Sunspots and Eclipses

Once upon a time, a scientist wrote a paper about how changes in sunspot activity correlated with climate changes over long timescales. A mathematical model was proposed in which the sun rang like a bell with two layers. It fit the data and made a testable prediction. But that prediction was not popular with certain politicians and scientists who insisted that the system was far too complicated to understand without their expensive super-computer based models. As a result, the paper was retracted and buried.

Such a story is relatively common, but it has played out recently with respect to a famous paper about sunspots that made predictions about the climate. I wrote about this paper last year and am disappointed by its retraction because I think that the journal knowingly misinterpreted what was written in the paper and discredited it due to political pressure.

Their jargon filled retraction reads:

The analyses presented in the section entitled “Effects of SIM on a temperature in the terrestrial hemispheres” are based on the assumption that the orbits of the Earth and the Sun about the Solar System barycenter are uncorrelated, so that the Earth-Sun distance changes by an amount comparable to the Sun-barycenter distance. Post-publication peer review has shown that this assumption is inaccurate because the motions of the Earth and the Sun are primarily due to Jupiter and the other giant planets, which accelerate the Earth and the Sun in nearly the same direction, and thereby generate highly-correlated motions in the Earth and Sun. Current ephemeris calculations [1,2] show that the Earth-Sun distance varies over a timescale of a few centuries by substantially less than the amount reported in this article. As a result the Editors no longer have confidence in the conclusions presented.

Retraction Note from the editors at Nature

For those who don’t speak physics-ese, I’ll translate it into layperson language.

We believe that the pull of planets like Jupiter cause the Earth and the Sun to move in the same direction at the same time and by the same amount. We are rejecting this paper because it did not take this motion into account. We also believe that because there is a disagreement with a popular, yet non-validated long-term estimate of the distance between the Earth and the Sun, the paper’s equation for the internal physics of the sun is invalid, despite the fact that it matched historical data.

My translation of Nature’s retraction

Let’s think about this for a moment.

• First of all, why should a paper on the internal physics of the sun be invalidataed by a slight disagreement over appropriate approximations of the distance between the Earth and the Sun? The thesis of the paper did not rely on that distance.
• Second of all, the Sun and the Earth weigh different amounts and they are different distances from Jupiter, so why should they move by the same amount at the same time in the same direction? That makes no sense. Sure, some tiny fraction of their motion has that property, but it is so small that it has no impact on the conclusions of the paper.
• Are the Nature editors idiots or are they just certain that most of the people who read their journal are idiots?
• Are they really going to remove a famous paper and hide it from the public behind both a paywall and a retraction?

If I wanted to fire back at them in jargonese, I’d say that this retraction is based on a deliberate conflation and confusion of relative and absolute coordinate systems. The Nature editors are using a relative, Riemannian coordinate system estimate to criticize a theoretical framework constucted with an absolute, Cartesian coordinate system and the error the editors are making couldn’t be more fundamental (and trivial). I think they are cynically exploiting common weaknesses in people’s understanding of relativity.

To understand this jargon, you need to understand the difference between calculating the distance to the center of a rotten onion and a fresh onion.

If you prefer listening instead of reading, try this video.

Imagine a group of planets orbiting the sun within an absolute, Cartesian coordinate system — a grid with a fixed distance between all of the lines – like a fresh onion. The biggest planets cause the center of the sun to wobble around relative to the center of that onion and the smaller planets will notice that wobble in the form of a small change in their distance to the sun. The smaller planets also experience orbit changes caused by the pull of the heavier planets but one can treat them independently and just add all of the effects together.

a Cartesian grid used to represent a sphere.

Now, imagine a group of planets orbiting a sun within a relative, Riemannian coordinate system — a topological map in which the distance between the lines changes when the planets move — like in a rotten onion. The planets will not cause the center of the sun to wobble around relative to the center of the coordinate system because such motion is defined to be invisible. Because the onion is rotten and goey in the middle, the center tracks the motion of the sun.

A Riemannian topological map.
I once hiked the Pacific Crest Trail with such a map. We accidentally hiked into the wrong, snow covered valley and it took us two days to find the trail again.

If smaller planets compare their distance to the center of a fresh or rotten onion coordinate system, they will clearly calculate different distances at a given instant in time. The reason is that they are using different measurement tools or metrics or onions. The relative, Riemannian metric changes to compensate for the motion of the planets and the absolute, Cartesian metric stays fixed.

The editors at Nature retracted the sunspot paper because it used the language of fresh onions rather than rotten onions.

Strangely enough, this sort of confusion is also the reason that astronomers mess up their calculations and see ‘dark matter’ filling the galaxy. When they forget that the onion they are using as a measurement tool is rotten, they mistakenly apply Cartesian intuition to a Riemannian system and confuse the rotten goo within their coordinate system for things that actually, objectively exist. If I spilled jam on a map of the world, I wouldn’t think that I had discovered a new continent, but this is what astronomers do when they see dark matter everywhere.

Of course, mathematicians all know that the discrepancy in distance within onions is irrelevant for the calculation of planetary trajectories if you take into account the maximum speed with which energy can be transported through fresh vs. rotted onion flesh, but astronomers are not usually mathematicians. They use the sorts of programs and simulation tools developed by mathematicians, but they don’t usually understand them completely. Clearly, the editors of Nature — the world’s top physics journal, don’t understand these tools either. That was why they retracted a physics paper that had been written with a mathematican as the lead author.

Methinks Nature is censoring a paper that

• does not line up with present day climate politics,
• exposes the emptiness of the concept of ‘dark matter’,
• suggests that solar and climate activity is predictable with simple equations,
• clarifies the way in which heat from the earth’s core is driven by the solar magnetic field

If you don’t think that scientists censor one another, think again.

• Walter Levin was banished and defamed after teaching fundamental physics to an international audience. He was accused of sending lewd emails to a student in another country.
• Freeman Dyson was banished from physics to the realm of mathematics when he developed a theory of fundamental physics that was too simple and clear.
• There are things called ‘no go theorems’ that prevent physicists from unifying gravity and electricity. Whenever someone tries to get around these theorems, the community attacks.

He was trying to create a simple, self-consistent physical model, but that isn’t allowed within the modern physics community. Complexity is the law — not just a recommendation.

Based on these incidents, I suspect that if there is such a thing as a Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC), it sure hates high-profile physics teachers. Maybe they just don’t want the sort of teachers who seek out an international stage or a lay-person audience. One is only allowed to discuss real physics if one uses a coded language of mathematics, but shhhhh, don’t let the physicists find out. Just keep them busy with building things that they don’t fully understand.

When I see a Poincare disc, I see a Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC).

When you are confined to the disc, as in the Standard Model of particle physics, you will find things like the 30 degree Weinberg angle mysterious.

If you look up from the disc into Cartesian space, you understand that classical physics has been approximated by modern physics. The disc is a relativistic portal into an absolute reality.

Sometimes discs both near and far obstruct the light of the sun and I think that if viewed as distorted gravitational shadows from the planets, sunspots are examples of this sort of obstruction.

I know, I know, everybody learns in class that this idea has been ruled out. But did they prove to you that it has been ruled out? They didn’t prove it to me and with some digging, I found the idea still circulating in literature from the 1970s. I get the sense that there are certain ‘facts’ that are just repetitions of rumors passed down in classrooms.

I think this because the modern physics classroom has many elements of the monkey vs. ladder experiment.

• Put a group of monkeys in a room with a ladder and a bananna at the top of the ladder.
• Spray the monkeys with water every time one tries to climb the ladder.
• Replace one of the monkeys in the group with a new monkey
• He will be attacked by the other monkeys when he tries to climb the ladder.
• Continue replacing the monkeys in the group with new monkeys.
• Eventually, the monkeys will attack one another for trying to climb the ladder, even though none of them has ever been sprayed with water.

Sunspots are not bananas, but they are certainly correlated with the distorted gravitational or tidal shadows which the planets cast upon the sun as they travel around it, however people who like thinking of the sun as something isolated rather than as a part of a holistic solar system will not agree with this assessment. They will insist that impossibly complex, chaotic, magnetohydrodynamic motion within the mysterious heart of the sun are the cause of sunspots and that the Earth self generates its magnetic field in a way that has nothing to do with the sun.

Does this guy sound nuts to you? It does seem like he is overcomplicating things.

They will insist that the increase and decrease of the number of sunspots over the course of ~11 years has nothing to do with the ~11 year orbital periods of Jupiter and Saturn even though they are not sure why they insist this is the case.

Solar cycle – Wikipedia

This picture gets muddied further by controversy over the appropriate way to ascribe causality to sunspots. A simple way to explain sunspots is to say that they are distorted and overlapping gravitational shadows cast by planets. A complicated way to explain sunspots is to say that they are like bubbles popping on the surface of a pot of boiling water. The simple explanation is given in terms of simple harmonic relationships that are largely deterministic. The complicated explanation is given in terms of the statistics of complex, chaotic magnetohydrodynamics that can only be calculated with supercomputers. They both might give similar answers, but one theory suggests a more predictable system than the other — and it can be calculated by anyone with access to some pencils and paper.

Why might there be an effort to convince students that the sun and the weather are completely unpredictable over long timescales?

All I know is that the data about where sunspots form and migrate is pretty but presented in a non-intuitive, non-illuminating fashion. Sometimes such noise is worse than nothing.

I learned absolutely nothing from this chart.

The migration pattern is said to be due to the fact that the center of the sun takes 35 days to rotate around the axis and the region near the poles takes 25 days. The axis of rotation is also not lined up with the ecliptic (the plane on which most of the planets orbit).

This is typically presented along with a picture of how the geometric and gravitational center of the solar system move in a sort of butterfly-esque shape relative to one another.

Sometimes confusing data presentation with no context is worse than no presentation at all.

I find it more helpful to think about sunspots in terms of orbital harmonics and simple relationships between the fundamental forces, however, you would find people who insist that this way of thinking is controversial. I find that it is an obvious conclusion that anyone who has worked with a resonating electric circuit will make — but astronomers today don’t work with electric circuits in our compartmentalized physics education systems.

To avoid overcomplicating the basic mechanisms, I try to imagine what sunspots would look like fi the solar system consisted of just the Earth and Jupiter. For around 11 years, Jupiter is on the upper side of the ecliptic disc and for the next 11 years, it is below that disc. Relative to an observer on the ecliptic disc, Jupiter is spinning clockwise when it is above the disc and counterclockwise when it is below the disc.

It helps to imagine an ecliptic oriented observer at the center of the sun who is responsible for how the solar magnetic field will look to the Earth. When that observer looks out at Jupiter, it sees a spin up planet or a spin down planet, depending on where Jupiter sits relative to the ecliptic disc. In other words, it sees a planet with positive polarity or a planet with negative polarity depending on whether Jupiter is above or below the disc.

When Jupiter passes from the top of the ecliptic disc to the bottom of the disc every eleven years, the sun’s polarity flips in order to compensate for this change of polarity. I’m sure that there is an atomic analogy to be made, but I don’t want to over-complicate things. In short: from the Earth’s perspective, the sun likes to keep its polarity opposite of Jupiter’s — because Jupiter is a very big planet.

I’m sure that with more planets the situation gets complicated, but I think that this simple model can point people in the right direction. Maybe it makes more sense to think of the disc defined by the sun’s equator rather than the ecliptic disc defined by the Earth’s orbit, but my guess is that the Sun’s magnetic field might look different to each planet and should be thought of from multiple perspectives. After all, a wind will seem to change direction if you turn around and face the opposite way. Sometimes it is hard to understand different points of view when you are confused by relative conceptions of space and time.

Here and there, you will find speculations on the internet about correlations between sunspots and various geophysical effects -like volcanoes, but these tend to be pushed to the fringes of the scientific community and the issue is muddied with the fact that sunspots track changes in the magnetic field and heat of the earth’s core and that both sunspots and tidal forces on the earth are caused by the pull of nearby planets. When trying to separate these effects from that of the lunar apse cycle, everything gets even more confusing. With this situation, it is always possible to find fault in someone’s work and impossible to ever meet the standards of the academic physics community.

The standards of academic physics are quite interesting. Sometimes the community is a stickler for mathematical formalism, and sometimes it is satisfied by those who draw pictures with overfitted smulation tools or write down form-factors without more justification than, “it works.” Politics and money tend to determine these preferences. Most of the time, the community chooses the most complex, inconsistent, Rube-Goldberg machine-esque theories it can create, as was certainly the case when it decided to popularize Feynman diagrams and Gell-Mann’s eight fold path. These theories require lots of money and time to work on.

Why? Why does the scientific community work like this? One possible reason is that they don’t trust politicians and business people to use their ideas responsibly and the other is that if you convince a government or corporation to invest heavily in expensive experiments or space travel, that government is automatically reducing the amount they invest in their military. Each research project or space station disarms them… at least it did back when the research projects were not used to accelerate military research. Nowadays, with experiments like LIGO, things are all a muddle and it is not clear why sensible ideas are suppressed. Science has gotten so politicized that I don’t even think that I can trust NOAA predictions about La Nina and el Nino. Is the establishment so corrupt that they play politics with the weather?

Are there certain types of knowledge that we are not meant to have? This is the premise of the novel I am working on.