Einstein's Relativity and Everyday Life -- Clifford M. Will

The fucker is on Google now , I guess he has all the exposure that he
wanted:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Mukesh+Prasad&btnG=Google+Search

 

Arghhh Bose-Einstein statistics..... my eyes! I actually enjoyed
statistics mechanics more then I thought I would

I am - but the story condensed is basically

Jeff Relf proves he gets all his knowledge from Wikipedia
I make a jokey comment in arguing against him (when he had said I like
Windows or something like that) "I like Jaffa Cakes"

He then tries to wiki them, fails and makes a tit of himself

I point him to some info on H2G2, he then finds them on Wiki and again
claims I know nothing about them compared to him, when as far as I can
tell he's never seen one before and I have a serious weakness for that
chocolately lovely mmmmmmmmmmm sorry Jaffa Cakes.

I then point out how Jaffa Cakes are a good analogy for the failure of
his method.

A loud "Whoosh" is heard across Seattle as the point goes completely
over his head!

--
The greatest enemy of science is pseudoscience.

Jaffa cakes. Sweet delicious orangey jaffa goodness, and an abject lesson why
parroting information from the web will not teach you cosmology.

Official emperor of sci.physics. Please pay no attention to my butt poking
forward, it is expanding.

 

I'll get to statistical mechanics eventually, but I'm putting it off as
long as I can. Of all the topics required for my physics degree, that
is the one I am NOT looking forward to.

If it were not for my weird interest in math/physics, I would probably
be chasing something related to abnormal psychology. People like Jeff
Relf are just *fun* to watch and screw with.

Look at what he is doing on Wikipedia! It is like watching a human
trainwreck over and over and over. I can't help but put up a chair, get
a drink, and watch the show.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Albert_Einstein#Line_break_edit_war

Every time he opens his mouth a similar sound is made either by hot air
escaping or by the atmosphere filling the massive void between his
ears.

 

Shades of Douglas Adams? ;-)

But when we get there, phoowey then the fun starts! "Excuse me Dr
Puddleduck, is that your universe in the car park? You can't leave that
there!"

Now cosmology really butters my muffin. But I'm working on sub-mm
galaxies for my final year so its a bit more observational then I would
have liked ;-)

The course on the physics of stars this year burnt me towards dead
stars. I don't want to see that again for a while - Lame-Emden (shiver)

Or - when everyone says you're in a hole, stop digging !

Ok no sleep tonight!

--
The greatest enemy of science is pseudoscience.

Jaffa cakes. Sweet delicious orangey jaffa goodness, and an abject lesson why
parroting information from the web will not teach you cosmology.

Official emperor of sci.physics. Please pay no attention to my butt poking
forward, it is expanding.

 

While my style of writing, intentionally as often as isn't, does borrow
from a lot of folks but Douglas Adams isn't one of them.

We won't be even within an order of magnitude of Planck energies within
either of our lifetimes. Probably not even the lifetimes summed. Mabey
squared though. I wouldn't bet on it though..

Sub-mm galaxies? Any guess I can make will probably be wrong so it is
easier to ask...

[...]

 

Observing galaxies at sub-mm wavelengths - i.e in the microwaves. I'll
be coding from data of observations...

Its late, I tend to be a bit confused at this time ;-)

--
The greatest enemy of science is pseudoscience.

Jaffa cakes. Sweet delicious orangey jaffa goodness, and an abject lesson why
parroting information from the web will not teach you cosmology.

Official emperor of sci.physics. Please pay no attention to my butt poking
forward, it is expanding.

 

Whats so special about those?

All the cool galaxies are hiding in the radio spectrum...

 

The detector will also be working on planetary stuff as well. This is
all high z-based stuff. Stuff to do with inflation

sort of like

http://www.citebase.org/cgi-bin/citations?id=oai:arXiv.org:astro-ph/0406
069

Im at the preliminary reading stage right now ;-)

--
The greatest enemy of science is pseudoscience.

Jaffa cakes. Sweet delicious orangey jaffa goodness, and an abject lesson why
parroting information from the web will not teach you cosmology.

Official emperor of sci.physics. Please pay no attention to my butt poking
forward, it is expanding.

 

I, for one, am enjoying your exchange, gentlemen! Oh to be back in
school again. It's an awful lot of work!

 

Tell me bout it ;-)
--
The greatest enemy of science is pseudoscience.

Jaffa cakes. Sweet delicious orangey jaffa goodness, and an abject lesson why
parroting information from the web will not teach you cosmology.

Official emperor of sci.physics. Please pay no attention to my butt poking
forward, it is expanding.

 

Personally uninteresting, but essential.

Knowing something as simple as distance can be very important...

I'd rather see people study things like quasars and other objects that
fly under the banner of "active galactic nuclei". I attended a small
talk about them before I left for summer break. It was very
interesting...

Basically, we know black holes and the fun associated with stuff
falling into them are what is driving them. But we don't know much of
anything with any certainty. We have a vague idea of the mass of the
core, with the interesting addition with the occasional infalling
intermediate mass black hole. [I think I heard that there, but I know
that has been seen before]. We don't know the actual mechanism that
makes the jets, and the offered reasons had the professional physicists
who study things like aurora confused.

We don't have any idea how strong the electric or magnetic fields that
are driving the jets happen to be. I was told "on the order of a
neutron star's magnetic field", but I don't really buy that. We don't
know how much mass is in the jets, much less what it is made of.

Much to my internal amusement, a mention was made of the relativistic
beaming effect that makes stuff appear to be superluminal. The guy also
mentioned some of the pictures that he has published are now used on
some crank websites, though the actual wording escapes me.

I asked, and it appears we won't be getting any numbers for the black
hole's charge and spin at this point in time. I'll be impressed when
the error bars of the black hole's mass isn't measured in millions of
solar masses.

The stuff in the radio range is much, much cooler.

 

Good grief. As somebody said, it makes you want to just
start pounding your head on the desk over and over.

So what happened to the big multimillion commodity deal
he was doing with tjfrazir? Last thing I saw before my vacation
was when Jeff posted his address, phone number, and bank
account info for all the world to see. Did he at long last get
disillusioned? Or what?

- Randy