Ok, what should we worry about today?
And a very good morning to you. It’s 4:30am, and I was awakened by a cat and this oppressive, sweltering Durban heat. I do have aircon in my home, but don’t like to use it continuously. I suppose that subliminally, I’m embracing the warmth as we start an irreversible slide into the headwaters of a looming Ice Age. Not that I’m worried about it. It’s out of my hands.
In this world as it is, there are far more pressing issues I would say. Like the Great Global Warming Swindle, for instance. From a sociological point of view, it is rich ground for contemplation. I didn’t want to get involved, but I have to; my social conscience won’t let me ignore the greatest scam - by orders of magnitude - ever perpetrated. When one looks at the sheer scale of the deception, it blows the mind - it’s now a multi-trillion dollar burglary, feeding without mercy on those scraps of decency that let Homo sapiens feel guilty about environmental hygiene and the way that we prey on and decimate other species. Chairman of the IPCC Dr Rajendra Pachauri has already pocketed (personally) millions of dollars, and he’s only just started. The head of this bloated fish is indeed rotten.
What’s the good news? The light at the end of the tunnel for me is that when climategate is eventually exposed, and we sheepishly admit that we’ve been horrendously duped, and we’ve guillotined whoever we’ve caught, perhaps broader society will have insight enough to the corruptions of power and greed, and the horrifying social tumours growing out of propaganda, to see that essentially, it is science and education that are corrupted. The walls of mathematical sophistry are all but impenetrable, and the $13,000,000,000 underground redoubt called the Large Hadron Collider is safe haven for those toying with the personal consequences of owning the Theory of Everything. “Playing God” is the ultimate fascination for man, and I use the gender term advisedly. It is utterly shameful that the unrepentant patriarch in the male of our species reduces us to this. Al Gore could never, ever have been a woman.
Outside the birds have woken, and the day beckons promisingly. I think that my emerging book “Stephen Hawking Smoked My Socks” is going to be a deeply passionate expression of my environmental sadness. Perhaps we can forgive each other, eventually, but I fear that war is the usual panacea for a smoking soul. The Carbon Diaries are written in blood, and Gore’s surname is suddenly sickeningly prophetic.
Lord have mercy!
Breathe in, breathe out, look left and right, and step onto the highway…
Take it easy.
Hilton
Take an hour or so out of your life to watch this. It’s worth the trouble.
http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=9SiB868VEFc
Online discussion of neutron repulsion energy
Dear Oliver, friends,
I’m an interested observer of this discussion, and look at it through the lens of physics (oh how I envy chemists that freedom to practice their art without strictures of meta-geometrical topology that afflict extra-terrestrial physics. Imagine if we tried to discuss chemical reactions in varying space curvatures).
For some years now, Oliver and I have collaborated on a Solar System model that aligns with conventional chemistry and physics rather than opposes them. Thus, we have an explosive progenitor in the form of an iron-rich supernova. Isotope sequences put that event at ~4.5GYA. That much is empirically verifiable, and is no longer controversial in the mainstream. What happens next is where physics and consensus depart each other.
How could the SN debris settle and accrete gravitationally so that the lightest element known, H, forms the nucleus of the nascent Solar System? How does iron float on hydrogen? It is clear, short of resorting to metaphysics, that there is something fundamentally wrong with the basics of the Standard Solar Model, and that our spectral analysis of the photosphere cannot be representative of what lies beneath.
And that, in my view, is why we’re looking at other processes besides predominantly H fusion to satisfy the Sun’s energy requirements. The proposal of n-repulsion should be seen against the background of a physically sound, fundamentally secure solar model. That is the mistake that Eddington and Bethe fell prey to: They let their theory of energy production in stars dictate the chemical composition of stars, instead of the other way around.
All the best for Christmas and the New Year, however you choose to celebrate them.
With kind regards
Hilton
From Chapter 8 of The Static Universe
To understand cosmic cycles, study explosions. The moment a star dies in a supernova, an inexorable tide of creation goes forth, and it is a beautiful thing to behold. It represents cosmic nativity. A supernova (SN, plural SNe) takes a fraction of a second to explode, yet its brilliance outshines entire galaxies, and the nebula that remains is a starkly fascinating shadow in the picture of galaxies. In that telling instant, redistribution of assets saturates the environment, and consequently, it’s so easy to make supernovae major players in theories of cosmic evolution.
There’s a problem though. You see, SNe happen far less frequently than the old blue moon—about two observed per galaxy per century. That’s not nearly enough—by orders of magnitude—to account for stellar phenomena with anything approaching statistical significance. One per 50 years in a collection of a hundred billion stars isn’t going to do much in the bigger picture. But protagonists in the saga of expansion found a use for supernovae that quite exceeds the design parameters for exploding stars. They extracted from observational data a timescale warp in the fading glow of supernovae. Specifically, they targeted those supernovae known as Type 1A.
Convinced that they are standard candles, these devout women and men measured variability in time taken by 1A SNe to fade from their peak brilliance, and concluded with unseemly haste that the differences in apparent duration were not natural properties of varying explosive parameters, but indeed, the effect of expanding space. The idea behind it is that the “light curve”—the graphical plot of brightness varying with time—would be the same for all 1A supernovae if they were measured locally. Measured remotely from Earth, however, the light curves are not the same, and that is unacceptable for standard candles. Explanation: Because they lie at different cosmological distances, the variations in fade duration must be because of expanding spacetime, something known as “time dilation”. The immediate conclusion drawn from this interpretation is that all this proves universal expansion. What’s more, closer examination, subject to the necessary primary assumptions and fudge factors, indicated to an astonished scientific audience that the rate of expansion was increasing. The Universe, ladies and gentlemen, is accelerating away again. So they say…
The real issue here, as I understand it, is whether or not the universe is undergoing systematic expansion, and whether or not SNe rise times (the patterns caused by ebb and flow of luminosity) support that contention. Here’s the rub: Do the different light curves not tell us that 1A SNe are in fact not standard candles, and that they explode differently over time in each example? That is pretty much how we would normally interpret the observational data in the absence of an overriding theoretical model that tells us otherwise. Unless the progenitor stars of supernovae are geochemically and geophysically identical, we would expect each explosion to plot a unique course on a non-standard timeframe. No one can deny that observable debris fields left after supernovae are so different from one another in so many ways that to suggest the progenitors were all precisely alike is ludicrous. Here again, we are asked by cosmologists to abandon straightforward physics and analyse what we see and measure through their spectacles.
Do you get an inkling now how annoying that is for us?
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