[lit-ideas] Re: The Piano Man
- From: Paul Stone <pas@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2005 15:46:00 -0400
A.A. Fundamentally it doesn't change. There's always still one answer for
everything: God.
Very few people actually believe that.
A.A. The jury's not out on what the universe is made up of. It's made up
of the 93 or whatever number of elements that Earth is made up of, held
together by the same forces earthly molecules and compounds are held
together by.
Well as Tom Lehrer wonderfully rhymes "these are the only ones of which the
news has come to Hahvahd, there may be many others but they haven't been
discahvahd!"
Admittedly ideas change. It used to be thought that life on
earth couldn't survive without sunlight (photosynthesis). Now it's been
known for decades that plants thrive at or near the bottom of the ocean
using volcanic heat and gases for food, never seeing sunlight. Now it's
thought all life on earth can't survive without water. Maybe someday an
organism that doesn't need water will be found. Likewise this new thing
about light traveling faster than the speed limit. Maybe it's true, maybe
it isn't, but however it shakes out, that law will certainly pertain to all
of the universe, not only Earth.
How can you say that? Right now, light speed is always 186,000 mps. That's
the 'truth' regardless of how fast your flashlight is going already. So if
someone DisCAHVAHS that it's not true, then THAT becomes true. So who gives
a shit? Nothing is knowably true.
As far as the consistency of elemental makeup is concerned... what about
the possibility of other stuff that we haven't discovered? Can't you
imagine a place in which our stuff doesn't act like there stuff?
A.A. Sort of like the Founding Fathers' attempt at creating a more perfect
union. Science, good science, is always willing to become more correct.
Otherwise it wouldn't be science.
A friend of mine is an electrical engineer who designs 3-d computer eyes
which can detect inconsistencies in sheet metal. He has worked at the same
place for about 20 years. They have NEVER sold ONE SINGLE thing that they
have researched and developed. They routinely work for 18 months on
something and then they get to a point at which they say "it'll never work"
and they turf it. This is the way science works: 1000 people fail and one
succeeds.
Most brilliant minds in physics work their whole life and die without every
doing ANYTHING of note. They are sheep who contribute to the law of
averages that if enough people work on something, discoveries will be made.
Right now, many of these brilliant minds are working on a T.O.E. Apparently
they think that all other 'mysteries' have been cleared up.
There are generations of physicists banking on the inevitability that they
are on the right track with String Theory and M-Field this and blah blah
blah. The thing is, every time they have something they think is workable,
someone else says "yes, but you need 29 dimensions to get rid of the -ve
scalar in the 5th partial integral of the yadayadayada." Then the next guy
comes over to the school and says, no, we need to invent another type of
imaginary particle ending in 'on' -- maybe go-on or loon -- so that we can
get rid of that number right there. That one that doesn't make sense!!! Of
course it doesn't make sense. It's WRONG!!! The whole of science, well,
maybe not the whole, but most of recent science is hinged upon
fudge-factors. We are so far from actually understanding things but the
'scientists' keep insisting that we know everything. We don't even
understand the weather. Do you know how complicated CFD is? Do you know
that we can't even realistically model the droplet dispersion in a spray
tower? Did you know that we don't really know exactly how a fluidized bed
will work? Granted, we have excellent predictive abilities on a lot of
things, but we don't know shit on the microscopic or macroscopic scale in
reality.
A.A. I think they did. The 18th century was an amazingly inquisitive time.
And now isn't?
A.A. This is interesting. What kind of questions do you ask,
all kinds
A.A. and what answers have you found?
not too many.
We are all clueless, yes, but growing incrementally less so. I would say
even with really big questions, like
why death, the universe follows the same laws. Like humans, stars too are
born, go through life stages, die. Why stardust needs to decay (question
#37 on your list?) is one of the "it just does" scenarios. If stardust,
along with humans, needs to die, then truly, what was God thinking, and
where did he put the cemetary? That's why I don't fear death. We will go
to whence we came ... ashes to ashes, dust to stardust ...
But I don't want to.
p
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