Striving For Ever Better Thinking. Humanism Is Intelligence Unleashed. From Intelligence All Ways, Instincts & Values Flow, Even Happiness. History and Science Teach Us Not Just Humility, But Power, Smarts, And The Ways We Should Embrace. Naturam Primum Cognoscere Rerum
NEWARGUMENT Shows That Relativity Suffers Momentum Limits!
Abstract: The Principle of Relativity claims that absolute motion of weighty matter can’t be detected. However a simple thought experiment shows that there is an absolute limit to momentum: BLACK MOMENTUM MATTERS! It’s astounding that nobody noticed this before.
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Poincaré on the Relativity of motion, claiming all motion is relative,1895, ten years before the Einstein parrot tried to grab it all (because that volatile was depressed): “L’expérience a révélé une foule de faits qui peuvent se résumer dans la formule suivante: il est impossible de rendre manifeste le mouvement absolu de la matière, ou mieux le mouvement relatif de la mati`ere par rapport `à l’éther; tout ce qu’on peut mettre en évidence, c’est le mouvement de la matière pondérable par rapport `à la matière pondérable.”
Contracted translation: myriad facts show absolute motion of weighty matter can’t be detected, all we can know is relative motion.
OK, let’s suppose the universe is an infinite flat sea with frictionless ships. Consider ships A and B, each of mass m. Poincaré says we can consider only relative speeds. Now accelerate A. According to the theory of Relativity and the equation: EE = ppcc + mmcccc, the energy of A will grow as pc, where p is its momentum, namely: mu/√(1-uu/cc)…
Let’s keep on accelerating. At some point, the energy will be so large that A will become a Black Hole. More exactly the length of the ship A will sit inside its Schwarschild radius. ,
Conclusion: all momenta are not the same: very high momenta are absolutely bounded… thanks to the Theory of Relativity itself!.
Quandary: Does that mean that the Theory of Relativity is… false? Not exactly, not that fast.
The basic slowing down of local time, shrinkage of length in the direction of motion, Lorentz transformations, Poincaré group, additions of speeds and the relationships I used were all obtained from the dynamics of light, which has mass zero and can have arbitrary low energy. So all the equations and the conceptology remain valid.
What gets hit is the Principle of Relativity of the motions of WEIGHTY matter in its most general form. The light cone: xx + yy + zz = cctt in the case of light remains unchanged and valid, and it’s all we need to derive the preceding entities and equations.
If there is a limit to momentum, as I simply demonstrated, then there is a notion of absolute rest. A consequence is that what I call the “Russian Dolls” universes can’t happen.
Another more mundane consequence is the de facto existence if not a sort of aether, of a sort of absolute cosmic reference frame [1].
Morality: theories are refinements. We further refined.
Patrice Ayme
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P/S 1: Cognoscenti may object that one may enter a Black Hole and see no physical change. That’s true if the Black Hole were galactic size. Namely, here is my preferred example: an object the size of the Milky Way and with the density of air would imprison light, so would be technically, from the outside, a Black Hole. One could enter such a Black Hole, in a kilometer long starship, without visible effect. However, in a smaller Black Hole, the full Ricci tensor comes into play, and lateral tearing forces (“tidal” effects) appear. Those effects would be blatant in a small BH, and the smaller the BH, the more blatant.
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P/S 2: One may make to the preceding argument the following objection: it has long been known that the Theory of Gravitation (aka “Einstein General Relativity, GR”) “contradicts” Special Relativity, SR: light can go in circles in GR, light can come to a standstill in GR, etc. Einstein himself recognized this. However the contradiction is only apparent, going from local to global in a differentiable way. One could as well say, and the analogy is 100% exact, that global differential geometry “contradicts” local differential geometry: the global geometry (and topology!) of a manifold deviates from its own local geometry, because the former is integrated from the latter.
But this is not what the effect I showed does, as it contradicts the Principle of Relativity, LOCALLY… while, for the reason I explained, it leaves the basic equations of SR intact…
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P/S 3: The observation above is not the Unruh effect. By the way, moving at high speed in one direction will make that side of the cabin hot, simply from hitting the Cosmic Background Radiation (this effect, which is also extremely elementary to anticipate, is much more basic than the Unruh effect…) One could disregard this situation by philosophically claiming the heat came from the outside. In the effect I brandished, the effect is inside, as the tidal forces caused by the formation of the black Hole permeate the inside of the enclosure.
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[1] Poincaré struggled with the notion of aether, which was supposed to be the medium in which electromagnetic waves… waved. He finally concluded that the notion was useless, one could do all the computations without it. Einstein said so in September 1905, deducing all the Relativity equations from just the Principle of Relativity (Galileo- Poincaré) and the constancy of the speed of light in all cases (Poincaré). However, it’s not that simple. Poincaré, who had introduced relativistic gravitational waves (June 1905) was cautious about the aether, and Einstein would go back to it after 1921 (Poincaré died at 56 in 1912, too bad…) Mathematical theorems evolved after 1930 (Whitney) and 1960 (Nash) show that a manifold of dimension n can be embedded (technical meaning in differential topology is subjacent) in a larger Euclidean space of dimension 2n +1. I view this “simple” fact as more salient, and rich in consequences, than the String Theory divagations…
If there is a limit to momentum, as I simply demonstrated, then there is a notion of absolute rest… As there would be in the (2n+1) dimensional manifold. This conceptual framework enables mathematically SQPR, the Sub Quantum Physical Reality and its superluminal speed… Somewhat above 10^23c…
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The PARIS ACCORD IS COUNTERPRODUCTIVE. ONLY HARD CORE NEW SCIENCE WILL SOLVE THE ECOLOGICAL CRISES, And Prevent Their Consequences (Wars). New Science has to be invested in, forceful fossil fuel interruption will not work.
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Abstract: “Two degrees is too much” was clear 13 years ago… The Paris Accord pretended to address the problem with self-discipline and a little redistribution of wealth. That strategy is just cosmetic: homilies to self-restraint and electrification all over are not enough. The correct strategy is to do what Homo always did: ”Science the shit out of this”, as The Martian puts it…
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The present civilization is encountering an ecological crisis of the greatest magnitude. The phenomenon is not new. Countless civilizations have encountered such crises in the past, and, as a result, failed. What is new is that the problems we are confronting strongly affect the entire biosphere. And there are several problems, entangled. Some have to do with greenhouse gases: CO2, CH4, NOx, Chlorofluorocarbons; some with agriculture: phosphates, deforestation; some have to do with industry: plastics, heavy metals pollution, etc. Greenhouse gas pollution has made greenhouse forcing revert to what it was twenty million years ago, when Antarctica was covered with forests.
There is no magical solution out of this situation. Present “solutions”, brandished by self-obsessed politicians, are not really solutions: covering the planet with electric cars, batteries and windmills will not replace fossil fuels, because the fabrication, disposal, and eventual recycling of such cars and batteries and electric engines and generators requires greater pollution and energy than it pretends to solve. At best, nothing much will have happened.
In an act of short termism, and herd behavior, Japan is closing 30 nuclear plants: fossil fuels will replace them, mostly. The nuclear incidents at Fukushima, caused by criminal negligence, killed nobody (although the useless evacuation did). The new fossil plants will kill plenty of people… and biosphere [1].
Asking the entire planet to become much poorer will not work, as governments, let alone We The People, will not agree. The fact is the terrestrial biosphere, given enough time, can handle much higher temperatures. Camels and larches thrived as close to the North Pole as one can, less than three million years ago, with a total CO2 equivalent parts per million significantly lower than today. Homo, the all-powerful species evolved during the most glaciated period.
Thermonuclear Power works. 1952 FILE PHOTO – The mushroom cloud of the first test of a hydrogen bomb, “Ivy Mike”, as photographed on Eniwetok, an atoll in the Pacific Ocean, in 1952, by a member of the United States Air Force’s Lookout Mountain 1352d Photographic Squadron. The top secret film studio, then located in Hollywood ,California, produced thousands of classified films for the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission beginning in 1947. A 50th anniversary tribute to these “Atomic Cinematographers” and their work is planned for October 22 in Hollywood. ATOMIC – RTR7YHQ. The problem is to contain it in a room.
So what to do? We have no global solutions now. Ensure that the future will have them. That means investing in researching, or deploying new energy. An energy immediately deployable is “green” hydrogen (it can be mixed into the natural gas infrastructure). And then there is thermonuclear fusion or other near-clean nuclear energy solutions (Thorium, etc).
So the mentality has to change. Biden wants to spend 74 billion dollars on car battery chargers. Tesla makes most of its profits by selling credits to polluting companies (a government subsidy program). This is happening at the rate of two billion dollars a year. By comparison, the Energy department budget request for 2022 is around 46 billion dollars, out of which the Department of Energy Office of Science’s budget of exactly $7.4 billion. Thus it is rising by $400 million. Very insufficient (although worse in nearly all other countries, with the exception of China, of course…)
Expanding the science budget means to expand it in all directions. Because all directions are useful, potentially. Famously, Faraday, a research physicist paid directly by the British monarch, having discovered Faraday law.
Faraday demonstrated some basic science for senior politicians. One of those critters asked: “What is its use?”. Faraday recycled Benjamin Franklin’s observation, a few decades earlier, when he was asked what use could possibly have all these balloon experiments Franklin had witnessed in Paris:”…it may pave the way for some new discoveries in Natural Philosophy at present we have no conception of…” Pushed back by some contradictors, who couldn’t see what new science could be involved, Franklin retorted:”What’s the use of a new-born baby?”
Faraday’s law of induction (briefly, Faraday’s law) is a basic law of electromagnetism predicting how a magnetic field will interact with an electric circuit to produce an electromotive force (EMF)—a phenomenon known as electromagnetic induction. It is the fundamental operating principle of transformers, inductors, and many types of electrical motors, generators and solenoids. Around 1830, it looked as if electricity was of no use for civilization. Now we have an electric civilization. All of society, all the electricity generation (except Photovoltaics), including all the green energy drive, depends upon the induction law [2]. The photovoltaic effect was discovered at the same time by some obscure Frenchman… That looked like an anecdote, until the physicist Hertz found many peculiarities related to it (and which Einstein elucidated, long after Hertz’s death, with Planck’s quantum).
The USA has 331 million people. Just China plus India have ten times the population of the USA. No matter what “help” the USA can give those two by holding their hands would be not just presumptuous, but ineffective. However, if the USA and the EU invent new energy, that would be very helpful to the rest of the world, especially countries like Niger. When the French administered Niger last, in 1960, there were 3.4 million inhabitants there. Now there are 25 million in this mostly desertic country. Women there have an average of eight babies or so. This is typical of subsaharan Africa.
So we need to accelerate science. It is a matter of saving civilization. Because only science can save the future.
When a Euro-American probe passed by Enceladus, it took pictures of water plumes. Enceladus, a little moon of Saturn, has a gigantic ocean of water. Said ocean has existed for more than four billion years. A probe equipped to fly through and analyze the plumes for organics should have long been launched. It was not, so we don’t know if life has evolved there and if not, why not.
An occasion was missed.
Those sorts of probes push inspiration, imagination, science and tech to its limits. An example is thinking about what happened to Venus… thanks in part from information by earlier probes, including a European one which practiced aerobraking… It turns out that Venus probably had life, and an ocean, for three billion years… And then a run-away greenhouse. So Venusian science helps us visualize potential futures… Venusian climate was impacted by the planet’s very slow rotation: an effect we do not have, Earth rotating 200 times faster…
There is only one solution to the ecological crises we have created: science. And science we do not have, or do not master yet…
All the rest is smoke and mirrors…
In particular, the Paris Accord is worthless: countries are supposed to reduce their CO2 emissions… But most countries simply cannot… Absent a scientific miracle… which only wealthy countries can produce. But, instead of producing said miracle, by spending a lot of money on science for new energy, wealthy countries are supposed to give to the poor, as if Mr. Climate Catastrophe could be bought with cash. So the Paris’ Accord entire drive, money as panacea, is grotesque, deeply immoral and strategically tragic [3].
Indeed that offering of money would be better spent doing scientific research.
Strategically tragic also in part because scientific supremacy by the dominant civilization insures peace, and only this supremacy does that (The most advanced Greek city states and Republican Rome understood this).
Some civilizations, confronted to ecological devastation they caused, were able to save themselves by taking scientific action: the Egyptians retreated to the Nile, the Sumerians went up rivers, the entire Middle East introduced hydraulic dictatorships and their water works, Middle Age Europe and Japan took drastic actions to save the forests. In all cases, they analyzed the situation and found solutions. The Roman state did not, thus collapsed.
If you want peace, prepare for science.
If you want sustainability, muster science.
If you want an optimal future, invent a lot of new hard science.
Wishful thinking is no alternative.
Patrice Ayme
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[1] Although Japan is talking about creating a hydrogen economy. That’s great, as I have long advocated. However, Japan rolled out its first hydrogen transportation ship. It is supposed to bring (dirty, not green) hydrogen from Australia; the ship carries as much energy as a briefcase with the appropriate fissile materials (which can be recycled).
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[2] Electric tech depends upon magnets, and the higher performing, the better. Thus huge quantities of rare heavy metals are used, say in windmills. Efficient windmills, as big as skyscrapers, kill birds, and are visual and auditory nightmares; even if replaced by windwalls or the like, with smaller mills in a wall (that has been proposed).
The material in a Tesla battery is worth around $1500 – but the market value is between $10,000 and $15,000,’ due to precision manufacturing. To get those materials, including expensive, toxic cobalt, you have to disassemble the battery (without it catching fire!), you have to crush it, you have to process it in some kind of recycling process. And then you only have a couple hundred dollars left.
The toxic materials required by all this electric tech are produced in work friendly environments such the Congolese jungle, full of helpful children who don’t go to school for you, eco battery enthusiasts, or in countries colonized by the just as friendly People Republic of China, where thousands of Uyghurs are keen to be recycled as servants of those who love to pose as ecologically correct.
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[3] Full disclosure: I know personally one of the plutocrats who authored the Paris Accord. He has a PhD in (pseudo) physics from Princeton, but he hates me so much that he got my daughter kicked out of her Franco-American school. At least, she was, and so he told me he would make it so. This is the sort of individual who has a fleet of (Tesla) expensive model electric cars, but he can’t even go between his mansions with them.
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In the most advanced species, evolution is culturally driven. Far from being solely blind, and driven by chance, evolution can be smart and willful. A restricted theory of evolution called “Darwinism” promoted that idea, which originated with Lamarck, as soon as it claims that mate selection is driven by choice… And that choice will itself be driven by cultural values, in advanced species. This is why evolution has been accelerating since cultural species have evolved.
Culture is so strong that zoos trying to save species in extreme danger of extinction have discovered, to their surprise, that rare animals tend to adopt the culture of animals of other species they see, or hear, at the zoo. So zoos are now trying to save animal cultures, not just the species…
Evolution by chance dominates the simplest species of animals, but the apparition of powerful brains change everything…
Indeed, there are CULTURAL SPECIES. One could say an animal species is advanced if it is cultural. By definition, cultural species can’t survive without culture.
What is a cultural element? Figuring the reality of that element from communication with other animals, in contrast to figuring it out by oneself.
The notions of cultural species and intelligent species are distinct. Cephalopods are very intelligent, but their mental achievements as a species are limited, because they have to learn everything through personal scientific experimentation. Bees, although individually much less clever than cephalopods, can exploit far fetched resources, thanks to cultural communications (their famous dances which convey where exploitable flowers are).Bees, as a species, can do much more than cephalopods, pollinating much of the world of terrestrial plants.
Humanity is the supremely cultural species. Not only this, but humans have been created (by evolution) to discover as much truth as possible, in all directions imaginable. We are truth machines.
For more than a million years, human supremacy has been fed by truths and the alternative to supremacy has been extinction: most human subspecies were exterminated (whereas Denisovans and Neanderthals contributed to today’s human species in mergers and acquisitions).
Humans are truths machines, so obsessed by truth that, when they don’t have it, they make their own. Humans kill for truth. It is an official fundamental belief of a religion followed by hundreds of millions: unbelievers shall be killed. Truth is that important.
It is likely that life evolved on Venus, for billions of years. The planet seems to have had oceans for three billion years, computer models show. Then a runaway greenhouse killed that biosphere. Right now, the situation of Earth is cataclysmic: recipes for many sorts of extinction have been applied and are simmering…Truth is not an option now, it has become the crucible of existence. And how do we get to truth? Through culture.
The way out is supreme, vastly superior thinking. Immensely not just progressive, but progressed thinking. Truths unveiled. Cultural supremacy running amok.
We are the scientific species. We have been doing science for two million years. Interestingly, the latest archeology reveals that full bipedalism preceded huge brains by hundreds of thousands of years, and maybe millions of years. This means that we got huge brains because there was a demand for them, and they presented an opportunity… and that opportunity arose from the way of life our ancestors had chosen… culturally. In other words, the cultural choice of bipedalism made intellectual demands which in turn imposed a superior, more diverse way of life which gave an advantage to superior intelligence, and superior brains provided an advantage they would not have had if bipedalism had not been chosen. Yes, supremacy everywhere: some evolutionary paths are superior to others and bring the extinction of inferior ones.
Just as superior culture provides an evolutionary advantage, inferior culture brings extinction. An excellent example is Nazism. Nazism may have brought the death of 15% of native German speakers. Thus culture enables us to also go the other way, down the drain. And not just as the Nazis did.
Darwin famously wrote in 1879 that “the rapid development as far as we can judge of all the higher plants within recent geological times is an abominable mystery” . By “higher” he meant angiosperms, the flowering plants. Since then the mystery has become much more abominable. The solution? Culture! A recent invention of evolution… At least in insects…
Flowers are cultural achievements. Flowering plants would not exist without the culture of pollinators. Evolution had to wait billion of years for intelligent pollinators to appear before it could grace the universe with blossoms… 125 million years ago
An argument exists, which holds that Neanderthals, faced as they were with a more difficult life, needed bigger brains… as observed (they seem to be a fifth of a liter bigger). Humans beings could do later with inferior genetics and smaller brains, because human culture became so superior, it could act as a crutch to the more dim witted.
The Earth biosphere is all primed up for several extinctions in a snap geological instant at this point. Only superiorly intelligent culture will save us, and others. It’s not just about smarts anymore, it’s about survival. But smarts have always been, ultimately the final solution for survival.
Humanitizing lore, traditional humanism, love to oppose the world of “culture”, and the world of those who don’t have it. That’s racism and class supremacy in disguise, and also an illusion. In truth, flaunting a restricted culture is a trick to hide that culture is, first of all, a tool and also… a weapon.
“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” said Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong, who completed six years of graduate studies beyond high school to become a teacher, third in his class. The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party were smart and worldly (some of the principals, Chou En Lai, Deng Hsiao Ping, had been educated as workers in France by French Communists, themselves quite smart).
Culture has grown guns. Culture was always about Lebensraum, vital space, to use the Nazi expression. Not just this, but wild chimpanzees seem prone to evolve the culture of going to the next valley over to massacre the neighbors.
….”group-level cultural evolution is more adaptive and more rapid than genetic evolution in humans. This difference has caused an increasing fraction of human life to be mediated by culturally evolved group-level practices and technology, and a decreasing fraction by genetic traits. Available evidence suggests that this trend is ongoing and accelerating. We note that both cultural and environmental change are far from equilibrium… We speculate that, in the long term, culture will continue to grow in influence over human evolution, until genes become secondary structures that hold human biological design blueprints but are ultimately governed by culture. If genes hold culture on a leash, culture is dragging them straight off the trail.”
Even strict Darwinism in the most restricted and naïve sense, held that individuals select mates in the selection of the fittest… Thus even strict Darwinism assumes that intelligence was a driver of evolution. Recent studies on monkeys show that the females can be very subtle in their choices.
Life perished on Venus. This will not happen on Earth. Cultural intelligent life on Earth is getting ready to spawn throughout the universe… or at least the galaxy.
Whether this cosmic expansion has merit or not, is besides the point: it is happening, it will happen, it is a force which cannot be contained, even the oldest state, China, is all for it … and this cosmic expansion is the expansion of culture… culture is the exact opposite of basic and base instincts.
Thus, criticizing this cosmic expansion, this expansion of culture, is criticizing what is most human, what made us most humans. Far from a noble critique, then, attacks against cosmic cultural expansion denote the base aspiration of becoming sewer stew again. It is not just hypocritical, vulgar and sadistic, but it is bound to fail, because, remember, culture, superior culture, is the supreme weapon.
The preceding lofty considerations may seem not to have practical consequences. But they do. We don’t know why Venus became hell, with a 460 degree centigrade ground temperature and the pressure a kilometer down an ocean. Several probes will be launched to figure all this out: Venus has become a much bigger mystery than Mars and a poignant one: Earth’s sibling was steamed alive…
However, it is clear that, one the present trajectories with various forms of pollution, Earth is heading towards hell at an amazing speed. Just in greenhouse gases, we are at a density not seen in twenty million years (only 5 millions if one looks only at CO2, neglecting NOx, CFCs, etc…). And there are several other types of pollution and attacks on going.
We have to evolve out of that incoming holocaust. Culture will do it: we know how to modify genes, even to bring rejuvenation. Dramatically superior culture is the only way out, and it should give the boot to tragic inferiority.
As the Romans did not say, and it is because it was not a Roman proverb that their culture failed:
If you do not want evil, prepare for higher culture: Si vis ne malorum, para superior cultura.
Patrice Ayme
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Abstract: Incompleteness is not just a consequence of our finite neurobiology. Quantum Physics says that Incompleteness is how the universe works.
Einstein famously pondered whether Quantum Mechanics could be considered complete. He looked, very fruitfully, at nonlocal effects. Einstein and his collaborators asked:
However a more direct, simpler answer was possible: Quantum Mechanics is obviously incomplete in comparison to the (erroneous) Weltgeist Classical Mechanics gave us. Quantum Mechanics does not allow us to have as complete a knowledge of the world as we thought possible. And no, this observation is not a rehash of the Uncertainty Principle… which actually is not an overall principle, since it has been experimentally violated in 2021.
Some philosophers, observing we know just part of reality, claimed that all we know is therefore illusion. However, pontificating that we are certain about uncertainty or incompleteness in some certain cases doesn’t make everything a complete illusions… This silly position emanated from Plato. That’s so obvious one would not have to tell it to a toddler.
So Platonism “All-Is-An-Illusion-I-read-It-In-A-Cave” was already found “embarrassing” by Aristotle, 24 centuries ago, “because these people are friends”
There are forms of incompleteness. Neurobiology always considers portions of reality, on a “need to know basis”. But sometimes the sensitivity of the human eye and its neurons is down to ONE photon: can’t beat that. Moreover the problem of incompleteness does not just have to do with biology being finite…
Nor do we have, when considering incompleteness, to harness the mathematical axiom of infinity and brandish theorems of Gödel or Tarski about incompleteness, which can be deduced from it. Although these theorems attracted a lot of attention, they are very specialized aspects of so-called “Second Order logic”, and the importance non-specialists give them mostly reflect the ignorance of said non-specialists. Biological incompleteness and Quantum incompleteness, my subject here, are much more primordial and important.
Incompleteness arises straight from physics: arguably, reality, as depicted in Quantum Mechanics, is INTRINSICALLY incomplete (relative to what Classical Mechanics took, erroneously, for granted). In Quantum Mechanics, completeness is just a need-to-do basis.
Look carefully at the axiomatic of Quantum Physics. Given an experimental situation, one sets up a Hilbert Space H the eigenbasis of which is made of possible outcomes of said experiment. The experiment is by definition partial, a part of reality, and thus so is H. This Hilbert Space H is intrinsically a partial consideration. This is a trivial, thus very deep observation. PARTIAL CONSIDERATION IS HOW QUANTUM PHYSICS WORKS… Because any Quantum measurement is inside a Hilbert space specific to that measurement.
That any Quantum realm, this Hilbert Space H it is made of, has constraints turns on its head the worries of Einstein about Quantum Physics being incomplete (applause!) Quantum Physics is not incomplete. Instead Classical Mechanics assumes freedoms we do not have.
Lest I be accused to illusionary logic, I will need to dig into the argument. What’s the difference with Classical Mechanics? The argument I make is then highly non trivial and controversial… because, should it be correct, it demolishes at the most basic philosophical level a new technique in physics called “Quantum Trajectories“… and yet I do believe in the work of some physicists using those “Quantum Trajectories”…
When we deal with a classical system, all initial conditions can be considered (and then those get plugged into a Partial Differential Equation). Not so in Quantum Physics. Consider the setup of the original EPR: two regions, A and B, vastly separated in space. Measuring in A constraints measurements in B. This has been verified experimentally outside of the light cones (so the Quantum Interaction is superluminal). There is no such a constraint in Classical Mechanics.
Thus Quantum Physics restricts our freedom. We are not free to expect any outcome by making any measurements: the outcomes have been restricted, sight unseen [2]. But it also means that, however restricted they may be, incomplete descriptions of reality can be full. Thus bemoaning that what may appear to be a partial description is an illusion is silly: partiality can be full and dynamic.
Patrice Ayme
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[1] What should be viewed as well-knowns philosophical errors of the past often enjoy great Internet applause. The gist of it was that human reality was an illusion because it comprised just a fraction of “reality”. Hence the need for “objectivity”. This is a variation on Plato’s Cave Argument.
Here is some of what a honorable retired IT specialist says, while apparently not aware that finding out the nature of reality is what physics does: “Reality is the set of everything that exists…biological entities, like humans, have no direct access to reality… we don’t experience reality: we experience only stimuli from reality… The wavelengths of light and sound that we are able to detect are only a small subset of all available wavelengths. Our sense of smell is similarly hobbled. There’s a lot of stimuli from reality that we’re missing. The human experience of reality is actually an illusion, albeit one that serves us pretty well…
It’s this disconnection from raw reality that explains our need for objectivity. We have no way of knowing what reality is.”
This sort of all-too philosophical consideration is what happens when people do not know much more than what was already known 2,000 years ago. The nature of reality and the nature of objectivity have been intensely the focus of physics ever since Henri Poincaré introduced Relativity and local time, pushing Lorentz’s work to its conclusion… and then Planck introduced the idea of the Quantum, soon boosted by Einstein.
The result is that not anything goes: as I said above, there restrictions in providing and receiving information: Quantum Physics reduces our freedom.
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[2] Does that mean that the Moon is not there when we don’t look at it? No. The Moon itself is zillions of entanglements entangled together, running its own reality show. No need for us.
Reality is NOT what we make it, as some deranged Copenhagen Quantum Interpretation fanatics had it. It’s more subtle.
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Cheating can be emotional, spiritual and semantic, and it can affect science on a millennial scale, the obvious example being the progressive collapse of Greek science under fascist regimes (320 BCE until the closing of the Athenian academies in the Sixth Century). Science seeks to ascertain the truth, so mentioning cheating when seeking truth is not surprising, as the powers that be, except in democracy, have interest to lie, and thus learning how to eschew truth is a paramount notion when educated under such regimes. Once again, a blatant example was Aristotelian physics, which overlooked the existence of friction, and then proceeded to pretend a force was needed for motion to persist. Buridan proved that wrong in the Fourteenth Century. Why it did not happen before was precisely because Aristotelian physics was a blatant lie, a big lie, hence its utility (the Nazis, following other autocrats, insisted “big lies”were great).
Cheating in physics starts apparently small, and ends up very big. For example the Anglo-Saxons evoke “Newton Laws” and “Maxwell Equations”, as if the Englishmen were the only ones who contributed to these laws. In truth, Newton may have added the Third Law, and Maxwell found part of one of the equations. Many other physicists, over centuries, found the rest. Ignoring them is not just unfair and racist, it obliterates logic… and not just the logic of historical discovery, but also the logic of epistemological discovery, how one goes from appearances and obviousness, to more cerebral considerations one is forced into, and how, and why.
I focus here on “physics” because the term actually it comes from “nature” in Greek, and so physics is actually the master science: biology is *just* Quantum Computing writ large. And thus biology itself is why it’s important to find out what “quantum” is and what “computing” is.
To find what these concepts entails is no mean feat: they will require inspecting nature to new depths… Including the nature of our obscure selves, and how and why it is that we thought some ways about some things. For the concept of “computing” there is, among other things, an activity, a field of science, called “proof theory”. More generally there is logic… and, although some forms of logic are well established, overall one does not know what logic is… And yes, there is a field called “Quantum Logic”, yet, although it is different from conventional logic already, it is by no means clear it really covers all of Quantum Physics (which could be weirder). From my point of view logic is very general, it is whatever goes (which is basically the fundamental idea of Category Theory)… Should that be true, and it is, the consequences on the nature of reality will be farfetched
So it’s important to under-stand the Quantum. We need to stand under, we need something from which the Quantum emerges. However, as Ian Miller points out:
Most people probably think that science is a rather dull quest for the truth, best left to the experts, who are all out to find the truth. Well, not exactly. Here is a video link where Sean Carroll points out that most physicists are really uninterested in understanding what quantum mechanics is about: https://youtu.be/ZacggH9wB7Y
This is rather awkward because quantum mechanics is one of the two greatest scientific advances of the twentieth century, and here we find all but a few of its exponents really neither understand what is going on nor do they care. What happens is they have a procedure by which they can get answers, so that is all that matters, is it not? Not in my opinion. What happens thereafter is that many of these are University teachers, and when they don’t care, that gets passed on to the students, so they don’t care. The system is degenerating.
But, you protest, we still get the right answers. That leaves open the question, do we really?
Under-standing the Quantum is the deepest question. Fully answered, it will probably bring an answer to the nature of consciousness.
The Quantum is about the infinitesimally small. To expect that “smaller” would ever be “smaller” just the same way was first philosophically solved by the Greeks, by denying the idea smaller is ever the same. Instead they the Greeks invented a-toms, which could not be divided. The Greeks claimed to have observed the atoms (or assemblies thereof) moving around haphazardly, so they also invented (or discovered) Brownian motion (or the effect of Brownian motion on larger particles).
But what was what could not be divided, these atoms, be made of? All forces we know augment inversely to distance, they become infinite at zero scale… so the smaller the portion of an object, the more crushed it is going to be, ultimately, so crushed light would not come out (as Laplace found out in the 18th Century). So we shouldn’t be able to see what is incredibly small, because the gravitational field goes to infinity. That was not really a problem… although a variant of this, when applying the idea of Quantum Field to gravitation and its gravitons (excitations of the gravitational field) is a problem, because gravitation should black holed itself, although it obviously does not.(I made a very famous mathematician in the field a friend actually, completely furious in his Stanford office when I pointed out this simple fact; he was the world’s top specialist in that generation, learning his field was empty was not a pleasant experience…)
A road to scientific cheating is misattributions. Misattributions are important, because they falsify the logic of discovery, thus the ontogenesis of epistemology. For example, Anglo-Saxons tend to elevate Newton to a quasi-divine status which he himself explicitly rejected, using a medieval aphorism several centuries old:”I stood on the shoulders of giants”. Roughly 90% of what is traditionally attributed to Newton was not discovered by Newton or when Newton was alive.
For example, the 1/dd law was derived by Boulliau, with an analogy to light which keeps its simple force to this day. Boulliau, aka Bullaldius, became a member of the Royal Society before Newton learned calculus (an invention of Descartes, Fermat, etc…). The first and second laws are pretty much in Buridan, three centuries before Newton (when geometric calculus, abandoned since Archimedes, got relaunched). Buridan, an iconoclast very familiar with kings and queens of France, addressed the question of the Cretan paradox… which is at the heart of the incompleteness theorem of Godel and Tarski… So not only was Buridan burying Aristotelian physics, he also addressed logic.
There are so many misattributions, it’s frightening. Emilie du Châtelet, correcting Newton (again!) demonstrated the concept of energy (with contribution from Leibnitz). That was a tremendous advance (Newton had confused mv with ½ mvv, momentum, Buridan’s impetus, with energy… Emilie corrected that).
The attribution of Relativity to Einstein has to do, ironically enough, with Anglo-Saxon-German nationalism, aka Nazism. This dubious amusement had the other grave consequence of burying Poincare’s careful ontogenesis of whatever happens to be relative (local time)… which was much more careful than Einstein’s prestidigitator style…
Another form of cheating, in which Feynman himself indulged, was to claim that philosophy has nothing to do with physics, “shut up and calculate” as the slogan goes (the truly greatest physicists never made that mistake). That is roughly as intelligent as claiming that the heart has nothing to do with breathing. All the more silly as some of Feynman’s own excellent lectures in physics are sometimes more akin to prestidigitation than logic.
One way physics jump is by making a broad claim, and then checking its consequences. For example, Buridan invented “impetus” (= momentum), and then drew consequences.
With the Quantum, the two initial claims: E = hf (Planck 1900-Einstein 1905) coalesced with De Broglie sweeping generalization that any object that has energy E and momentum P *is* a de Broglie wave of frequency F and wavelength L:
E=hF
L = h/P.
Here, E and P are, respectively, the relativistic energy and the momentum of a particle.
When an interaction has occurred, what happens next? Doing physics consists in pushing the consequences of the De Broglie Hypothesis (DBH).
Turns out, if we are honest, we don’t know much. There has got to be some object O, that is, a wave, and we should apply DBH to O. That leads to predictions. The first obvious one is that O, being a WAVE, is NONLOCAL.
And this is why Quantum Physics is completely different from its limit, Classical Physics.
Very simple and very deep, simply philosophical, this (De Broglie) matter wave hypothesis leads to many predictions: besides matter behaving like waves, the so-called Schrodinger equation, which was in De Broglie thesis, pops right out.
But then, philosophically again, we observe interactions happen at points (both Quantum Field Theory, and non-demonstrated String Theory dilute this a bit). How do we get from waves to point? Obviously, nonlinearly. Observing water waves confirms that their linearity can be spectacular. Here we are prisoner to the lack of nonlinear theory, partly the result of a lack of efforts towards non linear mathematics.
Ian Miller explains that a lot of the computations in chemistry may be bogus, because the constants are manipulated to get the results. But then it gets better:
“That scientists do not care about their most important theory is bad, but there is worse, as published in Nature ( https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-01436-7) Apparently, in 2005 three PhD students wrote a computer program called SCIgen for amusement. What this program does is write “scientific papers”. The research for them? Who needs that? It cobbles together words with random titles, text and charts and is essentially nonsense. Anyone can write them. (Declaration: I did not use this software for this or any other post!) While the original purpose was for “maximum amusement” and papers were generated for conferences, because the software is freely available various people have sent them to scientific journals , the peer review process failed to spot the gibberish, and the journals published them. There are apparently hundreds of these nonsensical papers floating around. Further, they can be for relatively “big names” because apparently articles can get through under someone’s name without the someone knowing anything about it. Why give someone else an additional paper? A big name is more likely to get through peer review and the writer needs to get it out there because they can be published with genuine references, although of course with no relevance to the submission. The reason for doing this is simple: it pads the number of citations for the cited authors, which is necessary to make their CV look better and to improve the chances when applying for funds. With money at stake, it is hardly surprising that this sort of fraud has crept in.”
A monopolistic effect has been discovered: big institutions, that is, big universities, have big names on the big panels distributing big funds: they distribute to themselves. Nature 21 May 2021. Update 07 June 2021. Prestigious European grants might be biased, study suggests
How to fix all this cheating in science? Simply by providing enough funds. Multiply science funding by ten. We can do this: the COVID pandemic has shown much of the economy is “NON-ESSENTIAL”! Maybe it’s high time, to save the biosphere, to run a more disciplined ship, where the crew actually turns out to be essential?
Patrice Ayme
Ten stories high wave, Nazare, Portugal. Notice how the wave starts to make a singularity: the bigger the wave, the more energetic and the faster they go, like matter waves. The physics of nonlinear waves is poorly understood beyond solitons (KdV equation, Nonlinear Schrodinger) and the fact that faster waves catch up with smaller ones, being even bigger monsters (rogue waves).
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A “moderator” on a social media foamed at the mouth against yours truly, in a public post reacting to my preceding essay on the semantics of “Quantum Supremacy“, it was weird:
“Do not direct your vile aspersions at me, nor imply that disagreement with your melodramatic phillipics [sic] is an indicator lack of wit. You know nothing of the conversation of moderators before action is taken, or how we reach consensus, nor can you hope to realize the amount of effort taken to give you leeway before speaking to you.“
Truly, I did not know the existence of that excited character, and I had been (mostly) speaking of the irruption of cheap racism in fundamental physics, so I was a bit surprised. Why so much excitement? My reply (very slightly modified); to avoid accusations of defamation, although she made her attack public under her name for at least 1,600 readers I know of, I would call her Ms BSS, for obvious reasons:
“Vile”? “To you”? Where did I mention you, Ms BSS? I was not aware of your existence, prior to this, as I am noticing it presently. Thus I notice mosquitoes when they sting. Let me scream intellectually, out of politeness to you. I had no idea someone thought so lowly of me to call me “vile” in public. I guess that’s a compliment: vile creature denounced by the righteous moderators! Facebook told me I was suspended for 30 days for “Hate” reported in the Facebook group that you apparently help to “moderate”. Facebook was specific about “repeated violations” at that group, III; and quoted one such violation explicitly referring to the policy of the Nazis regarding Japan.
I had to send Facebook pages on the Nazi policy regarding Japan. They then recognized their mistake, recognized I had the right to inform the public about historical racism, and apologized to me, reinstating me immediately… after their apology.
In the preceding context, it is fascinating that you refer to “philippics” as Demosthene, who uttered them, is a philosopher and martyr whom I admire, and whom all genuine democrats should admire (and that the Macedonian fascist plutocratic Aristotle hated, naturally).
A philippic is a fiery, damning speech, or tirade, condemning a political actor. The term originated with philosopher Demosthenes of ancient Athens. The term itself is derived from Demosthenes’ speeches in 351 BC denouncing the imperialist and fascist ambitions of Philip of Macedon. They later came to be known as The Philippics. Three centuries later the term qualified speeches of the famous lawyer and Consul Cicero of ancient Rome.
Demosthenes and his fiery philippics tried to get Athens to resist Macedon in a timely manner (the objective ally and ultimate insider and teacher of Macedon, Aristotle, had to flee Athens). Athens gave Demosthenes ambassadorial powers to argue with Macedon, but the philosopher was unsuccessful in getting Athens to go to war early enough. When finally Athens went to war belatedly she, Thebes and their allies nearly won, but a charge of Alexander won the day for Macedon. (The modern analogy is France accompanied by Britain, going to war against Nazism too late to avoid the Holocaust… But early enough to ultimately win thanks to their progeny, the USA…)
Fascinating as in fasces, of course. Democrat Demosthenes, an Athenian patriot and industrialist, was killed by the vile Macedonian fascists of the generalissimo Antipater, the senior general of (long dead) king Phillippe of Macedonia (in a refinement of cruelty, the Macedonian fascist, who had just defeated Athens militarily, actually sent an old friend of Demosthenes on an island to arrest him; so Demosthenes, after talking to his friend, expecting torture to death, committed suicide with the poison he carried with him at all times). The real history of philosophy is extremely violent: most of the great philosophers of the time were involved in the greatest forms of melodrama, including, but not limited to death, execution, large scale military action, fleeing for one’s life, or living with a husband who contradicted who may have been the greatest philosopher of antiquity, Aspasia. Aspasia’ life work was greatly demolished by her own husband… its greatest exponent!
Funny how some people get enraged… even when talked to kindly and reasonably, stooping down to lift the crushing ignorance under which they crawl. There again, it’s not an accident: ignorance causes pain to the beholders, so they hate.And they prefer to hate as a mob, that’s safer and mightier.
Here is a melodramatic example for you, Ms BSS, full of blood and gore.
Once I knew some racist fascists on another continent… I talked to them reasonably, several times, and they tolerated me: my arguments were powerful and their minds weaker. Ultimately, then, as the good Nazis they were, they resolved to use violence, the final solution. Moderated into oblivion, such is the way of the fasces.
In an academic setting (!), according to generally accepted classification, the world’s top college prep (8 Nobel Prize laureates), the Neo-Nazis attacked. Such was the paradox: the top school, attacked by the vilest minds. They threw a homemade bomb on me, and it was quite powerful. I lost my hearing for days. Very eerie. There were pieces of human flesh everywhere. From the guy who stepped in the way of the bomb. And that was not even the worst, which came later. So here you have it: supreme viciousness, and supreme goodness, entangled. Relativize, but don’t compromise on the basics, that’s should be the way (and was Demosthenes’). https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/aristotle-destr
Aristotle was the philosopher of monarchy (although his Macedonian buddies were more of a fascist oligarchy). In any case, he was favorable to intellectual fascism, hence his enduring favor with anti-democratic politicians in the last 24 centuries… But the “vile” critics are still around…
Emotion is more basic than reason, and the emotion of the sheep is all the reason it needs:
The ferocity people deploy in purely intellectual matters illustrates well the importance of intellectual debate for human beings. Intellectual supremacy is arguably the deepest specifically human instinct. Intellectual supremacy is the essence of humanity, it is always in conflict with the herd instinct with its countless sheep, barking dogs, and opportunistic fleas.
Patrice Ayme
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Leonie Mueck, Carmen Palacios-Berraquero, Divya M Persaud wrote:
“In 2012 the theoretical physicist John Preskill from the California Institute of Technology coined the term “quantum supremacy”. It was introduced to represent the ability of quantum computers to solve problems faster than conventional supercomputers. The term quickly caught on and, after years of research in the field by scientists at universities and companies, Google in October 2019 announced it had achieved the breakthrough. The result sparked optimism about the future of quantum computing, but something was missing in the debate that followed, namely the uncomfortable association of the term with “white supremacy”.”
su·prem·a·cy: “the state or condition of being superior to all others in authority, power, or status.”
The white race obsessed (thus racist) authors instead propose to use “Quantum Advantage“. This is a mistake as far as physics is concerned: the Quantum is not just “advantageous”. It is a misunderstanding of physics to think so. Quantum Physics is not just advantageous relative to Classical mechanics, it thoroughly EXTINGUISHES it. Quantum Physics is the final solution of the problem of localization in classical mechanics. The joke is on us, the hilarious woman below, Divya Persaud “the third”, a doctoral student, claims a supremacy she does not have in science, because she obviously does not understand Quantum Physics:
Divya M. Persaud is a planetary scientist, writer, and composer. She is obviously NOT a physicist specializing in the foundation of physics. She is not afraid to leverage her brown skin by claiming Quantum Supremacy has to do with the white race. Reciprocated racism is still racism…
Refuting Quantum Supremacy on purely semantic grounds, because one does not like the notion of “supreme”, and call it racist is supremely stupid, indeed.
And idiotic, because those condemning “supremacy” do so by alleging their own supremacy. I recognize just one race: that of imbeciles.Tends to be hereditary too. It’s culturally, and epigenetically inherited.
I got some taste of this when some “moderators” complained to Facebook that I was full of “Hate” because I reported (as an anti-Nazi) some well-known Nazi ideology. I got suspended for 30 days (!) as a result… Untill, several pages of complaints on my part later, Facebook recognized that reported Nazi ideology was not reason enough for suspension…
Superior and inferior simply mean one is in the presence of an ordered set, in the mathematical meaning of the term. Such sets are all over, and even bacteria recognize them as useful, when they swim up a food gradient.
But the supremos of muddled, dark thinking don’t recognize any order which they do not themselves rule…
The correctors of semantics want to achieve their own supremacy, through intellectual fascism, as the Nazis and Soviets wanted to do. Please read the excellent:
“Quantum Physics” is not just advantageous. It is true, and classical physics is not. In some situations, say Quantum Entanglement, Quantum Physics CANNOT be replicated by classical effects: this is the essence of the Einstein-Podolski-Rosen (“EPR”) effect and the the John Bell theorem. And it has been experimentally demonstrated in thousands of experiments. Nor can the Casimir Effect, or the Bohm-Aharonov effects be duplicated by classical mechanics. There, in those various effects, which all involve forms of mysterious local-time flaunting nonlocality, Quantum Physics rule supreme.
In nonlocal matters, Quantum Physics rule not just supremely, but absolutely. Let’s then introduce the concept of QUANTUN ABSOLUTISM! (This way the silly ones will call me a monarchist!)
It is supremely fascist, idiotic and ignorant to try to cancel the purely physical concept of “Quantum Supremacy”, but I expect no less of those so inferior that they need to leverage their skin color to gain advantage in society.
Patrice Ayme
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P/S: John Preskill, professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology who coined “Quantum Supremacy”, proposed it to describe when a quantum computer performs a task that a classical computer never could. Preskill rejected the term ‘quantum advantage’: the word ‘advantage’ implies that a computer with quantum supremacy would have only an edge over a classical computer while the word ‘supremacy’ better conveys complete ascendancy over any classical computer. As I said, it’s not just ascendency, but also Quantum Computation which can’t exist classically.
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Roman Democracy Failed From Private Power Escaping 100% Taxation
Too much power in a family is iniquitous, dangerous for the society at large. Thus, tax power. The fundamental reason for taxation is not, contrarily to common opinion, to raise money for the government.
The fundamental reason for taxation is to prevent a few families from grabbing all the power of society for themselves, making an oligarchy...
Money and power exponentiate: they grow proportionally to themselves. So if power is not limited in a timely manner, one individual, the monarch, will grab all power.
Fully sovereign states can decide where power shall be directed, by passing appropriate laws: the Inca empire worked very well without tax or currency. Just like the Roman empire and the feudal system, the USSR, or the UK or USA in WW2, workers or companies, in a fully sovereign state, can be mobilized to do necessary work, by command and control. A fully sovereign state has so much power, it does not need to purchase it.
However, if families acquire enormous wealth, they can acquire so much power that they can direct the public discourse to their liking, and, ultimately, purchase armies. This is exactly what happened in the Roman republic, in violation of old Republican laws which limited power, and wealth absolutely. This happened greatly because global Roman plutocrats were able to escape Roman taxation and jurisdiction by going and thriving overseas [1].
Coming back quickly the overseas Roman plutocrats used propaganda to buy for themselves a large part of Italy, and manned those monopolistic agribusinesses with armies of slaves. Gracchi laws passed too late to stop the phenomenon [2]. We are in exactly the same situation. Tax power now!
The imperial Roman Republic could have been saved, and transmogrified. First it needed a different attitude to ideas, by realizing and emotionally integrating, that one should be ruled by a society where nothing can, and should, beat a superior idea into submission. Instead emperor Vespasian paid an inventor to not reveal a machine which could have saved enormous amount of work. So, by 80 CE, the official Roman policy was anti-tech investment.
Second the nefarious side of the entanglement with slavery should have been revealed. Slavery perverted society in more ways than one, including not just from its inequity, but by favoring an ever more oligarchic society leveraging inequity, and thus discouraging technological progress, an absolute good (everything else being equal). When the Latin speaking Queen Bathilde from the Roman successor state, the Imperium Francorum, outlawed slavery in 657 CE, the forces of progress were unleashed: not just tech, but mandatory secular education.
(Outlawing slavery was not just a Frankish idea, Chinese emperors tried it several times; but differently from what happened in Francia, the reform did not hold.)
The monopolists who now dominate the world propaganda and most of its information economy, have acquired those positions in the worst possible way: through complicity with the darkest part of the state of the dominant nation-state, the US.
The fabulously powerful plutocrats and their worldwide conspiracy, which include the dictatorship in China, have to be stopped now. No more excuses. The “Democrats” control the Congress and the Senate. The least they can do is to try to break the power of the most powerful families, their countless plots, foundations, and accomplices in academia. Yeah, just try, that’s the decent thing to do.
One should not want to risk the Republic, as Rome did by trying to control too late the wealthiest, the self-described “best” (as the Gracchi did).
Notice that Trump’s Justice Department launched pursuits against Google and Facebook…. And couldn’t do more, because the “Democrats” then focused on Trump instead of focusing on the monopolists. That was a bad mistake, but no doubt, as the monopolists have greatly helped the “Democrats” they saw it as the right move at the time. Well, this is now, no more excuses…
If the power of the wealthiest is not curbed immediately, civilization is in peril. Tax severely very great wealth, enough to prevent exponentiation of society into degeneracy and Armageddon for everybody. As happened so many times in the past.
Patrice Ayme
***
[1] Roman rentiers became wealthy during the Second Punic War: to escape Hannibal’s forces, peasants took refuge in the cities behind fortifications (Rome’s walls were so formidable, Hannibal didn’t even try to besiege it)… But they had to rent lodgings. An aggravating factor is that many, if not most of the most noble families died on the battlefield, and with them, their Republican, democratic mentality. If anything, it was demonstrated that high republican spirits kill, and base mentality enriches.
Rome also found itself with an empire after defeating Hannibal and his Macedonian ally. The Republic had a light touch, and preserved local elites and local laws (in most cases). Roman generals expanding the Roman civilization’s security sphere were able to enrich themselves considerably by acquiring, say, mines in Iberia, as Marius did (that enabled him to run for Consul).
Conquests made Rome, and especially its elite, very wealthy. Roman public land had been acquired by wealthy members of the Senate starting in 180 BCE. Senators used the public land to create large farms worked by slaves, to produce cash crops, such as olive oil and wine. These giant farms became known as latifundia and the Senators or wealthy individuals (Equites) who owned these were not concerned with feeding the city’s populace, but instead were obsessed to become ever more wealthy. They could leverage this further by escaping the Roman absolute wealth limit from making money in other jurisdictions, overseas.
***
[2] The plutocrats of Rome who wanted to override the spirit of the laws of the 350 years old Republic called themselves, ironically enough, the “Optimates”. Those self-declared optimal types, were the exact opposite of what their description entailed. They used massive propaganda to depict themselves as they were not. In truth, they were the most vile and degenerate. They were an offense to the spirit of countless noble Romans of centuries passed, including the six (elected) Roman kings (the one who was not, Tarquinius Superbus, the assassin of the great king Servius Tullius, caused a civil war, and was the last king), and (elected) dictators Camillus, Cincinnatus, tremendously courageous generals such as Regulus, etc. The propaganda worked…
***
That the Roman Republic lasted as long as it did, five centuries, is greatly attributable to limit put on the wealth and power of individual families:
The truly wealthy pay (basically) no tax. That’s why they are truly wealthy and powerful: they have manipulated laws so that, like monarchs of old, they escape taxes.
Yet, the only reason for taxation is to prevent the exponentiation of wealth. Because wealth and thus power, grows proportionally to itself, ABSENT taxation.
Recent tax codes in so-called “democracies” were passed by politicians in the employ of the wealthiest (one way or another, past, present, or future, themselves or their significant others or avatars).
The wealthiest and most influential persons in the USA, and the world, are basically thieves. They pay no tax but their employees, the politicians, have made it so that average people are getting ever more poor. We are therefore led by thieves. Hence the highest ideals of our society have to do with stealing, lying, dissemblance, inequity, greed, and worship of the most evil personalities. Call that the Plutocratic Thesis.
“In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes.
Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row.
Soros spent a huge amount of efforts fomenting insurrection against “populist” elected officials in recent years, financing in particular “Antifa” rioters.
ProPublica: “Taken together, it demolishes the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most. The IRS records show that the wealthiest can — perfectly legally — pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year.
Many Americans live paycheck to paycheck, amassing little wealth and paying the federal government a percentage of their income that rises if they earn more. In recent years, the median American household earned about $70,000 annually and paid 14% in federal taxes. The highest income tax rate, 37%, kicked in this year, for couples, on earnings above $628,300.
The confidential tax records obtained by ProPublica show that the ultrarich effectively sidestep this system.
America’s billionaires avail themselves of tax-avoidance strategies beyond the reach of ordinary people. Their wealth derives from the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property. Those gains are not defined by U.S. laws as taxable income unless and until the billionaires sell.”
They don’t need to sell anything: they just go to the bank and borrow… billions. Those loans are NOT taxed.
***
I PROPOSE TO TAX LOANS TO THE HYPER WEALTHY… Say above 50 millions of combined income… At the normal maximum income rate.
How to fix that evasion of the spirit of taxation by the plutocratic class? A problem progress has is that the present so-called representatives, and the administration and executive branches are owned by hyper wealth, and so is the media (with few exceptions). The first key, as usual, is knowledge.
First by having the right analyses and the right solutions. Selling both to the
TIME TO TAX HYPER WEALTHY PLUTOCRATS ACCORDING TO THEIR TOTAL POWER (In particular tax their loans and their foundations).
***
To Keep The Middle Class Impotent, Tax It Away:
ProPublica: “According to Forbes, those 25 US citizens saw their worth rise a collective $401 billion from 2014 to 2018. They paid a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes in those five years, the IRS data shows. That’s a staggering sum, but it amounts to a true tax rate of only 3.4%.
It’s a completely different picture for middle-class Americans, for example, wage earners in their early 40s who have amassed a typical amount of wealth for people their age. From 2014 to 2018, such households saw their net worth expand by about $65,000 after taxes on average, mostly due to the rise in value of their homes. But because the vast bulk of their earnings were salaries, their tax bills were almost as much, nearly $62,000, over that five-year period.
No one among the 25 wealthiest avoided as much tax as Buffett, the grandfatherly centibillionaire. That’s perhaps surprising, given his public stance as an advocate of higher taxes for the rich. According to Forbes, his riches rose $24.3 billion between 2014 and 2018. Over those years, the data shows, Buffett reported paying $23.7 million in taxes.
That works out to a true tax rate of 0.1%, or less than 10 cents for every $100 he added to his wealth.”
Buffet is typical of the liars of the Democratic Party: saying one thing, doing the opposite, such as Biden advocating 28% corporate tax inside the US, and then fighting to get the G7 to propose a global 15% rate (logically enough, France wanted 21% which is the present US and French rate).
***
Techniques that the hyper wealthy use to reduce their tax bills, take advantage of a complex web of loopholes and deductions that are perfectly legal and can enormously minimize tax liability. That includes borrowing huge sums of money backed by enormous stock holdings. Loans are not taxed and the interest that the executives pay on the borrowed money can be deducted from their tax bills.
The wealth tax as suggested by Senator Warren would not fix the evasion by using borrowed money. She proposed to tax 2% the absolute total wealth of individuals worth more than 50 million dollars.
That’s a joke: according to Warren, then, one could be a billionaire, borrow another billion from (complicit or not) banks, invest it in a variety of supposedly money losing ventures, and then one would owe no tax.
Actually this is exactly how Larry Elison, CEO of Oracle, did it for many years: he would borrow so much, year after year, using Oracle’s stock as collateral, that he did not have to pay any tax. When the local city tried to force him to pay a tax on his house, like everybody else, he refused. His house was a reproduction of the Japanese emperor’s imperial palace, and was known to be worth an enormous amount of money, and then he should have paid nearly 1% annually of that enormous amount (the money goes to schools). Well, he celebrated by buying the Hawaian island of Lanai.
Another tax trick is foundations: foundations do not pay taxes, but the founders of foundations can keep control. And what is control? Power, exactly what money purchases.
This is why plutocrats when they mature turn into “friends of man”, philanthropists: they can keep power, but their power, and that of their heirs, will not be taxed.
As this power grows, the plutocratic philanthropists can afford to buy ever more politicians, and rig the laws to serve themselves. This is how the Roman Republic was destroyed by its plutocrats, who called themselves “the best” (“Optimates”).
In 2007, Mr. Bezos, the chief executive officer of Amazon, paid nothing in federal income taxes even while his company’s stock price doubled. Four years later, as his wealth swelled to $18 billion, Mr. Bezos, adding insult to injury, reported losses and received a tax credit of $4,000 for his children, according to ProPublica.
Mr. Buffett, the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway who has long hypocritically bemoaned that the tax code should hit the rich harder, paid just $23.7 million in taxes from 2014 to 2018, when his wealth rose by $24.3 billion. So Buffett got taxed at the rate of .1%….
In 2018, Mr. Bloomberg, who controls the media giant Bloomberg L.P., reported income of $1.9 billion and paid $70.7 million in income tax. That’s about a 3% rate. According to the Propublica report, Mr. Bloomberg was able to reduce his tax bill through deductions, charitable donations and “credits for having paid foreign taxes” (probably in tax havens).
Full of hatred and vengeance, the Politically Correct Mr. Bloomberg, once elected king of New York, said he would “use all legal means at our disposal to determine which individual or government entity leaked these and ensure that they are held responsible.” Since Bloomberg and his ilk represent basically the government, the threat is not to be taken lightly.
Lily Adams, a Treasury spokeswoman, confirmed that: “The matter is being referred to the Office of the Inspector General, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, all of whom have independent authority to investigate.”
The plutocratic republic is in danger!
Mr. Biden and his advisers have declared a wealth tax unworkable: it would force the top sponsors of the Democratic Party to pay taxes. Instead, Biden has sought $80 billion to beef up the Internal Revenue Service so it is better able to go after tax cheats of the middle and lower classes… who sometimes have to pay more than they earn in taxes
This is how to save the plutocratic republic.
How can one pay more than one earns? Simple, have no fancy income and no fancy lawyers… and enjoy the redistribution of Obamacare, which has caused tremendous health care costs increases… I know some cases, personally, with people who are well below the official poverty level.
So where are we here? This is a world where the guy in charge of fighting pandemic worldwide finances lethal worldwide pandemics, and then accuses pangolins. This is a world where the president screams against inequality, racism, but then does all he can to help his sponsors, hedge fund managers (such as Renaissance funds related individuals). Warren and other pseudo-inequality fighters, who are actually very wealthy multimillionaires, propose pseudo-reforms which would tax and harass the inferior classes. It’s more of the same.
Instead, I propose to tax power. So, for example, tax the Gates Foundation, which promoted companies fabricating devastating poison, by having the Gates Foundations invest in those companies… And also the same Gates made the Virus Dictator Xi stronger, by providing him with surveillance technology (and keeps on doing that)… The Gates Foundation is a Tax Foundation: there is no significant difference with Microsoft in the sense of the power it provides these extraordinarily powerful individuals, the Gates… whether married or not.
By the way, the world wealthiest person is a Frenchman. In a country where the middle class is taxed to death. How come? Well, French plutocrats are as good, if not better, they actually seems to be better, as their US colleagues in paying the politicians to tweak the taxation laws as required to make the wealthy wealthier. The same exact problem happened in Republican Rome, the Gracchi did what they could…. But they and their thousands of colleagues and collaborators were assassinated (at least 5,000 in just the second wave of assassinations)…
Lest we are careful there is a risk that we will repeat that performance. Because there was already a repeat; the fascist movements of the 1930s were propelled by the same class and mentality… Even Hitler said it and bemoaned it, complaining to his associates, Marshall Rommel, while in Italy, that he had to sit and entertain “plutocrats”.
So we need to tax the power of the wealthiest before it’s too late, and they have fully captured hearts, minds, politics, sociology and civilization itself. How do we tax power? Good question. The same problem at the level of individuals, taxing power, exists with corporate entities (which are also legal “persons”).
For corporations, the radical solution is to tax their revenues, country by country… instead of trying to tax their profits, as normal taxation has it (the other way would be to impose a worldwide minimum corporate tax, but Biden allowed only 15%, about half of what he proposed inside the USA, making a bad joke of the whole thing).
A wealth tax does this, by taxing the assets directly. The model here is the Roman Republican one, which worked for centuries and imposed a 100% tax above 50 million dollars. The Roman tax could be duplicated progressively on the extremely wealthy, starting at the Roman Republican level, 50 million dollars (I computed that in the past)… BUT, by adding assets and loans… So taxing the entire revenue (so to speak).
Patrice Ayme
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Violence, like folly, has been unfairly criticized by ingrate thinkers. Both methods are central to proper mental creativity. Any serious change of mind is a form of crazy violence, this is why great thinkers have been so thoroughly hated throughout history.
The list of the martyrs of thought is long. Socrates, condemned to death, Plato and Aristotle barely escaping execution, Demosthenes suicided by Aristotle’s BFF, the Gracchi and thousands of their collaborators assassinated for fighting the “Optimates”, Caesar treacherously and stupidly assassinated, Christ crucified, Domitians killing all philosophy, except supine Stoicism, Julian mysteriously stabbed, Hypatia flayed alive (and her torturer in chief made into a Christian saint!), Boethius executed by having his bones broken (because the Ostrogoth in chief heard some rumors which he recognized later were erroneous)…
… and then when one gets to medieval times, many of the most important western thinkers were involved in life and death struggles, for trying to reconcile the Christian madness with reason, the most famous being Abelard’s fighting the genocidal upper society maniac Saint Bernard… but Hus, Dolet and Bruno were among the many top teachers burned alive by the Vatican… Descartes had to run for his life… But the guillotine caught up with Lavoisier, the world’s top chemist… Of course, under the Nazis many intellectuals died the hard way. The situation was worse on the Muslim side, and got actually so bad that, when the west got finally thoroughly islamized (that took centuries), so did intellectual life (which thus died).
Why we need lions (as Nietzsche, last of a long line, pointed out). Wisdom needs claws. I prefer to master the lion, as the lady above… then feed him my enemies. I made it so that I have enough of those, my lion will not go hungry…
Why so much violence against thinkers? Because violence is force and it requires enormous force to change minds. This all arises from the fact it takes enormous amounts of energy to make up a brain: baby brains consume up to 25% of a body’s energy. Thus, when a mind is made up, they are nearly impossible to change… before rebuilding a brain one would need to demolish it, and it’s not clear how to do this: thoughts and emotions are literally physical objects, highly nonlinear neural networks of axons, dendrites perfused by emotional topoi from various organ, organelles, and even neurons. Let me quote one of my frenemies, celebrated by Critical Race theorists, Frantz Fanon, a very smart Martiniquais psychiatrist FLN-Soviet-CIA agent who exerted violence for the liberation-destruction of Algeria: “Violence is man recreating himself.” I explained that neurologically.
Socrates and Machiavelli are generally held to hold vastly different views on violence and violent actions, the former advocates strongly that it is always better to be harmed rather than to harm while the latter argues that violence is essential, when used correctly, in order to gain and maintain power. The former was a real warrior, killing and saving people in combat. Machiavel was just a paper-pusher with boyish admiration for Cesare Biorgia.
However, Socrates was put on trial for injuring the Athenian democracy, corrupting the youth: several of his followers and lovers, decades younger than him, engaged in high treason against Athens. So Socrates was basically accused of exerting violence against democracy. And that’s pretty much what some of his philosophy does. (As with anything Socratic, much of this may have been “fiction”, as indicated by Aristotle…) Thus Socrates, bathing as he was in violence, demonstrates, by his own life, that violence is everywhere. His own attempt at showing showy non-violence is itself a violence: Socrates insisted to punish Athens by making her sin… As a fleeing Aristotle himself pointed out, as he chuckled, fleeing, that he would not let Athens sin against philosophy again….
So I say: sometimes the ends justify the means. For proof I direct you to contemplation of aerial Allied bombings in World War Two. Including the nuclear bombings and deaths by irradiation, those bombings on Germany and Japan killed less than 1.5 million people, most of them sort-of innocent, or even completely innocent (children). However their effects on the war were so great that those two fascist powers were unable to pursue the war. Without prior aerial bombing for years, which weakened it considerably, Nazi Germany would have had, ironically enough, to be atom bombed into submission…
Plato claims that often it is better to get injured, that’s how to be more open, and submit to others and other things. But, although the view has merits, within bounds, it cannot be absolute. As an absolute, it only reflects Plato’s inclination to dictators (namely the tyrant of Syracuse) and dictatorship (“philosopher-kings”). So Plato makes Socrates mouth this sort of opinion, focusing on rape (“eros”)… As if normal people had to make a philosophy of rape… to guide daily life… Levinas was more subtle: on the first page of Totality and Infinity,he writes: “being reveals itself as war—even more, war is “the very patency, or the truth of the real.” (TI, 21/9)
As I said, neurological war, if nothing else. Socrates recognizes things around us are tumbling in and out of being. In spite of his dissemblance on violence, Socrates was more real on folly. He considered it 2440 years ago that:”the greatest blessing granted to mankind comes by way of madness, which is a divine gift.” Erasmus followed, 19 centuries later.
The source of the madness is simple: when genuinely new neural circuitry is erected, old erroneous circuitry has to be destroyed. This violent act requires so much, one may feel it makes no sense, hence the appearance, at the very least, of folly.
Incitation and redemption comes from humans being, instinctively, truth machines. For this we have to enjoy changing our minds, hard, painful and energetically expensive. So we have to enjoy pain, at least that way.
So here you have it:
Sometimes the ends justify the means. Those who claim otherwise are just posing without knowledge of the most eminent facts.
There is something such as new and better thinking, and that is defined as thinking that is closer to reality, and feed the beholder better. Ultimately superior thinking will be all proven by destroying the enemy. Same old same old. (That does not mean I am advocating to go out kill people 24/7: Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr, destroyed their enemies pretty well… by marching.)
Energetic violence inside one’s mind implements new and better thinking, starting with oneself, but it’s more fun when imposed upon others.
Folly, or the appearance, and the appreciation thereof, is an indispensable method to implement the systematic and systemic doubt Descartes advocated. Even Socrates/Plato got that one right.
It’s a complicated world out there, best dealt with subtlety greater than what has been previously described in the classical imagination… Descartes, a man of the sword, a captain, had forgotten, or did not dare, to make explicit a few methods indispensable to thinkers. He knew those methods all too well, and the accusations they led to, thus why he had to flee France for his life.
Patrice Ayme
***
P/S: It may, and will be argued that, in truth, the “violence” and “folly” I am talking about is not really either, since they are fully legitimate as part of creativity. Was Van Gogh violent and mad? We don’t know, as we don’t know how he really died (OK, a gunshot, but who fired it and how?). But whatever his mental status, thank you. However, I was reflecting on various bans I received over the years on the Internet, several of them permanent and forever (“we have the means to know who you are, etc.”). The most recent ban for “hate” being in May 2021, for alleged “hate” on Facebook, the punishment being for 30 days. The reason for the alleged “hate” was a case of shooting the messenger because Facebook didn’t like the message. Facebook recognized it was in error and suspended its own suspension. Meanwhile I sent a few comments to the New York Times, including to some famous pseudo-intellectuals, and they got banned, and I was wondering what goes through the minds of such people, pretending to think publicly while enabling trite comments and banning important and intelligent ones.
So the verdict was that, in any case, mental creativity will often show up as violent madness to some. Authentic tolerance is, then, to tolerate the appearance of intellectual violence and madness… As long as it doesn’t really hurt those who can’t defend themselves.
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AKIRA Intellectual Property Law
Intellectual Property Attorney, PhD Biophysics, California Bar, UK Solicitor, Member of the Bar of the Supreme Court, Computer Science Professor
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Tyranosopher
State of the Art Philosophy, Devouring the Feeble Minded.
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AKIRA Intellectual Property Law
Intellectual Property Attorney, PhD Biophysics, California Bar, UK Solicitor, Member of the Bar of the Supreme Court, Computer Science Professor
0
EVIL EVOLUTION
Evil Is Not An Accident But A Necessary Mean To ecological Sustainabiilty. That It Is A Solution Is Also A Warning.
0
Ian Miller
New Zealand Physical Chemist musing very cogently about the state of everything
0
Our Friend Barry.
On Barack Obama’s formative years as a scholarship student at the Punahou college preparatory school in Hawaii, by his classmates and friends.
0
AKIRA Intellectual Property Law
Intellectual Property Attorney, PhD Biophysics, California Bar, UK Solicitor, Member of the Bar of the Supreme Court, Computer Science Professor
EVIL EVOLUTION
Evil Is Not An Accident But A Necessary Mean To ecological Sustainabiilty. That It Is A Solution Is Also A Warning.
Ian Miller
New Zealand Physical Chemist musing very cogently about the state of everything
Our Friend Barry.
On Barack Obama’s formative years as a scholarship student at the Punahou college preparatory school in Hawaii, by his classmates and friends.
Philosophy and science: the human adventure. Philosophy is not as popular as it should be, as it supports not just civilization, but human evolution. It matters what we love. Philo-Sophy: Love of Wisdom. But what is love, and what is wise? We humbly examine all the issues we can possibly imagine having to do with defining love, and wisdom. Plus Oultre!
Striving For Ever Better Thinking. Humanism Is Intelligence Unleashed. From Intelligence All Ways, Instincts & Values Flow, Even Happiness. History and Science Teach Us Not Just Humility, But Power, Smarts, And The Ways We Should Embrace. Naturam Primum Cognoscere Rerum
Striving For Ever Better Thinking. Humanism Is Intelligence Unleashed. From Intelligence All Ways, Instincts & Values Flow, Even Happiness. History and Science Teach Us Not Just Humility, But Power, Smarts, And The Ways We Should Embrace. Naturam Primum Cognoscere Rerum
Striving For Ever Better Thinking. Humanism Is Intelligence Unleashed. From Intelligence All Ways, Instincts & Values Flow, Even Happiness. History and Science Teach Us Not Just Humility, But Power, Smarts, And The Ways We Should Embrace. Naturam Primum Cognoscere Rerum
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 