General Science

Still Getting It Wrong

I hate to keep beating on this drum, but it’s an error that many defenders of evolution make. Frederick Turner says:

…I did state flatly that the theory of evolution had been proved. I wanted it to be clear where I stood. Much of the mail I received protested about that statement. I hold to it, and hold to it not as my own opinion, but as a fact, like the existence of Australia, which is not my opinion but a fact. But I do know that there are many who sincerely, and given their range of knowledge, rationally, do not believe in the theory of evolution.

This ignores the (in my opinion, correct) position of one who believes in evolution, but doesn’t believe that it has been “proved.” This is because no scientific theory is ever “proved.” Proofs are for mathematics and the courtroom, not science. Scientific theories are useful in that they can be disproved, something that Creationism cannot.

I discussed this at length several months ago.

Space

Questions

I don’t have time to answer this email query, but perhaps some of the other readers do, in comments:

I loved your article about the Hyper X 43 and scramjets in genral, it was amazingly informative. As an amatuer space enthusiast I try to keep up, some of the stuff is completely out of my league. I had some questions, even if a singlestage could be built, would it be able survive re-entry? Second, even though Rutan’s Spaceship one did in fact go to 62k up, didn’t all the x-15’s do the exact same thing? Could the feathering device that Spaceship one uses be applied to a space craft coming in from low-orbit or is that type of system restricted forever to sub-orbital manuevering? if not is the composite material shell of the Spaceship as effective or even in the same league as Shuttle’s tiles? and finally, with the weight of turbofans and some kind of orbital manuevering system and reaction control system, could the design or anything like the design of the Spaceship One work off taking us to the runway to low orbit system that we only dream of in science fiction.

Technology and Society

“He’s Dead, Jim”

RIP, Scotty.

Of course, given that he had Alzheimers, he may have been dead by any useful definition for some time, just as Ronald Reagan was, even if the empty shell of the body continued to metabolize. In many ways, I fear this disease more than cancer, because it robs you and your loved ones of what is essentially you, while leaving them with an ongoing burden that can only be relieved by the final, physical death, which cannot come too soon once the mind is gone.

This, to me, is a powerful case for euthanasia. We may (and I suspect, will) come up with a cure for Alzheimers in the sense of preventing the damage, but once the damage is done, there’s no repairing it–it’s information death, which is actually much more final than metabolic death.

[Update on Wednesday evening]

How appropriate. They’re beaming him up. So to speak.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!