Anti-science BBC- the Cox-up!

[cherenkov]

Prof Brian Cox: prettier than Brigstocke but just as wrong

"Sanctimonious Cox says he himself is ‘absolutely true to science’."

This apology for a scientist stood in front of a carefully selected bunch of celebrity dullards and said, for example, that every electron in the universe 'is in communication' with every other electron!

This guy confuses science with science fiction, favouring stupid sensationalist, not even theoretical statements like the above, that are an abuse of his undeserved status as a respectable scientist, to collaborate with the BBC in promoting the public perception of science it wants to encourage.

Anyone who watched this appalling piece of glib showmanship masquerading as science will not need me to tell them what this view is. For the rest let me set it out,

The BBC wants from us, regarding science, what it wants from us politically, philosophically, and existentially..., and that is essentially for us to be bamboozled into thinking that science is too challenging and difficult for ordinary people to get their heads round.

The combination of Dr Who and the pseudo-science programmes like Horizon dressed up, with all the special effects and gimmicks of Dr Who, and a pantheon of celebrity, former pop-star scientists like Brian May and Prof Cox, willing to play the game, conspire to produce a gullible mass audience ready to guzzle all the unscientific crap the BBC wants to peddle as scientific truth.

Like all mass-manipulating megalomaniacs the BBC shows respect to other similar organisations like the discredited IPCC for instance, or CERN and ITER, in much the same way as Islam and Catholicism show respect for each other against the shared threat of enlightened rational thinking. Any kind of criticism seems to be muted at best.

A good example of this betrayal of the interests of the poor suckers like us who are forced to pay for the BBC even if we choose to watch any other channel but the BBC, is ITER.

As a scientist, and I know I am not alone in this, I see the huge and ever-rocketing cost of this project as an affront to human intelligence and a slap in the face for the world's hungry people who could all be fed in perpetuity for a fraction of what this quixotic fiasco will cost the world economy.

Nowhere in the BBC's broadcasting will you hear anything but tiny soundbites concerning the disgusting flagrant self-serving abuse of science by corrupt, careerist, nest-feathering so-called scientists that ITER represents.

Yes you could say the same about the IPCC but believe me ITER takes it to another level, and if the BBC had any sense of responsibility towards the interests of it's licence payers it would be giving ITER the same level of sceptical and critical coverage it reserves for the current UK government.

The people of the world should know;

1) Nuclear fusion relies on gravitational pressure (or an atomic bomb induced implosion in the case of a hydrogen bomb) winning a skirmish with it's universal enemy, namely radiative expansion. Fusion power generation rests on the science fiction premise that you can use electromagnetism, as opposed to gravity, to achieve the same steady net energy release as is produced in stars. The problem is THAT YOU CAN ONLY CONFINE CHARGED PARTICLES USING ELECTROMAGNETISM. The ultra-high energy zero-charged NEUTRONS produced in fusion reactions cannot be confined and will not only destroy the lining of any containment vessel but also turn it into radioactive waste as toxic as anything produced by existing fission reactors!

Right now the world of science is totally clueless about a solution to this most basic and fundamental flaw in the entire concept of man-made fusion power. Thankfully there are some ethical scientists out there trying to wake us up to this fact and the extravagant folly that ITER really is, but outside the columns of 'Nature' and other journals you hardly hear a cheep.

2) Our species has already got totally FOC and for billions of years to come, access to a fusion reactor so powerful that it delivers every second a minute fraction of all the energy we could ever require. We now have solar panels that exceed the remarkable threshold of 20% energy conversion efficiency, and if we only spent a fraction of the cost of the ITER-doomed to failure white elephant we could put solar panels on every roof on this planet and solve our energy needs without the need for fission or fusion power (not to mention the bloody useless and horrible wind turbines) overnight!

The deafening silence on the ITER deception from the BBC and others is simply disgraceful, and ultimately catastrophic for our future.

PS Merry Christmas one and all!

[cherenkov]

Iter: The world's most expensive scientific gamble?

"Sebastien Balibar, head of research at the France National Council for Scientific Research in Paris, doubts that the requisite technology to make the experiment work is anywhere near existing."

This piece did get a couple of minutes on the Today programme but Balibar was given no opportunity to clarify what he meant by the above. Last year I recall Nature discussing whether fusion power will always be the energy source of tomorrow, possible hybrid fission plus fusion reactors, and I think, also suggested a delay in the building of ITER until research could be done on finding out if there is a way of solving the problem posed by the neutrons.

[Teddy Bear]

Excellent posts Cher.
Also the Telegraph article by James Delingpole you linked to above is also so good I am going to copy it here as well.

I recently watched a few programmes by this Cox and I noticed he's another Attenborough type, inasmuch as he likes to travel the far corners of the world for a few scenes in the programme that really do little to enhance the point of the particular theme. It appears that it's okay for these self-important 'scientists' to have a huge carbon footprint, which in my opinion, really magnifies their hypocrisy and shows just how arrogant they really are.

Prof Brian Cox: prettier than Brigstocke but just as wrong

By James Delingpole

Martin Durkin is a hero of mine, not just for his courage in making the first mainstream British TV programme seriously to challenge the idea of Man Made Global Warming – The Great Global Warming Swindle – but also for the equally brilliant programme he made on our eye-wateringly vast national debt, Britain's Trillion Pound Horror Story.

So I'm delighted to be able to put up a guest post of his on the subject of a recent drubbing he had from top celebrity particle-physicist Brian Cox. Cox (not to be confused with the scary man who played the original Hannibal Lecter) has become one of TV's favourite science pin-ups because not only does he look a bit like a pop star but he actually was one once in D:Ream (unofficial court composers to New Labour thanks to their party anthem Things Can Only Get Better). Unfortunately, it seems, there are one or two things that our Brian doesn't quite get about Climategate and peer review: as Durkin will now explain. (In bold, I'm afraid because I can't be bothered to strip out all the "strongs" from html)

This year’s BBC Huw Wheldon lecture was delivered by pop star and celebrity-physicist Brian Cox, who was telling us how science should be reported on television.

Brian looks like a rebel. One of the kids. He has long hair and wears a T-shirt under his jacket. But appearances can deceive. I’ve met countless grungy greens who are every bit as censorious and freedom-hating as the most well-ironed Nazi.

And, as it turns out, Brian is about as rebellious as Captain Mainwaring. He says it’s the job of documentary makers to relay to the public science which has been approved by the scientific establishment.

He described a film of mine – The Great Global Warming Swindle – which naughtily did not tow the line, as ‘polemical cack’. Like many censors, he starts by waving the flag for free speech. Far be it from him to stifle views which are outside the mainstream. But … There were many buts.

The logic of his descent into censorship went like this (it so often does): Science is really important – just look at the need to combat global warming. Government funding is therefore vital. And television ‘has a big responsibility to get the science right’. This means television must ‘report and explain the peer-reviewed consensus accurately’ and (here it gets interesting) broadcasters must ‘avoid the maverick and eccentric at all costs.’ After all, ‘we’re dealing with the lives of our children and the future of the climate’.

He admits that his argument ‘does sound rather authoritarian’ and asks himself blithely towards the end, ‘Have I been led to an Orwellian conclusion? … I don’t know.’

I do. All the way through, there’s a sinister Orwellian ring to Cox’s style. In weasel words, he warns of ‘occasional incompatibilities between science and television’. Like Uriah Heep, says he wants to explore ‘how these might be avoided’.

His special worry is global warming. The problem appears to be this. Lots of people don’t believe it. Despite the fact that there is almost total acceptance of this ridiculous theory in the media, many ordinary people just don’t buy it. So if some scoundrel (like me) pops up and says the science behind this garbage is bunkum, the scientific establishment – Cox & Co – become furious. And I know to my cost what it’s like when they turn on you.

Cox equates scientific truth with the consensus view of the scientific establishment. His justification for doing so is the revered practice known as ‘peer review’. Cox tells us, ‘a peer-reviewed consensus is by definition impartial’. Now this is an extraordinarily stupid thing for anyone to say, let alone someone like Cox who likes to pretend he’s clever.

Peer review happens when an article is submitted for publication to a science journal. The editor doesn’t know whether the author is talking out of his hat or not, so he sends it out to other scientists working in the same field to (anonymously) pick holes in it. If the others say it’s fine he’ll print it. If not, he doesn’t.

Peer review is at best imperfect. At worst it’s a rather nasty form of censorship within the scientific community. Good papers are frequently rejected. Rubbish is often printed. The main problem is that scientists who do the reviewing are extremely partial to their own views. Their reputations have been built on certain theories (like global warming). Their grant funding depends on the wide acceptance of these theories. They don’t like it when folk rock the boat. So there is a tendency for the consensus to prevail against those who would shake things up.

Take the notorious ‘Hockey Stick’ scandal. A big problem for global warming theory is that, compared to temperature change over the past thousand years, today’s temperatures look perfectly normal. So a bunch of jokers came up with the ‘Hockey Stick’ graph, which suggested that temperatures were flat until the industrial revolution and then shot upwards. It’s now clear that the research was, to borrow a phrase from Cox, utter drivel (see the Wegman report and others). Nevertheless it sailed through peer-review with flying colours and was published in Nature and by the IPCC and by a thousand others. James Lovelock had it up on his wall to remind himself about fragile Gaia. Al Gore waved it about till he was red-faced. Or how about all that peer-reviewed dodgy data from East Anglia, or the countless, laughably alarmist peer-reviewed papers published since the Ice Age scare 50 years ago. Yet woe betide anyone in the media with the brass neck to point out that this peer-reviewed guff has proved to be nonsense.

Cox and his chums in the scientific establishment love to portray themselves as simple well-meaning scientific folk. But as anyone who has experienced the wrath of the scientific establishment will attest, it’s a significant political force, bullying politicians and beating up critics. The pious self-image of scientists, especially the global warmers, as guardians of the truth, is nauseating and dangerous.

Sanctimonious Cox says he himself is ‘absolutely true to science’. He says that, unlike media people, scientists are above politics.

But science is incredibly political. Whole careers are built on, and the funding of entire institutions depend on certain ‘scientific truths’, or as they should be called, ‘funding excuses’. The global warmers embrace freedom of speech and critical views like turkeys welcome Christmas.

What’s more, the political views of scientists are inevitably, profoundly coloured by their almost complete reliance on big state funding. Predictably, most of them have the trite anti-capitalist worldview that almost always go with it.

Global warming isn’t just the best funding wheeze they’ve hit upon since the Cold War. It’s also a repository for all the green, middle class anti-capitalist prejudices which are part and parcel of the Western intellectual worldview.

Cox & Co are no saints. They are not above the prejudices of the age and their class. Nor are they unaware of their own economic self-interests.

Far from giving them rights of censorship, we in the media must watch them like hawks.

[cherenkov]

Thanks, though I think I did get a bit carried away. I did so only because all my life I have been a huge fan of science across all of it's spectrum and as such I get very angry when scientists appear to me to be serving themselves first and the cause of true scientific research and knowledge second.

There is little or no doubt that over the years scientists have bamboozled politicians into giving them astronomical (apparently unlimited in the case of ITER) sums of money by making highly speculative claims about what can be achieved, along with the usual, 'Well we don't want the Soviets (the Chinese nowadays) getting there first' argument (always effective, especially if there's a possibility of some new weapon being developed).

To me it is simply a no brainer that ITER should be kicked into touch and the huge costs be channeled into continued efforts to better exploit the huge energy supplied free by the massive stellar fusion reactor that our planet orbits. Fusion power stations, like the atomic space rocket scam that obtained funding from the pentagon, are outdated relics from a bygone age, and politicians should wake up to the fact before it's too late.

After all, when the project fails, sometime in the current century, the scientists will just ride off into affluent retirement leaving the gullible politicians with egg on their chins.

What Cox said about the electrons rankled me for several reasons, the most obvious one being that his glib statement that the energy state of every electron in the universe is slightly different from every other, and that can only be because each electron is in communication with every other, is that such a phenomenon is simply impossible to prove. To do so would require the simultaneous and incredibly sensitive measurement of the energy state of every electron in the universe, while at the same time detecting the signals they were sending to communicate with each other! Simply impossible and in violation of the principle of Occam's Razor

Occam's Razor

If you measure the height of every human on this planet accurately enough you will find no two humans are the same height. Should we infer from this that there are magical spirits passing information between us all making sure no one of us is identical to another?

What he could have said was that the uncertainty principle dictates that at the level of the quantum wave particles the limits on making exact measurements are such that the probability of any two particles being classically definable as identical to each other at any instant in time is effectively zero. There is no need to invoke some kind of ethereal communication, it simply arises from the nature of the quantum world just as biological variation arises from the genetic, epigenetic, and environmental influences each individual organism is defined by.

Less speculative showmanship and more evidence-based nitty gritty science please. Don't worry, most of your audience will still find it interesting enough!

[Teddy Bear]

What Cox said about the electrons rankled me for several reasons, the most obvious one being that his glib statement that the energy state of every electron in the universe is slightly different from every other, and that can only be because each electron is in communication with every other, is that such a phenomenon is simply impossible to prove.

This would imply that there is also a subsequent conscious decision to be different by every electron, or am I misunderstanding his hypothesis?

I'm also thinking of an example like the groupie who wants to imitate his or her particular hero or heroine. Even if they had surgery to make themselves as an identical copy as would be possible, they can never escape the fact that it they who chose to copy the other, which is why they would always be different. So applying this element to electrons, they cannot consciously decide to be the same, and be identical, even if they wanted to. Therefore 'communication' as a means of explaining it, cannot be involved in this dynamic.

[cherenkov]

"This would imply that there is also a subsequent conscious decision to be different by every electron, or am I misunderstanding his hypothesis?"

Yes you've reminded me of the word I should have used to describe this rubbish, namely Anthropomorphism. It is deemed wrong to attribute human characteristics to animals as per anthropomorphic fantasies like Watership Down, but to attribute some form of consciousness and self-awareness to electrons is just plain bonkers!

If he is trying to attract the attention of the Vatican the way Hawking did by allowing them to seize on the big bang theory as proof of a form of Creation, by conjuring up phenomena that could only exist by means of some divine agency, I wouldn't be surprised. After all isn't he trying to demonstrate the existence of a form of Omniscience?

Let's hope they don't notice, though I suspect the Vatican watches people like Cox closely, as someone, like Hawking, they can do business with.

The unavoidable flaw of science is that it is conducted by humans. It has more safeguards to mitigate the effects of this flaw than any other human endeavour but nothing can really get rid of it completely.

Thus we will always have charlatans peddling nonsense like 'cold fusion' for example, or people like a head of the IPCC revealed as having a conflict of interest;

UN IPCC chief Pachauri under fire in India for conflicts of interest

Yep, either corrupt or incredibly naive, take your pick. Either way not exactly the man for the job, not even close.