December, 2009, Posts of the Month

AnswersInGenitals writes:Dear Prof. Pope:I'm wondering if in your extensive wanderings and interactions with physics illuminaries you had the opportunity to have discussions with a certain Dr. Arthur Compton. His thoughts on photons seems to be very scattered and I am curious to know if you have any opinion on his work. I was talking to him just the other day and he didn't recall having met you.

Viv Pope writes:No, I haven't had the pleasure of meeting Profesor Compton.In the current state of physics there are so many so busily 'plouging their own furrows' that they sarcely have time to see over the hedges. One looks forward to the time when it all comes together. If you see that gentleman again, please give him my best wishes.By the way, I am not a card-carrying 'Professor'. So any bids for qualifications I have made in that particular area have been cloaked in controversy. This was from the time when my mentors discovered that I was a heretic. It is certainly a truism that society doesn't encourage heretics, far less fund them.Thereby hangs a tale, which might provide some insight into what I said in an earlier posting, about Socrates being executed and so on. I'd love to tell that tale, but hardly on this particular forum thread, even though that tale is all about my views on light and relativity.

AnswersInGenitals writes:You have my sincerest sympathy and empathy. I know what it is like to have someone totally miss my point. May we both have more success in future endeavors.

The evolutionary method of sticking close to what worked in the previous generation might therefore be considered well-suited to the task at hand.

Explaining how something which is obviously true in practice can't be true in principle is one of the quaintest of creationist customs.

God can make a cow out of a tree, but has He ever done so? Therefore show some reason why a thing is so, or cease to hold that it is so - William of Conches, c. 1150