L. Riofrio's Blog

Cumbre Vieja volcano in the Canary Islands looks peaceful now. Undersea surveys have found a 400 cubic km landslide, the debris of a prehistoric eruption. Previous activity has caused the Western slope to come loose, creating a North-South fracture. Another large eruption would cause 500 cubic kilometres of mountain to crash into the sea. Dr. Simon Day and Steven Ward have modelled what would happen next. The initial impact would create a water dome 900 meters high, collapsing and spreading like a stone creating ripples. A massive tsunami would race across the Atlantic at nearly 800 km/hr. The coast of Morocco would be struck by waves 100 meters high. Waves up to 50 meters from crest to trough would strike the US East Coast. Water would inundate coasts from Britain to Brazil. The Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 produced waves up to 30 m high. Krakatoa's eruption in 1883 created 6 m waves, killing 30,000 people. The damage in New York City alone would make 9/11 look like a college prank. The Northeastern US is also vulnerable to earthquakes. As recently as 1925 a magnitude 7 quake struck the region. Unlike California or Hawaii, New York has never prepared for a major earthquake. Before Einstein and Planck some scientists believed they knew everything about physics. Even today some will tell you that they have inventoried everything in the Universe. It is the height of folly to think we know everything in nature. Previously humans did not suspect what lies beneath their feet. The hiccoughs of a Black Hole less than a millimetre across can wipe out whole coastlines. The Universe has power and mysteries far beyond human understanding. POSTED BY L. RIOFRIO AT 1:28 AM 19 COMMENTS SUNDAY, MARCH 13, 2011

A new article from “Inside Science” suggests that ‘constants’ like the speed of light could change. It also suggests that LIGO the gravitational wave detector could be used to find change. This would add to LIGO’s victory in detecting gravitational waves from colliding black holes.Could Fundamental Constants Be Neither Fundamental Nor Constant?

On October 2, 2018 Donna Strickland became only the third woman in history to share the Nobel Prize in physics. That same day her Wikipedia entry finally appeared, frantically written even while people were searching for her name. Others had tried to give her an entry earlier, but Wikipedia’s faceless editors kept deleting her because they felt her work wasn’t noteworthy. The Nobel committee thought otherwise. Someone has been nice enough to write a Wikipedia article about my work. Will it get deleted? Louise Riofrio

Another article has appeared in the DAILY EXPRESS, the other big UK paper, about my work on black holes. Former NASA scientist claims there’s a black hole inside the Earth

I am subject of an article in UK DAILY STAR, one of the biggest newspapers. NASA Scientist Claims Speed of Light Is Changing

I am back in the papers. It started with an article in SCIENCE TRENDS: Atomic Clock in Space to Test Changing Speed of Light

From time to time I have reported on the idea that the Universe is 2/3 filled with a repulsive "dark" energy. Like the Emperor's New Clothes, it is only apparent to those most educated. It would cause expansion of the Universe to accelerate, in violation of the First Law of Thermodynamics on the grandest scale. Alleged detection of "dark" energy led to a Nobel Prize in 2011. Not happy with their million, the discoverers proposed billion-dollar space experiments to investigate "dark" energy, with names like SNAP. The last remnant of them, WFIRST, is cancelled in the new NASA budget. February 21-23, 2018 is a Dark Matter conference at UCLA. The conference used to include "dark" energy, but the latter is a dead field. Reputable conferences like the International Astronomical Union don't include "dark" energy, though they have discussions on a changing speed of light. The "accelerating data is sign of a change in the speed of light, exactly as predicted. A simple equation GM=tc^3 predicts the "accelerating" data more precisely than any "dark" speculation. The idea of repulsive "dark" energy is dead.

In 1998 Adam Riess was first author on a paper claiming evidence that the universe was accelerating. In 2011 he shared 1/4 of a Nobel Prize for the "discovery". Shortly after Oxford researchers published a paper saying the dark energy may not exist, Riess was compelled to write a denial in Scientific American blogs. No, astronomers haven't decided dark energy is nonexistent! It's on!

Professor Subir Sarkar of Oxford has long been a skeptic of "dark energy". The idea of an accelerating universe was first proposed in 1998 by two competing groups of physicists, both based in Berkeley and both using the same data on Type Ia supernovae. In a new study of 740 supernovae, 10 times the original dataset, Professor Sarkar concludes that the data is consistent with a non-accelerating universe. Marginal evidence for cosmic acceleration from Type Ia supernovae For years physicists have wasted careers and their credibility professing that the universe is filled with a repulsive "dark energy". If DE really dominated the universe, objects would not fall toward Earth! Data indicating an "accelerating universe" really shows a slowing speed of light. A simple equation GM=tc^3 predicts the data precisely.

Science has long tried to put the Universe on a T-shirt. Using science and light, I've done that. The project has only been on Kickstarter a day, and has already blown past its modest goal. We are bringing Light to the Universe.