Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever, Declares Himself Dissenter: 'I am a skeptic'
Excerpt: Ivar Giaever (Norway), the 1973 Nobel prize winner for superconductivity (he was essential to master electron tunneling in superconductors and shared the physics award with Esaki and Josephson), was asked how the world should tackle climate change:
"First of all, I didn't want to be on this panel. Second of all, I am a skeptic. Third of all, if I am Norwegian, should I really worry about a little bit of warming? I am unfortunately becoming an old man. We have heard many similar warnings about the acid rain 30 years ago and the ozone hole 10 years ago or deforestation but the humanity is still around. The ozone hole width has peaked in 1993.
Moreover, global warming has become a new religion. We frequently hear about the number of scientists who support it. But the number is not important: only whether they are correct is important. We don't really know what the actual effect on the global temperature is. There are better ways to spend the money [question period]," he referred to a lecture about poverty by Hans Rosling (Sweden) that heavily relied on my favorite Gapminder: well, he is the director of the Gapminder Foundation.”
Ivar Giaever had done some "Google research" before the panel so he could also speak about 1934, 1998 as the warmest U.S. (where they have the best record) years in the 20th century, the hockey stick graph, the crucial role of the huge heat capacity of the oceans, the little ice age whose cause is unknown, and about the increase of "bulk" Greenland ice in the last century (by 2 meters at the center). Another panelist conjectured that this increase of ice was due to precipitation.
Much like every year since 1951, there has been another meeting (6/29-7/3) of Nobel prize winners in Lindau, Eastern Germany.
In the high-energy panel, Martinus Veltman has said some really stupid things about the relationships between astrophysics, cosmology, and high-energy physics. He essentially argued that astroparticle physics doesn't exist or shouldn't exist and that it was "idiotic" to argue that the LHC will recreate the Big Bang.
Well, I happen to think that astroparticle physics is a legitimate and well-established subdiscipline and that the proposition that the LHC will recreate the Big Bang is non-rigorous but surely much more correct and important than the statement that it is idiotic to say that the LHC will recreate the Big Bang. 😊
In fact, it is not just a popular cliché. Physicists themselves describe the temperature - or energy per particle - and directly map it to a particular moment after the Big Bang because the typical phenomena that occur at a certain energy scale are also directly relevant for a particular era of the early cosmology. If you allow me to summarize, the LHC will recreate the Big Bang.
Gross and Smoot agreed with my position above but their answer wasn't sufficiently colorful to waste the dear TRF readers' time. 😉
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