Number One, Engage! Green jobs, relativity, and other such matters

View 693 Saturday, September 24, 2011

Small is beautiful. Green is the color of tomorrow. Go Green. It’s humane.

Green Nazis Burn Homes and Kill Children

Armed troops acting on behalf of a British carbon trading company backed by the World Bank burned houses to the ground and killed children to evict Ugandans from their homes in the name of seizing land to protect against “global warming,”….

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

The site has links — including the original NY Times article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/world/africa/in-scramble-for-land-oxfam-says-ugandans-were-pushed-out.html?_r=2&scp=3&sq=uganda&st=cse

The Green Tyranny has begun…

—– Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

I recommend that readers begin with the New York Times account,

As to the commentary, what you call Green Tyranny is seen by many as a way to save the Earth. Now it is likely that in parts of the world the authorities use heavy handed methods for enforcing the decrees of the central government, and not all decisions are made with the impartiality that you would find in, say, the Old Bailey or even in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, but the intentions are good. Planting trees takes up carbon. Requiring companies to buy carbon offsets is vital to preventing global warming with the threat of rising sea levels.

The intentions are good. There need to be adjustments to the methods, but the intentions are good. Never forget that the intentions are good.

I wonder if Detroit would be a good place for vast tree farms? We need not worry about small matters like real estate titles. The Earth is in danger.

Continuing the discussion of my inability to understand relativity:

The light cone is another important concept related to the perception of causality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone

—–

Roland Dobbins

Of course I understand the mathematical concepts, and I can deal with that at need, although in fact relativity plays no real part in anything I have been professionally concerned with. We didn’t need relativity in guiding ICBM’s or B-52 navigation, nor in the Apollo program, and when GPS came along they use relativity in the calculations, but you can get the same results (to an indistinguishable accuracy) using other assumptions including Petr Beckmann’s assumption of luminiferous aether which, he assumes, is an entangled gravitational field. It is often claimed that you can’t calibrate GPS without relativity — http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html — but it would be more accurate to say that you can’t calibrate GPS without taking into account effects predicted by general and special relativity, meaning that any other theory predicting the same results would work. Petr Beckmann’s Einstein Plus Two discusses this.

Relativity works. It is generally accepted. There is no experimental evidence refuting it although Beckmann claims that some aberration observations are not consistent with relativity and even if they were they are needlessly complex; but Beckmann’s theories are hardly the extraordinary proof that his extraordinary assertion that relativity is wrong would require for such a paradigm shift.

Comes now the possibility of faster than light communication. Sixty nanoseconds is not a long time, but it is long enough for several bits of information to be transmitted. This really is incompatible with the relativity principle. Indeed, according to relativity, those ftl neutrinos are not only impossible, but imply the end of the principle of causality.

And that’s where my understanding comes apart at the seams. It is widely asserted that the existence of any communication (let alone physical travel) that is faster than light implies the end of causality and allows time travel. You could go back and kill your grandfather. And so forth. The argument is presented in many places, including the light cone article that Roland references.

The Wikipedia statement is

On the other hand, if signals could move faster than the speed of light, this would violate causality because it would allow a signal to be sent across spacelike intervals, which means that at least to some inertial observers the signal would travel backward in time. For this reason, special relativity does not allow communication faster than the speed of light.

That brings me to a thought experiment.

We have an Alderson Drive which allows us to send a starship instantaneously from Earth to Alpha Centauri. We also have a system of instant communications. We have sent a small colony to Alpha Centauri. It does not have a space watch network (more fools they) and suddenly the colony is hit by a comet. They see the comet coming in just in time to send an SOS to Earth by they instantaneous messaging system. “SOS We are being hit by a comet send hel—“

Earth won’t see that even for four years, but fortunately we have the Enterprise armed and ready to go. Within seconds we send that ship to the aid of the colony. “Get there before it happened! Intercept the comet, Picard! Blast it out of existence. Go!”

It takes off travelling faster than light – indeed, it makes the trip in zero time.

But surely it gets there just in time to see the ruin of the colony? How does all this instant messaging and travel change the fact that the colony is already destroyed?

And Picard is so depressed by all this that he decides to go back in time to prevent his mother from ever meeting his father, so that he will never be born, and thus won’t feel this pain of failure. “Number One, take me back to the Sorbonne precisely 63.4 years ago! Make it so!”

Now what, precisely, does the First Lieutenant do to make that happen? He’s got instantaneous travel and instantaneous communications.

And my imagination breaks down.

One thing about the CERN results (which may very well be data errors, although 60 nanoseconds is quite a long time. Move the receiver thirty feet north and see if the time shrinks to 30 nanoseconds…

Fortunately I don’t have to understand relativity and causation, and I can postulate faster than light travel in novels like The Mote in God’s Eye, which, by the way, is a pretty good yarn and is selling like hotcakes on Kindle and Nook. And I keep trying to understand why faster than light communications change the whole universe. So I can go faster than light. So what?

At one time the fastest means of communication on earth was a sailing ship, and they were slow enough that the Battle of New Orleans happened after the Treaty that ended the War of 1812. To some observers the Battle happened before the treaty (at least so far as they knew) and to others the Treaty before the Battle. If the telegraph had existed the Battle probably wouldn’t have happened. Ah, well. It all makes my head ache.

You may find the Wall Street Journal editorial Salazar’s Priorities, A Case Study in green limits on job creation, worth your attention.