The blog of Hilton Ratcliffe

 
Dear Malcolm,
Thank you most sincerely for your response last month to my April 2009 Breaking News column in Ndaba. I wish more of our readers would express their views and exchange ideas. I fear though that objectivity may be on thin ice here (pun unintended) because we both, by our own admission, engage for ethical [...]

Well, I have after trial and tribulation managed to watch all of “The Age of Stupid”. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a free download site that offered the entire movie in one chunk, so ultimately I resorted to YouTube and watched it in 9 episodes. Given the emotional style of the production, which requires uninterrupted flow [...]

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 [...]

Is the Universe expanding? It would appear not. What do we see? We do not see, let alone measure, large objects systematically moving away from all other large objects. On the contrary, it would seem to be quite the opposite, at least in the case of colliding spiral galaxies. Every observable large scale system is [...]

My argument is that terrestrial climate is dynamic, and has been changing cyclically for the Earth’s entire lifetime. Climate change exists and is natural. Climate and energy on Earth are products of the Sun by such an overwhelming margin as to make human influence vanishingly trivial. Al Gore lied about that and has formulated [...]

Astronomy ought to be an observational science. It really should. It used to be, after all, a hundred years ago or so. Ideally, astronomers would point their instruments at the heavens, find astounding new things, and publish them where we could all share in the joy of discovery. I wish it were so. The appalling [...]

HEADLINE: AUSTRIAN GOVERNMENT WITHDRAWS FUNDING FOR THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER.

HEADLINE: AUSTRIAN GOVERNMENT REINSTATES FUNDING FOR LHC.
 From: Stephen J Crothers, Associate Editor, Progress in Physics.
 Dear Concerned Scientists and Thinkers,
 The Austrian Bundeskanzler (Federal Chancellor), Werner Faymann, has reversed the decision of Austria’s Minister for Science, Johannes Hahn, and committed Austria to further funding of the LHC [...]

From chapter 3 of the third edition of The Virtue of Heresy:
 The tidal wave caused jointly by Max Planck’s 1900 quantum hypothesis and Einstein’s relativity swept the scientific world, and by 1930, physics was standing on its head. As professor of mathematics at the University of Leningrad, Alexander Friedmann enthusiastically promoted these ideas, and his [...]

In reminiscing over the enormous contribution the late Tom Van Flandern made to physical science, I re-read his essay, “Physics has its Principles”. Tom epitomised principles and ethics to me, so I share with you today the abstract and concluding paragraphs:
Abstract. Physicists and mathematicians have fundamentally different approaches to describing reality. The essential difference is [...]

We live in a dynamic and violent universe, and the emissaries of time gone by lie scattered in their trillions throughout the Realm. They are part of a cosmic archive, a virtual treasure chest of secrets waiting to be explored. A seemingly endless array of lights from prehistory fills the heavens, and the better we [...]