Looking Back at My Blogging Activity, Part 3: The Year 2015

This is the third in a series of rarely-appearing posts in which I will look back at particular years of my blogging activity (see here and here for parts 1 and 2). In this post I will look at my blogging activity in the year 2015. 

In early 2015 I wrote a four-part series of posts entitled "50 Things Science Cannot Explain" which you can read here, here, here and here.  The image below mentions some of the things discussed in the post. 

The third of these posts was one of the first posts in which I discussed the failure of scientists to develop any credible theory of human memory. I wrote this:

"We know exactly how the memory of our computers and digital devices work. On the lowest level, all information is stored as binary bits, sequences such as 01100111010101; and such bits are stored magnetically on surfaces such as hard drives. But we have no such understanding at all of how our own memory works. Try looking up human memory on the Internet. You will get a lot of discussion that makes quite a few points that don't add up to a substantive answer. We have no idea whether memory is stored chemically, electrically, through neuron connections, through some combination of the three, or through some entirely different means. Nor do we have the slightest idea about what kind of code or alphabet the brain might use to store memory. A modern neuroscientist can say quite a few things about memory, but he can't really explain it."

This paragraph stands up very well after ten years. During that time my studies on the topic of memory greatly deepened, and I became aware of specific reasons why we should reject the doctrine that human memories are stored in brains. Such reasons are discussed in the posts of my blog site here, and in my free online book "Why Mind and Memory Cannot Be Brain Effects," which you can read here. 

My March 2015 post "The Top 6 Problems With Using a Multiverse To Explain Cosmic Fitness" was a good explanation of why speculations about other universes do nothing to explain the fine-tuned habitability of our universe.  In the same month I wrote my post "If You Had Always Lived in a Random Universe," which involved a big  leap of imagination. Because human bodies require a universe with very special conditions, you cannot credibly imagine a body such as yours existing in a truly random universe.  But you can imagine yourself as a very different type of entity (such as a formless gas) existing in a very random universe with no special conditions. It was just such a leap of imagination that I took in this post. 

My post "Trying to Explain Things, Naturalism Offers a Jumbled Mishmash" did a good job of discussing how materialists rely on the most scrambled hodgepodge of attempted explanations, rather than anything with coherence. My August 2015 post "Does Darwinism Plausibly Explain the Origin of Human Intelligence?" offered an answer of "no, it does not," which was the same answer given by Alfred Russel Wallace (the co-founder of the theory of natural selection) in the 19th century. 

I wrote this:

"Comments such as these by leading Darwinists strongly suggest that Darwinism does not offer a plausible account of the origin of human intelligence. Generally speaking, you only offer a plausible explanation of something when you offer some explanation under which such a thing is likely....Similarly, if Darwinists cannot give us a situation under which the evolution of intelligence is likely under Darwinist principles, they have not provided a plausible explanation of the origin of human intelligence. You do not give a plausible explanation of something if you describe it as being a strange rare fluke under your theoretical framework, something we would be unlikely to see again on any of millions of other planets....We need to start pondering explanations of the origin of human intelligence which describe a situation under which the appearance of human intelligence is a likely event rather than some incredibly improbable fluke. No theory that describes the origin of human intelligence as some strange improbable fluke can claim to have offered a plausible account of the origin of human intelligence."

My November 2015 post "Can Natural Selection Explain the Human Mind?" asked a similar question, and reached a similar answer of "no."

My September 2015 post "The Ocean Deniers of Centralia" is one of my favorites of the stories I have wrote. It is a portrait of the stubbornness of authorities who refuse to believe evidence conflicting with their worldview. I've written other stories with a similar theme, including "The Sun Seers of Planet Evercloudy"  and "Planet of the Blind." 

In my December 2015 post "The Difficulties in Explaining the Big Leaps in Life's History" I criticized the sophistry and misstatements in Bill Nye's book trying to sell us on Darwinism. After making a list of biological wonders (mostly great leaps of physical organization), I stated this:

"Overall, the ability of natural selection and mutations to explain these things is poor. If scientists think otherwise, it's partly because they have long had a habit of underestimating requirements...The very clannish and dogmatic community of evolutionary biologists will probably continue for quite a while to push the Official Party Line that natural selection explains the origin of biological complexity, in a way rather similar to the way that Marxist dogmas (an Official Party Line) would be handed down authoritatively from Moscow in the years of the Soviet Union."

In January 2015 I started my Orb Pro blog, devoted to publishing photos I had taken of mysterious orbs.  By January 2015 I already had the most extraordinary backlog of photos of the mysterious that I had taken during 2014. And the year 2015 was one of my most successful years in getting photos of the mysterious. So I was able to start the blog "full blast," and was able to keep it running "full blast" throughout 2015. I look back on years such  as 2015 as my peak period as an orb photographer. I still get astonishing orb photos, but not as frequently as I got around the year 2015. 

An example of one my year 2015 orb photos was the photo below taken in Grand Central Terminal in New York, one of the most dramatic moving orb photos I have ever taken. We seem to see five position states of a mysterious pink orb moving very fast. 

Below is a photo from December 9, 2014 showing a large orb in Grand Central Terminal, one I published in January 2015. 

Origin-of-Life Researchers Pile Up Groundless Boasts

 For 70 years the mainstream science literature has presented enormously misleading coverage about origin-of-life research.  There has been a huge amount of bunk and baloney in the press coverage of origin-of-life research, and the statements made on this topic by scientists themselves have very often been wildly  inaccurate. Many examples of such misstatements can be found here and here and here and here and here and here and here.

Never has more boasting and hype been written when the results were so minimal and meager.  It is not merely that no experiments have ever produced life from non-life. The reality is that no experiments realistically simulating the early Earth have ever produced any of the main building components of single-celled life, and that no experiments realistically simulating the early Earth have ever produced any of the building components of the building components of single-celled life. 

The research output: "peanuts" (i.e. "chickenfeed") 

The main building components of one-celled life are functional protein molecules, which have never been produced in any experiment realistically simulating the early Earth. The building components of such building components are amino acids, which have never been produced in any experiment realistically simulating the early Earth.  The widely-discussed Miller-Urey experiment (which did produce some amino acids) was not anything like a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions, requiring a very specially constructed glass gizmo unlike anything that would have existed on the early Earth, and requiring a degree of electricity exposure unlike any part of the early Earth would have experienced. 

Let us look at a recent example of groundlessly boasting origin-of-life research. Some scientists created a very fancy chamber device which they claim simulates interstellar space. Inside the device they put some glycine, which is the simplest amino acid. They zapped the chamber with some energy that they claim was simulating cosmic rays, and got the most meager result: a mere peptide molecule. The peptide molecule they got was what you can get from combining two glycine molecules. The result was as simple as 1 +1 = 2 or "a + a = aa." 

The result is passed off as a simulation of what could happen in interstellar space. But is that claim accurate? No, it is not, because there is no robust evidence that glycine exists in interstellar space.  Recent claims to have found glycine after a soil sample retrieval from an asteroid in the solar system do not count as such robust evidence, both because such an asteroid is not in interstellar space, and because the amounts supposedly detected are so minute they can credibly be accounted for by assuming terrestrial contamination (as I discuss here). 

In the 2006 paper here we read about an apparent false alarm regarding the detection of the amino acid glycine in interstellar space:

"The early searches for glycine were all negative, but two years ago Kuan et al. (2003) reported detection of a number of glycine lines, some 27 in several astronomical sources. Unfortunately, this claim has not been confirmed. The amount of glycine claimed by Kuan et al. is in conflict with previously published upper limits (e.g. Combes et al. 1996; Ceccarelli et al. 2000), and glycine lines which should have appeared were not found. In a detailed analysis of the evidence, Snyder et al. (2005) recently concluded that few, if any, of the lines attributed by Kuan et al. to interstellar glycine were actually from that molecule. The spectroscopic data on which the claim of Kuan et al. was based have not been published or made available to other workers, and there is now a fairly wide consensus among radio astronomers and laboratory spectroscopists that glycine has not yet been found in space."

A more recent 2022 paper tells us this: "The simplest amino acid, glycine (NH2CH2COOH), has been searched for a long time in the interstellar medium, but all surveys of glycine have failed." 

So,  you are not realistically simulating interstellar space by putting glycine in a chamber and zapping it with energy.  The glycine-zapping experiment does nothing to make it seem more likely that extraterrestrial life exists, or that life could form naturally.  But our clickbait-loving "science news" press fell for the story "hook, line and sinker."

And so we have an article at the clickbait-heavy phys.org, an article with the extremely misleading headline shown below. At least the article has a visual which shows that all that is going on is "one plus one equals two" stuff. I added the bottom row as commentary to what is shown above. 

We have a quote from the main researcher, Sergio Ioppolo making this untrue claim: "We already know from earlier experiments that simple amino acids, like glycine, form in interstellar space." Experiments could never show that glycine forms in interstellar space. Only observations could show that, and no robust observations show that. 

Ioppolo makes this false claim: "But research like ours shows that many of the complex molecules necessary for life are created naturally in space." No, it does not show any such thing. All it shows is that when you stick in a chamber two simple glycine molecules and zap them with energy, you might get a molecule looking like two glycine molecules joined together, which is a result as unimpressive as the deduction that one plus one equals two. 

Physicists Try to "Big-Mystery-Glamorize" Their Pigeonhole Pet Projects

 Scientists believe that when two very high-energy photons collide, they produce equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and that when matter collides with antimatter, it is converted into high-energy photons. Such a belief is based on what scientists have observed in particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider, where particles are accelerated to near the speed of light before they collide with each other. But such conclusions about matter, antimatter and photons lead to a great mystery as to why there is any matter at all in the universe.

Let us imagine the early minutes of the Big Bang about 13 billion years ago, when the density of the universe was incredibly great. At that time the universe should have consisted of energy, matter and antimatter. The energy should have been in the form of very high-energy photons that were frequently colliding with each other. All such collisions should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. For example, a collision of high energy particles with sufficient energy creates a matter proton and an antimatter particle called an antiproton. So the amount of antimatter shortly after the Big Bang should have been exactly the same as the amount of matter. As a CERN page on this topic says, "The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe." 

But whenever a matter particle touched an antimatter particle, both would have been converted into photons. The eventual result should have been a universe consisting either of nothing but photons, or some matter but an equal amount of antimatter. But only trace amounts of antimatter are observed in the universe. A universe with equal amounts of matter and antimatter would have been uninhabitable, because of the vast amount of lethal energy released when even a tiny bit of matter comes in contact with a tiny bit of antimatter.

The mystery of why we live in a universe that is almost all matter (rather than antimatter) is called the baryon asymmetry problem or the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem.  There is not much of a prospect that this problem will be solved in our lifetimes.  It's like the problem of "why is there something rather than nothing?" That's not a problem we can expect to solve in our lifetimes. The infographic below explains this matter-antimatter asymmetry problem. 

But sometimes when scientists have embarked on a boondoggle costing billions, they may evoke the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem to try to sanctify their misguided schemes.  That is what is going on with various boondoggle projects researching neutrinos. They include these projects:

• An ongoing T2K experiment in Japan that beams neutrinos over a distance of 295 kilometers. 
• An ongoing 280-million-dollar NOVA experiment in the USA that beams neutrinos 804 kilometers (500 miles), from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois to a 14,000-ton detector in Ash River, Minnesota.
• An under-construction 3-billion-dollar DUNE experiment in the USA that will attempt to beam neutrinos 1300 kilometers (800 miles), from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois to a very-deep-underground facility in Lead, South Dakota. 

The first two experiments have been running for years, and there was recently released a paper announcing a kind of combined results from the projects. Nothing of any importance was found.  But you might think otherwise from some of the press coverage, some of which attempts to make this "found nothing" result sound like something worthwhile. 

Scientists were hoping to find evidence of something called "mass ordering" or something else called "inverted ordering," but the paper says, "The data show no strong preference for either mass ordering."  We read, "There is no statistically significant preference obtained for either of the mass orderings." We also read, "We do not see a significant preference at present for either mass ordering."  

The only thing the paper authors say on the question of the matter-antimatter asymmetry is, " It is unknown whether neutrinos—and thus leptons—violate charge-parity (CP) symmetry and thereby provide a source of matter–antimatter asymmetry in nature, which is of great interest given the connection between CP violation and the unexplained matter dominance in the Universe." Since the paper says nothing else on the topic of matter-antimatter asymmetry other than this "say nothing" sentence,  the results obtained utterly fail to shed any light on the mystery of matter–antimatter asymmetry, contrary to the sales pitches for these very expensive projects, which tried to suggest that they would give important insight on this topic. 

The Reuters article on this paper describes it without exaggeration, and does not claim that the work shed any light at all on the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem. We have a headline of only "Researchers in US and Japan offer insight into ghostly neutrinos."

A Caltech press release on the paper uses some scrambled reasoning to gin up some relevance to the results. It states this:

"The combined results of NOvA and T2K so far do not favor one mass ordering scenario over another. However, if future results show the neutrino mass ordering is inverted and not normal, NOvA's and T2K's results published today provide evidence that neutrinos do exhibit the suspected asymmetry, potentially explaining why the universe is dominated by matter instead of antimatter. "

This is  kind of like someone saying, "My photo published today of triangular marks in the mud provides no evidence of extraterrestrial creatures; however if it is proven in the future that there are extraterrestrial visitors with triangle-shaped feet, then my photo published today potentially provides evidence of such creatures." 

In the article here, a Professor Yu speaks in a bungling way. We read,  "Professor Yu said, 'Given these results, we expect that next-generation neutrino research facilities such as Japan’s Hyper-Kamiokande or America’s DUNE will discover matter–antimatter asymmetry,' adding, 'We anticipate being able to understand why matter exists in overwhelmingly greater amounts than antimatter in the universe.' ”  But we already know that matter-asymmetry exists, so it makes no sense for Yu to be claiming that it will be discovered by the still-under-construction DUNE project. That's as silly as saying that you anticipate that some new project will discover that the sun exists. There is no basis whatsoever for the described "anticipation." The new paper describes 14 years of expensive neutrino search that failed to shed any light on why "matter exists in overwhelmingly greater amounts than antimatter in the universe."

We can describe the neutrino study projects listed above as "pigeonhole pet projects." That's because they are investigations of some topic of no interest to the general public, and only of interest to a very small number of physicists, such as neutrino specialists. If you are a scientist trying to get funding for one of these pigeonhole pet projects that are of no interest to 99% of the public, what sales strategy can you take? One strategy: try to make your little pigeonhole pet project sound like it has some relevance to some grand mystery that people are interested in. 

More Who Seemed Trance-Transported to a Higher Realm

 In a previous post "Did Their Trances Give Them Trips to Heaven?" I gave newspaper accounts of people who reported something like trips to heaven after being in some kind of trance, often one produced by some kind of sickness. Let us look at some more cases of the this type. 

The January 27, 1900 newspaper account below (which you can read here) tells of a trance experience of Mrs. Mahlon Gause:

A similar account (involving the experience of Cora Matton) can be found in this 1891 account which can be read here.

In the newspaper account here, we have an account of a trance trip to heaven, one made by Luella Cameron:

In the newspaper account here, we have another account of a trance trip to heaven, one made by Eliza Wright:

In the newspaper account here, we have another account of a trance trip to heaven, one made by Ida Sharp:

We read here of a minister who went into a trance and claimed to have gone on a journey to heaven:

"After lying as in a trance on the pulpit platform from one o'clock to 5:40 o'clock in the afternoon, Pastor Brown emerged from his mysterious slumber, weakly crumpled into a seat, and later on when he had recovered his strength he related that he really had been to 

heaven, that he had met many former Wilmingtonians including Bishop Cook, the Rev. Dr. Skinner and others whom he mentioned by name. He told of some of the beauteous scenes there, and announced that he would return to the church next Sunday and tell in detail of his pilgrimage to the haven or rest, 'It would take me a year to tell all I saw, ' he declared." 

Below is an account of a woman near death (Mrs. Alexander Taylor) claiming to have visited heaven during a trance-like close encounter with death. You can read the account here. 

On the same page as the first account quoted above, we have this  remarkable account of telepathy between twins.