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WHOA! When did AI-double-A change their name? I've been a member for almost 30 years... and I wasn't notified!
AIAA = American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
http://www.aiaa.org
Whew! They're still them... good.
[sarcasm]And that guy in Korea managed to clone a dog, and clone eleven cycles of stem cells, too... interesting fellow.[/sarcasm]
Carry on.
AIAA = American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
http://www.aiaa.org
Whew! They're still them... good.
[sarcasm]And that guy in Korea managed to clone a dog, and clone eleven cycles of stem cells, too... interesting fellow.[/sarcasm]
Carry on.
Well, sweet. Someone send me an e-mail to Deep Blue when I can buy my Valk. Are they working on N3's as well? 'Cause you kever know when you'll need 'em to shoot up aliens.
At least we'll be able to walk around on planets and inside stations.
At least we'll be able to walk around on planets and inside stations.
There will always be charlatans and geniuses, and sometimes the charlatans ARE
geniuses. When we begin to push the envelope there are both at the fore. Some
will make the cut, some will not. Sometimes the one that does not make the cut is the one that is right. We will never know until someone funds the research. I look
at aviation pioneers like Bert (Burt?) Rutan and see him do what NASA is doing (yes,
on a smaller scale) with several orders of magnitude less funding. We in the U.S.
can afford to fund a bunch of so-called "crackpots" (well. if we stop giving tax cuts to the rich) and see where it all goes. Thomas Edison said that innovation was 90%
perspiration, and that is what needs the funding. Here in the U.S., most of whatever wealth that has been generated in the last two decades has been on the backs of layed-off workers. If we don't invest in R&D soon and start innovating again soon, we're FUCKED.
geniuses. When we begin to push the envelope there are both at the fore. Some
will make the cut, some will not. Sometimes the one that does not make the cut is the one that is right. We will never know until someone funds the research. I look
at aviation pioneers like Bert (Burt?) Rutan and see him do what NASA is doing (yes,
on a smaller scale) with several orders of magnitude less funding. We in the U.S.
can afford to fund a bunch of so-called "crackpots" (well. if we stop giving tax cuts to the rich) and see where it all goes. Thomas Edison said that innovation was 90%
perspiration, and that is what needs the funding. Here in the U.S., most of whatever wealth that has been generated in the last two decades has been on the backs of layed-off workers. If we don't invest in R&D soon and start innovating again soon, we're FUCKED.
Gotta agree with Softy on this one, and from what I know, his particle physics is better than mine (I'm an astrophysical fluid kinda guy)
The US government is also spending money on a teleporter... trying to take the quantum level effects to a macro level...
the problem is... it ignores the Heisenberg uncertainty principle entirely.
with a 400 billion dollar budget, and few reputable scientists making the actual financial decisions, they'll buy anything.
That being said. If they DO have a machine that produces that level of magnetic field, expect more interesting things than just this.
The US government is also spending money on a teleporter... trying to take the quantum level effects to a macro level...
the problem is... it ignores the Heisenberg uncertainty principle entirely.
with a 400 billion dollar budget, and few reputable scientists making the actual financial decisions, they'll buy anything.
That being said. If they DO have a machine that produces that level of magnetic field, expect more interesting things than just this.
LOL Yeah, Shape. I imagine that one episode of Coyote & Road Runner where Wilde E. Coyote builds the giant magnet device and everything metal within 1000 miles comes careening into his hidey-hole.
*BOOOM*
Ahhh I love old Coyote & Road Runner cartoons.
*BOOOM*
Ahhh I love old Coyote & Road Runner cartoons.
I'm no scientist, probably not the smartest guy on this thread, but the one thing that struck me about the article is that it talks about going faster then the speed of light, and just how do they plan to stop that speed from crushing all the passangers aboard the ship?? We can barely stand a few G's worth of pressure. Let them spend the money, although I'd rather just see a new working CEV soon.
because traveling like that, there is very little acceleration, you're not moving faster than light, you're just taking a shortcut
Anyway who cares about transporting people? It's the US Air Force. It's about bombs!
Forget about Bombs Tzu... you could transport a piece of the sun to your intended target.
And that guy who is the cloning genius man... he lied... all his stuff is fake.
And that guy who is the cloning genius man... he lied... all his stuff is fake.
They actually have it working for quite some time. This is the beginning of disclosing it. How about that. :-P
80 days to go 11 light years... all of a sudden I feel so Star Trek....
I still hope for this to happen in my lifetime. :)
80 days to go 11 light years... all of a sudden I feel so Star Trek....
I still hope for this to happen in my lifetime. :)
icbm: that was exactly my point... (I fixed my earlier post) :p
Ratt: I'm afraid you contradicted yourself - before I reply, did you mean too? (I don't want to miss your point, since my sarcasm was missed earlier)
Ratt: I'm afraid you contradicted yourself - before I reply, did you mean too? (I don't want to miss your point, since my sarcasm was missed earlier)
I am not going to argue about the validty of Heim's theory until somebody point me to a paper that shows that his theory reduces to the Standard Model of particle physics at low energies. If you can't, then perhaps somebody should do it before rushing to give money.
What I will argue about, is the rush to go fund crackpot ideas. If the only reason you have to fund these stuff is "it'll be great if it is true", then I have a bridge to sell you. Science has a very solid self-regulating mechanism (peer review is one of its components): leapfrog brought up the great example that if you try to BS the system, you'll get caught pretty soon. The sad thing is : the money's already spent. Millions of dollars gone. This is a failure of BOTH the scientists, AND the funding agencies. I can guess that people *wanted* it so much to be true that they decided to ignore all the danger signs.
If you are a funding agency, there is NO EXCUSE for not doing your research properly BEFORE you hand out dough. This is money that the public entrusts you to give out, so you have a responsibility to do your job before handing them out on a whim. If you give out money because some far-fetch idea struck you as "cool", then you are really poor at your job.
To add to what andreas says, it's true the NSF has been really great. Another agency that's great in funding physics is the DOE (yeah they watch over the bombs too) , though some of the stuff they do is still pretty far out there. Most NASA money goes to the big coorporations, though they fund some crackpot stuff too (they have a program funding research into FTL travel which attracts all sorts of crazy people).
Feynman once said that creativity in science is a very hard kind of creativity compared to that of art. Not only do you have to think imaginatively, you have all sorts of experimental and theoretical constraints to fulfill.
For me, everytime I see an artist dance on the dancefloor, I'd imagine myself doing the same thing....except that I am forced to be creative while wearing a straightjacket.
What I will argue about, is the rush to go fund crackpot ideas. If the only reason you have to fund these stuff is "it'll be great if it is true", then I have a bridge to sell you. Science has a very solid self-regulating mechanism (peer review is one of its components): leapfrog brought up the great example that if you try to BS the system, you'll get caught pretty soon. The sad thing is : the money's already spent. Millions of dollars gone. This is a failure of BOTH the scientists, AND the funding agencies. I can guess that people *wanted* it so much to be true that they decided to ignore all the danger signs.
If you are a funding agency, there is NO EXCUSE for not doing your research properly BEFORE you hand out dough. This is money that the public entrusts you to give out, so you have a responsibility to do your job before handing them out on a whim. If you give out money because some far-fetch idea struck you as "cool", then you are really poor at your job.
To add to what andreas says, it's true the NSF has been really great. Another agency that's great in funding physics is the DOE (yeah they watch over the bombs too) , though some of the stuff they do is still pretty far out there. Most NASA money goes to the big coorporations, though they fund some crackpot stuff too (they have a program funding research into FTL travel which attracts all sorts of crazy people).
Feynman once said that creativity in science is a very hard kind of creativity compared to that of art. Not only do you have to think imaginatively, you have all sorts of experimental and theoretical constraints to fulfill.
For me, everytime I see an artist dance on the dancefloor, I'd imagine myself doing the same thing....except that I am forced to be creative while wearing a straightjacket.
This particular crackpot theory is encouraging because it actually proposes a falsifiable test that, in order to get to the level where we could run it, would require funding other, non-crackpot, lines of research and development. So the worst thing that could possibly happen here is that we end up with a big spinning magnet and make a few fringe physicists look like idiots. Someone else can use the magnet down the road, and I'm sure the people doing the development and manufacturing for the magnet would make some useful gains there.
This particular crackpot theory does not even predict the basic ingredients of what we see around us (the standard particles), so it has already failed the "experimental" test bit. There is no need to spend money to build more magnets.
Your "worst thing that can happen" is not "just". It's very very bad : money's wasted on something that does not even pass the basic requirements for what's constitute "science". Not to mention the fringe physicists looking like idiots give a bad name to the public who will wonder why their tax money is allocated to these idiots. And that's OK?
Your "worst thing that can happen" is not "just". It's very very bad : money's wasted on something that does not even pass the basic requirements for what's constitute "science". Not to mention the fringe physicists looking like idiots give a bad name to the public who will wonder why their tax money is allocated to these idiots. And that's OK?
Mmmm... Magnets.
Isn't this just...Hyperspace?...
or subspace, who knows
or "teh VOID!"
I'm in complete agreement with softy on this one after doing a little research. I have a pretty good BS detector and it's off the friggin SCALE.
Doesn't help that we have a president in office who seems to think that the Theory of Evolution is no more than a passing fad, and that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is about a confused senior schoolteacher named "Heisenberg." I'll recommend a book by Carl Sagan: "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark". All of you should read it, and when you're done, roll it up and use it to whack creationists, flat-earth conspiracy theorists, UFOlogists, mystics, psychics, and scientologists. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469
I'll still keep dreamin bout human spaceflight, though. To quote the excellent show Firefly:
"... You can't take the sky from me..."
I'm in complete agreement with softy on this one after doing a little research. I have a pretty good BS detector and it's off the friggin SCALE.
Doesn't help that we have a president in office who seems to think that the Theory of Evolution is no more than a passing fad, and that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is about a confused senior schoolteacher named "Heisenberg." I'll recommend a book by Carl Sagan: "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark". All of you should read it, and when you're done, roll it up and use it to whack creationists, flat-earth conspiracy theorists, UFOlogists, mystics, psychics, and scientologists. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469
I'll still keep dreamin bout human spaceflight, though. To quote the excellent show Firefly:
"... You can't take the sky from me..."
"Your "worst thing that can happen" is not "just". It's very very bad : money's wasted on something that does not even pass the basic requirements for what's constitute "science". Not to mention the fringe physicists looking like idiots give a bad name to the public who will wonder why their tax money is allocated to these idiots."
Sorry, I had to laugh at that one. Government wasting money? Never! Public tax money misallocated and wasted? Horrors!
I'd rather they waste it developing SOMETHING, pushing the boundary of SOMETHING, rather than on missile defense or ITER or any of the other worthless massive money sinks.
This is a couple of million dollars to pay some people to actually work Heim's theory into something that can be peer reviewed. That costs fraction of what a single TEST of the missile defense system would, and that hasn't done anything but make slightly better missiles. Even if all we end up here is a bigass magnet capable of generating a very powerful magnetic field more than a few centimeters across, it's a damn sight better than most edge research funded by the government.
Having poked around a bit more myself, it seems that no one has reviewed Heim's theories largely because they take up several thousand pages and the guy refused to publish them until the 80's, when the correct predictions that are under such scrutiny now were made. And even then, it was in german only, and though too expensive to do properly. So, it's premature to say if it's crap or not at the moment, because no one has made any sort of objective review aside from the few german physicists who happened upon it and were intriuged. And they're focusing soley on taking what's there and translating it so that people in other countries can even have a chance at crunching through it.
Sorry, I had to laugh at that one. Government wasting money? Never! Public tax money misallocated and wasted? Horrors!
I'd rather they waste it developing SOMETHING, pushing the boundary of SOMETHING, rather than on missile defense or ITER or any of the other worthless massive money sinks.
This is a couple of million dollars to pay some people to actually work Heim's theory into something that can be peer reviewed. That costs fraction of what a single TEST of the missile defense system would, and that hasn't done anything but make slightly better missiles. Even if all we end up here is a bigass magnet capable of generating a very powerful magnetic field more than a few centimeters across, it's a damn sight better than most edge research funded by the government.
Having poked around a bit more myself, it seems that no one has reviewed Heim's theories largely because they take up several thousand pages and the guy refused to publish them until the 80's, when the correct predictions that are under such scrutiny now were made. And even then, it was in german only, and though too expensive to do properly. So, it's premature to say if it's crap or not at the moment, because no one has made any sort of objective review aside from the few german physicists who happened upon it and were intriuged. And they're focusing soley on taking what's there and translating it so that people in other countries can even have a chance at crunching through it.
I agree that governments spending money on stupid ideas is nothing new.
However, I think that the pursuit of "bunk" science is particularly dangerous, it lends credence to those who would ignore a wealth of evidence and expert opinion *cough*Global warming*cough* and find the one crackpot that supports their opinion.
They REALLY need some real scientists overseeing the military budget.
And for once, could we PLEASE see the military say... "you know what, we don't really need 400 billion dollars, while the education system gets 2 billion.
However, I think that the pursuit of "bunk" science is particularly dangerous, it lends credence to those who would ignore a wealth of evidence and expert opinion *cough*Global warming*cough* and find the one crackpot that supports their opinion.
They REALLY need some real scientists overseeing the military budget.
And for once, could we PLEASE see the military say... "you know what, we don't really need 400 billion dollars, while the education system gets 2 billion.