Okay, technically it's not warp drive, but we may have invented impulse engines.
A while back, Roger Shawyer a British aerospace engineer formerly of EADS Astrium and founder of Satellite Propulsion Research Ltd. announced he had produced a microwave resonant cavity that produces thrust apparently in violation of the laws of conventional physics. The engine he produces is called the Em Drive or RF resonant tapered cavity thruster. Shawyer speculates that a superconducting resonant cavity could produce 30 kN/kW, or 3 tons of thrust per kilowatt of input power. Everybody laughed.
In 2010 a Chinese research team from Northwestern Polytechnical University replicated Shawyer's experiment claiming to have produced 720 mN of thrust (by contrast the shuttle main engines produce 1.8 MN of thrust) with 2500 watts of input power.
Last year NASA's Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratory or Eagleworks also claimed to have replicated Shawyer's experiment.
Now, NASA claims to have replicated the thrust in a hard vacuum. So what do you think? A new reactionless drive in violation of the Law of Conservation of Momentum or the next "Cold Fusion"?
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods
From Lord Macauleythe poem Horatius may be familiar to many of you from last years film Oblivion. I chose it, and the image above of the Large Hadron Collider to illustrate a theme recently discussed, that of the large body of militant atheists who treat atheism for all practical purposes as religious dogma.
High Priests in the Holy of Holies
Photo: Urcomunicacion
From orchestrated objective reduction to quantum electrodynamics most of the gospel is as incomprehensible to the body of the faithful as the Gospel of Thomas would have been to your average 12th century French peasant. For all intent there is little difference between militant atheism and the Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición of yore.
I didn't know what fire and
brimstone was until I made a throwaway claim recently during an
appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher. It seemed pretty
unaudacious at the time, but by dropping the simple sentence
"Atheism is a religion," I opened a biblical floodgate of
ridicule, name-calling, and abuse. ~ Kennedy
Religion: an organized collection of beliefs, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to an order of existence.
Or: a "system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic." Clifford Geertz
There are probably as many definitions of religion as there are religions, if not more. This isn't about whether atheism, which is simply a rejection of the belief in deities is a religion, but whether or not atheism itself has become for all intents and purposes a religion to a subset of non-believers, those generally referred to as militant atheists. Held in faith, defended dogmatically, and proselytized as vehemently as evangelical Christendom.
A study at the University of Tennessee recently studied and categorized six types of atheist:
1. Intellectual Atheist:This type of nonbeliever seeks information and intellectual stimulation about atheism. They like debating and arguing, particularly on popular Internet sites.
2. Activist Atheist: These kinds of atheists and agnostics are not content with just
disbelieving in God; they want to tell others why they reject religion
and why society would be better off if we all did likewise.
3. Seeker-Agnostic: This group is made up of people who are unsure about the existence of a
God but keep an open mind and recognize the limits of human knowledge
and experience.
4. Anti-Theist: This group regularly speaks out against religion and religious beliefs,
usually by positioning themselves as “diametrically opposed to religious
ideology,” Anti-theists view religion as ignorance and see any individual or
institution associated with it as backward and socially detrimental,”
the researchers wrote. “The Anti-Theist has a clear and – in their view,
superior – understanding of the limitations and danger of religions.” Anti-theists are outspoken, devoted and – at times – confrontational
about their disbelief. They believe that "obvious fallacies in religion
and belief should be aggressively addressed in some form or another.”
5. Non-Theist: The smallest group among the six are the non-theists, people who do not
involve themselves with either religion or anti-religion.
6. Ritual Atheist: They don't believe in God, they don’t associate with religion, and they
tend to believe there is no afterlife, but the sixth type of nonbeliever
still finds useful the teachings of some religious traditions. “They see these as more or less philosophical teachings of how to live
life and achieve happiness than a path to transcendental liberation,”
I've included the description of all of Category 4, Anti-Theists, because that is what I believe we are discussing here. Here is an example of an anti-theist:
Now don't get me wrong, I kind of like Bill Maher, I think it would be very entertaining to sit down over a beer and discuss neurotheology. For those not familiar with the term, neurotheology is the scientific concept that our brains are hard-wired for religion. In other words... the religious among us were born that way. Hmm, now where have I heard that argument before?
Scientists have found that young blood actually ‘recharges’ the brain,
forms new blood vessels and improves memory and learning. In parallel research, scientists at Harvard University also discovered that a
‘youth protein’ which circulates in the blood is responsible for keeping the
brain and muscles young and strong.
The protein, known as ‘GDF11’, is present in the bloodstream in large
quantities when we are young but peters out as we age. There seems to be little question that, GDF11 has an amazing capacity to
restore aging muscle and brain function.
In the study, the blood of three-month-old mice was repeatedly injected into
18-month-old mice near the end of their natural life span. The "vampire therapy" improved the performance of the elderly mice in memory
and learning tasks.
See ya later, I'm going to go sit on my ass, eat a pound of bacon in cream gravy, down a fifth of Jack, and smoke a pack of Lucky Strikes... I'm kidding, there's no way I could eat a pound of bacon.
