RATM First Public Performance

**Mizango** · 2012-05-21 20:19

Woozie makes an excellent point. The answers you get from Brian Greene, Kaku, Smolin, Guth or C Johnson will be drastically different. Not dog piling on you, just pointing out how right on the money he is.

**Shiroikage** · 2012-05-21 21:03

i miss maxteem

**Day** · 2012-05-21 21:38

I hate you guys.

**MF Perm tha Fineass** · 2012-05-21 22:29

Are you kidding me this thread went from hoverboard amazing to finding Gray's Sports Almanac 1950-2000 amazing

**MF Perm tha Fineass** · 2012-05-21 22:31

and when is the last Miz laid it the fuck down like that I mean come on. My retinas are burning from the nuclear flash on that one.

**Greatguardian** · 2012-05-21 22:48

Sorry about the delay. I'm moving, so I've been popping off and on for a while now. I'll try to take things apart as there's generally a lot said in between my forays into this thread.

1) My presentation of hypothetical time travel in this thread was a mirror of a lecture a professor of mine gave to some of her freshman students. The various devices/methods I brought up are not of my own creation, and were presented to me as-is by people significantly more advanced in the field than I am. The bit about colliding black holes was actually originally mentioned by NDT during one of his lectures and then expanded upon in a class. I suppose "Easy" was the wrong word to use. "Easy, if you get a bunch of other crap worked out" was the implication, but it seems to have been missed. The if is extremely large, and I apologize if I wasn't clear enough on that part. If colliding black holes and towing wormholes are absolute hogwash, that would be sincere news to me and I'd be all ears if someone wanted to talk about why that sort of thing wouldn't work. If my professor was talking out of their ass, well I'm open to that possibility - especially considering the crowd they were tailoring their lectures towards.

2) If my physics seems sloppy/rusty (primarily in other threads), it's because it is. I'm a 22 year old grad student with a STEM undergrad major and a physics minor. The last math or physics class I actually took was almost 7 years ago (not counting discrete structures because the only new math involved in that was modular arithmetic). I walked into college with enough math and science credits to fill out a minor and far more than a CS major would ever require. I sat in on a lot of physics/astron classes when I had the time, but suffice to say I haven't actually had to put pen to paper and crank out some ODEs in a long time. So yes, I probably will make a lot of simple mistakes or just plain screw something up and I'm totally fine admitting that.

3) I don't recall ever seeing a post from you (Miz) in Howie's thread. If you posted there, I probably missed it. The only thing I recall mentioning at all in that thread was Newton's universal law of gravity and newton's second law. Howie asked if the Earth would fall into the sun if the Earth got heavier. The answer is no, because the magnitude of the acceleration of an orbiting body is only dependent on the mass of the central body (yes, acceleration is a vector. yes, increasing earth's mass would affect the orbit of the sun around its center of gravity, thereby altering the orbit of the earth to a very small degree as it would be orbiting a slightly different point. Was all of this entirely relevant in the context of asteroid mining? I didn't feel that it was tbh). If the Earth got too heavy, I suppose the Sun might fall into the Earth, but that's not really the same thing. Is there something wrong with that analysis of the situation?

4) Understand that from my perspective, I have professors that I've known for years with Ph.Ds in the field talking and lecturing about these sorts of hypothetical constructs with a decent amount of confidence. All of a sudden, grad students and post-grads from the interwebs are having a conniption fit because they're not familiar with any sort of work concerning the viability of these constructs. I'm clearly not qualified to argue the point either way.

**Rhyis.** · 2012-05-21 23:19

I remember Max.

**Greatguardian** · 2012-05-21 23:40

Originally Posted by Mizango

Woozie makes an excellent point. The answers you get from Brian Greene, Kaku, Smolin, Guth or C Johnson will be drastically different. Not dog piling on you, just pointing out how right on the money he is.

This seems to be the crux of the problem, really. The next time I email my professor I'll ask about what studies in particular they were referencing in lecture to get a better handle on where all this came from. Though I'll have a hard time tracking down NDT to ask him about where he saw that work done on colliding black holes. I'm not even sure how long ago that lecture was at this point.

But yo, in all seriousness, if you think I'm doing some bad science or getting some shit wrong, all you have to do is say something. My foundation sure as shit ain't as advanced as some of y'alls, but I find this sort of stuff positively fascinating and I enjoy talking about it. I just don't particularly take well to being blindsided by the entire BG Science club. All it does is give Perm an excuse to ride my nuts.

**Woozie** · 2012-05-21 23:47

I didn't know about the thread where you did have to discuss Newton's Law for gravity, so my apologies for misinterpreting what you meant when you said "you don't need a PhD to explain Newton's theory of gravity". I thought you were somehow trying to justify your claims about time travel using this argument.

I figured you probably heard some lectures on the subject which is why I gave examples of people who give lectures on said subjects and tried to explain how not everything they say is not meant to be taken as scientific truth. Brian Greene taught at your school you would have heard plenty of lectures from one of the top scientists in the world about how all particles are made of string and about how the universe has 11 dimensions. He would have spoken with much confidence, and he's a guy with much more knowledge and experience in this area than anyone here has. Yet, it would still be incorrect to claim that these ideas are supported by current science. These are just theoretical notions that some extremely brilliant people happen to believe are true even without scientific justification. There are plenty of people out there just as brilliant as he is who would disagree. And it's no surprise that there's such disagreement because these are theories that answer questions that science is not able to actually answer yet. This same thing applies to backwards time travel and wormholes. There are plenty of scientists out there just as brilliant as your professors with entirely different views on wormholes and science is not yet able to tell which (if either of them) are correct.

It is an undeniable fact that most (if not all) of the brilliant theoretical physicists are actually wrong about what they are saying. This can be said with 100% confidence because there are MANY contradictory theories out there and either they are all wrong or only one of them is correct. There is no outcome that does not lead to most (of not all) theoretical physicists being wrong. That's why it's VERY important to distinguish between what scientist say and what science says, especially when it comes to theoretical physics beyond the Standard Model (of particle physics or cosmology).

**Woozie** · 2012-05-21 23:58

Originally Posted by Greatguardian

Though I'll have a hard time tracking down NDT to ask him about where he saw that work done on colliding black holes. I'm not even sure how long ago that lecture was at this point.

Coincidentally, if you want to find the lecture NDT did on wormholes, Miz probably the best person to ask. He knows NDT and is much more familiar with his work and lectures than pretty much anyone else here.

**Odon** · 2012-05-22 00:48

Originally Posted by Brill Weave

I like how when debating intelligence words like yo and dog are used.

yo dog u dum n shit k?

**Woozie** · 2012-05-22 00:51

Oh, another thing I wanted to point out is that sometimes the people giving the lectures don't necessarily believe what they are saying. As I pointed out earlier, at some point Brian Green decided that he doesn't believe in String Theory but he still studies and gives lectures on it. This is especially true with public figures like NDT who is expected to give information on a broad range of topics instead if his specific area of study. Stephen Hawking often presents contradictory ideas or theories in his own public lectures/books, so obviously he doesn't believe everything he says/writes. Since the class you took clearly wasn't a class meant for graduate students writing a dissertation on wormholes, it probably falls in the category of "survey of theoretical physics for non theoretical physicists". Maybe your professor actually believes it, or maybe he thought it was interesting and popular enough of an idea to present in his lecture. You can probably figure out which is the case for your professor, but as for NDT, he's probably explained a lot of ideas to the public that he doesn't necessarily believe in himself.

I once gave a presentation to undergraduate students about the Axiom of Choice and had to explain a lot of the consequences of its negation even though a lot of the work I do implicitly assumes the axiom of choice is true. For example, I've implicitly appealed to the axiom of choice in lots of homework assignments I've done and I'm pretty sure my thesis implicitly assumes it too. The negation of the axiom of choice is interesting enough to talk about when I'm presenting/discussing anything related to analysis or set theory even though it goes against my own belief.

Well, I guess the situation is more complicated with math because my actual belief is that the truth of math statements is relative to the system and hence, since the axiom of choice is independent if set theory, it's "truth" is whatever you want it to be (according to my own beliefs). But I strongly prefer the axiom of choice because it's just way too useful and too many important results depend on it. This is a lot different than science, where we determine right and wrong based on experiment.

I don't know if you're familiar with the axiom of choice or not but I think my example serves its purpose regardless.

**Brill Weave** · 2012-05-22 06:47

yo dog u dum n shit k?

You're so hurtful.

**Greatguardian** · 2012-05-22 06:49

I feel like the past 6 pages could've been avoided entirely if I prefaced that post with "Some scientists say". I'm sure I've freaked out over less, though. Serves me right.

**Brill Weave** · 2012-05-22 06:50

Silence would have worked too. Just sayin....

**shepardG** · 2012-05-22 07:21

RAGE AGAINST THE SCIENCE!

**Conrad** · 2012-05-22 08:08

hey guys, I was a humanities/social science major
guys

hey, guys

**Day** · 2012-05-22 08:09

Originally Posted by shepardG

RAGE AGAINST THE SCIENCE!

Turn on the time machine, naw fuck it, turn it off.

**Brill Weave** · 2012-05-22 08:26

Go on.....

**Day** · 2012-05-22 08:41

For contrast... RATM2010 crowd losing their shit.

Thread: RATM First Public Performance

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