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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Let Coal Live
Kill Net Zero
On Tuesday on the Moggs show at 8pm on GB News there was a discussion between David Turver and Bob Ward. David Turver provided forthcoming costings for the grid, Bob Ward tried to bat these away looking like he was about to explode. Starts about 25 minutes in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8AhkU4Une0
Mick.
Thank you for that link – waffle from the Grantham Institute wonk, Eigen values on the money as ever.
I recall a similar discussion many years ago between Ward and Richard Tol, who defected from the IPCC. Ward was dressed in a sharp suit, Tol was dressed like a hippy, which says it all about how Big Green is now in charge.
And yet no Youtube video of last Saturday’s show when Ben Leo interviewed someone looking into the clandestine meeting between the PM and Gates, and on another occasion, a meeting with Larry Fink from Blackrock.
You will find everyone is censored if they dare to speak about the usury of the big International Private Banks. —-It is easy to censor everyone when you own everything, and the big private banks own the whole world including all of the media ofcourse. ——-So they are easily able to shut us all up.
In summary…
…Hydrocarbons lifted half of humanity out of poverty and squalor – Rejoice!
…Along with nuclear power, can elevate the other half too – Get on with it
…No climate crisis – Carbon dioxide is a Good Guy, Net Zero unnecessary
…RoW beyond Europe knows it – Net Zero irrelevant
.. Wind and solar unreliable substitutes for the real thing – Net Zero expensive
…Planet perfectly capable of saving itself, humanity prioritise humanity
Watchword – UIE (pronounced phonetically WHY), Unnecessary, Irrelevant, Expensive
I agree that Net Zero is unnecessary, but it is entirely necessary for those globalist traitors like 2TK who want to destroy us.
Therein lies the problem – decades of infamy, vested interest and deceit to be undone.
Maybe we can stop sobbing about the reduction in overseas aid because … our spending of vast sums on wind farms and solar panels has a very desirable impact, on demand for coal, and therefore on its price.
Yes, we (and like-minded countries) have blessed the world with a reduction in the price of their coal. I will sleep better tonight.
Just heard a conversation on Five Live with Andy Burnham, I hate this fake prick with a passion. Always claiming to be a Northern working class hero while pushing the climate agenda. He wants more devolved powers up north, but not devolved from the WEF and the think tanks that we fund through government ‘charities’.
Chris, I deeply admire your writing, and your calm intellectual stance against the mass hysteria that is AGW is a genuine ray of sunlight. But please don’t use the Americanism “genuinely pissed” when you mean “pissed off”. The first is what I am on Saturday night, especially after England has beaten France. The second is what I am during the rest of the week when I read about the antics of the clowns in charge.
Let’s try to retain some linguistic independence. Otherwise, couldn’t disagree less.
Snap.
There is an even darker aspect to this agenda and that is its use to obfuscate real losses all around us for example the sinister decline in insect numbers and the general feeling of toxicity within the biosphere. Something is causing it and it isn’t coal or oil. There is no way that it can be attributed to temperature changes this doesn’t match the data. They know it’s happening and yet they are silent about it despite pushing the carbon agenda. Their best hope for complete destruction of the biosphere lies in providing such red herrings for as long as possible.
Keep hearing this about insect numbers – have you seen any studies actually showing observed numbers etc or just your personal observations?
You neglected to mention that the play at the national theatre will have been generously subsidised by the horrible working classes.
”Perhaps most significant of all is the recent news that the head of the Environmental Protection Agency has asked the administration to rescind a 2009 ‘endangerment finding’ on the so-called greenhouse gases.”
Excellent news from the US. A stake in the heart of this and the same for the awful Climate Change Committee would obliterate the justification for almost all the pernicious, money grabbing scams in our lives, based solely upon the lie that the gas of life is a “pollutant”.
It would save us taxpayers £Trillions and transform our lives.
It was from the beginning about us all in the Western World making do with less of everything. In a world that now has 8 billion people in it we cannot all have the same standard of living as the wealthy western countries. Or at least so say the Malthusians at the UN and WEF. The reason we became prosperous in the west ofcourse was by using coal oil and gas, so the Politics say that we must STOP using them, as we have apparently used up more than our fair share already. Those politics are the politics of the UN called Sustainable Development, and our own Political Class are fully onboard with impoverishing their own citizens by weaning us off of fossil fuels and therefeore lowering our standard of living and pretending to us that it is all about the planet. —-But how are China India and the rest of the developing world who emit about 60 % of all CO2 emissions not concerned about the planet? Or as someone once asked “Why are China not saving the planet??—–With the answer being “Because they already have a communist government”. —–Green=Red. —–Sustainable Development is just a fancy word for communism and it is to be hoped that the USA under Trump kicking this eco socialism into touch might just mean a stay of execution of some sort for the rest of us silly people in Europe and the rest of the west.
It was from the beginning about us all in the Western World making do with less of everything. In a world that now has 8 billion people in it we cannot all have the same standard of living as the wealthy western countries. Or at least so say the Malthusians at the UN and WEF. The reason we became prosperous in the west ofcourse was by using coal oil and gas, so the Politics say that we must STOP using them, as we have apparently used up more than our fair share already. Those politics are the politics of the UN called Sustainable Development, and our own Political Class are fully onboard with impoverishing their own citizens by weaning us off of fossil fuels and therefore lowering our standard of living and pretending to us that it is all about the planet. —-But how are China India and the rest of the developing world who emit about 60 % of all CO2 emissions not concerned about the planet? Or as someone once asked “Why are China not saving the planet??—–With the answer being “Because they already have a communist government”. —–Green=Red. —–Sustainable Development is just a fancy word for communism and it is to be hoped that the USA under Trump kicking this eco socialism into touch might just mean a stay of execution of some sort for the rest of us silly people in Europe and the rest of the west.
According to Ian Plimer’s The Little Green Book, China has 1,118 operating coal-fired power stations (EU 256, USA 224 and India 179).
As regards No such luck in the UK where the activists on the Climate Change Committee have informed the citizenry that within 15 years they will need to eat less meat and dairy … The Exposé writes (https://expose-news.com/2025/02/26/environmental-policies-are-destroying-tenant-farming/):
Many of Britain’s tenant farmers, who manage about a third of England’s farmland, are facing eviction or being forced to give up their tenancies.
The National Trust, a major landowner, is playing a significant role in this shift, planting trees and rewilding large areas of land, which is taking productive farmland out of use and threatening food security.
Current policies will lead to a loss of productive farmland, reduced food security and the decline of rural communities, with many farmers feeling that their livelihoods and way of life are being threatened by environmental schemes.
So the UK continues to attack hard-working farmers, all in the name of saving the planet.
Another cracking article, just love the rapier like wit. Thank you Chris, keep ‘em coming!
I’ve never eaten a doner kebab in my life, let alone two a week, so I declare myself exempt from the rest of this rubbish.