Science papers now being memory-holed

More and more scientific papers are being retracted, usually for plagiarism or data fraud. Here is
one for ideological reasons:

That fear has come true with the removal of a paper by J. Phillippe Rushton and Donald Templer from the psychology journal Personality and Individual Differences. Rushton is known for his belief that cognitive ability varies not only between individuals but also between human populations. That was not, however, the subject of the removed paper. The subject was body coloration, specifically the fact that darker animals tend to be larger, more polygynous, and more aggressive. This correlation seems to hold true not only between species but also within species.

I am not sure what the ideology is here. Maybe writing about darker animals is now considered tasteless, in the light of the death of George Floyd?

There is more info here.

A lot is being done in the name of George Floyd, and now that includes the whitewashing of scientific papers. Even in Medieval Europe, where the Pope famously doubted heliocentrism, nobody removed scientific works from libraries.

If scientists want to contribute anything to the George Floyd, then I wish they would explain specifically how racism or police misconduct contributed anything to his death.

Scott Aaronson complains that the NY Times has caused a popular psychiatrist/rationalist blog to be taken down. The newspaper publishes anti-Trump garbage on a daily basis that is sourced to unnamed officials, but it intended to dox the blogger out of editorial policy.

One of Scott's readers says that he should not use terms like SJW and snowflake, because they are used by political enemies. A couple of others insist that there is no such thing as human races.

Obviously there are human races. Saying that race does not exist because a few people are hard to classify, is like saying there are no planets because of disagreements about how to classify Pluto.

People only deny race to pursue leftist politics, not for any scientific reason. So politics is causing scientific articles to be censored.

There has long been an effort to bring down the Slate Star Codex blog. The author is clearly left-of-center, and most of the comments are leftist. But leftists hate the site because it permits right-wing comments. The author tried to move some of those comments to Reddit, but that did not satisfy the leftists. It is amazing that the leftists got the NY Times to conspire in the effort to take down the blog.

If anything, Slate Star Codex promoted rationalism, where one can objectively examine the facts and come to reasonable conclusions. Sometimes those facts were uncomfortable for some people. For that, the blog was hated.

Those opposing the rationalists seem to belong to something called the Sneer Club.

FQXI goes full Marxist

From FQXi, a Physics Institute:

The FQXi June 14, 2020 Podcast features:

Strike For Black Lives
Retrocausality Reviewed
Measuring Consciousness in Fruit Flies
Superior
Monster Galaxy

First it talks about systemic racism against Blacks. There are no actual example, or any data indicating that Blacks are mistreated.

Then a researcher pushes retrocausality. He complains that people are usually only concerned about how the past influences the future. He wants theories for how the future causes events in the past.

Then someone measures consciousness in fruit flies. It's easy -- just like qubits.

Then a review of an Indian woman with strange beliefs about people. She seems to think that the races and sexes are all the same, except that India is superior to everyone else. There is no actual science. Just a jumble of leftist talking points. Listening to her garbled nonsense just convinced me that she is incapable of scientific thinking.

I would think that these folks would have a more scientific outlook, and a smart scientist can still have goofy politics. But even their opinions about hard science is goofy! Studying retrocausality is about like studying Astrology.

LIGO discovers new object

The NY Times reports:

Astronomers announced today that they had discovered something new out in the dark: a stellar corpse too heavy to be a neutron star — the remnant of a supernova explosion — but not heavy enough to be a black hole.

Whatever it once was, it is long gone. About 780 million years ago — and 780 light-years away — it was eaten by a black hole 23 times more massive than the sun. That feast left behind an even heavier black hole — a vast, hungry nothing with the mass of 25 suns.

News of that event only recently reached Earth, in the form of space-time ripples known as gravitational waves. These evanescent vibrations were felt on Aug. 14, 2019, by an array of antennas in Italy and the United States called the International LIGO-Virgo Collaboration, and the results were published on Tuesday in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Maybe this will be corrected by the time you read this, but if we are just seeing something from 789 million years ago, then it must be 780 million light-years away.

Gravitational waves travel at the speed of light. The universe has expanded in that time, so the distance then is smaller than the distance today, and so referring to distance is a little imprecise. Still, it is rate to see the NY Times off by a factor a million, on a matter than does not involve Pres. Trump.

Update: The NY Times corrected the article without comment.

Another use of Bell to attack locality

Eddy Keming Chen writes in a new paper:

Bell's theorem is most significant because its conclusion is so striking and its assumptions so innocuous that it requires us to radically change how we think about the world (and not just about quantum theory).

Before Bell's theorem, the picture we have about the world is like this: physical things interact only locally in space. For example, a bomb dropped on the surface of Mars will produce immediate physical effects (chemical reactions, turbulences, and radiations) in the immediate surroundings; the event will have (much milder) physical effects on Earth only at a later time, via certain intermediate transmission between Mars and the Earth. More generally, we expect the world to work in a local way that events arbitrarily far apart in space cannot instantaneously influence one another. This picture is baked into classical theories of physics such as Maxwellian electrodynamics and (apparently) in relativistic spacetime theories. After Bell's theorem, that picture is untenable. Bell proves that Nature is nonlocal if certain predictions of quantum mechanics are correct.

He then goes on to argue that the nonlocality conclusion can only be avoided by either accepting superdeterminism or rejecting probability theory.

He doesn't even mention that Bell only showed that a classical theory of hidden variables would have to be nonlocal. His theorem says nothing about non-classical theories.

He also doesn't mention that merely rejecting counterfactual definiteness resolves the problem.

I don't know if these authors are misguided or dishonest. They can believe in action-at-a-distance if they want, but if they claim to survey the opposing views and leave out the mainstream explanation, then they are not telling the truth.

Ellis explains downward causality

Physicist George Ellis wrote a very good relativity textbook with S. Hawking, and now writes in Aeon:

Physics has made huge strides since the days of Laplace; indeed, it would be completely unrecognisable to him. Yet there are still physicists today who confidently proclaim that we can’t have free will because physics determines everything, including brain functioning – entirely ignoring the complex context and the power of constraints.

If you seriously believe that fundamental forces leave no space for free will, then it’s impossible for us to genuinely make choices as moral beings. We wouldn’t be accountable in any meaningful way for our reactions to global climate change, child trafficking or viral pandemics. The underlying physics would in reality be governing our behaviour, and responsibility wouldn’t enter into the picture.

That’s a devastating conclusion. We can be grateful it’s not true.

For a biologist with such a disbelief in free will, see Jerry Coyne.

Ellis doesn't deny the Schroedinger equation or any law of physics. What he does deny is that any of those laws give the sort of deterministic predictability that would eliminate free will. I think that he is correct about that.

Not everyone agrees. Einstein was a determinist who denied free will. Sean M. Carroll is a determinist, but he also believes in many-worlds theory.

China puts quantum keys in space

The NY Times reports:

China Reports Progress in Ultra-Secure Satellite Transmission

Researchers enlisted quantum physics to send a “secret key” for encrypting and decrypting messages between two stations 700 miles apart.

The world of artificial satellites, silent in the void of space, might seem pacific. In fact it’s a high-flying battlefield rife with jamming, snooping, blinding, spoofing, hacking and hostility among the planet’s growing array of spacecraft and space powers. Now, Chinese scientists report new progress in building what appears to be the first unbreakable information link between an orbiting craft and its terrestrial controllers, raising the odds that Beijing may one day possess a super-secure global communications network.

In the journal Nature on Monday, the team of 24 scientists describe successfully testing the transmission of a “secret key” for encrypting and decrypting messages between a satellite and two ground stations located roughly 700 miles apart.

The method enlists quantum entanglement, an idea of modern physics that seems ridiculously at odds with common sense. It posits that a pair of widely separated subatomic particles can still seem instantaneously linked: Measuring a property of one will simultaneously affect the measured results on its companion, even if the two are millions of light-years apart. Albert Einstein called quantum entanglement “spooky action at a distance.”

This is absurd. We already have super-secure communications is space. It is done using end-to-end encryption. It doesn't matter if an adversary listens in, because the messages are computationally indistinguishable from random bits.

What the Chinese quantum physics supposedly accomplishes is that there is a probability that an eavesdropper could be detected, so that the communication link could be shut down.

However, if the cryptography is done right, then there is no need to worry about eavesdroppers or to shut down the link.

In a research summary, Nature said the team had demonstrated that the system “produces a secure channel that is resistant to attacks.”

But not as resistant as conventional end-to-end cryptography.

NASA has drawn up plans to rival the Chinese advance. Known as the National Space Quantum Laboratory program, it intends to use a laser system on the International Space Station to relay quantum information between two ground stations. The program was initiated in 2018.

Generally, Dr. Earl said, Beijing seems far ahead of Washington in the race to master the quantum riddles and their practical applications in space.

That is how you get funding in Washington. Claim that we have a Doomsday Gap.

What great scientist will be purged next?

Noah Carl writes in RT.com:

The Western world appears to be in the midst of a “woke” Cultural Revolution. Historical monuments are being toppled, popular authors are being denounced for saying “sex is real,” and corporations are rushing to pledge fealty.

A question that naturally arises at the beginning of any such period of upheaval is, “Who will survive the purge, and who won’t?” I fear that even Charles Darwin might not be safe. ...

Will Darwin survive the purge? ...

First, differences between the sexes. In The Descent of Man, Darwin states that “the average of mental power in man must be above that of woman.” ...

Second, differences between the races. ...

Third, eugenics. ...

In summary, Darwin believed that men were on average more intelligent than women, and that some races were “civilised” whereas others were “savage.” His views on eugenics are not entirely clear (the term was coined one year after Darwin died), but it is obvious from his remarks in The Descent of Man that he believed industrial society could have dysgenic effects.