New CMB Discovery Could Shatter the Big Bang Model

Finally some empirical evidence that my theory was right all along: The CMB is the Hubble Horizon, not a remnant of the Big Bang. The universe is infinite. This is why space is so flat.

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?

Climatology as a Modern Version of Neo-Luddism

The popular anti-rationalist pseudo-science of »Climatology« and its demand of a reduction of CO2 emissions seems to be a revival of the 19th Century Luddite movement.
The Luddite were radical textile workers that protested against modern technology, especially mechanical stocking frames and had a mystical and probably fictional leader called »Ned Ludd«. The name »Luddite« became since then a trademark for everybody opposing modern technology. Another famous Luddite of the 20th century was the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski who wrote an interesting manifesto called »Industrial Society and its Future«.
Today we have another incarnation of this movement that manifests itself in the fight against Global Warming. It is directed against any form of actually totally harmless CO2 emission, which is a way to quantify the degree of industrialization. The more CO2 something emits, the more industrial it is considered and therefore attracts the wrath of the modern Luddites. Even a new charismatic leader of the Neo-Luddites has emerged in the person of the 16-years old Swedish girl Greta Thunberg and her »Fridays for Future« movement. The fact that a child with no expertise at all on the matter is leading this movement staging a school strike, the symbol of science and reason, shows its general aversion against any form of rationalism. It is hereby very unfortunate that even well established scientists have been corrupted to support the neo-Luddites with absurd theories about threats to the global climate by returning fossilized carbon into the natural cycle where it originally came from.
But we can see that this current phenomenon of climate hysteria is not unique in human history. It had its predecessors that sporadically re-emerge driven by a subconscious skepticism of humans against technological advancement, which they feel they are not prepared for. So the current climate hysteria is not a new kind of the collective madness that has spread in the western world, but part of human nature, which will hopefully be overcome like earlier incarnations of the Luddite movement.

Segregation in School

The most important issue that humanity faces in our time of conflict and political polarization is finding a common ground. This common ground can only be reason and logic and has to reject the concept of opinions and beliefs, on which no common ground is possible.

Reason and logic are principles that are the same for everybody, no matter if man or woman, if White, Black, or Asian, no matter from which cultural background. Logic is so universal that it can serve even as common ground for non-human beings like higher animals, computers, artificial intelligence, and extraterrestrial civilizations, if we ever make contact with one.

The task of any school should be to create the foundation of this common ground, to instruct students in reason, logic, and empirical science. It is contrary to this task to teach opinions and belief systems in school or to segregate the students according to gender or race. School should teach us, what is consensus and agreeable for all intelligent beings. If it does not fulfill this task, it is not a true school that deserves this name.
Therefore girls’ and boys’ schools or race segregated schools are no schools at all; they are institutions of cultural indoctrination. And opinions and belief systems should have no business in any school.
Mathematics and scientific facts are universal and the same for any human being. They require essentially the same learning methods, which are based on memorizing information and learning the laws of logic and their application. There is now other way to learn a new language than memorizing the vocabulary, covering one column of a table and trying to reconstruct the other one from memory. This method has successfully been used by any human being, be it a girl or a boy or from whatever race.

Now the segregationists claim that there are natural differences between the sexes as well as between the races. Therefore different methods would be required to teach students effectively according to their gender/race.
But this argument is invalid, since individual differences among humans outweigh statistical differences between the sexes or ethnical groups. If different teaching methods are used, they have to apply to groups based on learning skills in general, not on gender or ethnicity. A boy may outperform any girl in his class, even if it has been confirmed that statistically girls do better in school than boys. It would be unreasonable to put this boy into a boy class with lower standards, just because he is a boy. The skills of a student have to be determined individually, not predetermined based on gender.

The consequences of gender segregated schools are known from our history. It is hardly the teaching methods that are different (The binomial theorem is taught in the exactly same way to boys and girls, just as vocabulary in foreign languages is.), but it is the curriculum. This curriculum is adjusted to the supposed gender specific roles that are later expected for men and women. The result is a society where certain professions are limited to one gender and where social life is split into two worlds, mostly to the disadvantage of women. This means that the society loses all the potential of nearly 50% of its population, which are forced into suboptimal career decisions. This is a completely utilitarian reason independent from any ideological goal of social justice. Gender segregated societies are inefficient, because they prevent people from optimal career decisions for their individual skills.
It furthermore destroys social cohesion by alienating the sexes from each other.
And last not least it diminishes quality of life, since heterosexual people feel naturally more attracted to the opposite gender and perceive a single-sex community as hardship, which is obvious in prisons, the military or monasteries.

If schools do not teach empirical science and the laws of logic equally to any being that is endowed with reason, then it would be better to have no schools at all, because they would be nothing but a tool of indoctrination and brainwashing.
Above anything else we are all intelligent beings, we have the ability to think and act reasonable. Differences based on gender and race are secondary. Logic and science are universal. They cannot be divided unequally among the sexes or ethnic groups.
There cannot be any compromise when it comes to abolishing segregation in schools.

Modern Stoicism

Now Social Justice Warriors have also found their way into modern Stoicism. The article below is a typical example. Stoicism and the renewed interest in this philosophy apparently is too masculine to them, so they need to effeminate it.

http://donaldrobertson.name/2018/01/03/whats-the-difference-between-stoicism-and-stoicism/

Why it’s important to distinguish clearly between stoicism (small s) and Stoicism (capital S).

When it comes to mixing up the words Stoicism and stoicism, there are several problems.  Firstly, people often just equate it with mental toughness and so it’s not unusual for them to argue that people they revere as tough or self-disciplined are Stoic role models.  The UFC fighter Conor McGregor is a typical example people choose but there are many similar conversations on the Internet.  Now, it’s fair to say he may be someone tough and self-disciplined but he’s obviously very far removed from figures like Socrates [sic] and Marcus Aurelius, who were held up as examples of Stoicism in the ancient world.  He’s probably a better embodiment of stoicism than Stoicism.  He arguably doesn’t embody the Stoic virtues of wisdom and justice, or natural affection toward others and ethical cosmopolitanism [sic], in quite the way that Marcus Aurelius does. 

The word stoic also implies to many people some kind of suppression or concealment of unpleasant feelings: the stiff upper-lip notion.  Boys don’t cry, etc.  That’s particularly problematic, though, because it’s well-known from large volumes of modern research in the field of psychotherapy that the suppression of negative feelings can be quite harmful. 

And the author of this article, Donald Robertson is even farther removed from philosophy than any UFC fighter could possibly be.

First of all Socrates was no Stoic. Since all we know about him was written by Plato, the founder of the Academy, he is probably closer related to this philosophical school.

It is then true that there are two known occasions where Stoic philosophers called themselves cosmopolitans, but it was never meant to be a Stoic virtue. The degenerate modern concept of "diversity" did not exist in antiquity, and "justice" did certainly not mean "social justice" as the author wants to make us believe.

Affection is a passion and therefore the antithesis of Stoicism.

And the reference to "boys" in the article is the last proof of its feminist agenda, if we would still need one.

The actual virtues of Stoicism were wisdom (sophia), courage (andreia, conveniently omitted in the article as too masculine), justice (dikaiosyne, in the meaning as described in Plato's Politeia), and temperance (sophrosyne), all of them deducted from the one principle virtue, which is living according to the logos, the natural laws of reason and logic that bind the world together.

Apart from the aforementioned misrepresentations of Stoic philosophy, it  is a common misconception that a modern Stoic has to follow the writings of M. Aurelius and Epictetus literally in order to deserve the capital S. This would be an argumentum ad verecundiam (argument from authority) Stoicism is a philosophy, not a religious revelation.

Along with our advance in science  philosophy necessarily has to advance too. Stoic physics in the time of Zeno and Chrysippus for example was based on the 5 elements (earth, water, air, fire, aether), but today we have a better understanding of nature. Therefore the theoretical background of Stoic philosophy has to change too.
Even Roman Stoicism, which today is almost exclusively quoted as example of Stoic philosophy, was very different from Greek Stoicism, which is today mostly ignored. In the same way modern Stoicism needs to be different.
What always remains the same however is Stoic practice, what the article calls "stoic" with lower case s. This attitude of apatheia (the stiff upper lip) is what remained the same throughout the centuries. It is the true core of Stoicism, because this has always been the trademark of Stoicism. Not obsolete beliefs in the pneuma, the aether, and determinism is what Stoicism is about, but the rejection of passions and emotions and the dedication to the logos, which is reason and logic.
This is what Stoic virtue (arete) is about. This is in no way different from the meaning of lower case stoic only that it also includes the mathematical discipline of logic, which remains valid since the time of Chrysippus.
Stoicism is not psychotherapy (The author of the article above however is a psychotherapist.) or a feel-good New Age movement where anything goes. Stoicism is strict self-discipline and effort to the degree of asceticism, but it is also very rewarding for those who master it and reach ataraxia. Because after all philosophy should be the path to eudaimonia.

The Unfalsifiable Big Bang Creation Myth

https://www.usnews.com/news/news/articles/2017-12-06/colossal-distant-black-hole-holds-surprises-about-early-universe

Colossal Distant Black Hole Holds Surprises About Early Universe

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The oldest and most distant black hole ever observed -- a celestial brute 800 million times more massive than the sun -- is providing scientists some surprises about the nature of the universe when, on a cosmic scale, it was a mere toddler.

Astronomers on Wednesday said the black hole, residing at the center of a highly luminous celestial object called a quasar, is located about 13.1 billion light years away from Earth. The quasar's light detected by the researchers dates back to about 690 million years after the Big Bang that created the universe, when the cosmos was only 5 percent of its present age.

[...]

"This object provides us with a measurement of the time at which the universe first became illuminated with starlight," said another of the researchers, physics professor Robert Simcoe of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

Finding such a large black hole existing so early in the universe's history surprised the researchers. Its very existence at that point in time challenges current notions about the formation and growth of such objects, they said.

"The universe is full of surprises," Bañados said.

Yes, the universe is full of surprises, especially if you use a wrong model to explain it.

This is just another in an endless series of examples where modern cosmology simply ignores observations when they do not fit into the Big Bang theory.

The Big Bang theory has proven to be completely useless, because it did not make a single prediction that was later confirmed by an observation. All predictions were wrong and needed to be fixe by introducing new variables into the theory, like cosmic inflation, i.e. space expansion faster than light, dark matter, dark energy etc.

Now again they found a remote object, a so called quasar which is interpreted as an early galaxy with a very active super-massive black hole in its center. If the Big Bang time scale was correct that quasar should already have existed at a time when the universe started to become transparent. Before it is supposed to have been a compact cloud of matter too dense for light passing through. These are conditions that would never allow a galaxy or a quasar to exist or to have formed. And still we have just discovered one.

If cosmology was a science, the Big Bang theory would now be discarded and a new theory would need to be developed. However the Big Bang creation myth seems to be unfalsifiable. No matter what is observed, they do not give this theory up, but come up with new explanations just to keep this theory. Falsifiability is the principle criterion that the philosopher Car Popper developed as test for a scientific theory. The Big Bang theory fails this test. It will never be falsified, no matter what is observed or measured.

The universe was found to be completely flat and Euclidic to a error margin of 1%, while the Big Bang theory is only compatible with a curved universe with a finite size. It did not change anything. Globular clusters and galaxies were found that were just as old or even older than the supposed age of the universe. It changed nothing. Now they found a quasar that cannot have existed at such an early stage of the universe. Again it does not change anything. the creationists will still not give up their beloved Big Bang, the moment of creation.

This has nothing to do with science anymore. This has become to be about faith, the firm belief that the world must have had a beginning. But this assumption has utterly been proven false. The universe has no beginning. We have no model yet to explain its overall superstructure, but we know for sure that it did not start at any particular time. This is what our observations tell us.

Unfortunately we have to live with the sad reality that during the decades to come our cosmologists will continue to be puzzled by every new discovery that contradicts the model of a Big Bang. We will see them readjusting the theory, adding more variables ,invisible forces and mysterious stuff. And at the end the priests will tell us that such a precisely fine-tuned universe needs a god as only possible explanation and quote the Big Bang theory as proof of his existence.

Bacteria from Outer Space

http://tass.com/science/977591

Scientists find living bacteria from outer space on ISS satellite’s surface

MOSCOW, October 27. /TASS/. Scientists have found living bacteria from outer space on the surface of the Russian segment of the International Space Station (ISS). They are being studied on Earth but most likely they don’t pose any sort of danger, Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov told TASS on Monday.

According to him, during spacewalks from the International Space Station under the Russian program, the cosmonauts took samples with cotton swabs from the station’s external surface. In particular, they took probes from places where the accumulation of fuel wastes were discharged during the engines’ operation or at places where the station’s surface is more obscure. After that, the samples were sent back to Earth.

Another example of premature claims by scientists, this time from Russia.

It is pretty simple to verify, whether or not an organism has an extraterrestrial origin. If these bacteria have proteins made of the same amino acids as life on Earth and uses the same genetic code, then they are definitely from Earth.

Especially the genetic code, which is based on a particular tRNA that assigns a particular triplet of DNA base pairs to a particular amino acid, which is then assembled by ribosomes to long chains that form the proteins is unique to life on Earth. This combination of base pair triplet and amino acid has developed in a completely arbitrary way on our planet. The same DNA code would not be translated into the same amino acids in organisms that have developed independently on another planet.
We can compare this with a language. If we receive some radio signals on the ISS and they are in English, then we can be absolutely sure that they came from Earth. Because it is impossible that an extraterrestrial civilization would have independently developed the English language. The genetic code is a kind of biological language.

The issue could easily be clarified by sequencing the tRNA in these bacteria, something that could be done within a day. Why has this not been done before making such spectacular claims? And if it has been done, then what is the result? Has a different genetic code been discovered in these bacteria?

The bacteria samples have already been sent to Earth. So there is no reason for not having analyzed the genetic code and the amino acids in the proteins of these bacteria.

This entire story is just another example of the lack of professionalism and the sloppiness that currently prevails among scientists. A lot of modern science seems to aim at spectacular announcements instead of solid research and rational analysis.

Gravitational Waves II - Gossip Over Colliding Neutron Stars

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rumors-swell-over-new-kind-of-gravitational-wave-sighting/

Rumors Swell Over New Kind of Gravitational-Wave Sighting

Gossip over colliding neutron stars has astronomers in a tizzy

Astrophysicists may have detected gravitational waves last week from the collision of two neutron stars in a distant galaxy—and telescopes trained on the same region might also have spotted the event.
Rumours to that effect are spreading fast online, much to researchers’ excitement. Such a detection could mark a new era of astronomy: one in which phenomena are both seen by traditional telescopes and ‘heard’ as vibrations in the fabric of space-time. 

[...]

Astronomers who do not want to be identified say that NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is rumoured to have spotted γ-rays emerging from the same region of sky as the potential gravitational-wave source—gossip which a senior Fermi member declined to comment on.

When the scientists at LIGO made their claims about having detected gravitational waves as result from the merging of two black holes, one of my criticism was that there was no additional evidence for such an explanation and that I would have expected to see a gamma-ray-burst at the same time, which was not the case. This time however there are rumors that a GRB was indeed detected at the same time as the event at LIGO. Does this change my assessment of the observation and the capability of LIGO? 

- Yes, it does. If the rumors are true and a GRB is confirmed by the Fermi telescope, then LIGO was able to make a correct prediction strengthening the theory that what they measured were indeed gravitational waves. As a scientist I need to be willing to change my initial theory as soon as new evidence becomes available.

- A simultaneous detection of an event at LIGO and a GRB would indicate that LIGO was able to measure gravitational waves. However it does not tell us what event exactly caused these gravitational waves. The merging of two neutron stars is a plausible explanation, but the observation is not a sufficient proof for it.

- Anyway the oscillations that have been detected in this event were significantly different from the earlier ones, which is why the LIGO scientist explain it with the merging of lower mass neutron stars instead of black holes. Since black holes do not exist in the way how most of today's astrophysicists imagine, while there is ample proof for the existence of neutron stars (pulsars), this explanation is far less questionable than the one of earlier events. And the lower frequency of the oscillation indicates that it was a completely different event this time. Therefore there is no reason to change my assessment of the earlier ambitious announcements of having detected merging black holes. These claims were not supported by sufficient evidence and therefore based on sloppy scientific methods. 

- If the Fermi telescope confirms a GRB, then we know how real gravitational waves look like and that they have to coincide with gamma ray burst, as I have apparently correctly predicted in my first post about this subject. It also shows that the first two observations were wrongly interpreted by the scientists at LIGO. It would have coincided with a far stronger GRB, if it had been caused by two black holes. The last event was farther away and is supposed to be caused by two neutron stars, which have a lower mass. How much stronger would have been the GRB of merging black holes.

Some astrophysicists may claim that merging black holes have no GRB because the radiation gets swallowed by the gravity of the black holes. But someone who makes such an argument only shows that he does not understand what black holes are. As even Stephen Hawking, the main proponent of "black holes", has confirmed, nothing ever gets swallowed by a "black hole", because nothing can ever pass through its horizon, which should always have been obvious for anybody who understood Einstein's General Relativity. What is called a "black hole" is neither black nor a hole. If anything at all it is dark red (extremely red-shifted), and nothing can ever completely disappear in it.

Therefore merging "black holes" would cause an extremely strong gamma ray burst, much stronger than that of merging neutron stars. Even if half of the energy gets red-shifted and ends up as undetectable long-wave radiation, there would still half of the energy be emitted as gamma rays. We did not detect anything like that the last two times, so the explanation as merging black holes was wrong.

- It remains to be seen, whether or not whatever the Fermi telescope has seen coincides with the observation at LIGO. It could be the first evidence for gravitational waves, but we need to be careful not to over-interpret the observation with far-fetched explanations.

Another question that we need to ask is: Why do we need to know all this? Does a phenomenon that does not affect us in any way justify the immense expenses or would the money not be better invested in the colonization of Mars? Science should not be about the collection of useless knowledge; science should advance our civilization. What does not affect us, does not require our attention.

Human Civilization Over 30,000 Years Older Than Thought

Evidence that ancient farms had very different origins than previously thought

Dramatic new hypothesis could change the way we understand human history.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/08/evidence-that-humans-had-farms-30000-years-earlier-than-previously-thought/

It's an idea that could transform our understanding of how humans went from small bands of hunter-gatherers to farmers and urbanites. Until recently, anthropologists believed cities and farms emerged about 9,000 years ago in the Mediterranean and Middle East. But now a team of interdisciplinary researchers has gathered evidence showing how civilization as we know it may have emerged at the equator, in tropical forests. Not only that, but people began altering their environments for food and shelter about 30,000 years earlier than we thought.

[...]

It all started about 45,000 years ago. At that point, people began burning down vegetation to make room for plant resources and homes. Over the next 35,000 years, the simple practice of burning back forest evolved. People mixed specialized soils for growing plants; they drained swamps for agriculture; they domesticated animals like chickens; and they farmed yam, taro, sweet potato, chili pepper, black pepper, mango, and bananas.

Those who read my book "Chronology of the Empire" might notice that the new time frame of human civilization coincides exactly with the theory that I presented in my book a few years ago. I had the year 45,360 BCE (beginning of the age of Sagittarius 0)as the beginning of human civilization. The number was deducted from hints in Sumerian mythology and the Kings List of Berossus and other Babylonian sources.

The so called Neolithic Revolution is the resurgence of humanity after the Great Flood, which was a very reel event that has been described independently by civilizations all over the world. This global disaster apparently refers to the end of the last glacial period, which had cataclysmic effects on the climate, the shape of the coastlines and human society.

In face of this new research everything falls in place and makes sense.

It is wrong to discard all mythology as fairy tales, because this was simply the way how history was remembered in the early days of human civilization. The questionable way how historians cherry-pick arbitrarily names from the same kings lists declaring some of them historic and others mythological fabrication has always astonished me. All Egyptian rulers in Manethos's kings list after Namer (=Menes) are historic, all dynasties before Namer on the same list are mythology. This is a totally arbitrary judgement that I am not willing to agree with. A historian should not discard kings, because he does not like the names, because they are the names of the Egyptian gods.
I am not saying that the theory in my book is true, but it made predictions, of which one has just been confirmed by this new study of Patrick Roberts and his team from the Max Planck Institute. So it fares better than the conventional theories about the beginning of human civilization, which regularly get disproved by new discoveries.

It will be interesting to see what else archaeology will reveal about the origins of human society in the near future.

The Death Of Science As We Know It

The "March for Science"

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-march-for-science-la-20170422-story.html

Thousands of scientists, students and activists gathered Saturday in downtown Los Angeles for the March for Science, one of more than 500 such events being held around the world.

After a rally in Pershing Square, the march began at 11 a.m. with participants walking about seven blocks to City Hall, where several speakers were to address the crowd. Afterward, demonstrators will return to Pershing Square for presentations on air quality, dinosaurs and how to spot “alternative facts” on the Internet.

Today is a sad day in modern human history. We are witnessing the death of science as a field of research. Gone are the times of Galileo Galilei when the modern scientific method was developed, when science served the expansion of human knowledge.

Today's "March of Science" has  finally turned Science into a political ideology. Science (from lat. scientia = knowledge) is openly advocating for left-wing politics. It is not about knowledge anymore, not about research, it is about ideology.

We could have seen it coming with more and more pseudo-sciences like climatology, gender studies, dubious "social sciences" and theoretical physics with its unfalsifiable theories claiming their place in Western universities. Many professorships and positions in scientific institutions had become a comfortable source of income without the need of ever coming up with independently verifiable results. Fifty years ago science produced practical applications, today science produces theories, paper and colorful computer animations.

And these self-declared experts who have become so comfortable in their  professors' chairs suddenly feel the pressure to produce tangible results or lose funding in the "Trump era". Of course this can be a scaring experience, especially if someone has never actually worked in the private sector and lived  on  the public budget throughout his lifetime. So it is no surprise that these people are now mobilizing to support a leftist ideology, which was far more sympathetic towards them.

But these "scientists" marching for a leftist cause do not understand that they destroy every last bit of credibility that science has enjoyed until know.

Climatology for example has always been suspected to be politically motivated and funded only with the condition of a predetermined result of the research. If there had been the need of any further proof that it was based on politics rather than facts, then this "March for Science" just provided it by revealing the political motivation of these scientists to the public.

But the negative consequences for human progress are far worse. By turning science into an ideology and bringing all scientific knowledge into discredit, they have now provided the enemies of science with a perfect argument. Now every creationist can rightfully say that science is nothing but an ideological belief and that evolution was just as questionable as climatology or gender studies. It has now become impossible to distinguish what is based on facts and what is based on ideology, because scientists have revealed themselves as political activists.

The proponents of "intelligent design", homoeopathy, astrology, parapsychology, theology, "hollow earth theory" and whatever superstitious belief may exist, can now claim that all justified scientific criticism of their pseudo-science was politically motivated, since science is nothing but an ideology to begin with.

We have now entered an age of absolute relativism. There is no truth anymore, no facts, nothing is certain, everything is just a belief. And all beliefs are equal and unverifiable. This is the result of turning science into just another political ideology.

Now I have to admit that I hold a scientific decree myself (graduate biologist = Master of Science), which would also make me a scientist. However from today on I cannot help but feeling embarrassed by this designation. I do not want to be placed into the same category as those political activists who call themselves "scientists".

Therefore I think, we who are interested in expanding our knowledge by research, experiments and observation as well as logical deduction cannot continue to use the discredited term "science" for what we do. Maybe it is better to call it "natural philosophy" again, as it was called centuries ago.

Science is now about ideology and beliefs, only natural philosophy is still about knowledge and research.

Historical Parallels Rome - USA

It appears that the United States are bound to repeat the history of ancient Rome. The parallels are overwhelming and allow us to male predictions for the future with quite a high probability.

Currently the US is in a situation that can be compared with the end of the Roman Republic in the first century BCE.

The country is extremely polarized after extreme political leaders. In the US these were George W. Bush and Barack Obama, in Rome C. Marius and L. Cornelius Sulla. In the US it is between conservatives (including the Tea Party movement) and the liberals. In Rome it was between the Optimates (establishment) and the Populares. Even the names are scaringly similar, since Donald Trump has repeatedly been called a "populist".

The country is dominated by political violence and neither side respects the democratic constitution, in Rome as today in the US. The latest example is the disrespect for the elected president and the attempts to deligitimize him. In turn Donald Trump calls a federal judge a "so called judge" questioning his legitimacy.

So what can we expect for the future, if history follows the precedent of Rome?

We have already seen that many liberals consider to impeach Trump, before his term is over. In ancient Rome the Pompey faction in the Senate deposed C. Julius Caesar as proconsul of Gaul and declared him "enemy of Rome".

If Trump is impeached by the US Senate, we can be quite sure that he will not just accept this decision, but instead question its legitimacy as it seems to be his habit. Just like Caesar he has the major part of the military behind him. Trump is improving his relations with the US military and law enforcement almost daily, while the liberals have alienated the police by their support for the "Black Lives Matter" movement that is responsible for several terror attacks against the police. Caesar in his time had the command of the best Roman legions and they believed in him personally. When he was formally deposed, he took his elite Legion XIII Gemina, crossed the Rubicon and marched to Rome. The Pompey faction had not enough forces to oppose him and abandoned the capital. Caesar declared himself dictator and defeated Pompey afterwards in the resulting civil war.

This is exactly the scenario the US is heading for, if the liberals continue with their idea of impeaching Donald Trump.

He is not going to accept an illegitimate impeachment. He will use the military that is loyal to him to occupy Washington D.C. Then he will rule with martial law. Even if there is an armed uprising like in ancient Rome, the odds are on his side.

The example of Rome also shows us the inevitability of history. Even when Caesar was murdered, it only resulted in a new civil war, and at its end Augustus was Emperor. Even if Trump is killed, nothing will stop the course of history. His followers will use even more force and at the end the US will be an Imperium ruled by an emperor.

The end of the republic is inevitable, if the US follows the current course. Only overcoming the polarization and the violent extremism of the leftists and normalizing the presidency of Donald Trump could stop this development. But it does not look like this is to happen.