The Trump Enigma

That would make a great book title, in the “truth is stranger than fiction” genre. Right from the get-go, Trump’s Presidential campaign was totally puzzling: he never seemed to miss insulting just about every minority you could think of; he ran around making grandiose statements that were either hideously ridiculous, such as Mexico was going to build his wall, or he was saying things that everyone seemed to recognize readily as being very unlikely to be correct. It was not as if he were trying to fool everybody; he looked the exact opposite of a con man. He was ramming statements in people’s faces in a way that almost challenged them not to believe. How could anybody win like that?

He did have some statements that almost certainly struck home. “Drain the swamp!” was one such statement. All around the world there are a lot of people who have little faith in politicians, and many people are convinced that politicians specially favour big business, etc. We also see politicians closing down the government for no good reason other than petty politics, or pushing extraneous agendas. So that sort of statement should have struck oil.

However, recently I came across a news extract that summarized parts of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, and here was a surprising explanation: Trump did not want to be President. He wanted to lose. As the campaign was coming to an end, he was about 10 points behind. That did not bother him. Trump intended to run a TV network, and his aim was to be one of the most famous men in the world. He was happy. He did not want to be President, and just about everyone close to him thought he should not be. Trump apparently said something like he was not thinking about losing because he wasn’t going to lose. He would not be President, but he would be a huge winner.

Why did he not release his tax returns? Because it never occurred to him he would win, and if he lost, there would be no point. He had a built-in whinge against Preibus, the Chairman of the Republican National Committee, hence an excuse for losing. He would be a martyr to “Crooked Hillary”. His family would be extremely famous. Kellyanne Conway could be a cable news star. Then a wheel fell off. Comey made his famous public statement and Hillary’s ratings started to fall. Apparently, on the night the results came in, Melanie burst into tears at the news. Trump did not believe it, then he became horrified, then suddenly he decided, yes, he could do this.

I have no idea how accurate this is, but this is what Michael Wolff apparently wrote. My initial thought after reading this was, Dang! Why couldn’t I have thought of something like this sooner? This would make a great plot for a novel, and it’s wasted, thanks to Trump.

But this puts a new perspective on Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian collusion. There cannot be collusion between two parties unless they have a common objective. If the Russian interventions, if there were such interventions, were aimed at promoting Trump, as is usually asserted, and Trump was trying to lose, there can be no collusion. On the other hand, suppose the Russian interventions were aimed at getting Trump to lose, can you collude and plot to lose? Or will the proposed collusion now make Hillary guilty, because she was the only possible beneficiary? Or was such Russian activity a clever punishment on Trump? Or, as I feel is more likely, if some Russians did something, it was totally independent and not coordinated with Trump or his campaign. Who knows?

Yet, in a way, this forks Trump. Now he is President, can he really afford to announce that he tried to lose? Can he make that his defence against Mueller’s probe? To add to the mix, right now there is a memo that Congress wants to release that some people claim relates to the Christopher Steele report, which is the basis of the allegations of collusion. Now Steele runs a consulting company and was an MI6 agent, and the funding for this report apparently came from the Clinton/Democrat party. Is that not collusion with a foreign agent to undermine the US political process? Is there any way out of this mess for anyone?

All the same, I wish I had thought of that plot. Not, of course, that anyone would have believed it to be plausible. It would be laughed out of court as to ridiculous for words.

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What Does Evidence Prove?

I often hear people say they want evidence-based decision-making, but they then behave in a totally different way. My view is evidence is all observed facts relating to the issue at hand. Only too many people think evidence is that which supports their hypothesis, and that which does not is irrelevant. Thus collecting evidence requires dispassionate thoroughness, while determining what such evidence means requires clear logic. However, not everyone is capable of being truly dispassionate once they have reached a conclusion; they do not like revisiting previous decisions.

Consider the hypothetical statement, John murdered Joe. Joe’s apartment door was open, whereupon another apartment dweller found the body, which had a bullet through his head. Forensics tell you he died of the bullet wound at about 1 am. Joe is dead, which meets the first criterion, and there is no gun left behind. So, was he murdered?

Superficially, suicide can be eliminated, but in principle someone else could have removed the gun, so there are actually two hypotheses consistent with that evidence. The police could test the victim’s hands for gunpowder residue, but suppose they jump to a conclusion and don’t bother? Some innocent could go to jail.

So, what about John? People state that earlier John had a heated argument with Joe in his apartment. John has no alibi; he states he was in bed asleep at the time. They find John’s DNA in the apartment, but apart from Joe’s, nobody else’s. After a lot of questioning, the police find someone who saw a man walking away from the apartment block “early in the morning”. The person looked like John and was wearing a hoodie. John owns a hoodie.

So, what do we have? Strictly speaking, nothing against John. John does not deny the heated argument, and it also explains why his DNA is in the apartment. That no other DNA is there is not necessarily indicative that nobody else was there, but merely that nobody else left enough to be found. Just because you argue does not mean you will murder the other person, and anyone that lives alone is likely to be in bed asleep at 1 am. As for the “identification”, all we have is a man of about John’s height was wearing a hoodie. Such evidence can be consistent with a statement, but it can only prove the statement if it falsifies every other possibility.

Now, a real case. A young couple were at a New Year party near a marina and also present (and relevant to this) were our accused, who was drunk and behaving badly by trying to chat up any female, and a “scruffy man”, who was never identified and was alleged by the police to be the accused. The “evidence” in support of this was somehow they got a scruffy photo of the accused and one person picked this photo out of a photo lineup. He was later to say that the photo indicated the degree of scruffiness but it was not intended as a full identification, and as it happened, this photo did not look particularly like the accused. The two young people were ferried out to a boat at the invitation of scruffy man. The man who ferried them out described the boat as a forty-foot ketch. The couple were never seen again.

The police arrested the accused, and claimed they had been taken to his boat, a twenty-six foot sloop. The accused had been repainting his boat, and the police claimed he was covering up evidence. The accused claimed it was normal maintenance. The witnesses claimed that the water taxi ferrying the victims out left on a given course and gave a time for how long it took to get there. That would put it a minimum of ninety meters away from the sloop. The police maintained there was no ketch, but independently some claimed to have seen it, and their location of it was roughly where this water taxi went. In evidence there was no ketch, the police produced a montage of the whole area, and there was no ketch. The problem then was the various photos were all taken at different times, and all of them well before the party. The police argued the two were locked away in a cabin of the sloop, and there were scratch marks where they had fought to get out. Evidence was that the scratch marks had been there before. Finally, after some time, forensics found two hairs belonging to one of the victims on a blanket taken from the sloop. What do you make of that?

If someone were making deep scratches trying to get out (a futile gesture but that is beside the point) there would be a lot of other DNA there. Ha, the police said, the accused cleaned that up. But if he was good enough to clean up all the DNA from everywhere else, why not get rid of the bedding, because it was almost certain that something would be left behind? In my opinion, the key evidence was where these victims were taken. If you know anything about boats, you know the difference between a sloop and a ketch (one and two masts is one major difference) and the ferryman was a master mariner. Further, if the people who saw the water taxi go out and come back have it going to a different place than the sloop, coupled with the ketch, the police have the wrong boat.

However, the accused was found guilty. Part of the problem was the defence lawyer. Thus when the police asked one witness did you not pick photo C from a photo lineup, the witness had to agree he had. He was later to say that had the defence lawyer asked him was the scruffy man he had seen now in the court, he would have answered no. But the lawyer had no idea what the witness would say, and he relied on his oratory at the end. The trouble was, his oratory was not up to scratch, and he had failed to establish sufficient facts. On the basis that the accused gets the benefit of reasonable doubt, I believe this was a miscarriage of justice, but thanks again to lawyers, his appeals process has run out. Had I been on a jury I would never have convicted, not because I am sure he was not guilty, but because I am sure there is reasonable doubt. However, the emotion of these two young people presumably being killed, together with angry parents, meant the jury almost certainly did not view this dispassionately. Evidence will be consistent with the truth, but it can also lead many down a completely different path.

Tabby’s Star – Affirmation or Misleading?

I hope you all had a good Christmas period. We have been having a heat wave, with temperatures way above normal, and a fairly high humidity as well. Even my cat Horatio can’t get up the energy to pester me for early meals. Anyway, something about astronomy, astrophysics, and even science fiction to start the year. During the break, I entered a debate regarding evidence, which eventually led me to Tabby’s star.

There has been odd behaviour in the star KIC 8462852, sometimes called Boyajian’s star, but more commonly called Tabby’s star, after Tabetha Boyajian, who led the team that discovered the strange behaviour. (Fancy having a star named after you.) The reason it is of interest is it has variable flux, with massive dimmings (up to 22% of total flux that occur with 750 day period) and a number of minor ones (approximately 2% that, because there is a number of them, have not as yet been assigned periods). The star is an F type star, about 1.43 times the size of our sun, and it has a surface temperature of about 6750 ^oK.

So what is going on? What is causing the light to dim? There are two possibilities: the star itself has a variable output, or something crosses between us and the star, and thus dims it. That, of course, is what happens when a planet crosses in front of the star, and that is what the Kepler telescope looks for. However, a planet crossing does not usually manage such a dimming as this because the planet is compact. For example, during the transit of Venus, you would not notice it on Earth without specially looking for it. To get a 22% reduction in light intensity there has to be something with a very large cross-section getting in the road.

Could the star do it by itself? There are variable stars, but they do not usually behave like this. Some multiple stars do, thus when one star goes behind the other, its light gets cut out, but so far there is no evidence of a companion for Tabby’s star. If the star is variable because it changes output, it usually does so rather slowly, and in ways that an astronomer would recognise. There are exceptions. Extreme magnetic activity or a huge swarm of sunspots might do it but it is difficult to envision this happening with a 750-day period.

Suppose something is getting in the road. For a 750-day period, assuming there is only one major body, it would be about 1.8 AU from its star. (An AU is the distance of Earth from the sun.) That makes it somewhat further from its star than Mars is from ours. One proposal is that if the star is far younger than we think, there may be the remains of an accretion disk, that is, a large mass of dust and small stones that is gravitationally coming together. That raises the objection, why not others at other distances? Also, if the standard theory of planetary formation were correct, this would make the star extremely young, because such an accumulations should create planets. Of course that theory could be wrong, as I believe it is. There have been other proposals such as a swarm of comets, and even the debris from a planetary collision. That is usually strongly rejected, but the logic is interesting. It is asserted the probability of seeing such an event is extremely small. So? Kepler has looked at something like 100,000 stars and found this one event, which makes it rare. Once you have a sample of only one, I do not think a probability argument makes any sense at all since no matter how rare the event, if it happens, it is possible to see it.

Another proposal is a large ringed planet, with Trojans. If that is the case, you will see the large event, and a minor event with about 1/6 the periodicity of the main event before and after it. This at least has the merit of being testable. However, the rings would have to be huge, and in one plane normal to the path of the planet.

One of the more bizarre proposals was that the star is surrounded by parts of a megastructure (a Dyson swarm) constructed by an alien civilization to gather energy from the star. Even in my science fiction, I would not suggest that. It took our planet 4.5 billion years to get a technological society, but we are a very long way from being able to construct such a megastructure, yet others are talking about just possibly this star could still be in its formative years. The other point is, why would any alien want to do that? The proposal was that societies might build them to capture their energy needs, but is that plausible? There are other potential shortages besides energy, including materials that you would have to devote to constructing such a monstrous structure. One problem is the periodicity. If you wanted to capture energy, would you not put it a bit closer to the star? If you put it at half the distance, you only need ¼ the materials to get the same energy.

Then there is the question of the absolute size. To get a 22% dimming, and assuming whatever it is totally eclipses the star, the area has to be a dead minimum of 362 billion square miles. In most cases, it has to be seriously bigger. That is a little under 8,000 times the area of the earth. Given that it would have to have a certain amount of thickness for mechanical strength, the mass of this beast would be a serious fraction of the mass of a rocky planet. Where would aliens get the materials? Destroy a planet?

My guess as to what it is? The mechanism for forming rocky planets outlined in my ebook “Planetary Formation and Biogenesis” was that when the star is accreting, the temperatures in the inner part of the disk get quite high, and where Mercury formed, the rocks and iron got sufficiently hot that the silicates stayed in a sticky molten state long enough for the planet to form. Further out it was hot enough to melt the silicates, but because the distances increase, at that point all that formed were a large number of boulders and lumps of iron encased in rock. As the disk started to run out of material, it would cool down. The boulders would collide and make a lot of dust, some of which acted as a cement. That would permit rocks to come together, and water vapour would set the cement, thus sticking them together. The planet Venus was in a rather delicate position because while the rock density was higher there that at Earth’s position, the temperatures from the star were hotter, and it was more difficult to set the cement. Accordingly, Venus was more difficult to get started. One possibility was that it might not get started, and hence it was predicted that some stars might have a boulder belt around them. These might come together gravitationally, but they would not stick.

Weird though it might seem, Tabby’s star more or less fits what might be expected from that theory. Because of the size of the star, if the initial accretion disk had the same characteristics proportionately to our star, the Earth equivalent would be about 2.75 AU from the star, which puts the “blocking object” more or less where the Venus equivalent should be. If it is as I predicted, there should be effects on the colour of the light, because blue light scatters more than red light if it goes through dust. I am waiting to see what happens. If it does turn out to be a gravitationally focused mass of boulders and dust, remember you heard about it here. Then ask yourself, if the standard theory of planetary formation is actually correct, why has this mass not formed a planet? Then the question is, is this evidence for my theory, or is it something else that is misleading me?