Please don't take this the wrong way. My intention isn't to attack your faith, but I do think that perhaps you need to think about the origins of your faith a little more deeply.
I find it quite surprising that you would hinge your faith on whether or not certain scientific theories are correct. Don't you think that's rather odd? Particularly given the fact that faith is usually defined as belief in something without having good reason to believe in it? Is some wild esoteric theory really that much of threat?
You have a problem with evolution and the big bang because you think that if these theories are true, then the universe could not have been "perfect." But I ask, perfect according to who? God's idea of perfection may very well be different from yours, and in fact, I think the idea of perfection that you allude to, may very well be logically impossible. For example, what makes you so sure that death is a flaw? I'm not sure that I would draw that conclusion from Genesis.
Second, and I'm sure you won't like this: What prevents God from using evolution as his means for developing life? According to Christian thought, God knew what outcome he wanted, and maybe evolution provided the outcome he was looking for. There is a lot of evidence that points in that direction, and you already agree that Genesis is by and large and allegory, so what's the problem? You don't like the idea of evolution because of the "chance" that's involved with it, but from my perspective, I say, who are you to question God's decision for making the universe work the way he did. Just because you think he should be involved in a certain way that you define, doesn't mean that that is the way that He put things together.
I know for a fact that there had to be quite a few people that were shorting SCO stock. I tried to do it myself, but was disallowed because the percentage of SCO stock that was already being shorted was too high. The original poster's story might've been lacking in details, but it's a pretty safe bet that if this guy didn't make a lot of money off of shorting SCO stock, somebody did.
If you were the accountant, and you found an unreported 200 million, what would you do with it?
Dear Sir,
I am hoping that this message finds you well. I would think that you should be quite surprised that I am writing to you. But I found some information about you, and I believe that you are quite trust worthy. I am an accountant for a large software company and I recently found an unreported sum of $200 MILLION DOLLARS that no one in the company knows about. All I need to do is use your bank account to deposit the full sum, and I will cut you in for 5%. Please contact me soon so that we can begin the transaction....
Damn! Maybe some of those emails really are legit after all!;)
Show me a smart, intelligent person that has researched Christianity, and concluded that it's true, and I'll show you another smart, intelligent person that has concluded that it's not true.
The facts are that there are very smart people that "switch sides" every day. And in the cases of some of the people that I know, I am not surprised by it in the least, in fact, I would almost say that they were pre-disposed to it for a number of different reasons (although they always quickly deny it).
My conclusion is that belief (or disbelief) in religion hangs on something else beyond simple logic or faith. I don't claim to know what this is, but I've seen too many people switch back and forth to be able to believe the claim that anyone's conclusions about religion are purely logical (or purely based on faith).
The idea that a finite amount of matter could collapse itself into an infinitely small space with infinitely large gravity is certainly not the simplest explanation that I can think of.
Nobody actually believes this is what happens, this is just what the equations say happens, there is a difference. This is why we say that our current laws of physics break down when it comes to black holes. Simply put, our equations don't tell us anything useful once you go past the event horizon of a black hole, it's utter nonsense.
As for simplicity, let me put it this way. We know that relativity and quantum mechanics break down in this situation. However, the mathematics that lead to this breakdown are far simpler, far better tested, and most importantly far more explicit, than what is currently proposed about gravastars. In other words, they are introducing additional complexity where there is no reason to believe that there is any. Let's face it, the authors are proposing the existence of a new state of matter for which there is absolutely zero evidence for, except that it happens to fit their pet theory. As a scientist, it is exactly these kind of conjectures that I am the most wary of.
Now, having said that. I don't think there is anything wrong with them introducing a new form of matter. I have no problem with that per se. However, they have got a lot of work to do before I am going to accept it. And that is precisely how it should be. Scientists have hypothesized the existence of all kinds of things, sometimes they have eventually been proven right, other times they have been proved false. Without any real evidence to support gravistars beyond somebody's pet theory, I'm going to continue to assume current black hole theory is more correct than gravastar theory, at least until gravastars have a better developed theoretical underpinning.
Speaking as someone who has studied comets for a living, I have to say that this is going deep into crank territory. I can disprove this theory with my own spectroscopic observations of plasma tails.
The plasma tails of comets are composed of unstable molecules that quickly break down in the presence of ultraviolet light from the sun. In order for this theory to even be even remotely correct, a mechanism has to be proposed for creating (and protecting from distruction) parent molecules in sufficient quantities in the inner solar system for a comet to "vacuum" up. The number density for these molecules would have to be quite high (relatively speaking), and the composition would be far out of sink with the composition we observe on the sun's surface, which would pretty much have to be the source. In other words, it just doesn't pan out.
Plasma tail dynamics is a very interesting field, but this theory doesn't even come close to the truth.
The orbital charactistics of an object coming in from outside the solar system would be very different from Kuiper Belt objects, and while it would be somewhat more difficult to tell the difference between an Oort cloud comet and an external comet/asteroid, there would be differences. Most notably, objects captured or "scattered" into the solar system will have higher orbital energies. eg. They will likely be coming in
at velocities large enough to escape from the solar system to begin with, while objects in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud are firmly bound to the sun.
Finally, you don't need to land a probe on these objects to figure out what they are made of.
Optical spectroscopy has done a pretty good job of figuring out what these things are made of, you don't need to send a probe to figure it out. I can tell you right now, the composition is most likely 95-98% water with the rest being a smattering of carbon and nitrogen bearing modules with some silicate particles thrown in to the mix.
But I can't help but think that we are talking to the wrong people here. The DOJ's main purpose is enforcing the law, not making it.
What we really need is a rethinking of IP law in general, which is more in the domain of the legislative branch of government than in the judicial. Unfortunately, catching the attention of those guys is a lot more difficult, unless you can contribute a couple of million to their campaigns.
I've more or less converted my mother over to linux,
and she does genealogy. There is a genealogy program available for linux, the name escapes me, but a google search should find it.
As I recall, feature-wise, I think the software seemed to be far more sophisticated than any of the programs she was using under windows. The sticking
point, however, was the interface. The software was (is?) appeared to be maintained by "professional" geneaologists which meant that it had all kinds of features that my mother had only the vaguest of idea of what they were. In the end, I wound up setting her up with vmware so she could use what she was used to. But the fact is, there is (or at least was several years ago) a very sophisticated geneaology program for unix, that seemed to be well mainained, but a little too advanced for the casual user. I haven't looked at in years, but I would expect that it has probably been updated considerably since then...
You know, I have sympathy for the mom and pop music shops, but I also believe very strongly in progress. Progress in science and technology has always caused some business models to collapse while providing new opportunities for others. That's part of life, will I shed a tear for the independent music seller? Sure, but I can guarantee you that there will be a new business opportunities for these people if they can adapt to the new environment. But there is no reason to try to keep the status quo just to keep the independents in business. In fact, I would expect that the next generation business models will probably come from these same independents, because they are nimble and quick whereas the RIAA and it's cronies are slow and too conservative to ever come up with something new (unless they buy it from someone else).
You are right that many, maybe even most people do in fact have some interest in space exploration, but having an interest and being willing to spend money on it are two different things.
On the political front, I'd say most politicians aren't really all that interested in supporting such long term goals, especially when they go beyond their own terms.
Finally, there is also a certain amount of resistance to the idea from within the scientific community itself. It is orders of magnitude cheaper to send out probes to the moon or Mars, than it is to send a human with life support and all the risks associated with it.
Couple that with the number of black-eyes NASA has gotten over the last couple of decades both with failed probes and shuttle accidents and you have a system that isn't going to get the funding or support it needs to accomplish the really big things.
Actually my argument really didn't have anything to do with yours. My point was that people are being critical of NASA when funding a return mission to the moon was completely beyond NASA's power to do without government support, and hence the support of the average tax payer. It doesn't really make sense to blame NASA for that.
As for gutting NASA, I'm not necessarily against that, however, on the other hand, NASA also supports a great deal of fundamental research that more than likely would not be picked up by the private companies that you want to give that money to. NASA does a lot more than fly the space shuttle and launch satellites. Things like that could easily be privatized, however many of the research projects are not so easily moved to the private sector simply because there is little to no near term return on investment. The US government has been pretty bad at looking at the long term, but as bad as the government has been, the private sector has been even worse.
There seem to be a number of comments here, including the one from the submitter, that would seem to blame NASA for the fact that we haven't gone back to the moon. While I think there a number of things about NASA that warrant criticism, this isn't one of them.
The reason we have not gone back to the moon is that most people in the US are not interested in it. If the people aren't interested in it, then the elected administration isn't going to be interested in it, the net result being that there is no support to fund that kind of undertaking. If you can somehow get the money to NASA to go back to the moon, you can bet there are people there that are ready and willing to take that project on.
What's really needed in the US is something that will once again spark a sense of urgency and wonder in the American public about space exploration again. In the sixties it was primarily competition with the Russians that sparked everyone's interest. Today we need something similar to get the people behind a new moon mission, otherwise it will almost certainly never happen. In fact, I think a manned mission to Mars probably has a better chance of getting funding today than a return to the moon (even though I personally think a moon base would be a much better use of funds...)
You're right, I was thinking about lithium burning in brown dwarfs just below the cut-off, and when I wrote the response, I only went up one spot on the periodic table instead of two.
Well, it is very near the low mass cut-off. The minimum mass required to fuse helium is right around 0.07. So yeah, it's possible for it to be a main sequence star, barely.
Ok, fair enough. But that's really not a very reasonable assumption to make. Speaking as a former astronomer myself, I think I can say with some authority that all working astronomers today know all too well how their work interconnects with other fields.
This guy is the Astronomer Royale, this is someone that is tuned in to what is going on in various branches of the field, even more so than I am, and I can name several branches that would be affected off the top of my head. In essence, your assumption that he doesn't realize his own field would be unaffected doesn't wash.
Now, weather or not he's right is another issue, but I am quite certian he understands the implications of what he is saying.
That's not even remotely true. Astronomy would be greatly curtailed by this as well. A large portion of current astronomy relies very heavily on results from high energy physics, particularly cosmology.
Stopping research in high energy physics would cripple research projects dealing with supernovae, cosmology, supermassive black holes, even cosmic ray research (and its affect on star formation) would likely be affected. And that's before we even start getting into the newer fields, like astrobiology.
In the season cliffhanger, Dr. Phlox gets trapped in the transporter, and it becomes clear that he can not be rematerialized in his previous form....
...and in the conclusion, Phlox is pulled out of the transporter and transformed into a slinky female Vulcan who immediately embarks on a lesbian love affair with Tpol.
It's a little trickier than that. Ices don't really have any spectroscopic features until you get into the far infrared. So you need an infrared spectrometer on board the probe. This isn't so easy to do, as any good infrared spectrometer needs a replenishable supply of liquid helium (which boils off fairly readily in the inner solar system).
It's far easier to take temperature measurement using other means, and those measurements are sufficient to show that it's too warm for CO2.
I'm not positive of this, but I would guess that ground based infrared spectrometers (like what's on NASA's IRTF) may not have the resolution nor the signal to noise capabilities to do the detection. No that I think of it, there are several plausible reasons why you can't do the detection from ground based telescopes, but I would need to check them out before sticking my neck out and posting them.
In principle, yes. However, the problem has been that the laser heats up the atmosphere as it goes through it, causing "blooming." Essentially the heated gas around the beam has different optical properties than the quiescent gas, then as the atmospheric gases of different temperature start to mix, get a randomn distortion of the beam. Multiply this over the distance you are trying to focus the beam, and it becomes pretty much impossible to focus properly. Now, if you've already got a laser in space....
No, that's not what your experiment does. All it does is confirm that the sun has a gravitational pull and that it is constant. It doesn't give you any information about the propogation of gravity.
Now if the sun were undergoing large pulsations, large enough to effect the sun's gravitational field, then you could start looking at the speed of propogation that way, but once you are already immersed in a constant field, the speed of propogation is pretty much impossible measure.
Yeah, I think the pharmaceutical plotline is one facet of the beginning of the mentats, but I also think that Norma Cenva may also be an early mentat. A lot of her thought processes seem to indicate proto-mentat abilities. At least that's how I read it.
If my memory serves me, I believe that there is a nearly confirmed black hole at the center of M15 (a globular cluster). However the conditions for it's creation are probably still up for debate. A bunch of semi-simultaneous stellar collisions at the core is not out of the question though.
We've been broadcasting interceptible radio and tv signals out into space for at least 70 years now, and we can't go out and stop those radio waves from continuing on. Any sufficiently advanced aliens living within ~70 light years of earth already knows about us, guaranteed.
I don't have the references handy, but IIRC, recently a whole class of organic, self-replicating molecules has been found, and they aren't that hard
to make under the conditions most scientists believe the primordial earth had. The argument posited is that these simple molecules could easily have been the chemical starting point, eg. there was enough raw material for these molecules to form, and to reproduce themselves. They also have a relatively high probability of mutation and some of those mutations are non-destructive...
Now, they may not be functional proteins, nor DNA, or even genes, but it sounds like these molecules just might be the chemical starting point.
Slashdot Mirror
Please don't take this the wrong way. My intention isn't to attack your faith, but I do think that perhaps you need to think about the origins of your faith a little more deeply.
I find it quite surprising that you would hinge your faith on whether or not certain scientific theories are correct. Don't you think that's rather odd? Particularly given the fact that faith is usually defined as belief in something without having good reason to believe in it? Is some wild esoteric theory really that much of threat?
You have a problem with evolution and the big bang because you think that if these theories are true, then the universe could not have been "perfect." But I ask, perfect according to who? God's idea of perfection may very well be different from yours, and in fact, I think the idea of perfection that you allude to, may very well be logically impossible. For example, what makes you so sure that death is a flaw? I'm not sure that I would draw that conclusion from Genesis.
Second, and I'm sure you won't like this: What prevents God from using evolution as his means for developing life? According to Christian thought, God knew what outcome he wanted, and maybe evolution provided the outcome he was looking for. There is a lot of evidence that points in that direction, and you already agree that Genesis is by and large and allegory, so what's the problem? You don't like the idea of evolution because of the "chance" that's involved with it, but from my perspective, I say, who are you to question God's decision for making the universe work the way he did. Just because you think he should be involved in a certain way that you define, doesn't mean that that is the way that He put things together.
I know for a fact that there had to be quite a few people that were shorting SCO stock. I tried to do it myself, but was disallowed because the percentage of SCO stock that was already being shorted was too high. The original poster's story might've been lacking in details, but it's a pretty safe bet that if this guy didn't make a lot of money off of shorting SCO stock, somebody did.
If you were the accountant, and you found an unreported 200 million, what would you do with it?
Dear Sir,I am hoping that this message finds you well. I would think that you should be quite surprised that I am writing to you. But I found some information about you, and I believe that you are quite trust worthy. I am an accountant for a large software company and I recently found an unreported sum of $200 MILLION DOLLARS that no one in the company knows about. All I need to do is use your bank account to deposit the full sum, and I will cut you in for 5%. Please contact me soon so that we can begin the transaction....
Damn! Maybe some of those emails really are legit after all! ;)
Show me a smart, intelligent person that has researched Christianity, and concluded that it's true, and I'll show you another smart, intelligent person that has concluded that it's not true.
The facts are that there are very smart people that "switch sides" every day. And in the cases of some of the people that I know, I am not surprised by it in the least, in fact, I would almost say that they were pre-disposed to it for a number of different reasons (although they always quickly deny it).
My conclusion is that belief (or disbelief) in religion hangs on something else beyond simple logic or faith. I don't claim to know what this is, but I've seen too many people switch back and forth to be able to believe the claim that anyone's conclusions about religion are purely logical (or purely based on faith).
Nobody actually believes this is what happens, this is just what the equations say happens, there is a difference. This is why we say that our current laws of physics break down when it comes to black holes. Simply put, our equations don't tell us anything useful once you go past the event horizon of a black hole, it's utter nonsense.
As for simplicity, let me put it this way. We know that relativity and quantum mechanics break down in this situation. However, the mathematics that lead to this breakdown are far simpler, far better tested, and most importantly far more explicit, than what is currently proposed about gravastars. In other words, they are introducing additional complexity where there is no reason to believe that there is any. Let's face it, the authors are proposing the existence of a new state of matter for which there is absolutely zero evidence for, except that it happens to fit their pet theory. As a scientist, it is exactly these kind of conjectures that I am the most wary of.
Now, having said that. I don't think there is anything wrong with them introducing a new form of matter. I have no problem with that per se. However, they have got a lot of work to do before I am going to accept it. And that is precisely how it should be. Scientists have hypothesized the existence of all kinds of things, sometimes they have eventually been proven right, other times they have been proved false. Without any real evidence to support gravistars beyond somebody's pet theory, I'm going to continue to assume current black hole theory is more correct than gravastar theory, at least until gravastars have a better developed theoretical underpinning.
The plasma tails of comets are composed of unstable molecules that quickly break down in the presence of ultraviolet light from the sun. In order for this theory to even be even remotely correct, a mechanism has to be proposed for creating (and protecting from distruction) parent molecules in sufficient quantities in the inner solar system for a comet to "vacuum" up. The number density for these molecules would have to be quite high (relatively speaking), and the composition would be far out of sink with the composition we observe on the sun's surface, which would pretty much have to be the source. In other words, it just doesn't pan out.
Plasma tail dynamics is a very interesting field, but this theory doesn't even come close to the truth.
Finally, you don't need to land a probe on these objects to figure out what they are made of. Optical spectroscopy has done a pretty good job of figuring out what these things are made of, you don't need to send a probe to figure it out. I can tell you right now, the composition is most likely 95-98% water with the rest being a smattering of carbon and nitrogen bearing modules with some silicate particles thrown in to the mix.
What we really need is a rethinking of IP law in general, which is more in the domain of the legislative branch of government than in the judicial. Unfortunately, catching the attention of those guys is a lot more difficult, unless you can contribute a couple of million to their campaigns.
As I recall, feature-wise, I think the software seemed to be far more sophisticated than any of the programs she was using under windows. The sticking point, however, was the interface. The software was (is?) appeared to be maintained by "professional" geneaologists which meant that it had all kinds of features that my mother had only the vaguest of idea of what they were. In the end, I wound up setting her up with vmware so she could use what she was used to. But the fact is, there is (or at least was several years ago) a very sophisticated geneaology program for unix, that seemed to be well mainained, but a little too advanced for the casual user. I haven't looked at in years, but I would expect that it has probably been updated considerably since then...
You know, I have sympathy for the mom and pop music shops, but I also believe very strongly in progress. Progress in science and technology has always caused some business models to collapse while providing new opportunities for others. That's part of life, will I shed a tear for the independent music seller? Sure, but I can guarantee you that there will be a new business opportunities for these people if they can adapt to the new environment. But there is no reason to try to keep the status quo just to keep the independents in business. In fact, I would expect that the next generation business models will probably come from these same independents, because they are nimble and quick whereas the RIAA and it's cronies are slow and too conservative to ever come up with something new (unless they buy it from someone else).
On the political front, I'd say most politicians aren't really all that interested in supporting such long term goals, especially when they go beyond their own terms.
Finally, there is also a certain amount of resistance to the idea from within the scientific community itself. It is orders of magnitude cheaper to send out probes to the moon or Mars, than it is to send a human with life support and all the risks associated with it.
Couple that with the number of black-eyes NASA has gotten over the last couple of decades both with failed probes and shuttle accidents and you have a system that isn't going to get the funding or support it needs to accomplish the really big things.
As for gutting NASA, I'm not necessarily against that, however, on the other hand, NASA also supports a great deal of fundamental research that more than likely would not be picked up by the private companies that you want to give that money to. NASA does a lot more than fly the space shuttle and launch satellites. Things like that could easily be privatized, however many of the research projects are not so easily moved to the private sector simply because there is little to no near term return on investment. The US government has been pretty bad at looking at the long term, but as bad as the government has been, the private sector has been even worse.
The reason we have not gone back to the moon is that most people in the US are not interested in it. If the people aren't interested in it, then the elected administration isn't going to be interested in it, the net result being that there is no support to fund that kind of undertaking. If you can somehow get the money to NASA to go back to the moon, you can bet there are people there that are ready and willing to take that project on.
What's really needed in the US is something that will once again spark a sense of urgency and wonder in the American public about space exploration again. In the sixties it was primarily competition with the Russians that sparked everyone's interest. Today we need something similar to get the people behind a new moon mission, otherwise it will almost certainly never happen. In fact, I think a manned mission to Mars probably has a better chance of getting funding today than a return to the moon (even though I personally think a moon base would be a much better use of funds...)
You're right, I was thinking about lithium burning in brown dwarfs just below the cut-off, and when I wrote the response, I only went up one spot on the periodic table instead of two.
Well, it is very near the low mass cut-off. The minimum mass required to fuse helium is right around 0.07. So yeah, it's possible for it to be a main sequence star, barely.
This guy is the Astronomer Royale, this is someone that is tuned in to what is going on in various branches of the field, even more so than I am, and I can name several branches that would be affected off the top of my head. In essence, your assumption that he doesn't realize his own field would be unaffected doesn't wash.
Now, weather or not he's right is another issue, but I am quite certian he understands the implications of what he is saying.
Stopping research in high energy physics would cripple research projects dealing with supernovae, cosmology, supermassive black holes, even cosmic ray research (and its affect on star formation) would likely be affected. And that's before we even start getting into the newer fields, like astrobiology.
...and in the conclusion, Phlox is pulled out of the transporter and transformed into a slinky female Vulcan who immediately embarks on a lesbian love affair with Tpol.
It's far easier to take temperature measurement using other means, and those measurements are sufficient to show that it's too warm for CO2.
I'm not positive of this, but I would guess that ground based infrared spectrometers (like what's on NASA's IRTF) may not have the resolution nor the signal to noise capabilities to do the detection. No that I think of it, there are several plausible reasons why you can't do the detection from ground based telescopes, but I would need to check them out before sticking my neck out and posting them.
At least, that's how it was explained to me...
No, that's not what your experiment does. All it does is confirm that the sun has a gravitational pull and that it is constant. It doesn't give you any information about the propogation of gravity.
Now if the sun were undergoing large pulsations, large enough to effect the sun's gravitational field, then you could start looking at the speed of propogation that way, but once you are already immersed in a constant field, the speed of propogation is pretty much impossible measure.
Yeah, I think the pharmaceutical plotline is one facet of the beginning of the mentats, but I also think that Norma Cenva may also be an early mentat. A lot of her thought processes seem to indicate proto-mentat abilities. At least that's how I read it.
If my memory serves me, I believe that there is a nearly confirmed black hole at the center of M15 (a globular cluster). However the conditions for it's creation are probably still up for debate. A bunch of semi-simultaneous stellar collisions at the core is not out of the question though.
We've been broadcasting interceptible radio and tv signals out into space for at least 70 years now, and we can't go out and stop those radio waves from continuing on. Any sufficiently advanced aliens living within ~70 light years of earth already knows about us, guaranteed.
Now, they may not be functional proteins, nor DNA, or even genes, but it sounds like these molecules just might be the chemical starting point.