Ever since a tiny warbler landed on our ship in mid Atlantic I have been fascinated by animal flight in general. It took me me ten years to work out how our would-be “Christopher Columbus” had done it. What a revelation … what a delightful surprise. By then I had become an expert on low speed aerodynamics, and a glider pilot who soared with birds all over the globe.
In 2009, the centenary of Bleriot’s first flight across the English Channel, I dusted down my simple aerodynamics and applied it to his famous exploit. Everything worked out perfectly: range, speed, endurance, power, fuel….. So while such matters were fresh in mind I thought “Why not apply the same analysis to the Wright Brothers’ famous first powered flight alleged to have taken place at Kitty Hawk in 1903?”
The famous photo allegedly of the Wright Brothers first powered flight near Kittyhawk in 1903. But there are many suspicious circumstances surrounding it. For instance it wasn’t released until FIVE YEARS AFTERWARDS. The only eyewitnesses said they had to pull it up a hill beforehand, so it was probably just another glider. It was allegedly “destroyed by a gust of wind immediately afterwards” so no one qualified ever inspected it. It’s got no undercarriage. Only a madman would try to make the first powered flight in a high wind. The claimed telegram announcing the triumph has never been traced. And most telling no replica with the same feeble engine-power has been able to repeat it. In subsequent years the Wrights did fly, but only with the aid of a powerful catapult. That’s not powered flight: taking off is the critical part
This time nothing worked out. As a long term Wright admirer who had even visited their workshop in Ohio I assumed I’d made some terrible mistake. So I looked deeply into the case and bit by bit their whole story fell apart. I reckon the Odds are about a hundred thousand to one that the famous Kittyhawk flight was total fabrication. You can follow up the investigation for yourself by clicking on:
is a literally vital subject which seems to have been completely missed by science up until now (That makes me a little nervous, could I really be the pioneer when….. ?) Humans have a mad strategy, they are born warm blooded but naked! They should have gone extinct; instead they have become the dominant species on Earth. Could their weird strategy actually be the secret of their success? Here I argue that it could, and that Thermodynamics dominates every aspect of our lives, our history and our evolution. In the tropics an individual has a thermodynamic efficiency of about 1 percent and must somehow survive with an average useful power of only one Watt, less than a very dim torch ! That same individual in Northern Europe would have 3 Watts and in Greenland 11. If that is true then Human Thermodynamics must dominate every aspect of our lives.
If you find that idea intriguing, or would like to argue with it, you might like to look at a shortish essay on the whole fascinating subject, including its implications for history, for us as a species, and as individuals. If so click on:
An immigration rate of about half a per cent a year as we presently have in Britain, sounds innocuous. I certainly thought so. Thus people who object to it are sometimes branded as ‘racists’ or worse by ‘liberals’. But liberals generally don’t understand that half a per cent a year is the equivalent of 3 British mothers out of 4 raising an extra child. So it is dramatic. Even as a very experienced user and teacher of maths myself, I was very surprised indeed when I worked this out last year (2019). Indeed I was so shocked I refused to believe it for weeks until I had re-done the calculation in several independent ways. But it seems there can be no doubt about it.
How could a small percentage lead to apocalyptic growth? Mainly because immigrants arrive every year whilst births and deaths are lifetime events, and Life-expectancy in Europe today is about 80 years. So you have to multiply yearly immigration rates by 80 to appreciate the real scale of it. Then again, only the female half of the existing population breeds, while immigrants come in in both sexes. So that’s another multiplying factor of 2. Now we can begin to see why the current figure of roughly 300,000 immigrants/year is equivalent to 160 times that amount in a lifetime, or 48 Million. It is indeed equivalent to 3 British mothers out of 4 having an extra child. [Alternatively note that the immigration rate is about half the annual birth rate; that should make one think — indeed that’s what started me calculating.]
I don’t think any of us can have a fruitful. discussion of immigration (or population control in general, which was my initial interest) unless we understand the scale of it. There is no avoiding the conclusion that at anything like its present level immigration will swamp Britain. That’s not racism, that is simple algebra. Alas very few of our governing or media elite are numerate enough to comprehend the scale of the problem while residents in certain areas know only too well they are being swamped, or have been already.
I discuss Population and Immigration as impersonally as I can in my recent book History of the Brits (from a scientists point of view), Amazon 2020. It is described elsewhere on this site under ‘My Books’ Category Here is the summary at the end of Chapter 16, which deals only with the numbers:
“Any discussion of population and immigration which doesn’t take numbers into account is worthless. Who sensible would argue that all or any immigration is either wholly good or wholly bad – surely it is a question of how much; and that takes some calculating:
We have found that:
Indigenous Brits have largely descended from a few hundred hunter-gatherers who were stranded here when Doggerland was inundated around 6500 BC. There is thus no way Brits can argue that they are especially talented people who got here because of, for instance, their seafaring enterprise. The silly buggers were simply cut off. Lucky devils!
Subsequent invasions must have been more of ideas than people. Ideas can obviously fly.
The indigenous British population is approximately 400 generations old.
So as to make up for occasional setbacks such as plagues and droughts all animal populations must be able to grow exponentially. Such is the nature of exponential growth however that minute rates of growth or decline can lead eventually to apocalyptic changes in population. We all need an intuitive grasp of this vital process. [See Box]
Many debates about immigration policy are confused, and have led to shouting matches, because educated but innumerate people have confounded immigration rates with population numbers and so have dramaticallyunderestimated the long term effects of immigration. To compare a rate with a number one must first multiply the rate by twicethe life expectancy of the existing population – 160 years in Britain. Thus the current rate of roughly 300,000 immigrants a year corresponds to a total number of 48 million migrants! This dramatic multiplier, which was by no means obvious, needs most careful thought – and acknowledgement.
NB The vital Intergenerational Population Multiplier is:
X= (b+B)/2 where b is the average number of children per mother (close to 2.0) while B=2IT/P where I is the net annual immigration rate (about 300,000 at present), T the average life expectancy (about 80 years), and P the existing population (about 67 Million in 2020). If you work it out B comes to about 0.75 extra babies per mother — as claimed above.
(The 2 in B arises because only the female half of the indigenous population breeds so the fair ratio of immigration to breeding has to be I/(P/2) = 2I/P while the T converts a rate into a number.)
Furthermore:
Britons are comparatively wealthy; immigrants are comparatively poor – which is mostly why they come. Thus, immigration must necessarily drain the per capita accumulated wealth of a host country. People don’t talk about this. Thus the present immigration rate is halving the UK’s annual accumulation of wealth – which is a very slow process.[Note 3]. Thus each immigrant costs the UK roughly a million pounds, but for some reason people never talk about that This is already showing up in the present housing crisis – the canary in the mine.
The great news is that we can, if we want to, reduce our present population to a sustainable level (less than 20 million?) in only two generations without any need for draconian restrictions such as a One Child policy, provided we now halt immigration almost entirely. Because of the aforesaid 160, small numbers of immigrants arriving per year are , in this context, equivalent to large numbers of extra babies. Every citizen should understand that. It is not obvious, but it is absolutely spinal!
But the point of this post is simply to help anyone interested in these subjects to understand the Maths, and if possible to check it. To that end I have written a short algebraic essay which you can click on at:
Somebody said, Einstein I believe: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science .” And no subject is so imbued with profound mysteries as Cosmology – despite what some glib professionals would have us believe
Think of Cosmology’s Big Questions:
1) Why is the sky dark at night – if the universe is infinite?
2) Why do distant galaxies have highly red-shifted Spectra?
3) Is the universe changing, and did it have a beginning?
4) What is the source of the powerful cosmic background radiation which glows in all directions?
(5) How can that radiation be so uniform (To one part in a hundred thousand) if the speed of light is finite – which it definitely is?
(6) If the universe is expanding in a hot Big Bang – which so many professionals maintain – then how did flimsy structures like galaxies form out of it? Nascent galaxies should have been torn to bits by radiation pressure.
(7) When you slam the brakes on in your car, why does your head jerk forwards ? It is being violently decelerated, but decelerated relative to what? It turns out that it is being decelerated with respect, not to the Earth, but to the distant stars. But how does it know that? ( ‘The Problem of Inertia’ ). In other words what is the physical mechanism that must connect your head to the stars?
These are all profound and mysterious questions to which science has so far been able to offer only fumbling answers – despite what some cosmology-priests would like us to believe: “The universe is expanding,” they say, “There was a Big Bang, Space – Time is curved, and we’ve got answers to all, or nearly all those other awkward questions too – Cold Dark Matter, Inflation, Dark Energy……”
Don’t believe them. Cosmology is an extraordinary difficult subject if only because it lies at the nexus of so many others: Astronomy, Physics, Mathematics, Philosophy, Sociology, Instrumentation, Computer -simulation…… Of the sixty different civilisations we know of, every single one has come up with a cosmology of sorts – it seems to be a necessity for the human psyche. And that leaves room for a priesthood only too eager to supply one.
To keep a sense of proportion it is worth recalling some recent cosmological follies:
Thinking of Time as linear: “We’re already back to within three minutes of the Big Bang” they say – when, in the cosmological context, Time is surely logarithmic. In logarithmic Time the Cosmos was completely opaque throughout the first 43 decades of its 60 decades of existence. Its origins will therefore be veiled beyond our sight – probably for ever.
If galaxy redshifts are not the Doppler effect in action – which apparently they are not – then what causes them? Yes, they come out of the mathematics (the ‘Robertson – Walker – Metric’), but that is hardly Physics.
Once the impossibility of forming galaxies in a Big Bang cosmology was recognised, an ingenious new substance christened ‘Cold Dark Matter’(CDM) was conjured up to solve it. Elaborate computer simulations were offered as proof that CDM works. But it doesn’t. Observed galaxies look nothing like the CDM variety; nothing like1. Yet the cognoscenti refuse to admit it.
Everyone agreed that gravity ought to slow expansion down but when the slowing was looked for it wasn’t there. On the contrary. Expansion had apparently accelerated – and in recent times too. This called for another improbable miracle: Dark Energy – whatever that is.
If expansion of the entire universe does seem a mite implausible – we do have an acid test for it – the Tolman Test devised in the 1930’s [distant galaxies should dim as the fourth power of their redshifts]. But one glance at the Hubble Deep Field (below) demonstrates that there is no such dimming – it falls short of the required amount by a factor of no less than 10,000! But professional astronomers won’t talk about that. Why not?
In short Cosmology appears to have been regressing of late because some of its most vocal proponents appear not to appreciate a truly fundamental principle of Philosophy – Ockham’s Razor. Every time you complexify a theory by introducing a new Free Parameter (such as Dark Energy) to solve one problematical feature of it, you fundamentally weaken that theory. So one is only justified in doing so if at the same time that Free Parameter illuminates other entirely new and favourable evidence which more than compensates for the weakening inevitably involved. CDM, Inflation and Dark Energy do not meet that criterion – and so should be rejected.
I have been an enthusiastic follower of Cosmology since I was a boy. I even taught myself Tensor Calculus at age fifteen in order to read Einstein’s original papers. I’ve been a professional extragalactic astronomer for much of my life and have been to some of the big cosmology conferences – including one in the Vatican ( see my book Crouching Giant), even taught it at university when nobody else would – but have become gradually more and more sceptical of the subject as the years roll by. Yes there are some strong arguments in favour of Big Bang Cosmology – but there are even more against. To come to a measured view of the whole subject one needs to weigh them against one another using Common Sense. When I do so the Odds come out at over hundred to one against Big Bang Cosmology being broadly right( See another post here entitled The Scientific Method.) Some aspects of it are probably sound, but which ones?
I’m not suggesting we should abandon Cosmology as a subject – on the contrary. We should study its mysteries with ever more ingenious techniques and instruments. Equally though we need to be alert to the crippling weaknesses of the current paradigm. If we close our ears to them, as so many professionals at present do, we could miss some subtle but tremendous secret the real universe is trying to whisper in our ear. As Daniel Boorstin wrote in The Discoverers: “The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge.” I believe we all need to become sceptical cosmologists now; most especially professionals.
Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Courtesy ESA/NASA
If you examine this extremely deep image taken with the Hubble Space Telescope almost every object on it is a galaxy . The small images are much further away and have high redshifts. But if those redshifts were due to expansion of the universe then those small images should be so dim as to be invisible. But as you can see they are nothing of the kind. This is a complete shock. On the face of it at least Cosmic Expansion has failed the classical test set for it — ‘The Tolman Effect’ by a factor of 10,000!
On the face of it then the Universe cannot be expanding! After all such dimming was the classic test for expansion proposed by Richard Tolman back in the 1930s when we didn’t have the means to apply it. But now we have, and the universe has spectacularly failed it. But nobody, at least no professional, wants to talk about it, Umm.
There is another more recent post on this site entitled “Big Bang Cosmology is Wrong” under the “Astronomy” Category
I go into the stories behind the Hubble deep pictures in the last 2 books in my quartet ‘Written in the Stars entitled’ : Crouching Giant and Beyond the Western Stars. [See under ‘my books’ Category on this site.
NB You can see hundreds of HST images at stsci.edu, nasa.gov. or eso.org.
Ref 1: Disney M J et al: 2008, Nature, 455, 1082-4, Galaxies appear simpler than expected.
If you want to see the author talking about Cosmology and galaxies there is a 45 minute Youtube video of him being interviewed by the Physicist and Author Alexander Unzicker about 3 years ago at:
Until my family moved to the city when I was ten I had never been in a library. Thereafter Kings Norton Public Library became the theatre of all my dreams and ambitions; real teenage life in Birmingham seeming tame by comparison. Books became my wings and I soared off like a young albatross in search of its destiny. One day, so I dreamed, I would become an Explorer, a World Traveller and, of course, ‘The ‘Great Novelist’. Then I had a stroke of luck , though it certainly didn’t feel like that at the time. At thirteen I was diagnosed with a “ progressive and incurable disease of the spine” and incarcerated in a ‘hospital for incurable children’ deep in the countryside. There I aged 30 years in 6 months and suffered a mid-life crisis early enough to really do something about it. Having had my dreams so nearly snatched away I emerged from hospital implacably resolved to live them out. Although cured, the problem was that I was too late: I learned that every bloody corner of the Globe had been explored already ! Then Sputnik came to the rescue. To Hell with the Earth; I would explore the Universe instead. And so, eventually, it came to pass. The dreamy boy became the dreamy astronomer who travelled the world in order to observe his beloved galaxies from remote mountain-tops from The Warumbungles to the Russian Caucasus. But even they weren’t high enough and the dreamy astronomer became the luckiest man alive when he was invited to join the team that would design, build and eventually use The Hubble Space Telescope. What an adventure that would turn out to be: disputes, disasters, surprises and discoveries the equal of any experienced by Marco Polo or Ferdinand Magellan. That Space Telescope saga is a tale that has to be told, and could only be told convincingly, by one of the lucky crew. But life was now far too hectic and thrilling to leave any time to do more than keep a diary of the events. Indeed the voyage turned out to be far more exciting than the romantic boy had ever dreamed in that quiet library long, long ago: a beautiful princess rescued from behind the Iron Curtain; a tiny warbler whispering profundities in his ear in mid-Atlantic; the secret of the Scientific Method appearing down on a coral reef off Tonga… you couldn’t make it up; nobody could. And yet it all really happened; it did.
Eventually however the frenetically busy astronomer semi-retired with his princess and sat down to write… and write … and write. The intended Great Novel became instead a saga of four – the quartet “Written in the Stars” (WITS). It had to be semi-fictional because a factual account of a voyage lasting fifty years would be far too tiresome to read. Elisions had to be made, shortcuts taken, complexity simplified, continuity of character and narrative maintained, while the true cast of thousands was pared down to a manageable caravan of family, friends, colleagues, rivals and enemies travelling through time together. Anyway the story insisted on writing itself. Year by year the characters took over control, while the cheeky Imps which sit on every author’s shoulder intervened from time to time and sometimes couldn’t be denied. However I did manage to insist that at least the Scientific side of the venture should be utterly faithful to the facts. In any case why fictionalise that science when the facts exceeded anything that fantasy could conjure up?
Prospective readers might be put off by books with a scientific background, imagining that they will be full of Frightfully Clever nerds doing Frightfully Clever things. But mine definitely are not. I am not FC myself (failed 11 plus) while, in my experience, successful astronomers are exceptional only in their outsized curiosity, their enjoyment of their occupation, their dogged tenacity and perhaps their search for some meaning to unusually obsessive lives. As the physicist Steven Weinberg put it: “The effort to understand the Universe is one of the few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy”. Being Frightfully Clever simply doesn’t cut it. However I do confess to a fascination with characters who do, or try to do, very hard things, whether it be climbing a precipice, rescuing a spacecraft or operating in an almost hopeless case. So there are many such in my books. I suppose the fascination here is that they too are explorers, but of the far deeps of the human heart and mind, looking down there for connections that the rest of us up here cannot see. Thus Henri Poincaré, the true inventor of Relativity, confessed that he did the best of his very great works when he was fast asleep.
Although the saga took a dozen years to write I am almost ashamed to admit that I really enjoyed the process and was sad when it came to an end. I hope that enjoyment comes across to the reader as something we can both share. My iconic novel is “The Wind in the Willows”– in which a group of friends explore their world, have adventures together and enjoy a great deal of reflective fun. Isn’t there a bit of Mole, Ratty, Badger and Toad in all of us ? There certainly is in me – mostly Toad I regret to say. And I can assure you, having done a great deal of both, that simply mucking about in telescopes is even more fun than simply mucking about in boats.
My third boyhood ambition was to Travel to wild and romantic places, and observational astronomy allows one to do that in spades. Practically anywhere on Earth is on the way home to Britain from Chile, New South Wales or The Cape. So I indulged myself and in WITS include many adventures and encounters which took place in faraway places such as Cherkessia, the Rub al Khalid, the Bay of Fires, Garafia, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Castel Gandolfo, the Masai Mara, Ootacamund, Immarettia … By contrast most of us also have a profound need for a territory of our own. Far too many Brits simply do not appreciate how bloody lucky they are in their home land. Having been ‘nearly everywhere’ I contend that our island has no superior as a territory in which to live, especially Wales where I come from and reside. I have thus tried to convey, throughout WITS, that widespread sense of ‘longing for home’, which the Welsh call ‘Hiraeth’ . If we are not proud of our home territories, we won’t look after them properly, as we desperately need to do, especially now so much of the world is rapidly going to hell.
I am an old man now, born in 1937, with eight books on Amazon, rather rushed out during 2020/1 when Covid 19 struck. The next big challenge is to get anybody to read them. I am convinced that one book could change the world (‘Thinking for Ourselve’s or TFO), optimistic that five could entertain it (WITS & Strangle), and hopeful that one (‘Pterodactyl’s Blood’ , PB ) might save some of those wonderful species that mankind is hurrying towards extinction. I’m afraid that I’m hopeless at marketing – indeed feel it is a faintly shameful activity – especially when one is trying to peddle one’s own stories, as here. But I’m bound to try – otherwise what was the point of ever writing them down? The Odds can’t be good but… who knows?
VIDEOS If you want to see the author talking about Cosmology and galaxies there is a 45 minute Youtube video of him being interviewed by the Physicist and Author Alexander Unzicker about 3 years ago at
The Parkes Radio Telescope in New South Wales Australia after it had been fitted with the new Multi-beam receiver system designed to pick up the Hydrogen signals from galaxies with about a thousand times the speed of any previous instrument. It has 13 separate dual-beams and 26 receivers cooled down close to absolute zero (minus 273 degrees C) up in the receiver cabin which is the size of a small house. Up there the very weak signals are mixed with a maser and the lower frequency output signals are sent down to the tower where they are processed by specially designed and very powerful digital correlators to look for the characteristic 21- centimetre wavelength signal of Cosmic Hydrogen. With it Morgan and his Australian colleagues surveyed two thirds of the sky and found over 5,000 such sources among which they hoped to find Dark Galaxies.[See Written in the Stars quartet of novels under ‘My Books’ Category]
The Dish has a romantic background. It was built by Taffy Bowen who, together with Hanbury-Brown, devised the night-fighter radar system which put an end to the Nazi blitzes in 1942. Starting at Bawdsey Manor in 1936 they devised means to cram radar systems into aircraft — which was fiendishly difficult to do in those days when radar waves were 10 metres long. But somehow, supported by Air Marshall Dowding, the head of RAF Fighter Command, they eventually did so.
In 1941 Bowen was sent to the US with his notorious ‘Suitcase Full of Secrets’ to teach the Americans how to build effective radars [See my book ‘History of the Brits‘ for that story ]. Later Bowen came to Sydney to direct the CSIRO Radiophysics Lab and the grateful Americans gave him half the money to build the Parkes dish which was completed in 1961. In 1962 Cyril Hazard from the University of Sydney used it to locate the first Quasar when the radio source 3C-273 passed behind the Moon. The disappearance and re-appearance of the radio-signal enabled Hazard to get a very precise position for it — which corresponded to that of a moderately bright star. An optical spectrum of that star showed it to have a high redshift and so to be an enormous distance away. The first Quasar Stellar Radio Source, or ‘Quasar’ had been discovered — starting off a whole new branch of Astrophysics — leading eventually to the discovery that they are Super Massive Black Holes.
Hanbury-Brown — after whom the term “Boffin” was coined, also made his name later as an astronomer in Australia. He it was who completed the night-fighter radar system which did for the Blitz and saved Britain [He features extensively in my Second World War scientific novel ‘Strangle‘ described in ‘My Books’ Category] .
The main weakness of radio telescopes is the non-existence of a ‘radio-camera’ which can look in more than one direction at once. The big box you can see at the focus was the first successful attempt at one. It has got 26 receivers looking in 13 adjacent but different directions at once — which allowed us to survey two thirds of the entire sky for Hydrogen gas in deep space — in the hope of locating Hidden Galaxies (see our Post ‘Hidden Galaxies‘). Unfortunately we then totally cocked things up by mis-identifying all the 5000 such sources we found with conspicuous optical galaxies , which is all too easy to do when galaxies are so highly clustered together in Space. Actually many of the Parkes sources are indeed dim or dark galaxies or gas clouds. Astronomy is hard….but very exciting!
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