wiggling cesium causes IMAX brain rot

My Amazing Clock, which NorthCO,usa figured out was actually a cleverly-disguised Radio that decodes Time Signals regulated by WWV's cesium-133 Atomic Clock, sent me surfing for the actual number of Wiggles Per Second of the cesium-133 nucleus. Not hard to find on the Web, almost as many sites as Paris Hilton wearing clothes.

If you are a latecomer to Vleeptron, if you only just caught the Zeta Beam, earlier readers have experienced a spate of Vleeptron rants about censorship down at the IMAX theaters ( <- note 2 links there). If the narrator of some 6-story-high nature documentary is incautious enough to mutter that the emperor penguin wasn't always the emperor penguin, but morphed into its modern penguinitude through millions of years of Evolution (a.k.a. Natural Selection), IMAX science centers, particularly in the USA's Bible Belt, have stopped showing such films, because they're getting complaints from the Creationists, or the Creation Scientists, or the Intelligent Design crowd, who don't want their taxpayer dollars renting these anti-Bible movies and brainwashing busloads of their children in dark rooms with anti-religious godless science stuff.

And that in turn is sending a chill up the Finance Chain so that producers of these nature and science documentaries can't get the funding to make their IMAX movies in the first place, because the usual sources of movie financing are worried these expensive productions won't be able to find an audience and thus won't earn back their production costs. (Nobody freezes to death in Antarctica for three years to get rich, but they would like to make enough profit so they can take their IMAX camera to the Gobi Desert and freeze and broil for another three years and make another movie.)

(Pat Z. reports that there's a movement of Swiss parents yanking their kids out of the public schools which teach Evolution in the science curriculum. It's not just a USA Bible Belt thang.)

One of the first sites which Google returned indeed has the correct Number of Wiggles Per Second of cesium-133. Which it uses in a chain of reasoning to prove that the Universe isn't 13,700,000,000 years old, and didn't begin in some secular sort of Big Bang. Here's an alternative account of the beginning of the Universe, or The Creation, from the Center for Scientific Creation, which seems to be a one-man band run by a retired Air Force Colonel and mechanical engineer with an MIT degree (and West Point graduate, and Army Ranger, and -- this guy's done it all!) named Dr. Walt Brown. (It's one of Google's first cesium wiggle sites because, by coincidence, Dr. Walt just updated it yesterday.)

I don't want to put words in Dr. Walt's mouth -- you should click on the above link and let Dr. Walt speak for himself -- but basically Dr. Walt says that the Speed of Light was not always 1,802,617,499,785,254 forlongs per fortnight, but has been rapidly decreasing. Light, says Dr. Walt, used to be a whole lot faster.

So conclusions that superdistant galaxies (for example, photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope) are ancient galaxies formed soon after the Big Bang are wrong. Dr. Walt is trying to do Something Odd with the Speed of Light so that he can reach a very different conclusion, but one that smells and tastes like science, one that wears a Science Hat.

Eventually he wants us to agree with the famous estimate of Anglican Bishop James Ussher (1581 - 1656), who used the Bible to calculate that the first day of Creation began at nightfall preceding Sunday 23 October 4004 BC in the proleptic Julian calendar, near the autumnal equinox.

So. Same number of Wiggles Per Second for cesium-133, but two diffferent dates for the beginning of the Universe, and both conclusions wear a Science Hat. Pick One:

|__| 13,700,000,000 years ago
|__| 6009 years ago

Be careful which you choose. One could make your graduate advisor in the university physics department happy, and launch you on a great science career, and a Nobel Prize. Or the biochemistry department, and from there finding the cure for AIDS.

But it could also send you to Hell and boiling in sulfur and agony forever. Momento mori.

With Dr. Walt, you can be in complete agreement with the chronology of the Bible and wear a Science Hat, too! You can be occasionally mistaken for a serious astrophysicist when people Google and find your website. And Heaven's your reward!

On Vleeptron, we have conducted extensive research into this matter, and I don't think the Speed of Light is slowing down.

But I am increasingly convinced that people are getting stupider.

Which didn't used to bother me. But now it's bothering me a lot. It's seeping into government, law (e.g. stem cell research), education (the very successful attack on public-school textbooks), and now into the IMAX theaters.

Oh. Bishop Ussher also had an opinion about Freedom of Worship / Religious Tolerance. I recently noted that those whacky screwy Dutch have let anybody worship any goddam way he or she wants since the 16th Century.

Here's Irish Anglican Bishop Ussher's 1626 take on that:

The religion of the papists is superstitious and idolatrous; their faith and doctrine erroneous and heretical; their church ... apostatical; to give them therefore a toleration, or to consent that they may freely exercise their religion ... is a grievous sin.

You can see what fine things the Bishop's ideas have done for Ireland. By all means, follow his lead into Science. Dr. Walt can help you. We can keep Catholics and Protestants hating and killing each other in Ireland, we can fill the public schools and the IMAX theaters with Creation Science drivel, we can devolve science and medicine to the Homer Simpson level, and we can all go to Heaven. That's a plan.