Monthly Archives: June 2015

Does Science Always Need Empirical Evidence?

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Interesting and worth reading article in NYT about moving beyond Einstein’s Classic Physics to Quantum Physics where empirical evidence may not be necessary, but it may be the only path to further explain the mysteries of universe (f.sheikh)

DO physicists need empirical evidence to confirm their theories?

You may think that the answer is an obvious yes, experimental confirmation being the very heart of science. But a growing controversy at the frontiers of physics and cosmology suggests that the situation is not so simple.

A few months ago in the journal Nature, two leading researchers, George Ellis and Joseph Silk, published a controversial piece called “Scientific Method: Defend the Integrity of Physics.” They criticized a newfound willingness among some scientists to explicitly set aside the need for experimental confirmation of today’s most ambitious cosmic theories — so long as those theories are “sufficiently elegant and explanatory.” Despite working at the cutting edge of knowledge, such scientists are, for Professors Ellis and Silk, “breaking with centuries of philosophical tradition of defining scientific knowledge as empirical.”

Whether or not you agree with them, the professors have identified a mounting concern in fundamental physics: Today, our most ambitious science can seem at odds with the empirical methodology that has historically given the field its credibility.

How did we get to this impasse? In a way, the landmark detection three years ago of the elusive Higgs boson particle by researchers at the Large Hadron Collider marked the end of an era. Predicted about 50 years ago, the Higgs particle is the linchpin of what physicists call the “standard model” of particle physics, a powerful mathematical theory that accounts for all the fundamental entities in the quantum world (quarks and leptons) and all the known forces acting between them (gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces).

But the standard model, despite the glory of its vindication, is also a dead end. It offers no path forward to unite its vision of nature’s tiny building blocks with the other great edifice of 20th-century physics: Einstein’s cosmic-scale description of gravity. Without a unification of these two theories — a so-called theory of quantum gravity — we have no idea why our universe is made up of just these particles, forces and properties. (We also can’t know how to truly understand the Big Bang, the cosmic event that marked the beginning of time.)

This is where the specter of an evidence-independent science arises. For most of the last half-century, physicists have struggled to move beyond the standard model to reach the ultimate goal of uniting gravity and the quantum world. Many tantalizing possibilities (like the often-discussed string theory) have been explored, but so far with no concrete success in terms of experimental validation.

Today, the favored theory for the next step beyond the standard model is called supersymmetry (which is also the basis for string theory). Supersymmetry predicts the existence of a “partner” particle for every particle that we currently know. It doubles the number of elementary particles of matter in nature. The theory is elegant mathematically, and the particles whose existence it predicts might also explain the universe’s unaccounted-for “dark matter.” As a result, many researchers were confident that supersymmetry would be experimentally validated soon after the Large Hadron Collider became operational.

Click link below for full article;

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/a-crisis-at-the-edge-of-physics.html?ref=opinion

Ramapo School District-When A School Board Victimizes The Kids (NYT)

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NEW YORK STATE has a proud tradition of local decision making in public education. However, students in the public schools in East Ramapo, about 30 miles north of Manhattan, in Rockland County, are being denied their state constitutional right to a sound basic education by a board that has grossly mismanaged the district’s finances and educational programs.

When there is overwhelming evidence that a local school board has persistently failed to act in the best interests of its public school students, the state must act. The Legislature will adjourn on June 17, so time is running out.

East Ramapo is a divided community. Of the roughly 32,000 school-age children enrolled in schools in the district, about 24,000 attend private schools, nearly all of them Orthodox Jewish yeshivas. Of the more than 8,000 children in the public schools, 43 percent are African-American and 46 percent are Latino; 83 percent are poor and 27 percent are English-language learners.

The East Ramapo school board, dominated by private-school parents since 2005, has utterly failed them. Faced with a fiscal and educational crisis, the State Education Department last June appointed a former federal prosecutor, Henry M. Greenberg, to investigate the district’s finances.

Mr. Greenberg’s report, released in November, documented the impact of the board’s gross mismanagement and neglect. Since 2009, the board has eliminated hundreds of staff members, including over 100 teachers, dozens of teaching assistants, guidance counselors and social workers, and many key administrators. Full-day kindergarten, and high-school electives have been eliminated or scaled back. Music, athletics, professional development and extracurricular activities were cut.

The Greenberg report also detailed dismal outcomes for East Ramapo students. In 2013-14, only 14 percent of students in grades 3 through 8 were proficient in English Language Arts, and only 15 percent wereproficient in math, according to the most recent statistics from the State Education Department. The graduation rate, 64 percent, is far below the state average of 76 percent. Click link for full article. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/03/opinion/when-a-school-board-victimizes-kids.html?ref=opinion

posted by f.sheikh

Muslim Woman Denied Job Over Head Scarf Wins in Supreme Court

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Muslim Woman Denied Job Over Head Scarf Wins in Supreme Court

By ADAM LIPTAK

June 1, 2015

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday revived an employment discrimination lawsuit against Abercrombie & Fitch, which had refused to hire a Muslim woman because she wore a head scarf. The company said the scarf clashed with its dress code, which called for a “classic East Coast collegiate style.”

“This is really easy,” Justice Antonin Scalia said in announcing the decision from the bench.

The company, he said, at least suspected that the applicant, Samantha Elauf, wore the head scarf for religious reasons. The company’s decision not to hire her, Justice Scalia said, was motivated by a desire to avoid accommodating her religious practice. That was enough, he concluded, to allow her to sue under a federal employment discrimination law.

The vote was 8 to 1, with Justice Clarence Thomas dissenting.

To read the full article, please click the hyper-link below:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/06/02/us/supreme-court-rules-in-samantha-elauf-abercrombie-fitch-case.html?smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0&referrer=

Shared by Dr. Nasik Elahi

‘White lies And Death Of Osama Bin Laden’ By VJ Prashad

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Mr. Prashad further analyses the death of Osama , article by Semour Hersh and asks following questions;  How did the U.S. learn that bin Laden was in Abbottabad? What did the Pakistani military know? Why did Obama betray the Pakistanis? ( f. sheikh)

In early May, THE veteran investigati-ve journalist Seymour Hersh wrote a 10,000-word report in London Review of Books entitled “The Killing of Osama bin Laden”. The essay alleges that the narrative produced by the United States government on the events of May 2, 2011, is flawed. The fact of bin Laden’s death is not in contention. At least that is taken for granted. What is in doubt, Hersh argues in the report, is the manner in which the U.S. government found out about bin Laden’s presence in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad, the role of the Pakistani government in the U.S. operation, the way in which the U.S. Navy Seals killed bin Laden, and the manner in which his body was disposed of. The allegations are not all new. Many of them had circulated widely in Pakistan right after the operation. What gives them weight is that they come from a well-respected U.S. journalist and produced a denial from the White House.

What was the U.S. government’s story? The film Zero Dark Thirty (2012) closely reflects the official tale. Under torture, the film suggests, an associate of bin Laden led the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to the Al Qaeda courier network that kept bin Laden in operational control. The CIA followed the couriers until they found bin Laden in Abbottabad. A fake polio immunisation drive allowed the CIA to get the DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) sample of bin Laden to confirm his identity. At this point, the White House authorised the Navy Seals to fly into Pakistan—without permission from the Pakistani military—and seize bin Laden. The raid went as planned although one of the two helicopters crashed in the compound. Bin Laden was killed in a firefight. His body was returned to Afghanistan, from where it was taken to USS Carl Vinson to be buried at sea. A trove of intelligence was found in bin Laden’s compound, which was turned over to the CIA.

Hersh disputes much of this story. He brings a tremendous amount of credibility to his assessment. Hersh as a reporter won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking the story about the My Lai (Vietnam) massacre by U.S. troops in 1969. Unlike many of his peers, he did not set down his notebook and take up the columnist’s pen; he continued doggedly to pursue the story in the trenches of the U.S. security state. Thirty-five years after My Lai, Hersh brought to light the torture by U.S. prison guards in Abu Ghraib (Iraq). In recent years, as Hersh has shone his torch at the operation of the U.S. security state, establishment media outlets in the U.S. have pilloried him as a “conspiracy theorist”. Rather than carefully go through the evidence that he is able to provide, the press has been overly hostile to his reports—whether on allegations that Turkey is in collusion with Islamist radicals and that these radicals might have used chemical weapons in Syria (“The Red Line and the Rat Line”, London Review of Books, April 17, 2014), or on the death of bin Laden.

One of the most frequent criticisms against Hersh is that he uses anonymous sources. This is certainly the case. Why do journalists like Hersh rely on anonymous sources? One of the reasons is that the U.S. government is ruthless in its treatment of whistle-blowers. The Barack Obama administration, more than any previous one, has used the Espionage Act against any government official who leaks information that is inconvenient to it. Most recently, Jeffrey Sterling, an undercover CIA officer, was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for letting The New York Times reporter James Risen know about Operation Merlin—a covert campaign by the U.S. government to sell Iran flawed material for its nuclear programme. That Hersh uses anonymous sources is nothing new. Most articles on national security rely on “senior government officials” or a “senior White House official who is not authorised to speak publicly”. Such formal criticism of Hersh’s reporting is misplaced, or even malicious. What is most striking about the lack of interest in Hersh’s account is that it comes just months after the U.S. Congressional Report on the CIA’s use of torture (“America’s Shame”, Frontline, January 9). That report shows that the CIA tried to hide its operations even when its personnel knew that laws had been violated. Trust in government should have been rattled by the revelations in that report, if nothing else. Hersh’s report takes apart several important pieces of the White House narrative on the death of bin Laden. There are pieces of the story, such as the bits about bin Laden’s body and the intelligence gained from bin Laden’s compound, that are fascinating but perhaps not as explosive as the three questions: How did the U.S. learn that bin Laden was in Abbottabad? What did the Pakistani military know? Why did Obama betray the Pakistanis? Click on the link below to read the full article; 

http://www.frontline.in/world-affairs/white-lies/article7239187.ece