úterý 29. března 2022

Steve Koonin responds to an article in SciAm

This text was posted on The Reference Frame on June 3rd, 2021, and censored through a Google AdSense request on March 29th, 2022. The Disqus discussion thread is available.

SciAm rejected to publish the following response by Dr S. Koonin
Koonin responds to a Scientific American article by Oreskes et al.

Scientific American has published a criticism of me and my recent book, Unsettled. Most of that article’s 1,000 words are scurrilous ad hominem and guilt-by-association aspersions from the twelve co-authors. Only three scientific criticisms are buried within their spluttering; here is my response to each them.

Creatures behind Malone's Twitter ban deserve the most stringent punishment

This text was originally posted on December 30th, 2021, and censored on The Reference Frame by a Google AdSense request on March 29th, 2022. The Disqus discussion thread is available.

In the morning, I was totally shocked (and I am still immensely angry, four hours later) when I learned that Twitter banned the main co-inventor of mRNA vaccine technology that runs the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, aside from others, Robert Malone MD. An account with more than 500,000 followers disappeared in a split second.

I just can't fathom how the aßholes behind such bans psychologically operate. They must know very well that relatively to Dr Malone, they are just worthless stinky piles of šit who know absolutely nothing about vaccines. But the immense fanatical group think in their corrupt environment somewhat manages to persuade them that they have the right to dictate who is "right" about the vaccination campaign and rob this important scientist from the right to speak on the very subject he founded. They must believe that it's just fine what they are doing and they will not be held responsible and executed. I beg to differ.

Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff (1949-2021/2022)

This blog post was censored by a Google AdSense request on March 29th, 2022, and originally posted on The Reference Frame on January 3rd, 2022. The Disqus discussion thread is available.

My sister in the French Riviera just informed me about doubly sad news. Both Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff died of Covid at Parisian "Georges-Pompidou" ICUs; see some French Google News. I think that among victims of the disease, they were closest to me personally (although I am uncertain about the cause of one death of a much older man).

These faces of popular science shows on French TV screens (most famously, Temps X in 1979-1985) had a genuine passion for science and obtained PhDs in theoretical physics. While I wouldn't see their dissertation as a fully meaningful foundation for further exciting research, I think that the papers were at least comparable with the average work that can earn PhDs. Or, I can't resist to make the comparison, with Pierfrancesco's recent paper. But their combination of the concepts was much more passionate and mathematically artistic (and spending more energy with mathematically nontrivial structures and patterns including quantum groups and the KMS state). Their writing was a piece of art that greatly resembled real papers about similar topics and with similarly many equations.

The term "Bogdanov affair" was invented to claim that they have staged a Sokal-like hoax; that was clearly nonsense, they genuinely and obviously believed their work to have been great science. With my roughly neutral approach (combined with some self-evidently positive underlying emotions), I was sufficiently unusual and they liked it. They also helped me to publish a popular book about theoretical physics that discussed many "regular" topics but that has used some of the concepts (and combinations) from their papers as a launchpad.

pondělí 28. března 2022

Global warming: Nobel Prize in Physics has become a joke, too

This text was posted on The Reference Frame on October 5th, 2021, and censored by a Google AdSense request in March 2022. Death to totalitarian lying ecoterrorists.
The Disqus discussion is here.



Yesterday, Scandinavian officials announced that the Nobel Prize in Medicine went to some folks who discovered the receptors of temperature and touch which sounds like interesting biophysics (in fact, a better candidate for a physics prize than what we discuss below). However, minutes ago, a new shock awaited us, especially 1/2 of the announcement is utterly shocking.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021
Giorgio Parisi got one-half
for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales
which is acceptable although I would obviously vote No. Giorgio Parisi has been a top notch particle physicist who has worked on QCD, partons, asymptotic freedom, Monte Carlo simulations, and even SUSY, and co-authored with men like Virasoro, to show that he has really been close to "my field" (his collaboration distance from me is 3, through Ferrara and Freedman). He increasingly focused on things like spin glasses, complexity, behavior of flocks of birds and planetary systems, and similar things.

Complexity-related ideas may be interesting but none of them is true Nobel Prize-level material – well, with this drop of the Nobel Prize, my assertion just became tautologically false.

sobota 19. února 2022

Nuclear energy is far from sufficient for carbon neutrality

Censored on The Reference Frame, too

While Czech PM Babiš spoke self-confidently here in Czechia, he didn't achieve much in Brussels.

He didn't really veto the insane EU gr@tin plans for carbon neutrality by 2050. Instead, along with Hungary, they agreed with these pledges – it was enough for the EU to promise that both Hungary and Czechia may maintain and expand nuclear power plants.



Meanwhile, Poland was granted an exemption from the carbon neutrality push. Good for them. It shows that they have better negotiators; but carbon neutrality at the national level would clearly be an even greater shock for Poland than for Czechia and Hungary. But now, Poland has a huge advantage relatively to everyone else. I think that we should officially donate the land beneath our coal power plants to Poland – and/or register our ČEZ power utility as a Polish company – so that these good old power plants may continue running without any harassment by the climate fearmongers.