Photon, Graviton, Contradiction

 Abstract: No need to dig very deep to find glaring contradictions in today’s physics. A discreet warning to those who act as if everything important is already understood.  I exhibit a few elementary reasonings where basic physics ominously implodes like an overstuffed star. Among other implosions, the “Planck Length” is derived, not from dimensional analysis, but through a perfidiously simple outrage.

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EVEN THE BRIGHTEST CIVILIZATIONS CAN MAKE THE GROSSEST ERRORS:

 May 8, 1945, the 68th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany. A big deal in France. Starting in 1934, the French republic armed itself to the teeth to crush fascism. It took a while, but it worked. At this point, fascism is only history in Europe (and don’t forget the collapse of the USSR).

 Keeping May 8 as a mandatory vacation day helps to remind the young generations that for the Republic to fight racial fascism cost, over 31 years, more than four million dead, in the French empire alone. (More than 100 million, 5% of the world’s population, died, all together. More if one counts the (“Spanish“) flu epidemics that hitched a hike on the military situation)

 Fascism was an erroneous system of thoughts and emotions. All the more striking as it struck mostly the country with the most intellectual hubris, namely the “German Reich“. The basic mental deviations inciting such errors are best studied in pure science, or aeronautics; as the  situations are clearer.

 When looking at history on the largest scale, what counts are optimal results. If one gets optimally to a disastrous result, it’s still disastrous. The Greeks had tremendous physics. At least, they built excellent ships. Roman cements were astounding; they made siphons on such a scale, aqueducts could cross valleys this way.  

 Yet, both Greek optics and Greek were full of correct, intricate considerations. Yet, both were not just false, but inside out, the exact opposite of the truth in the most fundamental message.

 How did it happen? The Greeks had overlooked the obvious. It should have been obvious that the Sun, being so much more enormous than the Earth, did not turn around it: that contradicted intuitive notion about centrifugal forces (say when launching a stone from a sling), and the fact the much smaller moon rotated around the Earth.

 In optics, simplistic experiments would have shown light came from the observed objects, not conversely.

 The Greeks had overlooked the obvious in physics. I will talk about something that maybe similar. Now. Keeping in mind that the Greeks overlooked the obvious so much that their democracy lost three wars to plutocracy in 250 years. Thereafter democracy, or even a republic was not to be seen in Greece again for nearly 2150 years. I claim that’s related. The lack of necessary criticism. It may show up in politics, but it trains best in physics.

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 SIMPLEST DERIVATION BLACK HOLE:

 Let’s assume light had a mass, m. (OK, modern physics assumes that light has no mass… otherwise modern physics would not be coherent. But that does not prove that light has, indeed, no mass!)

 If the mass of light were small enough, it would not be experimental detectable.

 Now let’s equate the energy of said mass to 1/2 mvv, the traditional kinetic energy. (Purists who know the Special Theory of Relativity will scream, as this is only the leading term in E = mcc.)

If the star is massive enough, it will bring light to a standstill, by pulling on it hard enough (forget about the geodesics of General relativity!)

 Now the potential gravitational energy of a mass m located at radius R in the gravitational field of a star of mass M is: GmM/R .

 Equating the kinetic energy with the gravitational potential energy:

 1/2 mvv = GmM/R. Putting v=c, the speed of light, eliminating the m’s, we get:

 R = 2 GM/cc

 This is the so-called Schwarschild Radius. When a star of mass is smaller than R, light can’t get out. That reasoning was made by the super mathematician and physicist Pierre Simon de Laplace in the Eighteenth Century. That is, during the Enlightenment. Laplace concluded that “les objets les plus massifs de l’univers ne peuvent etre vus (the most massive objects in the universe may not be seen). [To be entirely fair, an obscure Brit seems to have had the same idea too, at the time.]

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 GRAVITON BLACK HOLE, IN ANALOGY TO PHOTON BLACK HOLE:

 Laplace above made the hypothesis of what some physicists in 1929 came to call the “photon”, the particle of light. Meanwhile De Broglie rolled out his hypothesis that to each body a wave is associated. Although that does not prove the converse, namely that, to each wave a particle is associated, physicists take this for granted. 

 That there are gravitational waves, there is no doubt. Why? Because if one wiggles around a source of gravitation (say, a star), the direction of the incoming pull will vary, so a distant observer will be tugged back and forth. As the distance from the source augments, this will organize itself in nice waves.

 Backtracking conceptually, one gets particles of gravitation similar to particles of light, the gravitons. 

 Why not to play the game above?

 I made this smart remark one day to a Field Medalist specialist of General Relativity. He literally got enraged, fuming, repeating the offending sentence to himself, but unable to find a smart repartee. Indeed. There is none.

 If one plays the game above, the game Laplace first played, no graviton will be able to exit a sufficiently massive star, so the star, not only will not be seen, but not be felt. No wonder my friend got enraged.

 Could that really happen? Why not? Where would the energy go? if one insisted to keep the conservation of energy law? Well, what about coming out somewhere else as Dark Energy? 

 (Remember, we do not know, at all, about the dimensional structure of the universe; so energy could leak, through another dimension; a similar argument is central to some ultra modern theories of gravitation.)

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 PLANCK LENGTH MEANING; NO HIGH ENERGY GRAVITON:

 Another avenue of meditation is to observe that the Schwarschild Radius also exist for a graviton of mass m. It’s 2Gm/cc.

 The graviton’s own mass pulls the graviton itself towards itself. At high enough energy, the graviton becomes a contradiction onto itself.

 2G (hv/cc)/cc = 2G hv/cccc.  … Lv =c, v = c/L

Thus: L = square root (2G h/ccc)

 This “L” is the Planck Length. If the graviton’s matter wave  is confined within “L”, nothing will come out…

 It goes without saying that all of this ought to be taken with a grain of salt. First of all, the real structure of elementary particles is completely unknown. 

 String theory and M theory are attempts to guess said structure. However they assumed topological properties (such as compacity, locality, separability) that basic Quantum Theory violates enthusiastically. So they miss the essence conceptually, right from the start.

 Nevertheless, the reasonings above form the core of Quantum Gravity, the first order approximation. If that has no bearing on reality, neither will the rest.

 One of the main interests of the advancement of science is that it forces us to advance and refine what we mean by reason. In a world where the survival of the many will be increasingly in question, and depends essentially upon ever mightier reason, this is of the essence.

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Patrice Ayme

Why Europe Lays Supine

Abstract: The crisis in Europe is now worse than in the 1930s, in major countries such as Britain, or Spain. So how come, differently from the 1930s, revolutions are not wrecking the streets? The aging of the population does not explain all the torpor. Nor does the fact that Europe suffers from globalization, also known as ‘free trade’, and plutocrats make sure that the Plebs is not aware of what ails them, or even, that they suffer at all: the wealthiest profit from the unfolding catastrophe.

A  most subtle psychological mechanism is at work: Europe already tried something very bold, very virtuous, axed on the sustainable and, not only did it backfire, but it proved… completely unsustainable. A disabling injury joined by an insult to reason itself: no wonder Europeans feel too depressed to do anything about anything anymore.

Why No Panic Yet?

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EUROPEAN PLUTOCRACY: SUBJACENT TO MUCH.

I was reading newly published  conversations of Hitler with his generals. Marshall Edwin Rommel and Hitler, in May 1943, discussed the dislike that “plutocrats” (yes, “plutocrats”, that’s the word they used) had for any social tendencies found in Nazism. In particular Hitler expressed the revulsion he felt in Rome, in 1938, for Italian plutocrats, and the triple game they played, through their control of the military, and double faced diplomacy with Britain, playing everybody against everybody.

Italian plutocracy did not come out whole from WWII. A republic was installed, with a slightly modified version of the French revolutionary flag. The daughter of the king, the one that Hitler gave his arm to, in 1938, died in an extermination camp, victim of an allied bombing…

Fast forward to May 2013, 70 years later. The Dutch are hysterical with joy: they just nominated a new plutocrat to head the Netherlands, William-Alexander, worth at least 300 million dollars. His wife is particularly popular. She is doubly plutocratic; barely twenty year old, before even having an economy degree, she was an investment banker in Argentina and New York (the biggest banks made like bandits from Argentinean default); she is the daughter of another plutocrat, a minister of the dictator Videla (famous for having tortured, before assassinating them, more than 30,000 people).

The hysterical Dutch wear orange. My Mom asked me why. I did not know, but I was correctly suspicious. It turns out that William-Alexander’s family used to rule, more than six centuries ago, the city of Orange… In Provence, France. Unfortunately, for the plutocrats, France is now a republic, sort of, so the followers of William-Alexander are reduced to waving orange flags, instead of waging terror in Orange, as they used to. Of course, Orange was built as one the free cities of the Roman republic, and only later was stolen by the ancestors of William-Alexander.

Kleptocracy or plutocracy? The latter is more general than the former.

I visited a 17 centuries old cathedral, the Saint Sauveur cathedral in Aix en Provence, four centuries older than Islam. Part of the cathedral was built even before Constantine became emperor. Then Constantine, a major plutocrat, if there ever was one, greatly thanks to fiscal measures, imposed Catholicism… The breathing of millennia endows our minds beyond this Earth.

Christianity, like Islam, was instrumentalized. The Saud family is trying to pose as the guardian of pure and hard Islam, but it violates the very foundation of Islam according to Muhammad, zakat (basically an anonymous voluntary tax the pious rich are supposed to impose on themselves, a command of the Qur’an). The Saudis know that they thrive, as long as people think in a way that revere them on top.

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WHO COMMANDS MAKE CIVILIZATIONS MORE OR LESS POTENT & CREATIVE:

That the free are more motivated was already pointed out by Herodotus (see the last essay). What makes the minds of civilizations? Sometimes the oligarchy fabricates thoroughly the minds of the Plebs. Such robots show little mental creativity, even when they are requested to have some.

Indeed, even where they are allowed to be mentally creative, they will tend to be afraid of crossing scarlet walls across the mental landscape. This explains why the Roman empire lost much of its mental creativity, once it became a dictatorship. Even in the arts of war: the adoption of new weaponry in the first seven centuries of the Roman military dictatorship was roughly zero, in sharp contrast with the Roman Republic’s constant introduction of new weapons (although Constantinople introduced a crucial new weapon, Grecian Fire, the Seventh Century equivalent of the nuclear bomb).

Sometimes the oligarchy is ejected by a new, larger oligarchy, or several variants, in quick succession: this happened in England in the 17C.  Sometimes the revolt is even larger, encompassing much of the middle class: that’s what happened in France in 1789. The American Revolution was still something else, as it was more of a civil war.

Who leads is who gives the minds to the commons. If only a few lead, little mind is to be had. The wider the leadership, the more mind for the commons. This explains why the French republic of 1792 was able to defeat the coalition of all European plutocracies that tried to crush her, including Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia. French research in new high explosives and superior artillery was crucial in defeating the invading Prussian army at Valmy in September 1792 (same story as Captain napoleon’s artillery defeated the British at Toulon, a few weeks later).

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WHY EUROPE TOLERATES AUSTERITY:

The lack of vision in Europe is, colossal. And not just from the leaders, but also from the Plebs. But how come is austerity still proceeding apace? Why, as jobs are dying, not enough people are screaming for work? Is it just because the more people are out of work, the more stabilizers of the welfare state are at work?

The control of the EU by right wingers is still a fact, except, in appearance, for the French Socialists (but most elected socialists are right wingers in disguise). Many European leaders are tied to Wall Street.

This explains why Mario Draghi, ex-partner at Goldman Sachs, is still practicing the strong Euro policy (that takes away millions of European jobs; the Euro ought to be half the value it’s at, right now). That favors his masters on the other side of the ocean.

All these facts are known, but why no truly massive demonstrations? In May 1968, just because the state was too authoritarian, all of France went on strike, for a month (something similar happened in Czechoslovakia, and, in the USA, and LBJ declined to be candidate to the presidency again).

OK, people are older now, their anger hormones less in control.

Yet another fact is at work.  Europe made a giant effort, 25 years ago. Europe had two visions: the free market, “libre concurrence”, and ecology. Both visions have failed. The free market, it turns out mostly meant that banks were free to exploit the consumers and the states, and that plutocrats could live, tax-free, more powerful every year.

Many of those on the deep left said:”we told you so!” But even them have run out of critical steam. Indeed, they wanted to help the Third World, desperately. Now the Third World is helping itself with second, third, and actually, all servings. So what are European progressives going to say? Take jobs away from the Vietnamese, give them back to the French, who are paid twenty times more? Do they want to exploit the Third World, like the colonialists they used to criticize?

Sustainable energy is an even more painful subject, a wreck of European hopes and struggles. Ecological virtue has made European disadvantage even worse. Huge investments and efforts were engaged, great hopes raised, to curb the rise of the CO2. The rest of the world, led by the USA, refused to collaborate.
Thus, that vision has been a disaster. First, industrial production was delocalized in places that did not mind using the cheapest energy. Hence the global CO2 production was in no way impacted.

Secondly, European sanctions against energy production hobbled European industrial production and enabled those others, led by the USA, to get immense economic advantages, while the seas and temperatures rose, and Europe economic advantage sank.

British electricity prices have tripled in less than ten years. Even Germany, right now, having decided to get out of old fashion nuclear energy is finding the going tough, increasingly intolerably expensive. The French have wrecked their car industry by imposing tough CO2 standards.

Overall, because of Euro (and pound!) over-evaluation, the European economy has become uncompetitive (in spite of the German ‘success’, which is more appearance than reality).

Result? Now the Europeans are scared of any new vision, embarking in the many new ventures that really getting out of austerity would entail, lest something even worse comes about. They  suffer from a subconscious feeling that they did something uncomprehendingly, immensely bad, by showing too much initiative. Hence a dreadful determination to not go grandiose again. And thus the willing, collective wearing of the hair shirts.

This is why there is no explosion yet. And why the bought off right-wingers, the Barrosos, Rehn, Junkers,  German central bank head, and other austerians, keep on talking loud and strong. All the more as they have to disguise how wrong they were. And what better disguise for error than to keep on insisting that they were right?

And what of the USA? The sequester may bring a disaster: it’s pretty similar to what happened in Europe in the last few years.

When Roosevelt became president, he advocated to have no fear. Indeed one can hardly expand an economy when everybody is hiding below a rock.

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Patrice Ayme

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Patrice Ayme

Nuke Bad Comets

IT’S THE ONLY WAY (TO FULL EMPLOYMENT, AMONG OTHER THINGS).

Abstract: Appropriate use of technology is paramount, as civilization tremble, and the Earth turns into a gas chamber. The way drones have been used to kill extra-judicially in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, is deeply inappropriate. Yet, drones can be used very appropriately on a battlefield. But to use them to bomb millennia of Western morality, is definitively inappropriate. Our technology is turning us into gods, but we better be smarter than the Greek ones of lore. Remember what happened to the Greeks.

The way nuclear energy has been used has often been inappropriate. Yet, nuclear energy shortened up World War Two by several million deaths. Nukes could also save billions, should a bad comet suddenly appear.

Comet Pan-STARRS Visible This Weekend

The comet pictured above was detected by the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawai’i. It’s a “sun-grazer” comet with an elliptic orbit of 106,000 years (so it’s predictable). Perihelion: .302 AU, March 10 (today!). So it is getting as close to the sun as Mercury gets periodically.

Guess what? By a troubling coincidence one such bad comet has precisely just surprised us. OK, it’s not coming for us, but how many of those are there out there? Obviously more than we thought.

Space faring nations with the appropriate technology, nuclear, military, electronic and ballistic, such as France and the USA, should make well financed contingency plans to prepare to engage such a giant object with a nuclear bomb upon very short notice. This is not trivial, because of the unusual speeds and energies involved. The technology would also allow to intercept “city killer” asteroid, even with only a few hours’ warning (after dialing down the megatonnage of the bomb).

Only nuclear energy would work to deal with large impactors, forget big tales for small children, about painting them blue or something. One does not deflect comets with brooms, or firecrackers, but with an explosive energy a million times greater than what Genghis Khan used. That we fortunately have mastered. If we are masters of our souls, we can be masters of fusion.

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A BIGGER BANG:

Cosmic warnings are piling up. On January 3, 2013, a comet was discovered. It’s called C/2013 A1. It is on a hyperbolic trajectory, and moves in a retrograde orbit. That means it may be extra solar, and should be leaving the solar system. Maybe it is coming from outside the solar system.

Comet C/2013 A1 is on a collision course with Mars.

October 2014?

Even The Economist, the rogue free market magazine I subscribe to, in “Hits Keep Coming”, thinks that the big governments’ program promoted by the present essay is a good idea, and would give something meaningful for NASA to do. 

A crucial articulation of the present Greater Depression is that people in Western countries are running out of meaningful things to do, as the plutocracy has deliberately robbed them of employment and power, thus meaning. This essay speaks of struggling against comets, but that will not happen, before a bit of class struggle.

C/2013 A1 is a completely different style of comet from Pan-STARRS. C/2013 A1 is hyperbolic, not elliptic. It means that the comet has so much kinetic energy that, should it not collide this something first, it will escape the Solar System.

C/2013 A1 will come so close to Mars that it may well hit it (comets, because they emit jets of steam, behave a bit like rockets: they can go sideways). Should C/2013 A1 collide with Mars, the event should be most remarkable.

The current estimate of the absolute magnitude of the nucleus M2 = 10.3 indicates a diameter from 10 to 50 km. Worse: the energy imparted is proportional to the square of the velocity, and that velocity is very high, much more than what is needed to escape the sun. C/2013 A1′s speed would be approximately 56 km/s by the time it approaches Mars. By comparison the Solar System’s escape velocity in the vicinity of Mars is 34km/s! The comet has more than twice the energy needed to go visit other stars.  

The energy of impact on Mars, should it happen, might reach the equivalent of staggering 20 billion megatons of TNT!

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SPACEGUARD NEEDED:

We are lucky that C/2013 A1 is heading towards Mars and not Earth! One has to understand that big planets are for comets like honey strips for flies. They attract them.

That effect protects us. Jupiter is our existing Spaceguard system: it sucks in comets. Jupiter has 318 times the mass of the Earth, making it literally 318 times more attractive for comets (from the gravitation law that Isaac Newton reminded us a scientifically minded French priest had found earlier; often misattributed to Newton nowadays, in a spirit of manifest Anglo-Saxon, hence Wall Street-City of London supremacy).

Two large comets collided with Jupiter in the last two decades. That changed the mood among professionals.

Pre-Socratic philosophers would have been fascinated by all the understanding we have gathered on all these celestial bodies. They were already fascinated, as all this astronomy shook their metaphysics to the core. Before Socrates, it was thought that thinking had to do with learning about what was out there. (After Socrates-Plato-Pluto, it was thought the universe was all about what was in one’s heads. And, sure enough, within a century, plutocracy, Macedonian backed plutocracy, had won all over… Except the Roman republic. Who said metaphysics had no impact?)

In 466 BCE, Halley’s comet passed by for the longest time, 75 days. Simultaneously, an enormous meteor (perhaps associated to the comet) crashed into Northern Greece. A piece, as large as a wagon, landed on the ground and stayed a tourist attraction for more than 5 centuries. That shattered the ancient theories of the Greeks about the heavens. Anaxagoras’ science came to the fore.

The Greeks would  have been fascinated by Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9. Irresistibly attracted by the giant planet, that 15 kilometers diameter comet came too close to Jupiter. Shoemaker-Levy, quartered by Jupiter mighty gravitation, broke in 70 pieces or so, and went back to space. Still irresistibly attracted, the comet, now a train of comets of all sizes, hit the gas giant on its next pass. The pieces entered the Jovian atmosphere, making giant black impacts in it.

Each of the largest 7 fragments’ explosion was bigger than Earth herself. One explosion made a giant dark spot over 12,000 km across, and released an energy equivalent to 6 million megatons of TNT. That unreal succession of impacts into Jupiter in July 1994 blasted smugness about the stability of heavens to smithereens. Astronomer David Levy stated: “The giggle factor disappeared after Shoemaker-Levy 9″.

As the comet would pack 20 billion tons of TNT, something packing a few million tons of TNT may help Earth to negotiate with it. I want pacifists munching grass placidly in those vast, awesome Elysian fields in their heads, to meditate upon that.

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JUST ONE SOLUTION. NUCLEAR ENERGY:

Nuclear energy, because of the basic reason that, by a factor of a million, nuclear energy is the greatest energy source we have. This is why the main problem of our civilization has become the problem of nuclear energy. How to use it appropriately, and not freak out.

If the comet were heading towards Earth we would be scrambling to put together a giant thermonuclear weapon. It could be done. The French republic, by itself, could do it, using in-house equipment. The chance of success, though would approach 100% if, and only if, one were to prepare well, in an international program.

Lots of Uranium 235, and Lithium 7, for a bigger bang, in the monster fission-fusion-fission thermonuclear device we would be hastening to prepare. One of several (because we would need back-ups). If we were really pressed for time, we could rigged together several conventional nuclear warheads, packed together to explode simultaneously. 

As NASA puts it in 2012: For non-technical reasons, this would likely be a last resort, but IT IS ALSO THE MOST POWERFUL TECHNIQUE and could take several different forms, as discussed in the report. The nuclear option would be usable for objects up to a few kilometers in diameter. http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/news_detail.cfm?ID=183

The efficiency of a thermonuclear explosion is augmented by an order of magnitude if it happens three meters below the surface rather than on contact, one centimeter above the surface. So NASA (2012) has proposed to extend the Nuclear Explosive Device with a frontal penetrator which would create a three meter crater. Easy computations show that, had the hyperbolic comet headed towards Earth, the interception speed would have been at least 80km/s, meaning that the thermonuclear fusion sequence would have to be started just before first contact.

Fast Electronics Required @ 80km/s

Of the shelf H bombs could take care of comets a few kilometers across.

The power of nuclear devices is hard to fathom. The Castle Bravo device made a crater in the atoll reef. Although it was exploded 7 feet above the reef, the crater  had a diameter of 2 kilometers (6510 ft), with a depth of 80 meters (250 ft). It would have been much worse if it had been buried by 3 meters (five kilometers across, 160 meters deep).

For larger comets, a true bomb from hell would have to be devised: a fission-fusion-fission with a powerful third stage. A third stage is simply a Uranium envelope around the thermonuclear bomb. When it gets hit by “fast neutron” from the H bomb, it fissions in turn. The largest bomb ever tested, Tsar Bomba, over the arctic island of Novaya Zemlya, was 58 megatons TNT. It was deliberately made with NO third stage. (And the second stage may have contained some lead, instead of uranium.)

It’s not that a third stage is hard to make; it’s just uranium metal. But Soviet physicists computed that, with a third stage, Tsar Bomba would have been too powerful. The plane dropping the bomb and its parachute would have been destroyed, to start with. As it was windows were broken more than 1,000 kilometers away, in Finland and Norway. Because so little uranium was used, relative to the Lithium Deuteride fusion fuel, the mightiest bomb ever was also the cleanest, ever, at 97% pure fusion. (Fusion is cleaner because it fuses light elements to create slightly heavier, but still light, elements, and light elements tend not to be fission, or then not for long.)

By enriching the third stage tamper with U235, one could probably go beyond 200 Megatons (and such a tamper could be rigged around conventional warheads, too!).

Thus, contrarily to urban legend from luddites in denial, the largest thermonuclear bombs could take care of the largest comets.

Man-Made Fireball 8 Kilometers Across.

The largest comets are 60% larger than the entire picture, if one uses the fireball as a measuring unit.

Even the largest comet would fragment and the pieces would rocket away. If done a few weeks before Earth impact, clearly all the pieces would miss (another rocket or two would be in back up, just in case).

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BACK TO THE CATASTROPHE SCENARIO:

So let’s suppose again that C would be headed towards Earth instead of mars.

The next Ariane V would have to be modified hastily. Why Ariane V? First, that flight is already being assembled. It is Flight VA213, signifying the 213th launch of an Ariane from French Guiana since the family’s maiden liftoff in 1979. Its Automatic Transfer Vehicle, named Albert Einstein, would have to be modified with a booster, interception electronic package and basically a boom system in the front to detonate fast enough the nuke in the back, at the staggering speeds involved, so that the bomb can explode at 3 meter depth in the comet… 200 megatons against 20 billion megatons. Fun. Unreal reality.

In general, Ariane is the most dependable, most frequently launched rocket in the West’s arsenal. So it should be part of the quick reaction force to be assembled, as one would need to fling a hefty load.

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IS IT ALL REAL?

When “experts” come, and talk about the frequency of impacts, the truth is that we do not have any idea what it is, up to a factor of ten, or more. It is certainly higher than what experts used to believe. three cometary impacts, or near impacts of comets on planets close to us in 20 years is a bad omen.

I was listening to National Public Radio where some scientist from John Hopkins pontificated that the asteroid strike in Siberia (which, a few tens of seconds off could well have annihilated a  major city) happened only every century. In truth, on land three impacts about ten times bigger are known in the last century. Scaling with the ocean, one gets nearly ten of these ten times bigger impacts. Not to say that this is the long term average: it could be a fluke. The same stupid guy was saying that, if we had only 6 months warning, we could not do anything.

And he works on preventing impacts! NPR said.

But what he forgot to say is that his program strictly uses the explosive technology Genghis Khan already had at his disposal. (And what happened? After a costly victory in Hungary, the Tumens had to turn back, them and their fancy black powder rockets.)

(Scientists should stop pontificating, or talk as if they knew, when they don’t, reserve that to the Pope.)

There may have been other impacts in historical times. Unrecorded.

Strange events happening in the Sixth Century, recorded by Chinese and Romans (the only civilizations recording anything reliably at the time) could be explained by impact(s) at sea. (Or then a large volcanic eruption, unidentified so far.) Those events, whatever they were, altered the climate.

Some will smirk, and ask to see the craters. Celestial bodies colliding with the Earth are not on any kind of trajectories. They are ruled by the sun, that is they tend to have trajectories similar to the Earth, but at an angle. So a typical impact will involve a low angle atmospheric entry, spreading death, fires, shock waves and devastation for thousands of kilometers. A crater will not necessary form (elongated craters have been found in Argentina). And remember, 2/3 of Earth is water.

Speaking of which, a proposed impact, the Mahuika impact, 1443 CE, off the south coast of New Zealand, would have been gigantic, typical of a mini comet 500 meters across. There is some evidence for such a cometary impact, from the existence of a crater, from Maori evacuation of the area, to suspected tektites, to suspicious ice cores in Antarctica, to megatsunamis, up to 220 meters high in the region (and 143 meters high in Australia). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahuika_crater

So much for these things being rare.

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CHANGE THE MOOD ABOUT MOODS:

In recapitulation: learn to do what you can do about what matters.

Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, Nobel Laureate, etc. in Science Mag. editorial “Denial of Catastrophic Risks”, March 8, 2013: “In a media landscape saturated with sensational Science stories and “End of the World” Hollywood productions, it may be hard to persuade the wide public that real catastrophes could arise as unexpectedly as the 2008 financial crisis, and have a far greater impact. Society could be dealt shattering blows by the misapplication of technologies that exist already … we should be more concerned about events that have not yet happened but which, if they occurred even once, could cause worldwide devastation.”

What Rees is saying is that we should change MOODS. We should change our system of mood. Preparing for a comet impact, and how to defeat it would help to change the mood we have about moods.

We need to learn to deny our Denial of Catastrophic Risks.

And we learn to do something about catastrophic risks we have identified (I call this new way of thinking catastrophic calculus). Having an active Spaceguard program against asteroids and comets of all sizes and origins, hyperbolic or not, would be a good symbol of the new attitude we need to adopt. Besides, it would reduce unemployment, and push technology forward.  That’s appropriate.

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Patrice Ayme

Pluto’s Cosmic Impact

Abstract: There is a real, serious impact threat, from small asteroids, and, much worse, long period comets. Yet our great leaders are not too interested, because they prefer the world population as they will it to be: ignorant, despondent and impotent. Cutting science budgets in the guise of austerity helps. So they are busy cutting: austerity for humanity, and anything that makes the honor of mankind, wealth for those who lead us towards oblivion.

A world unwilling of solving problems to the point of being incapable to do so, is perfect for those who profit from the established order, and yearn for divinizing celebrities and more exploitative stagnation rather than real progress and empowerment of the commons.

Far Away Meteor’s Fireball: 27 Kilometers High (90,000 ft)

The comet problem is a case in point. It’s perfectly solvable. But it is left unsolved as a paradigm that unemployment is better than all and any alternative, including cosmic catastrophes. The ways of Pluto are subtle, and vicious.

Don’t ask for whom austerity tolls, it tolls for thee, and any science, wisdom or knowledge you may want to acquire. Admire the celebrities: they are the best lives you will ever get.
***

In less than four years, two nuclear explosion sized asteroid impacts were observed over continental plates. One was more than four times the power of the Hiroshima bomb (Sulawesi in Indonesia, 2009), the other was 33 times Hiroshima (Urals, 2013). So much for the notion that these things are rare and innocuous events. Just above land, I know of four explosions of city killers in 105 years.

(There have been eyewitnesses of major explosions at sea, too; a scientific debate is ongoing about whether there was a truly giant, country killer impact south of New Zealand, 5 centuries ago.)

Only 1,500 people were hospitalized by the shock waves of the Ural meteor, because as luck had it, the meteor was on a grazing trajectory when it collided with the atmospheric wall. It streaked through the wall sideways for 32.5 seconds before experiencing three explosions. The first one, and strongest, happened 27 kilometers above the Urals, 60 kilometers south of the center of a city habitated by one million people.

If the asteroid had been a minute late, on the same trajectory, Tokyo may have been hit. If the meteor had been 30 seconds ahead, on the same trajectory Moscow, moving at 30 kilometers per second, would have caught up with the meteor. In either case, the damage on the ground would have been considerable, and massively lethal.

Why? Because the angles of entry would have been much sharper in either case than they were above the Urals. So the asteroid would have delivered its 500 kilotons, 33 times Hiroshima, much lower. Low enough for either capital to have been partly disintegrated.

For those who want to have a good laugh, zombie style, let them be appraised of the following fascinating twist. The deliriously clever Soviets had installed an automatic nuclear retaliation system (“Dead Hand”) in case Moscow had been destroyed by surprise by the vile capitalists. (Western Strategic Submarines could have hit Moscow in three minutes, hence the hair trigger paranoia.)

“Dead Hand”, also known as “Perimeter” , worked by detecting flashes and seismic waves, and then firing nuclear tipped rockets automatically. The Russians have been coy about whether the system is still in use. May be that is why Putin was so ashen faced when speaking about the Ural meteor. Putin may have been told of my little computation above: 30 seconds or so later, and the meteor may have released 500 kilotons above the Kremlin.

When the folly of men insults the might of heavens, fireworks are guaranteed…

The debate about space impactors has been deflected towards the wrong problem, the obviously silly red herring, the problem one should not worry about, the non dangerous problem. That’s indeed the case when an asteroid CAN be deflected.

Deflection, per se, means one has decades to do it. Thus it is not an emergency, by definition. Why to assume celestial mechanics and happenstance will be that accommodating? Is the Solar System a restaurant where one makes reservations when one feels like it? Of course not. Thus asteroid deflection is the wrong problem. Asteroid deflection is a bit like worrying about being eaten by a shark while skiing out of bounds. What needs to be addressed is a different problem, impactor interception & destruction.

Why so much talk about deflection, when annihilation of the offender should be the focus? Why so much denial? Why change the conversation from a clear and present danger, to talk about a red herring?

The real danger is long period comets: they are huge, unpredictable, undetected, and the warning would come only with months to spare.

So why don’t we talk about them?

Is this blatant denial related to other difficulties we are experiencing, such as the Greater Depression, the Asphyxiation of the Biosphere with man-made greenhouse gases, the Waning of democracy, the Blossoming of Plutocracy? Yes to all.

The refusal to solve the space impactor problem is a baby example of the mood that enables the rule of plutocracy rather than the rule of reason for all.

One avoids to talk about the cosmic difficulty at hand to avoid a mood that plutocracy finds politically dangerous: solving problems and one can, you know, before we know it, solve the problem of rogue finance, corrupting fossil fuel industry, etc …. As NASA put it in 2012:
“For non-technical reasons, nuclear explosions would likely be a last resort, but IT IS ALSO THE MOST POWERFUL TECHNIQUE…
The nuclear option would be usable for objects up to a few kilometers in diameter.”

Nobody Can Resist Me

So what are we waiting for? Well we are waiting for plutocracy to keep on impacting our world ever more deeply. That’s what the plutocrats want. They want to deeply impact civilization with the sheer glory of their rule.

As I write this the threats of austerity cuts are already affecting the science budgets in the USA by more than 5% (from the looming “sequester”, which has already forced scientific agencies to implement thousands of cuts). In the European Union, scientific cuts are turning into a massacre.

Indeed, in the European Union, the cuts to the scientific budgets are in excess of an unbelievable 13%. Another victory for Kanzler Merkel and the very wealthy heir, David Cameron! Instead of cutting science, why don’t the politicians put a 93% tax on multi-millionaires, to finance science and education?

Putting a 93% tax on the wealthiest is what Republican president Eisenhower did to reimburse the World war Two debt. So why not? Why to throw the baby, but not the dirty bath? Answer: because the politicians would lose the friends that will make them so incredibly rich tomorrow. Politics would not be a lucrative career anymore.

This is a point Beppe Grillo is making in Italy, and now he has 18% of the Italian Parliament to show for it.
OK, Eisenhower taxed the wealthy when Lincoln’s party was really republican, instead of being thoroughly plutocratic, as it is now. In Eisenhower’s time, millions of citizens of the USA could go to the most advanced schools, for free. Including Medical School. Somebody will a normal job could feed a family and provides it with a roof without excessive debt (now a couple can barely do that with 2 jobs and excessive debt, as long as oil is not too expensive).

The mood the careerists such as Cameron, Merkel and the so called Republicans in the USA, want to avoid absolutely, is the mood of solving the problems at hand, with the technology at hand.

Indeed such a mood could impact hard plutocracy itself. Plutocracy is an even mightier threat for civilization than any comet. Any comet could be dispatched with a 200 Megatons thermonuclear bomb, should be act swiftly. In other words, disposing of a comet would be a technological project much easier to implement than getting rid of plutocracy. Why? Common people would understand that something four kilometers across at 40 kilometers per second would affect them adversely.

Yet, common people have been hypnotized into believing that plutocracy is their best friend. It’s their new religion. They salivate when beautiful people show up on the screen. they live through them. They don’t feel like the lobsters they are, slowly cooked for dinner.

Solving problems is a very bad habit for a society to have, when it wants plutocracy to rule. Because plutocracy itself is a problem. The worst chronic problem. So one may fear that plutocracy itself would be solved, by problem solvers… As it was under the Roman republic, for five centuries.

Roman emperors, the “Princeps”, those “First men in Rome” who stole power from the republic, were fully aware of this. So they avoided solving problems scrupulously. One could make a curve of problems solved by the Roman state, and see that it goes down to basically zero once the fascist empire started to rule in full.

A society that makes a habit of solving problems will solve excessive plutocracy first. because only the intelligence of the People is freed from celebrity cult, and starts to contemplate the universe at large. That is why one observes that highly innovative societies were also highly revolutionary socially, and cut down to size their own plutocracy. First.

For example the golden age of Greece was preceded by massive, well, drastic, revolutions, starting with the draconian Draco himself in Athens (around 622 BCE) Sparta would later free Athens from tyranny). And of course Solon in Athens, probably inspired by Draco.

During the French revolution, in 1792, as plutocratic armies invaded the country from all direction, the Polytechnique and other engineering schools were founded. The idea was to defend the homeland of human rights supreme with smarts. Immediately new explosives were invented at Polytechnique, and put to good use at Valmy, a few miles from Paris, to stop the Prussian Duke of Brunswick, who had promised to do to the Parisians what Hitler would do to the Jews, nearly two centuries later (tradition, tradition…)

Thus the Beatles were wrong when they sang hypocritically against revolution… (While racking the cash, and rubbing against the plutocratic order; Mc Carney married the Kodak heiress…) The revolutionary spirit infects all dimensions, once it’s allowed to grow in one of them.

During World War Two, the USA functioned pretty much as an equalitarian republic. Old French revolutionaries, ancient republican Romans, 22 centuries ago, Athenians 25 centuries ago, would have recognized the spirit immediately: out of the many, one, liberty, equality, fraternity… And plenty of ideas. The US navy in the Pacific, or the scientists involved in the atomic bomb project were pretty much self governing bodies, guided by truth.

Solving problems leads to an obsession with truth. Thus, if one wants to avoid the truth, one better stick to avoiding problems, and the solutions they bring. Thus the Roman emperors discouraged paradigm changing technology. As the mood of changing what could be changed could prove contagious, and thus threaten the order they ruled over, they astutely felt.

In the case of the threat of a space impactor, the solution is obvious. It calls for maximal, but existing, technology. The interception of the offensive object with a thermonuclear bomb is only rocket science, not Quantum science. It’s nothing off the shelf.

But to decide to do what can be done, and could do it efficiently, would recognize the preponderance of the metaprinciple that establishing an order of more or less vital priorities and taking care of high ranking priorities ought to rule over economic considerations.

It is this (meta)psychological subtlety that holds back Spaceguard.

After the Ural meteor’s strike, the Russian Prime Minister called for constructing Spaceguard. This would be intolerable to the world financiers and profiteers: if one used economic power for something useful, would not the world of finance supreme look irrelevant? Where would the spirit of enterprise stop? With finance’s heads on spikes?

Better to stick to the usefully childish, such as the muscle bound Princess of the USA (see the note about the meaning of the word “Princess”) giving a “best movie” award to still another motion picture glorifying wars of the USA in the Middle of Eurasia.

Such movies are much useful, to the plutocratic order. Hollywood seems to have a factory churning them out, and the Main Stream Media (“60 Minutes”, say) re-iterate the message.

Such movies, with their partial view of history, insure that We The People of the USA learn what a continual pain the Middle Easterners have been directing towards the USA, ever since they have oil, and have to be continually encourage to fork it all over to Wall Street.

Iran is particularly insensitive that way, as the USA worked hard changing the government there after the Iranian People voted for the wrong guy (Mossadegh) in the early 1950s. Then the USA installed by a real Shahanshah (“King of Kings”) with the help of its friend of the CIA, Khomeini. It’s good to be reminded of all this, and celebrate the “greatest country on Earth” (Shall we give it the title of Country of Countries?).

So never mind comets, asteroids, H bombs and heady stuff. Celebrities is where it’s at. Muscle and glitter. Now Sandberg, the Facebook woman, before that the Google woman, and before that, for more than a decade, the Larry Summers/Financial derivatives woman, since he got to meet her as an undergraduate when he was president of plutocratic Harvard, is coming out with a book to teach women how to succeed. I guess, that’s done the old fashion way, by meeting the right guys and accumulating that way a “stellar resume“.

They sleep, thus they rule, and they are even sleeping at the wheel.

Those who rule know how to take care of what’s important in the universe: the awe that become them. Let the universe take heed.
***
Patrice Ayme
***
Note: Ms Obama is given the title of ‘First Lady’. Yet, as anybody who knows Latin will testify, this is exactly what “Princess” means! It’s wonderful to discover that aristocracy is as American as motherhood.

Fragile Earth Syndrome

Abstract: The Earth is already all too close from being getting all too hot, from its astronomical position at the interior edge of the Sun’s Habitable Zone.

The Greeks viewed Gaia, the Earth, as the Mother Goddess from whom all other gods sprang. Yet, discoveries they made later showed that this metaphysics was misleading. In truth, habitable planets, far from being all powerful, are confined to narrow zones around their stars (and these zones move, and are under continual threat, as I describe below):

Sun Like Stars Are Most Hospitable.

Vertically the masses, going up, the unit being the mass of the sun; as stars gets bigger, they get hotter, thus they change color, covering the entire black-body spectrum, from brown dwarves to blinding ultra violet hot “Blue Stragglers”.

Horizontally, the distance from the star; the graph gives only a rough idea of the notion of Habitable Zone; in truth the whole point of this essay is that Earth is at the edge of Sol’s Habitable Zone, within 1% of boiling; Habitable Zones narrow as the stars get smaller, and get much larger, far out, around bigger stars.

The life of Earth on the edge has got more dicey in the last 400 million years. Thus the risk of hyper warming is greater than in the Carboniferous Era. By pumping into the atmosphere the equivalent of 100 million tons of CO2, every single day, we are, literally, playing with fire. (A first counter-measure would be to outlaw, through regulations, those gases that warm up the air a lot, and are not indispensable; for example leaks in the pipelines of the USA allow 4% of the CH4 to escape!)
***

The two close calls by large space rocks were a reminder that this is a serious, not particularly friendly universe. Something to meditate carefully.

Those who play apprentice sorcerers with the climate and planetary ecology should pay attention.

For reasons having to do with the periodic table, the frequency of elements and the chemical characteristics of carbon, namely its ability to form many liaisons, it seems likely that life in the universe will have to resemble life on Earth. That is being water, carbon and oxygen based. (Believing that life does not have to be carbon-centric may sound cute, but it’s unreal.)

Thus the habitable zone is the zone around a star where it is neither to hot, nor too cold, and a planet can support water.

Not all stars can have an habitable zone: the greater the mass of a star, the more fiercely it burns. A star with five times the mass of the sun will typically have 625 times the luminosity of the sun.

Why? In small stars, the part of the core hot and dense enough to sustain thermonuclear fusion is relatively small. In large stars, it becomes enormous, and embraces much more of the thermonuclear fuel tank.

For Stars, Mass Is Everything.

Thus, the larger the mass, the shorter the lifespan of the entire system orbiting the star. A star with 60 solar masses will shine only 3 million years before running out of hydrogen. At that point it will run hotter and hotter as it burns heavier elements until it explodes as a super nova. A star of five solar masses will live longer, but still only 100 million years or so. Long enough to make it a tourist destination, not long enough to evolve life (all the more as the habitable zone will migrate out fast, as the stellar furnace gets hotter, fast).

Even a star with only 50% larger mass than the Sun will live only three billion years. On Earth, after that duration, the first oxygen making organisms were appearing, and the atmosphere was going to change completely, from reducing to oxidizing. That would bring the “Snowball Earth” episodes, 600 million years ago, or so, when most of the planet froze, before enough CO2 could be generated to reach the appropriate greenhouse effect.

Clearly, for evolving advanced life, more than a billion years is needed. Thus planets with indigenous life will be restricted to red and yellow dwarves (the sun is one of the latter, with an estimated lifespan of ten billion years before turning ephemerally into a red giant).

The 2012 sci-fi (silly) movie “Battleship” has it right on that point: most of the habitability is found cuddling next to red dwarf stars, so that aliens would be blinded by our sunlight is likely. This also means that life out there has a good probability to have evolved in what, for us, would be rather dim circumstances. Indeed most stars are red dwarves and those are the longest living stars, easily going on for 15 billion years (they use their thermonuclear fuel conservatively).

Some red dwarves could have evolved life, in our Milky Way galaxy, when our sun, a mighty yellow dwarf, did not exist yet. Such stars, with their habitable planets, could still be around.

Being in the habitable zone is necessary for life, but it’s not sufficient.

For example, any planet orbiting too close to its star will lock its orbital rotation and its diurnal rotation (as the Moon has with the Earth). Thus the planet will have one side too hot for life, and the other too cold.

That means that when red dwarves become too small, their habitable zones, get too close, and would-be habitable planet lock down. (Venus, although 100 million kilometers from the Sun is nearly locked: it rotate on itself slower than it does around the Sun.)

The Earth is totally exceptional. She is endowed with a huge satellite that stabilizes her inclination on the orbital plane (Mars’ inclination on the elliptic varies wildly, causing wildly fluctuating super-seasons). This resulting, constant and mild inclination allows the poles to not get too cold, and the tropics, not too warm: it spreads the goodness of sunlight around.

Earth is also a mighty nuclear reactor, providing with the shield of a powerful magnetosphere (Venus does not have any, so its upper atmosphere is scorched by the solar wind), and plate tectonic (allowing for a complex recycling mechanism involving CO2 and long term climate stability).

The present, sort of official, habitability zone theory is 20 years old. It showed that Earth was within 5% of receiving too much warmth from her star. What has been found by the latest study is even more disturbing: Earth is within 1%, 1.5 million kilometers of inhabitability (5 times the Earth-Moon distance).

Earth is, astronomically, at risk of getting too hot, and of suffering a run-away greenhouse, as Venus did.

Long ago, Venus may have been in the habitable zone. However, general main sequence star theory, and observation, show that the Sun has warmed up. Its power output has increased by at least 25% since it got started. So the habitable zone in the Solar System has been slowly moving outward.

Why did the Earth cool over the last 100 million years, if the sun is slowly warming up? It probably has to do with non linear effects related to the geometry of the continents: the continents migrated north, and shallow tropical seas disappeared. The migration of land towards the north augmented the albedo of the Earth (as land stays frozen in summer more easily than sea, ice and snow keep reflecting more sunlight back to space, even then; that’s the core of the two centuries old glaciation theory).

So, as Earth should have warmed up, by a miracle, a sun shade, the glaciated North, was put in place, just in time!

Not all the coolness is due to ice and snow. Earth, before very recent human interference, had long been endowed with a cool climate. It seems that clouds make the difference (the effects clouds bring are too complex to be taken into account in computer programs of habitability at this point).
It’s a double edged sword. Water vapor may bring more clouds, but it is also a mighty greenhouse gas.

Still the point remains that all the objective data show that, our planet is not far, astronomically speaking, from a runaway greenhouse. By keeping on pumping a witches’ brew of greenhouse warming gases in the atmosphere, we are, literally playing with fire. Every day we add nearly 100 million tons, in CO2 alone, in our apparent urge to mimic Venus.

Pumping 450 million years of carbon into the air all of a sudden is not smart: Earth has had plate tectonics from the start, so much of this carbon was sequestered. Now we are freeing huge quantities of it… and in a geological, and biological, snap.

All other things being equal, the Earth is closer to inhabitability through warming than it was 400 million years ago (when the CO2 was very high). Having the same CO2 in the air as in the Carboniferous Era would result in a warmer planet.
To make things worse, there are no plausible technological fixes to too much CO2 in the atmosphere (with existing science and technology; and contrarily to disinformation from the fossil carbon burning fanatics).

In between the high- and low-mass stars lie stars similar to our own Sun. They make up about 15% percent of the stars in the galaxy. Such stars have reasonably-broad Habitable Zones, do not suffer from hard UV irradiation, have lifetimes of the order of 10 billion years. They are the best candidates for harboring planets with indigenous life.

Intriguingly, the three stars of the Alpha Centauri system may harbor life. The system is made of two main yellow dwarves, one slightly bigger, one slightly smaller than the sun. They come as close to each other as Saturn is from the Sun (not close enough to affect each other Habitable Zones directly).

A planet was just detected, grazing the .9 solar mass Alpha Centauri B. (We have the means to find out if the system supports life, but NASA and the Congress of the USA, shut down the projects, in an apparent fit of obscurantist anti-science rage; one of them called the Terrestrial Planet Finder; Alpha Centauri would be reachable with nuclear propulsion.)

The stability of orbits (hence of the Habitable Zones) in the Alpha Centauri system has been debated. Many a stellar system has been found where giant planets have progressively swept the entire system. And we are always one giant comet away from extinction. That could happen in 6 months. And we don’t know, because we are apparently not interested to find out. (Although the mightiest nuke could solve that problem, that would require some preparations.)

Life exists in the cosmos, everywhere, but it’s fragile. Everywhere. Including on so far invincible fortress Earth. Invincible, but still so fragile.

3,000 years after the Greeks elaborated their mythology, we find out that, contrarily to what they guessed, Earth is far from the mother of all what is divine. There are greater powers out there… The worst of them being, potentially, ourselves.

As a star goes up the main sequence, its Habitability Zone moves out. So we should be careful to think we can reconstitute the conditions of the Carboniferous Era, by pumping as much CO2 in the air as there was then, and prosper.

Everything indicates that we will punch straight trough.
***
Patrice Ayme

Violence Ends Worlds

PLUTOCRACY & MAN RUINED WORLDS BEFORE:
Mass destruction everywhere, all over, is how plutocracy makes the public violent and stupid, thus in synch with its rule.
Violence against people readily extends to violence against the environment, and reciprocally.
After all, one of the main reason to not hurt the environment is because, by doing so, people would be hurt. If one is willing to hurt people, one has one less reason to protect the environment. So ecologists should be concerned about the attitude to violence that people have.

VIOLENCE AGAINST THE ENVIRONMENT DID NOT START YESTERDAY, IT’S THE HUMAN THING TO DO. 50,000 years ago, Neanderthal applied the final solution to the Cave Bear problem. Cave bears and Neanderthals competed for the best real estate in Europe, caves. When Cave Bears had to do without caves, against their better instincts, they degenerated, and died off. There was even more a bear of a problem in North America.

Arctodus Simus: Guardian Of The Americas?

The largest Polar Bear (Ursus Maritimus) ever was 1,002 kilograms (killed circa 1800). During the Pleistocene, which ended with the glaciation, 11,700 years ago, there were three gigantic bears: Arctotherium Angustidens in South America, Arctodus Simus in North America and the Cave Bear Ursus Spelaeus (the largest Ursus species) in Europe (that one was eliminated by 27,000 BCE). These bears are among the largest terrestrial mammalian carnivores that ever lived. The first two were dedicated meat eaters, and could reach up to two metric tons.

Arctodus Simus, long limbed, made for running, cruised as fast as 70 kilometers an hour. It could fight off Saber Tooth cats for the kills. Those giant bears specialized in terror supremacy. Those bears, and other terrible predators guarded the Americas (North America had more than half a dozen species of huge predators). That profusion of man eating monsters is why Australia, much harder to reach by sea, was invaded 40,000 years before the Americas. Those bears had only one thing to fear, man. They kept man off the Americas until man invented weapons advanced enough to kill them, and go south from Behringia, under the cover of climate change.

Why those ursine species did not invade Eurasia, whereas the European Brown Bears (“Grizzlies”) did invade the Americas seems rather mysterious, until one realizes that Neanderthals and their colleagues had long modified, and controlled, the Eurasiatic ecosystem. Grizzlies were compatible with man (and are delicious to eat), whereas the giant meat eating bears were not.
***

HUMAN INDUCED CLIMATE CHANGE: 11,700 YEAR OLD, EXPLODING NOW
After bioengineering many domestic animals, and creating new “cultivars”, or plant species (best example: corn), our ancestors had to cut trees… And kill lions. Studies have shown, and logic imposes, that lions and the like used to dominate the megafauna in total biomass, as a lion could survive on anything, from rabbit to elephant. American, and European lions were larger than the large North African lion (extinct for a century).

The end result was millions of cattle making methane, millions more than there would have been otherwise, and the climate warmed up relative to what it should have been (some specialists say that this Neolithic methane prevented a return of the glaciers to a great extent). More methane meant less glaciers, in turn more CO2 released through melting permafrost, etc.
This may explain why the CO2 density has been long out of control:

Homo Explodes CO2 Chart: We Are Now ~ 450 ppm!

When people got to Australia, it was a massacre: the megafauna was quickly eliminated, leaving only kangaroos behind.
Conclusion: man has been violently modifying the environment for a very long time, we are in the Anthropocene.
***

WITHOUT PROGRESS, DELIBERATE, MEANINGFUL CHANGE, THE WORLD GETS OLD:
However, people did not get necessarily get away with it: in many places of the Middle Earth (Whatever can be reached from the Middle East within a few months of travel by Neolithic means, i.e. from Britain to India) cutting the trees accelerated, or even created desertification. Egypt is case in point (!). This was well known by the times of the Romans.
The Romans could see the mines getting exhausted, so they ran out of metals for their currency (currency crisis of the Third Century), and even for their weapons (metal crisis of the Seventh Century). After the Muslim attack, the Roman emperor came to Rome one summer to supervise the removal of metal from all the roofs of Rome to melt it, and make weapons of massive Muslim destruction.
Romanitas survived thanks to the metallic flame throwers of the Romans. Once, up to 2,000 Muslim ships were burned, as they sieged Constantinople. As late as the Tenth Century, a flame throwing Roman fleet coming from Constantinople, destroyed a Muslim fleet in the gulf of Saint Tropez, as a Frankish army, in a well coordinated pincer, eliminated the emirate Muslims had perfidiously established in Provence, so as to raid and ransom, all the way to Switzerland.

Meanwhile the Franks had invaded Eastern Europe, Rome’s unrealized dream. There the Franks got enough silver for making a currency again (China, having had drastic inflation & counterfeit from paper money would get silver for its own currency from Potosi, Bolivia, through the Philippines’ Spaniards, eight centuries later; paradoxically, by then the greatest European powers had reintroduced paper money for centuries, as their states were as strong as the 7C Tangs, who did use paper money!).

The cities of Sumer, at the root of (“Western”) civilization, were ecologically devastated. First there was salination (from too much sweet water usage), then deforestation in the Zagros and in the mountains around the Fertile Crescent caused an apocalyptic flood (the famous flood in the Bible). What had been civilization got covered by water, horizon to horizon.
Another famous (mostly) manmade disaster is the drought that put an end to the Mayan civilization. We now know that there was enormous environmental stress. The Mayans had run out of their preferred tree for construction: they used less and less mature specimen, until they had to switch to species that were not as good. The Mayans’ agricultural system depended upon the high technology of an enormous network of artificial lakes and canals. As the drought proceeded, that system failed, while war took over.
***

DARK FUTURE WITH COAL, THUS PERFECT FOR THE DARK SIDE:
Clearly a similar mechanism threatens us today: we need, desperately, more advanced technology. The only thing that can save the seven billions is more advanced technology, massively deployed. Thorium reactors are an obvious opportunity.
Right now, we do NOT have to proceed with coal. Anymore. British leaders were debating getting out of coal, exactly a century ago. Now leaders, everywhere, and especially the developing world, have decided to develop coal big time. In a few years, it will become, again, humanity ‘s main source of energy! Thus we will carry the sins of the Kyoto accord.
So what is going on? These leaders are actually plutocrats. They are not just leaders. They are rich, powerful, and nasty. They develop coal because they find natural to be nasty, as nastiness is the most distinctive quality that fostered their ascent. But it goes further than that. More nastiness deployed even makes them feel good about themselves, and the most developed quality they have, nastiness, showing them that nastiness is the force that moves the world.
***

THE DARK SIDE TOOK OVER ROME, PERFIDIOUSLY:
The fascist Roman empire imposed himself in a sneaky fashion. First there was a genocide against Carthage, one of the worst genocides known. It put an end to a civilization that was, in several ways, the world’s most advanced (in navigation and agriculture). Then the republican Greek city-states were exterminated (Corinth), or terrorized into abject obedience, after losing their independence. At that point, the plutocrats had to destroy the republic in Rome itself, and that is what happened in the following 130 years.
After this, the republic was not formally gone. Augustus did not make the mistake of his great Uncle Caesar, of violating tradition too far by making himself dictator for life (a notion all too close to the kings that Caesar had imposed all over Gaul, to the rage of the local Gallic Senates, causing in turn the great revolt against Caesar). Augustus called himself Princeps (First Man). First man in the Senate (and thus Rome).

Augustus’successors could only survive by augmenting the fascism, and the plutocratic index. The plutocrats around the emperor played a central role, and are always found in all tyrannies. Cultivating a small clique of “grands du royaume” buttressed the Princeps ( “grands”,as they were called in France: the Greats of the kingdom = plutocrats). These were of course the barons in England (with whom William conquered England, and their descendants) and the retinue of the “electors” in Germany (as the Frankish emperor was elected).

This was particularly obvious in the case of emperor Domitian (circa 80 CE), when we have actually reports of major conversations of the plutocrats around a dinner table, one of them the emperor, and they waxed lyrically that any of them could be the ultimate boss, and that those of their colleagues they had killed before, due to some conspiracies, had they not killed them, would naturally find their place again, and enjoy that meal with them.
The philosopher in chief, under Domitian, was Domitian himself, though. Those who disagreed with him, were, obviously, very bad, even dangerous, philosophers, and the sanction was death. Domitian exaggerated a bit, though. He rewarded some for their philosophy, and then eliminated them. Domitian progressively lost touch with his fellow plutocrats, so they send a professional assassin to have a picturesque fight to death with him in his bedroom.
Under the Antonine emperors that Gibbon admired so much, philosophers reached a pinnacle of power never seen before, or since. Most of them were Greek, some were billionaires, all said what the emperors, and the fascist-plutocratic structure supporting them, wanted to hear.
***

ROME & ATHENS CONTRADICTED THEIR RISE’S PHILOSOPHY, SO CRASHED:
A central tenet of the philosophy of fascist-imperial Rome was the exact opposite of what had allowed Rome to rise.
The rise of Rome was technological. Rome was first a melting pot, founded on equal opportunity. that equal opportunity made it an irresistible army, of citizens-soldiers, and that army, in turn, very pragmatically, favored technological innovation, by whatever means.
An example: Rome found itself at war with the greatest power in the western Mediterranean, Carthage. Carthage ruled the sea, her navigators had gone around Africa, and she brought, by sea all kinds of goods, from Black Africa, Gaul, Britain. Carthage ruled the seas, with the world’s most advanced ships.
The Romans captured one of them, and copied it . Within a few months, unbelievably, they built a fleet. The sailors were trained on the rocky soil, in fake triremes. They were declared sailors, and the Consul who had built the fleet, was declared to be an admiral. They sailed away. A Carthaginian fleet sank them all.
Never mind. The Romans built another fleet, paying more attention to detail. Soon they invented a device, the Corvus (=Crow), that could rotate around, and allowed to disgorge the redoubtable, hyper trained legionaries on the decks of the enemy. Carthage sank.
Amusing exploits. Demosthenes had incited Athens to engage in a private-public program to build a war fleet to fight Persia. That was done, and brought the tremendous victory of Salamis, just off the shore in Athens that ended up the efforts of the savage orient to conquer the West for 2,000 years. However, doing so, all the magnificent primary forest of Attica was razed, and never grew back, modifying irreversibly the climate, and making Athens even more vulnerably dependent upon Black Sea wheat. That is, Athenian food supply came from a very great distance, the kind of vulnerability many countries have nowadays. It forced Athens to conduct an aggressive military policy, constructing an empire that extended from Egypt to Byzantium and beyond.
In turn, that empire made Athens increasingly nasty. Within two generations, that nasty spirit, and its fragile far flung extent, became Athens undoing. Athens collapsed morally first, as she engaged in a pattern of war crimes (among them: attacking Syracuse out of the blue, annihilating an island’s population, etc.).
Here to define war crimes, I use Nuremberg, 1945. Some will say that I make an anachronism. However, not so. The roots of Nuremberg 1945 were planted 2,550 years earlier. Reading many texts of the period, and a century earlier, when republican, democratic Athens was created, is revealing. The Nazi like mood that seized Athens around 450 BCE, would have looked horrendous to some of the creators of its democracy (such as Solon), a century earlier, around 550 BCE (Solon was so disgusted by Athens after installing its democracy that he left for ten years to get better ideas, and visited Egypt, among other places).
Thus we see that, not paying attention to the ecology, even for the best reason (wasting Attica to build a war fleet to defend against fascist Persia), can lead to ill conceived, unsustainable empire (the Athenian empire rested on too small a population of Athenians), and then survived just by amplification of nastiness. When a besieged, starving Athens had to surrender to the coalition of Greek city-states, it’s (Persian financed) Sparta that saved it from the vengeance the other cities wanted to visit it with; some of its own medicine, annihilation.
That is why the moral drift in the USA leadership, ever since navy brass, and the dying Roosevelt became best friend with Ibn Saud, or blatant even earlier, when the USA declared Britain and France to be “belligerent” in 1939, and sanctioned them, is so dangerous. That’s how civilization dies.
Athens recovered, but not enough before the goons from the north, the Macedonians, the lovers of horse, Philippe and his son, with their own retinue of major plutocrats (Antipater, for example) could take over all of Greece.
Athens, and the other Greek city-states, ultimately rose successfully against Macedonia. But that was the help of Roman legions. By then the plutocrats were too powerful in the Roman Senate, and they made sure that the Social Revolution in Corinth was crushed. The new philosophy was sustainable fascism, plutocracy desired.
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ROME COLLAPSED MORALLY FIRST, ECOLOGY FOLLOWED LATER:
So what happened under the Antonine emperors? The philosophers, and other Romans observed, as they said, that “the world was getting old”. Namely there were ecological disasters all over. The economy was becoming more difficult to operate, and command and control would be imposed within 150 years, as precious metals ran out. 300 years later, after the Franks had been unable to stop them, the vandals would seized North Africa, and so doing, starved all of Italy.
Could have Rome been spared that ominous fate? Well, yes, by more advanced technology, which could have been deployed (primitive steam engines existed, and Papin made a steam engine boat, in the 17th Century, using roughly the same metallurgical expertise; there is no doubt that the Romans could have made the same). But the Roman emperors deliberately blocked advanced tech.
The emperors, ill advised, thought that higher technology would increase unemployment.
That myth is entertained to this day. See Krugman’s December 9, 2012, editorial in The New York Times: Robots and Robber Barons. technology has taken a turn that places labor at a disadvantage… About the robots: there’s no question that in some high-profile industries, technology is displacing workers of all, or almost all, kinds. can innovation and progress really hurt large numbers of workers, maybe even workers in general? I often encounter assertions that this can’t happen. But the truth is that it can, and serious economists have been aware of this possibility for almost two centuries. The early-19th-century economist David Ricardo is best known for the theory of comparative advantage, which makes the case for free trade; but the same 1817 book in which he presented that theory also included a chapter on how the new, capital-intensive technologies of the Industrial Revolution could actually make workers worse off, at least for a while — which modern scholarship suggests may indeed have happened for several decades.
The debate is nothing new: Aristotle argued that, having no robots, civilization needed slaves, to do the work. The entire Greco-Roman civilization operated upon the bedrock of this completely idiotic assumption. And died from it.
So the emperors argued that, unemployment being a chronic Roman catastrophe, and people needing to work, the machines had could have alleviated work should not be constructed. That sorts of logic looks good, but it’s wrong at every turn. Unfortunately variants thereof presided to the making of the Kyoto Treaty.
All what happened was that Parthian arrows, fired from powerful double curvature composite Mongol bows, started to go through Roman armor, and that cataphracts terrorized the Roman army. Pathetically, in the end, the Romans adopted those military techniques… more than five centuries after suffering the devastating defeat of Carrhae from them.
What was the truth?
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UNEMPLOYMENT AS A PLUTOCRATIC DEVICE:
In truth, unemployment was caused directly by the plutocracy that ruled Rome, it was a deliberate strategy. Unemployment empowers plutocracy. An unemployed man is impotent, and feels completely unworthy: after all, he is no use whatsoever. How could he be trusted to make a revolution? Let alone to vote? Another advantage is that unemployment means that the plutocracy lives off globalization, distant workers, who do the job, but can be cut off anytime, and replaced by others safely. That is why Rome, and then Italy got increasingly deprived of employment and even army under the fascist empire, culminating with the removal of the capital to Byzantium, by Constantine, to make Constantine-polis, Constantinople. To make sure, Constantine also removed the entire Roman metaphysics and tradition, by imposing Christianity.
When the Franks took control, they decreased the fascist index (the kings were elected, and the function was not hereditary, and women could reign), and they decreased the plutocratic index (sons were supposed to inherit equally and daughters would do, if there were no sons). Then the Franks formally outlawed slavery (~650 CE).
Outlawing slavery, that is, cheap labor, meant technology and science had to advance. It did. Countless tech advances occurred within a few centuries: heavy draught horse, bioengineered protein rich beans, water and wind mills all over. Frankish architecture (now known as “Gothic”), hydraulic presses, gravitational and spring clocks soon followed.
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PLUTOCRACY IS BACK! IT HAPPENS ALL THE TIME:
We are in a very similar situation nowadays, to the decay that corrupted Rome.
The plutocratic phenomenon has blossomed again. The banking sector has been taken over by bandits. This is very grave: in the Roman, Frankish, Tang, and other various Chinese empires, it was the state that created money. In the modern state, starting with the Italian republics of the Middle Ages, it has been the bankers that the state mandated to create money, through credit. So now the money creating system is corrupt, and the political, and even judicial class attached to them, is also corrupt.
Proof? All over the papers, everyday. Even inside the Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2012, the most incredible dialogues among plutocrats and crooks, about manipulating interest rates, and meeting back on their yachts to laugh it off, while exchanging 6 figures gifts.
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LARGEST PLUTO CRACTY EVER, LARGEST CRIME SYNDICATE, EVER:
Then there was the case of drug laundering by HSBC, a British based world bank. It showed the drug war is a very bad joke played upon the gullible public. Assistant Attorney General and longtime Bill Clinton pal Breuer is another of these plutocratic enabler who obviously expect to be well rewarded some more.
“Breuer this week signed off on a settlement deal with the British banking giant HSBC that is the ultimate insult to every ordinary person who’s ever had his life altered by a narcotics charge. Despite the fact that HSBC admitted to laundering billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels (among others) and violating a host of important banking laws (from the Bank Secrecy Act to the Trading With the Enemy Act), Breuer and his Justice Department elected not to pursue criminal prosecutions of the bank…”
This is another case of international plutocracy at work, the largest criminal enterprise ever.
I say this after considering very carefully the involvement of JP Morgan, Henry Ford and company with various fascist movements, some of them genocidal, in the period 1920 to 1945; although the extent of genocide is lower, by an order of magnitude, so far, with WWII, with only a bit more than six millions or so assassinated in Africa, the intricacy, extent and penetration of world financial, economic, political and informational systems is unprecedented. (I have said this long ago.)
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IGNORING NUCLEAR ENERGY IS BEYOND GROTESQUE:
Nuclear energy is around one million times more energetic than any other energy source. So it’s the future, and it will allow to conquer the solar system, and go the stars.
Nuclear energy is intrinsically clean. It exploits decay, so its waste disappear quickly: nuclear waste becomes less radioactive over time. After 50 years, 99.1% of radiation is gone. This is in sharp contrast with coal. Arsenic, mercury and other chemicals that are stable, forever poisonous are released burning coal: under our eyes, the oceans and the Arctic are made too poisonous for life, and all what idiotic environmental NGOs can talk about is how bad nuclear is!
Well, if the Plutonium based 1950s nuclear tech is so bad, push for other nuclear technologies! Thorium comes to mind. But the first giant Thorium reactor will be ready in a decade or so. it will be made in China, of course.
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KYOTO, AN ERROR IGNORING THE MIGHTIEST ENERGY SOURCE:
The Kyoto accord decided that emissions of CO2 would be reduced after a while to 1990 levels. So far, so good. But then it was decided that the most developed countries, in other words, the West, would bear the burden, all the burden. On the ground that they caused the mess. In other words, those who set the fire would extinguish it, while those who did not could go right ahead with a new conflagration. The USA refused to ratify that unwise injustice. The Europeans, who have a long history of self flagellation, ever since they roasted most of the Jews, signed on greedily, and, glutton for punishment as they are, are suffering indigestion ever since. Now China emits three times more CO2 than all of Europe. And many times that in arsenic, mercury, etc.
Denmark gives renewable lessons to all, and depends more crucially on burning carbon than basically any other country. New burn factories are under construction. (On the positive side, this is self limiting, as most of Denmark will soon go below water, including all the Do-goodism.)
Why all the burning fires? Because of Kyoto’s most vicious flaw. Kyoto, and a later annex, Marrakesh, held that nuclear energy was an enemy. The Marrakesh Accords state:”Recognizing that Parties included in Annex I are to refrain from using credits…generated from nuclear facilities to meet their commitments under Article 3, paragraph 1″ .
However, this all hogwash. Out of say 100 different potential nuclear energy methods, the only one used is the military one, the U235-Plutonium cycle.
Conclusion? The do-gooders fanatically anti-nuclear ecologists are bringing back coal. Within a few years, after an eclipse of a 100 years, COAL WILL AGAIN BE the world’s main energy source. Most of the ecologists who were influential in the last quarter century should get their heads examined, because the return of coal is their work.
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NO PROGRESS, NO LIFE:
Fascist imperial Rome refuted technology. Thus progress. However any human society, since the Pleistocene is as if on a bike: it cannot stand still without crashing. Why? Because resources get exhausted, they always have, they always will (Malthus wrote nearly 5,000 years after Sumer flooded, from deforestation, so Malthus was right, but his were old news).
Technological progress is an ecological stabilizer.
Intelligence evolved because it enables to manipulate the world in a self serving way. In the war against the plutocratic phenomenon, what is in play is the meaning of self. And intelligence itself: the selfishness of the plutocrats is not just self serving, is afflicted with lethal shortermism. Why? because more is different.
Plutocracy is related to fascism, in particular intellectual fascism, where only a few ideas, a few moods, and a few people lead. That’s why Rome got increasingly stupid: any new intelligent discourse is specialized, it’s a techno (special)- logy (discourse). By refuting technology, Rome did not just refute progress, it refuted intelligence.
Nietzsche famously founded his philosophy on the “eternal return of the same”. Nothing could be more false; everywhere we look, however far in the past, long ago, in galaxies further than we can see, there is change, tremendous dynamics at works. We cannot go back to the past, we can only forge a sustainable future. And that means using force, and we have more force at our disposal than ever before, but, paradoxically, not enough yet to put the world on the right track.
Shooting at each other all day long to see who the good guys are, as the NRA and its fellow plutocrats are suggesting, is certainly not the way. Nor is the return to coal, more devastating than anything but outright thermonuclear war.
We are facing the greatest ecological and energy crisis ever, just when plutocracy is heating up. What to do? Full speed ahead with new technology, based in the deepest new science, and that goes all the way to throttle up in more advanced philosophy.
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Patrice Ayme

Independence From What?

INDEPENDENCE FROM THE TRIBAL INSTINCT WOULD BE A GOOD THING!

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July 4th, anniversary of the Declaration Of Independence of the USA from the UK in 1776. Much change then, a slow sinking now. Deep thinking would be the way out, but that would require some effort.

Some deplore that the trust in the political system is gone. But that the trust is gone is actually a good thing. We cannot trust a system where a few lead hundreds of millions, if not billions. It was bound to lead to disaster. It did. And what we have seen so far is small potatoes. The best is yet to come. I am watching Actic ice everyday. Still tracking lower than the previous lowest.

Even if and when the few leaders come from the People, and especially if they come from the People, one should not trust. Because the less power where they come from, the greedier they are, and thus, the more eager to be bought. Watch Clinton, Bill: obviously in need of wider recognition always, as those who started so small, they feel small always, and so need to pile up the hundreds of millions, just to feel OK about themselves.

Within two weeks of the lifting of his presidential immunity, an armada of police, bailiffs and no less than three judges, descended on three places of residence and work of Nicholas Sarkozy. A good thing. Whereas Obama begs the hyper wealthy for money in full sight of the uncomprehending American people, it would be impossible anywhere else.

In France financing by the hyper wealthy under the table is frowned upon by the law. Judges suspect that Sarkozy got, under the table, what Obama gets in two hours every time he shows up in the mansions of Silicon Valley, to sit at the tables for all to see, and sleep in all beds… As long as the owner of the mansion forks the money, and brings all her, or his friends, and all these fork the money, too.

Two thousand years ago, any grouping of a few thousands Germans got enraged when someone would proclaim himself a king. Now people venerate a handfull who talk as if they could do all the thinking by themselves, and better, than billions.

Hence we are facing in the American (or French) revolution the reality of a vastly incomplete revolution: Athens, at her apex, had direct democracy (OK, no women, no slaves…). We don’t. Even the Roman republic, in spite of its mixed system, was more directly democratic than we presently are (this is not a poetic opinion: it can be quantified, according to how many people were represented by whom, how, and how long…)

Still, after 5 centuries, the Roman republic fell, to be replaced by the Roman plutocracy (aka ‘the empire”, or “Principate” as Augustus preferred to say…)

We have democratic institutions to help, true (such as a humanized, republicanized, and constitutionalized army). And these democratic institutions, missing in Athens, do, indeed, help. But they are not enough. Actually, it’s good to remember that these institutions started in Rome, with a very efficient administration, but that, once again, they were not enough.

The incapacity to stop the devastation of the biosphere, or the devastation caused by the rampaging financial sector, are proof enough that Pluto is taking over.

How bad is it? Very bad. We are experiencing a Greater Depression. Only appearances are doing better than in the 1930s, but some of the most important statistics are worse. See: Greater Depression.

The Greater Depression in Europe is so severe that the birth rate is severely collapsing. As a French thinker put it in the 19C: ‘demography is destiny’.

Therein the American Declaration Of Independence: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” Well, as it turned out, the frontier was soon extended to the ocean, and the “merciless Indian Savages” are now probably destroying the sea, with all its ages, genders, conditions…

This snippet of the declaration of independence is deeply disturbing, because it exhibits colossal insensitivity to Peoples who were just trying to survive to the destruction of their own world, while outrageously turning the tables on them, by claiming that they were undistinguished destroyers (while presumably the authors of the declaration were the distinguished destroyers). After all, it is cities such as Boston which paid money for scalps. A pattern was set in stone: accuse them of what you do, and call them savages. That mood has been much amplified today.

The Declaration of Independence of 1776 was just a rebellion, not a Revolution. The Revolution, that is the new Constitution of the republic, was established in 1789, within months of its French equivalent (that was to establish a constitutional monarchy headed by that great revolutionary, Louis XVI). The French constitution gave the right of vote to all (men), and outlawed slavery. it went further than anything Antiquity had known. Not so clearly in the American one (which refused the right of vote to individuals without enough property, contrarily to Rome).

It is only from the astounding agitation, encouragement, and giant financial and military support of Louis XVI that the American rebellion succeeded. Otherwise, the USA would have been the southern extension of Canada… That would have had advantages: France and Britain would have stayed masters of the planet (together, as it was, they defeated both China and Russia in the 19C).

Fascism, Prussian style, with its racist component would not have had a chance to rise in a world dominated by France and Britain (be it only because the Rothschilds had a firm grip on both sides, let alone Germany, ha ha ha). There would have been no “French revolutionary” and “Napoleonic” wars. No WWI, no Auschwitz (as the enormous resources of UK + Canadized USA +France + Louisiana would have crushed fascism outright. A non racist Austro-Hungary would have been an example of multi-national state, etc…

The British Parliament narrowly approved the expulsion of France out of Canada, although at the time many in the Parliament screamed to high heavens that was a terrible mistake, that would lead to the creation of the USA. Indeed France quickly returned the favor with the creation of the USA. So now what? Everybody should urgently recap the foundations of civilization…

Civilization is not founded on the market as some of the deranged economists whose thoughts presently reign have tried to make us believe. Watch Obama setting up free market exchanges to solve the health care problem, as if it were the job of markets to care about care! But Obama learned by rote that markets solve all, so he has now profit for solving care. What’s next? Selling babies to those who pay more, because that’s got to mean that, since they profit more, they care more?

Civilization is not just founded on the free market profit motive. Look at the Higgs particle, the discovery of which was announced today in Geneva, at CERN.

CERN was founded, and persists, as one of these typically French gigantic state institutions to foster human understanding with lots of taxes. CERN the Centre Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire has been a gigantic success, discovering a lot of new science, while establishing new technology.

The free market does not do it all! Brains are deeper!

The idea of such democratic institutions, as I said, directly spring from a mood inherited from Rome. But a difference is that Rome did not do research. Rome knew one had to have a society motivated by more than the profit motive. The republican and democratic motives were viewed as more important, and that is why Rome set a powerful army and administration.

But Rome had forgotten curiosity and to institutionalize the Will to Knowledge. Europe did not. There is only so much tribalism can do.

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Patrice Ayme

Deflating BIG BANG’s Inflation.

A BIG NOISE DOES NOT BIG SCIENCE MAKE.

Abstract: The Big Bang cosmological model is possibly completely false. It depends alarmingly upon the speed of expansion of the universe, assuming that, for reason and mechanism unknown, it was, at some point, for some convenient duration, trillions of trillions of times the speed of light. Or maybe not.

I give also a few other reasons to throw cold water on the Big Bang.

Geometrically the Big Bang assumes that it is “turtles all the way down”. Yet, Quantum Physics, properly interpreted, gives us reasons to think otherwise. Especially after integrating the latest experimental results on the apparent singularization of Quantum waves (2011). (If that gets confirmed, singularization is the greatest discovery in Quantum Physics since 1924: Louis De Broglie would be right, and Niels Bohr, wrong. I have always believed in singularization.)

It is unfortunate that this activity, Big Bang physics, has been all too much celebrated as the greatest success of the human spirit, and scientific rigor. I will try to show below that it is closer to mythology than to proper science. Although my reasons below are deep and cogent, it is clear that even the masses have some intuitive doubts about scientists who seem all too sure about the grandest scheme of things. Having Hawking telling us about ”A Short History of Time“, when nobody knows what time is, is not conducive to respect.

No wonder that, with such a model as the Big Bang brandished all the time as science much to admire, and presumably to emulate, all too many people feel that with science, anything goes. And thus, as often found in the USA, in a further identification, that anything goes is science. So to each its own. And next thing you know, fundamentalists pop up in every backyard.

On the positive side, Big Bang madness gives an opportunity to illustrate the fact that the topology of the space of all theories is not connected (if a single one of a few hypotheses Big Bangists make casually, is false, the Big Bang theory will completely implode into the nothingness it claims the universe arises from!)

[The essay is technical in parts; readers are invited to imitate Big Bang physicists, and jump over any part they don't understand, to get a feeling for the overall message, which is that Big Bang physics is not science according to the most exacting standards of science… Paradoxically enough for an area with such pretense!]

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A physicist relates in “Turtles all The Way Down?” that he got an interesting email about the Big Bang. Basically the writer said it was obvious mythology, and the physicist insisted it was not so: “The writer said she didn’t see how you could make something out of nothing. She collects creation myths and thought that, no matter how you sliced it, it’s always “turtles all the way down.” This is a reference to creation myths where the world is poised on top of a turtle, which is itself poised on top of something else, but raises the issue: Is there any firm ground?

This is worth addressing because it illustrates the gulf between the understandings in people’s minds about the Big Bang on one hand, and how physicists deal with it on the other. To be clear – we have a wealth of observations that support the Big Bang, but you have to be careful. We can only look back into the universe to a moment 300,000 years after the ‘start,’ as best we can discern it. At this early moment, the universe went from being opaque to transparent… The remnant photons from this time are seen as the so-called cosmic microwave radiation “

The later pontificating affirmation depends upon the common wisdom interpretation of the 3 degree Kelvin Cosmic Microwave Radiation as photons from the Big Bang explosion. Well, that’s mostly an hypothesis. For example, if photons, just as neutrinos (long thought to be massless), turn out to have a non zero rest mass, that hypothesis will be out of the window.

Those cosmic microwave photons are supposed to be cosmically distended, and thus weakened, by the expansion of their wave packets from the cosmic expansion of space, the later itself depending upon the Big Bang model. This is just a supposition, albeit a crucial one. In other words, the Big Bang model is eerily reminiscent of a house of cards of mutually supporting assertions: turtles all the way down in a mutually supporting circle.

I will argue that it looks all too much as a vicious circle to be used as a way to illustrate what science is. Science is about establishing iron clad proofs, not wishful thinking with proofs depending upon what they want to demonstrate (which is all what the interpretation of cosmic photons as big bangers is).

Reconciling models with data sounds reasonable. That is what is done in most of science. However it is not scientific, if the models have nothing to do with reality to start with. If the model is angels on a pinhead, no amount of tweaking of the model, will get it right.

This is related to a much more general problem, that of the distance between systems of thought (which is all what “models” are). If models are too far from each other, they cannot morphed into each other.

When Darwinian style models were unable to explain ultra fast adaptative evolution, epigenetics had to be invented.

The greatest discovery in cosmology since the discovery of the expansion has been the fact that it proceeded at an accelerating pace. That was not predicted by the main stream cosmology.

It was pointed out by De Sitter (1917), Friedman (1924) and Lemaître (1927) that the Einstein gravity equation described an expanding universe (none of these scientists were American).

The work of a number of astronomers, culminating with Hubble, confirmed the expansion later: the visible universe was dynamic. As an homage to American hegemony, Lemaître’s law came to be known as Hubble Law. Never mind that Hubble himself as late as 1936, did not believe in the Big Bang finding weird the “anomaly of a curiously small and dense and… suspiciously young universe”. Besides the injustice, it introduces a flaw in the logical flow of discovery.

When it became obviously confirmed that distant galaxies were receding, and the further, the faster, Einstein proclaimed his “greatest blunder”, that of having introduced a “Cosmological Constant”, precisely to imply a static universe.

The Einstein gravity field equation was built to reflect Riemann’s 1854 idea on the nature of force. That came out of his  Habilitationsschrift entitled Über die Hypothesen welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen (“On the hypotheses which underlie geometry“), a remarkable essay that contained just one equation (if that). Riemann observed that acceleration could be described by geodesics behavior, whether they came together, or separated. Thus force could be so described.

Basically, applied to gravity, that meant the gravity equation ought to be: curvature of spacetime = mass-energy of spacetime.

However Quantum Physics was discovered meanwhile. It says that energy travels in packets (Planck 1900-Einstein 1905). Yet, those packets are computed by waves (De Broglie 1923).

In other words, it was not turtles all the way down. At some point, the turtles turn into waves.

Einstein’s gravity equations did not incorporate matter, in a detailed way, that is, Quantum Physics. When some Quantum Field Theory ideas were introduced a bit (Zeldovich, before 1973, “Hawking radiation“, 1974), it turned out that, after all, Black Holes evaporated (contrarily to what Michell (1784) and Laplace (1796), discoverers of the idea of Black Holes would have expected to be ever possible in the slightest way).

But much more needs to be done: except when wave packets have collapsed, matter is all waves. The exact nature of these waves is unknown. Recent Quantum experiments, using “weak measurements” apparently exhibit waves-with-singularities, the picture De Broglie himself had proposed to go further than the Copenhagen Interpretation of de Broglie’s work.

Should something like the Big Bang make sense, the exact mathematical nature of the matter waves, and how to accommodate those singularities would have to become paramount. (As the purported  confirmation of the singularities was published on June 2, 2011 in Science magazine, the depth of these considerations will take some time to reach the society of cosmologists… After all it took more than 40 years to realize that the time-energy uncertainty implied Black Hole evaporation, which should have been immediately obvious!)

Back to our cosmological theory timeline. Time passed. Gamow made fun of the notion of everything coming out of a point, calling it the “Big Bang“. However, the Cosmological Cosmic Background was found at 3 Kelvin, a remnant, it was suggested of said explosion.

That ruled out the Steady State Cosmology, it seemed.

Yet, when regions distant by more than light can travel, they were found to be the same, as if the universe had always been there.

So some physicists postulated that the universe had expanded faster than light by an enormous factor. That was called inflation, caused by a non observed “inflaton field“.

Indecipherable reasonings were rolled out to claim that the mass-energy uncertainty inequality could be made to fabricate matter and energy, as needed. Indecipherable: indeed, a point of infinite density does not make sense in Quantum Physics (which basically insists that there are no points). And never mind that the new Big Bang, cosmological inflation looked exactly like Hoyle’s Steady State theory, after all (as Hoyle himself pointed out to a frosty reception in 1994).

The Big Bang reasonings are full of major assumptions whose proofs are justified by the end, namely the Big Bang, truly a beginning (as found in the Bible?).

For example, how do we know that cosmological photons do not, in some sense, simply age, producing thus the 3 Kelvin background? How do we know that, if the universe can expand so incredibly fast at some point, it could not expand incredibly slow, at some other point? Or even shrink for a while, in a recession, before resuming inflation?

For that matter we do not know why, at this point, the universe is expanding ever faster. Or is it just here?

And what is the evidence that a universe can be created out of nothing? Stanford’ s professor Linde, one of the originator of the inflation cosmology, has been writing articles where he creates universes all over, all the time. There is zero evidence for that.

(There was a whole school of Soviet physicists who, for philosophical reasons, were highly critical of “General Relativity”, starting, correctly with its absurd name; they followed Vladimir Fock 1955 book… which I own. Zeldovich and Linde were among them, they basically discovered much of what was attributed later to Western physicists, to emphasize the glory of plutocratically connected universities!)

Big bang specialists will snarl that I did not mentioned that GUTs (Grand Unified Theories)fit the Big Bang like a glove, so my objection that the Quantum is not integrated in the Big Bang is uninformed.

However, we talk of different things, at different scales. The Big Bang ultimately makes assertions, unsupported assertions, I added, about what is called the Trans-Planckian scale, where Quantum Field Theory breaks down. Conventional Big Bang theory uses basically Riemann’s mathematics from 1854 CE that ignores the waves-with-singularities that the universe is probably made of. That’s fine as a classroom project, it’s not fine as an example of what science can do, or, a fortiori, of what science is.

Big Bang cosmology is not science in the usual meaning of the term. It’s not molecular biology, geology, or material science. Nor mathematics. It’s all too much a bunch of assumptions piled up on top of each other, covered up by ironclad naïve certainty, a contagious illness probably contacted from the Standard Model of particle physics.

Real science demonstrates why Sea Lions and Seals, although they look the same, at first sight, are actually very different, since they evolved from very different ancestors. That illustrates well convergent evolution, when the same mathematics in the environment lead to the same solutions.

Real science demonstrates how stars evolve, going through many stages according to their masses and the nature of the various successive thermonuclear reactions in their core.

Real science explains why life is carbon based, thanks to the wealth of complexities carbon chemistry lends itself to.

Real science explains what happens to cause a tsunami (confirming what Greek philosophers suspected it was, 25 centuries ago).

Big Bang cosmology uses all too finely tuned reasonings unsupported by firm logic or experimental certainty, all over its theoretical landscape. Possibly, it’s completely false. It is unfortunate that this possible complete falsehood is depicted by physicists eager for cheap fame or book sales as the ultimate in science. In its present state, it is the best creation mythology we have, or an amusing project, but little more than that.

Inflated science is poetry, or metaphor. It is not science. Real science is truth. Real science is what’s left when everything else has been exposed as lies. In the case of the Big Bang, among other things, all other possibilities besides the common interpretation of Cosmic Microwave Background, have not been examined in detail, and thus

Real science is what allows planes to fly, not a bunch of lies and exaggerations held together by the thin veneer of self glorification. Scientific poetry, such as the Big Bang, is closer to science fiction, or mythology.

John Huth concludes his essay reasonably with: “We [Big bang cosmologists]fully realize that our models will extrapolate to conditions that raise difficult issues, like infinite densities. More often than not, the difficult conditions are something we avoid talking about, because, largely, we cannot really test or measure these. If it is inaccessible, it is inaccessible. The work can be perhaps more likened to the work of explorers. Our job is to map new territories, and, if anything, we can only report on territories we’ve explored. What lies beyond the horizon is a matter of speculation.
Responses? Questions? Contact me on Twitter @John Huth”

One would wish cosmologists would be that reasonable, all the time, for all to read and hear. How well one has explored, that is the question. For the longest time, explorers reported the strangest things and monsters they had absolutely seen (an exasperated Aristotle dispatched students to go out and faithfully report on all the biology they could rigorously observe). To claim one has seen light from a big boom may be true, but it is not scientifically demonstrated. Yet.

(And that photons do not age seems unlikely to me for reasons I have mentioned in older essays of mine. I am happy to report that Feynman, no less, approved of my considerations when I evoked them.)

One interest of science is to teach how the faith we have in models can be reconciled with evidence. That the distance between models can be insurmountable is an important lesson in the history of thought. No amount of tweaking could bring the geocentric theory close to the correct one, the heliocentric theory. One had to shatter the faith, to realize that yes, quite possibly, planets were turning around the sun: that is what Buridan and his students concluded around 1300 CE, after rolling over Aristotle’s erroneous physics, and introducing the concept of inertia. However, of course, they added perfidiously, ‘scripture‘ said the sun turned around the Earth, so we may as well believe that, since we cannot tell at this point, for sure.

If the distance between models with scientific pretense can be insurmountable, so can it be, for the distances between mentalities (and, in particular, civilizations). That is the core justification of the crackdown secularism had to implement upon murderous superstitions. (The obvious example being the outlawing of the Celtic or Carthagenese religions, to put it intemporally, not wanting to allude to anything having to do with the sects of Abraham… At least today.)

It’s not turtles all the way down, or turtles everywhere. Genuinely different thought systems and mentalities exist. And the way to explore that is by excluding all other possibilities, the way real science does, and the way that, precisely cosmology of the origins does, and cannot do.

Some will cynically argue that, to get funding to launch satellites and other big science projects, one needs pretty stories to charm the infantile minds of politicians. But I will not go down that slippery slope.

The main interest of science is to teach to the obscure masses how to learn to distinguish  truth from fiction. Everything else, however useful, is secondary. To pass a charming fiction such as the Big Bang for a certainty is just the sort of masquerade of the scientific method that genuine scientist will want to eschew.

***

Patrice Ayme

Science Better Accelerate With The Universe

DARK ACCELERATION Of The Universe, QUASICRYSTALS: New Science. NOT ENOUGH TO AVOID COLLAPSE. Yet.

Abstract: The Accelerating Universe is one of the greatest discovery in physics for more than 70 years. It requires new physics to explain it, some sort of anti-gravitation at a very large scale. First established with supernovas, it seems to have been confirmed independently by a galactic survey. “Dark Acceleration” would be a better way to call it than “Dark Energy” (for two reasons: it expands the dark, and we don’t know for sure that it is caused by “energy” in the conventional sense).

This astounding discovery of that the universe is taking off, is typical of how revolutionary science is created. Checking supernovae was just supposed to be routine, a sort of boring science anti-scientists condemn. It was supposed to confirm what the Big Bangists all knew so well: the universe was expanding less fast than in the past, as the Big Bang theory had proven it.

Helas, it was not so! We are faced with something not just unpredicted, but thoroughly unpredictable by conventional physics.

[Some embryonic theories predicted the accelerating expansion, as those I call Dimensional Leakage (they have no official name I know of) and TOW.] 

Revolutionary science is all about finding out the unexpected. Revolutionary science keeps on being found, so we  have faith, we the faithful, the scientists, that much more revoltuionary science has to be found. The Accelerating Universe further bolsters our faith that the present physics with its Standard Model, a noble, useful, fruitful, but naïve and feeble attempt, missed one or more dimensions in the needed logic of what is going on.

How does one find the unexpected? Well, by using the most corrosive logic, propped by the most drastic imagination, and the most careful observations.

The supernova surveys belong to the later, extreme experimental care, and so does the OPERA experiment on neutrinos, and other efforts at CERN. Lesson? All of science has to be funded, if we want to find the unexpectable. Don’t just listen to the fashionable ones. Actually fashionable physics has rigorously not scored for several decades now. It’s not “Not even wrong!“, as physicist pointed out (Their millions of “predictions” are all over the place, so, whatever happened, they said so! Besides, none can be checked!)

Interestingly, the Nobel committee emphasized the point by offering the chemistry Nobel to an Israeli, “for the discovery of quasi-crystals“.

Intelligence is the only thing which can save Israel, and its neighbors, so it is a good indication that the 62 year old nation of seven million got ten Nobel prize winners. This is all the more striking that quasiperiodic patterns are a discovery made by the Islam led civilization, which long controlled Israel and Palestine.

Surviving in this universe we created for ourselves we require us to master the unexpected. So finance the most profitable activity of the government: fundamental research.

When the regime in the USA (the monneyed Congress) cancelled the Super Conducting Super Collider, it saved less than 10% of the bonuses it paid with public money to Wall Street in the first year after the 2008 collapse of deregulated finance.

And what did the Wall Street pirates spent their money on? $40,000 Champagne bottles? Whereas the ever better telescopes use ever better technology which no other human activity requires at this point. $40,000 Champagne has no future, but the new technology used in astronomy does. It could even save our lives (two small asteroids bracketed the Earth this summer, and one of them so close it was severely deflected; the silly ones will say that it does not matter, but if the 1908 bolide had exploded over Wall Street rather than over a desolated part of the Siberian forest, there would have been no more New York).

Let alone all the medical research, say on cancer, which was not financed, because it is $40,000 Champagne which got funded instead. The Medecine Nobel Prize honored progress in immunology. One of the recipients died of pancreatic cancer before the announcement. He had been using his discovery, dentritic immune cells, to activate his own defenses against his cancer. A few days later, the artistic technology integrator of Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, died of the same cancer, after 7 years of a long battle. Some claimed that Jobs got a liver transplant in 2009 that the average job seeker would never have got. So money is never far from it all. There is clearly need for more biomedical research, for those who prefer their lives and those of their loved ones. But who are they, those who care about life? Who are they relative to those, the immense majority, who prefer, by far, seeing 20 something traders  buy a $40,000 Champagne bottle and then cause with it another $50,000 in damage to a restaurant? (That happened in Paris.)

***

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EINSTEIN WAS ALL CONFUSED BY THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE:

I was a bit surprised that the physics Nobel was given for the faster-than-expected expansion of the universe. Not that the discovery was not important. Just the opposite extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs. Clearly the committee decided to encourage research in the area, by making it more prestigious. Inasmuch as our leading politicians seem cowardly, unable to decide anything important, the Nobel committee has adopted the opposite strategy, bold, fully appropriate.

The Accelerating Universe is the most stunning discovery in experimental physics since, perhaps, the accidental confirmation of De Broglie’s matter waves by two American experimentalists. In the case of matter waves, theory (from De Broglie, in conceptual depths never touched before or since) preceded the discovery. Same thing with antimatter (Dirac predicted it).

But the Accelerating Universe was predicted by no prominent theory. It was an experimental find completely outside of standard theory, just as it was the case with neutrinos.

Neutrinos were also very important, because they meant that there was a new interaction at work, the weak force. Before the neutrinos and their weak force, Einstein knew of only two forces: gravitation and electromagnetism. So he said lots of things about space, and time, trying to tie both of the latter, with the preceding two. As if they could have eyes only for each other. Cute. Romantic. (An integrated 5 dimensional theory, Kaluza-Klein integrated both).

However, with the discovery of the weak force, it looked as if adding one, or more, dimensions was lurking in the distance. Einstein was unable to pursue his dream, and it would be taken again, long after his death, by adding dimensions frantically, using the mathematical theory of fiber bundles.

The basic idea of the Einstein gravitational field equation is:

[Curvature of spacetime = Energy (in) spacetime].

(The idea was spawned by Riemann, a generation before Einstein’s birth.) Both curvature and energy are locally defined, so this is an equation at every point, and it has to be integrated to give a geometry of the universe over a sizable bit.)

Just as it is, even in this grossest of approximations, there are a lot of problems with this would-be equation (the right hand side is not well defined, as Einstein himself remarked, and depends upon the left hand side, as I would perfidiously add).

A problem Einstein saw was that, as his equation was, the curvature would be unstable in time: it would either collapse the universe, or then the universe would have to expand. But Einstein came out at night he saw that the stars were not moving: Einstein believed that the universe was static. So Einstein added a little constant on the left hand side of his equation, the Cosmological Constant, k, to prevent the universe to move.

This was a singular example of lack of imagination, because proper motions were first demonstrated by Edmund Halley in 1718 for the three bright stars: Sirius, Aldebaran, and Arcturus. Halley compared his measurements of their positions to those made by Hipparchus of Rhodes (300 BCE). In 2000 years the motions built up to the point that they became apparent to naked eye observers.

One should have suspected galaxies also moved. Not just that, but Hubble, operating with the Hooker telescope at Mt Wilson, next to Los Angeles, then the largest in the world (until 1948, with its 2.5 meters, just 10 centimeters larger than the Hubble Space telescope), soon discovered that distant galaxies were going away from us wherever he looked, and the further they were, the faster they went. [Speed Galaxy = (Constant) (distance galaxy)].

Einstein coquettishly proclaimed his recourse to k, the cosmological constant, the “greatest blunder of his life“. Because otherwise, he pointed out, he would have been able to predict what Hubble found. (I rather think that the greatest blunder of his life was to abandon his family, but that’s just me.)

I am giving all these sordid details to show that scientific inventions are not always what they are cracked up to be, even from the best and brightest. It was a sort-of-a-prediction, because, in all intellectual honesty, Einstein did not know whether the cosmological constant was zero or not, one way or another.

Actually, if he had been really crafty, the way he liked to be crafty, he could have said:”It is possible, considering my cosmological constant can vary all over the place, that the universe will be found to accelerate more or less, like Hubble saw, or even shrink, on an even larger distance, here or there”. So Einstein made the biggest blunder in his life, twice, with his own cosmological constant, by his own weatherwane standards, depending how the cosmic wind was blowing through his brain.

Because an Accelerating Universe was found: type 1a Supernovas at large cosmological distance flee faster and faster from us.

***

POSSIBLE CAUSES OF DARK ACCELERATION OF THE COSMIC EXPANSION:

Of course installing an Einstein’s Cosmological Constant in Einstein gravitational equation is purely descriptive.  Nobody has any certainty about its source. The Cosmological Constant depicts DARK ACCELERATION. I call expansion beyond the Hubble prediction, Dark Acceleration, because we don’t know what it is due to.

People use interchangeably “Dark Energy” and what I call Dark Expansion, but the concepts are different. Dark Expansion is a fact, but it is not necessarily due to “Dark Energy”.

So “Dark Energy” is an abuse of language. Actually there are at least two imaginable mechanisms where Dark Acceleration is not caused by Dark Energy.

The DARK ENERGY idea proposes that somehow energy is injected in space which allows it to expand faster. Imaginable explanations for Dark Energy could be:

VACUUM ENERGY, which has been brandished as the source of the Dark Expansion. In Quantum Field Theory, the vacuum is full of energy. Nobody knows how much. All we know is that there is some energy in the vacuum (we have some indirect theoretical-experimental proofs, and direct measurements such as the Casimir effect). Evocations of “Vacuum Energy” are generally not accompanied of suggestions for a mechanism to expand the universe with it.

What do we observe though? A faster expansion. It could be due to a weakening of gravity at large distances (interestingly, inside galaxies and galactic clusters, gathering of the mysterious Dark Matter makes gravity stronger).

A mechanism to weaken gravity has been proposed by suggesting that space has more than three dimensions, and that gravity, somehow, would be leaking in one or more of these dimensions. One could call it DIMENSIONAL LEAKAGE. Dimensional leakage has also been proposed to explain the possible supraluminal speed of the very high energy neutrinos coming out of CERN (high energy neutrinos would jump into an extra dimension which shortens their trajectory through the “bulk“).

A final explanation for accelerated expansion could be TOW (Totally Objective wave), the author’s pet theory. TOW rests on the idea that its (hypothetic) Quantum Interaction proceeds at absolute speed TAU (more than ten billion times the speed of light!) Even though, the Quantum Interaction is overwhelmed by large cosmological distances: when a graviton, coming from way too far, singularizes itself, it loses part of its energy. Thus, according to TOW, gravity should weaken at large distances (just as light does).

The fact that there is no ready explanation for the Dark Acceleration shows that the hubristic crowd sing-songing on the rooftops about the “end of physics” a while ago, did not have much imagination. (Feynman was told about TOW, and was very appreciative, by the way.) 

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VINDICATED, A RIDICULED SCIENTIST WINS NOBEL:

When Israeli scientist Dan Shechtman claimed to have stumbled upon a new type of crystalline structure that seemed to violate the then known of the laws of nature, his “peers” and some giants of chemistry (Pauling) mocked him, insulted him and exiled him from his research group (“Danny, go away!“). “I was thrown out of my research group. They said I brought shame on them with what I was saying, I never took it personally. I knew I was right and they were wrong.”

Indeed, he just received the 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

The lesson? “A good scientist is a humble and listening scientist and not one that is sure 100 percent in what he read in the textbooks” Shechtman said. I would add that the greater the thoughts, the fewer the peers.

The shy, 70-year-old Shechtman said he never doubted his findings and considered himself merely the latest in a long line of scientists who advanced their fields by challenging the conventional wisdom and were shunned by the establishment because of it. And the greater the idea, the greater the shunning.

In 1982, “Metallic Phase with Long-Range Orientational Order and No Translational Symmetry” by Dan Shechtman et al. demonstrated “Order with No Translational Symmetry”, the key here. Translational symmetry is what Pauling wanted to see, because he learned it in his kindergarten, way back when. That, or no symmetry at all, namely a glass, as Shechtman had expected to find. But Shechtman had serendipitously discovered what are now called “quasicrystals” – atoms arranged in patterns that seemed forbidden by nature…

Although they were clearly authorized in Islamic art since the Middle Ages… which should have been enough of an hint: if even the Islamists allowed them, assuredly their existence could not be denied. True, at that point Islam was very open minded, and early in that “Golden Age”, most of the thinkers were actually not Muslims, but Jews, Zoroastrians, with probably a vast complement of atheist Neoplatonists. Theocratic fascism, as among the Franks, would grow later (and simultaneously with the Franks, as fascists, on both sides, realized that the Bible was an inspirational celebration of holocausts and other injustices that kept on being rewarded in high places, and thus provided business opportunities).

Quasiperiodicity was recorded from an Al-Mn alloy which has been rapidly cooled after melting (which probably means the quasi periodicity is higher energy than full periodicity).

The art in Isfahan (a fantastic city I highly recommend, by the way, not just artistically speaking, but for the presence of immensely old wisdom breathing through the stupendous beauty displayed in mosques and other buildings) showed that quasicrystals were logically permissible. They preceded the work of the British mathematician Penrose by nine centuries, and, definitively constitute the original discovery.

It seems pretty obvious to me that the mere possibility of these, as exhibited in the mosques, did most of the conceptual work. And how could not chemical bonds glue all the atoms all together, once we had showed the quasiperiodic pattern was possible? It’s not quasicrystals which were surprising, but how people could think they could not exist. 

The discovery “fundamentally altered how chemists conceive of solid matter,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said. It redefined the notion of crystal in textbooks. Previously, a crystal had “a regularly ordered, repeating three-dimensional pattern,” according to the International Union of Crystallography. The new definition, adopted in 1992, states that a crystal is any solid with a “discrete diffraction diagram” — that is, something that produces patterns, whatever a pattern is, just as Shechtman saw.

Quasiperiodic tiling, Masjid-e-Jameh, Isfahan

Since Shechtman’s discovery, more quasicrystals have been found. A Swedish company found them in most durable steel, used in products such as razor blades and thin needles made specifically for eye surgery, the academy said. Quasicrystals are studied for use in new materials converting heat to electricity.

They have also been discovered in nature, in a Siberian river. As it seems obvious that they will prevent the propagation of fractures, one may expect to see plenty of quasicrystals in a future near us, except of course, if the banksters devour our civilization first, like they tried last time and the time before that, with their dangerous marionettes.

Quasi periodic structures are all over nature. They depict the subquantum world. Indeed the waves produced by dropping four or more stones into a pond always form a quasicrystal (or more exactly a quasiperiodic pattern), because there is a mathematical theorem saying this. Schechtman was aware of the  theorem, and when he saw the 10 fold quasiperiodicity, he knew.

Matter waves continually interfere, creating quasi periodic existence waves all over.

***

SCIENCE: EVERY BODY’S BUSINESS. OR THE WORLD WILL GET OLD:

We are living in a scientific civilization, whether we like it or not, whether we are superstitious or not. The French ministry of ecology (headed by an experienced politician, a young and charging polytechnicienne who is piling up elected offices) just forbid by decree (executive order) fracking all over France (the National Assembly had already voted in that direction). The reason? Existing techniques have not demonstrated that they were ecologically sound, in the fullness of time. In other words, it was a purely scientific decision.

In the USA, fracking is practiced massively: whether the technique will lead to corruption of the aquifers is of no import, because, as Suskind’s book “Confidence Men” demonstrates, corruption is of the essence, and, now that it owns the White House, it may as well own the dark underground.

The essentiality of serious science is funded by states, as there is no monetary profit in it (learn, Tea Party!). But the science we have is not enough: we will soon be using several times this planet sustainable productivity, so we need to become much more efficient. This can be achieved only by considerable scientific progress, in all domains, from plate tectonics, to material science, to the most esoteric biology, to quantum algorithms, to whatever.

I say “to whatever” because there is no telling where the scientifically and, or, socially important breakthrough will occur.

For example nobody would have guessed that surveying supernovas would smash the hubristic certainty of those prestigious scientists who recited their new religion, the Theory Of Everything, the claim that they, the glorious ones, had figured out the entire universe (just like the proverbial god, before he got to know man). Not by coincidence, the peak of their hubris was around 1998, just when the accelerating universe started to make its presence known.

We are in scientific civilization, thus those who are anti-science are actually anti civilization. This is true even in the fossil fuel industry.

Even that fossil pursuit, trying to keep the fire going, as Homo Erectus already did, a million years ago, is scientific. Ever more primitively scientific, but still scientific, and involving many scientific issues, some potentially disastrous. Hydrocarbon burning is a massive scientific bet that the recombining with oxygen in the air of much of the hydrocarbons buried over 400 million years, will have no serious adverse consequence(s).

The evolving scientific evidence is that the consequences are many, and potentially extremely cataclysmically adverse. But as too many people in the leading countries are trained for superstitious, or sport analogy reasoning rather than scientific reasoning, especially in the USA, nothing much is done: other countries cannot afford to become uncompetitive with the USA and its 10,000 Chinese factories.  

Those who are not pro-science, being anticivilizational, are actually pro-world war, and pro-holocaust.

Should science not jump ahead, very soon, the coming holocaust is easy to compute: soon, on present trends, we will be using more than two sustainable earths, with eight billion people gnawing the shrinking resources (we are 7 billion now). Thus, if we do not augment our science considerably, we will have to cut the world population by half. 

Let’s insist on that point: we are exhausting the existing resources. For example we are well post easy-to-extract peak oil. The only reason we are not past vulgar peak oil, is that we are using increasing energetically expensive (energy is the only currency that counts by itself) and technologically expensive means.

The Romans did the same in their mines, with ever more slaves pushing ever more their primitive digging technology, to its bitter end, devastating the ecology for millennia. And they persisted, until they could not anymore. Exhausted, the mines closed for nearly 2,000 years. The Romans had no plans for that event. Nor did they have plan B.

Rome had been most technologically inventive as a republic. That’s how it vanquished everybody.

Having captured a Carthaginian ship, they, those Roman peasants, reverse engineered it, and made invincible fleets of ships. However as Rome progressively degenerated in the fascist dictatorship known as the Roman empire, innovation was the first victim, as proven by the fact that the Germans and Hellenized Persians became increasingly hard to beat on the open battlefield… because they had superior weapons (in particular, composite bows the arrows of which penetrated Roman armor).

Plutocratic, fascist imperial Rome did not want to understand that it was running out of science, considering the problems it faced. Plutocracy want the people to owe them, and the last thing it wants is to owe the people, and especially ideas! The official line in Rome was just to whine that the “world was getting old“. Rome was running out of resources, among other problems, its ore mines exhausted. When the Muslim army invaded, Rome needed to melt the metallic roofs of Rome to make weapons.

The master problem was of course that Rome was running out of moral, and thus intellectual, supremacy. When one treats one’s engineers, and engineering, badly, one runs out of engineering badly. (Something one can observe nowadays in the USA.) 

A similar shock between the demands of society and insufficient science and technology happened, roughly at the same time, to the Mayas (who confronted a dreadful drought). The Mayan ecology, construction technology, hydrology, agriculture and forestry science, although all sophisticated, and established for centuries, if not millennia, all came all too short, considering the crisis. Plutocracy got all enraged, and fought against itself, the way sharks do when they run out of food, and Mayan civilization imploded.

Science is about what really is, and why. With (more or less great) certainty. Thus science creates models and theories of great explanatory power, which can be emulated in other domains (sometimes simply as metaphors). Science transforms confusion and, or, phenomenological wealth into an harmonious explanatory whole. In other words, it can be inspirational, a leader to democracy, sociology, economy, even literature, poetry, etc.

It would be a dark future without new, really revolutionary science. Quasicrystals and the accelerating universe tell us, with certainty, that much revolutionary science is still to be discovered. Science has to pursue its dark expansion in the unknown, emulating the universe which harbors it. No choice.

***

Patrice Ayme

QUANTUM NON LOCALITY.

ONE & THE SAME, ACROSS THE UNIVERSE.

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Abstract: Why Quantum Physics violates locality. Twentieth-second century primary school version.

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 LOCALITY: What does locality mean? It means that what happens at a point is determined by what is happening in a neighborhood of that point within a small enough distance, as determined by light. Moreover, it means that the universe U is made of points: U = Union points. Points, by definition, are singletons (they have no elements in the sense of set theory), and they have dimension zero: nothing belongs to a point.

 SPACETIME: Generally the universe is called “spacetime”. However, this concept, spacetime, introduces the assumptions of Einstein’s Special Relativity, as boosted by Minkowski, established before Quantum Physics.

 In particular the spacetime hypothesis assumes that the universe is a product of what is called in mathematics the “real line”, which assumes, among other things, what is called a T2, Hausdorff topology. Two different points are separated by different neighborhoods (to use the appropriate concepts from general topology).

 Quantum Physics violates both LOCALITY and SPACETIME.

 How do we know this? When one analyzes the smallest processes, one finds that, in plenty of cases, the SMALLEST PROCESSES, THE INDIVISIBLE PROCESSES, SPREAD IN TIME OVER ARBITRARY BIG REGIONS, ON THEIR OWN (THAT IS WITHOUT ANY INTERACTION WITH THE REST OF THE UNIVERSE). Are they then big, or are they small? Verily, therein a mystery of the Quantum.

 In this innocuous concept I just uttered, they spread as big as they want, although being as small as there is, one finds the entire origin of Quantum non locality. No need for fancy mathematics, or even any equation. The idea is as dramatic as can be.

 Indeed, non locality boils down to a matter of definition. As the indivisible process spreads out, it stays one, well, by definition. It means that touching it anywhere is like touching it everywhere.

 When two particles comes out of such an indivisible process, they are called “ENTANGLED”. The semantics gets in the way. What we do not have is actually two particles, but two possible experimental channels, which can be widely separated, where, if we experiment, two particles will show up, and widely separated, if the channels are so.

 Thus we see that the two channels are entangled, and touching one is also touching the other.

 What are some of these cases where the smallest, indivisible processes spread out macroscopically? Well, they are so common, that they seem to be the rule, not the exception: 

 Diffraction (the 1 slit experiment) is such a case: the slit is small, diffusion gets big. Arbitrarily big.

 The famous 2 slit experiment is another case: the slits are close by, the interference screen is at a large distance. Hey, the 2-slit could be a galactic cluster. A cluster made of galaxies, each 200,000 light years across. 

 Any fundamental process where two particles separate after interacting. (In particular the simple set-up of the Einstein Podolski Rosen thought experiment, such as the Bohm total spin zero variant.)

 It is highly likely that such an effect is used all over biology, to transport energy close to 100% efficiency over macroscopic distances (an allusion to the fact that this is not only about pure science, but the economic fall-out will be considerable, once this is so well understood that we can dominate the processes involved).

 Not all Quantum processes spread all over space. Bohr got the Nobel for his patchy, haphazard atomic theory which worked, because electronic matter waves self interfere coherently onto themselves (these matters waves, the de Broglie waves, are called orbitals, and they make the body of atoms, what we call matter, and sharing orbitals is much of what we call chemistry).

***

 Thus we have found the following, from the most basic set-up of Quantum theory:

 A Fundamental Quantum Process, is one, until interacted with, even if it is spread over space. This is what Quantum Non Locality is all about.

 Some crystals can make out of one photon, two photons with opposite polarizations, and they could then be sent in two different channels, a light year apart.

Parallel transporting along the two channels the polarization directions, we would always find them opposite. A more subtle relation between the polarizations holds, and was found to be true even when the polarization angles are moved randomly during the photons flight time (Aspect experiment, for which Alain Aspect got the Wolf Prize in 2010).

 By making all sorts of supplementary hypotheses about local hidden parameters and local measurements of polarizations, though, on finds that should not be the case. This contradiction is called the Bell Inequality (I like Bell very much, and I approve of his quest, which is also my quest. I apologize for his many admirers, by presenting his efforts in an arguably demeaning light).

The preceding, most simple way to look at Non Locality, gives an excellent reason to not do that: the logic of the Quantum is as simple as it gets: as long as I am left alone, says the Quantum, I am one. And indivisible.

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 What does it all mean? First Einstein and company in their “EPR” paper, talked about “elements of reality”. They did NOT talk about ELEMENTS OF SPACE. They did not have the notion. I will argue they should have, but of course, the fact that they did not have it was central to their (erroneous) reasoning. 

 Einstein and company wondered how a particle could communicate with another, even across light years. Wrong amazement. Particles are not “communicating“. Actually, they are not “particles” to start with.

 For decades I have advocated a radical solution, as exposed above, aligning the definition elementarily: the two particles are one and the same, they are in the same place at the time of the Quantum interaction, and stop being so, as a result. The topology used in physics, the same that the dinosaurs used, the T2, separated topology, is not appropriate to the real universe. OK, it was appropriate for pterosaurs. But it’s not appropriate, across the universe. BTW, the pterosaurs, the best fliers, by far, that this planet has known, went extinct, although they were obviously very smart.

 Is this the end all, be all? Quantum Physics a la Bohr reigns, and nothing else can be said? No. If the bare bone theory above is true, the entire theory of spacetime is false: space is not made of points, and it is constructed interactively. The case of time is even more so. Imagine there are no heavens made of points, only the sky you make, etc. Thus more has been said. 

***

Patrice Ayme

***

 Note 1: An enlightening analogy: The question of using the Quantum set-up to transmit information superluminally, or what Einstein called “Spooky Interaction At A Distance” has come up. The preceding, as it is, sticking to strict Quantum theory, demolishes both views, with crushing simplicity.

 How? OK, let’s make an experimental metaphor. Suppose we have an infinitely rigid bar between the two entangled particles: each time we experiment with one, we turn the bar, and so it turns at the other end too. Simple. Some will say: ha ha ha, but then I can look at the bar, and I see the bar turn, and so information has been transmitted. Not so fast. We are dealing with as elementary a Quantum process as possible, which means the particle was not observed, before the bar turned. So we see the bar turn, but we do not know if it was, or not, turning before. To tell if a signal was sent, one has first to define a state where one can say no signal was received.  

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 Note 2: I was a rough to the point of inaccuracy with the Bell Inequality above.  There is a subtlety, which can be seen easily say in the case of spin. Spin measurements in various directions are not independent of each other. Thus, if one measures spin in the close channel, a measurement of spin in another, random direction in the distance channel will show that influence, and a local determination of spin in the distant channel by parallel transport will not exhibit this. BTW, introducing the notion of parallel transport in the conversation, which is the whole point of the “local hidden parameter” debate is from yours truly.

 Note 3: And let’s not forget to smile about the naïve who developed frantically supersymmetric superstrings super budgeted super having-nothing-to-do-with reality… While forgetting to think about the fundamentals as described above.

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