Category: Physics

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COVID pandemic Physics Science

The Science of Face Masks

There has been a shifting of positions on the use of face masks with the COVID-19 outbreak. Is there sound medical or scientific basis for the recommendations? Is much of it simply virtue signaling? Is there a legitimate rationale to do it to protect the vulnerable? And if so, at what cost to the rest of society? There are many important considerations including the risk versus the reward.

The Risks vs. Benefits of Face Masks- Is There an Agenda? by Dr. Alan Palmer on Children’s Health Defense

While the COVID-19 crisis rages on, the science against and in support of wearing masks accumulates daily. On the one side, proponents argue that masks save lives and stop the spread of the virus. The other side contends that wearing masks is complicated and suggests masks are ineffective and may even be harmful.

The Science of Masks

I have copied the list below from the above article by Children’s Health Defense’s lists of scientific research papers describing various aspects of the use of masks. In many circumstances for most mask types their prolonged use has more negative effects than positive.

Reports

Adverse Health Effects

Cloth Masks

N95 Masks

Masks in Surgical Settings

Other Mask Studies

Videos

(Videos below are found on Vumedi.com. They are  free to watch but you must sign up.)  

The Aftermath

Categories
astronomy Cosmology Physics

Dark matter in trouble again

Everyone loves a controversy. There is a new one brewing, and some astrophysicists are very unhappy because their pet paradigm is in trouble again.

By looking for x-rays coming from the sky between the stars, a team of physicists claims to have ruled out one possible type of dark matter. ROGER N. CLARK

Dark matter, the stuff that allegedly comprises up to 85% of the matter content of galaxies in the universe, has just hit another road block:

“…three physicists claim their observations of empty patches of sky rule out one possible explanation of the strange substance—that it is made out of unusual particles called sterile neutrinos. But others argue the data show no such thing.”

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Categories
pandemic Physics

COVID-19 and 5G

Many people have been sending me internet videos claiming that there is no coronavirus (Wuhan virus) but that the COVID-19 disease is caused by 5G telephony signals, which are slowly being installed around the world. In some cases the argument is that 5G network emissions at 60 GHz ionises oxygen molecules in the air and that inhibits peoples ability to breath. Here I would like to assess this claim in light of what I do know to be true.

I am a PhD physicist who has spent more than 20 years working in the field of microwave signal generation, building ultra stable microwave oscillators (or clocks). I do know something about physics especially at frequencies between a few GHz and 100 GHz. That is, I know something about microwave and millimetre wave radio physics.

The argument that 5G telephony radiation causes COVID-19 disease is total nonsense. It is false from a factual physical perspective. In the following I present some objective facts (which don’t depend on opinion).

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Categories
climate change Physics Science

Australian BOM ‘cools the past’

This is a real scandal. The Australian Bureau of Meterology (BOM) changed the past temperature record twice, ‘cooling the past.’ But, in reality, if you look at their raw official data, it is plain to see that there has been no more hot days in Australia than usual. The data goes back to at least 1910.

The following video reveals how the past Australian temperature record has been ‘cooled’ by at least 1.5 degrees C (or 3 degrees F) in two separate revisions. That means scientists changed the values of past temperature records before the 1990s. The effect is that it artificially makes it appear that the past few decades have been hotter than any decade prior to that time. This gives the appearance that the country has been hotter in recent times. But that claim is totally false.

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Categories
climate change Physics

Global atmospheric temperature trends

Since 1979, NOAA satellites have been carrying instruments which measure the natural microwave thermal emissions from oxygen in the atmosphere. The intensity of the signals these microwave radiometers measure at different microwave frequencies is directly proportional to the temperature of different, deep layers of the atmosphere.

The temperatures in the four layers presented here were once calculated using a hodgepodge of code that had been written by different scientists over years. Eventually a new version (6.0) was written by a single scientist resulting in 9000 lines of FORTRAN code. In 2015 Roy W. Spencer et al. of the University of Alabama in Huntsville used this to reanalyse the available raw atmospheric data since 1978. He writes:

Version 6 of the UAH MSU/AMSU global satellite temperature dataset is by far the most extensive revision of the procedures and computer code we have ever produced in over 25 years of global temperature monitoring. The two most significant changes from an end-user perspective are (1) a decrease in the global-average lower tropospheric (LT) temperature trend from +0.140 C/decade to +0.114 C/decade (Dec. 1978 through Mar. 2015); and (2) the geographic distribution of the LT trends, including higher spatial resolution.

Roy W. Spencer et al. 2015
Image excerpted from Roy Spencer’s excellent website on Global Warming
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Categories
astronomy climate change Physics

Solar sunspot cycle 24 just ended

The 11-year sunspot cycle number 24 has just ended. We are entering sunspot cycle 25. The number of sunspots has been decreasing over the past 3 cycles which has been about 4 decades. See plot below.

Note cycles 20 to 22, with an increase in peak sunspot number, is the same period that global warming has been claimed to be most significant . Then from cycle 22 to cycle 24 we see a decrease, but also there have been reports of global cooling, most significantly in the last decade or so.

Here I have labelled the peaks with number assigned to each sunspot cycle. On the left vertical axis is the 13-month smoothed number of sunspots. This is equivalent to yearly average. Colours indicate the fact that north and south hemisphere exhibit different numbers of sunspots. Data are available here.
Continue reading “Solar sunspot cycle 24 just ended”
Categories
astronomy climate change Physics

David DuByne – The ICE-AGE Cometh

This presentation is by David DuByne, who was a coffee buyer, which included buying coffee from Myanmar. His interest in the topic of global warming, or really global cooling, started when growers told him that coffee yields were down due to unseasonal cold weather.

The video is 1 hour 25 minutes but well worth the time invested. His predictions are well in line with the prediction of John L.Casey who predicted that the earth is headed for another mini Ice Age, by the year 2030. See my review of Casey’s book “Dark Winter”.

Introduction from David DuByne’s YouTube video presentation:

Solar activity occurs in cycles, the most well-known is the 11-year solar maximum to solar minimum, but our Sun also goes through longer duration more powerful cycles occurring in 400, 2000, 3600 and 7200 year intervals. Effects on societies during these Grand Solar Minimum cycles has been well catalogued through the millennia but always results in food shortages, economic contraction and population migration. Our Earth is now being effected by the new Eddy Grand Solar Minimum and will intensify from this point forward through 2030 with the same effects on our modern world.

How will governments cope with this type of society reset button when global crop yields decline year-on-year resulting in explosive food prices and social instability? Would they warn the general public of the changes or choose to create excuses, divert attention from the issues, refuse to discuss or censor voices explaining amplified extreme weather events across our planet caused by Earth’s magnetosphere weakening due to the electromagnetic connection with our star moving into a 400-year cycle of reduced activity.

The science that explains the changes we are now seeing in our weather with a societal forecast to 2030 based on past cycles of the Grand Solar Minimum. It’s not CO2, It’s not you, It’s the Sun.

Recommended Reading

Categories
astronomy Physics Science

The existence of the ISS refutes the flat-earth

It seems that flat-earth believers deny the existence of satellites, which means all global navigation system satellites (GNSS) including the American GPS satellites (at 20,000 km altitude), all geostationary satellites (at 35,000 km altitude) and all low earth orbit TV transmitting satellites (around 300 km altitude). The elephant not in the kitchen but in space is the largest of satellites, the International Space Station (ISS), the largest man-made structure in space. It orbits at an altitude of about 400 km, which is well outside of the atmosphere.

The ISS can be seen from the earth’s surface with the naked eye, when it passes overhead on a 90 minute circumnavigation of the planet, travelling much faster than stars move. It looks like a fast-moving plane only much higher and traveling thousands of kilometers an hour faster. When it comes into view in your area it is best viewed within two hours of sunset or sunrise. Because of the very large solar panels, used to power the spacecraft, sunlight can reflect off those in your direction.

The ISS with solar panels fully deployed. Curvature of the earth is clearly seen.

Here is a live video feed from the ISS. But flat-earthers say that all such video is faked. They say that all space agencies fake everything they show. So you can’t win.

NASA has it own TV showing live feeds from the ISS when available. Below is a YouTube recording of a past live feed.

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Categories
astronomy Physics

Earth as seen from the moon

In this video we can see the earth rise from the moon. It was taken about 10 years ago by the Japanese space agency JAXA (not NASA) from their lunar orbiter SELENE. The spacecraft orbited the moon for about a year before it was deliberately crashed in to the moon surface.

There are people who believe that the Earth is a flat disk and not a sphere. It is incredible I know. Apart from interpreting certain scriptures to support their claim it would seem that they have to also claim that all space agencies have faked all images of the earth since man’s quest into space began.

They also claim that there are no satellites (no GPS constellations), that there cannot be an International Space Station (ISS) in orbit and that man has never left the earth.

So they claim that this spacecraft could not have observed the spherical planet from the moon because no such craft ever left the planet. But the Japanese did send a spacecraft as have other nations. This one shows beautifully the jewel among the stars and it doesn’t look flat to me.

Recommended Reading

  1. THE EARTH IS NOT FLAT AND HANGS UPON NOTHING!
  2. A FLAT EARTH AND OTHER NONSENSE by Robert Carter and Jonathan Sarfati
  3. THE FLAT-EARTH MYTH AND CREATIONISM by Jerry Bergman

6/2/2020 Comment from a flat-earther: Haha you’re all comedians, but can’t see the reality that it is a fake video or believe that NASA could lie! Think about it. Where is the sun’s position, how bright should the moon be but isn’t, and seeing the earth seems to be in full light why is the background dark? When we are in day, the sky is blue. Perhaps someone has an answer.

My response: Number one, this video was not produced by NASA but by JAXA the Japanese space agency. I have had interactions with scientist colleagues from JAXA and find them to be a reputable organisation.

Number two: There is no atmosphere on the moon. Thus there are no molecules to scatter sunlight. You learn that in high-school. Hence the sky is black. On earth we see a blue sky because of scattered sunlight. Blue light (shorter wavelengths than red light) is scattered in all directions by the molecules of air in Earth’s atmosphere. Blue is scattered more than other colours because of its shorter wavelengths. As a result when we look at the sky we preferentially see the blue light component of sunlight which contains all the colours of the spectrum.

Then the automatic gain control on the camera on board the spacecraft reduces the aperture of the camera because of the high albedo of the moon. High albedo means high reflectivity. The moon reflects a little more than 10% of the sunlight hitting its surface. The moon’s surface has about 1/3rd the albedo of the earth’s surface. The reduction of the camera aperture means less light entering the camera so not to saturate the CCD module. Hence the moon surface does not look so bright, and note stars are not so easily seen in the black sky because the camera aperture is reduced.

Categories
astronomy History Physics

Job 38 and a Flat Earth

A Flat-earth believing Christian writes of Job 38

God talking to Job: Where were you when I made the foundations of the earth? Declare if you have understanding. Who has the laid measures thereof if thou knowest or who has stretched the line upon it? (not around it). Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened (how can the foundations be fastened on a spinning ball?). or who laid the cornerstone thereof.

This is God talking to Job. God’s words and not man.

Firstly, I do not consider one passage of scripture of more or less authority than another. It is all God’s Words. In the book of Job when Job is speaking about what God has done, He is speaking under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. That is the only reason he knows anything (e.g. Job 26:7).

All scripture, not some scripture, is inspired by the Holy Spirit.

All scripture is given by inspiration of God [literally means God breathed from the Greek original text], and is profitable for doctrine [teaching], for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:

2 Timothy 3:16 (KJV)

Also God is sovereign and He promised to preserve His Words so that none will ever be corrupted or lost.

The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried [refined] in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. 7 You shalt keep them [His words], O LORD, You shall preserve them from this generation for ever.

Psalm 12:6-7, KJVER

Looking at Job 38:4-6: (KJVER)

4 Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if you have understanding.

5 Who has laid the measures thereof, if you know? or who has stretched the line upon it?

6 Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof;

There is also Job 38:18 talking about the breadth of the earth (how big it is).

Have you perceived the breadth of the earth? declare if you know it all.

Continue reading “Job 38 and a Flat Earth”