I’ve read many descriptions of another theoretical branch of physics that is based on probabilities, Quantum Mechanics. And  two things seem to be hammered home again and again:

1. It is the most successful theory in the history or physics (or of science)
2. I keep hearing words to the effect that if you ever get to the point where you feel that your understanding if it is such that it ‘makes sense’ and somehow has become ‘intuitive’ to you then you have missed the point somewhere along the line and slipped into self delusion.

So do I believe that Bayesian stats and analysis trumps Quantum Mechanics?
Um, No I do not.

What QM shows us, again and again, is that the true nature of the world is stranger than we think and something other than we know.

So I feel that a philosophy of science that says we can ‘prove mathematically’ that the ‘no alternative theory’ paradigm points to the likelihood of a theory being correct is a philosophy that leaves science in a paradigmatic dead end.
IF your paradigm assumes an Earth-centric world and you don’t even realize that you are trapped in that paradigm then you’ll never even think of, let alone consider, and theories that are based on non-earth-centric world views.

I remember the first time I encountered Karl Popper’s idea about a theory being a scientific theory only if it was falsifiable and it was strange and hard to swallow at first but the more I thought about it the more I came to realize it was worthwhile. It’s a basic difference between a dogma and a scientific theory. I can grok that. I can embrace that.

And the more we know about the world through experiment and observation the more we come to understand that it is far stranger place than our ‘common sense’ and ‘intuition’ lead us to believe. So I think that a philosophy of science that is based on ‘history’ and ‘sociology’ is automatically limited because of the ‘human centric’ nature of its basis. How can it be otherwise?

So ‘No Alternative Exists’ speaks more to us and our limited paradigms than the real world and following that thinking will leave us wondering why forward progress is so hard and how come we cannot deal with unexplainables.

But then I’m just an armchair scientist at best …

The New York Times has a piece on this

If that NY Times article is unavailable here’s the scientific journal article it references.

I eventually came to possess a copy of George Gamow’s ’1,2,3 … Infinity’ and, even though I couldn’t understand everything, learned a lot more about cosmology.
Along with early calculations of the Speed of Light I learned about Einstein’s ‘discovery’ that it was the upper speed limit to everything. Another of one of the things I learned about was the Hubble Red Shift – essentially saying that the further away something is from us the faster it is receding. And that this can be reduced to a simple constant.

When I was 12, way back in 1965, coincidentally the same year that the Penzias and Wilson discovered the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, I made a couple of calculations using relatively simple arithmetic and close approximations for things like the speed of light and the red shift. I used the value of the red shift to calculate the outer limit of the observable universe to be about 12.5 Billion Light Years. That limit was the distance at which the light from anything would be red-shifted so far that it would appear that the object was receding from us at the speed of light.

I’m no genius – this was just a bright, inquisitive kid using approx. values (from published observations) and long hand arithmetic with pencil and paper.

The implication of that result is that we could NEVER see the light from anything at that distance, or further … one of science’s little perplexing parts.

BUT – What did it mean?

I’ll confess I had no real idea – I was just a kid after all … but later in the 60’s the theory called ‘The Big Bang’ got a lot more traction and, coincidentally, the approximation of the size of the universe was not that far off from my spitball calculation. (Partly this new breathe of life in BB was the result of Penzias and Wilson discovering the CMB back in ’65.)
When I learned of this correlation I felt a bit of pride I’ll admit but soon there was a niggling little doubt. Maybe that was the younger me that clung to a Steady State model … maybe the coincidence felt to pat for comfort. Doubt’s like that – it’s a feeling and not a rational thought.

In the years afterward I learned there was much back and forth questioning over whether the curvature and mass led to a universe that would eventually collapse back in on itself or keep expanding forever. A lot of work has gone into trying to come up technology that can give us observations so we’re not just spinning our wheels and creating theoretical ‘wheels within wheels’ like the pre-Copernican earth-centric model that church-bound European thinking used to be stuck with. This has resulted in space observatories such as COBE and WMAP and now Planck. Each lets us see more detail and each time we learn more and some theories become reinforced and others become refuted.

Now we have Dark Matter, Dark Energy, the Inflationary variant of the Big Bang – and we think that the universe is not only expanding but it’s gaining speed as it goes … maybe. We also used to think that nothing ever escaped a Black Hole … but Hawking has shown that’s not quite correct.

In the 90’s I picked up a book by Eric Lerner called ‘The Big Bang Never Happened’ . In that he proposes an alternative cosmology based on work in Plasma Physics by Hannes Alfven.

Experts in Cosmology and Physics have tended to dismiss the book, reject a number of the ideas and find errors with parts of it. They may be correct and this is their field.
But I find an interesting aspect to researching this piece … something I’d suspected and find more evidence for.

Lerner worked in Plasma Physics, Alfven’s field. It is a field where theories can be tested ‘in the lab’ or by observing the local space environment around our planet and our local star, the sun. Back in the early 90’s there was another concept that was proposed about a phenomena that appeared to fly in the face of accepted physics and came from working scientists that happened to be Chemists. It also got short shrift from the experts in the area on which it intruded: the physics of fusion. That proposal was Cold Fusion and it was more of an observation from the lab rather than an elegant theory from the blackboard.

I get the impression, and I’m not alone in this, that theoretical physicists have a hard time accepting alternative ideas that come from people outside their particular bailiwick. Especially if those ideas contradict the cherished ideas on which they have worked long and hard on. And if these new ideas are difficult to fit within the existing theoretical framework AND predict experimental data that is hard to reproduce then the proponents of established models find it easier to attack, refute and dismiss.

Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann are not physicists, they are Chemists. They’re not crack pots as the public at large were given to believe – they were working scientists who had much experience working with reconciling the real world to theory. Chemistry is an area where not only you can test your theories, but you are more likely to run into observed data that requires re-evaluation of theory to understand.

Eric Lerner only got a BA in physics – he ostensibly left graduate work because he was dissatisfied with the dominance of mathematics over experiment. But Hannes Alfven was a Nobel prize winning physicist who worked in an area of Physics that yields more places where theories are testable than Cosmology.

I suspect there is an inherent hubris involved in being a physicist working in cosmology, high energy, or condensed matter. Unlike ‘those other scientists’ working in their fields these physicists are working on the very stuff of the universe- all else is … not quite as important somehow. Doesn’t that feel kind of like Heart Surgeons versus all the other doctors?

I read the article linked here (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/9946222/New-images-confirm-Big-Bang-theory.html) and I find one thing off the bat that piques the doubter in me: “The maps appear to support the “inflation” theory, which says the universe briefly expanded faster than the speed of light an instant after the Big Bang.”
I’d forgotten a lot of the Inflation theory … my thoughts about it are starting to come back though and if I remember at the time I first encountered that my thought was that it wasn’t ‘space’ as we think about it that expanded but the metric or something underlying the metric that changed.

Whatever that might mean … when we run into things that violate the ‘laws’ we’re observing today we tend to explain them away with statements like ‘the physical laws were different back then because the “world” was different’.

In the article referred to the last paragraph mentions ‘anomalies’: “But because the precision of Planck’s map is so high, it has also revealed some unexplained anomalies in the data that require further study. Among these interesting findings are fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background over large scales that do not match what the standard model of physics predicts, including an asymmetry in the average temperatures on opposite hemispheres of the skies.” Further study, to a cosmologist, means reworking the theories to fit the observations … I cannot shake the feeling that this is ‘wheels within wheels’ thinking … but that’s only a feeling. Science is about adjusting theories to fit observations.

The article at the Guardian goes into more detail on those ‘anomalies’ http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/mar/21/planck-telescope-light-big-bang-universe

The article in the New York Times also explains them in more detail and goes into what it might mean for the Standard Model.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/22/science/space/planck-satellite-shows-image-of-infant-universe.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

At one point that article says “The map, the Planck team said in news conferences and in 29 papers posted online Thursday morning, is in stunning agreement with the general view of the universe that has emerged over the past 20 years“ but not so far down the article it mentions “however, the new satellite data underscored the existence of puzzling anomalies that may yet lead theorists back to the drawing board”.

WMAP, the previous observatory to study this, had shown many of these same anomalies but many had argued these were possible errors in analysis or ‘contamination from the Milky Way’. Now Planck shows them in greater detail so it’s back to revising the theories.

Another thing Planck gives us is a better estimation of the Hubble Red Shift constant: we used to think that things moved away from us 67 kilometers per second faster for every million parsecs (1 parsec = 3.26 light years) but now we see that it is closer to 69 KPS / MPSec. I’ll have to go look through the boxes of stuff from my junior high school years and see if I still have my old calculations …

So what does it all mean? Should you care?
I’m tempted to say ‘of course you should care.’ with some indignance, but I know that for most of the people on this planet it matters little even if they can understand the questions involved. Many n my own country find who’s going to win the Stanley or Grey Cup of far more importance. Who will be the next American Idol?
Sigh … I guess I find that rather sad but for those people I’m probably the one to be pitied.

“Why is the sky blue? What’s beyond the 12.5 Billion Light Year wall?” … I miss that kid. He had a bright future ahead of him. But life somehow got in the way and his friends persuaded him temporal things were much more important. Well they were certainly more distracting, I’ll give them that …

You don’t have to believe any of this or me. I’m just a non-scientist guy wearing a Collander showing my allegiance to a ‘religion’ that says the world was creating by a Flying Spaghetti Monster.
A religion where you can Believe it or Not …

Ramen.

We didn’t see him for over a year until one day my Laurel said “I think that cat’s here.”

The next day Laurel, my wife and friend of 16 years, was killed on the highway.

The day after that this orange tabby cat showed up at my back door. Hungry, thirsty and cold.

The neighbour saw him and said: “I see you’ve met Jasper.”

Dream on little buddy.

This was a point of coincidence: one of the cats we brought with us was named Casper.

Then she told me that Jasper had been the cat who lived there.
He’d been born there and when the owner, Jasper’s human, lost the house had moved with him to a house on Hardy Mountain Road.
A month or so before my wife was killed that house burned down and Jasper’s human died.

So Jasper made his way home … to the only other house he’d ever known.

And found me.

I took him in: The Universe took my wife away and gave me a cat in return – I wasn’t about to turn him away.

I could go on and on about what a good cat he was but if you’re a cat person you know and if you’re not it wouldn’t make sense.

He was smart. He listened. He understood quite a lot that way.

He appreciated affection but he wasn’t a suck up. I gave him as much attention as he wanted and let him leave when he was sated.

He liked having a home but he needed to go out.

Jasper was a good predator. After we moved my neighbour mentioned to me how much he appreciated Jasper keeping down the small pests that damaged his landscaping.

Never pushy or needing to dominate but willing to defend his turf until blindness and old age made that a losing game.

He was always trim: never fat.

He had a minor heart murmur but that wasn’t a problem.

Jasper’s thyroid became more active than it needed to be so he got medication twice a day over the last few years. He never fought you over it (though he could struggle a bit).

He was one of those cats that knew about claws and skin and I never got a scratch from him unless it was my fault (but I can’t remember any incidents at all).

IF he didn’t use his litter box it was for a reason and then he wouldn’t go on the floor or carpet, no – he would go in the sink or the tub or in something. Which made cleaning up a lot easier for me. I appreciated that.

A while back the lens in his right eye became detached. Last year the other one went leaving him essentially blind. He could detect light and dark and sense moving shapes in front of him but he was blind.

But he coped. And he still went outside – he wanted to. He didn’t stray off the yard (I think). And fortune in the choice of house gave him a little safe space behind bars right near the front door where he could await our return.

This all slowed him down a bit but it didn’t stop him.

But there was this lump … in his throat.

It was there one day a few years back. Sometimes it was hard to find but it grew.

It never got so large as you’d notice it from afar but … eventually, recently, it affected his swallowing.

And he took in less food and water … and his energy levels dropped and his health was affected: He began to shut down.

We fed him tuna – he liked that when it was still wet but eventually he went off it.

We got him wet cat food paté and he’d try that for a little bit but eventually he ate less and less.

I’d see him amble over to the feeding area and find the water dish. He’d lean in for a drink and then stop and grumble and then try again and grumble some more and eventually get a bit to drink.
But each time it was less and with draining energy levels it was harder and less frequent.

The last few days he didn’t move far – could quite make the litter box. Ahh gee … I don’t mind that.

He was in such a state I took him to the vet this morning and said: Make him feel better or make him not feel.

She examined him and told me any respite she could give him was only temporary – he’d relapse and eventually shut down.

So we brought him to his end as peacefully as we could.

I will miss him.

I’ve had many cats – almost my whole life there’s been cats around.

But he stands out in that group as one of my all time favourites. One I’ll never forget, of course.

Jasper lived 15 years (I think it was). I know he had a loving home and was never alone for the last 7 of those.

I am glad we met.
Even though he was only a feline I’ve always considered him a friend; a fellow traveller on this path through life.

But the Universe only loans you things and creatures and people for a while … eventually it takes it all back.

In a previous post I referred to a solar chimney concept that essentially is a synthetic, inside out, tree. Key to my concept is a energy generating ‘leaf’ that uses generates electricity from the mechanical energy involved in flipping between two physical state configurations. As air flows by the bistable ‘leaf’ flips back and forth and with each flip a small amount of electrical energy is derived.

As I was reading the New Scientist article above I was reminded of this concept since the polymer mentioned in the article is performing a similar bistable shape flip-flop and generating electricity as it does so … not that far off my leaf requirements except for the fact it requires a surface and moisture.

But … it gives me hope …

Sometimes a weird thought rambles through my head and leaves a more lasting impression. I had one the other day and it keeps coming back … this is my way of exorcising it so bear with me, please …
Should we allow the news to lie to us?

In the mid 1990′s in the US state of Florida there was a legal case that had the result of seeing a court state that television news programs do not have to tell the truth.
What the court actually said was that the FCC rules on this DO NOT rise to the level of a LAW since those rules were created by people that were not elected and laws are the province of elected officials only.
What it effectively has done is to tell the television industry in the USA that they can LIE ON THE NEWS and they will not be breaking any law.
Since then we’ve seen the flowering of a whole new range of flora in the television news garden: stinkweeds.
I’m referring to FOX News in large part but they aren’t the only ones – just the smelliest.
News anchors that harp on and on for years about things that have been legally settled such as whether or not their president was born in the USA. Networks that give succour and shelter to thinking and behaviours that a respectable journalist should shy away from and be ashamed to be seen in public with. Because it’s lies and supposition wrapped in a shiny package and passed off as ‘news’ and ‘truth’ to a viewing public that shovels it in with completely naive belief that they are getting the truth and can trust those they see on their TV.

In the 1960′s cable TV became a reality and Canadian cable companies began bringing in television from the USA for viewing in Canadian homes.
Television stations in Canada began to see a loss in viewers because of the competition. This was part of impetus that led the government to create the CRTC in 1968 to try and deal with this situation.

Over the years a lot has changed in the mix of technologies that give us media for consumption and television has lost a lot of viewers to recorded media, games and the online experience.
Home video recorders were the first real attack on TV and one effect of that battle was that the networks shifted from seeing their news divisions as a community service that the other parts of their businesses paid for to things that had to stand on their own and pay for themselves. This happened as the 70′s turned into the 80′s and we had the rise of infotainment with ABC Nightline packaging the embassy hostage taking in Iran over hundreds of days and the birth of a 24 hour all news satellite channel, CNN.
Since then the attacks on viewer counts has been relentless: Satellite TV, PC’s, game consoles, the World Wide Web, mobile web, social networking.
As a result of all of this Television has been searching for ways to stave off the losses of viewers with different strategies. And outrageous content has been one result. So called reality television with low, low costs becomes a competetor in the mix. That ‘Big News’ has to compete with … so you get people like Glen Beck on news channels. I know he’s not there anymore but he’s just a particularly loony example of the kind of lunacy that passes for content on some US television news channels. ‘Tabloid journalism’ on TV for your entertainment so your eyeballs can be sold to advertisers. And if it stretches the truth a bit … too bad – there’s no law saying they can’t do that.
And when their on air personalities start parroting loony paranoid fantasies as if they rise to the level of a serious, reasoned discussion, they love it because the ratings just go up.

Well I’m not in the USA. I live in Canada.
I’d like to know if we have a law in Canada that says you have to tell the truth on television NEWS in Canada or not.
IF we do not then why not?
If we do then I’d like to know why it is that cable companies can bring news programs into our homes that lie to the viewers.
Does the ‘must not lie’ law only pertain to over-the-air broadcasts and broadcasters?
If so, how can that be fair to both those broadcasters AND us consumers?
I realize that even if there is a law it would hard to enforce.
Ask Shaw, Bell and Rogers to stop carrying some major US networks? Like that will fly …
Make them put a warning label before or over top of the news broadcasts that states they may not be telling the truth? Like cigarette packaging showing the harm?
Gee I don’t know … like I said at the top, this thought got lodged in my head.

Ok, that was the post. In doing some research on this I found that a number of people / groups out there go to extra lengths to point out aspects of the case such as whether or not the jury in the original case thought this or that. Ignore the nitty gritty of the original case and just remember that there was the idea of telling lies in TV News journalism.
The meat of the matter, as regard this posting, is the judicial result later on when FOX and a couple of other media companies successfully argued that FCC rules about truth in reporting TV News are NOT LAWS. And by implication telling lies in newscasts is not breaking any actual law and therefore not illegal.

That’s in the U.S.A. where I do not live.

Is there a law here in my country, Canada, regarding this? – that’s my question.

Google cofounder Larry Page and Sergey Brin, along with director James Cameron, have founded a new company: Planetary Resources Inc.

It’s mission: mine asteroids, “add trillions of dollars to the global GDP” and “help ensure humanity’s prosperity.”

Ok here’s my take on this.

Mining asteroids:
Let’s say they succeed and find a movable rock that has a gazillion tons of nickel (or copper) and manage to park in one of the Lagrange points near Earth.
And are able to set up robotic (or drone) mining and smelting facilities to get the ore turned into metal.
Getting it down to Earth is relatively easy – it’s downhill all the way after all.

What’s the result of all this?
Well – the world price for Nickel (or Copper) will plummet because the supply in the sky will be much cheaper to exploit.
IF it wasn’t cheaper than there would be no fiscal sense to doing this.
So that means the terrestrial-based mining and smelting sectors for whatever they find will eventually be killed off. OR severely shrunken.

You might think: So what? Some rich guys take a beating?
Tamper with the wrong industry in the wrong way and we ALL suffer for it. Pension funds are major investors and many of us have a pension somewhere.
Industries are the engines that make national economies go. Knock out enough economic underpinning and nations start to slide.

I’m all for asteroid mining. I just think we should be prepared for the changes this will cause …

Our town. Grand Forks B.C., has a few industrial concerns and they regularly take heat from the eco/enviro section of the populace. Any way … someone referred to the ‘smog stick’ and someone else replied with a ‘what about those paycheques that smog stick generates’ type of reply.

I’d already posted twice to this thread and didn’t want to burden it with yet another missive … so I’m putting it here:

And there you go – pragmatism.

Many bitch and complain about the industrial concerns without ever getting close while those whose paycheques depend on them have to be as close as you can get on a daily basis.

Can they speak up here?
Would you when you know those you work with or for can read everything you say?
Easier to shut up or go Rah Rah Rah!

And those paycheques: those dirty, blue-collar, paycheques are the basic fuel for the drivers of the economic engine of community like this.

Take them away and what happens?
How long before the effects are felt in other businesses and areas of commerce?
And stores close – because there’s a drop in business because the families who depend on those jobs have to leave to follow the jobs.
And tax revenues drop because there’s a drop in citizenry and businesses.
So either taxes go up or the service levels degrade.

Of course not everything disappears … it just gets a hollowed out feeling after a while. Like you knew there was more here just a while ago and you can’t quite put your finger on just what has changed – what has gone … but something’s missing …

That’s the ‘big fear’ that lets big, industrial corporations get accommodation from small, rural, communities everywhere in the developed world.
Because that’s the model that these communities were built with. Resource development and exploitation on an industrial scale.

But there’s a different model that will come sooner or later.
And it might allow people to live where the quality of life is good and work where it’s not so good. Without ever leaving their home towns …

Supposedly this high-tech revolution will bring us the ability to tele-work. Sit down at a work station and operate a machine in a far off place.

Think Drones.
The drones that fly in Afghanistan are piloted by people in Wichita, Kansas. Or some other town back in the U.S.A.
While they are flying missions in a militarized zone on the other side of the planet they also get to go home at night to their families.

That same technology will eventually allow for the operators of industrial machinery, worker Droids, to be situated far from the workplace.
So rather than have a ‘call centre’ with people in cubicles doing tech support you get a ‘work centre’ with people at work stations operating machinery far away.

Any slum ridden, third world country with passable english can host a ‘call centre’ with the high-tech equivalent of McJobs.
If you’re thinking call centre for economic development then that’s your competition. Good luck with that.

A place with good living conditions that is first world, close to nature, and relatively free from big city crime problems where skilled tele-operators can work from might be a better future.
But if the job is in a place in the world where the pay / cost-of-living is lower than here … will the pay you get be lower as well?
Nothing is perfect …
As globalization inexorably grinds away at the fiscal inequalities of the world we all end up at some median quality of life / cost of living.
For those of us in the first world it might be a bit of a shock …

Insects have ‘personalities’ too, research on novelty-seeking honey bees indicates.

Scientists claim brain memory code cracked.