The State of Modern Science

Top French Scientist Admits Photo He Tweeted of ‘Space Telescope Image’ of Nearest Star to the Sun Was Just a Slice of Chorizo

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/08/top-french-scientist-admits-photo-tweeted-space-telescope-image-nearest-star-sun-just-slice-chorizo/

Top French scientist Etienne Klein tweeted a photo of a slice of chorizo and told his nearly 100,000 Twitter followers that it was a ‘space telescope image’ of the nearest star to the sun.

Tens of thousands of people believed him without questioning anything.

The tweet has received tens of thousands of ‘likes’ and ‘retweets.’

“Picture of Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, located 4.2 light years away from us. It was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. This level of detail… A new world is unveiled everyday,” Klein said on Sunday.

“In view of some comments, I feel compelled to clarify that this tweet showing an alleged snapshot of Proxima Centauri was a form of amusement. Let us learn to be wary of arguments from authority as much as of the spontaneous eloquence of certain images….” he said.

This is an example how easily people are willing to believe, whatever is sold to them as "science". The story reminds a lot of the famous photos of the black holes that have recently been published, pictures that have been rendered by a computer and where it remains unclear, what they actually show. Still everybody is convinced that they show pictures of black holes, because some scientist said so.

We should stop believing alleged "observations" that cannot be reproduced. Reports of singular observations are not science. Science is either repeated observations or experiments, whose controlled conditions can be reproduced. It is also necessary that scientific theories have to be able to make true predictions.

Black holes and other singularities do not fulfill these conditions. They are too remote to affect our lives. We are unable to conduct any experiments on them. We have instead theoretical hypotheses based on very few observations and far-fetched interpretations that we cannot follow or verify. The ring representing a black hole could be anything from a CGI product to a trivial object photographed in a low resolution and out of focus, just as the alleged photo of Proxima Centauri was actual a chorizo. 

Science should be about things that surround and affect us. About these things we have lots of data. Remote cosmic objects do not affect us and we have therefore extremely little data available. We cannot derive a theory from them that would allow us to make predictions, whose truth can be verified by us.

While Socrates said: "I know that I know nothing", in fact we know all that we need to know. Because if something affects us, then we have plenty of information at our disposal to form our theories about it. If something affects us only a little, then we have little information to form a theory, but it is also of little concern to us. If something does not affect us at all, then we have no information about it to form any theory, but it is also of no concern for us.

Coincidence? Hubble Horizon = Age of the Universe

Let's start with a short overview of the Hubble Horizon taken from this website: Cosmic Horizons – Explaining Science

The Universe is expanding. The further away an object is the faster it is receding from us.

There is a clear relationship between the recessional velocity and the distance of a galaxy. This relationship is known as Hubble’s Law and is written as

v = HoD

where v is the velocity an object is moving away from us
D is the object’s distance
Ho is a constant known as the Hubble constant. If v is measured in kilometres per second and D is in megaparsecs (Mpc) (1 Mpc =3.26 million light years) then Ho is approximately 70 km/s per Mpc. The Hubble constant measures how fast the Universe is expanding. In reality, the Hubble constant changes over time (it is generally believed to be decreasing) and so is more correctly called the Hubble parameter H(t). The Hubble constant is the value of the Hubble parameter today. However, the current rate of change of the Hubble constant is very small. It will take hundreds of millions of years to fall by 1% from its current value.

Assuming that Hubble’s law is valid at all distances, at a separation from us of more than 4,300 Mpc (or 14 billion light years) a galaxy will be receding at a velocity greater than 300 000 km/s which is the speed of light. In which case any light it emitted today could never reach us. The Hubble sphere is an imaginary sphere centred on the Earth of radius 4,300 Mpc. If the Hubble parameter didn’t change over time, we could only see objects which emitted light today located inside the Hubble sphere.

Now what a strange coincidence! The distance in which the speed of the expansion of the universe reaches the speed of light is around 14 billion lightyears. The age of the universe according to the Big Bang hypotheses is more or less the same, i.e. 13.7 billion years. So for some strange reason we live today at the exact point of time when the last light of the Big Bang becomes invisible, because it passes the Hubble horizon.

If we had lived a few billion years earlier, the Big Bang would have been taken place well within the Hubble sphere and we could observe everything in all its glory. If we lived a few billion years later from now the Big Bang would have happened far beyond the Hubble sphere, and we would have no idea that it ever happened.

Luckily it happened exactly at the border of the Hubble sphere, so we can still observe it in Cosmic Background Radiation, which led to the estimate of the age of the universe being 13.7 billion years. This is an amazing coincidence considering the unimaginable time that the universe will exist and has already exited.

However I am not willing to believe in such statistically almost impossible coincidences. The only rational assumption is that the alleged age of the universe is an effect of the Hubble horizon. What we see in the cosmic background radiation has nothing to to with the alleged beginning of the universe, it's just the effect of the expansion of the universe reaching the speed of light (No the expansion of space cannot exceed the speed of light, it can only asymptotically approach it. Special Relativity remains valid here.). The universe is therefore either far older or, more likely, has no beginning at all. What appears to us as the Big Bang happening 13.7 billion lightyears away is nothing but the effect of the expansion of the universe reaching the speed of light and hereby compressing all the infinite universe beyond into the Hubble horizon. The Cosmic Microwave Background equivalent to a temperature of 2.7 K simply reflects the average energy of the universe. Since we can see the infinite universe compressed together at the Hubble horizon, it becomes so diffuse by the effects of Special Relativity that it becomes the CMB.

The Big Bang happening exactly 13.7 billion years ago is incompatible with the fact that the Hubble horizon is exactly the same, but derived from entirely different parameters. That kind of coincidences do not exist in the real world.

Mass Hysteria 2

New COVID-19 cases in Italy

Now that the new COVID-19 cases are dropping globally, we can make a definite assessment of the crisis based on empirical data (not on computer models).

Apparently there is no country in the world, where significantly more people died through COVID-19 than during a normal flu season. This means, there has never been any extraordinary epidemic (like the Spanish Flu in 1918-20). The whole crisis existed only in the human mind and in theoretical computer models.

Still superstitious measures like lockdowns, which have been proven completely ineffective by all empirical data, and the global panic continue.

Based on polls it looks like around 2/3 of the world population are currently affected by this mental disorder. Only around 1/3 of humanity are free from symptoms of hysteria and have maintained sanity. It is hard to tell how long this mental disease will continue. There also seem tobe political and economic profeteers who have a vested interest that the madness and the opppressive measures are indefinitely continued. So the hysteria may last longer than it would last in the average individual. Itiscurrently actively promoted by profeteers like  Bill Gates andnd the institutions financed by him (WHO, Johns Hopkins University, Robert Koch Institute etc.).

There is unfortunately little, we can do about it. We can only make sure that we preserve our own mental health during this outbreak of a mass psychogenic illness of an unprecedented scale. The causes of hysterical contagions are still not well understood by psychiatrists. The reason, why this wave of mass hysteria has reached such a scale can probably be found in the effects of the increasing global Internet access and the importance of social media in daily life. Due to the lack of similar communication media outbreaks of mass hysteria have never reached this magnitude in past centuries. The increasing threat by mass hysteria was already visible in earlier outbreaks in this century, e.g. the climate hysteria, but not to such a devastating extent.

Precautions will need to be taken that such an outbreak cannot repeat. We first have to investigate its actual causes. But we will also have to do something about social media in the Internet. We might have to roll back certain Word Wide Web protocols that allow users interactive participation in the Internet. Web sites need to become more static, as they used to be at the end of the 20th century to prevent the spread of hysterical contagions. This would require changes at the lowest level of the TCP/IP protocol to make transmission and relaying of complex scripts impossible.

However there might be too much resistance against rolling back communication technology. 

So all we can do is to teach rationalism and to preserve our own mental sanity.
Stay reasonable, stay logical!

Devastating Global Mass Hysteria

The importance of reason and logic has never been more obvious as today. After an irrational scare mongering campaign that tried to tell us that we would all go extinct because of Global Warming, we can now witness an even more dangerous hysteria: the fear of COVID-19.

Above we can see the current official data of the COVID-19 ”pandemic" by country that has affected the globe.
In the moment that I am writing this we have 109,178 confirmed cases and 7,965 people dead.
To put this into perspective, we should be aware that in an average year we have globally around 50,000 people dead per year due to the common flu. So we are not even close to the numbers of a normal year.

Since the epidemic is still ongoing, we get a better view, when we look at the data from China, where the COVID-19 epidemic is mostly over. In China we have 3,226 people dead from COVID-19 so far and this number is not expected to increase much in the following weeks. In a normal year like 2005 e.g. we had 13,185 fatal outcomes from infectious diseases in China. So this year does not appear to stand out from any other year in China. The crisis existed only in our mind.

Nevertheless governments all over the world are currently panicking and shutting down their entire economy to mitigate the effects of the virus, to “flatten the curve" as they claim.
Fact is the curve is not flattening at all. And particular the countries with the most drastic and earliest measures are those who have the highest casualties: China, Italy, Spain, and France. On the other hand countries that did not impose lockdowns of entire cities and widespread quarantines (South Korea, Japan, Germany) are doing surprisingly good.
France and Germany are particularly good examples, since they are neighboring countries of a comparable size, where the outbreak started at the exact same time. And while Germany, whose government has taken hardly any measures, has only 26 fatalities, France has almost seven times this number, 175.  We could also observe that the infected cases and fatalities exploded in every country from the moment on that lockdowns and quarantines were implemented. From the available data we can therefore conclude that lockdowns do not work and are rather counter-productive.
Nevertheless most governments follow now the failed shutdown-strategy of Italy making things much worse for their respective countries.
This cannot be attributed to rational analysis but only to the irrational urge to act in some way, even if it is not helpful. It helps these governments to “feel good” about their activism, even if the measurable effects are devastating. They believe that what they do is right, even if the objective data says otherwise.
The result is a further increase in panic and hysteria that has now also affected the population. We see people hoarding toilet paper and food, which in an epidemic will never become scarce. Agriculture will not stop during an epidemic. Plants keep growing, animals keep reproducing. Farms will not be closed. Industrial goods will naturally become scarce first due to factories that are shut down. During an epidemic not the countryside, but the urban areas are most affected. So there is nothing more irrational than hoarding food during an epidemic.

If we can trust the official data (And every conclusion can only be as good as the data it is derived from.), there is currently no COVID-19 crisis. It is a normal flu season with casualties and infection rates in the normal range.
This does however not mean that we have a major crisis. But the nature of this crisis is economical. The shutdown is devastating for our global economy. Supply chains are breaking down; essential drugs will become scarce; the resulting poverty will kill millions. It can develop into the biggest disaster of human history, if our hysterical governments continue on their path. Irrationality is currently creating its own apocalypse.

So what should be done by a rationally acting government?

We should first be aware that infections do only to a small part depend on the presence of the pathogen. Pathogens are omnipresent. A compromised immune response is, what causes an infection. This is why the diseases caused by coronaviruses are called “common cold”. They are mostly caused by hypothermia (too low temperature) of the lungs and dry air. For this reason they happen mostly in a particular season. Fighting the pathogen would be a useless strategy. To avoid an infection we have to avoid hindering our immune response.
It is a false claim  that the SARS-COV-2 virus is so completely novel that our immune system cannot fight it. The genome differs only slightly from well known coronaviruses and the SARS-COV-1 virus. The essential proteins are almost the same. New virus strains every year are a normal phenomenon. Our immune system is very well able to deal with it, what the majority of asymptomatic, mild and moderate cases of COVID-19 prove.
An airborne virus that spreads that easily as SARS-COV-2 cannot be contained. It is a totally useless strategy trying to eliminate the pathogen in the environment. Boosting the immune system and maintaining it able to respond is the correct strategy. And a quarantine in an enclosed hospital is certainly the worst scenario for this. We now add to this the panic and psychological stress when the patients see people around them in hazmat suits pretending that a zombie apocalypse has occurred and the patients are all doomed. It is no surprise that mortality rates will go up.
It would be better to send people home to their beds, equip them with ventilator, if necessary and have them visited once a day by a nurse. This would eliminate the congestion of the hospitals. Healthy people would not be taken into quarantine and needlessly occupying space in hospitals. Everybody would be more relaxed.
The lockdowns have to end immediately to keep our economy healthy and enable us to manufacture medicine and develop vaccines. This is not going to happen, if the economy collapses.
Furthermore we have three candidates for a successful medication of COVID-19: Remdesivir (originally developed against Ebola), Chloroquine Phosphate (a drug against Malaria that acts as ionophor for Zn2+  ions that inhibit the viral RNA polymerase) and Kaletra (an anti-HIV drug). All of them have been tested for side-effects, because they are already widely in use for other diseases. Their effectiveness forCOVID-19 has so far not been formally established. However the reports from China and South Korea are very promising. I can see no logical reason why a treatment with these drugs is not at least attempted in severe cases. Instead we are told that there is no treatment, which is not true. The available treatments have not been approved for this particular disease, but all data indicate that they work.
If we don’t quarantine people, we also don’t need expensive tests. It is totally irrelevant what virus caused an acute respiratory problem. If a patient has difficulties breathing, he needs a ventilator, no matter what the pathogen responsible for his condition is. And if he has no severe symptoms, he does not need it. The COVID-19 test provides us with no useful information in this case and will only worry mildly affected patients unnecessarily.

If we had treated COVID-19 like any other flu without panic and just given severely affected patients the necessary treatments, we would not even talk about this disease today. Hospitals would not be overburdened. Italy had 2,500 fatalities so far. It is ridiculous to claim that a country of 60 million people cannot handle 2,500 or 5,000 patients in a month.

Only reason and logic can help us out of this crisis. Hysteria will be our downfall as civilization, be it climate hysteria or corona hysteria, or whatever the next one will be.

Big Bang Theory Takes Another Hit

Hubble Space Telescope

https://www.thenational.ae/uae/science/have-we-been-wrong-about-the-age-of-our-universe-all-along-1.894032

Until recently, such findings would have barely caused a stir, as the age of the cosmos was thought to have been revealed a decade ago by studies of the heat left over by the Big Bang.

By measuring the spread of that heat across the night sky, orbiting satellites had shown the primordial explosion must have taken place about 13.8 billion years ago, plus or minus a few tens of millions of years.

 [...]

In 2013, astronomers using the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope estimated Methuselah was about 14.5 billion years old, give or take about 800 million years. That’s hard to square with the latest estimates of the age of the universe.

It does not look good for our Big Bang theory, which is - as we might remember - a theory inspired by Abrahamic religion and brought up by the Catholic priest Georges Lemaître who wanted a scientific foundation to justify the need of creation. Before that the commonly accepted cosmological theory was a steady state universe with neither beginning nor end. 

The steady state theory did not deny the expansion of the universe, but assumed that the First Law of Thermodynamics (preservation of energy) could not apply to the universe, since it is infinite and therefore no closed system. Not the total energy is preserved, since it is infinite in an infinite universe, so that no finite amount of energy added or deducted could change this, but the amount of energy per volume of space measured over large distances is constant. So if space expands, energy (or matter) also have to increase at the same pace in order to keep the average density of energy constant. Instead of being created in a singular event (Big Bang) it was assumed that matter and energy are created constantly by the expansion of the universe due to quantum fluctuation of space itself.

The Big Bang theory changed this and gave the universe a beginning. In order to keep this mathematical model alive, which was not consistent with empiric measurements, new strange phenomena had to be introduced into the theory, among them Cosmic Inflation, a theory that is unable to provide any cause for it other than that it is needed for the equations to work, while it assumes the absurd concept of speeds faster than light. Other phenomena that had to be introduced in order to save the equations were dark matter and dark energy, of which neither was ever observed, while it would be responsible for the majority of mass in the universe. The Big Bang theory also set the age of the universe at 13.7 billion years, neglecting the fact that globular star clusters around our galaxy had almost the same age. Recently more and more galaxies have been discovered that must have been come to existence shortly after the Big Bang, which does not really fit into our understanding how galaxies are born.

And now we have a star that seems to be even older than the universe itself. 

Astrophysics should finally admit that we do not know how and if the universe began and if and how it was ever different from now. We do not even have a working theory for gravity, which would normally be the first step of developing a cosmological theory.

Besides all this we will even in the future have publications by stubborn astrophysicists that take the Big bang as a proven fact and build their weird speculative theories on top of it. 

Why can we not just start over, go back to what we really know and do research about things that we can know and that have an effect on us, so that we can experimentally measure them? Let us free science from religious beliefs and speculative theories (e.g. the entire branch of theoretical physics) and make it trustworthy and solid, as it once was.

Socrates once said: I neither know nor think that I know.

And this is one step ahead of all those scientists that think that they know, but actually do not know either.

Back Holes II - Best Explanation So Far

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/07/10/sorry-black-holes-arent-actually-black/#20d5ae265c02

Sorry, Black Holes Aren't Actually Black

[...] At the event horizon itself, space is moving at the speed of light. Which means, to someone infinitely far away, time at the event horizon no longer appears to pass.

When you observe something else fall into a black hole, you'd see that the light emitted from them would get fainter, redder, and their position would asymptote towards the event horizon. If you could continue to observe the faint photons they emitted, they'd appear to get stretched out in space and stretched out in time. They'd experience gravitational redshift, with the light emitted from them going from visible to infrared to microwave to radio frequencies.

And yet, it will never disappear entirely. There will always, infinitely far into the future, be light to observe from their fall into a black hole. Even though photons are quantized, there is no limit to how low their energy can be. With a large-enough telescope sensitive to long-enough wavelengths, you should always be able to see the light from anything that fell into a black hole. As someone falls in, their light never completely goes away.

Finally someone got the physics of Black Holes right. This is an article worth reading. 

I have pointed out so many times that time comes to a standstill at the event horizon of a Black Hole so that nothing can ever cross it, but hardly any scientist seems to understand it. Almost all articles about Black Holes mention a crossing of the event horizon, that matter reaches a point from which it cannot return anymore. General Relativity does not allow that. This point-of-no-return can never be reached. Nothing can disappear in a Black Hole during the existence of the universe. This removes entirely the information paradox that Stephen Hawking desperately tried to understand during his hole life. There is no paradox. Information never gets lost in a Black Hole.

Right-Wing vs. Left-Wing

Right-Wing and Left-Wing have got a new meaning. In the past Left-Wing meant support of the lower class and Right-Wing support of the upper class.
Today Right-Wing means defending democracy, free speech and human rights; and Left-Wing means destroying all that.

So Far-Right means a freedom extremist, and Far-Left a totalitarian extremist.

What has remained the same is that the Right wants to preserve the status quo, while the Left wants to overthrow it. However if the status quo is already quite good for everyone, its overthrow will be bad for everyone.

No Big Bang?

https://dailygalaxy.com/2019/06/big-bang-vanishes-quantum-theory-describes-an-eternal-universe/

It seems we have an alternative theory for the universe without a Big Bang. This is similar to a post that I made some years ago about a new steady-state model of the universe.
Quantum fluctuation allows for a continuous creation of particles due to the expansion of the universe, because the vacuum energy needs to remain the same.
It is certainly too early to say, but we should consider the possibility that there is no need for a Big Bang. This would also explain why the universe is completely euclidean (i.e. "flat").

So once again Epicurus was right about the universe: It is infinite in space and time. There are logical reasons for it as Epicurus explained, because any finite model would lead to a logical self-contradiction.

The Fire of Notre Dame

The fire of Notre Dame today marks the end of France and probably of European civilization. Although it was just a church and therefore dedicated to religious superstition it is also the probably most important symbol of European culture after the decline of Rome.

The cathedral was built during the High Middle Ages and is probably the apex of medieval architecture. During the French Revolution it became the Temple of Reason and later the place where Napoleon was crowned Emperor effectively ending the Western Roman Empire and replacing it with modern Western society. The cathedral of Notre Dame was far more important to Europe than the World Trade Center ever was for America, since the latter one was a rather modern building.

Although the destruction of a symbol has no real effect, the Fire of Notre Dame comes to a point in history, where the French identity is completely replaced by North-African culture, the United Kingdom is ruled effectively by Saracen sharia law and has left the European Union, and Germany is collapsing under an unprecedented Saracen invasion since 2015.

Europe is broken. It has no will for survival anymore. The most powerful European nations have been lost to Saracen invaders. The national leaders are puppets of the Saracens. And the last decent Europeans feel ashamed for the degeneracy of their own homelands that makes them unworthy of being defended.

In the face of such a situation a symbolic event becomes significant. Its importance might be abstract, but historiography is something abstract. It needs key events to mark the end of an era. The Fire of Notre Dame is such a key event. 

Today we have seen the end of European culture in France. And considering the importance that France had for modern Europe, it might very well be the event that future historians will take to give a date to the end of European civilization as a whole.

The Photography of a Black Hole

First photography of the supermassive Black Hole in the center of M87

https://www.space.com/first-black-hole-photo-by-event-horizon-telescope.html

Black Holes have finally been dragged out of the shadows.

For the first time ever, humanity has photographed one of these elusive cosmic beasts, shining light on an exotic space-time realm that had long been beyond our ken. 

"We have seen what we thought was unseeable," Sheperd Doeleman, of Harvard University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said today (April 10) during a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

I am not sure, what is supposed to have been proven by this picture?
It is a massive object and its center appears darker, but as I predicted for many years it is not black, but dark red due to the gravity-related redshift.

We know from General Relativity that time slows down in the proximity of a so called Black Hole until it comes to a complete standstill at the event horizon. From this follows that nothing can ever fall into a Black Hole, i.e. cross its event horizon, because all the time of the universe would not be enough for this to happen. This means no photon will ever reach the point of no return and disappear in it. Instead light escaping from the proximity of a Black Hole will be extremely redshifted all the way down to the lower end of the electromagnetic spectrum. And this is exactly what we see. The center of the alleged Black Hole is dark red.

Of course this effect is probably due to the low resolution of the picture, but if the resolution is too low to distinguish anything with certainty, then what are we supposed to see there?