nixtaken

The idea was that there are women claiming to be modern feminists who are being paid to undermine feminism.

Air is a good insulator and water is a good conductor, or?

This is a very old concept. Laplace wrote about it in the 1700s and Fred Hoyle tried to popularize it in the form of the steady-state universe in the 1960s, but he was shouted down by big bang LCDM dogmatists.

I'm even more confused this morning, because the files were still missing from the WordPress editor this morning for the first hour, and now they are back. Does that mean that there is still a hacker in my computer or that the hacker undid the changes that he made to try to cover his tracks and the system was just slow to update?

Since this is hackernews, maybe this is the right place for this question:

Yesterday evening, someone deleted two posts from my WordPress blog. I assume that it was a hacker who didn't appreciate my apostatic criticism of the scientific community.

The two posts (out of 160) included an early version of this one and another post that once circulated widely on Twitter (https://kirstenhacker.wordpress.com/2019/09/29/the-walrus-an...)

They included some of my sharper criticisms and they established my credibility as someone who studied these systems for years as a community insider.

I, of course, back up my work offline, and I immediately changed my WordPress password and disconnected my computer from the internet because I didn't know if they had just hacked my WordPress account or my computer. Yet, this morning, I am back online with my computer (I only have one) and am wondering what I should do. So far, I'm only planning to install windows updates and restart.

oh, no. you are right. my mistake. I will delete it

Did any of the 50 posts promote the novels? No. The posts which promote the novels only make up a small fraction of what is contained in the blog. Most of the blog is about tech, culture, and physics.

I haven't looked into WiFi, since this was about static magnetic fields rather than fluctuating magnetic fields, although I have read about the increased incidence of gliomas (a type of brain tumor) caused by cell phone usage. Of course, that only happens when you hold a wifi source up to your head constantly. For this reason, I don't think that wireless headphones are a good idea.

One odd thing I've come across lately are accounts of the effect of MRI magnetic fields on depression. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-mris-treat-dep....

Since ECT and other forms of brain damage have been shown to offer temporary relief from depression when endorphins are released in response to the damage, I wonder if MRIs have a similar effect.

I posted this because it helps to have a model of other people's blind spots whenever you encounter hostility.

"Navigating around other people's blind spots is tricky and often painful, but it is still worth doing. The internet can make this dance more difficult, but if you are curious and keep exploring, you will escape the confines of the internet’s echo-chambers and develop the ability to see things from multiple perspectives. This is the balm that salves the pain from seeing too much."

I thought this post would be of interest to the community because it described consciousness in terms of feedbak loops, networks, and physics.

Thanks for the tip. I'm new here.

Or a confederacy of dunces. Same difference. The dunsmen of Scotist thought were once famous for their brilliantly labyrinthine, obfuscating logic until the enlightenment started and people began making fun of their pointy hats. This is just how ideas evolve. I think tired-light would bring more clarity and unity to physics as a discipline.

The choice between the big-bang and tired-light is a choice between self-consistent theories which each explain the available data - the absence of distant stars in this case. Some say that the choice should be made based on politics, marketing, the amount of work already invested in the theory, etc. She made a case for tired-light based on heuristic and semantic grounds. She thinks that it is more consistent with existing word use and with other sub-specialties within physics. She believes it would reduce the fragmentation of physics as a discipline. Then again, perhaps this fragmentation was deliberate. It is like that Tool song, Schism, "I know the pieces fit. I watched them fall away." The question I'd like answered is: "Will the next generation be able to put the pieces back together?

The atoms in the distant stars are the same as the atoms here, but they are being shaken around relative to where we are - that is an explanation in terms of space. It relies on the motion of the atoms in the distant star being faster than the speed of light relative to us.

The atoms in the distant stars are the same as the atoms here, but they are emitting light at a different time relative to where we are - that is an explanation in terms of time. It relies on destructive interference between the light we emit and the light the distant star emits.

The two explanations are geometrically equivalent.

They are consistent with the worldview of people like Maxwell, Bjerknes and Hertz. They looked up at the sky and saw stars in jiggling jello. It isn't a bad heuristic. It just went out of fashion.

He is askng for an explanation in terms of quantum mechanics and I gave one, but I prefer the first explanation I gave in term of the speed of light. What is nice about tired light or steady-state universes is that the two explanations are consistent. The big-bang universe is full of inconsistencies and paradoxes which are somehow not paradoxical if you do the math and don't think too hard about the heuristics. In short, it is a mess that can only be sorted out if you think outside of the box which defines it.

He wanted a quantum explanation in terms of photons, so I gave him one. I liked the original explanation I gave in terms of the speed of light better: "If a vibrating star is always moving towards or away from the detector at greater than the speed of light, you won't see it."

What I like about tired-light is that it is consistent with both quantum and cosmic processes whereas the big-bang people insist that there is a mysterious incompatibility between the two realms (domains if you want to sound technical). I suppose that this isn't surprising because wherever there is a mystery, they can ask for money from politicians. Taxpayers like you and I pay for it.

Prior to her post-doctoral work, she wrote her thesis on the synchronization of particle beams with light, but it didn't have anything to do with mysticism. This contains a sample of some of that work: https://kirstenhacker.wordpress.com/posts-deleted-by-quora/

Think of me as her publicist. And the article that was flagged in your link was a good one.

She is a German Ph.D. in physics with 3200 followers and over 2.5 million answer views on Quora. Her posts are regularly upvoted by respected physicists and she is known for writing unusually clear explanations of complicated topics. https://www.quora.com/profile/Kirsten-Hacker

If atoms in star A and star B are moving in opposition - away and towards one other in a steady-state oscillation - this would cause destructive interference between the emitted photons. No energy will be exchanged and they will be blind to one another.

If the atoms of stars A and C are moving back and forth synchronously in the same direction at the same time, the photons they emit will add constructively and they will see one another.

If you want to, you can make stars A and C stationary and just let star B vibrate. The result is the same.

In the scientific community, we talk about how different foundational principles or axioms change the heuristics of physics and that is what this article was about. Convention A leads to Riemannian coordinates and the big bang. Convention B leads to Cartesian coordinates and tired light. There is nothing mystical about Cartesian logic. It was reborn during the enlightenment. When people try to think in Cartesian ways about Riemannian theories, as most people tend to do, trouble arises.

You're right that this language is not precise enough. Where you put the clocks matters a lot. What is synchronous to one person is asynchronous to another.

Those who believe in the big bang say that there was an inflationary epoch during which particles traveled faster than light - just like the Standard Model virtual particles within collider experiments which temporarily violate conservation of energy. Then, all of a sudden, for no discernible reason, we are supposed to believe that the laws of physics suddenly changed and everything that happened since must travel at less than the speed of light. Wild story. I saw Andre Linde tell it in a SLAC conference room when I was just a child. I've since been amazed by how much sand castle empire building resulted from this lark. Some of those who founded the theory have since abandoned it. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/physicist-s... The man who stood by it won the 2019 Nobel Prize (James Peebles). Loyalty to the group pays off.

I think the idea rests on the notion that the stars all obey the same physical laws and are made of the same types of atoms, but that the timing of the motion of atoms in distant stars is not synchronized with our own. I like to think of the physics of synchrotron light in this context. When a particle accelerates, as in an atomic clock, it emits light.

The physical process is gravity as Laplace described it back in the 1700s as a sort of breathing motion. Stars in our vicinity tend to breathe in synch and that is why they are easy to see. Jargon from the past only sounds mystical when present-day jargon loses contact with foundational principles.

People who've been conditioned to imagine a big bang bubble that expanded at greater than the speed of light and then popped often find it difficult for to imagine Fred Hoyle's steady-state universe (which is what she is trying to describe). For people with a materials science background, it is easy to imagine, but for people steeped in modern pop-sci mythology, it is difficult.

A vibrating star is a star that is literally moving back and forth relative to an observer. That doesn't sound like new-age mysticism to me.

With "vibrating in a mode which is out of synch with our own" it looks like she is translating physics jargon into more colloquial terms.

A physicist would instead say "oscillating in a mode which is out of phase with the motion of the detector".

A teacher would explain the concept in terms of a child being pushed on a swing. If you are pushing at exactly the wrong time during every swing, there will be no energy transfer. When there is no energy transfer, you are blind to each other.

The jargon of science is one of her bugbears and she is trying to demystify it.

I think the wiki lacks impartiality and that the handwaving in the article was done by a German PhD in physics with an eye to helping people develop intuition. If a vibrating star is always moving towards or away from the detector at greater than the speed of light, you won't see it.

The data suggests that the bifurcation described in her article is real https://www.wsj.com/articles/where-women-fall-behind-at-work...

With the contrast she made between WIMPs+tiredlight and Higgs+bigbang, I think she suggested that when both languages have equal predictive power, one should choose the language that is consistent with existing definitions. If a new language confuses definitions and creates the appearance of paradoxes, it is not a good language. This is drawn out in some of her other articles.