Progressives Should Push for the Senate to Ratify the CTBT

What's the CTBT?  It stands for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty.  The April 2014 issue of Physics Today has an article entitled Nuclear proliferation and testing: a tale of two treaties.  In this article it talks about how the US Senate failed to ratify this treaty in debate in 1999.  The article states:

"In 1999, when the US Senate considered giving its advice and consent to ratification, it declined to do so. In the hearings and floor debate, the verifiability of the treaty and the effectiveness of the US nuclear weapons stockpile in the absence of nuclear-explosive testing were principal issues cited as problematic. "

This article addresses these issues, and says that the Obama administration has declared its support for the Senate to ratify this treaty.

     Four or five months ago the Obama administration got Iran to open up its nuclear facilities for international inspection along with other nuclear activities.  These are described in the following article.  This agreement ends July 20.  To help continue these efforts to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon the US should show the world its good faith along the lines of nuclear proliferation and sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.   This would show the world that the US is committed in not testing any new weapons.  The US hasn't tested any weapons in decades but signing this treaty would show the world we are committed to this policy.  This is also the ethical and moral thing to do. 

    It would also put conservatives who have opposed this treaty into defending the position of supporting nuclear weapons testing.  I think of Johnson's ad against Goldwater and the little girl pulling flower petals with a mushroom cloud in the background.

The New Coffee Table Book

In the 1980 and 90's I thought it was interesting that folks would go out and buy Steven Weinberg's book "The First Three Minutes" and Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time".  Science books that it seemed like folks wanted.  I have no idea how many of them were read or how many were put on the coffee table to show off.  Coffee table books they were called to show visitors that the home owners were up to date with current trends.  Here are examples of Science books becoming best sellers.   Which is great for a variety of reasons.  People seemed to be genuinely  interested in Science.  Carl Sagan "Cosmos" show  maybe helped with that (maybe the new "Cosmos" show can help to get folks excited about Science again).  I remember in high school it was hard to find good books popularizing science.  Books describing what was happening in the frontiers of science just didn't seem so prevalent.  Maybe I just wasn't aware of them living in the country in Northern Idaho.  Now there are lots of book out describing research in science.  Just look how many books came out about the Higgs particle.  This is great in that it helps educate folks as to what is going on in science and hopefully will show kids how exciting science is and motivate some to pursue careers in Science.  It also gives the authors some needed cash since many of the authors are academics.
  The new  coffee table book is Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty First Century".  A book about income inequality .  As everyone knows this is a big current issue and will be for years to come.  Piketty's book will be the book to have on your coffee table.    Economist Paul Krugman's  views on this book are here.  Im going to guess that most folks won't read Piketty's book  since it is around 700 pages with equations and graphs, so I'm told.  I haven't read it.   Hopefully most will skim through it and some will read it.  I thought about ordering it when I first heard about it but I already have enough unread books and I'm not sure I want to read a 700 page economics tome.
     I wonder when the next popular physics book will be on the coffee table and what will be its topic.

Data is Data

Sounds sort of Zen like.  The joy of acquiring and then the fun of analyzing and interpreting the data.

     After acquiring and storing the data now to analyze the data. .  First thing is to replay the data so as to clean it up.  By this I mean replay the data and using software cuts remove data that you know is spurious but that the hardware gates were opened up wide so as to be sure not to miss something new and interesting.  Here in applying software cuts comes your knowledge of your detector and events that you think you might get, but making sure not to remove too much, tricky.   So you clean up the data being careful to remove only spurious data that is well understood and can be removed with software gates.  So now you have cleaned-up data
    Now time to see what the data says.  You know from acquiring the data what your data looks like in "raw" form.  With the cleaned up data what do you see?  Depending on the experiment your data maybe similar to other experiments except that yours has higher statistics, better resolution in areas of interest or something else.  Now again using your physics knowledge you again analyze the data.  Here let's say you are interested in a peak in the data.  You want the area of the peak since this along with other data taken gives you the cross section for your peak.  Your peak maybe sitting on some background so you need to understand this background since it might contain something interesting,. you just don't know.  You apply your physics knowledge to understand the background .  Putting these results in you see how well this describes the background.  There might be new physics in the background.  .  Now you are getting the physics from your experiment.  What is the absolute magnitude of the data?  What is its energy?  Whats the width of the peak compared to the know resolution of your detector?  New physics maybe.  The fun of analyzing data.
     When typing this up I had in mind how I use to analyze nuclear physics data from a magnetic spectrometer.  I also had in mind maybe what the folks go through in analyzing LHC data looking for the Higgs, or folks trying to understand their cosmic microwave background data  (CMB)    Maybe I also have data envy.
     Hopefully lots of new and interesting stuff in your data.  But you already know that the next generation detectors are either being built or planned to get even better data on the same area of interest.  It maybe that the physical universe presents itself in only a few ways and we must try to get as much information as we can  from observations.

Would You Be the First Person to Use a Star Trek Transporter? (Consciousness Studies)

Everyone is familiar with the Transporter from whichever version of Star Trek.  Captain Kirk is down on a planet open up his communicator and says "beam me up Scotty".  There is that familiar sound and glimmering of lights, Kirk disappears and then you see him reappear in the Transporter Room on the Starship Enterprise.  Would you be the first person to ever use such a device?  I talked about this in an earlier post.   Lets say the physics and engineering of a transporter type device is known. (The physics part would be amazing considering the quantum mechanical questions.)  Earlier devices were thoroughly tested.  Simple life forms were later tried, no problems.  Then various complex forms of life were tested, dogs and cats when transported knew their names and owners.  Chimpanzees were transported and they could perform the same on all intelligence tests.  They seemed like the same chimps.   Everything appears normal and ready to go.  Would you be the first human to use this machine?  The question I'm getting at is when you are transported does your consciousness also get transported?  Is it the same you that get transported?  Would you even be able to tell?
   Consciousness is an interesting topic for physicists to talk about.  I discussed it as part of an earlier post. It pops up in various areas like in discussing the concept of what is now?  The March 2014 Physics Today  has David Mermin commentary entitled "What I Think About Now".  One of my favorite physics bloggers Sabine Hossenfelder has The Problem of Now discussed in her blog Backreaction.   I made a comment in the Backreaction Now post where I asked basically "do we have to bring consciousness into physics?".  I didn't get any replies.
     Sometimes I wonder if Consciousness is a "bad" topic to discuss since it seems to be in the area of New Age Philosophy.  I think lots of Physicists got pissed that New Agers tried to use quantum mechanics to help bolster their philosophy. Lee Smolin in his new book "Time Reborn" talks about the "really hard problem of consciousness" in the epilogue. He has a comment of  he mentions that there is only one person he allows to talk to him on this subject.  Smolin thinks that consciousness is beyond science at this present time. Which makes me wonder is that statement true?
   The December 2013 Physics Today has a short piece entitled "The Brain is Big Science".  The piece describes the new Obama BRAIN initiative which has $110 million for 2014.  You know when the government has a new initiative in research that this is an established field that shows great promise, its just that this known promise started years ago..  It seems that brain research is at a point similar to physics research.  As said by a Kavli Foundation vice-president "We know the microscale of single neurons, and we know how large patches--the macroscale of brain light up in fMRI......but we are lacking [knowledge about] how the brain works on the mesoscale level.".  The human brain has around 100 billion neurons, each with many connections.  The article has a cool image that shows an image from data of pathways of neural wiring in a living human brain.  It shows that "the fibers of the brain to a surprising extent form a [regular] three-dimensional grid."  This is from data.  The article then switches to discussing European initiatives on computer simulations. They have a goal of simulating the human brain.  One group uses "microelectronics to build physical copies of brains cells, connections and synapses."  Brain research as in particle physics is generating huge data streams to be analyzed so again big data rears its head.

Will brain simulations either in a computer or in analog circuits ever reach consciousness?  How would researchers know? How would a computer simulations consciousness be known?  This gets back to the old Turing test.  Could a machine think?  Again more questions, and of course wikipedia Philosophy of Artificial Intellligence.

Many questions.  So I Googled "Physics Research and Consciousness".  Lots of hits, there is a Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona.  They are having a conference this week, April 21-26 on "Toward a Science of Consciousness-20th Anniversity the Tucson Conference".  Lots of talks, there's a preconference workshop with Roger Penrose and others discussing

Microtubules and Quantum Biology                  MADERA         

Sir Roger Penrose, Stuart Hameroff, Jack Tuszynski,

Travis Craddock, Anirban Banyopadhyay

.quantum vibrations in microtubules support the controversial Orch OR theory, and provide a basis for EEG

as ‘beat frequencies’ of intra-neuronal dynamics

I'd heard of the Orch OR theory from some surfing a few months ago, but don't know much about it.  This is an example of a well known living physicist involved in consciousness studies.  There is also the von Neumann-Wigner interpretation of the collapse of the wave function in quantum mechanics.

But would you be the first person to use a Star Trek Transporter?  This is clearly another path down the rabbit hole.

Climate Change and the Nonexistence of Aliens

I was thinking about the stupidity of climate change deniers and was wondering about the book "The Limits to Growth" by the Club Rome put out in 1972.  This is a book describing where they studied computer models of our resource use, pollution and population growth and projections of where this could led humans.  I can't remember all the details but if I remember correctly it painted a pretty bleak future for humanity.  Sometimes thinking about climate change deniers depresses me, since if we follow what they believe, humans are doomed.  You would think that folks would not seriously believe the  climate deniers.   But then again I don't understand how the poor and middle class can support Republicans.

I was texting a rant to a  friend about environmental issues and here's what we had to say.  I'll fill in between our texts with some comments in parenthesis.  . I was telling her about the limits to growth.  

Her: Sounds interesting.

Me:Yes describes what humans can and can't do on earth since it is one planet with only finite resources.  Contrary to what some businesses propose and some politicians advocate.

Her: Neat

Me:  The earth is a complex feedback system and if we fuck it up too much we can not survive.

Her:  We're halfway there.

Me:  Question is will we fuck it up? Can we even stop ourselves from fucking it up?  Like a crack addict are we as humans caught in a negative feedback loop that leds to our self destruction?  Some people think most intelligent life in the Universe destroys itself, that's why we don't have ET's visiting us.  (An interesting post on the blog Preposterous Universe talks about this question here.  This is also the topic of the post that discusses the Enlightentment/Boredom Hypothesis as to why aliens haven't visited us.  The question of why aliens haven't visited us is called Fermi's paradox)

(Not sure if it should be negative or positive feedback loop, but anyways a loop that keeps reinforcing the behavior instead of inhibiting it.)

Her: There you go  

Me:  We do seems to be hell bent on destroying humans.  There is only one little blue-green planet we are on and we are on a path to fuck it up.

Her:  I believe that.  It's why the environmentalists are upset.

Me:  Many individuals get stuck on self destruction paths is the whole human race stuck on a self destruction path?  Everyone should be upset.  Remember Earth Day back in like 1970?  

Her:  Yes.  I was in high school when it started.  April right?  We just had it.

Me:  Even in ultraconservative Idaho (I lived in northern Idaho from the late 60's to the end of the 70's) people knew you needed to take care of the environment.  But that conflicted with the logging and mining industries that fueled the economy and hence jobs. ( The same is true now where in live in Louisiana,     where the fossil fuel industry is big and helps to drive the state economy.    Louisiana Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu is a big fossil fuel promoter.  Climate denial is strong here partially because of the importance of  fossil fuels in the economy and the fact that this is a very conservative state and is very skeptical of the government and of anything being said by what they view as the liberal media to them.  See this post about being a liberal and living in a red state. )
Yes indeed it was April but it was celebrated nationwide?  If so I didn't hear about it.  Fossil fuel companies want to keep it quiet.  Like minded folks own Fox News and other media outlets.
I didn't see it in the liberal blogs I read.

Her:  You're on an environmental roll today.  I think its every year on April 8.

Me:  People just think its another problem and don't want to deal with it.  We just want to deny it and ignore it and not think its a problem and that it will go away.  (Similar to how people deal with their own damaging personal behavior., like drug addiction, alcoholism or addiction to money.   Here's a really good New York Times Op-Ed about a Wall St. guy's addiction to money).
But the same thing is happening to our society and will we wake up and fix it?  Right now I'm not so optimistic about it.  Fuck people even deny climate change.  When looking for that Malaysian plane what they found where huge collections of plastic garbage in the ocean killing fish and animals.  Are we fixing that?  For the most part people just say fuck it.
They have other things to worry about.

Her:  People are so out of sight out of mind.

Me:  They have short term things to worry about.  Job security, security for themselves and family.  Money for food and housing.
Problem is that's what humans might be doing continuously to our planet.
It sucks sometimes
But humanity is doing to this planet what an addict does to their body.
This is nothing new people have been talking about this for years but get shouted down by money and power addicts.  They are addicted to money and power like a crack addict.
I might type all this up and put in my blog.

Her:  True that.

Me:  Do you think I should put this rambling on my blog?

Her:  Of course.  It's not rambling and you have the science to back it up.

Me:  I don't know enough about the science but I know its out there and that's why large numbers of scientists and scientific organizations say we need to fix the environment but get overshadowed by big energy business.

End of our texting session.

Are humans acting collectively as a crack addict and are so addicted to our self-inflicted damaging ways that we will ignore how our pollution of all kinds is killing our planet?  We only have one little blue planet and there are no mulligans.  No do overs.  We fuck it up its game over, fini, done, no more, no happy ending.

Businesses Don't Create Jobs Customers Do

Businesses don't create jobs customers do.  That is not what you hear from any politician.  Neither Democrats or Republicans say this since they know they rely on business dollars to get elected and reelected.  Instead they say the inverse, businesses create jobs.  Think about it.  What does a business need to survive?  Customers.  No customers no business.  I'll bet if you ask anyone that opens their first business that on the night before they open their doors for the first time all they can think about is will they get customers.  Without customers they would not have any income to stay in business.

A nice article related to this is Capitalism Dirty Secret : Corporations Don't Create Jobs, They Destroy Them.
If this title scares you, here is the introduction to the article: Corporations are not working for the 99 percent. But this wasn’t always the case. In a special five-part series, William Lazonick, professor at UMass, president of the Academic-Industry Research Network, and a leading expert on the business corporation, along with journalist Ken Jacobson and AlterNet’s Lynn Parramore, will examine the foundations, history and purpose of the corporation to answer  this vital question: How can the public take control of the business corporation and make it work for the real economy?.

I thought that the article was interesting and has good points.  It talks some about the history of the 1930's and how FDR helped the US recover from the Depression. 

LBJ and Civil Rights with Bill Moyers

LBJ really screwed up the US involvement in Vietnam, but he seems to have been forgotten for some of his better achievements.

Bill Moyers on LBJ and Civil Rights