Random Thought Thread

000Robert said:
"Spooky actions at a distance".
Click to expand...
Quantum entanglement! Two particles that can be separated by any distance that behave as if they're touching and, perhaps in some dimension possibly are? A military application for this phenomenon is, supposedly, being developed by the Chinese to observe stealth aircraft. Put an entangled particle in the atmosphere somewhere and observe its pair and you'll know if something's moving through that environment. Quantum radar!
 
Nathan the Machinist said:
Quantum entanglement! Two particles that can be separated by any distance that behave as if they're touching and, perhaps in some dimension possibly are? A military application for this phenomenon is, supposedly, being developed by the Chinese to observe stealth aircraft. Put an entangled particle in the atmosphere somewhere and observe its pair and you'll know if something's moving through that environment. Quantum radar!
Click to expand...

There's no telling what the governments have that we haven't seen yet.
 
Nathan the Machinist said:
Some speculate that these UFOs are extraterrestrial life. Something that would be way scarier would be that they're not.
Click to expand...
I've heard people say they could be interdimensional beings .... I've also heard theories that the propulsion system could be creating a black hole in front of the craft

I'm not very smart, but it's interesting to think of lol
 
fonedork said:
This reminds me of the quote from Carl Sagan, "We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology." I think for the most part we don't even understand the technology we are "familiar" with. And I'm not talking about understanding how a capacitive touch screen works, I'm talking about understanding how electricity works...
Click to expand...

Nathan the Machinist said:
Dude that is no joke. The more I learn about electricity the more I realize I don't understand it.

Everybody knows that electricity is the flow of electrons in a conductor. And, eventually you learn there's not really a whole lot of flow, the electrons aren't exactly coming from the power plant they are in your own wire, an electron might move a few millimeters under some conditions, but, since we're using AC and they're just going back and forth, you probably have the same electrons in your wall that it started with. Okay. But then I read electricity is not really the flow of electrons, well it is, but the actual flow of power occurs outside of the wire. I guess this is why clamp on anp meters work? I don't know, the whole thing is baffling to me...
Click to expand...
You guys are talking about something I was just thinking about yesterday, how compartmentalized science is. I am a scientist, but I was considering what I could teach 15th century society if I suddenly arrived without books, notes or devices. Could I derive calculus from scratch? Electricity is a great example, could I generate and store it and make appliances? I think without a large diverse team, you wouldn't get very far.
 
Richard338 said:
You guys are talking about something I was just thinking about yesterday, how compartmentalized science is. I am a scientist, but I was considering what I could teach 15th century society if I suddenly arrived without books, notes or devices. Could I derive calculus from scratch? Electricity is a great example, could I generate and store it and make appliances? I think without a large diverse team, you wouldn't get very far.
Click to expand...

That's a great thought experiment! Science is so specialized nowadays. So is most stuff.
 
yoko said:
I've heard people say they could be interdimensional beings .... I've also heard theories that the propulsion system could be creating a black hole in front of the craft

I'm not very smart, but it's interesting to think of lol
Click to expand...


And there is a terrifying thought. People have been afraid we would create a tiny black hole with our large hadron collider and were afraid it would create a runaway black hole and consume the earth. But, at tiny scales the black hole evaporates very quickly through hawking radiation and is harmless. But a larger black hole, while not a risk of running away, would make a devastating weapon if it were to spontaneously evaporate and all that mass were to come out of a singularity explosively. If you think a nuclear bomb is scary, an evaporating black hole is way worse
 
Nathan the Machinist said:
Yeah. I think it's the one where Ringo got his start.
Click to expand...

What's a Ringo?

Nathan the Machinist said:
What if there was no Gs at all? What if they were totally stationary and it was the space around them moving. No issues with conservation of inertia if there isn't any momentum.

I'm just saying... What ever It is, thinking about it in the context of our own current technology (that can't even remotely do these things) might be missing something.
Click to expand...

Pretty sure that Scotty developed that idea for hyper-light speed transporter operation in "Star Trek" (2009).

Nathan the Machinist said:
A basic atomic bomb is fundamentally extremely simple. Just gather up enough of a particular isotope of uranium and put it into close proximity with more of the same. This process is usually assisted by the use of high explosives to compress a non-critical mass into criticality, but that's not the only way. The whole thing was designed and built in an era before computers and CNC. I'm not saying that nuclear science is simple, and the actual implementation of the Manhattan project was hugely complex, but the technology itself is relatively simple, it just wasn't understood until modern times.

My dad has some old encyclopedias that were printed before an understanding of nuclear energy that hypothesized that the sun was made out of an unusually high grade of coal. I remember reading that when I was a kid and it blew my mind that people used to think that. It's actually way simpler than that. Combining hydrogens under their own gravitational pressure is way simpler than forming and then combusting coal.


If Napoleon, who lives just a few hundred years ago, where to witness a modern multi-stage thermonuclear bomb go off, he would wonder how in the hell did they get so much high explosive into such a small space. That's got to be a lot of gunpowder to generate a 200 mile diameter mushroom cloud

Edit: he'd be like wow, that must be an unusually high grade of gunpowder!
Click to expand...

I think I can guess the approximate time when Nathan started drinking yesterday.

Nathan the Machinist said:
Dude that is no joke. The more I learn about electricity the more I realize I don't understand it.

Everybody knows that electricity is the flow of electrons in a conductor. And, eventually you learn there's not really a whole lot of flow, the electrons aren't exactly coming from the power plant they are in your own wire, an electron might move a few millimeters under some conditions, but, since we're using AC and they're just going back and forth, you probably have the same electrons in your wall that it started with. Okay. But then I read electricity is not really the flow of electrons, well it is, but the actual flow of power occurs outside of the wire. I guess this is why clamp on anp meters work? I don't know, the whole thing is baffling to me...
Click to expand...

There's a reason they call it "Electromagic." We had to take a year of it as undergrad EE majors at your brother's school, The North Avenue Trade School (aka GT).

Is it a wave? Is it particles? Given Maxwell's equations, can one really derive the universe? LOL. AFAICT, no one really knows.

To this day, I still have no idea what "the curl of E" really means, and I never could twist my fingers the right way to figure out which direction the wave (?) propagates given the directions of the E and H fields. Given all that, and the fact that I still managed to get As in Electromagnetics 101, 102 and 103, is, I think, conclusive proof that NO ONE really understands it. I always just thought of electricity as an energy field propagating at the speed of light. And I did pretty well at getting circuits to actually work thinking of it that way.
 
Last edited:
000Robert said:
That's a great thought experiment! Science is so specialized nowadays. So is most stuff.
Click to expand...

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clark

Also relevant to how alien-built objects might appear to us to move at speeds and with accelerations which are incomprehensible to us.
 
The Amazing Virginian said:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clark

Also relevant to how alien-built objects might appear to us to move at speeds and with accelerations which are incomprehensible to us.
Click to expand...
From a scientist's perspective, of course, that's true.

To the government, I think the Taylor corollary is apropos - "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a big gun."
 
Richard338 said:
I am a scientist, but I was considering what I could teach 15th century society if I suddenly arrived without books, notes or devices. Could I derive calculus from scratch? Electricity is a great example, could I generate and store it and make appliances? I think without a large diverse team, you wouldn't get very far.
Click to expand...

No, I don't think you'd get very far at all. If I'm remembering my history right, they were persecuting people for talking about science if it went against their views of the natural world. They forced Galileo (under threat of torture) to stop lying that the earth goes around the sun instead of the sun orbiting the earth. If you were to go to the 15th century and start trying to help people with science I'm pretty sure they'd burn you alive. People were like that then. People still are.
 
Thought provoking podcast narrated by Joe Rogan with Bob Lazar. Bob originally worked at Las Alamos but was placed on a special project to investigate the propulsion system on an alien craft that was being studied at S-4 near Area 51, Groom Lake. It's rather lengthly but he does offer insight into how an advanced anti gravity propulsion system functions and sheds light on attempts to reverse engineer the technology. Pretty mind blowing......draw your own conclusions.

 
prom52 said:
Thought provoking podcast narrated by Joe Rogan with Bob Lazar. Bob originally worked at Las Alamos but was placed on a special project to investigate the propulsion system on an alien craft that was being studied at S-4 near Area 51, Groom Lake. It's rather lengthly but he does offer insight into how an advanced anti gravity propulsion system functions and sheds light on attempts to reverse engineer the technology. Pretty mind blowing......draw your own conclusions.

Click to expand...
There's a recent documentary on Bob Lazar that's pretty interesting too
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top