[OT] The Tholian Web

I woke up early - as I sometimes do - and was screwing around with my
new PC TV wonder card... SciFi channel was doing a Star Trek Classic
mini-marathon, so I watched a couple of episodes.

One episode that had of course watched before but not for a long time
was the "Tholian Web". It's most notable visual was the two ships who
linked up and then drew a netting with some kind of light beam, slowly
enclosing the Enterprise.

Ok, so part of the deal here is that the ship they are investigating has
a dead crew who seemed to all have gone crazy. The ship is in a
/transitory/ state, a kind of glowing greenish color. And when they
are transporting 3 of the 4 people in the search party they barely get
back. Kirk stays behind, and they try to transport him but the ship
then totally disappears.

Two things: (1) This episode seems directly linked to the /Philadelphia
Experiment/ -- the glowing ship, and people who later experienced
dementia after going through the phase change.

(2) They talk about there being multiple universes which interface with
each other. In fact, they have to wait around, for the two universes to
come into phase so that they can rescue Kirk. And they talk like this
is common physics. But I thought that our own physics didn't even think
of such ideas as the multiverse until David Deutsche in 1995!

Was the dude just watching a lot of Star Trek or what ?!

Remote Wonder wrote:


Nobody here knows.. try a newsgroup forum that deals with Star Trek and you
might find out.

Morituri-Max wrote:



Could you be more negative ?

Remote Wonder <[Only registered users see links. ]> wrote:

Awww come off it, sci-fi's had multiple universes for decades, much longer
than star trek. Heck, even the lion, witch, and wardrobe dealt with multiple
worlds. (In fact, the prequel to Lion Witch and Wardrobe actually showed a
few more worlds... The evil witch in LW&W came from one of these)

Original star trek did the multiverse thing 3 times at least as it is! The
bloke from the anti-matter universe fighting his normal-matter self, the
evil dimension where kirk gets transported during YATM (which later becomes
a bit of an ongoing thread in DS9), and the tholian web.

Remote Wonder <[Only registered users see links. ]> wrote:


What you watched is irrelevant, Remote Wonder.


Classic unsubstantiated and erroneous claim.


Illogical, Remote Wonder, given that things can't "disappear".


On what basis do you make that claim, Remote Wonder?


What does that have to do with Physics, Remote Wonder?


You are erroneously presupposing that "the dude" was watching a lot of
Star Trek, Remote Wonder.

Remote Wonder <[Only registered users see links. ]> wrote in message news:<[Only registered users see links. ]>...

There's still a great deal of uncertainty of even what the
Philidelphia experiment was. It's highly classified, and hasn't been
repeated since (that we know of :-D).


Einstein theorized about the possibility. Science Fiction often tries
to use the language of science to make their fiction more credible.
It's not so unusual that science might occaisionally use the language
of science fiction to describe their technologies. For example, a new
engine designed for intersteller exploration uses "Ion Drive" - which
got the name because it used ionized particles of fuel to achieve
extremely high fuel efficiency. On the other hand, they credited it
to Star Trek.

In 2001 the computer HAL got its name by taking the previous letters
in the alphabet from IBM. The initials WNT were the letters following
VMS.


Many scientists developed an interest in science as a result of
watching star trek, and a number of other contemporary programs which
tried to promote interest in engineering.

The one I always found fascinating was when the famous Sci-Fi novelest
Isaac Asimov described Positronic brains back in a time when the
leading technology was vacuum tubes. Ironically, he wasn't too far
off. Vacuum tube theory presumed that electrons flowed from positive
to negative, based on the "wind" generated within the vacuum tube
which could be measured with a wind vane. When transisters locked the
protons and neutrons in place, it was discovered that the electrons
traveled from negative to positive. This shift in logic, along with
the transister itself, made it possible to design extremely small and
efficient switches and gates, the foundation of modern integrated
circuits.

When I have read the works of H.G. Wells, and some of the other
popular science fiction writers, it's often interesting to note how
many of their predictions came true, even though they did not have the
language to describe it at the time. Even Nostradamus seems to have
been surprisingly accurate with many of his prophesies, yet we can
only see them in hindsight because we don't have the language for the
event until after the event occurrs.

At the same time, when a prophesy event occurrs, it is often the
prophesy that gives the language. We see the squiggles that were
translated to Hister, but they don't make sense until AFTER Adolf
Hitler came to power. According to Nostradamus, the next dictator,
MABUS, was supposed to come into power after "New City in Flames and
Smoke". Many have claimed that this was a play on osaMA BUSh.
Personally, I think it's a bit of a stretch. The other possibility,
if you handwrite MABUS without lifting the pen, you could also see
WBUSh. Again, this is a stretch.

[Only registered users see links. ] (Rex Ballard) wrote in message news:<29d7c061.0409090801.4624392@posting.google.c om>...

<snip>


<snip>

It has been known since the 1890's that electrons are negatively
charged particles that are repelled by negative electrodes and
attracted to positive ones, just as Coulomb's law (which dates from
the 18th century) dictates. It is true that the current is considered
to flow in the opposite direction from the electrons, but this is a
result of the convention for assigning positive and negative charges
(due to Franklin). I never heard about wind vane experiments. The
electrons would transfer momentum to a vane that was placed in an
electron beam, but the momentum transfer would be small. If you could
make a vane rotate by this means, it would rotate in the same
direction as the electrons. All of this has been a well understood
part of vacuum tube theory from the beginning. Well, more precisely,
the early experimenters with vacuum tubes, de Forest et al, didn't
understand very much about what they were doing, but that was because
of their lack of background in basic physics. The physics was
certainly available for anyone who wanted to delve into it, as some
(like Langmuir) shortly did. Vacuum tube theory was certainly
understood well by every one, including electrical engineers, by the
time computers were being built in the 1940's.

There is no contradiction with transistors, in which electrons travel
from negative to positive and the current flows in the opposite
direction, just as in a vacuum tube. The only difference is that
semiconductors also have holes, which behave like positive particles
(although it is still negative electrons that are in motion).

Nessuno

Remote Wonder <[Only registered users see links. ]> wrote in message
news:<[Only registered users see links. ]>...


A clever man, Dr. Asimov...


Your statement is crap. Benjamin Franklin (18th century) postulated that
there were two polarities of electricity and coined the terms "positive" and
"negative," with electric current flowing from the positive to the negative.
[Only registered users see links. ]

Later Hittorf (19th century) showed that the charge carriers moved from the
cathode (negative terminal) to the anode, and thus had *negative* charges on
them.
[Only registered users see links. ]
BTW, he used the cathode rays to cast shadows, not to turn a "wind vane."


Protons are "locked in place" by chemical bonds - in this state they are
called "hydrogen." Neutrons still cannot be "locked in place." Transistors
are nearly pure crystals of semi-metals, but the carefully controlled
*impurities* do not carry the same number of electrons as the majority of
the atoms with which they share the crystalline lattice. This introduces
localized excesses/deficits of electrons - a local electron deficit is
called a "hole," and can carry electrical current as well as any electron,
only in the oppposite direction. It is the localized charges/deficits that
are "locked in place" by the crystalline lattice - that's why there are no
*liquid* transistors.


Credit that to photolithography. The original semiconductor devices were
comparatively macroscopic - my first transistors were large enough that
their number could be printed on the metal "top hats" that encased them.
Not very efficient, though - ran hot and ate batteries. The circuits that
used them were simple scaled-down versions of vacuum-tube circuits -
multivibrators, filters, oscillators, single and multi-stage amplifiers,
etc.

BTW, the letter "e" is not used in the word "transistor." When you misspell
a key word in your thesis, it casts shadows on your credibility.

The Internet and Usenet are killing the art of bullshitting. There are so
many people around who know what's what that you can't get away with a gross
misstatement for long. Just the other day, CBS news trotted out four 'newly
discovered' documents that appeared embarrassing to Republicans, and within
16 hours(!) a number of various document experts, military clerks, computer
specialists, typists, etc. had weighed in on various blogs exposing enough
inconsistencies in the papers to support a case for fraud.


Tom Davidson
Richmond, VA

On Thu, 09 Sep 2004 09:01:43 -0700, Rex Ballard wrote:


The fact that electrons are negatively charged was demonstrated during
the 1800's, many years before the transistor was developed.

--
Mathew M. <[Only registered users see links. ].org>
GPG public key ID: 0x3DDC1413

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Rex Ballard <r.e.ballard@usa.net> wrote:


Haven't you seen the film? It was a radar invisibility experiment that
went... a little kaka... In the blink of a cosmic clock they went from 1940s
navy grunts to.... people lost in 1985 after they fell through a hole in
hyperspace where the experiment had been repeated...


Philadelphia experiment 2 on the other hand was a complete pile of wank.