Dekan

Nice one! But that teeny parachute thingy can't add much to the ship's speed. Better if it had 5 times the diameter. But then what happens when the wind drops, the chute falls in the sea, and the cursing crew have to winch the great wet thing back on board, without ripping it to bits on the ship's sides. Why not mount a mast and sail amidships. That'd be easier to handle, if anyone was serious about it, but I don't think they are - it's pure swivel-eyed Greeny stuff (no offence - I know the intentions are good, probably)

The OP asked for a basic understanding of "Time". And people seem to be assuming that "Time" is an actual "thing", which can be pinned down and defined. But surely it's only an abstract noun we've invented. I mean, in the English language we've got a word "time", That doesn't by itself create an actually physical entity Anymore than having the English word "beauty" creates some objective and measurable entity "Beauty". Also in this connection, people keep talking about time "flowing". And the "flow" of time. As if "flow" were a thing, Well, why not try to define "flow". What is "Flow"? Doesn't that make as much sense as asking, what is "Time"? Aren't we perhaps being led astray by language. We create a word "Time", then look for some "thing" to correspond to it. But there may not be one. It may be just a linguistic artifact.

I see what you mean - if pressed too far, He might simply shut down the current Universe, then re-start with a mk.-2 version which omits the upstart Homo Sapiens. We're certainly causing Him trouble by building things like the LHC,. Just think how many new particles it's making Him think up! Wearying for Him. At least He saved some ieffort by intervening to get that big US 1990's SuperConducting SuperCollider stopped. That must have been a relief. Even more of a relief for Him, if He's divinely encouraging the Green Movement, which seems strangely averse to modern Science. The Greens want to build scaled-up medieval windmills. The sight of these must be very reassuring to Him. Isn't the sight of a massive windfarm with hundreds of expensive turbines all motionless on a windless day, a demonstration of how dumb people can be?

The alternative energy crowd only seem to be interested in retrogressing - like getting power from wind. Perhaps they want us to go back to sailing-ships - the wind is free, and quiet engineless hulls wouldn't thrash the ocean with noisy propellers, so the whales and dolphins would enjoy acoustic peace. Of course, ocean voyages would take longer, ships might get becalmed for days by lack of wind, world-trade would be disrupted, economies might suffer, people might run out of food, but while going hungry, they'd be consoled by listening to recordings of whale-songs.

Perhaps the Creator deliberately designed the Universe to demonstrate His cleverness. He thought " I'll create a Universe so fiendishly hard to understand, that nobody else will be clever enough to make sense of it". Then, to test the effectiveness of His egotistical plan, He made some intelligent beings (humans) and put them in the Universe, This was to see whether they were clever enough to suss it out. He was pretty confident they wouldn't. And for thousands of years His confidence seemed justified. He watched smugly as the humans did nothing more than run about, slowly inventing stone axes and bows and arrows. But then, He got a shock. The puny humans unexpectedly started developing Science, This enabled them to start serious, fast, investigations into the nature of the Universe. Thus potentially threatening His supreme cleverness. To foil this threat, He made sure that whenever the humans seemed to be making progress towards a rational understanding of the Universe, they got obfuscated by some new complication. And these complications are continuing to this day. So, if we find a Higg's boson, it's not the Higg's boson, No- it turns out be only a member of a possible whole extended family of them. Into which, He's no doubt cunningly slipped "up" ones, "down" ones, "top" and "bottom" ones, ""strange" and "charmed" ones. All in different "colors" and "flavors".of course. Not to mention their mirror-image super-symmetrical counterparts, which He's got craftily hidden up His sleeve, to be played when LHC-2 gets going.. In fact, doesn't particle physics most clearly reveal this - the scale, and desperation, of His grandiose will not to be outdone in cleverness by humans. No matter how many particles we cleverly discover, He'll always come up with some more to confound us. So it will go on - He cannot allow humans to attain full comprehension of the Universe, because then He'd have to admit defeat, resign, and shamefacedly flee. And that's not an option - where would He run away to?

I like your "can-do" spirit! This is what we need more of nowadays. As iNow points out in #25, some things may be mathematically impossible, like a rational number for square-root 2. But who knows... if we used different maths... after all, didn't we manage to get a handle on the square-root of -1 simply by calling it "i" . Then using it in practical calculations. In the practical field of applied Science and Technology, nothing that violates the basic laws of Physics (as currently understood!), should be regarded as impossible. Anything can be accomplished, - if we have the resources and knowledge (as you say) to do it. And above all - the will. For example, the USA could easily have a manned Moon-Station, if the will was was there to go out and build it. The money isn't really a problem (the US has spent billions on the absurd F-35) There's a negative, defeatist frame of mind, that seems to have infected modern thinking about Scientific progress,. This might be due to Green influence.

Reply - I wonder why the proportionality constant is c-squared. That seems to imply a kind of "Flatland"-style 2-D Universe. Whereas the actual Universe is 3-D. I mean light doesn't travel in a flat 2-D plane. It goes off in all three dimensions, Wouldn't that make a c-cubed constant, more what one would expect?

Replacing GR by something better, might be a career-maker for a young new scientist. But suppose he has to apply for funding from a panel of older scientists, who've spent the whole of their scientific careers working on and developing GR theory. How are they likely to react to this whipper-snapper, wanting funds to research a new theory which could prove that their life's work has been based on a false idea. Given human nature, would it be right to suspect that some of the older guys might be disinclined to grant funding?

Perhaps humans are born with a sense of moral values. I'm sceptical about that, but suppose it's true. At any rate, this sense seems to be not very strong, Hence it needs to be "enforced" by some powerful source of authority. Such authority was provided, In very primitive times, by tribal leaders. Who simply said "If anyone steals anything, I'll kill him" That's simple and clear cut. But it became impracticable when tribes grew in size - to 1,000 or 10,000 or more. With so many people around, how can leaders be expected to keep track of who's done what - whether some particular person has actually stolen something and needs punishing - or whether it's just lies made up by neighbours with a grudge. This was obviously a problem. The solution to the problem, was to invent an alternative source of authority, which would act as a deterrent to stealing and crime in general. The deterrent was Religion. Skipping the polytheistic phase, and getting to medieval times, Religion lays down a general stipulation - that theft, and crime of all descriptions, is sinful. It goes against the will of God And God will punish sinners by sending them to eternal punishment in Hell. Pretty effective stuff, perhaps. However, this stuff became less effective in modern times. Especially since the 18th century. The Enlightenment and the advance of science, all the new inventions - especially the steam engine, and I9th-century electric telegraph - gave Man a strong sense of his own power. This was bound to weaken belief in God and Religion. Nevertheless, the fundamental need - for a source of external deterrent authority to enforce morals - didn't go away. Religion might no longer be adequate, in a scientific age, to supply this deterrent, but a new force was developed - the Police Force. Surely it's no co-incidence, that the Metropolitan Police Force, and "Scotland Yard", were born in the 19th Century, in the most scientifically and industrially advanced country of the time - Britain. This British invention has since been copied all over the world, and no wonder - it offers a civilised modern means of deterring crime, and encouraging moral behaviour, without risking the potential barbarities of Religion ! So I think OP's post is basically on the right lines. You don't need Religion to have morals. Just an efficient Police Force.

Just a few comments from a -51 parhia: 1. (Anticipated by by Endy, while I was still thinking about this post!) Regarding Venus, note that its retrograde rotation is very slow. Quite unlike Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, These all have fast direct rotations of less than, or not much exceeding, 24 hours. One might suspect therefore, that Venus was originally a fast direct rotator, but got hit by a big asteroid/planetismal that "knocked it backwards", so to speak. The residual heat from this impact might account for the planet's high temperature, And the very dense atmosphere might result from gasses released from the disrupted body of the planet. A quasi-Velikovskian theory, but might contain some truth. 2. Regarding Kramer's original postulate, about Gravity causing rotation of bodies, Surely at least in some cases, this must true. In an earlier post I cited the axial rotation of the Moon as it orbits the Earth. Other posters keep referring to "tidal lock" in this connection. But isn't that just another term for "gravitional lock". If so, then can't we say that the Earth's gravitational field forces the Moon to rotate on its axis. I mean, could you have a non-rotating Moon orbiting the Earth? 3. On the "hammering head with metallic objects" feeling, great minds have experienced this throughout the history of Science. What seems to happen, is that a powerful intellect gets thoroughly saturated with current scientific ideas. It becomes so to be speak, "satisfied" with them. This makes it very unhappy about ideas which disturb this "satisfaction". Which can lead to emotional reactions.

I'd be grateful for advice and guidance on this question please. Given - that in 1984, London ("chief city of Airstrip One") is being subjected to a sustained bombardment by rocket-bombs, and: 1. The rocket-bombs are falling at the rate of 20 to 30 a week (say, 4 each day); 2. Each bomb destroys buildings within a 50-metre radius of the impact-point; 3. No rebuilding is undertaken; 4. London has an area of 40 x 40 kilometres, ie 1,600 square kilometres; Then - is it possible to calculate how long it would take for London to be completely destroyed? The difficulties in such a calculation seem to be as follows: A. As the bombardment goes on, there's an increasing probability that incoming bombs will land in the already destroyed area. Eg, when 50% of London has been destroyed, 50% of newly-arriving bombs will land in this destroyed area, and so do no more than "convulse the rubble". B. There's an infinite degree of "overlap" between the impact-points of successive bombs. Ie, a new bomb might land right on the dead centre of a previous detonation, or 1 metre from it, or 5 metres from it, or 10 metres.... and so on. I raised this question many years ago, on another science forum, and was told that because of factors A and B above, no exact mathematical calculation can be made. Granted that this is so, is it at least possible to make a kind of "statistical"prediction - on the lines of "after x number of years, there's a 99% probability that London will be 99% destroyed "? This question has nagged at my mind ever since first reading the book (which was before the actual year 1984!) Any advice will be very much appreciated - thanks!

This is a good example. Some people have the wrong idea that the Moon doesn't rotate. This idea obviously comes from the fact, that when we look at the Moon, we always see the same side of the disc. So we see lunar features such as the Mare Crisium, always staying in the same place on the disc (allowing for libration affects caused by the Moon's elliptical orbit ). This unchanging view gives us on Earth the impression that the Moon isn't rotating on its axis. But of course it actually is - att the rate of one axial rotation per lunar orbit, as Swansont points out. And one might suppose that this axial rotation, or spin, is forced on the Moon, by its close proximity to the Earth, and the Earth's gravitational field. I mean, suppose the Moon wasn't near the Earth. Suppose it was floating in the furthest depths of space. Far away from the Earth - far away from the Solar System - outside the Galaxy - outside even the Local Cluster of galaxies. In a very a remote region. Where there wasn't a sun or planet within a million light-years. It would then receive virtually zero gravitional force from other bodies. And as long as that remained the case - the Moon completely isolated from outside influence - wouldn't it be free to be static around its axis - ie not to spin. But if it eventually drifted into the gravitional field of some other body, would the gravitational force of that body induce some lunar spinning? Or not?

I tried to read "Finnegan" decades ago, but never got much past the first page. The book doesn't seem to have any worthwhile scientific content. The only thing I remember about it is the word "riverrun", That occurs I think in the first line, which goes something like "From riverrun to bend (or curve?) of bay..." The overall impression the book gave me, was of being a poor attempt to reprise "Tristram Shandy", which is IMO a much better read, if you like what might be called "cryptobooks". And at least "Tristram" provides one scientific insight in its opening lines, viz - the unreliabity of 18th-century contraceptive techniques.

As annoyed CharonY points out, that suggestion sounds nonsensical. On the other hand, doesn't recent research in another biological field seem to show that stem-cells can be produced, simply by putting skin-cells or blood-cells into a bath of weak citric acid for half an hour. Suppose last year someone had suggested trying that - "put some acid in ". What would've been the response - "Nonsense - how could that possibly work" ?

Maybe OP is waiting for Quantum Computers. These won't need any programming languages at all - you just specify the question, then the Q computer sprays its superpositioned qbits around randomly until it hits good and spits out the answer.

Thanks Sensei. appreciate your post, and would like to pick up on two points from it: 1. You say "If you would do research before posting, and talk about only things that you know, you wouldn't have reputation points like you have....you wouldn't ask such silly questions" To which I'd offer this (off-topic) reply - hasn't Science made progress precisely because some people didn't do previous research, didn't care about reputation points, and did ask silly questions? Think of Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin. Suppose these three characters had posted their ideas on a 16th/17th/19th century equivalent of SFN. Wouldn't they have got very bad rep, and been blasted off? For not doing proper research into the crystalline spheres which obviously surround our centrally- positioned Earth. And for not realising that heavy objects must obviously fall faster than lighter ones? And failing to grasp that all animals were created in 4004 BC and obviously saved from the Great Flood via the accomodation provided in Noah's Ark? 2. But all this is not really germane to the thread. So - getting back on topic - computer languages and the learning of them - a. I can kind of understand the points you make in the last two paragraphs of your post. But couldn't a single language, such as BASIC, cope with all the isues you describe. I mean, an advanced version such as BBC-BASIC enables the programmer to create sub-routines or "procedures". These procedures can contain any amount of complex coding. And once created, they can be called, within the program, by a single command such as PROC- dosomething. That would seem to be all that's necessary. After all, doesn't all programming really boil to this simple proposition - how to make bits flip from "0" to "1" and vice-versa. I find it hard to accept that this simple task can't accomplished by one set of programming instructions. b. On learning programming languages - are kids still taught in schools to program computers? What programming language is used - is it the same in all schools, or do different schools use different languages?

All these different languages! Is it really necessary to have so many? I never do any research before posting (it prejudices the mind so). But I'd guess that the total number of computer languages ever invented, must be fast approaching the number of human languages currently in existence. Which is, purely from memory, some 4,000 or so. Of course, some of the computer languages are perhaps dead or moribund - is COBOL still around? What happened to Forth, and LISP (((aka "Lots of Irritating Silly Parentheses"))). Does Pascal still find favour in some quarters - it was very big in the 1980's. Or has it gone the way of ancient Algol. Can't we devise, and use, a single common-purpose programming language. Just as English is used as the common language for Science. OK, some posters justify the use of computer languages for specific purposes. As in AtomicMaster and Trumptor's posts above - if you're looking at the financial market, then learn Java...... Oracle and SQL programming deal with databases (apologies for conflating the posts). But isn't that a bit as if we were to say - if you're looking at physics, then learn German. Or - Russian literature deals with chemistry, so learn the Cyrillic script. I know these aren't good examples! Best I could do in the white-heat of composition. My point is - suppose we discarded all computer languages except one - say C++. Would that make it impossible to write programs to cater for all the problems that we use computers to solve?

@ D. P Fisher's #1: A thought-provoking post. As I understand it, you're laying stress on "uniqueness", "measurement" and " conceptualisation" as characteristics of logic. I'm not sure I entirely agree. First of all, what actually do we mean by "logic" - it's a slippery word. It comes of course from the classical Greek "logos". This has so many shades of meaning that it's hard to pin down. The basic, root, meaning is "talk" or "word". This gets extended to the idea of "discourse", "discussion", "study". As in for example "Biology", which might be rendered "Lifetalk" or "Lifestudy". If we were using words with Anglo-Saxon roots, we might call it "Lifelore", where "lore" has a similar slightly hazy meaning. Because of this lack of precision, "lore" tends to be only used nowadays in terms like "Folklore". And is avoided in modern scientific usage. The most comprehensive modern equivalent to "logic" might be "reasoning". But even that gets narrowed down to propositions such as: If A = B, and B = C, then A = C. And aren't propositions like these, aimed at establishing not "uniqueness" - but "commonality"? The other factors you mention - "measurement" and "conceptualisation" - also seem to be applied, at least in Science, towards the same aim or goal - that of identifying commonality. I must admit to struggling to express myself here - abstract nouns always distress me, and I much prefer specific concrete words. So perhaps I could use a concrete example: Suppose you have in front of you two bowls of nuts. One contains a dozen peanuts, and the other a dozen hazelnuts. One bowl is large and circular, the other smaller and slightly elliptical. So there are in total 26 separate objects. Now if you applied your criterion of "measurement" to them, wouldn't you have to conclude that you were confronted by 26 unique objects. The bowls aren't the exact same shape and size. And they aren't the same shape and size as the nuts. And the peanuts aren't the same as the hazelnuts. And no individual nut, if measured carefully, is exactly the same as any other. Nevertheless if we go beyond mere measurement, and look at "commonality", we can surely identify a lot of common factors, such as: 1. The two bowls, despite their different sizes and shapes, are both recognisably "bowls" - they both possess "bowlness". 2. Similarly the nuts, despite species difference, are all nuts. 3. Both the bowls and the nuts are, in a sense "containers" 4. The numbers of the supplies of nuts are the same 12 = 12 5. 12 and 12 are both even numbers And so on and so forth. And aren't these common factors found, and identified, by a process of conceptualisation of commonality. Just as Newton is (apocryphally) supposed to have dentified Gravity by conceptualising the commonality between the fall of an apple, and the orbit of the Moon?

I suppose so, but why on earth try to hit the ball with a narrow round stick? It seems unnatural. Isn't it obvious that the narrowness means there's little enough chance of actually contacting the ball. And even if you do manage to make contact, the roundness makes the ball fly off at an unpredictable angle. So there's very litte possibility of steering the ball in any judged direction. All the baseball batter can do, is take a big almighty heave-ho swing, and hope for the best. Liitle skill involved. Not like in cricket, where we sensibly use a broad flat-bladed bat. This provides directional control - enabling a skilled batsman to use delicate tickles and deflections to despatch the ball where he chooses. And still the option of a big, full-bladed, square-on , "thwack" sending the ball sailing high over the boundary for a six! Glorious stuff.... No wonder the narrow baseball stick only finds favour in America, and due to post-WWII cultural influence, in Japan. Anyway, this is all a digression - let's get back to the gay subject - far more interesting!

Don't Americans engage in unnatural behaviour when they play baseball. I mean, they try to hit a ball with a narrow round stick.

Doesn't it all come down, in the end, to numbers. Our Solar System contains eight planets. One of these, the Earth, definitely contains life. We can't be sure about the others - Mercury seems guaranteed lifeless, Venus almost certainly the same. Mars - perhaps a 1 in 10 chance of current life as microbes. As for the outer planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune - they're just freezing-cold balls of poisonous gas. Unless - as Jayhawk points out in excellent post#1 - they contain floating creatures in a warm kind of mesosphere. However so far, we've no evidence of that. Our probes to Jupiter and Saturn have shown no indications of life. OK - there might be life in hypothetical sub-surface oceans of Europa, or other satellites of the outer planets. But as yet there's no proof - it's just speculation. So probably the Solar system is a dud as far as life is concerned - except for the Earth. But what of it? The Milky Way galaxy contains at least 100 billion stars, and some of those stars have planets. Researches in the last twenty years show that's true. So there's likely to be another life-bearing Earth-equivalent in our galaxy. Even if there isn't - does it matter. Suppose each galaxy contains only one planet with life. The Universe contains what, 50 billion galaxies? So even at a rate of only one life-bearing planet per galaxy, there'd be plenty of life spread through the Universe. Therefore doesn't it seem, from the numbers alone, that life - at least in simple forms - ought to be fairly common in the Universe.

All people are significant, but some people are more significant than others.

The video of the ant battle is very interesting. It seems to show a complete lack of co-ordination between the fighting ants on each side. Neither side is following a strategic or tactical plan. The "troops" just swirl about engaging in individual combat actions. Naturally this results in a mere chaotic melee. Such a painful lack of planning! Presumably the side with the most numbers eventually carries the day and wins victory. It seems very wasteful. Why can't the ants on one side get organised. If they did that, they could easily outfight and outmanoevre the enemy. For example, by putting strong forces on their right and left wings, leaving a weaker centre. This would invite the enemy ants to rush forward, towards the centre. The centre troops would withdraw slowly, drawing and funneling the enemy deeper into a trap. Then the trap would be closed - the right and left wings would wheel inwards across the enemy's flanks and rear. Thus encircling the enemy. Like at Cannae and Stalingrad. The enemy ants would then be compressed within a steadily shrinking circle, until they had no room to swing their mandibles, and got slaughtered en masse. That's how ant battles ought to go - if there was proper organisation. Consider how organised ants are in other respects. Don't ants engage in farming. That seems a pretty sophisticated activity If they're capable of advanced peacetime behaviour like that, wouldn't you think they'd be better at fighting wars?

Procrastination may be a quintessentially human characteristic. It sets us apart from the lower animals. They react to situations immediately, by taking the necessary actions. Only humans have the power to delay taking these actions, out of a spirit of what might be called conscious perversity. In this context, I recommend study of E.A. Poe's essay "The Imp of Pervesity". Naturally this must be read in its entirety to get the full value of what it offers, but here's an excerpt: "We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. We glow, we are consumed with eagerness to commence the work, with anticipation of whose glorious result our whole souls are on fire. It must, it shall be undertaken today, and yet we put it off until tomorrow; and why? There is no answer, except that we feel perverse, using the word with no comprehension of the principle. Tomorrow arrives, and with it a more impatient anxiety to do our duty, but with this very increase of anxiety arrives, also, a nameless, a positively fearful, because unfathomable, craving for delay. This craving gathers strength as the moments fly. The last hour for action is at hand.. We tremble with the violence of the conflict within us - of the definite with the indefinite - of the substance with the shadow. But if the conflict have proceeded thus far, it is the shadow which prevails - we struggle in vain. The clock strikes, and is the knell of our welfare. At the same time, it is the chanticleer-note to the ghost that has so long overawed us. It flies - it disappears - we are free. The old energy returns. We will labour now. Alas, it is too late!" Making allowances for the 19th Century melodramatic style, don't Poe's words resonate today?

And just to illustrate a further point about the dodginess of prepositions, we say: "I'm in the car" - but "I'm on the bus", or "I'm on the train". Why should that be so? In all 3 cases, the basic concept is travelling in an enclosed vehicle. So the reason for the prepositional distinction is obscure. It might be marginally possible to say "I'm in the bus", though that sounds very odd. But it would definitely not be possible to say "I'm on the car". That would convey the impression that you were sitting on the car's roof, clinging on to the roof-rack.