Next Stop: Andromeda
I just almost spent several hours attempting to understand the latest debate about black holes and whether Einstein was right or wrong about whether God plays dice with the Universe. Since Einstein actually co-wrote two papers, each taking one side of that debate, one begins to wonder when if and when we are going to stop funding this idiocy, the attempts to prove or disprove theories that have absolutely no practical application.
There’s one theory that black holes actually exist in pairs that there are connections between those black holes that create wormholes, the device that writers of science fiction (myself included) use to circumvent the uncomfortable fact that there is an effective speed limit of 186,000 miles per second beyond which nothing – not even light – can travel.
Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that wormholes do exist. How can we go through them, since going through them would require going THROUGH a black hole which dissolves all matter into its component sub-atomic particles? Before that, how could we ever get to that first black hole since, while there are black holes everywhere, there aren’t any in our neighborhood? It would take at least a few hundred if not a few thousand years to get to the first black hole…and we would have no idea where the other end of that wormhole might be, nor whether we would want to go there.
There are, however, supposedly sane scientists who are right now attempting to create miniature black right here on earth, which really doesn’t sound like a good idea. Let’s suppose they were able to create a stable black hole here on earth or somewhere nearby. (Mars would be a good idea. Especially if Elon Musk moves there.)
Now, if we were to do something this stupid to create black holes to create wormholes so that we could go out and explore the cosmos, here’s a third question: Who’s going to create the other black hole to complete the wormhole?
They have that one covered. There’s another theory – the holographic universe theory that posits there are two of everything so that when we create the first black hole the second black hole will automatically be created.
Eureka! We’ve found the key to the universe.
Spoiler Alert:
Not so fast. The same scientists who are doing all this theorizing have also theorized that, even though we are traveling from black hole to black hole through our newly created wormhole, we will not be able to go any faster than 186,000 miles per second because, apparently, the Einstein Speed Limit remains in force.
So, we are going to put out all this effort to create wormholes that won’t get us where we want to go if, indeed, there is anything out there worth going to.
Boy, am I glad I didn’t get sucked into that rabbit hole.
10/16/2022 @ 1:10 pm
There was a time when Democracy was believed to be a theory that had no practical application.
10/16/2022 @ 1:56 pm
Case in point. Democracy is excellent in theory and impractical in practice. We are now the world’s longest-enduring “democracy.” Right now, we are seeing the proof in a theory I advanced years ago: democracies all have a logical incongruity that makes them inherently unstable. Remember, the founders didn’t expect their democracy to last more than fifty years or so.
10/16/2022 @ 2:02 pm
The inherent fallacy is that the members of a democratic society have to agree upon the goals of the country while perhaps disagreeing about the methods of achieving those objectives. When there is a deep division over the goals of a society, democracies always fail.
10/16/2022 @ 2:11 pm
They didn’t expect ‘their’ democracy to last more than fifty years.
‘Our’ is quite different from the democracy the founders established…
The Constitution is elastic and malleable that’s why it has been able to survive and endure as a continuously evolving experimental idea and ideal.
10/16/2022 @ 4:14 pm
I beg to differ. Malleable refers to the tendency of a metal to deform under pressure. and that is exactly what is happening to our so-called democracy and you know this as well as I do. The Republicans have figured out how to stack the deck by taking control of a majority of the state legislatures and a majority of the Congressional Delegations to the House of Representatives, which is why every election that has been thrown into the house has given the win to the Republican candidate. The Republicans have stacked the deck using the elasticity of the constitution to stretch it out of shape.
10/16/2022 @ 8:11 pm
According to Webster, one of the definitions of ‘malleable’ is: “having the capacity for adaptive change.”
10/16/2022 @ 9:47 pm
but that’s not the first definition, which is “capable of being extended or shaped by beating with a hammer or by the pressure of rollers” nor even the second, which is “capable of being altered or controlled by outside forces or influences.”
10/17/2022 @ 12:24 am
The Constitution is worthless if those in government don’t support it, which is a real problem because unlike most countries overseas the US is not based on ethnicity. This country was created with the express purpose of giving us representation. If that is negated, the reason we’re a country is negated.
10/17/2022 @ 4:55 am
Alan;
I’m glad that you saw fit to look it up…
The simple fact is that you now have an idea of which idea or sense of the word applies to my use of the word in my comment…
I wish more people would do as you did….
The fact that the definition of the term as I have used it appears third on the list does not make it less accurate, or less valuable, or less valid as an appropriate description of the Constitution…
In fact, if you look at the process of etymology, you will find that in some cases, the most recent use of a word or term appears last in a listing of definitions which often tends to follow a chronological order or sequence in the usage of certain types of terminology, which can be useful in the pursuit of understanding what a person is saying and why he/she is saying it…
10/17/2022 @ 8:23 am
It doesn’t matter what the definition is. It matters what will happen. It matters if the Constitution survives from flexibility and springing back or if it gets deformed to the point where it doesn’t have any point except as a weapon and loses its legitimacy.
It in part depends on the midterms. It depends if Michael Moore is right. He predicted Trump’s victory in 2016 and he was pretty much alone in doing so. His article read now seems eerily prescient. He utterly nailed it. He was watching factors that others were ignoring.
And now he’s doing the same thing and thinks we’re probably looking at a Democratic sweep in the midterms. He thinks the kind of indicators we should be looking for is what happened in Kansas. No one saw that coming. A red state came out and overwhelmingly voted in favor of keeping abortions legal. Moderates wanted it and liberals were motivated to come out of the woodwork, which was not true in 2016 because liberals didn’t take Trump seriously as a result of the media not taking Trump seriously, a time when conservatives came out of the woodwork. But there are more Democrats. There are things polling misses.
10/19/2022 @ 6:30 am
“There are things polling misses…”. This is certainly true, Kosh, and it is one of our few hopes. We have never adjusted to digital phones carried by individuals as a polling source over landlines representing households. Interpretable data has become extremely fuzzy. One, maybe the only, other hope is that voting appears to be up so far in early voting. Georgia was quoted as being up something like 80%. In order to take advantage of our higher numbers, we have to turn out. So far, so good…but it is still early.
After that, if we maintain that discipline over several cycles…maybe a decade, we can make strides in constructing a democracy out of this middling, pseudo democracy that we have had since the mid-60s.
10/17/2022 @ 9:29 am
Ultimately, Ron, you have to concede that we are watching the government – the application of the Constitution in actual practice – being “adapted” to suit the Republican party, which is a cancerous growth that has invaded the body politic. In the 1950s, when the Republicans took up the cudgel of anti-communism, the Russians began infiltrating sleeper agents into the rank and file of the Republican party in an effort to undermine the Republicans’ anti-communist agenda. Today, what, four generations later, with communism itself having been kicked to the curb, the Republican party now has a disruptive agenda that is being dictated by Moscow.
One of the principal agents of disinformation was one Ayn Rand, whose vituperative anti-communist agenda concealed an elitist agenda that was in fact the actual philosophy of the Russian oligarchy. Her rugged individualism was posed against Russian collectivism.
Now that the Russian communists have left and gone away, for some strange reason, Republican anti-communism has never shifted its focus to re-aim itself at Chinese communism. That’s because Chinese communism is good for capitalism because it cheaply produces the goods that American capitalists mark up and sell to American consumers at highly inflated and therefore profitable prices. (The Russians produce virtually nothing the rest of the world wants except for carbon-based fuels which we are trying to wean ourselves off.)
No longer having Russian communism as a target to rail against, and not being able to rail against Chinese communism because the Republican capitalists are in bed with the Chinse, the Republicans had to turn their ire against another target and the only target left for them to focus upon was Democratic liberalism, hence the current situation.
10/17/2022 @ 3:32 pm
“…you have to concede that we are watching the government – the application of the Constitution in actual practice – being “adapted” to suit the Republican party, which is a cancerous growth that has invaded the body politic.”
Alan;
The Constitution isn’t being adapted. It’s being abused and misused.
10/17/2022 @ 4:16 pm
Kosh,
I hope you and Michael Moore are right…
At a time when America needs the advocacy of a free and independent press, the mainstream media wimps keep reciting the history of the midterm elections as though it were some kind of immutable inevitability.
10/18/2022 @ 9:29 am
“It doesn’t matter what the definition is.”
Kosh;
In the game of prime time, high stakes politics, words matter.
It therefore follows that definitions matter as well.
Choice of words and wording is as important as the actions, or nonactions, that ostensibly follow…
The root of hypocrisy is saying one thing and doing something that may be deemed to be the opposite of what was said thus contravening the word or words spoken….
What is mind boggling is that when Republicans are caught in their hypocritical lies, they don’t attempt to apologize or ‘walk it back’…
They double down on the the hypocrisy with the fervor of some kind of religious zealot…
Asymmetrical political discourse is difficult to to fathom and unpack…
Leaving Democrats the unenviable task of disambiguation of the one hypocritical lie while the liar moves on to the next lie…
The Republicans have become quite adroit at creating confusion and chaos in this manner…
It has become their trademark stock in trade…
10/21/2022 @ 12:04 pm
In general, yes. In this particular case involving “malleable,” no. it’s a pointless argument that doesn’t illuminate the flexibility or adaptability of the Constitution. If the term fosters disagreement, particularly when the disagreement is not ideological (like the alternate definitions of “racism” are), find a damned synonym and move on.
10/21/2022 @ 12:26 pm
I moved on. I am also bemused by the fact that this conversation somehow attached itself to a piece about lunatic fringe physics.
10/21/2022 @ 9:22 pm
Alan,
The attachment began with this:
RON:
“There was a time when Democracy was believed to be a theory that had no practical application.”
And came to fruition with this:
ALAN:
“Case in point. Democracy is excellent in theory and impractical in practice.”
My comment was a weak analogy and could have been addressed as such…
It was something of a false equivalency that resulted in the inadvertent hijacking of your “piece about lunatic fringe physics.”
My bad….
10/22/2022 @ 7:51 pm
C’mon DEMS! LETS GET THIS PARTY GOIN’ !
eveybody knows
11/22/2022 @ 8:54 pm
I am no expert in anything but fundamentally the USA “democracy” was founded on murdering the original inhabitants to steal their land in precisely the same pattern that Israel operates today. The founding fathers saw to it that only well off male land owners could vote and very gradually voting was granted to more of the populace since techniques were developed to deceive the public to promote control by the wealthy who saw to it that vast misinformation was sufficient to keep the wealthy in power. So called communism in Russia scared the hell out of the capitalists even though government by the workers there never was a reality and the myth of communism still is functional in justifying hatreds of Russia although “communism” has long vanished. Slavery was profitably functional in the USA long after it was discredited throughout the world and the mistreatment of black people still is a major force as a useful way to cause the population to be controlled by keeping them disunited. In no way is Russia any better than any other country where politics is immensely corrupt and world misbehavior is rapidly making the planet uninhabitable and very little realistically is being done to remedy that final rapidly approaching catastrophe.