From: Michael Lorrey (retroman@tpk.net)
Date: Thu Jan 23 1997 - 18:29:53 MST
Mark Grant wrote:
>
> On Sun, 19 Jan 1997, Michael Lorrey wrote:
>
> > I really don't care. I know that any time people say something is
> > impossible, someone else goes and proves them wrong.
>
> Seen any perpetual motion machines lately? Or are they all locked up in
> that big warehouse with the Ark of the Covenant, the captured alien
> saucers and the 200mpg carburettor?
Nice ad hominem mockery. Here's one recently posted by James Rogers:
Lockheed engineers are apparently taking the new Zero Point Field
theories of Puthoff and Raisch seriously enough that they think they can
figure out how to use the ZPF in a way to realize Alcubierre's
theoretical Warp Drive that he posited in 1952, as a method of traveling
faster than light without violating relativity, or at least traveling
through space MUCH more cheaply than at present, so cheap that most
people, if they knew about Lockheed's work, would scoff at them for
thinking they can violate the "laws of physics".
>
> > it happened with
> > the Wright Bros., when the head of the Smithsonian Institution had
> > previously said that heavier than air flight was impossible, it happened
> > with Robert Goddard, when "experts" said that rocket engines would not
> > work in a vacuum,
>
> Here's another one: 'they' always said that we couldn't travel faster than
> sound.
>
> And guess what... all those claims were true in a limited engineering
> sense (there were problems that would be hard to solve), but contradicted
> the laws of physics as they were known at the time. Rockets could
> obviously work in a vacuum if supplied with oxidiser, heavier than air
> flight simply required light enough materials, and bullets had been
> travelling faster than sound for decades; in fact, the V2 had done so in
> WWII, though that was probably classified. As absolute claims they were
> simply wrong, and any reasonable physicist could have shown why.
They did not violate the laws of physics as known at the time. They
violated the misconceptions about the laws of physics as known at the
time. A rocket does NOT need oxidizer to work in a vacuum (as the ESA
whether their hydrazine thrusters have oxidizer) the misperception was
that thrust was developed by exhaust gasses pushing against the
atmosphere surrounding the rocket, rather than simply a matter of the
difference in pressure between the front and rear of the device (kind of
like my drive, eh?). Goddard was derided for "violating" the same "laws"
as I am derided now, yet who now has a firm place in history?
>
> > Frankly I am surprised than anyone on this list would not have learned
> > from such recent history.
>
> There is nothing impossible about wiping out life on Earth from the moon.
> You just build yourself some kind of total conversion generator (you can
> do that with a black hole, right?) to convert lunar soil into energy and
> use that to launch millions of thousand ton rocks towards the Earth at 50
> km/s.
>
> What is impossible is doing so in the kind of small-scale scenarios that
> we've been talking about, because it contravenes fundamental laws of
> physics such as conservation of energy. None of the predictions that
> people always bring up to defend such claims contravene these laws.
>
> Mark
Like I said Mark, it only contravenes YOUR conceptions of the
"fundamental laws of physics", mainly because, as evidenced by your
scenario building and debunking, you seem to always choose your
assumptions by how they will most benefit your own preconceived opinion.
That is hardly the scientific method.
>
--
TANSTAAFL!!!
Michael Lorrey
------------------------------------------------------------
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#!/usr/local/bin/perl-0777---export-a-crypto-system-sig-RC4-3-lines-PERL
@k=unpack('C*',pack('H*',shift));for(@t=@s=0..255){$y=($k[$_%@k]+$s[$x=$_
]+$y)%256;&S}$x=$y=0;for(unpack('C*',<>)){$x++;$y=($s[$x%=256]+$y)%256;
&S;print pack(C,$_^=$s[($s[$x]+$s[$y])%256])}sub S{@s[$x,$y]=@s[$y,$x]}
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