New York Times on the Web Forums Science

Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

rshow55 - 09:24am May 12, 2003 EST (# 11599 of 11609)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

I don't know anything at all about any of the details set out in

http://www.starshipgamma.com/branton/misc/misc/coscon36.txt

http://www.american-buddha.com/last.circle.htm

but within American usages since the start of the Cold War - usages I do know something about - they are possible - and things like them have been reported often enough.

I've had some pretty good reasons to wonder about risks to myself - and to wonder what I could possibly do to be effective.

Under these circumstances, the question

"how would my actions look, written up in detail on the pages of the New York Times?"

is a pretty good question. Not because any such thing can ever happen - but because the sense of right and wrong of "the average reader of the New York Times" is an important community standard.

The average reader of the New York Times expects people, usually, to take care of themselves and their own problems. But that is only one standard, among some others.

In a world where facts are essentially never checked when somebody with real power actually objects - some problems are insoluble and some risks are unavoidable. Including risks involving huge losses to the world - and chronic problems involving the wastage of hundreds of lives that ought not to be wasted, every hour - hour after hour - day, month and year after year - without limit.

lchic - 09:31am May 12, 2003 EST (# 11600 of 11609)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

Risks?

rshow55 - 09:35am May 12, 2003 EST (# 11601 of 11609)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

Here is a posting from Science in the News - #381-383) that I expect to put up on my web site, along with some other correspondence. But I believe that it is worth posting here - because it deals with checking of facts and relations under circumstances where, as of now, effective checking doesn't exist, though it easily could. I believed, when I posted this, that the Glanz article cited was partly motivated by Times interactions with me. I'm guessing. People at the TIMES could know that answer by asking.

rshowalt - 07:43am Jan 4, 2000 EST (#381 of 386)

In "Geniuses, Crackpots and a Grand Unified Theory" JAMES GLANZ makes an important point. People with ideas off of the mainstream, right or wrong, are a nuisance. There's an extraordinary presumption against them. That presumption is statistically justified. Nor are individual scientists, or scientific organizations, or journalistic operations, well set up to handle them.

There's another side of the story, one I set out, with my friend and colleague, the late Professor Stephen J. Kline, of Stanford University and the National Academy of Engineering, a man who the Japanese Society of Mechanical Engineers suggested was the most distinguished theoretical and computational fluid mechanician of the 20th century. We decided that there was an error in the derivation of differential equations from coupled physical models. We couldn't get our work checked to a reasonable closure. He and I wrote this, and posted it in a TIMES forum about six months before Steve's death. I believe it fits today - it makes the case that "deviant" work COULD be valid, and ought not to be rejected out of hand. http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/whytimes2 I spoke at Steve's memorial service at Stanford - people with some interest in the kind of work Steve did, and the difference it made to his field, might enjoy http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/klineul Pieces of this eulogy were published by a professional journal thereafter.

Steve and I asked for something difficult in the world as it stands - an institutional ability to respond, in a timely manner, to points that could be reasonably described, right or wrong, by the term "paradigm conflict." I mean by "paradigm conflict" a pattern where people with different ways of thinking systematically misunderstand each other.

Steve and I both understood the "crackpot problem" and both did our best to offer clear argument. Efforts through channels were made, before efforts outside channels were initiated.