Archive for November 7th, 2005
The Latest News From Science
Posted by Bob in Musings about Life on 11/07/2005
I was just talking about science (below) and the most relevant example I could find was Ben Franklin and electricity.
When they talk about the future of science or the future of politics people assume that the latest news is what is important.
After all, they say, today is a lot closer to tomorrow than history is. So the Latest Thing must be the best predictor of the Next Thing.
So we jazz up the news by pontificating on how the latest news event will affect the future. We completely forget whatever happened yesterday and our pontificating on how THAT would determine the future.
Which is silly, but it is the essence of news entertainment.
I have been dead right about every presidential election I have liived through since 1948 when I was seven years old.
I am comfortably retired on the income I made largely because I was right, and literally, on the money.
Others predict the next two decades by what just happened.
What I do is look at other periods in history that were decades long.
I strike the Latest Thing junkies as asurd. They strike me as absurd.
I’m usually right. They’re usually wrong.
That is also why I am absolutely uncanny in my predictions about elections. I made my living that way, so even a Practical Man must give it a little credit.
Actually, they didn’t give me credit. They gave me money.
The Speed of Light
Posted by Bob in Musings about Life on 11/07/2005
I don’t know how many young people have been right by the track when a train went by tooting its horn. When I was a kid and the train came by we would make a pulling motion over our heads and the engineer would reach up for the cord and toot his whistle for us, long and loud.
As the train moved toward us the whistle was very high. The train was moving, so the waves came to us faster and sounded higher. After it passed us the whistle had a lower pitch. It was kind of a “WHEE-ooooooh” sound.
People noticed this before Einstein was born, and it was called relativity.
Einstein developed the Theory of SPECIAL Relativity. Just as sound differs with the point of view of the person standing still, so things are different between things traveling at or near the speed of light and things standing still.
Einstein made some excellent observations on this basis, but like all theorists, he tried to explain EVERYTHING with it and he ran into what I call The Bob Problem:
It doesn’t WORK.
Einstein insisted that the speed of light was the fastest anything could travel. So it takes eight minutes for light to reach us from the sun.
So far, so good.
But then he said that the speed of light was the fastest ANY force could travel.
Huh-oh!
Actually, gravity moves MUCH faster than the speed of light. We have not been able to measure the speed of gravity, it may be infinite. But we do know that a gravity shift from the sun has an instant effect here on earth while light is coming toward us at light speed.
Einstein therefore inserted a cheat factor to take care of that inconvenience. He said gravity was a curve in space. I am not going into the details here, but it doesn’t really make any sense. He just needed it and put it in.
Like all theorists who outlive their time, Einstein died a scientific reactionary. The last part of his life was spent fighting quantum physics, which is fully accepted today because it WORKS.
But this whole business of light speed is something we will have to deal with. You have watched satellite broadcasts on cable television, and the people talking sound a little retarded. A question is asked and there is a noticable delay in the reply.
With short wave radio we didn’t have that problem. If you are in Baghdad and I am here, the radio waves travel the six thousand miles between us directly. At the speed of light it takes the signal one thirteenth of a second to get to Baghdad, so there is no noticable delay.
But the satellite is 43,000 miles up. So the signal has to go all the way up there and back, some 86,000 miles, which takes half a second at light speed. That means the question and answer gap is a full second. In the give and take we are used to on the news, that is a very noticable delay.
What else moves faster than light?
This is not a practical matter right now. I suppose that when it comes to the speed of light we are about where Ben Franklin was in the matter of electricity. He tried and tried to think of some way electricity might actually be practical, but finally stated flatly that he couldn’t even imagine one.
By the way, the terms current, positive and negative and battery were all invented personally by Franklin.
So what I am saying here is just fascinating to me the way electricity was to Franklin. But they may become practical. I understand that some uses have been found for electricity since Franklin’s time.
So what is faster than light? Gravity is, but using gravity for anything practical is as weird an idea as using electricity was to Franklin.
What about ESP? It take years to contact anyone in another star system at light speed. But if I were in ESP contact with someone there, would the contact be light-speed or instantaneous?
This sounds like science fiction, right?
Do you happen to know who invented the entire satellite communications system we use today, every day, cable TV and all?
It was invented in a science fiction story written in 1947 by Arthur C. Clark. At the time no one could imagine it could have the slightest use outside of science fiction.
So let’s let Ben Franklin have the last word on this.
He was doing one of his experiments and some Practical Man asked him, “But of what USE is this?”
Franklin replied, “Of what use is a newborn baby?”
Reply to Richard
Posted by Bob in Comment Responses on 11/07/2005
My religion is very, very simple. If I am religious at all, it is simply a reliance on Jesus.
What fascinates me personally is the HISTORY of the ideas that led to Christianity.
My study of history tells me that Semites invent nothing. So I do not look to the Old Testament (OT) for hte real origins of Christianity. This at least gives me some special utility. Tens of thousands of theologians make a living digging into the Old Testament to try to somehow dig everything Christ said out of it.
There should be room for one amateur to get his nose out of the OT and look around for the truth elsewhere in history.
That is what I am talking to Richard about here.
Richard,
Zoroastrianism was an Aryan religion. Historians kept trying to push Zoroaster forward to about 600BC so he would not conflict with the real dating of the OT. Because of all the earlier references that have since been found, there is no doubt now that Zoroaster was at least 1200 BC.
I am not a theologian, but I’m a pretty good historian. Roman Christians competed with the Mazdaists, who were from Persia where Zoroastrianism is from. The Mazdaists used bread and wine and talkng about how THEIR savior was born of a virgin while sherpherds watched by night. Their services consisted of bread and wine. Actually it predated them considerably.
Naturally the Christians thought all this was stolen from them, and was therefore just blasphemy. I think there is more explanation of Christianity in Mazdaism than in the totally unrelated Old Testament.
I think Elizabeth is right. The fatal flaw of Mazdaism was that it excluded women.
The Protestant Old Testament excludes everything after about 600BC, the date you refer to.
You may look at all this as anti-Christian, or you may look at it as I do, something that puts Jesus outside the realm of OT Judaism, a whole newness. To an Old Testament Christian, it is pure heresy.
When Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the light,” I do not think he meant, “The OT and me are the way, the truth and the light.”
The truth is not in the Old Testament, and Jesus was not just another Jewish prophet.
No, he did not tell the Jews that in so many words. But his hints were very broad indeed.
Richard, you said,
“True Christian morality was taught in the (Old Jewish) law.”
Among other things, true Christian morality does not torture babies.
Referring to the OT you mention THE captivity.
WHICH captivity?
The Babylonian captivity is the one everybody knows about, and fits in with the poor, poor little Jewish bit. But the Persian captivity was where Judaism went from a pagan religion to good versus evil and the concept of a savior, which it learned from Zoroastrianism.
The only non-Jew praised in the OT is Cyrus, the only non-Jew who, without further explanation in today’s version, “did the work of the Lord.”
In the NT, the Zoroastrian Magi accepted Christ before the Jews rejected him.
Trying to shoehorn Christ into the Old Testament is what theologians have spent eons doing, so that they worship The Holy Land in the name of savior whose kingdom is not of this earth.
These are my own observations, and, contrary to your comment about Deutoronomy, I have read the book. If that covenant were still relevant, Jesus would have stayed in the Temple.
Ther is a lot of code in Jesus’s words, as when he said render unto God what is God’s and unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. There is much there that the OT does not contain or predict.
Jesus was not speaking in a land of free speech.
Thus endeth all my theology.
Apology to Peter
Posted by Bob in Comment Responses on 11/07/2005
One of the task of commenters here is to tell Bob when he makes an ass of himself.
Which is a lot of work because it happens a lot.
One of the routine things that happens to an old man is that he tried so hard to attack the people who were a pain in the ass when he was young that he becomes a pain in the ass himself.
When I was coming up the bane of my life was the World War II Generation. You know, the crowd that has abandoned all pretences and now just calls itself The Greatest Generation.
They were really really sickening and frustrating to a young Bob Whitaker. Every time I would say we should fight integration, they would demand cowardice in the name of True Courage.
They said they couldn’t be moral cowards, you see, because they had been in World War II, so they were Heroes.
Whikle attacking them, I wanted to make it clear that I had been in a little danger myself during the Cold War.
And, as an old man will, I beat it into the ground. So Peter makes fun of my pewter medals in exactly the same way as I got sick of the Greatest Generation talking about theirs.
No war hero ever made the slightest difference in real history. Moral courage is ALL that counts.
Well, I have made my point and I have made an ass of myself.
That’s the story of my life.
4 Comments