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News Briefs 18-02-2010

Today’s news brought to you by the Brothers Krofft.

Quote of the Day:

“The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or a curse.”

C. Castaneda

  1. Great quote!
    Thanks so much for covering me today, amigo.

    And great choice for a ‘quote of the day’. I think that one is from ‘A Separate Reality’, right?

    Welp, back to my challenge 😉

  2. ◦Brookhaven Collider
    breaking the laws of physics…….ha. The humble fridge magnet breaks the laws of physics every day. And we don’t need no billion dollar collider to show us that.

  3. that CERN artical
    is just a rant. They still have not made any real progress. And I know they will not make any real progress doing what their doing. The research is in the wrong direction to find the answers they want. If your looking for a dry stone, you don’t look in a lake. Silly metaphor, but who cares.

    1. I’m not even going to ask how
      I’m not even going to ask how a fridge magnet breaks the laws of physics 😉

      I wish i knew what progress they were going to make and where. How can you know it is in the wrong direction? For all we know unity between modern physics and any idea we care to mention might be just around the corner. The unknown is fun like that.

      1. you don’t need to ask
        I’m sure you will work it out one day if you apply the basic laws of physics.

        A loose metaphor here, I would not work out how a watch works by hitting it with a hammer to see inside.

        For all we know, the discoveries made after such a collision could only be the effects of the collision. This will not tell us what is inside and how it is held in place or how it gets it’s mass.

        This particle smashing is to me the equivalent of doing an autopsy with a chain saw.

        What they are looking for will be distroyed in the collision.

        They are messing with the glue of the universe and I don’t think they should.

  4. Everything Old is New Again…
    Hi All

    That “New Scientist” piece on the lethal radiation bath at 0.99999998c isn’t saying anything new. The radiation from protons – plain old interstellar hydrogen – crashing into the ship at near-light has been known for decades. What makes it kind of weird is why a medical Doctor suddenly thinks it’s worth publicising at a Physics convention.

    Aside from the dubious reasoning that the radiation is somehow an impassable barrier to interstellar travel (go at 0.98c and the radiation is much, much less), there’s the implicit assumption that there aren’t better ways of getting between the stars to be found.

      1. Commenters to the site seem
        Commenters to the site seem to have all the problems ironed out already; with a big focus on deflector shields.

        I think a far bigger problem with this sort of idea is time dilation. It would be pretty crap to fly off at close to the speed of light and reach your destination several years (to you) later only to have to then deal with the emotions involved with knowing that not only are all your friends and relatives dead, having died millenia ago, but quite probably the entire civilisation you were accustomed to.

        Much better to remind ourselves that that sort of travel is pretty crap and devise better ones. If none exist then maybe we can expect any aliens we meet to be pretty depressed. The last thing we want is a big old engine to just push us faster and faster until everything we care about is gone.

        1. small technical things
          There are some other small technical things.

          Materials are a bit iffy at the moment.

          Also it is problematic if you hit something big, like a few meters across. And it is not easy to avoid that, you can’t see it much ahead of time because you are going so fast.

          I don’t know about the time dilation part. The travelers would not figure on coming back anyway, so it doesn’t make much difference what is not here when they don’t.

          1. Yeah, if they are not
            Yeah, if they are not concerned about coming back then maybe it wouldn’t matter.

            I can’t get my head around the psychology of someone who would want to do it though. In fact, would we even bother as a species. Just to get 10% across the galaxy at the speed of light would take around 10,000 years.

            Can you imagine any country funding such a thing. It is not like they could even send much information back during transit. Looking at a clock on such a spaceship all we would see is it standing nearly still. They would experience several days stretched out over our 10,000 years – not exactly easy to transmit any findings to us.

            If you were the traveller you could travel all that distance, but when you get anywhere all you would be able to do is say ‘Hi, I am Earthling. I might be the last human alive.’ and you would have no way to know. Any information we could send would only have travelled at the speed of light, which you were close to, so any possible information you could have about Earth would be hopelessly out of date.

            If we want to travel even within this galaxy, never mind to other ones, then other methods of transport will be needed.

            Having said all that if things like OBE and astral planeing exist then spiritual travel is possible even if material travel isn’t. So far spirituality seems mostly silent on this possibility though. Evidence from mediums seems mostly self serving (for example) to the interests of heaven and eternal life outside of this universe rather than data communication across species within it, so who knows.

          2. the emerald tablets……..
            Thoth writes in the emerald tablets of leaving his body and travelling to the gates of darkness through the universe.
            He mentions how energy travels in spirals. Very interesting stuff.

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