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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My default position nowadays for any political pronouncements is to assume “they’re lying.” I no longer believe a word any of them are saying. This article more than reinforces my opinion. Labour are lying as usual and seem to be working on the Goebbel’s maxim of telling a big lie, repeat it continuously and eventually the people will believe it.
This Nut Zero travesty will surely provide Labour with their best ever chance to finally succeed at that which they are best at – running the country in to the ground. Significantly this will be the last government they ever form.
Indeed
As I write this, 21.7% of our electricity needs are being supplied by other countries, half of that by France
When the sun goes down, the contribution from solar will obviously disappear. At this moment our capacity from wind is far from being 100% utilised – presumably because the wrong kind of wind is blowing or not enough of it. Installing more bird choppers does not help if the wind is not blowing.
They must know this so the whole plan is malevolent and not a cockup.
Yes, 100%. Anyone who doesn’t have trust issues with anybody in authority, not even just the perma-corrupt politicians, is gullible in the extreme, in my opinion. There’s always an agenda, there’s always an ulterior motive, there’s always something they’re withholding from us. Sounds like paranoia but there it is, it’s how I roll now.
A 4min montage demonstrating the failures of these hated, ugly, destructive wind turbines, including a brief glimpse of the tragic effects on the poor birds;
https://x.com/TheMilkBarTV/status/1795113082907226397
If a cat kills a sparrow then all cats should be destroyed, but if wind turbines virtually wipe out the Red Kite, like what has happened in Germany then we should build even more of them.
Thanks for the link Mogs
Putting Government in charge of energy is like having wolves tending sheep. But actually the most powerful force today regarding energy is not this government or the next one. It is the “Climate Change Commitee”. It is they who run the show. It is they who have decided what your standard of living is to be moving forward, and since energy is the most important commodity for our prosperity and well being and the CCC have decided our energy use is to be strictly rationed then there can only be one outcome. ——Lower Living Standard. The use of coal oil and gas is what has given us the standard of living we currently enjoy. It is the standard of living that the developing world hopes to have and is why China and India continue using coal to bring their populations out of abject misery and poverty. By removing fossil fuels we reverse our standard of living. The countries with the highest energy prices are the UK, Germany and Denmark. —Why? because they have the most wind turbines. Any government that wants to expand the use of wind will only cause prices to increase. The idea we will have cheaper energy bills by using more renewables comes from the mouths of LIARS.
The odious CCC was covered here:
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/disband-the-climate-change-committee
Thans for that. Read it and saved it.
Quite apart from Labours usual fantasy orgasm non-policies I read recently that the average number of days without sun and / or wind is 110. That is 3 months of the year in the UK where anything relying on wind or sun cannot function. To put it bluntly that is 3 months with no light and no heat. Even if you have a gas boiler, how do you light it and drive the pump without electricity?
I didn’t read beyond the second mention of 3023
Only 9 comments. ————I am very surprised. There is no more important issue than energy for prosperity, health, life span and everything else that relates to our well being.
You are right, but I already feel defeated. If those in power decide to shut off the gas mains and stop petrol & diesel reaching the pumps there is nothing I can do to get them back.
And that is exactly what they will do …. but over a period of time, so that they don’t completely crash the economy or cause riots. It’s the classic “boiling frog” process.
The best thing we can all do is slow down the process by refusing to co-operate. Don’t buy an EV; don’t get a heat pump. Resist having a Smart Meter as long as possible. If you can, get an alternative heat source to gas and electricity.
So you vote for those that will stop Net Zero and currently the only party saying they will do that is REFORM. —–Not so easy if they were government to say it though as the entire Liberal Progressive machine of the western world would be down on them like a ton of bricks. No make that 50 tons of bricks.
Socialist Labour modus operandi when it comes to State run disasters, is keep the end-user price low by taxing them to subsidise the lower price.
The people have been falling for that one since 1945. Don’t forget when you use the NHS it is free – you don’t pay anything. State education similarly is free.
In the days of State owned gas, electric, coal, rail none of these made a profit – or surplus if you prefer – out of revenues, but prices were kept down.
In the case of energy, after it was privatised in the 80’s prices were still low and competitive. It was only after the Climate Change Act in 2008 (Miliband) that prices started to rise because wind is an expensive way to produce electricity, and also because the turbines were being paid for out of our bills. It isn’t privatisation that has cause high prices, it is government interfering in the energy market with pretend to save the planet policies.