Category Archives: Mail

Mail 695 Sunday, October 09, 2011 

innovate v legislate from 1989!

Here’s a little article on US competiveness from 1989 by a strange fellow named Jerry Pournelle in Infoworld 1989.

http://books.google.com/books?id=IToEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PT47&ots=UccgJWdMYK&dq=%22What%20man%20has%20done%2C%20man%20can%20aspire%20to%20do.%22&pg=PT47#v=onepage&q=%22What%20man%20has%20done,%20man%20can%20aspire%20to%20do.%22&f=false

I was still in college, reading this and the other trades in the library…computer at the time was Mac Plus w/ external 20 GB SCSI drive.

I guess we’ve all been strolling down memory lane due to Steve Jobs passing.

It’s all been amazing.

Jay R. Larsen

Still reads pretty good…

Penumbras and emanations.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/world/middleeast/secret-us-memo-made-legal-case-to-kill-a-citizen.html?&pagewanted=all>

Roland Dobbins

This doesn’t really need comment. The Constitution is not a suicide pact; but arbitrary power is a dangerous thing.

Letter from England

So Romney’s Mormonism is attracting criticism from the right wing church <http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/poll/2011/oct/08/mitt-romney-mormonism>. It’s not especially surprising, given what happened during the Second Great Awakening. There’s no war like a war between brothers. Look at the schisms in the Disciples of Christ, a relatively moderate group <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Church_(Disciples_of_Christ)>.

Venus has an ozone layer. Most people are unaware that the best evidence for life elsewhere in the Solar System is atmospheric data from Venus. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15203281> <http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21021-venus-has-an-ozone-layer-too.html>

The UK Government has been stealing from pensions for a decade. Now it’s beginning to bite.

<http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2046634/SUNDERLAND-ON-SATURDAY-Pension-deficit-disorder-QEs-hidden-danger.html>

Harry Erwin PhD

—

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it? (Albert Einstein)

Once you begin to rob pension funds, it’s hard to see where to stop.

Dr Pournelle

Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom is available for Kindle. I downloaded the sample, but the entire sample is taken up with introductory comments. Thus, the comments defeat the purpose of the sample. I cannot tell if Hayek is worth my time.

Do you recommend this book?

Hayek’s Road to Serfdom is one of the books that everyone ought to read. On The List of One Hundred, for certain. More like the list of fifty. Yes, by all means read it.

Rand Paul Supports Your Argument

You wrote — several times — that you would cut 1% of the budget as part of a comprehensive plan to get our act together.  Rand Paul supports this policy in an email he sent:

"One penny out of every dollar. That’s all that needs to be cut from our bloated federal government each year for the next seven years to balance the budget.

*   The Penny Plan allows Congress each year to decide which one percent to cut unless they fail to act. Then, one percent of EVERY program is cut, automatically, by law. No exceptions, no waivers, no escape clause.

*   The Penny Plan limits spending to 18% of GDP after the 7 years. That number is important because it is the historic revenues levels of the last 40 years. That means the Penny Plan will ensure our budget STAYS balanced.

*   The Penny Plan turns the liberals arguments inside out. It is easy to explain – how can anyone possibly be against balancing our budget if all it means is we cut ONE PENNY out of every dollar each year?"

Your will is done; the matter is a talking point in national discussion.  Social Security and Medicare are two, major concerns I see during my research. 

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Clearly I agree.

Occupy Wall Street Are Organizing A Nationwide Boycott Of Banks

http://www.businessinsider.com/occupy-wall-street-are-organizing-a-nationwide-boycott-against-banks-2011-10

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

And inviting in the labor unions. It’s very odd out there.

The FTL Opera Results

Jerry,

There is a good article in The Register about the Opera FTL results. Some of the reader comments are worthwhile too. You may find it at <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/06/opera_and_general_relativity/>.

John Edwards

Jerry

Can general relativity explain the OPERA neutrino result?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/06/opera_and_general_relativity/

“CERN’s decision to release data about its “superluminal neutrino” experiments at an early stage is providing the world with a rare insight into the process of scientific peer review. Another small step in that process in relation to the fascinating OPERA results asks whether general relativity can be called in to help explain the results.”

The article draws attention to a letter. “Author Carlo Contaldi, a reader in Theoretical Physics at Imperial College, London, is particularly interested in how the OPERA setup accounts for correcting GPS timing to provide a universal time coordinate (UTC) that’s the same for CERN and Gran Sasso, where the neutrinos originated and were detected, respectively. . . .

“the OPERA experiment employed a travelling Time-Transfer Device (TTD) to calibrate the difference in time signals at each receiver. We assume this device to be a transportable atomic clock of sufficient accuracy [15]. The TTD constitutes a classic moving clock synchronisation conundrum in relativity,” the letter states.

“He notes that the experimental setup introduces three relativistic time distortions that need to be corrected in analyzing the apparent time-of-flight of the neutrinos: time dilation resulting from “moving the TTD through a non-uniform gravitational potential”; a “Doppler-type effect” resulting from the TTD’s velocity with respect to Earth’s “rotating frame of reference”; and finally, errors due to “the rotation of the Earth as the TTD travels to its destination”.

“The most important of these, Contaldi writes, is the first – the effect of non-uniformity of gravity on the TTD. Since “the time differences the result hinges on are extremely small”, even trivial details such as whether the TTD was transported by car or by air could potentially change the synchronization between the two ends of the experiment.”

“Usually, peer-review looks opaque to non-scientists. The general public often learns of a research result after a paper has been accepted by a journal – and therefore after the peer-review process is completed (and most often, only because the journal decides to throw some bones at the general media). As examination and analysis of the OPERA experiment proceeds, however, the public is getting a fly-on-the-wall view of peer-review at work. Condaldi may be right or wrong; OPERA may survive this examination, but fall at some other hurdle; a new physics might emerge, or not. Whatever the result, giving the public a ringside seat as academics rake over the OPERA results is already looking like a win for science. By the time OPERA is either settled or falsified, we’ll have had our most detailed demonstration of why science works.”

Ed

Harry Reid Nukes the Senate

<http://takeaction.pollingprecinct.com/emk/open.php?M=4873015&L=75&N=2090&F=H>

<http://takeaction.pollingprecinct.com/emk/link.php?M=4873015&N=2090&L=2229&F=H>

Fellow Conservatives:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) fundamentally weakened the United States Senate yesterday in a desperate attempt to block a vote on the President’s stimulus bill.

Using a simple majority vote, Reid used the "Nuclear Option" to change the rules of the Senate so senators cannot offer amendments. In the future, senators will only be able to modify legislation if Harry Reid agrees to it.

Harry Reid changed the rules of the Senate because Republicans planned to force a vote on President Obama’s stimulus plan. The plan is so unpopular that it was going to be defeated by Republicans and Democrats when it came up for a vote. This would have embarrassed the president so Reid and the Democrats just changed the longstanding rules of the Senate to block it. You can learn more at RedState.com <http://takeaction.pollingprecinct.com/emk/link.php?M=4873015&N=2090&L=2230&F=H> .

The Senate is supposed to be the "World’s Greatest Deliberative Body". That means debating, amending, and voting on legislation — all things Harry Reid has sought to avoid during his tenure as Senate Majority Leader.

Folks, we’re teetering on tyranny. We must elect a conservative majority in 2012 to stop this madness. <http://takeaction.pollingprecinct.com/emk/link.php?M=4873015&N=2090&L=2229&F=H>

This latest attempt to ignore the rules and force bad legislation on the American people is alarming, but it’s not that surprising. Democrats have been ignoring the U.S. Constitution and blowing through its stop signs for years.

Republicans can protect their rights in the Senate but it requires 41 Republican votes to keep the Democrats from cutting off debate. Unfortunately, too many Republicans lack the courage to stand together for the principles of freedom.

The only way to take our country back is to elect true conservatives to the U.S. Senate. We need principled leaders who care more about defending our freedoms than their own political careers.

Respectfully,

Jim DeMint

United States Senator

A political letter, but the incident it refers to may be important.

Spengler’s take: Wall Street Protestors Have Met the Enemy and It Is They:

http://pajamasmedia.com/spengler/2011/10/06/wall-street-protesters-have-met-the-enemy-and-it-is-they/?singlepage=true

He begins the essay: “America is the land of opportunity, and never before the great housing bubble has a Ponzi scheme drawn such a wide base of support and benefited so many people. This was the most democratic scam in history, and if you got in on the first half of it, you’re still better off. The big losers were not homeowners, but the bankers. A quick look at the numbers shows how misinformed are the protesters running around Wall Street. Instead of picketing the bankers, they should pair off and picket each other. I ran through the numbers recently in an Asia Times Online essay. Here’s the story of the People’s Ponzi scheme in a nutshell:”

And on. It’s choice.

Ed

All true. My house is still worth considerably more than ten times what I paid for it in 1968. But when the government injects money into the housing market it drives up the prices. Comes the bubble. One big Ponzi scheme. And of course in most places that means an enormous increase in the “value” meaning the taxes, driving fixed income people out of their houses. Fortunately we have Proposition 13 in California or I could never afford the taxes on this house…

But do note that the Goldman Sachs didn’t do too badly out of all this. And somehow the Toxic Asset fund didn’t retire the toxic assets…

Devil’s Mountain: NSA’s Abandoned Cold-War Listening Post,

Jerry

So here we are – a Russian transmitter and an American listening post – Devil’s Mountain: NSA’s Abandoned Cold-War Listening Post.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/10/teufelsberg/?viewall=true

Ed

Einstein vs the ‘kooks’

Hello Jerry,

"Without that observation all the speculations about relativity are fairly idle talk: as Russell Seitz reminds me, most physics professors have a peach crate full of well reasoned refutations of Einstein’s theory of relativity sent by smart people, and there’s not a lot of point in reading them because there’s no need for a new theory: what we have works to cover the data we have."

The first thing to remember is that I am in no way qualified to judge the arguments of relativity vs ‘Alternative Theories 1 through N, where N is large’.

That said, I did do a bit of reading on the ‘Einstein Plus Two’ link that you provided. It was noted that a large number of experiments that confirm a theory does not prove that the theory is correct but a single data set that contradicts a theory is sufficient to falsify it.

One set of experimental data that supposedly contradicts relativity is the aberration of binary stars. Specifically, binary stars of roughly equal mass rotating about a common center of gravity with relatively short orbital periods. Relativity (supposedly–remember I am not qualified to pass judgement) predicts about an order of magnitude more aberration than that actually measured by astronomers. The measured aberration is that predicted by Beckman ( http://www.k1man.com/f39.pdf ).

There are a few other examples, which I am equally unqualified to judge. Other people are however and at least a few PhD professors have commented favorably on Beckman, who himself was a PhD college professor.

I also note that it is apparently routine in the physics community to refute a theory questioning relativity on the grounds that it was proposed by a ‘kook’, whether or not it successfully accounts for known experimental data. How do we know that the individual questioning relativity is a kook? Because his theory questions relativity. It has become a bit like the ‘Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming Caused By CO2 Emitted By Civilization’ theory in the climate science community. Alternate climate theories are dismissed because they are proposed by individuals who are not bona fide climate scientists. What does it take to establish your climate scientist creds? Unquestioning support for the CAGWCBCEBC theory of climate change.

Bob Ludwick

‘A former official said one of the reasons for making senior officials principally responsible for nominating Americans for the target list was to "protect" the president.’

<http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/05/us-cia-killlist-idUSTRE79475C20111005>

Roland Dobbins

al-Awlaki

Jerry,

I must be slow. I’m not exactly clear about what the difference what happened to al-Awlaki and if a Union sharpshooter had shot a Confederate soldier dead during the Civil War. They or I might say we (my father claimed one our ancestors died of wounds he received at Chickamauga), were engaged in armed insurrection against the U.S. government. If what President Lincoln did was legal, why isn’t what President Obama did also legal?

Joel Upchurch

I take it that you would have had no objection to the Union sending a hit man to London to take out the Confederate ambassador, then? Or had we had drones, firing one at Tom Hayden when he and Fonda visited Hanoi? Do understand, had I been able to get out of our blackbirds from South Viet Nam to Hanoi at the time, I would have been pleased to order a strike with the 105 (accurate to cep 10 feet at 10,000 yards slant range) on Hayden and Fonda. But who should have had the authority to order the strike? That’s the question worth debating.

Subj: Current FEMA director not quite as clueless as you seem to think

Craig Fugate came up from local disaster-handling. He knows full well

that the initial response to a disaster can only be local. He’s trying

to manage down the widely prevalent unrealistic expectations that FEMA

can and should respond instantly and effectively.

Of course, he cannot unilaterally reverse the entire institutional

inclination of his agency.

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/CraigF

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

Perhaps so, but he has an impossible job.

taxes & philanthropy

Perhaps some readers will consider reading the information at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-04/rockefeller-ellison-weill-turner-allen-join-buffett-s-charity-pledge.html

chris klow

A soft sell.

How stakeholders see each other

As usual, it funny because it has at least a ring of truth to it…

http://mthruf.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/workplace-subjectivity-chart1.jpg

Regards,

Bill Wilkinson

Mail 695 Wednesday, October 05, 2011

Steve Jobs

There was plenty to dislike about Jobs but it cannot be denied that he had a major effect on the world that makes him a member of a very small club. And far too many members got there by killing lots of people rather than making things people like.

Jobs’ accomplishments stand as a refutation of the insane tirade recently delivered by Elizabeth Warren. By her philosophy, a Steve Jobs owes it to the world to pay ever higher taxes because he owes everything to the world for having built the roads and other infrastructure to make his business possible. But it is the reverse that is true. Without the drive and talent to create an Apple, what purpose do the roads serve? Where are you commuting to if nobody is creating stuff that leads to employment opportunities? Left to the government, you’d probably live in a barracks on the factory grounds. It’s terribly efficient.

And the contribution to the tax base by a person like Jobs is hugely underappreciated by Warren and her ilk. She again gets it backwards by focusing on all the non-producers the wealthy are somehow obligated to support at even greater levels than they already do. But what of the legion of people who became high earning employees of Apple and companies selling parts and materials to Apple? Warren says nobody ever got rich on their own.

It’s true but not in the way she wants voters to believe. Other than by pure theft, nobody ever got rich without bringing a lot of other people into wealth as well. Trying to determine the volume of people who got rich by working at Apple or just investing in the company would likely take a goodly chunk of time. All of these people in turn pay their taxes in a much higher bracket than the average citizen. No doubt many of those people would have been successful in a world without Apple but I’ve also no doubt that many of them would have settled for doing a lot less without the necessary spark.

A significant piece of the tax base that contribute far, far more more than median earners came into existence because Steve Jobs was a man who lead people to create desirable things that might never have existed or at least never achieved the same quality without him. Leadership really matters. We’ve seen far too many collections of talent that could never deliver to their full potential for lack of the right person turning a talented group into a team.

Eric

Well said,

An Exchange of views from another conference:

The left ought to be asking if Jane Fonda would have been on the list, if there had been a list in 1972 when she visited Hanoi.

And the right ought to be asking themselves quite carefully just how safe they feel, living in a world with such lists. I don’t think Rush has anything to worry about, but as we should all remember, the Department of Homeland Security’s 2009 report on right-wing extremism shows how easily a left-wing administration could criminalize what some of us call patriotism.

. png (Peter Glaskowsky)

I’ve always felt the appropriate treatment for Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden would have been exile. Do what you want but you’re no longer welcome in this country. As it is I find it remarkable there was no crime with which to formally charge her. Or perhaps there was, if she had a different father.

I don’t know how much further into treason she could have gone without committing espionage or taking up arms against the US.

Eric Pobirs

Well, I think Fonda could have gone a lot further without being unambiguously guilty of treason, though she was certainly deep into the gray area and undoubtedly guilty of criminal stupidity and naiveté.

But the question is, if Nixon could have dealt with her by putting her on a list, would he have– and if not, where’s the line, and how comfortable is everyone about the idea of even HAVING a line?

I think I’d just feel better about the whole thing if there was some formal, adversarial process to go through.

I understand the Seventh Amendment carves out a pretty big chunk of lawful authority for the military "in time of War or public danger", but the circumstances of this particular execution aren’t exactly what was meant there.

. png

Which sums it up fairly well. With Nixon and Fonda it was not an option. Would it be now?

On Climate Change

Back to the drawing board… again

But a new study by a University of Michigan paleoclimatologist and two colleagues suggests that the deep ocean was not an important source of carbon during glacial times. The finding will force researchers to reassess their ideas about the fundamental mechanisms that regulate atmospheric carbon dioxide over long time scales.

"We’re going back to the drawing board. It’s certainly fair to say that we need to have some other working hypotheses at this point," said U-M paleoclimatologist David Lund, lead author of a paper in the journal Nature Geoscience.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111003180440.htm

RW Salnick

I do not think our models are sufficiently well validated to justify betting trillions of dollars on their accuracy.

http://www.ktvu.com/news/29385123/detail.html

A cold weather front took aim at Northern California Tuesday, packing a potent punch with as much as 10 inches of snow for the Sierra peaks, the earliest return of winter conditions to Tahoe since 1969, according to weather forecasters

And Winter is coming early in Central California. Are we warming or cooling?

‘Climate change’ comes to Tahoe.

<http://www.ktvu.com/news/29385123/detail.html>

—

Roland Dobbins

FEMA

Here is a message sent to my wife by one of her fellow choir members who lives in the Magnolia community. It is a bit long, but interesting. My comment to friends about it was that FEMA wants (needs?) everyone to be "Grasshoppers" not ants. (Recall the Aesop’s fable) That gives them power.

Here are some stories about the Tricounty fire in Montgomery, Grimes, and Waller County, Labor Day week, 2011.

My neighbor across the road has a sister named Kenna. Labor Day, when she saw the huge column of smoke over our homes, she left a birthday party at my neighbor’s house to meet with her friend Tara at the Baseball complex in Magnolia. She called the owner of the complex and got permission to use the warehouse there as a staging area for donations for the fire fighting effort.

They put a notice out on facebook that they were going to be taking donations on their facebook pages. That night as they were setting up tables and organizing, News2 Houston came by and saw the activity, investigated and left with the phone numbers and a list of suggested donations.

The facebook notice propagated faster than the fire. By dawn they had 20 volunteers, bins, forklifts, and donations were pouring in. I stopped by with my pitiful little bags of nasal wash and eye wash, and was amazed. There must have been 20 trucks in the lot, offloading cases of water, pallets of Gatorade, and people lined up out the door with sacks of beef jerky, baby wipes, underwear, socks, and you name it. School buses and trailers from many counties around were there offloading supplies, students forming living chains to pass stuff into the bins for transport to the command center and staging areas. If the firefighters had requested it, it was there. What do you give the guy out there fighting the fire that might engulf your home? Anything he or she wants. Including chewing tobacco and cigarettes.

Kenna moved on to the Unified Command Post at Magnolia West High school. She looked at what the fire fighters needed, and she made calls and set it up.

Mattress Mac donated 150 beds. Two class rooms turned into barracks kept quiet and dark for rest. The CEO of HEB donated 2 semi trailers full of supplies, and sent a mobile commercial kitchen at no charge to feed all the workers, but especially our firefighters, 3 hot meals a day. An impromptu commissary was set up, anything the firefighters had requested available at no charge.

As exhausted firefighters (most of them from local VFDs with no training or experience battling wildfires) and workers came into the school after long hours of hard labor, dehydrated, hungry, covered with soot and ash, they got what they needed. They were directed through the commissary, where they got soap, eye wash and nasal spray, candy, clean socks and underwear, and then were sent off to the school locker rooms for a shower. HEB then fed them a hot meal and they got 8 hours sleep in a barracks, then another hot meal, another pass through the commissary for supplies to carry with them out to the lines, including gloves, safety glasses, dust masks and snacks, and back they went.

One of the imported crews from California came into Unified Command and asked where the FEMA Powerbars and water were. He was escorted to the commissary and started through the system. He was flabbergasted. He said FEMA never did it like this. Kenna replied, ”Well, this is the way we do it in Texas.”

Fire fighting equipment needed repair? The auto shop at the High School ran 24/7 with local mechanics volunteering, students, and the firefighters fixing the equipment.

Down one side of the school, the water tankers lined up at the fire hydrants and filled with water. Down the other side there was a steady parade of gasoline tankers filling trucks, dozers, tankers, cans, chain saws, and vehicles.

Mind you, all of this was set up by 2 Moms, Kenna and Tara, with a staff of 20 simple volunteers, most of them women who had sons, daughters, husbands, and friends on the fire lines. Someone always knew someone who could get what they needed – beds, mechanics, food, space. Local people using local connections to mobilize local resources made this happen. No government aid. No Trained Expert.

At one point the fire was less than a mile from the school, and everyone but hose volunteers were evacuated. The fire was turned.

The Red Cross came in, looked at what they were doing, and quietly went away to set up a fire victim relief center nearby. They said they couldn’t do it any better.

FEMA came in and told those volunteers and Kenna that they had to leave, FEMA was here now. Kenna told them she worked for the firefighters, not them. They were obnoxious, bossy, got in the way, and criticized everything. The volunteers refused to back down and kept doing their job, and doing it well. Next FEMA said the HEB supplies and kitchen had to go, that was blatant commercialism. Kenna said they stayed. They stayed.

FEMA threw a wall-eyed fit about chewing tobacco and cigarettes being available in the commissary area. Kenna told them the firefighters had requested it, and it was staying. It stayed. FEMA got very nasty and kept asking what organization these volunteers belonged to – and all the volunteers told them “Our community”. FEMA didn’t like that and demanded they make up a name for themselves. One mother remarked “They got me at my boiling point!” and suddenly the group was “212 Degrees”. FEMA’s contribution? They came in the next day with red shirts embroidered with “212 Degrees,” insisting the volunteers had to be identified, never realizing it was a slap in their face. Your tax dollars at work – labeling volunteers with useless shirts and getting in the way.

The upshot? A fire that the experts from California (for whom we are so grateful there are no words) said would take 2-3 weeks to get under control was 100% contained in 8 days. There was so much equipment and supplies donated, 3 container trucks are loaded with the excess to go and set up a similar relief center for the fire fighters in Bastrop. The local relief agencies have asked people to stop bringing in donations of clothing, food, household items, and pretty much everything else because they only have 60 displaced households to care for, and there is enough to supply hundreds. Again, excess is going to be shipped to Bastrop, where there are 1500 displaced households. Wish we could send Kenna, too, but she has to go back to her regular job.

John Pennell

Your tax dollars at work. Bush was fried for what FEMA did in New Orleans. The Obama FEMA has learned nothing and forgotten nothing, but the media don’t notice. Abolish FEMA and restore civil defense.

Letter From England

Quiet week.

"Unter vier augen"–I remember those days. The KGB was working hard to remove demented hands frozen on controls and steering wheels and wondering if they could preserve the Soviet Union. Andropov died unexpectedly, which is why Gorbachev was in charge. KGB analysts were showing up at western research conferences looking for insight into what was going on.

Compulsory retirement abolished in the UK <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15127835>

All cats are grey. <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/30/dont_bother_with_it_degree/> A bog-standard computing degree in the UK isn’t worth getting–mostly because it doesn’t teach that much.

—

Harry Erwin, PhD

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." (Benjamin Franklin, 1755)

UK Stories

Nothing exciting. Some interesting.

NHS hospitals coming under fire for poor emergency surgery. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-15098114 Death rates about 4xAmerican.

Problems with the student loans system. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15090178

Article on the metal theft problem. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15062064 . Theft of a £50 copper cable can do hundreds of thousands of pounds of damage. Copper pipes used to connect gas mains to gas meters are stolen, resulting in gas explosions.

60 babies adopted last year in the UK, down from 4000 in 1976… The adoption process now takes more than two years. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/sep/29/60-babies-adopted-england-last-year

You want it bad; you get it bad. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=417583&c=1 Current Government policy is to discourage foreign students (and their money).

—

Why I use a Macintosh: Eccl 12:3 "those who look through the windows see dimly" (Crossan’s translation).

Harry Erwin

Buffett and the Ultra Rich

Hi Jerry,

Seems to be a day for sharing stories. Buffett now claims that he’s only talking about taxing the ultra rich (400 richest americans).

http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/1192505402001

I still don’t understand what’s keeping him from writing a check to the government, and convincing the rest of those folks to do so. It’d take less than a year if he just called 2 of them every day (and they’d probably take his calls).

Cheers,

Doug=

I thought that the alternative minimum tax was supposed to take care of this sort of thing? In any event, I would rather that the super rich had the money than that it go into the pot to keep the 7% annual exponential growth of government spending going. Buffet may not invest wisely, but he does invest; money paid to the government is just spent.

5% surtax on million / year earners

Sounds so reasonable. After all, how can someone earning 1 mil a year notice 50K in more tax? But wait, they just might invest the 50K in someone’s startup. Or, give it to the church, or… In any case, what reason do we have to believe that the federal government will use it wisely? Past performance? Current performance? Crystal ball? I believe the republican strategy should be to starve the beast in any way possible.

Phil

I would prefer that if they are going to take that money they would convert it into hundred dollar bills and drop them from airplanes rather than giving it to the government to continue the out of control spending. It would go for better use if simply thrown into the wind. But I suspect it would be better not to take it at all.

In case you missed this:

Subj: Video: Elon Musk of SpaceX on the future of human space flight

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/SpaceFligh

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

Elon was at the National Press Club luncheon today

I caught the last half. He was very good. His stance on global warming was reasonable based on his pro-solar bent. There is an animation on the space x website showing how they will reuse all stages of the Flacon 9 / Dragon. Each stage has it’s own re-entry powered descent capability. Since the stages are mostly depleted of fuel and hence weight, they don’t need that much remaining fuel to brake themselves. I have not done the math, but assume space x has. The second stage and the dragon both use a heat shield for the gross braking and then turn over and use their existing boost engines to do the final deceleration. Actually, Dragon does not have a boost engine so it uses side mounted thrusters, which are also the launch escape system.

Elon mentioned that if shuttle like safety is all that is required, then Dragon could carry people on the next launch. A launch escape system is considered highly desirable by NASA and will take 2 to 3 years. Since we flew all of the shuttle missions without it, and only one, STS51L (Challenger) killed the crew due to a lack of a launch escape system (which probably is not true – it was the SRB leak which Falcon does not use), it seems reasonable to not need one in the interest of getting back into space and adding it later.

Phil

NASA’s Ultimate Legacy

<i>"It is probably time to phase NASA out in its present form. There is still talent at NASA, and it is still important to have space science and space research: the question is whether NASA ought to do that or contract for it."</i>

This is the crux of the matter and I happen to agree with you, though with trepidation. I have seen nothing in the last 5 years that leads me to believe that the Iron Law has not subsumed the spirit of exploration at NASA, and that unless they are reduced in number by at least 30% (those most senior being the first to walk) and given firm goals, timelines, and budgets, there is little they can accomplish that will not be unacceptably expensive for the amount of actual exploration returned.

Everything, from robotic explorers to asteroid visits, needs to be put out to bid or (as you have suggested) achieved through a X-prize style cash payment for successful completion.

America needs to admit that adopting a Soviet style bureaucracy for HSF was a bad idea, and that it simply doesn’t work – not if you actually want space exploration.

Best regards,

Bennett Dawson

Mead on Higher Education

Walter Russell Mead has an excellent, brief essay on the role of higher education in modern society.

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/09/29/just-because-they-start-doesnt-mean-they-finish/

The essay echoes the reasoned arguments that you and Charles Murray in Real Education have made over the years.

Jim Ransom

Education has this dilemma: most of the students are not a great investment in the sense that their education will result in all that much return to the society. Most innovation and economic growth comes from fewer than 20% of the population, and the highest returns on education investment comes from the top. Raising a 40^th percentile student to 50^th percentile is good for the student, but the effect is not particularly noticeable on the society; while raising a 90^th percentile student to 95^th percentile can change a lot. We all know this.

If education is a right, then it is a duty to pay taxes to support it: but whence came the obligation for a childless couple to pay for the effort to teach a 20^th percentile child and devote as much effort to that child’s education as is given to, say, the 85^th percentile child? Or even the 50^th? The only way people are equal is in the sight of God; does the duty to pay for the special needs of the special education student come from God but is enforced by the tax collector?

Our Courts have said that young illegal immigrants have a right to public education. The argument does not cite any section of the Constitution that mentions education at all. The people of California passed a state constitutional amendment saying that illegal aliens do not have the right to public money but the federal courts ruled that unconstitutional. The exact basis whereby this is a Constitutional right was not made clear. It does not seem to be by consent of the governed.

China’s first space station

Sir,

I thought you might appreciate this news story on China’s preliminary stepping stones towards a space station.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/29/china-space-station-launch

"

China http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/china is preparing to take its building boom into space <http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/space> on Thursday night by putting a first research module – the "Heavenly Palace" – into orbit The unmanned Tiangong-1 laboratory, which will be launched into the skies above the Gobi desert, is a stepping stone towards a bigger, fully-fledged orbiting platform that China expects to be cheaper than the US and European-backed International Space Station http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/international-space-station .

The 10.5m-long cylinder will ride around 220 miles (350km) into space on board a Long March 2F rocket from the Jiuquan satellite launch centre and remain in orbit for two years."

Might be a good time to brush up on your gorram Chinese

http://smallcultfollowing.com/firefly-chinese-slang.pdf

Respectfully,

Brian P.

As Mr. Heinlein was fond of saying, the universe does not guarantee that the language of space shall be English.

German Currency Reform 1948: Summary of the "First Law…"

http://www.cvce.eu/obj/first_law_on_currency_reform_20_june_1948-en-a5bf33f8-fca0-4234-a4d2-71f71a038765.html

Alas, I have not yet been able to find the conversion rate for the subsequent exchange of old money for new.

Is this the approach to currency reform we want to take in the US?

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

Probably not. If we can grow the economy, then normal market acts will take care of the rest. But so long as we must every year spend another 7% more of money that we don’t have, there is no way out from the coming crash.

Immediate suspension of regulations would start a boom but nothing else will.

Jerry Pournelle

Chaos Manor

I’m largely inclined to agree.

We need *both* to suspend regulations *and* to throttle the growth of government spending.

Suspending regulations — even firing all the regulation-mongers — won’t by itself throttle the growth of government spending, though: only a small fraction of government spending is spending on regulating. It’s the entitlements that are driving the growth in spending.

I doubt we can throttle the growth of government spending before the Federal debt gets so large that the only way to deal with it is by repudiating it. Since outright repudiation would run afoul of the Fourteenth Amendment, the only way we’ll be able to repudiate it is by inflation — about a 1000% inflation, I’d guess.

Of course, that will destroy all the savings of the people like me, who saved for several decades, hoping to start businesses of their own without losing control of them to vulture capitalists and/or lenders.

Only the super-rich will retain enough wealth to finance start-ups.

Will they bother?

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

Each of us owes $47,000 on the national debt as of this moment. That’s a lot to be paid off. Economic boom times can do it, but only if we stop the spending. Since we consider a 0 growth budget a drastic cut balancing the budget on the backs of the poor, it may be that – what? Each of us, every single one of us, owes $47,000, and confiscating all the wealth of the super rich will not reduce that below $30,000 – and it sure will eat up a lot of investment capital.

The normal state of mankind is poverty for most: a single set of clothes, one meal a day, poor to no medical services. For most of human history that is the way 80% of the population lived. Read the novels of Dickens and when reading Christmas Carol pay attention to the way Bob Cratchit – lower middle class, almost a gentleman – lived.

We have worked at throwing away what we had. With enough greed and political rapacity we can throw the rest away. But at some point there will be default. Watch Greece for a picture of the future of the United States. Watch the United States spend money to help Greece. Perhaps the Chinese will help us. Or perhaps God almighty will.

At 7% exponential growth each of us will owe about $100,000 twelve years from now. And the beat goes on.

Mail 694 Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Works and Days > Why Does the Good Life End?

Jerry

Victor Davis Hanson starts by noting, “People just don’t disappear. Look at Germany in 1946 or Athenians in 339 B.C. They continue, but their governments and cultures end. Aside from the dramatic military implosions of authoritarian or tribal societies — the destruction of Tenochtitlan, the end of Nazism, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the annexation of tribal Gaul — what brings consensual states to an end, or at least an end to the good life?”

http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/why-does-the-good-life-end/

He then points out, “The city-states could not stop 30,000 Macedonians in a way — when far poorer and 150 year earlier — they had stopped 300,000 Persians descending on many of the same routes. The French Republic of 1939 had more tanks and troops on the Rhine than the Third Reich that was busy overrunning Poland. A poorer Britain fought differently at el-Alamein than it does now over Libya. A British battleship was once a sign of national pride; today a destroyer represents a billion pounds stolen from social services. . . . Redistribution of wealth rather than emphasis on its creation is surely a symptom of aging societies.”

And that’s just the beginning of his essay.

Ed

Hanson is always very much worth while paying attention to. This isn’t the same world that I grew up in.

People killed in Uganda

Jerry,

The link to Infowars was broken…here is a better link:

http://www.infowars.com/armed-troops-burn-down-homes-kill-children-to-evict-ugandans-in-name-of-global-warming/

And below in an excerpt from the article, environmentalism isn’t only affecting poor people in Uganda:

"Climate change alarmism and implementation of global warming policies is a crime of the highest nature, because it is already having a genocidal impact in countries like Haiti, where the doubling of food prices is resulting in a substantial increase in starvation, poverty and death, with the population being forced to live on mud pies.

As a National Geographic Report confirmed http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/01/080130-AP-haiti-eatin.html  , “With food prices rising, Haiti’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice, and some must take desperate measures to fill their bellies,” by “eating mud,” partly as a consequence of “increasing global demand for biofuels.”?

A Sidebar to the above:

You may remember I spent about 4 years in Uganda from 2001 to 2005 putting patient tracking computer systems in hospitals throughout the country. The kind of thing happening here is pretty standard…in a country the size of Oregon that has over 24 million people in it, if you are going to do anything that consumes land, you are likely going to displace people, and poor Ugandans have little recourse. Uganda, like other ‘developing nations’ as they are called now, instead of ‘third world countries’ is fraught with bribes to officials to get even normal business done. Poor people don’t have money like a big corporation would have, therefore, they lose.

One of the worst things I saw there was China moving into Uganda. Chinese have absolutely no problem with bribes, it’s a way of life already with them. Chinese road construction companies, telephone companies, even a Chinese power company. The Chinese power company ‘won’ (more likely bought) the contract to manage Uganda’s main source of electric power, a dam on the Nile river near Entebbe. A few months after taking over the management, suddenly Uganda was experiencing a higher than normal rate of blackouts and brownouts, and it turned out that the Chinese company was selling much of the power to Kenya. I don’t believe anything has changed on that to this day.

I am not sure that comment is required. Thanks

Overturning "E=mc2"

On the one hand, obviously SOMETHING about Einstein’s formulation of relativity is correct, because it allows us to explain observed phenomena and allowed us to predict others.

On the other hand, so did “F=ma”.

Mike

E = MC^2 can be deduced from other repeatable experiments, and doesn’t require relativity. It was, however, part of the theories which allowed Lise Meitner and her nephew Frisch to understand the theory of how to split an atom, and what would happen; that is, Meitner was a relativitist. Her work showed the theory of the self-sustaining chain reaction which Fermi confirmed by construction. She would certainly be a strong defender of relativity; on the other hand she was committed to experimental evidence.

In any event, you can deduce e = mc^2 from Coulomb and Maxwell, and some did so before Einstein made the formula universally accepted.

Twin Paradox

Dr. Pournelle,

Reader Richard White posed an interesting question about clocks and special relativity, namely, shouldn’t both clocks see the other run slower when one of the clocks is accelerated to a high speed. This is the classic Twin Paradox of physics, in which the clocks are replaced by identical twins, one of whom makes a trip to the stars and upon returning to earth finds his twin brother has aged. We’ve run this experiment with high precision clocks aboard aircraft, and indeed, the clock on the plane returns showing less elapsed time than its twin which stayed on the ground. The relativistic explanation lies in the fact that to compare the clocks (or the twins’ age), they must be brought back together into a single inertial frame. Both clocks therefore cannot have remained in inertial, or non-accelerated, frames of reference, and the clock that has undergone acceleration will be the slow clock.

—

regards, Fred

Yes, I understand that; but what I don’t understand is why the twin who doesn’t have a rocket ship lives in a priveliged reference frame. That is, how does the universe know who did the accelerating? Sending a clock around the world is a repeatable experiment, and it always has the same result: it either gains or loses time. How does the universe know that the clock travelled, rather than stayed still while the Earth rotated around it?

Aurora Borealis from the International Space Station

http://www.wjla.com/blogs/weather/2011/09/watch-an-unusual-view-of-the-aurora-borealis-from-space-12939.html

–Gary

Jerry

A Large Tsunami Shock Wave on the Sun:

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110925.html

And they’re not kidding. Very cool.

Ed

The Haqqanis have always been the warlords of that part of the country. They always will be.”

<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/world/asia/brutal-haqqani-clan-bedevils-united-states-in-afghanistan.html?&pagewanted=all>

—

Roland Dobbins

Mail 693 Sunday, September 25, 2011

Relativity, causality, and the CERN faster than light neutrinos.

Additional material added Monday, Septermber 26, 2011

First, here is, I think, the consensus position:

Faster than light?

Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. The problem is one of viewpoint in more ways than one.

The sun, the reality of the sun, is not 8 light minutes away, which if the Earth is zero-point of time, the sun as witnessed from the Earth would be minus 8 minutes with regard to zero-point. The reality of the sun is that (-)8 minutes (+)8 minutes to the sun’s zero-point of time (0 = 0).

Now, nothing but a photon will travel from 0-point Earth to (-)8 minutes sun. Anything else will travel from 0-point Earth to 0-point sun and always arrive at the sun 8 minutes earlier than any observer or instrumentation on Earth will witness it to arrive. If it takes 2 minutes for something to travel from Earth to the sun, the observation per the speed of light will be 8 minutes plus 2 minutes for an Earth observed travel velocity of 10 minutes from 0-point to (-)8 minutes. An Earth observed velocity slower than the speed of light.

Of course from the point of view of the sun, the traveler arrives at 0-point (the sun) before it leaves the Earth (-)8 minutes, a trip from (-)8 minutes to 0 in two minutes, the math being (+)8 minutes to get from (-)8 minutes to 0. Rather, (+)8 minutes inside two minutes, 8 minutes worth of light-time photo events in transit between the sun and Earth traversed in two minutes. A fast forward of a historical movie (the sun (-)8 minutes at Earth to the reality of the sun in its own spatial 0-point of time equals a voyage [forward] in space and time of (+)8 minutes within two minutes of travel time).

This works for all travel from object reals (0-point) to object reals (0-point) whether the travel is for a trillion trillionth of a light second’s distance ((-)x to 0 via (+)x) or ten trillion light years of distance ((-)x to 0 via (+)x). (+)x is the direction and nothing is ever going to travel backward in time or leap forward in time.

Mr. Pournelle, there is no space tied to time in the expansions and contractions of time of physicists. In a unification of space-time, the space is as flexibly relative as the time, exactly as flexibly relative, and time cannot be contracted or expanded without a concomitant spatial contraction or expansion, preventing the kind of time travel where children come out of travel older than their parents or grandparents, or a parent comes out of it younger than his children and even his grandchildren. You notice that the observation from the Earthly point of view above exactly contradicts the observation from the sun’s point of view. The Earth observer says there was no travel faster than the speed of light, 10 minutes to travel 8 light minutes (observing a decelerative travel 0 to (-)8 minutes). The sun as an observer would say that there most definitely was travel faster than light (observing an accelerative travel (-)8 minutes to 0). The traveler (the third 0-point of time) in point of view forward up through space-time to 0-point (the on-rushing sun) says no there wasn’t, and in point of view rearward down through space-time to (-)8 minutes (the distancing Earth) says yes there was. In all, the two contradicting observations cancel each other out.

G.L. Bradford

There are two ways of calculating where the Sun “really is now” when you see it in the sky. After all, the Sun has moved since the light we now see left the surface of the Sun. Surely it can’t be in the direction that you’d get if you pointed to the bright yellow thing you see in the sky. Only there is aberration – that is, Earth is moving (or under the principle of relativity the sun is moving) so that the light doesn’t come from the direction we thought. The light arrives from an aberrant angle. The aberration is in the direction of the velocity of the Earth (or of the Sun, depending on which reference frame you like). Magically, at least to a very close approximation, the Sun really is “that way right now” when you point to it in the sky. Now Newton assumed that gravity propagates instantly. That assumption leads to some predictions regarding where the planets will be over time, as for example when the planet will be in perihelion to its primary; and the prediction is wrong. If you assume that gravity propagates at the speed of light, Newton’s calculations turn out to work, and to be a lot simpler than if you do the complex math required by general relativity.

Assume that the light leaves the Sun and at that instant a well insulated observer teleports to the Sun. Why would he get there before the light left the Sun? I fear I am not following you. From the point of view of someone in Washington, the Battle of New Orleans took place after the Treaty of Ghent ended the war: a sailing ship got the news across the Atlantic before anyone was able to get a message from New Orleans to Washington, Somewhere along the path from the District to NO, say about Memphis, the new arrived simultaneously. All very well, but Packenham was still dead, and Andrew Jackson was still the hero who would become President, even though the news got to people in a different order. And if someone in Ghent – someone credible – had been able to teleport to Packingham’s camp the night before the assault, the result would simply have been that the battle didn’t happen, so far as I can tell. Which would greatly affect American history – possibly no President Andy Jackson, a renewal of the Bank of the United States, possibly the survival of the Whig Party … all interesting speculations, but I don’t see any paradox here.

Neutrinos/causality/headache

Dr. Pournelle,

Your speculation on FTL comments brought to mind two questions:

1. If some particle is observed to travel faster than c, why not recognize that particle as the basis for a space-time speed limit? The concept of causality violation, and all of its Wikipedia examples, seems to be based on light being the fastest means by which information (e.g. seeing your comet impact from Earth) can travel. From the lay perspective, that’s a circular argument in itself – if you accept that light is fastest, of course you’d run into paradoxes. If you re-draw the "light cone" as a "neutrino cone," with the edge between light speed and the speed recently measured at CERN expressed as a probability function, the paradoxes disappear again, at least so far into the math…I’m a pilot, not a physicist.

We could follow (and expand) your analogy of sailing ships delivering messages, and recognize that if the presence of a neutrino sixty nanoseconds earlier than it was supposed to arrive conveys a bit of information (vs. that neutrino arriving at light speed, to the proper observer), then causal relationships are not turned upside down, any more than with Andrew Jackson’s lack of a satellite phone, merely because we aren’t currently able to receive information that way. Perhaps some entity is so equipped.

Which brings up the second question:

2. Wouldn’t the most appropriate theory then be that neutrinos are what the stars use to communicate with each other, to avoid the apparent simultaneity of cause and effect? "Eta Carinae just Twittered: ‘Going supernova, guys, here’s your 60 ns heads-up…’"

Ian Rummel

But of course we are both naive…

Tachyonic Neutrinos and Causality

Tachyonic neutrinos suggest the existence of a preferred (true privileged) inertial frame. Baez discusses them in http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLight/FTL.html#19 . Now that we have them, what do we do with them? They destablise the vacuum; we exist; something has to give. They also cannot be used to transmit information at FTL speeds; we’ve measured their velocity in a beam that is turned on and off; oops…

Harry Erwin

Which is the heart of the matter. If there is a preferred reference frame everything changes. Of course that makes for some oddities, too.

A paradox of the Special Theory

This question has been buggin’ me for years – decades, really. I put it to Petr Beckman once, but he understandably begged off, as he didn’t believe in relativity.

The classic description of the dilation of time part of the special theory says that you have a spaceship, two clocks and a magic telescope. The clocks are synchronized, one of them is put on the ship and the ship takes off. Before long it is traveling at a significant portion of the speed of light, relative to us (on Earth, presumably). When we look at the clock on the ship with our telescope and compare it with our clock, we see that it is running slower, since it is traveling so fast.

But what if there are two telescopes, and one of them is on the ship? According to the special theory, won’t the astronaut, when he looks at the clock on Earth, observe that it is running slower than his, because the Earth is moving away from him so fast? Remember that the Earth is not fixed and that all velocities are relative.

If that confuses you, imagine that there are two space ships, each with a clock and a telescope. They start at the same point in space and accelerate in opposite directions until their velocity, relative to each other, is nearly the speed of light. According to the special theory, each would observe the other’s clock to run slower than his own. Which one is right? What will the clocks show when the drivers apply the brakes (this is a thought experiment, remember) and bring their ships to a stop (relative to each other)?

This seems to me to be a paradox of the special theory, but I don’t have an advanced degree in theoretical physics.

Richard White

Austin, Texas

Well, the math on that is fairly straightforward and not all that difficult as a thought experiment.

As you state, the most that can be said with special relativity is that, to an observer traveling faster than light, there are some reference frames in which a sequence of events, say A precedes B for a sublight observer, appear to be reversed for the relatively faster than light observer — WHEN viewed by visualization of the light emitted at A and B. Casualty should be correct for such events when viewed by an appropriate FTL viewing scheme, and time reversal is not automatic. However, the FTL technique must admit of infinite velocity to completely avoid the problem — otherwise it would always be possible to find a restricted subset of the space where the casualty remains reversed. (That’s going on memory; I haven’t actually worked with the relevant equations since grad school.)

This does not discount the closed timelike loops of general relativity, which are a different but related phenomena.

I’ve occasionally considered buying Professor Beckman’s book but haven’t had the opportunity; conversely, his is hardly the first time I’ve heard the same suggestion. (Frankly, that might be The Skylark of Space.) I note that second-hand copies presently list for $120+ on Amazon.

I have the book, but I do not know who Beckmann’s literary executive is. It is certainly still in copyright.

Subj: Re: FTL neutrinos at CERN?

The paper has been posted:

http://static.arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897.pdf

First impressions:

1. The quoted mu neutrino velocity is (v-c)/c = (2.48 ± 0.28 (stat.) ± 0.30 (sys.)) ×10-5 for average energies <E> = 17 GeV.

2. The FERMILAB MINOS experiment ALSO reported a FTL neutrino with statistics

(v-c)/c = 5.1 ± 2.9×10-5, which is within 1 sigma of the more precise CERN result, for an energy distribution E = 3 – > 100 GeV but much lower mean energy (not specified in the CERN paper).

3. The nominal SN 1987A neutrino velocity result for 10 MeV electron antineutrinos was |v-c|/c < 2×10-9.

4. At the end of the paper they present a first, crude attempt to assess an energy dependence. While the results are not of adequate statistics to draw any firm conclusions, their preliminary result is that neutrinos of > 20 GeV energy averaged 20% greater velocity (TOF) deviation than neutrinos < 20 GeV, which is less than 1 standard deviation of the difference statistics. However, such a result is contrary to the naive Feinberg tachyon.

Bottom line:

(a) We now have two consistent experiments with faster than light, very high energy neutrinos, one with two sigma statistics, one with six sigma statistics.

(b) We have a preliminary hint that the results, if they stand with greater statistics, are not consistent with classical special relativity tachyon theory.

Physicist

Which sums it up about as well as anyone can. Obviously the way to bet it is that this is experimental error. SF writers hope for something else, of course. Space opera writers need that FTL…

ADDITIONAL MATERIAL ADDED MONDAY 26 September 2011

"There are two ways of calculating where the Sun “really is now” "

Actually there are none. I have not commented on this before because I thought for sure you must understand this but I increasingly have the impression you really don’t.

In a relativistic universe, there is no such thing as "at the same time" across interstellar distances. The only occasion when you can have things "at the same time" is when they are also "at the same place".

What specifically causes the time travel effect is the relativistic slowing of clocks as observed from different inertial frames of reference. When the two frames of reference are separated, each one sees the other as having accelerated and thus having its clock slowed slightly. Trying to reconcile two mutually exclusive cases – that each clock is slower than the other guy’s – is what produces the paradox and the time travel. Lightspeed in this case isn’t an arbitrary limit, it’s fundamental to the math, because it’s fundamental to the time distortion – which has been experimentally verified. It’s not clear to me that the starting point and the end point in this particular experiment are actually different inertial frames of reference – which would seem to me to prevent the time travel effect, at least in this case – but properly exploring the implications of that would have to be left for a better physicist than I.

In general though it makes absolutely no sense to talk about where the sun "really is now". It isn’t. You can’t know. I don’t mean you don’t have the tools for it, I mean the knowledge is not physically possible within the structure of reality. The reason you think like that, and think it should be possible to know it, is because your human animal brain has evolved and is equipped to handle the everyday world of Newtonian mechanics, where "at the same time" generally makes sense. All your hypotheticals and counterfactuals about going a little bit or a lot faster than light to go check something are fundamentally Newtonian thinking. In this universe, things don’t work that way.

Unless of course the neutrino experiment turns out to be correct, in which case there is a lot more to the story. But every experiment up until now that was intended to verify various aspects of relativity has produced exactly the results the theory predicts.

R

I am aware that if one accepts the theory of relativity then one accepts the premises, and the premises say “no privileged reference frame”, and thus it is meaningless to ask “where is the Sun really truly.” One of the reasons why some rather respectable people rejected Einstein: not from pique, but because they found it needlessly complex as an explanation of the observed data. The observation is that there’s a bright yellow disk in the sky. We see it can can point to it. And we have done experiments that tell us reliably that it takes 8 minutes for the light from that bright yellow disk to get to us.

Beckmann asks the question this way: “Is the bright disk in the sky a souvenir left by the sun where it was 8 minutes ago, or is that the direction to the real sun where it is now?”

To most of the people in the world including – as Beckmann observes – the janitor in the lecture hall, that is a meaningful question; yet as you point out, Einstein’s relativity (as opposed to the Principle of Relativity which has been around far longer than Einstein’s) makes the question, if not meaningless, then vary complicated. I point at the disk and say “If I go in that direction for 8 light minutes, where will I be relative to the Sun?” It is precisely the complexity of asking question which spurs some to seek alternatives. And as Beckmann observes: “It is a sobering thought that when the professors are through arguing, they find the position of the sun exactly where the janitors never doubted it to be; and if we apply this janitors’ principle to [a] fictitious body S’ which travels at the same angular velocity as the earth but lies beyond it, so that its light – like the sun’s gravitational force – has the same direction as sunlight, but the opposite sense, then clearly everything that has been said about the propagation of light must equally well apply to the propagation of force.”

Newton’s classical physics assumed that the propagation velocity of gravity was infinitely fast; using his equations but assuming that gravity propagates t a finite speed yields the same results as Einstein’s equations, and assuming that that velocity is c gives results that fit quite well to the observed data. And it’s a whack of a lot simpler. Beckmann continues “the present theory assumes that forces propagate with velocity c from their sources, that Newton’s Laws and the Maxwell equations are valid when all velocities are referred to the local force field rather than to an observer, and that the relativity principle is valid in Euclidean space and unreformed time, This leads formally to the same expressions for mass, momentum and energy, and to the same relations among these thee as in the Einstein theory, but the corresponding effects are rooted in the phenomena themselves, independently of any observer’s location of perceptions.” (Einstein Plus Two page 72)

The FTL neutrino doesn’t change any of this for Beckmann and the other “revised classical” theories. Thus Einstein can’t ask where the Sun really is, but if the FTL neutrinos prove out, then the rest of us can sensibly ask “where’s the Sun just now?”

Faster Than the Speed of Light?

Jerry,

First some questions.

Is there a difference in the speed of light in a vacuum versus the atmosphere?

Is Time consistent throughout the Universe?

How many dimensions beyond the four that we can currently sense and measure exist?

Why do we let Schroedinger tell us that we may change the state of the cat in the box when we know that there is no rational reason that opening a normal box will affect the state of the cat?

(However, the currently available methods for observing the spin of an entangled photon clearly will change the state of the entangled pair. The difference would seem to be between destructive and non-destructive means of observation.)

When is a transfer of information that appears to be FTL, in fact not FTL?

(To answer my own question, when the actual transmission distance is less than the distance measured by the observer. This is a possible answer to the entanglement quandary.)

To sum up, our problem is that our view of the Universe is limited by what we can sense and our measurement techniques. Perhaps the Universe is actually much smaller in volume than what we currently observe. Perhaps, using dimensions that we currently cannot observe, things are much closer together than the appear to us.

Maybe God isn’t playing dice with the Universe.

Bob Holmes

I am certain that some variant of string theory will come to the rescue.

My question is, suppose an alien space ship headed toward the Earth at a high fraction of the speed of light. That means that the ship has gained weight. But since there are no privileged reference frames, it’s equally valid to say that Earth and all on it have gained weight, Given that, can Jenny Craig get that pesky alien to slow down so that we’re not so fat?

Of course if we don’t know that the aliens are coming at 0.98 c, then will their ship have any effect on us? But when we learn…

You may have already seen this …

"We don’t allow faster than light neutrinos in here" said the bartender. A neutrino walks into a bar.

—

Brian Dunbar

Geidus

"Display some adaptability"