Its perfectly valid for someone to say their work was garbage. In this case John Baez never even looked at their work before assuming that just because they had been on French TV they were incapable of getting a PhD.
Remember, there is more to getting a PhD than just writing a thesis.
Incidently, if this *was* joke then perhaps they would have owned up to it when the issue was hot?
They won their PhDs fairly. They weren't honorary.
The nature of science (for good or for ill) is that unless someone can disprove your work then yours is as good as anyone elses.
I have visions of heavily addicted fans pouring more and more money into a game like this.
Fortunately this game looks really boring. Without player vs player encounters I can't see why anyone would want to invest sums of money to make their character any better.
I was asked to do some work on alternative methods of refridgeration by a very large alcoholic beverage company. The real pioneers of acoustic stirling heat engines are located here at Los Alamos.
Global Cooling on the otherhand produce rival products to Medis El based on the Free piston Stirling Engine.
Despite being some impressive technology, Free Piston Stirling Engines haven't really been taken up to well. Its a shame because they do seem to be much more efficient.
If you are really interested then you might want to check this out At Ames Lab. Gschneidner's work on the giant magnetocaloric effect is REALLY impressive. Its all about the exchange of entropy between magnetic and kinetic forms. Damn cool.
Are these the guys responsible for this annoying piece of spyware? Does the class action involve this as well?
If so, I hope they throw the book at them.
Re:"unknown"? Light article...
on
Einstein Unveiled
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Einstein believed the universe to be fully deterministic in nature. Meaning that if one thing happened and you could measure it, then you would be able to calculate the results. QM on the other hand has the uncertainty principle which says you can't measure one parameter without affecting the out come of another parameter. QM gets around this by using statistical probabilities. This is the root cause of the often cited quote "Its not entirely impossible" when a physicist is asked if a ludicrously impossible event could happen.
Einstein's greatest mistake, the Cosmological constant, is currently under debate again after observations of NASA's deep space probes and for example supernovae.
Will someone please start a sourceforge project to get this ported to Windows?
I can't wait to see people with BSOD permanently displayed on their bodies.
Space travel isn't a commercially viable proposition. But then emerging technologies rarely are, which is why there are so few companies actively engaging in the developement of new technology.
The writer of the story clearly believed that space flight was a 'mature' technology assuming that commercial organisations could easily fill the void should NASA, ESA et al be disbanded.
To an extent, I agree. But government funded organisations be they NASA, JPL or the universities will always be the primary instigators of new technological achievements.
There is another story about a man name Christopher Columbus (you may have heard of him) who tried to mount similar but purely commercial venture. Unfortunately he failed to acquire enough commercial funds and had to resort to government funding also.
The pressure of 'always turning a profit' will confine companies such as Mir-Corp to feeding off of pure research's achievements. I suspect I am not the only one to see that in such an environment the 'giant leaps' (such as moon landings), are unlikely to occur with out a 'NAFA'. Instead progress will continue at a crawl.
But I suppose 'NAFA' money could always be spent on loftier goals, such as invading another country.
What Did Poe Know About Cosmology? Nothing. But He Was Right.
By EMILY EAKIN
n 1848, by then a nationally celebrated poet, Edgar Allan Poe published "Eureka," a 150-page prose poem on the nature and origin of the universe. The work, an overheated grab bag of metaphysics and cosmology, was a flop. A reviewer for Literary World likened it to "arrant fudge." A hundred years later T. S. Eliot summed up the critical consensus. "Eureka," he wrote, "makes no deep impression . . . because we are aware of Poe's lack of qualification in philosophy, theology or natural science."
Of course, Eliot had a point: "Eureka" was the work of an amateur, a backyard stargazer who read astronomy books in his spare time.
But Eliot -- himself no scientist -- was underestimating his fellow poet. Eighty years before 20th-century cosmologists hammered out the math, Poe, it turns out, came up with a rudimentary version of contemporary science's best guess for explaining how the universe began.
>Well so could anyone.
Expansion from a point source is hardly
a 'wondrous' idea that only a genius could
explain.
Departing from conventional wisdom of the day, which saw the universe as static and eternal, Poe insisted that it had exploded into being from a single "primordial particle" in "one instantaneous flash."
>Modern Physics does not have anything to say
about particles. To say otherwise is to
misunderstand the theoretical constructs that
pervade Quantum Mechanics.
"From the one particle, as a center," he wrote, "let us suppose to be irradiated spherically -- in all directions -- to immeasurable but still to definite distances in the previously vacant space -- a certain inexpressibly great yet limited number of unimaginably yet not infinitely minute atoms."
> He could easily be as easily expressing a view on the origin of radioactivity as to anything else. Clutch at more straws please.
The language is vague and convoluted, and some details are wrong (Poe had no concept of relativity, and it makes no sense today to speak of the universe exploding into "previously vacant space"), but here, unmistakably, is a crude description of the Big Bang, a theory that didn't find mainstream approval until the 1960's.
> All details are wrong. Depending on their context, some others could be considered musings close to other people's later hypothesis.
This wasn't Poe's only uncanny display of prescience. He also came up with the idea that the universe was expanding (and might eventually collapse), a notion that the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann ferreted out of Einstein's equations in 1922.
> Prove this. No really. Where is the math? Did
you ever read Chicken Lickin?
Einstein initially pooh-poohed the idea, and it wasn't widely accepted until the 1930's,
> No it was Einstein who FIRST cam up with the idea. He later retracted it in the face of
overwhelming astronomical evidence against it.
This issue is still to be resolved!!!
after Edwin Hubble gleaned some hard data from the velocities of far-flung galaxies.
Black holes? Poe envisioned something like those, too.
> Prove it.
And he was the first person on record to solve the Olbers Paradox, which had dogged astronomers since Kepler: the mystery of why the sky is dark at night.
>The Math of which is presented here:
www.wildpresumptionswithoutmathematicalbacking.com
If the universe was infinite, as 19th-century astronomers believed, there should be an infinite number of stars as well, plenty, in other words, to illuminate the sky at all times. Poe understood why this in fact was not the case: the universe is finite in time and space (and light from some stars has not yet reached the Milky Way).
> Yeah? You mean Poe Presumed. He had no evidence.
So what accounts for Poe's prophetic genius?
> Your sensationalist journalistic attempts to
get an undeserved promotion just because you
managed to get yourself bribed to the front page??
Tom Siegfried, the science editor of The Dallas Morning News, doesn't explain
> Doesn't explain? he just makes wild assumptions without evidence?
just how the poet derived his cosmological theory, but in his new book, "Strange Matters: Undiscovered Ideas at the Frontiers of Space and Time" (Joseph Henry Press), he argues that the history of astrophysics is littered with such "prediscoveries," or "instances of theoretical anticipation."
> So? Someone says "The universe is like an
onion." Does that mean they discovered M-brane
theory? NO. If no evidence is presented or a
pretention of proof, then its not science.
"There are lots of things theorists predict on the basis of what's known and what's already been found,"
> That is the point of theoretical developement, duh!
Mr. Siegfried explained in a telephone interview. "The distinction with prediscovery is that theorists discover the existence of something observers have never seen.
> And so the charlatan is exposed!
Siegfried does not understand that theory only PREDICTS. It does NOT discover.
It's one thing to figure out an explanation for the observation. It's another thing altogether to suggest something exists that no one had any idea about beforehand."
> Fantasy is easy. Just look at your local book
shop's shelves.
Unlike, say, Leonardo da Vinci's sketches of "flying machines" or Jules Verne's descriptions of submarines and televisions decades before such objects were ever made, scientific prediscoveries, as Mr. Siegfried defines them,
> Pre-design maybe. Prediscovery... anyone can
doodle. Without the physical calulations it is just a doodle.
are not human inventions awaiting technological realization, but rather insights into the nature of reality.
"Eureka" may be Mr. Siegfried's most striking example, a literary mind hitting the cosmological jackpot. But his list of bona fide prediscoveries includes an impressive number of contemporary physics' most basic concepts: antimatter, electromagnetic waves, neutron stars, neutrinos, quarks and atoms.
> FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD
In the 1860's the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell inferred the existence of invisible radiation from a mathematical analysis of electricity and magnetism. (Nine years after his death, Maxwell was proved right when the radio waves were discovered by the German physicist Heinrich Hertz.)
> Yes, but this has to do with what exactly?
Maxwell had studied his field... Emily Eakin,
clearly has not.
In 1931 the English physicist Paul Dirac came up with a more preposterous-sounding notion: antimatter. From the mathematical equations of other physicists, Dirac concluded that electrons, one of the observed building blocks of atoms, must have identical but oppositely charged twins.
> More FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD
Dirac WROTE the definitive version of Quantum
Mechanics: P and Q algebra.
True, he discovered anti-matter. But Emily
shows a complete lack of how and why and
forgets that he was aknowledged of this fact
almost immediately (in comparison to the point she is trying to draw).
The following year Carl Anderson, an American physicist, identified a positively charged electron, or positron, the first antiparticle.
And around the same time, the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli prediscovered the neutrino:
> FUD!!!!!
He THEORISED the existance of the neutrino!!
The proof of its existance can be found in
amongst others, the Super Kamiokande experiment which is stil running today!!!!
a neutral particle so light and undetectable that it could pass through a lead wall trillions of miles thick without a trace.
> Please keep believing that. Science is better
without you.
Given the number of successful prediscoveries in the past, Mr. Siegfried argues, some of the wacky ideas floating around in astrophysics today are bound to be validated sooner or later.
> If a millions monkeys sit at a type writer....
That turns out to be an alarming proposition: Mr. Siegfried's book is filled with enough mysterious hypothetical entities --
> ie. Mr Siegfried's book is full of Bullshit.
some of which, under the right circumstances could snuff out the earth in a nanosecond -- to sustain a dozen Hollywood thrillers.
> The same circumstances that would allow the
atom bomb was to ignite the atmosphere? I
contend it is all Bullshit.
Which object will turn out to be real? Cosmic Q-balls ("lumps of super matter that may have formed when tiny superparticles coagulated in the hot dense phase of the early universe")?
> You really don't underastand what you are
saying do you?
Wimpzillas (particles "heavier than a million billion ordinary subatomic particles")?
> You mean weakly interacting massive particles. Where the hell did the Zilla part come from?
Are you trying to make your own legacy???
Or quark nuggets (a four-ton object less than one twenty-fifth of an inch long that could "shoot through Earth like a bullet through butter")?
> Sensation!
Any of these concepts might help solve the mystery of "dark matter," the unidentified stuff that astronomers believe makes up 90 percent or more of an average galaxy's mass.
> No. Black Hole galactic nuclei have solved that problem, lassie
Personally, Mr. Siegfried said, he's betting on WIMP's -- that's short for weakly interacting massive particles -- thought to be heavy, generally unstable particles that hover in the outer regions of galaxies and rarely interact with ordinary matter.
> No, they are supposed to be neutrinos that have larger mass than we suspect due to errors in our calculations.
As extravagant as some of these potential prediscoveries sound, the astronomers behind them have a substantial leg up on Poe.
> You assume much!
They're working within a scientific world, using the latest technology, trading information and comparing notes.
> Comparing notes? You assume even more!
And yet Mr. Siegfried raises the tantalizing possibility that valuable scientific ideas may lie outside science, awaiting a mathematical mind to seize on them:
> No shit Sherlock. But it doesn't help when
people with hindsight try to put words into
dead people's mouths.
Alexander Friedmann, the man credited with inferring the expansion of the universe from Einstein's theory, he notes, loved Poe.
> No Friedman is credited with saying the
universe evolved over time.
Did Friedmann read "Eureka?" No one seems to know.
> Has any credible scientist? Have you? Properly?
Nevertheless, Mr. Siegfried speculates, it's quite possible "that Friedmann was conditioned by Poe's imagination to see the true meaning of Einstein's equations, whereas others, Einstein included, did not."
> Speculate to accumulate.... or just guess.
Without proof.
As for Poe, he never doubted that his ideas would eventually get their due. "What I have propounded will (in good time) revolutionize the world of Physical & Metaphysical Science," he wrote to a friend in 1848. "I say this calmly -- but I say it."
> And so he was placed along side other science
fiction writers, because he never proposed a
proof of his work by prediction.
Emily,
You have writen a very nice piece of fiction here. I hope my debunking does not loose you your job. But I hope it does make you realise that you can not post sensationalist clap trap (about a subject with which you are only vaguely familiar)to a national news paper without putting yourself up for ridicule.
Please feel free to debate any of the comments I have made. My e-mail should be available should you need.
Regards,
Chembryl (a graduate in astophysics)
The Big Bang is a hypothesis not a 'theory', it has been proposed as a possibility, but has yet to be disproven.
God has been proposed as a fact but it has yet to be proven.
So basically what he is saying is that this article implies that Star Trek should take the credit for the creation of warp drive.... should it ever be created...
Dear Coward,
Afraid of religion? No religion is for those who are incapable of forming there own opinons based on the evidence presented before them.
When they say 'faith', they mean believe what we tell. No reason, really.... but we are right and don't you forget it.
When 'science' specifically, people like myself say-
"We have studied the evidence after spending years building instruments, calibrating out instruments and then devisins experiements.... we have finally come to the conclusion that this is th most likely scenario"
People, like are convinced that it is still just a 'THEORY'.
Well inactual fact, as far as your perception is concerned kiddo, this is the best description of reality that you have available.
Now unless you are able to prove any of my previous points wrong then STFU u n00b and go back to school you religious zealot you.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember, there is more to getting a PhD than just writing a thesis.
Incidently, if this *was* joke then perhaps they would have owned up to it when the issue was hot?
They won their PhDs fairly. They weren't honorary. The nature of science (for good or for ill) is that unless someone can disprove your work then yours is as good as anyone elses.
Why not just increase your screen resolution?
Shadowbane Out in February.
When can we expect ChasOS? Or even TonyHartOS?
Fortunately this game looks really boring. Without player vs player encounters I can't see why anyone would want to invest sums of money to make their character any better.
If you're interested in an almost fully functional online world where PvP and Guild vs Guild competition is the main objective then check out Shadowbane where you can literally change the world.
Open beta will occur in the new year.
Investing a lot of money does not give anyone any legal right to make any profit. Much less the right to change the law in order to continue to do so.
Bah, there's nothing wrong with it.
My guess is that this 'personal time' he suggested may indicate the later.
Global Cooling on the otherhand produce rival products to Medis El based on the Free piston Stirling Engine.
Despite being some impressive technology, Free Piston Stirling Engines haven't really been taken up to well. Its a shame because they do seem to be much more efficient.
If you are really interested then you might want to check this out At Ames Lab. Gschneidner's work on the giant magnetocaloric effect is REALLY impressive. Its all about the exchange of entropy between magnetic and kinetic forms. Damn cool.
If so, I hope they throw the book at them.
Einstein's greatest mistake, the Cosmological constant, is currently under debate again after observations of NASA's deep space probes and for example supernovae.
Will someone please start a sourceforge project to get this ported to Windows? I can't wait to see people with BSOD permanently displayed on their bodies.
The writer of the story clearly believed that space flight was a 'mature' technology assuming that commercial organisations could easily fill the void should NASA, ESA et al be disbanded.
To an extent, I agree. But government funded organisations be they NASA, JPL or the universities will always be the primary instigators of new technological achievements.
There is another story about a man name Christopher Columbus (you may have heard of him) who tried to mount similar but purely commercial venture. Unfortunately he failed to acquire enough commercial funds and had to resort to government funding also.
The pressure of 'always turning a profit' will confine companies such as Mir-Corp to feeding off of pure research's achievements. I suspect I am not the only one to see that in such an environment the 'giant leaps' (such as moon landings), are unlikely to occur with out a 'NAFA'. Instead progress will continue at a crawl.
But I suppose 'NAFA' money could always be spent on loftier goals, such as invading another country.
Thats why people like me get employed to make numerical models. YAY!
... the parents of the deceased could sue under some form of genetic DMCA?
bug report time...
What Did Poe Know About Cosmology? Nothing. But He Was Right. By EMILY EAKIN n 1848, by then a nationally celebrated poet, Edgar Allan Poe published "Eureka," a 150-page prose poem on the nature and origin of the universe. The work, an overheated grab bag of metaphysics and cosmology, was a flop. A reviewer for Literary World likened it to "arrant fudge." A hundred years later T. S. Eliot summed up the critical consensus. "Eureka," he wrote, "makes no deep impression . . . because we are aware of Poe's lack of qualification in philosophy, theology or natural science." Of course, Eliot had a point: "Eureka" was the work of an amateur, a backyard stargazer who read astronomy books in his spare time. But Eliot -- himself no scientist -- was underestimating his fellow poet. Eighty years before 20th-century cosmologists hammered out the math, Poe, it turns out, came up with a rudimentary version of contemporary science's best guess for explaining how the universe began. >Well so could anyone. Expansion from a point source is hardly a 'wondrous' idea that only a genius could explain. Departing from conventional wisdom of the day, which saw the universe as static and eternal, Poe insisted that it had exploded into being from a single "primordial particle" in "one instantaneous flash." >Modern Physics does not have anything to say about particles. To say otherwise is to misunderstand the theoretical constructs that pervade Quantum Mechanics. "From the one particle, as a center," he wrote, "let us suppose to be irradiated spherically -- in all directions -- to immeasurable but still to definite distances in the previously vacant space -- a certain inexpressibly great yet limited number of unimaginably yet not infinitely minute atoms." > He could easily be as easily expressing a view on the origin of radioactivity as to anything else. Clutch at more straws please. The language is vague and convoluted, and some details are wrong (Poe had no concept of relativity, and it makes no sense today to speak of the universe exploding into "previously vacant space"), but here, unmistakably, is a crude description of the Big Bang, a theory that didn't find mainstream approval until the 1960's. > All details are wrong. Depending on their context, some others could be considered musings close to other people's later hypothesis. This wasn't Poe's only uncanny display of prescience. He also came up with the idea that the universe was expanding (and might eventually collapse), a notion that the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann ferreted out of Einstein's equations in 1922. > Prove this. No really. Where is the math? Did you ever read Chicken Lickin? Einstein initially pooh-poohed the idea, and it wasn't widely accepted until the 1930's, > No it was Einstein who FIRST cam up with the idea. He later retracted it in the face of overwhelming astronomical evidence against it. This issue is still to be resolved!!! after Edwin Hubble gleaned some hard data from the velocities of far-flung galaxies. Black holes? Poe envisioned something like those, too. > Prove it. And he was the first person on record to solve the Olbers Paradox, which had dogged astronomers since Kepler: the mystery of why the sky is dark at night. >The Math of which is presented here: www.wildpresumptionswithoutmathematicalbacking.com
If the universe was infinite, as 19th-century astronomers believed, there should be an infinite number of stars as well, plenty, in other words, to illuminate the sky at all times. Poe understood why this in fact was not the case: the universe is finite in time and space (and light from some stars has not yet reached the Milky Way).
> Yeah? You mean Poe Presumed. He had no evidence.
So what accounts for Poe's prophetic genius?
> Your sensationalist journalistic attempts to
get an undeserved promotion just because you
managed to get yourself bribed to the front page??
Tom Siegfried, the science editor of The Dallas Morning News, doesn't explain
> Doesn't explain? he just makes wild assumptions without evidence?
just how the poet derived his cosmological theory, but in his new book, "Strange Matters: Undiscovered Ideas at the Frontiers of Space and Time" (Joseph Henry Press), he argues that the history of astrophysics is littered with such "prediscoveries," or "instances of theoretical anticipation."
> So? Someone says "The universe is like an
onion." Does that mean they discovered M-brane
theory? NO. If no evidence is presented or a
pretention of proof, then its not science.
"There are lots of things theorists predict on the basis of what's known and what's already been found,"
> That is the point of theoretical developement, duh!
Mr. Siegfried explained in a telephone interview. "The distinction with prediscovery is that theorists discover the existence of something observers have never seen.
> And so the charlatan is exposed!
Siegfried does not understand that theory only PREDICTS. It does NOT discover.
It's one thing to figure out an explanation for the observation. It's another thing altogether to suggest something exists that no one had any idea about beforehand."
> Fantasy is easy. Just look at your local book
shop's shelves.
Unlike, say, Leonardo da Vinci's sketches of "flying machines" or Jules Verne's descriptions of submarines and televisions decades before such objects were ever made, scientific prediscoveries, as Mr. Siegfried defines them,
> Pre-design maybe. Prediscovery... anyone can
doodle. Without the physical calulations it is just a doodle.
are not human inventions awaiting technological realization, but rather insights into the nature of reality.
"Eureka" may be Mr. Siegfried's most striking example, a literary mind hitting the cosmological jackpot. But his list of bona fide prediscoveries includes an impressive number of contemporary physics' most basic concepts: antimatter, electromagnetic waves, neutron stars, neutrinos, quarks and atoms.
> FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD
In the 1860's the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell inferred the existence of invisible radiation from a mathematical analysis of electricity and magnetism. (Nine years after his death, Maxwell was proved right when the radio waves were discovered by the German physicist Heinrich Hertz.)
> Yes, but this has to do with what exactly?
Maxwell had studied his field... Emily Eakin,
clearly has not.
In 1931 the English physicist Paul Dirac came up with a more preposterous-sounding notion: antimatter. From the mathematical equations of other physicists, Dirac concluded that electrons, one of the observed building blocks of atoms, must have identical but oppositely charged twins.
> More FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD
Dirac WROTE the definitive version of Quantum
Mechanics: P and Q algebra.
True, he discovered anti-matter. But Emily
shows a complete lack of how and why and
forgets that he was aknowledged of this fact
almost immediately (in comparison to the point she is trying to draw).
The following year Carl Anderson, an American physicist, identified a positively charged electron, or positron, the first antiparticle.
And around the same time, the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli prediscovered the neutrino:
> FUD!!!!!
He THEORISED the existance of the neutrino!!
The proof of its existance can be found in
amongst others, the Super Kamiokande experiment which is stil running today!!!!
a neutral particle so light and undetectable that it could pass through a lead wall trillions of miles thick without a trace.
> Please keep believing that. Science is better
without you.
Given the number of successful prediscoveries in the past, Mr. Siegfried argues, some of the wacky ideas floating around in astrophysics today are bound to be validated sooner or later.
> If a millions monkeys sit at a type writer....
That turns out to be an alarming proposition: Mr. Siegfried's book is filled with enough mysterious hypothetical entities --
> ie. Mr Siegfried's book is full of Bullshit.
some of which, under the right circumstances could snuff out the earth in a nanosecond -- to sustain a dozen Hollywood thrillers.
> The same circumstances that would allow the
atom bomb was to ignite the atmosphere? I
contend it is all Bullshit.
Which object will turn out to be real? Cosmic Q-balls ("lumps of super matter that may have formed when tiny superparticles coagulated in the hot dense phase of the early universe")?
> You really don't underastand what you are
saying do you?
Wimpzillas (particles "heavier than a million billion ordinary subatomic particles")?
> You mean weakly interacting massive particles. Where the hell did the Zilla part come from?
Are you trying to make your own legacy???
Or quark nuggets (a four-ton object less than one twenty-fifth of an inch long that could "shoot through Earth like a bullet through butter")?
> Sensation!
Any of these concepts might help solve the mystery of "dark matter," the unidentified stuff that astronomers believe makes up 90 percent or more of an average galaxy's mass.
> No. Black Hole galactic nuclei have solved that problem, lassie
Personally, Mr. Siegfried said, he's betting on WIMP's -- that's short for weakly interacting massive particles -- thought to be heavy, generally unstable particles that hover in the outer regions of galaxies and rarely interact with ordinary matter.
> No, they are supposed to be neutrinos that have larger mass than we suspect due to errors in our calculations.
As extravagant as some of these potential prediscoveries sound, the astronomers behind them have a substantial leg up on Poe.
> You assume much!
They're working within a scientific world, using the latest technology, trading information and comparing notes.
> Comparing notes? You assume even more!
And yet Mr. Siegfried raises the tantalizing possibility that valuable scientific ideas may lie outside science, awaiting a mathematical mind to seize on them:
> No shit Sherlock. But it doesn't help when
people with hindsight try to put words into
dead people's mouths.
Alexander Friedmann, the man credited with inferring the expansion of the universe from Einstein's theory, he notes, loved Poe.
> No Friedman is credited with saying the
universe evolved over time.
Did Friedmann read "Eureka?" No one seems to know.
> Has any credible scientist? Have you? Properly?
Nevertheless, Mr. Siegfried speculates, it's quite possible "that Friedmann was conditioned by Poe's imagination to see the true meaning of Einstein's equations, whereas others, Einstein included, did not."
> Speculate to accumulate.... or just guess.
Without proof.
As for Poe, he never doubted that his ideas would eventually get their due. "What I have propounded will (in good time) revolutionize the world of Physical & Metaphysical Science," he wrote to a friend in 1848. "I say this calmly -- but I say it."
> And so he was placed along side other science
fiction writers, because he never proposed a
proof of his work by prediction.
Emily,
You have writen a very nice piece of fiction here. I hope my debunking does not loose you your job. But I hope it does make you realise that you can not post sensationalist clap trap (about a subject with which you are only vaguely familiar)to a national news paper without putting yourself up for ridicule.
Please feel free to debate any of the comments I have made. My e-mail should be available should you need.
Regards,
Chembryl (a graduate in astophysics)
The Big Bang is a hypothesis not a 'theory', it has been proposed as a possibility, but has yet to be disproven. God has been proposed as a fact but it has yet to be proven.
'Faith' shows a lack of being able to think for yourself.
Yes, oh sooo wound up oh yes..
Or its a case of someone trying to get a pay rise by fabricating something vaguely plausible and then citing themselves as front page news?
As opposed to yourself who should go and study something rather than express idiocy on net forums without evidence to back it up.
So basically what he is saying is that this article implies that Star Trek should take the credit for the creation of warp drive.... should it ever be created...
Dear Coward, Afraid of religion? No religion is for those who are incapable of forming there own opinons based on the evidence presented before them. When they say 'faith', they mean believe what we tell. No reason, really.... but we are right and don't you forget it. When 'science' specifically, people like myself say- "We have studied the evidence after spending years building instruments, calibrating out instruments and then devisins experiements.... we have finally come to the conclusion that this is th most likely scenario" People, like are convinced that it is still just a 'THEORY'. Well inactual fact, as far as your perception is concerned kiddo, this is the best description of reality that you have available. Now unless you are able to prove any of my previous points wrong then STFU u n00b and go back to school you religious zealot you.