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Author Topic:   Hollow Earth Expedition?
dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 12 of 177 (702307)
07-04-2013 1:11 AM
Reply to: Message 11 by AZPaul3
07-03-2013 11:46 PM


Re: Take 2
** Paraphrased from a very good movie. Name the movie and the author of the original book. For extra credit name the two stars that played the protagonists in the movie and their character's names.
"Hunt for Red October". Based on book by Tom Clancy and starring Alec Baldwin and Sean Connery.
And my prize is ... an "atta-boy!". Now I need 9 more "atta-boys" to wipe out one of the many "aw shit!"'s that I have.

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 15 of 177 (702310)
07-04-2013 1:49 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by yenmor
07-02-2013 7:56 PM


Re: Take 2
That and the fact that engineers have a track record of being young earth creationists around here...
Just being an engineer shouldn't predispose one to being a creationist. Though it's certainly the case that in any list of "scientists who are creationists" you will find the vast majority of them to be engineers.
I have also noticed a certain negative attitude among engineers about scientists. Engineers tend to view theory disparagingly and champion instead empirical methods deriving through direct measurement. For example, at one job (I'm a software engineer, something "real engineers" also tend to sneer at) we had to integrate a new humidity sensor into our system. From the manufacturer we had a graph that plotted ADC output (0 to 255) to relative humidity. I started working out the equations for that curve when our lead engineer, a retired EE, ordered me to just construct a lookup table. Similarly, when my linear circuits prof (I was an electronics technician and a CS major who took EE courses mostly for fun) introduced us to the delta function * he gleefully told the story of how engineers had come up with it and used it with great success for at least 100 years before the scientists could figure out that it worked.
So even though an engineer would or should have some understanding of the science behind what he's working on, most engineers can still be nearly as ignorant of science as most laymen are.
{ * FOOTNOTE:
The delta function. Basically, when you apply a force to a system over time, you can plot a curve of the function of that force and by integrating it you get the area under the curve which is the total amount of energy being applied. Now consider the curve of one unit of energy delivered as a pulse which has an amplitude and a width (delta-time); the amplitude times the delta-time equals one. Divide the delta-time in half and the amplitude doubles. Now shrink the delta-time so that it approaches zero; the limit of delta-time approaching zero would be an infinite amplitude.
In our class, this was applied to a technique called convolution, most of which I have forgotten in the intervening 35 years. But the basic idea was that we used the delta function to drive the circuit whose frequency-domain equation we had created and this showed us what its response was. Basically, we were slamming the circuit instantenously with an infinite amplitude jolt of energy and then watching how it would ring. }
This hollow earth idea has been around for over a century. I think it goes back to the late 1800's. Then in 1914, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote the first of a series of novels set in Pellucidar, a prehistoric world on the inner surface of the hollow earth, with a small sun where the earth's core should be. It was eternal daylight there and instead of a horizon like we are used to the earth just curved up in the distance until it was lost in distant mists.
Where I work, we have an engineer, a conservative Christian BTW, who fervently believes in the hollow earth. Just smile and nod and keep your back to the wall.
Here's my take on this. We know the mass of the earth and we know the average density of the crust. Furthermore, through seismology we have a picture of the distribution of density throughout the body of the earth. Of course there's also the fact that every square centimeter of the earth has been photographed many times over, though hollow-earthers will just invoke the international conspiracy of whatever groups they want to entangle in that conspiracy (it used to be bankers and Jews, now it's scientists, atheists, world governments, etc).

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dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 16 of 177 (702311)
07-04-2013 1:56 AM
Reply to: Message 13 by NoNukes
07-04-2013 1:27 AM


Re: Take 2
I guessed a different submarine movie, but I wanted to point out that you missed out on the atta-boy by not giving the character names, Marko Ramius and Jack Ryan as required, and now it's too late.
Oh that's just great! Another "aw shit!"! Now I need ten more "atta-boy"'s to wipe that one out.
Of course, the problem is that an "aw shit!" is ten times more likely to be noticed than one "atta-boy".
Tangential story. At a Boy Scout Camporee that we took our Webelos den to, I went back to our campsite to rest and I noticed an odd cloud of dust in a neighboring campsite. Then their trash bag burst into flames, which it turned out was sitting right next to their propane tank. My immediate reaction as I sprang into action was to call out "Fire! Fire! Fire!". Straight out of the movie, though I am a retired Chief Petty Officer with 35 years of service (29 in the Navy Reserve and 6 in active duty Air Force, my checkered past).
PS
Do I get any "atta-boy" for knowing where Tom Clancy got his information from and how he had worked out the submarine battles?
Larry Bond was a Naval Reserve officer (back before it became the Navy Reserve) who had created a pencil-and-paper naval wargame, Harpoon. The descriptions and capabilities of the ships and of their sensor and weapons systems were researched out of publicly available references such as Jane's Books. As he was researching for his book (I believe that "Hunt for Red October" was his first, or at least his first successful book), Clancy came across Bond's game and contacted him. Clancy based much of his naval systems knowledge on the game and on Bond's open-source sources, so that when Navy brass questioned him on where he had gotten that information from, he could answer them truthfully. They also used Harpoon to play-test the ships' actions in the novel. Later, Clancy and Bond collaborated on at least one novel, "Red Storm Rising", and Bond also went on to write a number of techno-thrillers. And the rights to Bond's Harpoon were sold to computer game developers from which a number of computer games have been developed.
An interesting historical note is that Fred T. Jane (1865 to 1916), the founder of Jane's books, published his first book, All the World's Fighting Ships in 1898 as a supplement to his own naval wargame.
Edited by dwise1, : PS

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 18 of 177 (702315)
07-04-2013 3:55 AM
Reply to: Message 17 by NoNukes
07-04-2013 3:11 AM


Re: Take 2
Definitely worth an atta-boy. Nine more and you are even for the night!
Ah, but by the time you have made Chief you should have learned that it is impossible to ever accrue enough "atta-boy"'s.

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 26 of 177 (702350)
07-04-2013 5:23 PM
Reply to: Message 23 by NoNukes
07-04-2013 2:42 PM


Re: Take 2
I'm still miffed that the answer isn't Ice Station Zebra.
Rock Hudson:
quote:
Because of the close quarters here, we're all on a first-name basis. Mine is "Captain".
Once while undergoing my annual physical, I was waiting to have my X-rays taken with a group that included a couple fellow Chiefs. When the HM came out and said, "You're next, Chief.", we looked at each other and I advised the HM that he shouldn't just use our first name.
Edited by dwise1, : Sea story.

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 44 of 177 (702411)
07-05-2013 4:32 PM
Reply to: Message 38 by Coyote
07-05-2013 12:04 PM


Re: Hollow Man
A Dyson sphere?
Next to Google, Wikipedia is your best friend: Dyson Sphere
It's a science fiction term based on a thought experiment performed by Freeman Dyson.
If we try to use solar power, the problem is that the earth's surface only receives a very small fraction of the sun's entire output. We can increase that by creating a swarm of solar-power satellites that encircle the sun. First the swarm started out as a ring around the sun along the earth's orbit, rather like the ring-like swarm of communications satellites encircling the earth's equator in geo-synchronous orbit.
The article proceeds with the expansion of this ring-like swarm to where the swarm forms a bubble around the star and then finally with the connecting of the swarm into a shell that encircles the sun, thus receiving all of its radiant energy. This shell would then become a Dyson sphere, the final stages of which would be to convert its inner surface into living areas.
This idea (and the name -- Freeman Dyson doesn't like that it's named after him) has been developed and used extensively in science fiction, the most popular example being in the Star Trek:TNG episode, Relics, which marked the return of Scotty. Another most famous example is Larry Niven's Ringworld novels in which a ring had been built around a star.
------------------------------
"Those who fail to learn the lessons of science fiction are doomed to live them."

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dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 45 of 177 (702412)
07-05-2013 4:48 PM
Reply to: Message 43 by yenmor
07-05-2013 4:20 PM


Re: Hollow Man
I'm an atheist. I'm neither an evolutionist nor a creationist.
A large part of the problem is that most of us here have a rather heightened sense of smell which has been developed by years, even decades, of experience. It is a very sad fact that we've encountered many creationists who present themselves as non-creationists and many fundamentalists who present themselves as not being Christians, but it doesn't take long for them to let their sheep's clothing drop and be revealed for what they really are.
It's just that by your posts we were picking up that same scent off of you. Do stick around though.
I have a very interesting idea for a science fiction novel that I plan to work on.
Then check out some of the other novels based on a hollow earth. I was introduced to the idea a half century ago by Edgar Rice Burroughs' 1914 At the Earth's Core, which included a polar opening that could be reached by airship (dirigible), though the first novel involved a drilling vehicle that, once it started downward, the protagonists discovered to their dismay could not be steered. The world down there is called Pellucidar and even Tarzan visited there once (yes, that Edgar Rice Burroughs).
Edited by dwise1, : Tarzan

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 53 of 177 (702423)
07-05-2013 6:31 PM
Reply to: Message 46 by yenmor
07-05-2013 4:56 PM


Re: Hollow Man
Yet another YEC PRATT ("points refuted a thousand times").
Please read the page I posted about my own research into the YEC claim about "moon dust", which depends on a false claim about the rate of influx of meteoric matter: http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/moondust.html
It turns out that if the moon is really 5 billion years old, it should have accrued a layer of meteoric dust that's a whopping ... 1/3 inch think!
The rate for the earth was either 10 or 100 times greater, but still hardly enough for your purposes.
But if your goal is to write a sci-fi novel, then you do indeed need to work out all the real science.
I just loved Issac Asimov's biographical notes! First, he notes his having been born in Russia, but then realizing his mistake, his family emigrated to the USA. As he was growing up, his father, quite naturally (I am, after all, myself a father), wanted the best future for his son. Knowing that science was important albeit being totally ignorant of science himself, he gave his young son a science fiction publication. The rest is glorious history.

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 55 of 177 (702427)
07-05-2013 6:41 PM
Reply to: Message 52 by yenmor
07-05-2013 6:28 PM


All planets start out as solid. But through some natural process (I'll figure this bit out later), stuff began to slowly move to the surface and cause the expansion, causing a void in the center of the Earth that grew over time.
My last physics class was back circa 1980, but I'm good at retaining concepts. Gravitation depends on mass and upon the distribution of mass -- the distribution of mass becomes far more important in problems concerning the conservation of angular momentum which has very practical applications in satellite despinning and in turns performed by dancers and ice skaters (my own interest in the matter is in dancing ... so many times I want to explain what the teacher is trying to express in terms of actual physics).
One problem in our physics textbook (Fundamentals of Physics 2nd ed, Halliday and Resnick, John Wiley and Sons, 1974) involved the gravitational field of a hollow sphere. You might want to look into that problem.

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