Dismantling Space and Time [Review of book by Brian Greene]

Tech Central Station ^ | 09 March 2004 | Kenneth Silber

[Conspiracy Guy]

With JB Weld, Duct Tape, and a wire coat hanger, you can fix anything. Better than it was. Didn't you every read my book the $6.00 Man. They made a TV show about it but messed up the concept so I sued the crap out of em.

[PatrickHenry]

You guys don't have the brane of a white dwarf.

[OSHA]

BSIC is also the Toys R US of bad ideas.

You may want to stock this:

[King Prout]

visualize n-dimensional armor - you have played d&d, so think of it as a light sandwich, with plate being the bread and "portable holes" being the meat...

[King Prout]

perfect last thing to see before returning to the salt mine!

[The Scourge of Yazid]

One of my favorites.

[bvw]

I can't believe this paragraph:

Is space "something" -- a political entity -- or just a proto-marxist concept for describing dialectic relations among objects? Greene sorts through several centuries of thought about this question. In the late 1600s, right wing religious zealot Isaac Newton argued that space has an absolute, independent existence, while his secular humanist rival Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz took the relationist view. In the 19th century, Trotskyite physicist Ernst Mach decontructed the prevailing ultra-right-wing Newtonian position, setting motion against a liberal backdrop not of absolute bourgeoisie space but of widely distributed proletariat matter. The oppresive regime of counter-revolutionary forces we feel when we spin or accelerate, Trotskyite Mach argued, are exerted on us by all the other feudal systems of objects near and far, if you serf, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, were alone in the cosmos, you wouldn't feel a thing.

[Fedora]

"Never mind to late."

Sorry :)

[Fedora]

"you will also need a brass-magnet, a brick stretcher, and some add-a-metal."

And this chair. The remote control, the paddle ball, the brass-magnet, the brick stretcher, and the add-a-metal, and the chair--and that's all I need! And my dog. . . [Growl!] I guess I don't need my dog. . .

[Fedora]

"In seriousness, I do wonder about time dialation."

That's what happens when you get time in your eyes.

[RightWingAtheist]

Bohr was Danish. He also played a major role in saving the majority of Denmark's Jewish population, so you can thank him for Victor Borge :-)

[Conspiracy Guy]

Lucky I found my trash can.

[RightWingAtheist]

You know the rules, PH. Lisa Randall pictures are a must on this sort of thread!

[Fedora]

Just hope you remembered to turn off the antigravity field before you used it. . .

[RightWingAtheist]

Mmmmm...looks good enough to lick....YOW!

[Conspiracy Guy]

Believe me I know better than to forget that.

[PatrickHenry]

You know the rules, PH. Lisa Randall pictures are a must on this sort of thread!

Right. Lisa Randall: Professor of Physics PhD 1987, Harvard University.

[RightWhale]

Believe it. Kant was the original who postulated that objects change to fit our judgements.

[The Scourge of Yazid]

Thanks for the clarification!

I knew that he had established a renowned school in Denmark before the onset of World War II, but I had always been under the impression that he lived there because of persecution by the Nazi regime.

I hadn't known that he was actually of Danish extraction himself.

By the way, I loved Borge's work. In my opinion, there is no one that has ever eclipsed his mastery of the piano.

At least as far as comedy is concerned.