| Saturday,
January 16, 1999 I ought to know better than to say anything about
relativity. It's one of those areas where classical logic doesn't seem to apply, and I
don't seem to have the mental tools to accept paradoxes as normal things. I also start
with the premise that people who claim to know what they are talking about have at least
tried to make sense of what they say. That latter is I fear a real problem: there are
people with odd intellectual axes to grind, and I guess the cosmology question attracts a
lot of them. Most are easy to spot since they haven't paid the least attention to what's
already known. Others are a bit more plausible.
Years ago I wrote an essay that I delivered as the C. P. Snow Memorial Lecture in
Ithaca, later incorporated into some of my other writings: the essence was that novelists
need only be plausible. We don't have to prove anything, merely make you believe it, at
least for the duration of a story. Lawyers want evidence: they do want to
"prove" something, but only in order to win a case. Since the law is
adversarial, lawyers can and do select their facts, presenting only those most favorable
to their own side of the matter, and if forced to present facts against their own view
they can and do minimize their importance.
Scientists aren't supposed to do that. Scientists are supposed to look for data, which
is to say, to incorporate all the facts into their case. Of course many scientists do act
like lawyers, and a few act like novelists; if they are lucky they were on the right side
of the issue, so their anti-scientific behavior never comes out, and no apparent harm was
done to the scientific process. If they were wrong, though, they can and do steer whole
generations down the wrong path, wasting a lot of talent and resources.
As to journalists, I come from a tradition that says journalists are more like
scientists than lawyers: while one may have passionate views, one is still required to be
more devoted to the truth than to one's own opinions. I am not sure that view holds with
some modern journalists, and worse, with some modern science writers and reporters.
All this is brought about by an exchange of
letters on which I don't have any expertise: someone showed me an URL to a site that
detailed a paradox I've long known but seldom thought about, on the propagation speed of
gravity. (I've even used the device of "the unknown speed of gravity wave
propagation" in novels, where all I have to do is get you to believe it for a few
minutes.) The exposition at that URL seemed clear as far as I followed it, and I put up
the link without much comment as something to look at that might be important.
One of my polymath readers has his objections, strongly felt. The exchange is over in
mail, although I may move it to an alt.mail page; but it did get me to thinking about my
own obligations here, and the Internet in general.
The Internet is often thought of as a source of lies, and it can be that; but it's also
a source of real information. How does one tell the difference? Two ways, of course:
first, if a source talks nonsense as if it were truth in areas you're familiar with,
you're certainly justified in a great deal of skepticism about what's said in areas you
are not familiar with; and second, do the sources seem to care about truth? Anyone can be
wrong, and most will be wrong once in a while, either through mistake or genuine error;
but those dedicated to truth will correct this.
Anyway, I leave relativity to experts, and if I really need to sound as if I know what
I am talking about for a story, I have a number of physicist friends I can ask; for casual
conversation I go back to what Dick Feynman once told me about the slit-interferometer
experiment: "Sometimes things just don't make sense, and that's just the way it is.
Live with it. More tea?"
Things that don't make sense can be a lot of fun, if you can apply logic to all the
parts that aren't just plain illogical…
Anyway, I have move the whole discussion including a copy of the above notes to a
separate page. Now to get back to plotting. Mamelukes, ie Janissaries IV is in a critical
stage, and I'm wandering about in a deep fog trying to get the plot straightened out. If I
am a bit illogical, you'll have to live with that: my wife says I am too unattached to
reality to be permitted to drive, so I need to go for a long walk...
==
From Pete DuPont
SenateVote.com Delivers Messages Directly to Senate
New Web Site Ensures Citizens’ Voices Are Heard During Impeachment Trial
WASHINGTON, DC—SenateVote.com launched today as thousands of people logged on to
the Internet to speak out to their senators on the impeachment trial of President Bill
Clinton.
SenateVote.com was created as a forum for people to send their opinions on the
impeachment trial to their senators. SenateVote.com collects messages that constituents
post on their senators’ pages, prints them, and then sends them directly to the
senators’ offices throughout the trial, ensuring that all opinions registered at the
site get to their destination in the Senate. In addition, the site’s content will be
recorded and stored on CD-ROM to capture the state of the nation during this historic
event, the first time an elected president has been impeached and tried.
"This history-making trial comes at a time when the Internet and e-mail
theoretically provide a unique opportunity for virtually all citizens to voice their
opinion to their senators," said William "Sam" Sneed, spokesman for
SenateVote.com. "Yet, many question what happens to the e-mails they take the time to
write and send to their senators. Some question whether they are ever received. Most
importantly, recent studies have documented that e-mail has the least impact upon a member
of Congress."
"SenateVote.com was created to provide citizens with a more effective voice in the
Senate," said Sneed.
Policy.com ( http://www.policy.com) and IntellectualCapital.com (http://www.intellectualcapital.com), two of the Internet’s leading nonpartisan political sites,
created SenateVote.com to provide individuals with an alternative method to deliver their
opinion to their senators and permanently record their opinions on this history-making
event. In addition to collecting and delivering messages to the Senate, SenateVote.com
serves as a resource for up-to-date news and information about the impeachment trial.
Organizations with Web sites are encouraged to participate and provide their audience
with a voice in the Senate by placing a SenateVote.com icon on their homepage that links
to SenateVote.com.
SenateVote.com can be found at http://www.senatevote.com.
As for me, I am not sure that polls are a Good Thing in cases like this. We get our
information from Sound Bites; the Senate for better or worse has to listen to coherent
arguments in their entirety. I doubt my opinion is worth a lot. (Or, being a Californian,
that there is a shred of uncertainty as to how my two Senators will vote anyway...)
I'm having fun with Baldur's Gate. The official strategy guide is available at Amazon.
And meanwhile there's a new wrinkle
in the gravitation debates; me, I think I will work on my novel, which still needs
plot work.
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