Dr. John F. Clauser, born 1942, is an American theoretical and experimental physicist known for contributions to the foundations of quantum mechanics. Clauser was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger, “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”.
Dr. Clauser spoke in July at the event Quantum Korea 2023. What follows is a transcript of his remarks that prompted the International Monetary Fund to cancel his appearance and kicked off a predictable pattern of broader cancellation.
Below find the speech and transcript.
Oh, I hope there wasn’t a significant miscommunication in the invitation for this particular talk, I’m going to give another one later on – the keynote address. I was asked for the first to make some brief remarks as inspiration to young Korean scientists. I’m not sure, wasn’t sure how to do that, so here’s my best shot at it and it really has very little to do with quantum technology, but here are my inspirational thoughts.
A long time ago, actually my whole life, I have been an experimental physicist. Have had the distinct privilege of literally being able to talk to God even though I’m an atheist. In a physics laboratory, I am able to ask carefully posed mathematically-based questions and correspondingly observe universal truth.
To do so I make careful measurements of natural phenomena. In the physics laboratory, I once settled the debate between Einstein and Schrodinger on one hand, Niels Bohr and John von Neumann on the other. In a laboratory, I asked a simple question: which one of these two groups was right? And which one was wrong?
I didn’t know ahead of time what answer I would get. I just knew I could get an answer. Nonetheless, I found real truth. For the answer. I assert that real truth can only be found by observing natural phenomena. By carefully observing natural phenomena.
Good science is always based on good experiments. Good observations always overrule purely speculative theory. Sloppy experiments, on the other hand, are frequently counterproductive and provide scientific disinformation. That is why good scientists repeat each other’s experiments carefully.
For inspiration to young scientists, I would suggest that today is an opportune moment for careful observations of nature. Why? The current world I observe is literally awash, saturated, with pseudoscience, with bad science, with scientific misinformation and disinformation, and what I will call ”techno-cons”. Techno-cons are the application of scientific disinformation for opportunistic purposes.
Non-science business managers, politicians, politically appointed lab directors and the like are very easily snowed by scientific disinformation. Sometimes they participate in its origination. The purpose is to try to inspire you as young scientists to observe nature directly so that you too can determine real truth. Use the information gained from carefully performed experiments and research to stop the spread of scientific misinformation, disinformation and techno-cons.
Well-educated scientists can help solve the world’s problems by acting as scientific fact-checkers. A fact-checker’s most common problem, unfortunately, is determining what is true and what is not. The world is awash with someone else’s perception of truth as an alternative to real truth.
Perception of truth frequently differs significantly from real truth. Moreover, given sufficient promotion and advertising, perception of truth becomes truth. Its promotion by commercial enterprise is called marketing, commonly used in the furtherance of political, commercial or various opportunistic ends by its promoters. When promotion is done by government or political groups, it’s called spin or propaganda.
To such a promoter, perception of truth is truth. If you can sell it, it must be true. If you can’t sell it, it must be false. Perception of truth is also malleable. If you can sell it, if you want to sell it, and you can’t sell it, that’s easy. You change it. You can change truth. You can claim false observations if necessary.
My favorite in this act is ChatGPT. It’s very good at doing exactly that. It has lots of man-made pseudoscience to copy and manipulate and emulate. It can lie and cheat even better than its human mentors whose writings are abundant in literature. In literature, you will observe there’s far more fiction than there is nonfiction. Pseudoscience is science fiction. Unfortunately, neither computers nor human fact-checkers can, in general, tell fact from fiction. Or science from science fiction or from pseudoscience.
If Starship Enterprise can fly faster than the speed of light, it’s gotta be possible, right? All you need is dilithium crystals, right? Wrong.
Real truth is not malleable. It can only be found by making careful observations. Well-tested laws of physics and observational data are important guides to allow you to distinguish truth from perception of truth.
Now, I am not alone in observing the dangerous proliferation of pseudoscience. Recently, the Nobel Foundation has formed a new panel to address the issue called the International Panel on Information Environment. They plan to model it after the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC.
I think personally that they are making a big mistake in that effort because in my opinion the IPCC is one of the worst sources of dangerous misinformation. What I’m about to recommend is in furtherance of that, of the aims of that panel.
In the past, we scientists act, have acted, as referees for journal article peer review. And we have peer-reviewed each other’s work, so as just to prevent the proliferation of scientific misinformation. That process recently seems to have broken down. Somehow it needs to be reenergized.
During my career as a scientist, I have frequently been asked to referee lots of scientific journal articles. Here I will offer a few pieces of advice. First, very importantly, your work should be based on careful observations of nature. You must try hard and recognise what I will call an elephant in the room hiding in plain sight. Ask very simple questions. I found an elephant in the room that I will be describing in my keynote address in quantum mechanics.
I have a second elephant in the room that I have recently discovered regarding climate change. I believe that climate change is not a crisis.
Real truth could be found if and only if you learn to recognise and use good science. It’s especially true when real truth is politically incorrect and does not reflect political, business aims or desires of leaders. Even the scientific community can sometimes become diluted by pseudoscience.
Recall, if you want pseudoscience to be true, just simply spin it and it becomes true. Importantly, a referee must know and use mathematically based physics. A good scientist must also know how to derive and solve differential equations. That was the first thing I learned as an undergraduate at Caltech.
Follow the teaching of Sir Isaac Newton. He found that the world is governed by differential equations. He had to invent calculus to do it but he did it. A referee must correctly identify the dominant processes. That’s the starting point. The best way to do this is with order of magnitude estimates of the various conceivable processes.
One of my examples I can give later, I don’t have time to do it though regarding climate change, the dominant process I believe, has been misidentified by factors of 200. So if you’re off by a factor of one hundred, two hundred, your process is way too small to be important. It’s the big one – big numbers matter, little numbers can be neglected.
Sometimes people will promote new ideas that are off by factors of one million. They just simply haven’t run the numbers themselves. The most pathetic part of all this is that they don’t know that they need to know how to do that. Their lack of scientific knowledge allows science, pseudoscience, to promote what I will refer to as techno-cons, political opportunistic aims.
Techo-cons are readily unmasked and identified if you simply apply order of magnitude calculations. Very importantly, a referee must apply good calculus-based statistical methods along with good common sense. I would also like you to consider methods used by two of my former associates at University of California, Berkeley, Nobel laureates. When they were shown data, a group of data points and told “Look, the trend is obvious,” Luis Alvarez, Nobel laureate, would look at it and say, “Flattest line I ever saw.” Charlie Townes would look at it and say, “I don’t see in the data what you’re telling me I’m supposed to see.”
Beware. If you’re doing good science, it may lead you into politically incorrect areas. If you’re a good scientist, you will follow them. I have several I won’t have time to discuss, but I can confidently say there is no real climate crisis and that climate change does not cause extreme weather events.
Thank you.
This article was first published by the Brownstone Institute.
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“Techno-con”. Neat phrase. I’m going to use that. It will take off.
Because Clown World logic dictates that the likes of a total non-expert ( and extremely bloody irritating, while I’m at it ) called Greta gets to have all the limelight and spout all the blatant lies but on her elitist platform she will remain, because she’s talking complete garbage but is pro-narrative.
And speaking of the Peta Pan of the Garbage Pail Kid world and bloody annoying people, does anybody have photo evidence of her or her eco nutter acolytes ever getting their hands dirty? Because if any of them ever did anything useful to help the environment, as opposed to gluing themselves to things, walking like zombies in the road or chucking orange stuff everywhere, I might be a tad less scathing. People should be judged by their actions, after all;
https://twitter.com/WallStreetSilv/status/1685046948833673216
Hello, Westminster….Mr Sunak…..Parliament…….Uncle Tom Cobley……
‘I can confidently say there is no real climate crisis and that climate change does not cause extreme weather events.’
Dr J. F. Clauser
‘Dr. John F. Clauser, born 1942, is an American theoretical and experimental physicist known for contributions to the foundations of quantum mechanics. Clauser was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger, “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”.
Oh!
‘In conclusion on the basis of observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet.’
‘A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming’ The European Physical Journal +, Jan 2022
Off-topic due to there being no articles about jabs today:
This new peer-reviewed study is significant because it demonstrates increased mortality in children <5yrs the more vaccinations they have. Conclusion;
”There are statistically significant positive correlations between neonatal, infant, and under age five mortality rates of developed nations and the number of early childhood vaccine doses that are routinely given. When developed nations require two versus zero neonatal vaccine doses, or many versus fewer infant vaccine doses, our study suggests there may be unintended consequences that increase all-cause mortality. Further investigations of the hypotheses generated by this study are recommended to confirm that current vaccination schedules are achieving their intended objectives.”
https://www.cureus.com/articles/164423-neonatal-infant-and-under-age-five-vaccine-doses-routinely-given-in-developed-nations-and-their-association-with-mortality-rates#!/
Jikky has a good thread about it here with some additional information;
https://twitter.com/Jikkyleaks/status/1685468279077244930
Thanks for the information.
Neil Z. Miller, referred to in the links also has a very interesting book – “Miller’s Review of Critical Vaccine Studies”.
Well worth a read.
Of course Obama live by the ocean, (or should that be oceans?) despite his warnings of the sea rising
Cancelled by the IMF.. now there’s a surprise.. another nasty little cabal of bankers who are responsible for sucking the life blood out of so many third world countries with their unpayable debt, and plunging them into despicable levels of poverty..
Anybody who believes the IMF are the slightest bit interested in ‘saving’ the planet needs a size 10 boot five lace-holes up their jacksy..
LOL! What the hell does he know? Is he famous? Is he on the telly?
Well then…proof positive, the ‘science is settled’ according to the omniscient BBC…
we have our true, bona fide Commander in Chief Greta, who absolutely knows better and we need to be listening to her!
If Clauser is cancelled then all of science needs cancelling as well because a “climate crisis” is NOT supported by any science.—— In matters of science you question EVERYTHING. But the thing that is different about climate science is that there is no way to conduct experiments. There maybe agreement about some basic facts, such as the earth has warmed in the last 150 years, and that CO2 has contributed in some way to that. But there are also serious doubts and uncertainties. (1) How much can the climate expect to change as a result of us adding CO2 to the atmosphere and (2) Is this dangerous? There is also the question over the role of natural variability of the climate compared to assumed changes caused by CO2. But assumptions are NOT science. Speculations about the effect CO2 will have on temperature and climate should be discussed and debated, and when there is this determination to halt any discussion and silence those asking pertinent questions then we are no longer dealing with science. But many on this website will know that already. Science is all the time sold to the public on this issue as FACT. No it isn’t. It is a PROCESS. ———- Yesterday on GB News we had the usual little debate with invited guests. One of those guests in a discussion about ULEZ was the Meteorologist Jim Dale. I found it astonishing that he could still be harping on about the manufactured consensus, the so called 97% of scientists all apparently agree on something. But in this so called consensus, what were the scientists asked, and what were there replies? 97% consensus of scientists is ABSURD. As Judith Curry has pointed out Consensus is NOT a proxy for truth. Consensus stops questions from being asked and investigations taking place. Consensus is also just an appeal to authority, but science is not a dictatorship where people with views not consistent with the political consensus masquerading as scientific truth are outlawed, ostracised and silenced, and those who question dogma are delegitimised. Is this what science has become? Clauser is certainly finding that out, and so are everyone else who challenges climate tyranny.
If they cancel an opposing or different point-of-view it means they don’t have the data to defend their own viewpoint.
They know their opinion will not stand up to scrutiny.