mintpressnews |The enormous economic dislocation
caused by the COVID-19 pandemic offers a unique opportunity to
fundamentally alter the structure of society, and the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) if using the crisis to implement near-permanent
austerity measures across the world.
76 of the 91 loans it has negotiated with 81 nations since the
beginning of the worldwide pandemic in March have come attached with
demands that countries adopt measures such as deep cuts to public
services and pensions — measures that will undoubtedly entail
privatization, wage freezes or cuts, or the firing of public sector
workers like doctors, nurses, teachers and firefighters.
The principal cheerleader for neoliberal austerity measures across
the globe for decades, the IMF has recently (quietly) begun admitting
that these policies have not worked and generally make problems like
poverty, uneven development, and inequality even worse. Furthermore,
they have also failed even to bring the promised economic growth that
was meant to counteract these negative effects. In 2016, it described its own policies as “oversold” and earlier summed up its experiments in Latin America as “all pain, no gain.” Thus, its own reports explicitly state its policies do not work.
“The IMF has sounded the alarm about a massive spike in inequality in
the wake of the pandemic. Yet it is steering countries to pay for
pandemic spending by making austerity cuts that will fuel poverty and
inequality,” Chema Vera, Interim Executive Director of Oxfam
International, said today.
These measures could leave millions of people without
access to healthcare or income support while they search for work, and
could thwart any hope of sustainable recovery. In taking this approach,
the IMF is doing an injustice to its own research. Its head needs to
start speaking to its hands.”
Oxfam has identified at least 14 countries that it expects will
imminently freeze or cut public sector wages and jobs. Tunisia, for
example, has only 13 doctors per 10,000 people. Any cuts to its already
scant healthcare system would cripple it in its fight against the
coronavirus. “If people can’t afford testing and care for COVID-19 and
other health needs, the virus will continue to spread unchecked and more
people will die. Out-of-pocket healthcare expenses were a tragedy
before the pandemic, and now they are a death sentence,” Vera added.
tabletmag | Tides
was founded in 1976 by Drummond Pike, a California real estate investor
who named the entity after a Bay Area bookstore popular among
left-leaning activists. From the beginning, according to their own documents,
Tides was designed unlike most other nonprofit institutions. Rather
than building up or spending down an endowment, it sought to become more
like a sophisticated piece of software—a financial instrument that
would allow wealthy individuals and donors to contribute to the causes
of their choosing with more anonymity than is generally allowed by the
laws governing ordinary nonprofits.
Recently,
after Pike stepped away, the Tides network has taken on a distinctly
political role, whose guiding star appears to be Barack Obama. The
secretary of the Tides board
is Suzanne Nossel, the CEO of PEN America and a former deputy assistant
secretary of state for international organizations in the Obama
administration; board member Cheryl Alston was appointed by Obama to the
advisory committee of the federal pension program. Peter Buttenwieser,
the heir to the Lehman Brothers fortune who passed away in 2018,
financed a fund in his own name which is administered and distributed
entirely by the Tides Foundation. A “major behind-the-scenes supporter of Democratic candidates,”
Buttenwieser was one of President Obama’s earliest high profile
backers, helping the then-senator organize his bid for the White House.
Moreover, Atlantic Philanthropies, a nonprofit created by billionaire retailer Chuck Feeney in the 1980s, has directed more than $42 million in grants through the Tides network since 2000. Based in Bermuda,
Atlantic Philanthropies was able to participate in political lobbying
efforts in ways that continental United States nonprofits cannot.
Atlantic became increasingly aggressive under the Obama administration.
As Gara LaMarche, Atlantic’s president, said in one think tank address,
when Obama was elected “we saw opportunities to assist our grantees in
moving forward more rapidly and broadly in a number of areas central to
our mission.” In return, Atlantic dispensed $27 million to help push Obamacare through Congress. At the ceremony to sign Obamacare into law, LaMarche stood beside President Obama in the East Room of the White House.
In
any case, what’s clear is that there is now a sophisticated and complex
structure underneath what many assume to be an organic and spontaneous
social movement, one with deep pockets and ambitious goals. “After over
fourteen years of learning and over 700 million dollars invested ... the
collapse we have been expecting is surely underway,” reads the NoVo
Foundation’s website. Right now there’s only this one statement on the
site, which is under construction as noted: “Working on solutions now so
old patterns of power can’t, once again, re-form to rebuild and
continue to repress.”
WaPo | The
day after President Trump told the Proud Boys, a far-right group with a
history of inciting violence, to “stand back and stand by,” during the
first presidential debate last week, tech investor Cyan Banister tweeted that the group was misunderstood and had “a few bad apples.”
The
open defense of an organization that has been deemed a hate group by
the Southern Poverty Law Center is one extreme example of an
increasingly public reactionary streak in Silicon Valley that diverges
from the tech industry’s image as a bastion of liberalism. Some
libertarian, centrist and right-leaning Silicon Valley investors and
executives, who wield outsize influence, power and access to capital,
describe tech culture as under siege by activist employees pushing a
social justice agenda.
Curtis Yarvin, dubbed a “favorite philosopher of the alt-right” by the Verge, has become a familiar face
on the invite-only audio social network Clubhouse, in rooms with
investors such as Facebook board member Marc Andreessen, the founder of
Andreessen Horowitz, which invested in the app.
Cryptocurrency
start-up Coinbase recently sought to restrict political speech by
employees, a move many interpreted as a shift to the right because it
came in reaction to internal discussions of Black Lives Matter.
Tensions
are running high even at some of the biggest tech companies. The
crackdown on employee speech in response to social activism over the
past year has spread to Facebook, Google and Pinterest, among others.
In September, Facebook restricted spaces
for political discussions after employees protested the company’s
moderation policies against hate speech affecting Black users. Pinterest
shut down a Slack channel used to submit questions for company meetings
and turned another Slack channel read-only, opting to use a different
tool for up-voting. Employees, who had used both channels to question
leadership about race and gender bias and pay equity in recent months,
were upset, according to records viewed by The Washington Post.
Banister, a
former partner at Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm and an early
investor in Uber and SpaceX, said she applauded Coinbase’s decision.
“Enough is enough. The pendulum swings and it swings back,” she told The
Post. “Sometimes people just want to have a safe place to go where they
don’t have to think about this stuff anymore because it’s literally
everywhere. ”
Banister
told The Post she became interested in the Proud Boys after Trump
mentioned them during the debate. She said she does not condone white
supremacy and it should have been “dead easy” for the president to say
the same.
“Questioning something does not mean condoning or agreeing,” she said.
Often, the trigger for this public pushback has been social pressure around racial equity, according to diversity consultants.
The tech industry went through similar reactionary spasms around the last presidential election, revealing a different strain
of libertarianism from the counterculture and cyberculture geeks coding
away in their garages. At the time, the underlying tension was also
around equity and injustice. But the battle was about disavowing Thiel, a
Trump donor and adviser, rather than expressing support for Black Lives
Matter.
tomluongo | Back during the early days of the Democratic primaries I told you
that the real story behind the scenes was a three-sided civil war for
control of the DNC.
Not quite an equilateral triangle, the two major factions were the
Clintons and the Obamas with the Soros-backed squad pushing them both
farther and farther left, through the fake Progressivism of Bernie
Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
And with the ascension of Joe Biden as the candidate, triumphing over
the inept Hillary-backed challenge from Mini Mike Bloomberg, it was
clear that the Obamas won the internal battle.
Hillary eventually bent the knee and endorsed Biden along with everyone else.
After her failure to beat Trump in 2016 it became clear that Obama was the choice by The Davos Crowd to deliver the U.S. into their hands weak, divided, literally on fire and close to irretrievably insane.
In the words of Bush the Lesser, “Mission Accomplished.”
But what’s been sticking in the back of my mind for months was Trump’s tweet from May:
sandrarose | The latest statistics confirm what U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams said about face masks in February.
Dr. Adams previously said the public should not wear masks to protect
against the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus disease because masks offered little protection against a virus.
"Seriously people — STOP BUYING MASKS!" Adams tweeted on Feb. 29.
The WHO, the CDC and NIH's Dr. Anthony Fauci also strongly discouraged wearing masks as not useful for the public.
Dr. Adams changed his tune months later. He encouraged Americans to
wear a mask to stop the spread of the coronavirus — insisting the face
coverings don't infringe on Americans' "freedom".
Adams was not wearing a mask in August when he and another man were cited for trespassing in a park in Hawaii that was closed.
Adams, 46, was with his personal assistant, Dennis Anderson-Villaluz,
a 37-year-old dietician with the U.S. Health Dept. The two men
were "taking pictures" inside the rural park.
People who are most at risk for contracting Covid-19 include those
with preexisting conditions such as cardiac problems, hypertension,
asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), immunodeficiency
(HIV), psychiatric condition, diabetes, or obesity.
"The idea that we're going to do a national, stay-at-home order ... it's just not going to happen," says @ScottGottliebMD. "When history looks back on us, the critical failing is going to be the fact that we were so blind to the spread back in April and May." pic.twitter.com/x7xJP1OvcX
NYPost | The World Health Organization has warned leaders against relying on
COVID-19 lockdowns to tackle outbreaks — after previously saying
countries should be careful how quickly they reopen.
“We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” Nabarro said.
“The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time
to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health
workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”
Nabarro said tight restrictions cause significant harm, particularly on the global economy.
“Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never, ever
belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer,” he said.
He added that lockdowns have severely impacted countries that rely on tourism.
“Just look at what’s happened to the tourism industry in the
Caribbean, for example, or in the Pacific because people aren’t taking
their holidays,” Nabarro told the outlet.
“Look what’s happened to smallholder farmers all over the world. Look
what’s happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a
doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a
doubling of child malnutrition.”
off-guardian | The World Health Organization has finally confirmed
what we (and many experts and studies) have been saying for months – the
coronavirus is no more deadly or dangerous than seasonal flu.
In fact, they didn’t seem to completely understand it themselves.
At the session, Dr Michael Ryan, the WHO’s Head of Emergencies
revealed that they believe roughly 10% of the world has been infected
with Sars-Cov-2. This is their “best estimate”, and a huge increase over
the number of officially recognised cases (around 35 million).
Dr. Margaret Harris, a WHO spokeswoman, later confirmed the figure,
stating it was based on the average results of all the broad seroprevalence studies done around the world.
As much as the WHO were attempting to spin this as a bad thing – Dr Ryan even said it means “the vast majority of the world remains at risk.” – it’s actually good news. And confirms, once more, that the virus is nothing like as deadly as everyone predicted.
The global population is roughly 7.8 billion people, if 10% have been infected that is 780 million cases. The global death toll currently attributed to Sars-Cov-2 infections is 1,061,539.
That’s an infection fatality rate of roughly or 0.14%. Right in line
with seasonal flu and the predictions of many experts from all around
the world.
0.14% is over 24 times LOWER than the WHO’s “provisional figure” of 3.4% back in March. This figure was used in the models which were used to justify lockdowns and other draconian policies.
In fact, given the over-reporting of alleged Covid deaths, the IFR is likely even lower than 0.14%, and could show Covid to be much less dangerous than flu.
None of the mainstream press picked up on this. Though many outlets reported Dr Ryan’s words, they all attempted to make it a scary headline and spread more panic.
WEForum |The challenge: As countries around the world work to overcome
the COVID-19 pandemic and restart their economies and tourism, they all
face the challenge of how to reopen their borders and allow
international travel to resume while protecting their populations’
health. The current patchwork of policies and ever-changing border entry
and health screening requirements has made international travel
incredibly complex, leaving airlines and border agencies uncertain about
the validity of test results and passengers unsure of what is being
asked of them.
The solution: CommonPass aims to
develop and launch a standard global model to enable people to securely
document and present their COVID-19 status (either as test results or an
eventual vaccination status) to facilitate international travel and
border crossing while keeping their health information private.
Recognizing that countries will make sovereign decisions on border entry
and health screening requirements, including whether or not to require
tests or what type of test to require, CommonPass serves as a neutral
platform which creates the interoperability needed for the various
'travel bubbles' to connect and for countries to trust one another's
data by leveraging global standards.
For governments,
airlines, airports, and other key stakeholders throughout the end-to-end
travel journey, CommonPass aims to address these key questions:
How can a lab result or vaccination record from another country be trusted?
Is the lab or vaccination facility accredited/certified?
How do we confirm that the person who took the test is indeed the person who is travelling?
Does the traveler meet border entry requirements?
How it works: In line with protocols and guidelines
from international organizations and standards bodies in the aviation
and health sectors, CommonPass allows individuals to securely document
their COVID-19 status electronically and present it when they board a
plane or cross a border.
The framework will:
Allow individuals to collect and store their health information
securely and present their health status in conjunction with border
crossing and travel requirements.
Support a range of health data inputs, including PCR test results and vaccination records.
Support a range of health screening entry requirements that vary
from country to country and will evolve through the course of the
pandemic and beyond.
Protect the privacy of individual health data.
Be interoperable across countries and regions.
Be based on proven, international standards and open technologies.
Be operated on an open, independent, sustainable, not-for-profit basis.
thecorrespondent | It seems that blockchain sounds best in a PowerPoint slide. Most blockchain projects don’t make it past a press release, an inventory by Bloomberg showed. The Honduran land registry was going to use blockchain. That plan has been shelved. The Nasdaq was also going to do something with blockchain. Not happening. The Dutch Central Bank then? Nope. Out of over 86,000 blockchain projects that had been launched, 92% had been abandoned by the end of 2017, according to consultancy firm Deloitte.
Why are they deciding to stop? Enlightened – and thus former – blockchain developer Mark van Cuijk explained: “You could also use a forklift to put a six-pack of beer on your kitchen counter. But it’s just not very efficient.”
I’ll list a few of the problems. Firstly: the technology is at loggerheads with European privacy legislation, specifically the right to be forgotten. Once something is in the blockchain, it cannot be removed. For instance, hundreds of links to child abuse material and revenge porn were placed in the bitcoin blockchain by malicious users.
It’s impossible to remove those.
Also, in a blockchain you aren’t anonymous, but “pseudonymous”: your identity is linked to a number, and if someone can link your name to that number, you’re screwed. Everything you got up to on that blockchain is visible to everyone.
The presumed hackers of Hillary Clinton’s email were caught, for instance, because their identity could be linked to bitcoin transactions. A number of researchers from Qatar University were able to ascertain the identities of tens of thousands of bitcoin users fairly easily through social networking sites. Other researchers showed how you can de-anonymise many more people through trackers on shopping websites.
The fact that no one is in charge and nothing can be modified also means that mistakes cannot be corrected. A bank can reverse a payment request. This is impossible for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. So anything that has been stolen will stay stolen. There is a continuous stream of hackers targeting bitcoin exchanges and users, and fraudsters launching investment vehicles that are in fact pyramid schemes. According to estimates, nearly 15% of all bitcoin has been stolen at some point. And it isn’t even 10 years old yet.
al-jazeera | “Kampf der Nibelungen” or “Battle of the Nibelungs,” a reference to old
Germanic and Norse legends, is beloved by white supremacists from across
Europe and beyond – they are both fans and fighters.
With German authorities keeping a close eye on them after banning
their previous event in 2019, organisers are planning to stream their
far-right fight-night of boxing, kickboxing and mixed martial arts (MMA)
online this Saturday.
Observers warn Al Jazeera that Europe’s far-right groups are using
combat sports to recruit young men and train them for literal battle in
the streets.
“They are violent neo-Nazis training for physical violence,” said
Robert Claus, a German journalist and author of a new book on combat
sports and the European far right.
The individuals behind Kampf der Nibelungen are violent and “dangerous”, he added.
There is “a very long list of racist attacks which comes out of the network of Kampf der Nibelungen”.
Moreover, Claus is concerned about the longer-term consequences if Kampf der Nibelungen goes ahead as planned.
“They’re showing a middle finger to German authorities,” he said. “If
they manage to go ahead and broadcast this event in defiance of German
authorities, it undermines the state’s monopoly on violence and the
authority of the state.”
reuters | The primary “terrorist threat” facing the United States, according to an
Oct. 6 Department of Homeland Security report, are lone offenders and
small domestic extremist cells who may act out grievances.
An October
poll by political scientists including Lee Drutman of the New America
think tank published in Politico found around a third of Americans
justified violence to advance political goals, double the number in
December 2019.
“The
most likely outcome is the election happens, there’s no major violence,
but the risk of serious or even low-level violence is probably higher
than it’s been in a very long time,” said Drutman.
“That’s what is galvanizing and driving militia groups and other armed
individuals to think that they have a role to play in this moment of
sweeping social change,” said Joan Donovan, a misinformation expert at
Harvard.
YOU - don't have to follow the detailed equations and everything. The
celestial sphere is a Riemann sphere and the collection of light
rays/points/events comprise a lorentz group in minkowski
space.
Points on the Riemann sphere are conformal comprising a circle
on the sphere. A Riemann sphere is a complex curve or manifold, twistor
space is therefore a complex space.
Quantum mechanics is based on complex numbers and amplitudes and thus we need a complex and non-local space-time manifold.
An entire light ray is a point, a simultaneous
entity. A photon doesn't experience "time" and thus its mechanics are
and can be non-local.
9:45 Stereographic projection on a Riemann spere with discussion of particle spin.
At 11:40 he shows the spinor calculus and breaks
down the components of the spinor. Showing the light cone as a spinor in
Riemann space, making things real and plain.
At 12:40 he explains the twistor and its associated algebra.
At 40:00 he explains cohomology utilizing an impossible triangular solid - can the geometric structure be realized in 3-space
weylmann |The notion of electron spin was first surmised in 1922 when the German physicists Otto Stern and WaltherGerlach noticed that a stream of silver atoms (each having a single electron in the outer 5s orbital) could be separated by a non-uniform magnetic field into two streams, ‘‘up’’ and ‘‘down.’’ At the time, no one knew what to make of this odd behavior, but three years later George Uhlenbeck and Samuel Goudsmit proposed that electrons could exist in two spin states,±1/2, each with the units of angular momentumħh=h/2Ï€.
Still, the concept of electron spin varied between a simplistic physical ‘‘spinning’’ of the electron about some axis (like a child’s top) and a kind of internal angular momentum.
Today we look upon electrons and other spin-1/2 particles as havingan intrinsic angular momentum with no classical counterpart. This gave rise to the notion of such particles living in ‘‘spin space,’’ an abstract two-dimensional internal space that requires a description beyond that of scalars,vectors and tensors. Cartan’s spinor formalism was found to be appropriate for this description.
Many attempts have been made over the years to explain spinors at an intuitive, elementary level, but the simplest approach remains an appeal to basic Lorentz group theory. This is rather a pity, because undergraduate students often express an aversion to group theory because of its mathematical nature. But the theory of Lorentz rotations and boosts is relatively simple, and it has the nice property of being relativistic from the start.
In addition, it neatly admits a formalism that underlies that of the 4-vectors it ordinarily applies to, which is where spinors come in.
Even better, Lorentz theory confirms the intuitive notion that if a spinor represents half of a 4-vector (rather than the square root), then there should be two kinds of spinor: one comprising the upper half and another representing the lower half. This observation is critical, since a single two-component spinor can be shown to violate odd-even parity in quantum physics, and it takes two spinors acting together to preserve it. Thus, the Dirac bispinor—a four-component object consisting of two stacked spinors—fully preserves parity.
Our approach will therefore be based on the Lorentz transformations of rotations and boosts. There are, however,a few subtleties that other, more advanced treatments either gloss over or assert by inference, and I will try toexplain these in a more straightforward and understandable manner as we go along.
The Dirac Equation
When it was discovered that electrons can exist in both+12and12spin states, the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli suggested in 1927 that the scalar wave functionΨin Schrödinger’s equation be replaced by a two-component spinor, each component representing one of the electron’s allowed spin states.
But while Pauli’s approach worked,it presented a problem having to do withparity; that is, the sign reversal operationΨ(x,t)→Ψ(−x,t)gaveinconsistent results in Pauli’s approach, violating the notion that Nature should be mirror-image invariant.
However, in 1928, at the age of just 25, the great British mathematical physicist Paul Adrienne Maurice Diracmade a monumental discovery, perhaps the greatest discovery in all of modern physics. The student can look upthe details, but what Dirac did was essentially take the square root of the relativistic energy-mass equation
E2=m2c4+c2p
He ended up with the set of four partial differential equations in (1) involving four4×4 matricesγμ(now calledthe Dirac gamma matrices), along with a new four-component wave functionΨa(x,t), where
a=0,1,2,3.
It was soon realized that Dirac’sΨwas abispinor, a four-component mathematical object consisting of theφRandφLWeyl spinors we identified earlier:
Ψ=Ψ0Ψ1Ψ2Ψ3=ïφRφLò
Dirac’s bispinor was found to preserve parity under the sign reversal operation
Ψ(x,t)→Ψ(−x,t).
Far more importantly, the spinorφReffectively represents the spin-up and spin-down components of an ordinary electron,while φL represents the spin-up and spin-down components of an anti-electron (known as a positron)—Dirac’swork thus predicted the existence of antimatter (the positron was subsequently discovered in 1932, for which the Caltech experimental physicist Carl Anderson won the Nobel Prize).
Dirac’s relativistic electron equation alsoexplained electron spin as a form of intrinsic angular momentum called S. Thus, the angular momentum L of an electron alone is not conserved—instead, it is L+S that is conserved.Dirac’s equation and its underlying mathematics today represent the foundation of much of modern quantum field theory.
space | Penrose admits it's a wild suggestion, but believes that like all
good scientific theories, it might be tested through experiment and
observation. These tests stem from the idea that our aeon and the one
preceding it were not completely isolated from one another. "Information
does get through," he said. "It gets through in the form of a shock
wave in our universe's initial dark matter."
Dark matter,
like dark energy, is a shadowy substance, this time needed to account
for the way structures such as galaxies and clusters of galaxies formed
in the early universe. According to Penrose's calculations, that shock
wave would have had an effect on the cosmic microwave background (CMB),
which is the leftover radiation from the Big Bang, released when the
universe was under 400,000 years old. "You'd see rings in the CMB that
are slightly warmer or cooler than the average temperature," he said.
The
equations of CCC predict that a shock wave arriving from a previous
aeon would have dragged matter into our universe. If that caused
material to head toward us, we would see light from that region shunted
to shorter wavelengths — an effect astronomers call blueshift. Equally, a
region carried away from us by a CCC shock wave would be redshifted,
meaning its wavelength would be stretched out.
Blueshifted
regions would appear hotter and redshifted areas cooler. It's these
changes Penrose believes we'd see as rings in the cosmic microwave
background. Multiple shockwaves might even have produced a series of
concentric rings. "I asked whether anyone had looked for these rings in
the sky," Penrose said.
Several years ago, it did seem as if those rings had been found, a
veritable smoking gun for CCC. "Except nobody believed us. They said it
must have been a fluke or something," Penrose said.
"But those
signatures have been confirmed by alternative groups," said Vahe
Gurzadyan a physicist at the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia and
Penrose's long time collaborator on CCC.
The scientists point to
the fact that a team of Polish and Canadian researchers confirmed the
presence of the rings to a confidence level of 99.7%. However, there are
still many doubters. Gurzadyan remains steadfast. "These structures are
real – there is no doubt that our calculations are reliable and
correct," he said. Still, Penrose has been exploring other approaches
that might further support the pair's claims about CCC and a time before
the Big Bang.
The transition between aeons would do something more fundamental that
just create a shock wave in our dark matter and rings in the cosmic
microwave background. "A new material, the dominant material in the
universe, is created at the crossover," Penrose said. He regards that
new material as the initial form of dark matter itself.
"But
in order that it doesn't build up from aeon to aeon, it has to decay,"
he said. He calls these initial dark matter particles erebons after
Erebos, the Greek god of darkness.
On
average it would take 100 billion years for an erebon to decay, but
there are some that will have decayed in the 14-billion-year history of
our universe. Crucially, as they decay, Penrose says erebons dump all
their energy into gravitational waves.
Forbes | Ultimately, science moved on while the contrarians became more and
more irrelevant, with their trivially incorrect work fading into
obscurity and their research programme eventually ceasing upon their
deaths.
In the meantime, from the 1960s up through the 2000s, the sciences of
astronomy and astrophysics — and particularly the sub-field of
cosmology, which focuses on the history, growth, evolution, and fate of
the Universe — grew spectacularly.
We mapped out the large-scale structure of the Universe, discovering a great cosmic web.
We discovered how galaxies grew and evolved, and how their stellar populations inside changed with time.
We learned that all the known forms of matter and energy in the
Universe were insufficient to explain everything we observe: some form
of dark matter and some form of dark energy are required.
And we were able to further verify additional predictions of the Big
Bang, such as the predicted abundances of the light elements, the
presence of a population of primordial neutrinos, and the discovery of
density imperfections of exactly the necessary type to grow into the
large-scale structure of the Universe we observe today.
At the same time, there were observations that were no doubt true,
but that the Big Bang had no predictive power to explain. The Universe
allegedly reached these arbitrarily high temperatures and high energies
at the earliest times, and yet there are no exotic leftover relics that
we can see today: no magnetic monopoles, no particles from grand
unification, no topological defects, etc. Theoretically, something else
beyond what is known must be out there to explain the Universe we see,
but if they ever existed, they’ve been hidden from us.
The Universe, in order to exist with the properties we see, must have
been born with a very specific expansion rate: one that balanced the
total energy density exactly, to more than 50 significant digits. The
Big Bang has no explanation for why this should be the case.
And the only way different regions of space would have the same exact
temperature is if they’re in thermal equilibrium: if they have time to
interact and exchange energy. Yet the Universe is too big and has
expanded in such a way that we have many causally disconnected regions.
Even at the speed of light, those interactions couldn’t have taken
place.
Unfortunately, Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose, although his work on
General Relativity, black holes, and singularities in the 1960s and
1970s was absolutely Nobel-worthy, has spent a large amount of his
efforts in recent years on a crusade to overthrow inflation: by
promoting a vastly scientifically inferior alternative, his pet idea of a
Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, or CCC.
The biggest predictive difference is that the CCC pretty much
requires that an imprint of “the Universe before the Big Bang” show
itself in both the Universe’s large-scale structure and in the cosmic
microwave background: the Big Bang’s leftover glow. Contrariwise,
inflation demands that anywhere where inflation ends and a hot Big Bang
arises must be causally disconnected from, and cannot interact with, any
prior, current, or future such region. Our Universe exists with
properties that are independent of any other.
The observations — first from COBE and WMAP, and more recently, from
Planck — definitively place enormously tight constraints (to the limits
of the data that exists) on any such structures. There are no bruises on
our Universe; no repeating patterns; no concentric circles of irregular
fluctuations; no Hawking points. When one analyzes the data properly,
it is overwhelmingly clear that inflation is consistent with the data,
and the CCC is quite clearly not.
nautil.us | Once you start poking around in the muck of consciousness studies, you
will soon encounter the specter of Sir Roger Penrose, the renowned
Oxford physicist with an audacious—and quite possibly crackpot—theory
about the quantum origins of consciousness. He believes we must go
beyond neuroscience and into the mysterious world of quantum mechanics
to explain our rich mental life. No one quite knows what to make of this
theory, developed with the American anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff,
but conventional wisdom goes something like this: Their theory is almost
certainly wrong, but since Penrose is so brilliant (“One of the very
few people I’ve met in my life who, without reservation, I call a
genius,” physicist Lee Smolin has said), we’d be foolish to dismiss
their theory out of hand.
Penrose, 85, is a mathematical
physicist who made his name decades ago with groundbreaking work in
general relativity and then, working with Stephen Hawking, helped
conceptualize black holes and gravitational singularities, a point of
infinite density out of which the universe may have formed. He also
invented “twistor theory,” a new way to connect quantum mechanics with
the structure of spacetime. His discovery of certain geometric forms
known as “Penrose tiles”—an ingenious design of non-repeating
patterns—led to new directions of study in mathematics and
crystallography.
The breadth of Penrose’s interests is extraordinary, which is evident in his recent book Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe—a
dense 500-page tome that challenges some of the trendiest but still
unproven theories in physics, from the multiple dimensions of string
theory to cosmic inflation in the first moment of the Big Bang. He
considers these theories to be fanciful and implausible.
Penrose doesn’t seem to mind being branded a maverick, though he
disputes the label in regard to his work in physics. But his theory of
consciousness pushes the edges of what’s considered plausible science
and has left critics wondering why he embraces a theory based on so
little evidence.
Most scientists regard quantum mechanics as
irrelevant to our understanding of how the brain works. Still, it’s not
hard to see why Penrose’s theory has gained attention. Artificial
intelligence experts have been predicting some sort of computer brain
for decades, with little to show so far. And for all the recent advances
in neurobiology, we seem no closer to solving the mind-brain problem
than we were a century ago. Even if the human brain’s neurons, synapses
and neurotransmitters could be completely mapped—which would be one of
the great triumphs in the history of science—it’s not clear that we’d be
any closer to explaining how this 3-pound mass of wet tissue generates
the immaterial world of our thoughts and feelings. Something seems to be
missing in current theories of consciousness. The philosopher David
Chalmers has speculated that consciousness may be a fundamental property
of nature existing outside the known laws of physics. Others—often
branded “mysterians”—claim that subjective experience is simply beyond
the capacity of science to explain.
phys.org | In the 1960s, in an attempt to understand quantum gravity, physicist
Roger Penrose proposed such a radical alternative. In Penrose's twistor
theory, geometric points are replaced by twistors—entities that most
closely resemble stretched, light ray-like shapes. Within this twistor
space, Penrose discovered a highly efficient way to represent fields
that travel at the speed of light, such as electromagnetic and
gravitational fields. Reality, however, is composed of more than
fields—any theory needs also to account for the interactions between
fields, such as the electric force between charges, or, in the more
complicated case of General Relativity, gravitational attraction
resulting from the energy of the field itself. However, including the
interactions of General Relativity into this picture has proven a
formidable task.
So can we express in twistor language a full-fledged quantum
gravitational theory, perhaps simpler than General Relativity, but with
both fields and interactions fully taken into account? Yes, according to
Neiman.
Neiman's model builds on higher spin gravity, a model developed by
Mikhail Vasiliev in the 1980s and '90s. Higher spin gravity can be
thought of as the "smaller cousin" of String Theory, "too simple to
reproduce General Relativity, but very instructive as a playground for
ideas," as Neiman puts it. In particular, it is perfectly suited for
exploring possible bridges between holography and twistor theory.
On one hand, as discovered by Igor Klebanov and Alexander Polyakov in 2001, higher spin gravity, just like string theory,
can be described holographically. Its behavior within space can be
captured completely in terms of a boundary at infinity. On the other
hand, its equations contain twistor-like variables, even if these are
still tied to particular points in ordinary space.
From these starting points, Neiman's paper takes an additional step,
constructing a mathematical dictionary that ties together the languages
of holography and twistor theory.
"The underlying math that makes this story tick is all about square
roots," writes Neiman. "It's about identifying subtle ways in which a
geometric operation, such as a rotation or reflection, can be done
'halfway.' A clever square root is like finding a crack in a solid wall,
opening it in two, and revealing a new world."
Using square roots in this way has a longstanding history in math and
physics. In fact, the intrinsic shape of all matter particles—such as
electrons and quarks—as well as twistors, is described by a square root
of ordinary directions in space. In a subtle technical sense, Neiman's
method for connecting space, its boundary at infinity, and twistor
space, boils down to taking such a square root again.
Neiman hopes that his proof of concept can pave the way toward a quantum theory of gravity that does not rely on a boundary at infinity.
"It will take a lot of creativity to uncover the code of the world," says Neiman. "And there's joy in fumbling around for it."
oakridger | “If nuclear fission can occur naturally near the surface, why wouldn’t it occur deep in the earth?” Hollenbach asked.
Using
SCALE nuclear safety analysis codes, Hollenbach simulated a georeactor
that would function as a fast neutron breeder reactor and have an energy
output (under 3 terawatts) that would enable it to heat the planet’s
core and power its magnetic field for 4.5 billion years, the widely
accepted age of Earth. The initial density and relative abundance of
uranium isotopes that he assumed for his simulation were based on what
is determined to be present in a certain kind of meteor that is almost
oxygen-free (as Earth was during its formation).
By
absorbing neutrons, the uranium isotope U-235 would break into lighter
elements more readily than the much more abundant uranium isotope U-238,
releasing considerable heat energy and neutrons that will trigger more
fission, or self-sustaining chain reactions. Free neutrons absorbed by
U-238 nuclei can cause the formation of plutonium-239, another nuclear
fuel. This process, known as breeding, can significantly extend the
lifetime of a nuclear reactor.
Hollenbach’s
calculations also generated data on the fission products that would
result from uranium fission deep within Earth, as well as from
radioactive decay. He showed that two helium isotopes, He-3 and He-4,
would be produced in the same relative proportion by georeactors as
helium isotopes found in basalt extruded from volcanic lavas in Hawaii
and Iceland. Because helium is a light noble gas that does not react
with other materials, it could migrate from a georeactor to hot spots on
Earth’s surface. “The only way helium is produced on the Earth is
through fission or decay of heavy elements,” he said.
When helium was first discovered in the 1960s on
Earth’s surface, it was assumed that helium gas in space was trapped in
the surface during Earth’s formation. Hollenbach said trapped helium
would have outgassed during Earth’s molten stage. He found that the
ratio of He-3 to He-4 at the surface corresponds to the ratio calculated
to be produced by deep-Earth fission. It’s not the same as the ratio of
helium isotopes formed in the air by cosmic rays (which is up to 34
times lower).
Because most fission products
are lighter and less dense than nuclear fuel in a georeactor, Hollenbach
said, they most likely migrate away from a georeactor after
accumulating there. As a result, the georeactor’s energy output will
stop decreasing and start to rise again.
The
Earth’s magnetic field varies in strength and has flipped its polarity
over millions of years. These changes, he suggested, could be explained
by georeactors that turn on and off.
“The
cyclic nature of geomagnetic field reversals and periodic high volcanic
and plate tectonic activity indicate a varied power source,” he said.
If
beryllium-10 and certain noble gases were discovered in deep mantle
magmas and volcanic lavas and if anti-neutrinos could be detected, such
evidence would help validate the georeactor model, he added. A FORNL
participant suggested that Hollenbach confer with researchers at the
IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica.
Hollenback
asserted that an even better understanding of georeactors could be
attained through simulations using advanced software on today’s
supercomputers — if funding for such a study is available.
bbc | UK-born
mathematical physicist Sir Roger, from the University of Oxford,
demonstrated that black holes were an inevitable consequence of Albert's
Einstein's general theory of relativity.
Reacting
to the win, he told the BBC: "It was an extreme honour and great
pleasure to hear the news this morning, in a slightly unusual way - I
had to get out of my shower to hear it."
Among scientific awards, he said, this is "the prime one".
Penrose
receives half of this year's prize, with the other half being shared by
Genzel and Ghez. Prof Ghez is only the fourth woman to win the physics
prize, out of more than 200 laureates since 1901.
The other female recipients are Marie Curie (1903), Maria Goeppert-Mayer (1963) and Donna Strickland (2018).
"The
history of black holes goes way back in time to the end of the 18th
Century. Then, through Einstein's general relativity, we had the tools
to describe these objects for real," said Ulf Danielsson, a member of
the Nobel Committee.
But
the mathematics of black holes was incredibly complex. Many researchers
believed they were nothing more than mathematical artefacts, existing
only on paper. It took researchers decades to realise they could persist
in the real world.
"That's
what Roger Penrose did," said Danielsson. "He understood the
mathematics, he introduced new tools and then could actually prove this
is a process you can naturally expect to happen - that a star collapses
and turns into a black hole."
Sir
Roger explained: "People were very sceptical at the time, it took a
long time before black holes were accepted... their importance is, I
think, only partially appreciated."
Penrose
was born in 1931 in Colchester and comes from a distinguished
scientific family. He is the son of the psychiatrist and geneticist
Lionel Penrose and Margaret Leathes, who was the daughter of a
well-known English physiologist. His brother Jonathan is a chess
grandmaster.
Sir Roger shied away from competition as a child and struggled in exams. He told BBC Radio 4's The Life Scientific programme
in 2016: "I was good at maths, but I didn't necessarily do very well in
my tests." However, he added: "The teacher realised if he gave me
enough time, I would do well.
"I
think I had to do all my arithmetic working it out from first
principles," he chuckled, adding: "I just was slow, and I'm slow at
writing."
In
the 1950s, he came up with the Penrose triangle, an impossible object
which could be depicted in a perspective drawing but could not exist in
reality. The triangle, along with other observations by Sir Roger and
his father Lionel, influenced the Dutch artist MC Escher, who
incorporated them into his artworks Waterfall, and Ascending and
Descending.
Inspired
by the British scientist Dennis Sciama, Penrose next applied his
mathematical ability to physics. In 1965, he published a landmark paper
in which he was able to show that a black hole always hides a
singularity, a boundary where space and time ends.
quantummagazine | Every day, dozens of like-minded mathematicians gather on an online
forum called Zulip to build what they believe is the future of their
field.
They’re all devotees of a software program called Lean. It’s a “proof
assistant” that, in principle, can help mathematicians write proofs.
But before Lean can do that, mathematicians themselves have to manually
input mathematics into the program, translating thousands of years of
accumulated knowledge into a form Lean can understand.
To many of the people involved, the virtues of the effort are nearly self-evident.
“It’s just fundamentally obvious that when you digitize something you can use it in new ways,” said Kevin Buzzard of Imperial College London. “We’re going to digitize mathematics and it’s going to make it better.”
Digitizing mathematics is a longtime dream. The expected benefits
range from the mundane — computers grading students’ homework — to the
transcendent: using artificial intelligence to discover new mathematics
and find new solutions to old problems. Mathematicians expect that proof
assistants could also review journal submissions, finding errors that
human reviewers occasionally miss, and handle the tedious technical work
that goes into filling in all the details of a proof.
But first, the mathematicians who gather on Zulip must furnish Lean
with what amounts to a library of undergraduate math knowledge, and
they’re only about halfway there. Lean won’t be solving open problems
anytime soon, but the people working on it are almost certain that in a
few years the program will at least be able to understand the questions
on a senior-year final exam.
And after that, who knows? The mathematicians participating in these
efforts don’t fully anticipate what digital mathematics will be good
for.
CTH | With 30-days left before the election
perhaps it’s worthwhile remembering what all of this opposition is
about…. Something 99% of American voters do not quite understand.
Congress doesn’t actually write
legislation. The last item of legislation written by congress was
sometime around the mid 1990’s. Modern legislation is sub-contracted to a
segment of DC operations known as K-Street. That’s where the lobbyists
reside.
Lobbyists write the laws; congress sells
the laws; lobbyists then pay congress lucrative commissions for passing
their laws. That’s the modern legislative business in DC.
When we talk about paying-off politicians
in third-world countries we call it bribery. However, when we undertake
the same process in the U.S. we call it “lobbying”.
CTH often describes the system with the
phrase: “There are Trillions at Stake.” The process of creating
legislation is behind that phrase. DC politics is not quite based on the
ideas that frame most voter’s reference points.
With people taking notice of DC politics
for the first time; and with people not as familiar with the purpose of
DC politics; perhaps it is valuable to provide clarity.
Most people think when they vote for a
federal politician -a House or Senate representative- they are voting
for a person who will go to Washington DC and write or enact
legislation. This is the old-fashioned “schoolhouse rock” perspective
based on decades past. There is not a single person in congress writing
legislation or laws.
In modern politics not a single member of
the House of Representatives or Senator writes a law, or puts pen to
paper to write out a legislative construct. This simply doesn’t happen.
Over the past several decades a system of constructing legislation has taken over Washington DC that more resembles a business operation than a legislative body. Here’s how it works right now.
Outside groups, often called “special
interest groups”, are entities that represent their interests in
legislative constructs. These groups are often representing foreign
governments, Wall Street multinational corporations, banks, financial
groups or businesses; or smaller groups of people with a similar
connection who come together and form a larger group under an umbrella
of interest specific to their affiliation.
Sometimes the groups are social interest
groups; activists, climate groups, environmental interests etc. The
social interest groups are usually non-profit constructs who depend on
the expenditures of government to sustain their cause or need.
The for-profit groups (mostly business)
have a purpose in Washington DC to shape policy, legislation and laws
favorable to their interests. They have fully staffed offices just like
any business would – only their ‘business‘ is getting legislation for their unique interests.
These groups are filled with highly-paid
lawyers who represent the interests of the entity and actually write
laws and legislation briefs.
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4/3
43
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My birthday
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...
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
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