Revolutionary Science

There is something called TED talks where authoritative speakers, often with commending British accents, distill a wisdom compatible with the reigning oligarchies, and a clipped delivery. Although the subjects vary, the tone seems to be always the same.

“TED” stands for “Tech, Entertainment, Design”. Anti-plutocrats should be aware that TED banned a talk where Nick Hanauer pointed out that “rich people don’t create jobs”. TED did not find Hanauer entertaining. By design, TED applies the technology of eradication to “ideas worth spreading”. So it gave its grand prize to the pseudo-Christian “Bono” of U2 for becoming a Facebook billionaire, or to Bill Clinton for authorizing banks to invest in financial derivatives, instead of the base material world they used to belong to, before their elevation.

In a book called “Science Set Free” (USA), or: “Science Delusion” (UK) Dr. Sheldrake challenges notions about science that many take for granted:  Sheldrake itemizes what he calls the 10 “dogmas” of modern science, then tries to challenge them in his own special way.

Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D. is a biologist, author of more than 80 scientific papers and 10 books.  A former Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he got a Ph.D.  in biochemistry at Cambridge U.  He was a Fellow in Cambridge, and Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology.

Here is the default world view of science educated people hold, according to Sheldrake. Every of these scientific dogmas is questionable, he says. (As I will show, little does he know…)

1.  Nature is Mechanical.
2.  Matter is unconscious.
3.  The Laws of Nature are fixed.
4.  The total amount of matter and energy is constant.
5.  Nature is purposeless.
6.  Biological inheritance is entirely material.
7.  Memories are stored inside your brain in material processes.
8.  Your mind is inside your head.
9.  Psychic phenomena are impossible.
10.  Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that works.

(Sheldrake believes in his own weird and unnecessary theory. He does not understand the way units relate in physics, so he went on a flight of fancy from there. He wants young giraffes’ (!) minds to be educated by a mysterious force out there, not realizing that the environment itself is doing so, in subtle and mighty ways.)

What fascinated me, when I came across Sheldrake’s amusing list above, is that the most established recent science itself has thrown many of these dogmas down. So Mr. S. is blissfully unawares of the true state of science. Indeed:  

 1) Nature is Mechanical: we are machines, “lumbering robots” (Dawkins)

What’s outrageous about Dawkins, and many other leading thinkers, is that they do not seem to have a full vision of science. Question: What’s mechanics? It is certainly not about mechanical robots, in the classical mechanics sense. One has to realize that mechanics is Quantum mechanics. And nobody under-stands that. quantum systems have one thing in common with conscious system, namely that they are not completely predictable.

 2) Matter is Unconscious: lots of philosophy of mind in the last century is about proving that we are unconscious.

Right, well…Question: define conscious. Are sleep walkers conscious? Is an electron conscious when it decides to do whatever it’s doing with the 2-slits it seems aware of? Consciousness cannot be experimentally defined.

 3) Laws of Nature are fixed:

Remark: this is under constant check by physicists. When on the moon, the acceleration of gravity, a “law”, has changed. The reason for the suspicion is the fact the universe itself is evolving. Also Conventional Big Bang theory creates universes from nothing; that’s probably why it’s false.

Einstein himself admitted that his theory of gravitation threw down the constancy of the speed of light (be it only because gravitation can make light go around in circle, or come to a stand still).

 4)  The total amount of matter and energy is constant.

First we should know how to detect all the matter and energy, before we assert such a thing. The whole riddle of Dark Matter and Dark Energy is that we can’t do either. So, by astronomy’s own reckoning, right now, we miss 96%, we fail to detect or explain, 96% of the matter and energy out there (WMAP). The WMAP seven-year analysis gave an estimate of 72.8% dark energy, 22.7% dark matter and 4.6% ordinary matter.

This science is so official that the discovery of Dark Energy has already been rewarded by several Nobel Prizes.

 5)  Nature is purposeless.

Question: Are we part of nature? Some of us have purpose.

 6)  Biological inheritance is entirely material.

Question: What is material? Is information material? Is a photon material? If it is, and it is, then information is material. Much of biology is a mix of the inherited, and the informed. Both come from material processes.

 7)  Memories are stored inside your brain in material processes.

What else?

 8)  Your mind is inside your head.

We don’t know what “inside the head” means, because we don’t know how many dimensions the universe really has. Some contemporary physicists have tried to depict gravity as a leak, in three dimensions, of a stronger phenomenon, in higher dimensions. It goes without saying that the same could apply to minds.

 9)  Psychic phenomena are impossible.

I don’t know what a “psychic” phenomenon could be. Control of object by pure thinking has already been achieved in the lab by animals, including Homo.

 10)  Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that works.

Well the placebo effect really exists, and that’s pretty spiritual. Speaking of revolutionary science…

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ARE REMEDIES FOR THE PLUTOCRATIC PLAGUE GETTING FINALLY APPLIED?

It’s not clear the placebo effect will save plutocracy, though. The illusion that bankers and oil men created for us the best of possible worlds is fraying fast. (In spite of desperate counterattacks such as those orchestrated by Sheryl Sandberg, a creature of Larry Summers, soon to be adressed appropriately on this site.)

Real, mechanical, old fashion remedies against the plutocratic plague are on the way. The European Union ordered Cyprus to levy a 10% tax on plutocrats’ bank holdings. Otherwise, the EU will let Cyprus go bankrupt. It goes without saying that Cyprus’ days as a tax haven are over, should Cyprus’ Parliamentpass the law it has been ordered to pass. Meanwhile, ATMs are blocked.

In other anti-plutocratic news, France and Britain threatened to send sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles to the rebels fighting the major plutocrat Assad. They gave what boils down to an instructive ultimatum to the rest of Europe.

By instuctive, I mean that, many countries that were clueless when confronting Hitler, are now incited, by France and Britain, in a pedagogical manner, to learn to assume some anti-fascist standing. For some of these countries, it’s like learning to walk. It’s an occasion for them to learn. Obviously, France and Britain will act, and Obama’s admirable USA, quite differently from Roosevelt’s despicable, cowardly and greedy USA, will follow.

Even Conservative PM Cameron had his fill with major plutocracy, so he rolls out the missiles. Nice.

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Patrice Ayme

FORCE IS A HUMANISM

FORCEFULLY CONTEXTUALIZING MAN.

Force Is Strong, It Beats Weakness Anytime.

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 Abstract: Homo Sapiens, fundamentally, is all about force. And thus, so is humanism. So is wisdom.

 The name of the species is “Homo Sapiens Sapiens”. In English: “Man Wise Wise”. And in which sense is Man Wise Wise  wise about? Wise in the usage of force.

 And how did all this wisdom arise? Through genetic mutations that force facilitated, and implemented. The force of the most domineering species, those even lions feared, the human species. Force protected our fragile, growing brains. And the usage of force has become much more extensive since man has become super brainy. Brains are all about mustering, and mastering, forces.

 So how come conventional humanism ignores this powerful evidence? Simply because conventional humanism tends to be the humanism masters prefer their slaves to have. Even Nietzsche’s ‘Amor Fati’ is so affected. So is Existentialism. Real man does not just exist out there. 

 A human being in full creates worlds, using force, inside out.

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 FORCE ME UP:

 It’s not even sad, and certainly true that man is about force. Molded by forces, creating new ones. It should be forcefully celebrated. Celebrations are often about force: contemplate fireworks. Those who disagree with this evidence live in denial. OK, living in denial can be best: so does the resigned sheep, when eaten by the wolf. Force is good, when well directed. Just ask bacteria. And good does not happen without force. Such is the theme of this essay: NO FORCE, NO LIFE, NO INTELLIGENCE, NO MORALITY.

 Force.

 A word conventional humanism has been avoiding as if it had the plague. Thus the ostrich’s head is deep in the sand, and its juicy rump, up in the air, ready for clawing by lions. “Why can’t wolves eat grass, as we do?” bleat the sheep. Some questions, like the moon, have no moral answer.

 Here you have an animal (man) driving the entire biosphere to extinction. And some ecologists observing this deplore the usage of force? But it is force that destroys the biosphere, force applied by man, and only other forces applied by man can stop those destroying forces.

 An American acquaintance reading a tweet about force as an essential part of humanism, denounced me as “too far off”, adding he was “off”, “unfriending” me right away. That brutality was fully coherent with yesterday’s humanism’s hysteria on the subject of force. 

 That got me to think: why does conventional humanism hate force so much? Why does it want to be weak so much? How can one hate force so much, in a world, a civilization, that rests on force, so much?

 My irascible (ex)correspondent confused “force” and “abuse”. Those who have studied physics know that force (or, even better, potential) is fundamental to (all of) physics. What is fundamental to physics is fundamental to man.

 Anything can be abused. Anything.

 Those who forcefully deny force as an overwhelming concept, are, at best, hypocrites. And, at worst, severely retarded. How come so much common philosophy got so retarded, then, that so much of the folks also are, and does this explain the civilizational crisis we are experiencing?

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 LOGIC IS STRONG, BUT CONTEXT, STRONGER; Context Overwhelms Deduction Forcefully:

 The irascible clown was prisoner of a deeper flaw than faulty logic: simplistic semantics, too meager a context to support reality. In his context, force is abuse, a manifestation of evil. However, in its physical sense and more frequent occurrence, force is just what brings change. In particular what turns oppressive infamy into delicious salami.

 This, neglecting the importance of context, was Socrates’ main strategic character flaw. Socrates set-up for himself little logical games he then won (easily, as he had rigged the context). But, as Alexander showed when he cut the Gordian Knot, logic is nothing if one uses force, and more of a context often gives greater force.

 Nietzsche too neglected context when he embraced fate. The Franks he alluded to, calling them “noble” were not just free of other men, they were free of fate as much as they could get the better of it, in a good fight they always welcomed. They welcomed hatred and resentment as calls to violent, forceful action. That, in turn was directed towards many hostile forces, including intolerable Christianism and invasive Islamism.

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 LIFE IS FORCE. INTELLIGENCE EVEN MORE SO:

 At first sight, life is an orderly organization, but the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that entropy, that is, disorder, keeps on increasing. So life contradicts the Second Law, on the face of it. That law can be contradicted only by the application of force. That is the first obvious way in which force enters what defines us. Even an urchin’s symmetry is the expression of force.

 That leads to a number of philosophico-physical questions: what is force? Where does the organizing force that defines life come from? Those questions are very deep, and involve the deepest philosophy of mathematics too; we will eschew them here (however, see the note).

 What is force? A deviation from routine, an inflection of inertia, a change of geodesics. Short of changing the trajectory of the planet itself, certainly extinguishing the biosphere qualifies as a considerable change of trajectory. A considerable usage of force.

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 FORCE, ESPECIALLY THE FORCE OF TRUTH, ALLOWED MAN TO BE:

 What is intelligence? Using force to one’s advantage. Picture a bacteria going up stream towards a food source the smell of which it detected. It is using the force of its propelling system to its (future) advantage. If the bacteria had no possibility of using force, it could not deflect its existence closer to its (future) subsistence.

 Chimps were never far from trees. Not so with the ancestors of man, thanks to their usage of force. The very principle of man was to evolve into an all conquering ape who uses so much force, the lions themselves contend in vain. Thus the apeman could settle the savannah park, and also the rest of the planet. And force was not just about protection, but energy procurement. Eating energy and protein rich meat allowed more time and energy for thinking (and first of all, about projecting more force, such as about how best to hunt, make war, and grab lots of females)

 Of course, there is no civilization without force: civilization means cities, and one needs force to build houses, let alone operate a city, and keep it alive, by forcefully bringing goods and water to it, while evacuating waste. The Greco-Roman empire existed because of long distance trade, rendered possible by 10,000 ships, all using force. Force could be used passively: see aqueducts and other hydraulics.

 What is intelligence? Doing the right thing. “Doing”: how does one do anything without force? No doing, nor even ding, without force.

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 WHY ARE SO MANY MENTAL SYSTEMS ADVERSE TO FORCE? ALTHOUGH CIVILIZATION RESTS ON FORCE?

 Naturally civilization has to be civil, and so the usage of illegal force within society has to be discouraged. Oppressive mental systems hide behind that to implement their oppression of the full, but innocent nature of man.

 The cruel masters, the plutocrats, fear that force will be used against them. So they instill the People with the fear of force. Not only the fear that this terrible thing could be used against the innocent, but also the fear of wielding it against abuse. 

 That is why Christianity was a slave religion: so that there would be masters, who reigned with their minds, rather than tiring themselves beating up their subjects as much as they otherwise would have to. The occasional execution helped: the last person assassinated by the church for heresy was in the Nineteenth Century. This violence of Christianity by mental means unfolded until the Twentieth Century: the papacy, namely Pie XII, was an active collaborator of Nazism, the religion of the Master Race, and was so effective that nobody think of it to this day.

 Although Nietzsche posed as the re-evaluator of all values, and an adversary of “slave religion”, Nietzsche was all about having the force to accept the force of one’s fate. That alleviated subjects from extraneous baggage such as resentment, he opined. But what is wrong about resentment? If I resent Obama and Krugman for having set-up too small of a real stimulus to the economy of the USA, there is nothing wrong with me. It reminds me there is something wrong with them.

 Nietzsche, following a lot of top thinkers of the enlightenment, spent a lot of time heaping scorn on Christianity. However, he was the son of a pastor, and his belief in fate is immediately recognizable as the old Christian quandary of the problem of Grace and the Christo-Muslim attitude symbolized by the slogan “Inch Allah!”

 And what of many of the French intellectuals of the mid Twentieth Century, those who embraced decolonization, Mao, after embracing Vichy and Stalin? Well, they embraced all these mighty forces, because they were weak. Weakness was their religion. They produced an obscure philosophy, Existentialism, whose shadowy existence denied context. It had no more impact on infamy and plutocracy than Heidegger putting on his Nazi uniform had on civilization. Heidegger, too, was weak, and thus their hero.

 Nietzsche was clear, strong in his elocution, and said many good little truths. However Nietzsche embraced the oldest message of the leaders of empire: learn to love your fate. Many French philosophers (Sartre, Foucault, etc.) were neither clear nor strong enough to embrace anything, but themselves, and the sycophants who licked their bottoms clean.

 As Sartre puts it in his ‘Existentialism is a Humanism‘: “man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards.” That is silly. Man does not just exist, and “surge”. Humans are molded by forces, including some mental ones from caregivers. There is a debate of forces at work, and that debate is called man.

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 WHEN MAN IS SO STRONG AS TO BE A MAKER:

 Nietzsche could not escape his own fate. Nobody can. For this travel that we cannot escape, Nietzsche enjoins to carry as little baggage as possible. No resentment. So be it. But so what?

 Nietzsche was just scratching the surface of the nature of man, when he proclaimed again the religion of accepting one’s fate, a religion very well known, indeed, as it is the one the masters prefer, ever since plutocracy appeared, and it has ruled. Nietzsche’s message was without any originality.

 Verily, Nietzsche and the slave religions missed the big picture completely. Man is strong. Although man has to embrace fate, man is also a creator of worlds, and a maker of fate itself. For those who doubt that, have a look at the tortured planet. Fate is elaborated there, poisoned river, after polluted sea, extinguished species, after mercury sprinkled Arctic, melting icecap, after dying plankton, and burned out forest.

 For those who doubt that, have a look at the grander work of man.

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 WHEN FORCE IS USED TOO LATE:

 During their reign, the Nazis assassinated one million and a half Jewish children. With the best of intentions, of course.

 The Nazis killed even more innocent children, and people, than that. However, by 1935, it was clear, considering the Nuremberg racial hatred laws, that the Nazis had they set the framework for such a holocaust.

 Yet, they were not opposed, and the United Kingdom and the USA (among other vermin, such as Sweden) kept on collaborating with the would be mass murderers, transferring ever more power to them. (Even thoroughly hostile the French republic, led by a Jew, sent her athletes to Berlin in 1936.)

 Why? Lack of force. Lack of desire to use force. Lack of relish for the usage of force. Force was not used. Neither intellectual force, nor physical force. Force was nowhere to be seen. Yet, what greater delight than to crush a terrible infamy such as Nazism? If that pleasure does not exist enough, it ought to be taught.

 When finally France and Britain decided to use force, September 1, 1939, it was all too late, and the alliance between Hitler, Stalin and American plutocrats had become nearly unstoppable. 70 million dead were what it took. OK, better late than never. Millions of assassinated children were part of the price paid for having not enough intellectual and moral force in a timely manner.

 Now one can see something similar with the spectrum of Merkler rising. Fortunately, she is in the process of being stopped in her tracks by the force of the (mostly French) electorate. The others have been there, and seen that, this time they have the force.

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 WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO REALIZE FORCE IS THE ESSENCE OF INTELLIGENCE? THUS MAN?

 Because only force allows to do what is necessary.

 Just look at the austerity programs implemented around the West, from Greece to the USA. Austerity is characterized by a renunciation of force. It’s something monks do (thanks to others, in the background, who are working and fighting for them).

 When Obama came to power, instead of being forceful like the wheelchair bound Roosevelt, who closed all the banks, and enforced a giant WPA, Obama put in place a tiny real stimulus program (not any larger than that of Sarkozy in France). OK, Obama played basketball a lot, so he felt very active. The activity of the spinal cord, not that of the higher mental functions FDR displayed.

 Merkel has been much more devious. Whereas she embarked on heavy stimulus inside Germany (10% GDP!) plus massive Kurtzarbeit and other socialist, central planning tricks, all of which bore excellent fruit, she has been pushing deliriously on murderous austerity on the rest of Europe, earning herself full Nazi garb in caricature, and theperfidic nickname of ‘Merkler‘ from yours truly. (That theme will be developped in the next essay.) 

 Europe is equipped with the most plutocracy friendly banking system in the world. Unbelievable, but true. All the screaming from wall Street about Europe being a ‘welfare state” masks that fact. And all banking systems in existence are plutocracy friendly, as the Chinese Prime Minister admitted recently about big Chinese banks (adding that was intolerable). To break that institutional state of affairs, force has to be used. Mental force, physical force (white nights of debates among politicians, economists, and philosophers, studying of the situation by the common citizenry, demonstrations…)

 Similarly, to build a world sustainable economy, massive force has to be used.

 The root of the financial-economic-social-civilizational crisis is that plutocracy has envenomed democracy with torpor and a paralysis of the mind. As the People got persuaded that force was anathema, the forces of evil were left unopposed. So, out of the lofty, thoroughly idiotic perspective that humanism had nothing to with force was born, naturally enough, a humanism without force. And now a civilization without force, something that does not grow anymore, but implodes onto itself.

 Time for some vigor. Voltaire’s recommendation to crush infamy requires some force. Let’s gather it. It starts with observation, analysis, resolve. It’s not as bad as when our ancestors had to face real lions.

 Context is made of bits and pieces of semantics, and all connect to the emotional. To be a human in full, it’s important to feel good about force. Otherwise one will end up without dignity, as the dinner of hyenas, or banksters. A weak, degenerated version of humanism is bringing us, and our biosphere, to an ominous doom. Time for some glory.

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Patrice Ayme

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 Note on life’s vital principle. How come life grow within an ever more chaotic world? How does life overwhelms the second law of Thermodynamics? This is related to a thought experiment called Maxwell’s Daemon. The Daemon separates gas molecules, fabricating a cold compartment in a tank. Maxwell did not present a mechanism to do this. Nor does life.

 My hunch though is that a so far unrevealed force, tied to low energy Quantum Mechanics, the collapse force, is what presides to the rise of this order. Big particle accelerators cannot study that force. (But research towards the Quantum Computer will.)

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Note on: http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/humanism-is-force-no-fly-over-libya/

The present essay offers an abstract framework for the older one, which urged to intervene in Libya to throw out the bloody dictatorship.

Science Rests On The Masses, Not Just Giants.

WISDOM BLOSSOMS FROM COMMON SENSE ON STEROIDS, LET IT BE SCRUTINIZED.

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It turns out that the OPERA “observation” of Faster Than Light neutrinos seems to have been caused by a not-fully-screwed-on right optical cable.

(It’s fascinating that the pitfall had not been detected earlier: because we use electronic computers, not photonic computers, information down an optical cable has to be transformed into electrons, and, because we are still at a gross point of technology, that means plenty of optical energy has to ramp up, until enough electrons can be excited, and generate a signal. If screwing is not right, the ramping up of power takes longer… Hence the infamous delay!)

Too bad. But let’s not forget we have neutrinos from a supernova that arrived several hours before the photons. However, that’s explained by supernova explosion theory: as the explosion proceeds, light gets bottled inside star material for a while, whereas the neutrinos of the intense thermonuclear explosion involving heavy elements rush out; in the sun, thermonuclear photons take hundreds of thousands of year to get out of the thermonuclear region, in the core, where they are produced. So it looks as if I will have to hold my faster than light horses a while back longer. Yet, Einstein’s own theory of gravitation, especially when cosmologically modified, means that the speed of light is all too relative…

(Physics) Professor Matts Strassler asks on his (excellent) blog, http://profmattstrassler.com/ a “Question to Laypersons: Your Views on the Neutrino Saga.”

This was the occasion for me to roll a few of my pet themes. (I have to relax with rather innocent considerations as I prepare an essay bound to make me many new friends, where I compare Arabized regimes to Vichy style regimes, just worse, that have perdured, for more than 13 centuries…)

“Prof” Strassler “would like to ask YOU a question or two.  And by “you”, I mean non-scientists.  I would like to know how seeing this episode unfold changed (or did not change) your view of science, or physics, or particle physics…  Are you disappointed in or pleased with the scientific process as you saw it unfold?  Are you more suspicious of or less suspicious of scientists and/or of science now that you’ve seen this happen? I think these are things that many scientists would be curious to learn.”

I commented this way: Don’t we all know quite a bit of science? … Say relative to, hmmm, Newton? We are living in a scientific society, whether we admit it or not.

By the time of Newton it was not know that there was such a thing as oxygen, it supported life, and oxidized stuff. That was a century after Newton’s apogee. Many a commoner not having formally studied science out of high school could reconstitute Lavoisier’s experiments nowadays.

Similarly for Pasteur’s experiences on spontaneous generation or… pasteurization.  And the idea of vaccination, formalized by Pasteur is also well known. As is continental drift.

You can go in the middle of Africa, meet a woman who does not know how to read, but she may well known Pasteurization… and why.

The basic ideas of the Quantum are less well known, true.

However this is partly the result of an anti-French bias, because the luminously simple idea of the French medievalist, prince de Broglie, is not taught, and, instead, Germano-Nazi physicists, such as Heisenberg, with their appropriately dark mumblings, are always evoked by those perhaps nostalgic of the Aryan, anti-French order… But I digress… As far as I am concerned, just like Einstein sucked Poincare’ dry, so did Heisenberg and Schrodinger with De Broglie (not to say they were not great scientists; just smaller, with smaller ideas; thus erroneously teaching the small for great has real consequences on… mass science, the science the masses know!)

But let’s go back to the ideas of Prof Strassler, which are shared with many scientists, namely that they stand on the shoulders of giants just like themselves, as they are a race of giants.

That’s how this fool of Chu got into supporting stupid (and intrinsically corrupt!) enterprises such as Tesla (465 million dollars of taxpayer money, so that Silicon Valley plutocrats can drive an electric sport car made in France, powered by glued up together laptop batteries; or Solyndra, more than half a billion from the taxpayers, for a tech that was obviously not going to work). OK, Chu, the energy secretary, has a Nobel in Physics, but that just means he was part and parcel of some intelligent project, and that he may have had, personally an intelligent moment.

But diligent a lot, and intelligent, once, does not mean diligent always, and intelligent always. Certainly not, especially if one suddenly imagines one belongs to a race of giants.

For more context on the preceding, see the New Republic (January 25, 2012):

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/magazine/100037/steven-chu-energy-obama-solyndra?page=0,0

What did I want Chu to do? Instead of playing Venture Capitalist with 25 billion dollars, just fund fundamental research, make sure you can persuade people energy taxes have to be risen,  make sure solar plants go up in the high altitude desert south west USA, and that very high speed train lines, in the North East and California get build.

On the latter there was an interesting development: those geniuses realized that in France Very High Speed trains mostly use conventional lines (one can use conventional methods with trains up to 125 mph, 200 km/h). By doing same as the French, the cost of Very High Speed rail in California crumbled down to 60 billion dollars, and still only 3 hours downtown San Francisco to downtown LA… roughly the time to go to the airport and pass security. Morality; go to Europe, and learn.

The expression “layperson” is shared by many a scientist, mathematician, and university type. Maybe not verbally, but certainly conceptually. However, that’s an error.

Indeed the expression “layperson” hints that scientists are some sort of priests. It reminds me of a short story of Isaac Asimov, where civilization has devolved, and, on a planet with multiple suns, the rabble hunts the few remaining astronomers, when an exceptional night occurs.

I also wonder what defines a “scientist”? A scientific degree? But what is really so special in common between a paleontologist and a mathematician? OK, mathematicians maybe do not qualify as scientists? But then a lot of theoretical physics, on the edge, is little else than mathematics gone so wild that even mathematicians avert their eyes (until it works, then they come to make it appear they invented it themselves…)

Something else: a lot of, say, cosmology is a magnificent razzle-dazzle show in full view of “laypersons”. However, a lot of the certainty there seems to have an OPERAtic component: bold assertions, not all the details in for sure (I am alluding, say, to cosmic inflation).

One thing scientists ought to remember is that scientific research is one thing, science itself, that is, certain knowledge that is indeed certain, is something else. It would be good to teach that to the public too, as it would help it learn to search for truth, and not to confuse inquiry with certainty.

Science is just the result of observant and sophisticated common sense. One sees both faling, increasingly, in the USA. A good indicator of that are the “Stand Your Ground” laws in the USA. Those allow any brute carrying a concealed weapon to assassinate anybody who gets in their way, as long as they can build a half way plausible story about the ground on which they stand. In particular if they don’t like the race of their victim.

As far as the gun lobby and the plutocratic lobby are concerned, it’s perfect. Marie Antoinette, being told people ran out of bread, supposedly quipped:”Let them eat cake!” (actually brioche, a viennoiserie, a type of pastry made where she came from!) As far as the gun lobby and the plutocratic lobby are concerned, it’s :”Let them eat lead!” Better: let them serve it, to each other.

That average Americans fell for such a divisive tactic is a testimony to not knowing anymore what common sense is. Something studying carefully the genesis of science can remedy. That is precisely while plutocrats hid behind theocrats to forbid the teaching of critical thinking. For teaching critical thinking, one cannot just teach literary criticism. Because it’s harder to show error, for certain in literature, or even philosophy.

In science, and science history, it’s much more clear cut. Both the truth, and the errors (and why the later happen, itself a type of meta knowledge).  

More generally, the most important subject of study at school ought to be the history of big ideas, big errors, vast delusions, and immense progress. Our civilization surfs on a tsunami of thoughts.

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Patrice Ayme

FASTER THAN LIGHT

WHY RELATIVITY OUGHT TO FAIL AT HIGH ENERGIES.

Why Relativity Is Not That Relative: A Theory Of Velocity?

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Main Idea: Theoretical triage on Special Relativity leaves the theory in shambles at high energies. A precise mechanism to blow up the theory is produced which may cause Faster Than Light (FTL).

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Abstract: I don’t know whether neutrinos go faster than light or not. The OPERA neutrino anomaly rests on some guess work on the shape of long neutrino pulses, so its superluminal results may well be a mirage. (The experience will soon be run with very short pulses.)

However neutrinos may go Faster Than Light. Why not? Because the idea has caused obvious distress among many of the great priests of physics?

In science one should never suppose more than necessary, nor should one suppose less than necessary. Faith is necessary in physics, but it should reflect the facts, and nothing but the facts. Such is the difference between physics and superstitious religion.

There are reasons to doubt that the leanness of Relativity reflects appropriately the subtlety of the known universe. This is what this essay is about.

OK, I agree that the equations of what Henri Poincare’ named “Relativity”,  seem, at first sight, to lead one to doubt Faster Than Light speeds. Looking at those equations naively, and without questioning their realm of validity, it looks as if, as one approaches the speed of light, one gets infinitely heavy, short, and slow.

However, adding as an ingredient much of the rest of fundamental physics, I present below an argument that those equations ought to break down at very high energies.

As my reasoning uses basic “Relativity” (Special and General), plus basic Quantum physics, one may wonder why something so basic was not pointed out before.

The answer is that, just as in economics most people are passengers on the Titanic, in cattle class, so it is in physics.

Most people have a quasi religious approach to “Relativity”, and their critical senses have been so stunted, that they even fail to appreciate that Einstein did not invent “Relativity” (as I will perhaps show in another, gossipy essay). This is of some consequence, because Einstein had a rather shallow understanding of some of the concepts involved (as he proved aplenty in his attempts at a Unified Field Theory… Pauli called them “embarrassing“… well, may be, my dear Wolfgang, all of Relativity was embarrassing, another collective German hallucination…)

The logic of the essay below is multi-dimensional, but tight. As it throws most of relativity out, I am going to be rather stern describing it:

1) At high energies, absolute motion can be detected. This renders Galileo’s Relativity, and its refurbishment by Poincare’, suspicious.

2) Time dilation is real. There is no “Twin Paradox’ whatsoever; fast clocks are really slow. This is well known, but I review the physical reason why.

3) Length contraction is also real. Moving rods really shrink. It is not a question of fancy circular definitions (as some have had it). I show this below by an electromagnetic argument which makes the connection between relativistic transformation and Maxwell equation obvious.

4) A contradiction is derived. A particle would suffer gravitational collapse if its speed came close enough to the speed of light, as it would get confined within its Schwarzschild radius, should the equation of “Relativity” remain the same at all energies. A particle gun, at high enough energy, would become a black hole gun. That would violate all sorts of laws.

Thus “Relativity” breaks down. The simplest alternative is that some of the energy spills into acceleration (beyond c!) instead of mass acquisition.

5) Einstein’s conviction that Faster Than Light is equivalent to time travel is shown to be the result of superficial analysis. If the equations of relativity break down at high energies, they cannot be used to present us with negative time. Although I will not insist on this too heavily in this particular essay, Einstein got confused between a local notion (time) and a non local one (speed, and its parallel transport around loops).

As an humoristic aside, should high energy neutrinos go faster than light, it should be possible to measure time beyond the speed of light, using a high energy neutrino clock.  

Thus a reassessment of “Relativity” is needed, starting with the name: if all the “Relative” laws blow up at high energies, that is, at high velocity, uniform motion is not relative, but absolute. The theory of Relativity ought to become the Theory of Velocity (because, at intermediate energies, all of the laws of the present “Theory of Relativity”, including fancy rotational additions of velocities, do still apply!) Mach’s principle, already absolute for rotational motion, and already favoring a class of uniform motion, would become absolute for any motion.

***

ABSOLUTE, UNIFORM MOTION IS DETECTABLE… IF ENERGETIC ENOUGH:

Poincare’ named the theory that he, Lorentz and a dozen other physicists invented, “Relativity“. Yes, Poincare’, not Einstein: this essay is about truth, not convention to please a few thousand physicists and a few billions imprinted on the Einstein cult. (And I like Einstein… When he is not insufferable.)

That name, “Relativity”, may have been a mistake. A better name, I would suggest, would be “THEORY OF VELOCITY“, for the following reasons:

In 1904, summarizing the experimental situation then, Henri Poincare’ generalized the Galilean relativity principle to all natural phenomena into as he wrote:

“The principle of relativity, according to which the laws of physical phenomena should be the same, whether to an observer fixed, or for an observer carried along in a uniform motion of translation, so that we have not and could not have any means of discovering whether or not we are carried along in such a motion”.

A first problem is that the American Edwin Hubble, and others, ten years after the precocious death of Poincare’, discovered cosmic expansion, which defines absolute rest. OK, Galileo would have said:

“Patrice, just don’t look outside, I told you to stay in your cabin, in the bowels of the ship.” Fair enough, but rather curious that inquiring minds ought to be blind.

However, fifty years after the death of Poincare’, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) was discovered.  That changed the game completely. You can stay in the bowels of the ship all you want, Galileo, when you move fast enough relative to the CMB, the wall of your cabin towards your uniform motion, v, will turn incandescent, and then into a plasma, as the CMB will turn into gamma rays, thanks to the Doppler shift. Even burying Galileo’s head in the sand will not work. Even a Galileo ostrich can’t escape a solid wall of gamma rays.

Relativity fanatics may insist that they are correct in first order, when they don’t go fast enough. OK, whatever: the equations of “Relativity” do not change shape with v, but, as I just said, the bowels of Galileo’s ship will always disintegrate, if the speed is high enough.

When equations don’t fit reality, you must them quit. That’s why it’s called science.

But let’s forget this glaring problem, as I said, I have found a much worse one. To understand it requires some background in so called “Relativity“, the theory of Gravitation (so called “General Relativity“, an even more insipid name), and Quantum physics.

We have to go through some preliminaries which show that time dilation and length contraction are real physical effects. There is nothing relative about them. So it’s not just the relativity of uniform motion which is not relative. It is the other two basic effects of relativity which are not relative either.  

People can write all the fancy “relativistic” equations they want, a la Dirac, and evoke some spacetime mumbo jumbo . Those equations rest on, and depict, the three preceding relative effects, and if these are not relative at high energies anymore, one cannot use them at very high energies either. Paul Dirac can sing song that they are pretty all he wants, like a canary in a coal mine. Physics is not a fashion show. It’s about what’s really happening. If the canary is dead, it’s time to get out of there.

***

POINCARE’-LORENTZ LOCAL TIME (prior to 1902):

One central notion of standard relativity is “Local Time“, which Poincare’ named and extracted from the work of Lorentz (sometimes calling it “diminished time“). We have:

t’ = t multiplied by square root of (1- vv/cc)

[Because of problems with the Internet carrying squares and square roots properly, I write cc for the square of c, instead of c^2, as some do, etc… After all, it's exactly what it is. In the end, mathematics is eased, and rendered powerful by abstraction, but it is all about words.]

So when v= 0, t’ = t and when v = c, t’ = 0, or, in other words, t’ stops. Here t’ is the time in the coordinate system F’ travelling at speed v relative to the coordinate system F, with its time t. More exactly t is what one could call “local electromagnetic time“. Some physicists would get irritated at that point, and snarl that there is nothing like “local electromagnetic time”. In science precision is important: we are more clever than chimps because we make more distinctions than chimps do.

How do we find t’ knowing t? We look at a light clock in F’ from F. If we look at a light clock perpendicular to v, in F’, from F, we see that light in F’ will have to cover more distance to hit the far mirror of the light clock. That clock will run slow. If we suppose there is only one measure of time in F’, that means time in F’ will run slow. (This unicity of time is a philosophical hypothesis, but it has been partly confirmed experimentally since.) This is what Poincare’ (also) called “diminished time”, in his 1902 recommendation of Hendrick Lorentz to the Nobel Prize in physics (for what Poincare’ called the Lorentz transformations).

The math to compute t’ from t use nothing harder than Pythagoras’ theorem. The idea is to compare two IDENTICAL light clocks, both perpendicular to v, one in F, standing still, the other in F’, moving along at v, and separated by some distance that light covers in time t. We look at the situation from F. When the F’ light has gone from one mirror to the other in the moving clock, it has covered ct’. Why that? Well we don’t know (yet!) what t’ is, but we know light is supposed to always (appear to) go at the same speed, the astronomers’ practice, as Poincare’ reiterated in 1898.

Meanwhile the origin where the light emanated from in F’ has moved by vt’. By Pythagoras:

(ct’)(ct’) = (vt’)(vt’) + (ct)(ct). This is the relation between t’ and t above.

***

FITZGERALD CONTRACTION IS A REAL PHYSICAL EFFECT:

The Irish physicist Fitzgerald suggested that, to explain the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment, the arm of the instrument was shortened, as needed. What is the Michelson-Morley device? Basically two light clocks at right angles, one perpendicular to v, the other along v. These two arms allow to make light interfere, after it has gone back and forth either along the direction of v, or perpendicular to it.

No difference was found. The way I look at it, it shows that electromagnetic time is indifferent to direction. The way it was looked at then was that there was no “ether drag“.

What is going on physically is very simple: F’ moves relative to F. Light released at x = x’ = t = t’ = 0 is going to have to catch up with the other mirror. (notice that this is a slight abuse of notation, as the xs and ts are in different dimensions, and F and F’ in different coordinate systems…) Suppose v is very high. Seen from F, it is obvious that photons will take a very long time to catch up with the mirror at the end of the arm. Actually, if v was equal to the speed of light, it would never catch up (if someone looked in a mirror, when going at the speed of light, she would stop seeing herself).

Well, however, the M-M device showed no such effect. Thus the only alternative was that the length of the M-M interferometer shrank, as Fitzgerald proposed in 1892 (13 years before Einstein’s duplication).

Poincare’ introduced “Poincare’ stresses” to explain the effect as a real physical effect. That was explored further in 1911 by Lorentz, and then worked out in even more detail in the 1940s, using Dirac’s quantum electrodynamics.

The reason I am giving all these details is that Einstein could not understand Poincare’s insistence on “mechanical” models. That’s OK; not everybody can be super bright.

Einstein preferred the more formal insistence that the arm along v had to shrink, because c was constant, and that was it. This was exactly Fitzgerald’s initial reasoning, and it does not explain anything: true it seems necessary that the arm will shrink, but is it really happening, and if so, how? Einstein’s platitude about the mind of god, who he was most apt to seize, are just plain embarrassing… Especially as it turns out that, in this case, the one who got the idea was Poincare’. Maybe a god to Einstein, but to me, just a man. (All the more confusing as Einstein tried to refer, and defer, to Poincare’ less than justice required.) By clinging to Fitzgerald’s original vision like a rat to a reed in the middle of the ocean, Einstein aborted the debate with a hefty dose of superstition.

As the detailed development of Quantum Field Theory showed, the mechanical models were the way to go. They reveal a lot of otherwise unpredictable, unanalyzable complexities. Just as we are going to do below.

So what is happening with the relativistic contraction?

Maxwell equations tell us how the electromagnetic field behave. In ultra modern notations, they come down to dF =0, d*F = q (d being covariant differentiation). Very pretty.

Maxwell is not all, though. The Lorentz  force equation tells us how particles move, when submitted to the electromagnetic field. It is:

Force = q(E + vB)

[E, B are vector fields, vB is the (vector) cross product of the particle velocity, the vector v, with B.]

Let’s suppose the particle moves at v. As it does, it will be reached simultaneously by the electromagnetic field from two different places. Say one of these field elements will be a retarded component, Fretarded, and the other is obtained from Pythagoras theorem, using the same sort of diagram used for a light clock. One can call that component Frelativistic. Frelativistic is proportional to the usual gamma factor of relativity, namely 1/sqrt(1-vv/cc). The total field incorporates Fretarded plus Frelativistic. The relativistic component basically crushes any particle sensitive to the Lorentz force in the direction of motion.

In particular, it will crush electronic orbitals. So atoms will get squeezed. That reasoning, by the way, explain directly, physically why the Lorentz transformations are the only ones to respect the Maxwell equations. It is better to achieve physical understanding rather than just formal understanding (by the way, professor Voigt found the formal argument for the Lorentz transformations in 1887, 18 years before Einstein).

How do formal relativists a la Einstein look at this? They look at it eerily, not to say… ethereally. Max Born, a Nobel Prize winner (for the statistical interpretation of the Quantum waves), a personal friend of Einstein expounds the formalism with coherently infuriating declarations around p 253 of his famous book “Einstein’s Theory of Relativity“.

“For if one and the same measuring rod…has a different length according to it being at rest in F, or moving relative to F, then, so these people say, there must be a cause for this change. But Einstein’s theory gives no cause; rather it states that the contraction occurs by itself, that is an accompanying circumstance to the fact of motion. In fact this objection is not justified. It is due to too limited view of the concept “change”. In itself such a concept has no meaning. It denotes nothing absolute, just as data denoting distances or times have no absolute significance. For we do not mean to say that a system which is moving uniformly in a straight line with respect to an inertial system F ‘undergoes a change’ although it actually changes its situation with respect to system F.

The standpoint of Einstein’s theory about contraction is as follows: a material rod is physically not a spatial thing, but a spacetime configuration.”

This sort of theology will remind some of Heidegger’s writings, when the pseudo philosopher looks for the “ground” and never finds it. Too much relativity will do that for you. Stay with confusion, end up with Auschwitz.

Could it be that, according to Born, a bird which flies by does not change, as it ‘actually changes its situation as a spacetime configuration’. Thus the bird at rest on its branch has not changed into a bird flying. Maybe Born should have received another Nobel for this other wonderful theory?

What Born forgets is this: 1) let’s suppose there is something as absolute rest (given, once again, by the reality of the CMB). 2) then a fast frame passing by has been colossally accelerated first before reaching that high relative speed when vv/cc approaches 1. So the fast frame has undergone an absolute change… And I explained what it is.

3) trying to play relative games between relatively relativistically moving frames does not wash, as there is privileged state of rest (or quasi rest: the Earth moves at 370 km/s relative to the CMB).

The derivation I sketched above provides with a cause for the change. It shows that, by reason of the uniform displacement, a real boost in the e-m field occurs which causes the contraction. So, basically it’s the electromagnetic geometry of uniform motion which causes the Lorentz transformations. It’s deep down not mysterious at all.

The reasons for real time dilation and real length contraction are plain, and absolute.

This is all about the geometry of electromagnetism. When Einstein wrote down in marble his formal considerations about relative this, relative that, a full generation would elapse before the discovery of the neutrino, which responds to weak interactions (OK, there is an electroweak theory, but we are not going to remake all of physics in this essay!)

By the way, I can address in passing another confusion: some will say that by standing on the surface of the Earth one undergoes an acceleration of one g (correct!), and thus why would an acceleration of one g in a straight line for a year (which is enough for high relativistic speeds) cause all these absolute changes I crow about?

The reason is simple: in one case no energy is stored, the acceleration is purely virtual, as the ground is in the way. In the other case, a tremendous amount of energy is concentrated piles up inside the moving body.

***

CLINCHER: YOU CAN’T ALWAYS SQUEEZE WHAT YOU WANT, BUT IF YOU TRY SOMETIMES, YOU GO FTL:

The Schwarzschild radius is given by R = 2GM/cc, where M is the mass of the body, G is the universal constant of gravitation, and c is the speed of light.

The energy of a particle is E = hf, where h is Planck’s constant, and f the frequency of its matter wave. Plug in Poincare’ mass-energy relation: E = M cc. Now E/cc is inertial mass M. Thus it causes, by the equivalence principle, the gravitational mass: hf/cc.

Thus the Schwarzschild radius of a particle of matter wave of frequency f is: R = 2Ghf/cccc.

But now comes the clincher: As the particle accelerates, at ever increasing speed v, its matter wave will shrink ever more, from (Fitzgerald) length contraction. At some point the wave will shrink within the Schwarzschild radius of the particle.

If one takes the gravitational collapse of the particle within itself at face value, the particle would exit physics, never to be seen again, but for its gravitational effect. That is obviously impossible.

So something has to give in the equation f = ma; here f is the force through which one pumps energy in the system (an electromagnetic field, or a muon jet, whatever), m is the relativistic mass, and a is the acceleration. What we saw is that m is bounded.  Thus a has to augment, and the particle will accelerate through the speed of light. QED.

Some could object that I used the photon energy relation: E = Hf, instead of M = (Rest Mass)/ sq. root (1 – vv/cc). But that would not change the gist of the argument any.

[Neutrinos are suspected of having a non zero mass, because they oscillate between various states; but the mass is so small, it's not known yet. Similarly the question of the photon rest mass is an experimental problem!]

Another objection could be that I used the Schwarzschild radius, but it does not apply to single particles. Indeed, the initial argument (Tolman Oppenheimer Volkoff), was that the gravitational force would overwhelm the nuclear force inside an extremely dense star. The nuclear force is repulsive at short distance.

[I tried to show a picture of the nuclear force, but I had to give up as the WordPress primitive system does not allow me to.]

A rough sketch of the force between two nucleons shows a strong repulsive peak, which is, however finite. The force depends upon gluon exchanges, is very spin dependent, etc… The idea of TOV was that gravitation would overwhelm it, and neuron degeneracy, under some circumstances. The basic ideea in this essay is the same, although it is the all too real Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction, not gravity, which does the crunching.]

Previously Einstein had tried to demonstrate the Schwarzschild singularity had no physical meaning. His argument was contrived, erroneous. TOV succeeded to prove Einstein wrong (Hey, it can be done!)

Besides, all these subtleties can blown away by looking at particles the strong force is not applied to, such as photons or neutrinos. They both have mass, as far as creating geometry is concerned.

In the Schwarzschild computation, a term shows up, causing a singularity at a finite distance. The term is caused purely by the spherical coordinates, and the imposition of the vacuum Einstein gravitational equation. It is indifferent to kinetic effects (an important detail, as I put the Fitzgerald squeeze on). That term is identified to a mass for purely geometrical reasons. That mass will appear through Poincare’s E = mcc, or m = hf/cc, after plugging in the de Broglie relation.  

This allows to circumvent Hawking style, trans-Planckian arguments (which, anyhow, Hawking superbly ignored in deriving Hawking radiation).

In any case f = square root [ccccc/2Gh]. Plugging in the numbers, one gets trouble when the frequency gets to ten to the power 43 or so. That’s about ten to the power 16 TeV, or 2 tons of TNT.  About one million billion times more energetic than the CERN neutrinos. But then, of course, the effect would be progressive, somehow proportional to energy. (Also see Large Dimensions below.)

***

EINSTEIN GRANDFATHER OBJECTION SELF CONTRADICTING:

Conventional physicists will make the following meta objection to the preceding. According to lore of the standard theory of Special Relativity, the preceding scheme is completely impossible. Countless physicists would say that if one had a particle going faster than light, one could go back in time. Einstein said this, and everybody has been repeating it ever since, because Einstein looked so brainy.

Or maybe because he was also German. Thus he had got to have invented the Poincare’-Lorentz relativity! (We meet here again the Keynes-Hitler problem, that, in much of the Anglo-Saxon world, blind admiration for anything German, reigns sometimes to the point of spiting reason. I am myself fanatically pro-German, but there are lines of prejudice I will not cross).

OK, granted, there is some mathematical superficiality to support Einstein’s confusion between speed of light, time, and causality. Those mathematics are reproduced in the next chapter, where the mistake is exposed.

There are three problems with using the Grandfather Paradox to shoot down my reason for FTL.

The first objection is that Einstein’s General relativity itself makes possible The “Grandfather Paradox“. So it is rather hypocritical to use it to fend off contradictions of (Special) Relativity.

That grandfather paradox increasingly haunts standard fundamental physics. The paradox arises from “Closed Timelike Curves“, which appear in (standard) Relativity (not in my version of Relativity). Hawking was reduced around 1992 to the rather ridiculous subterfuge of a “Time Protection Conjecture“.

The second objection to the objection is that, in practice, experimentally, the objection has proven irrelevant, by years of increasingly precise experiments. Basically what happens is that Quantum theory allows Faster Than Light teleportation of some sort (“states“, as the saying goes). And experiments are confirming this, leading to claims that time travel has been achieved, experimentally. There are many references, here I give one from July 2011, one of the authors, professor Lloyd from MIT is a Principal Investigator, on just this sort of problems.

Personally I have no problem with the results: they fit my vision of things, which is very friendly to Faster Than Light. But I have a problem with the standard semantics of “time travel“, which comes straight from the way Einstein looked at time.

Einstein was, in my opinion, very confused about time. He notoriously said: “time is nothing but a stubbornly persistent illusion“. In my vision of physics, time is fundamental, and it has nothing to do with space. I believe the notion of spacetime applies well to gravitation, at great distances, such as Earth orbit. I used above one of the staples of “General Relativity”, the Schwarzschild radius, but very carefully, from first principles. When people argue “time travel“, they argue from later principles, later day saints, so to speak. They confuse cornucopia and utopia.

I believe this: Time is the measure of the change of the universe. It’s not subject to travelling. But it is subject to confusion, and Einstein is the latter’s prophet.

(I also believe that the second Law of Thermodynamics applies even at the subquantal level (the subquantal level is what those who study entanglement, non locality, in Quantum physics, such as the authors I just quoted, tangle with). OK, the latter point is beyond this essay, the main theme of which does not use it at all.)

***

THE EINSTEIN GRANDFATHER ERROR:

The third objection to using the grandfather paradox to contradict me is much more drastic, and revealed by my own pencil and paper (the following is just an abstract of my reasoning). The conventional reasoning due to Einstein is faulty (and faulty in several ways). 

Most specialists of relativity subscribe to statements such as “it should be possible to transmit Faster Than Light signals into the past by placing the apparatus in a fast-moving frame of reference“.

Einstein’s argument rests on equations for time such as  t’ = (t – xw/cc)/square root of (1- vv/cc).

In this v is supposed to be the speed of a moving frame, and w the speed of an alleged Faster Than Light signal. One sees that, given a w > c, there is a v close enough to, but inferior to, c, such that t’ becomes negative.

t’ is time. So what we have, given a Faster Than Light signal w, frames moving with enough of a speed v in which events seem to be running in reverse. Thus Very Serious Professors have argued that the putative existence of that FTL w reverses causality. They abbreviate this by saying that time travel a consequence of FTL. And what do I say to this howling of the Beotians? Not so fast.

Indeed, this ought to be physics, not just vulgar mathematics. One argument was overlooked by Einstein, who apparently believed blindly in Poincare’s Relativity Postulate even more than his author himself did.

We have discovered above that there is a limit energy, beyond which Relativity breaks down. Thus the Lorentz transformations break down.

Let’s look at the situation in a more refined way. What happens to the traditional transverse light clock encountered above, and in all traditional Relativity treatises? Well, in this thought experiment, admitting my reasoning above as valid, the light clock, if made energetic enough, will start to accelerate faster than light. So it would stop functioning, because light will not be able to catch up with it. This may sound strange, but it’s not. In the mood of the preceding, it just says that the light used is limited in energy, and the clock is not. To still keep time for a while, we may have to use a high energy neutrino clock (supposing that neutrinos, indeed, travel Faster Than Light; a neutrino clock is build exactly like a photon clock, with the photons replaced by neutrinos).

This is why the Lorentz transformation fail; because the clock fail, as the light cannot catch up with the mirror. Pernicious ones could claim I self contradict, as my argument used the Fitzgerald contraction. Yes, I used it, because it failed. In my logic, the contraction fails first.

Another argument is that the alledged violations of causality hard core relativists find in the apparition of negative times are much less frequent than they fear, because time dilation dilues the statistics. A relativistic point they absolutely ignore. Also, as I have argued in the past, in http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2011/09/01/quantum-non-locality/, Quantum physics non locality, in conjonction with Faster Than Light space expansion implies violations of local causality. Basically Quantum entanglements can happen beyond the space horizon given by the cosmic FTL expansion (which is an experimental fact).

Thus causality has to be taken with a grain of salt, and plenty of statistics (a characteristic of modern physics, at least since Boltzman).

***

AND LET’S NOT FORGET FASTER THAN LIGHT FROM THE QUANTUM…

In physics, these days, a thousand theories blossom, and nearly a thousand fail miserably. So, on the odds, it ought to be the case with the preceding theory. However the preceding rests on fundamentals, whereas much of the fashionable stuff rests on notions nobody understands, and few bothered to study (such as the interdiction of FTL, which rests just on the shallow logic of Einstein exposed above).

An interesting sort are the Large Extra Dimension theories (pertly instigated and made popular by the famous Lisa Randall, a glamorous professor from Princeton, Harvard and Solvay, author of the just published “Knocking On Heavens’ Doors”). They would help the preceding arguments, by lowering considerably the threshold of relativity’s high energy failure. Thus, if superluminal neutrinos are indeed observed, in light of the preceding, they would suggest the existence of Large Extra Dimensions.

Many of the theories which have blossomed are “not even wrong“. The obsession with superstrings was typical. Why to obsess with those, when basic Quantum theory had not been figured out? Is it because superstrings cannot be tested?

Basic Quantum theory is subject to experiments, and some have given spectacular, albeit extremely controversial results. There was curiously little interest to confront those tests. If nothing else, the OPERA experiment illustrates that the failure of Relativity at high energy can be tested (OPERA was really out to test neutrino oscillations, which are, already, a violation of Relativity in some sense, as they confer a (rest?) mass on a particle going at the speed of light!)

The preceding theory, and its absolute frame, fits like a glove with the idea with an absolute (but stochastic and statistical) space, constructed from Quantum Interaction (or “potential” as Bohm has it). That would partly cause the CMB. That theory rests on the predicted failure of standard Quantum theory at large distances, and the existence of an extremely Faster Than Light interaction. It’s getting to be a small world, theoretically speaking…

***

Patrice Ayme

***

P/S: The reasoning above is so simple that normal physicists will not rest before they can brandish a mistake. So what could that mistake be? Oh, simply that the perpetrator, yours truly, did not use full Relativistic Quantum Mechanics, obviously because s/he is ignorant. But referring to Relativistic Quantum Mechanics, by itself, would use in the proof what one wants to demonstrate with the proof. Relativistic Quantum Mechanics assumes that Relativity is correct at any speed. I don’t. I don’t, especially after looking outside.

OK, that was a meta argument. Can I build a more pointed objection? After all, Dirac got QED started on esthetic grounds, while elevating relativity to a metaprinciple. But beauty is no proof. Nor is the fact that Dirac’s point of view led to several predictions (Dirac equation for electrons, Spin, Positrons).

One could say that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (HUP) would prevent the confinement of a particle in such an increasingly small box. However, the HUP is infeodated to general De Broglie Mechanics (GDM), and there is no argument I see why GDM could not get confined..

Out With NASA Decadence, In With Better Union

 

OUT WITH THE PAST, IN WITH THE NEW, SAME AS THE OLD PAST

Let me add my spice to the excellent decision of Obama to change the strategy of NASA back to what it used to be, and what it ought to be: shaping the sharp edge of science and technology, where the profit motive does not provide enough lift.

Obama proposes to drop Bush’s going-back-to-the-moon-because-it-is-there-and-we-can-do-it-with-wheelbarrow "Constellation" program. "Constellation" is a nice French word, that was the best to be said about it, before burying it in shame.

"Constellation" was only going to use old technologies for a backbone, with a varnish of new gimmicks. When I say old, I mean really old. Example: the Ares I idea came from China, a millennium ago (the inventor died in the process).

Instead of using obsolete technologies that ought to, and could have been, deployed 30 years ago, Obama proposes to push for new technologies, an unusually bold, courageous and clever plan (for an administration known for its Summers of our discontent).

Inventing really new technologies was what NASA used to do in the 1950s (with the glorious X program). At the time the idea was to push for new technology, and new science. Going to orbit, and then the moon, qualified as such, back then. But we have been to the moon, and we do not have the technologies to stay to the moon sustainably (which would be the only way to progress scientifically, technologically and economically there).

True, sending explorers to Mars would bring a huge scientific progress, but we simply do not have the means to do this reasonably yet… Considering that robots can do plenty there (pushing robot tech in the process, no doubt most profitably in the most down to earth manner.) in particular, a French-American robotic Mars sample return mission that was scrapped (too expensive, said the USA), could be revived.

Obama is thus entirely correct to go back to the way it used to be.

If worse come to worse, and private USA companies cannot go to space safely and effectively, the USA does not have to use Soyuz forever. Indeed the French led European rocket, Ariane V, and its Jules Verne Automated Transfer Vehicle, modulo a bit of tinkering, would be a perfect replacement for the Ares program: whereas Ares I promised to be an even stupider vehicle than the Shuttle, Ariane V, with its hydrogen propulsion, and safety and effectiveness record, is perfectly state of the art. Besides the French have embarked on the future Ariane VI program, and, knowing them, they will not quit.

Indeed, remembering 1940, the French view is that superiority in aerospace is of the strategic essence. The USA can afford to be more relaxed, considering it is better defended by demography, geography, and history.

After Japan attacked at Pearl Harbor, it got quickly defeated because the USA was more mass technological. What do I mean by this? The USA had much more pilots, for example, including thousands of women pilots, who helped crucially the military effort in the Pacific, by flying very dangerous cargo missions. After Midway, when the competent Japanese fliers ended in the drink, or as combustible on the flaming Japanese carriers, Japan did not have enough competent pilots to train others and fly missions. Equivalent losses would not have stopped the American juggernaut.

The USA also had much more technologically competent individuals and private companies than Japan (or Germany) did.

As a result, the USA was a republic of engineers, and had much more advanced technologies than Japan, that it was able to deploy quickly. American carriers with armored decks and steam catapults, the imperial Navy did not have. So quickly the Americans were flying much better, well armored planes into battle, and turning their radars on. Superb Japanese binoculars came short during the night battles the Americans relished. Besides the USA had cracked the Jap codes, and USA submarines were superior, preventing the great rising sun imperial contraption to ship anything much between the dozens of thousands of islands on which it had cleverly spread countless garrisons (sometimes discreetly reduced to cannibalism).

It will be good, this time, for the core of the West, the European Union and the USA, to operate more as a unit, in a timely manner. Things got messy in the Second World War (and also the First world War) precisely because Europe and America did not operate as a unit to start with (instead some rogue American plutocrats went to operate as a unit with… Hitler!).

The USA waited malignantly until France and Britain won the war for them (WWI), or nearly lost it (WWII). It was great for the so called "American Century", but that did not last too long… And the 75 million or so who died in WWII, among others, sure did not find the strategy most profitable (differently from Wall Street, which laughed all the way to its associated banks!)

It is not well known that the "Manhattan Project" truly started with the French "War Ministry" in January 1938 (you will probably not find this information on Wikipedia, and I will not bother putting it there). The French removed all the nuclear patents deposited by French scientists, and insured the cooperation of Norway in a determined nuclear bomb effort, extended later to the UK, and then the USA, which ended by hastening the end of WWII with as little blood and roasted flesh as possible(as everyone does not know yet).

My point? Because of a tradition of technological, scientific, and generally mental supremacy in the West, there is much more to be gained in cooperating, than by having everyone sulking in its corner.

The Eurofighter, and the F35 Lightning, are examples of contemporary major multinational military programs (on these superiority fighters and the Franco-French Rafale does, and will, the air supremacy of the West depends).

Less well known, France used the USA to mass produce the 75mm gun in the First World War, helping to save France (the "75" was perhaps France’s main weapon in WWI).

But not just that: USA private companies learned to mass produce the “75” with higher precision than they could initially muster (the Ford Model T would come out of that new technological tradition of massive precision, a decade later).

So welcome to the future! One of the reasons the European Union was created was to make economies of scale, and synergies of mental efforts. For example, although all Airbus models are assembled in Toulouse, France, all Airbus’ wings are conceived and constructed in Wales (UK).

There is no reason why the same economies of scale could not be extended systematically to the USA, as a collaborator of the EU (the Saturn robot, Huyghens-Cassini, is a splendid example of this; Boeing’s 787 another, with Japan thrown into the mix, as Mitsubishi now traditionally makes Boeing’s wings, which is more crafty than fighting Boeing’s planes; by the way, Airbus is now more of an American company than Boeing itself…)

In other words, nothing prevents its errant colony to come back ever closer to its parent, Europe, in order to achieve a better union… And others should, and ought to join in, which means, democratize (and the eye was on Beijing.)

PA

TRAPPED BY SUPER TRAPS

CO2 AND SO2 KILLED DINOSAURS. ARE WE NEXT?

***

In a nutshell: Contrarily to what is conveniently believed in the USA, the extinction of the dinosaurs was probably NOT caused by a giant impact from an asteroid, or comet. The impact was NOT explosive enough, not poisonous enough, nor cooling enough.

What killed the dinosaurs was super giant volcanism, a type that happens every 200 million years or so, the SUPER TRAPS. Super Traps correspond to catastrophic Earth core cooling events: giant burps from Vulcan itself. The most extravagant violence of the Deccan Super Traps 65 million years ago, happened within 300,000 years of the Yucatan impact (a sheer coincidence, as we will see). The fabulous extinction of 250 million years ago was caused by the even more gigantic Siberian Super Traps, and so on.

Super Traps offer a convenient model for the present greenhouse catastrophe. CARBON BURNING BEHAVES LIKE A MAN MADE SUPER TRAPS.

(No wonder that US scientists do not want super traps to have caused mass extinctions: it is not cool to be the bearer of extinction news, and attribute it to something that made their private and public sponsors rich!)

***

Introduction and abstract: SUPER TRAPS DID IT.

The disappearance of dinosaurs (and many related species) was NOT caused by an impact with a celestial body, I claim (although, clearly, that did not help!).

There was a sizable impact, true, around that time, but although it sadly caused the death of many, it is probably completely irrelevant to the total disappearance of so many species down to the last survivor, worldwide. How do you cool the planet for millions of years, with an object just a few miles across?

Well, you don’t. Still Earth cooled for millions of years afterwards.

The massive Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) extinction, just as the even more massive Permian-Trias (P-T) extinction, and all other massive extinctions of the last half billion years, were caused by a super massive volcanic event, a super giant blob of magma erupting directly from the boundary of the core of planet Earth (“lava lamp” style).

Such events are rare, every 200 million years or so, and are causality related to the Earth’s dynamo (magnetic records show). We call such super giant eruptions SUPER TRAPS (by contrast to smaller traps, caused by smaller and shallower plumes of magma, such as the most recent one, the Columbia event of 15 million years ago; those smaller traps are too small for worldwide extinctions).

SUPER TRAPS kill worldwide, and durably, by hyper massive infusions of SO2 (Sulfur Dioxide) and CO2 (Carbon Dioxide). So they provide an excellent model for the present anthropogenic CARBON BURNING CATASTROPHE (also known by one of its effects, “Global Warming”).

SUPER TRAPS provide an excellent model for what would happen if one injected the atmosphere with enough SO2. That, unbelievably, some American scientists, apparently not satisfied with the CO2 their country injects already, propose to do. They think it’s “cool“. Time for them to learn something new, from the past.

The present behavior of mankind smacks of the disappearance of dinosaurs, and other superb species depicted below.

It’s taken for granted in the USA that a bolide which crashed in Yucatan, Chicxulub, caused it.

This is convenient, be it only because Chicxulub smacks of the typical act of God, and the USA loves to believe in God: God worship, God trusting beats going to school, any day, and being responsible of one’s acts.

As I will show, the convenience goes beyond divine intervention: to see what really happened during the Super Traps eruption is all too reminiscent of the present burning all-the-carbon-that-ever-was catastrophe. The Super Traps catastrophes force to study the same mechanisms that are at play presently, in what may soon turn into a man-made hell.

There is overwhelming evidence that the massive extinction was not caused by an impact. To start with, the mathematics of the explosion are against having enough power to cause such a massacre, from that brutal excavation alone. Instead, another explanation offers itself, and that one keeps on giving, because it explains even more spectacular extinctions.

How do we know that super volcanism, the VOLCANISM OF SUPER TRAPS, on an unimaginably violent scale, bubbling straight up from Earth’s core, is the culprit of MASS EXTINCTIONS?

As I will show, a super traps eruption is a biosphere nightmare and catastrophe that constitutes, in several ways, a model for the sort of biosphere destruction we are presently engaged in. WE ARE GETTING TRAPPED IN MAN MADE SUPER TRAPS…

The impact theory has turned to comedy. To make the impact work nevertheless, in spite of its puny aspect, the more it has become obvious that it does not work at all. Fast food for thought seems an American tendency, a resultant of a school system that favors consensus (the way of the gregarious lemming) rather than argument (the way of the creative thinker). To demolish the impact theory can be done in a single argument: explosive power. It came from below, not above. But a reminder first on the impact theory of the disappearance of dinosaurs and their colleagues.

***

THE IMPACT THEORY IN A FRIVOLOUS LIGHT:

In the USA, a while back, Walter Alvarez, a geologist at UC Berkeley, went to see his dad, physics Nobel Laureate Luis Alvarez, up at LBL on the hill, and asked him how he could prove that dinosaurs disappeared because they had been struck by an asteroid. Alvarez junior wanted a proof of impact. Alvarez senior suggested to look at iridium, an element rare in Earth’s crust, but frequent in meteorites, he said. Notice the concept of “Earth crust” (= “lithosphere”): our entire argument is going to be that Earth is not just a crust, something that escaped the unconditional partisans of the space rock impacting the neighborhood.

Sure enough, an iridium layer was found, about 65 million years old, when the dinosaurs and other most advanced life forms suddenly vanished, and so the Alvarez team proclaimed victory: a massive asteroid impact had caused it, they said. (But all they had truly found, a certain and significant discovery, was more iridium than normal, in a layer!)

Then geologists proceeded to look for a crater. One was conveniently found, of just the right age, or so it looked at the time, in the records of geologists working for oil companies, in Yucatan… in one of the world’s top tourist areas. The popularity of Yucatan among geologists richly endowed with grants, became undisputed. (There are more recent impacts in Siberia, possibly less popular because they are adorned with fewer coconut trees in winter, without nice hotels at the ready to provide the weary academics with rest and relaxation. Besides, they… caused no extinctions.)

The Yucatan crater, soon dubbed the Chicxulub crater, is located near the town of the same name. Conveniently, Chicxulub is the rough translation of the Mayan for “tail of the devil”. The crater is 180 kilometers (110 mi) in diameter, making Chicxulub one of the largest confirmed impact structures in the world; the impacting bolide that formed the crater was up to 10 km (6 mi) in diameter. So far, so good.

***

THE CHICXULUB BOLIDE THAT STRUCK YUCATAN:

Radar topography reveals the 180 kilometer (112 mi) diameter ring of the crater.

***

IRIDIUM: A PROOF WITH A GIANT LOOPHOLE:

Magnanimously, I will not insinuate that finding an impact in a tourist area is a measure of scientific bias. But to assume that an iridium layer can only be produced by a bolide is a grave logical mistake. Before deciding that something caused something else, one has to eliminate all other blatant alternative causes of that same something else. This, the Alvarez team did not do. It turns out that the Reunion volcano and the Hawai’i volcano both emit gases and dust enriched in hexafluoride of IRIDIUM.

These volcanoes are very special, especially the one of Reunion island, and we accuse it to be the real tail of the devil. Hawai’i is known as the Earth’s tallest mountain, relative to its basis (Hawai’i stands more than 10,000 meters above the sea floor it rises from) and the Reunion island is not far behind. Volcanically speaking, the Hawaiian volcano arises from a HOTSPOT (or “plume”). Hawai’i's hotspot is smaller than the Reunion hotspot, geophysically and historically speaking. The Reunion hotspot gave rise to a volcanic ensemble that, viewed in its entirety, is probably the world’s most impressive, in the last 250 million years. It disintegrated part of India, and sliced right through a mid oceanic ridge. But there is more.

The Alvarez iridium rich layer, their proof of the importance of the bolide’s impact, is only a few centimeters thick around most of the planet, and upon that thin evidence, the elation of the partisans of the impact rested. When and where the Reunion super hotspot exploded in its maximal fury, the iridium rich layer is a METER THICK. On this observation alone, the case should already be closed: Reunion did it, not Chicxulub. But I will pursue, because many lessons are therein revealed. And many independent arguments will be made. Contemplating an eruption worth 1,000 to 10,000 Chicxulubs is instructive. Let’s contemplate:

The 1,200-m-thick exposed section through the Deccan basalt pile at Mahabaleshwar, Sahyadri (Western Ghats) region. Grand! Photo by Hetu Sheth.

The Deccan Super Traps are really, really big, and very thick: this is just a tini tiny sample… The present area of directly observable lava flows is estimated to be around 512,000 km2 (197,684 sq mi). That is about the size of California, and just a fraction of the total mayhem. Some lava flows are 800 kilometer long (they are the longest on Earth, and were created in a few days).

***

COULD CHICXULUB HAVE CAUSED THE EXTINCTION?

The Chicxulub bolide penetrated the earth, and transformed its kinetic energy into heat. It became gaseous, and the gas exploded with immense force. How much? Well, Chicxulub had a volume of roughly 400 cubic kilometers. Very generously, one can suppose that it volatilized ten times its own volume in Earth’s rock (assuming, once again generously, an impact at a maximal 40 kilometers per second). So one ends up with 4,000 cubic kilometers of disintegrated, volatized rock.

What the Chicxulub partisans claim is that these exploding 4,000 cubic kilometers of rock killed the dinosaurs, down to the last one. Of course, it would be an immense massacre, if it happened today, and most large animals would die. Most of humankind would die. But exterminating species is another matter entirely.

***

By the way, Chicxulub did not just kill the dinosaurs, supposing it did. It would have also killed all the Plesiosaurs, Pliosaurs, and Mosasaurs, which were highly successful sea reptiles:

(Typical Plesiosaurs on top, Pliosaur below, Mosasaur at the bottom.)

That deep fact puts the impact under water, logically speaking: the sea reptiles could endure colder temperatures, and they were protected from transient heat. Now the impact partisans argue that the dust of the impact, and the smoke of thousands of fires (started by re-entering incandescent material: tektites) caused a “nuclear winter”, and very cold temperatures. But the sea reptiles knew cold and dark (see picture above). Obviously something else decimated them to the last.

After the sea reptiles were exterminated, it took ten million years for sea mammals to re-enter the sea. Obviously, the condition of the sea was no good for very long. What could have caused badness to perpetuate itself for so long?

***

The Pterosaurs, the most accomplished fliers that ever were, also went extinct, at the same time as the dinosaurs and the sea reptiles:

Size comparison of the two known Quetzalcoatlus species and a human being. (Some have said Quetzalcoatlus was a bit smaller...)

By the way, such enormous sizes are completely impossible for birds. The Pterosaurs used evolutionary tricks the avian dinosaurs known as birds never stumbled upon (such as variable geometry inflatable surfaces). Thus the largest flying Pterosaurs were at least ten times heavier than the largest flying birds (maybe 25 times heavier).

How could such incredibly superior creatures disappear? Just one hit from a bolide? 4,000 cubic kilometers of rock thrown about in a minute did it? All around the planet? Down to the last eggs? For creatures who were, it seems, partly carrion eaters, as some birds of prey are nowadays? And why did the birds survive, with a great wealth of species preserved?

(After the dinosaurs were killed, there was an age of birds on land; meanwhile, carnivorous mammals entered the sea, now that the sea reptiles were gone: the first whales appeared within ten million years.)

***

WHAT KILLED THE DINOSAURS WAS THE COOLING OF THE CLIMATE, NOT THE BIG SPACE ROCK:

Now, of course, in the beginning, when the solar system was young, there were many enormous impacts. It is probable that life started several times on Mars, Earth and Venus, and got extinguished after giant impacts. And that life (bacteria) may have been thrown from one planet to another where a previous impact had extinguished it. One such impact, by a Mars sized planet, melted all of Earth, and the debris thrown in Earth orbit coalesced to form the Moon. Thereafter, Venusian or Martian life probably conquered Earth after it had cooled enough.

An impact with a big comet or asteroid could have caused a massive extinction: such objects can be 40 kilometers across, with 100 times the mass, and destruction of Chicxulub (the comet Hale-Bopp of 1997 had a diameter of at least 35 kms, and passed at 52 kilometers per second, giving it an explosive capability of 4.4 x 10⁹ megatons, about 44 times the estimated energy of the K-T Chicxulub event).

Although apocalyptic, the Chicxulub bolide was in no way that enormous, that it could have wiped out all advanced life on Earth. And the fact is, the K-T extinction event wiped out only selected advanced animals, namely all those resembling dinosaurs.

Why? My answer: because dinosaurs were adapted to a warm tropical world

There were polar dinosaurs, when the poles were … warm, which they were until the end of the Cretaceous, precisely.

There is independent biological evidence, from closely looking at their respiratory systems, that dinosaurs did not have the advanced temperature regulation that birds (= avian dinosaurs) and mammals had (there were plenty of mammals under the “reign” of the dinosaurs, and they were evolving: antelopes differentiated before the end of the Cretaceous).

So the dinosaurs were not adapted to serious, even transient cooling. That’s why they died, and why mammals and birds, and animals that could burrow in mud or soil (turtles, snakes, crocs, lizards) did not.

***

DINOSAURS DID NOT LIKE IT COOL:

Because the fact is, around the time when the dinosaurs died, the climate cooled down very seriously. And not just at the poles.

Notice the COLLAPSE OF TEMPERATURE AT THE TIME WHEN DINOSAURS DISAPPEAR: IT’S THE FALL OFF THE GIANT PEAK ON THE LEFT (2/3 of the way into the “K”, “K” being for Cretaceous, from the German “Kreide” for chalk a translation of the French-Latin for chalk).

Now, of course, the partisans of the bolide impact then claimed that the bolide, which obviously did not roast most animals, fabricated a very violent winter (a sort of “nuclear winter”). The idea is that a lot of material was up in the air, obscuring the sun, and so it became very cold, etc…

Unfortunately for this simplistic little explanation, it does not explain why the sea dinosaurs got so cold they died off, just because of a cloud deck for a few months: the ocean has a millennial thermal inertia. (The ocean takes a 1,000 years to change temps drastically.)

Then the impact partisans went on a whole gymnastic to boost the damage they claimed the impact did, asserting that it struck in a very special place, which would have made a special cloud…

***

THE REAL CULPRIT OF THE DEMISE OF DINOSAURS. THE DECCAN SUPER TRAPS:

The word “Traps” means big layered rock, and is of Scandinavian origin. The Deccan Traps, one of the largest such “traps” formed between 60 and 68 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous era. The bulk of the volcanic events occurred at the Western Ghats (near Mumbai) some 65 million years ago. This series of extraordinary eruptions may have lasted fewer than 30,000 years in total (as paleomagnetism reveals).

Before the Deccan Traps region was reduced to its current size by erosion and the drift and partial disintegration of India, the original area covered by the lava flows of basalt was of the order of 1.5 million km², approximately half the size of modern India. On a depth of 3,000 meters. That’s around 5 million cubic kilometers. Or 1,000 times the total imaginable maximal ejecta from Chicxulub.

Now remember, the ejecta from Chicxulub, ten times the mass of the bolide itself, was mostly made of rock, some of it incandescent, capable of starting fires, thousands of kilometers away, after going ballistic through space. But some of the ejecta was just plain rock and dirt, at normal temperature (that’s how impacts throw bacteria from planet to planet).

In any case, the Chicxulub ejecta was just rock, and mostly Earth’s own lithospheric rock (surface rocks, in other words). No big deal, this Chicxulub: a big excavation, gone nuts.

The Deccan traps were something all together different. We are not just talking liquid rock. When a volcano erupts, few people and animals die swimming in lava flows.

The most lethal, and far ranging part of a volcanic eruption, pertains to its gases. The gases are what propel the lava; there are always plenty. What I claim is that the gases released in the Deccan Traps caused the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event (which included the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs). Chicxulub did not have such gases associated to itself. Not at all. The real devil, as everybody knows, smells of sulfur. Reunion has sulfur. The bolide had none.

***

CRAZY VOLCANIC GASES. EXAMPLE: THE LAKI ERUPTION IN ICELAND, SUMMER 1783.

During the Laki eruption, 15 cubic kilometers of lava came out of a meek 10 kilometers long fissure (now a few cute small lichen covered innocent looking cones can be observed along it). But gases, with a lot of sulfur therein, went all the way to Europe, hanging around ominously. The Laki produced up to an astounding 6 million tons of SO2 (Sulfur dioxide), per DAY. The temperatures went crazy in Europe: hot, then cold. For months.

Besides human industry and volcanoes, there are no sources of SO2 in nature. The excess mortality in Europe due to Laki seems to have been around 200,000 dead! From the gases. 200,000 dead from a small volcano thousands of kilometers away, having a small eruption.

The point is that the Deccan Traps were of a similar type to Laki, just way, way, worse. Iceland is above a hot spot, besides being astride the mid Atlantic ridge. Hawai’i is another example of hot spot. The Reunion hotspot is still something else.

***

EARTH’S VOLCANISM ABSTRACT:

Volcanism is how the Earth cools down. Cooling happens in four ways (my own classification):

a) Conventional volcanoes. (Typically magma formed from light elements in a subduction zone.)

b) Plate tectonics. (Plates are the outside, cooling part of giant convection cells of Earth’s mantle. The plates cool as they are exposed to the atmosphere and space.)

c) Hot spots. (Hot material coming up through the mantle, as in a lava lamp. examples: Hawai’i, Yellowstone, many island chains.)

d) Super hotspots. (Same as hot spots, just so big they come straight from Earth’s own core.)

Thus the earth functions just as a boiling pot of a very thick soup. In such a pot, there are two ways heat is conducted from the bottom to the top: convection cells, and big bubbles coming up, straight through the whole mess (a problem heating tomato sauce in a microwave oven). The Deccan traps are of the later type.

Convection = Plate tectonics, Big Bubbles = Hotspots. Hawai’i is a hotspot, so is Easter island, Juan Fernandez island, Tristan da Cunha island, Yellowstone, etc… The hotspots are deeper in origin than the convection cells of plate tectonics, and they tend not to move that much relative to each other: the plates move above them (as the Pacific plate above the Hawai’i hotspot, at about 7 centimeters per year towards the north west).

Differently from a cooking pot, the Earth has a triple insulation system.

The super hotspots are the way to cool the core, directly. We know this, because massive plumes giving rise to massive traps occur every 200 million years or so. They are associated to the earth dynamo, in the liquid outer core. After the dynamo has been so quiescent, that there had been no more magnetic field inversions for at least 30 million years.

Then the dynamo gets active again, with plenty of magnetic field inversions, and shortly after, a super hotspot, a super plume, is released. The head of such a superhot spot is around 500 kms across, and can rise at one meter per year, through the entire mantle.

When the Reunion superhot plume reached the Indian island-continent, it pushed it from below: it was as a giant balloon of extremely hot magma; being so hot that it was much less dense, it pushed up, according to Archimedes principle (= “hydrostasis”). India, a continent made of light, solid, rigid material, as continents are, resisted for a while, bulging up by a full kilometer into a giant dome, before the hot lava and gases of the super giant plume broke through it, and flooded half of the Indian subcontinent with the Deccan traps.

This is no mean feat, because the lithosphere below a continent can be up to 200 kilometers thick (it is unlikely that Chicxulub could have broken through it significantly: the Siberian impact described at the end of this essay penetrated by a mile, and fractured rock nine kms deep).

The so called “Shiva” destruction off shore in India may be related to the fact that there can be NO lithosphere in an oceanic plate (for example between the Cape Verde islands (another small hotspot) and the Caribbean, the raw mantle is directly exposed to the ocean…) Thus, as part of the super plume broke through the oceanic plate, it was a different job there, dismantling the Seychelles (or so it seems).

***

SUPER HOTSPOT CAUSES SUPER TRAPS, AND SUPER TRAPS CAUSE MASS EXTINCTIONS:

When a super trap erupts, it goes through a series of massive, brutal pulses of activity. The two main ones of the Deccan traps bracketed the K-T boundary (the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, when the extinctions occurred). During the main pulse, a layer as deep as an astounding 220 meters of thick lava came out within ten years (it seems: latest research, 2009). Some lava flows, the longest ever recorded, rushed east across all of India, and are at least 800 kilometers long.

Enormous amounts of deadly SO2 and CO2 gases pervaded the planet’s atmosphere, the former poisoning and acidifying everything, and occluding the sun, bringing a multi-year night, the second causing an enormous, lethal greenhouse, that quickly followed the volcanic winter, and filled up the ocean with carbonic acid (killing sea life).

Next, the gigantic basaltic lava beds reacted with the CO2 in the atmosphere, removing it, and the planet ended up with less of a CO2 greenhouse than before the traps, hence much cooler (over the next million years as the geological record shows). So it went: super cold, super hot, hyper acidic, long term cold. In a few years. Then repeat in the next pulse.

It’s a miracle birds and mammals survived. In the earlier Permian-Triassic extinction, caused by the even more gigantic Siberian traps, which covered maybe a third of the gigantic Eurasian continent with lava flows, at least 95% of animal species went extinct (250 million BP). Just as with the Deccan traps, there was a first massive traps eruption several million years before (more exactly 8 million years before).

There are many examples of this. Not just the disappearance of dinosaurs, and the extinctions 258 and 250 million years before the present. All traps coincide with extinction events, except the smallest and most recent of them all, the Columbia traps, which broke through the North American plate, 15 million years ago (this from the “Yellowstone” hotspot; some lava flows then went 100 kilometers, in one shot, though!)

The release of volcanic gases, particularly sulfur dioxide, during the formation of the traps, contributed to contemporary climate change. Data point to an average global fall in temperature of 2 °C during the eruptions. At least. Experiences with various volcanoes in the last two centuries show it could have been several times that.

The Tambora eruption in Indonesia in1815 caused the “year without a summer” of 1816, in Europe. Around Tambora, it was completely dark for four days. Tambora was of course teeny tiny and ridiculous relative to a traps event.

***

THE DESPAIR OF THE IMPACTISTS:

When it became clear that the Chicxulub bolide was too small to extinguish so much, those obsessed by impacts searched for another impact. Plenty of them were found, but none of them coincided with an extinction. Chicxulub was the only one of the sort. So they argued the ground at Chicxulub was special (lots of limestone, thus lots of CO2 thrown up in the air). Now two thirds of impacts will happen at sea, so maybe a big impact disappeared in a subduction zone… Hope erupts, eternal.

Because the Deccan Super Traps loomed ominously in their future, and the Siberian Super Traps loomed ever larger, those obsessed by impacts argued that the Yucatan impact somehow melted, or broke, the other side of the Earth, creating the Deccan Traps (as if volcanoes needed impacts!) This is beyond silly. The traps had started millions of years before (although at a slower pace). Besides, continental drift shows that Yucatan and India were very far from antipodal then (Yucatan was in the middle of the present day Atlantic, and India was above the Reunion island)!

A recent variant of this is to argue that the tortured sea bed off the remaining piece of the Deccan traps is actually a super gigantic impact crater (!). The impactists even gave it a name: Shiva! But it is not because something drastic happened that it is necessarily a super giant bolide, landing just where the largest volcanism on Earth had festered for millions of years. Common sense should put limits to cosmic conspiracy theories!

And this is to forget the power of the Reunion super hot spot: it destroyed part of the Indian continent, forcefully separating the Seychelles islands micro-continent (these islands are indeed half granitic, which means they are made of continental crust; the continent in between got torn apart, and swallowed by the super hotspot, which also distorted the local mid oceanic ridge, while giving rise to a whole succession of islands finishing with Maurice and Reunion).

The impactists may say that the probability of Chicxulub coinciding with the Deccan Super Traps was low. But not that much. Let’s say a Chicxulub happens about twice every 100 million years nowadays (some may have happened, and be eaten in a subduction zone; besides we know of several giant impacts around 35 million years ago, in America and Siberia; one created Chesapeake Bay).

The worst pulse of the Deccan traps is roughly coincidental with the KT boundary, and was followed by the second most devastating pulse 300,000 years later. Chicxulub was also within 300,000 years of the largest Deccan pulse (supposedly).

The probability of a bolide impact happening during the Deccan traps is therefore 3%. Small, but not unbelievable. No other extinction was found sort-of coincidental with a bolide, all are simultaneous with super traps.

(And if one looks at the probability of a bolide impact during Super Traps (not just during an acute phase), it’s a minimum of 10%: ten million years for a Super Traps episode seems the rule. It’s higher if one observes that there were 4 bolide impacts in the last 100 million years, which is arguably the case; then the probability is as high as 40%!)

Before the K-T boundary, dinosaurs had been declining for a few million years (apparently the number of species would have been overestimated, because often the young looked very different from older individuals, and so were classified as different species; news from 2009).

The climate had been cooling (a cooling climate would have been devastating for dinosaurs, who had no time to evolve in warm blooded animals generating their own heat, as birds and mammals had evolved, over 180 million years).

The first, and smaller, Deccan pulse 2.5 million years earlier than Chicxulub (67.5 million years BP) has got to do with it: exposed lava beds absorb CO2. And enormous lava absorbs enormous CO2. The whole Deccan craziness was followed by a strong and persistent cooling, over millions of years, most probably for the same reason (absorption of CO2 by decomposing basalt beds).

***

Conclusion: LET’S NOT GET TRAPPED!

Whenever one discovers a truth, there is often a larger truth behind it. Going from the particular truth to the general one is the meta process, central to thinking, also known as abstraction. (I claim it is central to neurobiological thinking.)

It is true that the dinosaurs disappeared in a catastrophe. But that catastrophe is not a one-time event; it keeps on coming back, every 200 million years or so.

The model of the impact simply does not work. Besides, even it worked once, it would have to work each time the magnetic field reversals stayed quiescent for dozen of millions of years previously, an unimaginable causality, for those who don’t believe in miracles they do not need.

Moreover, we are engaged in a man-made ersatz mass extinction, led by Washington (the USA, and its leading factory, China, produce more than 40% of the man-made CO2).

This time the CO2 is indeed man-made, not caused by Vulcan. To make it more hellish, American technologists and self described “Super Freaks” have suggested to compensate the man-made CO2 greenhouse effect by a man-made SO2 cooling effect, exactly like the natural work of Vulcan. (They propose to inject billions of tons of SO2 in the stratosphere, because it will allow Americans to drive SUVs, and burn all their coal, since “the USA is the Saudi Arabia of coal”: clearly, God wanted it to be burned!)

Science is just common sense, on steroids, applied to the labyrinth of reality. We are living in a scientific society. Although some of the leadership clings to superstition, even the superstitious ones cannot ignore science. Science is about what is. It is also a method. That method consists in applying common sense to reproducible facts, and check the models one makes from said reproducible facts against observed phenomena.

We are working very hard right now. Most of the planet’s workers are hell bound to reproduce right away, right now, many of the conditions that extinguished dinosaurs, pterosaurs, pliosaurs, plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, etc…

What kind of economy is that? This house (eco) is managed (nomy) poorly. But I would respectfully suggest we know enough to predict what is going to happen next, and it is useless to reproduce the same catastrophe before its time. We don’t need man-made super traps.

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Patrice Ayme.

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P/S 1: Institut Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP), especially its paleomagnetic and tectonic units, have pushed for many of the ideas above about super plumes from paleomagnetism (most probably those units are the foremost in the world, and I say this although the Vincent Courtillot, who heads IPGP, professes to be skeptical of the anthropogenic CO2 greenhouse… I would not be surprised this has to do with some of the considerable, and considerably opaque financing of IPGP…But it is of good war, as one says. A careful listening to director Courtillot shows that he is so careful in what he says about the greenhouse, so anxious not to contradict it blatantly, that, obviously, he believes in it). Ever since the enormity of Siberian and Deccan Traps was known, and their coincidence with mass extinctions, many people, no doubt, drew the obvious conclusions.

Although I did arrive to the same conclusions independently about what really caused the disappearance of the dinosaurs, it was on more general principles (the purported impact was clearly insufficient in explosive power, poisoning potential, and long term, multi million year cooling capability).

P/S 2: Mr. Sheth (whose picture of the Deccan I used above) has claimed that the gigantic Deccan Super Traps would not be due to a super plume coming straight from the core. His arguments are unconvincing (they are contained within the data above, but he makes a bid deal about the fact that the Deccan Traps occurred over time). But, of course, super plumes or not, the volcanic events were large enough for a worldwide mass extinction (and the bolide was not).

P/S 3: Washington caused trouble before. The Chesapeake Bay impact crater was formed by a bolide that impacted the eastern shore of North America about 35 million years ago, in the late Eocene epoch. That crater is a mile deep (as deep as the grand Canyon), and about 100 kilometers across. Just as Chicxulub, it was revealed by oil geologists. There was a mass extinction around that time, as the temperature of the Earth fluctuated and cooled. That event came to be known as the “Grande Coupure” (French for Great Break, since French geologists discovered it).

Am I contradicting myself in these last few lines? Well, not really: the events 35 million years ago involved several impacts. There was an even larger impact in Popigai, Northern Siberia, plus another, again in Siberia, maybe one in Italy, and a secondary impact in America. Although complete guesswork at this point, it’s not impossible that Earth collided with a major comet then (the comet would have fragmented first maybe through a first low pass, as happened with Jupiter a few years back. Another possibility is a multiple body asteroid (those are frequent). Viewed the other way, this failed massive mass extinction proves the point about the K-T mass extinction not possibly being caused by just one 10kms body.