Relativity, Truth and Social Media
Maybe you don’t already know the story of Urbain Le Verrier. He was a french astronomer of the second half of the XIX°. This is the guy who, only using mathematics and reasoning, predicted the existence of a planet he never directly saw. Just by using celestial mechanics and data he found out some discrepancies in the orbit of planets. The only fitting explanation was the existence of a yet undiscovered planet. It was Neptune. He sent a letter to a fellow German astronomer and asked him if he could check whether or not his theory was correct. He was spot on. Johann Gottfried Galle found Neptune right where it was supposed to be (with 1° of accuracy). He was the first human to see Neptune using the telescope of the Berlin observatory, and the theoretical predictions of Le Verrier. Quite a wonderful story in itself isn’t it ? But the most interesting thing about Le Verrier is about what he was not able to understand. While observing Mercury’s orbit he found discrepancies, again. Things literally did not compute. This time Le Verrier was unable to explain nor to understand where those anomalies could possibly come from. The answer came later from another German guy named Einstein. The observed data could not make sense using Newtonian theory of gravity. Generalized Relativity theory was required. Indeed Mercury is so close to the sun that the enormous mass of the star produces effects that distort space time so much in its vicinity that you can actually see the distortion.
Maybe you have noticed some discrepancies in how the media work for a few years now. Those discrepancies can’t be explained with a XX° model of media. We are in the XXI° century, social media are changing the world on an every day basis for a decade now.
Mercurial TED
The format of TED conferences is a strange beast. By many aspects it looks like a chimera, an unholy creature made by gluing together parts coming from different animals. The bet was to have sexy, easy to digest, short talks touching on profound subjects. Finger food thinking comes to mind. TED has been trending lately because of an affair akin of the one of the discrepancies in Mercury orbit. Hugues Coleman gave a TED talk, last April in Vancouver, about the concept of color blindness. This is an interesting talk, not earth shattering to my ears because what he presents just sounds like common sense to my ears. But I will let you decide for yourself about that.
What is more interesting to me, and at the genesis of the ideas of this post, is what happened after this TED talk. The fact that those reactions incidentally show that color blindness is no longer common sense anymore is in itself as worrying as the general effect that is the subject of this post, but it is not the subject here. How things unfold from there is what can’t be explained with a Newtonian mindset. The story is described from Coleman point of view (but the head of TED, Chris Anderson, himself acknowledged that “First thing to say is that his piece is a reasonably accurate description of what happened”) in this article. I strongly suggest the reader to read this article. It is a piece of data just like the position of Mercury in the celestial sphere.
Long story short, the talk was not cheered by people living in Wokistan. Again here is not the place for this debate. I am going to examine how the mujahideen activists -for a lack of better word- acted on the media space. Here is how things turned out (excerpt from Coleman’s article):
As of August 17, the two talks released just before mine had 569K and 787K views, respectively, on TED’s website. The two talks released immediately after mine—videos that had less time to circulate than mine—had 460K, 468K views, and 489K views, respectively. My talk, by comparison, had 73K views—only 16 percent of the views of the lowest-performing video in its immediate vicinity.
My debate with Jamelle Bouie—a New York Times columnist with almost half a million followers on X, formerly Twitter—has performed even worse on TED’s website. As of Tuesday, September 19—after having over a month to circulate—it had a whopping 5K views. That makes it the third worst-performing video released by TED in all of 2023.
Either my TED content is performing extremely poorly because it is far less interesting than most of TED’s content, or TED deliberately is not promoting it. A string of evidence points to the latter explanation: unique among the TED talks released around the same time as mine, my talk has still not been reposted to the TED Talks Daily podcast. In fact, it was not even posted to YouTube until I sent an email inquiry.
So here are the empirical data. Now how can it be explained that a relatively known figure -I know Coleman and I am not even American but he has a quarter of a million followers on X and appeared in very big podcasts like JRE #1781- has had less views than I had on some of my published pieces ? I am not a celebrity by any measure. It can’t be explained by our previous theory of media.
Warping the Web
The world in which we are living is a direct product of the theory of Generalized Relativity. Some physical phenomena that are used on a daily basis could not be mastered without mastering this theory. The fact that the speed of light is a constant, and is not additive, was in the Maxwell’s equation. On one hand it didn’t compute with the idea that when you walk in a train, you have to add the walking speed and the train speed to get the relative speed of the walker with relation to an observer on a station dock. On the other hand the equations were so good at predicting how electromagnetic fields behaved that it indicated there was something huge we didn’t get.
We have an idea of what makes an interesting story or piece. Yet more and more the media interest on stories don’t match this. If you look a the year 2023 in the rear mirror there were extraordinary stories that were just left alone. Here are some major stories (list non inclusive), that would have led to major follow-ups in the XX°, that just topped the trends cycle for a couple of days:
Nordstream sabotage. This happened exactly a year ago.
published a an article accusing US Navy to have conducted the operation.UAPs and all that. A high level whistleblower declared that the US army is in possession of non human biologics material.
COVID aftermaths. The only certain thing about the COVID crisis is that institutions fucked up big time. Choose your subject and I can mount a case on screens of what went wrong.
Biden’s family business. Admittedly it all started with the laptop and 2020 election cycle, but 2023 was fertile in revelations: Joe said he never talked to Hunter's business associates, then he admitted to have talked weather 20 times with his son while Hunter was in business meeting…
Each one of this story if taken literally has the potential to change how we see the world. We are not talking about the dress that Kardashian was wearing at a social event last night. Yet nothing. The story reaches the headlines and things move on just like it was the score of the last Newcastle - Manchester City match (Citizen lost 1-0 /, stunning all observers).
The first story is legitimate war level kind of stuff. Wars have been declared on much more mundane attacks on infrastructure. Second story just touches on the question of : are we alone in the universe ? Third story exposes a level of incompetence by institutions that one would be hard pressed to find an equivalent in history. The fourth story is about allegations of major frauds and corruption by the current administration. I mean the Watergate is a little poney level event compared to it.
Again: none of these stories produced any noticeable troubles in MSM and just few riddles could be observed on social media. How is it possible ?
Everything looks like the trajectory of news stories are influenced by massive objects that can’t be seen. Just like Black holes can trap light itself in their massive gravitational field, it appears that “things” are having on effect on how public conversation is held.
One interesting point in the story of Coleman’s talk is that TED did not suppresses the talk altogether. The footage was online but somehow almost invisible. This is empirical evidence that the virtual world obeys rules that are not everyday rules. At least not the ones we imagine. There are forces at play that can’t be directly seen but that are so powerful that we can observe nth order effects. Paradoxically it is easy to see when speech is banned. If the TED talk would have disappeared from the TED portfolio and we could see that something is missing. Today’s game is less direct. You have to check things in detail, like Coleman did, to see the actual manifestation of those massive black forces.
Manhattan project
The theory of relativity may appear to be far from our everyday lives. Yet it led to the most famous physics equation: E=mc² which in turns directly lead to the fusion and fission bombs. It is not clear if the analogy holds that far. I would be inclined to think so. Anyway we are not there yet. Are we? But we can no longer act as if the world is as we thought it was. Maybe here lies one of the largest discrepancies of our times. Lately Sam Harris released a post mortem analysis on how he reacted to the COVID crisis. At least he is paying lip service to the importance of story #3. I am not going to delve into the particular arguments that he is referring to in this podcast. I am just noticing that his overall conclusion is that it was rational to follow the consensus. It sounds like someone's trapped in a vision of the world that no longer works. It looks like he can’t fathom the fact that we have experimental evidence that Newton's physics is not the ultimate truth. Relativity theory didn't meant Newton’s idea were useless, neither that what was going beyond Newtonian physics was complete lunacy. Invoking Newtonian consensus is not going to make black holes disappear either.