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Yesterday we had a video of Richard Dawkins and Kathleen Stock talking about gender activism, and today we have Dawkins writing about the intellectual and moral courage of atheists. This essay is needed because attacks on “New Atheism” continue, with many misguided people saying that New Atheism is dead because either its proponents were muddled or because they were sexual harassers.

Both claims are wrong. Yes, some New Atheists did engage in sexual harassment, but it certainly wasn’t characteristic of the “movement”, and none of the Four Horsemen who inspired Richard’s essay have been accused of it. But to reject New Atheism because of accusations against some of its proponents is fallacious: what’s important is the content of the movement.

And that content was not only unassailable, but based on evidence—or, in religion, the lack thereof. If there was one thing that distinguished the “New” Atheism from the “old” atheism of people like Bertrand Russell, Robert Ingersoll, and H. L. Mencken, was its scientific character. The arguments in the books of the “Four Horsemen”—Dan Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins—were infused with science, with repeated assertions that there was no evidence for religious claims, be they for the existence of gods or the ancillary tenets of faith.  For once, faith was seen as a vice rather than a virtue.  Dennett was largely a philosopher of science, Dawkins and Harris were trained as scientists, and Hitchens was science-friendly, constantly keeping up with science.

I would argue that New Atheism was a resounding success, and is no longer touted actively simply because it did its job and is no longer needed. (It is needed, though, about once per generation, just to acquaint the young with its arguments.) Religion is disappearing throughout the West—largely, I think, because it’s been displaced by science and rationality (see Steve Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now for supporting evidence).  And religion, as sociologists tell us, is largely embraced by those who are needy, poor, or sick, with nobody but a god to turn to. Yet as the well-being of the world increases, so its need for religion decreases accordingly.

The rise in America and Europe of the “nones”—those people who lack religious affiliation—attests to the decline of faith. Now comprising 28% of Americans, the percentage of “nones” has risen from 16% in 2007. Yes, some “nones” do believe in a god, a higher power, or are spiritual, but the rejection of organized religion tells us something about Americans’ decreasing need for both faith and for religion as a way to commune with others. Northern Europe, and particularly Scandinavia, are losing faith as well: one of my favorite figures is that exactly 0.0% of Icelandic people under 25 believe that God created the world, while 94% believe that the world came about via the Big Bang.

I attribute the rise in atheism not just to the increase of well-being of people in the West, but also to the efforts of the New Atheists, who broadcast the arguments against God widely (all their books were best sellers) and erased much of the shame for publicly admitting you were a nonbeliever. Back in the early days of New Atheism, when I’d lecture in places like the American South, people would often come up to me and thank me for publicly arguing against religion, saying that they experienced strong familial and vocational pressures to adhere to the local faith.  That is disappearing.

On September 30, 2007, the Four Horsemen sat down for a two-hour discussion, filmed by Josh Timonen, that you can watch in two parts on YouTube (here and here). This discussion was then turned into a 2019 book: The Four Horsemen: The Conversation that Sparked an Atheist Revolution. By that time Hitchens had died, but the three surviving Horsemen were asked to write an additional introductory essay for the book.  The one below is Richard’s essay, which he’s now rewritten to be a standalone piece, and which he’s just published on his website.  I hadn’t read it because I didn’t read the Horsemen book (I listened to the whole conversation), and so missed the essays.

If you did, too, you can see Richard’s piece for free by clicking on the link below:

The three best parts of the essay are its no-pulled-punches denigration of theology (a discipline that has no content, though “religious studies” does), its suggestion of ideas that weren’t part of the original New Atheism, and its theme: that atheists possess a kind of courage that believers don’t have. I’ll give a few quotes (indented) for each area.

The vacuity of theology vs the substance of science:

. . . it is characteristic of theologians that they just make stuff up. Make it up with liberal abandon and force it, with a presumed limitless authority, upon others, sometimes – at least in former times and still today in Islamic theocracies – on pain of torture and death.

. . In 1950, Pope Pius XII (unkindly known as ‘Hitler’s Pope’) promulgated the dogma that Jesus’ mother Mary, on her death, was bodily – i.e. not merely spiritually – lifted up into heaven. ‘Bodily’ means that if you’d looked in her grave, you’d have found it empty. The Pope’s reasoning had absolutely nothing to do with evidence. He cited 1 Corinthians 15:54: ‘then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory’. The saying makes no mention of Mary. There is not the smallest reason to suppose the author of the epistle had Mary in mind. We see again the typical theological trick of taking a text and ‘interpreting’ it in a way that just might have some vague, symbolic, hand-waving connection with something else. Presumably, too, like so many religious beliefs, Pius XII’s dogma was at least partly based on a feeling of what would be fitting for one so holy as Mary. But the Pope’s main motivation, according to Dr Kenneth Howell, director of the John Henry Cardinal Newman Institute of Catholic Thought, University of Illinois, came from a different meaning of what was fitting. The world of 1950 was recovering from the devastation of the Second World War and desperately needed the balm of a healing message. Howell quotes the Pope’s words, then gives his own interpretation:

Pius XII clearly expresses his hope that meditation on Mary’s assumption will lead the faithful to a greater awareness of our common dignity as the human family. . . . What would impel human beings to keep their eyes fixed on their supernatural end and to desire the salvation of their fellow human beings? Mary’s assumption was a reminder of, and impetus toward, greater respect for humanity because the Assumption cannot be separated from the rest of Mary’s earthly life.

It’s fascinating to see how the theological mind works: in particular, the lack of interest in – indeed, the contempt for – factual evidence.

. . . The biblical evidence for the existence of purgatory is, shall we say, ‘creative’, again employing the common theological trick of vague, hand-waving analogy. For example, the Encyclopedia notes that ‘God forgave the incredulity of Moses and Aaron, but as punishment kept them from the “land of promise”’. That banishment is viewed as a kind of metaphor for purgatory. More gruesomely, when David had Uriah the Hittite killed so that he could marry Uriah’s beautiful wife, the Lord forgave him – but didn’t let him off scot-free: God killed the child of the marriage (2 Samuel 12:13–14). Hard on the innocent child, you might think. But apparently a useful metaphor for the partial punishment that is purgatory, and one not overlooked by the Encyclopedia’s authors.

The section of the purgatory entry called ‘Proofs’ is interesting because it purports to use a form of logic. Here’s how the argument goes. If the dead went straight to heaven, there’d be no point in our praying for their souls. And we do pray for their souls, don’t we? Therefore it must follow that they don’t go straight to heaven. Therefore there must be purgatory. QED. Are professors of theology really paid to do this kind of thing?

Richard gives a long list of things that science knows, pretty much with certainty even though all scientific truth is considered provisional. This is in contrast with theology, which of course has told us NOTHING about what’s true in the real universe. (This is why theology has no meaningful content.) I’ll just give a paragraph of our scientific truths; note that he even quotes Gould, not Dawkins’s BFF. But that quote by Gould is quite eloquent:

Let us by all means pay lip service to that incantation, while muttering, in homage to Galileo’s muttered eppur si muove,the sensible words of Stephen Jay Gould:

In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’ I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Facts in this sense include the following, and not one of them owes anything whatsoever to the many millions of hours devoted to theological ratiocination. The universe began between 13 billion and 14 billion years ago. The sun, and the planets orbiting it, including ours, condensed out of a rotating disk of gas, dust and debris about 4.5 billion years ago. The map of the world changes as the tens of millions of years go by. We know the approximate shape of the continents and where they were at any named time in geological history. And we can project ahead and draw the map of the world as it will change in the future. We know how different the constellations in the sky would have appeared to our ancestors and how they will appear to our descendants.

Matter in the universe is non-randomly distributed in discrete bodies, many of them rotating, each on its own axis, and many of them in elliptical orbit around other such bodies according to mathematical laws which enable us to predict, to the exact second, when notable events such as eclipses and transits will occur. These bodies – stars, planets, planetesimals, knobbly chunks of rock, etc. – are themselves clustered in galaxies, many billions of them, separated by distances orders of magnitude larger than the (already very large) spacing of (again, many billions of) stars within galaxies.

. . . Who does not feel a swelling of human pride when they hear about the LIGO instruments which, synchronously in Louisiana and Washington State, detected gravitation waves whose amplitude would be dwarfed by a single proton? This feat of measurement, with its profound significance for cosmology, is equivalent to measuring the distance from Earth to the star Proxima Centauri to an accuracy of one human hair’s breadth.

Novel additions to New Atheism (things that weren’t in the “Old” Atheism). I’ll give just one. Theologians and others argue about the claim below (some making the ridiculous argument that “God is simple”), but I think it’s a decisive blow against theistic and deistic religions:

But more important, even if we never understand all the steps, nothing can change the principle that, however improbable the entity you are trying to explain, postulating a creator god doesn’t help you, because the god would itself need exactly the same kind of explanation.’ However difficult it may be to explain the origin of simplicity, the spontaneous arising of complexity is, by definition, more improbable. And a creative intelligence capable of designing a universe would have to be supremely improbable and supremely in need of explanation in its own right. However improbable the naturalistic answer to the riddle of existence, the theistic alternative is even more so. But it needs a courageous leap of reason to accept the conclusion.

The courage of atheism

Why did I speak of intellectual courage? Because the human mind, including my own, rebels emotionally against the idea that something as complex as life, and the rest of the expanding universe, could have ‘just happened’. It takes intellectual courage to kick yourself out of your emotional incredulity and persuade yourself that there is no other rational choice. Emotion screams: ‘No, it’s too much to believe! You are trying to tell me the entire universe, including me and the trees and the Great Barrier Reef and the Andromeda Galaxy and a tardigrade’s finger, all came about by mindless atomic collisions, no supervisor, no architect? You cannot be serious. All this complexity and glory stemmed from Nothing and a random quantum fluctuation? Give me a break.’ Reason quietly and soberly replies: ‘Yes. Most of the steps in the chain are well understood, although until recently they weren’t. In the case of the biological steps, they’ve been understood since 1859.

And the moral courage:

[Atheism] requires moral courage, too. As an atheist, you abandon your imaginary friend, you forgo the comforting props of a celestial father figure to bail you out of trouble. You are going to die, and you’ll never see your dead loved ones again. There’s no holy book to tell you what to do, tell you what’s right or wrong. You are an intellectual adult. You must face up to life, to moral decisions. But there is dignity in that grown-up courage. You stand tall and face into the keen wind of reality. You have company: warm, human arms around you, and a legacy of culture which has built up not only scientific knowledge and the material comforts that applied science brings but also art, music, the rule of law, and civilized discourse on morals. Morality and standards for life can be built up by intelligent design – design by real, intelligent humans who actually exist. Atheists have the intellectual courage to accept reality for what it is: wonderfully and shockingly explicable. As an atheist, you have the moral courage to live to the full the only life you’re ever going to get: to fully inhabit reality, rejoice in it, and do your best finally to leave it better than you found it.

These are short excerpts from a longer essay, but it’s not all that long, and, for me at least, the essay bucked me up, reminding me of the personal and societal benefits of atheism. Yes, you can argue for “belief in belief”: Dan Dennett’s phrase denoting people who don’t need God but think that religion is necessary to hold society together as a kind of community Velcro.  But as we can see from the well-run, moral, but atheistic countries of Europe, that claim is false.  And as for the riposte that, well, Western humanism is a product of Christianity over the ages (viz. Ayaan Hirsi Ali), I find that Hail Mary argument insupportable.

By now most people have heard that on Saturday there was a failed assassination attempt on candidate Trump at a rally. While it has only been a few days, preliminary investigation has found that 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, using a AR style rifle purchased legally by his father, acted alone in attempting to kill the former president. Again preliminarily, Crooks fits the typical profile of someone who would do this (young white male, loner, fond of guns) although his ideology is not clear at this time, and may be complicated. He is a registered Republican but has donated to liberal groups.

This is a huge event, which may alter the course of the campaign (although I am not convinced, given how galvanized public opinion is at this point). It was also an extremely close call, and we can’t help considering how world history can turn over a fraction of an inch. It’s unsettling. How people react in the moment says a lot about their psychology and the broader culture. Unsurprisingly, many people immediately reached for a conspiracy theory to help make sense of these events. Even among people I know personally, who are generally savvy and not conspiracy theorists, the possibility was immediately raised.

The conspiracy theories come into basic flavors – on the left the possibility was raised that this was a false flag operation in order to help Trump’s campaign. On the right, there were accusations that Biden was somehow responsible for the shooting, or even directly ordered it. Some comments are just political opportunism and spin, but the reaction goes way beyond that to blatant conspiracy theories, which exploded on the internet within minutes of the event.

It is a great example of motivated reasoning and the pitfalls of conspiracy thinking, so at least can serve as a teachable moment. First, at least anecdotally it is pretty blatant that these casual conspiracy theories align with the politics of the one proposing the conspiracy. In this sense, they essentially amount to wishful thinking. With blood still on his face, Trump was immediately seizing the event for its obvious political opportunity. The wishful thinking comes in when one imagines that it can all be taken away, and even reversed, if it is discovered that Trump staged the whole thing. On the other side, a desire for the event to have maximal impact, even be a death blow to Biden, leads to thinking that the assassination attempt can be tied to him. In either case, people then search for reasons to support their emotionally generated conspiracy theory.

This is definitely a core lesson from events like these – we immediately grasp for the most emotionally appealing explanation, then make a concerted efforted to support (rather than refute) that notion. That is motivated reasoning in a nutshell.

This is where conspiracy thinking comes in. As I have written many times previously, there are some common intellectual elements to conspiracy thinking. One is a search for any apparent anomalies, then declaring those apparent anomalies as evidence for a conspiracy. There are two logical problems with this approach. The first is that what counts as an “anomaly” can be subjective. The second is that anomalies can happen for many reasons, and they don’t necessarily point to a specific explanation. Often far simpler explanations are ignored or rejected in favor of the far-fetched.

In this case both sides have cited the failure of the Secret Service (SS) to prevent the shooting. How was the shooter able to place themselves on a nearby rooftop with a good site of Trump? This is a genuinely good question, and seems to have been a real SS failure. A good rule of thumb is that simple incompetence should generally be favored over more complicated explanations (an application of Occam’s Razor). While this was clearly a failure (and should be investigated with appropriate consequences) is it really an anomaly? The last time a US president was shot in an attempted assassination was Reagan in 1981, 43 years ago. We can look at that record and conclude that it is fairly impressive, and also note that a rare failure (while not acceptable) is not such an anomaly that it deserves a special explanation, like an inside job. Interestingly, both sides use the SS failure to argue for their conspiracy – Trump had the SS let it happen to stage the event, or Biden had the SS let it happen to assassinate Trump.

Others point to the fact that the SS allowed Trump to stand up and delay extraction to give his already famous raised fist. But even though SS agents are highly trained, how often are they actually in this situation (I would wager that this was a first for every agent involved) and how would they react to a personality like Tump wanting to do his thing?

What people generally do not do, and not just in the context of conspiracy thinking, is try to come up with reasons why their preferred conspiracy theory is not true. They don’t consider how hard it would be to pull something like that off. The SS is not composed of people who can be easily ordered to engage in a coverup. The risk of exposure is also far greater than the rewards, which are uncertain. Trump feels he is doing well, and cruising for victory, so why try a risky gambit? If Trump were actually assassinated, that would also inflame the right with both predictable and unpredictable consequences.

I acknowledge it’s reasonable to briefly entertain many possibilities when a dramatic event like this occurs. We seek understanding and the illusion of control that it provides. But such notions should be entertained privately and quickly dispensed with. Today, however, wild emotional speculation is immediately shared on social media. It is supported by a distrust of authority, and sensibilities about what is plausible and common that have been shaped by cinema, not reality.

Such conspiracy theories don’t have a good historical track record, but that doesn’t seem to have much effect on people’s behavior. It should. If the method you are using is wrong again and again, you should adjust your methods. It is reasonable to defer coming to any conclusion until more time has passed and there has been more investigation, to hit the pause button on making pronouncements that are likely not to age well. At the same time, we should recognize that a good default position is the one favored by Occam’s Razor. Almost by definition, those are the explanations most likely to be correct in the end. In this case, simple failure, opportunism, and chaos are enough to explain everything that happened.  Further, apparent lone wolf operations generally turn out to be lone wolf operations. Absolutely, we need to carefully investigate this and all similar events, and even consider unlikely scenarios. That is due diligence. But we shouldn’t leap over highly plausible and extremely likely explanations and settle quickly on the far fetched simply because it’s emotionally appealing.

Far fetched but emotionally appealing explanations rarely turn out to be true (except in the movies).

 

The post World Events and the Conspiracy Instinct first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Novel ways to move on other celestial bodies always draw the attention of the space exploration community. Here at UT, we’ve reported on everything from robots that suspend themselves from the walls of Martian caves to robots that hop using jets of locally mined gas. But we haven’t yet reported on the idea of a balloon that “walks.” But that is the idea behind the BALloon Locomotion for Extreme Terrain, or BALLET, a project from Hari Nayar, a Principal Roboticist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and his colleagues.

How exactly does a balloon “walk,” you might ask? By picking up and moving one of its six feet. BALLET’s architecture involves a positively buoyant balloon supporting six “feet” attached to adjustable cables. The “feet” are small science packages capable of taking small surface samples or analyzing the chemical composition of the part of the surface it touches.

Each foot is attached to three cables, individually controlled by pulleys. When a foot is done doing its science work at a given location, BALLET retracts the cables for the foot, lifting it off the surface. It then extends the cables using different lengths for the cables to place the foot in a new location.

Balloons have been an integral part of NASA’s explorations, as SciShow describes in this video.
Credit – SciShow

Preliminary research on the concept was done as part of a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant in 2018. That research showed that it was better to lift two opposing feet off the ground at the same time to ensure the balloon’s stability. It also demonstrated where the concept would be most useful—Titan.

Balloon locomotion is typically considered somewhere like Venus, where it could float in the atmosphere in conditions similar to Earth. However, that altitude would make controlling a payload placed on the ground exceedingly tricky. Additionally, the harsh conditions close enough to the ground to be feasible would make the material requirements of the system untenable.

Similarly, a balloon could also work on Mars, but the high wind speeds of the sparse atmosphere would make controlling the balloon difficult. Titan offers the best of both worlds – a relatively stable, thick atmosphere where a negatively buoyant balloon would be feasible and stable environmental conditions that wouldn’t blow BALLET everywhere.

The current plan for exploring Titan – a helicopter named Dragonfly.

It also has many interesting places to explore, including cryovolcanoes and methane lakes. BALLET would allow traversal over even some of the most difficult terrain without accounting for considerations that would dramatically affect the capabilities of either a rover or a helicopter, such as the planned Dragonfly mission. 

There are still plenty of design considerations, though, such as the difficulty of controlling all the different variables, such as balloon orientation, cable length for each of the 18 cables, and pathfinding, simultaneously. After the completion of the Phase I project, the concept appears to be on hold in terms of receiving further funding from NASA at this point.

However, in terms of applications, BALLET also has some obvious ones on Earth. One that immediately sprang to mind is the collection of “nodules” as part of an undersea mining operation. Given the increased need for cobalt and other materials provided in those nodules and the bad image that comes from the destruction of the seabed that comes with traditional mining techniques, this idea might be one of those rare space exploration ideas that sooner sees an application on Earth than off of it.

Learn More:
Nayar et al. – Balloon Locomotion for Extreme Terrain
UT – A Robot With Expandable Appendages Could Explore Martian Caves And Cliffs
UT – A Hopping Robot Could Explore Europa Using Locally Harvested Water
UT – Drones Could Help Map the Lunar Surface with Extreme Precision

Lead Image:
Artist’s conception of the BALLET concept mission architecture, including a “single step” action.
Credit – Nayar et al.

The post A Walking Balloon Could One Day Explore Titan – Or Earth’s Sea Floor appeared first on Universe Today.

Two studies suggest the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation could collapse by the middle of the century and wreak havoc with the climate, but such predictions are controversial

Vaccine scientist Stanley Plotkin coauthored a commentary on vaccine postlicensure studies. Antivax lawyer Aaron Siri tries to spin it as an "admission" that vaccines aren't safe. Predictable.

The post Aaron Siri vs. Stanley Plotkin on post-licensure safety monitoring of vaccines first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

What happens when a spiral and an elliptical galaxy collide? To celebrate the second anniversary of the “first light” for the Webb telescope, NASA released an amazing infrared view of two galaxies locked in a tight dance. They’re called the Penguin and the Egg and their dance will last hundreds of millions of years.

“In just two years, Webb has transformed our view of the universe, enabling the kind of world-class science that drove NASA to make this mission a reality,” said Mark Clampin, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Webb is providing insights into longstanding mysteries about the early Universe.”

Webb Witnesses a Galactic Dance

The telescope targeted a collision scene named Arp 142 containing both galaxies—a scene that the Hubble Space Telescope has also explored. They lie about 326 million light-years away. Their first close encounter began somewhere between 25 and 75 million years ago. That’s when two partner galaxies had the first of many passages that will distort their shapes more than they already appear here.

The Hubble Space Telescope captured visible light when observing Arp 142, nicknamed the Penguin and the Egg, in 2013. The Webb view (right) shows the near-infrared view. Courtesy NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

Webb’s observations, which combine near- and mid-infrared light from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), respectively, clearly show that a hazy cloud of gas and stars (blue) links them together. The close approach also set off tremendous bursts of star birth in the colliding clouds of gas and dust.

Eventually, after several close approaches in their cosmic dance, these two galaxies will merge completely. Observers hundreds of millions of years in the future will look at Arp 142 and see one massive elliptical galaxy.

Interestingly, Webb’s sharp infrared eyes also picked out very distant galaxies. Some lie beyond this cosmic collision, although at least one lies about a hundred million light-years closer to Earth. It bristles with hot, young, newborn stars.

How The Arp 142 Galaxies Experience a Merger

The Penguin and Egg galaxies lie about 100,000 light-years apart but they affect each other. The Egg’s gravitational pull distorts the spiral and that interaction is “sculpting” the Penguin. The core makes up the eye of a penguin. The slowly unwinding spiral arms form a beak, head, backbone, and tail.

Webb’s infrared view reveals otherwise unseen activity between the two. For example, the Penguin is rich in dust. Webb’s view shows us how gravitational interactions pull that dust away from the Penguin. There are also scads of new stars in the galaxy, surrounded by what looks like smoke. Webb’s view shows this hydrogen cloud. It’s rich in carbon-based molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). These are incredibly abundant in the Universe and astronomers find them just about everywhere they point a telescope.

Webb’s mid-infrared MIRI image shows the Egg as a small teal oval. Mid-infrared light predominantly shows the oldest stars in the elliptical galaxy, which has lost or used up most of its gas and dust. This is why the view is so different from the combined image, which includes near-infrared light. Courtesy: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

By contrast, in Webb’s view, the Egg looks like it’s hardly been touched—it’s still an egg-shaped elliptical. It has much older stars than the Penguin. Past epochs of star birth have pretty much used up the available star-making material. So, even though the two galaxies have about the same mass, the Egg just doesn’t have as much material to get stretched out or turned into stars.

Zeroing in on Webb’s Two Views

If you look at both of Webb’s infrared views of the galaxy collision, you can see marked differences in them. That’s because each one prioritizes a different set of infrared wavelengths. In the mid-infrared view, the egg looks tiny and washed out. That’s because the instrument sees only the old stars in the Egg. By contrast, the Penguin’s distorted core and spiral arms are brimming with young stars embedded in the PAH-rich hydrogen clouds.

The combined near- and mid-infrared view shows more of the gas clouds as the Egg tears them away from the Penguin. These regions will glitter in the future with the light of newly formed stars. For now, however, only cooler, older stars are visible in the combined image. The younger ones are there, but the mid-infrared-sensitive instrument doesn’t spot them.

Here’s a flythrough visualization of Arp 142. NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI), Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Christian Nieves (STScI), Joseph Olmsted (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI), Frank Summers (STScI), Greg Bacon (STScI) Why Does Webb Study Galaxy Collisions?

By studying this galactic collision site, the Webb telescope further probes the activity as galaxies evolve. Collisions are an integral part of this process. Our Milky Way Galaxy will dance with the nearby Andromeda Galaxy, starting in about 5 billion years. Images and data from observations of other galaxies doing the same thing give astronomers a chance to understand the process and forecast the distant future when something called “Milkdromeda” will contain the stars and planets of two spirals that once were close neighbors.

For More Information

Vivid Portrait of Interacting Galaxies Marks Webb’s Second Anniversary
Galaxy Evolution

The post Webb Completes Its Second Year of Operations appeared first on Universe Today.

Here we have a 55-minute on-on-one conversation between Richard Dawkins and Kathleen Stock conducted during the “Dissident Dialogues” conference in NYC last May.  Here’s a précis of Stock’s background from Wikipedia:

Kathleen Mary Linn Stock OBE is a British philosopher and writer. She was a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex until 2021. She has published academic work on aesthetics, fiction, imagination, sexual objectification, and sexual orientation.

Her views on transgender rights and gender identity have become a contentious issue. In December 2020, she was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in recognition of services to higher education, a decision which was subsequently criticised by a group of over 600 academic philosophers who argued that Stock’s “harmful rhetoric” contributed to the marginalisation of transgender people. In October 2021, she resigned from the University of Sussex.  This came after a student campaign took place calling for her dismissal and the university trade union accused the university of “institutional transphobia.” A group of over 200 academic philosophers from the UK signed an open letter in support of Stock’s academic freedom.

After tons of opprobrium and threats, Stock resigned from Sussex in 2021. The book that caused a lot of the trouble is Stock’s Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism. I haven’t read it, but it’s a work of gender-critical feminism, and the topic itself ensured that Stock would be ostracized and deplatformed. I suspect that it’s not a work of “transphobia,” but, like Helen Joyce’s Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, which I have read, a defense of preserving some spaces for biological women but a work that doesn’t demonize trans people themselves.

I won’t go into the details, but the discussion is largely about sex (she accepts the biological definition based on gametes, which produces a binary) as well as gender. (She also considers a “cluster definition”, in which one combinse secondary sex characteristics, chromosomes, gametes, and other traits to come up with a multivariate definition of “sex”, but properly concludes that it doesn’t work.)

They go on to discussing gender, and Stock dissects the many meanings of that elusive word.  As far as “trans” people go, she says (referring to Jan Morris), Stock says that Morris’s account of what it’s like being a woman was unconvincing (I agree; as it’s based largely on stereotypes). Stock does agree that females transition because they’re unhappy as males, but doesn’t agree that a transwoman is “a woman inside.” She adds that “she has no ambition to stop adults who’ve been through a proper period of reflection” to transition from one gender identity to another; but doesn’t agree that someone who has not medically transitioned should be allowed to define themselves as a member of their non-natal sex.

Stock discusses the “suicide myth”: the idea that girls not allowed to transition have a higher risk of suicide than those who do transition. This is a “myth” because the cohort of adolescent females who want to transition do indeed have a higher rate of suicide, but it could be because of other mental issues and, in fact, there’s no evidence that actual transitioning reduces that risk.

I’ll let you listen to the rest, which includes puberty blockers, the Cass Review, transracialism and so on.

My one disagreement with Stock is that she seems to equate almost all trans women as those who have a “male fetish”: autogynephilia.  I am not an expert, but I suspect that male-to-female transitioning can be caused by a variety of reasons, only one of which is autogynephilia.

In the end, Stock doesn’t seem to be a “transphobe”—someone who hates trans people—but, like others tarred with that slur, she seems pretty reasonable.  She is opposed to the prevalence of affirmative care and to the premature dispensation of hormones and surgery to children or adolescents, as well as to social acceptance of someone who identifies as a member of their non-natal sex as identical to members of that non-natal sex. The latter allows trans females, for example, to compete against biological women in athletics, to occupy cells in women’s prisons, and to display their penises in locker rooms.  In other words, I see her as not hateful, but reasonable and anxious to prevent harm to young people who don’t fully understand the consequences of premature decisions.  And she largely blames adults for this harm.

We hear a lot about the “war crimes of Israel and the IDF”; in fact, that’s about all we hear on campus regarding the war.  And it is these “war crimes” that have brought the world’s opprobrium down on Israel, even though they are not war crimes. Yes, an odd IDF soldier might commit a war crime occasionally (I know of none), but I take issue with the claim that Israel is guilty of war crimes in general.

In contrast, there is no doubt that Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups are guilty of multiple war crimes. Yet we don’t hear about them much, and the world certainly isn’t outraged by them. That is a curious situation.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has formalized the possibility that Israel could be committing genocide, and though it hasn’t yet concluded it is, even the possibility seems ludicrous to me, for Israel is certainly not bent on eliminating all Palestinians—just Hamas. The care that the IDF takes to avoid killing civilians when possible, Israel’s provision of humanitarian aid to non-combatant Gazans, and the warnings and “safe areas” that the IDF provides to non0-combatants—all of this argues against the claim of genocide, as has the big population increase in Gaza in recent years. And yet how often do we hear that among all armies of the world, the IDF is the most careful to avoid harming civilians?

Israel’s “war crimes” are also the basis of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) pending indictment against Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant, who will be charged with crimes against humanity. To be sure, though, the ICC has said that there are reasonable grounds for charging three Hamas leaders (Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri,  and Ismail Haniyeh) with the following war crimes (Mohammed Diab, known as Mohammed Deif, was just subject to an attack by the IDF, but we don’t know if he’s alive):

• Extermination as a crime against humanity, contrary to article 7(1)(b) of the Rome Statute;
• Murder as a crime against humanity, contrary to article 7(1)(a), and as a war crime, contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i);
• Taking hostages as a war crime, contrary to article 8(2)(c)(iii);
• Rape and other acts of sexual violence as crimes against humanity, contrary to article 7(1)(g), and also as war crimes pursuant to article 8(2)(e)(vi) in the context of captivity;
• Torture as a crime against humanity, contrary to article 7(1)(f), and also as a war crime, contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i), in the context of captivity;
• Other inhumane acts as a crime against humanity, contrary to article 7(l)(k), in the context of captivity;
• Cruel treatment as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i), in the context of captivity; and
• Outrages upon personal dignity as a war crime, contrary to article 8(2)(c)(ii), in the context of captivity.

I will add a few more war crimes committed by Hamas, some of which were described (but NOT identified as war crimes, by a recent piece in the New York Times, as noted by the Elder of Ziyon):

• Hiding among civilians while acting as a combatant
• Dressing as civilians while fighting
• Using civilian homes for military purposes
• Purposefully hiding among civilians and firing rockets from civilian neighborhoods
• Recruiting children to do military activities
• Hiding soldiers in hospitals

In fact it was the NYT article that described Hamas’s war crimes—without labeling them as such—that angered me to the point that I had to write this post. But of course this post may be superfluous since everyone seems to ignore Hamas’s war crimes; and the world is certainly neither emphasizing these crimes nor coming down on Hamas for committing them.

And here are two more violations by Hamas:

• Firing missiles at civilian populations in Israel
• Using terrorism as an act of war: attacks in Israel on civilians

These are palpable and arrant war crimes of Hamas, and one can’t deny that they were committed. In fact, these are the usual tactics of Hamas.  My question is this: why does the world ignore them? You don’t see encampments by Jewish or non-Palestinian students protesting Hamas’s war crimes; you hear very little about them as war crimes in the media; and the NYT article is one example about how Hamas’s normal battle tactics are completely ignored as genuine war crimes. As the Elder of Ziyon says about this article:

While the NYT describes all of these violations of the laws of war, the only time it mentions that fact is saying more than 50 paragraphs into the report that “International law requires combatants to avoid using ‘civilian objects,’ which include homes, schools, hospitals and mosques, for military objectives.” The article should have been written many months ago, and it should have emphasized that Hamas’ actions are not only illegal but also the cause of so much suffering of the innocent in Gaza.

This is one example, but perhaps the most blatant one, about how a double standard is applied to Hamas and the IDF in the war. Hostage-taking alone should enrage the world.

I’ll leave it to readers to hypothesize why this double standard exists.

We have one batch of photos left besides today’s, so this feature will become sporadic as of tomorrow.  You know what to do!

But John Avise has come through again with some bird photos from California.  John’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. 

The July Doldrums 

Here in Southern California, mid-summer is not the most ideal time for avian photography.  The excitement of the spring migration in April and May is but a distant memory, and the start of autumn migration in late August is still more than a month away.  Most of the ducks have long since departed for far more northerly climes for nesting, and the few remaining resident ducks are in their dull eclipse plumage.   About the only avian excitement here in the hot weather is the welcome appearance of chicks representing the next generation for resident species.  This week’s post shows chicks (and their parents) of several bird species that do nest locally.  All of these pictures were taken near my home in July.

Black-necked Stilt (Himantopus mexicanus), adult:

Black-necked Stilt chick:

American Avocet (Recurvirostra americana), adult:

American Avocet chick:

Another American Avocet chick:

Least Tern (Sternula antillarum), adult on nest:

Least Tern chick:

Pied-billed Grebe (Podilymbus podiceps), proud parents:

Pied-billed Grebe chicks:

Pied-billed Grebe parent with chick;

Pied-billed Grebe chick clambering on board:

Pied-billed Grebe with chick on back (yes, young grebe chicks often ride on the backs of their parents):

Gadwall (Mareca strepera) hen with two chicks:

Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) hen;

Mallard hen head portrait:

Mallard chick:

The Heritage Foundation’s COVID-19 Commission Calls for Chinese “Accountability” for US Pandemic Damage

The post Heritage Covid Commission Wants China Accountable… What About Trump? first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Look at most spiral or barred spiral galaxies and you will see multiple regions where stars are forming. These star forming regions are comprised of mostly hydrogen gas with a few other elements for good measure. The first galaxies in the Universe had huge supplies of this star forming gas. Left unchecked they could have burned through the gas quickly, generating enormous amounts of star formation. Life fast though and die young for such an energetic burst of star formation would soon fizzle out leaving behind dead and dying stars. In some way it seems, galaxies seem to regulate their star formation thanks to supermassive black holes at their centre. 

The first galaxies formed about 400 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, during the Epoch known as Reionization. These early galaxies were small and faint, mostly composed of hydrogen and helium, and contained dense clusters of massive, short-lived Population III stars (the first generation of stars.) The intense radiation from these stars ionised the surrounding gas, clearing the fog that permeated space making the universe transparent for the first time. These primordial galaxies began merging and interacting, laying the foundation for the galaxy types seen today.

A new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society explores why galaxies are not as large as astronomers would expect. The research suggests that galaxies, even those that formed first, avoid an early death because they have mechanisms similar to “heart and lungs,” which regulate their “breathing”. Without these regulatory processes our bodies, and galaxies would have aged much faster, resulting in massive galaxies filled with dead and dying stars and devoid of new star formation.

Observations show that galaxies are not so big and full of dying stars having outgrown themselves. It seems something limits their ability to allow gas to form into stars. Astrophysicists at the University of Kent believe they may have the answer: galaxies could be controlling their growth rate through a process not too dissimilar to “breathing.” They compare the supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy to a heart and the supersonic jets emerging from the poles with the radiation and gas they emit to airways feeding a pair of lungs.

The supermassive black holes seem to pulse just like a heart. These pulses cause a shock front to oscillate along the jets like a diaphragm inflating and deflating the lungs. This process transmits energy along the jet slowly counteracting the pull of gravity and slowing gas accretion and star formation. The idea was developed by PhD student Carl Richards and his simulations showed a black hole pulsing like a heart. 

Assisted by magnetic fields, a spiraling wind helps the supermassive black hole in galaxy ESO320-G030 grow. In this illustration, the core of the galaxy is dominated by a rotating wind of dense gas leading outwards from the (hidden) supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center. The motions of the gas, traced by light from molecules of hydrogen cyanide, have been measured with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. Image credit: M. D. Gorski/Aaron M. Geller, Northwestern University, CIERA, the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics.

Richards explains “We realised that there would have to be some means for the jets to support the body – the galaxy’s surrounding ambient gas – and that is what we discovered in our computer simulations,” He continued “The unexpected behaviour was revealed when we analysed the computer simulations of high pressure and allowed the heart to pulse.”

Evidence of ripples just like those in Richards’ simulations, in extra-galactic media have been found in galaxy clusters like the Perseus cluster. These ripples are thought to sustain a galaxy’s environment, though their generation mechanism was unclear. Conventional simulations fail to explain gas flows into galaxies, but the work of the team from the University of Kent may well have answered the question.

Source : How the ‘heart and lungs’ of a galaxy extend its life.

The post Galaxies Regulate their Own Growth so they Don’t Run Out of Star Forming Gas appeared first on Universe Today.

Here’s Bill Maher’s 10-minutes Real Time segment that constitutes his video “op-ed”. This is one of the best such segments I’ve seen.

As the title indicates, Maher thinks that Biden should make a hasty exit. The bad news is that he’s quite enthusiastic about Kamala Harris as his replacement, a choice that I don’t agree with. But the good news is that he also think she’s too unpopular to win. He also likes Gavin Newsom, despite his “slickness” (Maher even suggests a slogan: “I’m havin’ Gavin”).  Further, he’s a fan of Gretchen Whitmer (my favorite candidate) and Mayor Pete (my former favorite candidate). He also suggests five governors who are younger and liberal but not “crazy woke”.

h/t: Rosemary

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Well, we have three batches of photos left, and that leaves two after this post. Don’t make me beg!

Today we have some lovely bird photos, including DUCKS, from Damon Williford in Bay City, Texas. Damon’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here are several bird photos that I captured at a local park back, Resoft County Park, in April. Resoft County Park is located in the southern portion of the Houston Metropolitan area of Texas. It’s a nice place for photography due to the presence of several ponds, an active heron rookery, and the fact that most of the birds are accustomed to humans.

Male Wood Duck (Aix sponsa):

Female Wood Duck:

A pair of Wood Ducks:

A pair of Black-bellied Whistling-ducks (Dendrocygna autumnalis). This is a Neotropical species that has undergone rapid expansion within Texas since the 1980s:

The Egyptian Goose (Alopochen aegyptiaca) is a non-native species that has become established in several cities and towns in Texas:

A pair of Egyptian geese:

An adult Egyptian goose with goslings:

The park hosts both wild and domestic Mallards (Anas platyrhynchos). The bird pictured might be a drake of the wild type. I’m not good at differentiating wild mallards from wild-domestic hybrids or the breeds that are closer to the wild type:

Domestic Mallard:

American Coot (Fulica americana):

Western Cattle Egret (Bubulcus ibis):

An adult Great Egret (Ardea alba) with nestlings:

Eastern Bluebird (Sialia sialis):

Dark matter is curious stuff! As the name suggests, it’s dark making it notoriously difficult to study. Although it’s is invisible, it influences stars in a galaxy through gravity. Now, a team of astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to chart the movements of stars within the Draco dwarf galaxy to detect the subtle gravitational pull of its surrounding dark matter halo. This 3D map required studying nearly two decades of archival data from the Draco galaxy. They found that dark matter piles up more in the centre, as predicted by cosmological models.

Dark matter comprises approximately 27% of the all the mass and energy in the universe but interacts only gravitationally, emitting no light. The idea first – ahem, came to light to explain discrepancies in the rotation curves of galaxies and is detected through its gravitational effects on visible matter. Despite extensive research,  the nature of dark matter remains elusive. Understanding dark matter is crucial for comprehending the composition and evolution of the universe.

Astronomers are getting a new tool to help them in the hunt for Dark Matter. This is a rendering of the BREAD design, which stands for Broadband Reflector Experiment for Axion Detection. The ‘Hershey’s Kiss’-shaped structure funnels potential dark matter signals to the copper-colored detector on the left. The detector is compact enough to fit on a tabletop. Image courtesy BREAD Collaboration

Dark matter has often been described as the invisible ‘glue’ that holds galaxies together. Although galaxies are mostly composed of dark matter, understanding its distribution within them provides an opportunity to understand its nature and relevance to the evolution of the galaxy. Computer simulations predict a dense concentration of dark matter at the core of the galaxy, forming a density cusp. However, numerous observations have shown that dark matter appears more uniformly spread throughout galaxies, contradicting these simulations. 

To study dark matter within galaxies, scientists can analyse the movements of stars, which are influenced primarily by the gravitational pull of dark matter. One common method involves using the Doppler Effect to measure the speed of objects in space—observing changes in the wavelength of light as stars move closer to or further from Earth. Along with moving toward or away from us, stars can also move across the sky. This proper motion, when combined with line of sight measurements allow for the creation of the movement of a star in 3D.

Astronomers have employed NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to study the dynamics of stars within the Draco dwarf galaxy, located about 250,000 light-years from Earth. The Draco galaxy was used because, as a dwarf galaxy, it is relatively small and is believed to have a higher proportion of dark matter than other types of galaxy.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope flies with Earth in the background after a 2002 servicing mission. Credit: NASA.

Over 18 years of observational data from 2004 to 2022 were examined and they painstakingly mapped the precise three-dimensional motions of these stars, drawing from extensive archival data collected by Hubble. This effort has yielded the most accurate understanding to date of how stars move within this small galaxy. Understanding precisely how stars move in galaxies allows for precise maps of dark matter to be created. 

The technique the team have developed is not only of use for the Draco dwarf galaxy but for other galaxies too. The Sculptor dwarf galaxy is already being analysed using the same technique along with the Ursa Minor dwarf galaxy.

Source : NASA’s Hubble Traces Dark Matter in Dwarf Galaxy Using Stellar Motions

The post Mapping the Stars in a Dwarf Galaxy to Reveal its Dark Matter appeared first on Universe Today.

When massive stars detonate as supernovae, they leave often behind a pulsar. These fast rotating stellar corpses have fascinated scientists since their discovery in 1967. One nearby pulsar turns 174 times a second and now, its size has been precisely measured. An instrument on board the International Space Station was used to measure x-ray pulses  from the star. A supercomputer was then used to analyse its properties and found it was 1.4 times the mass of the Sun and measured only 11.4 km across!

The death of a massive stars leads to one of a number of objects but two of them are closely related, the neutron star and the pulsar. Both are formed during the core collapse and supernova explosion that marks the death of a star. All of the components of the atom are squashed together removing all the space between the neutrons to form one MASSIVE neutron. Pulsars are rotating neutron stars with strong magnetic fields that emit beams of electromagnetic radiation from their magnetic poles. These beams become visible from Earth when aligned with our line of sight, creating a pulsating effect, hence the term “pulsar.”

Artist’s illustration of a bright and powerful supernova explosion. (Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss)

One of the nearest pulsars, PSR J0437-4725 lies at 510 light years in the constellation Pictor. It rotates 174 times per second which means it rotates once in just 5.75 milliseconds. Perhaps more mind blowing than its rotational velocity is its size. Imagine 1.4 times the mass of the Sun squashed up into a ball just 11.4 kilometres across – the Sun is 1.39 million kilometres across by comparison! 

This astonishing result of the pulsars diminutive size are the results of precision measurements by a team fo astronomers at the University of Amsterdam. The scientists used data from the NICER X-ray telescope on the ISS, combining it with a method called pulse profile modelling. The data was fed into Snellius, the Dutch national supercomputer and complex statistical models were created. This allowed them to calculate the star’s radius, assisted by mass measurements from Daniel Reardon (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia) and his colleagues at the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array. Not only were the team able to identify precise dimensions, they were also able to map the temperature distribution of the magnetic poles.

The NICER payload, shown here on the outside of the International Space Station. Credit: NASA

The lead researcher, Devarshi Choudhury was very happy with the results ”Before, we were hoping to be able to calculate the radius accurately. And it would be great if we could show that the hot magnetic poles are not directly opposite each other on the stellar surface. And we just managed to do both!”

The team’s paper reports something known as a softer equation of state. This means there is a smaller increase of pressure for a change in density. This implies that the maximum mass of neutron stars is likely lower than previous theories have predicted. An observation that sits well with gravitational wave observations from neutron stars.

Source : Nearest millisecond pulsar has radius of 11.4 kilometres and is 1.4x as heavy as the sun

The post A Close Pulsar Measures 11.4 km Across appeared first on Universe Today.

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss447_Jay_Bhattacharya_2024_07_13.mp3 Download MP3

Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research. He directs Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. Dr. Bhattacharya’s research focuses on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations, with a particular emphasis on the role of government programs, biomedical innovation, and economics. Dr. Bhattacharya’s recent research focuses on the epidemiology of COVID-19 as well as an evaluation of policy responses to the epidemic.

He became famous—or infamous in some circles—for his co-authorship, with Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated lifting COVID-19 restrictions on lower-risk groups to develop herd immunity through widespread infection, “while promoting the fringe notion that vulnerable people could be simultaneously protected from the virus.” (Wikipedia) In a private email to Anthony Fauci, NIH director Francis Collins called the authors of the declaration “fringe epidemiologists” and said that “(it) seems to be getting a lot of attention — and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises.”

That is when he became known as a “fringe epidemiologist”.

In fact, he has published 135 articles in top peer-reviewed scientific journals in medicine, economics, health policy, epidemiology, statistics, law, and public health among other fields. He holds an MD and a PhD in economics, both earned at Stanford University.

Shermer and Bhattacharya discuss:

• loss of trust in medical and scientific institutions (Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins)
• overall assessment of what went right and wrong with the COVID-19 pandemic
• testing, masking, social isolation
• Is the cure worse than the disease?
• closing of schools, restaurants, salons, parks, beaches, hiking trails, etc.
• the cost to the economy of the shut downs
• the cost to the education of children of the shut downs
• Precautionary Principle
• comparative method: which countries and states did better or worse?
• Lab Leak hypothesis vs. Zoonomic hypothesis
• living with SARS-CoV-2 and its variants
• RFK, Jr. and his conspiracy theories
• debating anti-vaxxers (Rogan and elsewhere)
• treatments: hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, remdesivir, Vitamin D, Paxlovid, Tamiflu, retroviral medicines, monoclonal antibodies
• high risk vs. low risk groups; age, sex, race, pregnancy, weight, preconditions, immune compromised
• myocarditis, Robert Malone, mRNA vaccines, Joe Rogan, RFKJ, Peter Hotez
• The Great Barrington Declaration (“focused protection” of the people most at risk)
• Wall Street Journal OpEd: “Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?”, which argued there was little evidence to support shelter-in-place orders and quarantines
• In March 2021, Bhattacharya called the COVID-19 lockdowns the “biggest public health mistake we’ve ever made” and argued that “The harm to people is catastrophic”. Blacklisted by Twitter.

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