There's magic all over in science. Dark energy, dark matter weren't predicted and don't have explanations. Entanglement was predicted as a reductio ad absurdum to cast doubt on quantum mechanics, but was later observed contrary to Einstein's expectations; and seems to involve "conveniently undetectable magical waves".
Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that...
Of course, the idea that government can't spend more than it takes in strengthens those ties. The way out is for us, the voters, to realize that government can and should empower its people with direct payments, instead of giving money to corporations. Create a basic income, and fund it with govt bonds bought by the Fed which can expand its balance sheet to pay for them, and return the interest to the Treasury so that the govt's borrowing costs are zero. The best way to fight corporate power is to provide individuals with a choice of not entering the free market.
I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go.
This argument is to my mind quite a strong one. One can say in reply that many scientific theories seem to remain workable in practice, in spite of clashing with E.S.P.; that in fact one can get along very nicely if one forgets about it. This is rather cold comfort, and one fears that thinking is just the kind of phenomenon where E.S.P. may be especially relevant.
In evaluating the various laboratory studies conducted to date, the reviewers reached the following conclusions:
A statistically significant laboratory effort has been demonstrated in the sense that hits occur more often than chance.
What was the market for space launches? It was purely government funded. The market approach is far too short-sighted for such a disruptive endeavor as developing spacecraft.
NASA, deep into planning for the Apollo Project, needed advanced circuits for the Saturn rocket's onboard guidance computer. Microchips promised unparalleled computing power at a small size, but they were unproven in the marketplace and had never been produced on a large scale. Nonetheless, Eldon Hall, a NASA official, decided to take a risk on the promising new technology. Soon, private companies were churning out massive amounts of purpose-built Apollo Guidance Computer microchips. In fact, NASA bought so many that manufacturers were able to achieve huge improvements in the production process - so much so, in fact, that the price of the Apollo microchip fell from $1000 per unit to between $20 and $30 per unit in the span of a couple years.
The point is, the feeling that Ptolemy was standing on a motionless earth was as real to you as the idea that everything can't happen.How can you disprove block time, the theory that everything is happening at once? And if the "block" (the universe) is infinite, then somewhere in there the Earth can be standing still, and Ptolemy standing on it? Or there could be an infinity of multiverses, at least one of which has different "laws" of physics in which Ptolemy is standing on a motionless earth. There are infinite possibilities for everything to happen.
Your statement: "There are no physical means to achieve that state." reminds me of the reasoning used by the Ancient Greeks to "disprove" Aristarchus's theory of a heliocentric solar system: "If the earth moves around the sun, there will be parallax motion of the stars. We do not observe parallax motion of the stars. Therefore, the earth doesn't move around the sun." But the "meaningful" frame of reference that was so real to them changed. In the same way, your "meaningful" frame of reference will not be so real to others. Aristarchus's frame of reference is now more real to you; but in his time, would you have been arguing against him because your frame of reference conformed to the social realities?
So in the future (not too distant, I bet), for example, we could construct a simulation of a motionless earth and put a virtual Ptolemy on it, and he would be right that the earth didn't move, from his frame of reference. And from another frame of reference, he'd be wrong. But from another even larger than that one, he'd be right. And so on. Everything is true, and everything is not true.
Frames of reference are strange though. To Ptolemy, that the earth didn't move was the only meaningful frame of reference. How can you say that what is not meaningful, in your opinion, today, will not be so, or is not so right now if you abandon your assumptions (that orbits had to be circles, in the analogy to epicycle theory, for example)? Was the sun really orbiting the earth, because that was the meaningful frame of reference at the time? In the same way, is your "meaningful" frame of reference preventing you from seeing evidence that everything is or will happen?
Sounds like someone's suffering from cognitive dissonance. Take cholera, prevention preceded scientific identification of the cause. Snow identified a pump that was associated with the disease outbreak in London in 1849; but an agent wasn't identified for another 45 years.
Ancient Jain texts prescribe straining or boiling water, because of water bodies that couldn't be seen, millenia before the microscope.
Back then, the early pioneers were not at all motivated by money. Our gratification was to share ideas with each other, do good technology and have others use it.
[Interviewer:] You approached AT&T with packet switching and they weren't interested.
[Kleinrock:] Worse than that. They said it wouldn't work. Then they said even if it does work, we want nothing to do with it. At that time, all their revenue was coming from voice communications. They made a long-term mistake big-time, but short term you could understand it.
Biz is often too short-sighted to invest in long-term disruptive technologies. That's where govt can step in to fund it. I think the best way is to provide a basic income, so that individuals can have a choice to be free of the market and innovate disruptively on their own or in ad hoc collaborations using the unprecedented communication tool that is the internet.
Taxes aren't needed to fund a basic income. Simply create govt bonds, which the Fed expands its balance sheet to buy. Or former taxpayers can buy govt bonds and get interest from funding the government.
Innovation is the key. As long as we keep advancing knowledge, we can create as much money as we feel.
I think it means that spin exists as something we can't really envision (yet), so we just treat it as a mathematical abstraction without a corresponding physical referent we've experienced.
Right. There was no grammatical error, as was claimed. (Note the passive voice in "was claimed", because I didn't feel like explicitly referring to the claimant(s).) The sentence was as clear or clearer than anything so far proposed. Claiming otherwise is just pedantry.
This is a matter of taste, not grammar. "People have written..." and "There are..." are both active voice. One uses an explicit subject, one uses the dummy subject "there". So, first of all, you were wrong that my example was passive.
Second, I don't see how "There are..." is any better than the passive voice. Unless you're a pedant, which it's strange that you accuse me of being, when I was objecting to the pedantry of the post complaining about the use of passive voice.
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There's magic all over in science. Dark energy, dark matter weren't predicted and don't have explanations. Entanglement was predicted as a reductio ad absurdum to cast doubt on quantum mechanics, but was later observed contrary to Einstein's expectations; and seems to involve "conveniently undetectable magical waves".
As for political influence, consider Feynman in Cargo Cult Science:
How do you know James Randi doesn't have special powers that he uses to negate evidence of ESP?
Of course, the idea that government can't spend more than it takes in strengthens those ties. The way out is for us, the voters, to realize that government can and should empower its people with direct payments, instead of giving money to corporations. Create a basic income, and fund it with govt bonds bought by the Fed which can expand its balance sheet to pay for them, and return the interest to the Treasury so that the govt's borrowing costs are zero. The best way to fight corporate power is to provide individuals with a choice of not entering the free market.
Money is speech in the same way that the Supreme Court ruled that education should be separate but equal, or that Dred Scott was property.
Alan Turing believed in esp. From http://www.abelard.org/turpap/turpap.php#the_argument_from_extra-sensory_perception:
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing#US_government-funded_research:
From the second source cited, http://www.lfr.org/lfr/csl/library/airreport.pdf:
What was the market for space launches? It was purely government funded. The market approach is far too short-sighted for such a disruptive endeavor as developing spacecraft.
From http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/the_semiconductor_revolution_m:
How do you know the researchers who fail to find psi evidence don't have unconscious control over the data?
The point is, the feeling that Ptolemy was standing on a motionless earth was as real to you as the idea that everything can't happen.How can you disprove block time, the theory that everything is happening at once? And if the "block" (the universe) is infinite, then somewhere in there the Earth can be standing still, and Ptolemy standing on it? Or there could be an infinity of multiverses, at least one of which has different "laws" of physics in which Ptolemy is standing on a motionless earth. There are infinite possibilities for everything to happen.
Your statement: "There are no physical means to achieve that state." reminds me of the reasoning used by the Ancient Greeks to "disprove" Aristarchus's theory of a heliocentric solar system: "If the earth moves around the sun, there will be parallax motion of the stars. We do not observe parallax motion of the stars. Therefore, the earth doesn't move around the sun." But the "meaningful" frame of reference that was so real to them changed. In the same way, your "meaningful" frame of reference will not be so real to others. Aristarchus's frame of reference is now more real to you; but in his time, would you have been arguing against him because your frame of reference conformed to the social realities?
So in the future (not too distant, I bet), for example, we could construct a simulation of a motionless earth and put a virtual Ptolemy on it, and he would be right that the earth didn't move, from his frame of reference. And from another frame of reference, he'd be wrong. But from another even larger than that one, he'd be right. And so on. Everything is true, and everything is not true.
Frames of reference are strange though. To Ptolemy, that the earth didn't move was the only meaningful frame of reference. How can you say that what is not meaningful, in your opinion, today, will not be so, or is not so right now if you abandon your assumptions (that orbits had to be circles, in the analogy to epicycle theory, for example)? Was the sun really orbiting the earth, because that was the meaningful frame of reference at the time? In the same way, is your "meaningful" frame of reference preventing you from seeing evidence that everything is or will happen?
Sounds like someone's suffering from cognitive dissonance. Take cholera, prevention preceded scientific identification of the cause. Snow identified a pump that was associated with the disease outbreak in London in 1849; but an agent wasn't identified for another 45 years.
Ancient Jain texts prescribe straining or boiling water, because of water bodies that couldn't be seen, millenia before the microscope.
Have you actually done a comparison, or are you yourself showing perception bias?
False from your limited perspective. True from other frames of reference.
And yet, in the Major Depression in the Population MOOC, we had a slide showing how often in history treatment precedes a scientific understanding of the cause of a disease: http://subbot.org/coursera/pmhdepression/prevention_vs_etiology.png
In an infinite universe, everything will happen.
"Everybody wants to be a nigger, nobody wants to be a nigger" - Paul Mooney
Lots of good ideas come from individuals without a profit motive. Leonard Kleinrock has said he wasn't motivated by economics when he helped create the internet. From http://articles.latimes.com/2009/oct/24/opinion/la-oe-morrison-use24-2009oct24:
Biz is often too short-sighted to invest in long-term disruptive technologies. That's where govt can step in to fund it. I think the best way is to provide a basic income, so that individuals can have a choice to be free of the market and innovate disruptively on their own or in ad hoc collaborations using the unprecedented communication tool that is the internet.
Taxes aren't needed to fund a basic income. Simply create govt bonds, which the Fed expands its balance sheet to buy. Or former taxpayers can buy govt bonds and get interest from funding the government.
Innovation is the key. As long as we keep advancing knowledge, we can create as much money as we feel.
I think it means that spin exists as something we can't really envision (yet), so we just treat it as a mathematical abstraction without a corresponding physical referent we've experienced.
What about this sentence in a post I was responding to?
I think the point is that the term "spin" is not, at the quantum level, what we think of when we say a top spins, for example.
If an electron spins like the earth spins, it's revolving at 100 times the speed of light (see http://www7b.biglobe.ne.jp/~kcy05t/spin.html).
Right. I don't understand pedantic, arbitrary rules. I suspect the motivation for them is purely control, and/or inflexibility.
Right. There was no grammatical error, as was claimed. (Note the passive voice in "was claimed", because I didn't feel like explicitly referring to the claimant(s).) The sentence was as clear or clearer than anything so far proposed. Claiming otherwise is just pedantry.
This is a matter of taste, not grammar. "People have written..." and "There are..." are both active voice. One uses an explicit subject, one uses the dummy subject "there". So, first of all, you were wrong that my example was passive.
Second, I don't see how "There are..." is any better than the passive voice. Unless you're a pedant, which it's strange that you accuse me of being, when I was objecting to the pedantry of the post complaining about the use of passive voice.