planetguy

43 ms·

421.
by planetguy 14y ago
And as someone with the username "planetguy" I hate to be corrected, but you're right. My defense is that I am planetguy, not historyguy. :) Historical brainfart.
422.
by planetguy 14y ago
A large slab of Penrose's book The Emperor's New Mind is, if I recall correctly, devoted to describing how certain structures of the brain just might have some quantum mechanics involved. I don't recall the details and I don't know whethe
423.
by planetguy 14y ago
I thought one of the things we'd learned over the last decades was that when the hippies took over the education department and took all the regimentation and repetition out of the classroom, the result was a bunch of students who didn't
424.
by planetguy 14y ago
They are talking about the fact that you have a few teachers telling you to question authority People don't need to be taught to question authority, they figure it out on their own at a pretty young age. Usually the moment an authority te
425.
by planetguy 14y ago
Also, astronomers in the Renaissance didn't have telescopes, so the moons of Jupiter weren't part of what they saw around them anyway.
426.
by planetguy 14y ago
I think we are saying similar things, but I'm getting the sense that you don't think there is a single unified theory to be found (not simply that humans are incapable of understanding it). Do you have a particular reason for thinking this
427.
by planetguy 14y ago
I've skimmed one or two of his books. There's no doubt that he knows his physics better than most physicists. However I'm not sure what you're saying he's saying differs from what I'm saying he's saying. In both cases, the basic argument is
428.
by planetguy 14y ago
Well, you could do it like the cargo version of the 747: fold up the nose and load stuff straight in from the front. (Of course this requires having an upper flight deck like on the 747. Realistically, there's lots of ways to handle the boa
429.
by planetguy 14y ago
How would you distinguish an academic acquaintance with curiosity, passion, and depth from one who lacked those qualities?
430.
by planetguy 14y ago
You seem to be engaging more with the headline writer than with Penrose. They're both, perhaps, wrong, but Penrose is wrong in a far more interesting way. Penrose doesn't just think quantum mechanics is wrong in the sense that it can't quit
431.
by planetguy 14y ago
I don't know how old you are, but I'm pretty sure Penrose overtook you by the time he was your age.
432.
by planetguy 14y ago
Hey, I'm cool with solipsism.
433.
by planetguy 14y ago
Mars had water far more recently than it had any substantially different orbit. The sun has been getting brighter over the past four billion years, too, but afaik that isn't enough to stick together a full Martian climate history. There's o
434.
by planetguy 14y ago
Well, I'm not a European or an American so my own national penis remains unaffected, however... Your lead is waning not because America is doing less science but because everyone else is doing more. American scientific dominance lasted from
435.
by planetguy 14y ago
The "dry Mars" hypothesis has been dead for decades. At this point we have about as much evidence for water on Mars as we have for water on Earth. The media is always keen on every new "omg, there was once water on Mars" discovery, but we'v
436.
by planetguy 14y ago
Oddly enough, the caption "NASA had plans to send a spacecraft to Jupiter but later dropped them" accompanies a picture of Juno, the not-cancelled NASA spacecraft currently on its way to Jupiter. The "cancelled" mission is actually the EJ
437.
by planetguy 14y ago
It's not a zero-sum game, and I think you need to get some perspective. It's great that the ESA is sending a probe to Jupiter's moons, and I'm totally excited about it. On the other hand, NASA currently has: 1. One spacecraft at Saturn (Cas