Another Famous Physicist Leaves the APS Over Global Warming

Nobel Laureate Dr. Ivar Giaever (click for credit)
Dr. Ivar Giaever has a PhD in physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He was a biophysics scholar at Cambridge, and is professor at both his alma mater and the University of Oslo. Although he has an impressive list of accomplishments, he is best remembered for sharing the Nobel Prize in physics with Dr. Leo Esaki and Dr. Brian Josephson in 1973. The trio won the award for investigating a quantum mechanical effect called “tunneling” and how it relates to solids. When a particle (like an electron) passes through a barrier that Newtonian physics says it should not be able to pass through, we say that it has “tunneled” through the barrier. Specifically, Dr. Giaever showed how this quantum-mechanical phenomenon applies to superconductors, which are materials that conduct electricity without resistance.

Of course, that was almost fourty years ago. Since then, he made a name in the field of biophysics, shedding light on how large biological molecules as well as cells interact with thin metal films. While he still has academic appointments at both Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Oslo, he has dedicated most of his recent time to a company called Applied Biophysics, which specializes in scientific instrumentation used in biological research and drug discovery.

Why am I telling you about this world-renowned physicist? Because he has joined another famous physicist in protesting the American Physical Society’s stand on global warming by resigning from the society.

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An Interesting Canadian Homeschooling Study

I started working with homeschoolers because while I was on the faculty at Ball State University, my best chemistry and physics students were homeschool graduates. At the time, I knew almost nothing about homeschooling, but since it was sending me my best university students, I thought I should investigate it a bit. As I looked through the academic literature that was available at the time, I saw that the few studies which had been done on homeschooling were in accord with my observation: homeschooled students are academically superior to their publicly- and privately-schooled counterparts.

Since then, a wealth of studies have been done on homeschooling, and the results are essentially the same. In 1999, for example, Rudner showed that homeschooled students academically outperform their publicly- and privately-schooled counterparts at every grade level.1 In 2010, a nationwide study of more than 11,000 homeschooled students showed that homeschooled students score, on average, more than 30 percentage points above the national average in all subject areas tested (which included math, science, social studies, reading, and language).2 In general, when you attempt to measure academic performance, the average homeschooled student beats the average privately-schooled student, and the average privately-schooled student beats the average publicly-schooled student.

Well, a recent study of homeschooled elementary students in Canada has produced very similar results, but in a different way. In addition, it actually compared two different homeschooling styles, and the results are very intriguing.

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Particles Traveling Faster Than The Speed of Light?

The OPERA detector at CERN (click for credit)

First, you need to know that the particles being studied are called neutrinos, and they are maddeningly hard to detect, because they don’t interact strongly with matter. In this experiment, the neutrinos are detected by an underground system called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus), which is made up of about 150,000 bricks of photographic emulsion film stacked in between lead plates. The mass of this system is 1,300 tons. It sits 730 kilometers away from the source of the neutrinos it is detecting, and those neutrinos generally take about three thousandths of a second to travel from the source to the detector.

The scientists have published an initial version of their paper, and it is impressive. Most importantly, they seem to have taken great care in keeping track of time in their experiment. After all, if the scientists are going to measure the velocity of the neutrinos, they need to know when the neutrinos are made and when they reach the detector. The difference between those two times tells them how long it took for the neutrinos to travel from source to detector, which then allows them to determine their speed. Measuring those two times is a bit tricky, however. Even though they took great pains to measure the times as well as they could, I think that’s the weak point of their experiment.

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Stem Cells: Induced Ones Make The Same Proteins as Embryonic Ones






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Young-Earth Creationist Leads Award-Winning Research Team

The bombardier beetle is an amazing animal. It has a fully-functional chemical weapon that it uses to protect itself. Inside its body are two chambers that are separated by a muscle-controlled valve. In the first chamber, the beetle makes and stores hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone. In the second chamber, it makes and stores two enzymes. When the beetle feels threatened, it opens the valve between the two chambers, which allows all the chemicals to mix. The enzymes catalyze a reaction between the hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone, resulting in the production of a very hot gas. The gas builds up pressure and is then released, shooting from the abdomen and hitting whatever the beetle thinks is a threat. As shown in the video above, this weapon is quite effective.

The bombardier beetle has fascinated young-earth creationists for quite some time, because its chemical weapon is best understood as a product of design. This fascination caused Dr. Andy McIntosh, a young-earth creationist, to lead his research team at the University of Leeds to develop an artificial system that mimics the bombardier beetle’s weaponry. What was the result? New technology that received the 2010 Outstanding Contribution to Innovation and Technology award at the Times Higher Education awards ceremony in London.

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Doubt Can Aid Faith

Robert Boyle (Click for credit)






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Antibiotic Resistance is Not a Modern Phenomenon





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The Inquisition Strikes Again!

On August 4, 2004, an article by Stephen C. Meyer appeared in a rather obscure peer-reviewed journal entitled The Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington,1 and it quickly ignited a firestorm of controversy. Why? Did it contain fabricated data? No. That kind of thing doesn’t produce nearly as much controversy. One study, for example, says that 14% of scientists have observed their colleagues fabricating, falsifying, and modifying their data, and 72% have observed their colleagues engaging in questionable research practices.2 Did the article contain egregious errors? No. While the article has many detractors, their criticisms were leveled more at the fact that it was published than at the content of the work.

So what caused the controversy? This peer-reviewed article not only had the audacity to argue that the current view of evolution can never hope to explain life as we see it today, it actually dared to say:


That’s what caused the controversy. This well-reasoned paper, full of serious data-based arguments, was an attack on the scientific orthodoxy of the day and dared to argue that intelligent design was a reasonable scientific alternative. As a result, the Inquisition was mobilized. In the end, the publisher of the journal released a statement repudiating the article, the editor of the journal was branded a heretic, and he was then targeted for retaliation and harassment. After the dust had settled, the biological community breathed a sigh of relief, because orthodoxy had been successfully enforced. Another editor would surely think twice before allowing a well-reasoned argument for intelligent design to be published in his or her peer-reviewed journal, regardless of its quality.

Well, it seems that biology isn’t the only scientific field where orthodoxy is enforced by the Inquisition.

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