ADAMANT

Eating The Heat

Here is the plate of thermal hors d'oeuvres  nature has dished up to fortify hurricane Gustave as it ponders chomping into New Orleans tomorrow night

GLAST Off !

NASA"s new view of the unfriendly skies seen in the hard gamma ray regime- yes, there is a  black hole in the middle of the galaxy.

-- NASA will hold a media teleconference on Tuesday, August 26, at 2 p.m. ET, to announce the first results from NASA's Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope and the telescope's new name.
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?10167

Star Wars : Better Than Tang !

The rivalry between America's space program and the Strategic Defense Initiative  dates back to the time NASA's Tang Dynasty ignited the Cold War struggle to spin the spin-offs that make men free, and motivate Members Of Congress to vote for next fiscal year's cost overruns

For  decades, the Tang Label was NASA's battle flag,but now the Star Wars empire has struck back with a cool new icon that testifies that the era of optical underkill is at its end. Solid state lightbulbs cannot be far behind.
                                  

Bolting Though The Fifth Dimension

While Bolt was blowing away the 100 meter mark , another  speed record  fell, with far more portentious consequences . An entangled pair of photons  ran an information relay at better that ten thousnd times the speed of light , and those who managed the race may end up with another sort of gold medal , for  passing a milestone on the road to multiple worlds.

Physicist Nicolas Gisin and colleagues report in Nature that pairs of quantum-entangled photons sent  from the university  University of Geneva through fiber-optic cables to two Swiss villages 18 kilometers apart changed polarization not just  identically, but  faster than synchronized atomic clocks could detect. 

Whatever was affecting the photons seems to have happened so nearly instantaneously that t the phenomenon influencing the particles had to be traveling at least 10,000 times faster than light.  Since that can't happen in four dimensions of space and time, the experiments show that entanglement might be controlled by something existing beyond it.

 Gisin says that once the scientific community "accepts that nature has this ability, we should try to create models that explain it." This doesn't demonstrate spooky action at a distance directly, but does provide a lower bound-the speed is truly superluminal. And out of this world.

 

Springtime For Darwin

Like the Beijing propagandists who studied the1936 Berlin games and turned to Albert Speer Jr. for helpful Olympic design hints, some people  seem oblivious to Godwin's Law.

It never seems to have dawned on the producers of Expelled that invoking  Hitler can  lose more than internet  arguments. Blaming science for the holocaust , Ben Stein's  neo-creationist 'documentary', styles Darwinism its 'necessary' cause, and commending the film,  Intelligent Design advocate David Klinghoffer insists

"many...don't want to understand ...Darwinism inspired Mein Kampf ...The major Hitler biographers...all agree on Hitler's debt to Darwinism. "

Yet Mein Kampf never mentions 'Darwin' or 'Darwinism', or indeed The Origin Of Species.  Why was the mild mannered Victorian  biologist expelled from Hitler's infamous autobiography? The answer is antithetic to Expelled's equation of 'Godless materialism' 'with moral decay-- Hitler was a staunch advocate of " intelligent design."

Expelled repeats a common cultural mistake. Darwin never wrote such incendiary phrases as "Survival of the fittest" or "Nature red in tooth and claw."yet instead of crediting  Herbert Spencer and Alfred Lord Tennyson with inventing and  immortalizing ' Social Darwinism', Expelled instead ignores the genealogy of eugenics' moral descent  from Nietsche's metaphysics and lays everything from the Gulag to the holocaust at science's door.  Klinghoffer, invokes Hitler's "appeal to biology, which, as he argued, revealed certain iron laws of Nature – principally the struggle for supremacy pitting the superior races against the inferior."

But what kind of biology  results from expelling evolution from the curriculum ? Though fictitious as Frankenstein, Stein's torch and pitchfork parade is less monstrous than fatuous. Deliberately confusing biology and astrophysics, it carps on evolution's failure to explain the origin of the universe.  The reality is that Darwin wrote little about First Things. He had no desire wrangle  with The Reverend William Paley's  metaphysical views --what would become the 'intelligent design' movement  was around before the science of biology was born.

Our world is always at risk of ideology  driving the lethal apotheosis of politicized science, but there's nothing Darwinian about the way in which Karl Marx's scorn for Romantic beliefs like ' elan vital ' evolved into the Leninist dogma of 'Scientific Socialism'.  To say it aimed at conquering nature and transforming man is rather like  insisting Werner von Braun  kepthis eyes on the stars over London.  Put into practice from Russia to Cambodia, it gave National Socialism's program of un-natural selection some  deadly serious competition.

But Klinghoffer's take on  Expelled turns history on its head. It imputes to the Nazis a "philosophical outlook is based on respecting Nature's laws " in contrast to Hitler's bizarre belief that the core of Judaism is "that "Man's role is to overcome Nature!" "  The reality is that the two  Socialisms  competed in  creating an equal opportunity holocaust that rounded up , and killed , scientists they could not suborn.

Did fascination with the origin of life inspire Stalin to send  geneticists to the Gulag, or lend intellectual frisson to Der Fuhrer's torchlight parades?  Hitler's deservedly obscure Tischgespraeche holds the answer:

 "Woher nehmen wir das Recht zu glauben, der Mensch sei nicht von Uranfaengen das gewesen , was er heute ist? Der Blick in die Natur zeigt uns, dass im Bereich der Pflanzen und Tiere Veraenderungen und Weiterbildungen vorkommen. Aber nirgends zeigt sich innherhalb einer Gattung eine Entwicklung von der Weite des Sprungs, den der Mensch gemacht haben muesste, sollte er sich aus einem affenartigen Zustand zu dem, was er ist, fortgebildet haben."

"From where do we get the right to believe that man was not from his very origin what he is today? Glancing at nature we see that in the plant and animal kingdoms changes and developments happen. But nowhere in that do we see a leap, a development of the magnitude man must have made, if he has as surmised, advanced from an ape-like state to what he is."

"Das, was der Mensch von dem Tier voraushat, der veilleicht wunderbarste Beweis fuer die Ueberlegenheit des Menschen ist, dass er begriffen hat, dass es eine Schoepferkraft geben muss."

"An advantage humans enjoy over animals, and what may be the best proof of their superiority is that they have grasped there must be the power of a creator."

This is no paean to  'godless materialism', but an endorsement of creationism from a man who set an army goose-stepping off to war with 'Gott Mit Uns' blazoned on its belt buckles.

If Expelled has a prequel,it's not the Auschwitz episode of the late  great Jacob Bronowski's  Ascent of Man, which  Expelled  shamelessly apes. Islamic creationists will find more to applaud  in Triumph Of The Will  than Hitler's rejection of Darwin's big idea. Poor Ben has joined the ranks of populists from William Jennings Bryan onward who have set out to bolster biblical literalism by blustering against science,  only to inherit the wind.

                 GREETINGS NATIONAL REVIEW REFUGEES
I see John Derbyshire has warped you over by offering newly excavated  wonders , but he gives me too much credit- the Hitler quote first appeared in a letter from an Intelligent Design enthusiast published by The American Spectator, but for some strange reason he did not offer a translation.

    As to my digging things up, John, you have no idea >>