Category Archives: View

View 693 Friday, September 23, 2011

The big news is that CERN has a pretty good case for faster than light travel by a neutrino. (BBC) No one wants to believe it. It is a fundamental assumption in modern physics that the speed of light as the absolute limiting velocity in the universe, and most physicists think this is some kind of anomaly, a measurement error perhaps. Nothing can move faster than light. That’s an axiom, because if something can go faster than light then the whole notion of causation is gone, and woe!

Yet the evidence seems fairly solid. Neutrinos sent from Switzerland to a lab in Italy about 450 miles away arrived some 60 nanoseconds earlier than they ought to arrive. That doesn’t sound like much, but in fact it’s huge: as Commodore Grace Hopper was fond of saying, a nanosecond is about a foot. Put two detectors fifty feet apart and see what happens.

If this holds up, something is wrong with relativity. Einstein got it wrong.

Of course some have always asserted that there is something wrong with Einstein’s theory. One was Petr Beckmann in his book Einstein Plus Two http://www.stephankinsella.com/wp-content/uploads/texts/beckmann_einstein-dissident-physics-material.pdf . The book is tough reading for those who have got out of practice using calculus and physics, but the arguments can be followed by anyone. Beckmann shows that many of the anomalies such as the movement of the perihelion of Mercury can be predicted by classical Newtonian physics if you assume that gravity propagates at the speed of light, rather than instantaneously as Newton assumed; and indeed this was done well before Einstein’s famous paper on the subject. I don’t suppose there are more than a few hundred physicists in all the world who take Beckmann’s theory seriously, but there are some including some smart cookies.

And, of course, there’s all the speculation about tachyons. I won’t try to reproduce the theories; Wikipedia has more information than most of us want. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon In particular you will be interested in the assumptions about causality. Do note that the causality paradox assumes the truth of Einstein’s relativity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon#Causality

Beckmann said in the preface to his book:

I am not so naive as to think that the first attempt to move the entire Einstein theory en bloc onto classical ground will turn out to be perfectly correct. What I do hope is that the approach will provide a stimulus for the return of physics from description to comprehension. Attempting to redefine the ultimate foundation pillars of physics, space and time, from what they have been understood to mean through the ages is to move the entire building from its well-established and clearly visible foundations into a domain of unreal acrobatics where the observer becomes more important than the nature he is supposed to observe, where space and time become toys in abstract mathematical formalisms, and where, to quote a recent paper on modem approaches to gravitation theory, "the distinctions between future and past become blurred.

The principle of the absolute limit of the speed of light is so well accepted that most science fiction authors admit that their space operas with faster than light ships is more fantasy than science fiction, which is supposed to be fiction about what might be, as opposed to pure imagination. It is unlikely but somewhat exciting to discover that space opera is science fiction again.

Time Science puts it this way

a team of European scientists has reportedly clocked a flock of subatomic particles called neutrinos moving at just a shade over the speed of light. According to Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity, that can’t be, since light, which cruises along at about 186,000 miles per second (299,000 km/sec.), is the only thing that can go that fast.

If the Europeans are right, Einstein was not just wrong but almost clueless. The implications could be huge. Particles that move faster than light are essentially moving backwards in time, which could make the phrase cause and effect obsolete.

"Think of it as being shot before the trigger is pulled," wrote University of Rochester astrophysicist Adam Frank on his NPR blog. Or, as Czech physicist Lubos Motl put it on his blog, "You could kill your grandfather before he had his first sex with your grandmother, thus rendering your own existence needed for the homicide inconsistent with the result of the homicide."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2094665,00.html#ixzz1Yo8VjI4k

Of course that assumes rather a lot about the universe and the truth of relativity. Assume I have a means for sending messages from Alpha Centauri much faster than the speed of light: I have an Alderson Drive. An event observable from Earth happens there, say a comet crashes into a planet. After it happens but before the light reaches Earth, a faster than light message gets out and the starship Enterprise is dispatched to arrive at Alpha Centauri in time to prevent the crash. This makes for a paradox – but only if you assume that there is no absolute time in the universe, and all events occur relative to each other, and every inertial frame of reference is equally valid. In the common sense world, the Enterprise can’t get there in time to prevent the comet impact. It has already happened. You can’t go back and kill your grandfather just because you can get to Mars in an instant. But that’s just common sense, and we already know from the two slit experiment that common sense doesn’t always make everything comprehensible.

On the other hand, suppose there isn’t anyone to observe Schroedinger’s cat: does it never die?

Common sense assumes that time exists, and there is a clock in the universe: events happen or they don’t , time’s arrow doesn’t let you go back and change things. You can’t go back and kill your grandfather, and the speed of light is no more relevant than the speed of the pony express as compared to the railroad as opposed to the telegraph. The telegraph didn’t let us go back in time just because it could transfer information faster than the pony express did. Common sense says that if something travels faster than light it won’t give you time travel. But, as I’ve said, when you get to quantum effects we’ve got cases of repeatable and reliable effects that common sense can’t make any sense of …

Enough. Thinking about this stuff can give you a headache.

HPV vaccine

Lot of argument back and forth about the HPV vaccine. Assuming it’s safe (the CDC says so), I don’t see what the problem is. Sure, parents don’t want their young girls to have sex. I’ve got two daughters and I don’t want them around sex until, say, 50. So what. Protecting them from dangerous or difficult to treat contagious conditions seems like a reasonable thing for the public good.

Phil

Sure. Fine. Get them the shots. But why should I pay for it or require you to do it?

Whatever the answer to that. it’s surely not part of the powers granted in the Constitution of 1787. For states, maybe so. The states have always had the power to take measures in the realm of public health. The question is whether this particular STD imposes a sufficient danger as to require compulsory vaccination against it. Who shall make that decision?

And assuming that it’s decided that compulsory HPV vaccination is a good idea, assume the state is broke (most of them are): is this such a benefit that we ought to raise taxes or borrow money to do it?  All are valid considerations, of course. Just because a state has the power to do something, and determines it would be a good idea, doesn’t mean that it can be afforded or should be.

The Green Jobs are the hope of the economy.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44638883/ns/politics-capitol_hill/t/solyndra-leaders-invoke-th-amendment-hearing/ 

Solyndra bet that Silicon would stay at a high price. The company was dead from the first day. So far, so good; but then came the federal money to bail them out.

View 693 Thursday, September 22, 2011

The Republican debates went fairly well. There wasn’t anyone on that platform that wouldn’t be preferable to Barack Obama for President of the Republic. Once again I found Newt impressive, as was Cain.

The Internet is abuzz with Elizabeth Warren, and no wonder. Those interested should listen to her speech. It’s short and done well. Here’s some of what she says:

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Her supporters are enthusiastic because she is in essence pleading natural law in defense of Obama’s tax policies. It’s pretty good natural law, too. Parts of it sound conservative. She appeals to “the social contract” as opposed to the libertarian precept. She says that capitalists are greedy, which they are, and that they ought to have more sympathy for the rest of us who built the social order that allows them to get rich. Time to give some back. What’s wrong with that?

Well, to start with, social contracts aren’t Constitutions. They Social Contract is a convenient fiction, but in fact there isn’t one, and to the extent that there is anything like one, Thomas Hobbes comes a lot closer to the agreement that creates a state than Rousseau or even Thomas Aquinas. Social Contracts sound great, but you can’t sit down and read the Social Contract. Constitutions are specific. Even then they can be embraced and extended: it’s a long way from Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion (which was intended to forbid Congress from establishing the Episcopal Church as a national religion, but also intended to forbid Congress from disestablishing the religions in the seven out of thirteen states which had a religion by law established) – it’s a long way from the specific language of the First Amendment to the US Supreme Court forbidding a manger in the public square.

Constitutions try to limit government. Social contracts may be seen as a limit of government power or as an empowerment, depending on your point of view.

As to the specifics, surely the man who built the factory can plead that he paid his share of the taxes that paid for the roads and operated the schools; he took his chances that his factory would be successful and people would be willing to pay enough for its products to cover his expenses and leave him a profit; and if he got lucky and made a lot of profit, isn’t he entitled to it? If he’d been unable to make his widgets for less than people wanted to pay for them, is he entitled to a subsidy because he tried? Well, maybe – if he’s trying to create Green Jobs the rules do seem to change, and the public is expected to give him a big break and maybe half a billion dollars in loans that won’t be paid back. Is that covered by the social contract? After all, the intention was good. We’re trying to save the earth and create Green Jobs.

As to defense against marauding bands, it depends on the marauders, as port operators in the state of Washington found when the unions came in to take over.

Ms. Warren sounds very reasonable because most of us sort of agree with her – there is some obligation on the part of the successful to contribute to making the society work better. It’s called providing for the common defense and promoting the general welfare. And the Constitution having set out the goal:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

They then set up the mechanism for doing that. They didn’t just say here’s your social contract, here’s a declaration of the rights and duties of the citizen, now let’s let Congress get on with it. The result was a Republic that achieved some remarkable achievements, including fulfilling a lot of Ms. Warren’s social contract, but with a rule of law. It lasted a long time, nearly as long as the Roman Republic, and it was a power in its time. Now all that is under reconsideration.

Note that what Ms. Warren says that we need the money for police and roads and fire services. It’s time for the successful to pay more because we’re broke, and without new money we won’t have roads and schools and fire and police and all those things you need in order to build and operate your factory. No political regime ever threatened to fire the bunny inspectors and the Department of Education SWAT team if the rich didn’t pay more in taxes. It’s pay more or lose the essentials.

No, the problem is that the rich have too much money and they don’t pay as much as we do and they have to pay more.

There are those who question whether soaking the rich will actually produce much more revenue: we need to be careful how close we sheer the lamb. Others say look how much they have!

And I will repeat yet one more time: if the problem is that the rich have too much money, we can debate that; but what I am hearing is not a plea for reducing the divide between rich and poor, or for breaking up great power centers into something smaller, or fulfilling a social contract. It’s simply a way to raise taxes, and the money will go to pay the salaries of those who want the taxed raised. If they want to despoil Bill Gates and Paul Allen and Eli Broad because they think they can spend the money more wisely than its present possessors, the most charitable thing I can say is “not proven”.  I’m more tempted to say Stop talking nonsense. You spend money on bunny inspectors. Why in the world should I give you more? You pay an army of bureaucrats and you want to pay more.

If you want to despoil the rich, then put the money in baskets and throw it out of airplanes. Don’t reward yourselves.

Yes, Ms. Warren, it’s true: those who get rich did so because they thrived under the blessings of liberty. Is that contrary to the actual contract signed in Philadelphia in 1787?

Social Justice and the Theory of Surplus Value

Much of Marx’s main work, Das Kapital, is devoted to the theory of value, specifically the labor theory of value, which says in essence that things have value because of the labor put into them. Said that baldly this is either trivially true or ridiculous. A statue wouldn’t be worth much without the labor of the sculptor. A gold nugget found on the street has value, and does so whether the nugget was dug out of the ground with great effort, or simply washed down out of the hills.

The naïve view of the labor theory of value confuses effort and work. That is, in physics, you can push against a wall with all your strength and continue to do so until you fall exhausted, but if you have not moved the wall, you have only expended effort: you have done no work. The classic refutation of the naive labor value theory is making a pie: an inept cook can reduce the valuable ingredients to a valueless mess that needs cleaning up, while an expert cook can make an apple pie that sells for a profit. It is fun to ridicule Marx as if he had not understood this, but it is also unfair. He understood it pretty well.

He did have a naïve view of technology and the industrial revolution. He was somewhat familiar with small factories in Thuringia, but he had no real understanding of technology and that shows in his undervaluing of management and entrepreneurship. Communist societies were able to produce technology by concentration of effort, but it took constant attention to make such things work well. Even toward the end in the USSR, when many of its economists understood the value of markets and information, only a few industries operated with any appreciable efficiency, and some, like the shoe industry, were ludicrously inefficient. As Possony used to put it, after a while the KGB didn’t want West Germany to go Communist: they understood that communism would muck the place up and West Germany was more valuable as a trading partner than it would be as a full satellite.

The labor theory of value does say that most of the value comes from labor; the labor force uses capital (technology, tools, etc.) and those have their contribution to the final value, but most of that value comes from labor. The working class puts the work into the equation, and creates goods that have more value than their labor. The bourgeoisie confiscate this surplus value as profit. Progressives want to take more of that surplus value from the bourgeoisie and give it back to the workers.

Many social theorists invoke the social contract to justify doing this. Property is theft! Oddly enough, both Marx and Max Stirner rejected this proposition, but many social contract theorists say there is an essence of truth here. And of course that justifies any scale of property taxation you might like.

Now there are those who say the proper course is to tax the rich to exactly the optimum point: when raising taxes no longer brings in more income, it is too much and time to scale back. Up to that point, though, all is well. Clearly that view accepts the notion that property is theft: the rich have no right to their wealth. We let them keep some so that they will continue to create jobs and go work hard at investing, but when they falter, we send in the tax collector. It’s really our money, and they are only its temporary custodians.

It used to be that the notion of a free country included rights to property.

The problem here is that Ms. Warren invites the rich to “worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this.” The marauding bands will be tax collectors. The someone to protect against this will be lobbyists. That’s if we are lucky.

If we aren’t lucky, we can look at contemporary Mexico as a model for the future. Or perhaps Russia under the nomenklatura. Or maybe we will be partly lucky and we’ll only get Greece.

Rick Hellewell has created www.BunnyInspectors.com, a site on which you can post your candidates for government activities we’d probably be better off without. Go look at it, and if you think of something to add, post it. It’s well to have such a list. More than well.

View 693 Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Information theory tells us that the more probable the event, the less information is conveyed by a message saying the event took place. That is, the more predictable the message, the less information it has in it. On that theory the news this week has had a fairly low information value.

It has not been without excitement. The White House has decided to let Obama be Obama, and he is hard at work at delivering the message of class warfare. Predictably it is put forth as a plea for ‘fairness.’ It isn’t fair that Warren Buffet’s secretary pays income tax at a higher rate than Warren Buffet does. It isn’t fair that the rich have corporate jets and mansions and yachts while people have no jobs, and great numbers of people are in poverty. It isn’t fair, because the rich aren’t paying their fair share, and something must be done about it. One thing we can do about it is to pass the American Jobs Act now, right now, just as soon as the White House gets around to submitting the 150+ page Bill to the Congress. For now just understand that it’s a Good Thing, and We Need It Now. Let’s chant.

This morning things changed a little, at least for me. The President told the UN that the US will not approve the Palestinian bid for UN membership. While that was the most probable event, it wasn’t certain. US policy regarding Israel needs to be reconsidered in the light of events in Egypt. Just what is the US commitment to Israel, and under what circumstances will we commit the Legions? What is our official view of the new settlements now that Israel has abandoned the “build a security barrier and leave them alone behind it”? Israel can’t do that now. The Gaza experiment showed that pulling the settlements out and handing the territory over to the Palestinians did not bring peace. Most Israelis want some kind of peace. No one can be quite certain what most Palestinians want, but it’s pretty clear what their governments want.

Meanwhile, the Israeli military must be regretting the return of the Suez and Sinai to Egypt in exchange for mutual recognition and a peace treaty. That peace was kept for a long time, but it appears to be in question now as Egypt gets closer to civil war, and the street mobs clearly demand renewed hostility to Israel. How influential the street movement will be in the government of Egypt is not certain. The Egyptian military sees their general on a gurney in a cage, which is not an inspiring sight for the career members of the ruling council. Former President Mubarak is accused of suppressing the street movement – the street movement that assaulted Lara Logan and sacked the Israeli Embassy, and which seems to be demanding war. It’s not clear what the war would be for, since Egypt got all its territory back in the Peace treaty. Now imagine yourself as a Major in command of a force defending the Israeli Embassy in Egypt, and keep in mind the picture of the President of Egypt in a cage on trial for ordering the troops to disperse a mob.

Insure the Blessings of liberty vs. Promote the general Welfare

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

At the time this was adopted it was never contemplated that these goals were in conflict. It was assumed that liberty was the best way to promote the general welfare, and once there was general welfare – that is, that the nation was faring well – the specifics would be taken care of by local government, by churches and lodges and civic organizations.

In this upcoming election, “fairness” is pitted against liberty, and “fairness” is, presumably, what is meant by general welfare. Of course it could be said that simply pooling all resources and allocating to each according to need, from each according to resources and ability, would be the most fair policy of all.

Make no mistake, substitution of fairness for liberty is the end of the Constitution of 1787.

From Wikipedia

The Deficit Control Act of 1985 provided the first legal definition of baseline. For the most part, the act defined the baseline in conformity with previous usage. If appropriations had not been enacted for the upcoming fiscal year, the baseline was to assume the previous year’s level without any adjustment for inflation. In 1987, however, the Congress amended the definition of the baseline so that discretionary appropriations would be adjusted to keep pace with inflation. Other technical changes to the definition of the baseline were enacted in 1990, 1993, and 1997.

Baseline budget projections increasingly became the subject of political debate and controversy during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and more recently during the 2011 debt limit debate. Some critics contend that baseline projections create a bias in favor of spending by assuming that federal spending keeps pace with inflation and other factors driving the growth of entitlement programs. Changes that merely slow the growth of federal spending programs have often been described as cuts in spending, when in reality they are actually reductions in the rate of spending growth.

There have been attempts to eliminate the baseline budget concept and replace it with zero based budgeting, which is the opposite of baseline budgeting. Zero based budgeting requires that all spending must be re-justified each year or it will be eliminated from the budget regardless of previous spending levels.

The result as been that proposing a mere 3% increase in school lunch programs is described as cutting the school lunch program budget and, more wildly, as gutting the program and a war on the poor.

A zero-growth budget is now considered a drastic cut, and of course will be opposed by public service employee associations.