Freitag, 1. Juli 2016

A Sunken Ship

The European Union. In these times many are upset that Great Britain has decided to leave the union. A disappointment that seems to have it's roots in far-right propaganda which for some reason has become synonymous with EU-criticism, in particular Brexit. Confusion prevails and an in-depth look at the facts is in order.

This is (supposed to be) EU


It's hard to believe that the negative opinions are in proportion to the general understanding of what the European Union actually is, i.e. an intercontinental economic and political union between 28 European member states that have "pooled"* parts of their sovereignty to the seven institutions of the European Union. 


The basics.
The main goal of the union is to promote economic growth, through maintaining common policies in trade and ensuring free movement of people, goods and capital between the member states. It also aims to endorse human rights and peace both locally and around the world.

Coming up with and enforcing treaties is the method they use to meet these goals. Supposedly focus on transparency is of great importance to the decision making. Democratic principles are essential. 

All this according to the European Union itself.** 

More than meets the eye.

The Stark Reality


All this sounds well and good on the paper, but in reality much is left to be desired. Let me address three core issues that gravely undermines the credibility of the European Union.

Starting off with how EU works - how the treaties are being created and adapted. A constant critique has been over-complexity.

Please take a look at the following diagrams, the first one by the European Commission showing an over-simplified version of how the ordinary legislative procedure works, the ones beneath showing the procedure in greater detail. The fourth one shows common problems associated with legislative procedures.

EU's version.

A more detailed version of the diagram above. [See them in their entirety here]


"The following diagram summarizes potential issues that may emerge in the Policy to Bill phase and can cause unnecessary complexity in Bills introduced to Parliament."[link] Even though this diagram relates to the bureaucratic process in the UK, the issues most certainly are the same for the institutions in Brussels.

To understand all these steps one has to know how the institutions are connected to each other, what they are made up of and how they work, which demands serious legal understanding and knowledge of technical terminology. 

The sheer complexity alone compromises their main objective of being transparent and democratic. 

--

Another grave problem is the widespread lobbyism. According to The Guardian, in 2014, there were 30 000 lobbyists (of which up to 80% represent industrial interests) affecting the legislation processes in Brussels. 

As the purpose of lobbyists is to mold juridical decision-making to their advantage, one has to ask how reasonable it is to allow this amount of private economic interest to influence the workings of mentioned institutions - said to work for the greater good of Europe and it's citizens. 



Moving on, the European Union likes to boast about it's contributions to world peace, human rights and democracy. It even got the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012 for its alleged efforts in this regard, and it might be true that its policies to some degree have helped maintain a peaceful Europe. 

But claiming that EU is a peace promoting entity doesn't compute with the fact that many if not most of it's member states during the last decades have been producing and exporting arms worth hundreds of billions of Euro. Spreading weapons - products made to harm and kill human beings - on a global scale.

Enough for a Nobel Peace Prize? Actually, yes.

Veni, Vidi, Submergi


Seeing as the Union says one thing but acts oppositely on several key issues, one has to wonder how valuable the membership was for Great Britain in the first place.

Even if their borders will tighten up (we'll see, it might be pure propaganda talking), but they already had an op-out from the Shengen-agreement and countries like Hungary has put up massive barb-wired fences around its borders and keeps on being a EU-member, so ultimately it's Britain's own decision how open or secluded they wish to be - with or without membership.

--

In 2012, during the high storm of the economic crisis, the luxury cruise ship Costa Concordia capsized. It was the biggest Italian built ship of all time and its 13 decks were all named after EU nations, thus serving as an omen for the future of the EU-project.

The deck plans of Costa Concordia.
Costa Concordia/Costa UE.

With Brexit a serious dent has been made in the hull of Costa Unión Europea. 

Considering the lack of ethical and democratic judgment by this over-complex bureaucratic machine, hypocritical to its very core, this should be saluted rather than criticized. 









*
This word is used in the official "How the European Union works"-document put together by the European Comission in 2014. 

**
http://europa.eu/about-eu/basic-information/about/index_en.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union
http://www.gr2014parliament.eu/Portals/6/PDFFILES/NA0113090ENC_002.pdf

Sources: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opt-outs_in_the_European_Union
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/interactive/2013/jun/13/interactive-investigate-europe-arm-trade
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/08/lobbyists-european-parliament-brussels-corporate
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/when-laws-become-too-complex/when-laws-become-too-complex
http://europa.eu/about-eu/basic-information/about/index_en.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union
http://www.gr2014parliament.eu/Portals/6/PDFFILES/NA0113090ENC_002.pdf
http://www.lobbyplanet.eu/wiki/when/legislative-procedures/proposal/co-decision/

Donnerstag, 11. Februar 2016

Cause for Con[cern] (II)


What is the universe made of? How did it start? Physicists at CERN are seeking answers, using some of the world's most powerful particle accelerators. - CERN's website (about)

Legitimate questions. Although it's really only the first question that CERN occupies itself with, and this through a philosophically flawed methodology. What they are doing is the pinnacle of over half a decade of flimflam which we today know as high energy particle physics.


Before I begin pointing out the questionable antics of named organization, one must understand that they are operating within a paradigm which have been dominant in the world of physics since the mid 20th century, a system which is centered around a Standard Model - which has allowed itself to grow into a labyrinth with never ending invisible walls - the opposite of a sound theory explaining the eloquence of Nature's mechanics.

The Standard Model - what does your gut feeling tell you about this?

Knowing the history of it is good, and I urge everyone with an interest to study up on it. If not else it's pretty entertaining stuff, especially if absurdism is your thing. The works of Alexander Unzicker* is a good start, either The Higgs Fake (which I rely heavily on for this discourse) or Bankrupting Physics will do.

However a short presentation and a couple of examples will be enough to demonstrate it's fundamental fallacies.

As you shall see it is rather self-evident.


Quarksalvery


Everything began in the 1930's when physicists welcomed new particles to the table. First having only 2, the electron and the proton, to accepting the positron, neutron and muon as well.

At the beginning it was simple ...

Another particle was also introduced: the neutrino. It was suggested already in 1930 by the famous physicist Wolfgang Pauli who immediately after outlining it wrote: 
"Today I have done something that a theoretical physicist should never have done. I replaced something we don't understand with something we can't measure."**
Today this has become common practice within the field.

Going into the 40's we had 5 detected particles and 1 undetectable. A couple more joined the party during the decade, but this was nothing compared to what the coming age of high energy physics i.e. particle accelerators was about to add.

... a couple of decades later the amount was reaching one hundred ...

In the mid sixties the number had grown to ~80! The high number of particles was confusing to the scientists at the time as they were classified as elementary particles - the most elementary/smallest parts of all matter (today the term elementary particle has a more specified meaning).

But it turned out all these new particles had smaller building blocks: quarks.


Thus eliminating the uncomfortable high number of elementary particles.

Three types of quarks was introduced: up, down and strange. The last one getting it's name because it didn't confine to the consensus of how particles should behave [sic]. But it didn't end there, later three more flavors was discovered: top, bottom and charm.

6 quarks in total.

But this is not all they also come in different "color charges", blue, green or red. And they all have their anti-counterpart, the anti-quarks. This might be confusing, so here's a list of all quarks and anti-quarks:

First there were 6...
And here's the kicker: due to an idea called confinement, quarks can never be observed. Here's a description directly from Wikipedia that ... well, read for yourself:
Confinement, which means that the force between quarks does not diminish as they are separated. Because of this, when you do separate a quark from other quarks, the energy in the gluon field is enough to create another quark pair; they are thus forever bound into hadrons such as the proton and the neutron or the pion and kaon. Although analytically unproven, confinement is widely believed to be true because it explains the consistent failure of free quark searches, and it is easy to demonstrate in lattice QCD. [my bold] 
A sloppy ad hoc-solution to some, reasonable to others.

Quarks aren't the only type of elementary particles though, we also have leptons and bosons, they of course also come in different forms.

Very simplified presentation of the elementary particles as we know them today.
Equally evasive are the bosons, here is an example of how they went about to "confirm" the existence of the Z boson, which by the way had to be found as the theories otherwise would fail:
The huge Gargamelle bubble chamber photographed the tracks of a few electrons suddenly starting to move, seemingly of their own accord. This is interpreted as a neutrino interacting with the electron by the exchange of an unseen Z boson. The neutrino is otherwise undetectable, so the only observable effect is the momentum imparted to the electron by the interaction. (source)
Worth mentioning is that Z (and W) bosons have such short lifetimes (10-25 sec) that they can never make it into a detector, it's the "signature" of an electron emitting an undetectable neutrino that's supposed to seal the deal, so to speak. The term pseudo-science comes to mind, but maybe it's just me.

--

So how many particles are we counting today, in 2016? Counting all flavors, colors, forces, anti-particles, higgses and so forth, here's the number I could find***:

63 elementary particles.

There could be errors in the numbers, but in the end who cares, they're just going to keep on finding new higgses and anti-charm lambda-bambas so why even bother.

If I cannot say a priori what elementary propositions there are, then the attempt to do so must lead to obvious nonsense - Ludwig Wittgenstein


The Science of Interpretation


I have to tip my hat to the PR team at CERN because before I dug into these matters my idea of what they were doing with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was filled with mumbojumbo regarding minuscule black holes, dimensional rifts, vacuum bubbles and what not. Albeit very exciting but very far from reality.

Now I know that their main purpose is to test various theoretical models within particle- and high energy physics - to explore the reaches of the standard model.

A detailed example of what they are actually doing can be seen in this excerpt from their annual report (2015):
"The new ATLAS and CMS results do not show any significant excesses that could indicate the presence of particles predicted by alternative models such as supersymmetry. The two experiments have therefore established new limits for the masses of these hypothetical new particles. [...] This is just one of the many results that were presented on 15 December." (source)
In other words, they search for hypothetical new (?!) particles in different spectra and if they don't find them, they determine that these particles must be of a different nature than theoretically assumed.

That's it.

When the Higgs boson was confirmed late 2012 it was referred to as the "God particle" (what's that even supposed to mean?) in the press and conveniently saved many a man's reputation as well as justified the ongoing expenses of the whole project, which at the time was close to $13.25 billion [sic].

Needeles in a needlestack/colliding particles.
Here's another way to discover the Higgs boson.

Let's examine the process of how they found the Higgs boson and show the contrasts between their way of going about and the actual scientific method they claim to represent:

In short: Two independent teams (ATLAS and CMS) with the explicit purpose of finding the Higgs boson collide hundreds of billions of protons into each other and interpret the collisions.

The particle accelerator at CERN.
This is not entirely unproblematic.

The life times of many of the particles aren't long enough for them to travel the distance of a proton's radius, even lesser so into a detector. The W boson and top quark for example have no way of leaving the colliding point in which hundreds of millions of proton pairs smashes into one another every second.

Another problem is that the scatter process is not fully understood, as Unzicker puts it "a reliable theory of how accelerated charges radiate just does not exist".(source)

This could partly be because the size of the proton is still a subject of debate.****

...

So, out of ~one trillion proton-proton collisions, maybe one of them will create a Higgs particle which instantly decays into other particles, mostly photon pairs, which by the way most other proton-proton collision also decays into.(source)
If each of the LHC's 500 trillion collisions were represented by a grain of sand, they would fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool, yet the grains from the signals of interest — the possible Higgses — would cover only the tip of your finger. (source)
-Joe Incandela, [...] spokesman for the CMS team at LHC
Looking for a grain of sand in a swimming pool of sand ...

Found anything yet?
Assuming every single line of the immense body of computer code is correct and the detector calibration is flawless in every regard, we are still left with two groups of people with the specific goal of finding this and that by interpreting collision artifacts, whose complexity nobody fully understands.

Not to mention that that these teams are in charge of every instance of the experiment involving everything from beaming and detector calibration to data gathering, selection and analyze. Instead of having one independent group focusing on for example the detector calibration, the teams deals with everything.

All this behind locked doors, without public scrutiny.

Now consider the outcomes:

1. They find it. Fame and fortune awaits, Nobel prizes are being handed out, their employment is safe etc.

2.  They don't find it. Justifying further grants will be challenging, but it will be even harder to face the possibility that the standard model might contain fundamental errors - a situation which would have immense effects on thousands of people's careers and life work, including many of who are directly involved today.

And we're supposed to blindly take their word for it?

$$$
So far the bill for the LHC is around $18 billion (source). The annual costs for keeping it running is around $1.25 billion. By now it should be evident that even if they indeed did find Higgs the beneficial aspects of the discovery for humankind are diddly-squat, just one more addition to the particle zoo.


Cyclical reasoning


The ideal way of conducting science, as proposed by the Age of Enlightment, is since long dead. The world of science today is heavily dependent on money and glory. Two factors that we all too often underestimate. It's not hard to see how a scientific result might be affected by the possibility of loosing one's (or other people's) income or prestige.
"Nearly all scientists are employed by some large organization, such as a government department, a university, or a multinational company. Only rarely are they free to express their science as a personal view. They may think that they are free, but in reality they are, nearly all of them, employees; they have traded freedom of thought for good working conditions, a steady income and a pension." -James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of our Living Earth
And of course: an identity.

Looking back at our history, one finds that most breakthroughs have come not through a slowly evolving consensus, but rather through maverick individuals, who's ideas swiftly shook up the established ground.
“In the sciences, the authority of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man.”― Galileo Galilei
When looking at the standard model of today one can't help but to be reminded of the epicycle model. A geocentric astronomical model prevalent from ~300 BC to the late middle ages. In order for the proponents of the theory to explain the ever growing mountain of problems associated with normal sky observations, epicycles was invented. This explained the movements of the heavenly bodies without having to adjust Earths position as the center of the solar system.


The epicycles became more and more complex as time went by. Galileo, Kepler and Kopernicus of course changed all that, but to a high personal price; after all they questioned a system which had been in commonplace for almost 2000 years.

Beautiful and positively gut wrenching at the same time.
We see a great resemblance today within physics: extreme complexity, non accurate predictions, ad hoc-solutions, parroting, the good old "so many people can't be wrong for such a long time", great resistance towards alternatives etc..

They say we know better today, but that's what they've always said. If one does some digging they will find that our very recent history is filled with mistakes not only in physics but in all scientific disciplines. Dogmatism in particular never seem to fade away ...
If the Higgs is not discovered, I think it's practically certain that there is something else in nature which is equally interesting, and maybe even more interesting, that will create the symmetry breaking required by the standard model; and why do I say that it's required? Because the standard model is so good. 
- Jerome Friedman, Nobel Prize Physics 1990 (source)
When hearing statements like the one above one has to cringe a little, because when it comes down to it this is someone who is supposed to represent science and the scientific method, saying that there's no room for alternative models in physics.

What happens when you have this mindset and don't find what you're looking for?

No matter how much the followers keep on saying that the standard model is the best model ever (which they keep on saying by the way, as if they have to keep on reminding themselves), it hasn't gotten close to resolve any of the following basic problems in physics:

  • Contradictions of Electrodynamics
  • Compute Masses
  • Compute Mass Ratios
  • Compute Lifetimes
  • Compute Fine Structure Constant
  • Relation and Nature of Gravity
  • Origin of Spin
  • Origin of Radioactivity
  • Nature of Space, Time and Inertia

"A model that says nothing about all these fundamental questions is crap." 
- Alexander Unzicker








Asterisks:
*http://alexander-unzicker.de/
**p. 167, Particles and Nuclei: An Introduction to the Physical Concepts
*** Source for elementary particles, source for mesons and baryons
****Here's and example: the sixth, "top" quark has a mass of 173 gigaelectron volts whereas it's colleagues ranges from 0.3 to 4.6, but no number was predicted and therefore they could just keep on going higher and higher until they found something.
Further sources:
-The Higgs Fake, Unzicker, Alexander, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (October 9, 2013)-http://home.cern/about
-http://www.neatorama.com/2008/09/12/10-things-about-the-large-hadron-collider-you-wanted-to-know-but-were-afraid-to-ask/
-http://www.ibtimes.com/pulse/large-hadron-collider-reboot-explained-whats-next-after-god-particle-1819412

Dienstag, 12. Januar 2016

The Big Sham (I)

There was a time in my high school years when I considered the idea of a dead and empty universe, sprung from a shady miracle called Big Bang, to be the most rational of stances.

But as I made clear in my last post I find the notion of a happenstance cosmos to be neither probable or logic anymore - a position I've reached through profound personal experience and years of research into the mystical aspects of this world.

However, a relationship with the inexplicable isn't necessary in order to question the world view which the scientific establishment is trying to sell us - Big Bang cosmologists and particle physicists in particular - common sense is sufficient.

In this article, part 1, I will take you on a journey that begins before the existence of the Universe, makes a stop at Big Bang and continues on to cosmic microwave background radiation and quasars.

In part 2 I will examine CERN's Large Hadron Collider and the sad state of affairs that particle physics has reached.

Together they make up the current, ruling theorem of the origin and function of the Universe - and as we shall see, a most doubtful attitude should be maintained towards these ideas.

Before the Beginning


When dealing with the most fundamental question of them all, the origin of the Universe, I believe you only have two options to consider: either something eternal existed before it, or nothing at all.

Rationally the former makes more sense, but for some reason the latter has become the prevalent assumption in the world of physics.

It is however, very difficult to explain how a universe can come into existence from nothing. The famous atheist and astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss tried to do it in his book A Universe from Nothing and failed miserably.

Two prominent theoretical physicists who also have tried are Stephen Hawking and Ulf Danielsson, Sweden's most famous theoretical physicist. Here's what they had to say:

 
"At the big bang itself, the universe is thought to have had zero size, and so to have been infinitely hot. But as the universe expanded, the temperature of the radiation decreased. One second after the big bang, it would have fallen to about ten thousand million degrees." - Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 1988

 
"13.7 billion years ago, an expanding emptiness started to have some troubles. Nobody knows how big or old it was, perhaps it had existed for an eternity. It's also unclear whether it was the only one. [...] Anyway, it was completely empty except for dark energy boosting the expansion... Complete emptiness, dark energy ... and small vibrations. Nothing else existed." - Ulf Danielsson, talk at Gyldene Freden 2012
We can easily see how the two statements contradicts each other, one of them talking about no size whereas the other one talks about expansion.

But let's dissect both statements on their own. Stephen Crothers deals directly with the Hawking quote in this lecture, to paraphrase him: temperature is defined by how fast molecules are moving, the faster the hotter. Now, how can the molecules exist in something of zero size? How fast do they have to move in order to be infinitely hot? And exactly how many degrees is it between infinitely hot and ten thousand million?

Ulf Danielssons scenario is just as nonsensical: an expansion, vibrations and dark energy, i.e. two abstract nouns and a factor x. Couldn't one just as easily say: an amplification, beats and a blue force? Or a multiplication, throbbings and shimmering moxie?

Apparently a reputation and a nice degree are enough to keep one's drivel to remain unquestioned.

If it isn't clear yet let me remind you that we're not talking about science here, but rather purely theoretical fantasies, beyond any method of provability.

Seeing red


It has since long been established that the Universe is approximately 13.7 billion years old. This conclusion has been reached through observing distant heavenly bodies. The oldest ones we've seen seem to have a redshift (wave length of emitted light) that indicates that they're situated almost 14 billion years away from us. As we haven't observed anything further away, they must stem from the beginning of time.

That's the logic.

There are problems with this method of dating the cosmos, first of all one has to assume that both the speed of light and time as we know it are constants, and has been so everywhere during the entire evolution of space, but even if they are, another bigger problem is already at hand.

In my very first post on this blog I dealt with this troublesome area, here's what I wrote:
The recently deceased astronomer Halton Arp was one of few in this field who maintained a critical stance against the Big Bang-theory. He based his critique on observations he'd made when gathering pictures of galaxies. Many [...] showed seemingly connecting "bridges" between them [galaxies] and nearby quasars. Considering that the most distant galaxies he detected were approximately 200-300 million years away, they couldn't have any connection with each other what so ever - at least according to the Big Bang-enthusiasts.

Arp suggested that quasars derive from galaxies, thus implying a vastly younger age for those objects, and more importantly, that the mechanisms causing redshift aren't fully understood.
Of course you could argue about this and that, but the pictures doesn't lie.

 The NGC 7603 galaxy clearly shows a bridge between itself and a quasar.

The NGC 7319 galaxy even has a quasar in front of it.


Wave Race


Moving on to the next problem, much of what we "know" about cosmos today is based on this map supposedly portraying the cosmic background radiation (CMB). Under it you'll find a brief explanation of what it is:
 
The CMB is a snapshot of the oldest light in our Universe, imprinted on the sky when the Universe was just 380,000 years old. (source)
It's easy too see how valuable this information is for astrophysicists who, since it's discovery in the 60's, have been using it as a confirmation of the Big Bang theory. Today even better measurements continue to feed fuel into the fire, so to speak.

The clincher is, the CMB data might very well turn out to be complete junk.

As the methods of obtaining this type of data are very complicated it's not easy for anyone except experts to interpret them. Therefore, when professor Pierre-Marie Robitaille questions the data it's impossible for myself to validate or discard what he has to say, but it's not hard to see where he's coming from.


What he is proposing is that earlier measurements, made by a satellite (COBE) orbiting close to earth, did not take into consideration the microwave radiation emitting from our own oceans. It had nothing to shield off this type of radiation and therefore obtained a map of Earth instead of the Universe.


Looking familiar?

Later experiments with new satellites have been profoundly lacking due to using the previously obtained data as a basis for their own mapping.

In the latest case (called Planck/WMAP) the satellite was unable to distinguish any appropriate signals from background noise (from our own galaxy), which apparently was 1000 times stronger than what they wanted to measure.

Not only did they re-use the questionable COBE data, but they also claim to have removed the contamination signal (red color) even though it's ~1000 stronger than the signal underneath - without having an a priori knowledge or control over the unwanted signal.

I've been trying to find any serious critique against his bold yet reasonable claims, but unfortunately it's mostly the typical skepticist agenda being played out, like "he's a crank", "he doesn't know what he's talking about", "this has been established innumerable times already", "he has other crank ideas, (therefore all his ideas must be wrong)" etc.., instead of any substantial rebuttals.

Which of course gives us all the more reason to believe that he's on to something.

---

Man's appetite for knowledge easily leads him astray. We fear the (intellectual) unknowing so much, that we've actually managed to figure out the entire evolution of the Universe - even without being close to understand the nature of the tool we've used to reach those conclusions with, namely consciousness.

Talk about hubris.

In part 2 we'll have a look at the other ingredients that have contributed to the decline of science: fame and fortune.

Stay put for a visit to CERN and their multi billion dollar search for horsefeathers.








Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1ios-n7Zks&feature=youtu.be&t=2m8s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhYsOQTfYEc
http://www.psydonia.com/2014/09/ancient-universe.html
http://www.generationterrorists.com/quotes/abhotswh.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background
http://thewatchers.adorraeli.com/2014/04/26/pierre-marie-robitaille-the-cosmic-microwave-background-eu-2014/