Bob Lazar's 2011 Nobel Prize

UFO whistleblower Bob Lazar's claims about science make some basic mistakes. They were spotted by physicist David Morgan as early as 1996, showing that Lazar doesn't seem to understand:

• the omni-directionality and mass-energy requirements of wormholes.
• the fundamental differences between gravity and the strong nuclear force.
• that gravity is a field and will have to be quantized, using something like the graviton.
• that a spin-2 boson like the graviton can only be attractive, not repulsive.
• that the abundance of heavy elements beyond Polonium (element 84) depends on past supernovae in the galactic neighborhood, and not on the nature of subsequent star systems.
• the basics of charge and energy conservation in the creation of antimatter.

That is, Lazar seems to lack a basic grasp of how his claims contradict the vast majority of modern cosmology and especially quantum theory. The latter is famously one of the best-confirmed theories in all of science. 

Now, it could be that the vast majority of modern cosmology and quantum theory is fundamentally wrong, but that's not how paradigm shifts have been working over the last century or more. When Special Relativity and General Relativity and quantum mechanics replaced earlier theories, they still agreed with the previous theories in normal domains, and the differential predictions only happened in domains of the very small/brief or large/eternal. 

Lazar is talking about divergence in a domain scale of a basketball-sized device that he could turn on and off as it sat on his laboratory bench. That is not the scale at which to expect a paradigm shift. In over 30 years, Lazar still hasn't done his homework in demonstrating a grasp of the scientific theories he claims that he saw invalidated on a lab bench. It's the most important development in the history of science and technology, and Lazar just wants to be left alone to run his mail-order chemistry-set supply business. Yes, he claims that he shuns publicity and doesn't care if anyone believes him, but that's also a great way to avoid serious cross-examination.

In one sense I feel bad for Lazar, because when he came out in 1989 he was only one lucky guess away from looking like a genius. Here's how. It was well-known then that Einstein called his Cosmological Constant the biggest mistake of his career. Einstein's constant represented a hypothesized repulsive force, that Einstein abandoned after the 1929 discovery of the Big Bang expansion of the universe. Lazar in 1989 could have just said that UFOs use a mysterious form of anti-gravity similar to that implied by Einstein's Cosmological Constant. Lazar could then claim to have anticipated the greatest scientific breakthrough of our lifetime: the 1998 discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.

But instead, poor Bob built his UFO propulsion idea on regular old-fashioned antimatter and black holes, and his energy budgets don't add up at all. 1998-style dark energy is still poorly understood. Its ideas of negative pressure probably apply only to the universe as a whole, and not to tiny items like spaceships. But if Bob had just mumbled about the Cosmological Constant instead of mumbling about antimatter and element 115 and wormholes, he'd arguably deserve at least a share of the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics, which was awarded to the team that made the 1998 discovery.

More red flags show up in Lazar's 2019 interview with Joe Rogan. Not only does nobody on the show know enough science to raise any of physicist Morgan's 25-year-old objections above. In addition:

• Lazar just sits by and lets Rogan and his hagiographer Corbell act as though the 2016 detection of gravity waves was some big confirmation of a daring Lazar prediction. Lazar surely knows that gravity waves have been predicted as far back as Einstein.
• Ditto for the first synthesis in 2003 of element 115, which Lazar sits by as Rogan googles it. Tom Mahood explains: I have a 1969 article from Scientific American with a cool 3D graph showing an “island of stability” around 114. This was also repeated in my undergrad physics textbook. But maybe most interesting is an article (“Creating Superheavy Elements” by Armbruster and Munzenberg) published in Scientific American again talking about a potential island of stability around 114. The article’s date? May 1989, the same month Lazar began his interviews with KLAS TV in Las Vegas.
• Lazar at 1h51m subscribes to the idea of Project Looking Glass. In UFOlogy, this is an alien device that uses time-travel technology to allow its government operators to look forward into alternate futures. Mentioning Looking Glass further undercuts Lazar's credibility, as it exponentially expands the amount of apparent government failure to leverage its alien technology. (And it would be weak soup to make the Panglossian claim that our current timeline is the least bad option available to the wielders of Looking Glass.)

Lazar is not a dumb guy. He doesn't need Looking Glass to know what kind of forums and audiences he should avoid in order to face only friendly and scientifically-illiterate questioning. There are lots of skeptical critiques about Lazar's missing educational records, criminal conviction, etc. Those are weak soup too. 

A case like Lazar's is only really interesting insofar as it can be tested in two important ways. First, it should yield predictive claims about when or whether science will catch up with Lazar's theories. Second, it should yield claims about how the government's possession of alien science and technology should have influenced the last half-century.

This article argues that Lazar's story is weak regarding (1). I'm writing a longer analysis regarding (2) that lists the many ways that alien science and tech could have influenced the last half-century, but hasn't.

Subconscious Mammalian Thermal Footprint Memory

When I return to a spot that I had recently occupied (on a chair, bed, etc.) I don't particularly notice that it's still warm. But if I settle onto a spot that is warm from some other mammal recently recently being there, it's keenly apparent. (The most palpable version of this is when you sit on recently-occupied toilet seat.)

I bet that humans have a subconscious memory of where they have recently left thermal footprints. So we subconsciously discount our own warm spots as uninteresting, but it bubbles up to our consciousness when our backside detects a potential interloper.

A redditor opines that it's because when you're sitting in your own spot you're in thermal equilibrium. But that doesn't explain the differential between self vs. other, because the feeling is quite different if the person who left the seat two minutes earlier was you vs. not you.

I noticed it again this morning when my dog and I both got up from bed at the same time. He'd been laying near my feet on top of my thick comforter. When I returned to bed after a few minutes, the spot recently warmed directly by a 230lb mammal felt unremarkable. But the spot recently warmed through a comforter by a 35lb mammal felt very warm.

Do other people notice this, or am I a mutant? My family thinks I'm crazy for "smelling" food after I remove it from the microwave, but I explain to them that my snout is a very sensitive heat detector, allowing me to check my food without burning a finger. And when raising three daughters I found that I could measure forehead temperature with my hand to ±1°F. 

My other superpower is recognizing voices, especially celebrity voiceovers. I'm constantly amazed that people watching a show with me don't immediately recognize many of the voices like I do. Alas, none of these superpowers are very good for crime-fighting...

Fairly Dividing Cake or Chores

There are entire books on the topic of fair cake-cutting.  "Fair cake-cutting is the subject of intense research in mathematics, computer science, economics and political science." As a parent of three self-interested daughters, I'm very interested in this topic!

But I'm not interested in procedures that re-divide shares. A cake should have N contiguous shares, period. Don't ruin the cake.

And I'm not interested in procedures with a moving knife. Nice theory, but players will argue about where and when the knife stopped. (And a moving knife doesn't work on chores, which are somewhat discrete rather than continuous.)

And I'm not interested in envy-free. Players gonna envy. I just want no complaints of favoritism or collusion or election-rigging.

And I don't want a referee. If we can appeal to a fair authority, there is no need for a procedure!

And I want to minimize randomness. Players have their own utility functions, and that's what creates gains from trade.

I've come up with a procedure that I think is better by the above criteria than anything I could find during a hasty scan of the existing scientific literature. The best procedure I could find is this one by Dan Hulme in 2014. But his technique leads to unfairness complaints, as your position in the circle can totally exclude you from the best shares.

The 2nd-best procedure I found is Who Shall Have This. It's inferior to mine because shares are assigned randomly, leaving no room to exploit heterogenous preferences about the shares.

Little Risk Of Authoritarian Socialism in U.S.

Some freedom-lovers fear that America is on a path toward a socialist police state -- a path already followed by the most murderous regimes in human history:

• French Reign Of Terror
• Soviet Russia
• Fascist Italy
• Nazi Germany
• Communist China
• Cuba
• Nicaragua
• Venezuela

In all these cases, an authoritarian socialist police state arose without foreign conquest. However, there were many risk factors in play:

• Strong tradition of aristocracy
• Historic ethnic hierarchy/grievance
• Weak tradition of democracy
• Weak tradition of free speech
• Weak tradition of gun rights
• Severe land/resource inequality
• Agrarian economy
• Poorer than developed nations
• Recent war and/or depression
• Foreign military support for revolution

If you score these cases by the risk factors, you get:

• 7 French Reign Of Terror
• 9 Soviet Russia
• 8 Fascist Italy
• 6 Nazi Germany
• 9 Communist China
• 8 Cuba
• 8 Nicaragua
• 7 Venezuela

By contrast, the U.S. has only one risk factor: our distant history of slavery and our recent history of generous immigration has afflicted us with ethnic grievance. The U.S. is largely exempt from the other 9 risk factors. This suggests that alarmism about a U.S. police state is misguided, whether the alarmists are from the Left or from the Right. There was never any risk of Trump making America fascist.

Do the Internet and social media constitute a risk factor, or a mitigator? They allow activists and extremists to organize and to be amplified and to be canceled and to be de-platformed. But current concerns over cancellation and de-platforming need some historical perspective. The authoritative history Radicals For Freedom tells us that up until the late 1960s, the freedom movement was a remnant, a tiny flickering candle.  Even in the early 1970s, the freedom movement ran on shared postal mailing lists of at best a few tens of thousands of people. Now, the freedom movement is many millions of people, entrenched in every corner of the Internet. Some people may be canceled from enjoying the widest audiences, but what freedom-lover can honestly say that he cannot find enough pro-freedom content to read? What semi-diligent freedom-lover can say that he's successfully being kept ignorant about current events?

The sky is not falling. Our main risk is our continued slide toward some flavor of Western European nanny-state socialism. Preventing that slide is less sexy than LARPing about a revolution, but it is the hard work that freedom-lovers should not shirk.

SARS-CoV-2 might be lab leak

The SARS-CoV-2 virus might be an accidental leak from a lab, created by researchers who have been engineering "gain of function" in coronaviruses to study whether/how they might become pandemic risks for humans. If true, then researchers will have accidentally caused they very tragedy they wanted to prevent.

Here is a short pre-pandemic 2015 article from Nature highlighting the potential risk of such research: Engineered bat virus stirs debate over risky research. If that article isn't worrisome enough, then follow me down the rabbit hole: 

Fiction-writer Nicholas Baker published a lengthy piece on Jan 4 2021 in New York Magazine exploring the history of gain-of-function research and the lab-leak hypothesis. He points to plausible-sounding work by a pair of scientists, without mentioning that they are husband-and-wife self-published anti-GMO activists. He also invokes the recent work of Yuri Deigin, a biotech entrepeneur who has rebutted in detail the widely-cited March 2020 Nature paper that downplayed the lab-creation theory.

The Wuhan lab that stored a bat virus 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2 was only a few hundred yards from the wet market where the pandemic exploded. Further research on SARS-CoV-2 origins may yet settle this question, but the Chinese government is discouraging investigation into the research history of its Wuhan lab. But what already seems clear is that gain-of-function virus research is reckless. As Deigin tweeted on Feb 28: "Vaccines require clinical trials — that’s the longest and most expensive part. DESIGNING a vaccine against a known virus takes just a few days — Moderna had their candidate within hours of downloading SARS2 genome. See why creating a vaccine for some “potential” virus is BS?"

There's no evidence that the virus was engineered as a bio-weapon. In fact, one argument against that theory is that there is an easy and obvious way to make the virus even better at binding to human ACE2 -- and they describe exactly how to do it! (Arj Barker will have to update his bit about the Discovery Channel leaking info to terrorists.) And if China intentionally started the global pandemic, then they were colossally stupid (or diabolically clever?) to start it 500 yards from their own virus lab inside a major Chinese city.

I had always assumed that nature was as good at designing viruses as humans could be, but now I think I was wrong. Is this a bad time to mention that the smallpox genome has already been fully sequenced and published?

2021-03-07: There seems to be a growing consensus that the 1977 H1N1 Russian flu was a lab escape, because it was virtual identical to a 1950s version that had since dropped out of circulation.

Note that the U.S. government has a limited interest in pursuing the lab-leak hypothesis, as the relevant Wuhan research was funded at least indirectly by the NIH.

Note that as recently as 10 years ago, gain-of-function research arguably gave a head start on sequencing dangerous viral genomes. Now, sequencing techniques are much cheaper and much faster.