We need to erase all of history because of George Floyd.

The Guardian:

For centuries Ferdinand Magellan has been accorded a rare privilege. The explorer’s name has been written in the stars. Two satellite galaxies of our own Milky Way, which sparkle conspicuously over the southern hemisphere, are labelled the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.

Now astronomers want to erase this celestial distinction. They say that Magellan, the 16th century Portuguese sailor, was a murderer who enslaved and burned down the homes of Indigenous peoples during his leadership of the first expedition to circumnavigate the globe. They insist his name should no longer be honoured by being associated with the clouds.

Not only was Magellan a big time murderer of many, he had the nerve to drop a dis track against the natives he killed:

It’s just disgusting. I used to have sympathy for Magellan, even though I knew he was a big time murderer, but then I found out he released this dis track and I was like “damn, boy, he ain’t playing.”

“Magellan committed horrific acts. In what became Guam and the Philippines, he and his men burned villages and killed their inhabitants,” says the astronomer Mia de los Reyes, of Amherst College in Massachusetts. Magellan led the 1519 Spanish expedition that achieved the first European navigation to Asia via the Pacific, but died in a battle, in 1521, with Indigenous people in the present-day Philippines.

Video from 8 years ago, with Mia de los Reyes explaining how dancing is like physics

In an article in the journal APS Physics, Reyes calls for the International Astronomical Union – the body in charge of naming astronomical objects – to rename the Magellanic Clouds. “I and many other astronomers believe that astronomical objects and facilities should not be named after Magellan, or after anyone else with a violent colonialist legacy.”

It is not just Magellan’s actions that should lead to his name being stripped from the skies, argues Prof David Hogg, of New York University. “The primary issue is that the clouds aren’t his discovery,” he has told the website Space.com.

Correct.

Clouds were originally discovered by a black crip gang member in South Chicago. The gang member, Delareesus Jenkins, had been shot in the stomach and was bleeding out, laying flat on his back on the pavement. He had nothing to do but look at the sky, and that’s when he said: “damn, dey muthafukas been up der, dey be bigass white cuddlies all up in this bitch, shiet. I ain’t never thought them had cuddlies up in the top floor like a muthafuka, damn boy.”

Luckily, Delareesus survived, and while in recovery at the hospital, he called his friend Dr. Quinefiues Jackson to tell him of his discovery. “Nigga, take yo bitchass out da muthafukan crib, put yo head fo up do, check em, top floor got cuddlies all out this bitch like a muffagguah.”

Quinefiues was able to confirm the “cuddlies” did exist, telling Delareesus “nigga I fink yo bitch ass be tryin to play da nigga, but damn boy, you ain’t lie. Bitch got cuddlies all out da muthafuka in her.”

As they further research, they decided that “cuddlies” was too cumbersome a name for the white shapes in the sky, and Delareesus suggested that they name them “clouds” after his daughter, “Sainteen Hazelen Cloudy.”

One evening late at night, Magellan broken into the office of the two black scientists, and stole their information from them.

Those are just the basic facts of history.

Magellan was too nice to these savages

It’s about time we dealt with the white board question.

Campus Reform:

Did a recent physics study argue that whiteboards are racist?

“Observing Whiteness in Introductory Physics: A Case Study” was published last month in Physical Review Physics Education Research. The study observed three students as they worked to solve a physics problem and analyzed how “whiteness” is present in academia.

The study found that whiteboards can have racist undertones and perpetuate whiteness.

Seattle Pacific University Research Associate Professor of Physics Amy Roberton served as lead author. W. Tali Hairston, director of community organizing, advocacy, and development at Seattle Presbytery, served as the co-author.

Amy Robertson, your standard science womyn

W. Tali Hairston, your standard community negro

Your standard white boarder

Hairston told Campus Reform that although whiteboards “are not inherently racist,” the common classroom object can perpetuate racism.

“Whiteboards can be racist like how housing, employment, and the judicial systems were found to contain racist practices,” Hairston stated.

According to the authors, the role of the whiteboard as being the center of attention in classroom learning contributes to its role in student discussion and attention.

“Our findings support other studies that have found the study of physics to include racism and sexism,” Hairston added.

“Whiteboards display written information for public consumption; they draw attention to themselves and in this case support the centering of an abstract representation and the person standing next to it, presenting,” the authors argue in the study. “They collaborate with white organizational culture, where ideas and experiences gain value (become more central) when written down.”

According to this argument, when students use a whiteboard to display work, they are drawing attention to themselves that may portray characteristics of “whiteness.”

This can always get goofier.

This is the based Indo-Guyanese-Jamaican 

Good news, everyone.

Brown people are finally enriching our culture with something other than drugs, violence, and poverty.

The Guardian:

Girls do not choose physics A-level because they dislike “hard maths”, the government’s social mobility commissioner has claimed, prompting anger from leading scientists.

Addressing a science and technology committee inquiry on diversity and inclusion in Stem subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths), Katharine Birbalsingh said fewer girls chose physics because “physics isn’t something that girls tend to fancy. They don’t want to do it, they don’t like it,” she said.

Birbalsingh, who is headteacher of Michaela Community school in Wembley, north-west London, said that only 16% of A-level physics students at her school were girls – lower than the national average of 23%. When asked why so few girls progressed to physics A-level, despite outperforming boys at GCSE, she said: “I just think they don’t like it. There’s a lot of hard maths in there that I think they would rather not do.”

“The research generally … just says that’s a natural thing,” she added. “I don’t think there’s anything external.”

Mic drop.

Birbalsingh, a French and philosophy graduate, said she was “certainly not out there campaigning” for more girls to do physics. “I don’t mind that there’s only 16%,” she said. “I want them to do what they want to do.”

Dame Athene Donald, a professor of experimental physics and master of Churchill College, Cambridge, said the comments were “terrifying” and “quite damaging” and questioned to which research Birbalsingh was referring in suggesting that girls had an intrinsic lack of appetite for maths and physics.

“It’s not a case of campaigning for more girls to do physics, it’s a case of making sure that girls aren’t discouraged by remarks like this,” Donald said. “We want girls to be free to pursue what they’re good at and, equally, boys should also be able to go into professions like nursing. We aren’t in a society like that.”

Dr Jess Wade, a physicist at Imperial College London who campaigns for equality in science, said: “I honestly can’t believe we’re still having this conversation. It’s patronising, it’s infuriating, and it’s closing doors to exciting careers in physics and engineering for generations of young women. Whilst girls and boys currently choose A-level subjects differently, there is absolutely no evidence to show intrinsic differences in their abilities or preference.”

The comments come after girls outperformed boys in both A-level and GCSE maths for the first time last year.

Rachel Youngman, the deputy chief executive of the Institute of Physics, said: “The IOP is very concerned at the continued use of outdated stereotypes as we firmly believe physics is for everyone regardless of their background or gender.”

This IOP thing’s channel is all like this except for some cringy videos that I think are supposed to make young children interested in physics

Youngman said the comments ran contrary to the experiences of young people, “including many girls, who tell us they face barriers to studying physics because of who they are rather than their ability”.”

“Outdated ideas need to be eradicated,” she added.

Research by the IOP has highlighted that girls at single sex schools are almost two-and-a-half times more likely to progress to A-level physics compared with mixed schools, which it said strongly suggested gender biases played a role in A-level choice.

Its report concluded that teacher-student relationships played a significant role in A-level choices and that gender stereotyping by teachers, parents and the media continues to be an issue, with a recommendation that all teachers be trained in unconscious biases and gender stereotypes.

Birbalsingh was urged to apologise by Munira Wilson, the Liberal Democrats’ education spokesperson.

Wilson said ministers had “failed to challenge the culture of misogyny and unconscious biases in our education system for years”, and that every child should get the chance to “thrive and follow their passions during their time at school”. She added: “The government must finally step up to the plate and act. We need new measures to challenge these biases, backed up by legislation, and Katharine Birbalsingh should apologise for her remarks.”

Anneliese Dodds, Labour’s shadow equalities secretary, said the “appallingly outdated and damaging thinking is the very opposite of promoting social mobility”. She called on ministers to condemn the comments and added: “Girls deserve a government that backs them, not one that talks down their ambitions.”

Wow, racist much?

Stupid white bitch.

Maybe you should be silent while brown people are speaking.

How the hell is this building still standing? This defies science!

Yesterday’s news about the Grenfell Tower in London going up in flames has me a bit confused.

On September 11th, 2001 the Twin Towers in New York City both sustained a great amount of fire damage and each building collapsed at near free fall speed. They disintegrated into dust!

It is interesting how this did not happen with Grenfell Tower in London despite the entire structure being engulfed in flames.

I guess the laws of physics were just suspended yesterday, because any time a building catches fire it should collapse at free fall speed. The Twin Towers proved this!

Just an observation though. What do you guys think?

Albert Einstein: Your standard kike scam-artist.

People who think the hard sciences are the last free intellectual pursuit should try and question the orthodoxy of the “theory of relativity.” It’s a theory that mainly only Russian and Chinese scientists have questioned in recent years, largely because Jewish control over Western academia has made it taboo to question it. Because of this, the field of physics has remained quite stagnant of the last several decades (compared, to say, the Aryan and East Asian dominated field of computer science).

Unsurprisingly, much of the deference to Einstein is based not on the brilliance of his work, but on his biography and the myth created around him.

Einstein left Germany in 1933 when Adolf Hitler took power, and this was when – according to the narrative we’ve all been taught in school – German science collapsed as Jews began to emigrate. Scientists in the Third Reich heavily criticized Einstein’s theory of relativity in particular, which is why there is a latent notion among scientists that if you question it today you’ll be branded an “anti-Semite” or blacklisted in intellectual circles (and you will).  But maybe, just maybe, these German “anti-Semites,” who gave mankind rocket propulsion, had empiricism on their side, while Einstein relied on Judenpresse mythologists and academic censorship to bolster his shots in the dark.

But who am I – I’m no Einstein. You see, Einstein was the world’s most brilliant and infallible mind to ever live, just like Sarah Silverman is funny, Lena Dunham is hot, and Israel is a bastion of human rights-based democracy.

But lo, some bold physicists beg to differ.

The Guardian:

The newborn universe may have glowed with light beams moving much faster than they do today, according to a theory that overturns Einstein’s century-old claim that the speed of light is a constant.

João Magueijo, of Imperial College London, and Niayesh Afshordi, of the University of Waterloo in Canada, propose that light tore along at infinite speed at the birth of the universe when the temperature of the cosmos was a staggering ten thousand trillion trillion celsius.

It is a theory Magueijo has being developing since the late 1990s, but in a paper published on Monday he and Afshordi describe for the first time how scientists can finally test the controversial idea. If right, the theory would leave a signature on the ancient radiation left over from the big bang, the so-called cosmic microwave background that cosmologists have observed with satellites.

“We can say what the fluctuations in the early universe would have looked like, and these are the fluctuations that grow to form planets, stars and galaxies,” Afshordi told the Guardian.

The speed of light in a vacuum is considered to be one of the fundamental constants of nature. Thanks to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, it was stamped in the annals of physics more than a century ago at about 1bn km/h. But while general relativity is one of the cornerstones of modern physics, scientists know that the rules of today did not hold at the birth of the universe.

Magueijo and Afshordi came up with their theory to explain why the cosmos looks much the same over vast distances. To be so uniform, light rays must have reached every corner of the cosmos, otherwise some regions would be cooler and more dense than others. But even moving at 1bn km/h, light was not travelling fast enough to spread so far and even out the universe’s temperature differences.

To overcome the conundrum, cosmologists including Stephen Hawking have proposed a theory called inflation, in which the fledgling universe underwent the briefest spell of the most tremendous expansion. According to inflation, the temperature of the cosmos evened out before it exploded to an enormous size. But there is no solid proof that inflation is right, and if so, what sparked such a massive period of expansion, and what brought it to an end.

Magueijo and Afshordi’s theory does away with inflation and replaces it with a variable speed of light. According to their calculations, the heat of universe in its first moments was so intense that light and other particles moved at infinite speed. Under these conditions, light reached the most distant pockets of the universe and made it look as uniform as we see it today. “In our theory, if you go back to the early universe, there’s a temperature when everything becomes faster. The speed of light goes to infinity and propagates much faster than gravity,” Afshordi said. “It’s a phase transition in the same way that water turns into steam.”

Scientists could soon find out whether light really did outpace gravity in the early universe. The theory predicts a clear pattern in the density variations of the early universe, a feature measured by what is called the “spectral index”. Writing in the journal Physical Review, the scientists predict a very precise spectral index of 0.96478, which is close to the latest, though somewhat rough, measurement of 0.968.

It’s possible that Magueijo and Afshordi could be incorrect in their counter-theory, but nevertheless, the passive resistance they are getting for practicing basic testing is telling. Stephen Hawking, who is an actual genius, is himself handcuffed by his beta male itch to follow the herd. The fact that he would come up with a new theory just to obfuscate a proven inconsistency in the theory of relativity – as if it was some self-evident truth – is a testament to his weak character and lack of respect for the principle ethic of science: ideological neutrality.

I am of the opinion that if all Jews were barred from administering Western universities, grants, and research centers, science and technology would be 100 years ahead of where it is now. One look at the marvels of human achievement in barely 12 years of Nationalsocialism.

My theory of Aryan proclivity: free an art of the retarding force of pathologically politicized Jews and watch it flourish. We can prove it by busting every last Jew myth.

An oped in the NYT:

“The ‘Benefits’ of Black Physics Students”

By JEDIDAH C. ISLER DEC. 17, 2015 696 COMMENTS

LAST week during oral arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas, a case about the constitutionality of race-conscious admissions policies, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. posed two questions: “What unique perspective does a minority student bring to a physics class?” Followed by: “I’m just wondering what the benefits of diversity are in that situation?”

Then Justice Antonin Scalia deepened an already painful wound when he questioned the abilities of black students to succeed at fast-paced institutions, an idea rooted in the widely discredited “mismatch theory.” Their questions left many black scientists, myself included, reeling from the psychological blow.

As a black woman and astrophysicist, I immediately became defensive of my own worthiness, and that of the black students I mentor and support every day. I wanted to scream my credentials from the rooftops: I have physics degrees from two historically black universities and a Ph.D. in astrophysics from an Ivy League institution.

I’ve thought a lot about who winds up in science classrooms and whose perspectives are cultivated. I went from sitting in a classroom full of brilliant black physicists-in-training to one in which I was the only person of color pursuing the same subject.

Of course I deserved to be an astrophysicist, and my achievements prove it; but that’s not the point. I was worthy the first day I walked into the classroom.

I had come from a tiny Christian high school where I didn’t get nearly as much scientific preparation as my dream to be a professional stargazer required. Yet there were people at Norfolk State University who believed in me and welcomed me. When I walked through the doors, my professors asked me if I wanted to understand physics, not what “unique perspective” I might bring. I did want to learn physics, so they told me that I was in the right place.

Isn’t she missing the point? Wouldn’t her having starred in physics at Norfolk State instead of flunking out of physics at Caltech support Scalia’s question?

It would seem that the best rebuttal to Chief Justice Roberts’s query about the “benefits of diversity” is to describe a scene where a black student brought a “unique perspective” that improved the learning experience for everyone.

Okay, so where’s the example?

But the truly insidious part of his argument is not predicated on the need to furnish examples. Obviously, black students march into classrooms all over this country and blow physical concepts out of the water with their individual intellects. The truly damaging part of Chief Justice Roberts’s question is the tacit implication that black students must justify their presence at all.

Black students’ responsibility in the classroom is not to serve as “seasoning” to the academic soup. They do not function primarily to enrich the learning experience of white students.

Actually, the Supreme Court’s pro-affirmative action Grutter decision of 2003 enshrined exactly that justification for race quotas: by providing diversity, underqualified blacks enrich the learning experience of white students.

Black students come to the physics classroom for the same reason white students do; they love physics and want to know more. Do we require that white students justify their presence in the classroom?

Yes. It’s called applying to college.

Do we need them to bring something other than their interest?

Yes. Their high school GPAs and test scores.

Contrary to Chief Justice Roberts’s implication, science is not some unchanging world of pure objectivity and fact. …

And physics isn’t just about the dry acquisition, memorization and regurgitation of equations. Think about something as basic to physics as Newton’s laws. Before they can be understood, they must be conceptualized.

Instead of stating “force equals mass times acceleration” and moving on, a good instructor will ply her students with real-life examples of how the application of force to a mass produces acceleration. Students must create relatable examples that allow them to practice and perfect their use of these tools before expanding them out into the larger, untested world.

For example, “Calculate the total force experienced by rapper 50 Cents as he got shot by 9 bullets each with a mass of …”?

… Closing that door to students of color unless they can justify their presence is closing the door to the kinds of creativity that can be shown only after a student has mastered basic skills.

A physics class should interrogate and transfer the canon of scientific knowledge.

Have you ever noticed how the word “interrogate” has been a favorite action verb of postmodern academics for at least a quarter of a century? You might think that a word so historically associated with the Gestapo and KGB might be considered kind of “triggering,” but only if you worry that you might wind up being the Whom instead of the Who in an interrogation. Evidently, a lot of academics have no concerns in that regard.

Those students will go on to consider the many unanswered questions at the frontiers of what is known about the universe. …

Jedidah C. Isler is a National Science Foundation astronomy and astrophysics postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University.

It’s not impossible that this piece is a pitch-perfect parody that slipped past the editors. Unlikely, but not impossible …

We can only hope.