Klimatalarmism Möter Skepticism i StorMedia i Norge

Stavanger Aftenblad frågar sig idag följande i en mycket intressant och välskriven artikel där klimatalarmism möter skepticism:

• Styr vi vädret med bilen - eller gör Naturen det själv?

Tänk om en sådan artikel kunde publiceras i DN eller SvD. En tidsfråga förstås. Kanske imorgon?
Vad skulle effekten bli?

Se utförlig diskussion av artikeln hos Klimatrealistene.

Skollagen: Vetenskaplig Grund: Vem Bestämmer?

Skollagen Kap 1.5 säger att

• Utbildningen ska vila på vetenskaplig grund och beprövad erfarenhet.

I mina försök att reformera skolmatematiken har jag nu kommit till den punkt där jag vill pröva följande argument:

• Med vetenskaplig grund måste menas den vetenskap som dagens ledande forskare representerar.
• Skolans utbildning ska alltså vila på den vetenskapliga grund som dagens ledande forskare representerar.

Och ställa följande naturliga fråga:

• Innebär det att dagens ledande forskare skall ges direkt inflytande på skolans utbildning?    

Min erfarenhet hittills är att jag som (världs)ledande forskare inom tillämpad matematik och beräkningsmatematik inte har givits någon möjlighet till någon form av inflytande vad gäller skolmatematiken i Sverige. Trots min uttryckliga vilja därtill.

Kan detta vara i enlighet med Skollagens bestämmelse?  Om det inte är jag som ledande forskare som ges tolkningsföreträde vad gäller den vetenskapliga grund som skolans utbildning skall vila på, vem är det då som skall stå för denna tolkning? Är det icke-ledande forskare som skall stå för tolkningen? Vilka icke-ledande i så fall? Vilka som helst som är icke-ledande? 

Synpunkter emottages! Såklart, man kan hävda att mitt resonemang faller eftersom jag faktiskt inte är någon ledande forskare, men då kanske det i så fall måste visas?

Matte-IT = Konkret Realisering av Ny Läroplan med Programmering

Åsa Fahlén, ordförande i Lärarnas Riksförbund skriver med anledning av Skolverkets nya läroplaner med programmering som del av matematikundervisningen att följas senast ht18 (se också SVT-inslaget):

• Många matematiklärare saknar helt kunskap i programmering. 
• Sju av tio känner sig osäkra. Man kanske aldrig läst ämnet eller så behöver gamla kunskaper fräschas upp. 
• Många känner sig också osäkra på hur de ska lära ut ämnet.
• Det är jättesvårt att lära ut något man inte kan själv. 
• Ska eleverna få en bra utbildning måste vi ha välutbildade lärare som känner sig bekväma med det de ska lära ut. Här behövs ett nationellt ansvar. 
• Om vissa lärare får en bra fortbildning och andra inte får det så blir det ett likvärdighetsproblem för eleverna.

Mats Hansson, undervisningsråd på Skolverket, säger något helt annat:

• Skolverket menar att det finns styrdokument för vad som gäller, och ser inget problem med att kommunerna utbildar i egen regi. Det visar ju att de tar ansvar. 
• Jag är mer orolig för de kommuner som inte tagit tag i det. De måste se över sitt eget ansvar.
• Regeringen vill skjuta till tio extra miljoner nästa år för utbildningsbehovet. Skolverket menar att de gjort tillräckligt, och att det slutliga ansvaret för lärarnas utbildning vilar på varje huvudman.
• Vi tror att webbkurserna och de lärosäten som startar kurser täcker upp det behov som finns.

Åsa har kontakt med verkligheten och ser problemen, medan Mats gömmer sig bakom sitt skrivbord och lämnar matematikläraren åt sitt öde med en omöjlig uppgift och bara smulor som vidareutbildning.

Matte-IT erbjuder en lösning i form av en ny syntes av matematik + programmering, som gör matematiklärarens uppgift möjlig och ger eleven en meningsfull matematikundervisning i dagens IT-värld. 

Matte-IT kommer snart att lanseras som komplett läromedel för både lärares och elevers självstudier och förkovran, allt för att uppfylla den nya läroplanen med råge. 

Om Du är intresserad av våra barns framtid, ta en titt och ge gärna feed-back!

The Principles of Qspeak

Qspeak was the official language of Quantum Mechanics and had been devised to meet

the ideological needs of Modphys or Modern Physics. 

It was expected that Qspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Classical Physics, as we should call it) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all Party members tending to use Qspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech. 

The purpose of Qspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Modphys, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Qspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Modphys — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.

Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of un-orthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. 

To give a single example. The word position still existed in Qspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ’One cannot speak about the position of an electron’. 

It could not be used in its old sense of ’position here or there’ since position no longer existed even as concept, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. 

Qspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.

Qspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Qspeak sentences, even when not containing newly-created words, would be barely intelligible to an English-speaker of our own day:

• wave-function-collapse
• quantisation
• Hilbert-space
• mixed-state
• spin
• photon
• gluon
• lepton
• quark
• fermion
• boson
• baryon
• quit
• uncertainty-principle
• correspondence principle
• complementary principle
• exclusion principle
• superposition principle
• entanglement
• interference
• phase coherence
• plum pudding model
• hyperfine 
• bra-ket-notation
• mixed-state
• strangeness
• probability-amplitude
• matrix mechanics
• CP violation
• observables
• indistinguishable-particles
• intrinsically-identical-particles
• supersymmetry
• superpartner.

If needed The Party can use Qspeak in a form of Shut Up and Calculate, which eliminates any remaining tendency of heretical questioning.

If you think you understand Qspeak, you don't understand Qspeak. (Richard Feynman)

Those who are not shocked when they first come across Qspeak cannot possibly have understood it. (Niels Bohr)

 It is safe to say that nobody understands Qspeak. (Richard Feynman)

In physics we deal with states of affairs much simpler than those of psychology and yet we again and again learn that our task is not to investigate the essence of things—we do not at all know what this would mean; but to develop those concepts that allow us to speak with each other about the events of nature in a fruitful manner using Qspeak. (Niels Bohr)

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth, in Qspeak. (Niels Bohr)

When asked ... [about] an underlying quantum world, Bohr would answer: There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature, according to Qspeak. (Niels Bohr)

I think there is a moral to this story, namely that it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations in Qspeak than to have them fit experiment. (Paul Dirac)

Ny Webb-Sida för Matematik-IT

En ny webb-sida för Matematik-IT har öppnats:

• Matte-IT

Den nya sidan är under uppbyggnad med mål att göra presentationen mer tillgänglig för både elever och lärare, när nu Matematik-IT kommer att lanseras för en bredare publik. Budskapet finnes sammanfattat i denna  bild (Homo Sapiens Sapiens Faber Ludens)

Digitala Läromedel Kan Höja Skolresultat

DN tar idag upp studien Digital Tools in Education utgiven av SNS:

• Nationalekonomen Carla Haelermans sammanfattar lärdomar från den internationella forskningslitteraturen om digitala lärverktyg i skolan. 
• Hon har också genomfört åtta olika experiment på högstadieskolor i Nederländerna för att ta reda på hur de digitala verktygen påverkar elevernas skolresultat. 
• Hennes studier visar att användning av digitala lärverktyg bidrar till förbättrade skolresultat inom matematik och vissa delar av språkinlärning. 
• Störst nytta av digitala lärverktyg har lågpresterande elever. 
• Resultaten visar att det särskilt är möjligheterna till individanpassning av uppgifter som gör de digitala verktygen effektiva.

Detta visar att reformprogrammet Matematik-IT har vind i seglen. Matematik-IT fyller den nya läroplanen, med programmering som del av matematikundervisningen, med konkret innehåll. Och visst: Matematik-IT erbjuder helt nya möjligheter för lågpresterande elever att bli högpresterande, och för högpresterande att nå hur långt som helst.

America First Energy Conference Announced

This looks promising:

• The America First Energy Conference examining the scientific, economic, and political foundations of the America First Energy Plan will be gathering in Houston, Texas at the J.W. Marriott Hotel on Thursday, November 9, 2017.

LIGO vs Neo-Newtonian Cosmology

The Earth is pulled in the direction of the present position of the Sun at each  instant, right?

Let us continue our reflections on LIGO recalling my earlier post on Neo-Newtonian Cosmology as an alternative to Einstein's Cosmology based on Einstein's equations with related posts here and the discussion about The Hen and the Egg.

In Neo-Newtonian Cosmology a gravity potential $\phi (x,t)$ (depending on an Euclidean space coordinate $x$ and time $t$) is connected to mass distribution $\rho (x,t)$ through Poisson's equation

• $\Delta\phi =\rho $

which is interpreted as creation of mass $\rho$ by the action of $\Delta$ upon the gravitational potential $\phi$ through a local instant operation of differentiation.  

This is different from the standard interpretation in Newtonian cosmology with instead the gravitational potential $\phi$ created from mass $\rho$ by instant action at distance corresponding to solving or integrating Poisson's equation, as if gravitational force/potential is propagated at infinite speed. We thus have: 

• Neo-Newtonian Cosmology: matter created from gravitational potential by instant local action.
• Newtonian Cosmology: gravitational potential created from mass by instant action at distance.

Now, the big mystery of Newtonian Gravitation/Cosmology is the instant action at distance, which with the optics of Neo-Newtonian Cosmology is a fictional problem, which thus can be replaced by local instant action, with the mystery of instant action at distance eliminated. 

The beauty with both Newtonian and Neo-Newtonian Cosmology, as compared with Einstein's, is that motion of the Earth around the Sun gets an theoretical explanation agreeing with the following observation:

• The Earth accelerates at each instant of time in the direction of the present position of the Sun as if the action of the Sun is instant at distance.  

In particular, the Earth does not accelerate in the direction where the Sun is seen, since that position through the finite speed of light, has a delay of 8 minutes. The difference comes out in the thought experiment that the Sun suddenly disappears into nothing: In Neo-Newtonian Cosmology that would mean the instant disappearance of the gravitational field and thus leave the Earth instantly continuing in the tangent direction, while with finite speed of propagation of gravitational force created at distance by the mass of the Sun, that would take 8 minutes and the path would then be different.

In Einstein' Cosmology gravitation is propagated with the finite speed of light, but that does not seem to be the case for the Sun-Earth system.  Right?

Recall that Einstein was obsessed with choice of coordinates in both the special and general theory, as  if this choice has anything to do with physics, as if physics carries around coordinate systems imprinted in the "fabric of space-time" as the name of the game. But coordinate systems are inventions/conventions made by humans and not the Creator of the World, who had no need of such things when putting things together and letting it go...

LI(e)GO Nobel Physics?

The detected signal of amplitude $10^{-22}$ lasting a fraction of a second supposedly coming from collision of the most violent event of a merger of two massive black holes 1.3 billion years ago.

With the announcement today of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics:

• "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves"
• On 14 September 2015, the universe’s gravitational waves were observed for the very first time. The waves, which were predicted by Albert Einstein a hundred years ago, came from a collision between two black holes. It took 1.3 billion years for the waves to arrive at the LIGO detector in the USA. 
• The signal was extremely weak when it reached Earth, but is already promising a revolution in astrophysics. Gravitational waves are an entirely new way of observing the most violent events in space and testing the limits of our knowledge.

I cannot refrain from recalling my earlier posts on this issue posing some serious questions: How is it possible to connect a largest possible cause (collision/merger of two black holes) to a smallest possible effect (measurement with precision of the thickness of a hair on a distance of 4 light years) according to Einstein's equations which are not understood and cannot be solved, and as an inverse problem draw conclusion about the very big cause from the very small effect? Compare with these questions. See also this detailed criticism. And this analysis with comment here. Also this.

If gravitational waves exist as "ripples in the fabric of space-time", whatever that means, why are they so incredibly tiny? And if they now are so incredibly tiny, what importance do they carry? Can they really be used as carriers of specific information?

LIGO is an example of Big Physics in the sense of Building a Biggest Possible Detector for detection of a Smallest Possible Effect from a Biggest Possible Cause.

Of course, if you build a Biggest Detector like LIGO in search of Smallest Possible Effect, it is only a question of time before you discover Some Small Effect.

But how can you go from there to a Unique Big Cause?

To me it seems to require a mathematical model of infinite precision, and what says that Einstein's (unsolvable) equations carry that precision?

In any case, I remain skeptical until more evidence is presented.  Here is the story we are supposed to buy. Is this real physics, or is it fake physics?

In Advanced Information (about LIGO) we further read:

• Gravitational waves are travelling ripples in space-time.
• A passing gravitational wave is expected to distort space-time through the effects of strain in a very specific way, predicted by the general theory of relativity.
• It is easy to reproduce these results qualitatively without detailed calculations using the full power of general relativity.
• The most likely interpretation for this evolution is the inspiral of two orbiting massive bodies, while emitting gravitational radiation.

We see several caveats: "ripples of space.time", "predicted by the general theory", "it is easy...without detailed calculation using the full power...", "the most likely"...

As soon as you hear "it is easy" concerning a mathematical equation, you should be on your guard...since usually it means the opposite...