DNA sequencing is now mainstream science. We don't need a panopticon of ancient DNA for the method to work.
Since most of the structures Behe and Dembski point to evolved in the distant past, it certainly seems like they wouldn't be included in the reasonable people you spoke of: "Of course, any given designer might have given up designing and taken a day off, but if species emerge through statistically normal events, then most reasonable people would assume that the rest of evolution could have happened through similarly unshocking means."
In fact, based on the fact that creationists/intelligent design advocates already come up with creative ways to ignore the speciation going on right in front of our eyes, I doubt that decreasing the error bars on modern evolution would affect their views on ancient evolution in the slightest.
The point is we need a statistical test developed for this sort of stuff regardless of the whole evolution debate, and when we have one developed, we could apply it to the DNA record for the past and see what it turns up.
As I said, if we had a Jurassic park time machine to collect DNA samples from the past, that might be feasible. But without a time machine, DNA simply doesn't last long enough for any sort of rigorous analysis. Even using a time machine to collect DNA samples, it's not clear that it would be possible to distinguish a rapid change in natural selection pressures from the work of a supernatural designer.
I doubt it would support ID, but it does make ID falsifiable.
I've previously listed a few experiments that already could have falsified evolution. Your fantasy doesn't count because it's too vague and requires technology that doesn't exist and may very well be impossible. That's why you wouldn't be able to publish it in a reputable evolutionary biology journal, but if this bill goes through maybe your chances will improve.
Here's a good analogy. When I was debating Brett, I proposed a "crazy hypothesis of a non-biologist" to falsify abiogenesis. I think your argument is similar to mine (albeit more vague- I didn't see you describe the exact steps necessary to identify a statistically abnormal mutation).
But I was describing abiogenesis, which scientists consider more tentative and mysterious than evolution (a separate topic.) And I later became more skeptical of my own proposed falsification, calling it an example of my "ignorance of exobiology". These sorts of musings shouldn't be conflated with the actual falsifications that have been repeatedly applied to evolution.
But all this is beside the point anyway, because Beelzebud was right to point out that "intelligent design" argues that "irreducably complex" structures like flagella can't possibly have evolved naturally. The list of these "irreducably complex" grows without bound, because it's a scientifically useless concept that embodies the "argument from incredulity".
Occasionally I think climatologists’ arguments are wrong (like RC.org and your stance towards Watts)... [ShakaUVM]
... the temperature station project was worthwhile, and various (real) papers have credited Watts for his work.[ShakaUVM]
... both Watts and the Mc's have occasionally made actual contributions and been cited in the literature.[ShakaUVM]
I could copy and paste links from thread after thread where you had to be dragged kicking and screaming to make even the smallest admission that Watts' empirical station survey had any work. I could post all of those links, and make you look stupid. Or I could just say it outright. Which I just did.[ShakaUVM]
Due to cognitive dissonance, most IDers would rather have their fingernails pulled out than talk about all the cases where they think the theory of evolution works just fine (similar to how Khayman had to be dragged kicking and screaming to finally admit that *maybe* there was some *small* benefit to AGW-denier Watts' station survey work)...[ShakaUVM]
Well, I'm neither an AGW-denier nor a creationist, but at least Mr. Fuckwit would have some basis for calling me an AGW denier, even though my criticisms are valid; the CRU was behaving in an anti-scientific sort of way, and the investigation rightly called them out for it. Calling me a creationist, though, is as stupid a criticism as calling me short. [ShakaUVM]
FWIW, I believe in AGW, and think it’s a serious problem. Does that sound like a crackpot creationist to you? No? Oh, I guess you don’t fucking know what you’re talking about, do you? [ShakaUVM]
... referencing the Salem Hypothesis (a reference to Creationism) *was* insulting. [ShakaUVM]
Thanks for making the record. You sounded just like the Creationists that get really evasive when pressed to explain some of their answers. In fact, saying that they don’t have time to educate people is one of their favorite lines. [ShakaUVM]
Years ago, I wrote an article defining science using falsifiability, and explained why ID/creationism doesn't qualify. In it, I pointed out that "Intelligent Design" advocates are humorously evasive about the identity of the Designer, but "wossname" has to be the funniest example I've ever heard. Anyway, a computer scientist replied to my article, saying "I'm a creationist" then claimedthat a prominent atheist scientist's belief in panspermia amounted to secular belief in ID/creationism. He argued that "evolution is almost infinitely adaptable like this, and is thus unfalsifiable" which can be rephrased as "you can prove nearly anything using evolution" or "you can sort of argue anything using evolution" or "... With the same rationale, evolution is impossible to falsify as well...". Like most creationists, he used the term evolutionistliberally but at least he didn't babble about ID excluding creationism. He also didn't pull a Ben Stein by trying to link Darwin to Nazis. Brett's real classy like that.
Better phrasing (will be cleaned up in final version): My failure to explain how the extra inertial mass of E/c^2 manifests in the container experiment
Nuclei of atoms get a significant fraction of their apparent mass from the nuclear binding energy from the strong force.
It's true that an individual nucleon (such as a proton or neutron) gets a significant fraction of its mass not from its constituent quarks but from the strong force. For example, a proton's mass is 938 MeV but its two up quarks and single down quark only sum to (at most) 12.4 MeV.
But nuclei of atoms are actually slightly less massive than the individual neutrons and protons that comprise them. I believe this effect has a different sign than the binding of quarks into individual nucleons because quarks can't ever be physically separated. It's also much smaller; iron has the most tightly bound nucleus, and its binding energy is only 8.8 MeV per nucleon. Though vastly larger than chemical energies, this is still less than one percent of its mass.
As you pointed out, E=MC^2, so any energetic entity has a gravitational mass under relativity.
... and thus also has an inertial mass through the equivalence principle. My failure to explain why the container shouldn't exhibit an inertial mass of E/mc^2 doesn't invalidate the equivalence principle. If light didn't exhibit inertial mass in that sense, the container would be a magical fuel tank for a photonic rocket. Most of the constraints of relativistic travel are related to the need to accelerate the reaction mass in the fuel tank. If the photons can simply be stored in a mirrored container and accelerated for free until they're allowed to escape out the back of the rocket, that would represent an unbelievably efficient space drive. And I mean "unbelievably" quite literally here.
I think the Higgs Field is better described as the "source of inertia", as opposed to the source of mass
Photons don't interact with the Higgs, and photons certainly have zero rest mass. Most of the introductory material I've read seems to use that terminology, but again I'm not a particle physicist.
Since photons do not interact with it at all, that's why I was saying that you could argue that photons do not have inertia (on top of the fact that you cannot apply a force to them to change their velocity).
Velocity is a vector, so gravitational lensing and reflection are both examples of changing the velocity of light. Refraction is an example of changing the direction and the speed of light. In all these cases, equal and opposite reactions occur but are simply too small to observe. The sun is gravitationally attracted to a beam of light that it deflects, a solar sail experiences a force, and the material interface that refracts the light really does experience a force as it deflects and slows down each photon.
I no longer think the "inertial mass" of a container full of photons will be due to more frequent collisions with the bottom mirror. After further thought, that's not true. But the second argument still seems compelling, so I wonder how the effect would show up in a literal container experiment. Perhaps the bottom mirror would reflect a slightly blue shifted photon, and the top mirror reflects a slightly red shifted photon? This might explain the pressure asymmetry but depends on quantum mechanics to show that the momentum change of reflecting a photon depends on the wavelength. I was hoping to come up with an explanation that depended only on special relativity, but no such luck.
... I've thought a bit more about that question of if photons of light have inertia. While they do have momentum, I am more convinced now that they don't have inertia. One can define inertia as the resistance of mass to changes in velocity, right? The root cause of this classic Newtonian mechanic is the interaction of objects with the Higgs field, right? That's what grants particles inertia. But photons do not interact with the Higgs field, so they don't have inertia. [ShakaUVM]
I've never taken graduate-level elementary particle physics, so I don't know much about the Higgs field. My classmates who have taken those classes and moved on to work at the LHC tell me that most theorists consider the discovery of the Higgs boson to be very likely.
Personally, I'm not sure how to rule out the notion that inertia is caused by viewing zero point energy in an accelerating reference frame. I'm sure the Higgs field really is more likely to be the cause of inertia, but right now I don't have enough time to wade through the relevant literature to learn why.
Anyway, you're right to say that the "inertial mass" of an object can be measured by placing it in a container and determining how much force is necessary to accelerate the container. Or, rather, how much extra force is necessary compared to experiments performed when the container is empty.
Now imagine a one dimensional container with perfectly reflective inner walls. I claim that if this container is filled with photons having total energy E, then more force would be needed to accelerate the container after filling it. More precisely, the experiment would show that the container has an extra "inertial mass" E/c^2 compared to its empty state.
Here's why.
If the container isn't accelerating, the trapped photons will exert equal pressure on both walls of the container as they're reflected back and forth, just as with solar sails. Accelerating the container, though, will cause the mirror on the bottom to reflect those photons more often than the mirror on the top. Thus on average the bottom mirror will experience more pressure than the top mirror, and this pressure asymmetry will mimic an "inertial mass" of E/c^2.
In fact, I think any method of measuring inertial mass would conclude that photons have inertia. That's because active gravitational mass in general relativity is defined by the stress-energy tensor, which includes the energy (and momentum) in electromagnetic fields. Active and passive gravitational masses need to be equal to conserve momentum, and the equivalence principle says that passive gravitational mass equals inertial mass.
In other words, the container curves spacetime more when it's filled with photons. Therefore its gravitational mass has increased, and via the equivalence principle so has its inertial mass.
This depends on my interpretation of the equivalence principle (and the principle itself) being correct. It also implies that pressure has inertia, because pressure contributes to the stress energy tensor. Interestingly, that implies tension has negative inertia because tension is just negative pressure. Greg Egan uses this concept masterfully in a short
Finally got this comment through the filter after removing MANY of the links.
In a field where all you really have are climate data and computer models, refusing to share them with the world is akin to a physicist claiming that he’s invented Cold Fusion, but refusing to show exactly how (except perhaps to a couple of his friends). Gavin of course defended him saying that while maybe THEIR data wasn’t available, HIS data was available, and so that made it all better. (Which it didn’t – it rather just highlighted their shady behavior).... [ShakaUVM]
Gavin wasn't just saying that other data was available, he was saying that CRU doesn't do any primary data collection:
... Claims that data has been destroyed or lost are untrue. Claims that there is no access to the raw temperature data are untrue. There is nothing in any of the CRU archives that is particularly special or noteworthy and that isn't mostly available to anyone already via NOAA....[Gavin Schmidt]
... If you want the very original hand-written records from individual stations, ask the National Met. Service in the relevant country, not the people who collate the homogenised records for use in tracking climate change.[Gavin Schmidt]
The raw data is in the custody of the met services who originated it. CRU is just a collation, not a temperature measuring organisation.[Gavin Schmidt]
No data has been destroyed, the original files and numbers are with the national weather services that provided them. Removing a copy of a original file because it is not useful for my purposes is not 'deleting data'[Gavin Schmidt]
The raw data is the GHCN data (v2.mean.Z) (publicly available, as has been the case for decades).[Gavin Schmidt]
Unsurprisingly, that's also what the reviews said:
The Unit does virtually no primary data acquisition but has used data from published archives and has collaborated with people who have collected data.... [Oxburgh panel, p2]
The CRU dataset, which forms the land surface component of the HadCRUT global temperature record, was compiled with the aim of comprehensiveness. The majority of the data in it are derived from the same freely-available raw data sets used by NOAA and NASA....[UK House of Commons Inquiry, p13]
Any independent researcher may freely obtain the primary station data. It is impossible for a third party to withhold access to the data.... Regarding data availability, there is no basis for the allegations that CRU prevented access to raw data. It was impossible for them to have done so.[Muir Russell Review, p48,53]
Somehow, you managed to twist the fact that it was impossible for CRU to prevent access to the raw data into a
Do you have any reputable citations showing professional climatologists engaging in groupthink or responding badly to reasoned criticism? I ask because, once again, your description of the climatology community sounds like a description of a cult... [Dumb Scientist]
You mean like how they circled the wagons around Phil Jones, even when actual bad behavior on his part was discovered? For example: [ShakaUVM]
“This has some similarity to the CRU email theft, where precious little was discovered from among thousands of emails, but a few sentences were plucked out of context, deliberately misinterpreted (like “hide the decline”) and then hyped into “Climategate”.”[RealClimate]
Or you can just read the editor’s comments left in the response sections of RC.org. Just skimming through that above article, here’s an interplay between Pielke and Stefan. [ShakaUVM]
Coincidentally, Pielke Jr. had similar things to say about that interplay. That's the interplay where he asked a bunch of 'questions' like "Was it appropriate for the IPCC to make stuff up about my views?". Then Stefan replied:
Clearly there are different views on this, which is why we called this graph "debatable". But let's keep things in perspective: we're discussing Supplementary Material and a response to one of those 90,000 review comments now, not even the report itself. You've been working hard to scandalize your personal quibbles with IPCC here - how consistent is this with your self-proclaimed role as "honest broker"? Stefan
That link leads to an in-depth comment, and neither seem to constitute "responding badly to reasoned criticism." In fact, it's not clear that Pielke's rant counts as "reasoned criticism" in the first place. As far as I can tell, he's got
Second, you mentioned the “0.3C per decade” prediction from emission Scenario A, but you’ve repeatedly ignored Scenario B which Hansen himself called “more plausible” in 1988. [Dumb Scientist]
That’s great, but I’m not talking about Hansen88, but AR1, which focuses on Scenario A. It’s possible this was done to scare politicians into action, but when one reads it, the +0.3C increase appears to be the best guess. [ShakaUVM]
No, what you and Michaels are doing isn't "great" in any sense of the word. Again, by "summarizing" the IPCC AR1 WG1 report as though it only gave one scenario, you pulled a "Pat Michaels".
As I've explained ad nauseum, the dynamical nature of climate models means that evaluating a GCM ensemble requires comparing projected forcings to the actual forcings. In other words, each scenario is an "if-then" statement: "If greenhouse gas concentrations rise at rate X, then temperatures will rise at rate Y." You and Michaels not only chopped off the first part of that sentence, you both presented it as the only scenario... which "coincidentally" makes it seem like scientists are discrediting themselves by making bad predictions.
The correct approach is to open the AR1 to the Annex on page 333, and examine the rates of CO2 rise given in the top-left of figure A.3. Scenario "A" (BaU in that plot) only applies if CO2 levels exceed 400ppm by 2010, which hasn't happened. The top right graph also shows that methane rises to over 2000ppm in that scenario by 2010, and once again that hasn't happened either.
Just like in Hansen88, AR1's scenario B is the closest match to the actual forcings. That's not really surprising, considering that Hansen was a contributing author for sections 6 and 8, table 2.2 on p52 repeatedly references Hansen88's radiative forcings and corrects a typo on p9360 of Hansen88, and chapter 3 repeatedly references Hansen88. Unsurprisingly, the emissionsscenariosused in bothstudies seem very similar.
I thought you'd be able to learn something from the eerie parallels between your mistake and Michaels's, but apparently I was wrong. Again.
Unlike many other scientists, I don't think Michaels is lying because his "rebuttal" seems to indicate that he's trying to draw conclusions based entirely on each scenario's legend, and that he doesn't understand the difference between dynamical and empirical models. If he thinks that climate models are empirical, it makes sense that he wouldn't understand the reason for making three different projections. In that case
... the paradox that I mention is this: even if we have no global warming, the +0C result is within the band of error bars, so this counts as verification of the prediction. But a +5C change counts as invalidating the prediction.... [ShakaUVM]
If for some reason you decide to smooth the GCM output and sensor data at only 10 years, the error bars will be large. That's why professional climatologists usually smooth data and model output using ~20 year averages. [Dumb Scientist]
If you'd like to engage in a gedankenexperiment, consider if predictions after 20 years had error bars from +0C to +10C. (Error bars themselves are fuzzy things, but I digress.) The same paradox applies to the notions of falsification and verification. No change verifies AGW, but a massive +20C change falsifies AGW (technically, the current-best-guess-AGW theory). [ShakaUVM]
Huh? You quoted me and repeated "20 years" as though your statement was a response to mine. But you're talking about waiting "after 20 years" and implying that we need to perform gedankenexperiments rather than just reading the peer-reviewed literature? I haven't ever been talking about waiting 20 years. This whole time I've been talking about the applied smoothing. There's no waiting, no "after 20 years". So there's no need to make up numbers. In fact, I've already shown you the actual dependence of the error bars on the applied smoothing (or trend length- same idea.) Sadly, this isn't the first time you've ignored this point:
... short term trends are not useful (a point I've made repeatedly). But you can see that the longer temperature trends are going to start being useful... [Gavin Schmidt]
So multiple scientists have already tried to tell you that longer temperature trends have smaller error bars than shorter trends, but you're still blissfully fantasizing that the opposite is true. According to #6, you get another 5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts the results of a widely accepted real experiment.
Clearly, we need to review the difference between an empirical climate model and a dynamical climate model.
An empirical climate model:
Incorporates past temperature data into its sample data set, and predicts temperatures without requiring one to specify radiative forcings as the IPCC emission scenarios do.
Is guaranteed to perform well over the sample data set; the real test would come with new data. Thus anyone claiming accuracy over the sample data would be laughed out of any scientific conference.
A dynamical climate model:
Doesn't incorporate past temperature data into its sample data set, instead the model describes the laws of physics.
As a result, the model requires input in the form of estimated and projected radiative forcing histories which are specified in the IPCC emission scenarios.
Thus, a dynamical model predicts the climate's response to changes in forcings like the sun's brightness, CO2 levels, etc. One example prediction of modern GCM's is the value of the equilibrium climate sensitivity, which has units of (degrees C) / (doubling CO2 concentration).
... Depending on how puckish I’m feeling, climatology could or could not be a “science”. Science is defined by empirical observations, hypothesis generation, testing, and hypothesis confirmation or falsification. Climatology doesn’t meet up to this full set of requirements to be science, so it, like a lot of other fields, fall somewhere in the middle of the science divide.... [ShakaUVM]
The last time you brought up this subject, I linked this similar exchange:
... Take the Big Bang. That takes a lot of faith to believe in a theory that has yet to actually be attempted - have we managed to run another big bang?...[Brontosaurus]
That's not the way science works. In science, observations are compared to predictions, which are then used to modify the theory to make new predictions. There's no fundamental distinction between science performed in a lab like chemistry and science performed through telescopes like cosmology. (Or any other discipline like paleontology, forensic science or paleoclimatology, for that matter.) [Dumb Scientist]
But I actually like coby's version better:
In my experience, this claim is supported by the notion that wrt to earth's climate you can not run any controlled experiments and thereby falsify any hypotheses. No complete ocean-atmosphere system in the lab = impossibility of scientific experimentation = not a science. I think the only effective and direct rebuttal of that is listing all the other sciences that whomever is making this argument would have to likewise reject. Cosmology, astonomy, geology, evolutionary biology to get started, I'm sure the list would be very long. It is unlikely that you are arguing with a serious philosopher so they are not likely to like the direction their own argument logically takes them.[coby]
What's the root cause of this confusion?
Unique events can and do all the time (it's a consequence of the probabilistic nature of the universe). A unique event is simply one that we haven't observed before or since. Science can't deal with unique events, which are often the most interesting things to us. All scientific studies are uncertain to different degrees; as you stated, studies in physics are probably pretty reliable....[ShakaUVM]
Singular events. Science can't handle singular events very well, or not at all.... It is fundamentally useless for knowledge about anything which cannot be reproduced... The scientific method certainly doesn't deserve the religion-like attitude of worship Popper and many people on here seem to give it.[ShakaUVM]
Here's a good example of coby's point: despite the fact that cosmic inflation was a unique, singular event, your comments suggest that you aren't applying your definition of
The AGW community... refuse to look at green technologies like nuclear because they’re ignorant.... [ShakaUVM]
Alreadydiscussed, but note that nuclear plants do generate small amounts of CO2 due to current enrichment and mining methods, as well as the curing of concrete containment domes. Averaged over the projected life of the reactors, this CO2 is only a few percent of the emissions from an equivalently powerful coal plant. Pebble bed reactors might be capable of safe operation without containment domes, but that unfortunate incident in Germany makes it unlikely that they'll be built that way for a while. Nuclear power is our best hope of maintaining a prosperous civilization. Please don't oversell it by making claims it can't live up to yet.
... It is possible to reduce our CO2 by 50%, maily because we can attack the problem in a centralized way at the power plant level. 0 CO2 emission is simply not on the table, but the fact that climatologists think it is doable is yet another bit of evidence for the fact that being good at science doesn’t make you good at policy. [ShakaUVM]
Dr. Knutti's emissions graph makes it clear that he's examining a scenario in which CO2 emissions only drop to half of 2010 values by ~2030, and a quarter of 2010 values by ~2070. That doesn't seem too different from the Lieberman-McCain "Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act of 2007" which seemed doable.
Because much of the CO2 emitted by nuclear plants is emitted in a pulse as the concrete dome cures, any nuclear plants built in the next few decades won't be emitting CO2 past ~2070 (unless we still haven't perfected mining and enrichment in the next ~60 years.) As you say, centralized power plants are easiest to upgrade, but we've got ~60 years to perfect electric cars in order to hit Knutti's target. They certainly can't universally replace gasoline vehicles in time (especially in developing countries) but biofuels can be produced carbon-neutrally (albeit inefficiently at present) in a centralized fashion. Distributing biofuels just like gasoline will avoid the need to make and sell billions of electric cars by 2100. Even if that fails, I'd be astonished if ~60 years isn't enough time for humanity to devise and implement a carbon sequestration program capable of making up the difference.
In fact, the only way the human race could possibly fail to tackle climate change would be if there were legions of crackpots arguing that climate "scientists" are actually just deceitful, shady, laughably dishonest, perverting, badly reeking, dogmatic, anti-scientific, idiotic, disingenuous, scurrilous, nefarious, damned, indefensibly guilty, laughably wrong, fundamentally rotten, self-discrediting, fraudulent, bullshitting partisan hacks with something to hide who do bad things, don't fucking know
Aside from the fact that I've never seen evidence of a galaxy without a dark matter halo, the Bullet Cluster has two opposing lobes of dark matter, indicating that each galaxy in the collision had a dark matter halo that flew right through the other dark matter halo. Another similar collision also has opposing two lobes of dark matter. If a collision is ever observed with only a single lobe of dark matter, that would be consistent with our hypothesis. (Though the other objections I raised would still apply.)
First, note that dark matter halos have always been observed around normal matter galaxies. Your example should therefore involve at least four galaxies- two visible colliding galaxies in our own universe, each with a counterpart galaxy that occupies the same physical space in the other universe/brane, which are therefore colliding in that other universe too.
In conventional theory, dark matter interacts with normal matter and with itself only through gravity. These dark matter halos would fly right through each other in a galactic collision, whereas normal matter can't because it also interacts via other forces, most notably the electromagnetic force. That's why the Bullet Cluster's separation of x-ray vs. matter distribution tends to support dark matter rather than MOND.
But if these dark matter halos are simply made of ordinary matter in another universe, they would collide with each other in that universe in the same way that ordinary matter collides in our universe. Thus I don't believe that our hypothesis would result in the same separation of x-ray vs. matter distribution observed in the Bullet Cluster.
Last year Tanuki64 asked a similar question, and I referred him to an anecdote from my senior year of physics undergrad. In 2004, I presented a similar idea to an astrophysicist in my department:
I wonder if "dark matter" is the result of gravitational interactions with galaxies in parallel universes. Suppose parallel universes exist in the same physical "space" we inhabit, and only interact with each other (and us) via gravity. The galaxies in different universes would then clump together, but their disks wouldn't necessarily be aligned. So the total gravity would appear similar to a spherical halo of dark matter. This would explain the too-high velocities of stars at the edges of galaxies and the too-high velocities of galaxies in superclusters.
In 2004, I didn't have enough experience to understand why that astrophysicist rejected my idea by saying that I was trying to explain something we don't understand by invoking something else that we understand even less. Several years later, though, I started to see some cracks in this idea:
2009-07-25 Update: I don't think my hypothesis is consistent with the Bullet cluster data.
2009-07-27 Update: Also, I wonder if galaxies in my imaginary parallel universes really would clump together. They'd certainly be gravitationally attracted to each other, but if each universe has roughly the same density of galaxies, they'd typically have a long way to fall towards each other. As a result, they'd be moving so fast that I doubt any damping mechanisms could have brought them to rest in ~13.7 billion years. But... what if they formed in the same place initially? That would make sense because supermassive black holes likely play a large role in proto-galaxy formation. Gravitational collapse in one universe would trigger collapses in other universes leading to galaxies with small relative velocities. But in that case, it seems like the disks would be aligned because disk formation probably doesn't involve a large percentage of actual physical collisions (any actual astronomers want to help me here?). I think this would result in the wrong velocity profile for stars versus distance from the center of the galaxy? Oh, and all these stars in different universes would cause gravitational lensing events to occur with a much greater frequency than has been observed by the OGLE. Galaxies with non-aligned disks would look even weirder- that implies imply lensing with bizarre relative velocities.
Perhaps. But given the above problems with such an idea, it's more likely that the Great Attractor is simply a massive supercluster in our own universe, even if it's already passed over the horizon.
Slashdot Mirror
That is supercool. I see your point.
If? You say this as though we haven't already observed many speciation events. Or is "advanced, interesting" code for that absurd argument about information in the genome?
Since most of the structures Behe and Dembski point to evolved in the distant past, it certainly seems like they wouldn't be included in the reasonable people you spoke of: "Of course, any given designer might have given up designing and taken a day off, but if species emerge through statistically normal events, then most reasonable people would assume that the rest of evolution could have happened through similarly unshocking means."
In fact, based on the fact that creationists/intelligent design advocates already come up with creative ways to ignore the speciation going on right in front of our eyes, I doubt that decreasing the error bars on modern evolution would affect their views on ancient evolution in the slightest.
As I said, if we had a Jurassic park time machine to collect DNA samples from the past, that might be feasible. But without a time machine, DNA simply doesn't last long enough for any sort of rigorous analysis. Even using a time machine to collect DNA samples, it's not clear that it would be possible to distinguish a rapid change in natural selection pressures from the work of a supernatural designer.
I've previously listed a few experiments that already could have falsified evolution. Your fantasy doesn't count because it's too vague and requires technology that doesn't exist and may very well be impossible. That's why you wouldn't be able to publish it in a reputable evolutionary biology journal, but if this bill goes through maybe your chances will improve.
Here's a good analogy. When I was debating Brett, I proposed a "crazy hypothesis of a non-biologist" to falsify abiogenesis. I think your argument is similar to mine (albeit more vague- I didn't see you describe the exact steps necessary to identify a statistically abnormal mutation).
But I was describing abiogenesis, which scientists consider more tentative and mysterious than evolution (a separate topic.) And I later became more skeptical of my own proposed falsification, calling it an example of my "ignorance of exobiology". These sorts of musings shouldn't be conflated with the actual falsifications that have been repeatedly applied to evolution.
But all this is beside the point anyway, because Beelzebud was right to point out that "intelligent design" argues that "irreducably complex" structures like flagella can't possibly have evolved naturally. The list of these "irreducably complex" grows without bound, because it's a scientifically useless concept that embodies the "argument from incredulity".
Again, my stance towards Watts is that he's convinced an army of crackpots that Real Climate is bullshitting about the temperature record despite the fact that he hasn't performed any original research to back up these libelous conspiracy
Years ago, I wrote an article defining science using falsifiability, and explained why ID/creationism doesn't qualify. In it, I pointed out that "Intelligent Design" advocates are humorously evasive about the identity of the Designer, but "wossname" has to be the funniest example I've ever heard. Anyway, a computer scientist replied to my article, saying "I'm a creationist" then claimed that a prominent atheist scientist's belief in panspermia amounted to secular belief in ID/creationism. He argued that "evolution is almost infinitely adaptable like this, and is thus unfalsifiable" which can be rephrased as "you can prove nearly anything using evolution" or "you can sort of argue anything using evolution" or "... With the same rationale, evolution is impossible to falsify as well...". Like most creationists, he used the term evolutionist liberally but at least he didn't babble about ID excluding creationism. He also didn't pull a Ben Stein by trying to link Darwin to Nazis. Brett's real classy like that.
Later, Marble joined Andy Schlafly and other "skeptics" in
Better phrasing (will be cleaned up in final version): My failure to explain how the extra inertial mass of E/c^2 manifests in the container experiment
erm, "E/c^2"
It turns out nickel is most tightly bound. News to me.
It's true that an individual nucleon (such as a proton or neutron) gets a significant fraction of its mass not from its constituent quarks but from the strong force. For example, a proton's mass is 938 MeV but its two up quarks and single down quark only sum to (at most) 12.4 MeV.
But nuclei of atoms are actually slightly less massive than the individual neutrons and protons that comprise them. I believe this effect has a different sign than the binding of quarks into individual nucleons because quarks can't ever be physically separated. It's also much smaller; iron has the most tightly bound nucleus, and its binding energy is only 8.8 MeV per nucleon. Though vastly larger than chemical energies, this is still less than one percent of its mass.
... and thus also has an inertial mass through the equivalence principle. My failure to explain why the container shouldn't exhibit an inertial mass of E/mc^2 doesn't invalidate the equivalence principle. If light didn't exhibit inertial mass in that sense, the container would be a magical fuel tank for a photonic rocket. Most of the constraints of relativistic travel are related to the need to accelerate the reaction mass in the fuel tank. If the photons can simply be stored in a mirrored container and accelerated for free until they're allowed to escape out the back of the rocket, that would represent an unbelievably efficient space drive. And I mean "unbelievably" quite literally here.
Photons don't interact with the Higgs, and photons certainly have zero rest mass. Most of the introductory material I've read seems to use that terminology, but again I'm not a particle physicist.
Velocity is a vector, so gravitational lensing and reflection are both examples of changing the velocity of light. Refraction is an example of changing the direction and the speed of light. In all these cases, equal and opposite reactions occur but are simply too small to observe. The sun is gravitationally attracted to a beam of light that it deflects, a solar sail experiences a force, and the material interface that refracts the light really does experience a force as it deflects and slows down each photon.
I no longer think the "inertial mass" of a container full of photons will be due to more frequent collisions with the bottom mirror. After further thought, that's not true. But the second argument still seems compelling, so I wonder how the effect would show up in a literal container experiment. Perhaps the bottom mirror would reflect a slightly blue shifted photon, and the top mirror reflects a slightly red shifted photon? This might explain the pressure asymmetry but depends on quantum mechanics to show that the momentum change of reflecting a photon depends on the wavelength. I was hoping to come up with an explanation that depended only on special relativity, but no such luck.
I've never taken graduate-level elementary particle physics, so I don't know much about the Higgs field. My classmates who have taken those classes and moved on to work at the LHC tell me that most theorists consider the discovery of the Higgs boson to be very likely.
Personally, I'm not sure how to rule out the notion that inertia is caused by viewing zero point energy in an accelerating reference frame. I'm sure the Higgs field really is more likely to be the cause of inertia, but right now I don't have enough time to wade through the relevant literature to learn why.
Anyway, you're right to say that the "inertial mass" of an object can be measured by placing it in a container and determining how much force is necessary to accelerate the container. Or, rather, how much extra force is necessary compared to experiments performed when the container is empty.
Now imagine a one dimensional container with perfectly reflective inner walls. I claim that if this container is filled with photons having total energy E, then more force would be needed to accelerate the container after filling it. More precisely, the experiment would show that the container has an extra "inertial mass" E/c^2 compared to its empty state.
Here's why.
If the container isn't accelerating, the trapped photons will exert equal pressure on both walls of the container as they're reflected back and forth, just as with solar sails. Accelerating the container, though, will cause the mirror on the bottom to reflect those photons more often than the mirror on the top. Thus on average the bottom mirror will experience more pressure than the top mirror, and this pressure asymmetry will mimic an "inertial mass" of E/c^2.
In fact, I think any method of measuring inertial mass would conclude that photons have inertia. That's because active gravitational mass in general relativity is defined by the stress-energy tensor, which includes the energy (and momentum) in electromagnetic fields. Active and passive gravitational masses need to be equal to conserve momentum, and the equivalence principle says that passive gravitational mass equals inertial mass.
In other words, the container curves spacetime more when it's filled with photons. Therefore its gravitational mass has increased, and via the equivalence principle so has its inertial mass.
This depends on my interpretation of the equivalence principle (and the principle itself) being correct. It also implies that pressure has inertia, because pressure contributes to the stress energy tensor. Interestingly, that implies tension has negative inertia because tension is just negative pressure. Greg Egan uses this concept masterfully in a short
Finally got this comment through the filter after removing MANY of the links.
Gavin wasn't just saying that other data was available, he was saying that CRU doesn't do any primary data collection:
The raw data is in the custody of the met services who originated it. CRU is just a collation, not a temperature measuring organisation. [Gavin Schmidt]
No data has been destroyed, the original files and numbers are with the national weather services that provided them. Removing a copy of a original file because it is not useful for my purposes is not 'deleting data' [Gavin Schmidt]
The raw data is the GHCN data (v2.mean.Z) (publicly available, as has been the case for decades). [Gavin Schmidt]
Unsurprisingly, that's also what the reviews said:
The Unit does virtually no primary data acquisition but has used data from published archives and has collaborated with people who have collected data. ... [Oxburgh panel, p2]
The CRU dataset, which forms the land surface component of the HadCRUT global temperature record, was compiled with the aim of comprehensiveness. The majority of the data in it are derived from the same freely-available raw data sets used by NOAA and NASA. ... [UK House of Commons Inquiry, p13]
Any independent researcher may freely obtain the primary station data. It is impossible for a third party to withhold access to the data. ... Regarding data availability, there is no basis for the allegations that CRU prevented access to raw data. It was impossible for them to have done so. [Muir Russell Review, p48,53]
Somehow, you managed to twist the fact that it was impossible for CRU to prevent access to the raw data into a
Couldn't get Climategate through the filter.
Presumably you meant to say that scientists in general are circling wagons and responding badly to reasoned criticism.
Coincidentally, Pielke Jr. had similar things to say about that interplay. That's the interplay where he asked a bunch of 'questions' like "Was it appropriate for the IPCC to make stuff up about my views?". Then Stefan replied:
Clearly there are different views on this, which is why we called this graph "debatable". But let's keep things in perspective: we're discussing Supplementary Material and a response to one of those 90,000 review comments now, not even the report itself. You've been working hard to scandalize your personal quibbles with IPCC here - how consistent is this with your self-proclaimed role as "honest broker"? Stefan
That link leads to an in-depth comment, and neither seem to constitute "responding badly to reasoned criticism." In fact, it's not clear that Pielke's rant counts as "reasoned criticism" in the first place. As far as I can tell, he's got
Couldn't get Falsifiability through the filter.
No, what you and Michaels are doing isn't "great" in any sense of the word. Again, by "summarizing" the IPCC AR1 WG1 report as though it only gave one scenario, you pulled a "Pat Michaels".
As I've explained ad nauseum, the dynamical nature of climate models means that evaluating a GCM ensemble requires comparing projected forcings to the actual forcings. In other words, each scenario is an "if-then" statement: "If greenhouse gas concentrations rise at rate X, then temperatures will rise at rate Y." You and Michaels not only chopped off the first part of that sentence, you both presented it as the only scenario... which "coincidentally" makes it seem like scientists are discrediting themselves by making bad predictions.
The correct approach is to open the AR1 to the Annex on page 333, and examine the rates of CO2 rise given in the top-left of figure A.3. Scenario "A" (BaU in that plot) only applies if CO2 levels exceed 400ppm by 2010, which hasn't happened. The top right graph also shows that methane rises to over 2000ppm in that scenario by 2010, and once again that hasn't happened either.
Just like in Hansen88, AR1's scenario B is the closest match to the actual forcings. That's not really surprising, considering that Hansen was a contributing author for sections 6 and 8, table 2.2 on p52 repeatedly references Hansen88's radiative forcings and corrects a typo on p9360 of Hansen88, and chapter 3 repeatedly references Hansen88. Unsurprisingly, the emissions scenarios used in both studies seem very similar.
I thought you'd be able to learn something from the eerie parallels between your mistake and Michaels's, but apparently I was wrong. Again.
Unlike many other scientists, I don't think Michaels is lying because his "rebuttal" seems to indicate that he's trying to draw conclusions based entirely on each scenario's legend, and that he doesn't understand the difference between dynamical and empirical models. If he thinks that climate models are empirical, it makes sense that he wouldn't understand the reason for making three different projections. In that case
Huh? You quoted me and repeated "20 years" as though your statement was a response to mine. But you're talking about waiting "after 20 years" and implying that we need to perform gedankenexperiments rather than just reading the peer-reviewed literature? I haven't ever been talking about waiting 20 years. This whole time I've been talking about the applied smoothing. There's no waiting, no "after 20 years". So there's no need to make up numbers. In fact, I've already shown you the actual dependence of the error bars on the applied smoothing (or trend length- same idea.) Sadly, this isn't the first time you've ignored this point:
So multiple scientists have already tried to tell you that longer temperature trends have smaller error bars than shorter trends, but you're still blissfully fantasizing that the opposite is true. According to #6, you get another 5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts the results of a widely accepted real experiment.
Clearly, we need to review the difference between an empirical climate model and a dynamical climate model.
An empirical climate model:
A dynamical climate model:
The last time you brought up this subject, I linked this similar exchange:
That's not the way science works. In science, observations are compared to predictions, which are then used to modify the theory to make new predictions. There's no fundamental distinction between science performed in a lab like chemistry and science performed through telescopes like cosmology. (Or any other discipline like paleontology, forensic science or paleoclimatology, for that matter.) [Dumb Scientist]
But I actually like coby's version better:
In my experience, this claim is supported by the notion that wrt to earth's climate you can not run any controlled experiments and thereby falsify any hypotheses. No complete ocean-atmosphere system in the lab = impossibility of scientific experimentation = not a science. I think the only effective and direct rebuttal of that is listing all the other sciences that whomever is making this argument would have to likewise reject. Cosmology, astonomy, geology, evolutionary biology to get started, I'm sure the list would be very long. It is unlikely that you are arguing with a serious philosopher so they are not likely to like the direction their own argument logically takes them. [coby]
What's the root cause of this confusion?
Here's a good example of coby's point: despite the fact that cosmic inflation was a unique, singular event, your comments suggest that you aren't applying your definition of
As requested.
Already discussed, but note that nuclear plants do generate small amounts of CO2 due to current enrichment and mining methods, as well as the curing of concrete containment domes. Averaged over the projected life of the reactors, this CO2 is only a few percent of the emissions from an equivalently powerful coal plant. Pebble bed reactors might be capable of safe operation without containment domes, but that unfortunate incident in Germany makes it unlikely that they'll be built that way for a while. Nuclear power is our best hope of maintaining a prosperous civilization. Please don't oversell it by making claims it can't live up to yet.
Dr. Knutti's emissions graph makes it clear that he's examining a scenario in which CO2 emissions only drop to half of 2010 values by ~2030, and a quarter of 2010 values by ~2070. That doesn't seem too different from the Lieberman-McCain "Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act of 2007" which seemed doable.
Because much of the CO2 emitted by nuclear plants is emitted in a pulse as the concrete dome cures, any nuclear plants built in the next few decades won't be emitting CO2 past ~2070 (unless we still haven't perfected mining and enrichment in the next ~60 years.) As you say, centralized power plants are easiest to upgrade, but we've got ~60 years to perfect electric cars in order to hit Knutti's target. They certainly can't universally replace gasoline vehicles in time (especially in developing countries) but biofuels can be produced carbon-neutrally (albeit inefficiently at present) in a centralized fashion. Distributing biofuels just like gasoline will avoid the need to make and sell billions of electric cars by 2100. Even if that fails, I'd be astonished if ~60 years isn't enough time for humanity to devise and implement a carbon sequestration program capable of making up the difference.
In fact, the only way the human race could possibly fail to tackle climate change would be if there were legions of crackpots arguing that climate "scientists" are actually just deceitful, shady, laughably dishonest, perverting, badly reeking, dogmatic, anti-scientific, idiotic, disingenuous, scurrilous, nefarious, damned, indefensibly guilty, laughably wrong, fundamentally rotten, self-discrediting, fraudulent, bullshitting partisan hacks with something to hide who do bad things, don't fucking know
Believe this is the relevant paper.
Well, okay, rarely seen a galaxy that might not have dark matter.
Aside from the fact that I've never seen evidence of a galaxy without a dark matter halo, the Bullet Cluster has two opposing lobes of dark matter, indicating that each galaxy in the collision had a dark matter halo that flew right through the other dark matter halo. Another similar collision also has opposing two lobes of dark matter. If a collision is ever observed with only a single lobe of dark matter, that would be consistent with our hypothesis. (Though the other objections I raised would still apply.)
First, note that dark matter halos have always been observed around normal matter galaxies. Your example should therefore involve at least four galaxies- two visible colliding galaxies in our own universe, each with a counterpart galaxy that occupies the same physical space in the other universe/brane, which are therefore colliding in that other universe too.
In conventional theory, dark matter interacts with normal matter and with itself only through gravity. These dark matter halos would fly right through each other in a galactic collision, whereas normal matter can't because it also interacts via other forces, most notably the electromagnetic force. That's why the Bullet Cluster's separation of x-ray vs. matter distribution tends to support dark matter rather than MOND.
But if these dark matter halos are simply made of ordinary matter in another universe, they would collide with each other in that universe in the same way that ordinary matter collides in our universe. Thus I don't believe that our hypothesis would result in the same separation of x-ray vs. matter distribution observed in the Bullet Cluster.
Last year Tanuki64 asked a similar question, and I referred him to an anecdote from my senior year of physics undergrad. In 2004, I presented a similar idea to an astrophysicist in my department:
I wonder if "dark matter" is the result of gravitational interactions with galaxies in parallel universes. Suppose parallel universes exist in the same physical "space" we inhabit, and only interact with each other (and us) via gravity. The galaxies in different universes would then clump together, but their disks wouldn't necessarily be aligned. So the total gravity would appear similar to a spherical halo of dark matter. This would explain the too-high velocities of stars at the edges of galaxies and the too-high velocities of galaxies in superclusters.
In 2004, I didn't have enough experience to understand why that astrophysicist rejected my idea by saying that I was trying to explain something we don't understand by invoking something else that we understand even less. Several years later, though, I started to see some cracks in this idea:
2009-07-25 Update: I don't think my hypothesis is consistent with the Bullet cluster data.
2009-07-27 Update: Also, I wonder if galaxies in my imaginary parallel universes really would clump together. They'd certainly be gravitationally attracted to each other, but if each universe has roughly the same density of galaxies, they'd typically have a long way to fall towards each other. As a result, they'd be moving so fast that I doubt any damping mechanisms could have brought them to rest in ~13.7 billion years. But... what if they formed in the same place initially? That would make sense because supermassive black holes likely play a large role in proto-galaxy formation. Gravitational collapse in one universe would trigger collapses in other universes leading to galaxies with small relative velocities. But in that case, it seems like the disks would be aligned because disk formation probably doesn't involve a large percentage of actual physical collisions (any actual astronomers want to help me here?). I think this would result in the wrong velocity profile for stars versus distance from the center of the galaxy? Oh, and all these stars in different universes would cause gravitational lensing events to occur with a much greater frequency than has been observed by the OGLE. Galaxies with non-aligned disks would look even weirder- that implies imply lensing with bizarre relative velocities.
Perhaps. But given the above problems with such an idea, it's more likely that the Great Attractor is simply a massive supercluster in our own universe, even if it's already passed over the horizon.