Traveling today to meet a friend of WUWT right about the time this post auto publishes.
Behave yourselves. Don’t make me come back here.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Traveling today to meet a friend of WUWT right about the time this post auto publishes.
Behave yourselves. Don’t make me come back here.
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Time to be green without the attitude? Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Glad you have a friend Anthony . . . .
Nice to see you getting away a bit lately!
Thanks Willis for fill ing the gap – and then some.
As this is a science blog, I thought I would discuss Einsteins Twin Paradox, but in a way that deals with one of the most common misconceptions.
People often say that the Twin Paradox cannot possibly be right because the twin on Earth is moving relative to the twin in the spaceship with exactly the same relative velocity as the spaceship is to the Earth. They both see each other’s clocks moving slower. So how is it possible for one twin only – the one in the spaceship – to end up younger than the other twin?
Richard Feynman attempted to explain the paradox by saying that only the twin in the space ship feels accelerations, but with all due respect to Richard, I did not feel satisfied with that explanation, because it just subsitutes one question with another.
I got to thinking about the scenario from the point of view of each twin observing the clock of his other twin throughout the whole trip – out and return – and realised that there is a very subtle twist that breaks the symmetry.
When the spaceship twin looks back at Earth on his outward journey he sees his twins clock running slower, based on the fact that each pulse of light has to travel further to reach him than the previous one. Likewise, the twin on the Earth sees the spaceships clock running slower for the same reason. So far, symmetry is maintained.
Now, imagine the spaceship suddenly arrives at the destination and stops. What does he see of the clock back on Earth? Each pulse of light from Earth now travels the same distance to reach him as the last pulse, and seems to run at normal speed. But what of the Earth bound twin? What does he see?
If you said the same, you have just made the classic mistake. You have forgotten that at the moment the space ship comes to a halt at the distant star, the Earthbound twin is still seeing the spaceship as it was before it reached the destination. This must be so, because the light from the arrival event will take years to get back to Earth. In fact, if the spaceship then reverses direction and heads back towards Earth, to the Earth bound twin, the space ship will still appear to be heading on the outward leg, and the spaceships clock will STILL appear to be running slow.
Symmetry is then broken, because the Earth bound twin sees the spaceships clock running slower for a larger portion of the journey time than the space bound twin sees the Earths clock running slower. The space ship may be half way back to Earth before the Earth bound twin even sees the arrival, and halfway back to Earth before he sees the clock speed up.
So, for most of the journey, the Earth bound twin sees the space ships clock run slowly, and only speed up for a short part near the end. The space ship sees the Earths clock running slowly exactly half the trip, and speed up exactly half the trip. And because the Earth bound twin sees the space ships clock going slower for most of the trip, when his astronaut twin lands back on Earth, his clock will show less time has passed. And he must ergo be younger.
And that is the twin paradox explained.
Thank you for listening.
I had to laugh when I saw this.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23418533
Statistical standards at high impact journals like Nature recently found to be low. After MBH98, is anyone surprised?
Hot off the press. Another “model fail” post, this time about the relationships between modeled marine air temperature and sea surface temperature:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2013/02/23/cmip5-ipcc-ar5-climate-models-modeled-relationship-between-marine-air-temperature-and-sea-surface-temperature-is-backwards/
And a recent post about a few of the atypical ENSO indices monitored by the JMA:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/jma-monitors-a-couple-of-atypical-sea-surface-temperature-based-enso-indices-and-provides-climate-tendency-maps-per-index/
Last, on Monday, I posted the mid-February 2013 sea surface temperature update:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/mid-february-2013-sea-surface-temperature-anomaly-update/
Regards
Vince
The twin paradox?!
You’re right that acceleration isn’t the explanation, but it’s really simpler than that. If you travel along two sides of a triangle from A to B to C, the distance is different to travelling direct along the third side from A to C. Spacetime is peculiar in that the most direct route is actually the longest possible rather than the shortest (the Pythagoras rule for right-angled triangles has some extra minus signs in it), but apart from that it’s straightforward geometry.
Another way to see the symmetry is to imagine two people walking at the same speed across an open field. For each, the forward direction is ‘time’ and the sideways direction is ‘space’. But because they are moving relatively to each other, they are facing in slightly different directions. As each marches forward, they see the other drift sideways in ‘space’ and also fall slightly behind them in ‘time’. The other person sees exactly the same thing – the other is drifting the other way in ‘space’ and falling behind them in ‘time’. Both clocks appear to be going slower than the other, but that’s because each is using a different definition of ‘time’.
Similarly, if each carries a ruler to measure their own space, the other sees it shortened, because of the rotation of their coordinate system.
The twin paradox occurs because on the outward journey each sees the other running slower, then when the travelling twin turns around they switch to a coordinate system in which the other twin has jumped ahead of them. Then as they come back together again each sees the other’s clock slowed. Think of it again in the field. You march apart, and your partner falls behind. You turn around to march together again, and suddenly your partner is in front of you! You march towards them and start to catch up, but because you’ve travelled further, you’re still behind them when you cross their path.
It’s simple geometry that you can demonstrate easily to a bunch of schoolchildren out on the playing field. It’s just unfamiliar.
@ur momisugly http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/23/open-thread-weekend-16/#comment-1231335
Vince Causey: Paradox is the key word . . . just because a clock slows down does not mean that time has slowed down. . . . and even if someone ages slower, that does not mean time has slowed down either.
I don’t even think the twin paradox theory was Einsteins, (my memory could be mistaken) at the risk of quoting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox . . . the only question is it correct!
That’s why “time is relative” . . . . it’s why one day on earth is different than one day on mars. But, one rotation of mars is measured on our (earthlings) clocks. It’s kinda like transferring from base 2 to base 7 to base 10. A mathematically feat we learn in grade school and then promptly forget, because we don’t use it.
And so the Twin Paradox theory is a rabbit hole proposition, to confuse the us commoners. Kinda like please, oh please, define: NOTHING.
Having listened to the debate over Global Warming (GW) I would like to offer my take on it all, from a non-partisan, engineering perspective. I live pretty modestly by American standards, and it does offend me a bit to see suburbanites driving H2s and monster pick-ups they do not need. I can afford to drive an H2, but I have better uses for my money. I am all for conserving energy and oil because they are expensive, not because I believe in GW.
I notice that GW has morphed in to Climate Change (CC), which on its face is an admission that evidence for rising global temperatures is lacking. Now any change at all is “evidence”, and of course the climate is always changing everywhere. This smacks of religious faith; a believer sees her god acting everywhere because she was told that her god “drives the universe”. The invisible and the non-existent look a lot alike. To the believers, CC now drives all weather everywhere, even cooling is change, and so no matter what happens the believers feel correct. It is wrong to twist facts to suit theories, it is correct to twist theories to suit facts.
I often hear that “Weather is not climate” coming from the believers, but when I read their articles they often cite extreme weather to be the result of GW. Must there be extreme weather to do the damage claimed? Is it possible to have no extreme weather and still suffer the claimed ill effects of GW? This reminds me of pareidolia, looking for a cryptic sign from heaven, like a god face on a tortilla.
The claims strike me as “the end of the world” all over again. A look in to the history of end times prophesies shows them to be based on faith, not scientific fact. The media love to jerk everyone around, keeping them running scared, always buying more media to feed their morbid fantasies. Big scares mean big profits. At first we had the end of the world because of an asteroid, then it was global cooling, then it was the population explosion, then it was Mayan doomsday, then it was a volcano, then it was Y2k, then it was AIDS, then it was a comet, then it was nuclear war, then it was the last of the crude oil, then it was the flu, it is always something! This is business as usual for the fear mongering press. GW will always be the disaster that is always just around the corner, but never materializes.
The 2005 hurricane season and Katrina seemed to be the final nail in the coffin, but the next season was hurricane free, which had the faithful backpedaling like mad. Just remember, the computer models have many adjustable gains which can be tweaked to report whatever is needed to get the next federal study grant. And notice the hypocrisy from rich believers. They tell us that we need to sacrifice and cut back and go without, but they do not practice what they preach. They zoom around in private jets, easily pay huge electric bills, and drive in SUV motorcades. This reminds me of televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart preaching about living a pious life, then getting busted for hiring a hooker. If they believe then they should lead by example. Imagine everybody in the world flying around the globe preaching to everyone else to stop using so much energy. Reminds me of Multi-Level Marketing.
Some middle class people preach a “green” life style. But look past the claims; they use just as many lights and computers, drive cars, have kids, eat food, heat and cool their homes as those who don’t claim to be “green”. They proudly tell others how green they are for buying a few CF lights, recycling some plastics and buying a few products claiming to be “earth friendly”. In fact it is a form of auto-eroticism – feeling good without making a baby. It is the current fashion to pay lip service but not really sacrifice anything; it is a way to relieve some of the guilt.
GW claims remind me of Irving Langmuir’s description of Pathological Science, which are;
• The maximum effect that is observed is produced by a causative agent of barely detectable intensity, and the magnitude of the effect is substantially independent of the intensity of the cause.
• The effect is of a magnitude that remains close to the limit of detectability, or many measurements are necessary because of the very low statistical significance of the results.
• There are claims of great accuracy.
• Fantastic theories contrary to experience are suggested.
• Criticisms are met by ad hoc excuses.
• The ratio of supporters to critics rises and then falls gradually to oblivion.
Pathological science, as defined by Langmuir, is a psychological process in which a scientist, originally conforming to the scientific method, unconsciously veers from that method, and begins a pathological process of wishful data interpretation.
Another item that bothers me is this: If one area must cool while another warms, then what are the benefits of the cooling? The stories always presume that even a little warming is harmful, so by the same thinking a little cooling must be equally helpful. But we never hear about the good effects of localized cooling, this makes me suspicious of a scam.
Followed a source link from the wikipedia related to CO2, landed at the EPA… yay for NPOV…
So, could one of you Americans complain to the EPA about their webpage here…
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/causes.html
Find the text “Warmer periods coincide with periods of relatively high CO2 concentrations. ” near the graphic that shows past CO2 concentrations and temperature and tell them that they forgot to state that temperature rises 800 years BEFORE CO2.
Maybe those bureaucrats didn’t pay attention since Gore used the deception in 2007. Help them out.
Oh, and maybe they could explain ocean outgassing as well, equilibrium pressure and all that…
One of my favorite forms of humor is “bloopers”, innocent mistakes that end up funny. We had the Kermit Shafer albums when I was a kid. I just came across this on YouTube. Enjoy.
While we’re at Einstein…
Goedel was at the same university, Princeton, and as a birthday present he presented Einstein a solution of Einstein’s field equation – the Gödel metrik. It’s a weirdly rotating universe in which some light rays form closed loops, arriving where they started – allowing a form of time travel.
It is said that Einstein wasn’t that happy about the present…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_metric
On Sea Level Shenanigans
Real Science did a post on Hansen now predicting 8 meters of sea level rise! A graph depicted the idiocy of the prediction, going from a slight upslope of sea level (for Los Angeles) gains over the 20th century, to suddenly being ratcheted nearly straight up. Insane. The new prediction is laughable, but I also noted that that slight upslope of the past should actually be.. flat. My comment:
Yes [CheshireRed], that’s my reaction. Lol hilarious, a joke. It’s so funny though that I almost forgot to laugh. In fact that Los Angeles [sea level gain] line should be flat — flat out flat — since at least the 1960s, because people see, in person on beaches, that there has been no change. Not 15mm of change, no change. Santa Monica Beach… is the same as it was, in 1970. Up and down the CA coast (and the whole world, I’ve heard), it’s the same. Malibu, the same. Big Sur, I know, because I’m familiar with the (big) rocks of a particular beach, and I did a tide calibrated check: 1972 (I used to tidepool fish, and pay attention to the tides and tidepools) / 2010, the same, exactly. Yeah, the line should be flat, but the “data” says otherwise, there are “adjustments” for… what? No adjustments from reality. There’s been no change. Flatten that sea-level line out.
Regarding the organized crime aspect of wind/solar… note the quote at the end. I wonder if that good professor would be willing to entertain a few questions regarding that, among other things, to Bill McKibben….
Italian police seize alleged Calabrian mafia boss
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hinvgHJk_M8MUy1-Zxb6lO-NBVFw
In recent decades, the ‘Ndrangheta has become the largest and most feared of Italy’s four large organised crime syndicates, which include Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, the Camorra in the area of Naples and the smaller Sacra Corona Unita in the southeastern region of Puglia.
The arrests in northern Italy, aimed at the ‘Ndrangheta’s commercial interests, “confirm that northern Italy is the true theatre of operations for the ‘Ndrangheta,” anti-mafia prosecutor Alberto Cisterna told AFP.
Healthcare “is the sector they prefer, since it allows them to establish contacts with politics and with public administration,” Cisterna said.
The operation showed how the ‘Ndrangheta is organised in a vertical structure, in some ways resembling that of Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian mafia, and not a horizontal one as earlier suspected, observers said.
“The ‘Ndrangheta still has its head in the heart of Calabria,” Antonio Nicaso, a ‘Ndrangheta expert and professor of the history of organised crime at Middlebury College in the US state of Vermont, told AFP
————————
Middlebury College/Mckibben
http://www.middlebury.edu/newsroom/experts/mckibben/node/25001
At the “Telegraph” website, an article about Scottish onshore wind farms possibly causing more CO2 emissions than they save over a 25 year lifetime. The reason is that many are built on peat bogs, a huge natural carbon store. The road building required for the wind farms causes the peat bogs to dry out, releasing massive amounts of CO2.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/9889882/Wind-farms-will-create-more-carbon-dioxide-say-scientists.html
From JoNova-
A doctor named Helen Caldicott, claimed on ABC that Monckton of Brenchley has a specific medical condition. Her unethical and wrong insinuation was that such a condition should preclude Christopher Monckton from engaging in the debate on climate.
Jo Nova writes with sharp irony:
“Caldicott is a doctor and also the co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, “an organization of 23,000 doctors”. [See her Bio http://www.helencaldicott.com/about/ ]
Perhaps she thinks it would be “socially responsible” to start a show where panels of doctors speculated on the medical conditions of celebrities they had never met?”
Quite rightly Christopher Monckton has written to ABC (as well as medical registration boards) making a number of points.
http://joannenova.com.au/
Last year when I mentioned this on an open thread I got some positive response. The eagle cam at decorah, Iowa has been activated. Watching it you get a teriffic view of a pair of Bald Eagles raising their brood. All the way from courting through egg laying through feeding to fledging. Try it and enjoy.
Decadal-Extent Complex Raised Cosine Wavelet Semiannual LOD Amplitude
http://imageshack.us/a/img692/5952/lodraisedcosine.png
New 2013 paper from Norway – but I said it in five years ago, in January 2008.
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog/carbon_dioxide_in_not_the_primary_cause_of_global_warming_the_future_can_no/
I personally discovered the relationship between dCO2/dt and temperature in late 2007 and published the paper on icecap.us in January 2008. This dCO2/dt is the source of the 9 month lag in CO2 after Lower Troposphere temperatures, also demonstrated in my paper ( but the latter fact was previously noted by Kuo et al in 1990, Keeling et al in 1995, and Veizer in 2005 ).
The correlation between dCO2/dt and temperature is robust – all the data and calculations are available in Excel at icecap.
The evidence suggests that varying atmospheric CO2 is not a cause of climate change, it is an effect.
_______________________
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921818112001658
Global and Planetary Change
Volume 100, January 2013, Pages 51–69
The phase relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature
• Ole Humluma, b, , ,
• Kjell Stordahlc,
• Jan-Erik Solheimd
• a Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1047 Blindern, N-0316 Oslo, Norway
• b Department of Geology, University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS), P.O. Box 156, N-9171 Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway
• c Telenor Norway, Finance, N-1331 Fornebu, Norway
• d Department of Physics and Technology, University of Tromsø, N-9037 Tromsø, Norway
Abstract
Using data series on atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperatures we investigate the phase relation (leads/lags) between these for the period January 1980 to December 2011. Ice cores show atmospheric CO2 variations to lag behind atmospheric temperature changes on a century to millennium scale, but modern temperature is expected to lag changes in atmospheric CO2, as the atmospheric temperature increase since about 1975 generally is assumed to be caused by the modern increase in CO2. In our analysis we use eight well-known datasets: 1) globally averaged well-mixed marine boundary layer CO2 data, 2) HadCRUT3 surface air temperature data, 3) GISS surface air temperature data, 4) NCDC surface air temperature data, 5) HadSST2 sea surface data, 6) UAH lower troposphere temperature data series, 7) CDIAC data on release of anthropogene CO2, and 8) GWP data on volcanic eruptions. Annual cycles are present in all datasets except 7) and 8), and to remove the influence of these we analyze 12-month averaged data. We find a high degree of co-variation between all data series except 7) and 8), but with changes in CO2 always lagging changes in temperature. The maximum positive correlation between CO2 and temperature is found for CO2 lagging 11–12 months in relation to global sea surface temperature, 9.5–10 months to global surface air temperature, and about 9 months to global lower troposphere temperature. The correlation between changes in ocean temperatures and atmospheric CO2 is high, but do not explain all observed changes.
DOES ANYONE KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THIS, OR
WOULD CARE TO COMMENT ? (From The Times) :
Tom Whipple Science Correspondent
Published at 12:01AM, November 8 2012
The public needs to wake up and smell the coffee with regard to the issue of climate change, scientists said yesterday — or we might not have any coffee to smell.
Researchers at Kew believe that the wild arabica coffee bean, whose cultivated cousin is the basis of most of the coffee drunk around the world, could die out in the wild within 70 years. If it does, a main source of genetic diversity, essential in maintaining the health of the cultivated crop, will be lost.
“The recorded temperatures tell a very frightening story,” said Aaron Davis, head of coffee research at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. He said that in Ethiopia, “between 1960 and 2006 the average temperature has gone up by 0.28 degrees a decade”. The result is that wild coffee, which is native to East African highland climates, is running out of places to grow.
Bill Illis — if you’re around — or anyone else who can answer:
Where can I find the Seattle 500mb = 500hPa GPH time series illustrated here?
Johnstone, J.A. (2008). Quasi-biennial synchrony of the extratropical troposphere and the solar magnetic field.
http://solar.physics.montana.edu/SVECSE2008/pdf/johnstone_svecse.pdf
The article flags up what appears to be a clue of substantial importance. Even if Johnstone’s speculation is completely wrong, it shouldn’t be too hard to crack the code of this wave.
Lewandowsky’s practice of ‘Punitive Psychology’ finds a cheerleader at the New York Times:
Unlocking the Conspiracy Mind-Set
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/21/unlocking-the-conspiracy-mindset/
John Bell, I appreciated your (I hope it was) stream of conscious rant.
Vince Causey says: February 23, 2013 at 1:28 pm
As this is a science blog, I thought I would discuss Einsteins Twin Paradox, but in a way that deals with one of the most common misconceptions. …
Nope.
Vince i think you are mixing up the relativity theories;
Special theory of relativity deals with inertial frames of reference
and general theory with accelerating frames. By your reasoning the earth twin will not “see” the traveling twin a long time after he arrives in his twin’s face.