May 24, 2020 - Although I've been keeping busy by listening to podcasts, I keep thinking I should use this time to work on the "final" revision to my sci-fi novel, the novel I started writing on October 2, 2013, and finished the first draft on December 1 of that year.  I finished the third draft on January 3, 2014.  Then I discovered that most literary agents won't even listen to anyone over age 60, much less represent them, and the current literary market seems to demand "series" books.  So, I finished a second book in the series on February 17, 2015, and I started working on a 3rd book.  But in May of that year I got sidetracked into arguing about different views of Relativity and how it seemed that just about everyone had their own view of how Relativity and the universe work.  I created this cartoon that month:
 


In December of last year (2019) I decided I'd self-publish the first book in the series, and I started on the "final" version, typesetting the book as I revised it. I only got to Chapter 4 in the 35-chapter book.  I'm not sure what caused me to stop at that point, but I think it was a feeling that my descriptions of the settings and locations where things happened were too dry and uninteresting.  They needed to be more involving.

Now, I'm wondering if anyone can write any contemporary novels anymore without mentioning the COVID-19 epidemic.

While the books are science-fiction, they are not futuristic science-fiction about space ships and distant planets.  The books take place "today," but in a world where the President of the United States is a fictional character named Nathan Frederick Rawlins.  The story is told by Kyle Rawlins, the President's older brother, who is asked by his brother to assist a scientist who has invented a time travel device that allows you to visit the past without altering the past.

I think it's a terrific story based upon a terrific idea, but it was written pre-Trump and pre-pandemic.  Now I have to wonder how any story about visiting the recent past can work without mentioning Trump or the pandemic.  The time travelers in the book never go back any further than a few days, but what is the world going to look like after the pandemic is over?  Will shaking hands still be a common practice?  The story opens with Kyle Rawlins having dinner with a young woman in a fancy restaurant.  Will restaurants return to the way they were before the pandemic?  Will anything be as it was before the pandemic?

I think I should probably wait awhile before I try revising that book again.  Right now, I'm wondering about a podcast I just downloaded from the "Stuff You Missed in History Class" web site.  The podcast is about The Flu Epidemic of 1918.  That should probably be at the top of my to-do list.  It's only about a half hour long.

And, I'm also wondering if I should listen to an audio book I have in my MP3 player.  It's "Years of Rice and Salt" by Kim Stanley Robinson.  The book is described this way:

It is the fourteenth century and one of the most apocalyptic events in human history is set to occur—the coming of the Black Death. History teaches us that a third of Europe’s population was destroyed.  But what if the plague had killed 99 percent of the population instead? How would the world have changed? This is a look at the history that could have been—one that stretches across centuries, sees dynasties and nations rise and crumble, and spans horrible famine and magnificent innovation.

The problem is that it is the longest audio book I've ever seen.  It is 26 hours long!  

Or maybe I should work on a revision to my paper "Radar Guns vs Wave Theory."  Since finishing the latest version that is on-line, I've done experiments with my radar gun where I measured the speed of cars on the street by pointing the gun through the aluminum screen that covers my balcony door.  And I've measured the speed of the blades of a large floor fan by pointing the gun through the mesh-covered door of my microwave oven.  I also discussed my findings with a physicist, and his only argument was that the experiment wasn't "scientific" enough, since I simply assumed that the door screen was made from aluminum, and I had no idea what material my microwave door screen is made from.  He claimed the experiment wouldn't work if the screen was made from copper.  But he wouldn't say what would happen if I used a copper screen. So, if I did the experiment using a copper screen, he would obviously just find some new way to argue that it wasn't a valid "scientific" experiment.

If I revise that paper, I want to first do some experiment which would show that the gun does NOT perform two external speed measurements, one to obtain the speed of the gun and a second to obtain the speed of the target.  I think the measurement of the speed of the gun is an internal measurement.  I just need to find a way to demonstrate that.   Of course, the simplest experiment would be with a radar gun that only does ONE measurement, but that brings me back to the fact that I cannot afford to buy such a gun without first confirming that it works the way I was told it works (and the way Einstein says it must work).

Or maybe I'll just go for a walk after lunch and then watch some episodes of The Mentalist or West Wing or Angel or some of the other TV shows I have on DVDs.

Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined by comedy producer John Lloyd, mathematician Colva Roney Dougal and writer Simon Singh, to explore the universality of mathematics, the nature of infinity and the role of numbers in everyday life.

Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined by comedian Dave Gorman and maths author Alex Bellos to discuss the joy of numbers and why we are all closet mathematicians at heart.

Prof Randy Lewis shows Adam Rutherford genetically modified goats at a farm at Utah State University, US, which produce large quantities of a spider silk that is among the strongest substances known to man.

The transplanted gene means the goat produce milk containing an extra protein, which is extracted and spun into spider silk thread.

The Indians of this country seldom kill the bear they are very much afraid of them and the killing of a White or Grizly bear, is as great a feet as two of their enimey. the fiew of those animals which they chance to kill is found in the leavel open lands and pursued on horses & killed with their Arrows. they are fond of the flesh of this animal and eate imoderately of it when they have a sufficiency to indulge themselves. The men who were complaining of the head ake and cholick yesterday and last night are much better to day.  Shabonos Squar gathered a quantity of fenel roots which we find very paliatiable and nurushing food. the onion we also find in abundance and boil it with our meat.

Mr. President, since hydroxychloroquine is a prescription drug, are you saying that your doctor prescribed it for you, or that you obtained it from somewhere without a prescription?

President Trump's physician prescribed hydroxychloroquine for him as a preventative measure against the coronavirus, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany confirmed Wednesday amid criticism and questions about whether Trump is actually taking the drug.

"Yes, the doctor did prescribe it for him. And he took it after having several discussions with Dr. [Sean] Conley about its efficacy," McEnany told David Brody of CBN News.

McEnany has in recent days defended the president's decision to take the drug while at the same time attempting to make clear that average Americans should not do the same without a prescription from their doctor.

She connected the ingestion of hydroxychloroquine to the "right to try" legislation Trump signed in 2018 that allows terminally ill patients access to experimental medical treatments not yet approved by the FDA.

   

Ig Nobel Prize Winner Dr. Elena Bodnar demonstrates her invention (a brassiere that can quickly convert into a pair of protective face masks) assisted by Nobel laureates Wolfgang Ketterle (left), Orhan Pamuk, and Paul Krugman (right).

MEDICINE PRIZE: Silvano Gallus, for collecting evidence that pizza might protect against illness and death, if the pizza is made and eaten in Italy.

BIOLOGY PRIZE: Ling-Jun Kong, Herbert Crepaz, Agnieszka Górecka, Aleksandra Urbanek, Rainer Dumke, and Tomasz Paterek, for discovering that dead magnetized cockroaches behave differently than living magnetized cockroaches.

ANATOMY PRIZE: Roger Mieusset and Bourras Bengoudifa, for measuring scrotal temperature asymmetry in naked and clothed postmen in France.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Shigeru Watanabe, Mineko Ohnishi, Kaori Imai, Eiji Kawano, and Seiji Igarashi, for estimating the total saliva volume produced per day by a typical five-year-old child

ECONOMICS PRIZE:  Habip Gedik, Timothy A. Voss, and Andreas Voss, for testing which country’s paper money is best at transmitting dangerous bacteria.

PEACE PRIZE: Ghada A. bin Saif, Alexandru Papoiu, Liliana Banari, Francis McGlone, Shawn G. Kwatra, Yiong-Huak Chan, and Gil Yosipovitch, for trying to measure the pleasurability of scratching an itch.

I have seen your article on "Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories". Congratulations for the clearest view about Einstein's Fundamental Postulates in the TR, I ever have seen. I fully agree that the textbooks for scholars present absurdities that turn the STR arcane and very confusing.

In 1900, Eli Lilly, working in collaboration with Bayer, began distributing heroin without prescription in the United States, promoting it side by side with aspirin as a treatment for colds and the flu. Lilly claimed that the drug could be given safely not only to children, but also to infants and pregnant women.

In the early 1950s, oxycodone made its American debut. Initial preparations were combined with a variety of other drugs. For example, there was Percodan, a combination of oxycodone and aspirin; Combunox, a combination of oxycodone and ibuprofen, a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory; and Percocet, a combination of oxycodone and acetaminophen (Tylenol). But the single most powerful, and eventually most addictive and most abused preparation, was OxyContin, pure oxycodone uncut by other drugs. OxyContin’s manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, marketed the drug as a first-line agent for arthritis. In OxyContin, Purdue Pharma had struck gold—the drug would eventually account for more than 80 percent of its business.

In 1972, President Richard Nixon crossed “the bamboo curtain” and visited China. With him was James Finneran, a senior executive from the M. W. Kellogg Company. At the time, China was the most extensive recycler of human and animal waste in the world. Every ounce of natural nitrogen was put onto every piece of cultivable land. It was simply not possible for China to produce more food than it was producing. But it wasn’t enough. Peasants began eating their livestock, wild vegetables, soup made from grass, and bark stripped from trees; in some regions, cannibalism was reported. By 1961, an estimated 30 million Chinese had died from starvation. Those who had survived ate rice and a few vegetables; meat was rare; food was rationed. Worse, the population in China was increasing at a rate of ten million a year.

The M. W. Kellogg Company had constructed the world’s most efficient ammonia manufacturing plant. Finneran had accompanied Nixon to China because he wanted to help local industrialists build a plant of their own, assuming they would probably build one. They built 13. Within a few years, Chinese fertilizer production doubled; farmers grew massively greater amounts of crops, enough to feed not only people, but also food animals. Meat became plentiful. By 1989, China was the largest producer and consumer of synthetic fertilizer in the world. And, although China is home to one-fifth of the world’s population, malnutrition is no longer a problem. Obesity is the problem.

In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, an angry, raging, no-holds-barred polemic against pesticides—especially one called DDT.

Although the U.S. Department of Agriculture had placed some restrictions on DDT a few years before the publication of Silent Spring (because of stream pollution), Carson’s book ignited a movement that would eventually eliminate the pesticide from the face of the earth.

In the early 1900s, more than a million Americans were infected with malaria every year. Although improvements in housing, better standards of living, and control of mosquito breeding sites had clearly lessened the incidence of the disease, DDT spraying was enormously beneficial, especially in rural areas. Between January 1945 and September 1947—as part of a program run by the MCWA (Malaria Control in War Areas)—more than three million houses were sprayed in the Southeast. In 1952, the United States was finally declared free of malaria. (Located in Atlanta, Georgia, the MCWA later changed its name to the Centers for Disease Control.)

Since 1972, when the Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT from the United States, about 50 million people have died from malaria: Most have been children less than five years old.

Examples of the impact of Silent Spring abound:

In India, between 1952 and 1962, DDT spraying caused a decrease in annual malaria cases from 100 million to 60,000. By the late 1970s, no longer able to use the pesticide, the number of cases increased to 6 million.

In the end, 99 countries eliminated malaria; most used DDT to do it. “Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in twentieth century America,” wrote author Michael Crichton. “We knew better and we did it anyway and we let people around the world die, and we didn’t give a damn.”

Despite Carson’s warnings in Silent Spring, studies in Europe, Canada, and the United States showed that DDT didn’t cause liver disease, premature births, congenital defects, leukemia, or any of the other diseases she had claimed. Indeed, the only type of cancer that had increased in the United States during the DDT era was lung cancer, which was caused by cigarette smoking. DDT was arguably the safest insect repellent ever invented—far safer than many of the other pesticides that have since taken its place.

       There is a third consequence of special relativity, a bizarre effect important only close to the speed of light: The phenomenon called time dilation. Were we to travel close to the speed of light, time, as measured by our wristwatch or by our heartbeat, would pass more slowly than a comparable but stationary clock. Again, this is not an experience of our everyday life, but it is an experience of nuclear particles, which have clocks built into them (their decay times) when they travel close to the speed of light. Time dilation is a measured and authenticated reality of the universe in which we live.
       Time dilation implies the possibility of time travel into the future. A space vehicle that could travel arbitrarily close to the speed of light arranges for time, as measured on the space vehicle, to move as slowly as desired. For example, our Galaxy is some sixty thousand light-years in diameter. At the velocity of light, it would take sixty thousand years to cross from one end of the Galaxy to the other. But this time is measured by a stationary observer. A space vehicle able to move close to the speed of light could traverse the Galaxy from one end to the other in less than a human lifetime. With the appropriate vehicle we could circumnavigate the Galaxy and return almost two hundred thousand years later, as measured on Earth. Naturally, our friends and relatives would have changed some in the interval–as would our society and probably even our planet.
       According to special relativity, it is even possible to circumnavigate the entire universe within a human lifetime, returning to our planet many billions of years in our future. According to special relativity, there is no prospect of traveling at the speed of light, merely very close to it. And there is no possibility in this way of traveling backward in time; we can merely make time slow down, we cannot make it stop or reverse.

The U.S. is not a leader in the pandemic crisis, we are anti-cooperation.   

In India there are conspiracy theories that claim Muslims are behind the coronavirus pandemic.

Americans hate and fear other Americans more than foreigners.

Some on-line computer systems understand you better than you do yourself. 

People will do terrible things to others, just to make them believe you are right.

Many people do not want to admit they made a mistake.  They have an almost pathological fear of it.

Religion these days is about finding excuses for why praying doesn't work.

If the only thing important to you is power and money, this is a time of opportunity.

May 8, 2020 - While doing some research yesterday, I stumbled across an article about this picture:



The article is about the colors you see.  The article says,

Left-brained people (those who are more logical, since the regions of the brain that handle language, analytical thinking, and number are on the left side) see grey and teal [green], while right-brained people (those who are more creative, since the regions of the brain that handle expression, emotional intelligence, and imagination are on the right side) see white and pink.

It's a fun theory to think about—that you may use one side more than another, and it influences your personality—but brain dominance is ultimately a pop psychology myth.

So does one side of the brain control specific functions? Are people either left-brained or right-brained? Like many popular psychology myths, this one grew out of observations of the human brain that were then dramatically distorted and exaggerated. 

Perhaps the observations have been "distorted and exaggerated, but that does not mean that there isn't some truth to them.  And the more you dig into it, the more interesting it becomes.  I found a test that can be performed to see which side of your brain is dominant.  Click HERE for the YouTube video.  It's interesting because, in addition to how you see colors, which side of your brain is dominant also determines such things as how you cross your legs, how you clap your hands, how you lace your fingers, and how you turn around.  The key test as I see it, however, is one where you extend your arm out and hold up a finger, aligning the finger with some object in the distance, like a book on a shelf or the side of a door. Then you close your left eye.  Does the finger remain aligned?  Then try the same test with your right eye.  Does the finger remain aligned?

When I close my left eye, my finger remains aligned.  When I close my right eye, my finger seems to jump to the right and is totally unaligned.  That says I am a left-brain guy.  Most of the other tests say the same thing, although they are less certain because when you think about it, you don't always do things the same way as when you do them without thinking.

Of course, I then had to search through the Internet for pictures of Donald Trump with his hand folded, his arms folded, clapping and sitting with his legs crossed. Nearly all such pictures (say 90%) show that Trump's right brain is dominant. An example:


 
May 6, 2020 - Hmm.  I posted an abbreviated version of the comment I wrote here yesterday to the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum and it generated some reactions, even though my post wasn't addressed to anyone specifically.  The first response was via my web site log file.  This morning there were 4 or 5 copies of each of the following entries in the log:

185.216.32.130 - - [05/May/2020:18:08:15 -0500] "GET /And_this_is_why_you_are_incredibly_STUPID HTTP/1.1" 404 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0"
185.216.32.130 - - [05/May/2020:18:08:42 -0500] "GET /You_happily_quote_Feynman=Scientific_knowledge_is_NOT_
absolutely_certain---yet_YOU_argue_that_it_can_be_proven HTTP/1.1" 404 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0"
185.216.32.130 - - [05/May/2020:18:09:06 -0500] "GET /if_its_NOT_absolutely_certain___then_it_can_NOT_be_proven HTTP/1.1" 404 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0"
185.216.32.130 - - [05/May/2020:18:10:26 -0500] "GET /only_a_MORON_would_quote_phrases_that_contradict_him____
FACEPALM HTTP/1.1" 404 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0"

LOL.

Another example of Ed Lake caught in his pretenses about who he’ll talk to and who he won’t.

So Space Ship guy always measures the speed of light pulses passing him to be c.   Great, we agree.   So what if we simply replace "space ship guy" by "detector on car", what speed would that detector record as the speed of light hitting it ?

For example, you are in the car travelling with speed v (relative to road), with a light source sitting in the middle of the car emitting pulses front and back.  At the front and rear of the car are two detectors being hit by those pulses (so by definition the detectors are travelling along with the emitter and car).  What speed will those detectors on board the car show as the speed of those pulses ?

When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty - some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.

To continue our discussion of the Lorentz transformation and relativistic effects, we consider a famous so-called paradox of Peter and Paul, who are supposed to be twins, born at the same time. When they are old enough to drive a spaceship, Paul flies away at very high speed. Because Peter, who is left on the ground, sees Paul going so fast, all of Paul’s clocks appear to go slower, his heartbeats go slower, his thoughts go slower, everything goes slower, from Peter’s point of view. Of course, Paul notices nothing unusual, but if he travels around and about for a while and then comes back, he will be younger than Peter, the man on the ground! That is actually right; it is one of the consequences of the theory of relativity which has been clearly demonstrated.

One of the consequences of the laws of electricity was that
there should be waves, electromagnetic waves - light is an
example - which should go at 186,000 miles a second flat.
I mean by that 186,000 miles a second, come what may. So
then it was easy to tell where rest was, because the law that
light goes at 186,000 miles a second is certainly not (at first
sight) one which will permit one to move without some
effect. It is evident, is it not, that if you are in a space ship
going at 100,000 miles a second in some direction, while I
am standing still, and I shoot a light beam at 186,000 miles
a second through a little hole in your ship, then, as it goes
through your ship, since you are going at 100,000 miles per
second and the light is going at 186,000, the light is only
going to look to you as if it is passing at 86,000 miles a
second. But it turns out that if you do this experiment it
looks to you as if it is going at 186,000 miles a second past
you, and to me as if it is going 186,000 miles a second past
me!

The facts of nature are not so easy to understand, and the
fact of the experiment was so obviously counter to common-
sense, that there are some people who still do not believe the
result! But time after time experiments indicated that the
speed is 186,000 miles a second no matter how fast you are
moving. The question now is how that could be. Einstein
realized, and Poincare* too, that the only possible way in
which a person moving and a person standing still could
measure the speed to be the same was that their sense of
time and their sense of space are not the same, that the
clocks inside the space ship are ticking at a different speed
from those on the ground, and so forth. You might say, 'Ah,
but if the clock is ticking and I look at the clock in the space
ship, then I can see that it is going slow'. No, your brain is
going slow too! So by making sure that everything went
just so inside the space ship, it was possible to cook up a
system by which in the space ship it would look like 186,000
space-ship miles per space-ship second, whereas here it
would look like 186,000 my miles per my second. That is a
very ingenious thing to be able to do, and it turns out, remarkably
enough, to be possible.

I think it’s a riot that you seized on something in the paragraph below and completely missed the key point in the paragraph above, namely that the light does not go past you at 86,000 miles per second, no matter what makes sense to you.

Trump’s ego prevented him from making sound, well-informed judgments. He stepped into the presidency so certain that his knowledge was the most complete and his facts supreme that he turned away the expertise of career professionals upon whom previous presidents had relied. This amounted to a wholesale rejection of America’s model of governing, which some of his advisers concluded was born of a deep insecurity. “Instead of his pride being built on making a good decision, it’s built on knowing the right answer from the onset,” a senior administration official said.

“He is a transgressive personality, so he likes to attack and destroy and unsettle people,” [Peter] Wehner said. “If he sees an institution that he thinks is not doing his bidding, not protecting him like he wants or is a threat to him, he’ll go after it. The intelligence community because they didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear. The Justice Department because it wasn’t doing what he wanted to do. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization because he doesn’t think they pay enough. . . . The press is ‘the enemy of the people.’ So he doesn’t have any regard for institutions, the role they play, why they’re important, and he delights in tearing them down.”  

When Alexander Hamilton wrote the two essays in The Federalist devoted to the idea of impeachment, Trump was the kind of president he had in mind—a populist demagogue who would foment frenzy, pander to prejudices, feed off chaos, and secretly betray the American people in the accumulation of power—according to Hamilton’s biographer Ron Chernow. Two hundred thirty-two years after Hamilton put pen to paper, Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine forced a reckoning. Would the system the Founding Fathers imagined withstand the pressures of this moment? Or would Trump prevail yet again, another pursuit of justice stymied by his sheer political force and the fealty of his followers?

The difference in cost between doing the moon landing and faking the moon landing is the cost of catering.

You DO know that Joe Rogan is a comedian, right? He may know more physics than you do, Ed, but then, I've got a mud fence in the back yard that knows more physics than you do... and that's a fact...

On September 14, 1918, in the midst of the worst pandemic in modern history, an article in the New York Times quoted Dr. Rupert Blue, then surgeon general of the US Public Health Service. Blue reported that doctors in many countries were treating their influenza patients with digitalis and the antimalaria drug quinine. There was no evidence that the two drugs were any more effective than folk remedies being used by patients, including cinnamon, goose grease poultices, and salt stuffed up the nose, but doctors were desperate and willing to try just about anything. They would eventually abandon quinine and digitalis as treatments for flu when studies showed they were not only ineffective but caused serious and sometimes deadly side effects.

Today, just shy of two months since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, the media are once again flooded with cures, patients such as Michigan State Representative Karen Whitsett are being quoted with claims that hydroxychloroquine “saved my life,” and doctors are prescribing drugs that have not been shown to be effective. Only this time, it’s the twenty-first century, the age of “evidence-based medicine.” Or so it might seem. But instead of no science to back up treatments, we now have bad studies being reported uncritically in the press, and Twitter storms of doctors, journalists, and researchers arguing about the ethics of withholding drugs from dying patients, even though we have no idea if those drugs do more harm than good.

1. If we wear masks and practice social distancing, that makes it much more difficult for the disease to spread.

2. If the disease cannot spread, in time it will mostly die out because there are no more infected people to spread it.

3.  When there have been no new cases for awhile (say two weeks), things can slowly start to go back to normal.

4.  Yes, it may come back again and infect those who didn't get it the first time (or it may be possible for people to be infected a second time).  But we will know how to control it.  Return to step-1.

5.  When they develop a vaccine, which may take many months or even years, everyone can get vaccinated and we can be reasonably certain that we'll never have to go back to step-1 again.

Stephen Colbert's show, and a few parts of Jimmy Fallon's Monday night show.  (I record the shows and then watch them the next evening so I can fast-forward past the commercials.) Then it was movie time, and I tried a couple movies I'd downloaded from TCM, but it quickly became apparent that what I really wanted to do was watch a couple more Joe Rogan podcasts, specifically his two discussions with British physicist Brian Cox.  I clicked on the first discussion from February of 2015 and the link wouldn't work, so I watched the discussion from January 28, 2019, episode #1233, which is 2 hours and 35 minutes long.

Wow!  I have listened to many of Brian Cox's "Infinite Monkey Cage" podcasts and found them all enjoyable, but the Joe Rogan podcast was terrific.  It was what I really needed after watching and listening to Sean Carroll and Brian Greene.  Brian Cox is my kind of scientist.  He's clearly interested in how the universe works, not in how Quantum Mechanics is used to compute things that aren't real.  Quantum mechanics was mentioned only briefly in the show, at about the 1 hour 45 minute mark.  The rest of the discussion was about everything from science fiction movies to measuring space, from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to dark matter, from carbon and oxygen being more and more rare the farther you travel from the Milky Way to Bertrand Russell's addiction to tobacco.

Prof. Cox talked about his work at the LHC and the kinds of experiments they did to see how sub-atomic particles work.  He views the LHC as extremely important to science and feels sad that in 1993, due to budget and political problems, America abandoned its plans to build a Superconducting Super Collider in Texas.  Contrast that attitude to the negative views by Sean Carrol and Brian Greene, who seem to believe that the LHC was and is a waste of money.

Prof. Cox very carefully described to Joe Rogan what it means when scientists talk about a "flat universe."  He also talked about experiments and how experiments both confirm what theories propose and they provide clues to solving mysteries.  At one point Prof. Cox stated, "It is natural to not know."  That is in sharp contrast to the QM advocates who seem to believe that QM is all that you need to know.

When I paused the show from time to time to make a note I noticed that four links to other shows appeared near the bottom of the screen, and one of the links was to Joe Rogan's first discussion with Brian Cox (episode #610):


    
The link to that show on Joe Rogan's web site still didn't work, so when I finished watching episode #1233 I clicked on the link to episode #610 and watched the YouTube copy.

In some ways that 2 hour and 50 minute discussion is even better than the one I had just watched.  I didn't have time to watch it all.  When it was bed-time, I turned off the TV at the 2 hour 8 minute mark (2:08:00) and I'll watch the rest of it tonight.  In the part I watched, Prof. Cox talked ONLY about what can be proved to be real, and he never mentioned Quantum Mechanics.  At about the 1:19:00 mark he talks about how, if you could watch at a proton going around inside the LHC at 99.9999999 percent of the speed of light, you would also see that time for that proton is passing 7000 times slower than it is for you.  That is what I keep telling the mathematicians on the sci.physics.relativity forum and what they constantly argue is not true!

At about that same place in the discussion, Brian Cox explains how you cannot travel at the speed of light if you have mass, and if you have no mass then you must travel at the speed of light.  That's something I had thought about but never saw or heard stated by any scientist before.  The rest of the discussion around that point is how time slows down when you travel very fast, and because time slows down it also seems like distances shrink.  If you were a proton traveling around the LHC which is 17 miles in circumference, it would seem to you that you only traveled 12 feet to go around one time.  (When I use a time dilation calculator, I find that if you go 299,792.455 kilometers per second, you will age 1 second while someone who is stationary ages 7,068 seconds.)

I'm going to have to transcribe some of the statements Prof. Cox makes in that part of the podcast and put them on the sci.physics.relativity forum where they constantly tell me I'm the only person in the world who believes such things.

On the sci.physics.relativity forum, they argue that when scientists talk about time actually slowing down for clocks (or a person) who is traveling very fast, the scientist does not actually mean it, they are just "dumbing down" what is true so that the "ordinary" people who do not understand mathematics and Quantum Theory can understand it. On that Joe Rogan podcast, Joe Rogan is asking questions and Prof. Cox is giving answers.  Plus Prof. Cox explains those answers in different ways, all of which would totally disagree with what the sci.physics.relativity mathematicians say.

I just wish there was some way to contact Prof. Cox to ask him what he thinks about my proposed radar gun experiment.

April 28, 2020 - Yesterday, I received my $1,200 stimulus check.  So, I'm once again trying to figure out how to talk with someone who has a Stalker II SDR radar gun.  I need to verify that it works the way the manufacturer said it works before I buy one.  (Another manufacturer also told me their gun works the way I need the gun to work, but I soon learned they were just telling me what I wanted to hear in order to sell me a gun.)  I've tried my local police departments, but they use Lidar guns, not radar guns, and I'm not sure of the best way to contact police departments that are further away and have less reason to talk with me.

Maybe someone on in Turku, Kauhajoki, Pyharanta, Taialkoski, Haapajarvi, Porvoo, Kokkola, Rauma, Miehikkala, Forssa, Lapua, Hämeenlinna, Keuruu, Kajaani, Lappeenranta, Tornio, Utsjoki, Mellila, Anjala, Valkeala, Lumijoki, Jokioinen, Uusikaupunki, Seinajoki, Ekenas, Nakkila, Ilmajoki, or Ylikiiminki has an idea.  Those are all towns in Finland from where people have visited this web site in the past month or so, plus Helsinki, of course.  I keep wondering what I have written that has gotten their attention.  Or is it just one traveling salesman?

Meanwhile, yesterday evening I watched the second of the three discussions podcaster Joe Rogan had with Professor Sean Carroll, which means I've now watched all three.  They once again discussed all sorts of topics, from Quantum computing to the "Black Mirror" TV show on Netflix, from Twitter to whether there is a need for people to die, from religion to the total number of heart beats each creature has in its lifetime.  To me, it still seems like a lot of Prof. Carroll's beliefs are total crap.  That was particularly true when the show ended and I saw that YouTube was suggesting that I might also be interested in a YouTube lecture by Sean Carroll titled "A Brief History of Quantum Mechanics."  I watched about half of it.

Argh!!!  More total crap!  He begins by describing what happens when a photon hits a half-silvered mirror, and how the photon will travel "in part" through the glass and "in part" be reflected by the mirror. How can anyone believe that????  What happens is that many photons hit the half-silvered mirror and half of the photons go through the glass and half bounce off the silver of the mirror.  A photon cannot be divided in half by a mirror! 

At about the 16:23 minute mark, they showed this graphic:

It seems to describe the cause  of the nuttiness.  If nobody is looking, things work the way mathematicians compute that they work.  If somebody looks, things work in a rational and easy to understand way.   Why would anyone care about fantasies that happen when no one is looking?????????????????????

When I turned off that video, YouTube suggested another video that might be of interest to me: "Brian Greene and Alan Alda Discuss Why Einstein Hated Quantum Mechanics."  It was only about 15 minutes long, so I watched all of it.  Argh!!  It was more of the same, only instead of Joe Rogan being confused by what a Quantum Mechanics physicist was saying, it was Alan Alda.

I think I've had my fill of Quantum Mechanics lectures.  Why Einstein hated Quantum Mechanics is totally clear to me: Quantum Mechanics has nothing to do with reality, and the Quantum Mechanics practitioners don't care!  They just love playing around with mathematical equations, and they love how those equations just confuse all the non-believers.  If the non-believers want to understand, then they need to stop asking questions and just believe in the wonders of Quantum Mathematics. That is basically what people on the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum have been telling me for years.  I'm just not a believer.  Like Joe Rogan and Alan Alda, I need to understand the logic.  If it is not logical, then it is not understandable.  And if it is not understandable and just requires that you believe, then I'm not interested. 

April 27, 2020 - In yesterday's comment I mentioned the idea of referring to Quantum Mechanics as "Myth Math," and I wondered how the people on the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum would react to that.  I asked, and there was only one response.  It was from "Dono" who wrote:

The reason that idiots like you can post on the internet IS QM. Without QM, transistors would not exist. Without transistors computers, routers, etc. would not exist.

I knew that, of course.  So, I need to qualify what is "Myth Math" and what is not.  When Quantum Mechanics was first developed, it produced amazing results.  But today it seems to be doing far more harm than good.  I needed to think more about that, so I spent most of yesterday afternoon puttering around with podcasts in hopes that, while doing that, my subconscious might put things in their right order or that some idea would occur to me.

One of the things I did was create a web page that only I can see because I haven't uploaded the page to my web site.  The page is just a directory of podcasts that seem interesting, something like a bookmark or favorites page, but with more details.  I could have done it with WORD or some other way, but creating a page in html format is easy to do with my SeaMonkey browser, so that's what I did.  Now I can just open that page in my browser, click on a link, and a window opens up for that web site.  And I can also have links directly to specific episodes, too.  Here's part of what the top fourth of the page looks like:



Yesterday evening, I put the file on a flash drive so I could use it in my small laptop that I have in my living room near my 46-inch flat screen TV.  And I watched Joe Rogan's first Sean Carroll interview.  It's 2 hours and 41 minutes long, and it's from August 24, 2017.  It was a very enjoyable and educational discussion.  I made lots of notes.  At about the 10 minute mark, Sean Carroll says that physicists today disrespect you if you ask about how things work in the universe.  They ask, "Why are you doing that when you could be calculating some numbers?"  They tell you, "What we see is different from what is."

At about the 37 minute mark, Carroll and Rogan started talking about the Bohr vs. Electron Cloud debate.   They showed this image on the screen:

Evidently, Niels Bohr described the atom like the version on the left, with electrons orbiting around the nucleus and lots of empty space between the nucleus and the electrons.  Sean Carroll argues that an atom is not like that.  It is more like the version on the right, but he doesn't even like that version because it is made up of little dots.  Carroll says the "correct" version would have a fog around the center, because the electrons could be in an infinite number of locations.  So, what he appeared to be saying is that it is not correct to illustrate an atom the way shown on the left (i.e., the most common way) because you cannot measure or calculate locations of electrons that way.  Perhaps not, but it definitely helps you understand how atoms work if you view things that way.  

What I got from the discussion was that today's Quantum Mechanics physicists do not care about how things work, they only care about how beautiful their equations are.  At one point, Carroll said that no human understands how facial recognition systems work.  They can build facial recognition systems, and nearly every smart phone these days has such a system, but no one really understands how they work.  Huh?

What I got from that was that there are people who can build facial recognition systems that look at faces just the way some people look at atoms (like the image on the left above), and they can match one face to another face in another file, but to a Quantum Mechanics physicist the process is a mystery because there are an infinite number of points on a human face, and working with just a few points is not mathematically correct.  Who picks what points to use?

I could go on and on, but this morning I woke thinking that, while Quantum Mechanics was once an amazing discovery that helped physicists solve many problems, today it does more harm than good.  We know more about how the universe works today than we did in the first quarter of the 20th century.  Plus, a lot of people appear to have adopted Quantum Mechanics as a religion.  They believe what their equations say regardless of what experiments and evidence says.  They look upon their equations as "The Word of God," although they never express things that way.  To scientists, however, there is always the possibility of some unknown factor changing what today appears to be true.  Quantum Mechanics mathematicians don't care about "what is true."  So, as Professor Carroll said at one point late in the program, "In physics today you can never discuss a subject and have everyone agree with you."  Evidently, there is always someone who has a different mathematical model of whatever is being discussed.

When the show ended (after they discussed many more subjects than what I mentioned above), I decided that I'd wait until the next evening before watching Joe Rogan's second discussion with Sean Carroll.  So, I clicked on the Dr. Steven Greer episode from March 3, 2013. Wow, what a contrast.  The blurb for the episode says:

#331. Dr. Steven Greer is the founder of The Disclosure Project.  Dr. Greer also runs CSETI (Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence) whose goal is to initiate contact with extraterrestrials.

He claims to have seen an unidentified flying object at close range when he was about eight years old, which inspired his interest in ufology.

Greer founded the Center for the Study of Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (CSETI) in 1990 to create a diplomatic and research-based initiative to contact extraterrestrial civilizations.  The official statements regarding its intentions also included a new category of extraterrestrial encounters, namely CE-5 or 'close encounters of the fifth kind'. This was defined by Greer as human initiated contact and/or communication with extraterrestrial life.  Since its inception, the organisation has spent anywhere between $3.5 million and $5 million to achieve its goals.

when Carroll was out promoting his latest book titled "Something Deeply Hidden."  (The audio version of the podcast is 1 hour 41 minutes long because it contains commercials, the commercial-free video version is 1 hour 31 minutes long.) 



The interview took place before the Coronavirus pandemic began, and it covered all sorts of topics.  Once again I had to start taking notes.  I was somewhat stunned when Sean Carroll started spouting what seemed to me to be total nonsense.  I had to listen to it again (and watch it) on Saturday morning as I was writing this comment.  I wanted to hear and understand exactly what Carroll was saying.   

The idea that got my attention was that Quantum Mechanics is impossible to understand!  At about the 42 minute mark in the video version, Prof. Carroll says, "In Quantum Mechanics, what we perceive is different from what it really is."  And from there he goes off into QM ideas that he considers to be valid, but which someone outside of QM would not see as valid.  To me, if something is impossible to understand, that almost certainly means it is wrong. 

At about the 47 minute mark Carroll starts talking about whether an electron is "wave like" or "like a particle."  And he goes off into all sorts of directions, as if theories are valid without any experimental evidence, because experiments can be misunderstood.  At about the 50 minute mark, Rogan ask Carroll if an atom is mostly empty space, as most people (including me) believe.  Carroll doesn't believe that.  Listening to that part again doesn't clarify things very much.  It suggests to me that he's arguing that empty space is not empty space because it is filled with gravitational fields, therefore an atom is not mostly empty space because there are fields which keep the electron from escaping and also keep it from crashing down into the nucleus.  The problem, of course, is that some particles, like gamma ray particles, can go through those fields inside an atom just as easily as space ships can travel though gravitational fields without bumping into anything.   

At about the 54 minute mark, Rogan asks why so many people seem to dispute Quantum Mechanics ideas, and Prof. Carroll replies, "We use Quantum Mechanics but we do not try very hard to understand it.  You can talk to physicists on the street and they will tell you that understanding reality is not their job."  Moments later he says, "Because they don't care about these questions, they will often be sloppy in answering." Then he says, "Even if you are a super-duper expert at solving the equations and making predictions, understanding what is going on is a whole nother activity that a lot of physicists do not try very hard to do."  What he seems to be saying is that those physicists believe their job is to compute the equations, and if the equations do not fit reality, that's not their concern.  They just modify their equations to fit what they believe.

Like Richard Dawkins, Sean Carroll is also an atheist, which says once again that he 100% believes things that cannot be proven.  What's so wrong about saying "I don't know" when you do not have enough information to be 100% certain of an answer?

At about the 1 hour 20 minute mark in the video they start talking about podcasts and how podcasting has changed their lives.  It used to be that they could only get to interview scientists and celebrities if they were writing a book, which would be once every few years, but now they can routinely get the same people to talk on a podcast.  Rogan does about 4 podcast per week, and Carroll does about 1 a week.

When I finished listening to the Joe Rogan-Sean Carroll podcast on Friday evening, I then started on Joe Rogan's interview of another scientist, Lex Fridman, who is a research scientist at MIT working on human-centered artificial intelligence.  The audio podcast is 3 hours and 27 minutes long.  While the podcast was somewhat enjoyable, not one word was said about artificial intelligence in the first hour and a half, at which time I turned off my MP3 player and went to bed.  Instead, they talked about at least a dozen other subjects: Joe Biden vs Donald Trump, the movie "Ground Hog Day," being able to share your passions with others, and on and on and on.  Yet, it was interesting. 

On Saturday, I organized my bookmarks and my podcast copies.  Then in the evening, instead of listening to Joe Rogan podcasts on my MP3 player, I connected my small laptop to my 46-inch flat screen TV in my living room and I watched some Joe Rogan interviews on that big screen.  I watched the rest of the Lex Fridman interview, skipping over parts that seemed repetitious or of no interest to me.  Never did they talk about artificial intelligence.

Then I watched a bit of an interview with stand-up comic Duncan Trussell because it was the most recent podcast, created on that same day.  It didn't hold my interest, so I switched to the next most recent podcast, an interview with comic Tom Green, recorded on April 24.  They talked about the pandemic and about conspiracy theories.  It held my interest all the way through, but there was nothing in it worth mentioning here.  What it told me was that I need to plan ahead and make a list of the old episodes that seem most interesting.  That way I can go directly to the episode, instead of hunting through the entire list and sampling those that might be interesting.  Joe Rogan has interviewed Bernie Sanders, Edward Snowden, Brian Cox, Sir Roger Penrose, Elon Musk, Dr. Phil, Bill Maher, Robert Downey, Jr., Rosanne Barr, Mel Gibson, and right-wing nut job Alex Jones, among many others.  Plus, he's interviewed many people more than once, so I can try listening to an earlier interview with Sean Carroll to see if it clarifies anything about Quantum Mechanics, or one that is even earlier.

I awoke this morning thinking about an alternate name for Quantum Mechanics: Myth Math.  I wondered what the folks on the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum would think of it.  When I visited a thread about time dilation, I saw that a physicist had posted this:

NOTHING in physics can be proven -- proof is a MATHEMATICAL
concept inapplicable to the world we inhabit.