# Stuff and Things > HISTORY, veterans & science >  Why we do science

## UKSmartypants

There's  an element on this board, and the world, who question why we do exotic science . Why do we spend billions on things like the James Webb Telescope, or the Large Hadron Collider. What benefit do we get out of them?


In short, we dont know  yet. No one was thinking of powered space flight in the 17th century when Isaac Newton unified heavenly and earthly motions with his laws of motion and gravity. When James Clerk Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism in the 1860s, televisions, lasers or smartphones werent on anyones radar (and nor was radar).


But immediate technological or material gain isnt the point. To formulate his physics, Newton had to invent calculus, the mathematics that today underlies scientific models of everything from climate change to pandemic spread. In devising his laws for electromagnetism, Maxwell proved that light always travels at constant speed  paving the way for Albert Einsteins theories of relativity that, besides explaining gravity and the wider cosmos, enabled innovations such as GPS.

Science begets science and, along the way, technology of universal benefit drops out. Thats why we do exotic science.

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Conservative Libertarian (02-12-2022),nonsqtr (02-12-2022),Northern Rivers (02-14-2022),Oceander (02-13-2022),old dog (02-12-2022),Physics Hunter (02-13-2022),Quark (02-12-2022)

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## old dog

Many unforeseen technological advantages that we take for granted today are a result of the Gemini and Apollo projects.

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BooBoo (02-12-2022),Conservative Libertarian (02-12-2022),Sunsettommy (02-14-2022)

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## Conservative Libertarian

Yet...there is now a move toward non-scientific science. Need I mention our recent experience with how "following the science" as it applies to COVID-19 is something new and exclusive as compared to following the science with respect to any other virus.

The field of psychobabble is riddled with non-scientific science. 

I just retired from a career that was heavily dominated by the science related to electron beams and their interaction with RF signals (i.e. Maxwell's theories applied to the real world). Who would have thought that you could combine metallurgy, magnetism, and high voltage in a vacuum envelope to create devices that generate and/or amplify very high power RF signals at very high frequencies. Well...that's how the exotic science of prior generations were applied. It gave us Radio, TV, and RADAR.

If we were to follow or push the current  non-scientific science loved by our governments, not only would we have been discredited as idiots, people would be put into danger or even die. Kind of like our current COVID-19 science and maybe GlowBull Warming. We have to be careful of which exotic science that we decide to pursue, how we interpret it, and how we apply it.

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BooBoo (02-12-2022),Lone Gunman (02-12-2022),old dog (02-14-2022)

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## Quark

Don't forget that Leibniz also invented calculus at the same time as Newton and there is question to this day of who had the better calculus.

As to science, science is okay as long as it doesn't become a religion as the medical sciences seem to have become. Also just because science can do something doesn't mean science should like gain-of-function research.

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BooBoo (02-12-2022)

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## nonsqtr

> Don't forget that Leibniz also invented calculus at the same time as Newton and there is question to this day of who had the better calculus.


It was what was happening at the time. If it wouldn't have been Newton or Leibniz, it would have been someone else.




> As to science, science is okay as long as it doesn't become a religion as the medical sciences seem to have become. Also just because science can do something doesn't mean science should like gain-of-function research.


Science has no opinion. It's like a gun, it has no opinion of it's own, it depends on the opinion of the person pulling the trigger. It can be used to save a life, or take a life

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BooBoo (02-12-2022),Conservative Libertarian (02-13-2022)

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## Authentic

If the universe is the answer, what is the question?

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## Authentic

Is science becoming unscientific?

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## UKSmartypants

> It was what was happening at the time. If it wouldn't have been Newton or Leibniz, it would have been someone else.


And this is the thing, its part of the "no such thing as impossible" stuff i loathe. Many scientific  discoveries are inevitable. Its just a matter of time.

Take television. No one directly invented television, it was a consequence of a series of small inventions. It was ripe, by about 1920, for somone to come along and put it all together. If John Logie Baird in the UK, or Thomas edison in the USA, or James Morse or Charles Francis Jenkins or  Russian physicist Boris Rosing and Scottish engineer Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton hadnt  contributed what they had, then knowledge and education were such SOMEONE would have invented those bits anyway at some point.


There was an interesting article in one of the science magazines years ago in which the writer presented an interesting case for the proposition that had not the Roman Empire collapsed when it did, Roman technology was well on the way to inventing the steam engine.   Now imagine if that had happened, and what was Thomas Newcomens Atmospheric engine had been invented not in 1712 but 1500 years earlier in 212 . We would have been 1500 years ahead technology wise. We may well have got to the Moon not in 1969 but 600 AD. Can you imagine where we would be now - it would be like 3500 AD now.


This is why nothing is impossible. Science begats science, all things, all technologies, all sciences  will come to pass eventually.

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Conservative Libertarian (02-13-2022)

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## Physics Hunter

> There's  an element on this board, and the world, who question why we do exotic science . Why do we spend billions on things like the James Webb Telescope, or the Large Hadron Collider. What benefit do we get out of them?
> 
> 
> In short, we don’t know – yet. No one was thinking of powered space flight in the 17th century when Isaac Newton unified heavenly and earthly motions with his laws of motion and gravity. When James Clerk Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism in the 1860s, televisions, lasers or smartphones weren’t on anyone’s radar (and nor was radar).
> 
> 
> But immediate technological or material gain isn’t the point. To formulate his physics, Newton had to invent calculus, the mathematics that today underlies scientific models of everything from climate change to pandemic spread. In devising his laws for electromagnetism, Maxwell proved that light always travels at constant speed – paving the way for Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity that, besides explaining gravity and the wider cosmos, enabled innovations such as GPS.
> 
> Science begets science and, along the way, technology of universal benefit drops out. Thats why we do exotic science.



I was with ya until GPS, how does relativity enable GPS?   :Thinking: 

I know a whole lot more than I want to about GPS, and I don't see an obvious connection.

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Conservative Libertarian (02-13-2022)

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## Physics Hunter

> Is science becoming unscientific?



Yes.  It's about money, not science.

Think AGW, Epidemiology, and all the soft science stuff that is doing everything from finding the gay gene to showing why socalled disinformation needs to be banned from social media...
You would not believe the liberal shit that gets funding.

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Authentic (02-13-2022),Conservative Libertarian (02-13-2022),Sunsettommy (02-14-2022)

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## UKSmartypants

> I was with ya until GPS, how does relativity enable GPS?  
> 
> I know a whole lot more than I want to about GPS, and I don't see an obvious connection.



because he proved electromagnetic radiation travels at a predictable speed. GPS works by listening to radio signals from satellites all armed with synchronised atomic clocks and because the receiver knows how fast the waves travel, it can work out its position relative to all the satellites.  if you didnt know about Maxwells Laws, even if you coudl make a satellite and a radio transmitter, it would still be useless without the knowledge the signals travel at  a predictable speed. maxwells laws also enabled the invention of electronics in general.Use you imagination a bit.





You're just a troublemaker, we're watching you, you know..... :Police:

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## nonsqtr

> Yes.  It's about money, not science.
> 
> Think AGW, Epidemiology, and all the soft science stuff that is doing everything from finding the gay gene to showing why socalled disinformation needs to be banned from social media...
> You would not believe the liberal shit that gets funding.


Science has ALWAYS been about money.

Artists are lucky, they have patrons of the arts. Scientists have investors. lol

Mathematicians have neither, but they can do very well as mercenaries, selling their services to physicists and economists.  (That's what I did, I knew how to solve a particular equation on a computer and that was good for 20 years of the big bucks - and meanwhile I learned more math cause it was making me good money).

I suggest, if you think epidemiology is soft science, maybe that's why it's soft science. Cause people like you believe it is.

Humans don't like uncertainty, but that's because we don't know about it. If we became more familiar with it, it wouldn't bother us so much. Economists know all about making decisions with partial information. Physicists, not so much

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## nonsqtr

> because he proved electromagnetic radiation travels at a predictable speed. GPS works by listening to radio signals from satellites all armed with synchronised atomic clocks and because the receiver knows how fast the waves travel, it can work out its position relative to all the satellites.  if you didnt know about Maxwells Laws, even if you coudl make a satellite and a radio transmitter, it would still be useless without the knowledge the signals travel at  a predictable speed. maxwells laws also enabled the invention of electronics in general.Use you imagination a bit.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> You're just a troublemaker, we're watching you, you know.....


Yeah. Us musicians know all about that stuff. (Because we have to make music videos too).

We have a magic device called a Tentacle that syncs everything up with time code. All the audio, all the cameras... in most movies they use SMPTE standard which is 30 fps, but us audio guys use word clock at 192 khz. It works real good until things start getting too far away. Then you need either a repeater or one of those fancy Meyer units where you can introduce delays. If you're running a tube mic and your converter's across the room the chances are the Tentacle won't lock anymore (by itself).

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Conservative Libertarian (02-13-2022)

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## UKSmartypants

> Yeah. Us musicians know all about that stuff. (Because we have to make music videos too).
> 
> We have a magic device called a Tentacle that syncs everything up with time code. All the audio, all the cameras... in most movies they use SMPTE standard which is 30 fps, but us audio guys use word clock at 192 khz. It works real good until things start getting too far away. Then you need either a repeater or one of those fancy Meyer units where you can introduce delays. If you're running a tube mic and your converter's across the room the chances are the Tentacle won't lock anymore (by itself).



I used to play in a Jazz Trio.

we didnt do music videos, we just drank beer.

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Conservative Libertarian (02-13-2022)

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## Oceander

> because he proved electromagnetic radiation travels at a predictable speed. GPS works by listening to radio signals from satellites all armed with synchronised atomic clocks and because the receiver knows how fast the waves travel, it can work out its position relative to all the satellites.  if you didnt know about Maxwells Laws, even if you coudl make a satellite and a radio transmitter, it would still be useless without the knowledge the signals travel at  a predictable speed. maxwells laws also enabled the invention of electronics in general.Use you imagination a bit.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> You're just a troublemaker, we're watching you, you know.....


Not only that, but the GPS computations have to be adjusted to take relativistic effects into account.  If one proceeded on the basis that relativity wasn't real, one's GPS signals would be off - or rather, the position one determined for one's self based on those GPS signals would be off.

Source:  Einstein's Relativity and Everyday Life | PhysicsCentral.

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## Physics Hunter

> because he proved electromagnetic radiation travels at a predictable speed. GPS works by listening to radio signals from satellites all armed with synchronised atomic clocks and because the receiver knows how fast the waves travel, it can work out its position relative to all the satellites.  if you didnt know about Maxwells Laws, even if you coudl make a satellite and a radio transmitter, it would still be useless without the knowledge the signals travel at  a predictable speed. maxwells laws also enabled the invention of electronics in general.Use you imagination a bit.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> You're just a troublemaker, we're watching you, you know.....


I told you, that I know GPS down to the feasibility study...

Nah, we knew about the reliability of speed of electromagnetic radio transmissions via early radio use, and even WWII RADAR developments.  I have never heard that they were enabled or informed by relativity info.

We could easily have done that without relativity, just like we have microwaves ovens partially because of WWII naval RADAR and dead birds...

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## Physics Hunter

> Science has ALWAYS been about money.
> 
> Artists are lucky, they have patrons of the arts. Scientists have investors. lol
> 
> Mathematicians have neither, but they can do very well as mercenaries, selling their services to physicists and economists.  (That's what I did, I knew how to solve a particular equation on a computer and that was good for 20 years of the big bucks - and meanwhile I learned more math cause it was making me good money).
> 
> I suggest, if you think epidemiology is soft science, maybe that's why it's soft science. Cause people like you believe it is.
> 
> Humans don't like uncertainty, but that's because we don't know about it. If we became more familiar with it, it wouldn't bother us so much. Economists know all about making decisions with partial information. Physicists, not so much



Epidemiologists now wish they had as good of a reputation as weather forecasters.  They don't.

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## Physics Hunter

> Not only that, but the GPS computations have to be adjusted to take relativistic effects into account.  If one proceeded on the basis that relativity wasn't real, one's GPS signals would be off - or rather, the position one determined for one's self based on those GPS signals would be off.
> 
> Source:  Einstein's Relativity and Everyday Life | PhysicsCentral.


Now that's interesting, I'll have to take a look.

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## Authentic

> I told you, that I know GPS down to the feasibility study...
> 
> Nah, we knew about the reliability of speed of electromagnetic radio transmissions via early radio use, and even WWII RADAR developments.  I have never heard that they were enabled or informed by relativity info.
> 
> We could easily have done that without relativity, just like we have microwaves ovens partially because of WWII naval RADAR and dead birds...


I read it as a thread linking Maxwell, Einstein and GPS - with the key point being that Maxwell showed that EMF waves travel at a predictable speed.

I am not as knowledgeble as either you or UKSp on relativity, and I have never solved one of Maxwell's equations but I do believe that I correctly interpreted the crux of what UKSp was getting at - electromagnetic waves, not relativity.

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## Authentic

> Not only that, but the GPS computations have to be adjusted to take relativistic effects into account.  If one proceeded on the basis that relativity wasn't real, one's GPS signals would be off - or rather, the position one determined for one's self based on those GPS signals would be off.
> 
> Source:  Einstein's Relativity and Everyday Life | PhysicsCentral.


And maybe I missed something. Maybe relativity does matter to GPS.

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## Physics Hunter

> And maybe I missed something. Maybe relativity does matter to GPS.


The thing that Physics teaches one is if you can't follow the assumptions in the derivation, the argument probably isn't true.

I always look at things from first principles.  We did not have to know about the theory of relativity to empiracally measure the speed of electronic signals from geosynchronus orbit, we could simply measure it.

This claim is a high-bar to prove, but I am willing to see the proof.

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Authentic (02-14-2022)

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## nonsqtr

This is a great exercise for you guys.

You know EM is c, so you can calculate the difference in arrival time, in Beijing and New York, for a satellite hovering over NY.

And, we also know that light will be bent by a gravitational field, and in this case the Earth's field is 9.8 m/s^2, so we can calculate how much bending to expect.

Then we have to use parallel transport to figure out the signal strengths, but let's assume for simplicity that the receiver will take care of that for us and all we need are the arrival times.

Well, easy peasy. You can calculate the delta-t from the angular difference in where the waves land, bent and unbent.

And, if I'm reading you correctly, the question you're really asking is "is the difference significant".

I'll tell you, or you probably already knew, the height of the geosynchronous GPS orbit above the center of mass is 10,900 nautical miles, or 20.2 km. Ballpark at 2 or 3 x 10^8 the time is 0.1 msec "or so" to the center of mass, unmolested. And the radius of the earth is about 4000 miles, give or take (6500 km ballpark).

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Authentic (02-14-2022)

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## nonsqtr

Oh, I forgot to mention, GPS is about 1500 mHz (ballpark, there's also an L2 around 1200).

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## Physics Hunter

> Science has ALWAYS been about money.
> 
> Artists are lucky, they have patrons of the arts. Scientists have investors. lol
> 
> Mathematicians have neither, but they can do very well as mercenaries, selling their services to physicists and economists.  (That's what I did, I knew how to solve a particular equation on a computer and that was good for 20 years of the big bucks - and meanwhile I learned more math cause it was making me good money).
> 
> I suggest, if you think epidemiology is soft science, maybe that's why it's soft science. Cause people like you believe it is.
> 
> Humans don't like uncertainty, but that's because we don't know about it. If we became more familiar with it, it wouldn't bother us so much. Economists know all about making decisions with partial information. Physicists, not so much



No, scientists have grants, and more recently vulture capitalists.
Most (especially soft) scientists have very little to offer to those interested in profitability, so they look to the liberal run boards of dead or liberal philanthropists including DoD.

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## nonsqtr

> No, scientists have grants, and more recently vulture capitalists.
> Most (especially soft) scientists have very little to offer to those interested in profitability, so they look to the liberal run boards of dead or liberal philanthropists including DoD.


Wow. Well, I was a computer programmer and somehow Wall Street found out about me, and two weeks later I was at triple the salary and I had the key to the executive bathroom on the 29th floor of 85 Broad.

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## Physics Hunter

> This is a great exercise for you guys.
> 
> You know EM is c, so you can calculate the difference in arrival time, in Beijing and New York, for a satellite hovering over NY.
> 
> And, we also know that light will be bent by a gravitational field, and in this case the Earth's field is 9.8 m/s^2, so we can calculate how much bending to expect.
> 
> Then we have to use parallel transport to figure out the signal strengths, but let's assume for simplicity that the receiver will take care of that for us and all we need are the arrival times.
> 
> Well, easy peasy. You can calculate the delta-t from the angular difference in where the waves land, bent and unbent.
> ...


Yes.  In the applications that I worked with this was not an issue.
The gravity issue is also relative to the angle of incidence which adds complexity.

It is all about how much accuracy that one needs to fly a missile or drive to Pizza Hut.

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## nonsqtr

> Yes.  In the applications that I worked with this was not an issue.
> The gravity issue is also relative to the angle of incidence which adds complexity.
> 
> It is all about how much accuracy that one needs to fly a missile or drive to Pizza Hut.


I'm sure you know about this, didn't they recently activate a higher resolution GPS? I don't remember the details, but I remember reading about it a couple years ago

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## Physics Hunter

> Yes.  In the applications that I worked with this was not an issue.
> The gravity issue is also relative to the angle of incidence which adds complexity.
> 
> It is all about how much accuracy that one needs to fly a missile or drive to Pizza Hut.


There are error bars on all GPS applications.

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## Physics Hunter

> I'm sure you know about this, didn't they recently activate a higher resolution GPS? I don't remember the details, but I remember reading about it a couple years ago


My knowledge is like yours.  I was immersed in GPS crap, which is boring, in the early 90's.
Set some pseudo-random sequence looping pinging sats out at geosynch, control their station keeping within some limits, and use it for relatively accurate land navigation, and build it as a two level system, military and civie, with a kill switch.  But then the flight control community asked for more.  This was in the time of the 386/486, less processing power than a current "smart" watch.

There was just less you could compute in real time, and flight control is life or death real time.  And worse, it requires absolutely fixed time computing, but I digress.

I got out of the flight control biz in the 90's since it was pretty much a solved problem.

However as with all good things, the hunger for better never ends.  For a soldier or tank moving on the battlefield a reading of 1M data is great, for a Darpa Challenge autonomous navigating vehicle it ends in a ditch.

I heard something about that, but did not follow up.  AI is more interesting.  One must focus.

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## Physics Hunter

> Wow. Well, I was a computer programmer and somehow Wall Street found out about me, and two weeks later I was at triple the salary and I had the key to the executive bathroom on the 29th floor of 85 Broad.



I wanted to design computers, but about 10000 people do that, and the advancement is slow.

Millions program them and the proficient make the big bucks.

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## nonsqtr

> I wanted to design computers, but about 10000 people do that, and the advancement is slow.
> 
> Millions program them and the proficient make the big bucks.


Yeah. Kinda like being an airline pilot. "It used to be a good job".

When my mom was ailing I be ame a job shopper ("consultant") for a while, and the last job they wanted me to dummy up a "man behind the curtain" scenario for a trade show. 

I went to the boss and said WTF is this, I thought we were doing engineering here. He said "we are". The next words out of my mouth were automatic, I didn't even think about them. I said, "i'm out".

That's the only job I've ever had that was truly disgusting. The rest were mostly tolerable, the creativity of it kind of went downhill over the years as corporations discovered 'process', y'know, after you've worked at DoD you get onto one of these "rapid development" things and then you suddenly understand why they do design reviews and why they get the ergonomic psychologists involved. (It's cause the chair has to be comfortable for the man behind the curtain cause he has to sit in it for the better part of 12 hours).  :Grin:

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## nonsqtr

> My knowledge is like yours.  I was immersed in GPS crap, which is boring, in the early 90's.
> Set some pseudo-random sequence looping pinging sats out at geosynch, control their station keeping within some limits, and use it for relatively accurate land navigation, and build it as a two level system, military and civie, with a kill switch.  But then the flight control community asked for more.  This was in the time of the 386/486, less processing power than a current "smart" watch.
> 
> There was just less you could compute in real time, and flight control is life or death real time.  And worse, it requires absolutely fixed time computing, but I digress.
> 
> I got out of the flight control biz in the 90's since it was pretty much a solved problem.
> 
> However as with all good things, the hunger for better never ends.  For a soldier or tank moving on the battlefield a reading of 1M data is great, for a Darpa Challenge autonomous navigating vehicle it ends in a ditch.
> 
> I heard something about that, but did not follow up.  AI is more interesting.  One must focus.


Ditch?

That doesn't sound right. Lemme see, 386/486 was like late 80's?

Yeah, I suppose that was just about the cusp...

What's the challenge? Is it still on or did it get solved?

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## Physics Hunter

> Ditch?
> 
> That doesn't sound right. Lemme see, 386/486 was like late 80's?
> 
> Yeah, I suppose that was just about the cusp...
> 
> What's the challenge? Is it still on or did it get solved?


386 was 1987ish.

486 carried us into the 90's.

It lead to the current failure of the "autonomous vehicles are here" failure.
You want to ride in a supposedly autonomous vehicle on a one lane road using nav that has 1M accuracy?   :Smiley ROFLMAO:

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Authentic (02-14-2022)

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## Northern Rivers

> There's  an element on this board, and the world, _who question why we do exotic science_ . Why do we spend billions on things like the James Webb Telescope, or the Large Hadron Collider. What benefit do we get out of them?
> 
> 
> In short, we dont know  yet. No one was thinking of powered space flight in the 17th century when Isaac Newton unified heavenly and earthly motions with his laws of motion and gravity. When James Clerk Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism in the 1860s, televisions, lasers or smartphones werent on anyones radar (and nor was radar).
> 
> 
> But immediate technological or material gain isnt the point. To formulate his physics, Newton had to invent calculus, the mathematics that today underlies scientific models of everything from climate change to pandemic spread. In devising his laws for electromagnetism, Maxwell proved that light always travels at constant speed  paving the way for Albert Einsteins theories of relativity that, besides explaining gravity and the wider cosmos, enabled innovations such as GPS.
> 
> Science begets science and, along the way, technology of universal benefit drops out. Thats why we do exotic science.


A wabibito knows why we do all sorts of science: _we want to really know if there's life after bodily death. 
_
I wholly agree with the sentiment.  :Smiley20:

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## UKSmartypants

> 386 was 1987ish.
> 
> 486 carried us into the 90's.
> 
> It lead to the current failure of the "autonomous vehicles are here" failure.
> You want to ride in a supposedly autonomous vehicle on a one lane road using nav that has 1M accuracy?



Military GPS is 10cm, but  they wont let the plebs use that

when i started in IT in 1978 networking was an arcane art with the knowledge  shared between the small group of IT nerds who knew how it worked. I bet in 1980 there was less than10,000 people in the entire UK who knew how computer networking worked.. There was virtually no non technical books about the subject, just  a couple of deep technical books and lots of RFC paper  and stuff. I was a member of the British Computing Society which was the trade body for smartarse nerds, and  membership was by exam.  It was basically the only way other than trial and error to learn how to network computers.

The first networks I built were IBM Token Ring, using coaxial cable., on DOS 3.11 machines using NETBIOS.  In those days you had to build two batch files, AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS  that executed all the correct commands in the right order with all he correct parameters set to get it all to work.  You either researched how to make these files, or you pinched someone else's and then figured out how it worked., It was a real black art.

Now its all deskilled. You dont even have to know about the 7 layer model, computers just automatically connect. Piloting and air traffic control are on the verge of being deskilled now.  In 10 years time air traffic control will be a semiskilled blue collar job.

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Sunsettommy (02-14-2022)

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## nonsqtr

> 386 was 1987ish.
> 
> 486 carried us into the 90's.
> 
> It lead to the current failure of the "autonomous vehicles are here" failure.
> You want to ride in a supposedly autonomous vehicle on a one lane road using nav that has 1M accuracy?


No, I'm a neural networks guy. Don't need no steenkin' GPS lol  :Grin: 

I seriously think I could design an autonomous vehicle. They'd have to give me lots and lots of quantum dots though. This 200-qubit business won't cut it.  :Grin: 

In one of my other lives I do animation, I use Maya, do you know anything about it? It's a way to create animated characters, like for video games and such, and you can use an IK/FK model attached to the skeleton for realistic movement. Once you have the skeleton and kinematics, you can give it intelligence. So for example, my production company was all ready to fly in half a dozen dancers from NY and do motion capture on them, until we discovered we could do the whole thing in software for a lot less. (Better looking dancers too! lol)

We're almost ready with our flagship animation, you'll know it when it goes public. It's an Amazon jungle scene, in a music video. It might even get an Oscar, it's "that" good. My friend was an exec at Sony for 35 years, his jaw dropped to the ground when he saw it (and it wasn't even finished yet). We've been getting 4 hours a week on the big machine at Caltech for several months now, in exchange for which we're giving them Python extensions for their AutoDesk, which will allow them to apply neural networks to their layouts.

Anyway, what we have is a face hidden in our animated video, and a neural network that morphs the underlying world coordinates according to Navier-Stokes. There's a jungle scene with a bunch of dancers, and the face emerges from thin air in the middle of the jungle, but it's not disembodied, it's connected to things. Vines, and the dancers' arms and legs. The shape of the face is nothing more than turbulence. When you see it emerge from the jungle though, it's a life changing moment. It takes you from a jungle full of moving creatures to an eco-"system" that moves as a unit, ad if it had a collective mind. It's a stunning effect, I'll point you to it when it happens.

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## nonsqtr

> Military GPS is 10cm, but  they wont let the plebs use that
> 
> when i started in IT in 1978 networking was an arcane art with the knowledge  shared between the small group of IT nerds who knew how it worked. I bet in 1980 there was less than10,000 people in the entire UK who knew how computer networking worked.. There was virtually no non technical books about the subject, just  a couple of deep technical books and lots of RFC paper  and stuff. I was a member of the British Computing Society which was the trade body for smartarse nerds, and  membership was by exam.  It was basically the only way other than trial and error to learn how to network computers.
> 
> The first networks I built were IBM Token Ring, using coaxial cable., on DOS 3.11 machines using NETBIOS.  In those days you had to build two batch files, AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS  that executed all the correct commands in the right order with all he correct parameters set to get it all to work.  You either researched how to make these files, or you pinched someone else's and then figured out how it worked., It was a real black art.
> 
> Now its all deskilled. You dont even have to know about the 7 layer model, computers just automatically connect. Piloting and air traffic control are on the verge of being deskilled now.  In 10 years time air traffic control will be a semiskilled blue collar job.


Yeah. uucp was a "yuge" deal, if I'm not mistaken BSD was the first real operational public network (and like many other good things it came out of DARPA, or at least they funded it).

Yeah, us PC nerds used to laugh at the mainframe clowns, we had full screen text editors and they were still going 4u and 27r. I laughed hard, until I had to do 18,000 anova's on a Commodore 64. Cause the goddamn PHYSICISTS we're hogging the mainframe.  :Mad:  (Don't laugh, I got it done).  :Grin:

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## nonsqtr

> A wabibito knows why we do all sorts of science: _we want to really know if there's life after bodily death. 
> _
> I wholly agree with the sentiment.


So you should be very interested in all this nonlinear chaotic stuff I've been trying to bring to peoples' attention. (Not without difficulty, @Trinnity was very nice to me by letting me speak my peace before thread banning me for multiple rules violations, and I appreciate it).

In an abstract but useful nutshell, there is a HUGE difference between random systems and chaotic systems. The most complex structures and processes in nature, are both. (Like our brains).

Physics tells us about entanglement, then confuses us by pretending it only happens between two photons. Whereas in real life, Alice never picks up the correct spin because her photon is entangled with half a dozen other things!

A "stochastic" process is about random numbers, but a "chaotic" process is about initial conditions. Since the outcomes can be similar, it's sometimes hard to tell the difference, and it gets even more confusing because half the scientists publishing papers don't even know there IS a difference.

But, if there ends up being any such thing as ESP, or any such thing as life after death (even in the Zen sense), the answer will be in entanglements and long range nonlinear interactions.

Meanwhile though, we still keep an eye on the geometry - here for example, is something interesting that just appeared last week:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/...een-first-time

Not so hugely interesting in and of itself, until the part about "time reversal symmetry" catches your eye.

In a chaotic dynamic, it is theoretically possible to reverse time and reposition the ball at the very top of the bifurcation.

In a stochastic dynamic though, time reversal is completely forbidden, "by definition". There's no such thing as time reversal in a stochastic generator. (Note I didn't say "system" - and given the cited paper, what does this tell us about photons?)

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## UKSmartypants

> Yeah. uucp was a "yuge" deal, if I'm not mistaken BSD was the first real operational public network (and like many other good things it came out of DARPA, or at least they funded it).
> 
> Yeah, us PC nerds used to laugh at the mainframe clowns, we had full screen text editors and they were still going 4u and 27r. I laughed hard, until I had to do 18,000 anova's on a Commodore 64. Cause the goddamn PHYSICISTS we're hogging the mainframe.  (Don't laugh, I got it done).



did you ever use the command line driven text editor that came with Unix, Vi?


It was powerful, arcane, complex and totally unforgiving. Either you mastered it, or it mastered you. One badly placed full stop on the shell command line could undo days worth of work.  It was the only editor i came across for years that could execute operator commands from inside a word processed document.

Vi wasnt WYSIWYG, Vi was YAFIYGDWGI  (you asked for it,  you're gonna damn well get it.)





Commodore PETS wer fun, you coudl put a network card in them and connect them with coax, and then use their proprietary networking software and set up what was a serverless peer to peer network called a MuPet Bus (Multiple PET bus)/ It had an interesting flaw in that you could configure any connected device as an input, output or bidirectional device.  Configuring the network printer as an input device used to send the whole network bonkers

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Authentic (02-14-2022)

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## nonsqtr

> did you ever use the command line driven text editor that came with Unix, Vi?
> 
> 
> It was powerful, arcane, complex and totally unforgiving. Either you mastered it, or it mastered you. One badly placed full stop on the shell command line could undo days worth of work.  It was the only editor i came across for years that could execute operator commands from inside a word processed document.
> 
> Vi wasnt WYSIWYG, Vi was YAFIYGDWGI  (you asked for it,  you're gonna damn well get it.)
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Well, I learned vi in ed. Bell Unix v6, as I recall.

Yeah, I was real grateful when vi came along.

Plus I was thrilled we could play D&D with it.

tl... tl... th th th Oops you've been killed by a zombie.

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Oceander (02-14-2022)

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## Trinnity

> I've been trying to bring to peoples' attention. (Not without difficulty, @Trinnity was very nice to me by letting me speak my peace before thread banning me for multiple rules violations, and I appreciate it).


I didn't let you do anything. I hadn't seen it and it went on a long time before anyone reported it. 

I  don't have time to read all the threads. I try to mod fairly even if I have to mod a "friend" and to imply I did you a favor is injurious to my reputation.  :Nono:

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## nonsqtr

> I didn't let you do anything. I hadn't seen it and it went on a long time before anyone reported it. 
> 
> I  don't have time to read all the threads. I try to mod fairly even if I have to mod a "friend" and to imply I did you a favor is injurious to my reputation.


I didn't mean it that way. But you knew that.  :Smile:

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## Trinnity

> I didn't mean it that way.


Other people don't though. 



> But you knew that.


I do. I thank you for the spirit of it. You were gracious and I stomped on you. I apologize. I'm sorry for the big font.

I was rude and again, I apologize to you and the forum.

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## nonsqtr

> Other people don't though. 
> 
> I do. I thank you for the spirit of it. You were gracious and I stomped on you. I apologize. I'm sorry for the big font.
> 
> I was rude and again, I apologize to you and the forum.


It is I who should apologize. You're all good. We'll find something less controversial to talk about.

It's just a little... um .. confusing to me how smart educated people can ... oh well...

So let's move on to quantum superposition of neurons. Do you think anyone will believe that one? There's no evidence for it yet, but it makes perfect sense and I'll betcha it'll sell.  :Grin:

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Oceander (02-14-2022)

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## Oceander

> did you ever use the command line driven text editor that came with Unix, Vi?
> 
> 
> It was powerful, arcane, complex and totally unforgiving. Either you mastered it, or it mastered you. One badly placed full stop on the shell command line could undo days worth of work.  It was the only editor i came across for years that could execute operator commands from inside a word processed document.
> 
> Vi wasnt WYSIWYG, Vi was YAFIYGDWGI  (you asked for it,  you're gonna damn well get it.)
> 
> 
> 
> ...


vi.  Uggh.

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## Trinnity

> quantum superposition of neurons. Do you think anyone will believe that one? There's no evidence for it yet, but it makes perfect sense and I'll betcha it'll sell.


I don't understand any of it but I wish I did. The macro of the universe interest me a lot more. Dark matter. The multiverse, etc. 

The math is just too hard for me.

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Authentic (02-14-2022)

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## Authentic

I could design a lot of things if I had a decent O-scope.

Better take a look at Tektronix, or hang around the BadCaps forum.

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## Authentic

> So you should be very interested in all this nonlinear chaotic stuff I've been trying to bring to peoples' attention. (Not without difficulty, @Trinnity was very nice to me by letting me speak my peace before thread banning me for multiple rules violations, and I appreciate it).
> 
> In an abstract but useful nutshell, there is a HUGE difference between random systems and chaotic systems. The most complex structures and processes in nature, are both. (Like our brains).
> 
> Physics tells us about entanglement, then confuses us by pretending it only happens between two photons. Whereas in real life, Alice never picks up the correct spin because her photon is entangled with half a dozen other things!
> 
> A "stochastic" process is about random numbers, but a "chaotic" process is about initial conditions. Since the outcomes can be similar, it's sometimes hard to tell the difference, and it gets even more confusing because half the scientists publishing papers don't even know there IS a difference.
> 
> But, if there ends up being any such thing as ESP, or any such thing as life after death (even in the Zen sense), the answer will be in entanglements and long range nonlinear interactions.
> ...


Doesn't a random generator have to be set up with initial conditions?

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## UKSmartypants

> The math is just too hard for me.



Just use the big fonts more, you'll be ok.

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## UKSmartypants

> Doesn't a random generator have to be set up with initial conditions?



Well, lets not confuse 'random number generators' with 'pseudorandom number generators'


A 6 sided dice is a random number generator. it doesnt   require setting up.


Computers generate random numbers in various ways, all based on algorithms that require a seed to start them, hence they are mainly pseudorandom

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## Authentic

> Just use the big fonts more, you'll be ok.


Is that for math or _maths_?

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## Authentic

> Well, lets not confuse 'random number generators' with 'pseudorandom number generators'
> 
> 
> A 6 sided dice is a random number generator. it doesnt   require setting up.
> 
> 
> Computers generate random numbers in various ways, all based on algorithms that require a seed to start them, hence they are mainly pseudorandom


Well, pseudorandom generators are what I had in mind.

Las Vegas runs on the things.

There is a programmed chip in each slot machine or video poker game.

It allows for random card draw and determines the payout.

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## Trinnity

> Just use the big fonts more, you'll be ok.


You tried that, didn't you?  :Geez:

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## Trinnity

I've had a lot of study in radiation physics in medical applications. Math isn't a love or  hobby for me. I'm more an outdoors girl.

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## UKSmartypants

> Well, pseudorandom generators are what I had in mind.
> 
> Las Vegas runs on the things.
> 
> There is a programmed chip in each slot machine or video poker game.
> 
> It allows for random card draw and determines the payout.



yes, thats a pseudorandom generator, it requires a a seed

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Authentic (07-20-2022)

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## Physics Hunter

> Military GPS is 10cm, but  they wont let the plebs use that
> 
> when i started in IT in 1978 networking was an arcane art with the knowledge  shared between the small group of IT nerds who knew how it worked. I bet in 1980 there was less than10,000 people in the entire UK who knew how computer networking worked.. There was virtually no non technical books about the subject, just  a couple of deep technical books and lots of RFC paper  and stuff. I was a member of the British Computing Society which was the trade body for smartarse nerds, and  membership was by exam.  It was basically the only way other than trial and error to learn how to network computers.
> 
> The first networks I built were IBM Token Ring, using coaxial cable., on DOS 3.11 machines using NETBIOS.  In those days you had to build two batch files, AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS  that executed all the correct commands in the right order with all he correct parameters set to get it all to work.  You either researched how to make these files, or you pinched someone else's and then figured out how it worked., It was a real black art.
> 
> Now its all deskilled. You dont even have to know about the 7 layer model, computers just automatically connect. Piloting and air traffic control are on the verge of being deskilled now.  In 10 years time air traffic control will be a semiskilled blue collar job.





> No, I'm a neural networks guy. Don't need no steenkin' GPS lol 
> 
> I seriously think I could design an autonomous vehicle. They'd have to give me lots and lots of quantum dots though. This 200-qubit business won't cut it. 
> 
> In one of my other lives I do animation, I use Maya, do you know anything about it? It's a way to create animated characters, like for video games and such, and you can use an IK/FK model attached to the skeleton for realistic movement. Once you have the skeleton and kinematics, you can give it intelligence. So for example, my production company was all ready to fly in half a dozen dancers from NY and do motion capture on them, until we discovered we could do the whole thing in software for a lot less. (Better looking dancers too! lol)
> 
> We're almost ready with our flagship animation, you'll know it when it goes public. It's an Amazon jungle scene, in a music video. It might even get an Oscar, it's "that" good. My friend was an exec at Sony for 35 years, his jaw dropped to the ground when he saw it (and it wasn't even finished yet). We've been getting 4 hours a week on the big machine at Caltech for several months now, in exchange for which we're giving them Python extensions for their AutoDesk, which will allow them to apply neural networks to their layouts.
> 
> Anyway, what we have is a face hidden in our animated video, and a neural network that morphs the underlying world coordinates according to Navier-Stokes. There's a jungle scene with a bunch of dancers, and the face emerges from thin air in the middle of the jungle, but it's not disembodied, it's connected to things. Vines, and the dancers' arms and legs. The shape of the face is nothing more than turbulence. When you see it emerge from the jungle though, it's a life changing moment. It takes you from a jungle full of moving creatures to an eco-"system" that moves as a unit, ad if it had a collective mind. It's a stunning effect, I'll point you to it when it happens.


I avoided mainframes, FORTRAN (that I learned on cards on a mainframe), graphics, GUIs, networks and databases.  There are great people that do those things.  What most people could not do was hardcore real physics (Newtonian) motion models of military vehicles in hard real or scaled time.  

Having a Physics degree AND a EE degree gave me an edge that very few others had, that's how I created demand.  I knew how to write vehicle motion model code and how to lock it to real time or hot-rod it to go as fast as possible on then available machines/networks.  My symbolic AI experience made it easy to create behaviours that were realistic to adversarial tactics.
Later in my career I went into other topics, but stuck to algorithms with accuracy and performance.

No slight to other computing disciplines, I needed the best of them to do distributed simulation, and for the stakeholders to see the results.

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## Physics Hunter

> So you should be very interested in all this nonlinear chaotic stuff I've been trying to bring to peoples' attention. (Not without difficulty, @Trinnity was very nice to me by letting me speak my peace before thread banning me for multiple rules violations, and I appreciate it).
> 
> In an abstract but useful nutshell, there is a HUGE difference between random systems and chaotic systems. The most complex structures and processes in nature, are both. (Like our brains).
> 
> Physics tells us about entanglement, then confuses us by pretending it only happens between two photons. Whereas in real life, Alice never picks up the correct spin because her photon is entangled with half a dozen other things!
> 
> A "stochastic" process is about random numbers, but a "chaotic" process is about initial conditions. Since the outcomes can be similar, it's sometimes hard to tell the difference, and it gets even more confusing because half the scientists publishing papers don't even know there IS a difference.
> 
> But, if there ends up being any such thing as ESP, or any such thing as life after death (even in the Zen sense), the answer will be in entanglements and long range nonlinear interactions.
> ...


I'm actually published in a Chaos journal...  Not a focus for me, but I had to read in to develop an algorithm and publish it.

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## UKSmartypants

> I avoided mainframes, FORTRAN (that I learned on cards on a mainframe), graphics, GUIs, networks and databases.  There are great people that do those things.  What most people could not do was hardcore real physics (Newtonian) motion models of military vehicles in hard real or scaled time.



Well the ones that did graphics ended up in PARC, or working  for Industrial Light and Magic. The ones that could do real maths ended up working for NASA plotting spacecraft and planetary trajectories.

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## Physics Hunter

> Well the ones that did graphics ended up in PARC, or working  for Industrial Light and Magic. The ones that could do real maths ended up working for NASA plotting spacecraft and planetary trajectories.


Lots of all of us in Military simulation, and other more data-ish applications.

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