A paper by another team at Gran Sasso, ICARUS, contradicts the OPERA neutrino results by measuring the energy spectrum of the supposedly speeding neutrinos and finds that they could not have traveled faster than light.
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OPERA duplicates previous results: neutrinos still 60ns too fast
So what does OPERA find ? Their main result, based on the 15,233 neutrino interactions collected in three years of data taking, is unchanged from the September result. The most interesting part of the new publication is instead that the find that the 20 new neutrino events (where neutrino speeds are individually measured, as opposed to the combined measurement done with the three-year data published in September) confirm the earlier result: the arrival times appear to occur about 60 nanoseconds before they are expected.
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Astrology’s “obstetrician strawman” is no strawman
So, one among the dozens of ridiculous claims made by Ed Kohout in this thread was that the claim famously posited by Carl Sagan in Demon Haunted World, that the obstetrician in the room imparts more gravitational force on a newborn baby than does Pluto, is a strawman. Edit: To clarify, he referred to gravitational and tidal forces as proof that the planets have an effect on human lives (which we, of course, understand and can measure!), and handwaved away the Sagan quote preemptively as though it was a strawman caricature of the actual astrological arguments about gravity (which he didn’t, by the way, expand on). This strikes me as a bit of a Courtier’s Reply, and the fact is, the argument about gravity actually knocks gravity out as a potential vehicle for whatever influences are claimed about the planets’ influences — especially given that these influences are purportedly equally strong/subtle for any of the planets. The Sagan quote about Pluto’s gravity being less than the obstetrician’s is a sound-bite form of a knockout argument for one of the four fundamental forces.
Well, Ed said Jupiter instead, but I’m willing to crunch some numbers to see how right he is. For these calculations, since I’m no math genius, I’m using this Newtonian gravity equation calculator. Yeah, yeah, Newtonian physics have been superceded by relativity, but I’m not about to try to calculate this out using relativity, that would be ridiculous. Newtonian physics hold in this case anyway.
I’ve expanded out all the numbers from scientific notation to straight digits. Average baby weight is 3.4kg, so let’s go with that. As some commenters helpfully point out, this assumes the force from the center of a spherical mass, so assume a spherical baby and a spherical obstetrician. Because gravitational calculations are wibbly with oddly-shaped objects.
Jupiter at closest approach to Earth, weight rounded up:
object 1 mass (m1) = 3.4 kilogram
object 2 mass (m2) = 1900000000000000000000000000 kilogram
distance between objects (r) = 628743036 kilometerSolution:
gravitational force (F) = 0.000001090388427237 newton
Continue reading “Astrology’s “obstetrician strawman” is no strawman”