Why Scientific 'Truth' So Often Turns Out Wrong.

This post is motivated with John Allen Paulos's article The Decline Effect and Why Scientific 'Truth' So Often Turns Out Wrong.

In AWT this phenomena can be of real emergent nature and it manifests itself with switching of intersubjectively accepted opinion into dual perspective, whenever the density of facts increases up to certain level. It's analogous to dispersive spreading of waves at the water surface, which is switching its character with distance from longitudinal into transverse waves and back into longitudinal waves again. It corresponds the layered fractally nested character of Universe and observable reality.

For example, from terrestrial perspective the epicycle model of solar system appears relevant. With increasing scope this model has been replaced with heliocentric model but now the evolution of galactic arms can be described with epicycle model again. It's just the number of observable objects, which makes epicycle or heliocentric model more relevant.

After all, the acceptation/refusal of aether model is of the same emergent evolution. Before some time old Greeks believed in Aether, later (Newton) this concept has been replaced with concept of absolute space. In 19th century the aether based models were quite popular again, but they're were replaced later with relativity model of space-time. Now the aether model is returning into physics again with model of Higgs field, which is responsible for particle mass.

The emergent character of observable reality can be understood by example of compression of gas, which is changing into fluid or even solid during this. The  density fluctuations of newly formed phase are behaving like another generation of gas particles and when the compression continues, they're condensing and changing into nested fluid phase and solid again. The newly formed phase is embedded into previous generation of matter and this process can be repeated many times.

I presume, the same evolution occurs during pilling and condensation of facts into theories in hyperdimensional causal space. I Czech we have a proverb: "Stokrát nic umořilo osla" which roughly means "A hundred times nothing killed the donkey". The meaning of this proverb is, even the smallest chores are tiresome (if there is too many).

Global warming and galactic superwaves

CfA astronomer Doug Finkbeiner, together with two of his students, Meng Su and Tracy Slatyer, used NASA's Fermi Gamma Ray Telescope to study the diffuse gamma ray emission. They revealed humongous bubbles of high energy emission protruding about 50,000 light-years above and below the galaxy, and centered on its nucleus. Recently, it was confirmed independently from IBEX observations, the Sun going to enter soon a million-degree galactic cloud of interstellar gas.

At the time of this prediction, astronomers believed that the cores of galaxies, including our own, become active ("explode") about every 10 to 100 million years and stay active for about a million years. Since our own Galactic core presently appears quiescent, they believed it would likely remain inactive for many tens of millions of years. Although in 1977, astronomer Jan Oort cited evidence that our Galactic core has been active within the past 10,000 years. In Ph.D. dissertation, Paul LaViolette hypothesized that galactic core explosions recur about every 10,000 years and last for several hundred to a few thousand years. He was the first to suggest such a short recurrence time for galactic core explosions and that our own Galactic core undergoes Seyfert-like explosions with similar frequency. In 1983 Paul LaViolette presented evidence to the scientific community indicating that galactic core explosions actually occur about every 13,000 - 26,000 years for major outbursts and more frequently for lesser events. The emitted cosmic rays escape from the core virtually unimpeded. As they travel radially outward through the Galaxy, they form a spherical shell that advances at a velocity approaching the speed of light.

LaViolette's research suggests that the Sun also became highly active as dust and gas falling onto its surface induced extreme flaring activity. Together with the radiation influx from the Sun's dust cocoon, this caused the Sun's corona and photosphere to inflate, much as is observed today in dust-choked stars called "T Tauri stars." These various solar effects caused atmospheric warming and inversion conditions that facilitated glacial growth which brought on ice age conditions. On occasions when the solar radiation influx to the Earth became particularly high, the ice age climate warmed, initiating episodes of rapid glacial melting and continental flooding. There is evidence that one particularly tragic solar flare event occurred around 12,900 years ago during a period when the Sun was particularly active. This involved the release of an immense coronal mass ejection which engulfed the Earth and induced a mass animal extinction. Details of this scenario are described in Paul LaViolette's book Earth Under Fire as well as in a series of journal articles he has published. Astronomical observations show the last major Galactic core explosion occurred as recently as 10,000 to 15,000 years ago.

LaViolette has an analysis of this evidence of a superwave event on his blog (YT video). The geometry of the bubbles coincide with a superwave event occuring approximately 26000 years ago, which is supported by evidence in the ice core record. Data obtained from polar ice core samples show evidence of this cosmic ray event as well as other cosmic ray intensity peaks from earlier times.

Clever individuals do not make the group smarter

This post is a reaction to the recent article (more details) in which individual brainpower contributes little to collective smarts. Instead, it’s social awareness -- the ability to pick up on emotional cues in others -- that seems to determine how smart a group can be.

When we write something new in internet discussion, we just get negative voting usually, because people aren't prepared to get new generally valid information from individuals at all. Instead of this, the more irrelevant and widespread is the internet meme in your answers, the higher score you get - because it's considered "witty". Actually you're just repeating things, which most of people are already expecting to listen unconsciously. Most of people don't expect to hear some revolutionary ideas at all - instead of this, they're feeling confounded, if not confused when being confronted with them. It should be pointed out, the poor language skills are making the sharing of emotions much more difficult, then the sharing of logical information. In addition, socially successful people tend to ignore logical arguments.

In another words, if you want to convince people for something clever or good, you have to manipulate them for it emotionally... Emotions, emotions, emotions...

Unfortunately it works in both directions, as Joseph Goebels knew already.

Actually, in dense aether theory a rather simple wave spreading model can be applied to this situation. This model renders human society like particle system, where every particle exhibits it's own surface gradient of information density, i.e. the intelligence. Theories, i.e. well accepted paradigms of human thinking correspond the density gradients at the water surface and the intelligent ideas are corresponding causual, i.e. tranverse waves in causual space, similar to ripples at the water surface. The emotional feelings correspond the longitudinal waves instead, similar to underwater sound waves.

The underwater waves are weaker but they're spreading in much faster way - whereas surface waves tend to bounce from every gradient of information density (i.e. intelligence). Very bright people are behaving like black holes in this model - they're collecting all informations freely, but their experience cannot be shared easily, because of total reflection mechanism at their surface gradient of intelligence density. With compare to it, very dumb people are behaving like mirror-like bubbles with respect to transverse waves instead: they're empty and they're even reflecting all causal information coming from outside.

A well known kind of symmetry between formal (IQ) and nonformal intelligence (EQ) exists here, though: dumb people are often quite sensitive emotionally and they can be manipulated easily in this way, whereas logical argument doesn't count very much for them. Instead of it, formally bright people are rather emotional nuts and they lack EQ and social skills often - compare the Sheldon Cooper character from The Big Bang Theory sitcom.

The only way, in which black hole can radiate it's information to outside is the gravitational waves, which appear like Howking radiation. This mechanism is relatively subtle though, which explains, why really intelligent ideas are propagating slowly to the rest of society. Nevertheless, they can be supported with sufficiently emotional propaganda. For example, string theory (which is actually quite incomprehensible for laymans) is promoted with shots of beauty violinists in play at Nova TV show.

Should journalists second guess the scientific truth?

This post is a reaction to recent article of Lubos Motl of the same name. It's not surprising, Motl supports his restrictive stance, regarding the rights to expression of private opinion from the side of journalists. But we shouldn't neglect the fact, with respect to climatic science Lubos is just an educated journalist like everyone else and he violates his own rules flagrantly, because he is trying to influent public meaning massively all the time. He is just trying to dispute rights of journalists to the same activity, which he dedicated most of his time - and because he uses Google Adsense on his blog, he's even earning some money for it like professional journalists.

In general, opinion of experts matters from intrinsic perspective only. But just because experts are specialized to narrow area of their private interest, they're not overmuch qualified in judging of their opinions in wider context - on the contrary, they tend to occupy their stances rather blindly - the more, the more they feel being an experts in given area. In this context the reading of articles The era of expert failure by Arnold Kling,  Why experts are usually wrong by David H. Freeman and Why the experts missed the crash by Phill Tetlock (in Czech) may be useful not only for Lubos Motl.

Niels Bohr: "An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field".

Higgs boson and fourth generation of quarks

This post is inspired by recent blog post of Tomaso Dorigo, who announced finding of Higgs boson with mass of about 150 GeV. By official media coverage it's just a rumour, that's got out of hand, as expressed by Fermilab's spokes'girl. More interestingly is, what's behind this rumour - and I don't mean over imagination or exploding ego of Mr. Dorigo, as Fermilab's Twitter post implies spitefully. Or do you really believe, Fermilab would give its official stance through Twitter? Such anonymous message is even much less reliable, then the original blogpost of Mr. Dorigo. But such way of  prematurely presentation of results and their vetoing indicates, how mainstream physics maneuvers between less or more opened tendency to announce findings as soon as possible for the sake of publicity and/or grant support ex una parte - and  the demonstrative expression of conservative skepticism on the other hand.

IMO Higgs boson is the same fuzzy unparticle stuff, like the virtual bosons responsible for Casimir force - their effective mass depends on surface geometry. Just at the case of Higgs boson the upper bound is limited by mass of top quark, so it can form a fuzzy signal, corresponding the dilepton channel of top quark decay, which was observed already. If even more massive quark exists, then its corresponding Higgs should indeed exist too and the whole concept of unique "God's particle" becomes fringe.

Mr. Dorigo himself putted the nail into coffin of Higgs boson by his previous announcement of fourth generation of quarks in 450 GeV range. Before finding of neutrino oscillation, the Standard Model contained 19 arbitrary dimensionless constants describing the masses of the particles and the strengths of the electroweak and strong forces. After the discovery of neutrino mass the new Standard Model requires 26 fundamental dimensionless constants, whose numerical values are, to the best of present understanding, arbitrary. Currently Standard Model is indeed incompatible with fourth generation of quarks or neutrinos, but thanks so high number of constants flexible enough to implement even higher particle generations. It's sort of regressive epicycle model keeping the Ptolemaic physics of modern era alive.

We can say, this finding is of approximatelly the same relevance like the previous finding of Higgs boson anounced (about three sigma in error level). And quess what? In this time the blog article was handled by NewScientist quite seriously and it got full coverage in media. The whole trick here is, most of physicists actually do not believe in concept of Higgs boson on background - despite the massive propaganda in CERN related media, the main purpose is to justify expensive experiments at LHC.

The title of recent another NewScientist article "In SUSY we trust: What the LHC is really looking for" (full version) illustrates clearly, physicists are aware of the conceptual problems of Higgs field concept. The article should be interpreted like: "Uhm, well, ... we actually don't believe, Higgs boson will be ever found at LHC - so we should concentrate to supersymmetry instead. ."

With respect to AdS/CFT duality the success or problems with particle search at Planck scale will be replicated/mirrored at cosmological scales (WIMPs detection) and vice-versa. Therefore it's not so strange, when dual situation recently appeared in media, when scientists started to speculate, (primordial) gravitational waves cannot be found at all due the "quantum-spread", which would render detectors of gravitational waves useless in the same way, like the LHC at quantum scale.

This is an example, how seemingly spontaneous scientific PR is basically working - layman public should trace subliminal messages of it for to get the realistic picture about opinion of this close sectarian community in the noise of PR journalism and propaganda.

Danger of positive approach

Few weeks ago, Lubos Motl has won the 2008 Weblog Award price for Best European (Non UK) Blog, which may become a surprise for someone, proponents of dual theories in particular. Whereas AWT is rather invariant/symmetric with respect to string /LQG duality, we can make an attempt for independent analysis of this result. The positive thing may be, Lubos is compatriot of mine, we even both born in the same city - which is not so difficult, after all, as the Czech Republic is really tiny country. Czech Republic is birthplace of many brilliant and intelligent people and beautiful women as well, which is partly due its location in central Europe on the crossroad of many trade routes, along which the mixing of various races can occur.



On the other hand, I'm not very sure, whether Lubos is a typical representative of Czech science, society the less - which is traditionally rather balanced in its opinions, if not opportunistic due it's sensitive geopolitic role of small boundary country between zones of interest of East an West Europe blocks. Buffer countries are often playing a role of branes, which leads to the fragmentation of state boundaries in this area. Aether foam gets more dense at place of density gradient due the potential energy content, where two dual space-time branes/gradients intersects/interfere mutually.



Whereas Weblog Award is rather representative competition, it's still based on results of surprisingly limited number of votes, because the first place in Best European Blog category was a matter of just some 700 voices. Which isn't really too much in the world of anonymous proxies, whereas Goggle is doing a lot more than 1000 queries per second (about 25 queries per second per server). Anyway, Motl's price is well deserved for his frenetic activity and it's even logical in certain extent, because his postings are often quite entertaining and informative and Reference Frame blog is one of few ones, which I'm visiting regularly. Because modern people are basically consumers, Motl's graphomania plays well with their needs, because average visitor can always find something new in his blog everyday.

If so, where's the problem?

Even if we ignore the excentric and subjectively ugly design (typical for Motl's sites) and sometimes unstable behavior of scripts on his site (the purpose of which is to prohibit Motl's opponents in visiting and posting at times), we shouldn't neglect the fact, popularity of this blog is partially based on strongly biased opinions and ad hominem attacks, followed by personally motivated censorship of discussions, which manifest itself by sectarian character of people, which are allowed to post there (simillia simillibus curantur). From these reasons, Motl is often perceived as a controversial person in blogosphere. Personally, I do not believe, most of people, who voted in Weblog Award Poll didn't realize autistic and asocial character of "humble correspondent's" blog - the problem is, the system of voting didn't enable them to express their opinion. Negative voices simply don't count here.

This is a general property of contemporary voting systems, which enable only positive votes, which leads to high degree of populism in side of politicians and ignorance and lack of interests about negative aspects of politics on the side of publicity. Even morally controversial politicians may become successful in this system, if they're is sufficiently active in another areas, in self promotion of personality cult in particular. I believe, this MAY be one of reasons of society problems with its own political representations: voters simply have no veto privilege - they can be only partly responsible. In natural evolution such unbalanced approach to fitness function would suffer consequences, because it violates the equilibrium of supply and demand.

As I'm not expert in social sciences, I'm not informed, whether such approach was proposed or even tested in history and which reasons has lead people to consider only positive voting approach in anonymous elections. Maybe it could have adverse effects and it would lead to undesirable level of opportunism between politicians, I don't know. But as I've met in many cases, most trivial ideas were often ignored for long time just because of their simplicity or generally low asset, which can manifest only under high civilization density. Maybe it could even save Germany from nacism in the mid of 30's of the last century, which was rather inclined to Hitler's populism. If so, maybe the time of more dualistic/symmetric voting system just come up.

AWT and evolution of life

By AWT the life is the highly organized form of matter existence, whose properties and abilities are determined by extremely high degree of nested condensation from space-time perspective. Therefore the life formation occurs always near phase interface, where the highest density of space-time gradients can occur due mutual interference of energy waves constituting both phases. The highest concentration of gradients promotes the evolution of maximal complexity, so we can expect the life formation exactly at the middle of dimensional scale of Universe on high dimensional fractal coast of lakes at islands of ancient oceans, covering surface of planets inside of galaxies forming fractal surface of black holes, where solid, fluid and gaseous phase can met together.

Because life is space-time artifact, not just spatial one, the high density of temporal events, i.e. mutations is required to enable the gradual evolution of complexity. This requires an environment, capable of periodic changes and enabling the dissipation of energy in each step. Periodic and tidal waves of ancient oceans can provide such dissipation, because they're paced slowly enough to enable natural selection. Earth rotation and rotational axis inclination, presence of sufficiently massive Sun and Moon provides another level of periodicity due tidal forces, thus increase randomness of evolutionary process.

By AWT the life evolution follows an ancient Oparin's coacervate theory. Coacervates are tiny oily droplets, which are precipitating spontaneously from saturated solutions of various organic compounds, the racemic mixtures of amino-acids and sugars in particular. Under high concentration and some shaking so called reverse micelles or even double layered liposomes can be formed. Such liposomes can behave like walking droplets, described recently:

We can imagine, such droplets were precipitated from waves of ancient lakes at places, where organic compounds were pre-concentrated by wind and solar radiation and they were thrown at coast surface, covered by various surfactants. The droplets are attracted to them, so they started to climb around coast, collecting these materials in their cells. The most successful droplets become so large by such way, they fragmented into smaller ones under impact of next breaker wave, and whole process has repeated many times. Blastulation can be considered as a rudiment of this process by now.

During this the less successful ("low fitness") droplets disappeared gradually on behalf of those better ones, which have collected the proper surfactants into their liposome bodies. Later the concurrence has lead into preference of droplets, which were not only able to collect surfactants, but even to collect the chemicals, able to synthesize them inside of cells. These droplets has become able to digest food after then, so they become hunters of less successful droplets, not just passive collectors of matter from outside. Of course, such competition has accelerated the evolution a much.

And this saga continues till now...

Note that in this early stage of life evolution the inheritance was provided by physical mechanism completely, simply by dividing of cells together with their interior and surface membranes. By AWT the evolution of life follows exactly the evolution of inorganic matter in more nested dimensional scales, i.e. no ribonucleic acids, chromosomes or other contemporary subtleties were required here. We can consider, this mechanism could be reproduced in vitro under proper conditions without problem. Recently living examples of walking droplets were found: a single-celled giant amoebas of very ancient origin.

From AWT follows, such amoebas were first unicellular organisms by the same way, like sponges of foamy structure can be considered as a first multicellular animals. After all, the tissue of higher organisms is rudiment of foam with flat surface as well. The smaller structures (structures bellow human scale of about 1,7 cm) are having concave structures (organelles), while larger tends to become convex (trees, fungi), because they're kept together by surface tension forces. Therefore first organisms were relativelly large from their very beginning, because electromagnetic interaction itself doesn't provide necessary level of complexity and inheritance at molecular level.

Concerning the creationist approach to life formation, the "intelligent constructer" idea is dual to Aether concept and it can be replaced by it easily. From remote space-time perspective every gradualistic evolution becomes discontinuous stepwise artifact by the same way, like event horizon of black holes, when observed from large distance. Every logical explanation is concentrating non-causal assumptions on background, so it becomes a sort of religion. The belief doesn't differ from adherence to causal logics too much, because both approaches tends to tautology by gradual elimination of postulates.

Deism can be understood as an religious approach to Occam's razor criterion, whereas AWT is driven by causual logic. For deeper understanding of God concept we should understand creator paradigm better. Currently it seems, it's just our civilization, which created the black hole, where we are living now. Maybe the moment of final understanding of God becomes the very end of civilization at the same moment, maye quantum uncertainty will protect us from such destiny. Should we kill people like Zephir a well before they can bring an apple of ultimate understanding of reality? Or can just these people prohibits us from destiny of quantum suicide experiment?