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Humans and chimpanzees both take part in rapid social exchanges, suggesting some foundational principles of language may have evolved earlier than previously thought

I held the same National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant for about 30 years, renewing it under a competitive process every three years. It was onerous (I took six months to write each renewal application), but at least you could be sure that the proposals were judged on merit. Sure, you had to check a box with your “race” (the NIH considers that a social construct), but that was for record-keeping purposes only  and, during the times I sat in on evaluation committees, ethnicity and identity were never even discussed when ranking proposals.

That has now changed, not only with the National Institutes of Health, but with all the major funding agencies: the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).  All of these agencies, though legally forbidden to take into account the ethnicity of those who apply for grants, or to boost those of minority status, have found ways around that restriction, adhering to today’s DEI Zeitgeist.  This of course devalues scientific merit in proposals—a dangerous strategy if the aim of science funding is to promote the understanding of nature (with health benefits to humans in the case of the NIH). Giving grants based on minority status rather than merit also reduces the public’s trust in science.  The situation has become so fraught that I am positively elated that I no longer have to write grants, as I’m not sure how to write a diversity statement, and am opposed to them in general.

A new paper in SSRN (“Social Science Research Network”) calls attention to the pervasive attempts to circumvent race-based funding in the federal government, and outlines the problems that such attempts produce. You can go to the paper’s website by clicking on the screenshot below, or you can download the pdf here (go to “download without registration” at the upper right).

You’ll probably recognize a couple of names among the authors:

If you want a short take, you see below a summary and preview by Krylov and Tanzman from Heterodox STEM (click headline to read).  But I’ll be citing excerpts from the long paper itself.  It has not escaped my notice that the government’s attempt to circumvent restrictions on race-based funding parallel those now used by universities after the Supreme Court ruled out race-based admissions.

I’ll summarize the paper’s main points, indenting quotes and putting the main points under headers of my devising. All bolding is mine.

What is DEI?

While no reasonable person can oppose the morality of trying to to give every American equal opportunity to become a scientist (and that starts with birth), the mandates that condition federal funding call not for equal opportunity, but for equity—“equal outcomes” so that minoritized groups—not just races, but LGBTQ+, the disabled, women, and anybody said to be disadvantaged because of oppression—are represented in proportion to their occurrence in the general population. Here’s the authors’ construal of DEI as it is actually implemented by the government:

Actual DEI policies do not promote viewpoint diversity, equitable treatment of individuals based on their accomplishments, or equal opportunity for individuals regardless of their identity (e.g., race, sex, ethnicity). It can scarcely be questioned (Krylov and Tanzman, 2024) that DEI programs today are driven by an ideology, an offshoot of Critical Social Justice1 (CSJ) (Pluckrose, 2021; Deichmann 2023). DEI programs elevate the collective above the individual. They group people into categories defined by immutable characteristics (race, sex, etc.) and classify each group as either “privileged” or “victimized,” as “oppressor” or “oppressed.” The goals of DEI programs are to have each group participate in proportion to their fraction of thepopulation in every endeavor of society and to obtain proportionate outcomes from those endeavors. Disproportionate outcomes (with respect to science, such outcomes as publications, funding, citations, salaries, and awards), or disparities, are axiomatically ascribed to systemic factors, such as systemic racism and sexism, without consideration of alternative explanations (Sowell, 2019, 2023). Claims, such as “The presence of disparities is proof of systemic racism” and “Meritocracy is a myth” are propagated widely despite the vagueness of the claims and their lack of support by concrete data. Similarly, tenets that are central to DEI ideology—such as diversity is excellence, diverse teams outperform homogenous teams, and the advancement of women is impeded by biases—lack a robust evidence base, particularly when applied to science (Abbot et al., 2023; Krylov and Tanzman, 2023; Ceci et al., 2021, 2023).

Note that several important claims, including the assertion that underrepresentation of minoritized groups is due to ongoing systemic racism (which would be illegal) and that diverse scientific teams consistently outperform more homogeneous ones. Neither claim is supported by evidence.

My own opinion (and that of the authors; see below) is to give as many people as possible the opportunity to do science, and choose for advancement those who do the best work.  That might not result in equity, but it does allow equal opportunity. I recognize, of course, that we’re a long way from giving different groups equal opportunity, which must begin at or even before birth. But equal opportunity is the only permanent way to solve the problem of disproportional representation in science (or any endeavor). Effecting that will be hard, and requires immense effort, money, and empirical tests of educational systems, but once it’s in place, unequal representation would reflect other things, like behavioral differences or differential preferences among groups.

How do funding agencies employ DEI? This takes place through the use of required statements and plans to enhance diversity that must accompany grant proposals. Here are two examples; the first is from an HIH program:

Recruitment Plan to Enhance Diversity (NOT-OD-20-031):

The applicant must provide a recruitment plan to enhance diversity. Include outreach strategies and activities designed to recruit prospective participants from diverse backgrounds, e.g., those from groups described in the Notice of NIH’s Interest in Diversity. Describe the specific efforts to be undertaken by the program and how the proposed plan reflects past experiences in recruiting individuals from underrepresented groups.

New applications must include a description of plans to enhance recruitment, including the strategies that will be used to enhance the recruitment of trainees from nationally underrepresented backgrounds and may wish to include data in support of past accomplishments.

Renewal applications must include a detailed account of experiences in recruiting individuals from underrepresented groups during the previous funding period, including successful and unsuccessful recruitment strategies. Information should be included on how the proposed plan reflects the program’s past experiences in recruiting individuals from underrepresented groups.

For those individuals who participated in the research education program, the report should include information about the duration of education and aggregate information on the number of individuals who finished the program in good standing. Additional information on the required Recruitment Plan to Enhance Diversity is available at Frequently Asked Questions: Recruitment Plan to Enhance Diversity (Diversity FAQs).

Applications lacking a diversity recruitment plan will not be reviewed. [Emphasis ours.]

And one from NASA:

The assessment of the Inclusion Plan will be based on […] the extent to which the Inclusion Plan demonstrated awareness of systemic barriers to creating inclusive working environments that are specific to the proposal team. [Emphasis ours.]

But to those of us in science, there are no systemic (codified) barriers to advancement, although of course there is still some racism. But those who make the claim of systemic barriers have to ignore the ways universities are falling all over each other to recruit qualified women and members of minority groups.

Why are these requirements bad for science?  Besides taking up an enormous amount of time confecting such statements, which are surely often deliberately misleading, they are palpably illegal, violating civil rights laws:

These requirements to incorporate DEI into each research proposal are alarming. They constitute compelled speech, they undermine the academic freedom of researchers, they dilute merit-based criteria for funding, they incentivize illegal discriminatory hiring practices, they erode public trust in science, and they contribute to administrative overload. “Diversity,” which is sometimes described as “diverse backgrounds” or “diverse views,” actually refers to select underrepresented identity groups (Honeycutt, 2020; Brint and Frey, 2023; Brint, 2023).

. . .The demand to provide an inclusion plan without evidence that there is a need for one is compelled speech and an intrusion of ideology into the conduct of science. Forcing scientists to “acknowledge” and “show awareness of” systemic racism and “barriers to participation” in their institutions and teams (Nahm and Watkins, 2023), even if none can be documented, misrepresents reality, is an offense to scientists who have worked hard to establish fair and transparent hiring practices in their institutions, and is inconsistent with scientific professional ethics and, indeed, the very vocation of the scientist.

The paragraphs below identify what’s illegal. I’m fairly convinced that these DEI requirements do indeed violate civil-rights laws, and that the only reason they persist—just as DEI requirements for job applications in academia persist—is that nobody has challenged them in the courts. To do so, you need “standing”, that is, you must demonstrate that you have been injured by these requirements. And anybody doing that would be forever demonized in academia, not to mention tied up in legal battles that would last years.

The interaction of DEI with the legal system is troubling. First, the demands that PIs “acknowledge” systemic racism and “barriers to participation” in their institutions (Nahm and Watkins, 2023), and insert land acknowledgements in their scientific publications (NSF, n.d.(b)) raise grave legal concerns. The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States strictly forbids compelling people to say things they do not believe are true. The circumstances under which government may condition grants or benefits on attesting that one holds a certain belief (e.g., “acknowledges” the truth to be this or that with respect to a contested matter), though somewhat obscure, are certainly limited (Supreme Court, 2013). At a minimum, government’s engaging in such conditioning on contested questions raises significant civil liberties concerns and is in tension with core First Amendment values.

Second, there are strict laws against discrimination on the basis of race and gender, both at federal and state levels. Thus, invoking DEI explicitly attempts to circumvent existing laws. Any actual “barriers” or “systemic discrimination” can be prosecuted under existing anti-discrimination statutes, following due process.

Third, even more worrying is that successful applications require principal investigators and their home institutions to engage in practices that are likely illegal.  For example, DEI “equity”-based plans for equal gender or racial participation can, in practice, only be implemented by gender- and race-preferential hiring. This is strictly illegal under civil rights employment law (Title VI; Title IX; EEOC, n.d.).

How do funding agencies get around the illegality of this process?

Funding agencies attempt to circumvent the laws prohibiting them from basing funding decisions on race or ethnicity by cloaking DEI requirements in nebulous language (NIH, 2019; Renoe, 2023) and by disguising racial preferences and even quotas as “diversity of backgrounds” and unequal treatment as “broadening participation of underrepresented groups.” The determination of which groups to treat as underrepresented and worthy of special treatment is highly subjective, as Americans hold many identities and can be split up in a multitude of ways. In practice, implementing equity-focused DEI programs means preferring members of some groups over others (Kendi, 2019). To paraphrase Orwell, all groups are equal, but some groups are more equal than others (Orwell, 1945).

The evaluations of submitted DEI plans are not open to public scrutiny. Agencies run diversity-focused programs but refuse to give guidance on how to determine eligibility for them; they are careful to state that compliance with all applicable employment laws is the responsibility of the host institution. However, DEI metrics, which must be reported annually to the funding agency, are criteria for renewal (NIH, 2023b). It remains unclear how a principal investigator is supposed to be nondiscriminatory in hiring and at the same time fulfill de facto DEI quotas for renewal. In this way, programs are developed that are de jure “open to everyone,” but de facto allocated according to identity metrics, reminiscent of the pre-civil rights era in the U.S.

Why is this happening?  The proximate reason for DEI requirements is government regulations (see below), but the ultimate reason is the “racial reckoning” taking place in America, a reckoning speeded up by the death of George Floyd and extending now to many minority groups save those who have done well, like Jews and Asians.  The paper doesn’t mention ultimate causes, but does show several federal requirements that gave rise to DEI mandates:

In fact, the mandate that funding agencies implement DEI comes directly from the White House. Executive Order 13985, titled “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” directed all federal agencies to allocate resources to DEI and to incorporate “equity” into their decision making as a principle (EO 13985).

. . .If “consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals” means equality of opportunity and equitable treatment of people’s accomplishments based on their merit, we’re all for it. However, the Order goes on to make clear that the goal is not to achieve equal opportunity and equitable treatment, but to achieve equal outcomes for identity groups. The Order conflates racism in the past with disparities in the present and equitable treatment with equal outcomes. It attributes unequal participation in the present to alleged discrimination in the present. It charges the Domestic Policy Council with the task “[of] remov[ing] systemic barriers,” thus implicitly asserting the existence of such barriers in the present. It calls for “redress[ing] inequities,” “affirmatively advancing equity,” and “allocating Federal resources in a manner that increases investment in underserved communities, as well as individuals from those communities.” Whatever is to be said about such goals in relation to, say, social welfare programs, we question their value and appropriateness for science funding.

The authors note that in this executive order “merit,” “excellence” and “achievement” are not mentioned at all.

There is one more federal order:

The goal of promoting “equity” in science is reinforced in Executive Order 14091 (EO 14091). Titled “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” it explains how equity is to be implemented in various domains, and specifically calls for the “promot[ion] [of] equity in science.” It lays out specific DEI requirements for federal agencies, including NASA and NSF, such as the following:

The Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Director of the National Science Foundation […] (agency heads) shall, within 30 days of the date of this order, ensure that they have in place an Agency Equity Team within their respective agencies to coordinate the implementation of equity initiatives and ensure that their respective agencies are delivering equitable outcomes for the American people.

Both of these are orders are enforced by the government’s Office of Management and Budget, which monitors agencies to ensure that they meet DEI concerns.

What is to be done? The purpose of scientific research is not to be a lever for creating social justice. That’s the job of the government, but the government cannot violate the law to effect the change we need. In lieu of creating new law, they have to effect desired change within existing legal boundaries.  My own view, which is echoed by the authors, is to hold scientific merit as the overweening criterion for funding research.

At the same time, it would be churlish to ignore the palpable inequality in American society, an inequality that deprives some groups of simple access to doing science, often because their backgrounds and the existence of past racism or bigotry. This leads to the need for equal opportunity, something that Americans apparently lack the stomach for. Equity has become  a quick fix, a way to tell us that we’re good people, but it’s neither a permanent fix nor, in science, a way to best advance the field.  So ditch the DEI requirements mandating equity and do this:

Systemic disparities in opportunity, especially those related to socio-economic status, are real and well documented. Solid family structure, access to healthcare, good nutrition, an environment free from violence and drugs, high-quality preschool and K–12 education are necessary to nurture the next generation of scientists, but they are not equally available to all Americans. Rather than attempt to institute “equity” by mandating proportional participation through the manipulation of grant funding, we believe that increased efforts should be made to promote equality of opportunity as early in people’s lives as possible so that young people who aspire to standing in any field, including scientific fields, can succeed on merit (Abbot et al., 2023; Abbot et al., 2024; Loury, 2024).

It is sad that to write something like that, or the paper itself, is an act of courage in today’s political climate. But if you’re committed to advancing science, with equality of opportunity as a moral ancillary, then one must judge science on merit alone while working politically to eliminate differences in opportunity.

In the end, DEI statements should be no more than this: “This project will not discriminate against anybody on the grounds of race, religion, disability status, gender, or sexual identity or orientation.” End of story.

The mass of a single proton, often said to be made of three quarks, is almost 1 GeV/c2. To be more precise, a proton’s mass is 0.938 GeV/c2, while that of a neutron is 0.939 GeV/c2.

But the masses of up and down quarks, found in protons and neutrons, are each much less than 0.01 GeV/c2. In short, the mass of each quark is less than one percent of a proton’s or neutron’s mass. If a proton were really made from three quarks, then there would seem to be a huge mismatch.

(Here and below, by “mass” I mean “rest mass” — an object’s intrinsic mass, which does not change with speed. It is sometimes called “invariant mass”. [Particle physicists usually just call it “mass”, though.])

Part of the explanation for the apparent discrepancy is that a proton or neutron is, in fact, made from far more than just three quarks. In its interior, one would find many gluons and a variety of quarks and anti-quarks. However, that doesn’t resolve the issue.

• Gluons, like photons, have zero rest mass, so they don’t help at all, naively speaking.
• The typical number of quarks and anti-quarks inside a proton, while more than three, is too small to add up to the proton’s full mass;

And thus one cannot explain the proton or neutron’s large mass as simply the sum of the masses of the objects inside it. The discrepancy remains.

Moreover, as can be verified using either strong theoretical arguments in analogous systems or direct numerical simulations, protons and neutrons would still have a substantial mass even if the quarks and anti-quarks they contain had none at all! Mass — from no mass.

Clearly, then, the solution to the puzzle lies elsewhere.

Mass is Not “Conserved”

The essential point is that the mass of an object is not the sum of the masses of the objects that it contains. In physics-speak, mass is not conserved. Did you learn otherwise in chemistry class? Well, certain lessons of chemistry class are not exactly right, and in particle physics — and specifically, within your own body and within every object around you — they often do not apply.

There’s already a subtle clue in the mass of a simple hydrogen atom, made of just one electron and one proton. It differs very slightly, by about one part in 100 million, from what you’d get if you added together the mass of an electron and the mass of a proton.

Admittedly, it’s not obvious this has anything to do with the issues inside a proton. After all,

• the hydrogen atom’s mass is very slightly less than the sum of the masses of the electron and the proton;
• the proton’s mass is much greater than the sum of the masses of the objects inside it.

Nevertheless, these two facts are indeed closely related. I’ll go through the first one before explaining the second.

Both Einstein’s relativity and quantum physics are involved. We must keep track of the fact that electrons and quarks are not really “particles” — at least, not as we mean the word in English, when we apply it to specks of dust or particles of smoke. Instead, they have many wave-like properties. I often prefer to refer to them as “wavicles”, a term which was invented about 100 years ago, and I’ll do so in this post.

• Wavicles, unlike ordinary particles, are vibrations; like any wave, they can have a vibrational frequency f, but unlike usual waves, they have an energy E that is proportional to that frequency. This is represented in the quantum formula: E=fh, where h is Planck’s constant, a constant of nature that serves as a conversion factor between E and f.
  
  
• We must also accurately account for Einstein’s relativity equation, E=mc2, a formula that relates the energy stored within an object to its rest mass m — and where c, the cosmic speed limit (also known as “the speed of light”), again serves as a conversion factor between E and m.

The key intuition we need is this: in contrast to an ordinary particle, a wavicle has the property that its frequency grows — and therefore its energy grows — when its container shrinks.

For instance, a wavicle in a hole has energy that depends on the width of the hole, as well as on the depth of the hole. This is unlike a particle’s energy, which depends only on the depth. As a result, a wavicle in a well will lose energy if the well is made deeper, yet it will gain energy if the well is made narrower. Both for atoms and for protons, this is crucially important.

Why is this true? If you want the back-story, you should read my two earlier posts comparing ordinary particles and wavicles:

• The first post highlights key differences between particles, waves and wavicles.
• The second post points out a consequence of these differences: a particle in a collapsing well will remain there to the end, while a wavicle will escape before the well collapses completely.

Atoms

Within a hydrogen atom, made of nothing but one electron and one proton, the proton pulls the electron toward it via the electric force. The smaller the distance between them, the stronger the pull.

This makes the electron behave as though it is on a edge of a very deep and steep 3-dimensional hole, with the proton at its center. I’ve sketched this in Figure 1. The horizontal direction represents the distance of the electron from the proton, while the vertical direction in the drawing showing the energy-depth of the “hole”. The little flat area is the location of the proton, where the hole terminates. (It is not to scale; the hole should extend off the bottom of your screen.)

Figure 1: If an electron were a particle, it would fall, thanks to electrical attraction, into the “hole” created by the proton; this would leave it sitting on or inside the proton, as in Fig. 2, having lost a large amount of energy in doing so. Not to scale. The dashed lines represent what the electron’s energy would be if there were no proton nearby.

If the electron were really a particle that could fall to the bottom of a hole, it would fall toward the proton until it reached the proton’s edge. After radiating away some excess energy, it would eventually settle down there, as in Fig. 2.

Figure 2: If an electron were a particle (green), it would end up on or inside the proton (red), and its energy would be tremendously reduced.

The electron’s energy would then have been reduced by the depth of the hole. And how deep would that be? Well, the electron’s internal mc2 energy is about 0.000511 GeV. But in this hole, it would lose more than that, several times over! This means that the combined proton-electron system would have a smaller mass than the proton does on its own. (You can rightly worry about what that might lead to…)

But this is all heading in the wrong direction. An electron isn’t a particle, not of the conventional sort, anyway. It’s a wavicle. Squeezing it into a small region increases its frequency, and therefore its energy. As a result, its energy wouldn’t actually be reduced if it were shoved down into a deep but narrow hole; the energy would actually increase! And so an electron, unlike an ordinary particle, simply won’t allow itself to be forced into such a predicament; it won’t fall into the hole in Fig. 1.

What ensues is a competition between two effects:

• the hole is trying to pull the electron in and reduce its energy,
• but the further the electron goes into the hole, the narrower the space available to it, which increases its frequency and therefore its energy.

As shown in Fig. 3, these two effects balance, and a hydrogen atom forms, when the electron just dips its toe into the hole. In protonic terms, it ends up occupying a gigantic region — with a volume about 1,000,000,000,000,000 times larger than the volume of a proton! Said another way, the diameter of the electron, and thus of the hydrogen atom, is about 100,000 times larger than a proton’s diameter; the atom is 10-10 meters across, while a proton’s diameter is a tiny 10-15 meters.

Figure 3: In a hydrogen atom, the electron, as a vibrating wavicle (blue), remains very spread out, but falls just far enough into the “hole” created by the proton that it remains attached to it. A small but finite amount of energy would be needed to knock it free. Not to scale.

Note: this is different from what happens to a wavicle in a well with vertical walls, which I covered in a recent post. In a straight-walled hole, it’s largely all or nothing; either the wavicle is confined in the hole, or it isn’t. But here, the walls of the “hole” tail off very gradually, which permits the electron to spread out far and yet remain attached to the hole.

As is true for any object, the mass of the atom is its internal energy, divided by c2. Most of the atom’s energy is obtained by adding the internal energy of the proton (0.938 GeV) to that of the electron (0.000511 GeV). But because the electron is (barely) inside the well created by the proton, just below the “level ground” that it would sit on if it were isolated, it has lost a tiny amount of energy: a mere 13.6 eV = 0.0000000136 GeV. (This is called the atom’s “binding energy.”) That in turn means that a hydrogen atom’s mass is 13.6 eV/c2 less than the sum of the masses of the electron and proton.

Figure 4: The electron, as a wavicle, does not fall onto the proton, but surrounds it, with very slightly reduced frequency and energy. Not to scale; the proton is much smaller than shown relative to the electron.

It’s a tiny reduction, but without it, the hydrogen atom wouldn’t be stable — it wouldn’t remain intact. To break the atom apart, “ionizing” it so that the proton and electron separate from one another, requires 13.6 eV of energy be added to it. And so, unless and until someone or something provides that energy, the proton and electron will remain together in atomic form.

[Note: if you’ve seen this argued in terms of the uncertainty principle rather than using the approach I’ve used here, be reassured: these are two complementary views of the same phenomena, and they do not contradict one another.]

Seeing how an atom works now raises a puzzle. If the atom is stable because its energy is lower than that of its constituent parts, how can a proton, whose energy is higher than that of its constituent parts, be stable? I’ll answer that at the very end.

Click here for more mathy details on atoms

First, let’s see that the energy of an electron particle sitting on a proton would be reduced by more than its energy. The electrostatic energy of an electron near a proton can be written

which is just a rewriting of the usual expression seen in first-year physics; here is a number, approximately 0.007. If we put meters, the radius of a proton, then

which is a reduction in energy about three times larger than the electron’s .

Now let’s consider the electron as a wavicle in a box of length . The Compton wavelength of the electron is

The energy of a wavicle in a box of length is roughly

where I am not keeping track of factors of 2 and other details, but just capturing the essence of the phenomena. If the box is large, with , then the first term is larger than the second, and we can approximate the electron’s energy using the fact that if , then

and so

Maybe this reminds you of the expresssion for a slow particle’s energy in special relativity, where the second term is the particle’s kinetic energy, written in terms of its speed

Indeed, we should understand the second term as a wavicle’s kinetic energy, where is replaced by . This is how quantum physics works; this conversion from speed to shape underlies the Schrodinger equation.

If the electron is roughly at a distance from the proton on average, then perhaps we can think of it as being in a box of size , with a depth ? We should not expect this to be strictly accurate! A hole shaped like the one in Figure 3 is far from a simple box! Nevertheless, keeping this in mind, let’s proceed.

The total energy of the electron, under this guess, is then

The first term is independent of . The second grows positive when is small, while the third grows negative when is small. The balance point between these last two effects, where is smallest, is at

or, being careless with factors of 2 and

This answer turns out to be too big, by about a factor of a few, mainly because our approximation, in which we treated the hole as though it were a simple box, isn’t sufficiently valid; there are some factors to account for. But it captures the essence of the physics — the atom forms through a balancing act that prevents the wavicle from sinking to the bottom of the hole.

To check this reasoning is really correct, it’s time to sit down and solve quantum physics equations and do some hard work. At the end of that effort, one does indeed find detailed energy levels, and an atomic radius, that matches precisely with experiments on hydrogen.

See also this argument which gets the same answer, within a factor of 2, via an even simpler approach.

One more thing: What would hydrogen be like in a universe with electrons of even lower mass? Such electrons would spread out even further, and the decrease in their energy would be less. The smaller the mass of an electron, the larger its atoms, and the less energy would be required to ionize them.

This means that electrons with zero rest mass could not form atoms at all! They would be infinitely large and infinitely easy to ionize.

And that, in turn, is why the Higgs field is so important for our existence. Without it, electrons would have no rest mass, and stable atoms would not exist.

Protons

A proton presents a puzzle. We’ve seen that the electric pull of the proton on an electron lowers the electron’s energy. How can we use a pull to hold an object together and yet give a wavicle higher energy, and lots of it?

Within a proton, the quarks, gluons and anti-quarks are all pulling on each other via the strong nuclear force. When the distances between them are much smaller than a proton, the strong nuclear force is similar to the electric force, only somewhat stronger: it makes them behave as though they are within a deep, narrow “hole”, where their energy falls rapidly as they approach each other.

But when they try to separate from one another, something new happens; the hole’s walls, rather than sloping gradually outward as in Fig. 3, extend upward, preventing any escape, as in Fig. 5. The quarks and gluons are trapped.

[A reminder about what is plotted in Fig. 5, as in Figs. 1 and 3: the horizontal direction represents the distance between a quark and, say, an anti-quark, but the vertical direction represents energy, not a vertical direction of space. So the picture conveys that the energy between the quark and anti-quark is growing very rapidly as they separate… very different from the gradual die-off of the energy seen in Fig. 3 that allows an electron to move far from a proton.]

The high wall changes everything. The “hole” that contains the wavicles is very narrow, and if the walls were absent or low, the quarks and gluons would easily escape, or at least spread out, as in Fig. 3. But thanks to these walls, the quarks and gluons find themselves stuck inside the hole.

Figure 5: In contrast to an electron in an atom, a quark or gluon in a proton acts as though it is in a narrow hole with towering walls. This traps it and forces its frequency and energy upward, well above what naively would be “ground level” (dashed line.)

Moreover, the trap remains extremely narrow as one climbs the walls, which the wavicles, figuratively speaking, attempt to do. This raises their energy to the point that it’s the width of the trap, not the masses that the quarks themselves carry, that determines how much energy the quarks have — and it greatly exceeds their E=mc2 energy! Gluons, which have no mass, get all their energy from the trap.

[Specifically, the trap is much narrower than the Compton wavelength of the quarks. This is unlike the situation for an electron in an atom, where the electron can spread to an extent much larger than its Compton wavelength. The math of this is discussed in an aside below.]

In other words, it is the trap’s effects on the wavicles, not the masses of those wavicles, that provides the majority of the proton’s internal energy. That’s why a proton’s mass can be so much larger than the mass of the objects that it contains.

In fact, inside this trap, a quark’s energy would be almost unchanged even if its mass were zero. Since both gluons and quarks would still have a plenty of energy, a proton would still have mass even if its quarks had none! All that’s needed to generate considerable energy for the wavicles in the “hole”, and thus mass for the full collection of wavicles that make up a proton, is that the “hole” be narrow and that it have high walls that prevent the wavicles from escaping. And that’s what the strong nuclear force achieves.

Such are the deep secrets that lie at the heart of every atom. Without them, the proton and neutron would be a shadow of their true selves. Our existence depends upon this remarkable, intricate interplay of the strong nuclear force, Einstein’s relativity and quantum physics.

Click here to see more mathy details for the proton

You’ll want to look first at the related discussion about electrons in atoms, located at the end of the “Atoms” section.

The main difference for what happens in a proton versus what happens in an atom is that here the box is smaller than the quarks’ Compton wavelength. As a result, in the expression for the energy of a wavicle in a box,

the second term is now much larger than the first. Expanding the square root as before, but in the opposite way, gives us

The contribution of the first term involves the diameter of the proton, which is approximately meters, and gives us an energy per wavicle that corresponds to a good fraction of the mass of a proton! (As for electrons in atoms, this gives a bit of an over-estimate, thanks again to some 2’s and ‘s.)

The second term is zero for gluons, and for quarks, it is so small by comparison to the first term that it can be largely ignored. Almost all the energy is coming just from the fact that is small.

As before, this estimate, while far from precise, captures the heart of the phenomenon: merely by creating a small box for the quarks and gluons to live in, the strong nuclear force produces a proton with a mass much larger than the masses of its ingredients.

To conclude, here are answers to two questions that I’m sure many readers will ask.

Wait! What About The Other Picture of a Proton?

Those of you who’ve read my book, or read elsewhere on this website about protons, will no doubt have noticed that this picture looks very different from the one I usually present, in which the inside of a proton is a maelstrom of quarks, gluons and antiquarks running about at or nearly at the cosmic speed limit, smashing into each other, and appearing and disappearing.

Figure 6: Snapshot of a proton from my book, showing many quarks, anti-quarks and gluons as particles, moving around at high speed. © M. Strassler

The difference between them is a classic example of how one transitions from a particle picture to a wavicle picture.

There’s an analogue here for atoms, too. Before the correct picture of an atom, shown in Fig. 4, was discovered, there was the Bohr model of the atom, which captured some of its properties. This model is presented in any first-year physics class (sometimes without explaining its limitations!) In that early picture of an atom, an electron is a particle, not a wavicle; it travels on a path that orbits the proton, and so its behavior is somewhat like a planet orbiting a star, except that it has to follow strange, inexplicable rules. One can go from the Bohr picture to the true, quantum picture in stages; the Bohr view is a good stepping stone, but it has flaws that are uncorrectable in the end.

Figure 7: In the Bohr model of atoms, electrons (blue) are particles traveling on paths around the nucleus (red), not vibrating wavicles as in Fig. 4.

The picture I usually give of a proton is somewhat like the Bohr model of the atom: it treats the quarks, gluons and anti-quarks as though they were particles, not wavicles. Like the Bohr model, it captures some of the story. In particular, it correctly illustrates these points:

• a proton is far more complicated than an atom;
• the energy of particles inside the proton is far greater than their E=mc2 energy;
• it is impossible to say how many quarks, gluons or anti-quarks are inside a proton
  • though there are always three more quarks than anti-quarks

But as with the Bohr model of the atom, the reasons it gives to explain these three key facts are not complete or accurate. The correct picture is only obtained by treating the quarks, anti-quarks and gluons as the wavicles that they truly are. Then one learns that:

• it is the strong nuclear interactions among the wavicles that make the proton complicated and turn it into a prison;
• the reason that the wavicles inside a proton have so much energy is that the proton, for them, is a tiny prison, far smaller than their Compton wavelengths;
• the patterns of wavicle interactions (which can create or destroy gluons, and convert quark/anti-quark pairs to gluons and vice versa), combined with a quantum physics effect known as “superposition”, assure that a proton simply does not have a definite number of quarks, of anti-quarks, or of gluons
  • nevertheless, the number of quarks minus the number of antiquarks is definite, and equal to three.

Why did I leave this important story out of my book? The reason is simple: there wasn’t room for it. But… that’s why I have a website! What couldn’t fit in the book fits here.

Wait! Why is the Proton Stable?

Now we know why the proton is greater than the sum of its parts: the strong nuclear forces among those wavicles creates a high-walled, narrow trap. But why doesn’t the proton fall apart? If the energy of the individual quarks and gluons is smaller than that of a proton, how can the latter be stable?

This is far from obvious, and is directly related to why the walls of the hole stretch so far upward. Understanding how the strong nuclear force does this has been worthy of Nobel Prizes.

It turns out — I have written about this before — that it is impossible to isolate a quark on its own. If you try to isolate a quark, you will have to supply a huge amount of energy — so much that nature will co-opt it. Despite your best efforts, nature will take some of that energy and spontaneously create additional quarks and gluons and antiquarks in the vicinity of the quark you’re trying to isolate. In this way, nature itself assures that your effort will fail!

This effect is sometimes (and somewhat incorrectly) called “quark confinement” (for in truth it involves confinement of the strong-nuclear-electric field, or “chromoelectric” field.) The existence of the high walls in Fig. 5 is itself a consequence of this effect.

What this means is that a quark or gluon is never found outside a narrow deep “hole” with high walls… and therefore, all objects made from quarks, anti-quarks and gluons have mass greater than the masses of the quarks and anti-quarks that they contain.

Again, this cannot happen for atoms. You couldn’t have a hydrogen atom with more energy than an electron and a proton have separately, because the atom would instantly disintegrate; the electron and positron could reduce their energy by rushing apart from one another. But the quarks and gluons in a proton cannot escape each other; when they try, more quarks and gluons are made, requiring even more energy. Consequently, a proton cannot break into its component parts, even though those parts, treated individually, have less mass than does the proton itself.

Former President Donald Trump bragged in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention that "right-to-try" had saved "thousands of lives"? What's the real story? (Hint: Nowhere near that.)

The post Donald Trump bragged that “right-to-try” has saved thousands of lives. It hasn’t. first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

From the NYT (click to read), but first I’m gonna say that yes, I was right again:

Excerpt:

President Biden, 81, abandoned his bid for re-election and threw the 2024 presidential contest into chaos on Sunday, caving to relentless pressure from his closest allies to drop out of the race amid deep concerns that he is too old and frail to defeat former President Donald J. Trump.

After three weeks of often angry refusals to step aside, Mr. Biden finally yielded to a torrent of devastating polls, urgent pleas from Democratic lawmakers and clear signs that donors were no longer willing to pay for him to continue.

There’s more, but the race has suddenly become interesting. Will Kamala Harris replace him as the default candidate? (I hope not; I’m a Gretchen Whitmer fan.) Will Gavin Newsom throw his hat into the ring? Or will some dark horse emerge from the convention and go on to trounce Trump?

At this late date it’s probably too late to defeat Trump, but suddenly I feel hopeful again.

So who do you want to run?

In this 45-minute video, Christina Buttons, an independent journalist who used to write for The Daily Wire but now has her own Substack site, discusses the gender fracas with the Triggernometry crew.  As you know, the Cass Review in the UK has considerably rolled back “affirmative care” for those pondering gender transition, and several European countries adhere to many of its recommendations. But the U.S. obstinately rejects the Cass Review. In fact, the Biden Administration has gotten the powerful and affirmative-care-supporting WPATH organization to eliminate minimum age limits for dispensing hormones or performing surgery.

The problem is, as Buttons argues, that there is really no evidence supporting the efficacy of “affirmative care”.  Yes, there are transgender people who have been happy with their transitions, and that’s great, but that’s not the same thing as testing the efficacy of affirmative care on young people who are troubled, weighing it against an alternative: normal, objective therapy that, in many cases, allows gender dysphoric adolescents to come out as gay. (Buttons notes that about 70% of young people with gender dysphoria come out as gay without affirmative therapy.) No surgery or hormones required there. And, as Andrew Sullivan has emphasized, the affirmative-care crew have even come out as opponents of the gay-rights movement, perhaps because they think that gay kids really should be transitioning.

Buttons’s explanation of why this medical brouhaha is so pervasive in the U.S., despite the lack of evidence that it works, is convincing, but I’ll let you listen yourself. And her own experience with mental distress as a teenager spurred her passion for ensuring that children like she was aren’t put onto a conveyer belt leading to hormone therapy and surgery. Her personal experiences, describing a desperate search to understand what was happening to her, explain why so many young women latch onto the “I’m-in-the-wrong body” explanation.

In the last five minutes, Buttons describes her detransitioning from being a Social Justice Warrior to an objective journalist who is horrified when ideologues twist or reject the facts.

Here are the YouTube notes:

Formerly a Democrat, Christina’s primary focus is gender transition, detransition and the lack of evidence supporting the gender-affirming model of care. She is passionate about debunking pseudoscience, and her articles are informed by experts in gender medicine research and adhere to the principles of evidence-based medicine (EBM). She also writes about ‘Social Justice’ ideology, mental health disorders, autism – she has Asperger’s Syndrome – and critical thinking.

h/t: Rosemary

I’ve written quite a bit about the brouhaha over species names of plants and animals considered offensive to biologists and laypeople.

Remember first that every species has two names: the Latin binomial that is standard for the scientific literature (e.g., Passer domesticus), and the “common” name, which varies among countries (e.g., “House sparrow” in English).  Along with the present climate of trying to purify the world from words considered offensive and hurtful, scientists have been trying to purify species names, too, changing common names to conform to modern ideology.

They’ve had mixed success with animals.  Common bird names, for example, are being purified, especially when birds are named after “bad people”, like John James Audubon. Anybody who had a connection with the slave trade is toast.  In fact, some have suggested that we simply ditch all common names derived from people’s names, and use descriptors of the bird’s appearance and location.  But even that has its drawbacks. Reader Lou Jost, for instance, pointed out that there is substantial benefits to conservation to name organisms after people, both in Latin binomials and common names:

. . . .  naming species after people has always been a powerful tool that biologists have used to thank their patrons, recognize their field assistants and honour their colleagues or loved ones. This is the highest honour that an individual biologist can bestow on a person; we have very little else at our disposal. In recent years some biologists have also used the naming of species to raise funds for research and, especially, for conservation. Guedes et al. mentioned the auctioning of names by the Rainforest Trust. Fundación EcoMinga2 —an Ecuadorian non-governmental organization that is managed by some of us — was the beneficiary of two naming auctions for species new to science3,4. With these funds the foundation was able to pay for journal publication fees so that the resulting articles would be open access as well as pay for some of the logistics of the investigations. Most importantly, we were able to use the funds to help to directly conserve many hundreds of hectares of the habitats of these very same species. In many megadiverse countries of the tropics, funds for these purposes are otherwise scarce or non-existent.

And of course common names vary from language to language, so the purification process occurs only in Anglophone countries.

The debate over the Latin binomials for animals has already been settled by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), which decided that ANIMAL bibnomials will not be changed, for those Latin names are standard throughout the literature, and changing them now would seriously screw up the literature. The ICZN did suggest, however, that Latin names proposed for newly described species not be such as “would be likely to give offense on any grounds. But that is only their suggestion, not a rule.  So you could still name a species like the blind cave beetle Anophthalmus hitleri (yes, it was named in der Führer’s honor), though I doubt anybody would do that now.  As for common names, the ICZN has no authority over them, and no recommendations.  I agree with their decision not to give new Latin names to already-described species, as this would seriously confuse the scientific literature. And of course what’s considered “offensive” changes as our morality and ideology changes. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, for instance, were slaveholders, and any Latin binomials with their names would be seen as “offensive”; as should “Washington, D.C.” site of the ill-named “Jefferson Memorial.”

But the ICZN decision goes for animals only. The botanists, on the other hand, have just decided that offensive Latin names for plants already given can be changed, and some will be changed. Click below to read the article in Nature:

Excerpts (bolding is mine):

For the first time, researchers have voted to eliminate scientific names of organisms because they are offensive. Botanists decided that more than 200 plants, fungi and algae species names should no longer contain a racial slur related to the word caffra, which is used against Black people and others mostly in southern Africa.

he changes voted on today at the International Botanical Congress in Madrid mean that plants such as the coast coral tree will, from 2026, be formally called Erythrina affra, instead of Erythrina caffra.

“We throughout had faith in the process and the majority global support of our colleagues, even though the outcome of the vote was always going to be close,” says Gideon Smith, a plant taxonomist at Nelson Mandela University (NMU) in Gqeberha, South Africa, who proposed the change along with fellow NMU taxonomist Estrela Figueiredo.

Their proposal takes species names based on the word caffra and its derivatives and replaces them with derivatives of ‘afr’ to instead recognize Africa. The measure passed in a tense secret ballot, with 351 votes in favour against 205 opposed.

Alina Freire-Fierro, a botanist at the Technical University of Cotopaxi in Latacunga, Ecuador, says it was good that the ‘caffra’ amendment was passed, because of the offence it causes. But its passage could open the door for other similar changes, she says. “This could potentially cause a lot of confusion and problems to users in many fields aside from botany.”

And that’s the rub! I can barely agree with the notion of changing “caffra” (a derivative of “kaffir”, a deeply insulting term for a black African—the African equivalent of the n-word), but only because changing “caffra” as the species name to “affra” will not cause much confusion. But in general I think the botanists, do what they will with the common names of plants (“Trumpet vine” may have to go), should go along with the ICZN, and leave Latin names of plants alone, both new and old. The damage to the scientific literature is potentially large. Yet the International Botanical Congress also seems to be vetting all newly suggested Latin names as well:

A second change to the rules for naming plants that aimed to address problematic names, such as those recognizing people who profited from the transatlantic slave trade, also passed — albeit in a watered-down form, says Kevin Thiele, a plant taxonomist at the Australia National University in Canberra, who made the proposal.

Scientists attending the Botanical Congress Nomenclature Section voted to create a special committee to deal with the ethics of names for newly described plants, fungi and algae. Species names — usually determined by the scientists who first describe them in the scientific literature — can now be rejected by the committee if deemed derogatory to a group of people. But this applies only to species names given after 2026, not to historical names that Thiele and others would like to see eliminated.

Still, this opens the door to Pecksniffian policing of plant names. I am not comfortable with someone vetting all suggested new binomials for offense, as “offense” is a slippery word, and a mere suggestion (like the ICZN’s) should suffice for guidance.  As for changing older names, well, the botanists have created a slippery slope here. If they can change one name, they might change others, as was suggested by Thiele in an earlier article:

Kevin Thiele, a plant taxonomist at the Australia National University in Canberra, expects that, if his proposal to create a mechanism to remove offensive names is approved, a relatively small number of species names would change. It’s likely that the argument for stability in species names would be outweighed only in cases in which plants are named after “sufficiently egregious” individuals, he says.

One change Thiele would like to see is to a genus of flowering shrubs, most of which have yellow blooms and are found in Australia, called Hibbertia, with new species routinely discovered. They are named after George Hibbert, an eighteenth-century English merchant who profited from the slave trade and fought abolition. “There should be a way of dealing with cases like Hibbert,” he says.

You know how these things go.  Once “caffra” is changed to “affra”, people like Thiele will create a movement to change older species names not derived from “kaffir”, because, after all, opposing changing the names of plants named after those in the slave trade (or who did other bad things) would be considered racist, and who wants to be called a racist? (Note that even the vote for “caffra”—>”affra” was pretty close.)  It is the loudest people, even when they’re in the minority, who ultimately win in this kind of endeavor.

These acts are performative only, for offensive species names don’t seem to affect whether people go into botany or zoology because of offensive Latin binomials (I haven’t heard of a single case). The Botanical Congress should simply make a suggestion to avoid offensive Latin binomials and then keep its sticky fingers off names that botanists suggests for new plants. And, after making the “caffra” change, they should vow that this one change will be the only older species name to be changed, and will also be the last one.

h/t: Ginger K.

Europa and Enceladus, icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn respectively, have evidence of oceans beneath their crusts. A NASA experiment suggests -- if these oceans support life -- signatures of that life in the form of organic molecules (like amino acids and nucleic acids) could survive just under the surface ice despite the harsh, ionizing radiation on these worlds. If robotic landers were to go to these moons to look for life signs, they would not have to dig very deep to find amino acids that have survived being altered or destroyed by radiation.

A while back I was a big fan of Doctors without Borders (or “MSF”, for “Médecins Sans Frontières”).  It was put in my will to get a big bequest, and when I auctioned of a copy of Why Evolution is True, autographed by many famous scientists and nonbelievers, and illustrated and illuminated by Kelly Houle, every penny of the $10,000+ we got on eBay went to MSF.

Then I heard that the organization was anti-Israel (this was well before October 7 of last year). Checking up on the Internet, I found some confirmation of that claim, including several reports that MSF refused to cooperate with Israeli medical teams working in the same location. This, from the article below, may be what I remember (Rossin is named as “secretary general of MSF in the 1970s”)

Rossin recalled his experience in 2010 on a mission to Uganda when an MSF Holland contingent refused to interact with a fellow Israeli medical NGO team dispatched to help. Rossin remembered it as an episode of “one-way empathy,” where prejudice had poisoned the MSF team’s ability to cooperate with Israel in their shared goal of helping civilians.

(See also here, though MSF denies all these allegations.)

I subsequently wrote MSF asking them if they ever used Israeli doctors in their relief efforts.  I got no reply, even though in the letter I told them I was a donor. Their ignoring me after the dosh I’d given them was, well, uncharitable.

Now I can’t really criticize MSF’s humanitarian efforts: they’ve done a great deal of wonderful medical work during crises all over the world.  No, here I’m pointing out an article in Canada’s National Post that documents a pervasive anti-Israel—a former MSF secretary calls it “antisemitic”—attitude on the part of the organization, an attitude reflected in its refusal to criticize Hamas for the terrorist’s group own blocking or hijacking medical aid and turning Gaza hospitals into terror centers.  In the piece below, quite a few former directors and employees of MSF, not to mention donors, weigh in criticizing the organization on this account.

My own decision, based on what I’ve read over the years, is to stop donating to MSF, and I’ve taken them out of my will, replacing them with other humanitarian organizations (and that is a fair amount of dosh!).  Read the article below for yourself (click on the headline) and decide if you want to support them.  The article is free, and you can also find it archived here.

I’ll simply give a number of quotes from the article. According to its charter, MSF is supposed to be politically neutral and impartial, but former executives, donors, and employees say that when it comes to Israel, that’s not the case.

Former leaders and a major Canadian donor of Doctors Without Borders are distancing themselves from the venerable aid organization after its employees celebrated the October 7 atrocities, gave aid to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health, ran a one-sided social media feed and internally circulated articles accusing Israel of creating Palestinian “death worlds.”

“To be frank, I was very, very, surprised because it’s not the MSF I knew,” Alain Destexhe, the secretary general of the organization, popularly known by its French acronym MSF, from 1991 to 1995, told National Post.

Destexhe said MSF’s messaging throughout the Israel-Hamas war is markedly different than past conflicts.

“We used to make statements, you know, in Bosnia and Rwanda, but not taking sides like this,” he said. “We always took into account the political context, but not to take sides from one group to another. In the Gaza War, I really got the feeling that MSF was totally biased.”

From a donor:

Destexhe wasn’t the only MSF loyalist to have an October 7 wake-up call. One major Canadian Jewish donor told the Post he urged his mother to support the group despite pushback from family members cautioning him against MSF’s reputation of being institutionally biased against Israel.

“I think most people know that they have a history of not being the friendliest towards Israel,” the philanthropist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told the Post.

He said he reassured his mother, following conversations with MSF Canada’s leadership, that the organization was duty-bound to be apolitical and strictly adhere to its mission of providing aid and observation. However, the inconsistencies between their initial promise and their treatment of Israel reached a boiling point in November 2023 when the patron confronted MSF Canada’s executives.

“I will be honest,” the donor told then-executive director Joe Belliveau in an email shared with the Post, “the more I review MSF public communications (Instagram, specifically), the evidence is overwhelming that the MSF stance has a pronounced bias. There is still not one single mention of the 200+ civilian hostages; not one mention of Hamas’ indiscriminate rocket fire into civilian centers, both of which are war crimes and violations of the Geneva conventions,” he wrote in late November.

. . . and a former MSF executive:

The donor’s November 2023 email rattled Byron Sonberg, who’d proudly served as MSF Canada’s treasurer for two years. He’d begun to sense the organization straying from its principle of impartiality, especially after he was copied on the donor’s email chain expressing growing frustration with the group. But the final straw came in mid-February 2024 when he, and hundreds of MSF global leaders, were forwarded an article: “Israeli necropolitics and the pursuit of health justice in Palestine.” [JAC: I found some of that article here; just read the “summary box”]

It was shared by Ruby Gill, president of MSF Canada’s board of directors, to provide “more insight” into the ongoing conflict. It argued that “framing Palestinian violence on October 7 as provocation and Israeli violence as response is ahistoric and indicates indifference to the everyday violence experienced by Palestinians.”

In other words, Israel “had it coming” on October 7. And the article was apparently sent out by MSF!  More:

Hamas receives a single passing reference in the piece, while Israel is cited nearly eighty times to bolster the claim that the Jewish State’s military response is unjustifiable. It accuses Israel of creating “death worlds” for Palestinians. The ideas expressed in the article, and the silence of MSF’s leadership, disturbed Sonberg, a self-described political moderate.

This concentration on Israel and complete neglect of Hamas is distressing in light of the fact that Hamas repeatedly impedes medical efforts in Gaza, including highjacking medical supplies, turning hospitals into terror bases, and even shooting Gazan civilians.

From another former MSM executive:

Richard Rossin, who served as secretary general of MSF in the 1970s and later co-founded Médecins du Monde (Doctors of the World), said that he perceived a tone shift within the organization several decades ago.

“I think it was perceptible around the beginning of the ‘80s,” Rossin told the Post by phone from his home in southern Israel. Antisemitism within MSF “began under the cover of anti-Zionism.”

See the quote from Rossin in the opening paragraphs.

One of the most distressing parts of this narrative is that MSF blamed Israel for the attack on the al-Ahli Hospital on October 17 of last year, an “attack” that did not involved Israel at all, but came from a misfired rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad that landed in the hospital’s parking lot, with the casualties greatly exaggerated by Hamas. MSF never retracted its accusation, which has been abandoned by everyone familiar with the evidence, including the Associated Press (no fan of Israel), which summarizes the evidence. (there’s also a telling conversation between two Hamas operatives saying the rocket was “from us).

By comparison, after the al-Ahli Hospital blast on Oct. 17, 2023, MSF rushed to blame Israel.

“We are horrified by the recent Israeli bombing of Ahli Arab Hospital in #Gaza City, which was treating patients and hosting displaced Gazans. Hundreds of people have reportedly been killed. This is a massacre. It is absolutely unacceptable,” MSF International wrote on X on the day of the explosion.

Although the blast was the result of a misfired rocket from Gaza, likely launched by a Palestinian group, MSF never corrected the record. The post, as well as several Instagram posts published by major chapters — including Spain, Canada, Brazil, and France – remain active. No apology or correction has been issued.

To a scientist, refusal to retract an accusation like this is shameful. But that’s MSF. Here’s their tweet, still up on X, but with “context corrections”:

We are horrified by the recent Israeli bombing of Ahli Arab Hospital in #Gaza City, which was treating patients and hosting displaced Gazans. Hundreds of people have reportedly been killed. This is a massacre. It is absolutely unacceptable…

— MSF International (@MSF) October 17, 2023

More:

After Hamas invaded and killed over a thousand people, MSF did not release a single post addressing the worst killing of Jews since the Holocaust and it has not called for the return of kidnapped Israelis. Five days after the terrorist attack, the group issued a statement drawing a moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel. [JAC note: I think the link is meant to go to the MSF “X” feed, not to just one post.)

“We are horrified by the brutal mass killing of civilians perpetrated by Hamas, and by the massive attacks on #Gaza now being pursued by Israel,” MSF International wrote on Oct. 12. The remainder of the thread denounced Israel for “indiscriminate violence and the collective punishment of Gaza.” Two days later, the group called on Israel to “show humanity.”

The tone set by MSF International trickled down to its chapters across the globe.

By Oct. 17, MSF Canada wrote, “unconditional humanity needs to be restored in Gaza,” calling Israel’s response “unimaginable” and “inhumane.” The statement made no reference to Hamas or their invasion, which ignited hostilities.Before October 7, several nations facing humanitarian issues were highlighted in MSF Canada’s social feeds – including Malawi, Venezuela, Sudan, Haiti and Burkina Faso – but its coverage following the Hamas attack veered near-exclusively to covering Israel. At one point, in early November 2023, MSF Canada’s Instagram account was blanketed with six red-bolded calls for an immediate ceasefire, something not previously done as part of its advocacy for Sudan or Ukraine.

No calls on Hamas to “show humanity,” not just towards Israel but to civilian Gazans?

Despite the fact that the Gaza Ministry of Health, run by Hamas, is known to exaggerate death tolls, which have been revised strongly downward by even the UN, MSF continued to use them. Another comment from MSF’s former secretary-general:

MSF’s relationship with the Hamas-run Ministry of Health was another major reason why Destexhe lost faith. Their failure to admit “health facilities (are) being used by Hamas and by soldiers,” he told the Post, left him “really sad, and then I became angry.”

More:

MSF International’s Instagram page was comparatively muted in February 2022 following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, calling the situation “extremely worrying.” Within a month, the organization’s focus had quickly shifted to Libyan refugees, midwives in South Sudan, and social workers in the Palestinian Territories.

The messaging inequality was studied by Gerald Steinberg, founder and leader of NGO Monitor, a watchdog organization based in Jerusalem, who combed through MSF’s X feed. He found over a hundred tweets between the Hamas invasion and late November, “not one (solely) mentions Israeli victims.” There were five instances when Israelis were mentioned, but always alongside Palestinians.

Steinberg has grown accustomed to this discrepancy. “MSF is both a humanitarian and advocacy organization, and on Israel and the Palestinians, the partisan dimension is dominant and destructive,” Steinberg told the Post by email. He recalled the group showing similar favouritism during an earlier flare-up in 2009.

Finally, there are further claims in the article that a sizable percentage (a third) of MSF staffers celebrated the October 7 massacre, that some MSF employees have been linked to terror groups, and that MSF had donated to Gaza’s Ministry of Health but refused to respond when asked how MSF ensured that medical supplies weren’t getting hijacked by Hamas.

And a final comment by another former secretary general of MSF:

Rossin, a former secretary general who predated Destexhe, remains pessimistic that MSF can take a more balanced approach to Israel and Gaza moving forward.

“It cannot be fixed,” he said, exasperated. “How can you fix antisemitism, which is not an opinion but a mental disease?”

Although I long ago decided to give no more money to MSF, but divert it to organizations that have a “more balanced approach”, readers may wish to have a look at this article.  I was angered by MSF’s failure to even respond to my email about Israel, despite Kelly Houle and I having given them a substantial lump of money. (I haven’t asked Kelly for her opinion on this article.)

If you’re looking for reputable organizations that do good humanitarian health work without constantly impugning Israel and making unretracted false claims, I’d suggest you do what I did: go to Peter Singer’s list of reputable charities called The Life You Can Save. It shows a number of charities (not all involved with health), all of which have been vetted by Singer’s uncompromising criteria of providing the most assistance for the least money. The second time Kelly and I did an eBay auction of an autographed and illustrated book, my Faith Versus Fact, we deep-sixed MSF and gave all the money to Helen Keller International, a charity that prevents blindness and death in children by giving them inexpensive vitamin A supplements. The charity provides a lot of bang for the buck.

And you can bet that in my rewritten will, the part that goes for children’s health and poverty (the other parts go for wildlife conservation and purchasing lands for reserves) isn’t directed to MSF, but to Singer’s charities.

It’s Sunday, and so we have a batch of bird photos from John Avise. John’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

More Avian Young-‘uns

Last Sunday I mentioned that mid-summer would be the doldrums for avian photography here in Southern California, except for the welcome appearance of chicks in resident species.It’s fun to watch them grow.This week’s photos show youngsters (and their parents) in several more avian species that live here year-round.All of these photos were taken near my home in mid-summer.The Egyptian Goose is an introduced species, native to Africa.

Canada Geese (Branta canadensis), proud parents:

Canada Goose, head portrait:

Canada Goose, young gosling:

Canada Goose, parent with young gosling:

Canada Geese, parents with slightly older goslings:

Egyptian Geese (Alopochen aegyptiaca), proud parents:

Egyptian Goose, parent with chick:

Egyptian Goose, goslings swimming:

Egyptian Goose, goslings standing:

Egyptian Goose, “awkward teenager”:

American Coot (Fulica americana), proud parents:

American Coot, parent with chick:

Americn Coot chick;

American Coot, teenager swimming:

Ducks in a row; Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) keeping her kids in line:

Mallard teenager swimming:

Actual death is worse than theoretical death. This didn't used to be controversial in medicine.

The post Dr. John Ioannidis: Yet Another Doctor Who Treats Theoretical Death From The Vaccine With More Gravity Than Actual Death From COVID first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

The International Space Station (ISS) has been continuously orbiting Earth for more than 25 years and has been visited by over 270 astronauts, cosmonauts, and commercial astronauts. In January 2031, a special spacecraft designed by SpaceX – aka. The U.S. Deorbit Vehicle – will lower the station’s orbit until it enters our atmosphere and lands in the South Pacific. On July 17th, NASA held a live press conference where it released details about the process, including a first glance at the modified SpaceX Dragon responsible for deorbiting the ISS.

As usual, the company shared details about the press conference and an image of the special Dragon via their official X account (formerly Twitter). As they indicated, SpaceX will deploy a modified spacecraft that will have six times the propellant and four times the power of “their “today’s Dragon spacecraft.” The image shows that the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle will have a robust service module in place of the trunk used by the standard Crew Dragon vehicle. This module is larger and has additional fold-out solar arrays in addition to hull-mounted solar panels.

With 6x more propellant and 4x the power of today’s Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX was selected to design and develop the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle for a precise, controlled deorbit of the @Space_Station https://t.co/GgtuplTwqQ pic.twitter.com/E23sS7CE4U

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) July 17, 2024

It also appears to have more Draco engines than the standard Crew Dragon vehicle – which has 18 engines capable of generating 400 Newtons (90 lbf) each – for a total of 7,200 N (360 lbf) of thrust. Presumably, this means the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle will have 72 Draco thrusters (arranged concentrically) and be capable of generating close to 30,000 Newtons (1,440 lbf) of thrust. The image also shows the spacecraft docking with the Kibo module operated by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

NASA announced the selection of SpaceX in late June to develop the vehicle as part of a single-award contract with a total potential value of $843 million. While SpaceX is responsible for developing the spacecraft, NASA will take ownership once it is complete and operate it throughout the mission. Both the spacecraft and ISS are expected to break up during re-entry, and the remains will land in the “spacecraft cemetery” in the South Pacific. The contract for the launch services has not yet been awarded but is expected to be announced shortly.

SpaceX is also responsible for developing the Human Landing System (HLS) – the Starship HLS – that will transport astronauts to the lunar surface as part of the Artemis III and IV missions. SpaceX has also been contracted to launch the core elements of the Lunar Gateway – the Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) and the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) – into lunar orbit using a Falcon Heavy rocket in November 2025.

The International Space Station (ISS) in orbit. Credit: NASA

Since 1998, the ISS has served as a unique scientific platform where crew members from five space agencies – including NASA, the Canadian Space Agency), the European Space Agency (ESA), JAXA, and the Russian State Space Corporation (Roscosmos). During its operational lifetime, crew members have performed experiments ranging from the effects of microgravity and space radiation on human, animal, and plant physiology. This research will play a vital role as NASA and its international partners conduct long-duration missions to the Moon and Mars in the coming decades.

The station has also allowed for extensive research into space science, biology, the physical sciences, and technology demonstrations that are not possible on Earth. Above all, the ISS has served as a symbol of international cooperation, consistent with the Outer Space Treaty and its core philosophy of “space is for all.” NASA, the CSA, the ESA, and JAXA have all committed to operating the station through 2030, while Roscomos has committed to continue operations until 2028 at least. The safe deorbit of the ISS is the responsibility of all five space agencies.

Further Reading: NASA

The post SpaceX Reveals the Beefed-Up Dragon That Will De-Orbit the ISS appeared first on Universe Today.

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Common ground is hard to find in today’s politics. In a society teeming with irreconcilable political perspectives, many people have grown frustrated under a system of government that constantly demands compromise. More and more on both the right and the left have come to blame the Constitution for the resulting discord. But the Constitution is not the problem we face; it is the solution.

Blending engaging history with lucid analysis, conservative scholar Yuval Levin’s American Covenant recovers the Constitution’s true genius and reveals how it charts a path to repairing America’s fault lines. Uncovering the framers’ sophisticated grasp of political division, Levin showcases the Constitution’s exceptional power to facilitate constructive disagreement, negotiate resolutions to disputes, and forge unity in a fractured society. Clear-eyed about the ways that contemporary politics have malfunctioned, Levin also offers practical solutions for reforming those aspects of the constitutional order that have gone awry.

Hopeful, insightful, and rooted in the best of our political tradition, American Covenant celebrates the Constitution’s remarkable power to bind together a diverse society, reassuring us that a less divided future is within our grasp.

Yuval Levin is the director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. The founder and editor of National Affairs, he is also a senior editor at the New Atlantis, a contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times. His previous books include The Fractured Republic and A Time to Build. A former member of the White House domestic policy staff under George W. Bush, he lives in Maryland.

Shermer and Levin discuss:

• Trump assassination attempt: conspiracy or incompetence?
• Biden cognitive infirmities and why the party can’t replace him
• Out of 340 million Americans why did we end up with these two guys?
• why we have a two party system
• why the country is more polarized than ever before
• historically divided elections: 1800, 1824
• the unique genius of the founding fathers
• human nature and how politics builds on it
• how liberals and conservatives differ in their view of human nature (and thus politics)
• what is unique about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution
• The Federalist Papers
• why the three branches of government—legislative, executive, judicial—were established
• what the founders got right and what they got wrong.

Notes

“Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything—high and low and, most especially, high—lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away.” —Charles Krauthammer, Things That Matter, 2013

“A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.” —John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859

“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” —James Madison, Federalist Paper No. 51

In Federalist No. 10, Madison outlined the problem with competing factions in a direct democracy (“a landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest…”):

“[A] pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

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Conspiracy Theories; News Items: Lunar Cave, AI Love, AI Scams, Solar Clams; From TikTok: Antimony and Air Fryers; Your Questions and E-mails: Judith Curry; Science or Fiction

For over ten years, the ESA’s Gaia Observatory has monitored the proper motion, luminosity, temperature, and composition of over a billion stars throughout our Milky Way galaxy and beyond. This data will be used to construct the largest and most precise 3D map of the cosmos ever made and provide insight into the origins, structure, and evolutionary history of our galaxy. Unfortunately, this sophisticated astrometry telescope is positioned at the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange Point, far beyond the protection of Earth’s atmosphere and magnetosphere.

As a result, Gaia has experienced two major hazards in recent months that could endanger the mission. These included a micrometeoroid impact in April that disrupted some of Gaia‘s very sensitive sensors. This was followed by a solar storm in May—the strongest in 20 years—that caused electrical problems for the mission. These two incidents could threaten Gaia‘s ability to continue mapping stars, planets, comets, asteroids, quasars, and other objects in the Universe until its planned completion date of 2025.

Micrometeroids are a common problem at the L2 Lagrange Point, roughly 1.5 million km (932,057 mi) from Earth, so engineers designed Gaia with a protective cover. Unfortunately, the particle was traveling at a very high velocity and struck the cover at precisely the wrong angle, causing a breach. This has allowed stray sunlight to interfere with Gaia’s ability to simultaneously collect light from so many distant stars. Gaia‘s engineering team was addressing this issue the moment the solar storm hit, adding electrical issues to their list of problems.

Gaia’s all-sky view of our Milky Way Galaxy and neighboring galaxies, based on measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars. Credit: ESA

Mission controllers first noticed signs of disruption in May when Gaia began registering thousands of false detections. They soon realized that this may have been due to the solar storm that began on May 11th, which could have caused one of the spacecraft’s charge-coupled devices (CCDs) to fail, which converts light gathered by Gaia’s billion-pixel camera into electronic signals. The observatory relies on 106 CCDs, each playing a different role. The affected sensor was vital for Gaia’s ability to confirm the detection of stars and validate its observations.

While the spacecraft was built to withstand radiation, it has been operating in space for almost twice as long as originally planned (6 years) and may have been pushed to its limits. As Edmund Serpell, Gaia spacecraft operations engineer at ESOC, explained in an ESA press release:

“Gaia typically sends over 25 gigabytes of data to Earth every day, but this amount would be much, much higher if the spacecraft’s onboard software didn’t eliminate false star detections first. Both recent incidents disrupted this process. As a result, the spacecraft began generating a huge number of false detections that overwhelmed our systems. We cannot physically repair the spacecraft from 1.5 million km away. However, by carefully modifying the threshold at which Gaia’s software identifies a faint point of light as a star, we have been able to dramatically reduce the number of false detections generated by both the straylight and CCD issues.”

Meanwhile, the Gaia teams at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre (ESOC), the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC), and the European Space Astronomy Center (ESAC) have spent the past few months investigating these problems. They have also worked closely with engineers from Airbus Defence and Space (the spacecraft’s manufacturer) and payload experts at the Data Processing and Analysis Consortium. Thanks to their efforts, the Gaia Observatory recently returned to regular operations.

Illustrated effects of Space weather. Credit: ESA/Science Office

In addition, the engineers used the opportunity to refocus the optics on Gaia’s twin telescopes one last time, which has led to some of the best-quality data Gaia has ever produced. As a result, we can expect that Gaia’s final Data Release (DR5)—which will include the full mission data—will be even more poignant!

Further Reading: ESA

The post Gaia Hit by a Micrometeoroid AND Caught in a Solar Storm appeared first on Universe Today.

When deciding what material to use for infrastructure projects, metals are often selected for their durability. However, if placed in a hydrogen-rich environment, like water, metals can become brittle and fail. Since the mid-19th century, this phenomenon, known as hydrogen embrittlement, has puzzled researchers with its unpredictable nature. Now, a study brings us a step closer to predicting it with confidence.

Understanding how soft materials fail under stress is critical for solving engineering challenges as disparate as pharmaceutical technology and landslide prevention. A new study linking a spectrum of soft material behaviors -- previously thought to be unrelated -- led researchers to identify a new parameter they call the brittility factor, which allows them to simplify soft material failure behavior. This will ultimately help engineers design better materials that meet future challenges.

Engineers have shown that using a type of AI that revolutionized computer vision can greatly enhance modern adaptive radar systems. And in a move that parallels the impetus of the computer vision boom, they have released a large dataset of digital landscapes for others to build on their work.

Engineers have shown that using a type of AI that revolutionized computer vision can greatly enhance modern adaptive radar systems. And in a move that parallels the impetus of the computer vision boom, they have released a large dataset of digital landscapes for others to build on their work.

A new study describes a chemical reaction that can convert Styrofoam into a high-value conducting polymer known as PEDOT:PSS. Researchers also noted that the upgraded plastic waste can be successfully incorporated into functional electronic devices, including silicon-based hybrid solar cells and organic electrochemical transistors.