On Mon, 10 Nov 2003, David Silberstein wrote: > On Mon, 10 Nov 2003, Philip Hart wrote: > > > > > > >On Sun, 9 Nov 2003, David Silberstein wrote: > >> [tangent] > >> > >> The more the science/tech deviates from reality, or from sane > >> speculation, the more prefixes we add to the term, to indicate that it > >> came from further up the descending colon. So while, say, Trek's > >> "warp drive" is merely pararectal, the way the universal translator > >> *immediately* recognizes languages is hyperpararectal technology, and > >> the bogon-particle-du-jour is superhyperpararectal particle physics. > > > > > >I think about these sorts of classification on occasion and find them > >difficult. There may be a lot of particle species out there, I can > >imagine how a universal translator might work, and I suspect a warp drive > >violates causality, and there may be a lot of particle species out there, > >so I would tend to reverse the order you present, depending on what the > >bogon does for a living. > > The current "zoo" of nuclear and subnuclear particles is already > known and (mostly) named; hypothetical unnamed particles are not found > precisely because they are very difficult to create in the first > place (and even most hypothetical particles are already named!). I'm a particle physicist so supposedly know about this - my thesis (Measurement of the Ratio of the Invisible and Charged Leptonic Partial Widths of the Z Boson with the OPAL Detector at LEP) helped rule out some conjectured particles. There is a large group of hypothesized particles (called supersymmetric) which are indeed named, and which we hopefully will begin investigating in 5-10 years - but AFAIK there is no reason to rule out other groups of particles at higher energies. > A universal translator, as depicted in Trek, *certainly* violates > casuality - it knows how to map verbal expressions to concepts even > when the species has just been met and it has never been exposed to > the expressions before! I haven't studied the Trek translator, but I can imagine doing a brain scan of something and deducing from the connections how the language works. I think I'd look for math-type thinking structures to start with, or perhaps go from the optic processors out. It's a rather god-like ability, granted, but not (it seems to me) physically impossible. Plus it often doesn't work on creatures not like us, right? > And warping space has been tentatively identified as theoretically > possible by real-world science; there's a paper out there somewhere. > Now, granted, it isn't a *whole* lot like Trek's warp drive, but > the concept itself is not completely absurd. I'm not qualified to speculate on this, but my gut tells me that FTL travel isn't possible in this universe. > >In order of increasing unlikelihood, I would put: > >Santa Claus, one's neighbor's major religion, astrology. > >But what do I know. I do think this kind of back-of-the-envelope > >estimate would be good for tests of grad students in some field of study > >which probably doesn't exist but should, and which I guess you've named. > > > > Pararectal Quantum Bogodynamics