Re: OT: Favourite cover version

Ariel <ariella@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell wrote:

Ariel <ariella@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[snip]

Like I said, an original... :)

Honestly, not all that original. I'm quite a calm and sane version of
an amalgamation of several different types of lunatic motorcyclists -
the big difference between me and them is that I'm alive with all my
limbs still attached.

There is a lot that is original about you, though.

Very little, I can assure you. Bear in mind that I started to breathe
science fiction at an early age, and I don't mean childish fantasies
such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, or the modern trashy
equivalents like Stargate SG1 and so on.

No, I mean H G Wells and Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke etc., and all
the US SF magazine anthologies - short stories by the score - I could
grab. When I was at high school, I passed by a library on the way home
every day. It had a well-stocked SF section, and I read most of it.

I'm also steeped in the history of science.

Trust me, very little of what goes on in my head is novel - almost all
of it's derived from something else. Perhaps put together in a form you
don't often find, but - well, it's like this: most people who are
famously creative are actually little more than thieves who have stolen
things that most people have never seen, and they'll admit it if you
corner them in many cases. For sure a creative person will come up with
new arrangements, but not as much in the way of novel stuff as you might
think.

Even the people who do create genuinely new things from whole cloth do
so by getting a leg up from past masters in the field, and often using
inspiration from outside. I've got a book behind me detailling the
story behind designing a particular bit of electronic circuitry - the
engineer concerned got the inspiration how to solve the electronic
design problem by watching monkeys at the zoo. The monkeys showed him
how to do it!

(that's an example of the prepared mind - he had everything in his head
needed to solve the problem, except for the final form of the solution,
and he'd been worrying at the problem for ages. One trip to the zoo,
sitting looking at the monkeys, and then Spang! He saw the monkeys
moving thusly, a bolt from the blue hit, it was all suddenly clear, and
off he went. I did something similar once - asked someone `How do I do
this?', with respect to a mechanical design problem. `Like a banana',
she replied. And that was indeed the right answer - just so long as the
banana is straight, pointy, and made of a small bit of steel. Prepared
mind, that's the ticket)

And the way you get
your points across is impressive,

<smile> It's a product of disability, I suspect.

Me with Asperger's syndrome, added to the slydexia of my dad and baby
bro added up to me learning multiple approaches and approaches that most
people never meet.

That's got a lot to do with it, I think. I do know that I'm often able
to explain things to people when everyone else has failed - although I
should point out that I've got to have live feedback to get it spot on
right.

I'm not surprised that you have been
in teaching.

You mentioned in another post you don't like life's complexity too
much

Not exactly. I can't cope with human interactions because I can't work
out how it all works.

because it means you can not understand how the multiverse works
and you've always wanted to do so.

But on that subject, it's not that I don't *like* the staggering
complexity of it all, it's just that I felt a bit let down when I found
out that there's no way in creation that I could even begin to
understand `creation' - that is, everything around us. It's just too
much and I feel faintly cheated, that's all.

On the other hand, it's hugely exciting too.

I'd presently settle for a basic
(very much so) understanding of the universe. I have access to Stephen
Hawkin's A Brief History Of Time and his The Universe In A Nutshell,
may I ask if you think either (or both) of those books is a suitable
place to start?

<grin> I never managed to finish `A brief history of time'. I've not
even looked at the other one.

In my defence, I was failing to cope with university at the time, as
well as failing to finish `The Satanic Verses' /and/ `Spycatcher'. A
mate had all three; interested in the one, insisting on buying the
banned book and the book that people wanted banned in the case of the
other two.

The Satanic Verses are - to my mind at least - unreadable crap. I put
down Spycatcher one day and never bothered to pick it up. Not a
gripping read, it has to be said.

One thing you've got to bear in mind is that there is no one view of the
universe. There are multiple views, and some of them flatly contradict
each other. The currently most popular views are certainly wrong
because the measurements don't match the predictions of the theories, in
some cases by such staggeringly vast orders of magnitude that any fule
can see that something is badly wrong somewhere. It's like you're
expecting to see something about the width of a human hair, but it turns
out to be more like the size of Pluto's orbit - or worse.

No-one understands the universe. The currently popular `big bang'
theory got its name from Fred Hoyle, who intended it as mockery of what
he viewed as a theory which was certainly nonsense.

Fred's dead, but his theories about the formation of the universe
haven't died and are still being developed.

Einstein's theories replaced those of Newton, yes? But one of the
proposals for dealing with the fact that the rotation of galaxies does
not match Einstein's predictions is called `MOdified Newtonian
Dynamics', or MOND.

Unfortunately, most physicists are very conservative, and they'd rather
explain away the excessively fast spin of galaxies (they ought to fall
apart at that speed) by gaily claiming that actually, 80% or so of the
mass of a galaxy is a novel exotic form of matter that only interacts
via gravity, has never been detected by science, and has never even been
theoretically predicted by anything other than needing some extra mass
to stop galaxies flying apart, assuming that Einstein's theories about
gravity are correct. Nope, they either need to change the theory or
state that invisible magic dust (really) unknown to science is
responsible for holding galaxies together.

Does that sound very scientific to you? Nor me. Nor to the Astronomer
Royal, Lord Rees, FRS, who agrees with me that it's a lot more likely
that the theory of gravity is wrong (not that there is a theory of
gravity as such any more, but you get the idea). Not that he knows he
agrees with me - I just heard his opinion one day on `In our time' (BBC
R4, Melvyn Bragg).

[snip]

Rowland.

--
Remove the animal for email address: rowland.mcdonnell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sorry - the spam got to me
http://www.mag-uk.org http://www.bmf.co.uk
UK biker? Join MAG and the BMF and stop the Eurocrats banning biking
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Nature of dark matter and dark energy
    ... > population of light elements in the universe. ... The force of gravity is *still* toward the center of the earth. ... In the case of a helium balloon, ... > force would be larger in and near galaxies than it would be between ...
    (sci.physics)
  • Re: REDSHIFT IN A STABLE UNIVERSE
    ... Galaxies which are apparently too big to explain by our current ... > the universe should appear very young at such distances. ... It could be that the dark matter is ... What force law do you propose for gravity, ...
    (sci.astro)
  • Re: space: gravitys effect on time and expansion?
    ... galaxies get further apart, there is less and less gravity in inner- ... rich areas of the universe because everything happens faster there? ... think about what happens if you put a black hole inside the barn and ...
    (sci.physics.relativity)
  • space: gravitys effect on time and expansion?
    ... Last night, as I was watching the new series "The Universe", I was ... galaxies get further apart, there is less and less gravity in inner- ... Including expansion? ... but the expansion itself is causing gravity to be less ...
    (sci.physics.relativity)
  • Re: OT: Guns in Space
    ... Galileo spacecraft comes to mind. ... Where in the Universe is an object unaffected by the gravity of other ... In the exact center? ... The center of the Known Universe is NYC. ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
Loading