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Yo Leapfrog: I see what you mean. It's REALLY not self-contradictory, it's bad writing. My intent was not to tie Rutan's efforts to public funding. I'm well aware
that Rutan gets the majority of his funding from Paul Allen. My parenthetical comment about tax cuts for the rich was directed to my statement that we could afford to fund so-called "crackpots" if we were not spending ourselves into the dumper while cutting revenue by favoring the wealthy and thier corporations.
And no, I did not consider your comments a "flame" in any way.
that Rutan gets the majority of his funding from Paul Allen. My parenthetical comment about tax cuts for the rich was directed to my statement that we could afford to fund so-called "crackpots" if we were not spending ourselves into the dumper while cutting revenue by favoring the wealthy and thier corporations.
And no, I did not consider your comments a "flame" in any way.
leapie : Well, I am not really into the lib/conserv. debate, since in general I try not to dabble into things that I do not have a good understanding over. But I do appreciate your viewpoints.
Momerath42 : Fortunately not all organizations are run by old/corrupt nincompoops. The NSF is run mainly by scientists (especially those who gain a taste of "management" and realized how addicting the power to make/break careers are, usually senior scientists with uber track records.). My point is : there is an "ideal", and this "ideal" is attainable. Just because some organizations are run by idiots does not mean we have to accept the status quo and let things be what they are. Pork exists in science, true, but it's very much less than average. There is a reason why this is so : scientists by nature live and die by the merits of their work. If you try to impose an alternative scheme upon them, e.g. "money goes to those who put forward the most far-fetched idea" or "who suck the biggest d*ck", then they will scream and scream and rant.
On topic : Let me try again.
Just because you have money to burn AND that an idea sound really cool *if* it is true, does not mean you THROW MONEY AT THEM! Spend the time to "check" whether it make sense first. This is called "research". As for this Heim's in particular, it failed MISERABLY because it has no real particle content (among a lot of other things). (Sarcasm warning) : Don't be fool by shiny things.
Momerath42 : Fortunately not all organizations are run by old/corrupt nincompoops. The NSF is run mainly by scientists (especially those who gain a taste of "management" and realized how addicting the power to make/break careers are, usually senior scientists with uber track records.). My point is : there is an "ideal", and this "ideal" is attainable. Just because some organizations are run by idiots does not mean we have to accept the status quo and let things be what they are. Pork exists in science, true, but it's very much less than average. There is a reason why this is so : scientists by nature live and die by the merits of their work. If you try to impose an alternative scheme upon them, e.g. "money goes to those who put forward the most far-fetched idea" or "who suck the biggest d*ck", then they will scream and scream and rant.
On topic : Let me try again.
Just because you have money to burn AND that an idea sound really cool *if* it is true, does not mean you THROW MONEY AT THEM! Spend the time to "check" whether it make sense first. This is called "research". As for this Heim's in particular, it failed MISERABLY because it has no real particle content (among a lot of other things). (Sarcasm warning) : Don't be fool by shiny things.
Heim theory disgrees with the standard model and has made one accurate prediction. It has never been peer-reviewed, and hasn't even had any attention outside of germany until very, very recently. The only real source of "information", if you can even call it that, on this theory is the published results in the 80s and the paper that got the award recently. Plus, the one tested prediction it DID make was about particle masses - so how does it have nothing about particles in it?
Seriously, softy. You almost certainly are more informed about the particulars of standard particle physics, but you can't possibly shoot down Heim theory without having some understanding of it, and very few people seem to have that. Have you read the thousands of pages written in german? Heim was a recluse who refused to publish his work, and now when people try to get funding to look it over, it must be crap because no one's looked at it yet.
How the hell does anyone get funding to develop something to the point where it can be peer-reviewed? It seems they're asking for funding to translate the rest of Heim's writings so that they can be reviewed and tested, which seems a whole lot like someone coming up with an idea and trying to get funding to expand on it to the point where it can be peer reviewed and tested. The whole "research" step into checking into whether people should get funded requires someone to fund someone to research it. Right?
Seriously, softy. You almost certainly are more informed about the particulars of standard particle physics, but you can't possibly shoot down Heim theory without having some understanding of it, and very few people seem to have that. Have you read the thousands of pages written in german? Heim was a recluse who refused to publish his work, and now when people try to get funding to look it over, it must be crap because no one's looked at it yet.
How the hell does anyone get funding to develop something to the point where it can be peer-reviewed? It seems they're asking for funding to translate the rest of Heim's writings so that they can be reviewed and tested, which seems a whole lot like someone coming up with an idea and trying to get funding to expand on it to the point where it can be peer reviewed and tested. The whole "research" step into checking into whether people should get funded requires someone to fund someone to research it. Right?
softy2: Indeed, what I was trying to say in the addendum to my post was that I thought the field of science was more resistent to corruption and was an example of the direction we should take other organizations. But, when you say, "The NSF is run mainly by scientists (especially those who gain a taste of "management" and realized how addicting the power to make/break careers are, usually senior scientists with uber track records.)" don't you think people who are not attracted to the power could make better leaders? The question is how to make the most efficient distribution of power and responsibility desirable for a critical mass of people. This implies having far more advanced performance metrics and allowing democratic access to all non-personal data. Opensource government and industry (forking allowed), would be the elevator-pitch.
Starfisher: Though I think the success/failure ratio of our public figures is largely subjective, you have pretty much hit the nail on the head. Mass social change requires more than promises of a better way. It usually requires a disaster of some sort (a depression, a shortage of an important good, etc). Another possibility, though, is for a powerful meme to spread through the population. Especially disruptive memes will naturally encounter resistance and are often stomped out by those with an interest in maintaining the status quo. But, much as some suppressed memes ran wild when the printing press was invented, I think the internet provides a mechanism for extremely distruptive memes to spread too fast for stomping. I believe that it is just a matter of time before one comes along that obsoletes our relationships with our present authorities one by one.
Starfisher: Though I think the success/failure ratio of our public figures is largely subjective, you have pretty much hit the nail on the head. Mass social change requires more than promises of a better way. It usually requires a disaster of some sort (a depression, a shortage of an important good, etc). Another possibility, though, is for a powerful meme to spread through the population. Especially disruptive memes will naturally encounter resistance and are often stomped out by those with an interest in maintaining the status quo. But, much as some suppressed memes ran wild when the printing press was invented, I think the internet provides a mechanism for extremely distruptive memes to spread too fast for stomping. I believe that it is just a matter of time before one comes along that obsoletes our relationships with our present authorities one by one.
Why would someone who doesn't want to lead end up as a leader? :/
In our current system they naturally wouldn't. Certainly some people in leadership have said they didn't want the job but felt compelled by duty. A quick google indicates that Ulysses S. Grant is in that category. But my point was that there are organizational structures in which those who will have to live with the choice of a new leader can nominate and select one, and where campaigning is disgraceful. Obviously even in most nominally democratic organizations, somehow the people who most want the job get it, even when it seems like no one really likes them. It is all about what the members of the organization care about. When the citizens of the US elect a president, they obviously care most about preventing the other party from dragging the country left or right (as if political thought fit neatly along a line). When the new chief of surgery is selected in a hospital, I'm guessing they are usually one of the best surgeons, because there is more riding on who the leader is, and incompetent surgeons don't have long enough carreers. In organizations full of people who would like to do the bare minimum to keep their job, they will choose leaders for reasons other than who will cause the organization to do good work together. So someone who doesn't want to lead will only end up as leader in organizations in which the members greatest concern in the matter is that the leader is the best person for the job. If, after their peers select them, they will not take the job, they obviously weren't really the best for it anyway.
Humans always concidered themselves more intelegent than dolphins because humans had accomplished so much (art, science, New York) and all dolphins ever did was splash and play about in the water. Dolphins on the other hand concidered themselves more intelegent than humans for preceisly the same reasons.
the problem with leadership is that anyone who desires power inevitably desires it for a reason, and that reason is amost invariably a corrupt one. Furthermore the only people who can handle power without being tempted to abuse it are those who don't want it. As such anyone who wants power should not under any surcumstances be given a politicle office, and anyone who is worthy of office will not under any circumstance take the job.
-paraphrased from the writing of Douglass Addams
"That's what governments are for, to get in a man's way"
-Cpt. renolds
anyway, i usualy try to avoid in-depth discussions in any sort of text based media due to my lousy spelling so i'm not going to say much else other than this:
govenment is the inevitable result of humanity's flaws.
science is more like polotics than anyone likes to admit.
economics is a primative attempt at a science of information (something i expect will become increasingly inportant in physics in the years to come)
humanity hasn't made any real progress, and doesn't seem likely to.
now back onto the original topic:
does anyone actualy know anything about the theory behinde the article that started all this? my understanding is that the idea is to use a magnetic field (curvature along one of the 10 or so dimesnions in which space time exists) to displace the "craft" from what we percieve as "the universe" so as to cheat the whole "as velocity aporaches the speed of light the energy required to produce acceleration aporaches infinity" thing, in a maner that is analogus to the way a hydrophoile lifts out of the water to gain a more favorable hull speed.
is that anywhere close to the mark? 'cus that doesn't sound completely insane, and is probably at least worth taking a look at the underlying mathmatics before deciding if it is "bunk".
the problem with leadership is that anyone who desires power inevitably desires it for a reason, and that reason is amost invariably a corrupt one. Furthermore the only people who can handle power without being tempted to abuse it are those who don't want it. As such anyone who wants power should not under any surcumstances be given a politicle office, and anyone who is worthy of office will not under any circumstance take the job.
-paraphrased from the writing of Douglass Addams
"That's what governments are for, to get in a man's way"
-Cpt. renolds
anyway, i usualy try to avoid in-depth discussions in any sort of text based media due to my lousy spelling so i'm not going to say much else other than this:
govenment is the inevitable result of humanity's flaws.
science is more like polotics than anyone likes to admit.
economics is a primative attempt at a science of information (something i expect will become increasingly inportant in physics in the years to come)
humanity hasn't made any real progress, and doesn't seem likely to.
now back onto the original topic:
does anyone actualy know anything about the theory behinde the article that started all this? my understanding is that the idea is to use a magnetic field (curvature along one of the 10 or so dimesnions in which space time exists) to displace the "craft" from what we percieve as "the universe" so as to cheat the whole "as velocity aporaches the speed of light the energy required to produce acceleration aporaches infinity" thing, in a maner that is analogus to the way a hydrophoile lifts out of the water to gain a more favorable hull speed.
is that anywhere close to the mark? 'cus that doesn't sound completely insane, and is probably at least worth taking a look at the underlying mathmatics before deciding if it is "bunk".
Damn... you guys are *good*. :)
Can I buy everyone a rammer?
Can I buy everyone a rammer?
The key to all your examples, monmeranth, is that they deal with relatively small systems, and are based on groups of rational, intelligent individuals with specialized, common goals. As you add more people to a group, you decrease the homogeneity of it to the point where everyone doesn't think the same, and everyone has a different idea of "best". The internet may bring everyone together, but until it creates a single super-culture and eliminates differences of opinion as to the best course for humanity, even just looking at the US, the person who gets the job is going to be the person that wants it.
Of course, I'd go so far as to say that someone has to want a job to do it well. All innovation is driven by people who really want to do what they're doing and so are willing to sacrifice for it. The problem with wanting to be a leader is that is synonomous with wanting power, which is precisely what you don't want in a leader.
That is not to say that there are no leaders compelled by duty. However, you can't attain a country or globe-wide leadership where everyone is the best until you've radically changed society and some very fundamental parts of human nature.
Of course, I'd go so far as to say that someone has to want a job to do it well. All innovation is driven by people who really want to do what they're doing and so are willing to sacrifice for it. The problem with wanting to be a leader is that is synonomous with wanting power, which is precisely what you don't want in a leader.
That is not to say that there are no leaders compelled by duty. However, you can't attain a country or globe-wide leadership where everyone is the best until you've radically changed society and some very fundamental parts of human nature.
starfisher :
Your suggestion that "people should prove things wrong before not funding them" is doing science the wrong way. Carl Sagan once says "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". The onus is ALWAYS on the person who claims s/he found gold to show where the gold is.
Having said that, since you are persistent, let's show a very simple error of Heim's theory. You owe me $100 for wasting my time.
Let's do gravity instead of particle theory, since it's faster and probably easier for people (and myself) to talk about it.
Look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heim_theory
Scroll down, look at the equation under "Gravitation". The differential equation purports to describe the dynamics of gravity. This is so wrong on several levels, and I don't even have to solve the equation to tell you it's wrong :
(a) Gravity CANNOT be described by a scalar, simply because scalars do not have sufficient degrees of freedom to behave like gravity. This is known since Einstein's time (before General Relavitiy, he tried to do scalar gravity). The reasons are both theoretical and experimental. Theoretically, it's hard to make scalar theories of gravity diffeomorphism invariant (a big word that roughly means coordinate independence). Experimentally, gravity waves, as observed in the milisecond pulsar timing observations, are known to have 2 degrees of freedom, while scalars can only carry one.
(b) Ok, let's be generous. MAYBE the equation just described the weakfield newtonian limit, where gravity can be described by a scalar (i.e. the gravitational potential is a scalar). You lose diffeomorphism invariant, but that's ok if you are only interested in this limit. Even then this is wrong. The differential equation is a non-linear FIRST ORDER equation (there is only dphi/dt, no dphi^2/dt^2). Basically, you CANNOT describe even weakfield gravity with 1st order equations. Why? because newton's gravity, which EVERY theory of gravity must reduce to, is 2nd order.
This is enough to convince me that this is a crackpot theory : elementary mistakes that a smart undergraduate who has taken a course in gravity can point at and laugh, are made in a supposedly brilliant "grand unified theory".
I've refereed crackpot papers, they always take the MOST time because normally so many things are wrong you don't even know how to start. And yes, to answer your question before they are asked : crackpot papers do get submitted by cracks, and they DO get refereed.
And this bears repeating : if you have a theory you want to sell, it's up to you to prove it is right. Science doesn't make allowances if you are blind, disabled, do not speak Inggerish, do not want to do the legwork to sell your ideas, do not want to interact with other scientists etc...
If this does not convince you starfisher, then i'm sorry. I've wasted enough time as it is.
Your suggestion that "people should prove things wrong before not funding them" is doing science the wrong way. Carl Sagan once says "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". The onus is ALWAYS on the person who claims s/he found gold to show where the gold is.
Having said that, since you are persistent, let's show a very simple error of Heim's theory. You owe me $100 for wasting my time.
Let's do gravity instead of particle theory, since it's faster and probably easier for people (and myself) to talk about it.
Look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heim_theory
Scroll down, look at the equation under "Gravitation". The differential equation purports to describe the dynamics of gravity. This is so wrong on several levels, and I don't even have to solve the equation to tell you it's wrong :
(a) Gravity CANNOT be described by a scalar, simply because scalars do not have sufficient degrees of freedom to behave like gravity. This is known since Einstein's time (before General Relavitiy, he tried to do scalar gravity). The reasons are both theoretical and experimental. Theoretically, it's hard to make scalar theories of gravity diffeomorphism invariant (a big word that roughly means coordinate independence). Experimentally, gravity waves, as observed in the milisecond pulsar timing observations, are known to have 2 degrees of freedom, while scalars can only carry one.
(b) Ok, let's be generous. MAYBE the equation just described the weakfield newtonian limit, where gravity can be described by a scalar (i.e. the gravitational potential is a scalar). You lose diffeomorphism invariant, but that's ok if you are only interested in this limit. Even then this is wrong. The differential equation is a non-linear FIRST ORDER equation (there is only dphi/dt, no dphi^2/dt^2). Basically, you CANNOT describe even weakfield gravity with 1st order equations. Why? because newton's gravity, which EVERY theory of gravity must reduce to, is 2nd order.
This is enough to convince me that this is a crackpot theory : elementary mistakes that a smart undergraduate who has taken a course in gravity can point at and laugh, are made in a supposedly brilliant "grand unified theory".
I've refereed crackpot papers, they always take the MOST time because normally so many things are wrong you don't even know how to start. And yes, to answer your question before they are asked : crackpot papers do get submitted by cracks, and they DO get refereed.
And this bears repeating : if you have a theory you want to sell, it's up to you to prove it is right. Science doesn't make allowances if you are blind, disabled, do not speak Inggerish, do not want to do the legwork to sell your ideas, do not want to interact with other scientists etc...
If this does not convince you starfisher, then i'm sorry. I've wasted enough time as it is.
Heh. I don't owe you any money for wasting your time: if you really thought that post was worth $100, you never would have made it, and instead would have gone on to whatever it is that you do that is so much more important than arguing on the internet ;)
I'm not saying that people should "prove things wrong before not funding them" but wondering how the hell people get funding for things not already proven right. How do people develop ideas to the point where they can undergo peer review, if something must be peer-reviewed and proven correct before it gets any material support?
The funding debate is mostly moot, anyway, since right now the only thing the Air Force is doing is "investigating", and according to http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=6&id=16902006 , one of the physicists working on the theory said:
"It would be amazing. I have been working on propulsion systems for quite a while and it would be the most amazing thing. The benefits would be almost unlimited," he said.
"But this thing is not around the corner; we first have to prove the basic science is correct and there are quite a few physicists who have a different opinion.
"It's our job to prove we are right and we are working on that."
So it's not like the government is firing off checks.
Anyway, since you've completely debunked Heim theory through the gravitation section, why not take five minutes and note that to Steuard, who still appears to be active in the Talk section of the article. Perhaps he can edit or remove that section, since it contains such a basic error.
I'm not saying that people should "prove things wrong before not funding them" but wondering how the hell people get funding for things not already proven right. How do people develop ideas to the point where they can undergo peer review, if something must be peer-reviewed and proven correct before it gets any material support?
The funding debate is mostly moot, anyway, since right now the only thing the Air Force is doing is "investigating", and according to http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=6&id=16902006 , one of the physicists working on the theory said:
"It would be amazing. I have been working on propulsion systems for quite a while and it would be the most amazing thing. The benefits would be almost unlimited," he said.
"But this thing is not around the corner; we first have to prove the basic science is correct and there are quite a few physicists who have a different opinion.
"It's our job to prove we are right and we are working on that."
So it's not like the government is firing off checks.
Anyway, since you've completely debunked Heim theory through the gravitation section, why not take five minutes and note that to Steuard, who still appears to be active in the Talk section of the article. Perhaps he can edit or remove that section, since it contains such a basic error.
Indeed, Starfisher, all my examples are of groups I would call large, but which are certainly small compared to countries. I can't prove it yet, but it is my belief that if most of the organizations under, say, a thousand people, adopted meritocratic processes, the larger ones would be dissolved where uneccesary and those that remained (if any) would be made up of those the leaders of the meritocratic orgs trust. In fact, I don't see many organizations approaching a thousand people as being truly useful. They are always broken up into internal groups anyway, but internal groups, though often of the same size, aren't anywhere near as productive as startups or small businesses. We each should be judged for our own merits, choose our own coworkers when cooperation is necessary, and manage ourselves under almost all circumstances. I don't think it is even necessary to get leaders who don't want to be leaders in charge, though I most certainly do think it is possible; I think 80% of the gains can be had simply by breaking up unecessarily large organizations and filtering out all the people who *reeeally* want the remaining leadership jobs. Your main issue with my ideas seems, to me, to be that it is impractical or even impossible to put them into place. And that is what I've struggled with the most, but I do believe I have the answers. Unfortunately, if I tried to summarize as I have with my other ideas in this thread, you would have natural objections, which I would feel compelled to answer. So you'll just have to wait for me to explain it properly, and that will have to wait until our game is fun enough to advertise. So long for now- it's been real.
Yeah, I was about to say something about how you should be slaving away for my tiny monthly subscription instead of arguing about optimal social arrangements in today's society, but it seemed to lack class ;)
jumping in way way late with a response to a post a while back by ICBM, which is now way off topic, but I just have to reply to it (sigh)
"And since most technologies, even those with peaceful purposes... almost always get corrupted to be used for war... The government would do it too."
The reverse holds true as well. Without war there would be a significantly slower progress in many technological fields that are directly beneficial to the human race as a whole. As a few quick examples out of my favorite hobby, (WWII) without the drive to increase fighter speed and combat effectiveness the development of jet aircraft would probably have been delayed by about 5 years. Germany's push for V-bombs advanced rocketry by at least a decade, and there's always the manhattan project.
The british developed Sonar(they called it Asidic) and drastically improved Radar as a result of War, --sonar was a between the wars effort to counter the U-boats that had so damaged shipping in WWI--
WWII also brought about several medical advances in triage and field treatments that had a direct impact on paramedics after the war, and research into quite a few lightwight and strong alloys began as a search for better materiel to make weapons out of.
Most dramatic however is the strides in computation that came about because the army wanted better methods of calculating ballistic trajectories for its artillery. The modern computer has some of its deepest roots in those mechanical machines.
dammit i've started to ramble. War is bad, but arguing that good technology is corrupted for war is counterproductive. The old cliche 'neccsity is the mother of invention' is almost never as true as when active conflict is occuring. Without conflict to shake mankind out of his complacency we might have never gotten out of caves or developed anything more dangerous than spears. (of course we might have been better off if that had occured)
"And since most technologies, even those with peaceful purposes... almost always get corrupted to be used for war... The government would do it too."
The reverse holds true as well. Without war there would be a significantly slower progress in many technological fields that are directly beneficial to the human race as a whole. As a few quick examples out of my favorite hobby, (WWII) without the drive to increase fighter speed and combat effectiveness the development of jet aircraft would probably have been delayed by about 5 years. Germany's push for V-bombs advanced rocketry by at least a decade, and there's always the manhattan project.
The british developed Sonar(they called it Asidic) and drastically improved Radar as a result of War, --sonar was a between the wars effort to counter the U-boats that had so damaged shipping in WWI--
WWII also brought about several medical advances in triage and field treatments that had a direct impact on paramedics after the war, and research into quite a few lightwight and strong alloys began as a search for better materiel to make weapons out of.
Most dramatic however is the strides in computation that came about because the army wanted better methods of calculating ballistic trajectories for its artillery. The modern computer has some of its deepest roots in those mechanical machines.
dammit i've started to ramble. War is bad, but arguing that good technology is corrupted for war is counterproductive. The old cliche 'neccsity is the mother of invention' is almost never as true as when active conflict is occuring. Without conflict to shake mankind out of his complacency we might have never gotten out of caves or developed anything more dangerous than spears. (of course we might have been better off if that had occured)
Just looked at that equation, no kidding, idjits.
I remember when I was downtown, and some guy that I knew vaguely walked up to me, said "yer a physicist right?", and dropped a mound of papers in front of me. And he said, I kid you not, I think I've figured out gravity, but I need someone to do the math. Then he went into a METAphysical explanation of his theory of gravity.
Everybody's got one.
oy...
I remember when I was downtown, and some guy that I knew vaguely walked up to me, said "yer a physicist right?", and dropped a mound of papers in front of me. And he said, I kid you not, I think I've figured out gravity, but I need someone to do the math. Then he went into a METAphysical explanation of his theory of gravity.
Everybody's got one.
oy...
starfisher.
You should go read the MidKnight's post about moving the goalposts.
You should go read the MidKnight's post about moving the goalposts.
I thought your goal was defending scientific integrity?
gravity, my old arch nemisis...
Shapenaji:
so, did you help him with his hypothosis? or at least listen to what it was before deciding that something above and beyond curent physics wasn't worth lisyening to?
anyway, that whole gravity bit is prety damning as far as the legitamatcy of Heim theory goes, but then again it is comming from a tertiary source. how likely is it that that formula is just a misprint, or information gaind from somone who didn't understand the original perposal? regardless i'm too lazy to research it on my own.
as for the polotics discussion:
the problem with small orginisations is that while they are higly advantagious in most regards, they can be easily concored by larger orginisations, either militarily or as a result of economics of scale. as such there is a natural tendancy for any orginisation to grow untill it reaches criticle mass and colapses (or explodes). in order for small orginisations to be the primary governing force, they must be protected by some larger orginisation (which is then vulnerable to the increased corruption, and burocracy that was originaly intended to be eliminated by the paradime shift to smaller orginisations) the problem isn't that a perfect balance is unatainable, it's that every step towards that balance of small and large organisations is a step away from the freedom that humanity refuses to give up. in order to eliminate war, there must be a means of ensuring that the wourld comunity never outgrows it's means to provide for itself, and that those means are evenly distributed. and then what incentive would there be for the inovater, or for the worker for that matter? basicly in a perfect world no one has the right to be wrong, and being wrong is generaly more fun than being right.
Shapenaji:
so, did you help him with his hypothosis? or at least listen to what it was before deciding that something above and beyond curent physics wasn't worth lisyening to?
anyway, that whole gravity bit is prety damning as far as the legitamatcy of Heim theory goes, but then again it is comming from a tertiary source. how likely is it that that formula is just a misprint, or information gaind from somone who didn't understand the original perposal? regardless i'm too lazy to research it on my own.
as for the polotics discussion:
the problem with small orginisations is that while they are higly advantagious in most regards, they can be easily concored by larger orginisations, either militarily or as a result of economics of scale. as such there is a natural tendancy for any orginisation to grow untill it reaches criticle mass and colapses (or explodes). in order for small orginisations to be the primary governing force, they must be protected by some larger orginisation (which is then vulnerable to the increased corruption, and burocracy that was originaly intended to be eliminated by the paradime shift to smaller orginisations) the problem isn't that a perfect balance is unatainable, it's that every step towards that balance of small and large organisations is a step away from the freedom that humanity refuses to give up. in order to eliminate war, there must be a means of ensuring that the wourld comunity never outgrows it's means to provide for itself, and that those means are evenly distributed. and then what incentive would there be for the inovater, or for the worker for that matter? basicly in a perfect world no one has the right to be wrong, and being wrong is generaly more fun than being right.
Oh, I listened to him, I always listen, its what gives me the freedom to gripe about it afterward. It was basically a description of quantum mechanics based on Stephen Hawking, scientific theories based on popular science books is akin to Using Babelfish to translate Japanese to English, adding a few sentences to the end then translating it back again. Yer gonna get gibberish.
i don't know, it's been my expierience that a good physisist and an intelegent person can generaly discuss concpts without needing the math to be directly involved. but i will agree that most concept only books don't convey their true meaning very well (i've yet to finde a concept book that describes time dilations resulting from traveling at near the speed of light without that non-sensicle light beam bouncing between 2 mirrors analogy that makes so many assumptions it's practicly worthless)
what always suprises me is when i have have some idea that resulted from reading popular science books and just day dreaming and i later find out that there actualy physisists are working on that very idea.
it also amazes me that the more i hear about quantum machanics and various attempts at unified tehorys the more they sound like metaphysics.
what always suprises me is when i have have some idea that resulted from reading popular science books and just day dreaming and i later find out that there actualy physisists are working on that very idea.
it also amazes me that the more i hear about quantum machanics and various attempts at unified tehorys the more they sound like metaphysics.