The Javelineer

I have JSTOR access, but you can read the abstract here. (Insert the usual caveats about science-by-abstract.)

The arrow-of-time dilemma states that the laws of physics are invariant for time inversion, whereas the familiar phenomena we see everyday are not (i.e., entropy increases). I show that, within a quantum mechanical framework, all phenomena which leave a trail of information behind (and hence can be studied by physics) are those where entropy necessarily increases or remains constant. All phenomena where the entropy decreases must not leave any information of their having happened. This situation is completely indistinguishable from their not having happened at all. In the light of this observation, the second law of thermodynamics is reduced to a mere tautology: physics cannot study those processes where entropy has decreased, even if they were commonplace.

I once told a friend, “If I was a real man, I’d be doing physics or engineering instead of math.” Modeling traffic jams may seem unglamorous, but it’s surprisingly interesting. It’s also happens to be useful.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematicians have created a model to describe how these frustrating snarls form. With this understanding, engineers could design build better roads to minimize the odds of them happening.

The mathematics of such traffic jams are strikingly similar to the equations that describe detonation waves produced by explosions, said Aslan Kasimov, a lecturer in MIT’s Department of Mathematics. Realizing this allowed the reseachers to solve traffic jam equations that were first theorized in the 1950s. The MIT researchers even came up with a name for this kind of gridlock – “jamiton.” It’s a riff on “soliton,” a term used in math and physics to desribe a self-sustaining wave that maintains its shape while moving.

The equations MIT came up with are similar to those used to describe fluid mechanics, and they model traffic jams as a self-sustaining wave.

With computer modeling, it’s easy to see how these traffic solitons form.

Here’s what solitons look like in a swimming pool.

It’s interesting to see the difference between the continuous and discrete forms of the phenomena.

Kimberley A. Strassel writes in the Wall Street Journal about The Climate Change Climate Change.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. — 13 times the number who authored the U.N.’s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world’s first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak “frankly” of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming “the worst scientific scandal in history.” Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the “new religion.” A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton’s Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists’ open letter.)

The collapse of the “consensus” has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth’s temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.

There has never been a consensus on global warming. How can a nonexistent consensus collapse? People are simply discovering the lie, and they are angry at being lied to. Most of the global warming science used to fashion environmental laws is fake science using intentionally faked data gathering methods. Without a doubt, scientific study of global warming is the largest and worst abuse of science in history.

Having perpetrated such widespread fraud and mendacity, global warming alarmist have done incalculable harm to the repute of science itself. Long-term, climate science malfeasance will have worse effects than stupid regulatory proposals. When scientists complain of popular disregard for the findings of science, they can only blame themselves.

Related: Gore’s main scientific ally, Richard Hansen, faked temperature data
Related: Chicken: Gore wont debate imminent climate scientist (Gore’s hyperbole approaches insanity)
Related: Treason against reason?
Related: Obama’s war on science
Related: Greenhouse gases do not cause global warming. Global warming causes greenhouse gases.

Update: Batman’s a scientist
Update: Data is supposed to validate models, not the other way around