by Harry Ricker
Historians condense the facts to make complex social movements simple and understandable in hindsight. Our movement to reform establishment science, making it responsible to the needs of people who fund science with their taxes, and not a servant of the established state system, traces its origin to the work of Dr. John E. Chappell Jr., who organized the predecessor of the JCNPS known as the Natural Philosophy Alliance or NPA. >>>think critically...
by Harry Ricker
The search for the elusive dark matter is famous. Here I will discuss the discovery of a different kind of dark matter in interstellar space, which I call cobwebs of space. This dark matter is just as elusive as the more famous, but probably fictitious, dark matter. The appearance of this dark matter, which forms dark filaments in space is referred to herein as interstellar dust filaments. This is because they are like the dark clouds that populate interstellar space, but they are long and narrow and crisscross throughout space forming the appearance of a dark cobweb that overlies all of the space through which we view distant celestial objects. >>>think critically...
by Harry Ricker
This report documents a study of Milky Way dust filaments that appear in photographs of external galaxies. The technique used in this investigation is the use of software photograph processing tools called effects filters. The software used here is the On One Photo Perfect Effects 9. This allows the adjustment of digital photos to enhance aspects of the photo to permit the investigation of foreground dust in galaxy photographs. The thesis of this study is that the classification and interpretation of galaxy photographs is significantly influenced by foreground dust filaments that appear in projection against the bright background of external galaxies. >>>think critically...
by Harry Ricker
The Great Math Mystery Episode of the PBS popular science series NOVA asks the question: Is math a human invention or the discovery of the language of the universe? It seems to this writer that there is actually no question here at all. The correct answer is that mathematics is a human invention. So one has to contemplate, why is the question being asked at all? >>>think critically...
by Harry Ricker
The BBC Horizon program, Supermassive Black Holes, is an example of how science documentaries have turned science into science fiction, by combining a little science fact with fictional writing to produce speculative science fiction. Unfortunately, much of modern mainstream science is infected with this type of speculative fiction. We can lay the blame for this on the modern scientific method, whi... >>>think critically...
by Alexander Unzicker
Problems cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them. – Albert Einstein >>>think critically...
by Nick Percival
For the reader who is unfamiliar with physics academia, it might seem difficult to understand why Special Relativity (SR) remains one of the key foundation blocks of academic, theoretical physics. After all physics thinking should be based on empirical data and logic – there should be little room for subjective preferences, etc. >>>think critically...
by Alexander Unzicker
As with many of the thoughts in this blog, this is contrary to common wisdom, but I think it particularly weird how the perceived wisdom that “only dimensionless constants can have fundamental meaning” has been established. Not only has this idea become representative of a methodology that has replaced thinking by calculating, but the full ignorance of the statement reveals itself only if we l... >>>think critically...
by Nick Percival
The earliest empirical data directly related to “time dilation” came from particle accelerators. These results seemed to confirm Einstein’s time dilation prediction. When unstable particles had “high velocity”, their half-lives were greatly increased – in other words, “high velocity” particles survived longer than “low velocity” particles before they decayed. >>>think critically...
by Nick Percival
Sometimes one can get a much deeper insight into a theory by comparing it to a quite different theory covering the same domain. We will do that here by comparing Special Relativity (SR) to Lorentz Aether Theory (LAT) of the late 1800’s or, to be more precise, we will compare SR to the top level, conceptual framework of LAT.

>>>think critically...