I though I would write this very short article to demonstrate why there is so much ridicule going on when it comes to people who are into alternative stuff, whatever that might be. To me it seems that most people who are looking for alternative explanations and theories often lack the skepticism and perhaps knowledge that is necessary to distinguish disinformation from what is actually going on and what is based on scientific methods that can be verified. More often than not, these seeking people blindly believe in theories that are based on semi-truths or unreasonable subjective claims. As a result of their excitement about a particular theory or claim they are often trying to spread the world without realizing that what they are spreading the world with is unfortunately a misinformation, which can often be easily debunked with a bit of common sense and reasoning.

Just as a demonstration I will show you a SOHO footage of an object seemingly passing by the Sun. A video of this hit YouTube and spread quickly and people got really excited because it showed an object that was passing by the Sun and in theory it could be anything. Of course, it can also be a UFO. How can we say for sure? However, the point here is that first and foremost we should try to reason whether the claims we are making are logical and UFO and other phenomena should really be the last option after we fail to explain particular phenomena differently. 

I understand that people often wish that there are UFOs going to save us etc. but that desire as such should not get in the way of finding the truth ourselves. Consequently, a logical, critical but also an open-minded viewpoint is required if we want to get anywhere on our journey towards the truth. This is often not the case, many of us believe something lacking any reason just because it fits with our model of reality that is incredibly shaped and influenced by our hopes, desires and needs. The video claims to show a mothership passing by the Sun.  

The video captured by SOHO, which orbits on L1 Lagrangian point meaning that SOHO is constantly in front of Earth where its orbital period is exactly equal to the Earth’s orbital period. In this way SOHO can constantly monitor the Sun. The video below shows you a quick demonstration of this kind of orbit.

SOHO is looking at the Sun and the ‘mothership’ is simply a background star that appears to be moving with respect the Sun.  Click here to watch a video that I made form the simulation of this kind of orbit and you will soon see that the motion is caused by the Earth orbiting the Sun.

The video is taken approximately during the same time as the SOHO video above but I did not simulate precise SOHO orbit and hence do not claim that any of the stars in the video is the actual star in the ‘mothership’ video, however, I hope the video clearly shows the point and dramatically decrease the probability of the bright object being a mothership since there are billions of stars in our galaxy so you get the likelihood. I wrote this article to encourage, whoever needs it, to be an open-minded skeptic, not just open-minded and not just a skeptic.

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After nearly a one month, we had a semi-clear sky so I tried looking at Jupiter and sunspots (1092,1093). Visibility was not was good as I hoped but nonetheless we pulled out some detail from the recorded data.

Kurt Gödel - (April 28, 1906, Brno, Moravia, Austria–Hungary – January 14, 1978, Princeton, New Jersey, USA) was an Austrian logician, mathematician and philosopher. One of the most significant logicians of all time, Gödel made an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century.

Ludwig Boltzman - (February 20, 1844 – September 5, 1906) was an Austrian physicist famous for his founding contributions in the fields of statistical mechanics and statistical thermodynamics. He was one of the most important advocates for atomic theory when that scientific model was still highly controversial. 

Leonardo Da Vinci - (April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519) was an Italian polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer. Leonardo has often been described as the archetype  of the Renaissance man, a man whose unquenchable curiosity was equaled only by his powers of invention. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest  painters  of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived.

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In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing - whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.

The film begins with Georg Cantor, the great mathematician whose work proved to be the foundation for much of the 20th-century mathematics. He believed he was God's messenger and was eventually driven insane trying to prove his theories of infinity. 

Ludwig Boltzmann's struggle to prove the existence of atoms and probability eventually drove him to suicide. Kurt Gödel, the introverted confidant of Einstein, proved that there would always be problems which were outside human logic. His life ended in a sanatorium where he starved himself to death.

Finally, Alan Turing, the great Bletchley Park code breaker, father of computer science and homosexual, died trying to prove that some things are fundamentally unprovable.

The film also talks to the latest in the line of thinkers who have continued to pursue the question of whether there are things that mathematics and the human mind cannot know. They include Greg Chaitin, mathematician at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, New York, and Roger Penrose.

Dangerous Knowledge tackles some of the profound questions about the true nature of reality that mathematical thinkers are still trying to answer today.
 

 

As Albert Einstein lay on his deathbed, he asked only for his glasses, his writing implements and his latest equations. He knew he was dying, yet he continued his work. In those final hours of his life, while fading in and out of consciousness, he was working on what he hoped would be his greatest work of all. It was a project of monumental complexity. It was a project that he hoped would unlock the mind of God.

"I want to know God's thoughts"
"I am not interested in this phenomenon or that phenomenon," Einstein had said earlier in his life. "I want to know God's thoughts – the rest are mere details." But as he lay there dying in Princeton Hospital he must have understood that these were secrets that God was clearly keen to hang on to. The greatest scientist of his age died knowing that he had become isolated from the scientific community; revered on the one hand, ridiculed for this quest on the other.

It was a journey that started 50 years earlier in Berne, Switzerland. Then - in his early 20s - he was a young man struggling to make his mark. His applications to universities throughout Europe had all been rejected. In the end his father had pulled strings to get him a job as a third class clerk evaluating the latest electrical gizmos.

But in his spare time he was formulating the most extraordinary scientific ideas. In a single year - 1905, a year that would become known as his miracle year – he published papers that would redefine how we see our world and universe.

Time is relative
He confirmed that all matter was composed of molecules – an idea that at the time was controversial. And most famously of all, he published the paper 'On the electrodynamics of moving bodies'. It contained his Theory of Special Relativity and suggested that time - something that had always thought to be unchanging and absolute – was relative. It could speed up or slow down depending on the speed you were travelling. From this paper would come an additional three pages, finished in September of the same year, that would contain the derivation of e=mc², the most famous mathematical equation ever written.

Einstein was on a roll. Ten years after his Theory of Special Relativity, he published his Theory of General Relativity – a piece of work widely acknowledged as his masterpiece. The great 17th century scientist Sir Isaac Newton had described the force of gravity very successfully, but what caused gravity remained a mystery. In this Theory of General Relativity, Einstein suggested that gravity was due to the bending of time and space by massive objects. In 1919 astronomers confirmed this by measuring the bending of starlight around the sun during a solar eclipse.

The battle with quantum mechanics
In 1921, Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize, not for his theories of relativity, but for another paper published in 1905. In this paper, Einstein proposed that light was not simply made up of waves, it could also be thought of as discrete, individual particles or quanta. This discovery would revolutionise physics and chemistry, because it would become one of the foundations of a new science: quantum mechanics.

But during the 1920s the new science of quantum mechanics began to turn the tide against the way Einstein saw the world. Young pretenders in the field of physics had begun to emerge, such as Heisenberg, Bohr and Schrödinger, who are now some of the most famous figures in science. But at the time they were mavericks. They saw quantum mechanics as a brand new way of interpreting everything.

A core element to their new interpretation of the world was that at a fundamental level, everything was unpredictable. You could, for example, accurately tell the speed of a particle but not – at the same time – its position. Or its position but not its speed. It meant that precise predictions were impossible – the best you could hope for was a science based on probabilities.

God does not play dice
Einstein's work was underpinned by the idea that the laws of physics were an expression of the divine. This belief led him to think that everything could be described by simple, elegant mathematics and moreover, that once you knew these laws you could describe the universe with absolute accuracy. Einstein loathed the implications of quantum mechanics. It was a clash of ideologies.

The conflict reached a crescendo in the late 1920s at the Solvay Conference in Belgium. There Einstein clashed with the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr over the nature of the universe. Einstein constantly challenged Bohr over the implications of quantum mechanics, but never budged from his belief that "God does not play dice", meaning that nothing would be left to chance in the universe. To which the quantum mechanics community replied: "Einstein, stop telling God what to do with his dice."

The theory of everything
But Einstein had a trick up his sleeve. He had already begun a piece of work that he believed would ultimately replace quantum mechanics. It would become later known as his theory of everything – it was his attempt to extend general relativity and unite the known forces in the universe.

By completing this theory of everything Einstein hoped he would rid physics of the unpredictability at the heart of quantum mechanics and show that the world was predictable – described by beautiful, elegant mathematics. Just the way he believed God would make the universe. He would show that the way the quantum mechanics community interpreted the world was just plain wrong. It was a project that he would work on for the next 30 years, until the final day of his life.

But while Einstein's theory of everything may be considered to have been a failure, it is an idea that still fascinates and draws some of the brightest minds in physics. Today many believe that String Theory is our best candidate for a theory of everything. But the ultimate irony is that lurking at the heart of String Theory is the very thing that, because of his beliefs, Einstein had been unable to accept: quantum mechanics.

Further reading:
Good, concise introduction:
'Einstein', Peter D Smith, (Life&Times series) Haus Publishing, ISBN 1-904341-15-2

In depth and authoritative biography focusing on Einstein's science:
'Subtle is the lord', Abraham Pais, OUP, ISBN 0-19-285138-1

The Bohr-Einstein debate:
'Einstein Defiant - genius vs genius in the quantum revolution', Edmund Blair Bolles, Joseph Henry Press, 0-309-08998-0

Words of wisdom:
'The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Alice Calaprice, PUP, ISBN 0-691-07021-0

Also:
Einstein's Cosmos, Michio Kaku, Orion, ISBN 0-297-84755-4

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Alfred Kerr:  "I hear that you are supposed to be deeply religious."

Albert Einstein: "Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that behind all the discernible concatenations there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious."

_{quoted in The Diary of a Cosmopolitan by H. G. Kessler, 1971}

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Sunspot 1087 poses a declining threat for C-class solar flares.

Magnetic fields overlying sunspot 1087 became unstable and erupted. The explosion emitted a bright flash of UV light (a C3-class solar flare) and hurled a massive plume of hot plasma away from the sun.

Below is the picture taken this morning from our new Alien House Observatory. Make sure to watch a video from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) showing a sequence of B and C class flares taken over several hours.