Battling The Flat-Earthers

A while ago, I read this article on battling those who believe that the Earth is flat but forgot to highlight it here. I won't say much more about it other than have you read it for yourself.

But one quote stood out with me, because it sums up not just the way it describes why flat-earthers believe in what they believe in, but also a reflection on the issues of vaccines, face masks, etc. that we have been facing with during this pandemic and these fake-news stupidity. The quote is attributed to Lee McIntyre of Boston University:

Flat-Earthers seem to have a very low standard of evidence for what they want to believe but an impossibly high standard of evidence for what they don’t want to believe.

Replace "Flat-Earthers" in the quote above with any of the conspiracy theory believers and you have the gist of why they believe in the crackpottery. 

But the question that I have is, has anyone ever mention THIS to the flat-earthers themselves? Are they self-aware that this is what they are doing?

Zz.

How Big Is The Sun?

Hey, you get to use some of your high-school geometry and trig to make sense of this video!



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Happy Winter Solstice

I'm posting this on Dec. 21, 2014, which is often considered as the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year for Northern Hemisphere.

Now most people will associate that with the idea that from this day onwards, sunrise will be earlier and sunset will be later in the day. However, this article shows that that is not the case as they showed in the table.

Day	Sunrise	Sunset	Day length
(All times GMT) Turns out, it has to do with a day not being exactly of the same length all year long. There are two reasons why the length of the solar day varies, the first being the fact that the axis of the Earth's rotation is tilted - 23.5 degrees from vertical - and second, the Earth's speed varies because it moves in an elliptical orbit around the sun, accelerating when it is closer to the star's gravitational pull and decelerating when it is further away. The sun therefore in effect lags behind the clock for part of the year, then speeds ahead of it for another. So there you go! Zz.
11 December 2014	07:56	15:51	7:55:37
21 December 2014	08:04	15:53	7:49:45
31 December 2014	08:06	16:01	7:54:39
31 January 2015	07:41	16:48	9:06:42

Superconductivity And The Environment - A Roadmap

A rather interesting and unusual review article. It describes how superconductivity and superconductors can actually help in improving our environment. As stated in this PhysicsWorld blog, it is an unusual assertion because "... superconductors only work at very low temperatures and lots of energy is needed to cool them.. "

Still, you might want to check out the list of things that have been argued that superconductors can do to help with the environment. The review paper is available for free.

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Where Is The True North Pole?

This video might make you even more confused than before.



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New Limits On Possible (?) 5th Force

OK, I'll be honest. I am not quite sure how I would tackle this news release, because I could easily go off the deep end and just blast this thing to bits. First of all, this is a fine work, and I haven't finished reading the paper yet. So the issue here isn't with the published work. But I have issues with this press release.

This press release describes a very novel way of looking for a possible spin-spin force, using the entire earth (?) and invoking a multidisciplinary knowledge.

Hunter -- along with emeritus Amherst physics professor Joel Gordon; postdoctoral fellow Stephen Peck; student researcher Daniel Ang '15; and Jung-Fu "Afu" Lin, associate professor of geosciences at UT Austin -- co-authored a paper about their work that appears in this week's issue of the journal Science. The highly interdisciplinary research relies on geophysics, atomic physics, particle physics, mineral physics, solid-state physics and nuclear physics to reach its conclusions.

The way this has been titled, and the way it sounds, it makes it sounds as if there is a 5th force, and that we're just trying to hunt it down. All this experiment has done is put a severe limit on such a thing because of a non-detection at the level of accuracy that the experiment has. In other words, they didn't find any!

But what I found unbelievable is the comment from one of the authors.

Lin had his own take: "The most rewarding and surprising thing about this project was realizing that particle physics could actually be used to study the deep Earth."

Whoa! Is this really that surprising? We already have studies on geoneutrinos, among other things. It all came out of our knowledge from high energy physics.

Oh well, I guess we can add this to a GROWING list of practical applications of high energy physics.

Zz.

To 10 Reasons We Know The Earth Is Round

As if this needs further convincing, here are those top 10 reasons:



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Attacks On Climate Scientists

I think that this is a sad reflection of the times we live in, especially when people can send out things anonymously and threaten others for doing their jobs.

This article looks at the challenges being faced by climate scientists, and not on the task they faced with their jobs either!

Harassment of climate scientists by climate-change deniers goes back at least to 1995, after the IPCC published its Second Assessment Report. Santer was the lead author of chapter 8, which looked at the causes of climate change. “The single sentence ‘The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate’ changed my life,” he says. “I was the guy who was associated with this sentence. Those who did not like that finding did everything not only to undermine the finding but also to undermine my scientific reputation.”

 

The harassment has ramped up in recent years, says Michael Mann of the Pennsylvania State University, whose book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, due to be published by Columbia University Press in early March, includes a retelling of his own ongoing experiences with harassment. “Political intimidation, character attacks, what appear to be orchestrated phone and email campaigns, nasty and thinly veiled threats, not just to us but to our families, are what it means in modern American life to be a climate scientist,” says Mann. Even this magazine, after publishing last October articles on the science of climate change—about its being under fire and about communicating that science to the public—received an abundance of letters with the tenor, “How could PHYSICS TODAY print such a one-sided portrayal of climate science when many reputable scientists disagree?”

 

Fossil-fuel interests, says Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher at NASA, “have adopted a shoot-the-messenger approach. It’s been a very successful strategy. They have created a chilling effect, so other [scientists] won’t say what they think and the conversation in public stays bereft of anyone who knows what they are talking about.” Schmidt cofounded RealClimate.org, a forum for climate scientists to “provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary.” Meanwhile, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a vocal opponent to limiting greenhouse gas emissions, is suing NASA for the release of Schmidt’s personal emails.

This, of course, is made worse when politicians, people who should know better but don't, somehow voice the same level of skepticism. In the minds of some feeble-minded climate deniers, this gives them legitimacy to go after these scientists.

This may be the 21st Century. But some aspect of the Dark Ages still persists, and prosecution of scientists appears to be one of them.

Zz.

The Physics of Wind-Blown Sand and Dust

This review article might be of some interest to some people, especially those who are curious about how we can know so much about the conditions on Mars based on what we can observe of the landscape.

Abstract: The transport of dust and sand by wind is a potent erosional force, creates sand dunes and ripples, and loads the atmosphere with suspended dust aerosols. This article presents an extensive review of the physics of wind-blown sand and dust on Earth and Mars. Specifically, we review the physics of aeolian saltation, the formation and development of sand dunes and ripples, the physics of dust aerosol emission, the weather phenomena that trigger dust storms, and the lifting of dust by dust devils and other small-scale vortices. We also discuss the physics of wind-blown sand and dune formation on Venus and Titan.

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Geo-neutrinos

Looks like it's a day of neutrinos.

A very good summary on the search and study of geo-neutrinos in this month's issue of CERN Courier.

Geo-neutrinos are the (anti)neutrinos produced by the natural radioactivity inside the Earth. In particular, the decay chains of 238U and 232Th include six and four β− decays, respectively, and the nucleus of 40K decays by electron capture and β− decay with branching ratios of 11% and 89%, respectively. The decays produce heat and electron antineutrinos, with fixed ratios of heat to neutrinos (table 1). A measurement of the antineutrino flux, and possibly of the spectrum, would provide direct information on the amount and composition of radioactive material inside the Earth and so would determine the radiogenic contribution to the heat flow.

It's interesting that the article mentioned that the Earth emits mainly electron antineutrino, while the sun emits mainly electron neutrino. In light of the recent possible error in estimating the amount of electron antineutrino that is emitted from such nuclear reaction, I wonder if this makes the study of geo-neutrinos even more difficult. Or maybe the 3% difference doesn't matter.

Zz.

Berkeley Earth Group First Data Analysis

I mentioned a while back about the Berkeley Earth Group's project that was headed by Richard Muller, that aims to collect an extensive amount of data on the Earth's global temperature. The project and the group are not without controversy (as is the case with something within the area). There are skepticism surrounding the effort, especially considering some of the sponsor of the project. Still, as I wrote in one of the blog entries, I'm still curious to see what they would have come up with.

Well, we now have an initial indication of what they are finding, and it happened during a "charged" congressional hearing on Earth's climate.

Let's just say that those who were hoping that Muller's project would debunk climate warming took a severe blow with this one.

There are two separate issues here that should be considered:

1. When you have different studies considering different things, and then they ALL came up with very consistent results (see the graph), it is very difficult not to be convinced of the validity of the conclusion. I'd like to see similar consistencies in results that led to various policies in politics, economics, social sciences, etc.

2. It is of course unfair to simply label Republicans in the US Congress as being "anti-science", or have very little regards for scientific opinions that are contrary to their own beliefs. However, when there is a pattern of disregard, starting from Presidential candidates past and present, and when you think a lawyer, an economist, and a professor in marketing can actually provide meaningful evidence (rather than persuasion) with regards to scientific policies, it is very difficult for me to overlook such a thing and fall into such unfair label for that party. The blatant disregard for the importance (both scientific and economic) of science funding with a catastrophic budget bill proposal simply reinforced such a view.

Zz.

Earth's Lumpy-Like-Play-Doh Gravity

Oh, this is not only informative, but also way cool!

The latest survey of earth's gravity done by the European Space Agency produces a picture that makes our home planet looks like a lumpy ball of Play-Doh! You can also link to the original report here.

I am guessing that this might be published somewhere, but I wish the report would indicate what the color scales mean in terms of actual quantity.

Zz.

Earthquake And Tsunamis

As in the devastating earthquake and tsunami that occurred in the Indian Ocean several years ago, the disaster that occurred in Japan a couple of days ago reignites interest in learning more about tectonic plates, the cause of earthquakes, and tsunamis. PhysicsCentral has a short intro on this subject.

We also have articles that might appear to be in poor taste. This item describes why you can't surf on a tsunami wave. What is interesting is the comments generated by this article. A reader thought it was done in poor taste, while another didn't direct it to the article, but rather a news story that there were people who actually planned on surfing the waves that were about to his the US shoreline. The latter is certainly an activity done in very poor taste and judgment.

I personally do not think this is done in poor taste. The article is actually explaining the difference between those regular, giant waves we often see people surfing on. It is a normal question to ask why that is any different than the tsunamis. So in the process of answering why one can't (and shouldn't) surf on a tsunami wave, one learns about the physics of ordinary waves and tsunami waves. Maybe the premise of such explanation could be done in a different way, but that's the common question that many of us have seen in this situation. No better way to deal with it than to answer it directly.

Zz.

More Coverage of Berkeley Earth Project

Here's another, more skeptical, coverage of the Berkeley Earth project, headed by Richard Muller.

The team consists of: Muller, David Brillinger, a statistician at UC Berkeley; Saul Perlmutter, physicist at UC Berkeley; Art Rosenfeld, commissioner of the California Energy Commission; Robert Jacobsen, UC Berkeley physicist; Judith Curry, a climatologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology; and Robert Rohde, a recent PhD graduate of Berkeley.

Curry and Muller are both seen as climate skeptics by many in the climate science world. A recent blog post at Climate Progress examines these scientists and the funding for the project.

I first mentioned about the formation of this group in a previous blog entry. Whether extra data point around the same region is "supersaturating" or not, I am still curious to see what they come up with.

Zz.

Tackling Global Temperature Data

It seems that Richard Muller has gone beyond teaching physics for future presidents, and now tackling the issue of global warming. This might be the more difficult task, I would think, considering all the controversy and brouhaha surrounding this issue lately.

He has formed a Berkeley Earth Group with an initial task to compile ALL of the available temperature data of the earth throughout history.

Muller came to the conclusion that temperature data - which, in the United States, began in the late 18th century when Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin made the first thermometer measurements - was the only truly scientifically accurate way of studying global warming.
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To that end, he formed the Berkeley Earth group with 10 other highly acclaimed scientists, including physicists, climatologists and statisticians. Before the group joined in the study of the warming world, there were three major groups that had released analysis of historical temperature data. But each has come under attack from climate skeptics, Muller said.

In the group's new study, which will be released in about a month, the scientists hope to address the doubts that skeptics have raised. They are using data from all 39,390 available temperature stations around the world - more than five times the number of stations that the next most thorough group, the Global Historical Climatology Network, used in its data set.

This will be interesting to see. But then, I wonder how many will pay attention to such data and change their minds one way or the other. I think it will be useful to scientists who are in the midst of working in such a field. However, I'm a skeptic in the ability of the average public to be able to decipher pure data. Data, without context, are meaningless. And the majority of the public often do not have the context.

Zz.

Swiss Re Scientific Arguments Against Climate Change Skeptics

It is interesting to find out that now, even companies are considering the cost of not only Global Warming, but they are also now battling those who are skeptical of the anthropogenic origin of global warming. Swiss Re, which is the 2nd largest company in the word dealing with insurance, has evaluated the validity of global warming and its origin, and decided to present a detailed, scientific rebuttal against the skpetics. We're talking about argument-by-argument rebuttals with full citations to the sources.

And they're doing this not out of some social conscience, but rather, due to profit concerns that ignoring and denying what they consider to be a serious problem will be costly. This, btw, is consistent to an earlier analysis that the cost of being wrong about the anthropogenic origin of global warming is MORE than the cost of being wrong about the non-anthropogenic origin of global warming.

Source: Charles Day at PhysicsToday Blog.

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A "Cloaking Device" for Earthquakes?

This is an amazing proposal. We now have something that could potentially be "invisible" to a broadband elastic vibrations. This includes earth's vibrations such as an earthquake.

Researchers at Aix-Marseille Université in France and at the University of Liverpool in the U.K. have now developed a barrier that keeps buildings from feeling these waves. They took a cue from stealth aircraft, which employ combinations of specially shaped and fabricated materials that absorb radar signals and deflect them off course. For earthquakes, the concept is the same: Using computers, the team modeled a device composed of layered, concentric rings of plastic, copper, and four other materials of varying flexibility and stiffness--all designed to harmlessly deflect earthquake waves.

In a series of simulations, the team bombarded the rings with the equivalent of earthquake surface waves of standard frequencies ranging from 30 to 150 hertz, or vibrations per second. The rings absorbed and redirected the waves around a central protected zone essentially without disturbing it (see illustration), the researchers report this month in Physical Review Letters. A building of the future might have such an earthquake "cloaking device" incorporated into its foundation to protect it from harmful tremors rolling across the ground.

We now need to have this thing tested beyond just simulations.

Zz.

Mountains Emit Mesospheric Gravity Waves

Er... what? A rather "interesting" report, which can imply that it's something I've never heard before. :)

A U.S. study suggests wind blowing over mountain ranges can generate gravity waves that propagate vertically into Earth's upper mesosphere.

Researchers said such waves, known as mountain waves, have previously been observed low in the atmosphere. But Steven Smith, Jeffrey Baumgardner and Michael Mendillo of the Center for Space Physics at Boston University said their research has produced the first unambiguous images of mountain gravity waves in the upper mesosphere -- 50 to 62.5 miles in altitude.

A mass of wind can cause a "gravity wave" when blowing through mountains? Is this the same "gravity wave" that has been long sought-after by LIGO and LISA? Could they detect such a thing?

I plead completely ignorance over this phenomenon, and might try to see if I can get a copy of the paper, which isn't that easy to get based on the access that I have. Can anyone else shed some light into this?

Zz.

How Astrophysics Could Save Heart Patients?

This news article highlights the common factor between the study of planetary formation and the flow of molten "metal" at the center of a planet with blood flow in human.

Still, I'm not sure if I'm being picky here, but it appears to be more about the connection between geology and saving heart patients, rather than astrophysics. I don't see any "astrophysics" in this article, at least not in the traditional sense. Did I miss something?

I would hate to think that geologists who are really doing such work are not having their profession being credited for this.

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A Physicist Predicted The Italian Earthquake?

This is one of the few times that I'm ashamed of a fellow physicist.

An italian physicist claimed that he had made the prediction of the recent earthquake, based on the radon gas emission.

Gioacchino Giuliani is at the center of a debate about the limits of seismology after Italian officials shrugged off his warnings last month that a devastating earthquake in the central Abruzzo region was imminent.

In fact Giuliani, who works at the National Institute of Physics, was even reported to police for spreading panic.

But what exactly did he predict, and how accurate was he?

Giuliani's forecast was far from perfect. He believed the quake would have struck the town of Sulmona, which is more than 50 km (30 miles) south of L'Aquila. He also got the date wrong, predicting the quake would strike several days earlier.

The head of Italy's Civil Protection Agency, Guido Bertolaso, told reporters that if they had listened to Giuliani, they probably would have evacuated the residents of Sulmona to L'Aquila just in time for the earthquake.

If you take enough number of so-called psychic, I'm sure at least one of them would also claim that they had predicted the earthquake, given enough vague predictions.

The silliness here is that he is bypassing the modus operandi as a physicist, in which his model to predict such a thing should be sent in for peer-reviewed publication and evaluated on its merits. Instead, he chose to claim validity in the public media. Does "Fleishman and Pons" ring a bell?

Zz.