Sunday, July 14, 2019

Contrabang! #13 King of the No-Comma

No-Commas

Last week I wanted to comment on the frequency with which Starts With a Bang! employs a grammatical device we'll call the no-comma. The no-comma starts with the word no, followed by a comma, and then an explanation of how someone is wrong. Fortunately, Ethan gave us two more examples from article titles in just the last week. If we look back over his articles from the past month, the trend becomes apparent.
  • No, The Laws Of Physics Are Not The Same Forwards And Backwards In Time
  • No, Black Holes Will Never Consume The Universe
  • Yes, The Apollo Moon Landings Really Did Happen (this is just a sneaky no-comma)
  • No, Black Holes Don't Suck Everything Into Them
  • No, The Universe Cannot Be A Billion Years Younger Than We Think
  • No, This Is Not A Hole In The Universe
That's a frequency greater than once per week. Compare that to this contrarian blog. In the past year, only a single instance of the no-comma appears, in No, Mr. President... which was only intended to satirize another article. There is something childish, even bratty, about the no-comma. My five-year-old uses it constantly, always searching for ways that the adults are wrong and she's right. It's really annoying, but kids normally grow out of that and learn more polite ways to engage in civilized disagreements. Ethan - who has already hinted that he holds grudges for how he was treated in school as a geek - has not outgrown the urge to declare in direct terms that he is right and you are wrong. It's the same reason he's a Category 5 Clinger to the scientific consensus opinions: an overwhelming desire to be the one who is right, and, similarly, an aversion to any risk of being wrong.

Ask Ethan: Why Do Gravitational Waves Travel Exactly At The Speed Of Light? (link)

General Relativity has nothing to do with light or electromagnetism at all. So how to gravitational waves know to travel at the speed of light?
It's a good question. As we've learned, Ethan does not shy away from difficult questions, but then fails to give them satisfactory answers. In this case, he begins by explaining the source of c, the speed of light in a vacuum.
There are two constants of nature that show up in Maxwell’s equations:
  • ε_0, the permittivity of free space, which is the fundamental constant describing the electric force between two electric charges in a vacuum.
  • μ_0, the permeability of free space, which you can think of as the constant that defines the magnetic force produced by two parallel conducting wires in a vacuum with a constant current running through them.
When you calculate the properties of the electromagnetic radiation produced, it behaves as a wave whose propagation speed equals (ε_0 · μ_0)^(-1/2), which just happens to equal the speed of light.
Thus, the speed of light is not truly a fundamental constant, but can be calculated so long as a couple other constants regarding electric and magnetic properties of the universe are known.

After a bunch of chatter, he gets to the one sentence in the 3,000-word essay that actually addresses the question.
Gravitational waves, like any form of radiation, have zero rest mass and yet have finite energies and momenta, meaning that they have no option: they must always move at the speed of light.
That is not an answer; it just an assumption. The speed of electromagnetic radiation is determined by applying Maxwell's equations of electromagnetic fundamentals. The speed of alleged gravitational radiation is determined by a shrug of the shoulders.

It is not at all obvious why gravitational wave speed should be determined by vacuum permittivity and permeability. That would seem to imply that gravity is actually an electromagnetic phenomenon. [Interestingly, some people in the Electric Universe camp suggest just that!] The article ends by describing some experimental evidence that supposedly confirms the theory that gravitational waves propagate at the speed of light. The major problem with that is...there is no theory.

This Is How Mastering Dark Matter Could Take Us To The Stars (link)

In this piece of science fiction he really outdoes himself.
Even though we have yet to directly detect it, and even though we aren’t sure exactly what its true properties are, dark matter holds a tremendous promise for the future of humanity. Ubiquitously located all throughout the galaxy and far beyond, dark matter could be the perfect fuel that makes our interstellar dreams come true.
Yes, one day this mythical particle, which we can't detect and is theorized to not react with normal matter in any way besides through gravitation, will solve all the major technical limitations of interstellar travel. Also, they say it cures warts.
But dark matter offers a tremendous advantage over normal matter in this regard. Why? Because you don’t have to do anything special to collect it.
He actually said that the same matter they've not been able to observe or produce in a lab or even provide a working theory for what it may be, requires nothing special to collect.
There are a multitude of experiments looking for the collisions of dark matter with both normal matter and itself.
Yes, and they all fail. (The Supicious0bservers newscast provides routine updates on these experiments.)
If you can collect two dark matter particles and make them interact with one another, there’s a finite probability that they’ll annihilate. When an annihilation occurs, they’ll produce pure energy in a 100% efficient fashion: via Einstein’s E = mc². In other words, if we understand dark matter correctly, there’s a free, unlimited source of energy everywhere humanity dreams of going.
A finite probability as opposed to, what, an infinite probability? He's suggesting that there aren't just dark-matter particles, but anti-dark-matter particles as well, and they also float in diffuse halos around galaxies in whatever places are necessary to make the gravitational equations work. Also, they haven't already annihilated each other yet. It doesn't matter why, because dark matter and anti-dark-matter are magical and just do whatever we need them to do.

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