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Does Consciousness Come in Degrees? That depends on what you think consciousness is. by William Lycan | Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, US, and author of Consciousness and Experience Every living thing responds selectively to its immediate environment. Rocks don’t. One-celled organisms do. Viruses are a borderline case. To speak of perception is a little more demanding. Do amoebas actually perceive things in their environment? Do stylops? Do ants, for that matter? When we say perceive, we’re thinking of sense organs, inputs and information-processing, however rudimentary. Those criteria are vague and admit many borderline cases; they might even be said to come in degrees. But when we agree that an animal does perceive, we are attributing to it a kind of consciousness, namely, perceptual consciousness of the world around it. Perception itself certainly admits degrees. Some animals perceive more information per second than others; or they make a greater number of distinctions than others. Likewise, if an animal has a greater variety of senses, it will enjoy a higher degree of perceptual consciousness. A creature that does perceive the external world to any significant degree can be called a conscious being. Could there be conscious beings other than those of earth’s animal kingdom? Perhaps there are some outside our solar system. Could a robot be a conscious being, just in this modest sense of perceiving its environment? I don’t see why not. Despite appearances, a robot can amass information through its sensors and build a representation of the external world. Granted, there are plenty of arguments purporting to show that no mere robot could be conscious in any much stronger sense. Of course we can also ask whether a conscious creature in that sense is ‘conscious’ at a particular time, say at this moment, meaning roughly, is it awake, actually doing some perceiving, and in control of its actions? Even that ‘normal waking state’ admits some degrees, since we speak of accident victims and seriously ill patients as ‘semi-conscious.’ ___ "When we agree that an animal does perceive, we are attributing to it a kind of consciousness" ___ A much rarer form of consciousness is what we refer to when we speak of a ‘conscious memory’ or a ‘conscious decision’—we mean not only being in a mental state but being aware of that very mental state from the inside. A conscious memory is a memory we are directly aware of. The same goes for a conscious emotion, desire, intention, or bodily sensation such as pain. It’s assumed that there are memories, emotions, desires, intentions, perceptions, and even pains that we are unaware of, at least at times. For instance, while driving a car we might be thinking hard about this or that. We will still perceive the road, other cars, stop signs, etc.—otherwise we’d crash—yet we will barely notice our perceivings themselves, our own sensory states. It’s less common to be unaware of our desires or our physical pains, but if we have focused our attention elsewhere, these might go in the background. For example, in the course of playing in a hard-fought championship basketball game, we might not feel any pain. Less dramatically, I may just entirely stop noticing a mild headache while engaged in spirited conversation, though others may see me unconsciously stroking my brow. Awareness of your own mental states is often called “state” consciousness. Creatures that have state consciousness have the ability to represent their own mental states. It’s an empirical question which organisms do have that capacity. Human beings obviously have it. There is some evidence that gorillas do. We may naturally think that it does not extend very far down the phylogenetic scale, but only clever experiments could verify that. A cat can be hungry, or angry, and behave accordingly in no uncertain terms, but is the cat ever internally aware of the hunger or the anger? Except in a cartoon, can a cat say to itself, “My anger is diminishing [now that I have pooped in the sugar bowl]”? State consciousness comes in degrees. We can be just barely aware of a desire, say our desire for a less hectic life; or only dimly aware of it, or moderately, or well aware, or vividly, or urgently, longingly aware of it. (That is partly a matter of the strength of the desire, but it has more to do with claims on our attention.) The distinction between conscious and unconscious mental states raises some interesting moral issues. Is it wrong to cause gratuitous pain, when we know the victim will never be aware of the pain? Suppose a rabbit lacks the capacity to be aware of its own pain. May we cause it pain with impunity—assuming that we are doing it no real bodily harm—knowing that unlike us, it cannot experience or even notice the pain? On the one hand, why does the pain itself matter at all, if the rabbit is entirely unaware of it (and no one else is affected)? On the other, it’s pain, for God’s sake; the poor bunny is whimpering. In this article (Animal Pain and New Mysticism About Consciousness), Bence Nanay attacks the idea that animals ‘process’ pain but do not ‘feel’ it: ‘Rats and chickens systematically choose and self-administer painkillers when and only when they are distressed. I am not sure how this finding could be made consistent with the “animals don’t really feel pain” line short of some maneuver worthy of the Flat Earth crowd.’ Nanay may be thinking it pathetically obvious that pain itself and not awareness of it is what matters morally. If so, though of course he’s entitled to his opinion, he is just begging the question rather than addressing the dilemma. More likely, since he emphasises ‘feel,’ he is maintaining that the animals damn well are aware of the pain and do experience it. But the trouble there is that the expression ‘feel pain’ has two different uses. In one sense it’s just a redundant way of saying that a creature is in pain or ‘processes’ pain. In a stronger sense it means that the creature not only has pain but is aware of the pain. It is indeed obvious that rats and chickens can have pain or be in it. But to settle the question, the experiments to which Nanay alludes would have to show that the rats and the chickens internally represent their own pains as such. Were the experiments controlled against the hypothesis that the subjects’ self-medicating behaviour was just a direct response to the pain itself, like my stroking my brow? [SUGGESTED READING: Animal Pain and New Mysticism About Consciousness By Bence Nanay] More recently, philosophers have been concerned with ‘phenomenal’ consciousness. When we are aware of one of our own mental states, there’s ‘something it is like’ for us to experience that state; for example, there is something it is like to experience the sound of a high Bb as played by French horn legend Dennis Brain. ‘Like’ there does not mean resemblance or similarity; the quality, ‘what it’s like’ to have the sensation cannot easily be put into words. Philosopher Thomas Nagel has appealed to the case of whatever sensation may accompany a bat’s use of its sonar echolocation technique: 'Chiropterological (bat) ethology and neuroscience may detail the bat’s sensory system down to the last molecule and bit of information processed, but neither science nor anything else could tell us humans what it’s like for the bat to experience its sonar sensation. You would have to become a bat and have the sensation yourself. Phenomenal consciousness is ‘intrinsically perspectival’—in humans just as in bats. Even if phenomenal consciousness depends on state consciousness, it does not accordingly come in degrees. Where there is any degree of awareness of one’s own mental state, there is something it’s like for the subject to experience that state. I’ve distinguished three kinds of consciousness; each is perfectly real and worthy of its name. But for the philosophers Nanay labels as the ‘new mystics,’ only phenomenal consciousness is real consciousness, and it is very problematic for the metaphysics of mind. How are we to accommodate the fact—at least the majority view—that science cannot even describe ‘what it’s like,’ much less explain it? Opinions range from (1) there isn’t really any such thing, through (2) several varieties of ‘here’s how,’ to (3) scientific materialism is just false, and we have special properties that are irreducibly mental. In support of the first claim, philosopher Daniel Dennett and others argue that if we really do know every detail of both the bat’s sonar sense and the human psychobiology and chemistry, we could work out what it’s like for the bat to have its special sensation, and what it’s like for any human to be in any mental state. The leading version of the second claim is what’s called the ‘phenomenal concept’ strategy: proponents suggest that in introspection we categorise sensations in a unique way, using concepts that cannot be translated into day-to-day language. It is only the untranslatability that prevents explaining ‘what it’s like’ and makes us regard it as ineffable and mysterious; there is nothing metaphysically extraordinary about it. I have defended that view in my book, Consciousness and Experience. Philosophers go for the third claim when they are unpersuaded by the first two claims and argue on various grounds that those views will never work: The first seems to them clearly false and just a desperate lunge. (I agree.) They are unpersuaded by the phenomenal concept strategy because they find it pallid and just not adequate to the vivid and arresting character of what it’s like. There is an even more extreme position: (4) ‘What it’s like’ pervades the universe, and panpsychism is true. Ha-haa! What recommends that view to Philip Goff is that although ‘philosophers and scientists have struggled to understand how physical matter produces consciousness,’ those philosophers and scientists have had it the wrong way around: Rather, as Sir Arthur Eddington maintained, physical science merely ‘describes matter ‘from the outside’ by providing mathematical models and can say nothing about matter’s own underlying nature. In Stephen Hawking’s words, ‘it is consciousness that breathes fire into the equations.’ I myself would need to hear stronger argument than has ever been given. So, does consciousness come in degrees? Perceptual and state consciousnesses do. But phenomenal consciousness is different, and a whole different beast. William Lycan Here: https://iai.tv/articles/does-consciousness-come-in-degrees-auid-1226 - More from this issue: Vices of the Mind Hobbes vs Rousseau: are we inherently evil?

In my 360Chrome 13.5, on chrome://history/#p=0 page in Property, I've Time: 2022/9/24 ; Change time: 2022/9/24 ; and no history items here. Ok.

La Voie lactée / The Milky Way Au Lac-de-la-Chaîne. Lac-Bouchette, Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean, Quebec, Canada. By Curculion: https://www.flickr.com/photos/curculion/ On Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/curculion/27572901630/

Gravity: The Story So Far What happens when we try to explain gravity? by George Ellis | Templeton prize-winning cosmologist and co-author of 'The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time' with Stephen Hawking. The basic issue Gravity holds us to the Earth and makes apples drop to the ground when they fall off a tree. It controls how the Moon moves round the Earth and how the Moon causes tides on Earth. It controls how the Earth moves round the Sun and how the Sun moves round the Galaxy. But it’s not a force. That was Einstein’s great discovery. How can we say that? Well because you can, at least for a while, simply make it vanish! How do you do that? Just let go! In other words, jump off a building, and you’ll feel no gravity as you fall down (hitting the Earth does not count as falling down). More gently, join a freely orbiting space station crew, and you’ll find life difficult because there will be no felt gravity to hold you down on your seat or to hold your coffee in a cup. In short, what appears to be a gravitational force actually depends, locally at least, on how you are moving. You can make it go away by allowing yourself to fall freely. The reason why The reason this is true is because the gravitational mass of a body is the same as its inertial mass. This is what Galileo discovered, allegedly, by dropping objects of different weight from the Leaning Tower of Pisa (that experiment has since been done much more accurately by modern physicists - see this video for a feather and a ball falling at the same speed). That means that if you are in lift and the rope breaks, you and everything around you will fall at the same rate as the lift – so you will no longer feel gravity holding you to the floor of the lift. This was Einstein’s “happiest discovery”. What is it then? Gravity is now understood as being an effect of space-time curvature; in a static situation, of spatial curvature. A model is as follows: if you consider two aircraft that start off 1000 miles apart at the same instant from the Earth’s equator and they each fly at the same speed in an unchanging Northerly direction, they will get closer and closer together and will eventually collide at the North Pole. It is as if a force was pulling them together even though there was no attractive force acting between them. It was the curvature of the Earth that was the cause of this apparent force. Spacetime curvature is like that: if, for example, you let a spacecraft fall freely around the Earth at the right speed, with the engine turned off, it will arrive back exactly where it started because of the curvature of space caused by the Earth’s gravitational field. It never fired an engine to change direction but just kept going. ... ___ ... Is General Relativity the right classical theory? We don’t know. It has passed every test we have tried – there is no evidence against it. But to check if a theory is right, you need to compare it with other candidate theories and see which performs better. General Relativity has passed all these tests with flying colours. But some scientists, for example, are claiming you don’t need to have the huge amounts of dark matter in the universe that are suggested by standard studies – because they assume that General Relativity is correct. Maybe a modified gravitational theory, for example one in which the gravitational constant changes with space or time, might remove the need for dark matter. So many alternatives are being proposed and tested. It is difficult to test on Earth because it is a long range force, It is dominant in the Universe on large scales because all gravitational mass is positive, unlike electricity, where there are equal numbers of positive and negatively charged particles. We understand Einstein’s theory pretty well, despite its complexity. But that is not the end of the story. If you want to take part in the search for the ultimate answer, you will have to learn the maths (tensor calculus, maybe spinors) and the physics (variational principles and symmetry groups, for example) and then get going. No one knows what direction may lead to new and unexpected answers. Editor's note - in light of the recent awarding of the Nobel Prize in physics for the detection of gravitational waves, the author has added the below: "Gravitational waves are very difficult to detect because their sources are so far away and, despite appearances, the gravitational force is so weak. The first related Nobel Prize was awarded in 1973 jointly to Russell A. Hulse and Joseph H. Taylor, Jr, for the discovery of the effect of gravitational radiation emission on the orbits of binary pulsars (emission of gravitational waves causes energy loss that changes the orbits of the pulsars). This indirectly proved the existence of gravitational waves as foretold by the theory. Then this year, half the physics award went to Rainer Weiss and the other half jointly to Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne for the extraordinary feat of constructing detectors that could measure gravitational waves directly - an incredible theoretical and observational tour de force. So Einstein proposed they could exist in 1917. We now have two independent ways of proving not only that they can exist , but that the carry energy with them (some of that energy being deposited in the LIGO/VIRGO gravitational wave detectors) as predicted." Here: https://iai.tv/articles/gravity-the-story-so-far-auid-896 Gravity and the Dark Side of Science Anti-gravity does not exist. Or does it? - by Valia Allori | Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northern Illinois University If anti-gravity existed, the book that explains it would be impossible to put down. Unfortunately, anti-gravity does not exist. Or does it? It is not a settled question, and there is a sense in which it will never be. Nonetheless, that does not matter much. How can that be? Keep reading! There are two ingredients at play in this: theory and evidence. And their connection is more complicated than one may initially think. Let me start with theory. Gravity is responsible for stuff falling on the ground, as well as for planets moving in the sky. Scientific theories have been proposed to account for these phenomena: Newton’s theory of gravity first and Einstein’s general relativity later. Newton’s gravity is a force that acts instantaneously to pull bodies closer in virtue of their mass. In other words two massive bodies, no matter how distant, feel each other’s presence instantly and tend to get together. Here now comes evidence. Newton’s theory has been very successful. The theory predicted, for instance, the Halley comet to be seen again in 1758. One may even think that our best scientific theories are definitely proven by experiments - Newton’s theory successfully predicted the return of the Halley comet, therefore Newton’s theory is true. Right? Well, no. It does not logically follow that Newton’s theory is true even if all experiments come out as predicted. It like someone concluding that it is snowing right now by starting with the consideration that if it's snowing then the streets will be covered with snow, and then observing that the streets are now covered with snow. This is unwarranted: it takes snow a very long time to melt, so snow could have fallen earlier in the day. Similarly, the Halley comet return is a good indication of the past success of Newton’s theory, but does not provide any guarantee of its future success. Indeed, it later turned out that Newton’s theory was false and it was substituted by Einstein’s theory of relativity. Einstein argued that gravity is not a force but rather the effect of the modification of the fabric of space-time due to the presence of material bodies. That is, in empty space a body will go straight, but the presence of another body will bend its trajectory as if it were affected by a pulling force. Even if it is an imprecise analogy, a ball thrown on a bed where a cat is sleeping will not go straight but will rather curve towards the cat. Anyway, we cannot prove beyond any doubt a theory to be true, no matter how successful it is. It is better to say that the theory is confirmed, or more cautiously corroborated, by positive experiments: arguably, we have more reasons to believe a theory with lots of confirmatory instances than one with fewer. Can we at least prove a theory to be false? Newton’s theory would be proven false if the predicted acceleration of falling bodies were different from the measured one, say. Indeed, Newton’s theory was falsified by experiments: the theory predicted Mercury’s orbit around the Sun would not shift forward, which instead does. Such shift was predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. So, can falsification be definite? Again, no: sometimes old theories do not get replaced even if they have contrary evidence. In this case, experimental refutation of Newton’s theory was not the reason why relativity took the place of Newton’s theory in the physics books. Even if the predictions were wrong, scientists were not ready to consider Newton’s theory to be false and kept using it. After all, is it worth throwing away all the successes of such a powerful, explanatory theory just for such a small discrepancy? It could well be some experimental error. Nonetheless, eventually Newton’s theory was replaced because of theoretical, rather than empirical, reasons. Einstein proposed his theory of relativity because he found the ‘spooky action-at-a-distance’ of Newton’s theory of gravity extremely unsatisfactory. Therefore, he looked for another explanation and he found it. The bonus was that his theory could also correctly recover the shift in Mercury’s orbit that Newton’s theory could not account for. __ "Even if the predictions were wrong, scientists were not ready to consider Newton's theory to be false and kept using it. After all, is it worth throwing away all the successes of such a powerful, explanatory theory just for such a small discrepancy?" ___ Also, consider this other example. Gravity keeps the universe together and one of the leading early theories of the origin of the universe is the big bang theory: the universe started expanding after a huge explosion at the beginning of time. One should expect sooner or later the universe to slow down, just like the fragments of a more ‘regular’ explosion. However, recent astronomical data suggest that the fragments are getting away at increasing speed. This is a falsification of the big bang theory, which predicted deceleration. Nonetheless, sometimes, like in the case of Newton’s failure to predict Mercury’s orbital shift, rejecting falsified theories seems just too harsh. If I drop an egg on the floor and it does not break as expected, I will not claim I have refuted the current theory of gravity. Rather, I will check for false assumptions that would explain the mistaken result. Another example is that Newton’s theory predicted a different orbit for Uranus than the one observed. So the theory was, again, falsified. However, instead of rejecting Newton’s theory, astronomers questioned the assumption that there were seven planets: the existence of another planet, Neptune, would explain the observed orbit of Uranus, which they indeed later observed. Back to the case of the accelerating universe, many astronomers decided to do the same thing: they did not refute the theory, even with contrary evidence. In a sense, they proposed that gravity has its own dark side: something, now known as dark energy, which overpowers gravity’s attraction. More precisely, they questioned the assumption that space-time has no energy in itself. One may think of this as a repulsive gravity or anti-gravity, but do not read too much into it. Notice that hidden, unquestioned, assumptions are everywhere. For instance, when using a microscope, we assume light propagates in a straight line, even if it does not. There are some situations in which this is irrelevant, but some others in which it may not. Hence, when facing empirical refutation, scientists always have the option to put the theory into question or to challenge some hidden assumption instead. In this case, astronomers could either deny the existence of dark energy and radically modify general relativity, or assume dark energy exists without modifying general relativity too much. If the former is the case, there is a sense in which there is anti-gravity; if the latter, there is not. The philosophical question therefore is: when is it reasonable for a scientist to hold on to her theory, and when is she just stubbornly in love with it? Even if this is not the case here, I am sure you understand the gravity of the situation (pun intended!) if alternative theories are empirically equivalent. That is, in the case in which no experiment can be performed to tell them apart. This happens, for instance, between some different formulations of non-relativistic quantum mechanics. If we cannot choose which theory is correct based on the empirical results, what can help us? It is unclear: some will say super-empirical, or purely theoretical virtues, should be important. Simpler theories, for instance, should be preferred. However, what is simplicity? Why should we believe that the universe is simple? The bottom line is therefore this: one is never able to prove or rule out a scientific theory beyond any doubt with experiments alone. That means that there will certainly be alternatives and it is unclear how theoretical virtues may help in theory selection. Having said that, I believe that scientific theories are powerful tools that can tell us about the nature of reality. Even if we cannot definitively prove they are true or false, they are either one or the other. There is something about the scientific method that allows science, as opposed to the unscientific alternatives like crystal ball gazing or tarot reading, to track truth, even if we do not know exactly what it is. Not knowing it yet does not imply we will never find out more. And not knowing what it is it does not mean that it does not work: my mum’s ignorance about the way in which a nuclear power plant works does not make the plant stop working. So does anti-gravity exist? Either it does or it does not. We do not know yet and we will never be able to know for sure. However, science can still give fallible knowledge of the world: we sometime get things wrong but we are getting somewhere. Therefore, if you want to investigate the mysteries of gravity, as well as any other, keep studying, become a scientist and keep your philosophical eye open: the path is going to be uphill, but there is no fun without a challenge. Here: https://iai.tv/articles/gravity-and-the-dark-side-of-science-auid-901

Animal Welfare (Sentience) in the UK legal code Animals to be formally recognised as sentient beings in domestic law Introduction of the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill as part of the Government's Action Plan for Animal Welfare From: Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs and The Rt Hon Lord Goldsmith Published 13 May 2021 Government introduces Bill to formally recognise animals as sentient beings Animal Sentience Committee will put animal sentience at heart of government policy Bill introduced as part of government’s first of a kind Action Plan for Animal Welfare Vertebrate animals will be recognised as sentient beings for the first time in UK law thanks to the introduction of the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill, introduced in Parliament today. The legislation will also ensure that animal sentience is taken into account when developing policy across Government through the creation of a Animal Sentience Committee which will be made up of animal experts from within the field. By enshrining sentience in domestic law in this way, any new legislation will have to take into account the fact that animals can experience feelings such as pain or joy. The Bill will underpin the Government’s Action Plan for Animal Welfare, which launched yesterday and sets out the government’s plans to improve standards and eradicate cruel practices for animals both domestically and internationally. The Bill’s introduction, fulfilling a key Manifesto commitment, will further the UK’s position as a world-leader on animal welfare. Now that we have left the EU we have the opportunity to remake laws and go further to promote animal welfare by making sure that all Government departments properly consider animal sentience when designing policy, covering all vertebrate animals from farm to forest. The Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill will: formally recognise animals as sentient beings in domestic law establish an Animal Sentience Committee made up of experts to ensure cross departmental government policy considers animal sentience ensure Government Ministers update parliament on recommendations made by the Animal Sentience Committee ... Here: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/animals-to-be-formally-recognised-as-sentient-beings-in-domestic-law

Medicine's bad philosophy threatens your health Medicine has a mind-body problem by Diane O'Leary In recent years medicine has increasingly recognized a connection between mind and body and how the interaction between the two can affect our health. But in its effort to avoid a problematic separation between mind and body, medicine has been led astray. Due to misunderstanding what in philosophy is called mind-body dualism, trained medical doctors end up over-diagnosing conditions as psychosomatic, automatically construing medically unexplained symptoms as psychiatric problems. This is a philosophical error that ends up putting the health of patients at risk, argues Diane O’Leary. Medicine and philosophy have an uneasy relationship. Medicine is a practical endeavor, aiming for concrete results. Philosophy, on the other hand, has been construed as a head-in-the-clouds kind of thing since antiquity. Today, outside of medical ethics (which has taken a rightful place within the profession), it’s hard to see how philosophy’s abstractions could make a real difference to the nuts and bolts of diagnosis and treatment. If medicine were just an applied science of the body, all of this would make good sense. But in the late twentieth century, western medicine reconsidered its exclusive focus on the body and emphatically rejected it. Patients, it turns out, are not just bodies, we’re people. And persons have minds, as well as bodies. This shift raised one modern philosophy’s most intractable issues: the mind-body problem: How do our subjective, mental experiences relate to our objective, physical bodies?... More here: https://iai.tv/articles/medicines-bad-philosophy-threatens-your-health-auid-2225

25/07/2022 The Chinese superhero: caught a two-year-old baby girl who fell from the fifth floor A Chinese man was declared a "national hero" after he miraculously caught a two-year-old girl who fell from a fifth-floor window. Shen Dong, 31, was parking his car in front of an apartment building in Tongxiang, Zhejiang Province, when he heard a loud noise. It was a baby girl who fell from the window from the fifth floor and landed on a metal roof. The two-year-old slipped off the roof and was about to hit the sidewalk, when she was saved at the last moment by a tooth that caught her. The girl was rushed to the hospital with injuries to her legs and lungs, and her condition is stable, the "South China Morning Post" reported. A video of the incident was shared by the local police on Weibo - China's equivalent of Twitter - and went viral. On social networks, Shen was nicknamed "superhero". Shen, who works at the bank opposite, saw what was happening and was in the middle of a phone call to the emergency services, but then he noticed that the girl was about to fall from the roof, threw his phone and managed to catch her before she hit the concrete. According to him, at first he did not know it was a baby. "The truth is, I don't remember all the details," he told the "Chiangyang Evening News." "I don't remember if my arms hurt. It was an instinct to grab her. I was lucky I was able to grab her in time. Otherwise I would have felt terrible." Here: https://newsrnd.com/news/2022-07-25-the-chinese-superhero--caught-a-two-year-old-baby-girl-who-fell-from-the-fifth-floor---voila!-news.S1WXyuln2c.html

... and reread the "Self-care basics" post from this thread, please

that's horrible, awful! But you wrote in this same time: - voilà, exactly...so keep in touch with the others, please! cool, hold it like this. I'm Ok., generally speaking.

"Plasma is the dominant form of matter in the universe, with more than 99.99% of the matter in the universe being plasmas." Cosmic Connection From the discovery of the fusion process itself, the effort to control fusion energy has been tied to the study of astronomical phenomena on all scales in the universe, from our Earth’s aurora to superclusters of galaxies that contain hundreds of trillions of stars. The fusion process was discovered by Han Bethe and others through their research on the origin of the energy of the Sun and other stars. Later, as researchers learned about plasmas, the electrically conducting state of matter where fusion reactions take place, they could compare what they observed in the laboratory with what could be observed in space. Plasma is the dominant form of matter in the universe, with more than 99.99% of the matter in the universe being plasmas. Hannes Alfven, the founder of modern plasma physics, discovered fundamental processes in plasmas in space and then applied them to technology on earth—and vice versa, for example using technical problems in the transmission of electricity in Sweden to describe solar flares. The discovery by Alfven and his colleague Carl-Gunner Falthammar of the basic role played by filaments of current in the cosmos in the formation of structure from stars up to galaxies laid the basis for understanding filamentation in the plasma focus device. Similarly, LPPFusion Chief Scientist Eric Lerner’s research in the 1980’s using the formation of plasmoid in the DPF as a model for understanding quasars led to the formulation of a quantitative theory of the functioning of the DPF. This theory in turn predicted that the plasma focus could be used for pB11 fusion. ... Here: https://www.lppfusion.com/science/cosmic-connection/ Sun flares

Censored Papers That Refute The Big Bang Hypothesis These are the papers that the cosmology censors don’t want anyone to read: The first one predicts what the new JWST telescope will find—further refuting the Big Bang, expanding universe, hypothesis. The second paper shows, with the latest data, how large-scale structures could not have formed in the time since the hypothesized Big Bang—and how they really formed from plasma filamentation. The third paper summarizes the evidence against the Big Bang hypothesis, which is contradicted by at least 16 independent sets of data and supported by only one. It also shows how a universe without a Big Bang evolved into the one that we currently observe. ... PDFs here: https://www.lppfusion.com/censored-papers-that-refute-the-big-bang-hypothesis/ Physicists and Astronomers from Ten Countries Protest arXiv’s Censorship of Papers Refuting the Big Bang Hypothesis Twenty-four astronomers and physicists from ten countries have signed a petition protesting the censorship of papers that are critical of the Big Bang Hypothesis by the open pre-print website arXiv. Run by Cornell University, arXiv is supposed to provide an open public forum for researchers to exchange pre-publication papers, without peer-review. But during June, 2022, arXiv rejected for publication on the website three papers by Dr. Riccardo Scarpa, Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, and Eric J. Lerner, LPPFusion, Inc. which are critical of the validity of the Big Bang hypothesis: “Will LCDM cosmology survive the James Webb Space Telescope?” , “Observations of Large-Scale Structures Contradict the Predictions of the Big Bang Hypothesis But Confirm Plasma Theory”, and “The Big Bang Never Happened—A Reassessment of the Galactic Origin of Light Elements (GOLE) Hypothesis and its Implications”. ... Here: https://www.lppfusion.com/scientists-protest-censorship-in-cosmology/

Karen Strier – Lessons from the world’s most peaceful primate Posted on September 12, 2022 by Frontiers Science Communications in Featured News, Frontiers Announcements // 0 Comments Author: Natasha Inskip Dr Karen Strier is Vilas Research Professor and Irven DeVore Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. With a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard University, her current research is based in the Atlantic Forest of south-eastern Brazil, studying one of the world’s most endangered primates, the Northern muriqui. In June 2023, she will be celebrating 40 years of this continuous field study on the same population of this species. She is an international authority on the endangered northern muriqui monkey and her pioneering, long-term field research has been critical to conservation efforts on behalf of this species and has been influential in broadening comparative perspectives on primate behavioral and ecological diversity. Dr Strier served as the President of the International Primatological Society from 2016 to 2022. In 2005, she was elected to the National Academy of Science, USA and in 2010 she was awarded the Distinguished Primatologist award from the American Society of Primatology, to name just a small number of her many accolades. She is currently serving as an Associate Editor for Frontiers in Conservation Science, within the specialty section Animal Conservation. What is the focus of your current research and how did your career evolve? I started out in the 1980s trying to answer questions about the evolution of social behavior in my doctoral dissertation. Muriquis are critically endangered and so every discovery was important for their conservation, well-being, and ultimate survival. My research evolved from its original goal of testing specific hypotheses about social behavior and ecology, and I decided that I wanted to continue this project because, as is true with every interesting scientific study, the more you learn, the more you don’t know. I also loved Brazil, I loved the people, and I loved the animals. Photo credit: Carla B. Possamai / Projeto Muriqui de Caratinga One of the most interesting discoveries I made during that first year about Muriquis is that they live in peaceful societies where males and females have egalitarian social relationships. They are the same body size, and they have the same sized canines, unlike most mammals, where males are bigger and dominant over females or can threaten females. In muriqui society, the females are completely integrated with and equal to the males. Their peaceful society shows no evidence of agonistic dominance or hierarchies that you see in baboons and chimpanzees. The muriquis have a very different system. They didn’t fit any of the existing models, and maybe the models were applicable to particular cases but societies such as muriquis had not been considered. This led to the idea that there was no such thing as a typical primate, which subsequently was reflected in one of my most important publications ‘The Myth of the Typical Primate’. I also recognized the importance of getting more and more Brazilians involved in this kind of research. That is why from the very start a big part of my project has been aimed at capacity building. Every year, I provide support and training to up to 4 Brazilian students, so over the years the Project has trained about 90 students at the field site. About two thirds of them have gone on to continue with research and some of them now have their own studies of muriqui populations in other forests and we continue to collaborate. This process has been very satisfying and very rewarding. ... Right now, we are still collecting a lot of basic data. Over the past 40 years the population has exploded, going from 50 to 356 at its peak size, and then we had a series of stressful years, with drought and yellow fever, that corresponded with its decline. The population is now at about 225 individuals. Although smaller than it was at its peak size, this is still about 5 times bigger than it was when I first started. “We have learned a huge amount about muriquis population dynamics, individual life histories and how they adapt to changing environmental and demographic conditions. We are collaborating to make informed decisions about how to take care of these monkeys and how to protect them and increase their populations.” ... Here: https://blog.frontiersin.org/2022/09/12/karen-strier-lessons-from-the-worlds-most-peaceful-primate/ Northern Muriqui (Brachyteles hypoxanthus) | Flickr Northern Muriqui (Brachyteles hypoxanthus) taking a nap | Flickr

A virtual trip to the museum can improve the health of seniors stuck at home Posted on August 16, 2022 by Frontiers Science Communications in Featured News, Health, Humanities // 0 Comments By Peter Rejceck, science writer Image credit: SeventyFour / Shutterstock.com Social isolation can have devastating health effects, especially for elderly people. A number of studies have shown that art is not only good for the soul, but can also improve both physical and mental well-being. Researchers in Canada investigated whether these art-based benefits could be delivered digitally through virtual museum tours. They found that indeed older adults who attended weekly guided tours online felt less frail – offering a public health model to promote healthy aging. Scientists have long known that social isolation is associated with a number of health problems, including increased risks for stroke and heart disease, as well as mental decline and even premature death. The risks are especially acute for older adults, who are more likely to be socially isolated and lonely. The coronavirus pandemic only exacerbated the problem due to the need for social distancing, particularly to protect the health of the world’s elderly population. But the same digital technologies that helped workers connect remotely could help older adults become more physically, mentally and socially healthy when combined with interactive art-based activities. That’s the conclusion from a new study published in the journal Frontiers in Medicine that is the first to demonstrate how virtual museum visits can significantly improve quality of life for seniors who are stuck at home. Researchers in Canada teamed up with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts(MMFA) to investigate the potential benefits of conducting weekly virtual visits over a three-month period. The study recruited 106 people aged 65 and older living in the Montreal metro area. Half of the participants attended guided tours online once a week, while the control group abstained from participating in any cultural activities during the same time period. ► Read original article ► Download original article (pdf) Art improves life The intervention group showed significant improvements in their social isolation, well-being, quality of life and frailty assessment scores when compared to the control group, according to the paper. “Our study showed that art-based activity may be an effective intervention,” said lead author Dr Olivier Beauchet, a professor at the University of Montreal. “On a global scale, this participatory art-based activity could become a model that could be offered in museums and arts institutions worldwide to promote active and healthy aging.” The biggest benefits of the 45-minute virtual museum tours, which also included a 15-minute Q&A at the end with a museum guide, was on frailty. Frailty refers to a “vulnerable condition exposing individuals to incident adverse health events and disabilities that negatively impact their quality of life and increase health and social costs,” Beauchet explained. “Health and social systems need to address the challenge of limiting frailty and its related adverse consequences in the aging population.” A creative way to improve health The new study is an extension of previous research that investigated the potential health benefits of an ongoing MMFA program for seniors called “Thursdays at the Museum.” Findings from the single arm pilot study in 2018 indicated that art-based activities hosted by the museum can improve well-being, quality of life and health in older adults. In fact, the success of the pilot study led to a three-year multinational study to test the effectiveness of such art-based interventions across societies and cultures. In addition, the Research Centre of the Geriatric University Institute of Montreal, in collaboration with MMFA and the University of Montreal, is developing a new program marrying art and health called the Arts & Longevity Lab. The purpose of the lab is to develop, validate and promote art-based interventions for older adults. These initiatives reflect approaches advocated by the World Health Organization (WHO) to manage chronic diseases, according to Beauchet. For instance, the WHO launched the Aging and Health Program in 2015 that included using community-based organizations to promote culture as a key component of improving health. Traditionally, these sorts of preventive health activities have taken place in schools, community centers, and workplaces. “While these are suitable locations that reach a great number of people, there are additional organizations and sectors that could become partners in public health research and practice development,” Beauchet said. “Museums are among such potential partners. They are aware of the needs of their communities and are consequently expanding the types of activities they offer.” Here: https://blog.frontiersin.org/2022/08/16/frontiers-medicine-virtual-museum-visit-lonely-elderly/

... The universe might turn out to be a lot stranger than we think, or could possibly imagine, argues Bjørn Ekeberg. Read more here: We usually talk about the Standard Model of particle physics, but you also talk of a standard model of cosmology, and how it’s also on shaky foundations. What do you see as the key tenets of cosmology’s standard model? The standard model of cosmology (sometimes called the Concordance or Lambda-CDM model) resembles a game of Jenga, with building blocks stacked on top of each other. At the bottom is an evolutionary model of General Relativity in which space expands with time, based on the hypothesis that the universe originated in a 'Big Bang' - along with a few simplifying assumptions. Two key interpretations were hailed as evidence for this theory: the redshift of galaxies was taken to mean that space is expanding, and the so-called cosmic microwave background was interpreted as residue from the Big Bang. With these core building blocks, this theoretical framework became the first established 'scientific cosmology' in the 1960s. The core tenets of standard cosmology are that the universe has a finite origin in time - and more fundamentally, that the mathematical laws deduced from our own galaxy apply universally, that we can know the entire universe with certainty. It's a very bold project painting a grand picture that many observations contradict. And so new blocks were added on top to account for discrepancies between theory and observations. Dark matter was invented as an explanation for why our observations of galaxies didn't fit our mathematical model. Inflation was invented as an explanation for how the universe possibly could have gone from nothing to the kind of structure we observe today. Dark Energy was invented to account for ostensible acceleration of space, and so on. Today there are challenges to some of these upper blocks but very few scientists want to question the blocks below. In my understanding, this reluctance is not based on these blocks being proven beyond doubt but because if they were to be in doubt, the entire Jenga tower of standard cosmology would fall apart. ___ Dark matter was invented in response to the problem that observations of galaxies didn't match theoretical predictions. But after 50 years of research there is still no direct evidence of it. ___ What’s your main reservation when it comes to the existence of dark matter and the belief of many physicists that it makes up 85% of our universe? Dark matter was invented in response to the problem that observations of galaxies didn't match theoretical predictions. At a stroke, it solved the discrepancy and offered a very simple physical explanation to grasp. But after 50 years of research there is still no direct evidence of it. While it's not my role to judge the scientific merit of the theory, my reservation is that this belief that dark matter or something like it "must exist" is really a belief in the universalized theoretical model we use to understand the cosmos in the first place. It looks suspiciously like the epicycles that astronomers in ancient times postulated to make sense of planetary movements within the geocentric model. If we were to abandon the idea of dark matter as having no evidential basis, would other parts of our cosmological model fall apart, and if so, do we have an alternative model that could replace it? I use the Jenga metaphor for this reason - to suggest dark matter is not a core tenet of the standard model but rather an added block on top. It is potentially replaceable without threatening the blocks underneath. Dark matter now faces a serious challenger in the so-called MOND theory (modified Newtonian dynamics), which may well eclipse it by doing a better job of matching theoretical predictions with observations. But this would not constitute a radical shift. Basically, it would replace a simple physical explanation with a complicated mathematical description, which has taken decades to develop. In a way, MOND looks more like an evolution than a revolution. That said, its key idea, that gravity does not work the same way everywhere in the universe, does have interesting implications for the model as a whole. It's another simplifying assumption of the original framework that is called into question. ___ You can't build a cosmological model without metaphysics; to think cosmology is pure science is delusional. ___ One of the striking claims that you’ve made is that the Big Bang is a metaphysical hypothesis, rather than a claim based on astronomical observation. What do you mean by ‘metaphysical hypothesis’ here, that it’s not possible to test empirically? From the outset, the 'Big Bang' was always a hypothetical premise - if t=0, then... it allowed for calculation of scenarios. When this in turn could yield models that conformed to observations, it was seen to validate the original premise. This was repeated and became an integral assumption built into the framework. The 'Big Bang' also carried a powerful analogy with nuclear physics, the image of a cosmic explosion. It seemed to make sense to a certain generation and it was a very compelling narrative for many reasons - the ultimate origin story. We have since been scouring the skies for signs that we infer as proof of this cosmic origin. But this is retroactive reasoning - there is no direct evidence of the Big Bang because it lies beyond the horizon of the observable. So as a grounding assumption that can never itself be verified, it's a metaphysical hypothesis in this precise sense. Of course, you can imagine an alternate premise, that the universe is infinite in time, and this is metaphysical too. My point is you can't build a cosmological model without metaphysics; to think cosmology is pure science is delusional. [SUGGESTED READING: The Philosophical Problems of Cosmology By George Ellis] What about Hubble’s observation that the universe is expanding, that galaxies are moving away from each other, does that not count as empirical evidence of them being crunched up, all close together, in the past? Yes, this was the inference made. But note that Hubble didn't observe expansion, he observed a redshift that was interpreted as expansion - and he didn't himself believe this interpretation. ... ... by Bjørn Ekeberg - so the whole article here: https://iai.tv/articles/the-delusions-of-metaphysics-auid-2145

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The Delusions of Cosmology The metaphysical assumptions behind the science by Bjørn Ekeberg - 1st June 2022 The idea that the universe started with a Big Bang is a key tenet of the standard model of cosmology. But that model is a lot less scientific than it’s taken to be. To begin with, we can never have direct evidence of the Big Bang itself, and so if we are to accept it, it must be as a metaphysical, not a scientific hypothesis. Furthermore, the standard model of cosmology has had to adapt to a number of observational discrepancies, postulating entities like dark matter and dark energy for which there is no direct evidence. To add to the above, another central assumption, the cosmological principle, stating that the laws of the universe are the same everywhere, is also under scrutiny. The universe might turn out to be a lot stranger than we think, or could possibly imagine, argues Bjørn Ekeberg. ... ... Comments section here: Roy Lofquist10 June 2022 @Bud Rapanault "A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." ~ Max Planck Unfortunately that no longer applies. The cult of the "Big Bang" has become a multi-billion dollar a year rice bowl that will sustain the myths in perpetuity. Fortunately, cosmology is of little consequence. Bud Rapanault9 June 2022 "From the outset, the 'Big Bang' was always a hypothetical premise - if t=0, then... it allowed for calculation of scenarios." This gets the chronological and logical development of the Big Bang model wrong. First came General Relativity in 1915, followed by Friedmann's 1921 solutions to the GR field equations for a universal metric, now called the FLRW metric. Assuming a universal metric as Friedmann did was inherently at odds with GR which does not have a universal frame; what makes GR a relativistic theory is precisely its lack of a universal frame. Nonetheless, Friedmann's oxymoronic results had three possible solutions, an expanding, collapsing, or unstable static "universe". In the late 1920s Hubble published his observations of a redshift correlated with distance. That correlation was widely treated as the consequence of a recessional velocity, an assumption that Hubble himself never fully accepted. The recessional velocity interpretation was then treated as evidence for Friedmann's expanding universe model and the rest has been a slog, relentless and irrational, to the current reality-challenged standard model of cosmology, which describes a "universe" that looks nothing like the Cosmos we observe. To the extent there is a crisis in cosmology, it is not because of the so-called Hubble tension involving a discrepancy between two different measurements of the Hubble constant. There is a crisis because the scientific academy in its current state is incapable of reconsidering the standard model's foundational assumptions, which are: 1) it is possible to model the vast cosmos we observe as a singular coherent, simultaneous entity and 2) the cause of the cosmological redshift is some form of recessional velocity. Both of those assumptions are almost certainly wrong. Modern cosmology will remain in crisis, an inert unscientific discipline, until such time as those assumptions are openly reconsidered and alternative models based on reasonable counter-assumptions are granted access to research funding currently reserved for polishing the chrome on the rusting hulk of the BB model, such as dark matter searches, etc. The closed, guild-like grip that BB theorists hold over funding and publication needs to be broken if cosmology is to be a science rather than a crude and primitive belief system. Mike Pollock3 June 2022 Edwin Hubble discovered the galaxies expanding, not the universe. The scientific community states that he discovered the expanding universe when, as is stated in the article, he wanted nothing to do with the assumption. Recently, I've seen Wikipedia erase this fact from Hubbles page when it once was clearly stated. I found this extremely irritating and more of an attempt to keep the Big Bang theory alive forever. The Big Bang was simply our universe turning itself into a gargantuan particle collider no different than any of the ones here on Earth. They create quark plasma shrapnel and our universe created quark plasma shrapnel as the galaxies. That is where they got their energy and why they are expanding. The two objects contained the mass of the observable galaxies. There is no other feasible explanation. Black holes are made of quark plasma. This plasma is optically invisible and can make shapes. Our galaxy was spinning and created a spiral galaxy. If the shrapnel wasn't spinning or spinning very little, an elliptical or irregular galaxy was formed. Gravity is created by energy manipulating space just like Einstein suggested. Unfortunately, one of the biggest flaws of the Big Bang theory is that a cloud of gas and dust must create its own gravity to become a star. This puts the emphasis on normal matter to create all the gravity ignoring dark matter altogether. The reality is that the collision created the energy, not gravity. Energy creates gravity, gravity doesn't create energy. The Big Bang theory systematically ignores 95% of our universe. It is the reason the Theory of Everything hasn't been discovered and never will because this theory is currently an utter fact. Quark plasma creates all the naturally occurring elements all by itself from the outside of the mass inward. Dark matter is made of extremely pressurized Tau neutrinos. When the Big Bang happened, the pressure and friction from the event separated the quarks. It is the pressure and density of space itself that keeps the quarks apart indefinitely. As the cold dark matter of space comes into the reaction to disrupt the quarks, the strong force between the quarks and neutrinos throws the neutrinos out of the reaction as electron neutrino gamma rays. That is why they are optically invisible. These outgoing particles push out on the natural pressure of space causing gravitational lensing. Space uses its natural pressure to push through the outgoing matter and reacts with normal matter to create the force of gravity. The neutrinos and quarks start turning the kinetic energy black hole into potential energy by creating neutrons on the surface. Supernovae simply do not exist. The mass turns into a neutron star but they are merely a thin layer on the surface of the black hole. The neutrons break down to the first hydrogen atoms. The constantly forming neutrons then fuse with the hydrogen to form the first helium atoms using the beta minus decay reaction. This is the one, and only fusion our universe produces. This is why fusion has never created a net gain of energy and never will. The mass continues creating heavier elements making the mass darker until a surface forms and the light is extinguished. This is when the atmosphere is allowed to develop. Eventually, the hydrocarbons and the quark plasma heat underneath the surface behind creating water for hundreds of millions of years in the exact same fashion as a catalytic converter creates water in a car. That is where all the water came from. Our planet created every bit of it. This is the Theory of Everything. There is no other way our universe could produce what we see. I have followed every, single law in the book. This article states, perfectly, how our current theories are simply fantasies that have been made realities by one ad-hoc theory after another. Literally, nothing is understood about our universe. Please interview me. This theory took me 20 years to develop. I can answer all the questions that never get answered. My explanation is the whole point of this article. It is amazing that someone is actually questioning the Big Bang theory so thoroughly. Conventionalism makes this never happen. Everything known are facts when they are only terrible theories. Science should have listened to Edwin Hubble, not Georges Lamaitre. Joe Bakhos3 June 2022 I've recently put forward a modified gravity hypothesis that explains galactic rotation rates and also cosmological expansion without the need of dark matter or dark energy. This hypothesis also includes an adaptation of general relativity that explains time dilation and energy increase at relativistic velocities and within a gravity well, while retaining Euclidean space. Part of this hypothesis includes the idea that higher concentrations of neutrinos may inhibit other quantum processes. A copy may be found by going to the vixra site and searching for Bakhos. The title is "Chasing Oumuamua" Roy Lofquist2 June 2022 Summary: Radio astronomy observations of Pulsars indicate that the Hubble Red Shift is caused by “Tired Light” rather than the expansion of the universe. Dear Sirs, When Hubble published his observations of red shifted light from distant objects there were two possible explanations that came to the fore. One, originated by Georges Lemaitre, was that the Universe was expanding. The other, from Fritz Zwicky, was that light lost energy as it traveled, termed "tired light". At that time, ca. 1930, interstellar and intergalactic space were assumed to be perfect vacuums and thus there was no mechanism to redden the light. Now, 90 years later, we have actual observational evidence that Zwicky was right. In the radio astronomy of Pulsars we find that the shorter wavelengths of the leading edge of the pulse arrive before longer wavelengths. The velocity of light, c, is NOT constant but varies by wavelength. The dispersion is proportional to the distance from us of the pulsar. The observed effect is isotropic. The conventional explanation is that the dispersion measure is the “integrated column density of free electrons between an observer and a pulsar”. The mechanism matters not. What matters is that the interstellar medium is not a vacuum but rather affects light waves in a way best described as having an Index of Refraction greater than 1, unity. We find the same phenomenon in the observation of Fast Radio Bursts from other galaxies, thus indicating that the intergalactic media is not an electromagnetic vacuum. Regards, Roy Lofquist Ocoee, Florida Here: https://iai.tv/articles/the-delusions-of-metaphysics-auid-2145

Astronomy, Cosmology: send a message to your friends...: The Big Bang didn't happen What do the James Webb images really show? - by Eric J. Lerner, 11th August 2022 To everyone who sees them, the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images of the cosmos are beautifully awe-inspiring. But to most professional astronomers and cosmologists, they are also extremely surprising—not at all what was predicted by theory. In the flood of technical astronomical papers published online since July 12, the authors report again and again that the images show surprisingly many galaxies, galaxies that are surprisingly smooth, surprisingly small and surprisingly old. Lots of surprises, and not necessarily pleasant ones. One paper’s title begins with the candid exclamation: “Panic!” Why do the JWST’s images inspire panic among cosmologists? And what theory’s predictions are they contradicting? The papers don’t actually say. The truth that these papers don’t report is that the hypothesis that the JWST’s images are blatantly and repeatedly contradicting is the Big Bang Hypothesis that the universe began 14 billion years ago in an incredibly hot, dense state and has been expanding ever since. Since that hypothesis has been defended for decades as unquestionable truth by the vast majority of cosmological theorists, the new data is causing these theorists to panic. “Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning,” says Alison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, “and wondering if everything I’ve done is wrong.” [SUGGESTED READING: The Delusions of Cosmology By Bjørn Ekeberg] It is not too complicated to explain why these too small, too smooth, too old and too numerous galaxies are completely incompatible with the Big Bang hypothesis. Let’s begin with “too small”. If the universe is expanding, a strange optical illusion must exist. Galaxies (or any other objects) in expanding space do not continue to look smaller and smaller with increasing distance. Beyond a certain point, they start looking larger and larger. (This is because their light is supposed to have left them when they were closer to us.) This is in sharp contrast to ordinary, non-expanding space, where objects look smaller in proportion to their distance. ___ Put another way, the galaxies that the JWST shows are just the same size as the galaxies near to us, assuming that the universe is not expanding and redshift is proportional to distance. ___ Smaller and smaller is exactly what the JWST images show. Even galaxies with greater luminosity and mass than our own Milky Way galaxy appear in these images to be two to three times smaller than in similar images observed with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and the new galaxies have redshifts which are also two to three times greater. This is not at all what is expected with an expanding universe, but it is just exactly what I and my colleague Riccardo Scarpa predicted based on a non-expanding universe, with redshift proportional to distance. Starting in 2014, we had already published results, based on HST images, that showed that galaxies with redshifts all the way up to 5 matched the expectations of non-expanding, ordinary space. So we were confident the JWST would show the same thing—which it already has, for galaxies having redshifts as high as 12. Put another way, the galaxies that the JWST shows are just the same size as the galaxies near to us, if it is assumed that the universe is not expanding and redshift is proportional to distance. [SUGGESTED READING: Dark Matter Doesn't Exist By Pavel Kroupa] But from the standpoint of the Big Bang, expanding-universe hypothesis, these distant galaxies must be intrinsically extremely tiny to compensate for the hypothesized optical illusion—implausibly tiny. One galaxy noted in the papers, called GHz2, is far more luminous that the Milky Way, yet is calculated to be only 300 light years in radius—150 times smaller than the radius of our Milky Way. Its surface brightness—brightness per unit area-- would be 600 times that of the brightest galaxy in the local universe. Its density (and that of several other galaxies in the new images) would be tens of thousands of times that of present-day galaxies. ___ Tiny and smooth galaxies mean no expansion and thus no Big Bang. ___ Big Bang theorists have known for years from the HST images that their assumptions necessitate the existence of these tiny, ultra-dense “Mighty Mouse” galaxies. JWST has made the problem far worse. The same theorists have speculated that the tiny galaxies grow up into present day galaxies by colliding with each other—merging to become more spread out. An analogy to this hypothetical merger process would be to imagine a magical toy car a centimeter long that nonetheless weighs as much as a SUV and grows up into a real SUV by colliding with many other toy cars. [VIDEO: Bang goes the Big Bang: With Roger Penrose, John Ellis and Laura Mersini-Houghton] But the JWST has shot through this far-out scenario as well. If you could believe the toy car story, you would at least expect some fender dents in the colliding cars. And Big Bang theorists did expect to see badly mangled galaxies scrambled by many collisions or mergers. What the JWST actually showed was overwhelmingly smooth disks and neat spiral forms, just as we see in today’s galaxies. The data in the “Panic!” article showed that smooth spiral galaxies were about “10 times” as numerous as what theory had predicted and that this “would challenge our ideas about mergers being a very common process”. In plain language, this data utterly destroys the merger theory. With few or no mergers, there is no way tiny galaxies could grow to be a hundred times bigger. Therefore, they were not tiny to begin with, and thus the optical illusion predicted from the expanding universe hypothesis does not exist. But no illusion means no expansion: the illusion is an unavoidable prediction from expansion. Thus, the panic among Big Bang supporters. Tiny and smooth galaxies mean no expansion and thus no Big Bang. ___ Since nothing could have originated before the Big Bang, the existence of these galaxies demonstrates that the Big Bang did not occur. ___ Too old and too many galaxies mean the same thing. The JWST uses many different filters to take its images in the infrared part of the spectrum. Thus, it can see the colors of the distant galaxies. This in turn allows astronomers to estimate the age of the stars in these galaxies because young, hot stars are blue in color and older, cooler stars, like our sun, are yellow or red in color. According to Big Bang theory, the most distant galaxies in the JWST images are seen as they were only 400-500 million years after the origin of the universe. Yet already some of the galaxies have shown stellar populations that are over a billion years old. Since nothing could have originated before the Big Bang, the existence of these galaxies demonstrates that the Big Bang did not occur. Just as there must be no galaxies older than the Big Bang, if the Big Bang hypothesis were valid, so theorists expected that as the JWST looked out further in space and back in time, there would be fewer and fewer galaxies and eventually none—a Dark Age in the cosmos. But a paper to be published in Nature demonstrates that galaxies as massive as the Milky Way are common even a few hundred million years after the hypothesized Bang. The authors state that the new images show that there are at least 100,000 times as many galaxies as theorists predicted at redshifts more than 10. There is no way that so many large galaxies can be generated in so little time, so again-- no Big Bang. ... ... ___ SUGGESTED READING: Cosmology in crisis By Bjørn Ekeberg ___ Comment by: Roy Lofquist -12 August 2022 Summary: Radio astronomy observations of Pulsars indicate that the Hubble Red Shift is caused by “Tired Light” rather than the expansion of the universe. When Hubble published his observations of red shifted light from distant objects there were two possible explanations that came to the fore. One, originated by Georges Lemaitre, was that the Universe was expanding. The other, from Fritz Zwicky, was that light lost energy as it traveled, termed "tired light". At that time, ca. 1930, interstellar and intergalactic space were assumed to be perfect vacuums and thus there was no mechanism to redden the light. Now, 90 years later, we have actual observational evidence that Zwicky was right. In the radio astronomy of Pulsars we find that the shorter wavelengths of the leading edge of the pulse arrive before longer wavelengths. The velocity of light, c, is NOT constant but varies by wavelength. This time dispersion is proportional to the distance from us of the pulsar, indicating that the reduction in velocity is cumulative. The observed effect is isotropic. The interstellar medium is not a vacuum but rather affects light waves in a way best described as having an Index of Refraction greater than 1, unity. We find the same phenomenon in the observation of Fast Radio Bursts from other galaxies, thus indicating that the intergalactic media is not an electromagnetic vacuum. READ MORE here: https://iai.tv/articles/the-big-bang-didnt-happen-auid-2215 Institute of Art and Ideas IAI.tv/articles: https://iai.tv/articles

Send a message to your friends: "Oil & gas will not run out." Peter Clack @PeterDClack "Oil is the 2nd-most prevalent liquid on earth after water - not a 'fossil fuel', a term coined by J D Rockerfeller to create the idea of scarcity. Oil & gas will not run out." Here: https://twitter.com/PeterDClack/status/1572712155706978306 Peter Clack @PeterDClack "Climate is due to changes in earth's solar orbit not carbon dioxide, NASA said 3 yrs ago. Reports are finally coming to light that human CO2 emissions do not cause climate change. Most have been hidden from view by MSM & Big Tech. Now they are emerging." "Carbon dioxide maintains all life on earth, grows the food we eat & replenishes oxygen in the air we breathe. CO2 is in long-term decline. This is the crisis." "Carbon dioxide cannot warm the climate..." Peter Clack twitter account: https://twitter.com/PeterDClack

Yes my buddy @XPerceniol, I think he got sick, like me before... he couldn't read these posts anymore, maybe - we should be patient! He is young (50 years old) - so he will come out of this easily, I hope. I pray for him!

Yes Mina, studying before all. Maybe this will be useful to you: 7 Reasons You Won’t Start Studying Until It’s Too Late, And What To Do About It by Tom Miller: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/7-reasons-you-wont-start-studying-until-its-too-late-and-what-about.html

"mise" ... I'm not sure what you mean about - explains, please

Version 13 of ArcticFoxie doesn't show, but version 13 Modified by Humming Owl is Ok, version 13.5 is Ok too.

Very very true! How are you doing now... I don't see you posting anymore for a few days, and this worries me! - Or maybe the topics of my posts are not interesting for you anymore? Look too in two another threads, please...

The Cat Raised by a Mouse AaronsAnimals The Smallest Parrot you have ever seen - Tiny egg rescue A Chick Called Albert Winter Survival Shelter - Sleeping Outside in -25° Weather Kusk Bushcraft Winter Camping in a Hot Tent. Alone in the winter forest Forest Film: camping, off grid cabin and bushcraft