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Comments for Sunday,
December 16, 2018, thru Saturday, Dec. 22,
2018:
December
18, 2018 - I've
been working on my scientific paper about
photons and the Double Slit experiment, and
it has become abundantly clear that I need
to focus on what a photon looks like, and
how it works, before I can even begin to
look at how photons work within the Double
Slit experiment. Nearly all the
available information about the Double Slit
experiment is about waves. But light
is definitely not a
wave. So, I need to understand how a
photon works before I can understand how
photons work within the Double Slit
experiment.
Yesterday I decided that this illustration
of a photon is basically illogical, even
though I've used it in comments here many
times:
It then occurred to me that the photon would
become symmetrical if the two fields didn't
pulse at the same time. If the
electric field had its peak when the
magnetic field had its trough, the photon
should become symmetrical. I used the
above illustration to simply and quickly
create a new version showing that idea:
But it is still not symmetrical! When
viewed head-on, the fields would never
shrink down to a dot, but you would still
have a backward L turning into and upside
down L. It also suggests that the
photon may actually consist of two photons,
an electrical photon oscillating up and down
(following the red line) while the magnetic
photon oscillates from side to side
(following the blue line). But that
would also throw it off balance. To
remain symmetrical, it must have a center
that oscillates vertically and then
horizontally.
That illustration cannot be created so
quickly. It requires that the blue and
yellow waves be on both sides of the center
line at the same time. I'd have to
copy the second blue part over to join the
first blue part and then I'd have to copy
the first blue part over to become the other
half of the second blue part. The same
with the yellow parts. So, it becomes
something like a section of chain.
Here's my first feeble attempt:
The problem is: Doesn't the image now show
TWO wavelengths? Or FOUR, two for the
electrical field and two for the magnetic
field? It changes the whole idea of
what an electromagnetic wave consists
of. In the first two images you had to
go down and then up, or from one side to the
other side, to complete one wave. But
if you go up while also going down, then the
whole concept of a "wave" changes. It
is nothing like a sound wave or a water
wave. That doesn't mean it is wrong,
it just means it requires a lot of
explanation and convincing.
Here is what the photon it looks like when
viewed head-on:
I'm just knocking around ideas. There
could be some basic flaw that I'm missing,
but right now I need to figure out how to
create a black and white image like the
third image above, where the magnetic and
electric fields alternately oscillate both
ways from the center line. It could
take a lot of time. And I want to make
sure the idea is solid before I spend any
more time on illustrating it.
December 16, 2018 - I'm still
trying to logically determine what a photon
looks like and how it works. As part of
the process of doing that, I am also doing a lot
of research. For the past few days, I've
been trying to clarify the issues scientists
have with the
Double Slit experiment. I've
been working on a scientific paper about that
subject off and on for almost a year and a
half. The first version I have in my files
is dated July 5, 2017. I don't know if I
will ever complete it, but organizing the paper
should help me to organize my thoughts on the
subject, particularly since every step seems to
require a lot of research.
Thomas Young is widely considered to be the
first to perform the Double Slit experiment, but
it seems there is no real evidence that he
ever actually did such an experiment.
According to page 123 of Young's biography "The
Last Man Who Knew Everything,"
there is no question
that the double-slit experiment does
demonstrate the interference of light, as
countless others have subsequently shown. But
did Young actually perform it? Or was it only
a ‘thought’ experiment, like Einstein’s notion
of trying to catch up with a light ray? At
least one current historian of science, John
Worrall, thinks the latter was the case:
Young’s double-slit experiment was an
intuition of the truth, not a real
experiment.Worrall bases his view on the
following undoubted facts: Young does not
explicitly state that he did the experiment;
Young provides no numerical data; Young says
nothing about the light source he used and
the other experimental conditions; and Young
never again refers to the experiment.
So, of course, I had to research
that.
Young describes the Double Slit experiment on
page 464 and 465 of his book "A
Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and
the Mechanical Arts ..., Volume 1."
It is part of "Lecture XXXIX." And he is
clearly relating light to how waves of sound and
water work. The illustration he uses
("Plate XX. Fig. 267") is the same illustration
he used earlier when talking about water waves
in "Lecture XXIII," which is titled "On the
Theory of Hydraulics."
It really bugs me that many many text books
refer to the Double Slit experiment as being
performed by Thomas Young, but there is
absolutely no evidence that he
ever actually did such an experiment. His
actual experiments involved placing a thin card
edgewise into a beam of light (from a hole in
window shade, not a slit) and noting that the
card did not produce a solid dark shadow on
the wall, but instead produced multiple
shadows in the form of dark lines separated by
lines of color. And there was always a
white line in the center of the shadow where
one would ordinarily expect the darkest part
of the shadow to be. Young used those card
experiments to develop his wave theory of
light.
It also bugs me that in Richard Feynman's
discussion of this topic in his book "Feynman
Lectures on Physics - Volume 3"
Prof. Feynman seems to accept
that there is no way to determine exactly how
light works. He says at the very beginning
of the book, in Section 1,
Because atomic
behavior is so unlike ordinary experience, it
is very difficult to get used to, and it
appears peculiar and mysterious to
everyone—both to the novice and to the
experienced physicist. Even the experts do not
understand it the way they would like to, and
it is perfectly reasonable that they should
not, because all of direct, human experience
and of human intuition applies to large
objects. We know how large objects
will act, but things on a small scale just
do not act that way. So we have to
learn about them in a sort of abstract or
imaginative fashion and not by connection
with our direct experience.
Why not learn by
experiment???? There is nothing "abstract"
or "imaginative fashion" about scientific
experiments.
Prof. Feynman then goes on to say,
In this chapter we
shall tackle immediately the basic element of
the mysterious behavior in its most strange
form. We choose to examine a phenomenon which
is impossible, absolutely impossible,
to explain in any classical way, and which has
in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In
reality, it contains the only mystery.
We cannot make the mystery go away by
“explaining” how it works. We will just
tell you how it works. In
telling you how it works we will have told
you about the basic peculiarities of all
quantum mechanics.
Arrrgh!!! Yes, we CAN
make a mystery go away by "explaining" how it
works. However, his explanation is a quantum
mechanics explanation. And
that leaves things unexplained, since it assumes
that the quantum mechanical mathematics
are correct.
As I see it, instead of simply switching over
from science to quantum mechanics to get
"answers" which work mathematically, we need to
stick with science. And that means we need
to define exactly how a photon
works. Prof. Feynman then describes bullets
as being like the particles we know as electrons
and photons. A
photon is nothing like a bullet!
It seems that countless physicists cannot get
past the notion that energy must
consist either of particles or of waves.
And the definition of a "particle" is that it is
a tiny object of a
fixed shape and size, like a
microscopic grain of sand. It sometimes
seems like that is a false assumption
that physicists are required to accept
as true.
To me, photons are nothing like particles, and
they are nothing like waves. They just
exhibit some properties of both when an
experiment is designed to test for such
properties.
Instead of writing about all this here, I should
be writing about it in a scientific paper.
And I could be mistaken about nearly
everything. But, when I visualize a
photon, I do not visualize it as either a
particle or as a wave. It is something
that exists ONLY when traveling at the speed of
light. When stationary, it is not called a
"photon." It is called "energy." It
causes an electron in an atom to jump to a
higher energy state (or orbit), which the atom
cannot sustain, so the electron drops back to
its original energy state (or orbit) and the
atom emits the energy as a "photon" traveling at
the speed of light.
So, a "stationary photon"
would be magnetic energy moving up and down from
orbit to orbit while its electrical energy moves
side to side. It is essentially two
dimensional. And when the photon is
ejected, it becomes three dimensional, with the
third dimension being travel distance or time,
i.e., the time it takes to oscillate once up and
down and side to side while traveling at
266,792,458 meters per local second. Like
so:
That is not a wave, nor is it a particle.
It appears like a wave when moving at the speed
of light, and it has the properties of a
particle in that it consists of a specific
"quantum" of energy instead of a "stream" of
energy. It hits your eye as a particle of
electrical energy oscillating at a specific
frequency. And, if you receive enough such
particles in a short period of time, your eye
and brain will interpret the photons to be a
spot of colored light.
But, I'm just rambling. What I really need
to understand it what happens between
the "Single slit" and the "Double slit" in the
Double Slit experiment:
Groan. I should be
researching how people build the double slit
experimental equipment. What materials do
they use? Why isn't that an
important piece of information provided in every
demonstration of the Double Slit experiment?
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Comments for Sunday,
December 9, 2018, thru Saturday, Dec. 15,
2018:
December
13, 2018 - I awoke
this morning realizing that my subconscious
was pointing out some problems with my
thinking about photons. There were
things about photons that suddenly didn't
make sense, but those things had either
never occurred to me before, or I hadn't
considered all their implications.
First of all, this image of a photon that
I've use several times in the past is
definitely misleading:
It's misleading because when such a photon
is viewed head on, it would look something
like this:
+
That shape is possible, but
it is misleading. When you think about
polarized light, there is no +
shape, there is only a |
shape. It seems polarized light just
(or mostly) involves the electric
fields. In the image below, the
polarizing filter is evidently only allowing
photons which have electric fields
that oscillate up and down to pass
through. All others are either
absorbed or deflected away.
Using a filter to polarize light doesn't
appear to involve the magnetic field at
all. Or the magnetic field is much
much less affected by the polarizing filter
than the electric field. Or it is
affected in a very different way.
Thinking about that, it makes a lot of
sense. When talking about things the
size of an electron, electric fields tend to
be stronger than magnetic or gravitational
fields. They do not seem to vary as
significantly in intensity as you move away
from source the way gravitational and
magnetic energy does. I'm way out of
my areas of expertise on this, but that is
the way things seem to me at the moment.
The thing that really stuck in my mind as I
was waking up this morning was how this
seems to relate to the Double Slit
Experiment. When you view the Double
Slit experiment from above, the slits become
holes and things look like this:
It appears that the slits must
be polarizing the light. And the
magnetic fields on the photons must
be passing close enough to the magnetic
fields around the atoms that constitute the
slit material to affect the trajectory of
the photons. There's a lot more to the
idea, and I clearly need to start putting
together some illustrations of my own,
instead of borrowing them from other
sites.
I spent all morning working a scientific
paper about it, but I'm a long long way from
being done. I need to break the Double
Slit experiment down into steps. What
happens to the photons when they hit the
single slit in the first
barrier? How are the photons
affected by the fields surrounding the atoms
in the barrier? What happens when the
photons exit the single slit? What is
their trajectory? What happens when
some of those somewhat-polarized photons
pass through the two slits in the next
barrier? And what are the trajectories
of the photons when they leave the slits and
head for the viewing screen? How would
things change if the double slit barrier is
moved a bit further away or a bit closer to
the single slit barrier?
Hopefully, I'll be able to illustrate the
questions and the answers. If
I can't, then I should be able to find a
flaw in this reasoning. Until then,
it's going to be what I'm mostly thinking
about.
December 11. 2018
- Last Friday, I've started taking my MP3
player to the gym again, so that I can
listen to audio books while spending 30
minutes on a treadmill and 20 minutes on an
Exercycle. I gave up on doing that a
couple years ago when listening to audio
books while exercising became less
productive than just thinking about
scientific problems. I'm still
thinking about scientific problems, but it's
a different kind of thinking. It's
more like pounding my head against a
wall. If I cannot figure out what a
photon looks like and how it works, it seems
I cannot go any further. So,
basically, I am waiting for an
inspiration. And "inspiration" usually
comes from the subconscious. So, while
my subconscious mind is doing whatever it
does, I can use my conscious mind to listen
to audio books.
Of course, that means I am concurrently
absorbing the contents of three
non-fiction books. I am listening
to a comedian's very funny audio book
autobiography on my MP3 player while
exercising at the gym (and sometimes while
just laying on my couch), I am listening
to a history audio book about the space
program on my CD player while driving here
and there around town, and I am reading
a third Trump-related current affairs book
on my Kindle during breakfast and
lunch. And when not doing all that, I
am often at my computer trying to decide
which book I should read or hear next.
Occasionally, I also ponder the idea of just
sitting down and reading a paperback or
hardcover novel that I have on my
bookshelves. It's been many months
since I last read a novel.
Once in a while, I also ponder the idea of
reading one of my own science-fiction
novels. I finished writing the second
one back on February
27, 2015, and I never really got
started on the third. So, the
manuscripts are just sitting there on my
desk. The idea back then was that, in
today's world, it is next to impossible to
find a publisher for a novel if you haven't
already had one published. The market
is flooded with popular authors who pump out
a new book every year or even more
often. So, I thought it might be
easier to find a publisher if I could offer
them a 3-book series. But I only have
two books. Sigh.
I think I'm going to end this comment here
and just listen to the book on my MP3 player
until it is time to read the book on my
Kindle during lunch, and then I'll listen to
the book on my CD player while driving to
the gym.
December 9, 2018 - I'm not sure
if it's happening because it is getting close to
Christmas, or if it is just a new trend, but I
seem to be getting more scam emails and scam
phone calls than I ever did in the past.
I've been saving the scam phone call messages
that they leave on my answering machine.
I've been thinking I might someday make MP3
versions of them and putting them on this web
site to show people what the scams are like.
(The one where the IRS threatens to send the
police to arrest me in 24 hours if I don't
immediately pay my tax bill is my
favorite.) The basic elements that tell me
they are phone scams are that (1) they want
money immediately, (2) they are threats, and (3)
they are recorded messages that
do not mention my name or the name of the
person they are calling.
So, they are recorded threats to whoever
answers the phone. They
usually also set payment deadlines a day or two
in the future, which always pass without
anything happening. They may be targeting
the elderly, since I
read in the papers that such scams con
thousands of people out of billions of dollars
every year.
Last week I also received three interesting email
scams. I have about 100 filters to
block such emails, but these somehow got
through. The first one was received on the
5th. The entire content of the email is
below (with my highlighting in red):
Hello,
I am a spyware
software developer. Your account has
been hacked by me in the summer of 2018.
I understand that it is hard to believe,
but here is my evidence (I sent you this email
from your account).
The hacking was carried out using a
hardware vulnerability through which you
went online (Cisco router, vulnerability
CVE-2018-0296).
I went around the security system in the
router, installed an exploit there. When
you went online, my exploit downloaded my
malicious code (rootkit) to your device.
This is driver software, I constantly
updated it, so your antivirus is silent
all time.
Since then I have been following you (I
can connect to your device via the VNC
protocol). That is,
I can see absolutely everything that you
do, view and download your files and any
data to yourself. I also have access to
the camera on your device, and I
periodically take photos and videos with
you.
At the moment, I have harvested a solid
dirt... on you... I saved all your email
and chats from your messangers. I also
saved the entire history of the sites you
visit.
I note that it is useless to change the
passwords. My malware update passwords
from your accounts every times.
I know what you like
hard funs (adult sites). Oh, yes .. I'm
know your secret life, which you are
hiding from everyone. Oh my God, what
are your like... I saw THIS ... Oh, you
dirty naughty person ... :)
I took photos and videos of your most
passionate funs with adult content, and
synchronized them in real time with the
image of your camera. Believe it turned
out very high quality!
So, to the business! I'm sure you don't
want to show these files and visiting
history to all your contacts.
Transfer $905 to my
Bitcoin cryptocurrency wallet:
1Lmk4eUXcmtVU6YQvaPJ4yihu4fEcKtkby Just
copy and paste the wallet number when
transferring. If you do not know how to do
this - ask Google.
My system automatically recognizes the
translation. As soon as the specified
amount is received, all your data will be
destroyed from my server, and the rootkit
will be automatically removed from your
system. Do not
worry, I really will delete everything,
since I am 'working' with many people
who have fallen into your position. You
will only have to inform your provider
about the vulnerabilities in the router so
that other hackers will not use it.
Since opening this
letter you have 48 hours. If funds not
will be received, after the specified
time has elapsed, the disk of your
device will be formatted, and from my
server will automatically send email and
sms to all your contacts with
compromising material.
I advise you to remain prudent and not
engage in nonsense (all files on my
server).
Good luck! |
Interestingly, last week someone who regularly
reads this web site sent me a copy of a scam
email he had received that
involves this same type of blackmail scam.
It was a totally different message but it was
about the same thing and included the same kind
of threat, only his email was from a Yahoo email
account in France. Until then, I had never
seen such a scam. Now I have actually
gotten one.
The email address used by the scammer who sent
the above email is in the shaded box
below. Note, that he did indeed use my
email address to send me the email threat.
However, I
have the capability of looking at the source
code for the email, i.e., the email message
content before it is formatted to look like an
email on my computer screen. Part of
that source code is above. (I didn't include the part that shows
my email address as the "From" address
because it is much further down and would
involve showing all the stuff in between.)
Note that it is actually from someone with a
yahoo.jp email address in Japan. And the
sender's IP address (underlined in red) belongs
to a web site in Kemerovo, Russia.
Another scam email that I received two days
later, on the 7th, is shown below.
The "from" address at boulanger.com is for a
French web site. It seems to be a
legitimate web site, but I'm not certain what
they sell. The links in the text of the
email go to guooogle.com web
pages. However, I cannot find such a web
site by using Google. I didn't try
clicking on any of the links, of
course.
I don't have any "Google Ads" account, so it
isn't much of a threat to me.
The third scam email I received last week is a
real puzzle. The body of the email
definitely looks like a scam, but how did I
receive it? It isn't addressed to
me! The "To", "From" and "Cc"
addresses all belong to the public school system
in North Dakota. Plus, why is it
dated January 27, 2018? Where
has it been?
I looked at the source code for
the email, and it seems to show it was sent from
an IP address (104.47.40.80) that belongs to a
Microsoft outlook.com location in Honolulu,
Hawaii. Here is that part of the source
code:
Received-SPF: Pass
(protection.outlook.com: domain of k12.nd.us
designates 104.47.40.80 as
permitted sender)
receiver=protection.outlook.com;
client-ip=104.47.40.80;
helo=NAM03-CO1-obe.outbound.protection.outlook.com;
It's
quite possible that I received it via my
outlook.com email address, instead of via my
newsguy.com email address. But it's a
mystery why I received it at all. There is
nothing anywhere in the email (including in the
source code) that refers to any email account of
mine.
If it wasn't for the bad English in the text (my
"Full Names"? and why capitalize "Reply"?), I
would assume it was some kind of glitch
somewhere at Microsoft. But, if it is a
glitch, it is a glitch that makes me a bit
worried about the whole idea of using the
Internet for financial transactions. A
little research, moreover, shows that it is a
well known scam. Click HERE
to read about it.
If people can send me emails with phony return
addresses and incorrect mailing dates, they
could imitate the actual credit card companies I
do business with. I always pay my credit card
balances via the U.S. mails. Maybe that
makes me a bit "old fashioned" and "not part of
today's on-line community," but so what?
It also means that it is a lot easier for me to
detect and avoid a scam.
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Comments for Saturday,
December 1, 2018, thru Saturday, Dec. 8,
2018:
December
6, 2018 -
Yesterday, after doing my morning chores, I
basically just sat around reading for the
rest of the day. I read the last half
and finished the Kindle book I borrowed from
my local library, "Unhinged:
An Insider's Account of the Trump
White House," by Omarosa
Manigault Newman.
It was a very readable book, and fairly
enjoyable. It's like an adventure
story, and once you get going it's hard to
stop. Omarosa Newman is a minister and
was active in social causes before she
became a contestant on Trump's reality TV
show, The Apprentice in
2003 She remained as an assistant on
the show for awhile. Later, she became
part of Trump's campaign to become
President. Then, after Trump was
elected, she became an "AP," an Assistant to
the President. Early in the book she
wrote,
The Donald Trump of 2018
is not the same man he was in 2003. When I
met him, many of our beliefs were aligned.
He identified with Democrats and supported
commonsense gun control, like banning
assault weapons; legalizing marijuana;
universal health care; and even a tax hike
on the wealthy. He thought Hillary Clinton
was a “great” senator and donated money to
her campaigns and at least $100,000 to the
Clinton Foundation.
I've never seen The
Apprentice, but I have 17 pages of
notes from Omarosa's book, and this
quote says something about how the show
worked:
I had many famous lines to
come out of the first season. For
instance, I was the first person to say on
a reality TV show the now-famous phrase
“I’m not here to make friends.” My
objective was to methodically eliminate
each contestant, one by one, so why would
I want an emotional attachment to any of
them? How could you lobby Trump to fire
your “friend” on national TV with millions
of people watching?
The book is about how she
slowly changed from being an admirer of
Trump's, to distrusting him and everything
he stands for.
Trumpworld is a cult of
personality focused solely on Donald J.
Trump. And Donald, like a cult leader, can
spot susceptibility in people in an
instant. They were fascinated by fame,
power, Trump’s charisma, and would do
anything to be close to Trump and win his
favor.
For years she was part of
that cult and a believer.
The longer I stayed
involved, the deeper my loyalty was to
Donald Trump and the bigger my blind spot
became. As I’ve said, he chooses people
who are very loyal, who subscribe to the
fame and charisma that is Donald Trump’s
magnetism. And I was one of those people.
But, she also says,
In politics, your foe
becomes your friend in the blink of an
eye.
She explains Hilary
Clinton's loss in the 2016 election in a way
that I also see as the explanation for
Clinton's loss:
In fact, I lay some of the
blame for Hillary’s low turnout on those
assurances from the media that her victory
was a sure thing. Voter behavior indicates
that if voters believe their candidate has
it in the bag, they will not, for example,
take off work to go vote and lose a day’s
wages, believing their vote isn’t needed.
The press actually demotivated her base.
If they’d reported the truth, that the
race was very close, there is no doubt in
my mind that they would have turned out
for her.
When Omarosa was working in
the White House as Assistant to the
President, she gives this description of
Trump's use of Twitter:
We had an entire daily
memo devoted to “Trump Tweets Alerts,”
just to handle talkers on his favorite
platform of all. FDR used the radio to
reach the public. JFK used television. DJT
uses Twitter. He’s addicted to it because
he’s a narcissist, and he revels in his
many million followers. The likes and
retweets feed his ego. It’s the ultimate
power tool for him because he controls his
content. It’s not censored or even
spellchecked. No one can tell him what to
write or say. He can tweet about anything
in the world, and does, with a rawness
that is decidedly not presidential. He
loved the idea that any tweet could set
off a firestorm and that they allowed him
to get his message directly to his base.
She also provides a lot of
fascinating details about what it is like
working in the White House, and she says a
lot of things that agree with what I've been
thinking for years, but never related them
to Trump. For example, she says,
The world has yet to
learn about the extent of Donald Trump’s Diet
Coke habit. He always had one in his hand, as
far back as I’ve known him. He’s up to eight
cans a day, at least. Eight cans a day, for
the last fifteen years, is 43,800 cans of Diet
Coke, poured into his system.
I've always wondered about Diet Coke
addiction. When I was running a small
company, I had an employee who seemed to be
a Diet Coke addict. I definitely
thought she was addicted to the caffeine in
Diet Coke. And I've seen others who
seem to be in the same situation, but you
cannot convince them that they are probably
addicts. Omarosa writes this about
trying to warn Trump,
I researched it, and found
a brand-new study by a team of
neurologists from Boston University that
linked Diet Coke consumption with dementia
and increased risk of stroke. Dementia.
Not being able to remember anything,
confusion, loss of vocabulary and ability
to process information. Stroke. Those
awkward shaking hands, struggling to bring
a bottle of water to his mouth . . . I
printed out the study and put it in his
stack. He never read it.
I could go on and on, but
one particular comment really hit
home. It is something I have said on
this website a few times, and it is
something Omarosa said on the TV show "Celebrity
Big Brother" after she left the
White House:
“As bad as you think
Trump is, you should be worried about Pence.
So everyone wishing for impeachment might want
to reconsider it. We would be begging for the
days of Trump back if Pence became president.”
That same warning appears in the book "The
Shadow President: The Truth About Mike
Pence." I have it
in my Kindle, but there are a lot of other
books I think I want to read first.
December 4, 2018 -
I've been in a very interesting discussion
with a guy who joined my Facebook group "Time and Time
Dilation" a couple months ago.
His first name is Gary. He has some strange
misunderstandings about time and time
dilation, but unlike the folks on UseNet
newsgroups, he seems to understand that
there are things he doesn't
understand. So, it's a discussion, not
an argument.
And it's a good example of why I love
discussing science. When I explain
things to people, I learn things I never
thought about before. This morning
there was such a situation. Gary set
up a situation where there was a mirror
exactly one light year from Earth, and it
somehow remains at that distance regardless
of how the Earth moves. So, if he
emits a flash of light toward that mirror,
it will take the light one light year to get
to the mirror and one light year to get
back. So, he'll see the return flash
after waiting exactly 2 light years.
So far so good.
The problem comes with sending me to that
mirror at 99.995% of the speed of light,
which would mean that one year for me as I
travel would be 100 years for Gary back on
Earth. Gary posed
this question:
Now,
you board a spacecraft with
the mission of collecting our
mirror. You travel at 99.995%
c magically collecting our
mirror a little over a year
later and begin the journey
home arriving 2years and a
month later. From my
perspective. How is it that
you and light are so different
that I experience two years
waiting for the light to
return but 200 years waiting
for you to return? That makes
no sense.
His misunderstanding seemed
simple to clear up. So, I tried to do
so. I responded:
You
have a mirror that is one
light year from Earth,
which means that light
emitted on Earth will take
one year to get to the
mirror and one year to get
back. That part is okay.
However,
you then have me traveling
at 99.995% of the speed of
light to that mirror,
which means I would get
there in about 3.65 DAYS,
according to my clocks and
my time. According to YOUR
time, it would be 1 year
PLUS 3.65 days. Then it
would take me another 3.65
days of my time to get
back, but again one year
plus 3.65 days according
to YOUR time. Contrary to
your example, I would age
just 7.3 days while making
that round trip. (Every
100 days for you would be
1 day for me.) So, when I
return I will be only 7.3
days older than when I
left, and you would be 2
years and 7.3 days older.
I am
the person traveling, so I
am the one who experiences
time dilation. Time slows
down for me. My traveling
has absolutely no effect
on you.
You
wrote: "How is it that you
and light are so different
that I experience two
years waiting for the
light to return but 200
years waiting for you to
return? That makes no
sense."
It
makes "no sense" because
it wouldn't happen that
way. In reality, you would
wait 2 years for the light
to return and 2 years and
7. 3 days for me to
return. I traveled just a
tiny bit slower than light
traveled.
I had to study that response for a
long time before clocking on ENTER to post
it. I'm still not sure it is entirely
correct. If we ignore such things as
acceleration to reach an extremely high speed
and just assume that I can instantly
begin traveling at 99.995% of the speed of light
to reach the mirror and then instantly
begin my return trip, does the amount of time I
age equal the difference in travel time between
me and light? It took light 2 years (Earth
time) to make the round trip, and it took me two
years and 7.3 days (Earth time). So, I
aged only 7.3 days?
The math works. At the speed of light,
time stops. So light experienced no time
making the round trip. I went slower, so I
experienced some passing of time. And the
amount of time I experienced is what you get
when you use Einstein's equation via an on-line
calculator HERE.
99.995% of the speed of light is 299777.47
kilometers per second. When I plug
299777.47 into the calculator, it tells me that
1 second for me at that speed will be 100
seconds for a stationary observer. And
that means that 7.3 days for me at that speed
will be 2 years and 7.3 days for a stationary
observer.
Of course, no one on Earth is truly stationary,
but the point is that the amount of time I
experience is the difference between zero time
experienced by light traveling at 299,792.458
kilometers per second me traveling at 299,777.47
kilometers per second. Zero versus 7.3
days. I've always looked at it from the
view of what the stationary observers
sees: 2 years (plus 7.3 days) for the twin
who stays at home versus 7.3 days for the twin
who does the traveling. Seeing things from
a different angle, by using the speed of light
as zero, seems to make things much more
clear. It certainly says as Einstein said,
it makes the imaginary aether
"superfluous." We do not need the aether
to be zero in time dilation calculations, we
have the speed of light as zero.
In addition, it seems to validate my rejection
of spacetime. If a photon of light leaves
for that mirror in space a light year away at
the same time and from the same spot where I
leave, and if light travels at 299,792.458 kps
while I travel at 299,777.47 kps, the light will
obviously make the round trip slightly faster
than I do. So, where does "curved space"
fit in the situation? I traveled the same
path that the light traveled, just a bit
slower. So, how could anyone argue that I
traveled a shorter path through "curved"
spacetime than someone who stayed at home on
Earth? I traveled the same path that the
light photon traveled, and the person who stayed
at home didn't go anywhere near where I went.
December
3, 2018 - This morning, right on
schedule, I received another order from a
company that sells my books. Since I
cannot fill the order without joining a
program that will cost me $99 a year, I
simply filed the order away. It's the
8th order I've received since October 15th.
Meanwhile, I did a little research about the
fellow who emailed me yesterday to inform me
of his article that is available on the Vida
Institute web site. It is a
strange web site, evidently created by
someone named John David Best. It only
contains 10 articles and 8 theories, most of
them written by Mr. Best.
For some reason, I wondered if the guy who
emailed me had put his papers on other, more
popular web sites. So, first I looked
up his name on Google
Scholar. No hits. Then I
did a straight Google
search for his name. He has a
Facebook page and is on some web sites, but
the link that really caught my attention was
the fact that he is mentioned on page 1133
of "The
Worldwide List of Alternative Theories
and Critics" By Jean de
Climont. I'd never heard of that book,
and if it had over 1133 pages, I wondered if
I was mentioned in it.
I did a search for my name, and I am
in it!! I am
mentioned on page 1225 of the 2419
page book.
Evidently, I've been in the book since the
2016 edition, and "Origin: CLI" means that
the author found my name mentioned
somewhere, probably at the vixra.org
link. So, I guess I have no reason to
be proud or offended. I
just feel it is strange to find myself
mentioned in a book I never heard of.
A little additional research finds the
entire book is on-line HERE,
and I'm unable to find any place that
actually sells the book in paper or ebook
form.
December 2, 2018 - There are just
too many interesting things going on in the
world! It's difficult to focus! It's
a "problem," but it's a problem that I am glad I
have. It only bothers me when it conflicts
with something I need to do.
For the past few days I kept wanting to write a
comment for this web site, but I kept getting
distracted. And I couldn't write a comment
about what was distracting me, since I didn't
know how to make it interesting.
It wasn't particularly interesting to dig
through patents for radar guns to see if any of
the patents describe the physics
of how a radar gun works. None did.
The patents were just about new kinds of
circuitry or added gadgets, and they described
the guns as emitting "waves" which were
"reflected" off of the target. We know
that light consists of "photons" that are
absorbed by atoms in the target and then emitted
as new "photons." So, there are no
"waves" and nothing gets "reflected."
Then I started researching polarized
light. I decided to look at some
videos that show how polarized lenses work.
They confirmed something I already knew: Light
photons oscillate up and down or side to side,
and they also oscillate in every direction in
between. So, when light passes through a
polarized lens, the lens doesn't just allow
though light that oscillates up and down at
exactly 360 and 180 degrees as shown in the
illustration below.
Photons are very small compared to the size of
the slits in the filter, so the filter also
allows light photons through that oscillate at
angles to either side of 360 and 180
degrees. Such a range is shown by the red
lines in the image below, but in reality it
would also be all the angles in between
the red lines and angles shown.
So, what does this mean? It means that if
you were only able to see photons that move
straight up and down, you wouldn't be able to
watch 3D movies because the light would be too
dim. Not enough photons would be able to
get through. Plus, if you tilted your head
to one side at the slightest angle, you wouldn't
be able to see the movie at all.
While I was thinking about this, someone posted
two comments to my
Facebook page about Time and Time Dilation.
I saw the comments while doing my morning
routine today. It was the first time
anyone had posted a comment to me on my forum in
months. And the subject was how photons
work. So, I was all set to write answers,
which I did. And then, later in the
morning while I was writing this comment,
someone else posted a question about all
observers measuring light to travel at c,
regardless of their motion toward or away from
the source. He asked where that theory
came from. Good question. It
certainly didn't come from Einstein. I
have a
paper on that subject. I'll respond
as soon as I finish this comment.
Maybe something will be asked or said that will
help me focus on some specific scientific issue
instead of just blundering around looking to
better understand how photons work and what they
look like. I created that forum to discuss
science, but it's been years since I had an
actual scientific discussion there.
Hmm. When I finished writing and posting
the above comment, I then checked my newsguy.com
email in-box. I found a message waiting
there about a web site where scientific subjects
are discussed - a site I had never heard of
before. It's called Vida
Institute. The guy who wrote the
email has a paper there about "Timeflow
Theory." I'm not sure how I will
respond, but it definitely makes me wonder what
generated all this activity, first to my
Facebook page and then via an email. I can
only guess that there has been some word of
mouth going on about my scientific papers.
I'll try to find out.
|
Comments for Sunday,
November 25, 2018, thru Friday, Nov. 30,
2018:
November
27, 2018 - That image of 5 planets in
alignment from the NASA web site that
I used in yesterday's comment has been on my
mind. I kept trying to visualize
exactly what was happening. I'd never
thought about the planets being organized
like a Ferris wheel which is viewed edge-on
from the Earth, with the Earth being located
near the center of the wheel. I
finally had to sit down and create an
illustration of where the planets would be
in their orbits in order for them to be
aligned as seen in the image NASA used.
So, it's somewhat of an optical
illusion. Mars and Saturn are nowhere
near each other in reality, of course, and
neither are Mercury and Jupiter. Plus,
while they are all moving in the same
direction around the Sun, they move at
different very rates, and in the situation
shown in the NASA image, Venus is moving
downward while Mercury is moving toward the
Earth and the rest of the planets are moving
upward.
I don't know if it will interest anyone
else, but I had to create the illustration
to clarify my thoughts. Additionally,
while studying what
NASA wrote about the image, I happened
to notice what they used on their web site
to illustrate or explain the term "imaged
together." Here it is:
I guess that does represent
"imaged together," and finding that picture
somewhat justifies the time I spent on this
comment.
November 26, 2018
- It's Monday and, as expected, there was
another order in my email inbox this morning
from a company that sells my books.
And, as with all their earlier orders, I'm
just going to ignore it. The only
alternative seems to be to pay them $99 a
year to join a program so they will stop
sending me such orders. Interestingly,
they sold a paperback copy of "A
Crime Unlike Any Other"
yesterday. It's the first sale I've
had in over a month. It was a "print
on demand" book, which means they print a
copy when someone orders a copy, so there is
no reason to send me any order so they can
restock.
Meanwhile, I went through a little
demonstration of how the Right Brain works
after I browsed through the
latest paper by the Egyptian author I
mentioned in yesterday's comment. The
paper contains a version of this image on
page 17:
I'd never seen the picture before, and I
couldn't believe it was real. I collect
images related to astronomy, and I certainly
didn't have that one. Besides, when I
thought about it for a few seconds, how
could Mercury be in the image without it
being sunset or sunrise? Mercury is
too close to the sun to be seen in darkness
as shown in the image.
So, of course, I researched it. The
picture is a fake. Mercury, Venus and
Saturn did line up on December 3,
2012, but any such alignment seen from earth
would have been seen as a vertical
alignment, not nearly horizontal.
Plus, the image appeared on the Internet
months before Dec. 3,
2012. It was created by a blogger to
illustrate what he imagined the
alignment might look like. The image
was then passed around the Internet and
appeared on hundreds of blogs as
being real. A Nature magazine
blog article HERE
explains the situation in detail. It
says,
There will be an event on
3rd December, 2012 and it will probably be
quite special. However, according to
Plait, the photoshopped image here has
more than a few problems. To start with,
the angle the photo is taken from is
wrong. The picture is taken from the
southwest facing the pyramids. However, in
order to see the planet alignment, you
must be northwest of the pyramids. From
the angle the picture is taken from, the
planets would be behind the viewer.
Of course, other web sites
argued that the picture was a fake. As
I stated above, I felt it was a fake as soon
as I saw it. It just didn't fit with
the other images my right brain has
stored. And my left brain said it was
not logical, since Mercury couldn't be far
enough from the sun for the sky to be that
dark. But, by using mathematics, the
Egyptian author confirmed it fit exactly
with his beliefs.
After writing the above comment, I wondered
if there were any real
pictures of the event. So, I did some
more research and found
the image below, which is not the
event in question, but from August 16,
2016.
Evidently, according to astronomy.com,
the five planets could also have been seen
almost any night last month. And they
will be seen again in July 2020. So,
I'm not sure what the fuss was all about
back in 2012.
November 25, 2018 - The other
day, academia.edu
sent me an email advising me of a scientific
paper that they somehow assumed would be of
interest to me. The paper was titled "Solar
Planet Motion Trajectory Is A Square And Not
An Ellipse," authored by Gerges
Francis Twadrous.
The paper is written in horribly bad English by
an Egyptian who says he works as a translator.
The paper also says the author was a student at
the People's Friendship University in Moscow,
Russia, from 2010 to 2013, but the paper was
written on November 9, 2018, in Cairo,
Egypt.
I'm not sure why I bothered to look at it, but
it was probably because the title suggested that
planetary orbits are square, not
elliptical. It makes this claim:
I provide here a clear
claim …. let's summarize it in following:
1- The solar planet
motion trajectory is a square and not an
ellipse,
2- We see the planet motion
trajectory as ellipse (kepler 1st law is
correct)
3- The moon orbit geometrical
structure prevents us to see the solar
planet motion real trajectory (the square)
and covers it by an imaginary trajectory
(the ellipse)
So, he actually does
claim that planetary orbits are square!
How does he prove his claim? With complex
mathematics, of course.
Then another interesting part of the paper
caught my attention:
This paper supports
my claim against Nobel Prize Board Decision
in physics 2018
The claim is written in
my previous Paper
Kepler 3rd Law
Explanation (a Claim Against Nobel Prize
Board Decision in Physics 2018
Does it say what it seems to
say? Yes. It seems the author sent a
copy of his
first paper about square orbits (dated
October 4, 2018) to the Nobel Prize committee
and asked for the prize. In that paper, the
author argued that if Newton's laws of motion
were true, then Jupiter would have to be
located where Mercury is currently
located.
For some unknown reason, the Nobel Prize
committee turned him down. So, he began
protesting. He wrote a
second paper, dated October 6, 2018, which
stated:
Nobel Prize Board
faces the responsibility of Physics
development support.
That's why I still claim against
the decision because we need help to overcome
the wrong concepts and repair the science,
seeking to perform a progress in the solar
group geometry understating…
Evidently, he heard nothing
further from the Nobel committee, so he wrote
the third paper, which is the one academia.edu
wrote me about.
A little research finds that the author has
actually written 68
papers, beginning with a 100-page
paper written in September 2015 that has been
downloaded by 1,013 different viewers. (My most
popular paper has been downloaded by 373
different viewers.) In spite of the very
bad English used in Mr. Twadrous' paper, it has never
been revised. And it appears he never
revised any of his papers.
In a
paper dated last Wednesday, he provides
some very interesting information about
himself. It's a paper that says he's been
trying for 24 years to get a
degree in physics, and he hasn't
succeeded. So his paper requests:
I write my story with
hope someone will try to make the physics 1st
degree graduation process more easy!
I wonder who he expects will do
that. Regardless of whether someone will
do it or not, the author is still writing
papers. He wrote a 32-page paper yesterday.
It is titled "The
Moon Geometry," and it uses
mathematics to prove something or other.
It also has a section about his "methodology"
which says,
2- Methodology
I use the same method in all my researches, The
Planet Data Analysis…
Let's explain the idea here again
In Pythagoras triangle we found that a2+ b2 = c2, this rule we can conclude from the
triangle data if its dimensions are 3, 4 and
5… so the data may show the geometrical
rules….similar to that, I use the solar
planets data analysis to conclude the main
geometrical rules which explain the solar
planets origin and motion…
I'm not sure why I spent so much
time (probably about an hour) looking through
the papers written by Gerges Francis Twadrous, but he
seems to exemplify the idea that mathematics
can be used to prove anything you want to
prove. All you need to do is
ignore observations and experiments which show
you are wrong. However, Mr. Twadrous does
go one step further. He begins all of his
papers with this:
IN THE
ALMIGHTY GOD NAME
Through the Mother of God
mediation
I do this research
So, it appears he not only has an unshakable
belief in the infallibility of his mathematics,
he is on a Holy mission to explain the universe
to the rest of us. (That probably also explains
why he never saw any need to revise any of his
papers.)
And all I am doing is trying to make sense of
things so that I understand
them.
|
Comments for Sunday,
November 18, 2018, thru Saturday, Nov. 24,
2018:
November
23, 2018 - At
about the 25% point on my Kindle, I gave up
on reading "Blink:
The
Power of Thinking Without Thinking,"
by Malcolm Gladwell. It simply wasn't
worth my time. The author is preaching
misleading nonsense, as far as
I am concerned.
When I decide I that I do not want to
continue reading a book, I usually just move
on to the next book in the queue without
writing any comment on this web site.
However, "Blink" deserves a comment,
since it not only seems wrong, but it seems
it should be fairly easy to explain where
it is wrong. And writing out an
explanation might help me think through the
problems I have with the book. I call
it "thinking in writing."
"Blink" begins with the story of how,
in September of 1983, an art dealer named
Becchina tried to sell a statue to the J.
Paul Getty Museum in California. The
statue was a "kouros,"
which means it was a Greek sculpture of a
young male standing with his left leg
forward and his arms at his sides.
About 200 such statues have been found, but
most are badly damaged, since they were
mostly carved during the 6th century
BC. Becchina's statue was in excellent
condition, and he was asking just under $10
million for it. Various experts hired
by the Getty museum examined the stature for
over a year and concluded it was genuine, so
the museum agreed to buy it.
Then one of the Getty museum's own experts,
Frederico Zeri, looked at it and said it
didn't look right. There was something
about it that was wrong. But he wasn't
sure what it was. So, a new
investigation began. Gradually, Zeri
began to realize the statue looked too
"fresh." Other "kouros" from that era
were darker in color from having been buried
for centuries or millennia. The
investigation also found that the documents
detailing where the statue was found and who
had owned it before Becchina bought it
turned out to be fake. Plus the statue
seemed to have been carved by the same
person who carved a known
fake kouros.
The "moral" to this story, according to "Blink"
seems to be that "gut feeling" can sometimes
be better than detailed examination and
actual evidence. While true, the key
word is "sometimes." Plus, it took more
detailed examinations and more
actual evidence to confirm
that "gut feeling."
Essentially, Zeri's "gut feeling" was his
right brain telling him that the statue was
somehow different from other statues he has
seen like it, but his right brain didn't
know what the difference was. The
right brain basically just stores and
compares images. The left brain has to
go to work examine those images logically to
find out exactly what is
different, and whether or not
that difference is important.
"Blink" claims that "gut feeling" is
from the "unconscious mind," and logic is
from the "conscious mind." To me, that
is an over-simplification, if not totally
wrong. The right brain's observations
are "conscious" observations. They are
just tied to emotions instead
of to logic. Distrust is an
emotion. And if something
doesn't look right, that spawns
distrust. The left brain then has to
use logic to make sense of things and
determine if the distrust is deserved or
not. The "unconscious mind" is the
left brain working to figure things out
while you are doing things that do not
require much thought - like sleeping.
My unconscious mind sometimes figures things
out while I am sleeping, and when I awake I
realize what has been bothering me about
some problem or issue. Then my
conscious mind takes over the handling of
the problem.
"Blink" seems to advocate making your
"snap judgments" be more accurate, instead
of simply not trusting "snap
judgments." Here is one passage I
highlighted from the book:
The part of our brain that
leaps to conclusions like this is called
the adaptive unconscious, and the study of
this kind of decision making is one of the
most important new fields in psychology.
The adaptive unconscious is not to be
confused with the unconscious described by
Sigmund Freud, which was a dark and murky
place filled with desires and memories and
fantasies that were too disturbing for us
to think about consciously. This new
notion of the adaptive unconscious is
thought of, instead, as a kind of giant
computer that quickly and quietly
processes a lot of the data we need in
order to keep functioning as human beings.
When you walk out into the street and
suddenly realize that a truck is bearing
down on you, do you have time to think
through all your options? Of course not.
The only way that human beings could ever
have survived as a species for as long as
we have is that we’ve developed another
kind of decision-making apparatus that’s
capable of making very quick judgments
based on very little information.
As I see it, the only way to
improve the accuracy of your "adaptive
unconscious" is to gain experience.
There are no short cuts. The key is
what you do with the experience
information. Do you process it
logically, or do you just record and
remember the emotions
that came with the experience? If you
were frightened by a clown when you were a
child, you can remain afraid of clowns for
the rest of your life, or you can logically
conclude that it is just some silly man
behind silly makeup and neither the man nor
the makeup should frighten you.
"Blink" seems to advocate refining
your fear of clowns. Determine which
clowns should be feared and which should
not, and which way to run when a bad clown
shows up, so that when the bad kind show up
you can react and run away more
quickly. The author calls it "thin
slicing," making better decisions with less
information. Wha?! I would say
that is much more difficult than making
better decisions with better
information. Learn via logic
which kind of information is better and more
important, because making critical decisions
with insufficient information is always
risky and should be avoided - if
possible. If you collect the right
information you can make better decisions
more quickly. It is a matter of
quality versus quantity. You can
process less information, because it
is higher quality and better organized
information.
While it can be somewhat interesting, I
think "Blink" is mostly a waste of
precious reading time.
November 22, 2018 - I wish everyone a
very happy and peaceful Thanksgiving.
November 21, 2018
- This morning someone sent me a link to a New
York Times article from a couple days
ago titled "Does
the Universe Still Need Einstein?"
The article begins by saying Einstein "has
been dying a second death, if one believes a
new spate of articles and papers bemoaning
the state of contemporary physics."
And it provides a link to a
June 4, 2018, article from Quanta Magazine
titled "There
Are No Laws of Physics.
There’s Only the Landscape." The
article begins with this:
Scientists seek a single
description of reality. But modern
physics allows for many different
descriptions, many equivalent to one
another, connected through a vast
landscape of mathematical possibility.
It then says,
Albert Einstein famously
believed that, given some general
principles, there is essentially a unique
way to construct a consistent, functioning
universe. In Einstein’s view, if we
probed the essence of physics deeply
enough, there would be one and only one
way in which all the components —
matter, radiation, forces, space and
time — would fit together to make
reality work, just as the gears,
springs, dials and wheels of a mechanical
clock uniquely combine to keep time.
The current Standard Model of particle
physics is indeed a tightly constructed
mechanism with only a handful of
ingredients. Yet instead of being unique, the universe seems
to be one of an infinitude of possible
worlds. We have no clue
why this particular combination of
particles and forces underlies nature’s
structure.
The author of the article,
Robbert Dijkgraaf, views things from the
point of view used by mathematicians:
The game changer that led
to this switch of perspective has been
string theory. At this moment it is the
only viable candidate for a theory of
nature able to describe all particles and
forces, including gravity, while obeying
the strict logical rules of quantum
mechanics and relativity. The good news is
that string theory has no free parameters.
It has no dials that can be turned. It
doesn’t make sense to ask which string
theory describes our universe, because
there is only one. The absence of any
additional features leads to a radical
consequence. All numbers in nature should
be determined by physics itself. They are
no “constants of nature,” only variables
that are fixed by equations (perhaps
intractably complicated ones).
And it goes on and on.
You cannot prove String Theory to be wrong,
because you cannot prove the negative, so
String Theory must be right. Yada yada yada,
concluding with this:
Thinking of physics in
terms of elementary building blocks
appears to be wrong, or at least of
limited reach. Perhaps there is a radical
new framework uniting the fundamental laws
of nature that disregards all the familiar
concepts. The mathematical intricacies and
consistencies of string theory are a
strong motivation for this dramatic point
of view.
But there are also 62
comments following the article. The
second one in the list says what I would
have said,
Please name one thing that
string theory has predicted that has been
verified. "All the theoretical work that's
been done since the 1970s has not produced
a single successful prediction." See "Why
Some Scientists Say Physics has Gone Off
The Rails" for a counterview.
So, the New York Times
article just uses a provocative title and
opening to show that there is a lot of
disagreement between scientists
(particularly physicists). The article
concludes with variations on this idea:
If scientists want any
gift for the holidays, it’s some new
physics that would break the stalemate of
these “standard models” and provide new
clues to our existence.
It seems to me that
physicists aren't looking for clues.
They are looking for a new theory.
If they were looking for clues, they would
be looking for ways to explain how
a photon works instead of just saying that
light sometimes acts like a
particle and sometimes acts
like a wave. And they would be looking for
ways to explain how and why time ticks at a
different rate atop a mountain than at the
bottom of the mountain. And how and
why time ticks slower for a moving
object. Instead, they just argue, "It
doesn't!" "It does!" "It doesn't!" "It
does!" It
doesn't!" "It does!" "It doesn't!" "It
does!" "It doesn't!"
"It does!" "It doesn't!"
If
experimental facts and evidence say that
time ticks slower at the bottom of a
mountain than at the top, that should end
the matter. And if some mathematician
argues without proof that it
isn't so, then that mathematician should not
be considered to be a scientist, he should
be viewed only as "a mathematician with
beliefs." He can become a scientist
again when he supplies experimental
evidence undeniably confirming
his beliefs.
November 20, 2018
- This morning I received an email notifying
me that a book I had put on reserve at my
local library was available for downloading
into my Kindle. The book is "Blink:
The Power of Thinking Without Thinking,"
by Malcolm Gladwell. Without thinking,
I downloaded it. I think (via
thinking) that it has been on my reserve
list since June.
Looking through reviews
of the book (which I apparently didn't
think to do before reserving it), I found a
lot of somewhat negative
reviews, even though it was a "#1
bestseller." It appears to take the
opposite point of view from what I've been
arguing. I've been arguing for logical
thinking, and the book "Blink"
appears to argue for "trusting snap
judgements." It is very clear that
Donald Trump does a lot of "snap
judgements," and his thinking is largely crazy.
(I cannot believe Trump would be so moronic
as to
criticize the admiral in charge of killing
Osama bin Laden for not doing
it sooner!)
I read Malcolm Gladwell's earlier
bestselling book "The
Tipping Point" back in December
of 2015, and looking at what I wrote
about it back then, it seems the book was
about people like Trump who have the ability
to get a lot of people to follow them.
Only the book didn't mention that morons and
fascists can also gather a lot of
followers. The book seems to have assumed
that only "good" thinkers would gather a lot
of followers.
Looking at the passages I underlined in "The
Tipping Point," I have less than two
pages worth. Here is one passage I
underlined:
Sesame Street was built
about a single, breakthrough insight: that
if you can hold the attention of children,
you can educate them. This may seem
obvious, but it isn’t. Many critics of
television, to this day, argue that what’s
dangerous about TV is that it is
addictive, that children and even adults
watch it like zombies.
Another:
Kids don’t watch when
they are stimulated and look away when
they are bored. They watch when they
understand and look away when they are
confused.
And it is a lot
easier to understand emotions than logic.
So, this reasoning can also be applied to
adults: If Trump talks about disliking
people that his audience dislikes, the
audience understands and pays
attention. If someone tries to explain
to that same audience that their "dislikes"
are illogical or hurtful, the audience gets
confused and turns off the TV.
I'm not sure if it will be worth my time to
read "Blink," but if I think about it
logically, I might learn something from it,
and learning is usually worth the time
expended.
November 19, 2018
- There was another email in my inbox this
morning telling me:
You have a NEW order
awaiting your confirmation.
It was from one of the
companies that sells my books. The
previous such email was received on Nov. 12,
one week ago. Except for the order
number, email #31 is identical to email #30,
and says,
We require you to confirm
your orders in 24 hours. Please confirm
the number of copies you will be able to
ship and the estimated delivery date. If
you cannot ship within the next 2-3 weeks,
confirm the order with a "0" quantity, and
wait for a new order. If your order is not
confirmed in a timely fashion, it will be
auto-cancelled.
And,
of course, I cannot simply respond via
an email. I need to go to their
web site, sign into my account, and
enter information in the appropriate
box in order to respond. But, I
cannot establish an account with them
without first providing two
phone numbers, one of which must be a
mobile phone with the capability to
run apps and to scan barcodes on
products. And doing that will
allow them to bill me $99 per year for
the privilege of having an account
with them.
So, I'm just going to continue to
ignore their emails. It's not a
"scam." It's a "hustle" to get
me to set up an account. And the
reason they do not respond to emails
is because they are one of the
largest companies in the world,
which means they would have to hire
hundreds (maybe thousands) of people
to answer all the emails they'd
get. So, the only way to contact
them is to follow their established automated
procedures - which begin by setting up
an account. If you don't, you'll
just end up getting an email from them
every week reminding you that they
have an order for some of your books.
It really is like some science fiction
story about dealing with mindless
robots.
By the way, here is what a real email
scam looks like:
November
18, 2018 - The question "What is
a photon?" still bothers me, and I've been
thinking about how to answer that
question. I've also been reading papers on
the subject. So, here it is Sunday
morning, and I haven't prepared a comment, which
means that I'm going to write this one from
scratch. It might as well be on the
subject of: What is a Photon?
One thing I noticed is that the scientific
papers do not use logic to find
an answer. They tend to argue that there
is no way to answer the question. One
paper says,
Some say that a photon
is a bundle of energy. This statement is not
meaningful enough to be wrong. In physics,
energy is one property of a system among many
others. Photons have energy as they have spin
and momentum and cannot be energy any more
than they can be spin or momentum. In the late
1800’s some thinkers declared that all matter
is made of one philosophical stuff that they
identified with energy, without much empirical
basis. The theory is dead but its words linger
on.
That's an argument over
words. It's the kind of
argument I would get into when discussing things
on UseNet physics forums. Instead of
discussing science, they'd argue over word
definitions.
I don't have any problem with identifying a
photon as "a bundle of energy." We know
that a photon consists of energy, and we know
that it is a "bundle" that moves from its source
(emitter) to some atom somewhere where it is
either absorbed temporarily or
permanently. We also know a photon is
definitely NOT a continuous wave, nor is it a
wave in some mythical aether. It seems the
only real question is: What is the shape
of that "bundle"? Or to phrase it another
way: What does a photon look like? I
find it difficult to discuss an object if I
cannot visualize it. And, if it is a
"bundle" it is also an "object," even if it has
no mass.
Here's the image I typically use when that
question is asked:
According to that image, when viewed head-on the
photon is +
shaped. It has an electric field pulsating
vertically and a magnetic field pulsating
horizontally. Yet light photons can be polarized.
When light is emitted from a lamp, the electric
field in some photons oscillates up and down,
some electric fields oscillate from side to
side, and others oscillate at virtually every
angle in between. But you can put a
polarizing filter in the path of the light that
will allow only photons with electric fields
that are oscillating up and down to get through.
That is the principle behind 3-D movies.
You use polarized lenses to view two images at
the same time, one image where the photons
oscillate up and down is viewed by the right
eye, another image where the photons oscillate
from side to side is viewed by the left
eye. (This is different from the 3-D
images that use red and blue filters.)
Evidently, the filter only affects the electric
field. The magnetic field is not
affected by the polarizing filter. The
magnetic field is still there, it still
oscillates at right angles to the electric
field, but the filter does not block it or alter
it.
The point is: This means that a photon is not
just a point or particle that moves up
and down in a wave pattern (which would give it
height), a photon has length.
If any part of the photon - the front, the back
or some part of the middle - hits the bars of
the filter, the photon is stopped. It is
absorbed by an atom in the filter and probably
emitted in some random direction away from the
filter and back toward the source. It's
like a coin fitting into a slot. It won't
go through the slot unless it is aligned with
the slot.
That still doesn't allow me to visualize a
photon. In fact, it makes me want to
visualize a photon as being ring-shaped (or
coin-shaped or orbit-shaped), a spinning ring
with its "wavelength" being one complete
rotation. That would explain how a photon
would be absorbed by a single atom in the filter
if the photon hits at the wrong angle. The
problem I have is visualizing a photon that is
shaped like a spear that oscillates up and down
while trying to pass through a slit that runs
sideways. I keep seeing the spear get
partway through and then having the middle of
the spear hit the side of the slit, which causes
whole spear to be absorbed by an atom in the
side of the slit. It is certainly
possible, but it's difficult to visualize.
And that brings me back to microwave
ovens. If microwave photons were coin
shaped, they would be about 1.3 inches in
diameter (assuming the wavelength is the
circumference of the "coin") and certainly
wouldn't fit through the tiny round holes in the
screen that covers the door of the
microwave. Instead,
the photons bounce around, going from an atom in
one wall to another atom in another wall inside
the microwave until they hit a food item
containing the oxygen and hydrogen atoms which
form water molecules. Those atoms absorb
the microwave photons and turn the photons into
heat energy. Meanwhile, "coins" that are 400 to
650 nanometers in circumference (the
wavelength of visible light) easily pass
through the screen holes that are about
2,540,000 nanometers in diameter (about 1/10th of an
inch) and allow you to see what is
happening to your pop tart inside the
microwave.
And it's now nearly lunch time.
That means I have to end this comment
here. I don't know if what I wrote makes
any sense to anyone else, but it gives me
something to think more about.
|
Comments for Sunday,
November 11, 2018, thru Saturday, Nov. 17,
2018:
November
16, 2018 - While
I'm still not working on anything, at least
I'm not laying around listening to audio
books, and I am thinking
about scientific subjects. One subject
that keeps bothering me is that if you have
three different types of atomic clocks
working with three different types of atoms
- cesium, rubidium and strontium - they will
tick at three different rates:
6,834,682,611 ticks per second for
rubidium
9,192,631,770 ticks per second for
cesium
430,000,000,000,000
ticks per second for
strontium
However, the time shown by
the clocks will not drift. They will
all tick off each second in unison.
That says that time almost certainly relates
to particle spin. Otherwise, one clock
would gradually start to accumulate more
seconds than the other clock. But they
don't. They all tick at a steady
but different rate.
Moreover, if you use the clocks to measure
altitude or velocity, they will measure the
same differences if they are in the same
locations. If the rubidium clock ticks 10
more ticks per second when it is raised to
the top of a mountain, the strontium clock
won't tick 10 more ticks per second, it will
tick hundreds of thousands
more ticks per second. It will tick
faster by the same percentage
as the rubidium clock. So every
different type of atom in my body is
spinning at a different rate. And all
the carbon atoms in my head are spinning
faster than all the carbon atoms in my feet
due to gravitational time dilation, but each
type of atom (i.e., carbon, oxygen,
hydrogen, calcium, phosphorous, etc.) is
measuring the same rate of time as the atom
next to it, regardless of what kind of atom
it is.
I keep feeling there is something going on
that explains time and time dilation in a
way that would be clear and undeniable - if
I just understood it well enough.
I also spent some time today going through
web sites which identify "the biggest
mysteries in science." There are lots
of them - examples: HERE,
HERE,
HERE,
HERE,
HERE,
HERE
- but no two of them list exactly the same
mysteries, and none asks "What is Time?"
although several ask why time flows in only
one direction. I wouldn't call that a
"mystery," I'd see the "mystery" as being
why anyone would wonder why
time flows only in one direction. It's
got to be another one of those questions
that make sense only to a mathematician who
believes that motion is reciprocal.
November 15, 2018
- Yesterday, I finished listening to another
audio book on my MP3 player: "Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to
the Craziest Campaign in American
History," by Katy Tur.
Katy Tur is a reporter for NBC and MSNBC and
was assigned to follow Trump around when he
first announced that he was going to run for
President. Initially, she was the only
reporter assigned to him full time.
But that gradually changed as it became more
and more clear that Trump was actually
serious. Then Katy Tur and reporters from
other news organizations flew (via
commercial airlines) to each place where
Trump was going to give a speech and they
were all in the "press box" watching him and
the crowds he drew. Then the media
companies hired a private plane to haul the
reporters around when that became cheaper
than buying individual tickets. Of
course, the reporters would also
periodically interview Trump, and they
probably got to know him better than anyone
outside of his personal team. Katy Tur
also seemed to get into personal feuds with
Trump whenever he didn't like some question
she asked. Trump would point to her
during his speeches and call out her
name. That also resulted in her
fearing for her life when Trump's followers
started yelling at her and even spitting on
her.
I started listening to the audio book out of
curiosity, and then ended up laying on my
couch and listening to it for hours (7 hours
42 minutes total spread out over two
days). It was a very enjoyable and
interesting book, and in audio form it is
like having an interesting reporter tell you
an amazing adventure story. When I was
about 2 hours into the book, she said
something that I wanted to transcribe.
But before doing that, I checked my local
library to see if they had a Kindle copy
available. They did! So, I
downloaded it into my Kindle, zipped through
it through to the place I wanted to
transcribe and just underlined it.
That put it into the "My Clippings" file on
the Kindle. I ended up with about 7
pages of "clippings." Here's one
sample:
I’ve learned that Trump
has his own version of reality, which is a
polite way of saying he can’t always be
trusted. He also brings his own sense of
political decorum. I’ve heard him insult a
war hero, brag about grabbing women by the
pussy, denigrate the judicial system,
demonize immigrants, fight with the pope,
doubt the democratic process, advocate
torture and war crimes, tout the size of
his junk in a presidential debate, trash
the media, and indirectly endanger my
life.
And another:
Some politicians have a
gift for language. Trump is not one of
those politicians. His sentences call to
mind an aerial shot of a burning, derailed
freight train. The syntax is mangled. The
grammar is gone. “Donald Trump isn’t a
simpleton, he just talks like one,” reads
a
Politico article from last August.
“If you were to market Donald Trump’s
vocabulary as a toy, it would resemble a
small box of Lincoln Logs.” Every fourth
word seems to be very, great, beautiful,
or tremendous. He loves the word winning.
In fact we’re going to have so much of it,
Trump says we’ll get sick of it. His
insults are even simpler. Our leaders are
“dumb,” “stupid,” or “weak.” Our deals are
“terrible.” His critics are “losers” and
“haters.” The press is “scum.” Women he
doesn’t find attractive are “disgusting.”
There's not much in those
two samples that is news. And the same
with the other "clippings." The ones
that are "news" are too long to quote,
require too much explanation, or may be of
interest to no one but me. An example
is the occasion when Trump provided food for
the reporters which included Trump wine,
Trump steaks, Trump bottled water, plus
copies of Trump magazine to read. But
none of it was actually Trump brand
products. They were all from companies
that produce such products with your name on
it for a fee.
I don't plan to sit around listening to any
more audio books about Trump on my MP3
player, but I might change my mind. The
book in which 27 psychiatrists and mental
health experts assess Trump looks
interesting. I have it in audio
book form, but it is not available at my
library in Kindle format. That seems
like a book in which I'd want to do a lot
of highlighting.
I also feel that I know all that I want to
know about Trump and the
people who support him. Watching him
on the news as he constantly lies and makes
enemies of long time friends of America is
distressing enough. I'm not going to
write a book about him or his
followers. So, there's not much point
in researching him. Yet, he is
fascinating. That means I might change
my mind tomorrow and start reading or
listening to yet another book about him.
November 13, 2018
- Yesterday, I finished reading an extremely
interesting book titled "How
The Right Lost Its Mind," by
Charles J. Sykes:
I wasn't expecting to finish it until later
this week, but it ended when my Kindle
showed that I was 66% done. The rest
of the book is references and indexes.
When I accessed the "My Clippings" files in
the Kindle and copied all the passages I had
underlined into a WORD file, the file was 31
pages long.
The author of the book, Charles Sykes, is a
conservative and once had a right wing radio
talk show in Milwaukee. But he is also
very anti-Trump. So, his
book has a lot of details about why he
disagrees with all the "conservatives" who
support Trump. It's fascinating stuff,
since I had no idea there were so many
conservative radio talk shows, conservative
web sites, conservative pod-casts, and other
conservative media outlets out there.
I'd heard of Rush
Limbaugh and Alex
Jones, of course, but it's been many
years since I looked at anything on the
Drudge Report. Yet, the book
says,
If you want to understand
the nature of the Right’s alternative
reality, or its vulnerability to “fake
news,” you need to start with Jones and
Drudge. The
Drudge Report consistently ranks as
one of the top five media publishers
in the country, often drawing more
than a billion page views a
month. Media critic
John Ziegler describes Matt Drudge as
effectively the “assignment editor” for
much of talk radio, many right-leaning
websites, and a significant portion of the
Fox News channel. “If Drudge wants a
certain narrative to gain traction in
conservative circles, he has more power to
make that happen than anyone else,” he
writes. The gravitational pull of the
Drudge Report is so powerful, Ziegler
notes, “that when it becomes clear what
narrative Matt is favoring, a literal
‘market’ is created for stories which fit
that storyline so that they might be
linked on the Drudge Report.” Conservative
media types were also reluctant to cross
Drudge. “If … you can’t get your content
linked on Drudge,” explains Ziegler, “or
appear on Fox News, your career is, at
best, stunted and, at worst, over.”
The book also describes
Trumps many battles with
conservatives:
Charles Krauthammer was a
dummy/loser/clown; George Will was
“dopey”; Bill Kristol had “lost all
respect”; Rich Lowry was the “worst”; and
so on. Trump’s targets were unusual
because they were not politicians or
officeholders. But all of them were heirs
to the conservative intellectual tradition
and a culture that had once placed a value
on thoughtfulness, experience,
intelligence, and a coherent philosophy of
man and his relationship to the state.
What we were seeing was, in effect, a
repudiation of the conservative mind.
But gradually, the
extremists took over the conservative
agenda. It became "us against them"
and a form of tribalism. Conservatives
weren't "pro-Trump," they were
anti-anti-Trump. They were against
those who were against Trump. Another
quote from the book:
The New York Times’s James
Poniewozik notes that politics today” is
attitudinal, not ideological. The reason
to be for someone is who is against them.
What matters more than policy is your
side’s winning, and what matters more than
your side’s winning is the other side’s
losing.”
Another:
As the Right doubles down
on anti-anti-Trumpism it will find itself
goaded into defending and rationalizing
ever more outrageous conduct, just as long
as it annoys the Left.
There is probably no better
example of that than the Christian
Right supporting Trump, a known
adulterer and moral scumbag. Pat
Robertson is a prime example.
However, the book also says:
There were powerful voices
from within the church opposing Trump,
including the magazine Christianity
Today, which published a scathing
editorial comparing support for Trump to
“idolatry.” He has given no evidence of
humility or dependence on others, let
alone on God his Maker and Judge. He wantonly
celebrates strongmen and takes every
opportunity to humiliate and demean
the vulnerable. He shows no curiosity
or capacity to learn. He is, in short,
the very embodiment of what the Bible
calls a fool.
I could go on and on.
Tribalism is the one aspect of pro-Trump voters
that I'm most familiar with. I have
relatives who voted for Trump because their
neighbors voted for Trump. And when their
neighbors changed their minds and no longer
supported Trump, my relatives went along with
that, too. It seemed to have nothing to do
with policies and right or wrong, it was just
about supporting your tribe. Us against
them. They seemed to have no idea why it
was "us against them," they just wanted to
remain part of "us."
November 12, 2018
- This morning, someone sent me an email
mentioning an essay article by Isaac Asimov
titled "A
Cult of Ignorance." A
little research finds that it is from the January
21, 1980 issue of Newsweek.
Here's what seems to be the most frequently
quoted passage from the essay:
There is a cult of
ignorance in the United States, and
there always has been. The strain of
anti-intellectualism has been a constant
thread winding its way throughout
political and cultural life, nurtured by
the false notion that democracy means that
"my ignorance is
just as good as your knowledge."
That passage I highlighted
in red
should have been Trump's motto. It
seems to be what he constantly argues.
Asimov's essay is primarily a lament over
the lack of reading skills exhibited by the
American public (and probably by the general
public everywhere). It caused me to
turn around in my chair once again to look
at the bookshelves behind me. I
recalled and found a book from 1980 titled "The
Right Brain" by Thomas R.
Blakeslee. I have a hardcover copy
that contains underlined and circled
passages on about half the pages.
Here's a key passage from page 6 about some
"split-brain experiments" done in the 1960s:
They found that each
half of the brain has its own separate
train of conscious thought and its own
memories. Even more
important, they found that the two
sides of the brain think in
fundamentally different
ways: While
the left brain tends to think in
words, the right brain thinks directly
in sensory images.
The two halves of the
brain thus have a kind of partnership in
which the left
brain handles language and logical
thinking, while the right
brain does things that are difficult to
put into words. By thinking images
instead of words, the right brain can
recognize a face in a crowd or put
together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle,
which would totally baffle the left brain.
Ah! That probably fits
very well with the concept of "Thinking,
Fast and Slow," where "thinking fast"
means you see something that signifies
danger and you automatically run away from
it, or you see something that signifies
pleasure, and your mouth starts to
water. "Thinking slow" means you see
or hear something that seems strange or
illogical, and you try to make sense of it.
One of the things that seems totally
illogical is that anyone would believe
anything Donald Trump says. He's a
conspiracy theorist who does not like to
read and who evidently cannot think
logically. He clearly believes that
any facts you can cite to support a finding
he disagrees with can be directly challenged
by "alternative facts" that he can simply
dream up. His ignorance is just as
good as any knowledge you may have obtained
by reading and doing research.
I could probably go on and on, but I want to
get back to reading "How
The Right Lost Its Mind."
Meanwhile, this morning I received another
email (#30) from one of the companies that
sells my books. The subject of the
email is one I've seen a half dozen times
before:
You have a NEW order
awaiting your confirmation
And, of course, I need to
sign into my account in order to respond to
their email. But, I cannot establish
an account with them without first providing
two phone numbers, one of
which must be a mobile phone with the
capability to run apps and to scan barcodes
on products. And doing that will allow
them to bill me $99 per year for the
privilege of having an account with
them. So, I'm just going to continue
to ignore their emails.
November 11, 2018
- This is another one of those Sunday
mornings when I'm supposed to write a
comment for this web site, but I have
absolutely nothing prepared. I tried
to start working on today's comment
yesterday afternoon, but I just stared at
the computer screen and wrote nothing. I
wanted to write something about science, but
I'm stuck on the problem that no one seems
to know what a photon looks like or how it
works. To me that seems like an
interesting problem that definitely needs
to be solved, but to everyone
else it seems to be an accepted
situation.
I looked up "What
is a Photon?" via Google Scholar and
found lots of articles addressing that
question, but most seemed to argue aspects
of the question that are of no interest to
me. However, I also found a half dozen
articles all
in one place that seem to address the
question logically. One article begins
with this:
Light is an obvious
feature of everyday life, and yet light’s
true nature has eluded us for centuries.
Near the end of his life Albert Einstein
wrote, “All the fifty years of conscious
brooding have brought me no closer to the
answer to the question: What are light
quanta? Of course today every rascal
thinks he knows the answer, but he is
deluding himself.” We are today in the
same state of “learned ignorance” with
respect to light as was Einstein.
And it ends with this:
To my mind, Einstein was
right to caution us concerning light. Our
understanding of it has increased
enormously in the 100 years since Planck,
but I suspect light will continue to
confound us, while simultaneously luring
us to inquire ceaselessly into its
nature.
Another article seems to
indicate that the problem was solved by
accepting that photons seemingly have
conflicting properties:
The conflicting views of
the particle or wave essence of light were
reconciled by the establishment of the
quantum theory, with its introduction of
the idea that all excitations
simultaneously have both particle-like and
wave-like properties.
Another article begins with
this:
From the point of view of
experience, “What is a photon?” is not the
best first question. We never experience a
photon as it “is.” For example, we never
see a photon in the sense that we see an
apple, by scattering diffuse light off it
and forming an image of it on our retina.
What we experience is what photons do. A
better first question is “What do
photons do?” After we answer this
we can define what photons are, if we
still wish to, by what they do.
But the article never gets
around to actually defining what photons
are. That is probably because what
photons do seems inconsistent.
I'm still stuck on conceptualizing how a
microwave oven works. How can a
microwave photon be absorbed and then
re-emitted by a single atom in the metal
wall of the oven and yet be stopped by a screen
that covers the window in the door of the
oven. The openings in the screen are
far larger than individual atoms. I do
not think it is "illogical," I think there
is something I do not yet understand that
would make it "logical."
Then I gave up and went into the living room
to read a book on my Kindle. I had
temporarily given up on reading "Age
of Anger" when I was only 10%
completed, since it seemed to ramble and
never get to the point. I switched
over to reading "How
The Right Lost Its Mind."
I'm about 33% done with that book, slowed a
bit by all the underlining I've been
doing. It's a terrific book, even
though I think the author may have been
viewing things from not quite the correct
angle. But he does make a good point
when he shows that American politics has
been going crazy for a long time.
And it makes the point that social media is
making things worse. No matter how
idiotic your beliefs may be, there is
someone out there who will agree with you
and cite made-up "facts" to confirm
it. But, I'll go more into what is
said in "How the Right Lost Its Mind"
when I finish reading it.
All I need to do to confirm that things are
becoming more and more complicated and
confused is turn around in my chair and look
at the bookshelves behind me. One of
the books on the shelves is "The
Closing of the American Mind,"
by Allan Bloom, published in 1987. My
copy of the book has underlined and circled
passages on about half the pages, often many
of them on a single page.
Strangely, the book seems to argue that "the
closing of the American mind" means that
people (particularly college students)
believe that "truth is relative."
It says on page 25,
The relativity of truth is
not a theoretical insight but a moral
postulate, the condition of a free
society, or so they see it.
And on page 26 it says,
The study of history and
of culture teaches that all the world was
mad in the past; men always thought they
were right, and that led to wars,
persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism,
and chauvinism. The
point is not to correct the mistakes
and really be right; rather it is not
to think you are right at all.
So, many students have
supposedly closed their minds to the idea
that anyone is more correct than anyone
else. That may be well and good when
talking about tastes in food and music, but
science isn't about opinions,
it is about facts. It isn't just a
matter of opinion that the earth is a
spinning globe moving through space in an
orbit around the sun. Solid scientific
facts can demonstrate it. The Flat Earthers
do not argue that it is just a matter of
opinion, they argue that the earth is flat
and that their facts confirm
that. But, their "facts" are not
facts. Simple
experiments will show that their
"facts" are really just mistaken beliefs.
What the book "How the Right Lost Its Mind"
explains in detail is how in today's
Internet-powered world you can find support
for virtually any screwball belief you can
dream up, particularly if the belief is a
challenge to authority. Trump's
argument that Barack Obama was a Muslim burn
in Kenya is still accepted by many
people. Obama's birth certificate is
simply dismissed as a forgery. If you
argue with the True Believers who hold that
theory, they will just smile at you and
chuckle over how dumb you are to believe a
forged document. They have
"alternative facts" (i.e., unsubstantiated
claims) to counter any facts you may have.
It all brings me back to the problem of
people thinking emotionally instead of
logically. Many people believe the
"facts" they like and that support what they
believe, making them feel superior to the
non-believers. Instead of looking for
correct answers, they are
mindlessly competitive.
I am sometimes just amazed that we aren't
killing each other more often than we
are. I'm seeing articles suggesting
that we
might be headed for another Civil War,
but other articles show that today
is very different from the 1850s.
It all reminds me of the curse the Chinese supposedly
sometimes use: "May you live in interesting
times."
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