Dangerous nerds

Behold four scary criminals:

Asif Mohiuddin, Subrata Adhikari Shuvo, Moshiur Rahman Biplob and Rasel Parvez

Asif Mohiuddin, Subrata Adhikari Shuvo, Moshiur Rahman Biplob and Rasel Parvez

Their crime:

Yesterday, four Bangladeshi atheist bloggers were indicted for posting derogatory material about Islam and the Prophet Muhammad online. The bloggers, who were first arrested in April, will now face up to 14 years imprisonment and hefty fines. They are the first people to be tried under the country’s new Information Technology Act, which bans the publication of online material that “causes hurt to religious beliefs.”

Wait until they get a load of me. Don’t they realize there is a whole wide world out here that says mean things about Mo?

I’m tired of Fox News Christians

What awful, horrible people. And they’ve got a whole network full of them! Here, they’re commenting on the Massachusetts case to have “under God” removed from the pledge of allegiance.

All the news is about the first woman speaking, but really what astounded me was that they took turns going around the panel, and every single one of them said something incredibly stupid. They’re 0 for 5.

Dana Perino: I’m tired of them…they don’t have to live here.

Neither do you, lady.

Eric Bolling: It was added, but it doesn’t matter. It’s on our currency…they can choose not to take it.

It was also added to our currency in the 1950s, guy, at the height of Cold War fervor that couple religiosity to patriotism. It’s a relic of the same phenomenon that fostered McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklist. It’s not a history to be proud of.

Greg Gutfeld: they can…give thanks for giving us the freedom to be an atheist.

Oh, yeah, I should also get down on my knees and praise Jesus for allowing me to be an atheist now.

Kimberly Guilfoyle: Why should they be catered to? It is offensive that a few people…inflict their belief system. It is incredibly selfish, small-minded…

Guilfoyle was furiously indignant. She seems to think it is OK if a majority of small-minded people use their kids as pawns to force their Christian belief system on others, but if the minority resist, they must be ignored.

And finally, Bob Beckel. I despise Bob Beckel. When conservatives go looking for a nominally liberal person they can prop up as a figurehead who will reliably agree with them, they search for the dumbest person around, and there’s good ol’ Bob.

Bob Beckel: interesting that it’s in Massachusetts, where the Salem witch trials, remember that’s when there was an intolerance about not being religious.

I don’t think the women were hanged for being atheists, Bob. Retire, Bob. You’re too stupid to be humiliating yourself this way on TV.

No gods, no masters…and no heroes, either

I was reading Greta Christina’s piece about being disillusioned with heroes…and I was wondering why we keep propping up this hero thing.

We don’t need them. Ever.

I don’t need “heroes” to get my work done. I need colleagues and friends and peers and collaborators and partners. I need people to lead on some projects, and I need to lead on others. I need specialists and I need workers and I need assistants. I mostly need teamwork and a community of equals.

Think about every last job you’ve accomplished. The last damn thing you needed was a shiny nickel-plated figurehead striking a noble pose and freakin’ inspiring you. And I can’t think of anything more useless than getting placed up on a pedestal.

How about if we form a movement and shoo away all the goddamned heroes?

Dragons aren’t real

The concepts of “fiction” and “pretend” and “imagination” seem to be very difficult to get across to some people, especially the ones who keep muddling fiction with reality. The Creation “Museum” has a big exhibit on dragons that illustrates this confusion well, with a telling beginning.

The Creation Museum in Northern Kentucky shares a fascination with dragons with the creators of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus’ new show.

Yep, there’s a sucker born every minute.

Ken Ham is promoting them because he wants to tie folk beliefs, like those about dragons or Jesus or angels, to reality. Hey, if we’re basing our beliefs in the reality of Jesus on myths and fairytales, then fairytales had better be a credible source of evidence.

He said there are carvings and other kinds of primitive artwork all over the world that look like dragons and there are some fossil records to indicate dragon-like dinosaurs. The Welsh flag still features a picture of a dragon, he said.

“They are so prevalent,” he said, “they may have a basis in reality.”

In homes all around the country, you will find copies of Harry Potter stories and comic books about giant green hulks. They are prevalent too. That does not imply in any way that magic wands actually work, or that you should expose yourself to an atom bomb blast to acquire superpowers.

They’re fiction. Fiction does not have to be based on reality. Sometimes it’s only based on what we want to be true.

Silly ol’ Ken Ham. Isn’t it about time you grew up?

The future will not be the past

I want to be really clear about something. I am an atheist. I care deeply about the atheist movement. I’m also an angry anti-theist, and I want to see religion kicked off its pedestal. I’m also a scientist, and think reason and evidence and scientific thought aren’t just good ideas, but the best ideas humanity has ever had, and also the essential ideas that we need for survival and progress. I want a strong atheist movement, because that’s how these ideas will get advanced into the mainstream. We’re not going to conquer the world by scattering into a rabble of divided loners.

But there’s another aspect to expanding and broadening the atheist movement. It’s got to change. I’m a developmental and evolutionary biologist — we’re all about the continuous change. If you think growth means just taking an existing nucleus and making it bigger, keeping everything the same and just engulfing everything else into a homogeneous blob, you’re making a huge mistake. We’re in adapt-or-die mode right now and all the time. Stasis is death. Change is life. Get used to it.

So I was reading this essay about WorldCon, the science fiction convention, and it struck me that this is the same situation atheism faces. It’s the same damn thing every time and everywhere. It’s all fine to cheer the future, but you also have to embrace the changes.

Let me put it another way. The demographic shifts faced by WorldCon’s largest customer segment are the same ones faced by the Republican Party. Let that sink in for a minute. Really let it marinate. These are the same people who cheered me when I talked about Canada’s healthcare plan, and applauded Mark Van Name when he blamed rape culture for America’s ills. They want to be progressive, but they’re being blindsided by the very same demographic shifts afflicting the most conservative elements of contemporary society, for exactly the same reason: they haven’t taken the issue seriously. This is why there isn’t a Hugo for Young Adult novels. Because God forbid we reward the writers who transform young genre readers into lifelong customers at a time when even Bruce Sterling says the future will be about old people staring at the sky in puzzlement and horror.

The future? Right now. There are a lot of people within atheism staring at the new kids in puzzlement and horror. They don’t have penises, their skin isn’t pasty white, their hair isn’t graying — what weird aliens are these? What do you mean, they don’t consider the constitutional separation of church and state the only cause worth fighting for? How dare they threaten to change my movement, the movement I have contributed so much to, the movement that is supposed to cater to my needs?

I sympathize. Some of them don’t even idolize science, and they actually dare to criticize the actions taken in the name of science. Don’t they realize the movement must be entirely about science?

Oh, wait. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe there are other non-scientific goals that are also worth pursuing, and that doesn’t mean we have to abandon science — I can still be an advocate for it myself — but it does mean I don’t get to remake everyone into a clone of me.

I will not sniff indignantly at that. If I want to promote my personal goals within atheism, that’s fine — but I will be most effective at that if I fit them within a complex and diverse framework, rather than trying to reshape every other individual within this movement into my likeness.

And that’s how I win. Not by demanding homogeneity, but by plugging into a growing environment with broader scope, by letting my ideas piggy-back on a dynamic and evolving and successful system — a movement that appeals to more and more people. I am a gene, I proliferate best by fitting well within a genome.

The atheist movement is that genome. We make it grow by making it flexible and powerful and diverse. That essay on WorldCon illustrates the alternatives.

The last time I was at Anime North, a bunch of kids in cosplay brought out an amp, plugged it in, and started to jam in the parking lot. In another lot, more kids put together their own kaiju battle, doing slo-mo fights to J-rock and -rap. It was great. I was with a bunch of very happy people who didn’t give a fuck about jetpacks. Worldcon may be about the future, but it doesn’t have the future. Remember, Worldcon organizers all over the world: memento mori. And what will be left will be either a dwindling crowd of increasingly conservative elements, or a thriving community of people who are actively engaged in using network culture to bring about a better, more enjoyable world.

I don’t want to be a part of a “dwindling crowd of increasingly conservative elements”! That sounds awful. I’m not a fan of J-rock, either, but I don’t have to be — all I have to do is make room for it (or whatever the atheist equivalent is) and respect the people who enjoy it. No problem. And they have to make room for me, old white guy, or you, young black woman, or you, middle-aged Asian dude, or you, enthusiastic little kid with the toy rocket, or you, teenaged goth girl, or you, whoever you may be. And the more inclusive we are, the more we grow.

And if you can’t grasp that, if you think you need a sub-group to serve you and want to kick novelty to the curb, then you are the old deadwood holding back the movement, and you need to be sloughed away.

The New Age can be as deadly as Catholic ignorance

Read this story about abortions: it’s not anti-choice. It’s anti-science and anti-medicine. It’s appalling. She contrasts brutal “Western Science” with its machines (and also its caring people: ignore her colorful descriptions of the technology, and her experience with people in the abortion clinic was one where she was asked if she was sure she wanted it, and a woman who tried to help her afterwards) with “natural healing” in which she takes a few gentle herbs and just visualizes shedding the walls of her uterus, and magically her pregnancy disappears.

Then she babbles about how it is just fine if the “fundamentalist dickheads” burn down all the women’s clinics, because they’ll just be able to use organic natural herbal chemical-free machine-free medicine-free abortions using the magic power in women’s heads.

Jesus.

This is one of the nice things about FtB. Now you can go read Miri as a warm-up, finding parts of the essay that are worthwhile, while others suck.

Then go read Avi’s total destruction of the dangerous anti-medical quackery in the story.

It’s all good.

Time to make a promise

Oh no, not another of those stories.

OK, here’s my deal: a promise. I’m not an important speaker, and I’m not the kind of make-or-break participant that any conference might want, and I’ve got a lot of haters out there who want nothing to do with me anyway, but this is how I will approach speaking invitations from now on.

I will decide whether to accept only by considering my availability and the purpose and execution of the event. I do have some restrictions: I’ve got a heavy teaching load and limited available time. I also expect some reassurance that significant effort will be made to promote diversity; if I’m one more white guy in a roster already overloaded with white guys, I’ll step aside and suggest that you invite someone who doesn’t look like me instead. If your conference doesn’t have a harassment policy or treats attendees poorly, I won’t be interested.

But otherwise, I will not discriminate on the basis of who else you’ve invited to speak. So sure, you can also invite Ray Comfort to your conference, and I won’t use that as an excuse to back out. I won’t necessarily get chummy at the event, and I might even aggressively speak out against that other person, but I’ll do my part to make your conference interesting and a good experience for the paying attendees.

One more thing: conference organizers, I expect you to have the spine to refuse to cave in to suppressive demands from other speakers. I’m promising not to make those demands, I’m expecting you to refuse to honor them from others.

You know it’s agony for me to listen to Christian talk radio, right?

You are a cruel readership. One of you — I won’t name names to protect the guilty — told me to go listen to this radio program out of Colorado Springs called “Generations With Vision”, by some guy named Kevin Swanson, and in particular to an episode called The Secular Hold is Slipping. He’s a very cheerful, confident fellow, and I listened to several minutes of him lying blithely and loudly. It was…painful. It was a happy idiot gloatingly making stuff up to make himself feel good.

Here’s their summary of the episode.

It’s getting harder and harder to “shut up” the little boy in the Emperor’s New Clothes proceedings. And evolutionists and the secularists aren’t happy about it. Ray Comfort’s Evolution vs. God video is going viral. Kevin Swanson also questions the McMillan new dictionary definition for marriage on this episode of Generations.

It starts off with this assertion that the holy trinity of the humanists consists of evolution, feminism, and homosexuality, and that we’re on the run in all three areas. To claim that, though, they have to mangle all three ideas. Here’s their short summary of feminist social theory, for instance: get rid of all men, get rid of marriage, kill all the kids, and have lots of sex. Abortion is the sacred sacrament of the feminists.

I wish I were joking. That’s literally what they said, in a tone of absolute certainty. How can you even begin to argue with people who are that wrong?

But then they spent most of their time laughing at evolution from a position of unassailable ignorance. They are inspired by Ray Comfort (you know their credibility is shot right there), who is making everyone so mad. They claim he’s interviewed “the big shots”: Richard Dawkins [no, he hasn’t] and PG Myers [who?]. They actually believe he has exposed an absence of evidence for evolution, when all Comfort has shown is his zeal in chopping out evidence that contradicts him.

And then comes the babble of creationist buzzwords and assertions. There is no evidence or data for evolution; there is no evidence for how a non-heart non-lung animal turned into a heart-lung animal. That, at least, is a novel constructed claim, but…have they looked? If anyone mentioned Tinman/Nkx-2.5/csx to them, would they have the slightest clue what we’re talking about? There’s been a lot of work on the molecular evolution of heart-related genes, for instance. That they are ignorant of it all is not evidence that the data is not there.

Their biggest lie: they claim “We would love to know how it happened.” No, they wouldn’t. They believe they already know, that an invisible superbeing simply zapped hearts and lungs into existence, and they deny the truly wonderful explanation backed by the evidence and aren’t even interested enough to try and learn. They are smug little jerks sitting in a puddle of their own urine, unwilling to wash themselves of foolishness.

They make a host of weird claims. “Punctuated equilibrium is where a prince kisses a frog.” What? “Richard Dawkins isn’t a scientist.” They keep talking about all the “honest scientists” who are leaving evolution, but they don’t bother to name them.

Then they try to dazzle their audience with the intimidating authority of math. They trot out Fred Hoyle’s example of 20 amino acids assembling into a protein having impossible odds — wrong. It’s actually quite trivial, and they’re making an error of invalid assumptions. By their reasoning, every bridge hand is a triumph of the impossible coming into existence.

Yeah, they actually say it’s impossible. They trot out the familiar creationist claim that odds of one chance in 1050 can never happen, this magic number of 10 to the 50th power representing an absolute boundary. It’s wrong, and it’s ridiculously wrong.

To crown their demonstration of the power of lying about mathematics, they then announce that “People are not very good at math”. They did manage to prove that claim by example.

And of course they’re making claims that “Honest scientists are abandoning the theory left and right, because there is no evidence. They have no data.” and that “Evolutionists are going away — they’re very desperate.”

I would ask how they know that. They certainly don’t have any evidence for it. The subject of evolution is placed solidly in the core of every competent college biology curriculum; every week new papers come out testing and demonstrating the power of the theory; all of the biologists I know — and I think I’ve got more inside knowledge than a couple of obscure evangelical radio guys in the heart of fundie-land — are advocates for evolution who use it routinely in their work. They might try looking at the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), the Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB), the American Society of Naturalists (ASN), the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB), the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE), or the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB), just for a start. Ask them about the people abandoning evolution: they’ll give you an odd look, wonder what the hell is wrong with you, and walk away.

But then, that requires actually peeping out of their little bunker of isolated, ignorant Christianity and actually talking to a real biologist, rather than listening to a lying fraud like Ray Comfort. That’ll never happen.

I get email: looking for a geophysicist

I got a strange phone call today, from a fellow who was very polite, so I was polite in return, but it was weird — he kept asking me strange questions about the energy involved in breaking up supercontinents, and how much water could be stored under a supercontinent (which had me suspicious right there), and he was also complaining about how none of the geologists anywhere ever seemed to study this stuff. I told him repeatedly that what he needed to do was talk to a geophysicist, which I wasn’t, and that I really couldn’t help him. He had a few very basic question about plate tectonics that I could answer, but otherwise…this is not my field.

He seemed like a somewhat confused layman trying to get rationalizations for some preconceptions. And then he wrote to me.

He claims to be a Ph.D. student, and he’s getting these questions from Walt Brown. The creationist Walt Brown. Hydroplate theory. Flood creationist. Etc.

Dear Dr. PZ Meyers [sigh],

I’ve been reading your book and enjoying it. I know you aren’t a geophysics professor, but mentioned Walt Brown stating a coalescing of hydrogens and oxygens above perhaps a single, vast continent brought on 40 days and 40 nights of rain, but having taken a look at his website he seems more emphasizing that our colleges and labs take no interest at all in delving into the most size and strength of a Supercontinent planet Earth could (possibly) have broken up above where it lifted up its mid-ocean range by way of the most water it which could have had under pressure below it. Volcano interiors sometimes generate inner lightnings. Earthquaked continent sometimes do. Perhaps our planet made its record inner lightning intensities dividing a Supercontinent into its seven continents. I find it hard to believe, from what a few of my Earth science professors pointed out to me, that anyone is in possession of the absolute truth about how the Earth went from not having to having its mid-ocean range.

Thank you for being friendly to me on the phone. Please tell me if you were aware of this information on how the Earth’s heavy radioactive elements are distributed?

“The Earth’s continental crust occupies 41.2% of the surface area but represents only 0.35% of the total mass of our planet.”

(Hugh Richard Rollinson, Ph.D.[geochemistry], Early Earth Systems [Blackwell Publishing: Malden, MA, 2007], p. 134)

“90% of uranium and thorium are concentrated in the continents.”*

*Dan F. C. Pribnow, Ph.D.(geophysics), “Radiogenic Heat Production in the Upper Third of Continental Crust from KTB,” Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 24, 1 February 1997, p. 349.

“Earth’s radioactivity was confined to the crust, a few tens of kilometers thick.”

(John D. Stacey, Physics of the Earth, 3rd edition (1992), p. 45)

“Uranium, thorium and potassium are the main elements contributing to natural terrestrial radioactivity.. All three of the radioactive elements are strongly partitioned into the continental crust.”

(J. A. Plant and A. D. Saunders, Oxford Journals, Vol. 68, p. 25)

“The molten rock oozing from midocean ridges lacks much of the uranium, thorium, and other trace elements that spew from some aboveground volcanoes.”

(Sid Perkins, “New Mantle Model Gets the Water Out,” Science News, Vol. 164, 13 September 2003, p. 174.

Continental crust is roughly a hundredfold more concentrated with radioactivity than ocean-floor crust is.

“Surface rocks show traces of radioactive materials, and while the quantities thus found are very minute, the aggregate amount is sufficient, if scattered with this density throughout the earth, to suppy, many times over, the present yearly loss of heat. In fact, so much heat could be developed in this way that it has been practically necessary to make the assumption that the radioactive materials are limited in occurence to a surface shell only a few kilometers in thickness”

(Leonard R. Ingersoll, et al., Heat Conduction : With Engineering, Geological and Other Applications, revised edition [University of Wisconsin Press: Madison, WI, 1954], p. 102)

“Heat production rate is well correlated to lithology; no significant variation with depth, neither strictly linear nor exponential, is observed over the entire depths of the [two German holes].”

(Christoph Clauser, et al., “The Thermal Regime of the Crystalline Continental Crust: Implications from the KTB, Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 102, No. B8, 10 August 1007, p. 18,418)

Germany’s Deep Drilling Project discovered variations in heat-exuding radioactivity related to the rock types, not to depths.

Thank you, Rick Keane

P.S.

I’m working toward getting a Ph.D. in geophysics with respect to how lightnings can synthesize and disintegrate (e.g. via building up free neutron density and interactions) heavy atomic weight radioactive elements. It is known to science: the magnetic forces between electrons associated with a billion volt; million amp lightning channel are extremely significant relative to their electrostatic forces so their magnetic pinch effects are consequential when they are shooting between, through and around certain light and medium weight nuclei as far as pulling and pushing them together into proximities wherein their strong nuclear forces interact and overcome their Coulombic barriers. The channel radius decreases with larger lightning currents, e.g., 1 billion volts or more.

“A lightning bolt is an example of a Z-pinch discharge. . . A Z-pinch operating at 600 kV and I = 100 kA in hydrogen at 500 Pa pinched from an initial radius of 5mm down to a pinch radius of a = 1.5 mm, and remained stable for 100 nanoseconds.*”

*P. Choi, et al., IAEA Conference, 1978.

(Thomas J. Dolan, Ph.D.[nuclear engineering], Fusion Research [Pergamon: Oxford, UK, 1982], p. 312)

“It is possible for the magnetic pinch effect to occur if the lightning current is high enough while the channel radius is small. For example, for a channel radius of 1 cm, a current of 8 x 104 amp must flow before the magnetic pressure at the surface of the channel exceeds 10 atm. For a channel radius of 0.1 cm, the current must exceed 8 × 103 amp.”

(Martin A. Uman, Ph.D.[electrical engineering], Lightning [McGraw-Hill: New York, NY, 1969], p. 241)

The electrons’ negative charges repel each other. When close < 3 fm, their repulsion gets strong. Hence their electrostatic forces try to blow outer electrons away from the clusters. But there's a velocity-dependent magnetic force always acting in a direction perpendicular to their magnetic fields. Magnetic forces between electrons will produce magnetic pinch effects counteracting Coulomb repulsions between electrons acting in the opposite direction.

So, with respect to the magnetic fields encircling electrons in a counterclockwise direction, they’re velocity-dependent magnetic forces. They depend not only on the positions of the particles through the value of the magnetic field, but also on the velocities of the particles. The magnetic (Lorentz) force on a charged particle involves the velocity vector of the particle and the speed of light. It’s perpendicular to the velocity and the magnetic field.

An electron emits a velocity-dependent magnetic field akin to the magnetic field encircling a current carrying wire (a magnetic force vector perpendicular to the direction of the field). Its magnetic force exerts on any other electrons traveling near to it in the same direction (directed radially inward to the first electron by which a a bunching up of the outer electrons occurs).

“In 1895 he [Hendrik Lorentz] demonstrated that a moving charged particle would experience a force in a background magnetic field, because moving charges produce magnetic fields, and are therefore magnets and so also experience forces due to other magnets.”

(Lawrence M. Krauss, Ph.D.[physics], Hiding in the Mirror [Penguin: New York, NY, 2005], p. 30)

“. .a magnetic field generates a force at right angles to the field’s direction. Also, unlike electric forces, magnetic forces depend on the charges’ velocities.”

(Paul Halpern, Ph.D.[physics], Collider [John Wiley & Sons: Hoboken, NJ, 2009], p. 57)

“More current means a stronger magnetic field.”

(Don Lincoln, Ph.D.[physics], The Quantum Frontier [John Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, MD, 2009], p. 76)

The Lorentz forces/ampere/magnetic-pinch effects/self-focusing of the electrons in extraordinarily intense lightnings keeps their electrostatic repulsive forces from blowing up their beams. The electrons’ Lorentz forces attract each other with Ampere effects strong enough to overcome their Coulombic repulsive forces and thermal expansions.

One might wonder the most atomic weights of nuclides that can be magnetically pinched into 2 femtometer proximities by the most densities; velocities of beams of electrons that a 1 billion amp; 1 million volt lightning might be able to shoot between, through and around nuclides which are shooting through it in the opposite direction coming from the side of it that has a condensation of positively charged ions. (Two nickel nuclei; for instance, have a 99 MeV Coulombic repulsion.)

Physical Review paper by the pioneer in magnetic pinch effect research, Dr. Will Bennett: http://astrophysics.fic.uni.lodz.pl/100yrs/pdf/10/002.pdf

LIGHTNINGS (even average voltages and amperages–not even close to 1 billion volts and 1 million amperes–have been observed and measured making nuclear reactions, e.g. inverse beta decays, build ups of free neutron densities; interactions with magnetic pinch effects):

“It will be shown that the observations of near-ground AGR [atmospheric gamma radiation] following lightning are consistent with the production and subsequent decay of a combination of atmospheric radioisotopes with 10-100 minute half-lives produced via nuclear reactions on the more abundant elements in the atmosphere.”

(Mark B. Greenfield et al., “Near-Ground Detection of Atmospheric Rays Associated with Lightning,” Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 93, 1 February 2003, p. 1840)

“Immediately after lightning crackled through the atmosphere, the detectors would register a burst of gamma rays, followed by about 15 minutes later by an extended shower of gamma rays that peaked after 70 minutes and then tapered off with a distinctive 50-minute half-life.”

(Kim Krieger, “Lightning Strikes and Gammas Follow?” Science, Vol. 304, 2 April 2004, p. 43)

“Observations of > 10 MeV gamma rays observed in NaI detectors within 10s of meters from and coincident with rocket-triggered lightning at the International Center for Lightning Research and Testing suggest that charged particles accelerated in intense electric fields associated with lightning give rise to photons with sufficient energy to initiate nuclear reactions.”*

*Joseph W. Dwyer, Ph.D.(physics), et al. “Energetic Radiation Produced During Rocket-Triggered Lightning,” Science 31 January 2003, Vol. 299, no. 5607, pp. 694-697.

(Greenfield, M.B.; Sakuma, K.; Ikeda, Y; Kubo, K., “Delayed gamma radiation from lightning induced nuclear reactions,” American Physical Society, March Meeting 2004, March 22-26, 2004, Palais des Congres de Montreal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, MEETING ID: MAR04, abstract #D39.003)

“The generation of neutrons in thunderstorm electric fields is related to photonuclear reactions in gigantic upward atmospheric discharges caused by relativistic runaway electron bremsstrahlung.”

(Leonid P. Babich, Sc.D.[physics], “Neutron generation mechanism correlated with lightning discharges,” Geomagnetism and Aeronomy, Springer, 1 January 2007. Dr. Babich is the head of the Plasma Physics Laboratory at the Russian Federal Nuclear Center All Russian Institute of Experimental Physics, Sarov, Russia)

“Nuclear transmutations and fast neutrons have been observed to emerge from large electrical current pulses through wire filaments which are induced to explode. The nuclear reactions may be explained as inverse beta transitions of energetic electrons absorbed either directly by single protons in Hydrogen or by protons embedded in other more massive nuclei.”

(A.Widom, Y.N. Srivastava, L. Larsen, “Energetic Electrons and Nuclear Transmutations in Exploding Wires,” Physics Faculty Publications, Vol. 174, January 01, 2007)

“In 1992 Gurevich et al. [1992] described how a relativistic avalanche mechanism that they termed relativistic runaway breakdown would work in the electric field of a thunderstorm and it became clear that the lightning discharge could take on an entirely different character than previously envisioned [Dwyer, 2005]. Subsequent theoretical and observational work has supported the notion that relativistic runaway breakdown plays a significant role in the lightnings process. As will be shown in this paper the measurements of enhanced neutron fluxes in association with lightning can only serve to further confirm this notion.”

(Leonid P. Babich, Sc.D.[physics], Robert A. Roussel-Dupre, “Origin of neutron flux increases observed in correlation with lightning,” Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 112, 6 July 2007)

http://crdlx5.yerphi.am/files/thunder/2007Babich0.pdf

“Quite analogouse correlation of the neutron enhancements with electric discharges is seen in other events. Taking into account that the atmospheric discharge lasts for a few hundred milliseconds while the neutron detectors have a 1-min time resolution we see that the additional neutron flux generated in every discharge should be really giant!”

(A.V. Gurevich, et al., “Strong Flux of Low-Energy Neutrons Produced by Thunderstorms,” Physical Review Letters , Vol. 108, 19 March 2012)

“Photonuclear reactions are capable of accounting for the possible amplifications of neutron flux in thunderstorm atmosphere since in correlation with thunderstorms gamma ray flashes were repeatedly observed with spectra extending high above the threshold of photonuclear reactions in air. By numerical simulations, it was demonstrated that gamma ray pulses detected in thunderstorm atmosphere are capable of generating photonuclear neutrons in numbers sufficient to be detected even at sea level. . . It would seem that, for neutron generation, in thunderstorm atmosphere, strong nuclear interaction is responsible.”

(L.P. Babich, E.I. Bochkov, I.M. Kutsyk, and A.N. Zalyalov, “On Amplifications of Photonuclear Flux in Thunderstorm Atmosphere and Possibility of Detecting Them,” Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics, Vol. 97, May 2013, p. 291)

Thank you,

Rick Keane

Just another tip here, Mr Keane: real scholars and students don’t simply concatenate a whole bunch of quote fragments and say, “explain this”. You’ve cited a bunch of geology texts; have you read them to get clarification on those scattered quotes? That’s where you start. Not by phoning up biologists and asking them to explain geophysics to you.

But maybe there are some readers here who know that field better than I do (which is not a high hurdle to cross) and they can address a few of the points. Given that they’re from Brown and the Center for Scientific Creation, though, I don’t think you’re going to find any answers here to fit your presuppositions.