Daily Archives: February 18, 2008

Nanofear

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Nanotechnology isn’t morally acceptable to a lot of people.

My immediate reaction, after playing “what the?” is that this is a reaction from ignorance. I mentioned before that many people get visions of nanobots taking over the world dancing in their heads when you mention the word “nanotechnology” so I suspect this is just a simple reaction. It’s unknown, so I am suspicious and am predisposed to rejecting the idea. Calling it immoral is just an easy way to reject it, requiring little thought.

Of course it’s ignorant, because most of the respondents probably have a computer, which has nanoscale components in it. And use other nanotech products, perhaps even on a daily basis.

I’m not sure how the pollster draws the religious conclusions, because the poll questions aren’t given and we only have his word that the people were well-informed adults. I don’t trust polls, especially ones that are opaque.

Gazing Into the Relative Past

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Came across a great post entitled “The Pre-history of Einstein’s Relativity” over at Skulls in the Stars.

It starts with Galileo and the notions he had to overturn, and progresses through Newton and through to about 1900 1880.

Regarding Newton and relativity,

The first excerpt observes that understandings of space, time and motion that arise from everyday experience lead one to certain ‘prejudices’, or misunderstandings, about the nature of these quantities. In particular, there is a confusion concerning the ideas of ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ motion. These seem to be the same misconceptions we discussed earlier in the context of Galileo’s work.

Which applies to a whole bunch of physics, especially quantum mechanics, in addition to relativity.

(via Science After Sunclipse)

Added 2-20: next installment, in-depth Newtonian Ralativity

Let Us Hope It Does Not Become Widely Known

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So tachyons enter the conversation at SFN once again, and I was looking over the wikipedia article

And it says, in part, “the same formulae that apply to regular slower-than-light particles (“bradyons”) also apply to tachyons”

Bradyons? That’s a new one on me.

Obviously there are two types, or genders. They show bunching behavior. The first generation has one particle while the second generation has three. One gender has the property of brown hair, while the other is gold. The last one in the second generation in curls. And then there’s the interaction-regulator, or “housekeeper” particle, known as “Alice.” (OK, I recently saw the scene in “Hot Shots” where they are using the Brady Bunch theme as a cadence, so I still had this in the buffer somewhere)

But really, I wanted to know if I was out of the loop or if something was funny here. I know there are plenty of terms in particle physics that aren’t particularly familiar, but tachyons are recognized in a much wider circle. So why hadn’t I heard of bradyons before? (At first I thought it was a typo and bad physics, and the author meant baryon. But that was not it.) When I Googled I got about 4,200 hits for bradyon (and, while I got more than 2,000,000 for tachyon, many of the bradyon hits I saw were discussing the validity of the term or not about physics. Tachyon probably isn’t anyone’s name — though I readily admit to underestimating the “creativity” of some folks in naming their children) but there’s probably a lot of sci-fi hits. A Google scholar search shows 141 hits, spread out in time with some dating back to 1974, but about 8,500 for tachyon.

So I suspect it’s someone who keeps interjecting the term, hoping it will catch on, and the wikipedia pages are just another attempt, trying to draw attention to it.

I suspect Jan.