HyperdriveFollow

But how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop?

3

Kaelesh, your avatar is creeping me out.

Thanks for momentarily alleviating my boredom Kel

"Dröscher and Häuser's experiment requires a magnetic coil several metres in diameter capable of sustaining an enormous current density. Most engineers say that this is not feasible with existing materials and technology, but Roger Lenard, a space propulsion researcher at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico thinks it might just be possible. Sandia runs an X-ray generator known as the Z machine which "could probably generate the necessary field intensities and gradients".

For now, though, Lenard considers the theory too shaky to justify the use of the Z machine. "I would be very interested in getting Sandia interested if we could get a more perspicacious introduction to the mathematics behind the proposed experiment,"


If they ever DID get this off the ground.. I think it would open an entirely new barrel of monkies.

Waht this theory claims is an actual compatability between Relativity and Quantum Mechanics... Which right there, most people would call a vast stretch...

gee, umm, where do you think we got ANY of our terms from?

it wasn't a ******* burning bush on a mountain!!



everything has to start somwhere.

Made up? Hasn't everything that you KNOW been "made up" by sombody?

Is not EVERY interpretation of existance and reality simply a "made-up" assumption of relative Truths?

This seems to be a recurring problem. That is a philosophical issue, which I'm also very interested in. But whenever you throw some science or pseudo-science out there, and you get a response back that is rooted more in the language of science than philosophy, you don't seem to like it very much.

I don't know anything about gravitophotons. For all I know, physics has indeed identified it as an "actual" entity. But from my cursory exposure to it, the term appears a lot closer to an explanatory construct fabricated to explain something else. My only point was that if this is the case, such practices often prove dangerous. A lot of wasted time and money has been wasted on looking for a mediating construct that never existed to begin with. The classic example in psychology is "drive," which was presumed to be something an organism had which caused or mediated overt behavior. It turned out to be an utterly fruitless line of research and was dropped.

So yes, everything we know is "made up" in the sense that every single word in every single language is just a vocal/written symbol constructed by humans. Science is about finding evidence that the symbols correspond in some way to "what's out there." Granted, concepts may begin as theoretical symbols or metaphors (like "atom"), but in hard science, theories are built from a body of established principles and facts, and those theories are constantly challenged and tested for limitations. Theories that have stood up to the test of time have routinely held up under the scrutiny and criticism built into the practice of science. There is (and should be) especially strong resistance to theoretical symbols that are tied more closely to fanciful visions of the future or personal theories of reality than to emprical facts and data.

So, as someone with a strong background in science, I can only hope you forgive me if my immediate reaction tends to be critical and skeptical. It's what I was trained to do.

Just because I haven't FTFY in a while...







Quoting > me.

Edited, Wed Mar 1 20:27:07 2006 by TStephens

Wait, there's four dimensions now?

And they're all wrong!