Susan Signal Johnson Bio:
Susan Johnson – Susan’s experiences started at age7 when she had a recurring dream of ‘us’ flying a ship into the earth’s solar system and being abducted by a black hole over the earth’s upper atmosphere. Then, ‘they’ found her using her soul residual energy signature to trace her trajectory and incarnated her into her present physical body. ‘They’ then told her that she is one of them and showed her her true Arkaron parents on their mother ship. Susan wrote seven articles for George Filer in his Filers Files.
Susan will talk about what she knows about the Tall Whites and their Ovoid Grey companions, and how they deceive and enslave humans through lies and religion. Bruce will talk about what KaRa told me, and how she and her organization fit the Judeo-Christian and Muslim religious beliefs.
Bruce Cornet received a B.A. degree (1970) in biology from the University of Connecticut, a Masters degree (1972) in paleobotany from that same university, and graduated from Penn State in 1977 with a Ph.D. in geology and palynology (the study of fossil spores and pollen, used to age date rocks). He spent 11 years in the oil industry (1977-1988), working for Gulf Research & Development, Exxon USA, Mobil Oil Corporation, and Superior Oil Company, all in Houston, TX. Between 1981 and 1982 he ran his own independent exploration company (Geminoil, Inc.), which drilled for and found oil in eastern Virginia. Between 1988 and 1993 he held a research position at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (part of Columbia University).
He is profiled on ResearchGate, and has published many scientific Articles (28), Books (1), Chapters (3), Conference Papers (2), Theses (2), Technical Reports (4), Research (2), Experiment Findings (1), and Presentations (6). All total (49). He taught classroom geology and botany, and an online geology course for the Raritan Valley Community College in New Jersey for seven years (2002-2008). He also taught physical and historical geology for the El Paso Community College in Texas, and for the Dona Ana Community College, a branch of New Mexico State University. Now retired, he has been writing books and continuing his research into UAP and Alien Abductions.
Website: http://www.sunstar-solutions.com/AOP/Bonnie/Anatomy_Deception.htm
Bruce on ET connection between his late wife Bonnie, and a huge white domed circular mothership embedded in cloud over her grave.
Note huge mothership embedded in cloud, and green and purple colors on temple at center of Garden of Texas Liberty, colors of Bonnie’s Spirit.
Green and purple Spirit lights dancing around Temple like a merry-go-round.
Bonnie’s Egyptian jewelry. Star and Crescent ring signifies KaRa, or Spirit of God, adopted by Muslims as a symbol of their religion.
Columbia Professor: There’s a 50% Chance We’re Living in a Simulation
He did the math.
VICTOR TANGERMANN18 HOURS AGO
In an influential 2003 paper, University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom laid out the possibility that our reality is a computer simulation dreamed up by a highly advanced civilization. In the paper, he argued that at least one of three propositions must be true:
Civilizations usually go extinct before developing the capability of creating reality simulations.
Advanced civilizations usually have no interest in creating reality simulations.
We’re almost certainly living inside a computer simulation.
Now, Columbia University astronomer David Kipping took a hard look at these propositions, also known as Bostrom’s “trilemma,” and argued that there’s essentially a 50-50 chance that we are indeed living in a simulation, Scientific American reports.
Kipping collapsed the first two propositions into one, arguing that they both would result in the same outcome — we are not living inside a simulation.
“You just assign a prior probability to each of these models,” Kipping told SA. “We just assume the principle of indifference, which is the default assumption when you don’t have any data or leanings either way.”
Kipping also argues that the more layers of reality a simulation was embedded in, like a Russian doll, the more computer resources would dwindle.
In other words, the further you went down the rabbit hole, the less computing power you’d have to create a convincing simulation.
The astronomer’s conclusion after crunching the numbers: it’s about a 50 percent chance that either hypothesis is true.
But if humans were to ever come up with such a simulation, that picture would change radically.
“Then you are only left with the simulation hypothesis,” Kipping told SA. “The day we invent that technology, it flips the odds from a little bit better than 50-50 that we are real to almost certainly we are not real, according to these calculations.”
Other findings could put the question to bed. What if we could detect a “glitch in the Matrix” that showed that our reality is a simulation? Or what if we could demonstrate that the simulation uses quantum superpositions that are only determined when you look at them?
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Others even argue that over the next several decades, our computing know-how will actually allow us to finally confirm once and for all if we do live in a simulation or not.
For now, we have to contend ourselves with the fact that we just don’t know.
“It’s arguably not testable as to whether we live in a simulation or not,” Kipping told SA. “If it’s not falsifiable, then how can you claim it’s really science?”
Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 50–50
Gauging whether or not we dwell inside someone else’s computer may come down to advanced AI research—or measurements at the frontiers of cosmology
By Anil Ananthaswamy on October 13, 2020
It is not often that a comedian gives an astrophysicist goose bumps when discussing the laws of physics. But comic Chuck Nice managed to do just that in a recent episode of the podcast StarTalk. The show’s host Neil deGrasse Tyson had just explained the simulation argument—the idea that we could be virtual beings living in a computer simulation. If so, the simulation would most likely create perceptions of reality on demand rather than simulate all of reality all the time—much like a video game optimized to render only the parts of a scene visible to a player. “Maybe that’s why we can’t travel faster than the speed of light, because if we could, we’d be able to get to another galaxy,” said Nice, the show’s co-host, prompting Tyson to gleefully interrupt. “Before they can program it,” the astrophysicist said, delighting at the thought. “So the programmer put in that limit.”
Such conversations may seem flippant. But ever since Nick Bostrom of the University of Oxford wrote a seminal paper about the simulation argument in 2003, philosophers, physicists, technologists and, yes, comedians have been grappling with the idea of our reality being a simulacrum. Some have tried to identify ways in which we can discern if we are simulated beings. Others have attempted to calculate the chance of us being virtual entities. Now a new analysis shows that the odds that we are living in base reality—meaning an existence that is not simulated—are pretty much even. But the study also demonstrates that if humans were to ever develop the ability to simulate conscious beings, the chances would overwhelmingly tilt in favor of us, too, being virtual denizens inside someone else’s computer. (A caveat to that conclusion is that there is little agreement about what the term “consciousness” means, let alone how one might go about simulating it.)
In 2003 Bostrom imagined a technologically adept civilization that possesses immense computing power and needs a fraction of that power to simulate new realities with conscious beings in them. Given this scenario, his simulation argument showed that at least one proposition in the following trilemma must be true: First, humans almost always go extinct before reaching the simulation-savvy stage. Second, even if humans make it to that stage, they are unlikely to be interested in simulating their own ancestral past. And third, the probability that we are living in a simulation is close to one.
Before Bostrom, the movie The Matrix had already done its part to popularize the notion of simulated realities. And the idea has deep roots in Western and Eastern philosophical traditions, from Plato’s cave allegory to Zhuang Zhou’s butterfly dream. More recently, Elon Musk gave further fuel to the concept that our reality is a simulation: “The odds that we are in base reality is one in billions,” he said at a 2016 conference.
“Musk is right if you assume [propositions] one and two of the trilemma are false,” says astronomer David Kipping of Columbia University. “How can you assume that?”
To get a better handle on Bostrom’s simulation argument, Kipping decided to resort to Bayesian reasoning. This type of analysis uses Bayes’s theorem, named after Thomas Bayes, an 18th-century English statistician and minister. Bayesian analysis allows one to calculate the odds of something happening (called the “posterior” probability) by first making assumptions about the thing being analyzed (assigning it a “prior” probability).
Kipping began by turning the trilemma into a dilemma. He collapsed propositions one and two into a single statement, because in both cases, the final outcome is that there are no simulations. Thus, the dilemma pits a physical hypothesis (there are no simulations) against the simulation hypothesis (there is a base reality—and there are simulations, too). “You just assign a prior probability to each of these models,” Kipping says. “We just assume the principle of indifference, which is the default assumption when you don’t have any data or leanings either way.”
So each hypothesis gets a prior probability of one half, much as if one were to flip a coin to decide a wager.
The next stage of the analysis required thinking about “parous” realities—those that can generate other realities—and “nulliparous” realities—those that cannot simulate offspring realities. If the physical hypothesis was true, then the probability that we were living in a nulliparous universe would be easy to calculate: it would be 100 percent. Kipping then showed that even in the simulation hypothesis, most of the simulated realities would be nulliparous. That is because as simulations spawn more simulations, the computing resources available to each subsequent generation dwindles to the point where the vast majority of realities will be those that do not have the computing power necessary to simulate offspring realities that are capable of hosting conscious beings.
Plug all these into a Bayesian formula, and out comes the answer: the posterior probability that we are living in base reality is almost the same as the posterior probability that we are a simulation—with the odds tilting in favor of base reality by just a smidgen.
These probabilities would change dramatically if humans created a simulation with conscious beings inside it, because such an event would change the chances that we previously assigned to the physical hypothesis. “You can just exclude that [hypothesis] right off the bat. Then you are only left with the simulation hypothesis,” Kipping says. “The day we invent that technology, it flips the odds from a little bit better than 50–50 that we are real to almost certainly we are not real, according to these calculations. It’d be a very strange celebration of our genius that day.”
The upshot of Kipping’s analysis is that, given current evidence, Musk is wrong about the one-in-billions odds that he ascribes to us living in base reality. Bostrom agrees with the result—with some caveats. “This does not conflict with the simulation argument, which only asserts something about the disjunction,” the idea that one of the three propositions of the trilemma is true, he says.
But Bostrom takes issue with Kipping’s choice to assign equal prior probabilities to the physical and simulation hypothesis at the start of the analysis. “The invocation of the principle of indifference here is rather shaky,” he says. “One could equally well invoke it over my original three alternatives, which would then give them one-third chance each. Or one could carve up the possibility space in some other manner and get any result one wishes.”
Such quibbles are valid because there is no evidence to back one claim over the others. That situation would change if we can find evidence of a simulation. So could you detect a glitch in the Matrix?
Houman Owhadi, an expert on computational mathematics at the California Institute of Technology, has thought about the question. “If the simulation has infinite computing power, there is no way you’re going to see that you’re living in a virtual reality, because it could compute whatever you want to the degree of realism you want,” he says. “If this thing can be detected, you have to start from the principle that [it has] limited computational resources.” Think again of video games, many of which rely on clever programming to minimize the computation required to construct a virtual world.
For Owhadi, the most promising way to look for potential paradoxes created by such computing shortcuts is through quantum physics experiments. Quantum systems can exist in a superposition of states, and this superposition is described by a mathematical abstraction called the wave function. In standard quantum mechanics, the act of observation causes this wave function to randomly collapse to one of many possible states. Physicists are divided over whether the process of collapse is something real or just reflects a change in our knowledge about the system. “If it is just a pure simulation, there is no collapse,” Owhadi says. “Everything is decided when you look at it. The rest is just simulation, like when you’re playing these video games.”
To this end, Owhadi and his colleagues have worked on five conceptual variations of the double-slit experiment, each designed to trip up a simulation. But he acknowledges that it is impossible to know, at this stage, if such experiments could work. “Those five experiments are just conjectures,” Owhadi says.
Zohreh Davoudi, a physicist at the University of Maryland, College Park, has also entertained the idea that a simulation with finite computing resources could reveal itself. Her work focuses on strong interactions, or the strong nuclear force—one of nature’s four fundamental forces. The equations describing strong interactions, which hold together quarks to form protons and neutrons, are so complex that they cannot be solved analytically. To understand strong interactions, physicists are forced to do numerical simulations. And unlike any putative supercivilizations possessing limitless computing power, they must rely on shortcuts to make those simulations computationally viable—usually by considering spacetime to be discrete rather than continuous. The most advanced result researchers have managed to coax from this approach so far is the simulation of a single nucleus of helium that is composed of two protons and two neutrons.
“Naturally, you start to ask, if you simulated an atomic nucleus today, maybe in 10 years, we could do a larger nucleus; maybe in 20 or 30 years, we could do a molecule,” Davoudi says. “In 50 years, who knows, maybe you can do something the size of a few inches of matter. Maybe in 100 years or so, we can do the [human] brain.”
Davoudi thinks that classical computers will soon hit a wall, however. “In the next maybe 10 to 20 years, we will actually see the limits of our classical simulations of the physical systems,” she says. Thus, she is turning her sights to quantum computation, which relies on superpositions and other quantum effects to make tractable certain computational problems that would be impossible through classical approaches. “If quantum computing actually materializes, in the sense that it’s a large scale, reliable computing option for us, then we’re going to enter a completely different era of simulation,” Davoudi says. “I am starting to think about how to perform my simulations of strong interaction physics and atomic nuclei if I had a quantum computer that was viable.”
All of these factors have led Davoudi to speculate about the simulation hypothesis. If our reality is a simulation, then the simulator is likely also discretizing spacetime to save on computing resources (assuming, of course, that it is using the same mechanisms as our physicists for that simulation). Signatures of such discrete spacetime could potentially be seen in the directions high-energy cosmic rays arrive from: they would have a preferred direction in the sky because of the breaking of so-called rotational symmetry.
Telescopes “haven’t observed any deviation from that rotational invariance yet,” Davoudi says. And even if such an effect were to be seen, it would not constitute unequivocal evidence that we live in a simulation. Base reality itself could have similar properties.
Kipping, despite his own study, worries that further work on the simulation hypothesis is on thin ice. “It’s arguably not testable as to whether we live in a simulation or not,” he says. “If it’s not falsifiable, then how can you claim it’s really science?”
For him, there is a more obvious answer: Occam’s razor, which says that in the absence of other evidence, the simplest explanation is more likely to be correct. The simulation hypothesis is elaborate, presuming realities nested upon realities, as well as simulated entities that can never tell that they are inside a simulation. “Because it is such an overly complicated, elaborate model in the first place, by Occam’s razor, it really should be disfavored, compared to the simple natural explanation,” Kipping says.
Maybe we are living in base reality after all—The Matrix, Musk and weird quantum physics notwithstanding.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Anil Ananthaswamy
Anil Ananthaswamyis author of The Edge of Physics, The Man Who Wasn’t There and, most recently, Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality
Our Universe Isn’t Real: Scientists Say Ghosts Could Be Signs of a Simulated Universe
“…there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor‐simulations is false unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed…”
What if everything around you isn’t real? Imagine for a second that the planet we live on, the solar system, our galaxy, and eventually the entire universe we see as infinite is actually no more than a simulation?
According to a new theory by computer scientists, our universe may actually be simulated, and what we perceived as “ghosts” could be small pieces of evidence that suggest the universe we live in is simulated.
It’s called the simulation theory, and it proposes that we are no more than “avatars” in a universe that is entirely simulated.
According to computer scientist Curry Guinn from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, our world may not be real. Although Guinn’s idea is speculative, he argues that reports of phenomena such as ghosts, Déjà vu, and strange coincidences could actually be glitches in the “matrix.”
These glitches could prove to be the ultimate piece of evidence that mankind isn’t part of the universe that’s real, but actually a kind of science experiment where everything is simulated. In other words, imagine mankind as being part of a game like The Sims, only at a much larger scale.
Guinn isn’t the only one who argues three’s a possibility we live in a simulated universe. Tesla and Space X CEO Elon Musk shares that belief.
As noted by TechWire, Guinn pointed out Elon Musk’s belief in simulation theory to lend more authority to the idea and suggested mankind could build our own simulations in the future.
In the past, Musk has said that “there is a billion to one chance we are not living in a computer simulation.”
The idea Musk acknowledges as a possibility is actually derived from a scientific paper penned down by Nick Bostrom, a professional philosopher in the United Kingdom. Bostrom’s theory suggests there is a very high possibility we live in a computer simulation.
The idea set forth by Bostrom is, in fact, one of three possibilities. The third one that we are part of a simulation follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor‐simulations is
false unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other
consequences of this result are also discussed.
Guinn already knows who will take the first steps: according to the computer scientists, it will be Video Game developers who will catapult us into a new direction where we will challenge the limits of what we have considered impossible before.
“It is inevitable that we will create realities indistinguishable from this reality,” Guinn explained during a speech at a film festival.
So, how do we actually find out whether or not we are part of a massive, simulated game?
According to Guinn, we need to pay attention and look for bugs in development.
“Glitches in the system. Déjà vu, such as in the Matrix movie when a character sees a cat crossing a doorway repeatedly, may be one glitch,” Guinn explained.
“Ghosts, ESP, coincidences may be others. The laws of physics in our universe seem peculiarly designed with a set of constants that make carbon-based life possible. Where are the edges?”
Bostrom has also set forth that in the near future, computer games will become so well-developed that it will become extremely hard to tell the difference between reality and simulation. Characters inside these games may not even realize they are part of the simulation. In other words, we will come to the stage where we will be able to produce realities that will become indistinguishable from this reality.
PAST SHOWS:
Bruce Cornet & Susan Johnson ~ 09/18/20 ~ UFO Secret Space ~ Host Janet Kira Lessin ~ Aquarian Radio ~ 8 to 10 PM EDT, 7 PM Central, 6 PM Mountain, 5 PM Mountain, 2 PM HST.
I have no social networks or YouTube pages as of yet. I’ve joined a local UFO Meetup group that meets sporadically.
My experiences started at age7 when I had a recurring dream of ‘us’ flying a ship into earth’s solar system and being abducted by a black hole over earth’s upper atmosphere. Then, ‘they’ found me using my soul residual energy signature to trace my trajectory and incarnated me into my present physical body. ‘They’ then told me that I’m one of them and showed me my true Arkaron parents on their mother ship.
I remember crying and feel such a strong bond to them that I put up a fit because I didn’t want to come back here to these parents because they felt distant and not like my real parents. From there they told me how I was created and placed in uterine into my present earth mom’s uterus. At age 7, 1967, I knew about in uterine and in vitro. From then onward I’ve had/still have ongoing experiences with them-my true people.
I graduated high school, got college degrees in physics AA, electronic engineering technology AS, plant mechanical maintenance through an internship at college AS, several certs in OSHA, HAZWOPER, DOE CORE-level 1 very for health physics tech,2 other very in health physics. I worked in the power plant trade as a de in tech, HP tech, and labor.
I have formally diagnosed Asperger’s syndrome back in December 2012. Since then. I found out through watching Mary rod wells speeches on YouTube that most Aspies remember their past lives on other planets and claim to be reincarnated here from those worlds. She has very compelling evidence which backs up all of my recall and claims.
I’m artistic, grow rare plants, orchids, and fix mechanical things around the house. Due to my abrupt aggressive demeanor and my being brutally honest telling the truth and inherently defying the human social brainwashing I have very little to no friends and no social life.
Suzarons’ Vast Spance (past-lives)
1.’We’ were commissioned by the Arfaktianum High Order, High Council (planet, the universe, and races namesake) to come initially to the Allyactron universe to figure out what the source of negative energy and dichotomy was. ‘We’ found the source of it in a parallel universe on the other side of Draco. It was writhing with parasitic spirit entities sucking the life Force out of all life in it. (We The Arcturians-book). So as to prevent it from infecting adjoining universes, ‘we’ had to collapse it. It worked 3/4 of the way but some escaped into this universe through the alpha Draconis portal. So ‘we’ were sent here to finish it off.
- When ‘we’ arrived ‘we’ found the universe teetering but stalled at its next phase of evolution. So we had to work on its D’ and light harmonic configurations to assist its evolvement process. ‘We ‘successfully did it and finished it in 2010-13. But it took’ us’ from a past life on Nyinda and this one to do it successfully.
3.‘We’ ended the Lyran wars that we’re going on for millions of years in Ring Nebula in Lyra, between factions of humans from Vega star and Ara, Andromeda, and Antares (all tall whites). ‘We’ were drawn into the war after ‘we’ landed in Cygnus X-1, Sadr, Rukh and Ruvawa, and Arkaron. ‘We ‘ were going to settle-not conquer-Nyinda. But the locals gave ‘us’ a hard time all the time at every turn. Including interfering with ‘our’ light being’ ascension rites.
4.‘We’ are master planetary geomancers and engineers and create planets for those who’ve lost theirs-including ‘ours’. ‘We’ came into this universe through Taurus. ‘We’ ended up on Budactan near Aldebaran.
- When ‘we’ settled there, there were already Budgavists on it. They welcomed ‘us’ with open arms and integrated ‘us’ into their society, which was easy bc we’re a very similar type of beings. The Budgavists are originally from Orion and 2 adjoining universes: Allyactron and Dreractacte next to it.(us and Yctors drawings) ‘We’ lived on Budactan for approximately 300-500 or 700 years. Then, the Star was about to go supernova. So most of my race left and headed for Cygnus. Ysoron, me, Zydoron, Obron and some others had to stay behind to stabilize the supernova phase to offset the beams to protect the ‘life vein’ in the Milky Way. ‘We’ used a neutral radiation beam to shoot into the Star to change its central energy vortex in its center to modify and redirect the main magnetic flux and gravitational toroidal field in order to shift the pulsar beam away from the life vein. The configuration field variance sphere devices ‘we’ used was simulator the ‘flower of life vector diagram ‘ found on a wall in Abydos, Egypt.
The field is configured in a sphere by a conical focusing device on top of and one on the bottom of the sphere. We send a 1-3 D’ soliton wave through it to register or impregnate the specific energy field permutations on it. Used for field rectification w/n Star. Then ‘we’ change its resonance to match the star’s magnetic/gravitational negative neutral quantum field resonance. When ‘we’ send the soliton beam to the Star it acts as a bandpass filter and allows the field invariance to expand into the star’s core and expand outward. Then ‘we’ measure-in real-time- the expansion and interaction of ‘our field’ with the Stars field. As ‘we’ have a lock on the stars field which enables direct interfacing with it, ‘we’ were able to modify and correct the supernova beam direction. [the UMMO, who only contact a select few and write articles to those few about their chosen field, sent me an article about the use of neutrinos to modify supernova star beams.]
After ‘we’ finished, ‘we’ had to haul ass out of there. But just as we were 1-3 light-years away from it, it went supernova and killed us. Just then an Orion ship with greys (to be more accurate ovoids)on board. They had suspended animation bodies of our DNA on board and were able to trace our souls-there were other Cygnusians on board who specialize Soul Pomps- and animate the bodies with our souls. They made sure we had compatible biomatrix to soul matrix matches with these bodies-that were made from our own DNA from our previous bodies. Then we continued on to Cygnus.
About Dr. Bruce Cornet
Bruce Cornet received a B.A. degree (1970) in biology from the University of Connecticut, a Masters degree (1972) in paleobotany from that same university, and graduated from Penn State in 1977 with a Ph.D. in geology and palynology (the study of fossil spores and pollen, used to age date rocks). He spent 11 years in the oil industry (1977-1988), working for Gulf Research & Development, Exxon USA, Mobil Oil Corporation, and Superior Oil Company, all in Houston, TX. Between 1981 and 1982 he ran his own independent exploration company (Geminoil, Inc.), which drilled for and found oil in eastern Virginia. Between 1988 and 1993 he held a research position at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (part of Columbia University).
He is profiled on ResearchGate, and has published many scientific Articles (28), Books (1), Chapters (3), Conference Papers (2), Theses (2), Technical Reports (4), Research (2), Experiment Findings (1), and Presentations (6). All total (49). He taught classroom geology and botany, and an online geology course for the Raritan Valley Community College in New Jersey for seven years (2002-2008). He also taught physical and historical geology for the El Paso Community College in Texas, and for the Dona Ana Community College, a branch of New Mexico State University. Now retired, he has been writing books and continuing his research into UAP and Alien Abductions.
His book is based on eleven years of field research (1992-2003) in the Wallkill River Valley of New York State, which involved the photographing and videotaping of as many as 140 unconventional craft (ETVs and ARVs), many of which put on deliberate performances for Cornet’s cameras (time exposures or photographic canvasses) and videos. The images reveal electromagnetic, plasma, and gravity-altering properties unknown for declassified or disclosed human-built aircraft.
Appendix I to the book is published online at
http://www.sunstar-solutions.com/AOP/Appendix_I/APPENDIX_I.htm
It contains a detailed list of dates, places, times, events, and witnesses for 141 encounters, including alien abductions in 1981 and in 1993.
This book contains photographic and video evidence for the following:
1. Lights flashing in places where conventional aircraft do not have a physical structure.
2. Headlights out at the “wingtips” where they are the least effective landing.
3. Rotating wingtip lights for flying into and down tunnels.
4. Ability to fly sideways and backward.
5. Ability to stop and hover.
6. Ability to make high-speed right angle turns.
7. Ability to take off vertically from farm fields silently.
Conventional Aircraft Mimicry
1. Outwardly built to resemble older types of commercial aircraft, such as the Boeing 707.
2. Absence of external engines on wings or fuselage.
3. All external surfaces stealth black with no indication of windows, even where the cockpit should be located.
4. No identifying marks, insignias, or numbers on fuselage or wings.
5. Ability to unfold and fold up wings and stabilizers, or make them disappear – and still fly.
6. Ability to fly below conventional jet stall speeds: Can stop and hover, and back up.
7. Can fly silently or project various types of sounds.
8. Triangles that are installed with booms out front and back with lights on them that simulate positions of navigation lights at the front and back of elongate conventional aircraft fuselages.
Unconventional Engine Sounds
1. They provide us with some of the most compelling evidence that we are dealing with advanced foreign technology.
2. Engine sounds can be modified or eliminated; the craft can fly silently.
3. Absence of white noise, which is present for all jet aircraft analyzed.
4. Frequency spectrograms show sound made up of dozens of individual tones that uniformly respond to a shifting or changing energy field.
5. Sound loudness (volume) increases and decreases proportionately for approach and departure, unlike that of conventional jet sounds.
6. Sound profile defies Doppler law in being reversed – pitch decreases on approach and increases on departure.
Could some of these Flying Triangles (FTs) be ours?
1. Is our classified aerospace industry trying to duplicate this technology (ARVs)?
2. Were Mark Whitford, Dina Bertran, and Bruce Cornet given a flight capability demonstration for the TR-3B antigravity Triangle, authorized by the Pentagon to Lockheed Skunk Works, all caught on video and time exposures?
What Is The Singularity And Will You Live To See It?
If you read any science fiction or futurism, you’ve probably heard people using the term “singularity” to describe the world of tomorrow. But what exactly does it mean, and where does the idea come from? We answer in today’s backgrounder.
What is the singularity?
The term singularity describes the moment when a civilization changes so much that its rules and technologies are incomprehensible to previous generations. Think of it as a point-of-no-return in history.
Most thinkers believe the singularity will be jump-started by extremely rapid technological and scientific changes. These changes will be so fast, and so profound, that every aspect of our society will be transformed, from our bodies and families to our governments and economies.
A good way to understand the singularity is to imagine explaining the internet to somebody living in the year 1200. Your frames of reference would be so different that it would be almost impossible to convey how the internet works, let alone what it means to our society. You are on the other side of what seems like a singularity to our person from the Middle Ages. But from the perspective of a future singularity, we are the medieval ones. Advances in science and technology mean that singularities might happen over periods much shorter than 800 years. And nobody knows for sure what the hell they’ll bring.
Talking about the singularity is a paradox because it is an attempt to imagine something that is by definition unimaginable to people in the present day. But that hasn’t stopped hundreds of science fiction writers and futurists from doing it.
singularity
To save this word, you’ll need to log in. Log Insin·gu·lar·i·ty | \ ˌsiŋ-gyə-ˈler-ə-tē , -ˈla-rə- \plural singularities
Definition of singularity
1: something that is singular: such asa: a separate unitb: unusual or distinctive manner or behavior : PECULIARITY2: the quality or state of being singular3: a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative does exist4: a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling into a black holeSynonymsExample SentencesLearn More about singularity
Synonyms for singularity
Synonyms
- crotchet,
- curiosity,
- eccentricity,
- erraticism,
- idiosyncrasy,
- individualism,
- kink,
- mannerism,
- oddity,
- peculiarity,
- quiddity,
- quip,
- quirk,
- tic,
- trick,
- twist
Examples of singularity in a Sentence
People could not understand the singularity of his imagination. a college professor with singularities of dress and speech that have long endeared him to his students
Recent Examples on the Web
Paradoxically, by insisting on its own singularity, America risks becoming just another country that was unable to stop dictatorship.— Federico Finchelstein, The New Republic, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Right to Warn of “Fascism in the United States”,” 20 Aug. 2020
In the singularity point, more digital bits will be created than atoms on the planet.— Fox News, “Digital content will be half ‘Earth’s mass’ by 2245 as ‘information catastrophe’ looms,” 13 Aug. 2020
These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word ‘singularity.’ Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
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First Known Use of singularity
14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1
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“Singularity.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/singularity. Accessed 18 Sep. 2020. MLA Chicago APA Merriam-Webster Style: MLA
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singularity noun
English Language Learners Definition of singularity
formal : the quality of being strange or odd
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What Is A Singularity?
Ever since scientists first discovered the existence of black holes in our universe, we have all wondered: what could possibly exist beyond the veil of that terrible void? In addition, ever since the theory of General Relativity was first proposed, scientists have been forced to wonder, what could have existed before the birth of the Universe – i.e. before the Big Bang?
Interestingly enough, these two questions have come to be resolved (after a fashion) with the theoretical existence of something known as a Gravitational Singularity – a point in space-time where the laws of physics as we know them break down. And while there remain challenges and unresolved issues about this theory, many scientists believe that beneath veil of an event horizon, and at the beginning of the Universe, this was what existed.
Definition:
In scientific terms, a gravitational singularity (or space-time singularity) is a location where the quantities that are used to measure the gravitational field become infinite in a way that does not depend on the coordinate system. In other words, it is a point in which all physical laws are indistinguishable from one another, where space and time are no longer interrelated realities, but merge indistinguishably and cease to have any independent meaning.
Origin of Theory:
Singularities were first predicated as a result of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, which resulted in the theoretical existence of black holes. In essence, the theory predicted that any star reaching beyond a certain point in its mass (aka. the Schwarzschild Radius) would exert a gravitational force so intense that it would collapse.
At this point, nothing would be capable of escaping its surface, including light. This is due to the fact the gravitational force would exceed the speed of light in vacuum – 299,792,458 meters per second (1,079,252,848.8 km/h; 670,616,629 mph).
This phenomena is known as the Chandrasekhar Limit, named after the Indian astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who proposed it in 1930. At present, the accepted value of this limit is believed to be 1.39 Solar Masses (i.e. 1.39 times the mass of our Sun), which works out to a whopping 2.765 x 1030 kg (or 2,765 trillion trillion metric tons).
Another aspect of modern General Relativity is that at the time of the Big Bang (i.e. the initial state of the Universe) was a singularity. Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking both developed theories that attempted to answer how gravitation could produce singularities, which eventually merged together to be known as the Penrose–Hawking Singularity Theorems.
According to the Penrose Singularity Theorem, which he proposed in 1965, a time-like singularity will occur within a black hole whenever matter reaches certain energy conditions. At this point, the curvature of space-time within the black hole becomes infinite, thus turning it into a trapped surface where time ceases to function.
The Hawking Singularity Theorem added to this by stating that a space-like singularity can occur when matter is forcibly compressed to a point, causing the rules that govern matter to break down. Hawking traced this back in time to the Big Bang, which he claimed was a point of infinite density. However, Hawking later revised this to claim that general relativity breaks down at times prior to the Big Bang, and hence no singularity could be predicted by it.
Some more recent proposals also suggest that the Universe did not begin as a singularity. These includes theories like Loop Quantum Gravity, which attempts to unify the laws of quantum physics with gravity. This theory states that, due to quantum gravity effects, there is a minimum distance beyond which gravity no longer continues to increase, or that interpenetrating particle waves mask gravitational effects that would be felt at a distance.
Types of Singularities:
The two most important types of space-time singularities are known as Curvature Singularities and Conical Singularities. Singularities can also be divided according to whether they are covered by an event horizon or not. In the case of the former, you have the Curvature and Conical; whereas in the latter, you have what are known as Naked Singularities.
A Curvature Singularity is best exemplified by a black hole. At the center of a black hole, space-time becomes a one-dimensional point which contains a huge mass. As a result, gravity becomes infinite and space-time curves infinitely, and the laws of physics as we know them to cease to function.
Conical singularities occur when there is a point where the limit of every general covariance quantity is finite. In this case, space-time looks like a cone around this point, where the singularity is located at the tip of the cone. An example of such a conical singularity is a cosmic string, a type of hypothetical one-dimensional point that is believed to have formed during the early Universe.
And, as mentioned, there is the Naked Singularity, a type of singularity which is not hidden behind an event horizon. These were first discovered in 1991 by Shapiro and Teukolsky using computer simulations of a rotating plane of dust that indicated that General Relativity might allow for “naked” singularities.
In this case, what actually transpires within a black hole (i.e. its singularity) would be visible. Such a singularity would theoretically be what existed prior to the Big Bang. The key word here is theoretical, as it remains a mystery what these objects would look like.
For the moment, singularities and what actually lies beneath the veil of a black hole remains a mystery. As time goes on, it is hoped that astronomers will be able to study black holes in greater detail. It is also hoped that in the coming decades, scientists will find a way to merge the principles of quantum mechanics with gravity, and that this will shed further light on how this mysterious force operates.
We have many interesting articles about gravitational singularities here at Universe Today.
Here are 10 Interesting Facts About Black Holes, What Would A Black Hole Look Like? Was the Big Bang Just a Black Hole?, Goodbye Big Bang, Hello Black Hole?, Who is Stephen Hawking?, and What’s on the Other Side of a Black Hole?
If you’d like more info on singularity, check out these articles from NASA and Physlink.
Astronomy Cast has some relevant episodes on the subject. Here’s Episode 6: More Evidence for the Big Bang, and Episode 18: Black Holes Big and Small and Episode 21: Black Hole Questions Answered.
Sources:
- Wikipedia – Gravitational Singularity
- Stephen Hawking – The Beginning of Time
- The Physics of the Universe – Singularities
- Einstein Online – Spacetime Singularities
The Lord’s Prayer was spoken by Jesus of Nazareth as part of the sermon on the mount, delivered to an estimated 5,000 and recorded in Matthew 6:9-13 and Luke 11:2-4. Since the Middle East culture of that day normally recorded only male heads of household in counts such as this, the estimated total witness to this sermon was probably closer to 12,000.
As mentioned, the longer form recorded by Matthew (Levi Mattathia ben Alfai) was part of the Sermon on the Mount, the shorter form in the Gospel of Luke was a response by Jesus to a request by “one of his disciples” to teach them “to pray as John taught his disciples”. This last of course, was a reference to John the Baptist, cousin of Jesus and one who foretold Jesus’ coming as the Messiah.
Rick Thorne’s answer appears to be a reference to the following:
One of Jesus’ disciples, probably Levi Mattathia ben Alfai, wrote down notable sayings of Jesus both during and after his sermons. Written in Aramaic, this collection of sayings would be referred to as the “Oracles of the Lord” by Eusebius in his Church History written in the 4th century. Some scholars, capable of isolating these sayings in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, would call the source “Q.”
The Lord’s Prayer may have been contained, in its original form, in this collection of sayings. A “fingerprint” of Jesus’ sayings seems to be a two-four beat rhythm and rhyming. This was a device of good oratory of the time that assisted listeners in remembering what was said. Scholars learned to identify much of the “Q Source” material as genuine Yeshuine sayings (words of Jesus) by this meter and rhyme when the Greek of the New Testament record was “retroverted” to the Aramaic of Jesus.
Thus the best historical evidence we have, both biblical and extrabiblical, is that Jesus of Nazareth composed the Lord’s Prayer.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Champion Of Gender Equality, Dies At 87
Ariel Zambelich/NPR
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the demure firebrand who in her 80s became a legal, cultural and feminist icon, died Friday. The Supreme Court announced her death, saying the cause was complications from metastatic cancer of the pancreas.
The court, in a statement, said Ginsburg died at her home in Washington, D.C., surrounded by family. She was 87.
“Our nation has lost a justice of historic stature,” Chief Justice John Roberts said. “We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her, a tireless and resolute champion of justice.”
Architect of the legal fight for women’s rights in the 1970s, Ginsburg subsequently served 27 years on the nation’s highest court, becoming its most prominent member. Her death will inevitably set in motion what promises to be a nasty and tumultuous political battle over who will succeed her, and it thrusts the Supreme Court vacancy into the spotlight of the presidential campaign.
Just days before her death, as her strength waned, Ginsburg dictated this statement to her granddaughter Clara Spera: “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”
She knew what was to come. Ginsburg’s death will have profound consequences for the court and the country. Inside the court, not only is the leader of the liberal wing gone, but with the court about to open a new term, the chief justice no longer holds the controlling vote in closely contested cases.
Though Roberts has a consistently conservative record in most cases, he has split from fellow conservatives in a few important ones this year, casting his vote with liberals, for instance, to protect at least temporarily the so-called DREAMers from deportation by the Trump administration, to uphold a major abortion precedent and to uphold bans on large church gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic. But with Ginsburg gone, there is no clear court majority for those outcomes.
Upcoming political battle
Indeed, a week after the upcoming presidential election, the court is for the third time scheduled to hear a challenge brought by Republicans to the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. In 2012, the high court upheld the law in a 5-4 ruling, with Roberts casting the deciding vote and writing the opinion for the majority. But this time the outcome may well be different.
That’s because Ginsburg’s death gives Republicans the chance to tighten their grip on the court with another appointment by President Trump so conservatives would have 6-3 majority. And that would mean that even a defection on the right would leave conservatives with enough votes to prevail in the Obamacare case and many others.
At the center of the battle to achieve that will be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. In 2016, he took a step unprecedented in modern times: He refused for nearly a year to allow any consideration of President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee.
Back then, McConnell’s justification was the upcoming presidential election, which he said would allow voters a chance to weigh in on what kind of justice they wanted. But now, with the tables turned, McConnell has made clear he will not follow the same course. Instead he will try immediately to push through a Trump nominee so as to ensure a conservative justice to fill Ginsburg’s liberal shoes, even if Trump were to lose his reelection bid. Asked what he would do in circumstances such as these, McConnell said: “Oh, we’d fill it.”
So what happens in the coming weeks will be bare-knuckle politics, writ large, on the stage of a presidential election. It will be a fight Ginsburg had hoped to avoid, telling Justice John Paul Stevens shortly before his death that she hoped to serve as long as he did — until age 90.
“My dream is that I will stay on the court as long as he did,” she said in an interview in 2019.
“Tough as nails”
She didn’t quite make it. But Ruth Bader Ginsburg was nonetheless a historic figure. She changed the way the world is for American women. For more than a decade, until her first judicial appointment in 1980, she led the fight in the courts for gender equality. When she began her legal crusade, women were treated, by law, differently from men. Hundreds of state and federal laws restricted what women could do, barring them from jobs, rights and even from jury service. By the time she donned judicial robes, however, Ginsburg had worked a revolution.
That was never more evident than in 1996 when, as a relatively new Supreme Court justice, Ginsburg wrote the court’s 7-1 opinion declaring that the Virginia Military Institute could no longer remain an all-male institution. True, Ginsburg said, most women — indeed most men — would not want to meet the rigorous demands of VMI. But the state, she said, could not exclude women who could meet those demands.
“Reliance on overbroad generalizations … estimates about the way most men or most women are, will not suffice to deny opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description,” Ginsburg wrote.
She was an unlikely pioneer, a diminutive and shy woman, whose soft voice and large glasses hid an intellect and attitude that, as one colleague put it, was “tough as nails.”
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By the time she was in her 80s, she had become something of a rock star to women of all ages. She was the subject of a hit documentary, a biopic, an operetta, merchandise galore featuring her “Notorious RBG” moniker, a Time magazine cover and regular Saturday Night Live sketches.
On one occasion in 2016, Ginsburg got herself into trouble and later publicly apologized for disparaging remarks she made about then-presidential candidate Trump.
But for the most part Ginsburg enjoyed her fame and maintained a sense of humor about herself.
Asked about the fact that she had apparently fallen asleep during the 2015 State of the Union address, Ginsburg did not take the Fifth, admitting that although she had vowed not to drink at dinner with the other justices before the speech, the wine had just been too good to resist. The result, she said, was that she was perhaps not an entirely “sober judge” and kept nodding off.
The road to law
Born in Brooklyn, Ruth Bader went to public schools, where she excelled as a student — and as a baton twirler. By all accounts, it was her mother who was the driving force in her young life, but Celia Bader died of cancer the day before the future justice would graduate from high school.
Then 17, Ruth Bader went on to Cornell University on a full scholarship, where she met Martin (aka “Marty”) Ginsburg. “What made Marty so overwhelmingly attractive to me was that he cared that I had a brain,” she said.
After her graduation, they were married and went off to Fort Sill, Okla., for his military service. There Mrs. Ginsburg, despite scoring high on the civil service exam, could only get a job as a typist, and when she became pregnant, she lost even that job.
Two years later, the couple returned to the East Coast to attend Harvard Law School. She was one of only nine women in a class of more than 500 and found the dean asking her why she was taking up a place that “should go to a man.”
At Harvard, she was the academic star, not her husband. The couple were busy juggling schedules and their toddler when Marty Ginsburg was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Surgeries and aggressive radiation followed.
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“So that left Ruth with a 3-year-old child, a fairly sick husband, the law review, classes to attend and feeding me,” Marty Ginsburg said in a 1993 interview with NPR.
The experience also taught the future justice that sleep was a luxury. During the year of her husband’s illness, he was only able to eat late at night; after that he would dictate his senior class paper to her. At about 2 a.m., he would go back to sleep, Ruth Bader Ginsburg recalled in an NPR interview. “Then I’d take out the books and start reading what I needed to be prepared for classes the next day.”
Marty Ginsburg survived, graduated and got a job in New York; his wife, a year behind him in school, transferred to Columbia, where she graduated at the top of her law school class. Despite her academic achievements, the doors to law firms were closed to women, and though recommended for a Supreme Court clerkship, she wasn’t even interviewed.
It was bad enough that she was a woman, she recalled later, but she was also a mother, and male judges worried she would be diverted by her “familial obligations.”
A mentor, law professor Gerald Gunther, finally got her a clerkship in New York by promising Judge Edmund Palmieri that if she couldn’t do the work, he would provide someone who could. That was “the carrot,” Ginsburg would say later. “The stick” was that Gunther, who regularly fed his best students to Palmieri, told the judge that if he didn’t take Ginsburg, Gunther would never send him a clerk again. The Ginsburg clerkship apparently was a success; Palmieri kept her not for the usual one year, but two, from 1959-61.
Ginsburg’s next path is rarely talked about, mainly because it doesn’t fit the narrative. She learned Swedish so she could work with Anders Bruzelius, a Swedish civil procedure scholar. Through the Columbia University School of Law Project on International Procedure, Ginsburg and Bruzelius co-authored a book.
In 1963, Ginsburg finally landed a teaching job at Rutgers Law School, where she at one point hid her second pregnancy by wearing her mother-in-law’s clothes. The ruse worked; her contract was renewed before her baby was born.
While at Rutgers, she began her work fighting gender discrimination.
The “mother brief”
Her first big case was a challenge to a law that barred a Colorado man named Charles Moritz from taking a tax deduction for the care of his 89-year-old mother. The IRS said the deduction, by statute, could only be claimed by women, or widowed or divorced men. But Moritz had never married.
The tax court concluded that the Internal Revenue Code was immune to constitutional challenge, a notion that tax lawyer Marty Ginsburg viewed as “preposterous.” The two Ginsburgs took on the case — he from the tax perspective, she from the constitutional one.
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According to Marty Ginsburg, for his wife, this was the “mother brief.” She had to think through all the issues and how to fix the inequity. The solution was to ask the court not to invalidate the statute but to apply it equally to both sexes. She won in the lower courts.
“Amazingly,” he recalled in a 1993 NPR interview, the government petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, stating that the decision “cast a cloud of unconstitutionality” over literally hundreds of federal statutes, and it attached a list of those statutes, which it compiled with Defense Department computers.
Those laws, Marty Ginsburg added, “were the statutes that my wife then litigated … to overturn over the next decade.”
In 1971, she would write her first Supreme Court brief in the case of Reed v. Reed. Ruth Bader Ginsburg represented Sally Reed, who thought she should be the executor of her son’s estate instead of her ex-husband.
The constitutional issue was whether a state could automatically prefer men over women as executors of estates. The answer from the all-male Supreme Court: no.
It was the first time the court had struck down a state law because it discriminated based on gender.
And that was just the beginning.
Ginsburg (left) joins the only three other women to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court — Sandra Day O’Connor, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — in a celebration of O’Connor, the first woman justice, at the Newseum in Washington in 2012.Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
By then Ginsburg was earning quite a reputation. She would become the first female tenured professor at Columbia Law School, and she would found the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.
As the chief architect of the battle for women’s legal rights, Ginsburg devised a strategy that was characteristically cautious, precise and single-mindedly aimed at one goal: winning.
Knowing that she had to persuade male, establishment-oriented judges, she often picked male plaintiffs, and she liked Social Security cases because they illustrated how discrimination against women can harm men. For example, in Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, she represented a man whose wife, the principal breadwinner, died in childbirth. The husband sought survivor’s benefits to care for his child, but under the then-existing Social Security law, only widows, not widowers, were entitled to such benefits.
“This absolute exclusion, based on gender per se, operates to the disadvantage of female workers, their surviving spouses, and their children,” Ginsburg told the justices at oral argument. The Supreme Court would ultimately agree, as it did in five of the six cases she argued.
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Over the years, Ginsburg would file dozens of briefs seeking to persuade the courts that the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection applies not just to racial and ethnic minorities but to women as well.
In an interview with NPR, she explained the legal theory that she eventually sold to the Supreme Court.
“The words of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause — ‘nor shall any state deny to any person the equal protection of the laws.’ Well that word, ‘any person,’ covers women as well as men. And the Supreme Court woke up to that reality in 1971,” Ginsburg said.
During these pioneering years, Ginsburg would often work through the night as she had during law school. But by this time, she had two children, and she later liked to tell a story about the lesson she learned when her son, in grade school, seemed to have a proclivity for getting into trouble.
The scrapes were hardly major, and Ginsburg grew exasperated by demands from school administrators that she come in to discuss her son’s alleged misbehavior. Finally, there came a day when she had had enough. “I had stayed up all night the night before, and I said to the principal, ‘This child has two parents. Please alternate calls.’ “
After that, she found, the calls were few and far between. It seemed, she said, that most infractions were not worth calling a busy husband about.
The Supreme Court’s second woman
In 1980, President Jimmy Carter named Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Over the next 13 years, she would amass a record as something of a centrist liberal, and in 1993, President Bill Clinton nominated her to the Supreme Court, the second woman appointed to the position.
She was not first on his list. For months, Clinton flirted with other potential nominees, and some women’s rights activists withheld their active support because they were worried about Ginsburg’s views on abortion. She had been publicly critical of the legal reasoning in Roe v. Wade.
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But in the background, Marty Ginsburg was lobbying hard for his wife. And finally Ruth Ginsburg was invited for a meeting with the president. As one White House official put it afterward, Clinton “fell for her — hook, line and sinker.” So did the Senate. She was confirmed by a 96-3 vote.
Once on the court, Ginsburg was an example of a woman who defied stereotypes. Though she looked tiny and frail, she rode horses well into her 70s and even went parasailing. At home, it was her husband who was the chef, indeed a master chef, while the justice cheerfully acknowledged she was an awful cook.
Though a liberal, she and the court’s conservative icon, Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, were the closest of friends. Indeed, an opera called Scalia/Ginsburg is based on their legal disagreements, and their affection for each other.
Ginsburg speaks at a memorial service for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington in March 2016.Susan Walsh/AP
Over the years, as Ginsburg’s place on the court grew in seniority, so did her role. In 2006, as the court veered right after the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Ginsburg dissented more often and more assertively, her most passionate dissents coming in women’s rights cases.
Dissenting in Ledbetter v. Goodyear in 2007, she called on Congress to pass legislation that would override a court decision that drastically limited back pay available for victims of employment discrimination. The resulting legislation was the first bill passed in 2009 after Obama took office.
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In 2014, she dissented fiercely from the court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, a decision that allowed some for-profit companies to refuse, on religious grounds, to comply with a federal mandate to cover birth control in health care plans. Such an exemption, she said, would “deny legions of women who do not hold their employers’ beliefs, access to contraceptive coverage.”
Where, she asked, “is the stopping point?” Suppose it offends an employer’s religious belief “to pay the minimum wage” or “to accord women equal pay?”
And in 2013, when the court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, contending that times had changed and the law was no longer needed, Ginsburg dissented. She said that throwing out the provision “when it has worked and is continuing to work … is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
She viewed her dissents as a chance to persuade a future court.
“Some of my favorite opinions are dissenting opinions,” Ginsburg told NPR. “I will not live to see what becomes of them, but I remain hopeful.”
And yet, Ginsburg still managed some unexpected victories by winning over one or two of the conservative justices in important cases. In 2015, for example, she authored the court’s decision upholding independent redistricting commissions established by voter referenda as a way of removing some of the partisanship in drawing legislative district lines.
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Ginsburg always kept a backbreaking schedule of public appearances both at home and abroad, even after five bouts with cancer: colon cancer in 1999, pancreatic cancer 10 years later, lung cancer in 2018, and then pancreatic cancer again in 2019 and liver lesions in 2020.During that time, she endured chemotherapy, radiation, and in the last years of her life, terrible pain from shingles that never went away completely. All who knew her admired her grit. In 2009, three weeks after major cancer surgery, she surprised everyone when she showed up for the State of the Union address.
Shortly after that, she was back on the bench; it was her husband, Marty, who told her she could do it, even when she thought she could not, she told NPR.
A year later her psychological toughness was on full display when her beloved husband of 56 years was mortally ill. As she packed up his things at the hospital before taking him home to die, she found a note he had written to her. “My Dearest Ruth,” it began, “You are the only person I have ever loved,” setting aside children and family. “I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell. … The time has come for me to … take leave of life because the loss of quality simply overwhelms. I hope you will support where I come out, but I understand you may not. I will not love you a jot less.”
Shortly after that, Marty Ginsburg died at home. The next day, his wife, the justice, was on the bench, reading an important opinion she had authored for the court. She was there, she said, because “Marty would have wanted it.”
Years later, she would read the letter aloud in an NPR interview, and at the end, choke down the tears.
In the years after Marty’s death, she would persevere without him, maintaining a jam-packed schedule when she was not on the bench or working on opinions.
Some liberals criticicized her for not retiring while Obama was president, but she was at the top of her game, enjoyed her work enormously and feared that Republicans might not confirm a successor. She was an avid consumer of opera, literature and modern art. But in the end, it was her work, she said, that sustained her.
“I do think that I was born under a very bright star,” she said in an NPR interview. “Because if you think about my life, I get out of law school. I have top grades. No law firm in the city of New York will hire me. I end up teaching; it gave me time to devote to the movement for evening out the rights of women and men.”
And it was that legal crusade for women’s rights that ultimately led to her appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.
To the end of her tenure, she remained a special kind of feminist, both decorous and dogged.
