Is Time Travel Possible? Two Physicists from the University of Queensland think it is.

If you think about it, over the last four hundred years humanity’s growing science and technology has given us an enormous amount of control over many aspects of nature. The speed and distance we can travel has steadily increased, as has both the size and number of structures we can build. We grow more food than ever and whether we like it or not we are even changing the weather. Can you say climate change! We have discovered the very code of life itself and begun to understand how to alter and mold living things to suit our desires. We now have many ways of controlling space and material objects that would seem like magic to our ancestors of a thousand or more years ago.

Thanks to our control over Nature we have been able to build ourselves a world completely unlike anything in Nature. (Credit: Invisiverse)

But we still have virtually no control over time. Oh, we can measure it’s passing with an accuracy that, at the risk of repeating myself, is almost magical.  We can’t stop time of however, and although Einstein’s two theories of Relativity do describe how the passage of time can be slowed that slowing requires either velocities approaching the speed of light or immense gravitational fields such as those around black holes.

A modern Atomic Clock is accurate to something like one second in a billion years. Scientists can use that precision to make measurements of phenomenon that last only a billionth of a second. (Credit: WatchPro USA)

And even theoretically we can’t go backward in time. In fact many scientists have steadfastly maintained that time travel to the past is logically impossible because of something known as the grandfather paradox.

What is the grandfather paradox? Well it works like this. What if you were to travel backward in time and murder your grandfather before he fathered your own father? In that case you would never have been born and if you were never born how could you go backward in time to kill someone?

In the Grandfather Paradox the very existence of a Time Machine leads to a Logical Absurdity. (Credit: YouTube)

This idea of the dire consequences to the present of doing anything in the past has been the central idea in many Science Fiction stories like Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Sound of Thunder’ as well as movies such as ‘Back to the Future’. Many scientists feel that the logic of the grandfather paradox is so tight that traveling into the past is simply a pipe dream better left to science fiction writers.

In Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Sound of Thunder’ hunters travel into the past to hunt a T Rex. Despite their best efforts they change the past, changing their present! (Credit: Deviant Art)
In ‘Back to the Future’ the same idea is used for humour as Marty has to repair the damage he’s done to the past or he’s a goner! (Credit: Universal Pictures)

Still theoretical physicists and mathematicians looking for solutions to Einstein’s field equations occasionally came up with equations that, while physically hard to interpret seemed to include the possibility of going backward in time. Collectively these solutions are known as ‘Closed Timelike Curves’ or CTCs and where initially discovered back in 1937 by Jacob van Stockum and later extended by Kurt Gödel in 1949. Basically a CTC describes the movement of a material particle that loops endlessly through time and space in a circle. This would imply that the existence of a particle following a CTC would be extremely limited in both time and space.

Every observer exist at a single point in space-time. Since nothing in the Universe can move faster than the speed of light that observer can only be effected by events within his Past Light Cone while he can only effect events with his Future Light Cone. (Credit: Wiktionary)
Under Certain conditions however, such as near a black hole, a light cone can be tilted. Continuous tilting results in a Closed Timelike Curve. (Credit: SlideShare)

Physically it is hard to understand how any particle following a CTC could interact with other more normal particles. Such a path in Space-Time would seem to imply the possibility of events happening without causes since to the normal particle the CTC particle can appear to pop into existence without reason. At the same time to an outside observer a particle inside a CTC might appear to experience an event before its cause!

Because of such paradoxes many physicists expect, or perhaps hope that an eventual unified theory of gravity with quantum mechanics might eliminate CTCs as even being mathematically possible. Other physicists however prefer to try to make sense of these weird solutions to the field equations.

One of those physicists is Germain Tobar, a student at the School of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Queensland in Australia. With the assistance of his colleague Dr. Fabio Costa, Tobar has analyzed CTCs in such a way that he maintains opens up the possibility of time travel into the past.

Germain Tobar (r) with his advisor Dr. Fabio Costa. (Credit: News.Com.au)

But what about the grandfather paradox? What about the problem of actions in the past changing the present? Well in Tobar’s analysis what happens if you were to try to change the past then the universe would react so as to avoid the paradox, to repair the damage you have caused in other words.

I won’t go into the math. (Actually I am going through the Math, trying to remember what I learned in my course in General Relativity but I won’t impose it on you.) However, it appears to me that in Tobar’s treatment if you were to go into the past and kill your grandfather then when you returned to your present you would find yourself with a different grandfather or something equivalent. Sounds to me kind of like what Marty and Doctor Brown did to repair things in ‘Back to the Future’ except that this repairing would occur naturally, automatically.

I have to admit I have real problems with that idea. Remember, the past starts just an instant ago! What if you were to step into a time machine and go back ten minutes and murder yourself just as you’re stepping into your time machine? I’m sorry but I can’t imagine how the Universe could repair that damage, how it could change things so much so quickly in order to somehow avoid the paradox!

Maybe it would work something like this? (Credit: xkcd)

Time Travel would be the ultimate power, the ability to undo all of our mistakes, to right all of the wrongs we’ve done. Perhaps for that very reason it is the one power that will always elude us.

The Nobel Prizes for Science in 2020 are Announced.

Early October is always that time of year when we all take a moment from the mundane news to recognize those scientists who are making fundamental contributions to our knowledge of the world around us. The cause of this annual ceremony is of course the announcement of the winners of the Nobel Prizes for the natural sciences of Physics, Chemistry, and Physiology.

The Nobel Prize. Oh, there’s also about a million bucks involved as well. (Credit: Phys.org)

This year the Physiology, i.e. Medicine prize was announced first and has been awarded jointly to Harvey J. Alter, Charles M. Rice, both of the United States, along with British Born Michael Houghton. Fittingly in this year of the Covid-19 pandemic the work for which these three scientists have been recognized deals with the identification of and drug treatments for the deadly viral disease, Hepatitis C.

This Year’s prize winners for Medicine are (left to right) Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice. (Credit: Firstpost)

Hepatitis in general is classified as an inflammation of the liver and is most commonly caused by one of five different viruses giving rise to Hepatitis A, B, C, D and E. Of these Hepatitis A and B were the first to be studied and vaccines are now available to provide immunity against those forms of the disease. The cause of Hepatitis C however remained elusive for many years, making the search for effective means of treatment difficult.

Hepatitis is really several diseases that all cause an inflammation of the liver. Hepatitis is a very serious disease that if left untreated often results in death. (Credit: DW)

It was in the 1960s that Doctor Alter succeeded in demonstrating that Hepatitis C was in fact a completely different disease from the types known at that time, A and B. Due to Alter’s work Hepatitis C was for a time actually known as Hepatitis ‘non-A’, ‘non-B’.

Following up on Alter’s work Doctor Houghton then was able to isolate the genetic structure of a previously unknown virus in Hepatitis patients. Finally it was Doctor Rice who showed that the new virus alone could cause Hepatitis. Once the cause of Hepatitis C was known tests and treatment techniques could be developed for the virus so that today Hepatitis C is a treatable disease.

Like all viruses the Hep C virus is simply a strand of genetic material, RNA in this case, surrounded by a protective shell of proteins and lipids. (Credit: Wikipedia)

The Physics prize came second and was also awarded to a trio of scientists. Sir Roger Penrose of Oxford University in the UK received half of the award while Reinhard Genzel of Germany and Andrea Ghez of the United States shared the other half. The three were all honoured for their pioneering work on Black Holes.

The 2020 Nobel Physics recipients are (left to right) Sir Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez. (Credit: Hindustan Times)

In fact it was Sir Roger, along with the late Stephen Hawking who were the first physicists to take seriously the idea that the odd solutions to Einstein’s field equations might have a physical reality. (Einstein himself could never made up his mind on whether or not black holes existed.) Penrose and Hawking spent decades mathematically working out the details of what a black hole would look like (pun intended). For much of that time they continued working despite the fact that there was absolutely no observational evidence to confirm any of their theories.

Perhaps the two men most associated with Black Holes. Stephen Hawking (l) and of course Albert Einstein. (Credit: ABC)

In fact much of the first evidence for black holes came from the work of Genzel and Ghez who were investigating the supermassive object at the center of our galaxy known as Sagittarius A. Using some of the world’s largest telescopes Genzel and Ghez developed techniques to see through the clouds of gas in the Milky Way’s center. Those techniques enabled them to study Sagittarius A and demonstrate that it was an immense black hole, confirming many of the theories of Penrose and Hawking. Supermassive black holes like Sagittarius A are now thought to exist at the center of every large galaxy.

In the constellation of Sagittarius lies the center of our Milky Way galaxy. There sits a supermassive black hole millions of times as massive as our Sun. (Credit: NASA)

So if Sir Roger is now getting a Nobel Prize why isn’t Hawking? The answer to that question is easy, he’s dead and according to the terms of Alfred Nobel’s will that set up the Nobel prizes only living persons can receive the award. If you think that’s not fair, well it really isn’t. However, this is actually not the first time that a scientist has died before his work was sufficiently confirmed to be considered for the prize.

Actually I rather doubt that any of this year’s physics recipients would have won their awards if it hadn’t been for last year’s ‘photograph’ of a black hole, see my post of 17 April 2019. That image was the confirmation of many theories about black holes and undoubtedly convinced the Nobel committee that it was time for researchers studying black holes to finally be recognized.

The first ‘photo’ of a Black Hole, actually taken at microwave frequencies. This is the supermassive black hole in M87 and the accretion disk around it. (Credit: NPR)

No such prompting was required in order to choose the recipients of this year’s chemistry prize. Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin and Jennifer A. Doudna were honoured for their work on the gene editing tool CRISPR. See my posts of 5 August 2017, 1 December 2018 and 18 Aug 2019 for discussions of just how enormous a breakthrough CRISPR is.

CRISPR is the most accurate and precise tool yet discovered for the editing of genetic material. (Credit: YouTube)

The award to Doctors Charpentier and Doudna is unusual for several reasons. One reason is that the first major papers describing CRISPR were published less than a decade ago in 2011 and 2012. Nobel prizes are normally awarded for work that dates back several decades, remember what I said about Roger Penrose and Stephan Hawking above. This is in order to make certain that a great deal of conformational evidence has been accumulated supporting the work before the prize is awarded.

Over the last half dozen years however CRISPR has proven to be such a marvelous tool for genetic studies that the evidence of its importance is overwhelming. CRISPR has given science the most precise and useful tool that it has ever had for literally changing the code of life itself and we are only at the beginning of understanding all that it can do.

The other reason that this year’s chemistry prize is notable is because it represents the very first time that two women have shared the prize. It is unfortunately true that the majority of Nobel Prize winners are white men, with a small number of Asian men thrown in.

Like Hypatia of Alexandria Women have often made important contributions to science and mathematics. (Credit: Historic Mysteries)

Personally I want both greater female and minority participation in the sciences because the more scientists we have, whatever their colour or sex, the more discoveries we will get. For that reason I congratulate Doctors Charpentier and Doudna and hope that other women will soon join them in making equally important advances in our understanding of the Universe. Like Doctors Alter, Rice, Houghton, Penrose, Genzel and Ghez, and hey, let’s not forget Hawking, they all deserve our recognition for their work of discovery. 

Book Review: ‘Evil Geniuses, The Unmaking of America, a Recent History’ by Kurt Anderson.

 Forty years ago the United States was in the midst of a contentious presidential election. The incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter was being challenged by Republican B-grade movie actor turned politician Ronald Reagan.

Even at the time America could sense the political shift that Reagan’s defeat of then President Carter entailed but after 40 years the true extent of the damage is only now becoming clear. (Credit: Snopes.com)

Carter was widely viewed as a kind and gentle but weak leader who was unable to solve the country’s many problems. And America had a lot of problems back then. Not only was the economy sluggish, with low growth and very high interest rates but thanks to the Vietnam war and the Watergate scandal the average American’s trust in their government was at an all time low.

Reagan promised a new vision for the country. Government was the problem he asserted. His plan was to lower taxes, especially on the wealthy, and shrink the size of government. With their increased wealth the rich would invest more in the economy he told voters.  With all of that new investment the economy would grow at a faster rate than even during prosperous times of the 50s and 60s. The economy would grow so fast he assured us that before long the benefits would ‘Trickle Down’ to everyone so that ‘A rising tide would raise all boats’.

How Trickle Down economics was supposed to work. (Credit: Economics Help)

With his fatherly, show business personality Reagan easily won the 1980 election and proceeded to turn his agenda into policy. Since Reagan’s presidency that mantra of ‘Lower Taxes’ and ‘Shrink the Government’ has been gospel for the Republican Party, an act of faith without any evidence to support it. As the rich get richer, they still promise, the wealth will someday trickle down.

After 40 years how it actually feels like Trickle Down economics works. (Credit: St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

Regulations were another target; they just got in the way of Big Business making America a wealthier nation. Get rid of all of that anti-trust, anti-financial, pro-environment government meddling. The ‘Invisible Hand’ of a ‘Free Market’ would solve all of America’s problems.

Again, how the Invisible Hand is supposed to work. (Credit: Market Business News)

Well over the next forty years the rich certainly got richer, the rest of us are still waiting for the trickle to start. In fact while the real wealth of the top 1% of Americans has quadrupled the wealth of the middle 50% has remained virtually the same and the wealth of the lowest quarter of Americans has actually fallen by about a third.

Since Reagan’s time the Invisible Hand has lifted the wealth of the top 1% by quite a lot. The bottom 50%, not so much! (Credit: Vox)

‘Evil Geniuses, the Unmaking of America, a Recent History’ by journalist Kurt Anderson is the story of how the people of the United States were duped into accepting a flawed, indeed a dangerous economic plan. It’s the story of how in the 60s a few ultra-conservative, New Deal hating politicians and economists began to build a movement that in the 80s not only dominated the Republican Party but received the tacit consent of many Democrats.

Cover of ‘Evil Geniuses’ by Kurt Anderson. (Credit: Amazon)
Author and Journalist Kurt Anderson. (Credit: The Village Vioce)

But the conservative movement in the US was about more than just the economy. The ‘Free Market’ conservatives not only co-opted the support of the ‘Moral Majority’ religious right but even bargained with the racist, anti-immigrant hate mongers in America for their support. This latter accommodation with the old white supremacists was started by none other than Richard Nixon as his ‘Southern Strategy’.

Senator Strom Thurmond was one of many segregationist Democrats who switched to the Republican party in opposition to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. (Credit: Simple Wikipedia)

In ‘Evil Geniuses’ Kurt Anderson gives you all of the details of that monumental con game and even more importantly makes all of the connections. You’ll discover how the Koch brothers and other millionaires used their huge fortunes to fund conservative think tanks and endow university professorships with the sole intention of providing intellectual justification for their wholesale theft of the wealth of America. You’ll learn about how Roger Ailes, before creating the ‘fair and balanced’ FOX News was executive producer for Russ Limbaugh. Together the two demonstrated how to turn anger and hatred into entertainment, politics as show business laying out the path that would eventually lead to the ultimate hate monger Donald Trump.

Roger Alies (l) helped create right wing hate media with Rush Limbaugh (r). Today it has devolved into Breitbart, One America Network and even such underground conspiracies as Qanon. (Credit: YouTube)

There are far too many details to mention here, too many connections between the principal players; you’ll just have to read “Evil Geniuses’ to get the whole story. As Kurt Anderson himself says several times the story reads almost like a conspiracy theory except that, with the exception of a few individuals like the Koch brothers, all of the conspiring was done in public, there was virtually no attempt made to hide anything. Several times Mister Anderson points to the character of Gordon Gekko in the movie ‘Wall Street’ claiming that ‘Greed is Good’ as an example of the brazen economic immorality that has dominated right wing politics for the last 40 years.

Actor Michael Douglas as Wall Street executive Gordon Gekko. The unfortunate thing is that there are literally thousands of ‘businessmen’ who look upon Gekko as a role model.

I do have a few small criticisms of ‘Evil Geniuses’ however. For one thing Mister Anderson needs to learn how to present data in either graph or table form. Throughout ‘Evil Geniuses’ we are giving a good deal of statistics about GDP or unemployment or income inequality exclusively in prose form, not the easiest way to absorb a large number of facts. I know that Mister Anderson is a magazine writer and editor not a scientist, but he must know some science journalists who could give him a few pointers on how to use graphs and tables.

Let me give one example. Anderson discusses a survey where people in the US are shown pie charts illustrating the wealth breakdown in two countries, i.e. how much the top 1% own, the next 10% own on down to the people at the bottom. The people surveyed aren’t told which countries are represented, they are in fact the US and Sweden, and are asked, based on the information from the graphs only, which country they would rather live in. Of course more than 90% chose Sweden. Well I think that the point could have been made more effectively if the pie graphs themselves had been shown! If Anderson had access to the survey’s results he could have gotten access to the pie graphs and just shown them! Really, in my opinion a dozen or so graphs or tables would have greatly improved the punch of ‘Evil Geniuses’.

See how much better it is to show data rather than try to talk about it! A picture is worth a thousand words after all. (Credit: Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility)

 Other than that I give my highest approval to ‘Evil Geniuses’ by Kurt Anderson. It is without doubt an important and well researched book in these trying times for our country. In addition to being important however it also succeeds in being an absorbing, enjoyable book, a combination not at all easy to accomplish.

TV Review: ‘Lovecraft Country’ and a few remarks about the works of H. P. Lovecraft, and his racism.

“Lovecraft Country’ is a new series on HBO from executive producers Misha Green and J. J. Abrams. Based on a novel by Matt Ruff ‘Lovecraft Country’ is a chronicle of the adventures of a young black couple Atticus Freeman, played by actor Jonathan Majors, and Leticia Lewis, played by Jurnee Smollet-Bell. Taking place in the 1950s in ‘Lovecraft Country’ Atticus and Leticia, along with their relatives and friends must not only endure the prevalent racism of the time but also survive the machinations of a secret occult society of rich white people.

Official HBO poster for Lovecraft Country starring Jonathan Majors and Jurnee Smollet-Bell.(Credit: HBO)

Now let’s be honest right from the start. As an old, college educated white man I have had little personal experience of what it’s like to be discriminated against. (And by little in the instance I mean none!) I have, in my life and career known a wide diversity of different people and I hope that I have treated them based upon what kind of person they are rather than the group to which they belong. I had thought, just a few years ago that as a society we were making progress toward racial equality but lately it has become painfully obvious that bigotry runs deep in this country, and will take many more years to eliminate, if indeed we ever do.

And that’s one of the interesting aspects of ‘Lovecraft Country’. By illustrating some of the mechanics of historic Jim Crow racism such as ‘Sundown Towns’ (no blacks allowed after sundown) and tour guides for blacks (listing restaurants, motels and other establishments in cities and towns that serve blacks and are ‘safe’ to go to) you can acquire some feeling for what it was like to be black in a segregated America.

Atticus (l) with his Uncle George who publishes a ‘Travel Guide for Negros. There really were such guides back in Jim Crow America. (Credit: Insider)

But of course ‘Lovecraft Country’ is a supernatural horror show and quite a good one, with some familiar monsters such as ghosts and vampires being used in very unusual ways as well as some completely new otherworldly creatures. Despite the title ‘Lovecraft Country’ makes no use of H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘Olde Ones’ such as Yog-Sothoth or Nyarlathotep although Cthulhu does make a very brief appearance in a dream sequence right at the very beginning of episode one. Incidentally Cthulhu gets beaten up by Jackie Robinson with a baseball bat, something I admit I could never have imagined.

Jackie Robinson about to beat on Cthulhu in a dream at the beginning of ‘Lovecraft Country’. (Credit: HBO)

The important difference however is that in a Lovecraft story the humans in contact with or worshipping the daemons and monsters are ‘men of a very low, mixed blooded, and mentally aberrant type’. The quote is from Lovecraft’s story the ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ and is just one example of the way that Lovecraft usually described minorities.

Waiting ever in the shadows, Cthulhu is a symbol of our fear of the unknown. (Credit: Mod DB)

In ‘Lovecraft Country’ on the other hand most of the wizards are rich white people. This is in fact a deliberate twisting of the racism in Lovecraft’s own works and when combined with the normal, mundane bigotry of the 1950s does succeed in making young, attractive, well dressed, rich white people seem like monsters. And remember this is an old white guy talking!

In Lovecraft Country a secret cabal of rich white men are wizards pursuing Atticus because, despite being black he is the last direct descendant of their founder! (Credit: HBO Watch)

Another difference between Lovecraft’s stories and ‘Lovecraft Country’ is sex. There’s quite a bit of hanky panky going on in ‘Lovecraft Country’, most of it pertinent to the storyline. On the other hand it would be hard to have less sex than there is in Lovecraft’s works.

Technically “Lovecraft Country’ is very well made, the special effects are quite good, at times even chilling. The performances of the actors are also engaging, especially that of Majors and Smollet-Bell. Several of the ‘minor characters’ have also been given storylines of their own in addition to their parts in the main story of Atticus and Leticia.

One of the monsters in ‘Lovecraft Country’ is the Shoggoth. Although different from Lovecraft’s Shoggoths it is still a fearsome creature. (Credit: The New York Times)

I’ve just finished watching episode seven of ‘Lovecraft Country’ out of a total of ten so there are three episodes left to the series. If you haven’t started watching it yet don’t worry, this is HBO so I’m certain that they’ll be rebroadcasting the entire series before long. If you’re the type who enjoys a good supernatural horror story you should certainly check it out.

But before I go I would like to take a few minutes to discuss what kind of writer H.P. Lovecraft was. Did he write Science Fiction or Fantasy or Horror or what? Of course you could just say that Lovecraft, like most storytellers wrote whatever he felt like, mixing all three categories as necessary in order to tell his tale.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft. He looks more like an accountant than the genius who imagined countless worlds beyond our own! (Credit: Reddit)

That’s a bit of a cop out however. I think the best way to understand Lovecraft writings are to recognize that they all deal with the strange, the unfamiliar, the alien. Lovecraft never could have written the kind of stories and novels that a Jane Austin or Ernst Hemingway or others like them wrote. Writing stories about a couple who fall in love or a man who faces up to his fears…how boring, how pedestrian, give me a tentacled monstrosity from beyond the stars!

Another member of ‘ye Great Old Ones’ is Yog Sothoth, a formless mass of malevolence. (Credit: StarfinderWiki)

And Lovecraft’s fixation on that which is different is almost certainly connected with his streak of racism, literally treating someone, or something unfairly and unjustly because you perceive them as alien. Throughout his works Lovecraft often uses the same negative, pejorative adjectives to describe his extraterrestrial god-daemons as he does to describe non-white humans. Psychologically it is called xenophobia, a neurotic fear of anything that is different.

Living in what was a pretty racist period in history Lovecraft’s xenophobia paradoxically not only fueled his vivid imagination but also twisted it into something that at times became morbid and sub-human. I freely admit that I love the way Lovecraft could describe a Universe that is both larger and more diverse than most writers, most people could ever imagine. However I also recognize that Lovecraft used the immenseness of the Universe as a source of fear and loathing, not the place of wonder and beauty that I see in all of its diversity.

But if we are to call ourselves rational creatures shouldn’t we be able to control our fears and learn to appreciate everything the Universe has to offer? (Credit: Notable Quotes)

‘Lovecraft Country’ has something of that same attitude; basically just that the Universe is a big scary place and we human beings should be afraid of it. Personally I may enjoy stories built on that sort of framework, as I enjoy ‘Lovecraft Country’. In the long run however, I do prefer those Science Fiction stories that have a more hopeful view of the Universe and our future in it.  

So what should we do with H. P. Lovecraft? Should we follow the advice of Shakespeare’s Mark Anthony when he says “The evil that men do live after them, the good it oft interred with their bones, so let it be with Lovecraft?” Remember Shakespeare himself said quite a few racist things. Do we throw away everything Lovecraft ever did? Do we censor the past in a vain effort to clean it up so that it cannot offend our modern sensibilities?

Intended to be anti-racist, ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ are now considered to be rather embarrassing! How far should we go in trying to ‘correct’ the mistakes of the past? (Credit: Medium)

Perhaps we should do what ‘Lovecraft Country’ does, turn racism around on itself and thereby demonstrate that it is really the racists, and racism itself that is truly ‘vile, loathsome and sub-human”!!

Destruction of Archaeology sites around the World could forever erase the last traces of long ago cultures.

 It is often said that history is written by the winners. Over the past 100 years or so however many of the discoveries made by the science of archaeology have provided a more balanced view of human history, shining a light on some of the forgotten peoples from the past.

For those cultures whose written records are lost, if they ever existed, archaeology is the only means we have to learn anything about them. (Credit: Phys.org)

To recover that knowledge it is of course important that there still be archaeological locations and artifacts from the distant past that can be excavated and studied. However oftentimes throughout history the remains of the past have suffered because of the needs of succeeding generations. One prime example of this would be the city of Troy, which was rebuilt, time and time again during the classical period. Each new layer of habitation causing damage to the earlier layers beneath it.

The city of Troy actually consists of at least nine cities built one on top of the other. Homer’s Troy was either layer 6 or 7 and much of the evidence was destroyed when the later layers were built on top of them. (Credit: www.troyexcavations.com)

Of course those people of ancient times could be forgiven for not preserving the past, what few resources they had were needed just to keep them alive. It’s really only been in the last 200 years or so that human society has been able to afford archaeological research of any kind. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean that archaeology and economic progress no longer come into any kind conflict.

One very significant such conflict recently became big news in the land down under. It is thought that the first humans to reach Australia may have done so as much as 50,000 years ago and that the aboriginal population there remained in almost complete isolation until the late 18th century.

The first humans reached Australia about 50,000 years ago (KYA means Thousand Years Ago). They spread out quickly and within 10,000 years the entire continent was inhabited. (Credit: The Conversation)

That long period of isolation makes Australia a very important labouratory for the study of human societies and how they change and develop over time. Unfortunately the aboriginal population in Australia never grew very large nor did they ever develop cities or settlements of any kind. That makes any archaeological remains in Australia both very rare, and very valuable.

The musical instrument the didgeridoo is a well known symbol of Australian aboriginal culture. (Credit: Pinterest)

Which is why the destruction of two caves in Juukan George in the remote Pilbara region of western Australia by the mining company Rio Tinto is such a tragedy. Initial surveys of the caves over the last few years had found several traces of human activity, stone and bone tools along with other animal remains and even a lock of human hair. When dated the artifacts were found to be about 46,000 years old making them some of the earliest evidence for human habitation in Australia.

The two caves at Juukan George. Looks exactly like the sort of place a stone age culture would occupy but we’ll never know the extent of the occupation thanks to the mining company Rio Tinto whose engineers you can already see working in the upper background. (Credit: Jacobin)

None of that mattered to Rio Tinto, there was iron ore in the hills that contained the caves and they wanted it, and they wanted it now. So it was that in May of 2020 the two caves were blasted out of existence in order to clear the way for mining operations. Just another example of short sighted corporate greed leading to the loss of something that can never be replaced.

I dare say that this was the attitude of the corporate executives at Rio Tinto when they destroyed the Juukan caves. (Credit: Robert Steveson)

Not that Rio Tinto did anything illegal. The company had a 2013 agreement from the government of western Australia giving them permission to mine the site and in the days leading up to the detonation they gathered all of their corporate lawyers in case the Puutu Kunti Kurrama or some other indigenous people’s organization tried to obtain a judge’s injunction in an effort to stop the blasting operation.

Like a great wound in Mother Earth modern mining operations are so destructive of the local environment that the damage can last for decades. (Credit: New York Post)

Unfortunately it was only after the destruction at Juukan George that the protests and questions from government officials began. A month after the caves were destroyed Rio Tinto was forced to publish an apology for their cultural banditry. Since that time the company’s board of directors have forced out the CEO Jean-Sebastien Jacques and his top two assistants. In typical corporate fashion the trio had their yearly bonuses taken away BUT they reached an amicable departure settlement with the company, which I bet was worth more than the bonuses.

Protesters rally outside the Rio Tinto office after the destruction of Australian Indigenous sacred sites in Perth, June 9, 2020. Rio Tinto chief executive Jean-Sebastien Jacques will leave the Anglo-Australian mining giant by March over the destruction of the sacred sites, the company said on Friday, Sept. 11, 2020. (Richard Wainwright/AAP Image via AP)

In the words of Rio Tinto’s chairman Simon Thompson, “…what happened at Juukan was wrong.” To try to recover something of the company’s image he and the other Rio Tinto stockholders have agreed to help promote the preservation of other aboriginal heritage sites in the future.

But I’ll bet you they are still taking that iron ore from Juukan George!

P.S. News has just been released that the people of the Island of Bougainville in the nation of Papua New Guinea are accusing the Rio Tinto Corporation of releasing poisons such as mercury into the rivers of the island from an abandoned copper and gold mine. The residents of Bougainville maintain that they have suffered from the environmental policies of Rio Tinto for years but since the mine has stopped production the company has made no attempt to clean up the site or prevent a possible disaster happening to the people of Bougainville.

The Rio Tinto gold and copper mine on Bougainville, now abandoned. Why isn’t the company required to restore the site to something like it’s original state. Instead it was simply left to leak dangerous elements like mercury into the local water systems. (Credit: Mining .com)

Why does this news about Rio Tinto not surprise me?

Western Wildfires, yet another disastrous result of Climate Change.

Let me just take a moment before we start to address the nonsensical issue of whether we should be calling the damage done to our environment by the emission of huge amounts of greenhouse gasses global warming or climate change. I look at it this way; the greenhouse gasses are causing the Earth to warm, that’s global warming. That warming then directly causes a large variety of different problems, everything from sea level rise, more intense tropical storms to excessive droughts. That’s climate change.

Multiply this image tens of thousands of times to get an idea of the pollution we’re just pouring into the atmosphere. Can anyone really believe it’s not having any effect on our planet? (Credit: Save Our Eco)

In other words, greenhouse gasses cause global warming. Global warming then causes the different aspects of climate change.

The greenhouse effect in a nutshell. The warming of the Earth by CO2 and other gasses hs been known now for almost two centuries, and is easy to verify in a lab, so how can anyone deny it? (Credit: NIWA)

Honestly though, it really doesn’t matter what you call it so long as you recognize the damage that we are doing to the only planet we have and are willing to do something to solve the problem. Whether you call it global warming or climate change it’s still an ever growing danger that we have to face.

This year’s Atlantic Hurricane season has been so severe that we’ve already run out of names for storms and had to resort to used the Greek alphabet, and there’s still a month left go! (Credit: NBC DWF)

And the evidence of how dangerous the situation is becoming grows every day. This year’s Atlantic hurricane season is demolishing all previous records for the number of storms but today I’d like to talk about the crisis in the western part of the US due to the unprecedented number and intensity of wildfires.

Like the hurricanes in the Atlantic the number of wildfires in the western US this year is simply unprecedented. (Credit: National Geographic)

Now I used to live in California’s silicon valley, also known as the San Francisco Bay Area, during the 1980s so I am personally familiar with how large areas of California can go from March to November without a single drop of rainfall. I can remember being warned about the dangers of drought conditions, I have seen how square kilometers of grass and brush will turn brown because of lack of water and I have myself witnessed several, small wildfires. I know from personal experience that wildfires are just a natural part of California’s ecology.

I have driven across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco more than a hundred times but because of the smoke and glow of the wildfires I can barely recognize it. (Credit: Deadline)

However the extent of the fires now burning not just in California but throughout the western half of the US is far beyond anything in human experience. When I see some of the images coming out of San Francisco, coming from places I know very well, turned orange by the smoke and distant glow of massive fires I’m chilled. That hellscape is not the California I knew.

In just the past month of August the western US has seen a number of unprecedented weather and fire conditions. A fire tornado was observed for the first time ever just north of Lake Tahoe. The hottest temperature ever reliably recorded on Earth’s surface, 54.5ºC (130ºF), was measured in Death Valley. A dry thunderstorm swept across Northern California sparking 11,000 lightning strikes that ignited over 300 fires, two of which grew to become the largest even seen in the state. So far this year over 7 million acres of forest land has been burned, a staggering amount far surpassing any previous year’s total, and the fire season isn’t over yet.

The highest temperature ever recorded just recently occured in California’s Death Valley. (Credit: Forbes)
Dry lightning, lightning without rain, is another feature of California’s extreme weather. (Credit: CNN.com)

Meteorologically what is happening out west is that the increasing temperatures are leading to the growth of a massive ‘heat dome’, a high pressure system that becomes stuck in the same region of the Earth due to the jet streams. These heat domes have led to severe drought conditions causing the death of millions of trees that provide even more fuel for the fires triggered by the heat.

A Massive high pressure system has parked itself over the western US causing a historic heat wave. (Credit: CBS News)

The statistics back up the idea that what we are seeing is an ongoing trend rather than a singular, extraordinary season. Although the National Interagency Fire Center only began keeping more accurate records in 2000 those 20 years of records for California are enough to illustrate the alarming increase in the number of acres of forest burnt each year.

Acres of California woodlands destroyed by fire over the last 20 years.. (Credit: Wikipedia)

And remember the total for 2020 was as of the 11th of September and has grown considerably since then. Adding in the land area burnt in the other western states and the total area of forest destroyed now comes to something larger than the entire state of New Jersey.

But California isn’t unique; the golden state is just a bit out in front of the rest of us in the changes happening due to climate change. Back in August the Midwest States, especially Iowa, suffered badly from a rare storm system known as a derecho, a wall of storms hundreds of kilometers in width. The straight line winds developed in a derecho can be as strong as those in a tornado but the damage caused is spread out over a much wider path. In addition to massive destruction to homes and other structures several hundred square kilometers of crops were destroyed, a real tragedy in the agricultural heartland of America.

Just some of the destruction caused by the derecho storm that swept across the plains states in August. (Credit: CNN.com)

Once more we know what is happening, Earth’s rising temperatures simply means that more energy is being pumped into the weather systems around the world. More energy means more severe weather of all kinds, more severe hurricanes and more sever droughts, more and stronger tornadoes and just stronger storms in general.

And all just because we refuse to shift our energy production from quick, easy, cheap fossil fuels, which will run out eventually anyway, to longer lasting, sustainable forms of energy production. We all know that the long term cost of staying on our present path will be enormously greater than any short term savings. When will we finally find the strength of will to do what we must?

Election 2020: The Economy

I guess just about everyone in the world knows by now that we here in the U.S.A. are having a Presidential Election this November. Now in this year’s election the choice could not be starker but it’s important in every election to get past the rhetoric and name calling to try to look at the facts and to me facts mean numbers. Therefore over the next several weeks I will be looking at the issues in the race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden as objectively as I can.

The Choice in this year’s election. Donald Trump (l) versus Joe Biden (r). (Credit: The Atlantic)

In this post I will be taking a look at the US economy, comparing how it has performed under Donald Trump and comparing that to both his promises concerning economic growth but also against that the our Previous President Barack Obama, whom Joe Biden served as Vice-President.

Now in most elections the economy is by far the most important issue. This year however other issues, particularly the Covid-19 Pandemic, have pretty much pushed it aside but nevertheless the economy remains one issue where it is possible to point to unequivocal facts, job growth, GDP growth and federal budget deficits. Because of the quantitative nature of the economy it is possible to make objective assessments.

This year however the economy has suffered a devastating blow because of the Covid-19 outbreak, an event that Donald Trump cannot be blamed for. In order to be fair therefore I will only use the economic numbers from Trump’s first three years as President and compare them to the economy of Barack Obama’s last three years in office, as well as Trump’s own promises about the economy made during his campaign in 2016.

Claims for unemployment exploded in March of 2020. No administration could have been prepared for that initial disaster so economic comparisons for the Trump administration are only valid for the period before Covid-19. (Credit: USA Today)

Let’s start with the jobs figures because that always seems to be the economic measurement most important to politicians. In the first three years of his presidency, again before covid-19 hit, the US economy under Donald Trump gained six million, five hundred and nineteen thousand jobs (6,519,000) an impressive number. That’s an average of 181,000 jobs every month, bringing the unemployment percentage down to a very low 3.6%.

However it has to be remembered that Trump inherited a very strong, job creating economy from his predecessor Barack Obama. Unemployment when Trump took office was already very low, only 4.7%. In fact during the last three years of his presidency the labour market under Obama gained over eight million jobs, 8,067,000 to be exact. More than a million and a half more jobs than in Trump’s economy. The average monthly job gain for Obama works out to be 224,000 jobs. In fact 25% more jobs were created during Obama’s last three years than were created during Trump’s first three years. And remember Obama inherited an economy in the throes of the worst financial crisis since the great depression, the unemployment percentage was 7.8% when Obama took office and dropping rapidly.

Unemployment spiked during the financial collapse at the end of the George W. Bush administration. Barack Obama spend his entire 8 years in office repairing that damage. Trump was merely continued the Obama trend UNTIL the Covid-19 pandemic struck. (Credit: Business Insider)

Not only that but in an effort to create more jobs Trump used the old trick of lowering taxes, which of course led to a sharp rise in the federal deficit. In fact whereas Obama had received a budget deficit of over 1.44 Trillion dollars from President Bush he had in his eight years in office succeeded in lowering that figure to $585 Billion, a 60% reduction.

The tax cut engineered by Trump and the republicans certainly benefited rich Americans. How much of that money did you see? (Credit: ITEP)

The deficit under Trump however has increased to $960 billion, a 64% increase in only three years. If we again compare Trump’s performance in his first three years to that of Obama’s last three years we find that the Trump administration has borrowed $2.4 Trillion, 56% more than Obama’s $1.538 Trillion. And that’s all before the Covid-19 pandemic.

Obama inherited a massive deficit from Bush and spent his 8 years in office trying to get it under control. Trump has again increased federal borrowing and that was BEFORE Covid. (Credit: CNN.com)

  The economic statistic that really captures the overall improvement in the economy is growth in Gross Domestic Product or GDP. GDP is just the sum total of all economic activity, in other words every time money legally changes hands. Every product sold, every bit of labour paid for, it all goes into GPD and a healthy economy has a GDP that is growing faster than inflation.

Growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) since 2000. aside from the financial crisis at the end of Bush’s term there’s really little difference between all three of them. Trump cannot claim to have kept his promise of 4% growth. (Credit: Business Insider)

For the first three years of his presidency Donald Trump has succeeded in growing the economy at an average percentage of 2.5% as compared to Obama’s yearly average of 2.36%. However it should be pointed out that Trump promised a yearly increase in GDP of more than 4%.

That was in many ways his biggest promise, he’s a businessman after all and his ability to handle our economy is supposed to be the chief reason to vote for him. Throughout his career Donald Trump has bragged about his money-making abilities. However the reality of his four bankrupt casinos, the failure of Trump airlines, Trump magazine and Trump steaks tells a very different story.

Remember Trump Magazine? Neither does anyone else. It’s just one of countless business failures Donald doesn’t talk about! (Credit: Politico)

If Donald Trump can’t deliver on his economic promises, if in fact the Trump economy is little different from the Obama economy. If Trump’s only real economic idea was a trillion dollar tax cut, 67% of which went to the richest 1% of Americans, should the self proclaimed ‘King of Debt’ be given another fours years to give away more of our countries wealth?

Donald Trump has frequency proclaimed himself ‘The King of Debt’. Why would any rational person trust someone like that with our Nation’s economy? (Credit: Illinois Review)

The plain fact of the matter is that whatever Donald Trump may say he is not a businessman, never has been and never will be. Donald trump is a salesman who is very good at talking people into doing what he wants, investing in his business ventures, but who is incapable of doing the actual work of managing a business. All of his projects start off in a blaze of publicity only to collapse in a chaos of mismanagement.

Would you buy a used economy from this man? We did! (Credit: Twitter)

 The facts show that Donald Trump is no ‘Stable Genius’ where handling our economy is concerned. Instead, as he has always done, Trump just exaggerates his own achievements while belittling those of anyone else. In the end his claim to being the one man who can restore our economy after Covid-19 has no actual data to back it up. 

P.S. Just a few days after I published this post the New York Times announced that they have succeeded in obtaining Donald Trump’s tax returns and other financial documents for the past twenty years. The Times’ story details how Trump has lied to, cheated and manipulated his investors, the banks who lent him money as well as the US government. I heartily recommend that anyone check out the story by following this link. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-trump-taxes.html

Astronomy News for September 2020.

There were a couple of interesting stories about our Universe that caught my eye. Both deal with celestial objects and events that are among the largest and most powerful known to astronomy.

I’ve written several posts about the Gravity Wave observatories that are the newest field of research in astronomy. (See my posts of 14Jun17, 22Oct17, and 17Nov18) To date the two Laser Interferometer Gravity wave Observatory (LIGO) observatories in the US along with the Virgo observatory in Italy have observed over fifty events including the merger of two black holes or two neutron stars into a black hole as well as black hole and a neutron star into a black hole.

The LIGO gravity wave observatories in the US consists of two detectors, one in the state of Washington the other in Louisiana. (Credit: Caltech)
The inner workings of one of the LIGO detectors. (Credit: Wiley Online Library)

In all of those events observed thus far however the masses of the objects involved were between two and ten times the mass of our Sun. This places them all within a class known as stellar black holes, which are black holes with a mass comparable to that of our Sun.

The merger of two Black Holes sends out waves of gravitational energy so powerful that they can be detected billions of light years away. (Credit: Science)

At the same time astronomers are discovering more and more evidence of super-massive black holes in the center of every large galaxy. These black holes are estimated to have masses anywhere from several million to several billion times that of our Sun. Those observations left a gap however; there was no direct evidence for the existence of black holes with masses between several times ten to several times a thousand that of our Sun.

When the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies consume nearby stars and dust they become active galactic nuclei, also known as Quasars. (Credit: Mesosyn)

Until now, because on April 12th of this year a new gravity wave event, given the designation GW190521, was detected whose characteristics were such that astronomers could determine the initial masses of the two black holes to be 85 and 66 times that of our Sun. The resulting merger gave birth to a black hole with 142 solar masses, the remaining 8 solar masses being completely converted into the energy of gravity waves. That makes GW190521 by far the most powerful gravity wave event yet detected.

Gravity Wave GW190521 represents the first evidence for the existence of intermediate mass black holes. (Credit: NDTV Gadgets 360)

But what interests astronomers the most was that the masses involved, 66, 85 and 142 solar masses all fit into that gap area where no black holes had ever been observed. That makes GW190521 the first direct evidence for the existence of intermediate black holes. While astronomers may have learned a great deal from these first observations you can be certain they are eagerly waiting the next signal from the merger of intermediate sized black holes.

In another story, on an even larger scale, we have all heard of the galaxy of Andromeda, the closest big galaxy to our own Milky Way and the most distant object that is visible to the naked eye. A typical spiral galaxy Andromeda is a vast disk of more than 200 billion stars some 100,000 light years in diameter at a distance of about 2 million light years from us. And you may have also heard that Andromeda is heading straight at us! In fact Astronomers estimate that our two galaxies are likely to collide in just a little over four billion years.

The galaxy of Andromeda is the farthest object visible with the naked eye. Moving in our direction Andromeda will collide with our Milky Way in about 4 billion years! (Credit: Universe Today)

Most of our current theories about how galaxies evolve are based upon such collisions between small galaxies leading to the build up of ever larger galaxies as the galaxies merge.  What kind of a merger will result from the collision of our Milky Way with Andromeda is unknown at present, after all it’s hard to predict the details of something that’s not going to happen for four billion years.

The Whirlpool galaxy is actually a collision of two galaxies. The large spiral on the left is devouring the smaller elliptic on the right. (Credit: NASA)

Now however a group of astronomers are asserting that the collision has already begun. Using the Hubble space telescope these astronomers, led by Professor Nicholas Lehner of the Physics Department at the University of Notre Dame, were trying to determine exactly how big Andromeda is. That’s not actually an easy task since galaxies are not cohesive objects but vast collections not only of stars but huge amounts of gas and dust. In other words galaxies don’t have nice, well defined edges but rather just trail off, becoming less and less dense the farther you get from their center.

The astronomers were able to study the halo surrounding Andromeda by measuring its effect on the light of even more distant quasars located behind the halo. Quasars are the very active cores of distant galaxies powered by the feeding of supermassive black holes in the galaxy’s center. 

Using the Hubble space telescope and by observing the light coming from distant quasars astronomers could measure the size of the halo of Andromeda. (Credit: NASA)

As the light from those distant quasars passes through Andromeda’s halo certain wavelengths of light are absorbed. By studying which wavelengths are absorbed, and by how much the astronomers can learn a great deal about the material making up the halo. And what Professor Lehner and his team have found is that Andromeda has a very, very thin halo surrounding it, and that halo extends at least as far as 1.3 million light years from the galaxy’s center, half the distance to our own Milky Way.

In a couple of billion years, as Andromeda gets ever closer will there still be anyone here on Earth to observe it? (Credit: Earthsky)

But if Andromeda has a big halo, reaching halfway to our Milky Way, shouldn’t our Galaxy have just as big a halo. In fact the team has found evidence that it does, and further evidence that the two halos are already beginning to interact. So in a sense that collision between Andromeda and the Milky Way has already begun, even if the main event is still a long time to come. 

Book Review: ‘The Powers of the Earth’, by Travis J. Corcoran.

President Oprah declares war on an unauthorized Moon colony built by freedom loving CEOs. Yes it’s really almost that bad. In fact ‘The Powers of the Earth’ is only about 10% Science Fiction, another 30% starts off as a spy novel that evolves into a war novel. The remainder is more a political pamphlet than anything else and a rather cartoon version of one.

Cover of ‘The Powers of the Earth’ by Travis J. Corcoran. (Credit: Amazon)

In the short author’s bio at the back of the book, Travis J. Corcoran proudly proclaims himself to be a ‘Catholic Anarcho-Capitalist’ three ideologies that to my mind don’t really fit together all that well. Still Mr. Corcoran has every right to his opinions, his political views. The question is whether or not they serve to enhance a good science fiction novel.

Author Travis J Corcoran. (Credit: Libertarian Futurist Society)

In fact science fiction has long served as a vehicle for social criticism. H. G. Wells for example often brought his socialist ideas into his novels. The Morlocks in ‘The Time Machine’, the Martians in ‘War of the Worlds’ and the Selenites in ‘The First Men in the Moon’ are all described in socio-economic terms, but briefly, the politics don’t get in the way of the story. In some of his later novels, ‘In the Days of the Comet’ or ‘Shape of Things to Come’ Wells does become rather preachy, which is why those novels are not as popular as his earlier work.

In Well’s ‘The Time Machine’ laissez faire economics have forced the proletarian masses underground where they evolve into Morlocks. That description in the novel lasts 2-3 pages and doesn’t get in the way of the story. (Credit: YouTube)

In ‘The Powers of the Earth’ on the other hand, long rhetorical speeches are on nearly every page. And there’s no attempt at evenhandedness, whenever an argument in favour of some form of organized government is presented it is done so only to make it a target for attack. The characters back on Earth are all either idiots or self serving hypocrites, cartoon villains in other words. The inhabitants of the Moon, fully half of whom are CEOs of some company or other, aren’t presented in much better terms. Quarrelsome and unwilling to work together even when they agree if they are Mr. Corcoran’s view of an Anarcho-Capitalist utopia he can keep it!

However the real problem is that the politics just keeps getting in the way of the science fiction. For example, the Lunar colony at Aristillus crater is only possible because of the invention of an anti-gravity drive that the CEOs on the Moon have and the Earth governments don’t. But we’re never told anything about that drive, nothing at all about how it works. At the same time building a colony on the Moon appears to be simply a matter of drilling out enough big tunnels. No mention is ever made about where the air comes from, or the water.

Aristillus Crater on the Moon, the location of the Anarcho-Capitalist colony in ‘The Powers of the Earth) . (Credit: Alcheton)

When I began reading “The Powers of the Earth’ I first thought that Aristillus must be one of the craters near the South Pole where NASA has found evidence of ice. That would at least have served as a source for both the colony’s water and air but the crater isn’t near the South Pole, it’s right in Mare Imbrium, an area that is dry as a bone. There’s no particular reason for Mr. Corcoran to put his colony there that I can think of.

Even when Mr. Corcoran has an interesting idea he doesn’t develop it very well. As a part of the story there are five characters who are literally hiking around the Lunar farside. The hiking party is made up of one human and four genetically enhanced super-intelligent dogs. Now my ears perked up at the idea of super intelligent dogs, I wanted some details about the anatomic changes that allowed a dog to have a bigger brain, the changes to the vocal chords so that the dogs could speak (actually those dogs have some of the longest political arguments in the entire book) plus the changes to their paws so that they can type on their computers. (The dogs are all software whizzes by the way).

   But there’s nothing, no mention is ever made of anything about the dogs other than they can think and talk just like a human. Oh, and there are numerous times where the dogs have to take off or put on their spacesuits? How, with their paws?

IN ‘The Powers of the Earth’ genetically enhanced dogs get into and out of spacesuits on a regular basis. How is never described. (Credit: Ripley’s Believe it or Not)

During the course of ‘The Powers of the Earth’ several of the characters mention the old Robert Heinlein novel ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress’ and I have an idea that Mr. Corcoran wrote ‘The Powers of the Earth’ intending it to be a re-boot of that novel. Now it’s been nearly fifty years since I read, “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress’ but I don’t recall Heinlein as being so cavalier with the science, neither were his characters so poorly drawn.

Robert A. Heinlein’s ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress’ has been used several times as a starting point for ideas about revolution in Space. (Credit: Casey Handmer’s Blog)
‘Causes of Separation’ is the second novel in Travis J Corcoran’s series about anarchists on the Moon. (Credit: Amazon)

I do remember that Heinlein, like Wells, used science fiction as a way to describe different possible ways to build a society. Each different novel described a different aspect, a different kind of society. But on the other hand ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress’ was never intended recipe for a political movement, at least I didn’t get that impression.

But most of all I do remember a Heinlein novel as being worth reading, which I just can’t say about “The Powers of the Earth”. By the end of the story I wasn’t even interested in the dogs.

The annual ranking for Colleges and Universities has been announced.

Today’s post will be a bit out of the ordinary because I will not be discussing science or engineering so much as the places where our scientists and engineers receive their education. I’m talking about the Colleges and Universities of the world. I was prompted to write this post by the release of the annual Times Higher Education survey of the world’s best Colleges and Universities.

Why do we humans always feel the need to rank everything? (Credit: UCLA)

Now which University was chosen as the best, which schools made into the top 10, or which country had the most universities in the top 100 is really nothing more than a competitive exercise of no actual importance. What is important is whether or not new institutes of higher learning are being founded, and whether existing universities are getting better. Still it’s worth taking a quick look at some of the annual survey’s results in order to get an idea of what is going on in the world of higher education.

At the very top of the Times Higher Education list for the fifth straight year is Oxford University in the United Kingdom. Britain also has another spot in the top ten, Cambridge University coming in at number six. All of the other spots in the top ten belong to Universities in the United States from Stanford University at number two to the University of Chicago at number ten. Indeed the first non US non UK University is ETH Zurich in Switzerland coming in at number 14 with the University of Toronto in Canada ranking at #18, and Tsinghua University in China at #20, also appearing in the top 20.

For the fifth straight year Oxford University was chosen as the world’s best place of higher education. (Credit: University of Oxford)
Stanford University took the second spot in the listing. (Credit: Class Central)

Now I’m not trying to brag, and neither should these results be a great surprise. The US and UK have pretty much dominated the world of higher education since the end of World War 2 when most of the world’s other Universities lay in ruin.

During the years when the USSR was pushing education as the way to demonstrate the superiority of Communism several Russian Universities where recognized as among the best schools in the world. However the current Russian government appears to prefer to keep its population ignorant and gullible so the quality of Russian education has declined noticeably.

Lomonosov Moscow State University is Russia’s top school at #194 but just three years ago it placed at #161! (Credit: Schlinder)

Instead it’s now China whose institutes of higher learning are gaining the most ground. In addition to Tsinghua University, Peking University received a high ranking of 23 making China the only country other than the US and UK to place two universities in the top 25. China in fact succeeded in doubling its number of schools in the top 100 from three last year to six this year.

Tsinghua University is China’s top ranked school. The obvious newest of the buildings is an indication of the support education is receiving from the Chinese Government. (Credit: Hotels Combined)

Most of these Chinese Universities are in fact relatively new, babies when compared to Oxford or Cambridge. It’s a sign of China’s growing middle class who want a good education for their children, and are willing to pay for it. It’s also a sign that the Chinese government recognizes that a larger, better educated middle class will actually make China a stronger more powerful nation.

Other Asian nations are also working hard to improve the quality of the education they provide to their people. Sixteen Asian universities placed within the top 100, the most since the Times Higher Education list began.

The University of Tokyo is another important place of learning. (Credit: Britannica)

Of course the improvement in higher education in Asia doesn’t have to mean that education is the west is slipping. In the years to come the world is going to need all of its college and university graduates if we’re going to overcome the tremendous challenges facing our planet.

The Main Building at Drexel University. Drexel has grown so much in the years since I first attended class there! (Credit: The college Post)

By the way, my old Alma Matter Drexel University came in at 351. Not great, but not bad considering that’s 351st in the entire world.