What the Oakland assault tells us

As I feared, the authorities are starting to use force on the Occupy protestors, starting in Oakland. Charles Pierce says that the assault symbolizes the militarization of the police:

Make no mistake about it: The actions of the police department in Oakland last night were a military assault on a legitimate political demonstration. That it was a milder military assault than it could have been, which is to say it wasn’t a massacre, is very much beside the point. There was no possible provocation that warranted this display of force. (Graffiti? Litter? Rodents? Is the Oakland PD now a SWAT team for the city’s health department?) If you are a police department in this country in 2011, this is something you do because you have the power and the technology and the license from society to do it. This is a problem that has been brewing for a long time. It predates the Occupy movement for more than a decade. It even predates the “war on terror,” although that has acted as what the arson squad would call an “accelerant” to the essential dynamic
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It’s time for the country to realize that something is dangerously out of control here, and that it’s not a bunch of people in sleeping bags in the public parks. There is a tradition of public protest in this country. Hell, this country is itself an act of public protest. Preserve that, or preserve nothing else, because there’s nothing else worth preserving. Police officers are public servants. They are not soldiers, facing down enemies. This is not a war. This is America.

It may not be a war as yet, but the oligarchy sees this as an uprising that must be quelled in its infancy.

Relativity-9: The importance of corroborating evidence in science

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

In my series on the logic of science, I recounted how philosopher of science Pierre Duhem had pointed out as far back as 1906 that the theories of science are all connected to each other and changes in one area will have unavoidable effects on others that should be discernible. In this case, if neutrinos in the OPERA experiment did in fact travel faster than the speed of light, then we should be able to look at some other effects that should occur and see if they are observed.
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“Wall Street Isn’t Winning – It’s Cheating”

Matt Taibbi, in a must-read article with the above title says that what drives the Occupy Wall Street protests is not envy of the rich but the fact that the system is corrupt and unfair.

Americans for the most part love the rich, even the obnoxious rich. And in recent years, the harder things got, the more we’ve obsessed over the wealth dream. As unemployment skyrocketed, people tuned in in droves to gawk at Evrémonde-heiresses like Paris Hilton, or watch bullies like Donald Trump fire people on TV.
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Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners. But that’s just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning – they’re cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more.

In this country, we cheer for people who hit their own home runs – not shortcut-chasing juicers like Bonds and McGwire, Blankfein and Dimon.

That’s why it’s so obnoxious when people say the protesters are just sore losers who are jealous of these smart guys in suits who beat them at the game of life. This isn’t disappointment at having lost. It’s anger because those other guys didn’t really win. And people now want the score overturned.

He lists all the swindles that are currently going on in favor of the rich banks and against ordinary banking customers, and ends, “These inequities are what drive the OWS protests. People don’t want handouts. It’s not a class uprising and they don’t want civil war — they want just the opposite. They want everyone to live in the same country, and live by the same rules. It’s amazing that some people think that that’s asking a lot.”

Why US troops are leaving Iraq

Recent news reports have said that the US is making arrangements for a complete troop withdrawal from Iraq by December 31. I said five years ago that I felt that there was bipartisan agreement in the US to keep troops in that country indefinitely as part of its ambitions for global empire, mainly because the US was investing so much money to construct massive, permanent, military bases in addition to the largest embassy in the world. This did not look like the actions of a country that was planning to leave any time soon. So the announcement of a ‘complete withdrawal’ requires some explanation.
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Is Herman Cain stupid?

Clearly the panel on Bill Maher’s show think that Cain could give Sarah Palin a run for the title of the most ignorant and confused high-profile politician in recent times.

One thing that panelist Joshua Green said shed a lot of light and that is that although Cain is described as the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, that was from a long time ago. What he has been doing for the last fifteen years is touring as a motivational speaker. People who do that can get used to blathering self-help messages tailored to get a rousing response from the audience right in front of them without bothering about whether it makes sense or contradicts what they said to another audience at another time and place.

Cain’s latest campaign ad also has to make you wonder at his judgment. Look at what happens at the 40-second mark. Can you imagine any other candidate letting that pass?

How the Fed secretly bailed out American and foreign banks

Thanks to reader Mark, I came across this report by US Senator Bernie Sanders about a GAO audit of the Federal Reserve that reveals that it secretly loaned out over $16 trillion dollars to American banks and businesses all over the world. The audit also revealed that there were people on the board of the Fed who seemed to be benefiting from the Fed’s actions.

Such audits of the Fed are a new thing this year, thanks to legislation sponsored by Sanders. It is ridiculous that such secrecy has been allowed for so long to institutions that are publicly funded and use public money.

Relativity-8: General relativity

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

To understand the role of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, recall that the original OPERA experiment claimed that they had detected neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. This posed a challenge to what is known as Einstein’s theory of special relativity, proposed in 1905, which said that the relationship between the clock and ruler readings for two observers moving relative to one another would be different from the ones given by the seemingly obvious relationships derived by Galileo centuries earlier. According to Einstein’s theory, it is the speed of light that would be the same for all observers, while clock readings could differ, and that Einstein causality (the temporal ordering of any two events that are causally connected by a signal traveling from one to another) would be preserved for all observers. One inference that followed from Einstein causality is that no causal signal can travel faster than the speed of light, and this was what was seemingly violated by the OPERA experiment.

But Einstein had a later and more general theory that he proposed in 1915, called the general theory of relativity, that included the effects of gravity. He showed that clock readings were not only affected by the speed with which the clock was moving, they were also affected by the size of the gravitational field in which the clock found itself. This is the source of what is referred to as the ‘gravitational red shift’ that enters into cosmology that causes the light emitted by distant stars and galaxies to be shifted towards larger wavelengths as they escape the gravitational field of those objects on their journey to us.

To understand what is going on, recall that when we measure the elapsed time between two events, what we are really doing is measuring the number of clock ticks that occur between the events. According to general relativity, the stronger the gravitational field, the slower the rate at which a clock ticks. The slower the rate at which a clock ticks, the less time that it records as having elapsed between two events.

So, for example, since we know that the Earth’s gravitational field decreases as we go up, this means that if we take two identical clocks, one on the floor and the other on the ceiling, the one on the floor would have fewer ticks between two events than the one on the ceiling, even if both are stationary. So the clock on the floor would ‘run slower’ than the one on the ceiling and hence the time interval measured between two events measured by clocks on the floor will be less than that measured by clocks on the ceiling.

In the OPERA experiment, the time measurements were made using GPS satellites. These are whizzing by at both high speeds (about 4 km/s) and high altitudes (about four Earth radii). Typically, the signals are handed off from one satellite to another as they appear and disappear over the horizon and the transition is almost seamless and produces such small errors that we do not notice it. But the OPERA experiment requires such high precision that they arranged to do the experiment during the transit time of just a single satellite so that even that source of error was eliminated.

Because the rate at which clocks run depends upon the size of the gravitational field, one has to make corrections to allow for the fact that the time readings given by clock readings of the satellites will be different from the time readings given by clocks on the Earth, and so one needs to make extremely subtle corrections to the GPS time stamp to get the correct clock readings on the Earth. This is why much of the attention has focused on this aspect. It is not that the OPERA experimenters overlooked this obvious feature (such general relativistic corrections are routinely made by GPS software in order to make the GPS system function with sufficient accuracy) but whether they have made all the necessary corrections to the extremely high level of precision required by this experiment.

Carlo Contaldi at Imperial College, London has suggested that the clocks at CERN and Gran Sasso were not synchronized properly due to three effects, one of which is the fact that the gravitational field experienced by the satellite is not the same at all points on its path since the Earth is not a perfect sphere. He says that the errors that would be introduced are of the size that could produce the OPERA effect. (You can read Contaldi’s paper here.)

Ronald A. J. van Elburg at the University of Groningen has argued that subtle effects due to the motion of the detectors with respect to the satellite could have shifted the time measurements at each clock on the ground by 32 nanoseconds in the directions required to explain the 60 nanosecond discrepancy. (You can read van Elburg’s paper here and reader Evan sent me a link to a nice explanation of this work.)

The OPERA researchers (and some others) have challenged some of these explanations and said that they will provide a revised paper that explains more clearly all the things they did.

There have been no shortage of ideas and papers pointing out problems and possible alternative explanations for the OPERA results. Sorting and sifting through them all before we arrive at a consensus conclusion will take some time.