On Mon, 10 Nov 2003, Philip Hart wrote: >On Mon, 10 Nov 2003, David Silberstein wrote: > >> 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. [Feeling somewhat embarrassed - "Hey, grandma! This, you see, this is an egg, right, and you make a hole in this end, using this pin, right, and then *another* hole in the *other* end, see?, and then you put your mouth on one of the holes, doesn't matter which one, and then you *suck* the inside into your mouth, like this, fhwuuflp!"] Well, you're probably better qualified to speculate, but I note you append "at higher energies" -- if the Enterprise *was* experiencing sufficiently higher energies, wouldn't the ship have been vaporized? For that matter, wouldn't those high-energy particles quickly decay into known, lower-energy particles? > >> 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. But it implies a certain level of *telepathy*. If they can scan the brain's language-center, and automagically deduce miscellaneous cortical connections, they should be able to get a rough idea of what the individual is thinking even when *not* talking. Which is why DDB's example of the Arisians is more internally consistent - the Lens allows regular telepathy as well as language translation. I don't have a problem with the general idea of the universal translator, assuming magical tech, only with the inconsistent way it's been shown to work on "Trek". > Plus it often doesn't work on creatures not like us, right? I can only recall 2 episodes where it wasn't working quite transparantly - one was the moderatly famous "Darmok", and the other was an episode of DS9 where they met a new species (from the Gamma quadrant?), where it was taking longer than usual to kick in. And while it was emotionally powerful, "Darmok" made no sense linguistically. > >> 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. > Well, I'm not qualified to speculate either, but that doesn't stop me >from occasional pararectal ideation on the subject. But not at this point in time, I think.