I will be giving a talk on Saturday on Zoom

The annual Monterey Skepticamp is being held on Saturday, January 8th from 9:46am to 5:46pm California time. I will be giving a talk at 2:30pm.

Title: Why the age of the Earth has oscillated wildly over time

Summary: The age of the Earth seems to be a settled question in the scientific community, But estimates of its age have oscillated wildly in the past, starting with it being considered really old (even infinitely old) to becoming very young (of the order of thousands of years) to becoming sort of old (hundreds of millions of years) to younger again (tens of millions of years) to the current view of it being really old (of the order of billions of years). This talk will look at the interplay of scientific and religious thinking that was driving this fluctuation.

You can see the full schedule of speakers here.

It is free. You can RSVP here.

The Zoom link to join is https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88526995782

Tennis star Novak Djokovic in limbo in Australia

Tennis star Novak Djokovic has said that he is opposed to vaccinations. Australia now requires people entering the country to be vaccinated or apply for a special exemption. Djokovic had applied for and got an exemption from the Australian tennis body that issues such exemptions so that he could play in the Australian Open that takes place starting on January 17th. But later it turned out that he had applied for a visa that does not allow for medical exemptions. This caused a furore with people complaining that he was being given special treatment.

Australian prime minister Scott Morrison then stepped in and said only the federal government has the authority to decide who is allowed into the country and under what circumstances and that he was not eligible to enter. The Victorian state government also refused to weigh in in support of Djokovic’s exemption. Meanwhile, Djokovic and his entourage had already departed for Australia on a long flight and upon arrival he was separated from the rest and held isolated under an armed guard at the Melbourne airport while his case was deliberated. In the end, his visa was cancelled and he was asked to leave.
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Radiation paradoxes 10: Five scenarios for a charge and detector

(Previous posts in this series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9)

In the previous post, I quoted Fritz Rohrlich who said that asking whether an accelerated charge really radiates is meaningless and that we need to also look at the value of the Poynting vector at the location of the detector. In discussing the radiation from an electric charge that is freely falling in a gravitational field, the state of motion of the charge and the detector both have to be taken into account. and this requires transformations between frames and will depend on whether the detector is an inertial observer or not. The transformations to accelerating frames requires the use of the mathematical machinery of general relativity.

With that. in mind, let us consider a charge Q and a radiation detector D and see what happens under various scenarios that describe different states of motion of each. There are five possible scenarios of interest to consider. It should be borne in mind that these scenarios are hard to test experimentally and, as far as I am aware, have not been tested.
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A healthy lifestyle will not entirely protect you from covid-19

We have people who are opposed to vaccinations on ideological grounds, on partisan political grounds, on religious grounds, and who think that it undermines their ‘wellness’ attitude to health and believe that various dietary and mental therapies are the key to avoiding the disease and that vaccines interfere with that protection.

But there are those who do not fit into any of those categories and say that they are not opposed to vaccines as such but don’t get vaccinated because they think that vaccines are unnecessary if one lives a healthy lifestyle and do not have the comorbidities that make one a risk for serious illness and death, such as age or being immunosuppressed or having lung ailments. Younger and otherwise healthy people are likely to fall into this category of the unvaccinated.
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The pacing of the radiation posts

As long-time readers may have noticed, when it comes to complicated issues, as in the case of the current series on radiation paradoxes, I tend to post about it in installments. I have had many, many ten-to-twenty-or-more part series dealing with important questions, such as the Higgs, evolution, and the Big Bang. This doling out in small portions may be irksome to some, especially those who already know quite a bit about the subject, who may be impatient at my slow pace. They may wonder why I do not write out the entire thing first and post it in one long entry so that everything is settled once and for all.

There are several reasons for this. One is purely pedagogical. I think that it is hard to digest a lot of new and difficult material in one gulp. With small doses, where each post focuses on just one or more important issue, people can think and reflect on it, ask questions, and get things clarified in their own minds as best as possible and are thus more ready to move on to the next installment.
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Elizabeth Holmes found guilty of fraud

After a 15-week trial, a jury today found the founder of the Theranos company guilty on four of the 11 counts of fraud with which she was charged. In an earlier post I discussed how she had persuaded gullible wealthy people like Rupert Murdoch, George Schultz, and henry Kissinger that she had the makings of being the next Steve Jobs, an image that she carefully cultivated and a comparison that she encouraged by her dress and speech. She was found guilty on four of the 11 charges.

A jury convicted Holmes, who was CEO throughout the company’s turbulent 15-year history, on two counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit fraud after seven days of deliberation. The 37-year-old was acquitted on four other counts of fraud and conspiracy that alleged she deceived patients who paid for Theranos blood tests, too.
…

The jury deadlocked on three remaining charges, which a federal judge anticipates dismissing as part of a mistrial ruling that could come as early as next week. The split verdicts are “a mixed bag for the prosecution, but it’s a loss for Elizabeth Holmes because she is going away to prison for at least a few years,” said David Ring, a lawyer who has followed the case closely.

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Who said that there is no honor among thieves?

As part of the legal proceeding involving Virginia Giuffre’s charge that Prince Andrew was one of Jeffrey Epstein’s friends that she was pressured to have sex with as a minor, a federal judge yesterday released the sealed agreement that was reached about a decade ago between Epstein and Giuffre in settlement of her case against him.

The unsealed settlement states that upon receipt of the stipulated sum, Giuffre, referred to under her maiden name, agrees to “remise, release, acquit, satisfy and forever discharge the said second parties and any other person or entity who could have been included as a potential defendant … from all, and all manner of, action and actions of Virginia Roberts, including state or federal, cause and causes of action”.

It looks like Epstein was taking care of his friends to insulate them from legal actions by those they abused. Of course, I doubt that he did this purely out of a sense of friendship. More likely it was to prevent them from buckling under the threat of prosecution and revealing damaging information about him.

It is interesting that Andrew and Alan Dershowitz, neither of whom is specifically named, wanted this agreement to be released since they seem to feel that it will take the heat off them.
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Radiation paradoxes 9: The resolution?

(Previous posts in this series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8)

We saw in the previous post how Einstein’s Principle of Equivalence explained why two masses dropped from the same height in a gravitational field will fall at the same rate and hit the ground at the same time. It also seemed to resolve the paradox about whether an electric charge will fall more slowly than a neutral particle in a gravitational field. The answer arrived at was ‘no’ because since according to the PoE, the situation with the falling accelerating charge in the frame of the Earth E was equivalent to the charge being stationary in the inertial frame of space S, the charge would not radiate energy, contrary to naive expectations that any accelerating charge would radiate. On the surface, that seems to resolve the paradox that started this series of posts. The price we have paid is that we must abandon Postulate #2 and conclude that accelerating charges do not radiate when falling freely in a gravitational field.
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As the year 2022 begins, should it be followed by CE or AD?

When numbering years, the system using BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini, which is Latin for “in the year of our Lord.”) is commonly used, especially in the Christianity-dominant part of the world. More recently, there has been a move to change BC to BCE (Before Common Era) and AD to CE (Common Era), a shift that I applaud. The actual numbering would not change since the switch from BCE to CE occurs at the same time as the switch from BC to AD, but the label would be more religiously and culturally neutral.

Miriamne Ara Krummel describes how the BC and AD system came about. She says that part of the motivation was to marginalize the competing Jewish calendaring system.
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