The Five Most Mind-Blowing Implications of Special Relativity

5. Loss of Absolute Space

In the olden days, before the earth cooled, people tended to believe in absolute space. If you drove for fifty miles, you had driven fifty miles, and that was it. You didn’t have to worry about what you were driving from or to, only that you had traveled a fixed distance. Natural, right?

The problem is, relativity means that everything is relative. You may be driving for 20 miles by your odometer, but the way you know that you’re moving is because you’re passing objects (pedestrians, trees, road-rage-crazed bastards in sports cars). Take away your frame of reference, put your car in deep space away from any gravity wells or other physical objects, and you’ll have no way to tell whether you’re moving*.

It gets better. Let’s say you find another car out in the abyss, and let’s also say it’s moving at 150 mph. To you, the other car is the one that’s moving, and you are stationary. But to the other driver, your car is hurtling along at 150 mph, and their car is floating innocently in space. Who’s right?

 Special relativity says that you’re both equally justified in claiming that the other car is moving, and what’s more, there’s no possible way to tell (without one of you turning on your engine and introducing your own acceleration) who’s right. The question of who’s right has no answer. In other words, you’re not measuring your velocity by some constant of space; you’re measuring it by your reference points, which are entirely relative.

Thanks for the illustration, Cousin Jerry!

4. Time Isn’t Absolute Either

Take the cars that I mentioned before. If you add huge clocks on top of them (I’m shamelessly borrowing from Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe here, but only because there’s not really another way to illustrate this), both you and the other driver will observe your clock ticking slower than their own. The faster the relative motion between the two observers, the more the clock will appear to slow down. Again, there’s no way of telling which is which (in part because it’s hard to establish that events are taking place simultaneously) because you can both make the same claim to each other, and both be essentially correct.

This same effect happens in a different way, when you’re close to a large body and caught in its gravity well. If your car was orbiting the Earth and the other car was far away from the Earth, your clock would run slower than theirs because of the time-dilating effect of gravity. This time, because you’re introducing the outside force of gravity, it acts as a frame of reference; thus, both of you would agree that your clock is running slower than Driver 2’s.

3. The Faster It’s Going, The Shorter It Gets

I’ll save the buildup for this one and just say: the faster your vehicle is moving, the shorter it will appear to an observer perpendicular to the vehicle’s direction of motion. The vehicle will contract in the direction that it’s moving, in an effect called Lorentz contraction. The driver won’t notice; from her point of view, the vehicle will have the same dimensions it had previously. But to an observer, the vehicle will get marginally shorter as it increases speed.

Now, when I say marginally, I mean incredibly small; until you get up to half the speed of light, the difference is an infinitesimal fraction of an inch. But it occurs with every vehicle that moves at speed, relative to an observer. At 99% of the speed of light (hat tip, Wikipedia), an observer would see the vehicle as having almost no length at all.

2. Space and Time are One

This means, by the way, that the difference between “farther” and “further” is totally irrelevant, since they’re referring to the same thing. You may brandish this information in front of your English professors the next time they correct you. There’s a load of cool shit involving general relativity (which implies that spacetime is curved) and quantum physics, which holds that supposedly smooth spacetime is actually wildly chaotic on insanely tiny scales, but… oh, all right.

In general relativity, gravity is a consequence of spacetime. A massive body will create a sort of dip in spacetime, which means that lighter-mass objects will fall into the “dip” and orbit around the edges. It’s analogous to one of those things they have in airports and museums, where you put the coin in the top and it spirals around to the bottom, except that it takes place in a sphere around the massive body instead of just a funnel. Don’t ask me how to visualize it, I have no idea.

Like this, but we're sinking into the fabric in every direction simultaneously.

1. e = mc^2

Mass and energy are equivalent and can be changed back and forth; mass can become energy and vice versa. That sunlight hitting the ground outside could become a solid block of coal under the right energies, and we (people) could evaporate into electromagnetic radiation under the right energies. If that doesn’t blow your mind, nothing will. And this is a totally proven concept; it is applied every day in nuclear reactors, as mass (in the form of U-235) is changed into energy that powers our cities. I find this absolutely unbelievable.

*Acceleration changes the equation, but in a situation that's not influenced by an outside force, you'll have no way to tell. Also, windowless box: if you're inside of one, you'll have no way to tell whether the acceleration you feel is from your motion or from being near a gravitationally attractive body. Acceleration and gravity feel exactly the same.

"Ex Uno Fonte", Part II: A Common Search For Understanding

The motto of my school, the College of Wooster, is the following Latin phrase: "Scientia et religio ex uno fonte". Literally translated, it goes something like "Science and religion from one source". I've been saying since last year's History of Life class, if not before, that I know the name of the source. If you'll permit me a somewhat secularized look at religion (and if you won't, fuck you, I'm going anyway), the source is simply the human drive to understand the universe. It's not just curiosity, although our apelike brains do help us out by driving us to see what that thing means. It's not just intelligence, which gives us the ability to wonder "What's that?" and actually search for the answers. No, the source of these two disciplines started so long ago that, today, we've forgotten what it's all about. It is a combination of fear and awe.

We, humans, like to understand things. More than that: we can't not understand things. It drives us nuts. We can assume that this has been a constant desire for all of human history, right? Well, picture yourself as a pre-agricultural hunter/gatherer/all-out wanderer. Picture yourself as a Roman, or as a Knight Templar, or as a Chinese sage. The world around you is absolutely loaded with things you don't understand. Forces of nature! Lightning! What's that? Thunder! Volcanoes! What are those? The whims of rain and cloud, the beasts around you that hunt you and are hunted in turn, why one plant is safe to eat and another turns your guts inside out. Why is the world the way it is? It can't just be arbitrary, oh, no. We won't accept it. There has to be a will, a plan, a divine plan. Ah-HAH! NOW you've got it! A divine plan! Beings older and wiser than our meager human selves have created the world in this, that, the other way. They made the world the way it was because of such-and-such a reason. It may sound arbitrary, but never mind, they're gods! They're capricious and beyond our understanding! There it is. Now we understand the world.

But it's not just limited to religion! That's science, too! We--scientists, even though I'm not remotely close to one, we're the same kind of Homo sapiens sapiens so I'll just insert a 'we'--are going after the world and trying to understand it too, just in a different way! What's the difference between a universal law--to pick a now-banal example, e = mc^2--and a God that says nothing in the universe can exceed the speed of light? What's the difference between a Higgs boson and an angel that weighs down each and every particle and gives it mass? Absolutely nothing! Sure, you can test for one and believe in the other, but at heart they're still explanations for the same basic phenomena! (Well, not basic, it took tens of thousands of years for us to work out the speed of light. But never mind.)

Science and religion are humanity's two great efforts to understand the world around us. They differ only in their methods and their conclusions; the underlying spirit is the same. We want to explain what we see, understand what we feel and why we feel it. We don't see them that way because they're so often in conflict, because the conclusions they draw are so very different. But that's fine! That's brilliant! It's the best thing that could possibly happen, because it brings us closer to a true understanding of the universe! When the theories come in contact and conflict, people's beliefs change. We're forced to ask the hard questions about what it all means, how one theory fits in with the other, how--and if--they can be compatible. We're forced to keep on looking for the one true answer, the answer that will reconcile the two systems and create our final understanding of the universe.

I know that this all sounds kind of nebulous (hee hee!). I know that words like 'understanding' and 'universe' are vague and all-encompassing. They're meant to be. They describe everything that we, as a people and as a species, want to achieve. Look, in physics right now there are two great theories: general relativity, which describes gravity, and quantum physics, which describes the three other forces. Unifying those two will produce what physicists hope will be a complete understanding of the universe. The parallel between that idea and what I am saying is nontrivial (as a statistician might say). Sooner or later, science and religion will begin to work together on a grand scale to meet the ultimate goal. And you and I might just live to see it.

Thank you for reading.

Final Black Hole Note: This Is Absurd

A couple of black hole notes ago, I was able to roughly deduce the size of the Vulcan black hole in Star Trek (2009) and take a stab at its mass. I'm decently confident in my conclusions to date, but it occurs to me that there must be some other mechanism at work when there's a great deal of red matter involved. I think the massive amounts of red matter used in the creation of the Final Black Hole somehow gave it more gravitational attraction, and perhaps more mass than it should reasonably have.

I conclude this because, as I noted last time, the Enterprise can travel faster than light, and should therefore have been able to pull away from the black hole without any trouble. In the quest to try and fit all of J.J. Abrams' nonsense into an astronomically coherent system, I'm going to see what it would take for the FBH to have the kind of gravitational attraction that it did.

At the end of the movie, before they blow up the black hole with antimatter, the Enterprise goes to full warp in order to escape from the FBH. I couldn't find an exact value in the Star Trek Wiki for how fast "maximum warp" is, in terms of kilometers per hour; it did say that Warp 1 equals light speed and that Starfleet ships could manage Warp 9 at best during this time period, but I don't know what scale they're using. Warp 9 could be 9x light speed, or it could be nine levels up on an exponential, logarathmic or just arbitrary scale. I don't know. Thus, I'm forced to try Plan B.

In the movie, the Enterprise travels from Earth to the Vulcan home world. Now, according to a canon reference in a Star Trek novelization book I happen to own, the Vulcan home planet orbits 40 Eridani A. This is a real star, located 16.45 light years from Earth. Now, here's where it gets slightly stupid: we see the Enterprise both entering and exiting warp in the movie. If we assume that the movie is taking place in real time (and there's compelling evidence to do so; Kirk's in a tearing hurry the whole time), we can know the time it takes for the Enterprise to travel that distance. In the film, that's five minutes and 17 seconds. Meanwhile, Wikipedia gives one light year as 9,460,730,472,580.8 km. That times 16.45 is 155629016273954.16 km. That divided by 317 seconds is 490,943,269,003.01 kilometers per second. Light travels at a geriatric 300,000 kilometers per second, so when the Enterprise is at warp, it is traveling at 1,636,477 times the speed of light. Which means that the gravitational pull of the black hole is 1,636,477 times the speed of light, plus more, since the Enterprise was slowly pulled in by the black hole. WHICH MEANS that as soon as the black hole was created, Kirk and Spock and everyone aboard both the Romulan ship and the Enterprise should've been pulled inside immediately (when they weren't at warp) and DIED.


In conclusion, J.J. Abrams has literally violated every single rule* of what we know about black holes. Fuck that noise.

*Multiplication of mass, abuse of the Schwartzchild radius, we can see the unseeable black hole on the screen, no red-shift in the communications from Nero's ship, evidence of an accretion disk where no matter exists to make one, more abuse of the Schwartzchild radius AND SO ON.

Bonus Black Hole Note! The Enterprise Was Never In Any Danger!

At the end of Star Trek, the Enterprise is caught in the gravitational well of the black hole, seemingly inescapably so, and escapes only by ejecting what's basically a huge bomb into the black hole and riding the blast wave out (undamaged). SPOILERS.

"aaaaaaah..."

"CHOOOOOO!!!"

If warp speed is faster than lightspeed (which it is), the Enterprise should be able to escape the black hole without all the histrionics, like firing the warp core (which apparently isn’t strictly needed for the ship to go into warp) into the black hole FOR INSTANCE.

Here’s how. The Schwartzchild radius defines the area within which you would need to exceed the speed of light to escape, and so constitutes the effective boundary of a black hole (since we can’t see anything inside because light cannot escape). The Enterprise isn't within the Schwartzchild radius. We know this because nothing can escape once it's inside the event horizon (same thing, but sounds cooler) of a black hole, yet even when his ship has almost been swallowed, Nero is able to send transmissions to the Enterprise. Thus, the event horizon is the actual black border that we see on screen, and anything forward of that can still escape, and the Enterprise never crosses that line.* Therefore, the escape velocity that the Enterprise needs to attain should be less than the speed of light. Therefore, since warp speed exceeds lightspeed, the Enterprise should be fine,** and no huge goddamn bomb is necessary!****

Hooray! Now Kirk can go contract more alien STDs!

*Supplementary reasons: We (the camera) can see the Enterprise, so it hasn't passed the event horizon because the light reflected off of it can bounce back to us. Also, the accretion disk of the black hole helps define its boundary, which the Enterprise doesn't cross. What was it formed out of? I have no idea, since there was no matter around at the time other than Nero’s dead ship (which went straight in) and the Enterprise itself. Regardless, it’s there, and that provides a crude way of telling at least where the Schwartzchild radius isn’t. The disk will be outside the radius, and the Enterprise is outside the disk.

**Not to mention, since warp speed exceeds lightspeed, the Enterprise could theoretically be within the Schwartzchild radius and still be able to use its normal warp engines to escape. It's a question of how far they would be able to go into the black hole.***

***The movie ignores the "spaghettification" thing--the thing where the pull of gravity on the part of the ship closest to the black hole will be stronger than the pull of gravity on the farthest-away part, so the Enterprise will start to stretch out like a strand of spaghetti as it gets closer to the black hole--so I see no reason why I shouldn't ignore it as well. Phooey on you, spaghettification.

****One more thing: They hurled the huge bomb into the black hole, into the event horizon itself! Nothing can fucking escape the event horizon unless it has a magical warp-drive, and no matter what radiation the explosion generated, its maximum speed would still be the speed of light! Thus, it couldn't escape! Thus, that entire explosion in space is a crock of shit!*****

*****Done now, but there's another one coming. Hold onto your helmets. Also, celebratory penguins again!

Red Matter: Trying to Explain Black Holes in Star Trek

Preface: I KNOW that Star Trek (2009) played merry hell with all sorts of physics. I'm not trying to explain how contrary they run to regular, ordinary physics; that's just too damn easy. What I'm going to try to do is explore their black hole physics, and see what the implications are when you bring them into line with the parts of black hole physics that they didn't explicitly rewrite. It's... oh, forget it. Just read on. Or don't. Whatever makes you happy.

The plot device J.J. Abrams came up with in the film is called "red matter", which is apparently different than any other matter that reflects red light.

This isn't a wayward red blood cell, it's black hole fuel!

The basic idea seems to be that when the red matter is released into something, it creates a black hole. But there are conditions under which it won't; you can keep it suspended in a tank, even poke it with a needle and take some of it out, and it's stable. It only turns into a black hole if you provoke it, much like your adorable cat, who will only turn into a hissing, spitting ball of painful death if you step on his tail. Otherwise, he will be calm, serene, and float peacefully in midair (as many cats do).

The trigger for red matter seems to be making it interact with a massive body, such as a ship or a planet. You can't just set a trigger on it and tell it to become a black hole, it has to actually hit the massive object. Moreover, I think it is best used at the spot in the object where matter is most compressed by its own gravity. Namely, the center. This is why Nero used his giant drill to bore down to the center of Vulcan, as opposed to just hurling the red matter at the planet's surface.

Here's where it gets interesting, though. The black hole that's produced has no correlation to the amount of red matter that's used. For example, observe this photo of the planet Vulcan collapsing into the black hole at its core.

Here it is again, a second later. You can see the last remnants of the planet at the center, and then the patch of darkness in the center of the frame that defines the Schwartzchild radius (effectively, the boundary of a black hole).

So the black hole that's produced, by a tiny drop of red matter, is approximately planet-sized. Compare that to the black hole produced when the entire huge case of red matter impacts Nero's ship:

The black hole formed in the middle of Nero's ship; that's why it's on both sides.

Sure, it looks big, but that ship is at best comparable to a big asteroid. Certainly not moon-sized, or planet-sized. The black hole produced from all that red matter was only about the size of the ship!

This leads me to believe that the amount of red matter is irrelevant. What matters is the thing the red matter is used on, and how much mass it has.

Now, this presents a bit of a problem. The black hole produced is not directly correlated to the amount of mass the object has.

Let's assume Vulcan, shown collapsing above, is about the size of Earth (for convenience's sake). If Earth collapsed into a black hole, the black hole produced would be smaller than a grape. A stellar-mass black hole--a black hole with the approximate mass of our sun--comes from the collapse of a star with 25+ solar masses. Yet the red matter made Vulcan collapse into a planet-mass black hole! Thus, red matter must work, not by collapsing the mass already present to its natural Schwartzchild radius (all masses have it; it's theoretical in nature, kinda), but by acting as a multiplier for the mass that's already there. It multiplies the mass of the object it's used on until the radius of the black hole that'll be produced is equal to the radius of the original object.

We can even work out what the multiplier is, within reason. Here's how I did it:

The Schwartzchild radius of an object (what it would be, with its mass, if it were to become a black hole) is about three kilometers multiplied by its mass. Now, the radius of the Vulcan black hole (if Vulcan is Earth-sized) is about 6384 kilometers, since that's the radius of Earth. Divided by 3, that means that you would have to have 2128 solar masses to create a black hole that size!

Earth's mass, obviously, isn't anything even close to a stellar mass. According to Wikipedia, it's about 332,950 times less than the sun. So if we multiply 332950 by 2128, we get 708,517,600. That's the multiplier of the "red matter", if my theory is correct. When the red matter hits a massive object (planet, ship, whatever), it multiplies the mass by 708,517,600 times, causing it to collapse into a  black hole that has a Schwartzchild radius precisely equal to the original object's actual radius.

This is how red matter works. Thank you and good night.

Here's some celebratory penguins!

(Obviously I've had to make some assumptions; Vulcan is supposed to have a stronger surface gravity than Earth, for example, so it's reasonable to assume that it's heavier. However, fuck it, I didn't exactly have precise numbers to work with. And whether the red matter number is the exact multiplier or not, the important thing is I've got a good idea of how the mechanism works and what the multiplier is within experimental error. That's a decent starting point.)

Taking On Global Warming "Skeptics"

Well, this post has been a long time coming. Almost three weeks, as a matter of fact.

Before I get started, some quick news: The first departure of the 2011 offseason has happened. Packers WR coach Jimmy Robinson has accepted the same position in Dallas, and will also be named assistant head coach in Winston Moss fashion. I'm happy for him, but a bit scared, because damn has that guy got some talent to work with in Dallas. We'll see how he does.

Cracked.com also has an excellent pair of articles today, on the ways music can frak with your mind and the worst things alien invaders regularly do. For a musician and a sci-fi fan, that's like the best day they could've picked.

Here we go. This is a long post, so feel free to stop for coffee breaks.

Or perhaps some delicious cinnamon buns.

A few weeks back, I was privileged to take part in what I might charitably call a ‘debate’ with some avowed global warming skeptics. I say ‘skeptics’ to be kind, as ‘deniers’ is a loaded word, but also because skepticism was their defining feature; they either expressed or strongly implied skepticism in the integrity of every accredited scientific outlet I presented them with, in our ability to understand anything at all (not just in climate science), and the reliability of any information at all that did not support their points. This should not be termed ‘skepticism’ in the same way that a healthy dose of critical analysis is skeptical in nature. Rather, their inability to assimilate any information contrary to their position verged on outright nihilism.

I’d love to say that these unfortunate souls are the only people who pursue climate change skepticism with unhealthy zeal, but as we well know, this is not the case. There are a lot of people out there who have been misled by information that is simply false with regards to climate change. The people who tried, and failed, to debate me brought up six or seven of these talking points. I would like to take the opportunity to go through their arguments and debunk them, one by one.

Let me first emphasize that despite the accumulated evidence for the likelihood of anthropogenic climate change, there is still plenty of room for genuine skepticism of the data, scientific disagreement and the arrival of new information. What there is no room for is taking positions that are outright, completely, flatly, indisputably wrong.

First on the list is the idea that there is a major divide in the scientific community on the issue of climate change. The argument that one of the ‘skeptics’ made, with increasing fervor and desperation every time it was debunked, was that there is a genuine, wide and contentious rift in the scientific community over whether or not anthropogenic climate change is taking place.

This in no way reflects reality. It is wrong, false and incorrect. It is simply not true.

A recent metastudy ranked climate scientists by the number of scientific papers they had published, or in other words, their expertise. The study examined 908 climate researchers who had published twenty or more papers on the subject, then determined whether each scientist was convinced by the evidence of anthropogenic climate change (ACC) or whether they were unconvinced. “Our compiled researcher list is not comprehensive nor designed to be representative of the entire climate science community,” said the paper, “[but] we have drawn researchers from the most high-profile reports and public statements about ACC. Therefore, we have likely compiled the strongest and most credentialed researchers in CE [convinced by the evidence] or UC [unconvinced by the evidence] groups.” In the case of all researchers, it is assumed that they are familiar with the evidence for climate change, unlike the unfortunate skeptic.

The study found that only one of the 50 most prolific climate researchers was unconvinced by the evidence for ACC. Just 3% of the 100 most prolific and 2.5% of the top 200 most prolific climate scientists have publicly voiced their skepticism of ACC. 97% of the top climate scientists agree with ACC, which is consistent with the most recent survey of the broader scientific community. In addition, the UE researchers were likely to have less experience and have published fewer papers then the CE researchers, and tended to be geologists instead of atmospheric scientists.

But we need them to protect us from the volcanoes!

“This finding complements direct polling of the climate researcher community, which yields qualitative and self-reported researcher expertise. Our findings capture the added dimension of the distribution of researcher expertise, quantify agreement among the highest expertise climate researchers, and provide an independent assessment of level of scientific consensus concerning ACC,” the authors write.

But what of the potential implications of the study? For example, does this mean that there is a-brace yourselves-consensus in the scientific community? I emailed one of the authors of the study, Bill R.L. Anderegg, and asked him this question.

“’Consensus’ can have many different connotations and meanings," said Anderegg. "For me at least, the question really becomes a matter of scientific confidence. Do the vast majority of scientists believe we have enough information to say (and with what certainty) that the planet is warming, due mostly to human causes, and it's going to be fairly harmful. Our study attempted to answer this and critical to answering this is making sure you examine people who know the issue (and not just any self-proclaimed expert who has little training in the area). In this case, I think the answer is a resounding yes.”

All right, all right. But what about of the population that the study surveyed? Opponents of papers like Anderegg’s frequently charge that dissenting voices are suppressed by the scientific community, after all. Is this an accurate charge?

“No, it’s not an accurate perception and I’ll explain how and why I’ve addressed it,” Anderegg told me. “We have two main ways of addressing it. The first is data-driven and the second is based around scientific culture. Using data, I asked what fields the climate contrarians had a PhD in, with the idea being that if they were similarly trained (say, mostly atmospheric scientists) as the mainstream people, then you could make a case that their ideas are being unfairly rejected at journals. They weren't. Over a third didn't have PhDs and another third were either geologists or petroleum geologists (compared to nearly half of the mainstream people being atmospheric scientists). This suggests that the contrarians at least do not have the same background training as the mainstream community.

 “Now, as to the second, the culture of science itself thrives on discussions and dissent *if you have data* to support your ideas. Each grad student dreams of being the next Einstein or the next Darwin, and the way you become famous in science is to overturn a huge paradigm......again, if you have data. It takes an immense amount of well-done science and lots of data to overturn a paradigm. Thus, for all of these reasons, I think we can say with reasonable confidence that there is relatively little unfair excluding of alternate viewpoints in climate science.”

If they’re not accusing the scientific community of stifling dissent apurpose, climate change deniers charge that the existence of a “consensus” also smothers internal debate. I asked our expert to evaluate this possibility.

“There is still much, much, much debate on the details, timing, impacts, spatial distribution of climate change within the community. What the contrarians would like there to be debate on is 1) is the planet warming and 2) are humans causing most of it? To some extent, you must have some agreement to get do productive debate/discussion,” said Anderegg.  “If scientists let the evolution-contrarians keep the level of debate on "is evolution real", then we would not have a century's wealth of evolutionary biology that has contributed to our understanding of how the world works, medical drugs to fight diseases, etc. Our study tried to send a crystal clear message that around these two questions (are things warming and are we causing most of it) that the vast majority of scientists agree about this and we should move on to other more productive and critical questions.”

Well, this seemed fairly conclusive to me. But what about the methodology of the study? Doesn’t it seem like most scientists don’t sign the public statements that we read about in the paper? Could there be, in other words, a silent majority of climate change skeptics?

It turned out that Anderegg and his fellow researchers had accounted for this as well.

“It's my hunch that most scientists, in fact, generally don't sign public statements about this sort of thing. That's probably largely because 1) scientists are generally fairly shy and conservative people that don't like to get in the public eye or go out on a limb, 2) there's no incentive to be publicly vocal as a scientist and, in fact, the more vocal you are with the media, the less time you spend publishing papers and succeeding in your field, and 3) the science is quite evident to climate scientists and many don't feel like it's their job to educate the public (and, while I disagree with them in that I think they do have a moral obligation to share their research with society, they are quite frankly right - their job is to do research).

Now, we do have a way to assess those who haven't made public statements - surveys. In fact, two separate studies with different methods did surveys of the climate science community and they come up with almost the exact same numbers that my study did - 94-97% of climate scientists think global warming is real and mostly human caused.”

Does this mean that anthropogenic climate change is a done deal, in scientific terms? And does the weight of the overwhelming majority of the scientific community necessarily mean that their side of the issue is right? Absolutely not. As Anderegg noted in a 2009 memo, scientific opinion of the day does not garnish an argument with an everlasting halo. Many theories that were supported by a majority of scientists have since proven to be untrue. But that is not a reason to automatically discount scientific evidence, as the climate change denialists would have us do. Rather, it helps us keep in mind the fact that science can be flawed and imperfect, without losing sight of the veracity of the smorgasboard of evidence that climate scientists have presented us with.

Yummy.

For more documentation, I invite the reader to examine some of Anderegg's other work.

"Climate Science and the Dynamics of Expert Consensus", "Moving beyond scientific agreement: an Editorial comment on 'Climate Change: a profile of US climate scientists' perspectives'" and "Diagnosis Earth: The Climate Change Debate".