Decline of the West, twins and relativity, and other stuff

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