Category: Physics (Page 2 of 2)

WSJ: Busting Bad Scientists

September 25, 2023 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

An award-winning Harvard Business School professor and researcher spent years exploring the reasons people lie and cheat. A trio of behavioral scientists examining a handful of her academic papers concluded her own findings were drawn from falsified data.

With so much of our culture already infected, science was bound to eventually be corrupted by diversity, inclusion and equity. Even before DIE ideology, incentives to get grant funding, published or notoriety caused some scientists to take shortcuts or use shoddy techniques.

Another problem is that scientists don’t or can’t always take the time to be scientifically rigorous. Noted physicist, Richard Feynman discussed this in his fascinating Cal Tech Commencement Address.

Simmons and his two colleagues are among a growing number of scientists in various fields around the world who moonlight as data detectives, sifting through studies published in scholarly journals for evidence of fraud.

It’s not surprising that scientific integrity is being defended by enthusiastic volunteers, rather than through governmental or institutional investigations.

Boys need heroes.

June 1, 2023 / Richard Nestoff

Fox News: We like Heroes

Nobody likes being told what to do or how to live. Tell a teenager how something should be done, and the mental blast shields come up. That’s one reason why vegans, environmentalists and the WOKE can be so tedious. Everyone used to know that people learn from stories. That’s why the Bible has so many of them. A story is engaging, and allows the message to slip in.

Boys need stories about heroes to learn how to be men. For those with limited comprehension, I’m not saying girls don’t, it’s just different. Boys need men to live up to. Blessed is the man who was intimidated by his dad in his teen years, but eventually hopes he can be half the man his father was.

The genre of story doesn’t matter much. Westerns, sports underdog or adventurer stories can all show a man up against the wall. He chooses to do what’s right, regardless of the cost, and there is a cost. It’s grueling, painful or dangerous. He gets his ass beat, but it works out in the end.

Rocky and the first Indiana Jones are two great examples.

Teaching Physics, telling stories and showing examples of men was part of my hidden agenda.

The upside of climate change. Everyone claps when the batter hits a home run.

April 9, 2023 / Richard Nestoff

Climate Change increasing the number of home runs in MLB.

This topic has been making the news, so it’s worth a look.

“As soon as it gets warm, the ball carries a lot better,” Washington Nationals manager Dave Martinez told The Post. “I usually tell everybody, right about the middle of May, the balls will start flying out of the ballpark.”

That’s from a team manager, so it has to be true. More home runs couldn’t possibly come from the players getting into the groove as they get a month into the season.

Good on ya’, Fosbury.

March 14, 2023 / Richard Nestoff

Dick Fosbury, famous for the Fosbury Flop, passed away at 76 years old. Imagine being so innovative that a technique is named after you, but everybody forgets the name because it’s just what everybody does now.

What is Dark Energy?

March 8, 2023 / Richard Nestoff

What is Dark Energy? It’s a word we use to mean that there is more to learn about the nature of the universe.

The Big Bang Theory holds that the universe started from an infinitesimal point with nearly infinite energy that started to expand 14 billion years ago. There is evidence for this. For example, deep space is at about 3 degrees Kelvin. As the universe gets bigger, the energy is distributed over a larger volume, so is cooler.

The energy wants to expand, and gravity wants to pull it all back together. A big question in Physics was how the universe would end. Energy could win, gravity could win or it could be a draw.

Ending in the Big Freeze, meant that gravity was too weak to pull everything back together. The universe would continue to expand until the energy density is so low, that no life could exist and nothing else could happen.

The Big Crunch meant that the relentless pull of gravity would slow the expansion until it reverses, causing the universe to collapse. Then there could be another Big Bang, and it all starts over.

A third option was that the expansion would slow, but gravity wouldn’t be strong enough at such large distances to cause a collapse. The universe would remain in a steady-state. That seemed unlikely.

Better tools, like the Webb Telescope, yielded more and better information. We found that the universe is actually expanding faster. That wasn’t one of the conceivable options. There are four fundamental forces in the universe, and none of them can account for a universe that is getting bigger, faster. Physicists have no explanation, so new theories were needed. Dark Energy is like a word variable that stands for this thing we can’t explain.

There could be a fifth fundamental force, the four fundamental forces may be more complex than expected or numbers we call “constants”, may not be constant over long distances or time scales. Not comfortable for physicists, but it does gives them a problem to resolve.

Climate change isn’t a problem to solve, but an opportunity to exploit.

March 5, 2023 / Richard Nestoff

If you aren’t skeptical of the authorities, experts and the commercial media after the disastrous handing of Covid-19, then I can’t help you.

There are dozens of valid reasons to be skeptical of the narrative on climate change. If you are actually interested in learning, then Watts Up With That is a good place to get educated. If you aren’t interested in getting educated, then you should get off your high horse and shut up about it.

Climate change is real and ongoing. I am confident of that because my area was once covered by a thousand feet of ice. Climate change would exist whether or not people existed. What should we do if the Earth is getting too hot?

If the climate is heating up too much, geoengineering is the only solution. Rolling back civilization to pre-industrial levels and allowing billions of people to die will not necessarily reduce global warming. There are many approaches to cooling the planet, but there will be unintended consequences and many approaches aren’t easily reversible. The time scales will be long, and natural processes can cause ice ages. We must be very careful.

The best approach is a sun shade at the L1 Lagrange Point between the Earth and the Sun.

Earth-Sun Lagrange Points

In a two-body system, a Lagrange Point is a place where the forces all cancel out. A satellite placed on a Lagrange point will just sit there, with minor adjustments necessary to hold station.

The L1 Lagrange Point is a million mile above the Earth. That’s four times the distance to the Moon, but not particularly far. At it’s closest, Mars is 50 million miles from Earth, and we’ve sent plenty of equipment there. A satellite could be placed at L1, with huge shades that unfurl. The forces all cancel, so shades could be very lightweight.

We would want to make an infinitesimal reduction in the energy reaching the Earth, and watch for the temperature trends over several years. A large volcanic eruption or meteor strike to the Earth causes atmospheric changes that result in global cooling. Both of those have happened in the past and will happen again. If necessary, the solar shades could be removed.

It is no secret that the WEF and global elites want us to eat bugs, own nothing and shut up. I suspect that we don’t talk about solutions like this because their goal is power.