Time-reversal asymmetry

Wilczek again - at his best. I'm up to time-reversal symmetry ("T"), which works for Newton but not for the second law of thermodynamics. Wilczek is looking at K mesons.

A meson is an even number of quarks together; as opposed to the classic triple-threat of a nucleon. The mesons are rare in nature, and nowhere on Earth naturally. The K meson has a strange quark and is the lightest such hadron possible. It's unstable of course; it decays.

Anyway in 1964 James Cronin and, er, cronies found that the K meson decay follows an Arrow Of Time, as Discover put it as decade later. Apparently (I have no real clue how) the Standard Model will allow for this if there be quarks beyond strange (and charm). But, no more than that. Thus the bottom and top quarks were "born", posited anyway; which then got found during the 1990s.

Wilczek cites Helen Quinn that T-asymmetry depends on a quantum field which tends to zero over time. Lower field, T becomes more symmetric. Or so I read him.

Filtering out those perchlorates

We looked into getting oxygen (and hydrogen) from Martian perchlorates. How about skipping that and just getting the water?

Apparently perchlorates do have uses, like in rocket-fuel (nothing to sneeze at in a low-g planet), but you still don't want to drink them.

Besides electrolysis and straight boiling, both of which need energy which Mars is short on, UC Riverside went looking for a catalyst to turn the perchlorates into less-harmful chlorides.

What they've done is mixing a common fertilizer called sodium molybdate, a common organic ligand called bipyridine to bind the molybdenum, and a common hydrogen-activating catalyst called palladium on carbon. The oxygen in those perchlorates has to go somewhere else, probably into all those chemicals, but that's a job for the chemists; point is, you've now got water, albeit a little briny, but at least not toxic.

Do Shas voters even like girls?

This Shas advert is making the rounds in antiIsrael twitter. Apparently if you don't vote Shas you're at serious risk of accidentally wedding a beautiful tall blonde who slips into Russian when she gets hot.

I mean, credit to Shas, they're proving the Mizrahis are as good at cracking jokes as us 'zim. But. Err. How to put this politely. What's the audience?

Is this some appeal to nebbishes who fear getting hoodwinked by die ewige Shiksa? (Was David Cole helping out on this one?) Or maybe it's to their mamas. Except that mama enthusiastically approves this union once the bride's got her, um, fax.

It's amazing Shas get any votes at all. They need to head back to the drawing-board and rethink their priorities.

The limited hangout

Sean McMeekin is making waves, with his Stalin's War. Various reviewers are mooting what it's missing.

I'm interested in this because I first heard about the "Stalin's War" thesis when it was called the Suvorov Thesis... and only being touted by the Institute of Historical Review. "Suvorov" - Rezun, a Right-wing defector from the Soviets, in the Solzhenitsyn tradition - was writing in 1990 when the Soviets, nominally, were still in charge and few Westerners could verify sources. And Rezun made the autist's mistake of taking his findings to their logical conclusion, or at least to a reasonable one, here that Hitler had inflicted damage to the Red Army sufficient that the Iron Curtain ended up along the Hajnal Line and not at the Channel. So "Suvorov" got panned as a crank at best and as a Hitler apologist at... well, at middle.

I confess: when I read the IHR summary of Icebreaker, I thought this was neo-NSDAP crankery. Times change and it's looking like Suvorov is being rehabilitated.

Vox Day is wondering about the people involved in Roosevelt's circle; he's (rhetorically) cagey, in character. Guyénot at Unz re-raises Suvorov's politically-incorrect conclusion. (Vox Day retains an open mind whether Stalin was all that bad for the historical central-European nations. I do hope he is excepting the East German experience . . .)

If you get into Google for "Suvorov" and "Stalin's War", you'll see the "extremists" linked, in preference; the Vox Day sorts will wonder if Google is deliberately raising the cranks to the forefront, to bury McMeekin's allegations. So they link Counter Currents, Paul Craig Roberts, Guyénot - although, to their credit, they also had the Grauniad's review, which was not a takedown. DuckDuckGo got other minor blogs, because DDG tends less heavy-handed on curation than Google, better or worse.

Anyway I do agree McMeekin has such Opinions as he has not let into his book.

Suvorov appears in the index and he is mentioned in the text... once. It absolutely looks like McMeekin knows that his thesis is Suvorov's and that he's got to mention Suvorov somewhere. But he's done the utter minimum, in the main text (I suspect there's more in the endnotes). Left to his own devices, McMeekin is happy to credit Suvorov's work.

This is telling me that Western historians, who are nowhere near as brave as the midwits imagine they are, see that the truth is coming out, truth such as cannot be suppressed nor (as Suvorov) left to the fringes. I see this book as a Limited Hangout in the Nixon tradition; it's as much truth as McMeekin's publishers will allow for us right now. I don't even blame McMeekin.

Keys to Reality

My dad got me Frank Wilczek's Ten Keys to Reality. Wilczek is most-famed for time-crystals. Here he's sort of speaking for Carl Sagan if Sagan's later, more Christian-tolerant self was writing his earlier pro-science work. Wilczek is wholly superior to Neil Tyson the Gaseous in any of that one's output in the past and, I expect, in his future.

A lot of Wilczek's stuff, I already knew; but I did perk up at a few points. Like: I appreciated the explanation of diffraction, how it got us maps of molecular structure, beyond the classical lenses. Also it was interesting that Newton didn't like his own theory of gravity on account it magically happened across vast distances without any medium of interaction of which Newton was aware. (I'd have added that the Three Body Problem stymied the great man too, such that it inspired Lagrange and, ultimately, the Chaos Theory.)

We also learn of quasi-particles, the holes in a crystal lattice which - as far as the chemist is concerned - act like real particles [UPDATE 10/28/23: excitons, I think]. So... like the missing electron in an ion, allowing its proton's positive charge through? This seems to be Wilczek's main deal. I mean, why not; the Standard Model had pretty-much solved mainline particle physics by the 1970s. The gaps where a particle should exist aren't as famed outside Wilczek's lab, but they have real uses, in semiconductors especially. So I'm glad someone's on it.

Where the book is covering stuff I don't know, I am - obviously - still not an expert, so don't take this poast's word for any of its content. Overall I'm enjoying the book (my dad enjoyed it) and I'm noting markers for followup reading.

Why don't Egyptians do astrology?

I noted here where Egyptians of Late Antiquity, nearly alone, have a dream vision where contemporaries had astrology. I called this "characteristic" given that Joseph ben Jacob, famously, had interpreted 'Azîz's dreams back in the prePharaonic era.

So: why didn't Egyptians do astrology? They had the same zodiac. Their calendar was solar. Light-pollution couldn't have been that bad. So let's float possibilities.

One is that the various beasties which mark the various hunting- and gathering- seasons upnorf in Anatolia are less seasonal in that southern "up", namely the Nile. The Nile floods or it doesn't, and for Egyptians pre-Nasser that was enough. No real need to track lions or gazelles. And every season is croc season.

It might be difficult for southern Egyptian and Nubian astrologers even to communicate with Babylonians, given that they're far enough south they see a whole band of sky the northerners don't.

And suppose you did want to do some astrology off the lighted river. Guess what: you're deep in the desert! Water costs money out there. And why do you even care? Sure, with an accurate clock and a sextant your astronomy can help guide caravans to the Garamantes or to Lake Chad or out to the Red Sea. But on the off chance someone wanted that, they hired a tracker who knew the landmarks.

Egypt's need for the heavens went so far as marking the seasons, and (later) the latitudes. They could do both with sundials, as Eratosthenes famously did. No need for nighttime "astro".

BACKDATE 6/8

Boris Johnson is a bigamist

... and the Roman Catholic Church is complicit.

In our Chalcedonian tradition, confiteor unum baptisma in remissionem peccatorum. If you are married in a schismatic tradition, you are still married in the Christian tradition. Unless you are a Monophysite or Vox Day or, I dunno, a Jew.

Yes I know; muh 'nnulment process, yadda yadda. Annulment's unideal but traditionally the Church may grant it if there came no viable children from the union. Bigamous Boris, of course, has spawned several.

Honestly even if you're Jewish you shouldn't be divorcing and marrying again under another roof. It's not even the Creeds at issue here but Jesus' exegesis of the Torah - which was shared by the Essenes, and by the Prophets. G-d has joined man and woman, not man and woman and woman. To the extent Lilith be a thing (she shouldn't be a thing) we are really getting into apocryphal weeds if we posit children from that union.