Re: CDR: Re: New Scientist - Joao Magueijo - Hero or Heretic? (fwd)
On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, Tim May wrote: Does the common man read his Hawking's book? Did Hawking even write it? Second, I don't know about Hawking's books, but Lee Smolin is one of I especially like his 300 Years of Gravitation and his '73 work on large scale structure in time/space. stuff. This was mostly old hat 30 years ago (which is when I took Jim Hartle's class on general relativity). Hawking doesn't get much into the newer theories, at least not in any of the books of his I've skimmed. Then you should skim more of them. Hawkings really jelled black hole theory in the '73 work. He's pretty much the real modern father to some folks. I think he kicks Wheelers ass (nothing personal to Wheeler). -- We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Criswell, Plan 9 from Outer Space [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ssz.com www.open-forge.org
Re: New Scientist - Joao Magueijo - Hero or Heretic? (fwd)
On Wednesday, February 12, 2003, at 07:36 PM, Andri Esteves wrote: On Thursday, 13 de February de 2003 02:02, you wrote: On Wednesday, February 12, 2003, at 05:04 PM, Andri Esteves wrote: Everything that could go wrong in academia and science is in Portugal. That is the background Magueijo comes from... I sat in a bookstore and read most of his book several weeks ago. A few comments: First, I kept looking for a clear description of the theory, with convincing details, support, etc. I didn't find it. I instead found a lot of stuff about peeing outside a bar in some tropical place, stories about his girlfriend, insults he delivered to editors at Nature, and on and on. Sort of a Fear and Loathing on the Road to Quantum Gravity. (Pun with Smolin's title intended.) You still read science popularizers ? If you like science you should go to the source. I can't read many tecnhical articles, but good sinopses and conclusions give you an idea of the article's inplications. Just have to build a field mind map of an area... There's absolutely nothing wrong with reading popularizers. Unlike you, I see great value in reading overviews by folks like Brian Greene, Lee Smolin, and John Barrow before digging in to the arXives at xxx.lanl.gov. Second, I don't know about Hawking's books, but Lee Smolin is one of the current popularizers who have done excellent jobs. I recommend both of his books. His own Three Roads to Quantum Gravity is crystal clear in describing several of the competing theories. Smolin also explains what's really important. (Check the archives for my past comments on Smolin and topos theory, for example, from last summer.) Never heard of him... Books are very expensive in Portugal... As the publishing houses in portugal mainly publish religious or black-magic themes... I will probably read it in english... He's one of Magueijo's collaborators on VSL, so if you have not heard of him you should not be commenting at all. Third, I have no idea if the VSL theory is right. Time will tell. At least there is some experimental work on it. Wich tons of theorical work in physics don't even try to achieve and with blessing of the establishment... This is a silly comment. There are experimental results in many areas of physics, including at the frontiers. What can i say... Career or science. Are you part of the problem or of the solution?? ... Venal comments. --Tim May As my father told me long ago, the objective is not to convince someone with your arguments but to provide the arguments with which he later convinces himself. -- David Friedman
Re: CDR: Re: New Scientist - Joao Magueijo - Hero or Heretic? (fwd)
On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, Tim May wrote: You still read science popularizers ? There's absolutely nothing wrong with reading popularizers. Other than an clear block of time that could be better spent looking in the horses mouth ;) -- We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Criswell, Plan 9 from Outer Space [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ssz.com www.open-forge.org
Re: New Scientist - Joao Magueijo - Hero or Heretic? (fwd)
You fucking creep. I dredged through my Trash folder to find out what our Portugese friend was replying to and discovered this bit of deception: On Wednesday, February 12, 2003, at 09:49 PM, Jim Choate wrote: On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, Tim May wrote: Does the common man read his Hawking's book? Did Hawking even write it? Second, I don't know about Hawking's books, but Lee Smolin is one of I especially like his 300 Years of Gravitation and his '73 work on large scale structure in time/space. stuff. This was mostly old hat 30 years ago (which is when I took Jim Hartle's class on general relativity). Hawking doesn't get much into the newer theories, at least not in any of the books of his I've skimmed. Then you should skim more of them. Hawkings really jelled black hole theory in the '73 work. He's pretty much the real modern father to some folks. I think he kicks Wheelers ass (nothing personal to Wheeler). You snip my mention of Hawking and Ellis and then suggest that I ought to look at Hawking's 1973 book. Below is the relevant section of my post, the one you edited and then make a smarmy comment on: --begin quote-- Hawking writes about fairly established stuff, the usual black hole stuff. This was mostly old hat 30 years ago (which is when I took Jim Hartle's class on general relativity). Hawking doesn't get much into the newer theories, at least not in any of the books of his I've skimmed. (One of my texts 30 years ago was the Hawking and Ellis book, The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime. This was heavy going, not the popular fluff he's been turning out lately.) --end quote-- What a creep you are.
Re: Something conspicuously missing from the media survival lists
On Wed, 12 Feb 2003 23:30:12 -0500, Declan wrote: Note by broad conservative community I do not include politically-active gun owners, who would like an actual principled stand on the 2A. Fat chance. People who look for principled stands by a government, any government, aren't paying attention. Other than surviving and maintaining control over the governed, governments have no principles. That kind of thing just gets in the way of survival and control and potentially limits a government's options. Example: From the Declaration of Independence to the Sedition Act took only 22 years, and that was when the founding fathers still actively dominated political life. Today, a USA Patriot Act takes only minutes to enact, with neither debate nor hearings, and members of Congress don't even complain of not being able to read it before the vote.
New York state AG succeeds in bank shakedown?
BANKS AGREE TO BLOCK NET GAMBLING CREDIT CARD TRANSACTIONS Ten banks have reached agreement with N.Y. Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to begin blocking credit card transactions involving online gambling. The banks agreed to pay the Attorney General's office $335,000 to cover costs associated with an investigation into the activity. The Office said that the settlement is part of a trend in law enforcement to focus on intermediaries in combating illegal online activity. http://shorl.com/defrehasubrise [Stamford Advocate]
Re: NYT: The Wimps of War
By PAUL KRUGMAN George W. Bush's admirers often describe his stand against Saddam Hussein as Churchillian. Short, rude, drunk? As far as that goes, sure, he's Churchillian. But he's not even up to the standards of meet the new Bush, same as the old Bush, fool me...ummm...can't get fooled again; Bush the Elder may have been evil, but he was somewhat competent. Tim writes, on behalf of Shrub These Evil Doers have nucular weapons of mass destruction. I know I mispronunciate nucular. My bad. I've been amazed that Bush's handlers didn't straighten him out on nuculur long ago. Why are they trying to keep him looking ignorant?
RE: New York state AG succeeds in bank shakedown?
Declan McCullagh[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] BANKS AGREE TO BLOCK NET GAMBLING CREDIT CARD TRANSACTIONS Ten banks have reached agreement with N.Y. Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to begin blocking credit card transactions involving online gambling. The banks agreed to pay the Attorney General's office $335,000 to cover costs associated with an investigation into the activity. The Office said that the settlement is part of a trend in law enforcement to focus on intermediaries in combating illegal online activity. http://shorl.com/defrehasubrise [Stamford Advocate] This reminds me of a local shakedown. Like many states, MA has a serious budget shortfall. Last night on the news, Mitt Romney the (Republican) governor announced that he was thinking of legalizing casino gambling in MA, but promised not to do it iff the casinos in neighbouring states (mostly Connecticut) each paid MA $20M. At least one, (Foxwoods) has told him to pound sand. (annoyingly, I can't find an online cite) Peter Trei
Re: Something conspicuously missing from the media survival lists
On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, jet wrote: At 16:18 -0500 2003/02/12, cubic-dog wrote: The NRA is openly hostile towards the embarrasing 2nd Amendment. The NRA is mostly all about allowing the weathly wingshooters to be the last to fall. The rest of us, like the armed citizens, get bartered off everytime gun control bill comes to a vote. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be any RKBA organization without some sort of right-wing, religious, or loonie ties. How true. Aaron Zelmans JPFO is pretty loonie, but at least he is actually going after issues. It's pretty whacked out, but have a peek at http://www.jpfo.org
Why not log all firearm owners in a government database?
Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2003 11:31:28 -0500 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Declan McCullagh [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [IP] Researchers Work on Anti - Terror Program Cc: ip [EMAIL PROTECTED],[EMAIL PROTECTED] [for IP if you like] At 10:23 AM 2/13/2003 -0500, Dave Farber wrote: So terrorists can but assault weapons etc. That9s ok!!! Dave, I wouldn't have a problem with preventing terrorists from buying firearms, or for that matter forcibly disarming them with extreme prejudice. The problem is that we don't know in advance who a terrorist is, and by all accounts very, very few people in America are members of Al Qaeda or other terrorist cells. So when crafting a rule to target terrorist gun-buyers, we're by definition applying it to law-abiding members of the community. (It would be like saying record names of all encryption users, just in case.) Creating a registry of all U.S. firearm transfers means that it would become illegal for a member of a family to give a gun to their brother, sister, or cousin without filling out a form. It would be illegal to sell a firearm without government approval, or at least government notification. And consider the privacy and other risks of having a national database of all (or at least recent) gun owners. Such a rule would also encourage a black market in gun sales and bring the undesirable characteristics that black markets generally provide. Given that 60 million people (according to the BBC) in America own a combined total of over 200 million firearms, it would be very difficult to enforce. (When did you buy that firearm? Before or after the Domestic Tranquility Act took effect?) Also, it's anything but clear that terrorists are relying on firearms to cause havoc. The examples of recent large-scale terrorism inside the U.S. that I can come to mind involve box cutters and quantities of explosives. Restricting assault weapons or recording their sale would seem to have little effect. Finally, there's the Second Amendment, which the Justice Department believes protects an individual right, just as the rest of the Bill of Rights does: http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/guncontrol_010711.html And an article about a new lawsuit challenging Washington, DC's gun control laws, which say the mere *possession* of *any* firearm without prior government approval -- even by security guards and people in bad neighborhoods hoping to defend their homes from predators -- is illegal: http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20030212-71671916.htm Best, Declan -- Forwarded Message From: Jonathan Goldstein [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2003 10:10:38 -0500 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [IP] Researchers Work on Anti - Terror Program One small point. It is currently illegal to build a registry of gun purchases as the article describes: 18 U.S. Code ' 922 ``(i) Prohibition Relating To Establishment of Registration Systems With Respect to Firearms.--No department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States may-- ``(1) require that any record or portion thereof generated by the system established under this section be recorded at or transferred to a facility owned, managed, or controlled by the United States or any State or political subdivision thereof; or ``(2) use the system established under this section to establish any system for the registration of firearms, firearm owners, or firearm transactions or dispositions, except with respect to persons, prohibited by section 922(g) or (n) of title 18, United States Code, or State law, from receiving a firearm. -- Jonathan Goldstein President Urban Technology Group, Inc. http://www.urbantechgroup.com c: +1-215-266-5948 f: +1-215-569-1963 Dave Farber [EMAIL PROTECTED]To: ip [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent by: cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]Subject: [IP] Researchers Work on Anti - Terror Program ox.com 02/13/2003 06:53 AM Please respond to dave Reasearchers Work on Anti - Terror Program February 13, 2003 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 1:47 a.m. ET Financed by more than $20 million in government contracts, researchers are taking the first steps toward developing a system that could sift through the financial, telephone, travel and medical records of millions of people in hopes of identifying terrorists before they strike. So far, the companies awarded contracts by the Defense Department are using only fabricated data in their work on the program, which is called Total Information Awareness. The Pentagon's technology chief, Pete Aldridge, has said the department is interested in tying together such privately held data as credit card records, bank transactions, car rental receipts and gun purchases, along
Hacking the Bush War Machine
Here's a post I sent out to a hackers list I'm on. Address and name I'm responding to have been obscured to prevent cross-replies. From: Tim May [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu Feb 13, 2003 10:25:03 AM US/Pacific To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Hacking the Bush War Machine Date: 13 Feb 2003 00:13:05 -0800 From: Robert xxx [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: DCI's testimony to Senate today By now most of you have heard the stunning report that North Korea has a nuclear missile capable of hitting the West Coast. Another report said anywhere in CONUS. Oh my! I'm scared. I need more duct tape and plastic sheeting. And more batteries. (But not guns, because Big Brother has conspicuously not said anything about how having a gun might be useful in the Armageddon he is warning about...just a lot of duct tape! Or as Bush no doubt calls it, duck tape.) The daily drumbeat of warnings about missiles being able to hit the West Coast, about suitcase nukes on the loose in Russia, about smallpox and Ebola, about India preparing to launch against Pakistan, about Chinese leaders unwilling to give up power, about nucular terrorism, all this is designed, I think, to whip up a war frenzy. Fact is, it took the United States a lot of testing of various kinds of rockets to get them to fly straight. And it took a solid decade of nuclear weapons tests, simulations, and refinements to get the size down to where they could be lofted by even a large rocket, the aptly-named ICBM. Even today we occasionally launch tests out of Vandenberg (I see the contrails/exhaust sometimes), and many fail. No nuclear weapon has ever been successfully launched from a U.S. rocket and then detonated, even in the years of above ground testing (1962 and prior). To jump to the conclusion that the DPRK could successfully launch a nuclear-tipped ICBM and hit the U.S., without extensive rocket tests, nuclear tests, etc., is unwarranted. I've seen estimates that as few as one in three U.S. ICBMs could successfully hit their targets and detonate--with all of our expertise and decades of testing. (And there are solid reports that for about 5 years in the late 60s _none_ of the ICBM warheads were capable of detonating, until they could be very quietly and carefully modified to replace faulty components. If true, and I heard this from various sources including my Navy father, this was a critical secret at the time.) You address some of these points in your throw weight calculations later in your post, but I might as well cut to the chase and not try to analyze your rocket calculations. The press is riding this panic horse with great enthusiasm. Cover your mouth with a wet cloth when the chemical attack starts! Reporters are out at Home Depot and Lowe's showing panicky shoppers loading up on duct tape and plastic sheeting. The War on (Some) Dictators obviously needs the same this is your brain on drugs hysteria that the War on (Some) Drugs brought us. So we get the same disinformation the press delivered during the drug hysteria: Art Linkletter's daughter took LSD and thought she could fly! (A.L. later admitted his daughter was depressed and committed suicide...he thought he could make her life more meaningful by fabricating an anti-drug angle.) Soddom is an Evil Doer! His evil plans to dominate the world with nucular weapons are bad, bad! We're gonna lay a can of Texas whoop-ass on that bad boy! It's our duty as hackers to hack this war machine and shut it down. --Tim May
Re: Something conspicuously missing from the media survival lists
Example: From the Declaration of Independence to the Sedition Act took only 22 years, and that was when the founding fathers still actively dominated political life. Today, a USA Patriot Act takes only minutes to enact, with neither debate nor hearings, and members of Congress don't even complain of not being able to read it before the vote. This could explain the staunch anti-cloning stand of current administration. Maybe they are afraid someone would clone the Founding Fathers, who would then orchestrate a revolution?
Re: Hacking the Bush War Machine
On Thursday, February 13, 2003, at 01:21 PM, Blanc wrote: From Tim May: It's our duty as hackers to hack this war machine and shut it down. Well, I'd like to see *that*. But you know, if N.Korea throws a nucular at us, a gun will be as useful as ducked ape. (and how long are people supposed to stay taped up in their room, they haven't said, either. And where would the bad gas go - over to somebody else's neighborhood?) Last point first. You're uneducated about how chemical agents drift and disperse. Mustard gas, phosgene, even VX, disperse quickly. Simple physics of diffusion. I had one nitwit over on misc.survivalism assuming that the prepare for a 72-hour disruption, the standard earthquake/flood/hurricane advice, meant that we were supposed to seal ourselves up in an airtight room for 72 hours. The nitwits and chimps amused themselves yammering about how long the air would last... As for nukes, even if a DPRK rocket could make it to the West Coast, what would it hit? Guidance of a ballistic (think carefully about what ballistic means) missile is very difficult. The U.S. had to spend tens of billions of dollars getting precise mascon and geomagnetic maps of the earth before they could plausibly target within a 10 mile CEP (circular error of probability). Slight deviations in the earth's crustal makeup, even ocean depths, cause ballistic objects to diverge from ideal trajectories. Anyone, besides the yes men at the CIA, think the North Koreans have access to such maps--or if such maps have even been made of the the NK-U.S. path--as well as access to gyroscopes, precision thrusters, and so on? DPRK has not even come close to launching even a single satellite. And if they do, so what? Missiles could reach many countries from many other countries for several decades. Did Russia go into a meltdown panic when Japan got missiles? Sure, the North Koreans are practicing extortion: send us more money and Hennesy cognac or we will rattle our sabers. If anything, it's for the South Koreans and the Japanese, and maybe the Chinese, to deal with this. No reason whatsoever for U.S. taxpayers like me to either give in to their extortion demands or to pay for another war with them. Don't fall for the recent crap. It depresses me to see list members repeating the Big Lies. --Tim May Gun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her panty hose, is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound
RE: Hacking the Bush War Machine
At 1:21 PM -0800 2/13/03, Blanc wrote: (and how long are people supposed to stay taped up in their room, they haven't said, either. And where would the bad gas go - over to somebody else's neighborhood?) I guess beans are officially off the American diet. Cheers - Bill - Bill Frantz | Due process for all| Periwinkle -- Consulting (408)356-8506 | used to be the | 16345 Englewood Ave. [EMAIL PROTECTED] | American way. | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA
New York state AG succeeds in bank shakedown?
On 13 Feb 2003 at 9:50, Declan McCullagh wrote: BANKS AGREE TO BLOCK NET GAMBLING CREDIT CARD TRANSACTIONS Ten banks have reached agreement with N.Y. Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to begin blocking credit card transactions involving online gambling. The banks agreed to pay the Attorney General's office $335,000 to cover costs associated with an investigation into the activity. The Office said that the settlement is part of a trend in law enforcement to focus on intermediaries in combating illegal online activity. http://shorl.com/defrehasubrise [Stamford Advocate] Excellent. The effect of this, and thousands of similar measures, is to make US based banking slow, unreliable, and expensive. If you want good banking services, look for a reasonably capitalist country that is as far from the US as possible. This measure will accellerate the adoption of GoldMoney, and expand banking in places resistant to US regulation, thus improving the liquidity of the out-of-the-US system.
Obituary for Janis Jagars (Disastry)
Janis Jagars, known to many people on the Internet by his handle Disastry, was a prolific programmer who made numerous valuable contributions to the Internet. I am afraid I cannot do his memory justice, having known him only a short number of years and only through his work on privacy enhancing programs, but he earned my respect and appreciation for his achievements in that area. I first met Janis Jagars while I was employed by PGP Security. In preparation for the release of PGP 7, I located and contacted the people responsible for other implementations of OpenPGP, in order to set up interop testing. Janis was working on updating the DOS-aware PGP 2.6.3i program to work with modern implementations of PGP. His work on that program, and his presence in the IETF OpenPGP working group, helped to smooth over a number of PGP compatibility problems. On the PGP newsgroups and mailing lists, Janis helped many new PGP users get started using email encryption, and tirelessly answered support questions for privacy-related programs. To my knowledge, Janis operated the only anonymous remailer to exist in Latvia. Janis was, by the original definition, a true Cypherpunk. He believed that privacy was a right that must not be denied to Internet users, and he wrote code to help ensure that it could not be. When he needed a way to easily send encrypted email through Netscape, he wrote a plugin. When he wanted a way to mount PGPdisk volumes under Linux, he wrote a conversion tool. When Windows users wanted a pre-compiled version GnuPG, Janis gave them one. Janis understood that the fight for Internet privacy must take place at the hands of programmers, and he rose to the challenge of bring useful privacy-enhancing programs into existence, and into the hands of the public. Immediately after the terrorist attacks in September, 2001, I took over maintenance of the Mixmaster anonymous remailer project. Mixmaster had been unmaintained for over a year, and needed serious work. I was delighted when I received email from Janis, offering his help. Over the next year, entirely of his own initiative, Janis ported Mixmaster's server functionality to Windows, brought Mixmaster's OpenPGP support from an unstable alpha state to a solid, usable feature set, and established himself as an invaluable member of the Mixmaster development team. The upcoming Mixmaster 3.0 release features a number of crucial improvements which would not have happened had it not been for Janis's involvement. My last communication with Janis was on October 11th of last year. He had planned a vacation in Nepal, and expected to return a month later. When he did not return, we feared the worst. Sadly, it turns out that our fears were true: On October 31, while descending from Lobuche summit, Janis fell 250m, and did not survive. I am dedicating this year's CodeCon conference to Janis's memory. Janis will be missed, but his contributions will still be appreciated and utilized. It is my hope that Janis's work will serve as an example for other like-minded programmers, who chose to give their time and code in the name of free speech and privacy. Len Sassaman 13 February 2003 San Francisco, CA -- Janis's home page may be viewed here: http://web.archive.org/web/20010927055328/disastry.dhs.org/ News of his accident can be found here: http://www.vertikalex.lv/minisurvey/Discussion/ShowMessage.asp?ID=4703
Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
Tyler Durden opines: Yo! Superstring theory is only continuous math because the proper mathematical theory describing strings didn't exist. In the past, physics has sometimes lagged (ca 1900) sometimes led (Newton) the development of the needed mathematics. If Superstrings ends up describing everything, it will be apparent that Ed Witten was right: Superstrings is really 21st century physics that we accidentally stumbled upon in the 20th century. In other words, progress is slow precisely because the math is so friggin' hard. Perhaps it is so friggin' hard because you are trying to do the equivalent of modular exponentiation with Roman numerals. Manifolds are second countable Hausdorf spaces in which every point has a neighborhood homeomorphic to the open ball in R^N. I see no evidence that the Universe may be infinitely magnified and still remain manifold-like. If the small scale structure of the universe isn't manifold-like, then a theory which says it is an 11-dimensional manifold is not a great leap over a theory which says it is a 4-dimensional manifold. Remember that Einstein, in the days when gravitation and electromagnetism were the only known forces, spent a lot of time trying to incorporate electromagnetism into general relativity by making it the skew-symmetric part of a non-symmetric metric tensor. Einstein found inventing the math to do this friggin' hard. It was also friggin' wrong. As for Superstrings being dead, I'd suggest that quite the opposite is true, though a lot of the research in strings over the last decade has been done by mathematicians. Read Hawkings' recent Universe in a Nutshell...as some Superstring proponents have long suggested, it seems we are now coming very close to experimental verification of one tiny part of this massive theory. I didn't say it was dead. I said it was a dead end. Whether something will ever produce something of value is orthogonal to whether lots of people will work on it, and peer-review boxloads of eachother's papers. The manifold folks are never going to produce anything which obsoletes the big general relativity book by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, which will live forever as the apex of predictive power of the manifold approach to spacetime dynamics. I don't think any Superstring researcher believes that (at least the ones I've spoken to don't, and I have spoken to some of the older big figures). Make me a machine that does something of practical value, for which string theory predicts the machine will work, and general relativity and the standard model predict the opposite. Make me something that levitates, or transmutes, or forks off child universes, or generates traversable wormholes, or takes pictures of particles that can only exist if the universe is made up of strings. That will impress me. Protestations as to what the Priesthood of Tenured String Magicians and Popular Coffee Table Book Authors believes or doesn't believe will merely prompt derisive laughing. Hell, the whole point of Superstrings was to find a way to reconcile General Relativity with a QM view, and Superstrings is still a very nice candidate. Strings are little more than a trick to evade particle interactions being dimensionless points in space time. It's like saying that gravity can be combined with quantum mechanics if all particles are tiny wiggling plastic bags full of Jello, so small that they only appear pointlike to an ordinary observer. Fuzz out the charge and mass of a particle, and some infinities go away. The measure of the usefulness of a new theory is the increment in predictive power over the prior way of thinking about it. Not how many pages you can cover with indecipherable equations that are Friggin' Hard. Hell, Witten himself said something like The development of General Relativity probably occurs in nonhuman civilizations as a corrollary to Superstrings. The discovery of General Relativity on Earth prior to Superstrings will probably be regarded as an historical accident. I generally discount greatly any math or physics argument which has to appeal to nonhuman civilizations in search of profundity. Special relativity follows from the Lorentz Transformations, which follow from almost any clueful research into electromagnetism. General relativity is a simple extension in which Lorentz invariance is a local instead of a global property, and gravity and accelerated frames are locally indistinguishable. The notion that it is even remotely likely that a civilization, at the point where it knows about only two forces and has not yet discovered quantum mechanics, would invent superstring theory and then derive general relativity from it, is wishful thinking of the highest order. Uh, no. Even if M-theory has nothing to do with reality, it will yield interesting mathematics for decades. Remember, these branches of physics are ferociously mathematical. Morons never get anywhere near these
Re: New Scientist - Joao Magueijo - Hero or Heretic? (fwd)
Tim May wrote... Hawking writes about fairly established stuff, the usual black hole stuff. This was mostly old hat 30 years ago (which is when I took Jim Hartle's class on general relativity). Hawking doesn't get much into the newer theories, at least not in any of the books of his I've skimmed. Check out the last three or four chapters of Universe in a Nutshell. He actually does a good job of descibing M-theory and some of the experimental work that is now going on to search for missing energy radiating from bodies such as the sun. (Actually, the book is a good gift for non-Physicsts---nice illustrations and the occasional gag from Hawking). -TD _ The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
Wheeler
Jim Choate wrote... I think he kicks Wheelers ass (nothing personal to Wheeler). Maybe in Quantum Gravity. But Wheeler's work spans a huge array of fields that Hawking is unable to match (although likely due to his disability). Wheeler is also every bit as iconoclastic a thinker as Hawking, perhaps even more so. Wheeler may be the Tyler Durden of physicists. (Or maybe Tyler Durden is the Tyler Durden of physicsts!) -TD From: Jim Choate [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: New Scientist - Joao Magueijo - Hero or Heretic? (fwd) Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2003 23:49:46 -0600 (CST) On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, Tim May wrote: Does the common man read his Hawking's book? Did Hawking even write it? Second, I don't know about Hawking's books, but Lee Smolin is one of I especially like his 300 Years of Gravitation and his '73 work on large scale structure in time/space. stuff. This was mostly old hat 30 years ago (which is when I took Jim Hartle's class on general relativity). Hawking doesn't get much into the newer theories, at least not in any of the books of his I've skimmed. Then you should skim more of them. Hawkings really jelled black hole theory in the '73 work. He's pretty much the real modern father to some folks. I think he kicks Wheelers ass (nothing personal to Wheeler). -- We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Criswell, Plan 9 from Outer Space [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ssz.com www.open-forge.org _ MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus
Hawking (was Re: Wheeler)
Jim Choate wrote... I think he kicks Wheelers ass (nothing personal to Wheeler). (Where he == Hawking.) And don't forget folks, about Hawking's _other_ career: http://www.mchawking.com/ Enjoy, Dan
M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
Eric Cordian wrote... Continuous math is a dead end. So are strings. Yo! Superstring theory is only continuous math because the proper mathematical theory describing strings didn't exist. In the past, physics has sometimes lagged (ca 1900) sometimes led (Newton) the development of the needed mathematics. If Superstrings ends up describing everything, it will be apparent that Ed Witten was right: Superstrings is really 21st century physics that we accidentally stumbled upon in the 20th century. In other words, progress is slow precisely because the math is so friggin' hard. As for Superstrings being dead, I'd suggest that quite the opposite is true, though a lot of the research in strings over the last decade has been done by mathematicians. Read Hawkings' recent Universe in a Nutshell...as some Superstring proponents have long suggested, it seems we are now coming very close to experimental verification of one tiny part of this massive theory. The manifold folks are never going to produce anything which obsoletes the big general relativity book by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, which will live forever as the apex of predictive power of the manifold approach to spacetime dynamics. I don't think any Superstring researcher believes that (at least the ones I've spoken to don't, and I have spoken to some of the older big figures). Hell, the whole point of Superstrings was to find a way to reconcile General Relativity with a QM view, and Superstrings is still a very nice candidate. Hell, Witten himself said something like The development of General Relativity probably occurs in nonhuman civilizations as a corrollary to Superstrings. The discovery of General Relativity on Earth prior to Superstrings will probably be regarded as an historical accident. The M in M-Theory stands for Moron. Uh, no. Even if M-theory has nothing to do with reality, it will yield interesting mathematics for decades. Remember, these branches of physics are ferociously mathematical. Morons never get anywhere near these fields. Even I, a genius among mere mortals am a near-Moron in the presence of people working in these fields. (Want an example? I thought that generating the confluent hypergeometric functions using contours in the complex plane meant you were hot shit mathematically. Math-physicists refer to something like this as arithmetic.) -TD _ Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963
Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
On Thu, 13 Feb 2003, Tyler Durden wrote: The M in M-Theory stands for Moron. I always thought it stood for Mescaline. ]:
