The sociology of science

In my post on the Planck units yesterday, I referenced the work of C. Alden Mead who, as far as I am aware, was the first to take the idea of the Planck units as having a real physical significance out of the realm of folklore. Interestingly, Mead had considerable trouble getting his paper accepted for publication. When I read his paper, I noticed that it was first submitted in June 1959 and must have had multiple exchanges with referees because a revised version was finally received four years later in August 1963 and then it took another year to appear in print in August 1964. The publication of scientific papers can be slow and take about a year or so if accepted but five years means that he had a lot of trouble with referees and had to fight to get it published.
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Stephen Colbert on Trump being called a moron

He has a lot of fun with the Tillerson story. I really wonder how long the Trump-Tillerson relationship can last, now that the latter did not unequivocally deny that he called Trump a “fucking moron”. Even someone as self-absorbed as Trump has to realize that Tillerson did call him that. I think that unless Trump fires him, Tillerson will stay until he has completed a year in office so as to avoid a tax bill, because these people love money the most. It may happen that Trump, out of spite, fires Tillerson before the year is up just to have him pay the tax, unless being fired lets Tillerson off the hook.
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And now the hoax stories start

Things like the Las Vegas shooting reveal that there is something seriously wrong with the psyche of many people in the US. I am not talking about their deep love of guns and the paranoid fear that many have that they are defenseless unless armed to the teeth with massive weaponry, even though such heavy weaponry is overkill for any ordinary everyday need and utterly inadequate when confronting (say) the US military, which some gun enthusiasts feel is on the verge of declaring martial law.
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The Planck units and their meaning

(Note: I am using some Greek letters and math symbols in this post and HTML can be dicey in how they appear. They look ok to me using the Safari browser on my Mac but if it looks weird to you, let me know in the comments and I will try and tweak the HTML to make it look better.)

In our lives we need to have some system of units for quantities like mass (M), length (L), and time (T). The most common system, used almost everywhere in the world with the US being a notable exception, is the metric system where length is in meters, time is in seconds, and mass is in kilograms. But any such system of units is purely conventional and if we were to make contact with any extra-terrestrials, it is almost certain that they would have a different set of units. But could there be units that are universal?
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New discussion question: Is the US president a moron?

Yes, we have now reached the stage where this is now a question for serious public discussion. It follows a report that this past summer, secretary of state Rex Tillerson had referred to Donald Trump as a moron and had said that he wanted to resign his position. In a press conference that he called today, Tillerson denied that he had even thought of resigning or had to be talked out of it but did not deny that ‘moron’ quote.
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US votes against UN resolution condemning death penalty for LGBTQ community

It is said that you can tell a lot about a person by the company that they keep. Going by that standard, the US’s reputation is in tatters. Take for example the issue of governments executing LGBTQ people simply for being who they are. You would think that if the UN came up with a resolution condemning such a practice and calling for its end, that would be a really easy call and the US would sign on. But no. According to Alex Emmons:
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Shooter had a acquired a massive arsenal

The shooter in Las Vegas 64-year old Stephen Paddock is said to be a well-to-do retired accountant who liked to gamble for high stakes. But his motives remain obscure. Had he lost his money due to gambling and was lashing out at the world? Paddock’s live-in girl friend who is currently in Japan at the time is likely the person who can shed most light on the motives. The reports emerging about him have some surprising twists.
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Nobel prize in physics given for gravity wave detection

To no one’s surprise, this year’s Nobel prize in physics has been awarded for the detection of gravity waves in September 2015. This was a huge project involving large numbers of experimentalists and theorists because the waves have such a weak signal. It is not unlike the earlier discovery of the Higgs boson in that the final detection was received with relief rather than surprise because both were firmly believed to exist. In the case of the Higgs, the prediction had been made fifty years earlier and with the gravitational waves, it had been made 100 years earlier, as a consequence of Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. The challenge in both cases was to overcome the immense technical hurdles involved in detecting them.
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The fantasy of atheist discomfort and doubt

There is this odd fantasy that some religious people indulge in that they think that atheists secretly feel some void in their lives and that they try to suppress but that emerges into the open when they approach death, and manifests itself in deathbed remorse and conversions. We saw how religious people looked eagerly for such signs in David Hume and were infuriated when he showed none.
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