View 810 Friday, February 14, 2014

Happy Feast of Lupercalia and Spring Fertility Rites

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

2300: We’re back home, after yet another trip to the Kaiser Emergency room. It could have been a lot worse.

I took Roberta to an Italian restaurant on Ventura not far from where the first LASFS clubhouse was many years ago. They have gluten free pizza, and it’s better than the other place we used to go. Good dinner. We came home. I was carrying, alas in both hands, the two boxes of leftover pizza with another box containing antipasto salad which they also do gluten free, and is excellent. As I got into the back yard I saw on the ground the remains of the box of valentine candy I had got for Roberta. I leaned down to pick it up. With both hands carrying something. At dusk. The result was easily predicted, and in fact happened as expected. I went onto my face on the concrete pool deck.

Nothing broken. Lots of blood. At first I thought it was my nose bleeding, but it wasn’t, it was from various cuts and lacerations on my face. A couple were pretty big. Still lots of blood. And my glasses were a wreck.

Got inside, cleaned my face up, and Roberta insisted we go to the emergency room, which we did. As usual the Kaiser team was efficient and cheerful, and after a couple of stitches and a precautionary prescription, we came home. I feel like an idiot.

I know I don’t have any balance at dusk, I know that when I encumber both arms so I can’t counterbalance I am likely to fall down, and I damned well should have known there was no point in picking up the empty candy box. I already knew when I was bending over that Roberta must have left the box in the TV room where I gave it to her just before we went out for dinner, and that Sable must have found it and took it outside to devour the contents. Husky dogs are more cooperative than obedient, and if she can find something she figures it must have been left for her anyway. And since she is supposed to be dying of terminal cancer we don’t have the heart to severely discipline her as we might were she not supposed to have died six months ago. Huskies always test their status in the pack, and even when sick they’ll see what they can get away with.  But then that’s the way with good dogs and growing human being as well. I recall from one of the sermons of Cotton Mather “Tether a beast at midnight, and by dawn it will know the length of its tether.”  Anyone who has raised children or dogs will know the truth of that…

Anyway, the next time you see me I will have another set of Heidelberg dueling scars to go with the ones I got from falling out of bed. My forehead, my nose, and a cheek. Lots of blood. Nothing serious done.

And once again I can recommend Kaiser Permanente for health maintenance. It has been about 40 years now that we’ve been with Kaiser, and they have seen us through the usual problems with children as our four boys grew up, and after the boys were gone, the two of us. We have many stories, and all positive.  And when the time came that I was forced to stop paying my own way and go on Medicare (my membership cost went from about $350 a month to $1300 the day I turned 65, because Federal law essentially required that), my relationship with Kaiser did not change in any way.  I have seldom met anyone out there who wasn’t pleasant.

And I expect this is enough explanation for why there isn’t an essay on the Kurds in Syria and the dilemma they present. Think about it. Kurdish Iraq is the only pacified territory in what used to be called Iraq; it looks in fact a lot like the democracy we tried to plant in the country as a whole, and possibly shows what might have happened had we divided Iraq into Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish republics: possibly all three might have survived. Possibly. The two Kurdish factions seem to have settled their differences without war.

But of course a Kurdistan built on the remains of what used to be a Kurdish area ruled by Arabs is more than annoying to Iran, where there are probably as many Kurds as in Iraq, and Turkey, which is been going more and more Islamic and has already had a campaign of suppression of the Kurds in Turkey, of which there are quite a few.

The Christian Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was ended when Saladin defeated the Christian forces at the Horns of Hattin, starting the Third Crusade which generated many stories and novels. Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman comes to mind, and if you haven’t read it you might very well like it. It is about a knight in Richard Lionheart’s forces during the Third Crusade, and features Saladin as a major character in it.

Saladin was a Kurd; and with his Kurdish forces as the centerpiece of his army he was able to unite most of the Islamic world and revive the Caliphate.

Kurds are not Arabs. Neither are Persians, but Kurds are not Persians, either. Kurds and Persians are Aryans (the name Iran comes form Aryana, the land of the Aryans) but Turks are not. And if all this seems like outdated humbug, it is still taken seriously in the Middle East, where clans and origins are important. “My brother and I against my cousin; my cousin and I against the world.”

And I’m exhausted and it’s bed time. More later. At least I have a good reason for not writing more tonight.

The Pledge Drive ends soon. My financial harangues coincide with the KUSC pledge drives, KUSC being the Classical Music Station of Los Angeles. They are Public Radio. This site operates on the Public Radio model: it’s fee, anyone can access it, but it will only stay open if enough subscribe to make it worth doing. If you read here and have not subscribed, this would be a good time to do it. If you have subscribed but have not renewed the subscription in a while, this would be a good time to do it.

I don’t bug you about money very often. I don’t bash you with advertising. But I do remind you that you should consider subscribing, and time that for when KUSC runs their pledge drives. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html

You and Mr. Strohm posit that science has gone astray, that current theories such as General Relativity, Quantum Field Theory, and cosmological theory are wrong because, as said in so many words, they are too complicated and not intuitively addressable. You quote from Mr. Feynman his skepticism about his own "all histories" model of Quantum Field Theory to support your position. You declaim dark matter and dark energy as non-sense because they cannot be detected by current means, and in the past you have written poorly about General Relativity because it is formulated in tensors, which you hold as too complicated a tool for a valid theory.

Slow down! You do realize that our classical theories are just as replete with the undetectable and the undefined as well as the complex mathematics? Let’s take Newton’s Laws of Gravity. What is gravity? Ok, a force that draws bodies of mass together — but what the heck IS the force? We can detect what it does to bodies with mass, but we have no detection of the force itself. If I push on a body, I can see and detect my hand doing the pushing, but no one has ever seen gravity. I can describe what this force does between two bodies very elegantly with simple mathematics, but if I want accurate answers for just one additional body, I am reduced to using systems of equations iterated over time to find my answer — systems of equations much more readily defined and manipulated as tensors.

Classical science is full of things that have been given names, but have only ever been defined in terms of what they do, not what they are. We have gotten so used to this that most of us do not even wonder what they are any more or realize that we should wonder.

These things of science, classical and quantum, Newtonian and relativistic, are models of reality. Many of them never tell us what the thing is that they are modeling, they just give us a system of equations that accurately describes all past observed behavior and makes accurate predictions about as yet to be observed behavior. They are accepted and used because, empirically, they are useful.

So, General Relativity says that the things we observe can be modeled accurately if we assume that gravity curves space-time. Does General Relativity actually make the claim that space-time is curved? No, just that our observations and predictions are in accordance with the model of a curved space-time. Maybe space-time is curved; maybe it is not curved. More science is needed to settle that question.

Quantum Field Theory is in a similar position. It is a model that is in accordance with millions of observations and thousands of predictions, but, is the world really a unitary wave evolving over time? Do particles actually travel all possible paths? Is an electron whose momentum is know with high precision actually spread completely over the known universe in its position? Quantum Field Theory does not say yea or nay to any of these questions; it only says that our observations can be modeled accurately by these behaviors.

So slow down a bit when you fret over dark matter and dark energy. The word "dark" is there as much to acknowledge the fact that these things are fudge factors, added to our existing models to account for the outcome of numerous observations, but are of unknown nature. Science is trying to fill in this unknown with further observation and experimentation, but such activities always begin with speculation on what the dark stuff is, or we would not able to design experiments to identify it in the first place.

Kevin

A reasonable view. Dick Feynman said you had to put faith in something, and the more you studied the quantum effects the more you needed faith to believe you could understand it. I suppose I am a dinosaur in wanting to see a less complex universe. I am still not happy with the multiplication of particles and factors. And I am even less happy with the tendency to ignore evidence in favor of theory, as is happening in some practical matters.

Jerry:

There was a hidden truth in that report on the Kenyan "innovator."

The blame was laid on landing gear which was unable to handle the weight of the plane. They have identified a CORRECT cause of failure, but not the TRUE cause.

They have forgotten that the goal was to get the plane light enough to fly, and worry about how the landing gear isn’t strong enough while it’s on the ground.

This is a perfect example of the "Progressive" mindset. The fault was not that the load was too heavy, but instead that it didn’t get the support that it deserved.

Keith

My sentiments exactly while watching that.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 810 Wednesday, February 12, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightly consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

The pledge drive continues. I want to thank the new subscribers, and those who have renewed, during this week. After this week is over, I won’t be haranguing you over money for a while, but I do need a few more subscriptions and renewals. I time these pledge drives to coincide with the KUSC pledge weeks: KUSC is the Los Angeles Classical Music station, Public Radio: you can listen without subscribing but it will go away if not enough do send money. They need a lot more money than me, of course, since they have staff and equipment to buy (USC pays about 20% of their annual costs, which covers the studios and some insurance policies). In my case I have no corporate sponsor and I don’t do advertisements. Since we started this place we have one way or another found enough subscribers to keep it going. I thank you all for that.

So if you have not renewed in a while, this would be a good time to do that, and if you have not subscribed at all, this would be a splendid time to do that. You can find out more by going to Paying for this Place http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html

I have been collecting mail on the question about modern physics and Hawking’s uncertainties about event horizons, and it’s quite good: good enough that it deserves more time than I have to give it tonight. We will have that shortly.

I have mixed emotions about the Republicans raising the debt ceiling with a “clean bill” that allows the President to do pretty well as he wills with the newly borrowed money. Since the President and the Senate would have stonewalled and conceded nothing – note that the President shut down the government rather than delay implementation of the Affordable Care Act, even though a few weeks later he himself suspended implementation of many of its provisions. That got everyone’s attention, and the assessment of the Republican Leadership was that there was nothing to gain from another government shutdown. The Debt Ceiling is now off the table until after the November by-election. Whether this was a good strategy is an open question, but it is hardly worth debating now: it is done, as the Senate very quickly passed the House bill and sent it to the President. Note that more Democrats voted for the Bill than Republicans in the House.

The United States operates on borrowed money, which is not necessarily disastrous; the trouble comes if what is done with the borrowed money does not contribute to the recovery. What this will do is allow more regulations and taxes of the industrious, and more subsidies for the unproductive. If you want more of something, subsidize it: if you want more people to be unemployed, pay them to be unemployed. And if you want less production, lay more burdens on the productive.

As I have said often enough, if you want an economic miracle in the United States, exempt all businesses with fewer than 20 employees from all Federal regulations, minimum wages, compulsory benefits, and all the rest. Leave health and safety to the States, and get the feds out of people way. You would see a great many small enterprises with 19 employees spring up, and it would do wonders for the economy. Or so I would bet.

‘Are we all liberal imperialists now?’

Other than the blithe dismissal of Obama’s kowtowing personal behavior towards various foreign leaders, this article nails it:

<http://server1.nationalinterest.org/commentary/obamas-liberal-imperialism-9861?page=show>

——

Roland Dobbins

Actually that link leads to an interesting discussion of the law suit Mann is bringing against National Review regarding climate change. It is interesting. At least that is where that link led me; the true link to the Mann law suit over climate change is http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/02/12/mann_vs_steyn_the_trial_of_the_century__121528.html

The link to liberal imperialism is http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/obamas-liberal-imperialism-9861 . It is worth your attention and it is worth far more discussion than I can give it tonight. It asks the fundamental question of what is the role of the United States? We have discussed that here in the past and will again. And for a discussion of military ethics http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/the-us-militarys-ethics-crisis-9872 . Note that I am not endorsing these views, but I think those interested in the matter should be familiar with them. National Interest was for many years the voice of reasoned neo-conservatism. It was founded by Irving Krystal who paid attention to its editorial policies until he died. Since that time it has shifted in focus a bit, but it does stand for realism in foreign policy.

Having gone up the hill yesterday I have spent the day sort of recovering: I mean that in a “good way”. I am determined to continue to climb that hill at least once a week and if possible twice. I used to go up there every day.

sound while walking

Dr. Pournelle,

From your 12 Feb View, you described your walk and conversation, I was wondering how the hearing aids worked out for you. You’d reported on other conversations, seemingly mostly indoors, and this may have been your first exposure to nature sounds since getting them.

I’m still a little ways away from getting hearing support myself, but I’ve several relatives who are using, or are needing to use them.

Thanks,

-d

For the first time in a long time I was able to hear all the birds on the hill, and to make sense of the conversations going on around me. I would guess that I have not had hearing this good since 1950. I am still taking notes for reprogramming the devices to notch filter certain frequencies, so I expect an improvement, but if there is never any improvement I would still consider my investment in the COSTCO hearing aids – their house brand, the lowest cost, about $2000 – as good an investment as I have made in many years.

I will mention this again, because it is important, but for those interested in the sciences and science management, this is an important essay: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/09/how-journals-nature-science-cell-damage-science?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 810 Tuesday, February 11, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

This will be short. Larry Niven and Steve Barnes came over with a new friend, Evie King, and we hiked to the top of the hill, about 4 miles and 700 feet height. Obviously I survived. Mark, my long time heart specialist friend, has recently advised me to stop favoring this malaise and get myself up to the top of that hill. He was right. I am exhausted but I feel better than I have in weeks.

When you get older, you slow down. That’s not good, and it’s not something you want to encourage; at least that is my experience. It’s easy enough to convince yourself that you ought to take it easy, but that is not a good strategy. Push yourself to your present limit, and then a bit further next time, and keep that up. The result is good. I noticed that when we came down and went to lunch: we had a great conversation, and I was participating like my old self, even though I was physically exhausted, and I’ll probably have to take it easier tomorrow: but that’s all right, because, alas, Sable isn’t able to go on such long hikes any longer because of her cancerous leg. She hates that and wants to walk a lot, but then the leg gets painful and she has to come home; so tomorrow I’ll take Sable to her limit and I suspect that will be a good comedown for me. But I am no longer going to avoid going up my hell.

There are crows up there, apparently having escaped the general die off from West Nile that reduced our local flock (I know it’s a murder of crows, but that particular collective doesn’t much appeal to me) from two groups of 50 or so each to a single pair here in the Studio City triangle. I saw at least 6 up on the hill, as well as at least one red tail hawk. With luck our bird population will recover.

And I *STILL* say…

Jerry, when I first read your discussion of your afternoon of Lovecraftian horror with (as I recall) Niven and Forward, at the nearly-immobile hands of Dr. Stephen Hawking (“The Breakdown of Physics Physicists in the Vicinity of a Singularity”, or some such) I remarked to myself that this had all of the flavor and texture of an indirect proof.

I’m sure you recall the technique. You assume that the thing to be proved is false, and you work from there to an obvious contradiction, thus showing that your initial assumption was itself false.

The latest commentary, on the existence and/or nonexistence of black holes and/or event horizons, serves only to reinforce that perception.

The latest version seems to say that Cthulhu could not only pop out of the black hole, but he could pop out of the black hole and into the “normal” universe at ANY point in the normal universe. It also seems to say that something that is at ANY point in the normal universe could suddenly, without warning, find itself engulfed by the black hole. Yes, of course the probability is inversely proportional to the distance from the center of mass of the hole, but it ain’t zero…

The bloody thing seems to me to be SCREAMING at us that one of the fundamental assumptions going into the discussion is false.

–John R. Strohm

I share your conclusion, but then I have always thought that we went wrong somewhere. When you have to invent dark matter and dark energy as the makeup of most of the universe – something you cannot detect – it seems to me that you have gone far away from scientific methods as I learned it.

Dick Feynman never insisted that his QED in which everything that could happen did but most of that cancelled out in probability counts, he knew this, and often said so; but it did account for real observations, and did so with remarkable accuracy.

I don’t think we have anything quite like that for black holes. And yes, I did write in a Lovecraftian Vein about my experience at a Stephen Hawing lecture at Cal Tech three decades ago. It’s in my Step Farther Out, and was originally in a Galaxy SF magazine column. There is an interesting discussion of black hole radiation at http://folk.uio.no/thomas/po/consciousness-without-biology.html although it’s not enormously flattering to me; still it does show that I thought about all this a long time ago.

I think there is something fundamentally wrong with our assumptions about the structure of the universe, but I fear I can’t say what it is. It just seems wrong to me that we keep creating new particles to explain why the old ones don’t work the way they should, and we keep having to postulate dark matter and dark energy to explain the observations. At some point things just get too complex; but we also must keep in mind that the Standard Theory does explain a hell of a lot more than we thought we knew in 1950.

But like Mr. Strohm, I can’t quite escape the feeling that there’s something simple we have overlooked, an assumption that just isn’t true.

I remind you that this is pledge week at Chaos Manor, and if you have not renewed your subscription in a while, this would be a good time to do it; and if you have never subscribed, you should do so. It’s all explained at Paying For This Place, http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html, and it’s easy enough to do. I don’t harangue you about this often, and I leave the timing of when I do to KUSC, the Los Angeles Classical Music Station, since this place operates on the Public Radio model – it’s free, but if we don’t get enough subscriptions it will go away. I want to thank all those who renewed today, and the new subscribers; if we can keep that rate up all will be well.

For those who haven’t noticed, you can find at http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/view.html links to View from long ago, and at http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/mail.html a similar list links to mail. Some of it is quite significant; I content that for years I had the best mail column on the web. The new format required for this hosting has made it more difficult to keep that up, but we still get a lot of great mail; this is a very intelligent readership.

You will note that I don’t annoy you with advertising. That’s because enough of you have gone to http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html and subscribed. Keep it up! And yes, I will annoy you with pledge drive for this week, but it stops after that.

Good night.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 810 Monday, February 10, 2014

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

Syrian loyalists claim that the UN is allowing rebel snipers who have been shooting civilians in Homs to escape with their families just as the government was about to eliminate them, this in the guise of humanitarian aid. The government supporters are Alawites, and the UN is helping the Sunni rebels.

Which is one more instance of the problem of trying to spread liberal democracy in a society that does not have any such tradition. And no, I don’t know what we ought to be doing over there. At one time the US was able to aid Lebanon in seeking independence from Syria, which considers Lebanon as part of Syria for historical reasons.

And in Libya, now that the mad colonel is gone, it is not at all clear who will be in charge of what. Khadafy was not replaced by liberal democracy, and the history of Libya has not ended – or indeed even been written.

Global-Warming Slowdown Due to Pacific Winds, Study Shows

By Alex Morales

Stronger Pacific Ocean winds may help explain the slowdown in the rate of global warming since the turn of the century, scientists said.

More powerful winds in the past 20 years may be forcing warmer seas deeper and bringing cooler water to the surface,

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-09/global-warming-slowdown-due-to-pacific-winds-study-shows.html

Apparently this is not part of the extremely expensive models of the climate. Perhaps the effect will be added, but no one knows why the winds have become stronger. Global warming, perhaps, except that the warming causes higher winds which cause cooling; but that bit of negative feedback hasn’t been folded into the models, because it wasn’t expected.

IR Expert Speaks Out After 40 Years Of Silence : “IT’S THE WATER VAPOR STUPID and not the CO2″

I’m a professional infrared astronomer who spent his life trying to observe space through the atmosphere’s back-radiation that the environmental activists claim is caused by CO2 and guess what? In all the bands that are responsible for back radiation in the brightness temperatures (color temperatures) related to earth’s surface temperature (between 9 microns and 13 microns for temps of 220K to 320 K) there is no absorption of radiation by CO2 at all. In all the bands between 9 and 9.5 there is mild absorption by H2O, from 9.5 to 10 microns (300 K) the atmosphere is perfectly clear except around 9.6 is a big ozone band that the warmists never mention for some reason. From 10 to 13 microns there is more absorption by H2O. Starting at 13 we get CO2 absorption but that wavelength corresponds to temperatures below even that of the south pole. Nowhere from 9 to 13 microns do we see appreciable absorption bands of CO2. This means the greenhouse effect is way over 95% caused by water vapor and probably less than 3% from CO2.

http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/01/25/ir-expert-speaks-out-after-40-years-of-silence-its-the-water-vapor-stupid-and-not-the-co2/

I am not an IR astronomer and I don’t know many of them, but we have several among the readership here, so if this is nonsense I expect someone will tell me. I do know that Freeman Dyson has been pointing out that CO2 is not likely to be effective anywhere but in cold, dry areas, and we ought to be able to test this by observation.

Arrhenius about the turn of the 20^th Century thought that doubling the CO2 in the atmosphere would cause warming; his model was essential on the back of an envelope, but it is not clear that it was much less accurate than the extremely expensive climate models in current use. Everyone knows that the Earth has been warming since the interruption of the Ice Age (beginning of the Interglacial Period) and at one time most of the concern about climate change was that the Ice Age would return. That was of course the thesis of Fallen Angles, by Niven, Pournelle and Flynn, and was a major concern of Karl Sagan and others before the current warming trend resumed in the 1980’s.

It does seem that modern concern about climate change is impervious to falsification: any development is incorporated into the theory as another indication of support. There does not appear to be any crucial experiment or observation to be applied. The problem is that preparing for global warming if the real threat is cooling can be vastly expensive, sufficiently so as to make preparation for cooling prohibitively expensive. Simple Bayesian analysis would say that the optimum strategy would be to reduce the uncertainty.

Proof of the Iron Law in action

http://chronicle.com/article/Administrator-Hiring-Drove-28-/144519/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

No surprise, but nice to have confirmation.

Phil

I used to think I knew something about Black Holes, but they do not seem to be so simple as we once thought:

Hawking On Black Holes

Kevin L Keegan

A few days ago, Mr. Dobbins posted a comment about the latest Steven Hawking paper on black holes with the sensational subject that black holes don’t exist after all. You invited comment from those who think about such things…

Black holes have been a problem for physicists since they were discovered lurking in the equations of General Relativity. The notion of a black hole is much older, though; when scientists put Newtonian Mechanics together with the discovery that light has a finite speed, the idea of a "dark star" was born. John Mitchel wrote about the idea in 1783, a star so large that its escape velocity was greater than the speed of light. Most scientists hoped that they could not exist, but General Relativity put that hope to rest.

Einstein hated the idea of a black hole. If all things fell in and nothing came out, the black hole would have a temperature of absolute zero, breaking thermodynamics pretty badly. Stephen Hawking rescued thermodynamics in 1974 by showing that all black holes must emit radiation through quantum effects and that the amount of radiation emitted exactly balanced the expected entropy of the black hole. His work tied together General Relativity, Quantum physics, and classical thermodynamics for the first time. His work was not, however, a general treatment of gravity in Quantum field theory.

By showing that black holes radiate energy, thermodynamics was saved, but Quantum theory was destroyed. Quantum theory depends upon the notion of strict causality, which is to say that the past, once set, cannot be changed. This means that information cannot be destroyed. If information can be erased from the universe, there is no way we can know with any certainty what the past actually was, so, in principle, it CAN be changed and we would never know it.

When a classical black hole swallowed matter and energy and kept it locked up forever, quantum physics was safe because, while the information may be inaccessible, it still existed somewhere. That was good enough to keep quantum physics consistent. When Hawking showed that black holes radiate energy, but the source of the radiation was never IN the black hole, that changed the whole landscape. The black hole could radiate away to nothing while releasing none of its information!

The quantum physics community was in an uproar. Many did not want to believe the Hawking results. Others looked for ways that the information carried in a black hole could be preserved. Leonard Suskind wrote a complex paper claiming that the information in a black hole is "imprinted" on its event horizon and therefore was never hidden at all. Many quantum physicists were happy with the notion, but it was quite a reach.

It occurred to me that the problem was simpler to solve than this. If we are going to treat a black hole using Quantum principles, then the notion of an event horizon as an absolutely fixed set of points in space around a black hole had to go. The event horizon would have to fluctuate rapidly and randomly at all points in space, coming closer to the black hole in one moment and further away at another. If a photon were orbiting the black hole at the event horizon, which many should be at any given moment, and the event horizon suddenly fluctuated inward, it could allow that photon to escape to space. Now something that was in the black hole can get out of the black hole. The magnitude of the fluctuations should be inversely proportional to the radius of the event horizon, which is another way of saying that they will be inversely proportional to the mass of the black hole, just like Hawking radiation. And the notion explains how the escaping virtual particle of Hawking radiation achieved the energy necessary to become a real particle in the first place. It seemed like a neat solution, providing a mechanism to generate Hawking radiation and allow information from inside the black hole to get out.

I am not a physicist, however, and could not even begin to write a paper about this that anyone would read. I did put the ideas forth in a letter to Scientific American, but it did not get published. I feel somewhat vindicated, because Hawking’s latest paper puts this very idea forth in a more rigorous manner, even though the proper treatment of gravity under Quantum Field Theory does not yet exist to properly prove the concept.

So, the classical event horizon is gone, replaced by a fluctuating plane in space that allows a black hole to leak its information back into the universe at large, rescuing thermodynamics and quantum theory and getting rid of Suskind’s complicated model (which may, in the end, be an equivalent but messy description of the situation). The sensationalism is somewhat justified — if a black hole can slowly radiate away its information, it is not truly black at all, just very, very, very dim.

Saturday Roberta and I went to a local movie theatre at 0930 in the morning: we saw Rene Fleming in Dvorak’s Rusalka as part of the successful movie theater showings of Metropolitan operas. It was wonderful. Dvorak was greatly influenced by Wagner in that he does not stop the action for arias, but he does write arias into the opera. The Met production was extremely well done, and as part of the presentation you get to be backstage while they are making set changes. Recommended.

This is Pledge Week for KUSC, the Los Angeles Public Radio Classical Music station, which means it is pledge week for Chaos Manor. Alas, Chaos Manor hasn’t been operating at full capacity for the past few weeks, but we hope to remedy that. This place operates on the Public Radio model, which is to say, it’s free, but if it doesn’t get support it can’t stay around. It exists on the support of patrons, and I try to keep it worth the rather modest amounts required for subscriptions. If you have not renewed your subscription for a while, this would be a great time to do it; and if you read this and don’t subscribe, this would be a good time to subscribe.

I only harangue you for money during the pledge weeks, and I hold mine when KUSC holds theirs (and yes of course I subscribe to KUSC). You can subscribe here.

And yes, I’ll probably bug you all week, even though I feel a bit guilty about not providing quite as much content as I would like to. This flu like thing is letting go its hold over me, but it does so slowly, and I lose energy.

And it’s late and I am out of energy. Good night.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.