cool book

You are inventing nonsense to justify your prejudices. That makes for bad engineering too.

One essay in Berlinski's book is about Einstein and special/general relativity. He suggested GR to one of the great old physicists (Bohr or somebody) who immediately told him it was wrong. It took the eclipse light bending thing to mostly convince people.

I'm reading things that I find interesting and funny. You sneer and mock out of ignorance. Why?

That's a perfect example of what I just said to watch out for. He vastly oversimplifies what actually happened, sets up a straw man, and knocks it down to serve his rhetorical aims in an entirely unrelated field.

Opposition to Einstein *was* religious in many cases . It wasn't just the Third Reich grumbling about "Jewish physics," or people like Phillipe Lenard building a second career as "Chief of Aryan Physics" on his opposition to it, but there was an undercurrent of deep faith-based resistance that persists even today. They can no longer deny relativity with a straight face, but they can still spin it to serve their purposes. See for example

Gonna sign off on this subject, I'm starting to sound too much like another preachy denizen of s.e.d. :)

-- john, KE5FX

What actually happened?

Of course you snipped your previous claim that B "is someone who had a beef with classical mechanics and had never even heard of relativity."

How do you know that B did all that stuff if you never read the book?

You don't, of course.

When you meet, in real life, people who are believers of some sort, do you visibly sneer and show your contempt?

Unanswerable question, of course; folk can claim any belief whatsoever, we can only assume that the 2+2 = 6 messages, and the flat-earth conspiracy claims, are worthy of a bit of contempt. If we respect 2 + 2 = 4, we ought not to respect its denial. Contempt or a sneer is perhaps entirely appropriate.

Why, are you conflicted about having facial expressions? Botox much?

The look on my face is regretful, not a sneer, and there's no contempt (for you) behind it. Of course, that doesn't come across online. Would rather not go down this road any farther, as it only leads to hard feelings.

-- john, KE5FX

No, I was just taught to be tolerant and polite. Very old-fashioned.

We can be tolerant and polite online, too.

The other way around, as I have pointed out twice. The required containers can be observed forming today, in hot springs around the world. The existence of these containers dramatically increases the probabilities that the other peptide reactions occur and replicate.

As you keep illustrating.

Not that you know enough to have any sort of useful opinion.

And a few million years to run the experiment. <snip>

But the wiring is in front of the sensors. Not a sophisticated choice,

There are organisms around where the wiring is behind the sensors

John Larkin doesn't know much about it.

None which was all that complicated, back then.

Or at a lynching, or at a witch-burning, or at being placed in a cookpot... but we ought to choose otherwise when appropriate.

I just finished it. I'm disappointed that it wasn't longer, because it was great fun and getting better towards the end. I'll have to buy more of his stuff.

It's impressive that a simple book suggestion invoked a 180+ post thread, with most of the reactions violent disapproval and silly fabrications and snark about a book they admit they would never read.

A simple "thanks" would have been more appropriate.

I note that the most rabid Darwinists here, who believe in small-step incremental evolution, also say that electronic design proceeds in small tweaks to existing designs. I suppose theirs does.

Huge jumps are more fun.

You are inventing nonsense to justify your prejudices. That makes for bad engineering too.

FFS.....twaddle..

One needs to go to those that actually know something about the history of GR, like J D Norton, who actually did a Ph.D in the subject

-- Kevin Aylward

I had a flat-earth step-grandmother. Boy did we have some arguments. She genuinely believed. Was an ex-maths teacher as well. In fact a lot of the too-ing and fro-ing in this thread reminds me a lot of those times :-)

No, they don't. The eye-brain combination can easily be spoofed.

We are still discovering how badly they work and how often they fail.

This one scares glider pilots, because of its simplicity and the resemblance the blobs have to gliders on a collision course.

The human eye is cited by hyper-Darwinists as a refutation to intelligent design, because it is so bad.

If it's complex and bad, how did it survive natural selection?

I sort of like my eyes.

Easy. It was sufficient that the surviving humans didn't die before procreating.

Yes, and "sufficient" != "good".

I'd be disappointed to lose mine.

Still wish they didn't have all their design faults, because I'd be able to see even more wonderful things if they hadn't been crippled by a substandard designer.

This has been said several times already. It's as good as it can be, given the poor initial choices. It's clearly good enough to survive. It's a local optimum. There are examples of eyes with a better architecture in other animals, but evolution can't get there from here. It's trapped in a local optimum.

Jeroen Belleman

I wonder if you are sometimes just yanking my chain? There is this entire... what looks like mostly random... evolutionary history to our entire structure. Eyes get stuck in some local minimum... and yeah maybe squids or something find something better. Ear bones use to be jaw bones.. There must be some coherent path. but it's hard to see in the fossil record. Eyes are less well preserved.

George H.