Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Malaysia Airline Disappearance - With Every Day That Passes
The estimable Register provides this 3 page review of what may have happened to the Malay Airlines plane. It shows that the plane must be on or near a circle, centred on the satellite that recorded the engine signals. It runs from north of Afghanistan through Burma, omits Sumatra and Java, presumably because that has already been gone over and across the south Pacific. I initially thought it had landed in the Sumatra jungle and am still not certain it hasn't. Otherwise the Golden Triangle area of Burma is a possibility though it would have had to cross Burmese airspace without notice. I don't think it could have come near Afghanistan without lighting up radars.
But the odds increasingly look like it is at the bottom of the Indian ocean.
The Register glosses over the evidence that it rose to 45,000 feet when it first went off course. That could be a cockpit fight but, if combined with deliberate depressurising of the passenger space. would, as the Mail says in this otherwise very good assessment that this could be to "knock out" the passengers.
Or to kill them if maintained. Which would explain why they didn't get on their mobile phones.
I'm afraid that is what happened. Meanwhile the captain's semi-estranged wife and family are still missing. Did they flee to somewhere where he could meet them after successfully pulling off the crime of the century or did he kill them first? It is unlikely they could still be in Malaysia unnoticed. Could they have gone abroad without passing a video camera or have they literally vanished from the face of the Earth?
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The Register also highlights the recent observations said to have confirmed what likely happened at the Big Bang.
It also seems to confirm that we must list in an Everitt sort of multiverse.
What the BICEP2 experiment discovered is a polarisation – primordial B-mode polarisation – that it believes demonstrates the existence of an inflationary period in the universe. This inflation was predicted and explored by luminaries such as Alan Guth and Andrei Linde back in the 1980s.
If the BICEP2 results are correct – remembering that they're still to go through peer review – they would constitute the best observational evidence so far to support the inflationary model.
The reason BICEP2 implies inflation is that the polarisation is present fairly uniformly across the whole of the cosmic background radiation. In other words: whatever caused the polarisation represents sufficient energy to make the mathematics of cosmic inflation stack up.
And it was a tweet of a comment by Linde – that “If inflation is there, then the multiverse is there” – that captured The Register's interest.
As Dr Tucker explained, in the “generic inflation” model, in order to create enough energy and space for our universe to undergo that inflationary period, “you imply an infinite amount of energy and space.”
Even though our universe is big, “an infinite amount” of energy and space leaves a lot left over to be explained.
Hence the multiverse hypothesis: it balances the scales. The inflationary period, followed by a gravitational collapse into the universe we can observe, gives us the 13.8 billion years of universe history we can observe – leaving the excess energy and space beyond the reach of we inside the bubble.
“To get inflation, you have to have a vast amount of vacuum energy,” Dr Tucker explained.
UPDATE
I was wrong in believing his wife and family had disappeared. She did move out the day before, which may indicate a fight but went to her sister's. I had assumed the fact that our media didn't mention her meant they didn't know where she was.
It is now reported that satellite photos taken 4 days ago at t the southern tip of the range showed what may be large debris, probably a wing and most of another. That would mean the plane landed successfully on the sea. Being empty of fuel it is unsurprising that wings would float. However if you were going to rendezvous with somebody, equatorial waters, & somewhere you could reach well before the fuel ran out, would be infinitely safer than the storm lashed Antarctic Ocean so it still looks like a nasty way to commit suicide.
UPDATE 2
Jerry Pournelle broadly supports this assessment - that the plane was redirected to the nearest landing field and then the pilots overcome with smoke, from a burning wheel. Not sure but worth considering. If so I would expect the plane to have continued in the direction of its initial direction change and I get the impression there was a later redirection due south, but this impression may be wrong. Einstein said that an explanation should be as simple as possible to explain the evidence but no simpler and this may be it.
But the odds increasingly look like it is at the bottom of the Indian ocean.
The Register glosses over the evidence that it rose to 45,000 feet when it first went off course. That could be a cockpit fight but, if combined with deliberate depressurising of the passenger space. would, as the Mail says in this otherwise very good assessment that this could be to "knock out" the passengers.
Or to kill them if maintained. Which would explain why they didn't get on their mobile phones.
I'm afraid that is what happened. Meanwhile the captain's semi-estranged wife and family are still missing. Did they flee to somewhere where he could meet them after successfully pulling off the crime of the century or did he kill them first? It is unlikely they could still be in Malaysia unnoticed. Could they have gone abroad without passing a video camera or have they literally vanished from the face of the Earth?
-------------------------------------------------
The Register also highlights the recent observations said to have confirmed what likely happened at the Big Bang.
It also seems to confirm that we must list in an Everitt sort of multiverse.
What the BICEP2 experiment discovered is a polarisation – primordial B-mode polarisation – that it believes demonstrates the existence of an inflationary period in the universe. This inflation was predicted and explored by luminaries such as Alan Guth and Andrei Linde back in the 1980s.
If the BICEP2 results are correct – remembering that they're still to go through peer review – they would constitute the best observational evidence so far to support the inflationary model.
The reason BICEP2 implies inflation is that the polarisation is present fairly uniformly across the whole of the cosmic background radiation. In other words: whatever caused the polarisation represents sufficient energy to make the mathematics of cosmic inflation stack up.
And it was a tweet of a comment by Linde – that “If inflation is there, then the multiverse is there” – that captured The Register's interest.
As Dr Tucker explained, in the “generic inflation” model, in order to create enough energy and space for our universe to undergo that inflationary period, “you imply an infinite amount of energy and space.”
Even though our universe is big, “an infinite amount” of energy and space leaves a lot left over to be explained.
Hence the multiverse hypothesis: it balances the scales. The inflationary period, followed by a gravitational collapse into the universe we can observe, gives us the 13.8 billion years of universe history we can observe – leaving the excess energy and space beyond the reach of we inside the bubble.
“To get inflation, you have to have a vast amount of vacuum energy,” Dr Tucker explained.
UPDATE
I was wrong in believing his wife and family had disappeared. She did move out the day before, which may indicate a fight but went to her sister's. I had assumed the fact that our media didn't mention her meant they didn't know where she was.
It is now reported that satellite photos taken 4 days ago at t the southern tip of the range showed what may be large debris, probably a wing and most of another. That would mean the plane landed successfully on the sea. Being empty of fuel it is unsurprising that wings would float. However if you were going to rendezvous with somebody, equatorial waters, & somewhere you could reach well before the fuel ran out, would be infinitely safer than the storm lashed Antarctic Ocean so it still looks like a nasty way to commit suicide.
UPDATE 2
Jerry Pournelle broadly supports this assessment - that the plane was redirected to the nearest landing field and then the pilots overcome with smoke, from a burning wheel. Not sure but worth considering. If so I would expect the plane to have continued in the direction of its initial direction change and I get the impression there was a later redirection due south, but this impression may be wrong. Einstein said that an explanation should be as simple as possible to explain the evidence but no simpler and this may be it.
Labels: conspiracies, International politics, Science/technology
