The Skeptics Society has retired Skepticblog (while preserving all posts online at their original urls for future reference), but we’re proud to announce our bigger, better new blog: INSIGHT at Skeptic.com! Dedicated to the spirit of curiosity and grounded in scientific skepticism’s useful, investigative tradition of public service, INSIGHT continues and exp […]
Some people say, "Oh, there's anti-science on both sides of the political aisle." But that neglects one important fact: in only ONE political party are the leadership and the party platform dominated by science denial.
Would you believe there is a patch of trapped garbage floating in the North Pacific bigger than the state of Texas? It's called the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch".
On my second day at SkepchickCON–CONvergence 2013, I participated in two panels. The second panel was titled “The Physics of the TARDIS” and since the con had a “British Invasion” theme to it, Doctor Who was a big hit this year. And that meant that this panel was very well attended, so well attended in fact that it ended up being standing (and sitting) room only! In this panel we got into all manner of questions regarding the physics, realistic and speculative, regarding time travel, the TARDIS being bigger-on-the-inside, and more.
My co-panelists for this discussion were Steve Manfred, Renate Fiora, and Katherine Krantz. Check out the audio of the panel below, and enjoy! 🙂
[**Note: the audio is embedded in a PowerPoint file – just click the link to download the file]
On my second day at SkepchickCON–CONvergence 2013, I participated in two panels. The second panel was titled “The Physics of the TARDIS” and since the con had a “British Invasion” theme to it, Doctor Who was a big hit this year. And that meant that this panel was very well attended, so well attended in fact that it ended up being standing (and sitting) room only! In this panel we got into all manner of questions regarding the physics, realistic and speculative, regarding time travel, the TARDIS being bigger-on-the-inside, and more.
My co-panelists for this discussion were Steve Manfred, Renate Fiora, and Katherine Krantz. Check out the audio of the panel below, and enjoy! 🙂
Well, I’ve been back from SkepchickCON–CONvergence 2013 in Minneapolis, MN for about a week now, and I am finally getting caught up on everything. As usual, it was an absolute blast, and I recorded all the panels in which I participated. On the first day I participated in the “Time Travel in Film” panel, wherein we discussed in what movies has time travel been done well? Does bad time travel make it a bad movie? What are our favorite time travel movies?
My co-panelists were Charlie Jane Anders, Courtney Okey-Wernimont, and Sean E. Williams, and I took it upon myself to inject a bit of realism into the discussion, since I’m a physics professor. However, despite me trying to be a wet blanket, we had a rousing discussion which I hope you will enjoy 🙂
Oh my… some days something crosses my email inbox, and while a part of me says “this is just too silly, let it go” another part of me insists that this is simply something which must be dealt with in the most appropriate manner: by mocking it for the laughing stock that it is 🙂
Case in point: there is a video circulating on the Interwebs of a filmmaker, George Clarke, claiming – seriously, believe it or not – that he’s seen old footage from a 1928 Charlie Chaplin movie which “proves” the existence of a time traveler! His evidence consists of his claim that he’s seen what appears to him to be a mobile phone in the hands of a woman in the film. I’m not kidding, you just have to watch this stupidity in order to believe it…
At the 0:40 point in the video, he makes a blatant argument from ignorance: “Nobody can give me an explanation for what you’re about to see.” Using this sloppy reasoning, he goes on to state later in the video that the only possible explanation has to be that she’s a time traveler holding a modern day cellphone (presumably one which has been upgraded by The Doctor 😉 )
So which is more likely? That someone figured out how to travel back in time and once doing that, figured our how to travel through space roughly 886,973,634,480 miles (based on the Galaxy’s speed of approx 552 Km/s and the travel of 82 years and not counting leap year days or current time vs time that the shot was filmed)? And mind you, that’s not counting in the orbital speed of the Sun in the Galaxy (220 Km/s) over that time.
-or-
That someone of advanced age (and possibly diminished hearing) is wearing and holding onto a hearing assist device of the era?
I know which one I’m putting my money on.
So, because MR. Clarke states that “it’s unexplainable” then he’s going to explain it by appealing to time travel? Personally, I think that leprechauns are a much more valid explanation, because I simply cannot explain it any other way! ‘Nuff said.
Where does legitimate science end and questionable pseudoscience begin? It’s a good question, and one brought up in my mind due to a story about the theory behind the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which has gotten a lot of attention in recent days. Two theoretical physicists have come up with a theory by which they propose to explain why the LHC might never detect particles like the Higgs Boson… sabotage from the future.
Yes, you read that right – sabotage from the future. I’ll let the article explain it a bit more…
Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.
Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like “Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence From LHC,” posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half.
The Skeptical Teacher 