Science At The Bleeding Edge

Two new and very interesting press releases to do with Physics have just been released, both of which I'm sure will end up on the ADiots anti-science webpage.

The first is explained much better than I ever could over at the Cosmic Variance blog, the gist of the story is that the MiniBooNE experiment has found some interesting results to do with Neutrinos, they are possibly weirder than we thought, don't look to me for an explanation though.

The second is the first results from the Gravity Probe B, this orbiting satellite is designed to test for the effects of General Relativity as it streaks round the Earth. The results so far are a stunning verification of General Relativity to much higher accuracy than has been possible with this type of experiment before.


To anyone keeping score, that a 0 for 2 for the Autodynamics crowd.

Scientific Rivals

Over at cosmicvariance they have a post about a topic we have discussed in the group before, scientific enemies/nemesis, those people that work in your sub-field and for whatever reason you don't get on.

The cosmic variance article gives some handy hints on how to choose your own personal scientific nemesis, I myself already have one, it only took one chance meeting for me to decide on them, I'm sure that in all probability they are a decent person, just something about them rubbed me up the wrong way. I'm looking forward to many years of run-ins at conferences to come, in all probability without them ever realising I dislike them.

Does anyone else have any professional enemies?

Why Autodynamics Is Wrong, Totally, Utterly And Most Importantly Demonstrably

WARNING: Long Post
WARNING: Some Maths (not essential to understanding)

I think its about time I wrote a semi-complete critique of the whole Autodynamics theory. My reasons for doing this are that I think it provides an excellent opportunity to discuss the successes of the Special Theory of Relativity whilst also illuminating many of the common mistakes made by people attempting to present their own "alternative" theories. For explanations and examples of the theory I have mostly used the two main autodynamics websites, autodynamics.org and autodynamicsuk.org.

If anyone has any points to add feel free to email me, the address is in my profile. I should point out that most, if not all of the points I raise were not originally raised by me, hey, the theory has been around for sixty years, people have had plenty of time to point out the obvious (and less obvious) problems. If anyone recognises anything they think they may have originally come up with feel free to claim some glory in the comments. I especially credit Tom Roberts whose "A Physicists Refutation of Autodynamics" I came across while almost ready to post this entry, for certain mathematical explanations I have decided to use his methods, they were essentially identical to the ones I had, but were much simpler to follow. Hey I'm an Astronomer not a Mathmagician dammit.


History of Autodynamics
Lets start at the beginning. What is Autodynamics? AD is the result of an error made over sixty years ago by a young Argentine Physicist studying special relativity. The physicist, Ricardo Carezani believed that he had spotted an error in the derivation of Einstein's Special Relativity (SR). This perceived "error" became a life long obsession for Carezani, who set out to formulate his own theory, with which to supplant SR. Personally I would have been slightly worried if I thought I had spotted something that had eluded many of the greatest minds of twentieth century science, clearly Carezani had a pretty good opinion of his own abilities.

Now I personally feel some sympathy for Carezani, he was making his "discovery" at a time before most of the experiments that proved SR had been undertaken, for example the experiments that measured the energy spread in certain decays proving the neutrino existed had not been done yet. By the time these experiments had been done, it was probably too late, he wasn't going to be able to accept that he was wrong. He is after all not the first scientist to have sacrificed his career and credibility because of arrogance (I won't name names here, you probably know of a few). He has continued to work on his theory and with the help of a small band of cheerleaders led by a David de Hilster has attempted to publicise it. More recently day to day work on the theory appears to have been ceded to DdH, in fact it appears that Carezani has essentially been sidelined (he is getting on yuo know) in favour of promoting DdHs take on the theory.


AD In Brief
The main conclusion of Autodynamics, is that the derivation of Special Relativity is incorrect, that there is a superfluous reference frame (don't worry we'll look at what these are later) in the derivation and that removal of this frame leads to a simpler theory. This simpler theory predicts very different behaviour for objects travelling near the speed of light, for examples see this page. In particular while SR predicts that objects travelling near the speed of light appear to increase in mass (observed in particle accelerators), AD predicts the exact opposite, that moving objects physically decrease in mass leading to equations for the kinetic energy and momentum of moving objects which similarly display behaviour in the exact reverse of those predicted by SR (and observed in experiment). This change in mass is supposedly what supplies the energy for motion. AD also apparently predicts that electric charge is not conserved, and that "if a charged object decays its charge gets smaller" leading to obvious problems dealing with any particle physics phenomena. From this set of equations AD attempts to explain a wide range of phenomena, from particle interactions, gravity, motion of bodies etc.

It hardly needs stating at this point that SR as been proven time and again to be an accurate description of certain phenomena, therefore if AD is to have any usefulness it must reproduce the predictions of SR for those situations where both apply. In much the same way as SR simplifies to Newtonian Physics at low velocities, AD must predict the same behaviour as SR where SR has already been shown to be correct. As we shall see this is simply not the case.


Autodynamics Treatment Of Frames And Moving Bodies
The central claim of AD is that SR includes a superfluous reference frame and that while the mathematics are correct this frame is physically meaningless. This reverse of this can be shown to be true trivially, taking the equations of SR and AD side by side we can begin to see why this is. The equations on the left are the standard Lorentz transforms used in SR, the ones on the right the simplified Lorentz equations (the so called Carezani equations) used in Autodynamics.

Figure 1. The Lorentz and Carezani equations.

To get anywhere explaining the problems with AD it will be necessary to give a very brief description of the use of coordinate systems in Physics and in particular what the different symbols in the above equations mean.

Imagine that we have two people, Joe and Moe, who are observing some phenomena at a point P some distance away from them, further imagining that Moe is moving in the x direction (in the line between Joe and P) with uniform velocity u (see Fig. 2). Moe sees the distance between himself and the point P as distance x', Joe is at rest relative to the point P and measures the distance between himself and P as being x. The transformation equations above are simply some clever mathematics that allow Moe and Joe to agree on what they are measuring. In the example given if the two coordinate systems (Joe and Moe) were originally at the same point, then the relation between x and x' can be trivially seen to be x' = x - ut, y'=y, z'=z and t'=t (for simple Galilean Relativity), in other words it is possible for both Joe and Moe to reconcile what they have measured.

Figure 2. Two coordinate systems in uniform relative motion along the x-axis.

The description above deals with the results for classical Galilean mechanics, it can be shown that Newton's laws when transformed between the two systems are exactly the same, that is they are invariant, in other words there is no way to use a mechanical experiment to determine who is moving and who is at rest. This is the principle of relativity, that physical laws should be the same in all inertial reference frames (those frames where there is uniform motion), note it does not apply if there is an acceleration acting on one of the frames, this is the root of the infamous twins "paradox".

This was the situation until the mid 1800's when Maxwell formulated his equations describing the behaviour of electromagnetic fields. It was soon noted that Maxwell's equations did not appear to obey the principle of relativity, they were not the same in Moes frame as in Joes, this of course was a major problem. It was H. A Lorentz who first worked out that the transformations on the left side of Figure 1. would allow one to transform Maxwell's equations whilst preserving relativity, an interesting consequence of which was the observation that light appears to travel at exactly c (3x10^8 m/s) no matter how fast the observer or emitter is travelling. This leads to the first problem with AD, the Lorentz transforms are the only mathematically allowed transforms that preserve relativity for Maxwells equations. We know Maxwells equations are observed to be true in any reference frame they have been measured, therefore AD must be wrong. This would be a pretty short critique of AD if we ended there however, plus there is plenty of bad (and good) science/history left to be described.

Einstein took the observations of Lorentz and postulated that it wasn't just electrodynamics that these transforms applied to, but mechanics also, and that by replacing the m in Newtons standard equations with m = m0 / SQRT(1 - u^2/c^2) then the new theory of Special Relativity could be reconciled with the older laws of mechanics. An important point regarding the implications of special relativity is that differences between SR and classical mechanics only appear when objects move very close to the speed of light. In other words at the low speeds (v lt c) we are used to in everyday life then the SR equations reduce to the simpler Galilean ones we expect. SQRT(1-u^2/c^2) only becomes measurably different from 1 when u approaches c.

So now for another glaring problem with Autodynamics, it is the one that essentially kills of the theory at the start. It can be shown that the standard Lorentz transforms form what is known as a group, if you successively perform the transformations you produce another transformation. What this means physically is that there is some mathematics that different observers can apply so that they can bring their observations into agreement. This is essential, relativity means that no two observers will ever measure exactly the same event exactly the same way, but there is at least mathematically some way that both observers can agree that the same physical laws have applied to the phenomena. Without this property Physics and its ability to explain the Universe is impossible, different laws of physics apply to different observers and there is no way that they can ever be reconciled. We can show here that the AD equations do not form a group, that different observers of a phenomenon if they use AD can never agree on what they have observed, not even in principle.

Starting with AD equations 1 and 4 which we will renumber 1 and 2. x and t are measurements in reference frame F (i.e Joe), x' and t' are in reference frame F' (Moe), u1 is the velocity of F measured from F'.

To have any real physical significance it must be possible to introduce a third observer, after all the Universe wouldn't limit us to only two possible frames from which to observe any event right? Well of course not, think of any real life situation and you can see that there are essentially an infinite number of possible reference frames to choose from. So we can introduce a third observer to the system, this observer (Bo?) has reference frame F'', their reference frame must have some relation to the two others, in fact it can be shown that it is simply related in the following way:


where u2 is the velocity that F'' (Bo) measures for F' (Moe). This equation must hold true for any arbitrary choice of u2. There must also of course be some way to convert between reference frame F (Joe) and F'' (Bo) directly, it can simply seen that this situation is described by the following equations, where u3 is the velocity that F'' (Bo) measures for F (Joe).

This also should hold for any choice of u3. Now substitute 1 and 2 into 3 and 4. Giving us:

For the transformations to form a group equations 7 and 8 must be the same as equations 5 and 6, due to repeated transformations leading to transforms that are also group members. So we simply equate the two sets of equations to get:


Substituting 9 into 10 leads to:

Now Substituting this back into 10 gives us:
Which can be rearranged to solve for u1 to get:
Oops. We started out with an arbitrary choice of velocities u1 and u2, but have still ended up with u1=0, this is mathematically a contradiction and shows that the AD equations do not satisfy the conditions of being a group. The composition of any two AD equations does not produce another transformation, falsifying the theory as a practical theory describing real world events. Its is impossible for two observers to agree on anything they see or do using Autodynamics except in the rather boring case of u1=0, i.e both at rest. Needless to say this is not a problem that afflicts SR, I leave it as an exercise for the reader to attempt a similar procedure using the SR equations.

Now how do the ADherents deal with this pretty damning problem? In one of two ways, the first was simply to ignore it, looking at the discussion forums where this type of problem was pointed out to DdH is quite illuminating. After first being made aware of this problem he produced a new newsgroups policy for the SAA (Society for the Advancement of Autodynamics) which prohibited discussion of AD in forums by members, he or one of his sock puppets would then occasionally post some message extolling the virtues of AD whilst refusing to discuss the problems (in an attempt to attract new converts). I have only seen one argument from the ADherents disputing this type of analysis which is simply to claim that the Carezani equations are not transformation equations and that they never claimed that they were, this however spectacularly fails the credibility test when they use them exactly as transformation equations when deriving their equations for kinetic energy (and others) you can see some examples here (specifically where they go from equations 19 to 21). I could essentially end the discussion here, theory disproved end of story, but there are plenty of other examples of poor science to find in AD, some of which are quite amusing and instructive on how not to formulate a theory.



Figure 3. Illustration of the velocity sum.

Velocity Sum
A simple example of where AD predicts something obviously incorrect in real world situations can be seen by how AD relates the summation of velocities. We will use a simple example here to demonstrate the problem. Imagine we have a situation similar to the one described above, where we have someone on a moving body, say a train, the train moves with velocity V1, the person then throws a ball in the direction the train is moving, with as he sees it velocity V2. The question is, what velocity does a second observer, one stationary on the side of the tracks see? What velocity do they measure for the ball? Well in simple Galilean physics the answer is simple, the velocity observed by the person at rest is the sum of the velocity of the train and the ball. In SR the answer is similar, the derivation is trivial but I'll omit it in the interests of brevity, the SR equation for the velocity sum is:


As we can see an extra factor has appeared V1*V2 / c^2, this factor means that it is impossible for anything to appear to travel faster than the speed of light. Try it, if you pick a velocity for the train of 0.55c and one for the ball of 0.55c, the velocity of the ball observed by someone at rest is only 0.845c not 1.1c. The important point however is the behaviour of this formula at small values of V1 and V2 like we see during our normal lives, in this regime where V1,V2 lt c, the equation above reduces to the simple case V = V1+ V2 exactly as is seen in everyday life. Things are not so rosy in AD land however, their equivalent to the equation above for V1,V2...Vn lt c is:




So in our simple example above, the ball appears to anyone at rest to be travelling at SQRT(10^2 + 10^2) = 14.14 m/s. Oops. Clearly this is nonsense, it contradicts simple experiments you could do yourself at home.

The people at the SAA have many reasons for this problem, none of which is actually true, the real reason seems to be that they derive this relation using the assumption that kinetic energy (the energy due to the motion of an object) is invariant. Of course kinetic energy is not an invariant quantity, how much energy you measure an object to have depends on the relative motion between you and the object. This is another major contradiction in AD, it claims that only the motion between an object and an observer matters then ignores the fact that other observers will have a different relative motion and therefore measure a different kinetic energy for the object. Clearly we can again see that the supposed greatest strength of AD (its single reference frame) is actually its greatest weakness.


E=mc²
Perhaps the most egregious and obvious contradiction in all of the AD literature (read website) is the way they treat Einstein's most famous equation E=mc^2, which relates the amount of energy contained in mass to the speed of light squared. Throughout much of the website they consistently denigrate E=mc^2, for example check out the poster for DdH's much delayed documentary about AD:


Notice that it says that E does not equal mc^2. Which is good because in AD, E does not equal mc^2. Unfortunately for AD, in the real Universe E does equal mc^2.

Now E=mc^2 is not something that was chosen by Einstein to fit observations, it falls out naturally of SR, the fact that the relation has been measured to be correct time and again is pretty good, because it again provides yet more evidence that SR is right. The problem AD has is that we know E=mc^2 (or something so close we can't tell the difference) is true. For AD to be correct it has to be able to derive E=mc^2 from its own principles. It seems it can't do this, the changes they have made to the Lorentz transforms make this impossible as far as I can tell. To try to hide this fatal problem the ADherents try several tricks such as saying things like:

Carezani is working with some ideas (slowly and sporadically) with energy equal to E = moc^3. (See here.)

and

So, does the famous equation "E=mc^2" survive in Autodynamics? The answer is, currently, yes. Carezani discovered the Autodynamic equations using the same steps as Einstein, simply with a correction. He assumes this equation to be true for now. It may be that the equation for energy and mass equivalence is something different where E = m K where "K" is some constant other than c^2. But for now, it is assumed to be correct. (Here.)

You can't do this! It so obvious its crazy but they still try and get away with it. E=mc^2 is a natural result of SR, AD cannot reproduce it so if AD is correct then E=mc^2 must be wrong, but its not, we know from any number of experiments that it is true. You cannot say you have a theory that replaces and improves on SR and then say that your theory cannot predict how mass and energy are related so you'll just use the result from the theory you have supposedly disproven because you don't have anything better!

But it gets worse, they actually do just this, using E=mc^2 whenever they need to relate mass to energy, they then claim that AD manages to match observations! Its not AD, its SR that's doing any matching!

You may wonder as I have done why after 60 years no one has managed to come up with an AD relation for mass and energy, its certainly one of the most obvious things to do, the answer I suspect, is that they ran into the same result I did, I have had a very brief try at deriving an AD mass energy relation and ended up with a result that appears to be physically meaningless, which could be down to either my maths (hey, astronomer) or the fact that AD is physically meaningless. I will let the reader decide which is more likely. I suggest a challenge to those of mathematical abilities beyond mine (i.e. 12 year olds), can you produce a derivation for the relation between mass and energy in AD? I tend to think that if one existed that wasn't meaningless Carezani would have it by now, without having to resort to laughable guesses like E=mc^3.

NOTE: Thanks to CMB for pointing out a blindingly obvious problem with E having any dependence other then mc^2 is shown by dimensional analysis. The SI unit of energy is the Joule, which happens to have dimensions of kg m^2 s^(-2) which of course is exactly the same dimensions of mc^2. Carezani's guess of E=mc^3 is of course dimensionally impossible proving yet again how ignorant of basic physics the people at AD are.

This I think is where AD is most easily seen to fall into the crank theory bracket, making one of the most fundamental mistakes you can make in a theory, contradicting yourself. Stating that something is not true (or knowing that it cannot be true according to your theory), then using the fact that it is true elsewhere because you don't have anything better or even worse because you know it is in fact true from experiment. If AD wants to be taken seriously it has to be able to derive E =mc^2 or something like it itself, if as Carezani claims, AD is formulated similarly to SR then it should be simple to show that E=mc^2 is either true or false in AD, why hasn't any of the ADherents done this?

The Neutrino
Ah the poor neutrino, most innocuous of all the ADherents figures of hate. Yes that's right the ADiots really have it in for the poor neutrino, why? you may ask. Well because the neutrino was first postulated by Pauli to explain beta decay, where a neutron decays into a proton and an electron (and neutrino). It was observed that the energy contained in the observed decay products (electron and proton) did not add up to the amount of energy contained in the neutron, so Pauli postulated that an unobserved particle (the neutrino) must be carrying away some of the energy.

It seems that the irrational hatred of the neutrino shown by the SAA is a historical hangover of the formulation of AD. AD was originally claimed to have been formulated to explain beta decay without the need to postulate a neutrino. Unfortunately for Carezani the neutrino was first observed in 1956 about ten years after he came up with AD, the neutrino is now convincingly detected everyday in dozens of different experiments leaving the ADiots with one of two routes, to accept that the neutrino exists and try to salvage their theory or the route that they have (after much deliberation I'm sure) chosen, to stick their fingers in their ears and go "la, la, la I'm not listening to you". They ignore all of the vast quantities of data that clearly and convincingly show that neutrinos exist, instead claiming that the detections of neutrinos are either mistaken or fraud. This is of course laughable and ludicrous, some of the experiments done with neutrinos are incredible, they have been detected from the Sun (if you're wondering what that shows, its a picture of neutrinos from the Sun that have passed through the Earth), from nuclear power plants, particle accellarators and even supernovae in other galaxies for Jebus' sake.

Explain this to the ADiots and they simply claim that all detected neutrinos are other misidentified particles, this just doesn't hold water. Especially since experiments such as MINOS, in this experiment neutrinos produced in a particle accelerator are detected at two locations, one very close to the source of the neutrinos, the other 735km away and 716m underground. Guess what, if you turn off the particle accelarator beam, the signal stops, at both detectors, so what could travel 735km through solid rock without interacting with anything? Hmm, also very fast, near the speed of light, hmm, oh yeah and has the correct properties of spin (as in particle physics spin), charge and lepton number, predicted by looking at the reactions that create the particles? Oh yes thats right the Neutrino.

In simple laymans terms, evidence for the neutrino is now incontrovertable, the fact that AD can apparently explain the energy of one particle reaction, beta decay, without the neutrino must therefore be seen as yet another nail in ADs coffin. This is without even needing to go on and point out that without the neutrino most of the conservation laws of particle physics (spin, lepton number) would not be valid and the entire of particle physics would come crashing down, damn looks like I did point it out.


Conclusion
So there you have it, only a few of the myriad of ways that Autodynamics fails to reproduce anything that even remotely matches observation. We haven't even touched on the rank hypocrisy of its ADherents yet, accusing SR of inventing particles that don't exist (the neutrino which does), then inventing two of its own (pico-graviton and electro-muon which don't). Any visitor to the AD literature will see many examples of fuzzy logic, misunderstanding of SR, downright contradiction (repeated statements that AD only applies to decay cases, then an entire page on how everything can be thought of as a decay case). To me the theory stands out as the most complete of crank theories, but crank theory it is.

AD probably made some sense back in the 1940s, if you ignored the fact that it is physically meaningless in the real Universe, its unfortunately a theory that has far outlived any possibility of it being of any use, existing now as far as I can tell only to sell more copies of books on the subject or memberships to the SAA.

Conservapedia - 2

More Conservapedia gems. It's really hard to figure out which articles are real and which are satire. Not that it really matters because they're both funny. I'll actually post the relevant bits because I'm sure they won't be around in their original form for long, all bold is mine, all poor spelling is theirs.

Second Estate

The Second Estate was a social level in pre-revolutionary France. It consisted of the nobility, about 2% of the population, yet it controlled 20% of the land and paid very little taxes, much like welfare mothers in modern America.

The Battle Of Hastings

The Battle of Hastings was in AD 1066. William the Conquerer disguised himself as the Duke of Normandy and invaded England. He established himself as king, and ruled until 1086.

Er, he was the Duke of Normandy.


Delaware

What a hole.

There's not much I could add to that exhaustive description is there? And yes that is the entire entry.


Spartan Soldiers

The most famous battle involving Spartan soliders was that of Thermopylae where, in 480 BC, a force of 300 hoplites under command of King Leonidas held back a massive Persian army under command of Xerxes. With nothing but spears, shields, and sweaty loincloths these soldiers fought off the following:

• Armored Rhinos
• Mutants
• Guys with Grenades
• War Elephants
• Orcs
• Goat-Man

Wait a minute Rhinos and Elephants, well maybe but Mutants,? grenades?, Orcs and Goat-Men? Say what now?


Homeschooling

Homeschooling is not new, and a disproportionate number of high achievers have been homeschooled throughout history. Here is a list of Christian homeschoolers:

You will notice if you check out their list of homeschooled Christian high achievers that the majority of them had one major advantage that more than explains their supposed high achieving status. They were born to rich families, generally in times when organised schools didn't really exist, so the fact that they got any education was a vast improvement on what most people at the time got. If your born to a rich family and can be educated at a time when very few others are, is it really a surprise you do well? Again a very poor example of confusing correlation with causation. But hey, we already know they aren't really up to scratch with their scientific methods right?


Possibly the saddest thing I have seen so far is in the entry for James Buchanan, it has the time and date of last editing.

This page was last modified 00:14, 1 January 2007.

I actually feel pretty sorry for the people involved now, go on, have fun, enjoy yourself, at least take New Year off. There will still be plenty of things to distort, lie about or otherwise mangle when you get back.

Best. Conservapedia. Article. Ever.

I've just come across the best conservapedia article ever, its for the Pacific Northwest Arboreal Octopus, I guess it goes to show if you believe Dinosaurs roamed the Earth at the time of Jesus, or that unicorns were real and a type of dinosaur, you truly will believe in anything, even an octopus that lives in trees.

At least I should be pleased that its one of their few pages lacking any sign of bigotry or intolerance.

Evolution Cartoons

For this roundup of cartoons I decided to try and stick to a theme, the theme was decided when I came across the first of the cartoons below. All of today's collection relate somehow to evolution, some even date from the 1920's, showing that evolution has essentially always been under attack by fundamentalists.


This one comes from a great site called Russells Teapot, as in Bertrand Russell's famous china teapot floating between Earth and Mars.


Click here for a slide show of classic cartoons printed in the Journal Evolution between 1927 and 1938.

Conservapedia

The blogging world (well the sentient part of it) has been all over Conservapedia this week making some hilarious discoveries. For those of you that have been under a rock for the last week Conservapedia is the wingnuts attempt at making an "unbiased" version of wikipedia, by which they mean a version which is totally biased towards the right-wing creationist fundamentalist Christian demographic. For various other blogs on the subject try, here, here, here and here. Unfortunately the site is running extremely slowly, probably because so many bloggers are now causing mischief by editing the entries. Beware when reading it though, not only is it often (unintentionally) funny but its also incredibly difficult to read, the entries generally read like a 9 year old wrote them for a school project.

Some of the entries are very funny, it must be pointed out that its difficult to know how many of these articles are legit and how many were actually put up by people taking the piss. For example here is part of the entry describing a Democrat, as in a member of the Democratic Party:

According to leading conservative thinkers, no good Christian would ever be a Democrat. Catholics identify as Democrats more than Republican, but the opposite is true for Evangelicas. The major tenets of the modern Democrat platform include cowering to terrorism, cocaine presidents, corporate profits, and establishment of an aristocratic, faux-religious state. However, contempt for all the founding principles of America is not yet an official prerequisite for entry into the Democrat party.

Or how about part of the entry on Charles Darwin.

While often regarded by the majority of modern biologists (who accept evolution) as "the father of modern biology," Darwin himself was aware that some aspects of his work were not as scientific as he wished. However, this theory is promulgated by extremely biased groups not recognized as real science, or, truly, advanced critical thought.

This part from the entry on Bill Clinton is clearly a piss take. I guess they have been too swamped to change it yet.

Bill Clinton managed to serve two terms without botching the prosecution of two wars, manipulating intelligence, engaging in a systematic program of torture, or mishandling the federal response to flooding of a major American city. Obviously, he is the devil incarnate. Clinton also attempted to use the American military to kill Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, an action which was properly seen as a mere attempt to distract the nation from the Monica Lewisnky scandal.

Some entries are well somewhat lacking in content, take this one, which is the entire entry for France.

A country in Europe. Thrived during the middle ages. The capitol is Paris, France, which was founded in the Middle Ages.

Thrived during the Middle Ages, thats it? Or how about Germany? Again this is the whole entry complete with spelling mistakes.

A country in central Europe that was blamed for both Wolrd Wars and claimed to be the dominate race of mankind.

So there we have it the conservative view of everything you need to know about two of the most powerful countries on Earth. Kind of explains US foreign policy for the last 6 years doesn't it?

You can see how the site descended into a free for all as there we're people being banned at a rate of about 1 every ten minutes, in fact they have suspended new accounts now. Surely they could see that this was always going to be the outcome? Their ideas can only survive because they are so insular (its meant to help home schooled kids), any technology that allowed free discussion and presentation of the facts was clearly going to lead to articles that were reality based and hence not at all what they were looking for.

The British Space Program

I finally found a video of Top Gears most outrageous stunt yet, turning a Robin Reliant car into a space shuttle. Alright it was never technically meant to make it into space but just watch the video. I'm amazed it got off the ground.



I love it, its just so totally English, a bunch of guys turn a crappy three wheeled car into a semi-working rocket. It also has the right ending for this type of story, remember Beagle 2 anyone? Click here for the full segment.

The Philosophy Of Science

The Philosophy of Science is not something I have really given any thought to, it always seemed so obvious what Science is that it didn't really need defining. In light of those damn Intelligent Designers/Creationists I've come to realise that this isn't the case. The people that push ID in the states are making a consistent attempt to redefine the definition of Science so that it can include supernatural explanations, which is clearly utter bullshit. Their main aim is simply to redefine Science so broadly that they can get past the requirement for separation of church and state in the US and begin to teach Creationisms bastard offspring, ID, in schools.

My own personal view on what Science is (and is not) is fairly simple. Science is the pursuit of knowledge of the natural world through purely natural explanations (no magic thank you). For a theory to be scientifically valid it has to do two things, it must make predictions about phenomena, and importantly those predictions must be falsifiable. It is on this second point that Intelligent Design falls down, this paper which is fairly short (6 pages) and can be understood by anyone (no maths at all) makes very interesting reading for anyone interested in why Intelligent Design will always remain non-science. Its also fairly good at elucidating just what Science is about. Note: As is this blog post which contains the excellently succinct definition of Science favoured by Richard Feynman: "Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."

I would personally put the Scientific Method as one of the pinnacles of human achievement, leading to a level of knowledge and control over the natural world incomprehensible to our less enlightened ancestors. To think that people want to change that because they see it as a challenge to their faith is beyond me. Get over it, why should the Creation story in the Bible interpreted literally when other parts are interpreted allegorically? How many Creationists that believe you will go to hell if you don't believe the literal truth of Genesis, also follow all of the commandments in the Bible, including ones like:

Don't wear clothes made of more than one fabric (Leviticus 19:19) (Presumably in case you start to wear clothes that look a little bit fruity, if you know what I mean.)

If anyone curses his father or mother, he must be put to death. He has cursed his father or his mother, and his blood will be on his own head.(Leviticus 20:9) (I imagine they would die out quickly if they were putting their kids to death for a little bit of back chat.)

Say to Aaron: 'For the generations to come none of your descendants who has a defect may come near to offer the food of his God. No man who has any defect may come near: no man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed (Leviticus 21:17-18) (Doesn't sound very Christian does it? But there you go, the disabled are clearly not allowed to worship at the altar of God.)

Its the selectivity of their arguments that drives me nuts, some parts have to be believed without question, but the actual commandments of God, well you can pick and choose which of those you like the sound of.

Many people worry that the wingnuts are attempting redefine the things they don't agree with to gain more control and brainwash more people into their frankly ludicrous outlook, this may be true, but I always tend to look at why people are really doing this, fear. Inside every Creationist is the constant gnawing fear that they are wrong, they hope for certainty in numbers, after all if everyone believes what they do then they must be right, right? Their actions are not driven by any perceived rightness of their beliefs but by their obvious weakness in the face of real evidence. They cannot win on a level scientific playing field (hey we have the fossils) so they attempt to alter the rules to improve their chances.

Possibly The Saddest Thing I've Ever Seen

A truly horrifying video. A tip of the hat to Ben Goldacre's Bad Science.



What's so scary is that most of those kids really never had a chance, they will never be able to think for themselves, from age 0 they have been reduced to living automatons. If it is this easy to indoctrinate people to believe stuff that is clearly nonsense, just how difficult must it be to have them believe anything? This is why a rational outlook on the world is so important, it really is one very small jump from believing this kind of anti-factual rubbish to justifying absolutely any of the worst things humans are capable of because some old book tells you its ok.

Just look at some of the bullshit they are being taught, dinosaurs and men living together, the world is 6000 years old (so God has just set it up exactly so it looks older?), the good old lie that evolution says people are decended from monkeys, I don't know about you but the guy giving the talk looks a bit ape-like to me, so maybe there is something in that one.

Doctor of Perjury?

Over at Pharyngula there is a story that caught my eye. See the post here for more details but in brief the important points are the following: That a young Earth creationist has been award a PhD in Geosciences from the University of Rhode Island, his dissertation apparently deals with fossil sea creatures that died out 65 million years ago, this despite his avowed belief that the world is only 10,000 years old at most. So he has spent 4 years writing a thesis which he has then defended to a group of his peers, despite not believing a word of it. Wow the world is nuts.

I mention this story because I remember a similar situation when I was an undergraduate, we had one YEC on our Physics course, he sat through the lectures on Astronomy/Cosmology with a smirk that signified that he knew something the rest of us didn't, no doubt satisfied that all of the observational evidence that the Earth and Universe are vastly older than 6,000 (or whatever he believed) years was made up as some sort of prank by God. I really can't get my head round the type of person that would spend 4 years studying a degree that they believe to be totally wrong, someone that would go into a area of research already certain that anything they discovered that disagreed with their own worldview must be wrong. Its a total anathema to what science is meant to stand for.

Cranks Emails - 3 - Or William C. Mitchell Knows Nothing About Cosmology/Astronomy

Yesterday I asked for some more examples of crank emails, this morning I found about 15 in my inbox, a big shout out to CMB for sending his collection. In particular one stood out, it is an author attempting to hawk his Anti Big Bang book called - Bye Bye Big Bang - Hello Reality, or as I would have called it Bye Bye Scholarly Study - Hello Page After Page Of Embarrasingly Poor Arguments. NOTE: I haven't changed anything except to tidy up the lines a bit, all those strange symbols were in the original email. Oh and I removed the links to the book at Amazon because they don't fit on the page, the spelling mistakes are all the original authors. If this is a Google search then welcome, let's just have a quick look at how little William C. Mitchell knows about Cosmology, and research, and writing legibly.

Subject: COSMOLOGY

If you aren't interested in cosmology, please don't read any further. I
don't want to annoy anyone.

BIG BANG FRAUD © 2004 William C. Mitchell
The following is a review of some of the many items that are part of an
elaborate fraud that is perpetrated by the Big Bang cosmology establishment.

Some Necessary Background Information.
The solutions to Einstein's Special Relativity equations, as solved by Alexander Friedmann, provided for three possible cosmological ”cases” on which Big Bang Theory (BBT) is based. Those cases are: a “closed“ universe having positively curved space that would eventually collapse; a “flat” universe having uncurved Euclidean space that would expand forever; or an “open” universe having negatively curved space that also would expand forever, but at a slowly increasing rate. (Before Friedmann's work, I don’t believe that Einstein had ever given any consideration to negatively curved space.)

The Velocity of Matter in Space.
The velocity of matter departing from us in space, that is calculated by an equation [V/c = (Z+1)2 -1)/(Z+1)2 +1)], that is derived from the Einstein-Lorentz transformations, results in a rate of expansion that reaches c for large redshifts. However, that is incompatible with the Friedmann closed, flat or open universe cases mentioned above; and it is also incompatible with a universe of relatively slowly increasing expansion that has recently gained considerable acceptance. Regardless of those incompatibilities, that equation continues to be used to determine the velocity of matter in space as a function of redshift.

Lets look at this claim, that cosmologists use the above equation to "determine the velocity of matter in space as a function of redshift", this is of course rubbish, we don't need to know the velocities of objects, we can measure it using spectroscopy. We use the measured velocities to determine the physical distance to the object, using Hubble's Law.

The second claim appears to be claiming that it is impossible for objects to appear to recede at greater than the speed of light, this is down to Mitchell's utter lack of understanding of the expansion of the Universe. It is entirely possible for space to appear to expand faster than the speed of light, individual regions of space expand at a fixed rate, so that if you look over a long enough distance the individual expansions add up to produce an expansion that is faster than light. There is absolutely no problem with reconciling faster than light expansion of space with General Relativity.

The third claim is either a misstatement or a flat out lie, he is essentially claiming that when working out distances to objects in the distant Universe cosmologists neglect the effect of the extra expansion due to Dark Energy. This very easily disproven, many people use Ned Wrights handy Cosmology calculator to convert between things like redshift, physical distance, comoving distance etc, this program can be found here. Try it out, you input the value of the Hubble Constant, the fraction of the energy of the Universe that is in matter (both luminous and dark), the redshift to the object you want to know the distance to, and, drum roll, the fraction of the energy of the Universe that is due to Dark Energy. Try changing the value of the DE while leaving everything else the same, what happens? that's right all of the calculated numbers change. So there you have it cosmologists do include the effect of Dark Energy.

Some More Background Information.
Hubble time, which is the time that the BB would have occurred if the universe had a fixed rate of expansion at the Hubble rate (the Hubble constant) ever since the BB. The consensus of working astronomers seems to be that rate should be about 65 km/sec/MPc, but, because it appears to make the BB universe older, BBers prefer a value of about 50 km/sec/MPc (equal to about 15 km/sec/MLYs) putting the Hubble Time at about 20 billion years,

This book is now quite out of date so I will forgive most of this, even though it is all wrong now, the currently accepted value of the Hubble Constant is around 72 km/s /Mpc, on its own this would infer an age of the Universe that was too short, when compared to the ages of stars. Clearly you can't have stars older than the Universe. However when you include the effects of Dark Energy and Dark Matter, and do the full calculation you get and age of the Universe that is between 13 and 14 Billion Years (Gyr), more than old enough to accommodate even the oldest objects in the Universe.

The Age of the Universe.
The age of the BB universe is based on the “flat” universe case that became important as a result of Inflation Theory. According to that theory, the age of that flat universe is equal to 2/3 of the Hubble time, or about 13.3 billion years. Lately, that approximate age is most often presented as the true BB universe age.
A very much “open” universe of accelerating expansion, has recently become the favored new theory of many BBer. However, the age of the universe that is presented in the media is still based on the flat universe case of inflation theory; that is, at 2/3 of the 20 billion year Hubble time.

As my two previous points have explained this is simply wrong, use the cosmology calculator you will see that changing the value of any of the parameters, including the Dark Energy gives a different age for the Universe, (its the part that says: "It is now XXX Gyr since the Big Bang.").

The Size of the Universe.
Using the above erroneously derived age of the universe, and based on no factual data, BBers have also erroneously assumed that the expansion of the outer edge of the universe has expanded at the speed of light. That allows them to determine its radius, in billions of light years, to be equal to its age in billions of years, or about 13.3 BLYs.
(A plot of the Friedmann's solutions to Einstein’s SR equations would show that, although the rate of expansion of a fixed rate universe would ever be at c, the initial rate of expansion of a flat rate BB universe would be higher, perhaps at about 2c; and the initial rate of expansion of a closed BB universe would be even higher, perhaps at about 3c or more; and the initial rate of expansion of the newly popular BB universe of accelerating expansion might be as low as 1/2c, or even lower.)

This whole statement is garbage, even the wikipedia article gets the facts right on this. The fact that space/time is curved and that the Universe is expanding means that the radius of the observable Universe is not simply just the speed of light divided by the age of the Universe. The actual observable Universe calculated using all of the parameters in the cosmology calculator is about 46 Billion Light years in radius, you can see this in the cosmology calculator if you put a very high redshift, say 2000, this corresponds to a time only 65 thousand years after the Big Bang, now look at the Comoving radial distance, this is how far light can have travelled from 65 thousand years after the Big Bang till now. Again Mitchell reveals he understands nothing about Cosmology, certainly not anything to do with the implications of an expanding Universe in General Relativity.

The Distance to Matter in Space.
Based on that erroneously derived present size of the universe, BBers have concluded that the distance to remote matter in space is proportional to its erroneously derived departing velocity.
Although many BBers still believe that, in accordance with inflation theory, the radius of the universe is many times larger than 13.3 BRYs, they continue to report the distance to high redshift matter in space in accordance with the above; and although many of them have recently accepted the very open universe of accelerating expansion, they continue to report the distance to matter in the same manner.
Thus the distance of matter in space and its velocity as determined by BBers are, not only erroneous, but inconsistent with any currently accepted variety of BB.

I'm not really sure what he means here, but as it is entirely based on his erroneous premises, it can clearly be seen to be nonsense.

Resulting Media Reports.
By the use of such fallacious logic, the distances and departing speeds of matter in the space of the universe, as determined and disseminated by the comological establishment, all that is read, seen or heard in the media, and accepted by all the world regarding those figures, is based on those compounded errors.

The only errors we have seen so far have been yours, to paraphrase a favourite film of mine, "you are a poor scientist Mr Mitchell".

More Background Information.
The so-called “Age Paradox” has plagued BBT since day one. Some stars are known by astronomers to be considerably older than the reputed age of the BB universe; and far worse than that, a number of astronomers have estimated that it might have taken more than 100 billion years for the formation of the giant galactic structures that are observed in space.
That is not a “paradox,” but a disastrous problem that BBers have struggled for decades to overcome, meanwhile attempting to hide it, or dismiss it as a trivial, soon to be solved problem.

There is no age paradox its all a load of bullshit, mostly spread by Creationists who think that if they can disprove BBT then more people will believe the world is 6000 years old. I will state this clearly so it can be understood by anyone, including hopefully the incompetent like Mr Mitchell. There are no known objects in the Universe that have measured ages greater than the age of the Universe within the errors of the measurement. I work on the study of Globular Cluster systems, cranks often claim that the ages of GCs are older than the Universe, they are wrong, correctly determining the ages of these systems is difficult and requires a lot of telescope time, usually you don't get enough to do it very accurately, so what you do is try to measure many at once, when you do this equal numbers appear to be younger or older than their actual ages, this makes some of the objects which are actually 10-12Gyr old appear to be 15 Gyr old. This is simply to do with signal-to-noise, statistics and fitting of templates to determine ages. Similarly with objects like white dwarfs, or certain low mass stars which we know could continue to shine for 100 Billion years, yet we never see any of them that are older than 13 Gyr, why is this? Because there are none older than 13Gyr.

The point he makes about galaxy structures would actually appear to be true if you don't actually think about the issues for a moment. Lets face it what crank actually wants to do some thinking and then some difficult maths? For one, the early Universe was much more dense than it is now, as gravity acts as an inverse square of the distance between mass this means that if the Universe was half the size the average force of gravity between clumps of matter would be 4 times larger. Clearly earlier in the Universe it was much easier for gravity to pull matter together to from stars/galaxies/clusters of galaxies. A second point is that the simulations he talks about do not include the effects of dark matter, which contains many times as much mass as luminous matter, adding this in means you can easily form large structures in as little as a few Gyr. If you don't believe me here is a picture of a simulation showing exactly that. Every dot in the image is a huge clump of dark matter (and stars).

Solutions to the Big Bang Age Problem.
A recent new scheme to help BBers solve their age-old age paradox is the invention of “dark energy” or “quintessence.” They have decided that those imaginary entities cause the rate of expansion of the universe to be accelerating. The universe would therefore have expanded more slowly in the past. It would therefore be older than previously thought, thus helping to solve their age problem. (Incidentally, some Bbers of long ago had proposed a universe of accelerating expansion, but their schemes failed to survive.)

Not much to say here, he provides no proof that the cosmological constant or quintessence is impossible, mostly because it is far beyond his intellect to grapple with the maths I'm sure.

The Two Biggest Frauds of All:
The Big Bang creation of the universe was “out of nothing.” Until Inflation theory came along in the early 1980s, BBers believed that, before the Big Bang, there was no matter, no energy, no time, no space.
An equally ridiculous solution to that fraud was the ”inflation” resulting from a “vacuum fluctuation” of the energy of empty space as the source of the Big Bang. Somehow the space and energy, that hadn’t perviously existed, was now said to have been there all the time, and it contained unimaginable amounts of energy.

This is a vacuous and also incorrect statement. The BBT makes no real claims about what happens before the BB in fact it makes no real claims at present about what happened in the very smallest fraction of a second after the BB, why? Because when the matter reaches the incredibly high energies found just after the BB the laws of physics break down, we cannot use the laws we have now to explain all the way back. We know that the laws of physics break down because gravity is not yet reconciled with quantum mechanics and until we have a quantum theory of gravity we can't know what happens earlier with any certainty. Does this matter? Not really, the theory as a whole does not depend on the mechanism, as long as some process can produce the initial expansion and then the inflationary phase everything is fine.

The above are just a few of the items of fraud that continue to be disseminated. However, leading BB cosmologists are well aware of those; and many more problems and inconsistencies of BBT. While attempting to appear unconcerned, minimize their importance, or avoid mention of them, they struggle to invent new schemes to circumvent them; while making big money as professors, lecturers, TV personalities, and authors of articles and books with intriguing new titles. However, most of the innovations they produce (like inflation and acceleration), that are intended to solve BBT problems, produce only new problems.
Meanwhile, those intelligent and educated establishment folks choose to ignore the problems of BBT, and to perpetrate the fraud that continues to be disseminated in the media.

I'd love to know who makes big money from being an astronomer, I certainly don't know of any rich astronomers. If I wanted to be rich the easiest way would be to take up televangelism, or to write a really poor book about how scientists are frauds and the BBT is wrong and then try and sell it to the wingnut creationists. I mean you wouldn't even need to do any hard work then right? No need to check facts, or test theories, you know those people will believe anything as long as it makes BBT or evolution look bad.

If you would like to gain a thorough understanding of Big Bang Theory and its many flaws; and then learn the truth about cosmology based, not on wild ideas and fantasies, but on vast amounts of astronomical data, true science, logic and common sense, you must read my book, BYE BYE BIG BANG - Hello Reality.
This inexpensive, 446 page, paperback - that includes a bibliography, 5 appendixes, and name and subject indexes - can be found in most large US city and large US university libraries; or order it from your book dealer (at $19.95 - available to them from THE DISTRIBUTORS*), or click on:

Best wishes,
William C. (Bill) Mitchell
Carson City, Nevada, USA

*Conact Patty Walsh at THE DISTRIBUTORS, 702 S. Michigan, South Bend, Indiana
46601, USA. Email: pwalsh01@ameritech.net, Telephone: 574-232-8500

In conclusion I can't help but feel terribly embarrassed for the poor guy, it really is that bad, he hasn't even checked the simplest of his arguments, I would expect better from a high school essay. There are plenty of problems with the BBT, none of which are major, if there weren't there wouldn't be anything left for Astronomers to do, but he has decided to attack problems that don't exist. Very sad. I think we can see from the short email that reading the book is probably going to be pointless. If he can fit that many distortions, lies, out of date data into just that few lines how many will the book have?