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POPSGrand unification theory What is the force or structure that holds the shape of all boundaries in sub-atomic structures? Every particle must have something that binds it to reality. An electron must have a force that holds it together - that same force also encompases the electro forces keeping them from dissapating. The same force keeps the gravity wave from dissapating.
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POPSDoes Death Exist? New Theory Says 'No' This was clear with the death of my sister Christine. After viewing her body at the hospital, I went out to speak with family members. Christine's husband - Ed - started to sob uncontrollably. For a few moments I felt like I was transcending the provincialism of time. I thought about the 20-watts of energy, and about experiments that show a single particle can pass through two holes at the same time. I could not dismiss the conclusion: Christine was both alive and dead, outside of time.
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POPSJUNK SCIENCE revisited There are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 degrees Celsius is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.
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POPSAccept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up The lesson is that not all data is created equal in our mind’s eye: When it comes to interpreting our experiments, we see what we want to see and disregard the rest. The physics students, for instance, didn’t watch the video and wonder whether Galileo might be wrong. Instead, they put their trust in theory, tuning out whatever it couldn’t explain. Belief, in other words, is a kind of blindness.
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POPSThe Fluff Is Coming! The Fluff Is Coming! "There could be interesting times ahead!" says Opher." More from the article below: "The fact that the Fluff is strongly magnetized means that other clouds in the galactic neighborhood could be, too. Eventually, the solar system will run into some of them, and their strong magnetic fields could compress the heliosphere even more than it is compressed now. Additional compression could allow more cosmic rays to reach the inner solar system, possibly affecting terrestrial climate and the ability of astronauts to travel safely through space. On the other hand, astronauts wouldn't have to travel so far because interstellar space would be closer than ever. These events would play out on time scales of tens to hundreds of thousands of years, which is how long it takes for the solar system to move from one cloud to the next."
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POPSWhen Liberal Dreams Collide With Public Opinion
"What's really exceptional at this stage of Obama's presidency," writes Andrew Kohut, the Pew Research Center's respected pollster, "is the extent to which the public has moved in a conservative direction on a range of issues. These trends have emanated as much from the middle of the electorate as from the highly energized conservative right. From which we can draw two conclusions. One is that economic distress does not move Americans to support more government. Rasmussen reports that 66 percent of Americans favor smaller government with fewer services and only 22 percent favor more services and higher taxes. The second is that Barack Obama's persuasive powers are surprisingly weak. His advocacy seems to have moved Americans in the opposite of the intended direction. Obama first came to national attention in 2004 by promising to heal partisan, ideological and racial divisions. Like the other two Democratic presidents elected in the last 40 years .....
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POPSBy imagining many possible worlds fiction can chang our Minds "For more than two thousand years people have insisted that reading fiction is good for bookyou. Aristotle claimed that poetry—he meant the epics of Homer and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, which we would now call fiction—is a more serious business than history. History, he argued, tells us only what has happened, whereas fiction tells us what can happen, which can stretch our moral imaginations and give us insights into ourselves and other people. This is a strong argument for schools to continue to focus on the literary arts, not just history, science, and social studies. But is the idea of fiction being good for you merely wishful thinking?'
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POPS"Our World May Be A Giant Hologram" continues (full at source): For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," says Hogan.
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POPSGraphic: Timeline of the Big Bang An informative graphical timeline of the very creation of time, space, matter, and energy in our universe. Cool! I just clipped the first paragraph of the nicely written description that accompanies it. Of course, cosmology, cosmogony, and quantum physics, and the origins of space-time are some of the hardest fields of study being pursued right now. Any other pointers to clip-size explanations would be welcome additions to Clipmarks.
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POPSDid You Hear The One . . . "He joked about linear regression (a rumination about what kind of people post cat videos on YouTube), period doubling in chaos (which he likens to the splitting of behaviors of people as they become more and more drunk) and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. He explained this fundamental concept of quantum physics — that the more precisely the position of a particle is measured, the less is known about the particle’s momentum, and vice versa — with a photograph of a men’s room with television screens above the urinals. The designer “clearly didn’t understand the uncertainty principle,” Dr. Lee said."
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POPSManufactured Global "Consensus" Finally, the pretense of 'a consensus of scientists' about the 'reality' of 'global warming' is the very underpinning of the myth, a commodity manufactured by mediocre scientists most often associated with State or UN 'services', and marketed by globalized media-chains and unethical mainstream peer-reviewed magazines such as Science.
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POPSClimategate Gaining Traction in Liberal Media - Even in New Jersey I recently heard a New York radio broadcaster, whose name I won't reveal because I appear on his show now and then, mislabeling CO₂ as "soot." The column goes on to quote a Princeton physics professor, William Happer: In Happer's opinion, the carbon-control movement is really a population-control movement. He traces it back through the "Population Bomb" movement of the late 1960s all the way to the 18th-century writings of Thomas Malthus. Other scientists have said the same, but Happer says it the loudest. He terms the IPCC crowd a "religious cult" and says, "Disagreeing with them is like going to Saudi Arabia and criticizing Muhammad." As for the media, we've been guilty of putting our faith in the carbon cult as well, he said. By running the Politico column and the op-ed column today, the paper has finally turned the heat up on the climate elites, ending the three week-long deep freeze.
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POPS How We Know They Know They Are Lying with the expectations of the sponsors. Like the royal favourites of mediaeval times, they soar in the air on a zephyr of preferment, only to get too close to the sun and plunge to earth. Which brings us to: Secrecy In the security of powerful patronage some of the new brigade began to think that they were above not only the procedures of science, but of all other academic disciplines as well. In the case of the notorious Hockey Stick, for example, they claimed that knowledge from history, art, literature, archaeology etc. was all wrong and that their computer manipulation of such tenuous data as tree rings established that the Little Ice Age and the Mediaeval Warm Period never happened. The most powerful patrons of all, the UN, seized on the results and made them the main feature of one of their apocalyptic IPCC reports on the coming climate disaster. One of the first tests of any scientific work is to pose the question “Can the results be reproduced?”
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POPSPlaying tricks with the speed of light The mechanics of slowing light down, as well as speeding it up, is governed by methods and equations that are pretty well understood. Now scientists just have to figure out what to do with it.
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POPSBlack Holes May Act Like Cosmic Factories for Building Galaxies The stream of material was likely to be fuelling star formation in the galaxy, the scientists believe. In effect, the quasar was building its own host galaxy. At a later stage the quasar was expected to end up at the galaxy’s centre. ‘The two objects are bound to merge in the future: the quasar is moving at a speed of only a few tens of thousands of kilometres per hour with respect to the companion galaxy and their separation is only about 22,000 light-years,’ said lead scientist Dr David Elbaz, from the CEA research institute in Saclay, France. ‘Although the quasar is still ‘naked’, it will eventually be ‘dressed’ when it merges with its star-rich companion. It will then finally reside inside a host galaxy like all other quasars.’ A similar process may have led to the formation of other large galaxies with massive black holes nestling within them, the scientists believe. The research appears in the journals Astronomy & Astrophysics, and the Astrophysical Journal.
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POPS"Blue Skies" versus "Goal-Oriented" Research The Large Hadron Collider at Cern near Geneva has now achieved the status of the most powerful particle accelerator and the biggest and most expensive experiment in history. Will it be worth its cost? (via @ProfBrianCox)
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