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News Briefs 09-09-08

By Jameskeon

Smashing into pieces seems to be the metaphor of the day, and for science especially.

  • Looking back at the end of science.
  • Water bears survive vacuum of space.
  • Why the fascination with the end of the world.
  • More mystery space machines.
  • Something in the water.
  • 30 ton metal sphere spins for magnetic fields.
  • Marijuana to battle superbugs?
  • The tail of a galaxy.
  • GM crops are the only way to feed the world.
  • The AIDS puzzle. Or fraud.
  • The top 10 amazing physics videos.

Quote of the Day:

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

H.L. Mencken

Jameske

6 Comments

  1. Top 10 physics videos
    Fantastic! Took me back to my school days in the 1960’s when I was lucky enough to have a physics teacher who believed in unusual but informative experimentation. These days, most of his experiments would be banned from a school as being unsafe and dangerous. Quite a few were but did we have fun learning!

    I knew about helium altering one’s voice if inhaled but had not seen/heard the effect of Sulfur Hexafluoride – would love to try it but goodness only knows what it could do to your lungs.

    Nostra

  2. End of science?
    It’s interesting how in his argument to defend his thesis that the age of great scientific discoveries is already behind us, that Mr. Horgan totally overlooks queer phenomena like UFOs or NDEs, that somehow resist to die or grow out of fashion.

    —–
    It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
    It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

    Red Pill Junkie

    1. end of science
      Horgan seems to be under the impression that we are closed to reaching complete knowledge of fundamental physics, which is not the case. I give you dark matter and dark energy.

      He also seems to think that once the fundamental physics are known, everything else can more of less easily understood from that. This is utter nonsense. The complexity of interactions is huge. There is a huge gap in out understanding between interactions on a small scale of a few particles, and interactions on a very large statistical scale. We can do each end, but in the middle ground we are hopelessly lost. Even worse, nobody has any idea how to attack this problem.

      Some people use computer simulations to deal with these middle-ground problems. Things like aerodynamics, fluid flow, weather forecasting, climate models, carbon chemistry, and so on. But they are just applying the small scale methods many many times. They really have no clue how to do middle ground stuff, other than by brute force.

      Then there are sciences of the artificial, somewhat separate from natural sciences. This is not “just” applied science. We are just starting to make fundamentally new things. In time we will make artificial minds that are very different from natural minds.

      And of course now we are at what he calls “brain science”. A better term is “cognitive science”. Again we are at the beginning of this. There is reason to believe that cognitive science combined with artificial minds can give us insights to questions we haven’t even asked yet.

      Horgan’s piece seems like the mythical quote from the US Patent office that everything has been invented.

      —-
      It is not how fast you go
      it is when you get there.

      1. What I think his argument is
        I think his main argument is that there is a limit to what man can ultimately know. I partly agree with him in that point; but I think He is being too closed-minded. There are myriads of natural phenomena that seem trivial, but could open a whole Pandora’s box of questions to be answered by Science. Such as Earth lights or ball lightning.

        Where a man sees minor curiosities, another may see something that could possess him to devote his life into solving it.

        Another argument that bothered me was this confidence that there are no new places or creatures to be discovered in this planet of ours. He mentions Atlantis or a dinosaur living in some remote jungle. I know a few Cryptozoologists and Alternative Historians who might disagree with him 🙂

        —–
        It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
        It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

        Red Pill Junkie

        1. limits of knowledge
          Yes there probably are limits to what we can know, in the sense of what we can understand. But there is no reason to think that we are anywhere close to those.

          We can develop tools to deal with things we don’t understand. We do this all the time. The most common such tools is called “mathematics”. We successfully deal with quantities in the many millions, billions and trillions, when nobody can understand that. And that is just using addition and multiplication.

          Similarly, nobody intuitively understands the finer points of relativistic physics. People just manipulate complicated mathematics.

          So just that there are limits to what we can understand does not mean that these limitations prevent us to deal with problems beyond those limits.

          In a sense these mental limits are like our physical limits. Nobody can jump 3 meters high, but with the aid of a flexible stick some people go higher than 5 meters. And then there are rockets …

          As for unknown creatures – we have not seen much of the deep sea. In the shallow oceans, the military submarines listen to all kinds of creatures, they know what most of them are. Only most of them.

          —-
          It is not how fast you go
          it is when you get there.

  3. Marijuana to combat superbugs
    I dunno… somehow the idea of lethal superbugs presenting a case of munchies scares the living s**t out of me! 😛

    —–
    It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
    It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

    Red Pill Junkie

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