The Sick State of Todays Science

[barney]

Damn, one more thing I have to go back and read again... :lol:

I checked: he does use the word, "telepathy"...he's a got a whole section on it.

I've always disliked terms like this because they apply specific characteristics/functions to what is as yet completely unexplained and in this case, even unconfirmed phenomena. That is, it can be interpreted in many, many different ways; it needn't necessarily even be 'perception.'

I agree, but I also think the fact that his results are unclear and others have been unable to produce results that support his claims strongly suggest that he's missed something pretty basic. His methodology for the staring experiments, for instance (the only bits of his work I've followed recently), was extremely sloppy and open to multiple challenges; somebody with his scientific credentials really should have known better.

Having had little formal scientific education, I am hesitant to address the specifics of his methodology but yes, I do see what you're saying.

That said, I still find the general idea quite compelling.

 

[darkbeaver]

Selenite crystals 12 meters long. Naica Mine, Mexico. Photographer unknown.

 

[Dexter Sinister]

Uh huh. Selenite is a hydrated sulphate, usually found as gypsum; selenite is just the name for the very coarsely crystallized variety. Other varieties are called satin spar and alabaster. They're just textural terms, it's the same stuff chemically, CaSO4.2H2O. Gypsum is normally the first salt deposited from the evaporation of seawater, though it also occurs in saline lake deposits, is sometimes associated with native sulphur deposits, around volcanic fumaroles, as an efflorescence in soil and on cave walls, and as the gossan over iron deposits in limestone sediments. A gossan, BTW, is an exposed, oxidized portion of a mineral vein.

Gypsum's also very soft and quite fragile, as anyone who's handled it knows. Those caves where that picture was taken are half a million or more years old. If the great catastrophes Velikovsky postulated happened within historical times, those giant crystals would have been shattered.

 

[darkbeaver]

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Pseudoscientists Have Captured Peer-Review Process

A Harvard University astrophysicist is repeating what everybody already knows: 2009 International Conference on Climate Change: Update #3. (Via Heliogenic Climate Change)

NEW YORK--Willie Soon, a Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist with scores of peer-reviewed papers and books to his credit, said he is "embarrassed and puzzled" by the shallow science in papers that undergird the proposition that the Earth faces a climate crisis caused by global warming.

Soon told the second International Conference on Climate Change here, "We have a system (of peer reviewing scientific literature) that is truly, truly appalling." ...

Sununu and Soon both said global warming alarmists, particularly the politicians and the few scientists who wrote the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, have captured the scientific paper process, and in Sununu's words, have been successful in "taking control of who gets funding, who gets published, who gets acclaimed, and who gets demonized."

"What happened to the peer-review process?" Soon asked rhetorically as he reviewed egregious and complex examples of doctored data and sloppy scholarship in global warming alarmist literature.​

Hmmm, sounds familiar.

 

[darkbeaver]

In the face of discordant data, a scientist is required to check the original works and assumptions that lead to the theory under test. But there are very few such scientists in this modern age. As Sir Fred Hoyle put it, today the pressure is on to “do what aging gurus tell them to do, which is nothing” and simply build on the consensus those gurus have established. A fellow Australian, Stephen Crothers, has shown mathematical theorists to be remarkably unintelligent and sloppy in the application of their talent to physical problems. It seems that most of them don’t really follow the mathematical arguments anyway (which is not surprising) but are happy to extol the results of others, based on reputation, regardless of the principles of physics or commonsense. Crothers has done his historical and mathematical homework and delivered a paper, The Schwarzschild solution and its implications for gravitational waves, at the Conference of the German Physical Society, Munich, March 9-13, 2009. He concludes, inter alia, that:

• “Schwarzschild’s solution” is not Schwarzschild’s solution. Schwarzschild’s actual solution does not predict black holes. The quantity ‘r’ appearing in the so-called “Schwarzschild solution” is not a distance of any kind. This simple fact completely subverts all claims for black holes.

• Despite claims for discovery of black holes, nobody has ever found a black hole; no infinitely dense point-mass singularity and no event horizon have ever been found. There is no physical evidence for the existence of infinitely dense point-masses.

• It takes an infinite amount of observer time to verify the presence of an event horizon, but nobody has been and nobody will be around for an infinite amount of time. No observer, no observing instruments, no photons, no matter can be present in a spacetime that by construction contains no matter.

• The black hole is fictitious and so there are no black hole generated gravitational waves. The international search for black holes and their gravitational waves is ill-fated.

• The Michell-Laplace dark body is not a black hole. Newton’s theory of gravitation does not predict black holes. General Relativity does not predict black holes. Black holes were spawned by (incorrect) theory, not by observation. The search for black holes is destined to find none.

• No celestial body has ever been observed to undergo irresistible gravitational collapse. There is no laboratory evidence for irresistible gravitational collapse. Infinitely dense point-mass singularities howsoever formed cannot be reconciled with Special Relativity, i.e. they violate Special Relativity, and therefore violate General Relativity.

• General Relativity cannot account for the simple experimental fact that two fixed bodies will approach one another upon release. There are no known solutions to Einstein’s field equations for two or more masses and there is no existence theorem by which it can even be asserted that his field equations contain latent solutions for such configurations of matter. All claims for black hole interactions are invalid.

• Einstein’s gravitational waves are fictitious; Einstein’s gravitational energy cannot be localised; so the international search for Einstein’s gravitational waves is destined to detect nothing. No gravitational waves have been detected.

• Einstein’s field equations violate the experimentally well-established usual conservation of energy and momentum, and therefore violate the experimental evidence.

In an audience of theoretical physicists there was stunned silence—and not a single question.

A final official word on black holes from the Astronomer Royal who follows an unenviable tradition of holders of that office being completely wrong and retarding progress:

"Black holes, the most remarkable consequences of Einstein’s theory, are not just theoretical constructs. There are huge numbers of them in our Galaxy and in every other galaxy, each being the remnant of a star and weighing several times as much as the Sun. There are much larger ones, too, in the centers of galaxies. Near our own galactic center, stars are orbiting ten times faster than their normal speeds within a galaxy." —Martin Rees, Our Cosmic Habitat (2001).

The Black Hole at the Heart of Astronomy

 

[petros]

Press Release No.835

2008 AMONG THE TEN WARMEST YEARS; MARKED BY WEATHER EXTREMES AND SECOND-LOWEST LEVEL OF ARCTIC ICE COVER​

Geneva, 16 December 2008 (WMO) – The year 2008 is likely to rank as the 10th warmest year on record since the beginning of the instrumental climate records in 1850, according to data sources compiled by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The global combined sea-surface and land-surface air temperature for 2008 is currently estimated at 0.31°C/0.56°F above the 1961-1990 annual average of 14.00°C/57.2°F. The global average temperature in 2008 was slightly lower than that for the previous years of the 21st century due in particular, to the moderate to strong La Niña that developed in the latter half of 2007.

The Arctic Sea ice extent dropped to its second-lowest level during the melt season since satellite measurements began in 1979. Climate extremes, including devastating floods, severe and persistent droughts, snow storms, heatwaves and cold waves, were recorded in many parts of the world.

This preliminary information for 2008 is based on climate data from networks of land-based weather stations, ships and buoys, as well as satellites. The data are continuously collected and disseminated by the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs) of WMO’s 188 Members and several collaborating research institutions. Final updates and figures for 2008 will be published in March 2009 in the annual WMO Statement on the Status of the Global Climate.

WMO’s global temperature analysis is based on two complementary sources. One is the combined dataset maintained by both the Hadley Centre of the UK Meteorological Office, and the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, UK. The other dataset is maintained by the US Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Regional temperature anomalies

2008 again was a year with above-average temperatures all over Europe. A large geographical domain, including north-western Siberia and part of the Scandinavian region, recorded a remarkably mild winter. January and February were very mild over nearly all of Europe. Monthly mean temperature anomalies for these months exceeded +7°C in some places in Scandinavia. In most parts of Finland, Norway and Sweden, winter 2007/08 was the warmest recorded since the beginning of measurements. In contrast, the boreal winter was remarkably cold for a large part of Eurasia extending eastward from Turkey to China. Some places in Turkey had their coldest January nights in nearly 50 years. This extreme cold weather caused hundreds of casualties in Afghanistan and China.
February was a cold month across most of the USA Midwest, with average daily temperatures ranging from 4.0°C to 5.0°C below normal in some areas.
A very cold episode, due to an early Antarctic air mass outbreak, occurred in May in southern South America, particularly in central Argentina, where the minimum temperature dropped below –6°C in some locations, breaking annual absolute minimum temperature records. Conversely, mean July temperatures were more than +3°C above average in large parts of Argentina, Paraguay, southeast Bolivia and southern Brazil, making it the warmest July in the last 50 years for many locations. Also, November broke historical temperature records in association with an unusual heatwave. Central Argentina, including Buenos Aires city, had its warmest November in the last 50 years.
In March, southern Australia experienced a record heatwave that brought scorching temperatures across the region. Adelaide experienced its longest running heatwave on record, with 15 consecutive days of maximum temperatures above 35°C. Also, several heatwaves occurred in south-eastern Europe and the Middle East during April, associated with a very warm spring observed, not only in this region but also in a large part of the rest of Europe and Asia.

Prolonged drought

At the end of July, most parts of the Southeast of North America were classified as having moderate to exceptional drought, based on the US Drought Monitor. The continuous dry conditions across northern and central California hindered efforts to contain numerous large wildfires.
Southern British Columbia in Canada experienced its fifth driest period in 61 years. In Europe, Portugal and Spain had their worst drought winter in decades.
In South America, a large part of Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay experienced a prolonged and intense drought during most of 2008, which caused severe damage to agriculture.
Dry conditions in south-eastern Australia reinforced long-term drought over much of that region, with Victoria having its ninth-driest year on record. These conditions exacerbated severe water shortages in the agriculturally important Murray-Darling Basin, resulting in widespread crop failures in the area. September and October, in particular, were exceptionally dry in this region.

Flooding and intense storms

In January, 1.3 million square kilometres (km2) in 15 provinces in southern China were covered by snow and experienced persistent low temperature and icing. This weather affected the daily life of millions of people who suffered from disruptions of transport, energy supply and power transmission, as well as damage to agriculture.
In Canada, several all-time snowfall records were set during winter reaching more than 550 centimetres (cm) in many locations, including Quebec City. The accumulation of snow was heavy enough to cause numerous roofs to collapse, killing at least four people. In Toronto, the 2007/2008 winter was the third snowiest on record in the 70 year of snow measurement records. At the end of January, Prince Edward Island was struck by one of the worst ice storms in decades. Nearly 95 per cent of the province lost power for a time.
In the United States of America, heavy April rainfall combined with previously saturated ground and snowmelt resulted in widespread major flooding that affected Missouri and southern Indiana. During the month of June, daily precipitation records were broken in many parts of Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin and Missouri. Also, this year was one of the top 10 years for tornado-related fatalities (123 total) since reliable records began in 1953. According to statistics, from January to August, 1 489 tornadoes were recorded, marking a record since 1953.
In Germany, between May and September, a large number of strong thunderstorms with heavy rain, tornadoes and hail storms were observed, causing some casualties and significant damages.
Sub-Saharan Africa, including West and East Africa, was affected by heavy rains, which caused the worst-ever recorded flooding in Zimbabwe and affected more than 300 000 people in West Africa during the monsoon season.
In northern Africa, heavy and extended rainfall during the period of September to November affected Algeria and Morocco, causing important infrastructure damage and several casualties in many cities and villages. Extreme rainfall intensities were recorded in northern provinces of Morocco with up to 200 millimetres (mm) of rainfall in less than six hours. Within the same climate anomaly context and period, intense rainfall was also recorded in south-western Europe. In Valencia, Spain, a total rainfall of 390 mm was recorded in 24 hours, of which 144 mm were recorded in less than one hour. In France, heavy and intense rains affected several locations from 31 October to 2 November. In three days, total rainfall reached 500 mm in some locations, which caused severe flooding and flash floods particularly in central and east-central parts of the country.
Several major rain events affected eastern Australia in January and February, causing significant flooding, particularly in Queensland. In November, widespread heavy rains occurred across most of the continent, ending an extremely dry period in central Australia. Associated severe thunderstorms caused damage from winds, hail and flash floods in many places.
In southern Asia, including India, Pakistan and Vietnam, heavy monsoon rains and torrential downpours produced flash floods, killing more than 2 600 people, and displacing 10 million people in India.
In western Colombia, continuous above-normal rainfall resulted in severe flooding that affected at least half a million people and caused extensive damage and landslides during the second half of the year.
In Southern Brazil, heavy rainfall affected Santa Catarina State from 22 to 24 November causing severe flooding and deadly mudslides, which affected 1.5 million people and resulted in 120 casualties and left 69,000 people homeless.

Weakening of La Niña

The first quarter of 2008 was characterized by a La Niña event of moderate to strong intensity, which began in the third quarter of 2007 and prevailed through May 2008. The large area of cool surface waters over the bulk of the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, combined with warmer-than-normal conditions in the equatorial western Pacific, represented typical La Niña forcing on the global atmosphere; many climate patterns reflected those normally observed during a La Niña event, both in the vicinity of, and remote from, the tropical Pacific. La Niña conditions have gradually weakened from their peak strength in February, and near-neutral conditions prevailed during the later half of 2008.

Tropical cyclones season

The most deadly tropical cyclone recorded in 2008 was Cyclone Nargis, which developed in the North Indian Ocean and hit Myanmar in early May, killing nearly 78 000 people and destroying thousands of homes. Nargis was the most devastating cyclone to hit Asia since 1991 and resulted in the worst natural disaster on record for Myanmar.
A total of 16 named tropical storms formed in the Atlantic including eighthurricanes, fiveof which were major hurricanes at Category 3 or higher (averages are eleven, six and two, respectively). The 2008 Atlantic hurricane season was devastating, with many casualties and widespread destruction in the Caribbean, Central America and the United States of America. For the first time on record, six consecutive tropical cyclones (Dolly, Edouard, Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike) made landfall on the United States of America, and a record three major hurricanes (Gustav, Ike and Paloma) hit Cuba. Hanna, Ike and Gustav were the deadliest hurricanes during the season, causing several hundred of casualties in the Caribbean, including 500 deaths in Haiti.
In the East Pacific, 17 named tropical storms were recorded, of which seven evolved into hurricanes and 2 of them into major hurricanes (averages are sixteen, nine and four, respectively).
In the western North Pacific, 22 named tropical storms were recorded, and 10 of them were classified as typhoons compared to the long-term average of 27 and 14, respectively. Philippines, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and south-eastern China were the most affected by these events. For the first time since 2001, no named tropical cyclones made landfall in Japan this year.

Antarctic ozone hole larger than in 2007

The ozone hole area reached a maximum of 27 million km2 on 12 September. This is less than in the record year 2006 (more than 29 million km2) but larger than in 2007 (25 million km2). The variation in the size of the ozone hole from one year to another can be, to a large extent, explained by the meteorological conditions in the stratosphere.

Artic sea ice down to second-lowest extent

Arctic sea ice extent during the 2008 melt season dropped to its second-lowest level since satellite measurements began in 1979, reaching the lowest point in its annual cycle of melt and growth on 14 September 2008. Average sea ice extent over the month of September, a standard measure in the scientific study of Arctic sea ice, was 4.67 million km2. The record monthly low, set in 2007, was 4.3 million km2.
Because ice was thinner in 2008, overall ice volume was less than that in any other year.
A remarkable occurrence in 2008 was the dramatic disappearance of nearly one-quarter of the massive ancient ice shelves on Ellesmere Island. Ice 70 metres thick, which a century ago covered 9 000 km2, has been chiselled down to just 1 000 km2 today, underscoring the rapidity of changes taking place in the Arctic. The season strongly reinforces the 30-year downward trend in Artic sea ice extent.

Information sources

This press release was issued in collaboration with the Hadley Centre of the UK Meteorological Office, the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, UK, and the National Climatic Data Centre, National Environmental Satellite and Data Information Service and National Weather Service of NOAA and the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in the United States of America. Other contributors are the NMHSs of Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Finland, France, Germany, India, Japan, Morocco, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and Uruguay. The African Centre of Meteorological Applications for Development (ACMAD, Niamey), the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), the Centro Internacional para la Investigación del Fenómeno El Niño (CIIFEN, Guayaquil, Ecuador), the IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre (ICPAC, Nairobi, Kenya), the SADC Drought Monitoring Centre (SADC DMC, Gabarone, Botswana) and the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) also contributed.

WMO is the United Nations' authoritative voice on weather, climate and water

I wonder what 09 will bring?

 

[darkbeaver]

Plasma Volcanoes

Plasma Volcanoes

Apr 08, 2009

The recent eruption of Mt. Redoubt in Alaska calls to mind the skeptical imperative to doubt again the accepted explanations of vulcanology."If I hadn't believed it, I never would have seen it with my own two eyes."
--- Dr. James C. Kroll

What we see is influenced by what we presume, so the skeptical scientist will make an effort to see things that aren’t readily explainable.

Common things to see around volcanoes are steam and ash plumes, pyroclastic flows, and lava rivers. Less common things are rotation of the plume, lightning around the column, and waterspouts or dust devils downwind under the plume. Since the invention of the seismograph, a sub-discipline of seismic study has developed.

The consensus explanations for volcanoes have lumbered into our modern world from the Age of Mechanics, when slide rules were state-of-the-art and things worked by bumping into each other. Convection is king: Hot, buoyant magma rises through cracks in rocks from the “magic mantle,” that mythical realm far below ground that generates excuses for mysterious phenomena on the ground.

When the magma ruptures the surface, steam and ash boil into the sky. Shear forces generate eddies, which become vertical and coalesce to impart rotation to the plume. Friction between ash particles generates static electricity, which discharges as lightning around the eruption column. Seismic signals are exclusively from displacements and mark out the extents of magma chambers beneath volcanoes.

The Age of Plasma, when computers are taken for granted and things work by electrical transmission, suggests more agile explanations. Discoveries from space and in plasma labs guide theories: A volcano could be the result of underground “lightning.” Peratt and Dessler favorably compared the “volcano” Prometheus on Jupiter’s moon Io to the plume of a plasma focus device. The contours of the plume indicated that the center of discharge was about two kilometers below the surface.







Mt. Redoubt volcanic eruption. Credit: J. Warren, Alaska Volcano Observatory.

 

[darkbeaver]

"Nothing yet. How about you Newton?" Credit: Gary Larson


​

Imagine Another Wet, Rocky Planet
Apr 24, 2009

Geocentrism hides in the assumptions that support conventional astronomy. The result is unexpected observations and failed predictions.

A recent ESO (European Southern Observatory) press release announced that the “lightest exoplanet” ever discovered is orbiting a nearby red dwarf star. The planet has less than twice the mass of the Earth, and its “year” is about three days long. It is, “very likely, a rocky planet.”

Another planet in the same system orbits within the star’s “habitable zone” and “could even be covered by a large and deep ocean.”

Or not.

Let’s back away from the philosophical chasm over which these speculations are suspended and check what’s anchoring the cantilevered assumptions that support them. What astronomers observed were variations in the spectrum of the light from the star. The rocks and oceans and habitable zones extend from assumptions about how gravity organizes matter. Gravity extends from assumptions about mass. Mass, it turns out, is simply not anchored.

Astronomy is founded on a sensory bias: we see motion. With a few comparison tools—a ruler and a clock—we can measure position and distance and can directly calculate velocity and acceleration. Sight is our only “astronomical” sense. All others are “local,” terrestrial: for example, we sense force with muscles and measure it with hands-on comparison tools such as springs and balances. Hence, the physics of early astronomy—of Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Kepler—was kinematics, motion without muscle.

Newton connected motion and force with a mathematical relationship and therewith introduced dynamics. But the muscle—and measurement of forces—was still c​

Imagine Another Wet, Rocky Planet


21 April 2009
Newton’s Electric Clockwork Solar System



If the electric field within the Earth changes, the amount of this dipolar distortion will change and the force of its gravity will change. Charge exchange among planets is the key to the orbit stabilizing mechanism in an electric solar system. The ‘clockwork’ of the solar system is governed by gravity and its stability provided electrically.

What we need to find is a means of transferring charge between planets that may provide an orbit stabilizing influence.

Electrically Modified Newtonian Dynamics (EMOND)

In 1983 Mordehai Milgrom of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel proposed a modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) to describe galactic motions. As explained in Electric Galaxies, the motion of galaxies is not gravity dominated. MOND may not be necessary for galaxies. However, some form of MOND is needed to explain stable planetary motion within the solar system.

Conventional celestial mechanics never thinks of the mass of a planet as a variable. However, if the electrical charge on a planet can directly affect its apparent mass to a significant degree, a new and important consideration is introduced to celestial mechanics. Newton’s well-known gravitational equation has the force (F) between the Sun and a planet as
Newton’s Electric Clockwork Solar System

 

[darkbeaver]

Oil Is Mastery

Banned From Universe Today

Censored and banned by Ian O'Neill for quoting Velikovsky. Here is the quote:

"...it was accepted that the solar system has no history at all. So it was created if not 6000 years ago, then 6 billion years ago. But then for 6 billion years there was no change. Whether it was created or came into being by tidal action of a passing star which would be catastrophic as the tidal theory wishes or it is growing out of a nebula, the nebular theory which goes back to Kant and Laplace, but since creation there was no change. But if what I am telling you is truth, then there were changes, and very many, and very recently too." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1966

Despite losing readers due to censorship enforcement, they are more concerned with information suppression than they are with inclusive discussion and diversity.

And for Nereid, here is George Gamow's failed prediction of 50 degrees kelvin made in 1961, just two years before it's actual discovery. He was only off by 4 orders of magnitude (10 x 10 x 10 x 10).