OT: Book "Merchants of Doubt"

Ooh, endorsed by the noted scientist Al Gore himself!

If you agree to read "Wrong" I'll read that one.

I suspect you only read stuff that reinforces the things you already believe.

It's 55F here at 7 AM; Mo turned the heat back on. How's the weather where you are?

John

Spoken like a true global warming Nazi. Perhaps we should revoke the degrees of all PhDs that don't take the "I believe in Global Warming" pledge of allegiance.

Tom

Townes should have been fired for defying all those experts (including a Nobel physicist) who said the maser/laser were forbidden by the laws of thermodynamics.

John

Not to mention all the quantum physicists who used to say that two laser beams couldn't form interference fringes because of quantum indeterminacy. (On exactly the same logic, superhet radios can't work.)

Hanbury Brown had to recruit a theoretician (Richard Twiss) to prove them wrong before he could get his intensity interferometer funded (and thereby founded the whole field of quantum optics, of course).

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Most of us are aware that Al Gore isn't a scientist, and doesn't claim to be one. He is in a position to get good advice, and he seems to be able to understand the advice that he gets, and retail it in a form that othe non-experts can comprehend.

..

I don't need to read "Wrong". I've been shooting down silly ideas in science for some forty years now, and I doubt that your book's journalist author is going to tell me anything I don't already know.

Science does tend to work that way. I did read "The Bell Curve" - which I disagreed with - but the authors of "Inequality by Design" ISBN 0-691-02898-2 found a lot more things wrong with it than I was in a position to dig out.

I'm back in Nijmegen where it is chilly and damp - about 15C. I've been back since last Friday. Sydney was warmer and sunnier all through the southern hemisphere winter.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Just to make a point that the so-called laws of physics aren't fundamental principles by itself but just corollaries of the accepted theories.

VLV

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If you want to believe total nonsense, you are free to do it, as ayou are free to join the Church of Scientology - just don't expect to be taken seriously.

I've got a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry, which means I know enough of the basics to understand quite a bit of the published work, which does happen to make sense to me. If you want to argue specifics, go ahead. We've wasted a quite a lot of bandwidth on this kind of off-topic rubbish in this user-group, so it might pay you to read up a bit to avoid posting exploded nonsense. The American Institute of Physics has a useful web-site.

Claiming that climate science as a whole is deluding itself may play well in the kind of bars where you kill off your brain cells, but it isn't a point of view for which you can make a rational case.

There are a few people with Ph.D.s in climate-related science who haven't been convinced, and nobody has tried to revoke their Ph.Ds. Most of them do seem to profess rather odd reasons for their scepticism

retired at 65, which is inevitable in the Netherlands. Despite this, he claims to have been ousted because he was critical about the accuracy of climate modelling. His arguement seems to boil down to the observation that the atmosphere is turbulent (which, as an expert in that area he can claim with some authority), and thus chaotic and impossible to model, which rather misses the point of climate modelling, which concentrates on the longer-term averaged behaviour, which is more constained than he seems to want to accept.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

...

Nobel-prize-winning physicists get old - just like the rest of us - and have been known to jump to conclusions which have later proved to be wrong. Lord Kelvin didn't believe in evolution because the sun couldn't have stayed hot enough for the millions of years evolution requires, but he was pontificating before Einstein had published e =3D m.c^2 and before Marie Curie had found that pure radium is always warmer than its environment.

Anthropogenic global warming may yet be shown to be another such misconception, but it's unlikely - people having been looking for alternative explanations for a few decades now, and the recent publications do seem to be scraping the bottom of the barrel.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

No, they're quite real--and therefore distinct from anyone's opinion about them.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Ah, you know everything already. And you have for 40 years.

John

Yeah, ain't it frustrating when you know everything, and nobody else wants to hear The Truth? ;-P

Cheers! Rich

Is it really merely a pledge, or is it more like an ordainment? ;-D

Cheers! Rich

How about all those evil pseudoscientists who claim that it's possible for a bumblebee to fly? ;-D

Cheers! Rich

I've heard that with an appropriate grating, like prison bars, machine-gun bullets will diffract.

Cheers! Rich

Nope. You get incoherent scatter only, because each bullet hits only one bar.

Interestingly, if you shine a light beam on a ball bearing, you get exactly isotropic scattered light.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--- If you _expect_ it to tell you something, in the vein you've specified, then that means you want it to bolster your opinion and, since you've already made up your mind and no amount of logic controverting your position will cause you to recant, it'll add to your store of "People who agree with me.", further engendering your self-induced belief in your infallibility.

Just another day in the life of a narcissist who's convinced himself that he couldn't ever be wrong, especially when he's being judged by _winners_ who he professes to consider to be churls.

But, more interesting, why would _anyone_ post what you did, in the way you did and, thus, execute a pre-emptive strike against Larkin?

Everything was quiet before your strike and, if you'd gotten the book, read it, and then prepared a refutation to counter something Larkin had said earlier, that would have been one thing.

You chose, however, to attack him based on something you've never seen, (contents of a book which you say is on its way to you) which is quite another.

--- JF

I have his book, "Boffin." Worth reading.

John

With they key term here being "retail".

You lost this battle, dipshit.

Have any clue as to who "George Orr" is?

THAT book is the one you should read, idiot.

"The Lathe of Heaven" -Ursula K. Le Guin

She has more on the ball than you ever will.

Idiot! That is what *HE* said to you!