You are from a Christian family. Did you face any persecution under the communist regime?

My maiden name is Kryšpínová. The brother of my grandfather, a school headmaster, was a famous constructor of steam locomotives and he even became a director of the ČKD company. Unfortunately, we lived in the same house as the family of powerful communist bureaucrats. The mother of Vasil Mohorita was an influential Communist Party secretary in Prague 7. When I was finishing my elementary school, she rang a bell in our place and she yelled at me that a relative of the bourgeoisie ČKD director would never be allowed to study at any secondary school! Times changed, today my uncle Vojta is in the textbooks of the Transport Faculty of the Prague Technical University (ČVUT) as a constructor of world fame. He even has a street named after him, he has his stamps etc.

How did you solve it?

My uncle Vojta advised my parents to send me to the other grandparents to Jilemnice, at the foot of the Krkonoše Mountains. My grandfather was an engraver who printed cloths, almost worker class, so we though this might be acceptable to the communists. It worked, I even had the support of the grammar school headmaster in advance. It was a fine school. It had great teachers, including some scientists who were expelled there from universities for political reasons. This school was established as early as in 1909 when my country was part of the Austrian Empire and it was one of the few secondary schools where lectures were in the Czech language. Many Czech artists studied there such as the song writer Jiří Šlitr, actor Stanislav Zindulka, photograph Zdenko Fejfar or the director Karel Palouš. It is unbelievable, that now some madman wants to close this great school. Only Hitler was so insolent to do that. There are protests, demonstrations, so far in vain.

Yet the communist regime let you study at a university

I went to ČVUT (Czech Technical College), the Faculty of Civil Engineering, since my father was a civil engineer. The communists did not censor technical fields so much. I did not enjoy the first grades much, meliorations, road construction, surveyor work, but in the higher grades we could specialise – higher maths, (early) computers, cartography and others. I chose astronomy. In the building of the old Technical College at Karlovo Square, the magnificent Prof. Emil Buchar chaired the “Institute for Astronomy and Elementary Geophysics”. He always took only a couple of students. I was the first woman among them. This autumn it is the 110th anniversary of his birth.

You work at the Geophysical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. How did you get here?

The end of my studies was coming soon, when suddenly one day, late at night, the telephone rang. Prof Buchar called that the next day I was to go to the Geophysical Institute at 9 AM for an interview. He informed me he had already registered me. So I went there and I passed. I have been working here ever since.

Aren’t you sorry that after 20 years SIM is still not in the elementary school textbooks? That climate changes are still explained only by CO2, as if climate was influenced by no other factors whatsoever?

Publishing of my (our) articles has always been a bad dream. Some editors rejected our article without review, saying their readers would surely not be interested. Another editor told me, that they would not allow having anything about SIM published in their magazine! I even received a “peer review” consisting of a single sentence: “All articles about solar motion should be banned!” In spite of all these enmities, we succeeded to have articles about SIM and ST-relationship published in renowned world journals with high impact factor (e.g. New Astronomy (Harvard University, IF 2.2), Surveys in Geophysics (IF 3.1) or Climatic Change (Stanford University, IF 4.)

And my results are in the prestigious textbook of physics for American universities – “Fundamentals of Physics“.

What welcome did solar motion research get among the scientists in your country?

The enlightened ones, and they are many, support it and help me a lot. The others use this topic for target practice. I was sorry to hear dr. Grygar, Czech astronomer and member of the Czech branch of CSI, compares SIM to some astrology. I wonder when he will grow tired of doing that. And our climatologists? I represent our institute in the Czech National Climate Programme. These people “research” only greenhouse effect vs temperatures. I call them “heaters”. Sometimes I feel like a lone Hussite warrior – myself against all. They deny the existence of solar influence on climate let alone the influence of the whole solar system. Most of them refuse to talk to me, most of them even do not say hello, when we meet. Even now when many world journals publish articles about the influence of the Sun on climate. Probably this requires more time. Many discoveries had to wait, some very long. I do not waste my time fighting windmills. God will sort it out when the right time comes.

And what about the Czech media? What is their attitude to solar motion? Has there been any documentaries on TV about this?

Some two years ago people from the ČT2 television channel came to me and we filmed a half an hour interview for some TV magazine. I was sceptical. Will you really broadcast it? Sure, it’s already in the TV Guide. And then, some 2 hours before the broadcast, some powerful person called them and banned the broadcast.

My only media “presentation” was when I was invited to an entertainment TV contest on the PRIMA TV channel (The “Guess Who I Am” programme). It was fun and I used the opportunity to sneak a short description of the trefoils and solar motion into my speech.

But your work is known and cited abroad

It is. I am very cited in both Americas, Canada, I am cited by the Germans, Italians, Australians, Scandinavians, recently even by the Chinese. I am cited even in other fields of study, for instance in the journals Nuclear Physics, Neutron Repulsion Journal ... In 2009 as part of the European Geophysical Union congress there was a Great Panel on Sun and Climate. I had an invited talk there. And I had another invited talk at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Brazil 2010.

I hear you are cited also by the scientists who study exoplanets? How is it related?

Yes, I am cited by the Germans, the astronomers from the Heidelberg University. I suggested that we might expect barycentric motion in the stars, which manifest variable irradiance. Which means such stars probably have planets. I wrote this for CTS (Centre of Theoretical Studies) in year 1995, when no exoplanet was known yet. Now we know over 400 of them.



Figure 2 No, these are not jewel designs. These are four examples of barycentric path of stars with exoplanets (from Perryman and Schulze-Hartung, Astronomy& Astrophysics 525, A65, 2011).

Is there any message you would like to send to the readers?

When you fight for a good cause, you must never give up. I am from a family of keen followers of the Scouting traditions. My father was a founding member of the 5th Group of Water Scouts in my country. As a Boy Scout he had the honour to welcome our first president, the founder of the first independent Czechoslovak Republic, when T.G. Masaryk was returning from emigration. Thanks to his resilience my father succeeded with many things in spite of the communists. And I have a personal example too. To keep sane during the communist era I privately translated the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. My translations could be published only after the end of the communist regime, on the 100th anniversary of her birth (Modrý večer, ODEON, 1990, translated by Ivanka Jakubcová). Ms Anna had a difficult life. In the Stalinist era she was persecuted, she could not publish her poetry for decades, her son was imprisoned in Gulag for almost 20 years. But look now - her poetry is read by the whole world.

Interviewed by
Mgr. Vítězslav Kremlík, the founder of the Czech Climate Skeptic website www.klimaskeptik.cz

(The Czech text was authorised by ICH)

Profile:

born 3. 12. 1941 in Jilemnice, Czechoslovakia

education: ČVUT, Faculty of Civil Engineering, subject: geodetic astronomy and geophysics               

doctorate: CSc. 1991

current position: Geophysical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences since 1963 (Institute website - link)

List of publications
(note: some of the publications are downloadable from Klimaskeptik.cz - link)

Bucha, V., Jakubcová, I. and Pick, M. 1985 Resonance frequencies in the Sun’s motion, Studia Geophys. et Geod., 29, 107-111.

Jakubcová, I. and Pick, M., 1986a The planetary system and solar-terrestrial phenomena, Studia Geophys. et Geod., 30, 224-235.

Jakubcová, I. and Pick, M., 1986b Is there any relation between the Sun´s motion and global seismic activity? Studia Geophys. et Geod., 30, 148-152.

Jakubcová, I. and Pick, M.: 1987 Correlation between solar motion, earthquakes and other geophysical phenomena, Annales Geophysicae, B, 135-142.

Charvátová-Jakubcová, I., Křivský, L. and Střeštík, J., 1988 The periodicity of aurorae in the years 1001-1900, Studia Geophys. et Geod., 32, 70-77.

Charvátová, I., 1988 The solar motion and the variability of solar activity, Adv. Space Res., 8, 7, 147-150.

Charvátová, I. 1989 On the relation between solar motion and the long term variability of solar activity, Studia Geophys. et Geod. 33, 230-241.

Charvátová, I., 1990a The relations between solar motion and solar variability, Bull. Astr. Inst. Czech., 41, 56-59.

Charvátová, I., 1990b On the relation between solar motion and solar activity in the years 1730-1780 and 1910-60, Bull. Astr. Inst. Czech., 41, 200-204.

Charvátová, I., 1995a Solar-terrestrial and climatic variability during the last several millennia in relation to solar inertial motion, J. Coastal Res., 17, 343-354.

Charvátová, I., 1995b Solar-terrestrial variability in relation to solar inertial motion, Center for Theoretical Study, CTS-95-04, March 1995.

Charvátová, I., 1995c Solar-terrestrial variability in relation to solar inertial motion, Center for Theoretical Study, CTS-95-08, 2nd Edition, November 1995.

Charvátová, I., 1997a Solar-terrestrial and climatic phenomena in relation to solar inertial motion, Surveys in Geophys., 18, 131-146.

Charvátová, I., 1997b Solar motion (main article), in: Encyclopedia of Planetary Sciences, (Eds. J.H. Shirley and R.W. Fairbridge), Chapman & Hall, New York, 748-751.

Charvátová, I., 2006 Solar motion (main article), in: Encyclopedia of Planetary Sciences, (Eds. J.H. Shirley and R.W. Fairbridge), Springer, Berlin, 748-751.

Charvátová, I., 2000 Can origin of the 2400-year cycle of solar activity be caused by solar inertial motion?, Annales Geophysicae, 18, 399-405.

Charvátová, I., 2000 The cycle of 2402 years in solar motion and its response in proxy records, Geolines, 11, 12-14.

Charvátová, I., 2007 The prominent 1.6-year periodicity in solar motion due to the inner planets, Annales Geophysicae, 25, 1-6.

Charvátová, I., 2009 Long-trm predictive assessments of solar and geomagnetic activities made on the basis of the close similarity between the solar inertial motions in the intervals 1840-1905 and 1980-2045, New Astronomy 14, 25-30, doi: 10.1016/j.newast.2008.04.005.

Charvátová, I. and Střeštík, J., 1991 Solar variability as a manifestation of the Sun’s motion, J. Atmos.Terr. Phys., 53, 1019-1025.

Charvátová, I. and Střeštík, J., 1995 Long-term changes of the surface air temperature in relation to solar inertial motion, Climatic Change, 29, 333-352.

Charvátová, I. and Střeštík, J., 2004 Periodicities between 6 and 16 years in surface air temperature in possible relation to solar inertial motion, J. Atmos. Solar-Terr. Phys., 66, 219-227

Charvátová, I. and Střeštík, J., 2007 Relations between the solar inertial motion, solar activity and geomagnetic index aa since the year 1844, Adv. Space Res., 40, 7, 1026-1031, doi: 10.1016/j.asr.2007.05.086.

Paluš, M., Kurths, J., Schwarz, U., Novotná, D. and Charvátová, I., 2000 Is the solar activity cycle synchronized with the solar inertial motion?, Int. J. Bifurcation and Chaos, 10, 2519-2526.

Paluš, M., Kurths, J., Schwarz, U., Seehafer, N., Novotná, D. and Charvátová, I., 2007 The solar activity cycle is weakly synchronized with the solar inertial motion, Physics Letters A, 365, 421-428, doi: 10.1016/j.physleta.2007.01.039.

Charvátová, I., Klokočník, J., Kolmaš, J. and Kostelecký, J., 2011 Chinese tombs oriented by a compass: evidence from paleomagnetic changes versus the age of tombs, Studia Geophys. et Geod. 55, 159-174.

Does ethics require us to believe in tornado witches?

When I was a kid, something like a 10-year-old one, I didn't have the feeling that the contemporary human society is obsessed with irrationalities.

This experience of course depended on the environment; I guess that people such as my grandfather and the teachers at school were rational people which was why I made the implicit extrapolation that the mankind approaches similar issues in similar ways.



Examination of a witch

I have never really understood the psychology of the medieval zealots who would burn people at stake just because those people realized that the Earth wasn't a center of the Solar System or the Universe, for that matter. Where did such extraordinarily obsessed idiots come from, I was asking? Something like that is clearly impossible today, isn't it?

Of course, there were many other crazy stories that I used to view as a part of the history that could never return. When we visited the Salem Witch Museum 8 years ago or so, I learned some details about the Salem witch trials. As recently as in 1692-1693, the people were burning or hanging or beheading girls because a witness claimed that they saw ghosts around them or because dogs fed urine reacted in one way or another. Families just blamed bad crops, illness of the family, or a death of a child on a local outcast. That was enough for the mass hysteria to "ethically" punish the unlucky girl.




Why did they find it so important to attribute these obviously scientifically impossible features to pretty ordinary girls? Why did the people think that the worth of human beings becomes unacceptably low if we start to believe that the Sun is more central among the nearby celestial bodies than the Earth? I thought that this stupidity was unprecedented and would never repeat itself.

Of course, I learned that I was as wrong as I could be. People are essentially as stupid - and obsessed with completely crazy beliefs - today as they were in Massachusetts of the 1690s.

A huge percentage of people, including some people who are very close to me for various reasons, will start to curse you as soon as you suggest that ghosts and spiritism are nonsense or that the motion of glasses on the table, as well as the motion of all other material objects we have ever seen, agrees with the laws of physics. When you say such a thing, they make you sure that you are attacking an essential part of their soul and human dignity - because the bulk of their knowledge and perception of human dignity is built out of superstitions and lies. The bulk of their brain is composed of rubbish.

It's kind of normal for the normal people to have crazy beliefs and it mostly doesn't affect the functioning of the society. For centuries, sensible people were more likely to occupy more influential positions which is why the society could really make some progress despite the irrational beliefs of something that could be a majority of the world population. However, in recent years, much of this craziness started to be institutionalized in the very institutions that used to be associated with the scientific and rational evaluation of the evidence - such as universities.

In Italy, 6 seismologists and 1 official are on trial as killers - yes, they are already charged - because they didn't have the crystal ball needed to predict the 2009 Earthquake in L'Aquila in advance. But this article is about another story.

Anthony Watts has pointed out that the Penn State University - yes, the headquarters of the loop quantum gravity silliness and the hockey stick graph silliness, among other things - employs a completely unhinged man as an "associate professor of environmental ethics, science, and law". The description of the discipline is quite crazy by itself. But the article he wrote about the tornadoes is just extraordinary:

Why Ethics Requires Acknowledging Links Between Tornadoes and Climate Change Despite Scientific Uncertainty

Quite a title. And not only the title. I have mentioned the witch trials because Mr Brown's text is virtually isomorphic to Joseph Glanvill's 1668 essay, Against Modern Sadducism, which said that it was unethical not to believe in witches and apparition and which ideologically helped to execute those 26 folks in Salem.

(Sadducism was believed by some Jews 2,000 years ago who rejected afterlife, rewards and penalties after you die, fate, resurrection, and the evil committed by God - quite a mixture, a mostly sensible one, but Glanvill clearly uses "modern sadducism" as a synonym of "rationality" which is what he really hated.)

The page above about the tornadoes contains a remarkable number of 76 copies of the root "ethic", 28 of which are found in the proper part of the article. It's being repeated that even though we are not "certain" that tornadoes are caused by CO2, it is unethical not to "acknowledge" that the relationship exists. Wow.

What I find unethical is to say untrue things even if one knows that they're untrue - that's what Mr Donald Brown has explicitly confessed to be doing and the people who are doing so are called "liars". Mr Brown is not just a liar; he is a liar who is stealing lots of U.S. dollars from the U.S. taxpayer by saying these things that, as he knows, are lies.

The evidence is overwhelming that the Penn State University should be stripped of the status of a university and only regain this privilege once it starts from scratch and proves that the breathtaking intellectual weeds similar to Mr Brown have been safely removed from the institution in a way so that they can never return again. Just for fun, let me look at all the sentences in his article that contain the word "ethic*".

This post argues that ethics requires acknowledging the links between tornadoes and climate change despite scientific uncertainties about increased frequency and intensity of tornadoes in a warming world.

The main insane thesis of the title is repeated about dozens of times in the article. The scientific integrity, a key part of ethics of a scientist, requires to present the links between pairs of phenomena that agree with the scientific evidence. In the case of the tornado-CO2 link, the evidence in favor of the relationship is virtually non-existent, and the small glimpses of evidence suggest that these two things are negatively correlated, not positively.

This post, however, looks at links between tornado intensity and frequency and climate change and what ethics requires when discussing these links.

His post actually doesn't look at any links between those things at all. After all, the author doesn't know any science so he couldn't have achieved this goal. He just states the usual religious insanities of the type "climate change is always caused by CO2, it's 'real', and it's causing all the bad things in the world, Amen". Everyone who is genuinely incapable to demonstrate that such proclamations are preposterous religious dogmas possesses a physiologically defective brain.

IV. The Ethical Obligation To Discuss Tornado/Climate Change Links Despite Scientific Uncertainty.

Note that after several sections, there is a section number four whose headline is completely isomorphic to the headline of the whole text. This "recursion" doesn't look strange to mentally limited individuals of Mr Brown's caliber because they believe that this bizarre proposition has such a special status that if you repeat it at the top of your article, in a section, in its subsection, and at infinitely many other "levels", you will still look sane. Well, it turns out you can't.

To fully understand this it is helpful to understand why climate change is essentially an ethical problem.

More precisely, it is a problem invented, fabricated, and aggressively promoted by ideologically driven irrational zealots and their companion who believe that they can make profit out of this movement. But it's true that the "climate change problem" has nothing to do with science.

Climate change is an ethical problem because: (a) Some people in some parts of the world are putting others at risk,

That's a type of influence that people - and all other objects in the Universe - have been doing with each other since the Big Bang. The only problem is that the contribution of man-made climate change to this type of interactions between the people is zero for all practical purposes.

(b) The harms to those at risk could be catastrophic,

Except that we know that it will not be catastrophic, and it's highly questionable whether it will be measurable amid the contributions of other drivers - that may be confusingly classified as "noise" - at all.

and (c) Most of the victims of climate change can do little to avoid harm,

People in Micronesia, if the sea level are raised by less than 42 micrometers by a Czech power plant in Prunéřov as predicted by the IPCC, can move by a few micrometers away from the sea. They can do a lot. Even if there were any significant changes, such as 5 degrees of warming in the next 100 or 200 years, it would be pretty much trivial to avoid their consequences. It would be many orders of magnitude easier than to continue a civilized life without the currently essential pre-requisites such as the fossil fuels.

they must rely on a sense of justice will motivate those who are putting others at risk to reduce their climate changing causing behavior.

They do not have to rely on anything outside their world, and they shouldn't rely on anything outside their world. They shouldn't be taught to rely on things outside their world, either.

For this reason, since we now know that it is scientifically plausible that tornado frequency and intensity will increase as the world warms and climate change is already affecting timing, location, and intensity of tornadoes that will form, it is not ethically acceptable to assert there is no link because such a claim implies that there is no scientifically valid basis for concern or risk.

It is an ethical duty for every scientist to loudly and clearly say that there is no link between the CO2 and the tornadoes because all the available scientific evidence shows that there is no link and it is an ethical duty for any scientist to use and say things that are dictated by the actual scientific evidence.

There always remains a nonzero probability that something will profoundly change about the science in the future but this is true about any question about the real world and a scientist should never mix the evidence obtained from the past data, which is what science builds its conclusions upon, with unjustified speculations and/or wishful thinking about the future, which is the type of considerations associated with unscientific modes of thinking.

To understand why this it is ethically problematic to deny evidence. it is necessary to review the ethics of dangerous behavior.

Since the renaissance, people began to understand that it's always ethically problematic to say lies and that the truth really can't hurt, at least not hurt the mankind in the long run. It's been understood that the truth is often different than the first hunch or the dogmas inherited from the ancestors. Apparently, not everyone has understood those things.

The criteria of acceptability must be understood as an ethical rather than a scientific question.

That's fine except that science may often say that some people's ethical criteria are just insane. If someone finds it ethically unacceptable for people to realize that the Earth isn't the center of the Solar System or that the people promoting the tornado-CO2 links are unhinged loons, it is his personal ethical preference but this fact can't prevent a rational person from using the scientific evidence to determine that any person with such ethical preferences is a lunatic.

For instance, although science may conclude that a certain increased exposure to solar radiation may increase the risk of skin cancer by one new cancer in every hundred people, science cannot say whether this additional risk is acceptable because science describes facts and cannot generate prescriptive guidance by itself.

That's why science can't directly "dictate" that people should be "protecting the atmosphere", reducing CO2 emissions, avoid certain scientific insights about the tornadoes, or anything else of the sort. However, it's still true that a rational society and rational individuals will look at science when it makes its own decisions. They will affect them. In the particular case of the CO2 emissions, a rational society will allow the CO2 emissions to be anything they want to be because any regulation of CO2 means a reduction of the people's well-being.

The scientific understanding of the nature of the threat, of course, is not irrelevant to the ethical question of whether the risk is ethically acceptable, but science alone cannot tell society what it should do about various threats.

Right. That's why it shouldn't be doing so. That's why the IPCC or any other would-be scientific body should never try to do politics.

In environmental controversies such as global warming where there is legitimate concern, important ethical questions arise when scientific uncertainty prevents unambiguous predictions of human health and environmental consequences.

There is no legitimate concern when it comes to "global warming". All this concern has always been created by propagandistic tricks and fraudulent pseudoscientific babbling and attempted would-be "ethical" intimidation similar to this very article by Mr Brown, so it is thoroughly illegitimate.

By the way, the very fact that the uncertainties were not significantly reduced despite USD 100 billion invested into the climate research in the recent decades strongly suggests, if not proves, that the reason is that the correct answers are actually not in the vicinity of the predetermined answers.

The distance X between the predetermined answers - especially the answer "there is a climate threat" - and the correct answers is very large and its being large is essential for tons of parasites such as Mr Brown to continue to be parasites, so this distance can't be reduced by this community. Whenever the widely believed answers are close to the correct ones, USD 100 billion is enough to reduce the uncertainty X by a significant factor. It is easy to converge closer to the result and reduce X to X/2, and so on.

It's not possible in the "science" of a "global warming threat" because this "science" is qualitatively invalid, not just inaccurate. The incorrect qualitative conclusion about a "climate threat" is the very reason why those people are doing what they're doing so they're incapable (well, unwilling) to abandon this incorrect prejudice regardless of the amount of evidence. That's why they can't converge to the accurate answers.

This is so because decision-makers or those engaged in risky behavior cannot duck ethical questions such as how conservative "should" scientific assumptions be in the face of uncertainty or who "should" bear the burden of proof about harm.

There's still a rational approach to such decisions - one based on the costs-and-benefits analysis - that the rational decision makers will be close to while the irrational ones will be far from it.

This is an ethical question. And so from the standpoint of ethics, potential risks are relevant to what should be done.

Clearly, Mr Brown is using the word "ethics" as any kind of a pseudo-argument that should have the capacity to override any rational argument. However, "ethics" is not the same thing as "irrationality".

For this reason, environmental decisions in the face of scientific uncertainty must be understood to raise a mixture of ethical and scientific questions.

They have always been. However, in this mixture, one should still try to use good ethics and good science. Mr Brown's main point is that it should be a mixture of ethics of medieval bigots combined with junk science of corrupt ideologues that can always ignore the actual empirical evidence because of reasons that are described by fancy words but that are always nothing else than the desire of the fraudsters to continue with their fraud.

That only proven facts should count about dangerous behavior can be shown to be ethically problematic by looking at how societies often deal with other kinds of unsafe behavior.

If one is uncertain about the impacts, he will be more careful about these acts - and encourage others to be more careful. However, a modern society can't ban all new activities just because they haven't been tested for a long enough time. All of life - and especially life in the scientific and technological era - is about trying things that are new. One only prohibits things once there is a solid evidence that these things have some wrong consequences - because one may derive it from established science or because they have been tried (or very similar things have been tried) and there have been significantly bad consequences.

In other words, when the burden of proof should shift to those proposing to do something dangerous or how much proof should satisfy the burden of proof are ethical questions that need to take into consideration many different factors.

Well, the people proposing something dangerous are surely the people who dare to suggest that we should regulate our CO2 emissions. This idea is a threat for the well-being of billions of people - and their pets, among many other things. Mr Brown's idea is different than what he says: what he wants is to shift the burden of proof to those whom he doesn't like because they're not the same kind of unhinged and unstable kibitzers as he is.

Because these are ethical questions, they cannot be answered by an algorithm or a "value-neutral" scientific calculation.

In practice, rational economic questions about the right decisions may be answered in this way, as I mentioned. At any rate, even if we were using less well-defined algorithms than the science and the costs-and-benefits analysis, Mr Brown hasn't offered any evidence that these other algorithms would yield the answer he proposes. He has just repeated that he wants the ethical outcome to be XY but he has presented no evidence and no link with conventional definition of ethics whatsoever, except for the evidence that was relying on junk science as well so it can't be viewed as an ethical dimension of the problem.

As long as anyone is asking the question of whether there is a link between climate change and tornado damage because they want to know whether there is reason to limit greenhouse gas emissions, it is therefore ethically problematic to say there is no link.

In other words, the ends justify the means, Mr Brown says.

An honest scientist has to give and will give the same answer to a given well-defined question regardless of the reason for which the people who have asked want to know the answer. Otherwise the scientist is not a real scientist but an unethical liar and opportunist.

There is no tornado-CO2 link whether you ask because or X or because of Y. Or because of anything else.

However, it is also ethically required to acknowledge that increased tornado damage and frequency are not yet proven. However, if this said, it is also ethically important to acknowledge that increased damage from other kinds of storms is virtually certain as the planet warms.

Whether storms increase on a warmer planet is a scientific question, not an ethical question, so a medieval moron preaching about a perverse form of ethics has nothing to say about these matters. The answer of science is that a warming planet would see a faster warming near the poles, because of the stronger feedbacks, which would reduce the pole-equatorial temperature difference and the related gradients that dictate the strength of storms as well as the magnitude of weather oscillations of many other kinds related to rare and extreme events.

While there's no available measured evidence of a change of the frequency and intensity of storms and extreme events at this moment, science shows that if there is a correlation, it says that a warmer planet will see less extreme weather.

Furthermore, it is ethically important to acknowledge that tornadoes will appear in places that they would not likely occur in the absence of global warming even if tornado frequency and intensity decrease because a changing climate is already affecting tornado propagation.

Again, it's a lie - warming, even if it were occurring, wouldn't make some qualitatively impossible things suddenly possible - so it is unethical to say such things and it is even more unethical to agree with being paid a salary for spreading these lies.

You should be ashamed, Mr Brown. You should be ashamed, Penn State University, for harboring this stunningly dishonest crook. You should be ashamed, the people of Pennsylvania, for being unable to get rid of this big piece of immoral dirt that exists within your state.

And that's the memo.

Rapture will take place today

The global warming orthodoxy is predicting a judgement day. But some competitors of the IPCC propose that the end of the world will come earlier than that.



In particular, Harold Camping (89), an engineer who studies the Bible quantitatively :-), has calculated that on May 21st, 2011, which happens to be today, the rapture will arrive and swallow 3 percent of the world population. Or maybe only 3 percent will survive: I hope that you don't think that this detail of the prediction is too important. The end of the planet Earth will follow exactly 5 months later.

(Oh, I am stupid. The 3 people who will be sucked up are of course those who eternally survive! The remaining 97 percent will spend 5 months on an Earth full of earthquakes, droughts, floods, heat waves, and diseases, aside from 859 other bad things. Thanks to R.L. for a comprehensible clarification.)

As you see on the picture, people will be sucked out of their cars, revert the law of gravity, and they will fall up towards Jesus who will crystallize somewhere in the mid troposphere. According to Wikipedia, the topological defect should begin to absorb the dead and some of the alive folks should follow afterwards. For logistic reasons, Jesus will serve the individual time zones one by one, so expect your spectacular events at 6 p.m. local time.

(If you badly need to continue your life, you may avoid the event by flying to the West, around the globe, so that you will never see 6 p.m. on your watches today. But don't forget to tell your pilot that when the aircraft lands, many of the people at the destination airport will be dead or shocked by the disappearance of their colleagues. He shouldn't wait for any instructions while landing.)




People in Arizona are getting ready for the event that the mankind has been waiting for since the Big Bang, or at least since recombination. Camping's talk show is being broadcast by 66 radio stations and there are 3,000+ Google News articles about Camping's rapture prediction.



That's almost 1/2 of the number of articles dedicated to the whole competing global warming orthodoxy. That gives us some hope that global warming is slowly returning to the status of one of numerous crackpot theories promoted by a limited group of unhinged people. It's hard to disagree with Rush Limbaugh who finds an isomorphism between the AGW and rapture believers.

Meanwhile, the people who discovered the Higgs boson think that they have caused the rapture while others are expecting the rapture while reading books about an intimately interacting supersymmetry at a bar.

U.S. Air Force consecrated a witchcraft altar

The U.S. Air Force is a very tolerant organization.



In January 2010, the Air Force Academy decided to add a worship area for followers of Earth-centered religions. It's all about respect. Almost no one has noticed it until this week.




Sgt Brandon Longcrier became one of the most powerful people in the U.S. Air Force - he is also an official high priest who covers all druids, wiccans, New Age religious believers, and witches in general. The U.S. Air Force has added a pagan altar to its chapel so that the followers of witchcraft may practice their holy art on a regular fashion in front of all friends and they are no longer ostracized. ;-)



Sgt Brandon Longcrier consecrates a Pagan worship area just after sunrise on the winter solstice on December 21st, 2009.

The bosses of the U.S. Air Force have explained that the U.S. Constitution makes the construction of a pagan altar mandatory. So on Tuesday, they built some additional stones around the altar: Daily Mail, The Washington Times, and five other sources.



If you own a company or if you are a director or a principal, you are obliged to add a similar worship area for your employees and students who are Witch Americans. (About 1-1.5 percent of the U.S. citizens are Wiccans. If true, this actually matches Islam and Judaism, and beats Hinduism and Buddhism.) If you wonder what the shape means, the structure above is the ground floor of a future wicker man.

If you don't know, wiccans are members of a modern witchcraft religion born in the 1950s and the 1960s. On the other hand, druids were high priests of a pagan religion in the Celtic lands during the Iron Age (1200 BC - 400 AD or so). They enjoyed human sacrifice - which was not a big deal for them because they also believed reincarnation. Their beliefs were only being transmitted orally and the tradition system was largely eliminated during the era of the Roman Empire. It's back! Sgr Brandon Longcrier hasn't clarified whether he enjoys human sacrifice, too. But be careful! Weather-related petitionary prayer could cause environmental catastrophes, scientists warn.

A Texas pagan high priest has already said that this would only be possible in America. I kind of think that he is right. ;-)

CIA and the Pentagon have previously opened a new worship area for the AGW believers right in the middle of the Pentagon in Washington D.C.

The Washington Times also mention that the U.S. military has also started to use a new green ammo M855A1 which has the advantage that if you use it often, you will ultimately reduce the CO2 emissions. ;-)

(No, the real reason is that there's no lead in the projectile.)

Hat tip: Marc Morano

Al Gore, religion, Our Choice, and iPad

Larry Bell of Forbes wrote a nice article:

Climate Change As Religion: The Gospel According To Gore

He kindly credits Michael Crichton for some of the first crisp and complete explanations why the global warming orthodoxy has become a religion of the urban folks.

However, if it is a religion, it should have a Bible, right? And what is the coolest medium to create the Holy Scripture of a new 21st century religion? Well, take an iPod Touch and - pkh-vřsr-prd - make it bigger.

Al Gore's Our Choice from Push Pop Press on Vimeo.

So the right idea is to create the coolest, hugely interactive iPad book app ever written (one based on his climatic religious book, Our Choice), with an hour of films embedded in it, among other things, and sell this piece of climatic religion just for $4.99.




It seems impressive - and Gene, don't be afraid to buy a copy for your iPad and tell us what you have experienced. ;-) Unless Osama bin Laden creates his own iPad app, Al Gore will ultimately become the most influential bigot and global warming alarmist in the Middle East, too. :-)

Well, it actually seems that the app works both for iPad and iPhone (click to download). I will wait when the app is given for free; the paper version of his trash book already costs $0.88 at amazon.com, down from the original $13.77.

As an updated Buddhist proverb says, modern information technology offers humans a key to the heavens; the same key opens the gates of the hell, too. It is somewhat scary that because of the accumulation of gray green capital, one of the most deluded and atrocious aš$holes in the world who should be jailed for the rest of his life was able to pay for the creation of one of the most technically impressive iPad app that he will undoubtedly use to brainwash thousands of people.

Just to show you the stunning new benchmark for e-books that the rotten apples who have joined al-Gore (former Apple engineers) developed, see this introduction how to browse the e-book:

Al Gore's Our Choice Guided Tour from Push Pop Press on Vimeo.

Grist: confess a sin against Earth

I received an URL for a nice prankster website,

Earthconfessions.com (click)

On that website, you may enter your sin against the Earth - for example, you confess that you have just used natural gas to cook your lunch.



Click to zoom in

The website produces a nice postcard such as one above. It tells you how you should pray to a saint, e.g. to St Umbra who is O Mother of everything that is good and green. The Sin Gallery is usually very funny - showing that most sinners visiting the website are witty skeptics. ;-)




I was intrigued by the logo of Grist - a famous environmentalist blog.

Well, your humble correspondent was immediately thinking: those pranksters are cruel. They make it look like the Grist people's brains have been eaten by a dog. Every person with IQ above 100 can understand that the Grist people are deluded bigots - but with such a website, everyone would figure out that they are nuts. I was afraid that Grist could sue me for helping to spread misinformation that they're creating insane religious websites of this kind.

So I decided to check whether the pranksters have at least used a genuine Grist logo. How far did they get in their effort to imitate the Grist activists? So I opened

Grist.org (click)

to find out that the logo was exactly accurate. But I was watching for two more seconds to find out something much more remarkable... The Earth Confessions website actually is a genuine product of Grist.org. The Grist folks are promoting it on their very title page. They promise you that the truth will set you free. Tell us your eco-sins and go in peace. Confess now. And they're damn serious about it! ;-)

Ladies and Gentlemen, we live in a world where the boundary between the fact and fiction - and the boundary between mental health and a hopelessly devastating mental disease - has been fully dispersed by certain people. It's just amazing. You would think that it's one of the cruelest pranks attempting to show that the environmentalists' brains are full of feces - and after a minute of research, you find out that it is not a prank!

Well, Grist folks are not the only ones. An Australian priest has figured out that CO2 emissions play the role of a new crucification of Jesus Christ.

Amen. ;-)

Thanks to Marc Morano for some helpful URLs.

You may also want to know what is the holiest word of the climate cult. What is the word you should use very often if you want St Umbra and Her divine climate sisters really love you? Michael Tobis who is not in the climate science for the gold (but instead, for the U.S. dollars only) gives us a clue about the holiest word:

Mosher. [...]

Let me explain why. It is not because I am a pusillanimous chickenšhit, Mosher. It is because the fu⊂king survival of the fu⊂king planet is at fu⊂king stake. And if we narrowly fu⊂king miss pulling this out, it may well end up being your, your own fu⊂king personal individual fu⊂king self-satisfied mischief and disrespect for authority that tips the balance. You have a lot of fu⊂king nerve saying you are on my "side". [...]

Really, though, it's the fu⊂king thought that counts.

I hope your soul is sensitive enough to figure out what the new holiest word is from the excerpt above which represents the most current trends in the man-made climate change science. A simple computation of the holy word reveals that Mr Tobis has achieved Rank 8 which makes him a truly respectable authority among his fellow climate fu⊂king scientists and especially chickenšhits. But Tobis modestly admits he's still far from the most productive elite of his field when it comes to expletives:

Like I said in the comments, sorry, I'm Canadian, so I'm not very good at cursing.

By the way, when it comes to "sins against Earth", the only difference between skeptics and worriers is the worriers' breathtaking fundamentalism. Hank Campbell has just discussed some sources indicating that the actual behavior of the climate skeptics is as green as the behavior of the climate fundamentalists. Indeed, as Mr Tobis rightfully wrote, it is just the ... intimately interacting thought that counts! :-)

Gene has taken a quiz in Christian Science Monitor that attempts to measure how green you are depending on your choices of Honda Civic and Toyota Prius. You may try it, too. However, I think that there is still a big difference between the results of such "I am so green" tests and the actual lifestyle of the people.

How a theist defeated an atheist

Via Cosmic Variance

If you have 2 hours and 20 minutes, you may try to watch a debate about "Whether there is evidence of God". Theologian William Lane Craig represents the believers; cosmologist Lawrence Krauss is the atheist.



The first video in the playlist (with 11 items) contains nothing else than music. Go to 2:10 of the second video.

As Sean Carroll admits, the theologian won the debate when it comes to the actual formulations, compactness of the arguments, and rhetorical skills in general. That's why atheist pundits are collectively scared of Craig. In comparison, Krauss seemed like the guy who had no idea what he's talking about and why he's talking about it. Compared to Craig, Krauss is an impossibly lousy, stuttering speaker. He didn't really convey the key points, so even if you a priori strongly agree with Krauss's position, you will find it very strange to declare him a winner.

Needless to say, I chose my title because Craig was voted to be the winner - a fact that could reflect a largely religious audience in North Carolina (NCSU) but it didn't have to be the actual explanation. Don't get me wrong - Krauss has also made points that made me laugh and that were appropriate. I liked his comment how easy it would be for God to make miracles that prove His existence. It was nice to see Krauss as he defends that the sum of positive integers is -1/12, and the maths is only consistent in this way.

I would probably agree with Krauss' comments about the surprises of quantum mechanics - although his presentation wasn't really clear. But I don't understand the relevance of these remarks for the question about the "evidence for God" and I agree with Craig that the Universe is ultimately free of logical contradictions so the mysterious talk about quantum mechanics can't really suppress the power of logic (well, QM denies realism, but that's more than just "pure logic"). In this context, Krauss just emitted some fog.




Although I would have to count myself as an atheist, Craig has made some important points I agree with - but also many points I disagree with. Craig is right that one must fully respect mathematical logic, even when it comes to metaphysical debates such as this one, and he has perhaps even caught Krauss as offering some logical fallacies.

I also agree with Craig that if the conditional probability of an observed fact is predicted to be higher with God than without God, the observation is evidence for God (replace God by anything else, if you wish). However, many of his pieces of evidence of this kind are either fishy or damn weak when it comes to the number of units of evidence. ;-) Also, Craig may be overlooking lots of comparably or stronger pieces of evidence against God. ;-)

I don't really believe that one can prove or disprove the notion of God in His or Her or Its most general sense - and I wouldn't participate in a debate whose topic were this ill-defined. But many related statements that are much more accurate may be addressed by arguments based on the existing empirical evidence - and logic itself.

Craig has made some incorrect and some "at least" unjustified assumptions, however. For example, he seems to believe that the notion of an "infinity" is automatically a symptom of inconsistency, even if mathematics may build axiomatic frameworks that avoid such an inconsistency.

This is a very subtle assumption because he implicitly believes that the "real world" and "physics" have higher standards of what "consistency" implies. Well, in general, I even agree that this is the case but I am not sure whether it's the case in the particular situations that have been discussed.

For example, there was an important question whether the Universe could possibly last eternally - from "t" equals minus infinity - just like physicists thought until the early 20th century. This is a subtle question and the answer is not as clear as some people on both sides could think.

First, Craig is surely wrong that one couldn't even consider a spacetime that existed in the infinite past - just because in such a Universe, we couldn't count the "time since the beginning" as a finite number. The reason why this constraint doesn't exist is that there doesn't have to be any "time since the beginning": the Universe may be parameterized by a time coordinate that may be real - both positive and negative - and arbitrarily large negative values of "t" may still exist.

There is certainly no contradiction at the level of spacetime geometry! Craig and other theologians - and not only theologians - are just mixing their prejudices about the reality with actual proofs of inconsistency - which they don't possess. In some sense, their perception that there is an inconsistency follows from their emotional problem to work with negative numbers. When it comes to the real and important questions, it seems to me that they think that coordinates such as "t" always have to be positive.

On the other hand, a time coordinate that could have been continued to the infinite past is a potential source of inconsistencies; it becomes clear if you look at some detailed laws of physics. In the 19th century, the Universe would be thought of as being infinite both spatially and temporarily and there is no real problem with this assumption.

However, if you were imagining that the Universe is spatially finite - the volume is finite much like the volume of the currently visible Universe - a temporally infinite Universe would be a problem for physics. It would be a problem because of the second law of thermodynamics.

The entropy of the visible Universe today is something like 10^{100} "nats" and it is never decreasing. In fact, it has to substantially increase all the time. When you retrodict the past, you will find out that the entropy of the portion of the Universe that evolved to the currently visible Universe was much smaller a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. When you look at an even earlier moment, you will find out that the entropy was de facto zero. Because quantum mechanics prohibits negative values of the entropy - the entropy is the logarithm of the number of microstates which can't be e.g. 0.0000001 - there couldn't have been any "past" before the Big Bang.

An alternative scenario would be a quasi-equilibrium - the state of the Universe that could sustain a nearly constant, very low entropy for eons, but suddenly decided to "melt" and increase the entropy again. Such a quasi-equilibrium state is arguably impossible in physics, especially because its entropy should have been much lower than what it became later which contradicts the usual states of equilibrium.

Of course, there is one more realistic alternative: the eternal inflation. In eternal inflation, you may extrapolate time to minus infinity again - and there's no contradiction with the second law because every time you get to the beginning at which the entropy of your Universe is nearly zero, you will figure out that the Universe you knew is just a tiny bubble in a much bigger parent Universe whose entropy was, is, and will be much larger. So there's new room to reduce this entropy in the parent Universe, and so on.

Effectively, eternal inflation restores the 19th century possibility that the Universe may last eternally. Of course, the multiverse as imagined by eternal inflation is nothing like "Einstein's static Universe" or its 19th century predecessors - simply because it is not static. However, all eternal models of the Universe may lack an explanatory power which may fail to be a "sharp and inevitable" inconsistency but it could still be a problem for a physical theory.

(By the way, in the case of cyclic models of cosmology, Craig is completely right that one may only add new steps but he can't eliminate the need for the existence of a "beginning".)

At the end, I think that all such things must be studied by the methods of physics - or cosmology - and Krauss still arguably knows more about the stuff than Craig does, despite Krauss' weak rhetorical skills and his somewhat self-evident atheist prejudices. There will always be a difference between the different cultures - between theologians and philosophers on one side; and physicists and cosmologists on the other side.

There are aspects in which my respect to the theological and philosophical communities is nearly zero or negative; and there are aspects in which it is significantly positive. Those people tend to be educated in humanities and they may be great speakers - as Craig's example shows. On the other hand, they often use lots of verbal constructs that are meaningless and that only "look" clever, and they often ignore or deny the genuinely important arguments that may be derived from physics and its empirically rooted logic.

I was reminded about the world of the "wise men" of philosophy when I was giving the talk show at the Prague Jewish Community a week ago. Although the host told me that only very old Holocaust survivors would attend, there were also at least two young students of philosophy at the Charles University, among other young participants.

There were many points, questions, and exchanges about cosmology, string theory, and its testability - all the things you may imagine in such contexts. But the philosophers have asked me a somewhat unusual question - whether string theory was "normative or descriptive".

Of course, I was lost so I said that I had no clue (much like I said when I was asked about a giant laser that is going to be built somewhere in Czechia - I didn't follow that story). The last time when I heard about the "normative vs descriptive" dichotomy was about 20 years ago, during a philosophy (Citizens' Teachings, "Občanská nauka") class at the high school. It has never made much sense to me.

According to some explanations, it looks like "normative" is about "how things should be" and "descriptive" is about "how they are". Obviously, all science is "descriptive" in this sense - science never defines the right moral values, among similar things.

However, there was a sign that the "descriptive" meant an effective theory while "normative" was an accurate model identified with the reality. As long as string theory is the accurate theory of everything, it is no longer "effective" and could be even counted as "normative".

So even after a week, I still don't know what the right answer is to the question. I don't really understand why one would ask these confusing questions with somewhat ill-defined words. There exist similar questions that physicists could ask and that could actually be addressed. For some reason, philosophers don't seem to prefer questions that are more likely to produce valuable and/or decisive answers. They don't seem to care whether their questions may become a starting point for some progress.

Also, I was surprised to see that the philosophers must have thought that whether a theory was normative or descriptive was a question that scientists in general and philosophers in particular would be solving (almost) all the time. I forgot to emphasize to them that it wasn't the case. Most physicists would never use the term "normative theory" in their whole life.

This not-so-subtle fact is obviously being hidden from the students of philosophy. The students of philosophy are apparently never honestly told by their instructors that scientists consider speculations about "normative theories" to be ill-defined and meaningless verbal masturbations. So they don't know and they must be surprised if they meet scientists who are not obsessed by the normative vs descriptive dichotomy.

Back to Craig and Krauss. I found some of the arguments by Craig creative and witty. For example, Krauss would say that there's no "objective morality" but still, science depends on "honesty, open-mindedness" and other moral values. Craig pointed out the contradiction; I agree, there is a contradiction although it obviously exists only because we're combining different aspects of morality - and their different purposes - under the same umbrella.

I also agree with Craig that in order to claim that Jesus's resurrection is an extraordinary claim (one that requires extraordinary evidence), one needs to presume that God doesn't exist. After all, the religious viewpoint is not that the resurrection was a natural process - which would be highly unlikely to follow the Biblical scenario, indeed. Instead, the resurrection was done by God.

So instead of having a "purely empirical" evidence against God and/or resurrection, an atheist scientist has to apply a kind of Occam's razor here. The assumption is that the natural laws don't have to be supplemented by an extra deity - because there hasn't ever been a good observed reason to be sure that it is needed. Well, I agree that the opinion that such extra miracles don't exist is a belief, much like the religious beliefs. Still, any statement that the miracles occur at least "somewhat regularly" with a frequency higher than "f_0" may be empirically falsified, so if you measure the might of God by "f_0", science can make God arbitrarily tiny. ;-)

Of course, if one assumes that the miracles are restricted to special, irregular events (such as the resurrection of Jesus) that don't include a sizable fraction of cold scientific experiments (where the miracles never show up in a statistically significant way), be my guest. One can't really falsify this theory - this belief.

The Jewish Community of Prague

I have just returned from the Jewish Community Prague where I gave a talk show, or participated in a discussion with the members. It was a pleasant experience. The audience had a genuine interest in physics or at least philosophy etc.

And I was happily surprised that the community was de facto a living organism.

Although the kind host has mostly prepared me for a uniform community of 100-year-old holocaust survivors born in the era of Austria-Hungary (the monarchy), the audience included people from many generations. A young man wanted to deny my entry, but he quickly changed his mind when I explained to him who I was and what was going on.

There were attractive girls over there, too. ;-) And it was good to meet one perfectionist instructor from my Alma Mater.




Before the event, I was studying some Jewish culture and realia, which I have never been "officially" explained by anyone, including various forms of Judaism, their lunisolar calendar, holidays, and so on. I wasn't even shocked that the conference hall, which was a kosher dining hall at the same moment, couldn't offer milk with the coffee because it was a meat dining hall and, as you must know, milk and and meat can't be mixed in the same room!

If the blog were not visible to the public, I would probably quip that the rule must be a pain in the ass. ;-)

The topics we talked about covered string theory, its testability, cosmology, the LHC, Lawrence Summers and feminists, climate change, and a few others. A task for me was to choose the author of the best and most concise question - a winner of a bottle of wine - and I chose a woman who asked whether dark matter had been experimentally proved. That was a pretty good choice because, as it turned out, she didn't like my opinions about women in STEM fields too much so at least she has some liquid to qualm a potential anger if any. :-)

As I expected, it was impossible to avoid a faux pas in a mostly religious environment whose big defender I am - but with which I am unfamiliar in practice. There have probably been many mini-scandals related to what I was saying but I have learned about one of them; the rest of this blog entry is dedicated to this faux pas. When I am studying the historical background right now, what I did looks like a genuine offense but my guess is that when I will tell the story about the offense to other Czechs, they will think that it is a kind of joke.

Well, it's not.

What happened? I was also explaining that CO2 wasn't a pollutant analogous to SO2, SO3, N2O, tar, and so on (those are really bad guys). In fact, 20 years ago, everyone agreed. The most environmentally friendly plastic bags would boast that they decompose to H2O and CO2 only. What is the offense? Well, I used the same word for the plastic bags as pretty much every Czech would: they're "igelit bags" ["igelitové tašky"] because the word "igelit" is being used for any plastic foils, especially those made of PVC and similar soft compounds.

Ouch!

So it was explained to me by a participant that "igelit" was a wrong word. Just to be sure, "igelit" has been a commercial name only, and it referred to PVC (polyvinyl chloride), which produces pollutants when it burns, while the modern plastic bags are environmentally harmless - and they are mostly made out of polyethylene.

As you might guess, this technical inaccuracy of mine, while a clear departure from perfectionism, was not the source of the real trouble. So what was it?

It turns out that what is important is the owner of the commercial name that continues to be used across our nation. Well, it was a company called IG Farben - a huge German corporation founded in 1925; "ige" in "igelit" comes from "IG". That already sounds risky, doesn't it? Well, let me tell you the full story: IG Farben established a chemical plant to produce synthetic fuels and rubber out of fuel. Where? Well, in Auschwitz. To make things worse, IG Farben was employing 83,000 slaves, was the main commercial subject connected with the holocaust, and was the owner of the patent to produce Zyklon B.

Holy crap. Imagine that our nation innocently continues to use their commercial name, and not only for the original material, but for the whole class of materials that look similar!

IG Farben obviously had to be fully liquidated after the war. I guess that some of the U.S. leftists won't be impressed by the terrible things done by IG Farben, so let me add another point that will make them stunned as well: it's proved that IG Farben has collaborated with George Walker, i.e. the grandfather of George H. W. Bush (and great grandfather of George W. Bush). George Walker was given a unit of spies from IG Farben, the Hamburg-Amerika Line [sic], whose task was to spy in North America.

Again, I was totally unfamiliar with the very name of IG Farben - if I have ever heard the name, I instantly forgot it. That's a pity because after 1925, IG Farben included BASF, Bayer, Hoechst, Agfa, and two more "Chemische Fabriks"; add the confiscated Czech and Polish factories after the occupation and you get pretty much all chemical industry in Central Europe (and one half of the industrial backbone of the Third Reich). Of course, this story was just 1% of the event but it's just another example of the unexpected processes that may occur when different cultures interact.

Meanwhile, I doubt that the Czechs (and Slovaks) will stop using the word "igelit". But your humble correspondent may change his vocabulary a bit.

By the way, the Czechs must love German commercial names for plastics. We use the term "bakelite" ["bakelit" in Czech, a trademark of Bakelite AG], which should normally represent polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride only (an early plastic whose name I wrote via copy-and-paste), for most of the plastics that are not "igelite". For example, it's believed that Trabants were made out of "bakelite". It's not too inaccurate because these funny vehicles were made out of Duroplast which is a similar compound.

The words with the "plastic" root became somewhat more frequent in Czech but I guess that they're still less frequent than "igelit" or "umělá hmota" (a "synthetic or artificial material"), the most common Czech term to describe plastics in general. I vaguely remember that some of the teachers - even during communism - wanted the pupils to switch from all other general names to "plastics" but such a change is largely impossible in a society where only a small portion of the people (pupils of a particular age) are being re-educated in this way.

Homework for Grownups: Everything You Learned At School and Promptly Forgot by E. Foley & B. Coates

Stars: *****

Harper Collins Canada (2010)
Canadian Edition
Nonfiction
432 pages

Summary: Homework for Grown-ups is a brilliantly informative and entertaining book of old-school knowledge for adults. It is the ultimate refresher course on mathematics (remember Pythagoras' theorem? You will!), English grammar and literature (do you know your Margarets?), and chemistry and the sciences (including the big bang theory). It spans geography (can you name the planets in order?), history (what exactly was the Family Compact?), art, Latin, phys. ed. (hockey!), home economics and much more... including, crucially, recess (finally, definitive rules for Red Rover!).

I LOVED school. Well I loved the education part, not the social part. I love learning and I love knowing a little about a lot of things. It bugs me that I've forgotten knowledge I learned in school. I love watching Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? but it makes me mad that I can't remember it all, or at least the subjects I enjoyed. So this is the PERFECT book for me.

In this book, the following subjects are covered: English, Mathematics, Home Economics, History, Science, Religious Education, Geography, Classics, Physical Education and Art (plus a Recess!) For each subject there is a section covering some of the basics you would have learned in school. Important terms, dates or names are in bold. At the end of each section is a quiz (answers are at the back) if you really want to feel like you are in school. I didn't really take the quizzes. I looked over them and answered the ones I could quickly but didn't write anything down, score myself or look up answers.

I really enjoyed reading the subjects I enjoyed and was good at but found myself struggling with the ones I didn't care as much about. I guess I only care about remembering what I learned in school in certain subjects. This is NOT a book you read in one day. It took me a few months to get through this book because I read a bunch of other books as well. For the last few chapters I kept the book in the bathroom as a little knowledge pick me up when I get a break. (If you're a parent you know what I mean!)

Links of Interest: NONE

Other Reviews: NONE YET

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Feynman on science, religion, and communism

Here is a fun talk that Feynman gave on May 2nd, 1956, at Caltech. Obviously, it's read by a Feynman fan, not Feynman himself:



Transcript is here...




Around 12:00 in the first part, he discusses why communism is the opposite of science because it has no tools to adjust the direction. The debate is always over. You may replace "communism" by "global warming" and get an equally valid appraisal.

Feynman divides religion to several aspects and only finds discrepancies in the metaphysical aspect; the ethical and inspirational aspects of religion will remain largely untouched - except...

His comments about the pillars of the Western civilization are not unsimilar to many comments your humble correspondent would say half a century later - and I am sure that many of you will agree with him, too.

Merry Christmas

New articles are being posted below this one, so don't stop reading...



Merry Christmas to the TRF community!

Needless to say, I am not wishing any good Christmas to the environmentalists because it would be insulting for them. According to environmentalists, Everything that is wrong with humanity [...] is summed up in Christmas. Among other things, it is a turkey genocide day, we heard from Ethanol Greenfart, before he recycled his granny and wrote a book about it. ;-)




Yes, I mean a White Christmas. In 2010, global warming caused exactly the same winter as we have always been used to. So enjoy it. ;-)

Did a Jesuit priest discover the Coriolis force?

The Physics arXiv Blog uncritically promotes a preprint with an insanely long title,

The Coriolis Effect Apparently Described in Giovanni Battista Riccioli's Arguments Against the Motion of the Earth: An English Rendition of Almagestum Novum Part II, Book 9, Section 4, Chapter 21, Pages 425, 426-7

in which Christopher Graney, a physics instructor at a Kentucky community college, argues that the Italian Jesuit Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598-1671) discovered the Coriolis force in 1651. The Physics arXiv Blog even adds that Riccioli was "centuries ahead of his time".



Given the fact that Riccioli's argument was nothing else than a traditional salvo of the Aristotelian pseudoscience against Copernicus' heliocentric theory in particular and against the emerging discipline of physics in general, I can only say: holy cow.




Note that the Coriolis force,

F = -2m Ω x v

was derived and written down, in this very form, by Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis in his 1835 paper. It is an apparent force that you have to add to the description of physics in the rotating frames - and Ω is the vector defining the rotation of the frame (with the right magnitude and the direction given by the axis of the rotation).  By the term "Coriolis force", we actually mean this formula, so it's obvious that it couldn't be called "Riccioli's force" because he didn't have the formula.

But it's not about the formula only.

Obviously, what appears in the text verbally coincides with a sloppy description of the Coriolis effect we could produce today: a cannon shoots in several directions (North, East) and if the Earth were rotating around its axis, which is what Riccioli denies, the projectile would be deflected differently depending on the direction. But what Mr Graney and the Physics arXiv Blog are totally missing is a "detail", namely that Riccioli's way of thinking about the motion is fundamentally wrong.

In particular, it's essentially still the old Aristotelian thinking. Note that Aristotle lived between 384 BC and 322 BC. When Riccioli wrote his text in 1651, Galileo Galilei was already dead; all Galileo's contributions were available to the whole world. Isaac Newton was 9 years old and was arguably closer to a correct picture of mechanics than Riccioli.

Riccioli wasn't centuries ahead of his time; he was mindlessly defending myths that should have been abandoned 2000 years earlier when Aristotle died.

The idea that there would be new effects in various moving, rotating, and accelerating frames was not Riccioli's personal groundbreaking discovery; it was exactly the format of the bogus arguments that were used against the heliocentric theory all the time.

Physics was born when the flagrantly obvious laws of inertia were acknowledged.

Objects remain in the state of uniform motion or rest if no force is acting upon them,

says the first Newton's law. Galileo was fully aware of its essence. And all philosophers in ancient Greece and the Roman Empire had access to a huge body of empirical evidence that pretty much proves that the principle above was right. For example, you may take a Roman coin and it will roll and roll. It doesn't need any force to continue. Just watch it for a while.

However, Aristotle's dogma was very different

Objects instantly return to the state of rest once the force cease to act.

Now, Newton's law is obviously expanding around the idealization in which the friction forces and other forces are zero or neglected (and may be added later); Aristotle's law is "expanding" around an infinite-friction limit. Are both attitudes legitimate?

Well, if you didn't know anything about physics, they would look equally legitimate to you. Just like S-duality says that we may expand around two different values of a coupling constant, zero or infinity, we might also expand around two different values of friction, zero and infinity.

However, if you actually know something about the physics of motion, you know that this superficial argument is just wrong. One cannot expand the laws of motion around the "infinite friction" limit. Once you start with the assumption of an infinite friction, the information about the motion - and the motion itself - is instantly lost and you can't get it back by any "corrections". These days, we say that the friction is irreversible, much like all other processes that increase the entropy. Because it is irreversible, you can't start your description of the world with the assumption that the friction is infinite.

So it is only Newton's approach that can lead to a valid description of the laws of motion: uniform motion is the default state and one needs forces to change the momentum and one needs forces to bring an object to rest, too.

It took approximately 2000 years after the death of Aristotle for the people to establish physics as we know it. These two relatively dark millennia were dark exactly because many people were hysterically unwilling to admit that the previous paragraph was right. They were scared of motion and they were scared of moving frames. They were inventing bogus arguments why they couldn't live in them. Riccioli was no different.

What a surprise, people like Riccioli were not complete idiots. They could also produce pretty pictures. But they were still idiots and their way of reasoning - or the lack of it - was totally reactionary. They were the very reason why the scientific revolution couldn't have exploded a few centuries earlier.

A reason why Graney and the Physics arXiv Blog celebrate the Jesuit propaganda is that they totally take the Coriolis force out of the context. The Coriolis effect is not a new theory of the whole physics that replaces the Newtonian mechanics. On the contrary, it is a tiny addition to the Newtonian mechanics.

And whatever NM is, you simply can't be credited for tiny additions to NM if you completely deny NM itself.

It would be as preposterous as crediting Aristotle with the discovery of viscosity because his model of the world already assumed viscosity that was not just nonzero but actually infinite. ;-) Well, Aristotle talked about some situations where the friction forces were large (a horse in the mud): but he was not the only one who was familiar with the situations so he can't be credited for the discovery of these "experiments". He can't be praised for the discovery of the theoretical explanation, either, because it was wrong. The same thing applies to Riccioli.

The essential point in this whole debate was whether or not life could proceed in moving frames - whether motion itself was lethal. Aristotle and the Jesuits wanted to believe it was very bad to move their asses; for the bigots, motion was dangerous (much like the global warming crackpots think that climate change is dangerous). But motion is not dangerous. In fact, the physical phenomena observed in uniformly moving frames are indistinguishable from the phenomena at rest.

Riccioli's scenario is of course similar to an argument we could use to derive an effect of the Coriolis force today (and sloppy students won't find any difference); the Jesuits tried all conceivable complicated setups to defend their beliefs (Riccioli printed 77 reasons why Copernicus was wrong - you offer 77 lousy arguments if you don't have a single solid one, a wisdom that is true for the climate alarmists as well) so it is not shocking that they also found the Coriolis setup at some point. But what matters is that the most important conclusions they made about the setup were wrong. That's why we can say that the overlap between Riccioli's analysis and the present explanations of the Coriolis force was just a coincidence.

Obviously, if he really understood what he was saying, he would realize that it was no argument against the Copernican model. Why? He could estimate the magnitude of the effect to see that this effect is so small that it could be very real; I will show the estimate momentarily. And he could even construct the Foucault pendulum (which was only shown 200 years later, in 1851).

Was there some mathematics that was missing in 1651? It's preposterous. Small boy Isaac Newton was already starting to work on the differential calculus. ;-)

Imagine that it's 1651 and you really understand the Coriolis argument that is being attributed to Riccioli. Galileo has already made his contributions and died: everyone knows that one should test the hypotheses before he says that they are correct or wrong. So let's test whether the phenomenon exists or not. We must first calculate the predictions.

The heliocentric theory - with a rotating Earth - implies the deflection of the projectile. How much will it deflect? Well, let's look at the anomalous change of the velocity. If you shoot from the equator towards the pole (to the North), the East-West velocity beneath the projectile will change from the equator velocity to zero near the pole, thus modifying the information about the speed and direction of the projectile. The rotation-induced velocity near the equator is 40,000 km over 24 hours, about 463 m/s. The circumference of the Earth had been approximately known from the era of ancient Greece.

(Riccioli himself, together with Grimaldi, measured the circumference of the Earth between 1644 and 1656 - although their error 360x 10 km, about 10%, caused by various defects of their method, was worse than Willebrord Snellius' earlier measurement that was off by 360x 4 km , i.e. 4%, only. Riccioli was also the first man who tried to measure the Earth's gravitational acceleration.)

However, normal projectiles in 1651 didn't shoot 10,000 kilometers, to reach the pole from the equator. They may shoot 100 meters or so. That's 100,000 times less than 10,000 kilometers. Correspondingly, the change of the East-West velocity beneath the projectile will be 100,000 times smaller than 463 m/s, i.e. about 4.6 millimeters per second. That's clearly too small to be measured so the conclusion is that one can't distinguish the two theories by the unrefined projectiles available in 1651.

If we can't distinguish them, we have no right to say that one of them is right and the other one is wrong; we can only abandon theories that have been falsified; science doesn't give you any tools to favor one explanation if the evidence speaks a neutral language. (This simple point was misunderstood by the Jesuits and it is still misunderstood by the dumb critics of string theory today.)

Now, tell me what was unavailable in the previous 3 paragraphs in 1651? I haven't even used any Newton's laws of motion or anything of the sort. It was just a simple scaling argument. We know the maximum change of the East-West speed; and we know the approximate fraction of this change we can probe by cannons. The product is so tiny that the effect could very well be real.

If someone can't make this simple step - at the same time when others are already beginning to work with the differential calculus - then he simply can't be credited with a discovery just because some words resemble the words in a correct argument. You have no idea how to apply the "discovery" or use it, even in the simplest situations, so you simply have nothing to do with the discovery.

And that's the memo.

---

The luminiferous aether: a similar story

In the story above, modern people were defending the Aristotelian misconceptions as being "centuries ahead of their time". It's preposterous but it is not the only example of passionate heirs to some of the history's most mistaken thinkers.

One of the 20th century revolutions in physics began with special relativity. Relativity only became possible once Einstein realized that the vacuum was totally empty and there couldn't have been any aether that would pick a preferred reference frame.

Many physicists of the 19th century - including some big shots - believed in the luminiferous aether, an environment that has to exist for its waves to behave as light - in the same sense as the air has to exist for the sound waves to propagate. They were convinced that they had some actual evidence that the aether existed.

However, they didn't have any existence. The only thing they had was a dogma stating that a plausible analogy was necessary. One could envision the analogy - the aether had to be composed out of "atoms" just like the air - and they thought it was necessary.

If you think about it, the existence of a possible analogy doesn't prove that the analogy has to be realized in Nature. The argument was totally fallacious. In fact, Einstein realized that there was an overwhelming evidence that the analogy was wrong. Maxwell's equations work and don't seem to require any "speed of the aether": they can predict the speed of light without it. Because the aether speed seems to be absent in the fundamental equation that agree with electromagnetism, it seems that the aether is unphysical. Einstein was right, of course, and he didn't even need to take the Morley-Michelson experiments into account.

The emptiness of the vacuum, and the Lorentz symmetry that requires the emptiness, was totally crucial to make the relativistic step. And on the contrary, the idea that the aether had to exist was exactly what prevented the relativistic revolution to arrive e.g. 50 years earlier. The aether was a highly regressive idea.

Nevertheless, you may see how it was possible for the 19th century physicists to be stuck in the logical fallacies behind their opinion that the aether had to exist: some 21st century physicists are still stuck in these fallacies! That includes all the researchers of loop quantum gravities, spin foams, Ted Jacobson, and lots and lots of others. The difference between Maxwell and them is that Maxwell didn't live in a world where the arguments against the existence of the atoms filling the vacuum had been known for 100+ years.