Contempt of court act 1981

May 26, 2018 1 Comment

In 1981, the British government passed a law called the Contempt of Court Act allowing courts to forbid publication of facts about a current court case, Chapter 49, 4(2) reads:

In any such proceedings the court may, where it appears to be necessary for avoiding a substantial risk of prejudice to the administration of justice in those proceedings, or in any other proceedings pending or imminent, order that the publication of any report of the proceedings, or any part of the proceedings, be postponed for such period as the court thinks necessary for that purpose.

This is a bad law.
One problem with this law is that facts don’t imply any particular conclusion.
Let’s say Peter was accused of raping Mary. A suitable set of facts may be used in a criticism of the idea that Peter didn’t rape Mary. For example, if Peter’s sperm was found in Mary’s vagina, then John had may have had sex with Mary and he may have raped her. John might hear those facts and think that Peter raped Mary.
There might be some other relevant facts that are not consistent with Peter raping Mary. For example, Mary had not been raped at midnight and John left Mary’s location at 11pm and didn’t return. If John heard those other facts and a suitable explanation John might decide Peter is not guilty.
So publishing facts doesn’t force people to reach a particular conclusion. Their conclusion will depend on other facts and the explanations that people present for those facts.
But suppose that John has some bias against Peter. Then perhaps John is eager that Peter should be convicted of rape even if Peter isn’t guilty. Perhaps if John hears a report that Peter was accused he will divide Peter must be harmed regardless of the court’s findings. Or perhaps John will try to get on the jury to get Peter punished. In that case, the reporter isn’t responsible for John’s conduct, so why should the reporter be punished?
Another problem is that this law is open to abuse.
Some particular case may be controversial because it is perceived as being part of a wider problem. People will want to discuss such a case and it may be difficult to find people who are neutral about the issue. But in such cases there is some problem with how the cases are being handled or understood. That problem should be addressed directly by critical discussion. The government may be tempted to suppress such discussion because it has unpopular policies on a particular policy issue. But that is precisely why such a law is bad, the government should have to deal with these issues. The government shouldn’t be forcing an unpopular policy on people because the policy might be bad and even if it is good it hasn’t been properly explained. Trying to suppress such discussion because of a particular trial is dealing with the symptom is not an adequate substitute for dealing with the broader problem.
Another problem is that the government may be corrupt on some issue. Government officials are fallible and some of them are bad people. Some government officials like hurting people. Some government officials like getting money or other goods from people by abusing the law. Some government officials hate particular non-violent ideologies and want to destroy those ideologies and people who hold them. Some government officials make bad decisions in particular cases and want to prevent their mistakes from being revealed. Some government officials take an irrational dislike to a particular person and want to destroy him.
The sections of this law forbidding people to publish material that isn’t a direct incitement to violence should be repealed. Those sections can’t be used in a legitimate way. Any party that wants my vote can have it if they make a credible campaign promise to repeal this law and other laws that are being used to destroy freedom of speech in the UK.
This law is being used by government officials to prevent commentary on particular cases now. It is not a dead letter. I won’t mention the particular cases, but anyone who is interested will know what cases I’m referring to anyway.

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Tunnelling mistake

May 19, 2018 1 Comment

In a previous post I wrote about quantum tunnelling. In that post I said that the energy of the different instances of the particle undergoing tunnelling were not larger than those of the barrier. I reached this conclusion by looking at the terms in an analytical solution of the Schrodinger equation and estimating their magnitudes. However, estimation can quite easily go wrong and I thought I should check by doing a simulation. I have performed a simulation and my conclusion was wrong. Some instances of the particle tunnelling through the barrier increase their energy. The program that performs the simulation and produces the figures shown below can be found at this link. The program is written in Python because it has sparse complex number matrix libraries, which were needed for the simulation. The link also includes some references to papers used in writing the code.

Tunnelling involves a wavepacket interacting with a potential that has higher energy than the wavepacket. After the interaction some instances of the particle are present on the other side of the potential. I made the potential have a height of 1.1 times the wavepacket’s mean energy. The wavepacket comes in from the left, some of it is reflected to the left and some continues to the right after the wavepacket interacts with the potential, as shown in the figures below. The red line represents the potential, the blue line is square amplitude of the wavepacket, which gives the probability of finding the particle in that location.

wavef0wavef400wavef500wavef900

The energy of a wave with wavenumber k is k^2/2m. I calculated the energy spectrum at each time by doing a fast fourier transform, finding the square amplitude at each wavenumber k, which is proportional to the probability of finding the particle to have that frequency when you measure it. The fourier transform includes both positive and negative frequencies: the first half of the spectrum is the positive frequencies, the second half is the negative frequencies. I calculated the square amplitudes for both halves of the FFT and added up the amplitudes that corresponded to the same energy (the +k and -k amplitudes). I then took all of the resulting energy spectra and divided them all by the amplitude of the initial energy spectrum and plotted the resulting normalised results on a semilog scale. This allowed me to see whether the components with energies above that of the initial wavepacket increased or decreased. The results are shown in the figures below at the same times as the figures shown above except that the last figure is omitted. The red lines are positioned so that if the spectrum is above the horizontal red line to the right of the vertical red line, then there is a higher probability of the particle having an energy above what it had before the potential.fftnorm0fftnorm400fftnorm500

It appears that the energy of some of the instances of the particle increased after interacting with the barrier and in particular the probability increased for energies above 1.1 times the wavepacket energy: the energy of the potential. The original post will be updated after I publish this post.

 

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The Conservative Party’s Philosophy

May 12, 2018 1 Comment

In a recent article Daniel Hannan wrote:

Would you go an hour out of your way to get £100 discount on a £300 dishwasher? What about going an hour out of your way to get a £100 discount on a £12,000 car? If you’re typical, you’re much more likely to have answered yes to the first question than to the second. Which, logically, makes no sense at all. Either an hour of your time is worth £100 or it’s not. If the trade-off is in your interest – and, for most of us, it is – then you should make it both times. If you happen to be a hedge-fund owner or a gilded public-sector princeling, then you might rationally say no both times. But there is no sound basis for saying yes to one and not the other.

Hannan goes on to say that the Conservative Party’s leaders believe this kind of thing and base policy on it.

There are many differences between the decision about what dishwasher you should buy and what car you should buy. Many people drive their car to work, so their income depends on having a car that works. A dishwasher saves you some time when dealing with dishes, but if it breaks down you’ll still be able to pay for accommodation and food. So the cost of getting the car decision wrong may be a lot larger than the cost of getting the dishwasher decision wrong. So a person may stick with looking at cars from dealers he trusts rather than go looking for £100 off on a decision that could cost him thousands of pounds if he gets it wrong. So Hannan hasn’t given any reason to think actual decisions made by real human beings are irrational.

Hannan doesn’t mention the fact that according to his own theory politicians are irrational since they are human beings. So politicians should not be trusted to make decisions either according to this theory. And yet, somehow, politicians are fit to make decisions not only about their own lives, but also about the lives of their subjects.

The Conservative Party is run by technocrats who believe they know how you should live your life better than you do. The Conservative Party is opposed to individual liberty because its leaders think you are unfit to make your own decisions. That is part of why they are dragging their feet on Brexit. It also explains their contempt for freedom of speech, and their imposition of bad policy like plastic bag charges. And that’s why I won’t vote for the Conservative Party. I have respect for individual liberty, they have contempt for it.

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