Jesus is called good master by a supplicant and rounds on them and says (paraphrased) "Why do you call me good? There is no one that is good but God." admitting on one sentence that he is neither God nor Good.
Perhaps you are misinterpreting those verses. Here's a hint: the rhetorical question is a concept that preexists Jesus's presence on earth.
Jesus wouldn't go around saying things like, "Before Abraham was, I AM" and then contradict himself.
Or, I could just be quoting Mark:
10:17 And when he was gone forth into the way, there came one running, and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life? 10:18 And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God.
But hey, maybe Jesus was just being Modest, as in "Silly beanie, why are you calling me good master? Ain't nobody good but God. Oh, snap! I AM God, I AM I AM."
Oh, wait! This is consistent with that other bit where he admits that he preaches in parables so that many of his listeners will be deceived (and hence damned, if we are to believe what is written elsewhere). So maybe he's just being deceptive, trying to fake the guy out and convince him that he isn't God so he will end up being damned.
The only thing that puzzles me then is that (if we assume that this is reported correctly, which is itself an absurd proposition given the history of the New Testament as laid out by e.g. Bart Ehrman in "Misquoting Jesus") the guy asking the question didn't call him God, did he? Unless "good master" is a secret code or something. Jesus brought up the fact that he isn't God all by himself. Sort of as if you said, "Hey friend, how can I get to Fifth and Main?" and I replied "Who you calling `friend'? Ain't nobody YOUR friend but God, and God won't be your friend unless you cover your head in public and avoid eating cheeseburgers".
Which does not, in fact sound very godly, does it...
If you look into the history of Mark (the narrative, not the person since we really have no idea who "Mark" is and it is almost certain that no single person wrote the book that most scholars think was the first of the synoptics written, from which the other two are loosely derived) it ended with the empty tomb, no explanation, no eyewitnessed resurrection. Those verses were added later. So perhaps what Mark is saying here is that Jesus really was just a "Good Master" -- like Buddha, like the current Dalai Lama, like many other before and since -- and was no more divine than you and I are. Maybe we are catching a glimpse of the true Jesus. If Jesus actually existed, of course, which is by no means certain.
But I'm guessing that you are quoting John, who of course was NOT one of the synoptics. Yes, John -- IIRC one of the last Gospels written -- absolutely does hold that Jesus went around claiming to be God. Sadly, that isn't consistent with the others or with e.g. the Gospel of Thomas. But why bring up the politicking and violence of Nicaea and its post-Constantine aftermath, where Chrisitianity was forced by Constantine to decide once and for all if it was going to be trinitarian or arian and the arians lost. Following which all of the non-trinitarian scriptures were purged, and might have been lost for all time, until the accident at Nag Hammadi brought them to light.
If you want to play the game of Christian Apologia, Hermeneutics, and Exegesis, I'm ready. Bring some twenty sided dice and a bunch of cold beer, though. Because I actually have read the Bible. More than once. Some of it a rather lot of times. Made it through the Quran (much shorter) a few times too. Lots of it is rather forgettable, all of it (even the "historical" bits) are actually historically rather dubious, but I slogged through. Can you say the same?
LGW, we don't agree on much, but we agree on this. Some of the best people I've known in life have been believers, and by "best", I mean, really walked the best meaning of their faith. I'm talking about Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Jews. The whole lot. People whose first response to others was, "What can I do to help?" Now, I've also known some really wonderful non-believers, but it almost seems as if they are more susceptible to the worst impulses of humanity: Objectivism, neoliberalism, and the faux-Libertarianism that is infecting current discourse. If you should encounter a really horrible person online, say on a forum or Twitter or something, chances are very good that they're atheists. Not because atheism made them that way, but because being horrible almost requires non-belief. While there are horrible people of faith (Family Research Council and Westboro Baptist Jackoffs, for example), they tend to stick out because they tend to make a spectacle of themselves.
This is anecdotal evidence at best. All of us have met good people who are religious, and good people who are not, and good people who are in between. Since, by your own admission, good people are often those who do not proselytize and since you would have to know lots of good people very well indeed to know what really goes on in their head, your feeling that there is a difference in the probability distribution of good vs evil actions across faiths and between faiths and the lack of any faith is just that -- a feeling. It is also one that would be very difficult to turn into valid statistics (as people lie about their religious belief pretty regularly and will do so as long as our society maintains its "atheism penalty". Talk to me the day they take "In God We Trust" off of our currency and we elect a president who openly ADMITS to being an atheist (we've had a number who were deist or atheist in the past -- Jefferson was the former, Abraham Lincoln comes to mind as the latter -- but they had to hide it and lie in order to be elected).
Humans can be "good" or "bad", according to some standard establishing goodness and badness -- a thing, by the way, that Plato/Socrates wouldn't touch with a ten foot stick and something that NOBODY seems to quite be able to agree on, because the scriptures -- of all religions -- are full of direct ethical contradictions and because belief obstructs the development of a common rational ethos for human society. In the Abrahamic faiths, God is a Dick. In the old testament, God legalizes beating slaves ALMOST to death (and slavery which goes without saying), marriage by rape plus 30 shekels, beating almost anyone to death who breaks any of a good sized pile of silly rules -- including your own children. God commands one of the earliest semi-legendary acts of genocide, compelling Moses to slaughter the entire Midianite population, men, women and children down to babies in arms, but gives the young virgin females among the Midianite captives to his troop to rape and enslave. Then there are several pages describing the looting of the Midianites and how much of it Moses and his priesthood ended up with. Thanks, God!
But nobody ever reads the Bible, or (it seems) the Quran, or the Book of Mormon. At best they listen to a few carefully selected passages read out loud to them by their preacher on Sunday, who cherrypicks them and then explains them to conform to their own personal vision of good versus evil. And this goes for the new testament as well. There is a lovely scene where Jesus, feeling expansive in his Godhood, is in a tavern with his cronies and a Gentile woman comes up to ask for a miracle. Jesus calls her a dog, looking for scraps from a table set for the Jews, but then humors her and grants her a miracle anyway. Jesus is called good master by a supplicant and rounds on them and says (paraphrased) "Why do you call me good? There is no one that is good but God." admitting on one sentence that he is neither God nor Good. He curses a fig tree for not bearing fruit out of season.
This entire discussion is rubbish. The Matrix is just recent bad Science Fiction. It has no Scientific, Philosophical or Theological foundation. Anybody who takes any of it the least bit seriously needs psychological... adjustments. A good start would be the Ethics of Aristotle. Once one _gets_ the difference between man-made Ethics, and dispensed Morality, one can see that the last is always fictional, and thus The Matrix, or any variation thereof that invokes some kind of Predestination by a higher or greater Force, is Balderdash.
Or, one could actually read the works of Aristotle's teacher, Plato, specifically The Allegory of the Cave:
which fortunately has its own wikipedia page and is freely available online, being a bit out of even the DMCA copyright range at this point. The Matrix is clearly (and correctly) listed as being one of several works derivative from some very serious philosophical foundation -- very nearly all of Idealism:
is also fundamental to The Matrix, noting that in the final Matrix movie, they discover that the "reality" they broke out into is itself a supersimulation at a still higher order. The Matrix isn't even the first, or the best, SciFi work to explore the theme of the Cave. James Gunn wrote a triplet of novellas released as "The Joy Makers":
which would have been an even better prequel to The Matrix than the half-baked idea that one can generate more "power" by feeding people IV nutrients than one can get directly from those nutrients used as a power source. That's the really stupid thing about The Matrix that makes it bad SF -- the physics is laughably wrong on the very first page, so to speak. Gunn's Hedonic principle -- straight out of Aristotle and Utilitarianism, BTW -- makes a much better foundation and even corresponds to having a computational overlord whose responsibility it is to keep those in the simulation "happy", as opposed to "alive".
In both Hinduism and Buddhism, the Maya principle is that this world we appear to see with our eyes and smell with our nose and hear with our ears and taste with our tongue and feel with our skin is not the real world. The real world is Atman joined with Brahman, and is the master of the illusions presented by the senses: From the Kena Upanishad:
Not that which the eye can see, but that whereby the eye can see: know that to be Brahman the eternal, and not what people here adore;
Not that which the ear can hear, but that whereby the ear can hear: know that to be Brahman the eternal, and not what people here adore;
Not that which speech can illuminate, but that by which speech can be illuminated: know that to be Brahman the eternal, and not what people here adore;
Not that which the mind can think, but that whereby the mind can think: know that to be Brahman the eternal, and not what people here adore.
And how did they know this, eh? Oh, wait! Sure, there was this really old collection of legends and myths, and they could see it was obviously true, because it correlated so very well with experience.
Boole's own algebra, axiomatically derived by Richard Cox and converted into a sound basis for epistemology by a number of people especially E. T. Jaynes, can be used to show that their views, unsupported by anything like reliable evidence, were extremely unlikely to be true given the evidence.
But hey, these guys were, oh, a thousand times smarter than you (whatever that means) and could prove that their views were not superstitions. Mostly because they were a way of separating provisional knowledge into probably true and probably false categories using Bayesian reasoning incorporated into the axiomatically derived probability algebra of Laplace and Boole, justifying probability theory as both "The Logic of Science" (Jaynes) and incidentally, the basis for human knowledge all the way down at the level of "how the brain works".
Gold is currently just under $2000/oz, $32,000/pound, $64,000,000/english ton. With a specific gravity of around 20, one cubic meter of gold in space has a mass of around 20 metric tons, or 24 english tons, so it would be worth ballpark $1,500,000,000. Dropped from orbit to the Earth, it would arrive with (roughly) 32,000,000 Joules/kg of kinetic energy -- 6.4 e11 J total, or around 0.15 kt (360 pounds) of "TNT equivalent" explosive power -- energy that would have to be non-destructively dispersed without melting or vaporizing the metal. To get TO an asteroid to mine it is the big problem. OSIRIS-Rex is costing very close to $1,000,000,000 to launch, and it isn't even CLOSE to complex enough to actually mine it. At this time, the cost per gram of returning with a 60 gram load makes the recovery cost many, many times the cost of gold. That has been true of every single gram of material brought back from space so far. And this does not include the cost of altering the energy and orbit of the asteroid in question which requires fuel at FOB prices at the same location at the asteroid to accomplish or technology that we can imagine but that has yet to be built capable of altering orbits without fuel lifted from the Earth. Finally, if we make the not-too-extreme assumption that meteorites are at least approximately representative of the mineral composition of asteroids, finding a pure gold asteroid is enormously unlikely. Finding an asteroid with a minable gold content bound up the way gold frequently is on Earth is at least somewhat unlikely, although certain kinds of meteors have gold concentrations much higher than normal Earth crustal material in some of their mineral complexes. And finally, gold (or other trace metal) extraction on Earth from anything but raw gold nuggets is chemically toxic and extremely difficult, WITHOUT all of the problems attendant on trying to make it work in the absence of humans (adding human asteroid miners makes the cost increase by a factor of hundreds or more). So -- space opera SciFi aside -- I don't think that there is any real risk of a "space race" even if an asteroid made of (a substantial fraction of) pure gold or platinum in native metal form is found, and it is really rather improbable that one will be found.
But this isn't the real problem. The real problem is that nobody sane is going to let ANYBODY manipulate masses of tens to hundreds of metric tons overheat. 130 metric tons in orbit is 1 kiloton of TNT hitting the ground. It doesn't take a lot of mass up there before one has a "project thor" style weapon, and you KNOW that some Dr. Evil out there would be ensuring a way to make it so. This too has been foreseen by the same SciFi authors of yesteryear, with Heinlein bombarding the Earth with rocks from the Moon using the same launcher that was intended to ship wheat, or Niven and Pournelle's snouts dropping asteroids into the Indian Ocean. Same reason I am very skeptical of proposals to put solar arrays in orbit and beam energy down to the ground via e.g. microwaves. Your multi-gigawatt orbital maser is too easy to repurpose into your multi-gigawatt death ray from space.
I love SF. I've read a really significant fraction of it, although it is difficult to keep up with the recent explosion of e-publishing. But with anything LIKE our existing technology and knowledge of physics, it is just plain difficult to see anything in space that we can afford to reach at a cost that makes it profitable. Anything you can find in space or on the nearby planets can be found, or made, on Earth for a whole lot less, at least so far.
Is this a permanent condition, a fundamental physical reality, of the human species? Hard to say. We are a long, long way away from being able to go into space cheaply, and most of the limitations we had fifty years ago are with us today. If/when fusion becomes a viable energy source with something smaller than warehouse-sized generators, we might see some change, but with chemical rockets and current energy prices and ge
But the Earth IS flat. Well, locally flat. Sort of. A manifold, at any rate. Except for all of the fractally scaled bumps that extend down to the molecular level.
Come to think of it, the Earth isn't flat. In fact, it doesn't even have a surface. Just a highly irregular atomic-scale semi-fractal zone of Pauli-electrostatic intermolecular repulsion. The best that can be said is that at some particular coarse-grained scale, it is locally highly reminiscent of a truly flat planar surface osculating to a point in the average, sometimes.
Now the 6000 year bit -- yes, the earth has been around for 6000 years. Just like I've been around for 100% of the last two minutes. Unless one gets really serious about quantum fluctuations, where one could argue -- not necessarily perfectly reasonably -- that every elementary particle in my body flickers in and out of existence on the Heisenberg scale where \delta (mc^2) \delta t \approx \hbar. Following that argument, there is a near certainty that you could pick any instant you like and insist that the Earth "came into being" within an teeny bit of that instant...
It's like this. A dedicated construction robot eats sunlight, and breathes vacuum, or air, or H2 gas, or N2 or O2 gas as you ask. It, like honey badger, just don't care, as long as its batteries have time enough to recharge before its work shift. It can stay up in space for months or years without its bones deteriorating. Properly engineered, it is likely to survive all but the worst solar storms by just powering down and waking up again afterwards. It might even be able to repair itself, or if there were two, repair each other. And finally, if it "dies" for some reason the only loss is money -- no grieving relatives or national flag at half mast.
Also, there is little reason for a crew to be there before they are needed, and they might only end up being needed to move into the space habitat once it is constructed. I'm not religious about whether humans should or should not go into space -- I grew up reading Heinlein, Asimov, etc and think it would be lovely if they did, but then I learned physics and a certain amount of economics and a whole lot of computer science and programming and all I can say now is that robots make a whole lot more economic sense unless or until we are ready to make a serious commitment, such as building a large, permanent, 50's sci-fi style rotating space station at a lagrange point or in geosync orbit and sending people up to LIVE there, or LIVE on the moon. And that commitment would be extraordinarily expensive, and we haven't even taken care of business down here on Earth, such as ending world hunger and poverty and war so we can get on with trans-global progress and space.
Ten years ago, maybe, the possibility of robots doing all of the work might have still been fantasy, but at this point between AI robots and remote controlled drone robots, I doubt that there is much we cannot accomplish in space without risking human lives or spending the incredibly large multiplier on the amount of money required to do ANYTHING we want to do in space.
So at the very least I imagine it will end up making a lot more sense to build nearly everything with robots, even if humans do eventually come in to do their human "time for human judgement and creativity" thing, do things that are difficult to impossible to do remotely. And it isn't clear how large a set that will, ultimately, end up being. Even colonizing the stars seems a lot more likely to take place by sending our genetic instructions and raw materials and building an ecosystem from the ground up using robots as opposed to physically sending humans between the stars. We could afford to do ten colony starships of the former kind for one of the latter, if not more, and either way the original humans that leave the earth are not going to be the ones that first set foot on a planet circling another star...
Sure, pressure tested with HYDROGEN. Believe me, anything that holds hydrogen at 68 atmospheres should hold O2 at less than 1 (given the huge difference in molecular size), but yes, this is absolutely one of the design issues as the SV tank was designed to be loaded and then vent to hold the design pressure until launch, not hold H2 inside for weeks. Another one is that the tank itself only is structurally rigid enough to survive launch BECAUSE it is loaded with an enormous internal pressure, which makes the walls essentially rigid. OTOH even 1 atmosphere exerts 10^5 newtons per square meter, which seems enough to ensure substantial structural rigidity against far, far smaller thrusts. But still has to worry about whether or not it will substantially deform or rip if rorqued or dinged with an atmosphere inside and vacuum outside and somebody kicks a wall or hits it with a hammer or punctures it with a micrometeor, whether hydrogen embrittlement will occur in the comparatively short time it is loaded with hydrogen under pressure, whether (loaded) it can sustain unevenly applied end forces or torques, and so on. One might have to reinforce it on the inside with erector set circular beams and hang a lightweight interior shield to protect the outer shell and hide ductwork and facilities -- or not.
That is, I'm not arguing with you -- I AGREE that there is a lot of work to do on the subject, which is why I think the money being invested by NASA is well-spent. My only point is that there are some good reasons to think that it will be optimally cost beneficial to go this way rather than, as suggested by the top comment I replied to, a foregone conclusion that it is not going to work or turn out to be the best way to go. As many posters have noted, just because NASA opted at least partway out on this scheme with a Saturn V that happened to be available when a moon shot was cancelled doesn't mean that it has been properly researched or provisionally engineered with all of the things we've learned in materials science and electronics in the meantime.
I'd think that evacuating the remaining fuel would be the least difficult problem imaginable to solve. As you say, hard vacuum. It's only tricky if you want to recover it (as both O2 and H2 might have some value of their own in space). Beyond that, pretty much any simple valve will work as long as you bleed it off slowly and watch out for Unintended Consequences (like thrust or vacuum refrigeration of the interior from adiabatic expansion).
As you say, not a new concept. But it is a far cry from try to re-engineer a Saturn V tank "on the fly" to become a space lab and designing a replacement for the Saturn V on the same general scale and with a similar but updated structure DEVOTED to putting up a modular space habitat in stable orbit (say, geosync) or at a lagrange point, or DEVOTED to putting together a similarly modular deep space exploration vehicle to travel to mars or even the moon.
If you are engineering a "Saturn VI" workhorse for these purposes, the entire second stage fuel system would be redesigned to facilitate the reuse of the tanks as part of the payload, and the payload would be, in fact, the rest of the required support system in some sort of snap-together modular approach. The tanks would probably have either completely removable ends or would have ends with large (say 2m out of 3 or 4) ports with a standardized sealable interconnect. I'm guessing (open and closed) interior ductwork would be built in (ultimately ported as needed inside and/or into the standarized interconnect). Some interior facilities might be preinstalled on the ground and capable of handling LOX or LH temperatures at high pressure. Some would await orbital assembly. But all the orbital work would likely be snap together stuff, not "this work requires a team of skilled laborers to install" stuff.
I'd expect assembly to be something like:
a) Shoot up the rocket, retaining the second stage instead of separating it; No humans needed. In fact, there would be no third stage -- what was the second and third stage of the SV would be all payload for the SVI.
b) In the desired orbit, bleed any remaining fuel or recover it into a much smaller tank, whichever makes more sense. No humans needed.
c) Robotically disassemble the outer shell as needed (which might be little or none). Remove all unusable hardware associated with its use as a propulsion system -- the actual rocket motor, fuel pumps, wiring and plumbing. Save what is (designed to be) incorporated into the new function (e.g. exterior wiring might well find new life as interior wiring if it was modular and movable, ditto pipes and perhaps some pumps). Probably save the rest as a "scrap pile" that could be used as a supply of raw metal that can be resmelted with a solar mirror in space, or not, whichever ends up making the most sense.
d) Robotically disassemble the "payload" on top of the tank, take off the top of the tank, and hook it onto a modular unit (possibly engineered to be a "collar" that fits onto the top of the tank) containing life support, power, an airlock or flexible interconnect designed to connect a series or parallel combination of tanks. STILL no humans needed to render the habitat at least marginally inhabitable
e) Finally, send up a crew (or deploy the crew that is already there in a growing structure) to do any final interior installations that the robots couldn't handle, fix problems, test everything thoroughly, and integrate the unit into a multiunit modular space station.
f) Along with any needed crew (rotation), periodically send up life support supplies -- fuel, air water, food -- and any tools and hardware needed. But I'd assume that one could send up and self-assemble many living/workspace modules that are then both inhabited and finished off or (re)furnished by one crew and supply shipment.
g) Once "enough" of them are assembled and interconnected at the desired orbital poi
The article intro above actually explains this, if you read it. The fuel in this tank is BURNED, getting the payload into orbit. In the Apollo mission days, the payload was e.g. a third stage that went to the moon and back, as these are BIG rockets. In the past, the second stage tanks would be "thrown away" and allowed to reenter and burn up, but that's slightly insane given the roughly 32 MJ/kg direct energy cost (multiplied by a few orders of magnitude) of lifting anything at all into orbit.
The reasoning is then as follows: We've gotten this great big cylindrical chunk of pressure-tested metal -- remember, it held liquid hydrogen at HIGH pressure securely through a launch exerting many g's of acceleration -- into orbit. It already cost us millions of dollars to build, and tens of millions to get it into orbit as a SIDE EFFECT of lifting this other, really big payload. Let's not waste it!
So, what can we do with it? Well, given that it is roughly the size and even the shape of a good sized mobile home or the living volume of early submarines, making it into pressurized living space is an obvious choice. It is pressure tested at many times the 0.5-1.0 atm pressure differential needed to sustain human life in space. It is made of high quality, carefully x-rayed, stress-tested metal (because NASA would be insane to fire a rocket into space with humans on board with anything less holding in the fuel of the rocket). The metal has been carefully crafted and annealed to be able to handle liquid hydrogen temperatures without becoming brittle, so it is also proofed against your concerns with heat -- humans cannot tolerate any temperatures this metal is unlikely to be perfectly capable of withstanding, and besides, shielding it from sunlight is a matter of wrapping it in a reflective mylar blanket that weighs almost nothing and can easily be shipped up as part of the conversion kit.
As for radiation shielding -- that I don't know about, but I very much doubt that it is an issue. If the Earth gets hit dead on with a solar flare, I don't think there is anything we could reasonably put humans inside in orbit that would be "safe". It's not clear that being on the Earth's surface inside the atmosphere would be "safe". If the metal that the container was made of wasn't adequate as shielding during such an event -- I'm pretty sure it would be perfectly good most of the time -- and we had something better (but smaller and more expensive) then humans could retreat into the latter as a "shelter" to wait out the storm.
Life support machinery and furniture for the interior of the tank turned into habitat is a small fraction of the weight of the whole thing, and weight into orbit costs like gold.
Now let's compare costs. Suppose you used the Atlas to launch an Earth-built space habitat directly into space as to you suggest, and just wasted the second stage tank as usual. It costs you one launch to get the habitat into space, and the interior volume is almost certainly going to be smaller than the second stage tank volume. Now suppose that you take the empty tank and just hook it onto the habitat you just launched (which already has all of the life support machinery, radiation tolerance etc that you are worried about. Voila! You've more than doubled your available habitat volume in space at (almost) zero additional marginal cost! EVEN if it isn't AS safe as the primary habitat in the event of a solar storm, well, astronauts can always retreat into the primary habitat during such a storm and still use the tank as room for experiments, hydroponics, their ping pong table, room to spread out in to avoid going nuts.
The last question is: What do you have to do to the tank to FACILITATE this so that it isn't being done on an ad hoc basis? As you say, certain pieces of work are way cheaper on Earth than they will be in orbit. Should we build the tank out of slightly different metals so it IS a better radiation shield? Should we pre-install ductwork for ventilation and wiring and liquid
Wisdom. I've gotten higher on the math tree than you, perhaps, but I have students who can do math effortlessly that takes me a great deal of effort indeed. And you CANNOT do physics without real math. It's just the way it is. Real math starting with calculus, which Newton invented so that he could invent physics, and continuing on through number theory, set theory, group theory, geometry at many levels, and very, very advanced calculus, calculus so difficult that we can't solve it so discussions are about the best way to approximate a solution.
I get (for reasons that I cannot really explain but no doubt are some sort of karmic burden predestined for all time) lots of people who write me with their own special "unified theory of everything" -- and got them way back when the means of communication were paper letters or phone calls or email on networks like "bitnet" that nobody under 30 has even heard of -- and they are invariably filled with nifty diagrams, platonic ideals, bullshit from one end to the other that is all geometric and compelling to its creator, and have absolutely no relationship to anything one can measure and predict nothing at all. They aren't even accurately descriptive.
No way through but to pay your dues first. And your dues, in physics, nowadays takes years even for super-geniuses who really have a chance at having the critical insight to take things to the next level. There just isn't any low-hanging fruit left. Most of the people who invent theories of everything without doing the work needed to understand the real difficulty of the problem they claim to solve just by being naturally clever, themselves, simply have enormous personality disorders (or worse) such as chronic narcissism, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, grandiosity. And then there are the spiritualist whackos, who think that crystals produce "energy" without actually understanding what crystals, or energy, actually are. They come up with elaborate theories as well that make physics into a kind of elective magic that one can evade by using runes on specialized charts, according to the stars or deities or demons that REALLY drive everything.
Not an argument from me, this is really the point I was making. Gravity waves we observe are the moral equivalent of the classical EM waves emitted by a radio. Sure, somewhere in there there are photons, but they are in a state or mixed state that utterly obscures their quantum nature (and there I actually did a fair bit of work upon a time and have a PR paper on nonlinear quantum optics in the master equation/langevin approach).
So, without trying to unify quantum field theory -- which is what coming up with the right theory of gravitation is all about -- that somehow also is consistent with general relativity, the original question I responded to was whether or not "standing gravitational waves" were responsible for the alteration of ordinary 1/r^2 gravitation OR the excess mass creating ordinary 1/r^2 gravitation. All I then did was point out that it seems unlikely, even without a detailed theory, on the grounds of similar phenomena in the EM field where the "weak" component is more or less irrelevant to the opposition of super-weak gravity -- a point I make every three or four months to a new crop of introductory physics students btw. It takes an entire planet to pull us down with our weight. It takes the combination of electrostatic force and the Pauli exclusion principle to oppose that weight with a thin skin of structured charged particles (where nuclear and electroweak are important on the inside of atoms, but the actual force managing the repulsion is all fermionic electrons).
That doesn't make it impossible. The EM force is modified at short range by (quantum) virtual pair production and the polarization of the vacuum. One can imagine, at least that the vacuum is polarizable in some way to gravitation, although it is a bit difficult given that we are only aware of a single "pole". At least some phenomena in EM also alter measurably when one makes bound states out of things, creating bands of states instead of "ideal" sharp lines -- I'm not sure how that would apply to gravitation as gravitational bound states are the moral equivalent of purely classical EM orbits but without the strong radiation of energy that was predicted by Maxwell and that was part of the downfall of Newtonian mechanics. Sure, the moon presumably radiates away gravitational energy every time it orbits the earth, but the effect is so miniscule that it is overwhelmed by tidal coupling that drives the moon AWAY from the earth every year by a few cm, the exact opposite of a radiation spiral.
So I simply repeat -- if somebody wants to explain the cosmological galactic orbital anomaly data that gives rise to the dark matter hypothesis using "gravitational standing waves" instead, they have their work cut out for them. Starting with reading at least some of the hundreds of papers out there (usually a focused search and skimming of the abstracts can eliminate 90% or more of them, of course) and in many cases starting even earlier by getting University degrees in some mix of (serious) math and physics. I am a theoretical physicist, I'm pretty good at math and can do pages of algebra towards a goal and so on, and I'm still a bit intimidated by the gravity people. Differential geometry just for starters, maybe topology, general relativity, and of course the full course in math and physics through quantum field theory are your OPENERS, and then things really get difficult. Makes me tired just thinking about it;-)
Photons are carriers of the EM force like gravitons are supposedly carries for the gravitational force. I assumed that he was talking about this sort of wave. But yeah, a single observation or even two or three of gravity waves does not prove that "gravity" is a quantum wave phenomenon.
After all, hinting that gun owners might take matters into their own hands IF Hillary is elected (the time ordering and meaning of his sentences was very clear) sounds like promoting anarchy, treason, and terrorism to me.
Also, if he asserts that Obama is the "founder of ISIS" then he has to acknowledge that he wanted to "found ISIS" in exactly the same way as he clearly an unequivocally stated in TWO CNN interviews. So let's call him -- by his own standards -- a "co-founder of ISIS".
One can then work one's way down through whether or not calling for a "wall" to be built between the US and Mexico, prohibiting immigration of all Muslims, etc counts as "promoting terrorism" in the same sense that drawing Mohammed having relations with a camel or insulting whole swaths of the US population by calling them rapists and thieves might promote, rather than extinguish, acts of terror-level violence.
No? Political speech and hence protected? Then precisely what IS the difference between this sort of twittering and public speaking and expressing extreme annoyance at the United States in general and Trump in particular?
I disagree. There is a whole world of "public", and a lot of them don't have access to a University library. And no, science should not be confined to the cloistered halls of academe. You simply don't know who might come up with a new discovery or objection to a published work, or who might be inspired by one to invent something new. In addition to US citizens that paid for the research, there are young people in India, China, Africa who will only have the opportunity to read real scientific papers if they are open access. Do we WANT to keep the rest of the world in a state of non-participatory ignorance? Is that the kind of world we want to live in?
I would say no. And I agree, journals have a useful purpose, or even many useful purposes. But still, paywalled journals are, IMO, doomed. I think they'll be lucky if they get a year of grace from the granting agencies on the one hand, and nearly everybody puts their own work up on the web anyway -- it's just hard to find it and difficult to see if it actually made it through the refereeing process in the form posted without being able to access the actual published article.
The internet is not through evolving. We'll see where this ends up. If we live long enough...;-)
This is not true. In fact, it is not true by law, and was not true by law then. You simply haven't tried. The DATA is readily available from NASA funded research (and often the papers are/were too). The real problem, as I said, is that the old way the journals ran from the invention of the proceedings of the royal society to the present has been dead for at least five years, but nobody knows how to keep the journals (a desirable thing, believe me) and their refereeing and editorial process alive without the money Universities kick back for subscriptions. If everything is free on the web, there are no subscription fees and the journals die. If the journals die, it is as disastrous a consequence as trying to run the US with only a president and congress and no supreme court.
Yes, there are alternatives to paid journals, including some online/free ones, but they ultimately rely on humans contributing time (or to put it another way, having their living paid for some other way). That's not bad, but you can see why there could be problems with this approach as well. It remains to be seen what will work and not introduce even more sources of bias than there are in the current system (which is not above reproach -- gatekeeping and worse abound in at least some journals).
BTW, I'm not a fan of a lot of what passes for climate science or NASA GISS, but you do NASA in general a disservice if you think that GISS was somehow exempted from the law. Or if you think that everybody in NASA GISS are members of a vast conspiracy and not intellectually honest. James Hansen, for example is not everybody, even if he should have been replaced before he even started as head of GISS, or at worst the first time he spoke ex cathedra predicting 5 meter SLR. In my opinion.
I actually had the privilege of advising the govt to do this a few years ago, so it is nice that it is happening. But even then, NASA was progressive and required open access to data and more from their supported publications. This is a notch up.
The problem is that it needs to be mandated across all journals, and the journals then will face a major problem -- how will they survive when one no longer needs to buy journal subscriptions to fund the journals? Government support isn't a good answer for lots of reasons. But what answer IS a good answer?
I don't know, but they'd better find it soon, because the Internet has made old-style journals largely obsolete and the public will no longer tolerate not being able to read the research they, after all, ultimately paid for. It is my profound hope that the NSF and other major agencies follow suit immediately. We'll see if e.g. Physical Review can survive it and deal with what comes either way.
Again, I have to say this feels like a complete non-sequitor. I'm not sure exactly what you are trying to suggest with your assertion of "ample discussion and explanation of time theology" and how the "same arguments... were answered so long ago". When I google "time theology" (which I wasn't even aware was a reasonable "subject" of hermeneutics, if one imagines that making stuff up so that it all works out is somehow either a subject or reasonable) I get several hits but they do not illuminate your statement. I can't even tell if you are arguing that the Bible is "true" (for some meaning of the word true that is not, in fact, the meaning of the word true) or if you are commiserating the fact that people continue to defend the Bible as being true in spite of the fact that an eight year old child could tell that it was all made up if they weren't brainwashed to think otherwise from when they really were too young to know any better.
But then to jump to physics -- which has a completely different standard for establishing probable truth, one you can actually learn about if you read e.g. E.T. Jaynes' "Probability Theory, the Logic of Science" or "The Algebra of Probable Inference" by Richard Cox (or you are welcome to take a pass at http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/a... if you don't mind an eternally not quite finished book that makes the same argument, possibly more broadly) -- physics as a subject actually doesn't have that many "arguers" about things that are well explained by consistent theories plus evidence. Not within the discipline. This is in part because there is something approximating an objective standard for determining when something is (probably) true, (probably) false, or (most definitely) not really resolved yet one way or another. People may well have all sorts of fun in the middle area, but it isn't because of any misuse of faith, it is more a matter of placing your bets as to how experiments will eventually work out to resolve the issue, with both sides knowing that it is a BET and not to be taken seriously (that is, as truth) without experimental evidence to back it.
On/., of course, LOTS of people argue about physics, but most of them aren't physicists, and the ones that are are trying to correct people's egregiously lacking understanding of the physics of what they are arguing about. Which is the point I was making above, BTW. If you take a theory where the idea of standing waves is fairly well understood both mathematically and physically, and try to imagine how to make it explain the galactic rotation data, it is at the very least not easy to see how to proceed. This is a concrete statement, and if you disagree, feel free to actually post your way of proceeding. It wasn't argument, as I'm neither asserting that there is or isn't a fifth force, dark matter, monopoles, a useful standing wave theory of gravitational waves, or for that matter a meaningful "time theology" whatever that might be -- I'm just pointing out that using the terms in their usual sense it isn't easy to see how to explain the galactic data using standing gravitational waves, or even to see how (necessarily monochromatic and coherent) standing gravitational waves could come about.
The place where physicists DO argue is at conferences and workshops, usually where they disagree about some aspect or another of mathematics or experiment in an area of physics that is not yet resolved into probable/accepted provisional truth. I've been in the middle of one of those and it wasn't pretty. How CAN one explain things like conditional convergence of series to somebody that already ought to know it? But in the end, the mathematics and sound reason usually win, because (unlike time theology) there is actually a unique answer and we have an objective method for homing in on it.
Oh, dear, I you misunderstand the nature of evidence and theory, sir or madam. One does not usually "refute" a hypothesis in physics, and absence of evidence is not sufficient evidence of absence. The best that can be said for or against fifth force theories in physics is that there is little sound evidence to support any specific one of them. At the same time, there is AMPLE evidence that our knowledge of physics is incomplete, and there are large scale, clearly visible phenomena (like the galactic rotational anomaly and other cosmological observations) that strongly suggest that there is indeed SOME sort of additional force or interaction present beyond the four we know of, as we cannot (so far) see any way to explain what we see within the confines of those theories.
Is it a "fifth force"? Is it "dark matter" and/or "dark energy"? Well, if it is the latter, it IS a fifth force, at least, unless somebody manages to come up with a particle outside of the existing elementary particle zoo that doesn't couple to any of the forces but e.g. gravity itself. However, physical particles usually couple to the physical forces in some way so a completely new particle is not unlikely to be associated with a completely new force.
The point is that I don't BELIEVE in such a thing -- few physicists do -- in the absence of evidence to support such a belief. I think the theory of magnetic monopoles is absolutely lovely -- they would fill a tremendous gap in our knowledge of physics, they would symmetrize Maxwell's Equations in a way they are begging to be symmetrized in, they would explain the quantization of charge -- but I, like most physicists, will only BELIEVE in monopoles when somebody reproducibly puts salt on the metaphorical tail of not one, but a steady stream of monopole observations. Ditto the Higgs particle. Ditto "trans-luminal neutrinos". Experimental evidence talks, theoretical bullshit walks -- or more reasonably, waits in the wings as a plausible hypotheses not yet supported until experiments are performed that increase the probability that they are correct (incorrectly stated as "confirm" them, just as a lack of evidence or negative evidence doesn't necessarily "refute" them).
I don't quite get your point about the Bible, either. Yes, the Bible is bullshit, with pretty much ever line of its supernaturalism refuted by ordinary common sense and all of the evidence worthy of the name we've ever collected. (To provide an interesting metaphor -- suppose all four gospels reported Jesus as saying "I have seen the magnetic monopole in my water turned into wine." Would any reasonable person then conclude that monopoles are proven to exist beyond any reasonable doubt based on a single, 2000 year old observation of them reported as hearsay by individuals who were not there and who reported nothing of the experimental method used, the error bars, the controls against fraud perpetrated just so one could get tenure... bearing in mind that turning H_2O lacking carbon and nitrogen into a complex of ETOH and lots of flavorings and particulate matter made up of proteins and hydrocarbons is even more ludicrous than observing a monopole without any visible apparatus or method) Quite a lot of its supposed history is unsupported by actual archeological evidence -- it is more in the category of "legend" shading over into "myth" than it is "history". But belief in the absurd in the context of the Bible is in no way comparable to the process of formulating hypotheses and searching for corroboratory evidence in cutting edge physics. Even theorists who propose the theories usually know better than to "believe" in them -- they do the work in the hope that experiments will be done (guided by their work, perhaps) that validate their hypotheses or correct them and give them new insight.
Our knowledge of the Universe is known to be incomplete. It is then just a matter of common sense that we should work to complete it, and that work involves proposing new ways it might be complet
Maybe. But I think you'd have your work cut out for you to show it. And you'd have to explain at some point why e.g. the Coulomb interaction doesn't demonstrate it as a direct augmentation of Coulomb interactions and meso-scale deviation from 1/r^2 form with its much greater (and hence easier to observe) interaction strength.
Standing waves in EM fields (where we can easily observe them in e.g. lasers, Fabry-Perot interferometers, etc) require reflectors at both sides of a cavity. They arise out of solutions to a wave equation with specified boundary conditions on surface(s) bounding a volume. We do not USUALLY observe them as steady state phenomena between individual pairs of particles or objects, in part because the objects would scatter an incoming wave, not reflect it back in the direction that would (eventually, after a retarded time) be the location of the source. The scattering results in incoherence. It is very difficult to see how a linear wave theory could give rise to an effectively nonlinear resonant alteration of gravity with large numbers of incoherent sources in any of the usual models of dispersion or resonant interaction, let alone one that has the right properties to explain the observations.
So, if you are a math/physics/field theory uber-geek (I'm not, I'm just a humble ordinary physicist and this is over my pay grade:-) you could always give it a try and try to build some sort of model of your hypothesis, after doing enough research that you can establish how to even start, but as I said, my intuition based on a fairly detailed knowledge of ordinary EM waves is that -- probably not worth the time. One MIGHT argue that a dense galactic center (or a black hole at the center) could form a kind of effective "boundary" for such a wave, but the increasingly dispersed stars and other matter surrounding the galaxy do not seem to be good candidates for a second boundary.
If you want an idea that seems MORE likely to be fruitful, imagine that the black hole is radiating quantized gravity waves in all directions, and that those outgoing waves, as they pass physical matter, stimulate the coherent emission of more gravity waves in the one-pass phenomenon (observed and actually exploited in E&M) known as "coherence brightening". We actually observe coherence brightening in astrophysics, IIRC, when light from a distant source passes through excited stardust (that is, for example, ionized by nearby stars.
But this still doesn't quite work for me -- for one thing what "excites" stars so that they can add energy to a gravitational wave (which has to carry energy, after all)? Why doesn't the surrounding matter act more like a dielectric and SCREEN the gravitational field, if anything? It's hard to know how to even begin to build a theory of gravity per se that could explain the galactic rotational anomaly, and I think many very competent people have tried and continue to try.
...and wait for technology to catch up. At some point cost efficient storage has the capability, as TFA notes, to dramatically alter the utility and (especially) the cost-efficiency of intermittent renewable sources. The other critical point is energy transportation -- moving e.g. PV solar energy from Arizona or Texas to Maine without dropping half of it along the way. In the meantime, can we stop panicking and wasting huge amounts of money IMPLEMENTING immature technologies while they are -- immature?
Yes, to AC, but not often as they were SLOW... and modems started their upward track soon after.
I used teletypes several times, but not to write full projects. Those were on punch cards. I wrote a full box of Fortran IV to do a large physics computation for Duke's nuclear lab. So back at ya, did you ever use HASP and JCL to manage 360/370 jobs submitted on cards, loading disk packs and so on? Again, teletypes AND cards sucked, so like all sane humans I switched first to tty consoles and then to the IBM PC, where I wrote an entire full screen editor that ran on TOP of the QED line editor in BASICA. I think I was probably the only human in the world at the time that could do full remote full screen editing on IBM mainframes... or at least, I never heard of anybody else who could.
Sadly, I never WROTE a bootloader, but I did some work on a PDP-11 which booted from paper tape that somebody else wrote. Not that sadly, I might point out...
I did write some code on paper tape, but that was back in high school, and only one program (one of my first programs, actually).
Finally, I never changed fonts on a 2741 terminal. But I did write my dissertation on an IBM selectric and had to swap balls all the time to get the greek characters needed in a physics paper. Again, the IBM PC came out soon after with dot matrix printers, and I went through first T3 (if anybody remembers that, one of the first full screen math/text editors) and then TeX and never looked back after LaTeX.
Things really did get better! There was -- and still is! -- home for the world....
It was more a file sharing protocol. No html, but it was very easy to link resources of many sorts into a library a notch above FTP in ease of use. Oak Ridge, IIRC, had an awesome gopher site where one could get many tools and goodies.
Slashdot Mirror
FBI: Keep hand away from button!
Holmes: Mwhahahahaha I perform a chemistry on you, make life signal react to chemical stuff! Go away!
Perhaps you are misinterpreting those verses. Here's a hint: the rhetorical question is a concept that preexists Jesus's presence on earth.
Jesus wouldn't go around saying things like, "Before Abraham was, I AM" and then contradict himself.
Or, I could just be quoting Mark:
10:17 And when he was gone forth into the way, there came one running, and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?
10:18 And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God.
But hey, maybe Jesus was just being Modest, as in "Silly beanie, why are you calling me good master? Ain't nobody good but God. Oh, snap! I AM God, I AM I AM."
Oh, wait! This is consistent with that other bit where he admits that he preaches in parables so that many of his listeners will be deceived (and hence damned, if we are to believe what is written elsewhere). So maybe he's just being deceptive, trying to fake the guy out and convince him that he isn't God so he will end up being damned.
The only thing that puzzles me then is that (if we assume that this is reported correctly, which is itself an absurd proposition given the history of the New Testament as laid out by e.g. Bart Ehrman in "Misquoting Jesus") the guy asking the question didn't call him God, did he? Unless "good master" is a secret code or something. Jesus brought up the fact that he isn't God all by himself. Sort of as if you said, "Hey friend, how can I get to Fifth and Main?" and I replied "Who you calling `friend'? Ain't nobody YOUR friend but God, and God won't be your friend unless you cover your head in public and avoid eating cheeseburgers".
Which does not, in fact sound very godly, does it...
If you look into the history of Mark (the narrative, not the person since we really have no idea who "Mark" is and it is almost certain that no single person wrote the book that most scholars think was the first of the synoptics written, from which the other two are loosely derived) it ended with the empty tomb, no explanation, no eyewitnessed resurrection. Those verses were added later. So perhaps what Mark is saying here is that Jesus really was just a "Good Master" -- like Buddha, like the current Dalai Lama, like many other before and since -- and was no more divine than you and I are. Maybe we are catching a glimpse of the true Jesus. If Jesus actually existed, of course, which is by no means certain.
But I'm guessing that you are quoting John, who of course was NOT one of the synoptics. Yes, John -- IIRC one of the last Gospels written -- absolutely does hold that Jesus went around claiming to be God. Sadly, that isn't consistent with the others or with e.g. the Gospel of Thomas. But why bring up the politicking and violence of Nicaea and its post-Constantine aftermath, where Chrisitianity was forced by Constantine to decide once and for all if it was going to be trinitarian or arian and the arians lost. Following which all of the non-trinitarian scriptures were purged, and might have been lost for all time, until the accident at Nag Hammadi brought them to light.
If you want to play the game of Christian Apologia, Hermeneutics, and Exegesis, I'm ready. Bring some twenty sided dice and a bunch of cold beer, though. Because I actually have read the Bible. More than once. Some of it a rather lot of times. Made it through the Quran (much shorter) a few times too. Lots of it is rather forgettable, all of it (even the "historical" bits) are actually historically rather dubious, but I slogged through. Can you say the same?
rgb
LGW, we don't agree on much, but we agree on this. Some of the best people I've known in life have been believers, and by "best", I mean, really walked the best meaning of their faith. I'm talking about Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Jews. The whole lot. People whose first response to others was, "What can I do to help?" Now, I've also known some really wonderful non-believers, but it almost seems as if they are more susceptible to the worst impulses of humanity: Objectivism, neoliberalism, and the faux-Libertarianism that is infecting current discourse. If you should encounter a really horrible person online, say on a forum or Twitter or something, chances are very good that they're atheists. Not because atheism made them that way, but because being horrible almost requires non-belief. While there are horrible people of faith (Family Research Council and Westboro Baptist Jackoffs, for example), they tend to stick out because they tend to make a spectacle of themselves.
This is anecdotal evidence at best. All of us have met good people who are religious, and good people who are not, and good people who are in between. Since, by your own admission, good people are often those who do not proselytize and since you would have to know lots of good people very well indeed to know what really goes on in their head, your feeling that there is a difference in the probability distribution of good vs evil actions across faiths and between faiths and the lack of any faith is just that -- a feeling. It is also one that would be very difficult to turn into valid statistics (as people lie about their religious belief pretty regularly and will do so as long as our society maintains its "atheism penalty". Talk to me the day they take "In God We Trust" off of our currency and we elect a president who openly ADMITS to being an atheist (we've had a number who were deist or atheist in the past -- Jefferson was the former, Abraham Lincoln comes to mind as the latter -- but they had to hide it and lie in order to be elected).
Humans can be "good" or "bad", according to some standard establishing goodness and badness -- a thing, by the way, that Plato/Socrates wouldn't touch with a ten foot stick and something that NOBODY seems to quite be able to agree on, because the scriptures -- of all religions -- are full of direct ethical contradictions and because belief obstructs the development of a common rational ethos for human society. In the Abrahamic faiths, God is a Dick. In the old testament, God legalizes beating slaves ALMOST to death (and slavery which goes without saying), marriage by rape plus 30 shekels, beating almost anyone to death who breaks any of a good sized pile of silly rules -- including your own children. God commands one of the earliest semi-legendary acts of genocide, compelling Moses to slaughter the entire Midianite population, men, women and children down to babies in arms, but gives the young virgin females among the Midianite captives to his troop to rape and enslave. Then there are several pages describing the looting of the Midianites and how much of it Moses and his priesthood ended up with. Thanks, God!
But nobody ever reads the Bible, or (it seems) the Quran, or the Book of Mormon. At best they listen to a few carefully selected passages read out loud to them by their preacher on Sunday, who cherrypicks them and then explains them to conform to their own personal vision of good versus evil. And this goes for the new testament as well. There is a lovely scene where Jesus, feeling expansive in his Godhood, is in a tavern with his cronies and a Gentile woman comes up to ask for a miracle. Jesus calls her a dog, looking for scraps from a table set for the Jews, but then humors her and grants her a miracle anyway. Jesus is called good master by a supplicant and rounds on them and says (paraphrased) "Why do you call me good? There is no one that is good but God." admitting on one sentence that he is neither God nor Good. He curses a fig tree for not bearing fruit out of season.
This entire discussion is rubbish. The Matrix is just recent bad Science Fiction. It has no Scientific, Philosophical or Theological foundation. Anybody who takes any of it the least bit seriously needs psychological... adjustments.
A good start would be the Ethics of Aristotle. Once one _gets_ the difference between man-made Ethics, and dispensed Morality, one can see that the last is always fictional, and thus The Matrix, or any variation thereof that invokes some kind of Predestination by a higher or greater Force, is Balderdash.
Or, one could actually read the works of Aristotle's teacher, Plato, specifically The Allegory of the Cave:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
which fortunately has its own wikipedia page and is freely available online, being a bit out of even the DMCA copyright range at this point. The Matrix is clearly (and correctly) listed as being one of several works derivative from some very serious philosophical foundation -- very nearly all of Idealism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
is also fundamental to The Matrix, noting that in the final Matrix movie, they discover that the "reality" they broke out into is itself a supersimulation at a still higher order. The Matrix isn't even the first, or the best, SciFi work to explore the theme of the Cave. James Gunn wrote a triplet of novellas released as "The Joy Makers":
https://www.goodreads.com/book...
https://sciencefictionruminati...
which would have been an even better prequel to The Matrix than the half-baked idea that one can generate more "power" by feeding people IV nutrients than one can get directly from those nutrients used as a power source. That's the really stupid thing about The Matrix that makes it bad SF -- the physics is laughably wrong on the very first page, so to speak. Gunn's Hedonic principle -- straight out of Aristotle and Utilitarianism, BTW -- makes a much better foundation and even corresponds to having a computational overlord whose responsibility it is to keep those in the simulation "happy", as opposed to "alive".
Or, if you prefer, there is Descartes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
or the entire contemporary range of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
argumentation. Note well that the philosophical underpinnings of this aren't even exclusively western:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In both Hinduism and Buddhism, the Maya principle is that this world we appear to see with our eyes and smell with our nose and hear with our ears and taste with our tongue and feel with our skin is not the real world. The real world is Atman joined with Brahman, and is the master of the illusions presented by the senses: From the Kena Upanishad:
Not that which the eye can see, but that whereby the eye can see: know that to be Brahman the eternal, and not what people here adore;
Not that which the ear can hear, but that whereby the ear can hear: know that to be Brahman the eternal, and not what people here adore;
Not that which speech can illuminate, but that by which speech can be illuminated: know that to be Brahman the eternal, and not what people here adore;
Not that which the mind can think, but that whereby the mind can think: know that to be Brahman the eternal, and not what people here adore.
Idealism is truly ancient, and The Matrix a
You mean Charlotte, NC, of course. Nationsbank (nee' NCNB) took over BOA but kept the name and kept the national headquarters in Charlotte.
It is worrisome, though. The scariest thing about this is that it reveals that the BOA statisticians have no idea how to compute probabilities.
rgb
And how did they know this, eh? Oh, wait! Sure, there was this really old collection of legends and myths, and they could see it was obviously true, because it correlated so very well with experience.
Boole's own algebra, axiomatically derived by Richard Cox and converted into a sound basis for epistemology by a number of people especially E. T. Jaynes, can be used to show that their views, unsupported by anything like reliable evidence, were extremely unlikely to be true given the evidence.
But hey, these guys were, oh, a thousand times smarter than you (whatever that means) and could prove that their views were not superstitions. Mostly because they were a way of separating provisional knowledge into probably true and probably false categories using Bayesian reasoning incorporated into the axiomatically derived probability algebra of Laplace and Boole, justifying probability theory as both "The Logic of Science" (Jaynes) and incidentally, the basis for human knowledge all the way down at the level of "how the brain works".
rgb
Gold is currently just under $2000/oz, $32,000/pound, $64,000,000/english ton. With a specific gravity of around 20, one cubic meter of gold in space has a mass of around 20 metric tons, or 24 english tons, so it would be worth ballpark $1,500,000,000. Dropped from orbit to the Earth, it would arrive with (roughly) 32,000,000 Joules/kg of kinetic energy -- 6.4 e11 J total, or around 0.15 kt (360 pounds) of "TNT equivalent" explosive power -- energy that would have to be non-destructively dispersed without melting or vaporizing the metal. To get TO an asteroid to mine it is the big problem. OSIRIS-Rex is costing very close to $1,000,000,000 to launch, and it isn't even CLOSE to complex enough to actually mine it. At this time, the cost per gram of returning with a 60 gram load makes the recovery cost many, many times the cost of gold. That has been true of every single gram of material brought back from space so far. And this does not include the cost of altering the energy and orbit of the asteroid in question which requires fuel at FOB prices at the same location at the asteroid to accomplish or technology that we can imagine but that has yet to be built capable of altering orbits without fuel lifted from the Earth. Finally, if we make the not-too-extreme assumption that meteorites are at least approximately representative of the mineral composition of asteroids, finding a pure gold asteroid is enormously unlikely. Finding an asteroid with a minable gold content bound up the way gold frequently is on Earth is at least somewhat unlikely, although certain kinds of meteors have gold concentrations much higher than normal Earth crustal material in some of their mineral complexes. And finally, gold (or other trace metal) extraction on Earth from anything but raw gold nuggets is chemically toxic and extremely difficult, WITHOUT all of the problems attendant on trying to make it work in the absence of humans (adding human asteroid miners makes the cost increase by a factor of hundreds or more). So -- space opera SciFi aside -- I don't think that there is any real risk of a "space race" even if an asteroid made of (a substantial fraction of) pure gold or platinum in native metal form is found, and it is really rather improbable that one will be found.
But this isn't the real problem. The real problem is that nobody sane is going to let ANYBODY manipulate masses of tens to hundreds of metric tons overheat. 130 metric tons in orbit is 1 kiloton of TNT hitting the ground. It doesn't take a lot of mass up there before one has a "project thor" style weapon, and you KNOW that some Dr. Evil out there would be ensuring a way to make it so. This too has been foreseen by the same SciFi authors of yesteryear, with Heinlein bombarding the Earth with rocks from the Moon using the same launcher that was intended to ship wheat, or Niven and Pournelle's snouts dropping asteroids into the Indian Ocean. Same reason I am very skeptical of proposals to put solar arrays in orbit and beam energy down to the ground via e.g. microwaves. Your multi-gigawatt orbital maser is too easy to repurpose into your multi-gigawatt death ray from space.
I love SF. I've read a really significant fraction of it, although it is difficult to keep up with the recent explosion of e-publishing. But with anything LIKE our existing technology and knowledge of physics, it is just plain difficult to see anything in space that we can afford to reach at a cost that makes it profitable. Anything you can find in space or on the nearby planets can be found, or made, on Earth for a whole lot less, at least so far.
Is this a permanent condition, a fundamental physical reality, of the human species? Hard to say. We are a long, long way away from being able to go into space cheaply, and most of the limitations we had fifty years ago are with us today. If/when fusion becomes a viable energy source with something smaller than warehouse-sized generators, we might see some change, but with chemical rockets and current energy prices and ge
But the Earth IS flat. Well, locally flat. Sort of. A manifold, at any rate. Except for all of the fractally scaled bumps that extend down to the molecular level.
Come to think of it, the Earth isn't flat. In fact, it doesn't even have a surface. Just a highly irregular atomic-scale semi-fractal zone of Pauli-electrostatic intermolecular repulsion. The best that can be said is that at some particular coarse-grained scale, it is locally highly reminiscent of a truly flat planar surface osculating to a point in the average, sometimes.
Now the 6000 year bit -- yes, the earth has been around for 6000 years. Just like I've been around for 100% of the last two minutes. Unless one gets really serious about quantum fluctuations, where one could argue -- not necessarily perfectly reasonably -- that every elementary particle in my body flickers in and out of existence on the Heisenberg scale where \delta (mc^2) \delta t \approx \hbar. Following that argument, there is a near certainty that you could pick any instant you like and insist that the Earth "came into being" within an teeny bit of that instant...
It's like this. A dedicated construction robot eats sunlight, and breathes vacuum, or air, or H2 gas, or N2 or O2 gas as you ask. It, like honey badger, just don't care, as long as its batteries have time enough to recharge before its work shift. It can stay up in space for months or years without its bones deteriorating. Properly engineered, it is likely to survive all but the worst solar storms by just powering down and waking up again afterwards. It might even be able to repair itself, or if there were two, repair each other. And finally, if it "dies" for some reason the only loss is money -- no grieving relatives or national flag at half mast.
Also, there is little reason for a crew to be there before they are needed, and they might only end up being needed to move into the space habitat once it is constructed. I'm not religious about whether humans should or should not go into space -- I grew up reading Heinlein, Asimov, etc and think it would be lovely if they did, but then I learned physics and a certain amount of economics and a whole lot of computer science and programming and all I can say now is that robots make a whole lot more economic sense unless or until we are ready to make a serious commitment, such as building a large, permanent, 50's sci-fi style rotating space station at a lagrange point or in geosync orbit and sending people up to LIVE there, or LIVE on the moon. And that commitment would be extraordinarily expensive, and we haven't even taken care of business down here on Earth, such as ending world hunger and poverty and war so we can get on with trans-global progress and space.
Ten years ago, maybe, the possibility of robots doing all of the work might have still been fantasy, but at this point between AI robots and remote controlled drone robots, I doubt that there is much we cannot accomplish in space without risking human lives or spending the incredibly large multiplier on the amount of money required to do ANYTHING we want to do in space.
So at the very least I imagine it will end up making a lot more sense to build nearly everything with robots, even if humans do eventually come in to do their human "time for human judgement and creativity" thing, do things that are difficult to impossible to do remotely. And it isn't clear how large a set that will, ultimately, end up being. Even colonizing the stars seems a lot more likely to take place by sending our genetic instructions and raw materials and building an ecosystem from the ground up using robots as opposed to physically sending humans between the stars. We could afford to do ten colony starships of the former kind for one of the latter, if not more, and either way the original humans that leave the earth are not going to be the ones that first set foot on a planet circling another star...
rgb
Sure, pressure tested with HYDROGEN. Believe me, anything that holds hydrogen at 68 atmospheres should hold O2 at less than 1 (given the huge difference in molecular size), but yes, this is absolutely one of the design issues as the SV tank was designed to be loaded and then vent to hold the design pressure until launch, not hold H2 inside for weeks. Another one is that the tank itself only is structurally rigid enough to survive launch BECAUSE it is loaded with an enormous internal pressure, which makes the walls essentially rigid. OTOH even 1 atmosphere exerts 10^5 newtons per square meter, which seems enough to ensure substantial structural rigidity against far, far smaller thrusts. But still has to worry about whether or not it will substantially deform or rip if rorqued or dinged with an atmosphere inside and vacuum outside and somebody kicks a wall or hits it with a hammer or punctures it with a micrometeor, whether hydrogen embrittlement will occur in the comparatively short time it is loaded with hydrogen under pressure, whether (loaded) it can sustain unevenly applied end forces or torques, and so on. One might have to reinforce it on the inside with erector set circular beams and hang a lightweight interior shield to protect the outer shell and hide ductwork and facilities -- or not.
That is, I'm not arguing with you -- I AGREE that there is a lot of work to do on the subject, which is why I think the money being invested by NASA is well-spent. My only point is that there are some good reasons to think that it will be optimally cost beneficial to go this way rather than, as suggested by the top comment I replied to, a foregone conclusion that it is not going to work or turn out to be the best way to go. As many posters have noted, just because NASA opted at least partway out on this scheme with a Saturn V that happened to be available when a moon shot was cancelled doesn't mean that it has been properly researched or provisionally engineered with all of the things we've learned in materials science and electronics in the meantime.
rgb
I'd think that evacuating the remaining fuel would be the least difficult problem imaginable to solve. As you say, hard vacuum. It's only tricky if you want to recover it (as both O2 and H2 might have some value of their own in space). Beyond that, pretty much any simple valve will work as long as you bleed it off slowly and watch out for Unintended Consequences (like thrust or vacuum refrigeration of the interior from adiabatic expansion).
As you say, not a new concept. But it is a far cry from try to re-engineer a Saturn V tank "on the fly" to become a space lab and designing a replacement for the Saturn V on the same general scale and with a similar but updated structure DEVOTED to putting up a modular space habitat in stable orbit (say, geosync) or at a lagrange point, or DEVOTED to putting together a similarly modular deep space exploration vehicle to travel to mars or even the moon.
If you are engineering a "Saturn VI" workhorse for these purposes, the entire second stage fuel system would be redesigned to facilitate the reuse of the tanks as part of the payload, and the payload would be, in fact, the rest of the required support system in some sort of snap-together modular approach. The tanks would probably have either completely removable ends or would have ends with large (say 2m out of 3 or 4) ports with a standardized sealable interconnect. I'm guessing (open and closed) interior ductwork would be built in (ultimately ported as needed inside and/or into the standarized interconnect). Some interior facilities might be preinstalled on the ground and capable of handling LOX or LH temperatures at high pressure. Some would await orbital assembly. But all the orbital work would likely be snap together stuff, not "this work requires a team of skilled laborers to install" stuff.
I'd expect assembly to be something like:
a) Shoot up the rocket, retaining the second stage instead of separating it; No humans needed. In fact, there would be no third stage -- what was the second and third stage of the SV would be all payload for the SVI.
b) In the desired orbit, bleed any remaining fuel or recover it into a much smaller tank, whichever makes more sense. No humans needed.
c) Robotically disassemble the outer shell as needed (which might be little or none). Remove all unusable hardware associated with its use as a propulsion system -- the actual rocket motor, fuel pumps, wiring and plumbing. Save what is (designed to be) incorporated into the new function (e.g. exterior wiring might well find new life as interior wiring if it was modular and movable, ditto pipes and perhaps some pumps). Probably save the rest as a "scrap pile" that could be used as a supply of raw metal that can be resmelted with a solar mirror in space, or not, whichever ends up making the most sense.
d) Robotically disassemble the "payload" on top of the tank, take off the top of the tank, and hook it onto a modular unit (possibly engineered to be a "collar" that fits onto the top of the tank) containing life support, power, an airlock or flexible interconnect designed to connect a series or parallel combination of tanks. STILL no humans needed to render the habitat at least marginally inhabitable
e) Finally, send up a crew (or deploy the crew that is already there in a growing structure) to do any final interior installations that the robots couldn't handle, fix problems, test everything thoroughly, and integrate the unit into a multiunit modular space station.
f) Along with any needed crew (rotation), periodically send up life support supplies -- fuel, air water, food -- and any tools and hardware needed. But I'd assume that one could send up and self-assemble many living/workspace modules that are then both inhabited and finished off or (re)furnished by one crew and supply shipment.
g) Once "enough" of them are assembled and interconnected at the desired orbital poi
The article intro above actually explains this, if you read it. The fuel in this tank is BURNED, getting the payload into orbit. In the Apollo mission days, the payload was e.g. a third stage that went to the moon and back, as these are BIG rockets. In the past, the second stage tanks would be "thrown away" and allowed to reenter and burn up, but that's slightly insane given the roughly 32 MJ/kg direct energy cost (multiplied by a few orders of magnitude) of lifting anything at all into orbit.
The reasoning is then as follows: We've gotten this great big cylindrical chunk of pressure-tested metal -- remember, it held liquid hydrogen at HIGH pressure securely through a launch exerting many g's of acceleration -- into orbit. It already cost us millions of dollars to build, and tens of millions to get it into orbit as a SIDE EFFECT of lifting this other, really big payload. Let's not waste it!
So, what can we do with it? Well, given that it is roughly the size and even the shape of a good sized mobile home or the living volume of early submarines, making it into pressurized living space is an obvious choice. It is pressure tested at many times the 0.5-1.0 atm pressure differential needed to sustain human life in space. It is made of high quality, carefully x-rayed, stress-tested metal (because NASA would be insane to fire a rocket into space with humans on board with anything less holding in the fuel of the rocket). The metal has been carefully crafted and annealed to be able to handle liquid hydrogen temperatures without becoming brittle, so it is also proofed against your concerns with heat -- humans cannot tolerate any temperatures this metal is unlikely to be perfectly capable of withstanding, and besides, shielding it from sunlight is a matter of wrapping it in a reflective mylar blanket that weighs almost nothing and can easily be shipped up as part of the conversion kit.
As for radiation shielding -- that I don't know about, but I very much doubt that it is an issue. If the Earth gets hit dead on with a solar flare, I don't think there is anything we could reasonably put humans inside in orbit that would be "safe". It's not clear that being on the Earth's surface inside the atmosphere would be "safe". If the metal that the container was made of wasn't adequate as shielding during such an event -- I'm pretty sure it would be perfectly good most of the time -- and we had something better (but smaller and more expensive) then humans could retreat into the latter as a "shelter" to wait out the storm.
Life support machinery and furniture for the interior of the tank turned into habitat is a small fraction of the weight of the whole thing, and weight into orbit costs like gold.
Now let's compare costs. Suppose you used the Atlas to launch an Earth-built space habitat directly into space as to you suggest, and just wasted the second stage tank as usual. It costs you one launch to get the habitat into space, and the interior volume is almost certainly going to be smaller than the second stage tank volume. Now suppose that you take the empty tank and just hook it onto the habitat you just launched (which already has all of the life support machinery, radiation tolerance etc that you are worried about. Voila! You've more than doubled your available habitat volume in space at (almost) zero additional marginal cost! EVEN if it isn't AS safe as the primary habitat in the event of a solar storm, well, astronauts can always retreat into the primary habitat during such a storm and still use the tank as room for experiments, hydroponics, their ping pong table, room to spread out in to avoid going nuts.
The last question is: What do you have to do to the tank to FACILITATE this so that it isn't being done on an ad hoc basis? As you say, certain pieces of work are way cheaper on Earth than they will be in orbit. Should we build the tank out of slightly different metals so it IS a better radiation shield? Should we pre-install ductwork for ventilation and wiring and liquid
Wisdom. I've gotten higher on the math tree than you, perhaps, but I have students who can do math effortlessly that takes me a great deal of effort indeed. And you CANNOT do physics without real math. It's just the way it is. Real math starting with calculus, which Newton invented so that he could invent physics, and continuing on through number theory, set theory, group theory, geometry at many levels, and very, very advanced calculus, calculus so difficult that we can't solve it so discussions are about the best way to approximate a solution.
I get (for reasons that I cannot really explain but no doubt are some sort of karmic burden predestined for all time) lots of people who write me with their own special "unified theory of everything" -- and got them way back when the means of communication were paper letters or phone calls or email on networks like "bitnet" that nobody under 30 has even heard of -- and they are invariably filled with nifty diagrams, platonic ideals, bullshit from one end to the other that is all geometric and compelling to its creator, and have absolutely no relationship to anything one can measure and predict nothing at all. They aren't even accurately descriptive.
No way through but to pay your dues first. And your dues, in physics, nowadays takes years even for super-geniuses who really have a chance at having the critical insight to take things to the next level. There just isn't any low-hanging fruit left. Most of the people who invent theories of everything without doing the work needed to understand the real difficulty of the problem they claim to solve just by being naturally clever, themselves, simply have enormous personality disorders (or worse) such as chronic narcissism, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, grandiosity. And then there are the spiritualist whackos, who think that crystals produce "energy" without actually understanding what crystals, or energy, actually are. They come up with elaborate theories as well that make physics into a kind of elective magic that one can evade by using runes on specialized charts, according to the stars or deities or demons that REALLY drive everything.
Sigh.
Not an argument from me, this is really the point I was making. Gravity waves we observe are the moral equivalent of the classical EM waves emitted by a radio. Sure, somewhere in there there are photons, but they are in a state or mixed state that utterly obscures their quantum nature (and there I actually did a fair bit of work upon a time and have a PR paper on nonlinear quantum optics in the master equation/langevin approach).
So, without trying to unify quantum field theory -- which is what coming up with the right theory of gravitation is all about -- that somehow also is consistent with general relativity, the original question I responded to was whether or not "standing gravitational waves" were responsible for the alteration of ordinary 1/r^2 gravitation OR the excess mass creating ordinary 1/r^2 gravitation. All I then did was point out that it seems unlikely, even without a detailed theory, on the grounds of similar phenomena in the EM field where the "weak" component is more or less irrelevant to the opposition of super-weak gravity -- a point I make every three or four months to a new crop of introductory physics students btw. It takes an entire planet to pull us down with our weight. It takes the combination of electrostatic force and the Pauli exclusion principle to oppose that weight with a thin skin of structured charged particles (where nuclear and electroweak are important on the inside of atoms, but the actual force managing the repulsion is all fermionic electrons).
That doesn't make it impossible. The EM force is modified at short range by (quantum) virtual pair production and the polarization of the vacuum. One can imagine, at least that the vacuum is polarizable in some way to gravitation, although it is a bit difficult given that we are only aware of a single "pole". At least some phenomena in EM also alter measurably when one makes bound states out of things, creating bands of states instead of "ideal" sharp lines -- I'm not sure how that would apply to gravitation as gravitational bound states are the moral equivalent of purely classical EM orbits but without the strong radiation of energy that was predicted by Maxwell and that was part of the downfall of Newtonian mechanics. Sure, the moon presumably radiates away gravitational energy every time it orbits the earth, but the effect is so miniscule that it is overwhelmed by tidal coupling that drives the moon AWAY from the earth every year by a few cm, the exact opposite of a radiation spiral.
So I simply repeat -- if somebody wants to explain the cosmological galactic orbital anomaly data that gives rise to the dark matter hypothesis using "gravitational standing waves" instead, they have their work cut out for them. Starting with reading at least some of the hundreds of papers out there (usually a focused search and skimming of the abstracts can eliminate 90% or more of them, of course) and in many cases starting even earlier by getting University degrees in some mix of (serious) math and physics. I am a theoretical physicist, I'm pretty good at math and can do pages of algebra towards a goal and so on, and I'm still a bit intimidated by the gravity people. Differential geometry just for starters, maybe topology, general relativity, and of course the full course in math and physics through quantum field theory are your OPENERS, and then things really get difficult. Makes me tired just thinking about it;-)
rgb
Photons are carriers of the EM force like gravitons are supposedly carries for the gravitational force. I assumed that he was talking about this sort of wave. But yeah, a single observation or even two or three of gravity waves does not prove that "gravity" is a quantum wave phenomenon.
After all, hinting that gun owners might take matters into their own hands IF Hillary is elected (the time ordering and meaning of his sentences was very clear) sounds like promoting anarchy, treason, and terrorism to me.
Also, if he asserts that Obama is the "founder of ISIS" then he has to acknowledge that he wanted to "found ISIS" in exactly the same way as he clearly an unequivocally stated in TWO CNN interviews. So let's call him -- by his own standards -- a "co-founder of ISIS".
One can then work one's way down through whether or not calling for a "wall" to be built between the US and Mexico, prohibiting immigration of all Muslims, etc counts as "promoting terrorism" in the same sense that drawing Mohammed having relations with a camel or insulting whole swaths of the US population by calling them rapists and thieves might promote, rather than extinguish, acts of terror-level violence.
No? Political speech and hence protected? Then precisely what IS the difference between this sort of twittering and public speaking and expressing extreme annoyance at the United States in general and Trump in particular?
I disagree. There is a whole world of "public", and a lot of them don't have access to a University library. And no, science should not be confined to the cloistered halls of academe. You simply don't know who might come up with a new discovery or objection to a published work, or who might be inspired by one to invent something new. In addition to US citizens that paid for the research, there are young people in India, China, Africa who will only have the opportunity to read real scientific papers if they are open access. Do we WANT to keep the rest of the world in a state of non-participatory ignorance? Is that the kind of world we want to live in?
I would say no. And I agree, journals have a useful purpose, or even many useful purposes. But still, paywalled journals are, IMO, doomed. I think they'll be lucky if they get a year of grace from the granting agencies on the one hand, and nearly everybody puts their own work up on the web anyway -- it's just hard to find it and difficult to see if it actually made it through the refereeing process in the form posted without being able to access the actual published article.
The internet is not through evolving. We'll see where this ends up. If we live long enough...;-)
This is not true. In fact, it is not true by law, and was not true by law then. You simply haven't tried. The DATA is readily available from NASA funded research (and often the papers are/were too). The real problem, as I said, is that the old way the journals ran from the invention of the proceedings of the royal society to the present has been dead for at least five years, but nobody knows how to keep the journals (a desirable thing, believe me) and their refereeing and editorial process alive without the money Universities kick back for subscriptions. If everything is free on the web, there are no subscription fees and the journals die. If the journals die, it is as disastrous a consequence as trying to run the US with only a president and congress and no supreme court.
Yes, there are alternatives to paid journals, including some online/free ones, but they ultimately rely on humans contributing time (or to put it another way, having their living paid for some other way). That's not bad, but you can see why there could be problems with this approach as well. It remains to be seen what will work and not introduce even more sources of bias than there are in the current system (which is not above reproach -- gatekeeping and worse abound in at least some journals).
BTW, I'm not a fan of a lot of what passes for climate science or NASA GISS, but you do NASA in general a disservice if you think that GISS was somehow exempted from the law. Or if you think that everybody in NASA GISS are members of a vast conspiracy and not intellectually honest. James Hansen, for example is not everybody, even if he should have been replaced before he even started as head of GISS, or at worst the first time he spoke ex cathedra predicting 5 meter SLR. In my opinion.
rgb
I actually had the privilege of advising the govt to do this a few years ago, so it is nice that it is happening. But even then, NASA was progressive and required open access to data and more from their supported publications. This is a notch up.
The problem is that it needs to be mandated across all journals, and the journals then will face a major problem -- how will they survive when one no longer needs to buy journal subscriptions to fund the journals? Government support isn't a good answer for lots of reasons. But what answer IS a good answer?
I don't know, but they'd better find it soon, because the Internet has made old-style journals largely obsolete and the public will no longer tolerate not being able to read the research they, after all, ultimately paid for. It is my profound hope that the NSF and other major agencies follow suit immediately. We'll see if e.g. Physical Review can survive it and deal with what comes either way.
Again, I have to say this feels like a complete non-sequitor. I'm not sure exactly what you are trying to suggest with your assertion of "ample discussion and explanation of time theology" and how the "same arguments... were answered so long ago". When I google "time theology" (which I wasn't even aware was a reasonable "subject" of hermeneutics, if one imagines that making stuff up so that it all works out is somehow either a subject or reasonable) I get several hits but they do not illuminate your statement. I can't even tell if you are arguing that the Bible is "true" (for some meaning of the word true that is not, in fact, the meaning of the word true) or if you are commiserating the fact that people continue to defend the Bible as being true in spite of the fact that an eight year old child could tell that it was all made up if they weren't brainwashed to think otherwise from when they really were too young to know any better.
But then to jump to physics -- which has a completely different standard for establishing probable truth, one you can actually learn about if you read e.g. E.T. Jaynes' "Probability Theory, the Logic of Science" or "The Algebra of Probable Inference" by Richard Cox (or you are welcome to take a pass at http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/a... if you don't mind an eternally not quite finished book that makes the same argument, possibly more broadly) -- physics as a subject actually doesn't have that many "arguers" about things that are well explained by consistent theories plus evidence. Not within the discipline. This is in part because there is something approximating an objective standard for determining when something is (probably) true, (probably) false, or (most definitely) not really resolved yet one way or another. People may well have all sorts of fun in the middle area, but it isn't because of any misuse of faith, it is more a matter of placing your bets as to how experiments will eventually work out to resolve the issue, with both sides knowing that it is a BET and not to be taken seriously (that is, as truth) without experimental evidence to back it.
On /., of course, LOTS of people argue about physics, but most of them aren't physicists, and the ones that are are trying to correct people's egregiously lacking understanding of the physics of what they are arguing about. Which is the point I was making above, BTW. If you take a theory where the idea of standing waves is fairly well understood both mathematically and physically, and try to imagine how to make it explain the galactic rotation data, it is at the very least not easy to see how to proceed. This is a concrete statement, and if you disagree, feel free to actually post your way of proceeding. It wasn't argument, as I'm neither asserting that there is or isn't a fifth force, dark matter, monopoles, a useful standing wave theory of gravitational waves, or for that matter a meaningful "time theology" whatever that might be -- I'm just pointing out that using the terms in their usual sense it isn't easy to see how to explain the galactic data using standing gravitational waves, or even to see how (necessarily monochromatic and coherent) standing gravitational waves could come about.
The place where physicists DO argue is at conferences and workshops, usually where they disagree about some aspect or another of mathematics or experiment in an area of physics that is not yet resolved into probable/accepted provisional truth. I've been in the middle of one of those and it wasn't pretty. How CAN one explain things like conditional convergence of series to somebody that already ought to know it? But in the end, the mathematics and sound reason usually win, because (unlike time theology) there is actually a unique answer and we have an objective method for homing in on it.
rgb
Oh, dear, I you misunderstand the nature of evidence and theory, sir or madam. One does not usually "refute" a hypothesis in physics, and absence of evidence is not sufficient evidence of absence. The best that can be said for or against fifth force theories in physics is that there is little sound evidence to support any specific one of them. At the same time, there is AMPLE evidence that our knowledge of physics is incomplete, and there are large scale, clearly visible phenomena (like the galactic rotational anomaly and other cosmological observations) that strongly suggest that there is indeed SOME sort of additional force or interaction present beyond the four we know of, as we cannot (so far) see any way to explain what we see within the confines of those theories.
Is it a "fifth force"? Is it "dark matter" and/or "dark energy"? Well, if it is the latter, it IS a fifth force, at least, unless somebody manages to come up with a particle outside of the existing elementary particle zoo that doesn't couple to any of the forces but e.g. gravity itself. However, physical particles usually couple to the physical forces in some way so a completely new particle is not unlikely to be associated with a completely new force.
The point is that I don't BELIEVE in such a thing -- few physicists do -- in the absence of evidence to support such a belief. I think the theory of magnetic monopoles is absolutely lovely -- they would fill a tremendous gap in our knowledge of physics, they would symmetrize Maxwell's Equations in a way they are begging to be symmetrized in, they would explain the quantization of charge -- but I, like most physicists, will only BELIEVE in monopoles when somebody reproducibly puts salt on the metaphorical tail of not one, but a steady stream of monopole observations. Ditto the Higgs particle. Ditto "trans-luminal neutrinos". Experimental evidence talks, theoretical bullshit walks -- or more reasonably, waits in the wings as a plausible hypotheses not yet supported until experiments are performed that increase the probability that they are correct (incorrectly stated as "confirm" them, just as a lack of evidence or negative evidence doesn't necessarily "refute" them).
I don't quite get your point about the Bible, either. Yes, the Bible is bullshit, with pretty much ever line of its supernaturalism refuted by ordinary common sense and all of the evidence worthy of the name we've ever collected. (To provide an interesting metaphor -- suppose all four gospels reported Jesus as saying "I have seen the magnetic monopole in my water turned into wine." Would any reasonable person then conclude that monopoles are proven to exist beyond any reasonable doubt based on a single, 2000 year old observation of them reported as hearsay by individuals who were not there and who reported nothing of the experimental method used, the error bars, the controls against fraud perpetrated just so one could get tenure... bearing in mind that turning H_2O lacking carbon and nitrogen into a complex of ETOH and lots of flavorings and particulate matter made up of proteins and hydrocarbons is even more ludicrous than observing a monopole without any visible apparatus or method) Quite a lot of its supposed history is unsupported by actual archeological evidence -- it is more in the category of "legend" shading over into "myth" than it is "history". But belief in the absurd in the context of the Bible is in no way comparable to the process of formulating hypotheses and searching for corroboratory evidence in cutting edge physics. Even theorists who propose the theories usually know better than to "believe" in them -- they do the work in the hope that experiments will be done (guided by their work, perhaps) that validate their hypotheses or correct them and give them new insight.
Our knowledge of the Universe is known to be incomplete. It is then just a matter of common sense that we should work to complete it, and that work involves proposing new ways it might be complet
Maybe. But I think you'd have your work cut out for you to show it. And you'd have to explain at some point why e.g. the Coulomb interaction doesn't demonstrate it as a direct augmentation of Coulomb interactions and meso-scale deviation from 1/r^2 form with its much greater (and hence easier to observe) interaction strength.
Standing waves in EM fields (where we can easily observe them in e.g. lasers, Fabry-Perot interferometers, etc) require reflectors at both sides of a cavity. They arise out of solutions to a wave equation with specified boundary conditions on surface(s) bounding a volume. We do not USUALLY observe them as steady state phenomena between individual pairs of particles or objects, in part because the objects would scatter an incoming wave, not reflect it back in the direction that would (eventually, after a retarded time) be the location of the source. The scattering results in incoherence. It is very difficult to see how a linear wave theory could give rise to an effectively nonlinear resonant alteration of gravity with large numbers of incoherent sources in any of the usual models of dispersion or resonant interaction, let alone one that has the right properties to explain the observations.
So, if you are a math/physics/field theory uber-geek (I'm not, I'm just a humble ordinary physicist and this is over my pay grade:-) you could always give it a try and try to build some sort of model of your hypothesis, after doing enough research that you can establish how to even start, but as I said, my intuition based on a fairly detailed knowledge of ordinary EM waves is that -- probably not worth the time. One MIGHT argue that a dense galactic center (or a black hole at the center) could form a kind of effective "boundary" for such a wave, but the increasingly dispersed stars and other matter surrounding the galaxy do not seem to be good candidates for a second boundary.
If you want an idea that seems MORE likely to be fruitful, imagine that the black hole is radiating quantized gravity waves in all directions, and that those outgoing waves, as they pass physical matter, stimulate the coherent emission of more gravity waves in the one-pass phenomenon (observed and actually exploited in E&M) known as "coherence brightening". We actually observe coherence brightening in astrophysics, IIRC, when light from a distant source passes through excited stardust (that is, for example, ionized by nearby stars.
But this still doesn't quite work for me -- for one thing what "excites" stars so that they can add energy to a gravitational wave (which has to carry energy, after all)? Why doesn't the surrounding matter act more like a dielectric and SCREEN the gravitational field, if anything? It's hard to know how to even begin to build a theory of gravity per se that could explain the galactic rotational anomaly, and I think many very competent people have tried and continue to try.
rgb
...and wait for technology to catch up. At some point cost efficient storage has the capability, as TFA notes, to dramatically alter the utility and (especially) the cost-efficiency of intermittent renewable sources. The other critical point is energy transportation -- moving e.g. PV solar energy from Arizona or Texas to Maine without dropping half of it along the way. In the meantime, can we stop panicking and wasting huge amounts of money IMPLEMENTING immature technologies while they are -- immature?
rgb
Yes, to AC, but not often as they were SLOW... and modems started their upward track soon after.
I used teletypes several times, but not to write full projects. Those were on punch cards. I wrote a full box of Fortran IV to do a large physics computation for Duke's nuclear lab. So back at ya, did you ever use HASP and JCL to manage 360/370 jobs submitted on cards, loading disk packs and so on? Again, teletypes AND cards sucked, so like all sane humans I switched first to tty consoles and then to the IBM PC, where I wrote an entire full screen editor that ran on TOP of the QED line editor in BASICA. I think I was probably the only human in the world at the time that could do full remote full screen editing on IBM mainframes... or at least, I never heard of anybody else who could.
Sadly, I never WROTE a bootloader, but I did some work on a PDP-11 which booted from paper tape that somebody else wrote. Not that sadly, I might point out...
I did write some code on paper tape, but that was back in high school, and only one program (one of my first programs, actually).
Finally, I never changed fonts on a 2741 terminal. But I did write my dissertation on an IBM selectric and had to swap balls all the time to get the greek characters needed in a physics paper. Again, the IBM PC came out soon after with dot matrix printers, and I went through first T3 (if anybody remembers that, one of the first full screen math/text editors) and then TeX and never looked back after LaTeX.
Things really did get better! There was -- and still is! -- home for the world....
It was more a file sharing protocol. No html, but it was very easy to link resources of many sorts into a library a notch above FTP in ease of use. Oak Ridge, IIRC, had an awesome gopher site where one could get many tools and goodies.