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Very adv science is indistinguishable from magic
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Posted by Ari [Email] (#2847) [Profile/Gallery] (more from Ari) on Wed, 30 Apr 2008 10:02:55 Share Post by Email
In Reply to: Re: Oooh! pick me! I know the answer!, turbocon86, Tue, 29 Apr 2008 20:39:50
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Yes, there are arguments about how they built the pyramids. But the pyramids conform to the known laws of science. And nobody has shown that you can't build them with a lot of people and a lot of time, working very, very hard.

There are a few things that have held up pretty well to scientific scrutiny over the years, and conservation of energy and the associated laws of thermodynamics fall in there pretty well. So a good way to assess any new concept, however complex, is to see if it passes the 'sniff test.' In this case, does the concept violate some of the basic laws of physics that have stood up pretty well over the past century and change. If one or more of those laws is violated, that doesn't invalidate the concept right away - but it does put a massive burden of proof on it. Sometimes you need to strip away a lot of the jargon, and look at the basics.

It doesn't help that the guy pushing this idea seemed to have opened up an electrical textbook and picked up terms seemingly at random, threw in a few verbs, and ends up with an 'explanation.' Of course, if you don't understand it, you just ain't smart enough to grasp this new and inventive idea. But one should be able to explain it without all that jargon, and you never see that.

And in terms of being able to discuss this in real time, twenty years ago I would have said - cool! There really has been no miracle of science to allow this. We're using the same basic principles that Maxwell wrote of in the mid 1800's. All we've really done is improve the materials. Using those basic principles, we've built machines to make better machines to make things smaller. Yes, we've 'discovered' the transistor. But that's pretty much those same equations brought to material science. No new laws of physics needed to be discovered to create fiber optics. And we could have had an Internet in 1950 using computers with tubes and lots of copper wire over the country. It wasn't a matter of technology. It was a matter of technology making it cheap enough for people to do it.

Building the pyramids with bulldozers, cranes, and modern cutting tools would be expensive but hardly a technological marvel. We'd be using the same laws of physics they used 5000 years ago, just with better materials.

Does that mean the lone inventor can't come up with something new? No, he/she/it can. But don't confuse improved technology - basically, finding a better way to build a spear - with changes to the known laws of physics. So if someone is apparently violating some of the basic laws, the onus is on them to prove it. And if they had, why in heaven's name would they be stuck on some corner of the Internet selling a $29.95 gizmo for a car? A few folks came up with 'Cold Fusion' a decade or two ago and they were on every news station in the world.





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