The goal of this blog is to create a long list of facts that are important, not trivia, and that are known to be true yet are either disputed by large segments of the public or highly surprising or misunderstood by many.
At ABB Robotics in Auburn Hills, a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, where I used to work as an engineer, there was a steel door without a window that opened out into a hallway. Whomever designed this must have been clueless. When someone opened the door into the hallway, he would not know anything about what was on the other side of the door.
One day I saw a couple of guys standing and talking in the hallway in front of the door. Suddenly a fellow engineer opened the door, and it slammed into one of the guys, who screamed “hey watch it!”.
The thought that occurred to me was “no you watch it! Standing in front of that door is pretty clueless. How is the guy opening the door going to know that you are there?”. I did not say anything.
The fact of the matter was that the designer, the door opener, the guys hanging out in front of the door, all of them were oblivious. In my opinion the guy standing in front of the door and then when something happened instantly blaming the other guy was the most clueless.
Obliviousness is a state of being unaware or unmindful of something or being ignorant of its existence. Some synonyms are clueless, ignorant, and unmindful. The goal of this blog is to create a list of what I call super facts. Important facts that we know to be true and yet they are often surprising, shocking or disputed among non-experts.
However, I will write about other related things as well, and today I am musing about obliviousness and cluelessness, something that afflicts us all more or less. Without obliviousness and cluelessness this super-fact blog could not exist.
I got the idea for this post by reading a comment on another blog post where the author mentioned that “…a woman on her phone in the supermarket walked into my trolley this morning…”. The woman with the phone was oblivious to her surroundings because of her fixation on her phone, a very common situation. I think most of us are guilty of this on occasion, but it is very annoying when the person who was staring at the phone is blaming the other party.
The same is true for people who walk backwards in crowded places and then blame the people they bump into. There are different levels of obliviousness.
Stock Photo ID: 2340473623 by MDV Edwards
Obliviousness And Social Media
There are a lot of ways to be excessively oblivious. One of the most common and annoying examples on social media is in my opinion when people comment on articles they have not read.
I remember an experiment on Facebook where an organization posted an article with an intentionally misleading headline. The article was about something completely different, and the article even stated that the headline was misleading, and the article explained the experiment. If you read just a small part of the article you would know. The result was that most people commented on the headline, not the article. They did not read any of the article and fell into the trap.
This is a commonly used meme from Pinterest.
Obliviousness pops up in all kinds of circumstances. On Facebook I am the administrator or moderator in half a dozen beer groups. In these groups people discuss and review beers.
One of the want-to-be influencers are posting in lots of groups without ever engaging with or reading other posts, with the result that he has completely missed that one of the beer groups is very international and was started by Italians. He unsuccessfully keeps trying to engage other members several times a day by posting questions such as “Don’t you love this unusually warm evening?”, “What beer are you drinking while watching the game tonight?”.
Basically, he thinks this international beer group is his hometown, not Belgium, China, Brazil, Germany, Italy or Australia. As a result, no one knows what he is talking about. After one year with hardly any likes or comments he still has not figured this out because he never looks at anyone else’s posts.
Paulaner Octoberfest and my beer gnome, one of the photos I posted in various beer groups.
Oblivious Bilinguals
Another common example of extreme obliviousness happens when monolingual people judge bilingual people on their language abilities. I’ve written about that here.
People may speak and understand a second language perfectly and still have a strong accent in that language assuming they did not learn the second language in childhood. Unless you take speech therapy an accent is very difficult to lose in adulthood, something bilingual people know but many monolingual people do not know. You certainly cannot know everything, but when someone negatively judges people for having an accent their level of obliviousness is more extreme.
Past childhood it is much harder to accurately perceive and produce new sounds from another language Stock Photo ID: 1818291203 by pathdoc
Oblivious To Facts
Perhaps the most comical example of an extreme level of obliviousness is when people who know very little about a subject lecture the experts in the field and even mock the experts.
I recently read about such an example. A man was writing to a theoretical physicist, an expert on the second law of thermodynamics, telling him that the second law of thermodynamics contradicted evolution and that the physicist was an idiot for not knowing this. The man had fallen in the trap of believing a common but basic misunderstanding of the second law of thermodynamics.
Not understanding the second law of thermodynamics is one thing, assuming that your brief encounter with it makes you a superior expert on the topic compared to an expert with a PhD in physics is a much higher degree of obliviousness. I should say I see this type of situation quite often on social media.
Second law of thermodynamics Shutter Stock Vector ID: 2342031619 by Sasha701
We can’t know or understand everything, and we are all more or less unaware of other cultures, places, the feelings and thoughts of others, we all get distracted sometimes, and we know a very tiny infinitesimal portion of existing knowledge, we are all oblivious. However, we can make it much worse by not trying.
What are your favorite examples of obliviousness ?
The goal of this blog is to create a list of what I call Newstrade, but this is not a super-fact post. I sometimes create posts that are not super fact posts but related to this goal as well as other factual posts, and this is one of those. This post is about the Dunning–Kruger effect. The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. Those who are incompetent in a given area tend to be ignorant of their incompetence. What is so interesting about this effect is how widespread it is and how extreme it can get.
Some extreme examples include people without much knowledge in a given field lecturing the experts in the field, people without experience or much knowledge in an area telling the professionals in the field how to do their job. It includes people insisting on absurd claims despite not understanding the topic. It includes people dismissing scientific consensus on a topic without having much knowledge about that topic. It includes managers lacking engineering experience refusing to listen to the engineers, etc.
We are all occasional victims of the Dunning–Kruger effect. The problem comes when the one with the lower ability is stubborn and unreasonable and does not attempt to understand what the better-informed person is saying. Sometimes the situation becomes absurd. Below I am listing a few interesting cases, starting with a time when I was the ignorant one.
Creationism Bamboozled Me
When I was a teenager, I read creationist books that claimed that evolution was a hoax, and that earth was likely 6,000 years old. This is still a very common belief here in the US. These books appeared to me to be very convincing, and I took it upon myself to spread the word and correct the misconceptions. I was good at science and math, but this was before I had studied biology and physics in depth. I was accepted into the “Natur / Natural Science” Highschool program (similar to taking all AP Science classes) and I later studied physics in college.
As a result of what I learned I came to realize that the creationism I had come to embrace was bunk. The young earth claims and the anti-evolution rhetoric was not tenable. I realized this not by reading counter creationist books; I was just learning about the science. Understanding some science made all the difference. I just never knew how much I was missing. It was a lot. To read more about this click here and here. One more thing I learned is that you should avoid science related books written by lawyers and theologians with agendas. It is not their field and they don’t know what they are misunderstanding.
The fossil record is a lot more solid and much less problematic than the creationist books I had read claimed. Shutter Stock Photo ID: 1323000239 by Alizada Studios
Entropy and Evolution
Related to this is the myth that entropy contradicts evolution. Entropy is the measure of a system’s thermal energy per unit temperature that is unavailable for doing useful work. It is also the measure of the number of possible microscopic arrangements or states of individual atoms and molecules of a system that comply with the macroscopic condition of the system. These two definitions are identical.
The formula is S = K * ln (W), where S is entropy, K is Boltzmann’s constant, and W is the number of microstates whose energy equals to the one of the system. Entropy is said to be the amount of disorder in a system, but in this context “disorder” may not correspond exactly to what people mean by disorder. Anyway, the issue is the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated system left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease with time.
The creationists like to say that evolution decreases disorder in the biosphere and therefore contradicts the second law of thermodynamics.
Second law of thermodynamics Shutter Stock Vector ID: 2342031619 by Sasha701
If you take a college level class in thermodynamics you will realize within half an hour that this creationist / anti-evolution claim is false. The most important point being that evolution does not occur within an isolated system.
First of all, the earth, the biosphere, plants and animals receive energy from the outside, the sun for starters. Whether evolution decreases disorder in the biosphere or not, the claim fails instantly on the point that the system is not closed.
Despite decades and even centuries of conclusive debunking many people continue to make the false claim that the second law of thermodynamics and evolution are incompatible. There are people writing to prominent physicists and lecturing them and mocking them for “not knowing” that the second law of thermodynamics and evolution are incompatible. Typically, people who know almost nothing about the subject. They know too little to realize that their arguments are absurd.
The awkward algorithm
One day the engineering manager at my job at Siemens asked me and another guy to do research on how a certain process might improve our system. It was the CEO of the company (he was not an engineer) who was requesting this.
However, it was instantly obvious to me that this process was not compatible with what we were doing. Before, I had opened my mouth, the engineering manager told me “Thomas I know what you are going to say. This process is not applicable to what we are doing, but the CEO just learned about this process, and he is very excited about it. Just pretend to work on it for a few weeks and then write a report about why it did not work out. This is easier than explaining to the CEO why it wouldn’t work.”
Isotopes are real
On one occasion I was arguing on Facebook with an acquaintance regarding whether the current rapid Global Warming trend was natural or not. He said it was natural, and he insisted that he knew a lot about the science. I knew that he did not have a college level science degree, and it was obvious from what he said that he did not understand the science behind climate change.
One of the pieces of evidence I mentioned to him was that isotope studies showed that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere originated from our burning of fossil fuels. That was when he said that the atoms of a certain element were all identical. There was no such thing as isotopes. He accused me of fabricating the existence of isotopes.
Three natural isotopes of carbon Stock Vector ID: 2063998442 by zizou7
I posted a research article of one isotope study (carbon-12/carbon-13/carbon-14) and an article from Wikipedia on isotopes. Wikipedia isn’t an academically acceptable source, but it featured a good introduction.
He focused on the fact that Wikipedia articles are not always entirely accurate and used it as a reason to dismiss everything I said about isotopes. I was surprised he had never heard of Carbon-14. Isotopes is well known high school science and there are thousands of articles about it on the internet. He just didn’t know anything about this basic fact. He started insulting and mocking me perhaps because he felt I was lecturing him, but how would I have handled this? He knew too little about the subject to realize how much he was missing.
The Current Global Warming is not natural
Nearly all climate scientists say the same thing, Global Warming / Climate Change is real, and it is us. Just because the climate has changed for natural reasons in the past does not mean that is the case now. The same people who told us about the natural variability of climate in the past are the ones telling us it is not natural now. We should listen.
It is not orbital cycles, not the sun, not volcanoes, not bacteria or other lifeforms, and not cosmic radiation, it is us, primarily because of emissions from fossil fuels. The paleoclimatologists and the climate scientists and atmospheric physicists are telling us that it is not natural because of the quite substantial and solid evidence. Yet a very substantial proportion of us insist that it is natural causes without knowing much about the evidence. Why? Because they know too little about the evidence to consider it. The Dunning-Kruger effect again. BTW I will make a more detailed post about this in the future.
Wind Power Myths
Wind power has been on the receiving end of false claims, nonsense, and strange rumors for a while. It is not the only energy source that is a victim of widespread falsehoods, but it is a considerable problem. One false claim is that wind power requires an additional power source to operate (such as a companion diesel engine).
Another false claim is that wind power generates less power than it consumes, and yet another false claim is that wind power causes cancer. These claims are absurd and no one with basic insights in engineering and science would know they are false, yet many people fall for them. The people who fall for these claims think they know more than others, not less. Dunning-Kruger again. I am discussing nonsense and rumors about wind power here.
Some things cannot be known. There are things in mathematics and about our physical world that we know can never be known. For example, we can’t simultaneously know both the exact speed and the exact position of small particles (Heisenberg uncertainty principle). This is not because of a limitation of our instruments. It is a fundamental property of the Universe. But there are more examples of unattainable knowledge. In mathematics there are true statements that can never be proven.
“This”Some Things Cannot be Known” is the third post on my super-factful blog. As mentioned, the goal of this blog is to create a long list of facts that are important and known to be true, yet either disputed by large segments of the public or highly surprising or misunderstood by many. They are facts that are so unnecessarily controversial or astounding that I refer to them as super-facts.
This post is about a fact that may be highly surprising to many. Science knows a lot. People without a solid education in science are often surprised when they find out about some of the amazing things we actually do know.
For example, just by studying the light from a distant star, we can determine what elements it is composed of. The star may be composed of 71% hydrogen, 27% helium, 1% Lithium, and 1% other elements, and we can know that just from its light. We can also determine its temperature, the distance to the star, how it is moving compared to us, where it will be 2.5 million years from now, roughly its age and longevity, and more. 150 years ago, we could not have dreamed of this capability.
We can know so much about a star from its light. Shutter Stock Illustration ID: 566774353 by Nostalgia for Infinity.
However, there are also many things we don’t know, and what may come as a big surprise, we know that there are things we can never know, no matter how advanced science becomes. Infinite experimentation, super intelligence, a quintillion super geniuses, infinite time, we simply cannot acquire some knowledge. The universe itself forbids some knowledge. It also means that the statement “nothing is impossible” is false.
At least my natural reaction to such a claim is, “come on you can’t say that with certainty”, and I expect many others will feel the same. However, the reason some knowledge will never be attainable is that physical laws as well as mathematics and logic forbid some knowledge. Some things are not meant to be known. I will give four examples in the four sections below: the event horizon, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, beyond the observable Universe, and Gödels incompleteness theorem.
The Event Horizon of a Black Hole
A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing, including light, can escape it. The boundary of no escape is called the event horizon. If you pass the event horizon you cannot come back out no matter how much energy, you expand. Nothing can escape, no matter, no radiation, not light or other electromagnetic radiation, and no information. Nothing at all can escape. The curvature of time and space itself forbids it.
I should add that right at the event horizon, there is so called Hawking radiation, but without complicating things it is not the same thing as escaping a black hole. You can guess from physical laws what might be inside, but you can never observe and report what is inside to planet Earth.
Black Hole Stock Photo ID: 2024419973 by Elena11
I would also like to add some basic information about black holes. Some black holes are formed when large stars die and collapse. These black holes are estimated to have a mass of five to several tens of solar masses. However, there are also super massive black holes that reside in the center of galaxies.
The super massive black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is called Sagittarius A* and is estimated to have a mass of four million times the mass of our sun. The largest known supermassive black hole TON 618 is 66 billion times more massive than our sun. There are an estimated 100 million black holes in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. One interesting fact is that celestial objects can orbit a black hole, just like planets orbit the sun, but as you get too close you will rush, at the speed of light, into the depths of the black hole.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that it’s not possible to know the position and momentum of an object with perfect accuracy at the same time. Another way of saying that is that we cannot know both the position and speed of a particle, such as a photon or electron, with perfect accuracy. The formula is: dX * dP >= h/4pi , or uncertainty in position (dX) times uncertainty in momentum (dP) is larger than half of Planck’s constant. There is also an energy and time precision limit : dT * dE >= h/4pi.
These equations basically means that there are no perfectly exact measurements or knowledge. Everything is a bit fuzzy. Planck’s constant is very small, so Heisenberg uncertainty principle does not matter for everyday objects, but it matters when sizes are very small (positions, energies, etc.) Note, Heisenberg uncertainty principle is not because of a limitation of our equipment, but a limit set by a law of physics. It is a limitation set by the Universe if you will.
Heisenberg uncertainty principle Shutter Stock Vector ID: 2380436193 by Sasha701
Beyond the observable Universe
The observable universe is a ball-shaped region of the universe consisting of all matter that currently can be observed from Earth or its space-based telescopes. The radius of the observable universe is 46.6 billion light-years. The size of the observable universe is growing. Unfortunately, at those distances, space itself is stretching/expanding faster than the speed of light. Since no signal or information can travel faster than the speed of light we are losing, not gaining, celestial objects from the observable universe.
In the past we’ve lost many galaxies this way. Since the expansion is accelerating, we will keep losing more galaxies beyond the boundary of the universe and some galaxies were always lost (with respect to observation). I can add that the universe may be infinite.
A view of a galaxy full of stars. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
If we are wrong about the fact that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, then perhaps we can observe more galaxies in the future. But if not, then there are galaxies that we have never observed, galaxies that we can never observe, and there are galaxies that will become unobservable in the future. Depending on the size of the universe we may never be able to observe more than an infinitesimally small portion of the universe. Again, the universe is stopping us from knowing something.
Gödels incompleteness theorem(s)
The theorem states that in any reasonable mathematical system there will always be true statements that cannot be proved. In other words, to find a complete and consistent set of axioms for all mathematics is impossible. There are forever hidden truths in mathematics. For the case of natural numbers this means that there will always be statements about natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable. I can add that there is also a second incompleteness theorem that states that a formal system cannot prove that the system itself is consistent. Basically, there are limits to mathematics set by logic. And some things cannot be known.
I have a book on Gödels incompleteness theorem, which I have not read, but I will read it before I make a post about it. Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com
Bamboozlement Misunderstandings Big Surprises and My Journey
“Bamboozlement Misunderstandings Big Surprises and My Journey” is the first post of my super-factful blog. The goal of this blog is to create a long list of facts that are important and known to be true yet are either disputed by large segments of the public or highly surprising or misunderstood by many.
These facts are not trivia, they are accepted as true by the experts in the relevant fields, the evidence that the fact is true is impressive, and they are important to the way we view the world and to what we believe, and despite being known to be true they are hard pills to swallow for many. They are not scientific theories or complicated insights but facts that can be stated simply. In a paragraph or less. They may need more explanation than what you can fit in one paragraph, but they can be stated, perhaps with a brief explanation in just one paragraph.
Some important facts that are known to be true may still be hard pills to swallow. Photo by JESHOOTS.com on Pexels.com
In lack of a better term, I am referring to these facts as “Newstrade” and so far, I’ve made a list of more than a hundred. In addition to just stating the fact I will explain why we know that the fact is true and discuss the evidence, give background information and provide links. My posts will not be deep dives into the topics in question. However, I will try to remember to provide links for further study.
Why I Created This Blog
The reason for wanting to create this blog is not to prove anyone wrong, but because I think a list of important and true but often disputed, misunderstood or surprising facts would be a very interesting list. I am hoping that you my readers as well as I will learn from it. I am hoping it will be a growth opportunity for all of us. If we learn that something we used to believe is wrong, well that’s progress, that’s growth.
I am hoping to make the site interactive. I am open to suggestions for super-facts as well as challenges to super-facts that I’ve posted, or other things I have written that someone may disagree with. In fact, I would find that helpful, as long as we can discuss the issue in good faith and keep it friendly. I should say I would like to avoid politics.
I will certainly be open to counter arguments but let’s keep it friendly. Photo by Vera Arsic on Pexels.com
My Journey
One thing I would like to make clear in this post is that I have been bamboozled, misled, and I have misunderstood facts and information, and I have disputed information that turned out to be true. I have also seen others stubbornly insist on things that were obviously false. As time as passed, I have come to realize that it is very common that people believe what is known to be false, and conversely reject facts that are known to be true, and I am including myself in that. We are all guilty but naturally we are not aware of this and being told you are wrong can sometimes be unpleasant.
It is not just about being misinformed or ignorant about the topic in question. It is very much about arrogance, thinking you know when you don’t. I have often heard people say the darndest and strangest things about topics they obviously know almost nothing about and with total confidence on top of it (that includes myself). I have seen people with not even a paragraph worth of knowledge on a topic (and that little piece was wrong) lecture experts and professors on the topic, completely unaware of how silly that is.
However, it is also about a lack of curiosity and protecting your belief system or political viewpoint or tribal belonging. But I think it mostly is about arrogance. Do you think you know better than the scientific consensus even though you don’t even have a degree in the field? Do you think you know better than the community of experts? How much do you know about the evidence? Are you really interested in the evidence? Learning and growth requires humility, open mindedness and consideration for the evidence.
Consider the evidence, respect expertise and be humble. Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com
First Super Fact
My first super fact, which is discussed in my next post, is “We Know That the Earth is Billions of Years Old”. The scientific community states that Earth is 4.5 billion years old and that humans evolved over millions of years. This is not in dispute among the scientists / experts in the relevant fields, and yet a lot of non-scientists do not believe this.
A 2019 Gallup poll showed that 40% of US adults believe that God created humans in their current form within the last 10,000 years. I think this is a good example of a super fact because it is widely disputed and yet so accepted as true amongst the relevant scientists, and you will understand why it is accepted as true if you know something about the evidence. I will provide an introduction to the evidence in my next post.
Is Earth 4.5 billion years old or 6,000 years old? Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
As a teenager I believed that Earth and the Universe was 6,000 years old, and that evolution was a hoax. That was before I knew much about science. I had read agenda driven books that left out, or wrongfully dismissed the evidence for an old earth while presenting faulty arguments for a young earth. My religious background had something to do with me believing these books as well, but I also thought that I had the scientific facts on my side. The books and the so-called evidence presented in these books appeared scientific to me at the time.
Eventually I came to realize that this belief was unsupportable by science and untenable. Not by reading counter arguments, or books disputing the creationist books I had read, but just by learning about the relevant science. I was interested in science, and I got accepted to “Naturvetenskaplig linje”, a Swedish high school program for students with good grades and who showed aptitude for science. This program was like taking lots of AP classes in math/calculus, physics, biology, and chemistry, and it prepared me well for my university level studies in engineering physics and electrical engineering, which eventually led to my PhD.
A learned some interesting physics at “Naturvetenskaplig linje” and a lot more at the University. I loved physics, especially modern physics. Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com
In physics I learned about radiometric dating. That topic had been mentioned in the young creationist books as well, but they had insisted that radiometric dating was unreliable, they typically only talked about one radiometric dating method (carbon-14), not the several dozen other ones, they did not mention other types of dating methods, and they stated that radioactive decay rates very well could have changed. They also stated that the reason we could see galaxies billions of light years away was because the speed of light had drastically slowed. It was not an honest picture.
Radiometric dating uses the rate of radioactive decay and knowledge of initial relative abundances to establish age. Earth comes out to be billions of years old, not 6,000. Stock Vector ID: 2417370135 by grayjay
Now I learned why radiometric dating was very reliable if done correctly, and why radioactive decay rates must have remained constant. I learned about the physical laws involved, and I came to realize that highly sped up decays would have fried Adam and Eve. I learned why the speed of light could not have changed, and I encountered a large amount of other evidence for an old earth and an old universe that the creationist books did not say anything about. I realized that I had been bamboozled.
Creationism Vs Evolution
However, there was more. I also had to give up my view of creationism versus evolution. The evidence for evolution, including what creationists like to refer to as “macro-evolution” was overwhelming. From my biology classes at “Naturvetenskaplig linje” I came to realize that the fossil record and the strata as depicted in creationist books was misrepresented. For example, the talk about missing links was misleading. I came to realize that the evidence for evolution came from dozens of other scientific fields and that it all came together to form a very solid and compelling body of evidence.
The fossil record is a lot more solid and much less problematic than the creationist books I had read claimed. Shutter Stock Photo ID: 1323000239 by Alizada Studios
The creationist books I had read claimed that there was a contradiction between evolution and the second law of thermodynamics. As I studied entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, I came to realize that was just a very simple and silly misunderstanding. It eventually became clear to me that I had been misled on this topic as well. I am planning to make one, or a few, super-facts around this topic.
Second law of thermodynamics Shutter Stock Vector ID: 2342031619 by Sasha701
Back in high school (“Naturvetenskaplig linje”) I became very interested in modern physics, quantum physics and relativity, and I was in for more shocks. The second postulate of special relativity states that “the speed of light in free space has the same value c in all inertial frames of reference.” What that means is that no matter what your velocity is and no matter what the velocity of the emitting light source is, all observers, even if moving at different speeds and in different directions, will measure the light to have the same exact speed c = 299,792,458 meters per second or approximately 186,000 miles per second or 671 million miles per hour. This isn’t possible unless the different observers measure time and space differently.
In this picture Amy is traveling past Alan in a rocket. Both have a laser. Both measure the speed of both laser beams to be c = 299,792,458 meters per second.
However, as I began to learn more in depth about what this meant for space and time I started seeing contradictions of various kinds. It turned out to be a lot stranger and counter intuitive than I had imagined, and I got angry. It felt like the whole thing was impossible, illogical, and a sham. It seemed like Einstein was wrong and all the physicists were wrong and all the Nobel prize winners in physics were wrong.
Well, I was humble enough to realize that I was not smarter than all of them. It must be something I had not figured out, and finally I understood what that was. I learned to let go of thinking in terms of “absolute time” and instead thinking of time as relative. It was the depiction of time as a fourth dimension that helped me with that.
Like most people I had been preconditioned to think in terms of absolute time. The whole thing became clear to me very quickly and now it seemed perfectly logical. I was able to understand and enjoy all the amazing discoveries that this new way of looking at time and space led to. I think this is a super fact because it is an important insight into time that is highly surprising and in general poorly understood.
Time is going to be different for me and you in many ways including the order of events. From shutterstock Illustration ID: 1055076638 by andrey_l
That’s when I encountered two books that claimed that special relativity was illogical and a sham. They were written by a self-proclaimed philosopher of time, who had declared war on relativity. He really thought that Einstein was wrong, and that all the physicists were wrong and all the Nobel prize winners in physics were wrong about this. He believed he had figured something out that they hadn’t.
I saw quite easily where he was wrong. First of all, just like me had made unstated assumptions about time and space that were incorrect. Unlike me he could not even use the related physics formulas correctly.
Soon I came to realize that he was far from alone. Once upon a time there were a lot of people who like him had attacked relativity. They not only attacked the theory, but they also went after Einstein himself. In retrospect this looks pathetic, but it is arrogance again. If you have a hard time understanding something, don’t assume that you are correct and that the experts must be wrong.
One thing these failed critics all had in common was that they did not go after the General Theory of Relativity, which is even more abstract, complicated and counterintuitive. Why? Probably because it was so abstract and mathematical that they couldn’t even get started, and that should have been hint for them.
The understanding of black holes requires the General Theory of Relativity. Stock Photo ID: 2024419973 by Elena11
Rethinking My Beliefs
Well, when it is about bamboozlement, being surprised, and learning to understand what at first seems strange, I was far from done. About 15 years ago, I became increasingly skeptical and doubtful of global warming or climate change as it is more commonly called now a day. The reason was that I almost exclusively read and watched rightwing news media such as world-net-daily (tended to push conspiracy theories), Newsmax and Fox News.
I believed in the concept of global warming, it is basic science after all, but I thought that it was exaggerated and that it was promoted and distorted by left-wing agendas, and I incorrectly believed that there was no scientific consensus on the issue. I believed that whatever warming that existed could be explained more by natural cycles than our fossil fuels.
I also bought into the false narrative that this was about environmentalist ideology, politics, or even a sort of environmentalist religion, and not a real and serious problem. My disdain for environmentalists, and my gut feelings certainly aided the propaganda in misleading me. In addition, I read a lot by Björn Lomborg and Patrick J. Michaels and I believed them. To clarify, I did not know it at the time, but I was wrong, very wrong. Below is a video from NASA showing the annual shrinkage of the arctic sea ice.
To see the NASA web page from where the YouTube video of the shrinking arctic ice is taken click here.
I should say that I had some lingering doubts about my own “climate skepticism”. During my travels to national parks, the great barrier reef, and other places, I encountered guides who were scientists, as well as others, and they told me about coral bleaching, ocean acidification, receding and disappearing glaciers, the pine beetle problem, white pine blister rust, the destruction of forests due to global warming, and I could see some of the effects with my own eyes in northern Sweden, which is close to the arctic and therefore the effects of global warming are more visible.
Temperature anomaly graphs from NASA, Hedley Center, Japan Meteorological Agency, NOAA, and Berkley.
It also bothered me that my physics hero Stephen Hawing was a global warming alarmist and that other leading physicists and astrophysicists whom I admired, such as Michio Kaku, promoted and warned us about human caused global warming. Add that popular science magazines I subscribed to, such as Discover and Scientific American frequently wrote about global warming. I should say that I tended to skip those articles and I believed those magazines had a left leaning bias.
The carbon dioxide concentration measurements began in 1958 at the Mauna Loa Observatory on the island of Hawaii. Since then, several other ways of measuring carbon dioxide concentration have been added.
However, there were too many red flags regarding my “climate skepticism”. It seemed like a lot of people knew and understood something I didn’t. This prompted me to take a deep dive into the matter. I had a decent scientific background and that helped. I learned that global warming is not caused by natural cycles, something the experts on natural climate cycles repeatedly stressed. It is not the sun, or volcanoes and it isn’t a normal cycle, and the recent increase in temperature is disturbingly quick.
I also learned that warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions have a certain fingerprint; the arctic will warm faster, nights will warm faster, the tropopause would be pushing up the boundary with the stratosphere, the mesosphere would be cooling and contracting (think the troposphere as being a blanket). All of that has been observed. Long story short, I had been bamboozled. We not only know that Global Warming is real, but we also know that we are the cause, primarily because of our greenhouse gas emissions. That is yet another super fact. It has many doubters and yet the evidence and the experts are clear on the fact.
Natural causes for global warming / climate change would have cooled the planet, not warm it.
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