Tag: lightspeed

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To see the other Super Facts click here