NASA screws up again, reaches apogee of uselessness

First, a brief history of the space program: As readers of this blog will know well, the Apollo 1 astronauts, like Benazir Bhutto, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson, and most recently Ted Kennedy, are dead. NASA said it wanted to send them to the moon, but instead they died. Next, NASA tried to kill the Apollo 13 astronauts, who have been immortalized in several conspiratorial Tom Hanks movies. More recently, NASA blew up the Challenger, and for a twofer blew up Columbia.

So it should come as no surprise that NASA recently embarked on an abstruse failed mission to blow up the moon. As explained by Discover Magazine, none of the objectives were achieved. We just incinerated billions of dollars on the surface of an uninhabitable planet (by any relevant standard the moon is a planet).  Stephen Hawking has read too many J.R.R. Martin novels; we will never colonize the moon. It was ridiculous anyway for “scientists” to think we could find water in outer space. Outer space is a vacuum, and water is a thing.

As Cicero says to his inamorata, Artemis, “a vacuo abhorret aqua, equo ne credite.”

Brian Greene on How To Make Your Own Universe

According to this radio broadcast, Stephen Hawking’s butt boy, Brian Greene, claims that humans are very close to being able to “create their own Universes.” Readers of this blog shouldn’t be surprised that Greene’s (probably Salvia-induced) hallucinations have reached this new low. But fans of Greene’s might be disheartened. At least now they can know the truth.

Greene’s idea has a couple of premises. One is his mythological view of history, that the beginning of the Universe happens “over and over and over again.”

He also talks about – get this – a “cosmic bubble bath.” If you listen carefully enough, you’ll notice that he admits his theories are a “mental exercise.” Indeed. So basically Brian Greene is doing Yoga, not physics. I ask you:

Interestingly, Brian Greene also justifies the Holocaust in this broadcast. He says, “I don’t think it’s a good guide to use our senses and our intuition to determine what we think is right or wrong.” Well Brian, that’s what Hitler said. Don’t worry, you just think genocide is wrong. Really the math works out quite nicely!

Without further ado, here are Brian Greene’s instructions for how to build a Universe:

If you want a manageable way of building a Universe, what you want to be able to do is build something pretty small. But a small thing is not a Universe, so it has to expand. For something to expand, there’s got to be some outward push, there’s got to be some repulsive push. And that’s where this repulsive side of gravity come into the story. There are conditions, which according to the Laws of  general Relativity, the laws Einstein wrote down a long time ago, well tested, those laws tell us that in this context of the right energy density carried by the right substance, you will have repulsive gravity, which means, if you can build this little seed, this little nugget, it will on its own start to expand, grow, faster and faster and faster, begin tiny and sprouting into a gigantic Universe. You can calculate that the nugget that we believe perhaps gave rise to our unvierse – maybe someone created it in their aprartment in some other universe – was about roughly, mmm, ten to the minus 26 cneitmeters across, weighed about ten pounds. That’s small! You wouldn’t really think intuitively you could build the whole universe from ten pounds of stuff. … But it turns out that that’s all you need, because the repulsive side of gravity is so powerful that it actually injects energy from gravity itself into the expanding space. So from that point of view all you need is the seed and the gravity takes over and does the rest of the work.

Now Mr. Greene thinks this “seed” needs a black hole. But how to get a black hole? As always, Greene has the answer.

It turns out that black holes don’t have to be big. You give me any object, and if I squeeze it sufficiently small … it will be a tiny black hole. There’s nothing that you could give me that I couldn’t turn into a black hole by squeezing it sufficiently small.

And if you’re worried that the Universe would expand and kill everyone, don’t be.

This Universe that you create would in essence create its own space. It wouldn’t encroach on your space by expanding into your domain, your house, into your region. It would expand by creating new space, space that hadn’t existed before. So it would be off on its own, if you will, creating its own bubble universe. What you’re creating on the other side is there, and in principle you could go there.

If you feel like after that primer, you’re still not quite able to make your own Universe, don’t feel bad. Greene’s instructions are border-line incoherent, and where they are coherent, they are impossible. For example, everyone knows that creating a black hole would cause Planet Earth to be sucked into itself. And so on.

Charles Darwin’s Birthday; Obama’s Age of Reason; The Tunnel at the End of the Light

Consider this a more substantive follow-up to my previous post.

There is much self-congratulation going on in the scientific community these days. Just after CNN dealt a potential death blow to the field, Obama’s eerily populist inaugural speech proclaimed the coming omnipotence of “science,” using the positively monarchical language of putting it in its “rightful place.” Lion King, anyone? Perhaps Obama’s technocratic fantasy comes from reading too much Al Gore. As if this wasn’t enough to stimulate the egos of American scientists, Charles Darwin then went and had his 200th birthday. This has caused the biological community to engage in the most grotesque display of public intellectual masturbation I have ever seen. There aren’t enough words in the English language to hyperlink to every story which concerns itself solely with this completely insignificant and, frankly, morbid event. Honestly, the man has already ruined science education for the last 200 years – isn’t it time to let him rest in peace? Or, as my previous post demonstrated, pieces?

But one has to wonder how scientists could be so happy in a time like this. For one thing, global warming turns out to be way worse, and according to scientists, no amount of “hope” or “change” is going to stop it. Great. So during the coming apocalypse, scientists will be cheerful. Why? Because Obama has appointed them to positions of power.

And if that isn’t cynical and nihilistic enough for you, it turns out that the high priest of the New Physics, Stephen Hawking, is transforming into an Uncle Tom for the whole field. Apparently Hawking’s physical condition is finally catching up to him – he realizes what a pity it would be to waste his life following a sham subject. “Theory of Everything,” please. Leave theat to the theologians. I guess on this issue I have to declare my rare agreement with Hawking. But don’t think for a minute that this will stop the influence of Iranian sympathizer and collaborator Brian Greene. Apparently Hawking is going to make an announcement about his new-found nihilism to his colleagues. We’ll see how that goes. It looks like the meeting is going to include a full cast of ridiculous characters, including Nima Arkani-Hamed. Neverminding his obvious sympathies and collaborations, this ex-Professor works for the bizarrely non-descript “Institute for Advanced Studies.” Talk about a potential front. And what does he do there? He publishes ludicrous parodies of real science such as:

“The Minimal Moose for a Little Higgs“

“Ghost Condensation and a Consistent Infrared Modification of Gravity“

and worst of all:

“A Theory of Dark Matter“

Just think. This is where billions of your dollars are going to go in order to “stimulate” the economy. Are they going to help poor people get jobs? No. They are going to help an Iranian crank study moose, ghosts, and imaginary matter he (and everyone else) can’t even see.

Dark matter? (part two)

Many of you read my first post on Dark Matter. Some people, particularly Miss Sophismata, didn’t quite get it. Therefore in this post I’m going to expand greatly on my thoughts. It will include some overlap, but not very much. It is important that I, for example, am more explicit about precisely how the analogy between a frightened child and a contemporary physicist works. I begin with a little history.

A Brief History of Dark Matter

In the 1970′s it was reported that as much as 90% of the Universe doesn’t exist. Physicists had discovered that their theories, hiding behind very confusing mathematical equations, were simply wrong. Contrary to what you or I would do, the scientific response to this startling revelation was not to abandon the defunct theories. Exercising incredible hubris, scientists decided that their theories couldn’t possibly be wrong. But they needed a large amount of non-existent matter to keep the theories going. So physicists instead chose a more insidious route, and invented one of the most ridiculous ideas of the 20th century:

Dark Matter.

In positing the existence of Dark Matter as an escape from abandoning their theories, scientists fell into the same philosophical fallacy as influential philosopher of biology Alvin Plantinga when he stated that the following form of reasoning is “compelling”:

If X were true, it would be inconvenient for science; therefore, X is false.

The X in this instance is the proposition “Our theories are false.” So there’s a little bit of history, explaining how Dark Matter theorists fell into an egregious logical fallacy, on top of an already absurd empirical farce.

Understanding Dark Matter

It is not difficult to understand Dark Matter, because there is quite literally nothing to understand. No one has seen it, felt it, or heard it. Yet because the Universe is such an eerie place, we are supposed to accept on faith the statements of the high priests of theoretical physics. The Pope of science, Stephen Hawking, explains to us – merely on his own authority – that all “cosmologists” think that the edges of spiral galaxies are “dominated by dark matter that we cannot see directly.” His loyal disciple and lackey Brian Greene simply asserts – again on mere authority – that there is “strong evidence” that our world is “permeated with dark matter.” For these thinkers it is inconceivable that their theories could be wrong. Instead, they blame the Universe.

The Child/Physicist Analogy

Physicists, in this respect, are like children who are afraid of the dark. They cannot explain the empty closets opposite their beds. The child reasons thus:

Why is my closet so empty, so dark? Surely there should be something in my closet; closets are after all, according to my explanatory framework, made for things. Indeed I remember putting my toys away just yesterday. And besides, Stephen Hawking says there just must be stuff in my closet. But I can’t see it! Therefore: monsters.

This is exactly how physicists think about Dark Matter. They see an empty darkness, they haven’t any notion of what is happening, and so they create invisible monsters as explanations.