Brief Comments on Physics and Society
October 2024:
If you have tried but failed to discern the lesser of two evils maybe
you should just stay home on election day 2024.
September 2024:
Kamala Harris believes a woman needs the option to abort her children in case they interfere with her career plans.
August 2024:
Vestiges of the tunnels built for particle accelerators in the 20th century will be visible for millennia and pointed to by archaeologists as having furthered a rapid increase of knowledge of the fundamental structure of matter. The last of these, the tunnel for the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) was abandoned in the last decade of that century; some advocated it be filled with concrete to prevent its resuscitation. There followed a significant pause in the rate of new knowledge accumulation.
July 2024:
A Louisiana woman was arrested for abandoning a one-year old child by the side of a highway. Was she encouraged by the movement to decriminalize the destruction of human life up to and through the perinatal period?
June 2024:
In the upcoming election, many people refuse to vote for either Biden or Trump unless Biden withdraws in favor of Kamala Harris.
May 2024:
The laws against murder have not eliminated murder but without them the prevalence of adult murders in American society would equal that of abortions.
Apr 2024:
The Democratic Party is planning to boost its vote count in 2024 by appealing to a popular taste for liberalizing abortion rules all this without any thought for the million genetically distinct human lives that are being annually destroyed in the US together with all their potential joys and capabilities.
Mar 2024:
The Republican Party proposes to establish the notion that human life begins at conception. This puts them in agreement with every biology book.
Feb 2024:
In its Dobbs decision the Supreme Court recognized that different states have differing state values with respect to the sanctity of human life and,
as with all issues not explicitly mentioned in the constitution,
each state has the right to establish the kind of society it wants within its boundaries.
Jan 2024:
The International Court of Justice is deliberating whether Israel is
commiting genocide in its war on the people of Gaza
Dec 2023:
The president of the United States is continually telling Israel with a
wink that there are rules of war, that too many civilians have died in
Israel's attack on Gaza, and that the attack risks involving a disproportionate
response. Meanwhile the US continues to donate bombs to be dropped on
the captive people of Gaza. This does not imply that the Hamas terrorists
are innocent of war crimes.
Nov 2023:
The Supreme Court in its Dobbs decision confirmed the obvious statement
that there is no right in the constitution or in the traditions of the US for a
mother to destroy her pre-born offspring and that issues not mentioned in
the constitution are to be left to the States to decide.
Oct 2023:
A contingent object is one that changes in time or exists in various forms.
A contingent object can be the cause of other contingent objects but the
existence of any contingent objects implies a first cause that is not
contingent.
Sept 2023:
The role of the observer is central to quantum theory. A contingent object
only exists in a definite form when it is observed. We recall the ancient text.
He observed it and it was good.
August 2023:
There are ten Republican candidates and at least one Democrat who would
make a much better president than Donald Trump or Joe Biden.
July 2023:
The current cloud hanging over presidential politics can be cleared if Trump and Biden
are offered prosecutorial immunity for potential past offenses under the condition that
they renounce any future candidacy for elected office.
June 2023:
Due, among other causes, to petty jealousies among physicists, the Superconducting Supercollider project was cancelled in 1993. As a result the past thirty years has been
a desert as far as new knowledge goes of the fundamental particles and forces of nature.
May 2023:
Judaism ultimately reconciled with its prophets except for the one that
proposed to bring in the whole world.
Apr 2023:
America is in trouble. Politics has invaded the judicial system and now the
medical safety system.
Mar 2023:
Mississippi, which banned abortion last year, has just extended its Medicaid care for new mothers from 2 months to one year.
So much for those who say that pro-life states don't care about babies after birth.
Feb 2023:
In America, the wild west, there are too many guns and too little respect for human life. As Teresa of Calcutta predicted: if society accepts mothers killing their pre-born children, there is nothing left but to kill each other.
Feb 2023:
It seems likely that there will be no further improvements of our understanding of matter at the fundamental level until a machine like the Superconducting Supercollider is reconsidered and built. Beautiful pictures from outer space can at most provide hints.
Jan 2023:
Although abortion is primarily a humanitarian, ethical issue and not a
religious issue, the recent Dobbs decision is a new form of the old
Cujus regio eius religio precept. Any restriction or lack of restriction on abortion is determined by who is in charge at the national or state level.
Dec 2022:
2022 should be remembered as the year that the Supreme Court
dispelled the myth that women have a constitutional right to destroy their offspring.
Nov 2022:
The 2022 elections cannot be explained apart from a successful defense
by single white women of a fictitious legal right to terminate their offspring
up to some undetermined age from conception.
Oct 2022:
Since the Summer's finding by the Supreme Court that there is no right to abortion in the Constitution or long-standing traditions of the country there has been apparently a surge of interest in getting legislative protection for abortion access. All this without any evidence that the pre-born human is not a unique and sentient life with its own right to live.
Sept 2022:
To cease asking questions about the physical universe is contrary to human nature even if the answer to some of these questions is beyond the methodology of physics. Among these are not only "why is there something rather than nothing" but, more relevant, why are the laws of matter those of a particular interacting gauge theory rather than those of a free field theory.
Aug 2022:
At a cost of 10 Billion dollars, 10 times its original cost estimate, the Webb Telescope has produced some beautiful pictures of the early universe. Its real ultimate value will be the numbers it produces to shed light on the cosmological laws.
July 2022:
Some things are easier to explain to a ten year old than to an adult. If a baby is growing in a woman's womb, for the sake of all human life one must not kill it and throw it away.
June 2022:
We may be emerging from a multi-year pandemic marked by periodic respites. Throughout, however, several factions in society have aggressively asserted a right to intentionally kill.
May 2022:
I have come to realize that the purpose of physics is to inspire admiration for its ingenious laws.
April 2022:
The pro-choice argument that abortion is an economic requirement for women's equality is strikingly similar to the argument for slavery by southern landowners in 19th century America.
Mar 20:
On this date in 1961, in a gesture of
encouragement, a former First Lady, Edith Wilson, invited to her home several graduate fellowship winners pledged to the academic life. It seems that later First Ladies failed to carry on the initiative.
Feb 7, 2022:
Today, according to the Wall Street Journal Covid Tracker the daily deaths in the US from Covid 19 amounted to 2463 +/- 1600 (7 day average). Coincidently, the daily number of deaths from abortion, extrapolated from pre-Covid numbers, was 2363 according to LifeNews.com.
Both numbers seem to be trending downward.
Jan 23, 2022:
At the core of modern science is quantum theory in which the laws of physics determine the behavior of matter on the average. If you believe in science but also believe there is an intelligent force that determines everything in the particular you might conclude that the current situation is a hint that society needs to return to the core human principle of the absolute right to life.
Dec 12, 2021:
In Texas, if a baby survives to 6 weeks, no one can legally kill him.
Dec 2, 2021:
Society is beset by twin global plagues. One is the daily destruction in the US alone of 2363 human lives before birth. The second is the daily destruction in the US of a similar number of grandparents by a vicious virus. Yesterday the Supreme Court indicated a move to shut down one plague and today President Biden announced new plans to shut down the second plague. This could be the beginning of the end.
Nov 2021:
If it seems that one side of a human rights issue is dominated by religious believers maybe secular humanists are not pulling their weight.
Oct 2021:
No woman, in the course of a violent attack against her or afterwards, has the right to kill an innocent third party.
Sept 2021:
In the entire United States it is illegal to destroy an eagle egg.
In Texas it is also illegal to destroy a human fetus after a heartbeat is detected.
Aug 2021:
Steven Weinberg dreamed of a final theory by which he meant a mathematically consistent, fully constrained theory which correctly answered all questions about the behavior of matter except for why this theory was realized in nature rather than some other equally consistent theory.
July 2021:
In classical theology the theory of miracles is based on the notion that the One who makes the laws can suspend the laws. In the era of quantum mechanics, the freedom of the Author is built into the laws of physics.
June 2021:
America mourns 600,000 grandparents cut down by Covid-19. Unfortunately, there is less lament over the similar number of pre-born humans intentionally killed every year.
May 2021:
Generally, a physicist accomplishes more per unit time while walking than while sitting in front of a computer screen.
April 2021:
What does quantum mechanics mean for a system, like the universe, for which there is no ensemble, just one?
Mar 2021:
Given the general lack of perceptiveness in the American public, I would not be
surprised if the death rate from Covid 19 and its variants approached an annual rate of 860,000.
Feb 2021:
It's my non-expert opinion that, when the primary purpose of a largely partisan impeachment becomes the forbidding of a member of the opposite party from running for office preempting the voters, such an action is dangerous and unconstitutional.
Jan 2021:
In the history of our republic there was a period from 1865 to 1973 when the inalienable rights to life and liberty were enshrined in law. President Trump tried to make America great again.
Jan 2021:
While we are waiting to see what Joe Biden can accomplish for the country, let's not be distracted by the political theater but spend some time thinking about the mysteries of physics
Jan 2021:
The election of two liberal Democrats from Georgia to the Senate and the
amazing rise of rancor against President Trump this month suggests that Joe Biden's victory by some few percent in the key swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania did indeed correspond to valid votes. There seems to be something of
a liberal blue wave in America.
Dec 2020:
It is easy to see why Trump thought the election of 2020 was stolen:
election-2020.pdf
Nov 2020:
Archeology has uncovered a community in the Yucatan that, apparently, was beset by a severe epidemic in the 1300's. Evidence suggests that they experimented with a variety of herbal remedies whose side effects further decimated the population. Finally, in desperation they, evidently, renounced all human sacrifice and there was a gradual return to prosperity.
Oct 2020:
Many pro-choice people think they are actually helping people by making it easy for them to abort their children. This is a hopeful sign because they might eventually see a better way. Under slavery there was no pretense of helping people by separating them from their children.
Sept 2020:
I'm mostly worried about the next pandemic. The current one has killed 0.1% of our population and wreaked enormous economic damage. That should have been enough to increase respect for life and stop the pulling off of legs from babies.
July 2020:
If you think there should be some gestational age before which it is OK to destroy a
human life, maybe you should consider 19 or 23 weeks; they are prime numbers and no
scientific reason exists to choose any other particular age after conception.
June 2020:
In Massachusetts and similar states people are dying in nursing homes and hospitals for lack of PPE not to save other lives but to destroy additional lives in abortion clinics.
May 2020:
I am of the generation that brought massive wage inequality and massive destruction of pre-born human life to America. It has only taken a dramatic shock to the economy and a deadly viral attack on senior citizens to point us back to a better pro-life society.
April 2020:
The people who elected the presidents who nominated the justices who said that women had the right to destroy their offspring are now in their seventies and eighties. It was not true but the people believed it.
Feb 2019:
If supernovae are essential to the rise of life and supersymmetry is essential to supernovae then maybe we need to revive the supercollider.
Jan 2019:
The first bill from the new Democrat controlled congress proposes to resume funding the promotion of abortion in Africa. The majority of Americans are opposed to this racist agenda but, apparently, Nancy Pelosi thinks the bill will resonate with her base.
Dec 2018:
A problem with the current journal refereeing system is that referees can easily deceive editors with superficial and biased comments.It's not that referees are purposely lying. It's just that they persuade editors to elevate biases and minor quibbles to a justification to block publication of new ideas.
Nov 2018:
Supernovae briefly outshine the galaxy they are located in but, in physics theory as presently established experimentally, they are dark and mysterious. If theory cannot explain supernovae then perhaps supernovae can illuminate theory.
Oct 2018:
In case Row v. Wade is overthrown, Planned Parenthood is planning an "underground railroad" to deliver babies to their abortionists. Isn't this an underground railroad running backwards?
If you have tried but failed to discern the lesser of two evils maybe
you should just stay home on election day 2024.
September 2024:
Kamala Harris believes a woman needs the option to abort her children in case they interfere with her career plans.
August 2024:
Vestiges of the tunnels built for particle accelerators in the 20th century will be visible for millennia and pointed to by archaeologists as having furthered a rapid increase of knowledge of the fundamental structure of matter. The last of these, the tunnel for the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) was abandoned in the last decade of that century; some advocated it be filled with concrete to prevent its resuscitation. There followed a significant pause in the rate of new knowledge accumulation.
July 2024:
A Louisiana woman was arrested for abandoning a one-year old child by the side of a highway. Was she encouraged by the movement to decriminalize the destruction of human life up to and through the perinatal period?
June 2024:
In the upcoming election, many people refuse to vote for either Biden or Trump unless Biden withdraws in favor of Kamala Harris.
May 2024:
The laws against murder have not eliminated murder but without them the prevalence of adult murders in American society would equal that of abortions.
Apr 2024:
The Democratic Party is planning to boost its vote count in 2024 by appealing to a popular taste for liberalizing abortion rules all this without any thought for the million genetically distinct human lives that are being annually destroyed in the US together with all their potential joys and capabilities.
Mar 2024:
The Republican Party proposes to establish the notion that human life begins at conception. This puts them in agreement with every biology book.
Feb 2024:
In its Dobbs decision the Supreme Court recognized that different states have differing state values with respect to the sanctity of human life and,
as with all issues not explicitly mentioned in the constitution,
each state has the right to establish the kind of society it wants within its boundaries.
Jan 2024:
The International Court of Justice is deliberating whether Israel is
commiting genocide in its war on the people of Gaza
Dec 2023:
The president of the United States is continually telling Israel with a
wink that there are rules of war, that too many civilians have died in
Israel's attack on Gaza, and that the attack risks involving a disproportionate
response. Meanwhile the US continues to donate bombs to be dropped on
the captive people of Gaza. This does not imply that the Hamas terrorists
are innocent of war crimes.
Nov 2023:
The Supreme Court in its Dobbs decision confirmed the obvious statement
that there is no right in the constitution or in the traditions of the US for a
mother to destroy her pre-born offspring and that issues not mentioned in
the constitution are to be left to the States to decide.
Oct 2023:
A contingent object is one that changes in time or exists in various forms.
A contingent object can be the cause of other contingent objects but the
existence of any contingent objects implies a first cause that is not
contingent.
Sept 2023:
The role of the observer is central to quantum theory. A contingent object
only exists in a definite form when it is observed. We recall the ancient text.
He observed it and it was good.
August 2023:
There are ten Republican candidates and at least one Democrat who would
make a much better president than Donald Trump or Joe Biden.
July 2023:
The current cloud hanging over presidential politics can be cleared if Trump and Biden
are offered prosecutorial immunity for potential past offenses under the condition that
they renounce any future candidacy for elected office.
June 2023:
Due, among other causes, to petty jealousies among physicists, the Superconducting Supercollider project was cancelled in 1993. As a result the past thirty years has been
a desert as far as new knowledge goes of the fundamental particles and forces of nature.
May 2023:
Judaism ultimately reconciled with its prophets except for the one that
proposed to bring in the whole world.
Apr 2023:
America is in trouble. Politics has invaded the judicial system and now the
medical safety system.
Mar 2023:
Mississippi, which banned abortion last year, has just extended its Medicaid care for new mothers from 2 months to one year.
So much for those who say that pro-life states don't care about babies after birth.
Feb 2023:
In America, the wild west, there are too many guns and too little respect for human life. As Teresa of Calcutta predicted: if society accepts mothers killing their pre-born children, there is nothing left but to kill each other.
Feb 2023:
It seems likely that there will be no further improvements of our understanding of matter at the fundamental level until a machine like the Superconducting Supercollider is reconsidered and built. Beautiful pictures from outer space can at most provide hints.
Jan 2023:
Although abortion is primarily a humanitarian, ethical issue and not a
religious issue, the recent Dobbs decision is a new form of the old
Cujus regio eius religio precept. Any restriction or lack of restriction on abortion is determined by who is in charge at the national or state level.
Dec 2022:
2022 should be remembered as the year that the Supreme Court
dispelled the myth that women have a constitutional right to destroy their offspring.
Nov 2022:
The 2022 elections cannot be explained apart from a successful defense
by single white women of a fictitious legal right to terminate their offspring
up to some undetermined age from conception.
Oct 2022:
Since the Summer's finding by the Supreme Court that there is no right to abortion in the Constitution or long-standing traditions of the country there has been apparently a surge of interest in getting legislative protection for abortion access. All this without any evidence that the pre-born human is not a unique and sentient life with its own right to live.
Sept 2022:
To cease asking questions about the physical universe is contrary to human nature even if the answer to some of these questions is beyond the methodology of physics. Among these are not only "why is there something rather than nothing" but, more relevant, why are the laws of matter those of a particular interacting gauge theory rather than those of a free field theory.
Aug 2022:
At a cost of 10 Billion dollars, 10 times its original cost estimate, the Webb Telescope has produced some beautiful pictures of the early universe. Its real ultimate value will be the numbers it produces to shed light on the cosmological laws.
July 2022:
Some things are easier to explain to a ten year old than to an adult. If a baby is growing in a woman's womb, for the sake of all human life one must not kill it and throw it away.
June 2022:
We may be emerging from a multi-year pandemic marked by periodic respites. Throughout, however, several factions in society have aggressively asserted a right to intentionally kill.
May 2022:
I have come to realize that the purpose of physics is to inspire admiration for its ingenious laws.
April 2022:
The pro-choice argument that abortion is an economic requirement for women's equality is strikingly similar to the argument for slavery by southern landowners in 19th century America.
Mar 20:
On this date in 1961, in a gesture of
encouragement, a former First Lady, Edith Wilson, invited to her home several graduate fellowship winners pledged to the academic life. It seems that later First Ladies failed to carry on the initiative.
Feb 7, 2022:
Today, according to the Wall Street Journal Covid Tracker the daily deaths in the US from Covid 19 amounted to 2463 +/- 1600 (7 day average). Coincidently, the daily number of deaths from abortion, extrapolated from pre-Covid numbers, was 2363 according to LifeNews.com.
Both numbers seem to be trending downward.
Jan 23, 2022:
At the core of modern science is quantum theory in which the laws of physics determine the behavior of matter on the average. If you believe in science but also believe there is an intelligent force that determines everything in the particular you might conclude that the current situation is a hint that society needs to return to the core human principle of the absolute right to life.
Dec 12, 2021:
In Texas, if a baby survives to 6 weeks, no one can legally kill him.
Dec 2, 2021:
Society is beset by twin global plagues. One is the daily destruction in the US alone of 2363 human lives before birth. The second is the daily destruction in the US of a similar number of grandparents by a vicious virus. Yesterday the Supreme Court indicated a move to shut down one plague and today President Biden announced new plans to shut down the second plague. This could be the beginning of the end.
Nov 2021:
If it seems that one side of a human rights issue is dominated by religious believers maybe secular humanists are not pulling their weight.
Oct 2021:
No woman, in the course of a violent attack against her or afterwards, has the right to kill an innocent third party.
Sept 2021:
In the entire United States it is illegal to destroy an eagle egg.
In Texas it is also illegal to destroy a human fetus after a heartbeat is detected.
Aug 2021:
Steven Weinberg dreamed of a final theory by which he meant a mathematically consistent, fully constrained theory which correctly answered all questions about the behavior of matter except for why this theory was realized in nature rather than some other equally consistent theory.
July 2021:
In classical theology the theory of miracles is based on the notion that the One who makes the laws can suspend the laws. In the era of quantum mechanics, the freedom of the Author is built into the laws of physics.
June 2021:
America mourns 600,000 grandparents cut down by Covid-19. Unfortunately, there is less lament over the similar number of pre-born humans intentionally killed every year.
May 2021:
Generally, a physicist accomplishes more per unit time while walking than while sitting in front of a computer screen.
April 2021:
What does quantum mechanics mean for a system, like the universe, for which there is no ensemble, just one?
Mar 2021:
Given the general lack of perceptiveness in the American public, I would not be
surprised if the death rate from Covid 19 and its variants approached an annual rate of 860,000.
Feb 2021:
It's my non-expert opinion that, when the primary purpose of a largely partisan impeachment becomes the forbidding of a member of the opposite party from running for office preempting the voters, such an action is dangerous and unconstitutional.
Jan 2021:
In the history of our republic there was a period from 1865 to 1973 when the inalienable rights to life and liberty were enshrined in law. President Trump tried to make America great again.
Jan 2021:
While we are waiting to see what Joe Biden can accomplish for the country, let's not be distracted by the political theater but spend some time thinking about the mysteries of physics
Jan 2021:
The election of two liberal Democrats from Georgia to the Senate and the
amazing rise of rancor against President Trump this month suggests that Joe Biden's victory by some few percent in the key swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania did indeed correspond to valid votes. There seems to be something of
a liberal blue wave in America.
Dec 2020:
It is easy to see why Trump thought the election of 2020 was stolen:
election-2020.pdf
Nov 2020:
Archeology has uncovered a community in the Yucatan that, apparently, was beset by a severe epidemic in the 1300's. Evidence suggests that they experimented with a variety of herbal remedies whose side effects further decimated the population. Finally, in desperation they, evidently, renounced all human sacrifice and there was a gradual return to prosperity.
Oct 2020:
Many pro-choice people think they are actually helping people by making it easy for them to abort their children. This is a hopeful sign because they might eventually see a better way. Under slavery there was no pretense of helping people by separating them from their children.
Sept 2020:
I'm mostly worried about the next pandemic. The current one has killed 0.1% of our population and wreaked enormous economic damage. That should have been enough to increase respect for life and stop the pulling off of legs from babies.
July 2020:
If you think there should be some gestational age before which it is OK to destroy a
human life, maybe you should consider 19 or 23 weeks; they are prime numbers and no
scientific reason exists to choose any other particular age after conception.
June 2020:
In Massachusetts and similar states people are dying in nursing homes and hospitals for lack of PPE not to save other lives but to destroy additional lives in abortion clinics.
May 2020:
I am of the generation that brought massive wage inequality and massive destruction of pre-born human life to America. It has only taken a dramatic shock to the economy and a deadly viral attack on senior citizens to point us back to a better pro-life society.
April 2020:
The people who elected the presidents who nominated the justices who said that women had the right to destroy their offspring are now in their seventies and eighties. It was not true but the people believed it.
Feb 2019:
If supernovae are essential to the rise of life and supersymmetry is essential to supernovae then maybe we need to revive the supercollider.
Jan 2019:
The first bill from the new Democrat controlled congress proposes to resume funding the promotion of abortion in Africa. The majority of Americans are opposed to this racist agenda but, apparently, Nancy Pelosi thinks the bill will resonate with her base.
Dec 2018:
A problem with the current journal refereeing system is that referees can easily deceive editors with superficial and biased comments.It's not that referees are purposely lying. It's just that they persuade editors to elevate biases and minor quibbles to a justification to block publication of new ideas.
Nov 2018:
Supernovae briefly outshine the galaxy they are located in but, in physics theory as presently established experimentally, they are dark and mysterious. If theory cannot explain supernovae then perhaps supernovae can illuminate theory.
Oct 2018:
In case Row v. Wade is overthrown, Planned Parenthood is planning an "underground railroad" to deliver babies to their abortionists. Isn't this an underground railroad running backwards?
Sept 2018:
A well-known physicist told me that the Bekenstein entropy bound was violated in the early universe. The correct statement is that the bound is violated by the standard picture of the early universe.
Aug 2018:
Everyone is looking for supersymmetry. Perhaps, wherever there is a large
space-time volume of matter at high density, exact supersymmetry is there.
ArXiv:1802.09501
A well-known physicist told me that the Bekenstein entropy bound was violated in the early universe. The correct statement is that the bound is violated by the standard picture of the early universe.
Aug 2018:
Everyone is looking for supersymmetry. Perhaps, wherever there is a large
space-time volume of matter at high density, exact supersymmetry is there.
ArXiv:1802.09501
July 2018:
4.5 billion years ago, in a galaxy far away, a neutrino with an energy of
290 trillion electron volts was emitted as part of a high energy jet .
Last September the earth collided with this neutrino and produced a
signal observed in Antarctica.
The big mystery is: How are such enormous jets produced?
June 2018:
Astronomers are reluctant to believe the supernova phenomenon requires
radical new physics so they have written 946 papers (so far) trying to
find the progenitors using only the physics of the 1930's.
May 2018:
In the history of language there are some perfectly good words that are
grammatically jarring when used together. Such a pair is "his" and "husband".
Language evolves naturally not by court edict. When a court
claims to rewrite the dictionary it should be seen as merely defining a civil
usage of a term in analogy to its natural meaning.
April 2018:
All physical communication is mediated by the exchange of gauge bosons between
fundamental particles and is limited by the speed of light. Many people, however,
sense that there is a reality beyond physics where communication is not limited by the
speed of light and takes place through a web of consciousness. There are some rare
anecdotal reports of information being exchanged between humans outside of the
range of physical channels. The strength of these extra-physical interactions may be
proportional to the product of the awareness of two intelligent nodes
and may be enhanced in times of mental stress.
March 2018:
Old physicists rarely collaborate with each other. Is this because their heads are
filled with so many divergent issues that the chance of any two of them becoming
deeply and simultaneously interested in the same issue is vanishingly small?
February 2018:
Science advances by the development of new ideas through thought and reaction
to data. The journals are responsible for moderating this process and ensuring that it
does not proceed too rapidly.
January 2018:
Has the physics ArXiv caused journal referees to become less conscientious? In
earlier years referees felt an obligation not to block publication of an article unless it
was ruled out by experiment or was otherwise provably wrong.
Can the print journals be saved or how can they be replaced?
December 2017:
To combat catastrophic longevity the AMA has discouraged routine blood
monitoring. Replacing it is the "wellness" visit. The doctor asks you how you feel.
You say "OK". Then he shakes your hand and schedules you for another visit
one year hence.
November 2017:
Astronomers would like to believe that all astrophysics can be explained by the
physics of the 1930's: gravity plus nuclear fusion. As a result published simulations
are sometimes difficult to distinguish from data analysis.
October 2017:
A founding principle of the United States was that imposing taxes and deciding
their use is a right of the people. All budgeting bills in the congress must originate
in the House of Representatives. In opposition to this principle are court rulings
in Massachusetts, California, and elsewhere that hold that the state must fund
abortion of its future citizens if it funds maternity care.
The Massachusetts constitution defines abortion as the destruction of an unborn
human life. Nevertheless, the Massachusetts Supreme Court has ruled that the
state cannot, in its tax policy, prefer the giving of birth to the destruction of
human life in utero. The right of directing tax funding is thus unconstitutionally
taken away from the people and their elected representatives.
September 2017:
If you want to maximize the rate of scientific discovery, make sure you don't
inadvertently abort the next Einstein.
September 2017:
Hopefully only a small percentage of pro-choice people are that way because they
agree with Margaret Sanger's desire to eliminate "human weeds". The founder of Planned Parenthood was a notorious eugenicist.
August 2017:
The body of physical law is an immense mathematical structure that we have just begun to explore.If we have to migrate to a new planet we will need to bring the annotated statement of the current status.
July 2017:
There can never be a conflict between science and religion because everything good
that comes from the laws of physics is due to the One who invented them and everything unfortunate is due to free will and His decision not to intellectually force belief.
June 2017:
In the Americas, human sacrifice in the south to appease the gods has
evolved in the north into mass killing of the unborn for the convenience of humans.
May 2017:
The Democratic Party which used to uplift the poor and the marginalized has decided that the only solution is to abort them.
April 2017:
The peer review system becomes an enemy of progress in science when evidence-based refereeing is replaced by the facebook model of likes and dislikes as is happening now. This academic inertia effect is particularly destructive when a phenomenon has a standard explanation that exhibits serious problems for forty years or more. At this point there are senior members of the community with many students and a career-long investment in a potentially dead-end direction.
March 2017:
Any physical phenomenon that baffles theorists for four decades or more is fertile ground for the discovery of radical new physics. A current example that has not received the amount of attention from physicists that it deserves is the phenomenon of supernovae.
February 2017:
Many cosmologists think there are 10^500 degrees of freedom in the multiverse
whereas there are only about 10^44 degrees of freedom in the Earth's atmosphere.
Are they trying to solve the cosmological constant problem by turning cosmology into meteorology?
Fundamental physics, by definition, involves only relatively few degrees of freedom.
January 2017:
Love trumps hate and love for humanity trumps promoting abortion with taxpayer funding.
4.5 billion years ago, in a galaxy far away, a neutrino with an energy of
290 trillion electron volts was emitted as part of a high energy jet .
Last September the earth collided with this neutrino and produced a
signal observed in Antarctica.
The big mystery is: How are such enormous jets produced?
June 2018:
Astronomers are reluctant to believe the supernova phenomenon requires
radical new physics so they have written 946 papers (so far) trying to
find the progenitors using only the physics of the 1930's.
May 2018:
In the history of language there are some perfectly good words that are
grammatically jarring when used together. Such a pair is "his" and "husband".
Language evolves naturally not by court edict. When a court
claims to rewrite the dictionary it should be seen as merely defining a civil
usage of a term in analogy to its natural meaning.
April 2018:
All physical communication is mediated by the exchange of gauge bosons between
fundamental particles and is limited by the speed of light. Many people, however,
sense that there is a reality beyond physics where communication is not limited by the
speed of light and takes place through a web of consciousness. There are some rare
anecdotal reports of information being exchanged between humans outside of the
range of physical channels. The strength of these extra-physical interactions may be
proportional to the product of the awareness of two intelligent nodes
and may be enhanced in times of mental stress.
March 2018:
Old physicists rarely collaborate with each other. Is this because their heads are
filled with so many divergent issues that the chance of any two of them becoming
deeply and simultaneously interested in the same issue is vanishingly small?
February 2018:
Science advances by the development of new ideas through thought and reaction
to data. The journals are responsible for moderating this process and ensuring that it
does not proceed too rapidly.
January 2018:
Has the physics ArXiv caused journal referees to become less conscientious? In
earlier years referees felt an obligation not to block publication of an article unless it
was ruled out by experiment or was otherwise provably wrong.
Can the print journals be saved or how can they be replaced?
December 2017:
To combat catastrophic longevity the AMA has discouraged routine blood
monitoring. Replacing it is the "wellness" visit. The doctor asks you how you feel.
You say "OK". Then he shakes your hand and schedules you for another visit
one year hence.
November 2017:
Astronomers would like to believe that all astrophysics can be explained by the
physics of the 1930's: gravity plus nuclear fusion. As a result published simulations
are sometimes difficult to distinguish from data analysis.
October 2017:
A founding principle of the United States was that imposing taxes and deciding
their use is a right of the people. All budgeting bills in the congress must originate
in the House of Representatives. In opposition to this principle are court rulings
in Massachusetts, California, and elsewhere that hold that the state must fund
abortion of its future citizens if it funds maternity care.
The Massachusetts constitution defines abortion as the destruction of an unborn
human life. Nevertheless, the Massachusetts Supreme Court has ruled that the
state cannot, in its tax policy, prefer the giving of birth to the destruction of
human life in utero. The right of directing tax funding is thus unconstitutionally
taken away from the people and their elected representatives.
September 2017:
If you want to maximize the rate of scientific discovery, make sure you don't
inadvertently abort the next Einstein.
September 2017:
Hopefully only a small percentage of pro-choice people are that way because they
agree with Margaret Sanger's desire to eliminate "human weeds". The founder of Planned Parenthood was a notorious eugenicist.
August 2017:
The body of physical law is an immense mathematical structure that we have just begun to explore.If we have to migrate to a new planet we will need to bring the annotated statement of the current status.
July 2017:
There can never be a conflict between science and religion because everything good
that comes from the laws of physics is due to the One who invented them and everything unfortunate is due to free will and His decision not to intellectually force belief.
June 2017:
In the Americas, human sacrifice in the south to appease the gods has
evolved in the north into mass killing of the unborn for the convenience of humans.
May 2017:
The Democratic Party which used to uplift the poor and the marginalized has decided that the only solution is to abort them.
April 2017:
The peer review system becomes an enemy of progress in science when evidence-based refereeing is replaced by the facebook model of likes and dislikes as is happening now. This academic inertia effect is particularly destructive when a phenomenon has a standard explanation that exhibits serious problems for forty years or more. At this point there are senior members of the community with many students and a career-long investment in a potentially dead-end direction.
March 2017:
Any physical phenomenon that baffles theorists for four decades or more is fertile ground for the discovery of radical new physics. A current example that has not received the amount of attention from physicists that it deserves is the phenomenon of supernovae.
February 2017:
Many cosmologists think there are 10^500 degrees of freedom in the multiverse
whereas there are only about 10^44 degrees of freedom in the Earth's atmosphere.
Are they trying to solve the cosmological constant problem by turning cosmology into meteorology?
Fundamental physics, by definition, involves only relatively few degrees of freedom.
January 2017:
Love trumps hate and love for humanity trumps promoting abortion with taxpayer funding.
December 2016:
A supernova seen by Kepler and Galileo occurred 2300 light years away. Galileo,
in a letter to a fellow physicist, said "I have found an explanation that, for lack of
evident contradictions, may well be true." There is still no consensus among
astronomers for how these type Ia supernova occur.
November 2016:
Article 1, section 2 of the constitution states that 3/5 of the persons owned by another
person are to be counted toward the congressional delegation and electoral
college votes of the corresponding state. Since some believe that a child in the womb
belongs to the mother to dispose of as she wishes, the constitution implies that
3/5 of those babies should be counted toward the electoral vote.
October 2016:
Astronomers need a little help with supernovae. Maybe this?.
September 2016:
Some 90,000 years ago women discovered some utility in domesticating wild animals
such as wolves and oxen for protection and heavy lifting. This was called "animal husbandry" and is the origin of the modern term "husband".
September 2016:
My granddaughter asks "why are there no unicorns?"
I tell her all the learned cosmologists say there are infinite numbers of them
in the multiverse, just none here. That explains everything. Vive la physique!
September 2016:
In the decades before nuclear fusion was discovered there was probably no shortage
of astronomers proposing ideas about how the sun could be understood as a
coal burning power plant.
August 2016:
The question arises whether a person who is generally pro-life can vote Democratic in the coming election given that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic platform are so extremely pro-abortion. Standard ethical principles say "yes" if the person does not vote Democratic precisely because of the extreme positions but because these are outweighed by good points in her policies or in the platform. For instance the Democratic Party's history of success in eliminating poverty might outweigh its stated policy of allowing the dismemberment of many thousands of late term babies at tax-payer expense.
August 2016:
Within narrow bounds the laws of physics are such as to allow the emergence of creatures capable of pondering the laws of physics so physicists should vote pro-life.
July 2016:
In its famous 1973 Roe v Wade decision creating the woman's right to abortion the Supreme Court said: "We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins.." This has led to the "Hunter In The Woods" defense: If a hunter cannot determine whether the noise in the bushes is a human or a deer, he cannot be prosecuted for shooting. As former justice Scalia said, Harvard Law School does not teach lawyers how to make ethical decisions. It also does not teach freshman biology.
June 2016:
When running for office Benjamin Netenyahu was adamant that there should never be a Palestinian state. However, after winning he realized that the two state solution was best for Israel. Now he just thinks that the Messiah should come first.
June 2016:
Where is humanity going? There have been instances of backwards evolution such as when sea creatures evolved to become land animals and then evolved back to become sea dwellers. A few species of amphibians have even been observed to devour their newborns a practice seemingly disadvantageous from the point of view of natural selection. In this regard it was disturbing to hear about the pro-abortion soiree in Georgia where cookies were made in the shape of the human fetus so they could then have their heads bitten off. Countering this is a growing movement agitating for a society where respect for human life is absolute. DFLA
May 2016:
What's all this controversy over bathroom law? I always assumed that if the icon on the door matched the topology of your clothing, that was the bathroom you were supposed to use.
May 2016:
The only surprising feature of the LIGO discovery of the merging of two black holes each of 30 times the solar mass is that two such large black holes have evidently been produced in close proximity to each other without standard observational techniques having ever seen any such systems.
Apr 1, 2016:
Boston is a great city for physics. It even has a Squantum Street named presumably after the supersymmetric packet of energy.
Apr 2016:
Hawking radiation has caused more trouble for theoretical physics than any other unconfirmed idea.
Mar 2016:
We are faced with an election year quandary: The Republicans want to send troops to the Middle East to have their legs blown off while the Democrats just want to twist them off before birth.
Feb 2016:
This month, in a great technical feat, the LIGO experiment confirmed that massive bodies sometimes orbit each other.
It was also the first direct observation of gravitational waves as predicted by Einstein. However, convincing indirect evidence had already been provided by the observation of pulsar slowing. In addition, for many years there has been no serious theory that did not have gravitons and, therefore, gravitational radiation. In particular, string theories generically predict the existence of gravitons with the right coupling to the energy-momentum tensor.
A supernova seen by Kepler and Galileo occurred 2300 light years away. Galileo,
in a letter to a fellow physicist, said "I have found an explanation that, for lack of
evident contradictions, may well be true." There is still no consensus among
astronomers for how these type Ia supernova occur.
November 2016:
Article 1, section 2 of the constitution states that 3/5 of the persons owned by another
person are to be counted toward the congressional delegation and electoral
college votes of the corresponding state. Since some believe that a child in the womb
belongs to the mother to dispose of as she wishes, the constitution implies that
3/5 of those babies should be counted toward the electoral vote.
October 2016:
Astronomers need a little help with supernovae. Maybe this?.
September 2016:
Some 90,000 years ago women discovered some utility in domesticating wild animals
such as wolves and oxen for protection and heavy lifting. This was called "animal husbandry" and is the origin of the modern term "husband".
September 2016:
My granddaughter asks "why are there no unicorns?"
I tell her all the learned cosmologists say there are infinite numbers of them
in the multiverse, just none here. That explains everything. Vive la physique!
September 2016:
In the decades before nuclear fusion was discovered there was probably no shortage
of astronomers proposing ideas about how the sun could be understood as a
coal burning power plant.
August 2016:
The question arises whether a person who is generally pro-life can vote Democratic in the coming election given that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic platform are so extremely pro-abortion. Standard ethical principles say "yes" if the person does not vote Democratic precisely because of the extreme positions but because these are outweighed by good points in her policies or in the platform. For instance the Democratic Party's history of success in eliminating poverty might outweigh its stated policy of allowing the dismemberment of many thousands of late term babies at tax-payer expense.
August 2016:
Within narrow bounds the laws of physics are such as to allow the emergence of creatures capable of pondering the laws of physics so physicists should vote pro-life.
July 2016:
In its famous 1973 Roe v Wade decision creating the woman's right to abortion the Supreme Court said: "We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins.." This has led to the "Hunter In The Woods" defense: If a hunter cannot determine whether the noise in the bushes is a human or a deer, he cannot be prosecuted for shooting. As former justice Scalia said, Harvard Law School does not teach lawyers how to make ethical decisions. It also does not teach freshman biology.
June 2016:
When running for office Benjamin Netenyahu was adamant that there should never be a Palestinian state. However, after winning he realized that the two state solution was best for Israel. Now he just thinks that the Messiah should come first.
June 2016:
Where is humanity going? There have been instances of backwards evolution such as when sea creatures evolved to become land animals and then evolved back to become sea dwellers. A few species of amphibians have even been observed to devour their newborns a practice seemingly disadvantageous from the point of view of natural selection. In this regard it was disturbing to hear about the pro-abortion soiree in Georgia where cookies were made in the shape of the human fetus so they could then have their heads bitten off. Countering this is a growing movement agitating for a society where respect for human life is absolute. DFLA
May 2016:
What's all this controversy over bathroom law? I always assumed that if the icon on the door matched the topology of your clothing, that was the bathroom you were supposed to use.
May 2016:
The only surprising feature of the LIGO discovery of the merging of two black holes each of 30 times the solar mass is that two such large black holes have evidently been produced in close proximity to each other without standard observational techniques having ever seen any such systems.
Apr 1, 2016:
Boston is a great city for physics. It even has a Squantum Street named presumably after the supersymmetric packet of energy.
Apr 2016:
Hawking radiation has caused more trouble for theoretical physics than any other unconfirmed idea.
Mar 2016:
We are faced with an election year quandary: The Republicans want to send troops to the Middle East to have their legs blown off while the Democrats just want to twist them off before birth.
Feb 2016:
This month, in a great technical feat, the LIGO experiment confirmed that massive bodies sometimes orbit each other.
It was also the first direct observation of gravitational waves as predicted by Einstein. However, convincing indirect evidence had already been provided by the observation of pulsar slowing. In addition, for many years there has been no serious theory that did not have gravitons and, therefore, gravitational radiation. In particular, string theories generically predict the existence of gravitons with the right coupling to the energy-momentum tensor.
