Nov 24 2007
They Will Give PhD’s To Any Damn Fool With Money
Some “experts” in physics in the UK have decided mankind’s destruction of the world through Global Warming is not extreme enough. Now they claim our viewing the light coming from distant worlds is in actuality destroying the universe – I kid you not!
The startling claim is made by a pair of American cosmologists investigating the consequences for the cosmos of quantum theory, the most successful theory we have.
…
But there is an odd feature of the theory that philosophers and scientists still argue about. In a nutshell, the theory suggests that we change things simply by looking at them and theorists have puzzled over the implications for years.
Folks, all we know about the universe is what we can decode from the light striking this planet. Light and other forms of energy from our Sun spill out in all directions from the Sun’s surface, creating in a sphere of energy from which a tiny, miniscule bit hits our Earth and is captured. When you add up all the light hitting all the planets and asteroids and comets in our solar system, it is still represents an infinitesimal subset of the energy released by our Sun every second.
Now multiply our Sun by billions of billions to compute the number of stars in our galaxy, and the number of galaxies in the universe. With this ‘estimate’ of the amount of energy and matter in the universe (which is way too low, but the number is already so high to be impossible to grasp by the human mind) we can see Earth can ‘capture’ a totally irrelevant amount of the Universe’s energy. Like it to removing a drop of water from all the world’s oceans, and we would still be over estimating our effect on the universe.
With that in mind the claims of these “experts” are so laughable as to wonder if this is just a premature April’s Fool headlines:
New Scientist reports a worrying new variant as the cosmologists claim that astronomers may have accidentally nudged the universe closer to its death by observing dark energy, a mysterious anti gravity force which is thought to be speeding up the expansion of the cosmos.
The damaging allegations are made by Profs Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and James Dent of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, who suggest that by making this observation in 1998 we may have caused the cosmos to revert to an earlier state when it was more likely to end. “Incredible as it seems, our detection of the dark energy may have reduced the life-expectancy of the universe,” Prof Krauss tells New Scientist.
We cannot effect the amount of dark matter in the Universe just by noting its effects in the miniscule amount of energy that reaches our planet and focusing it into a telescope or some other instrument. Moreover, the light we see here on Earth has traveled billions of light years and is billions years old. These “scientist” need to explain how our detection – today – of events millions of years ago can change what happened millions of years ago!
The fact anyone would make such a claim is an indication our educational system is busted. The fact anyone would publish this garbage is to revalidate what really is of the most successful theories of all time: “There is a fool born every minute” – P.T. Barnum
Thanks for your post – I was referred by memeorandum.
“These “scientist†need to explain how our detection – today – of events millions of years ago can change what happened millions of years ago”
From what I recall of quantum mechanics, very strange things of this nature can happen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement
Is your post based on a specific knowledge of this subject matter or a more general concern with dubious research? Also, is the problem with the details of the research itself, or just the way it is portrayed in the article?
It is just as likely that someone on another planet is driving dark energy powered SUV’s.
That is a rather narcissistic claim because these same people are the ones who would say that there are good chances that there is intellegent life elsewhere in the universe and it is not likely that we are the most advanced. Which would mean that all of those things would have already been overserved by another civilization in another part of the universe which would mean that our observing it or not would mean nothing.
I saw this too on Drudge. How arrogant.
Might as well, they are generally worthless—hiring and firing in the aersospace industry for 30 years left me convinced that they are all “overqualified” for creative systems science and engineering —realized from the beinning that the degree did not matter, only clearly exhibited curiosity, desire to contribute and demonstrated keen intelligence. We technical vets made a big difference in scientific endeavor in the the 40 years following WWII. Now science is a total phony-math mess! Retired and finishing what Einstein started Frank Morgan (1924-now)
Wow. I do believe this is the first time I’ve ever read a science article that left me with the impression that (some) scientists are idiots. And I don’t like that feeling because I very much like science and I expect science articles to teach me things.
Mind you, quantum theory deals with subatomic particles — particles so small that you cannot see them and cannot even detect them, much less figure out what they are doing, unless you either (1) bounce other particles off them, or (2) bounce them off something else. This is clearly the kind of observation that is going to “change things simply by looking at them” — you’re going to change the particles’ direction, or velocity, or both.
It doesn’t follow that simply looking at BIG objects through a telescope is going to change them very much — we mammals can see because the sun is constantly bouncing photons off everything on the surface of our planet all day long, day in and day out, year after year after year — so I don’t see where the hell these guys are getting their conclusion that astronomers are contributing to the demise of the universe.
My local paper headlined this as “Bizarre claim”. Who says journalists never get anything right?
But these aren’t ‘“experts†in physics in the UK’ – the paper was by “two American cosmologists”. One of whom has since been going around the physics blogs apologizing.
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=621#comment-31045
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/11/telegraph-cosmologists-are-killing.html (towards the end of the ‘fast comments’)
The root of such ideas is the quantum rhetoric about “observers collapsing the wavefunction”, and so forth. Most physicists inhabit a state of doublethink on this issue. They will emphatically reject that observation creates reality, but they will also deny that quantum theory is incomplete.
Are these the same experts who just declared that “Global Warming” is the cause of all the big earthquakes we have been having? Seems I remember reading a few years ago that we should all be prepared for more, a bigger, earthquakes and volcanic activity in the next few years because of the way several planets will be lined up with the sun, causing a stronger magnetic pull on the earth. It seems that every time two or more planets line up, we get bigger earthquakes. Too bad John Q Joe Sixpack doesn’t have the intelligence to realize these bulls–t artists are full of it. So many tall tales and preposterous claims are floating around that it is difficult for anyone to know what is true and what is ta figment of one of these nut cases imagination. But surely, some of this stuff is beyond believable. So why is the MSM publicizing this crap as if it is real news?