h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I am indeed grateful for your uniquely rational response to my entry, which attempts, perhaps too concisely, to draw together a number of loose ends. Over the course of many years I have found proposed solutions becoming increasingly unreal. To have at least got a conversation going about them is, I suppose, something.

The trouble is that the several strands are examined separately rather than as an integrated system. An overview is hard to simplify because of this. The response has shown how deeply textbook notions are entrenched, though commonly outdated even before the books are printed.

The answer seems to be to explore one issue at a time, so a week ago I posted another entry, not for review in the light of past experience, under the title G: The Inconstant Constant, in the hope that some will find it more digestible, and follow it up with further bites at the cherry if the response is more favourable.

So why did nobody suggest this before the conversation got bogged own in the wrong forum? I agreed with FM that, in the event, it might be the wrong place, but there was no mention then of the right one. Nor did ACE mention it in our various exchanges. But thank you for pointing this out.

ACE did not understand your entry (which she pointed out to you), and has never set foot into the SEx forum. ACE thought things like 'At what temperature does a soap bar melt, "Why is the sky blue? "
"What makes a satellite stay in orbit? "
"What's in chocolate that I'm addicted to? etc. are the questions discussed in SEx. ACE didn't understand your entry as a question.

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I will take a look and try to get my head around it. Let's assume this entry here will be detached from PR, and then the conversation should be a little more relaxed!

Tea anyone?

I am afraid we have got caught up in a three-cornered conversation which is at cross purposes.
My entry was not phrased in the form of a question but as a statement to be the basis of a rational discussion, which never got off the ground, until now. It was on the basis of an article on gravity from some years back that I put forward mine for PR, only to be met by total incomprehension and vitriolic abuse.
I am hoping now that a more measured conversation will develop with AndrewS and perhaps others, based on a second entry I have made, not for PR, which may appear shortly.
I, too, thought that the SEx forum was for the more trivial questions cited, to be answered by the same people as had no answers in PR, and so I was surprised to be directed to that site. I shall be giving it a miss.

Thanks for the cuppa, to go with the digestives in my second entry!
I am sure that confining it to a single issue will make it more accessible, and I hope we can have a relaxed discussion about it enabling the further topic of integration to follow in due course.

Hello antimather, as it has been decided that this is not the correct place for the discussion you seek, would you like to remove the Entry from Peer Review yourself? (Click on the "x" next to your Entry on the PeerReview page)

Or I can arrange to have that done for you. There will still be a record of this conversation at the Entry which will be on your Personal Space until such time as you delete it.



Galaxy Babe
Scout

To save my looking for where x marks the spot, would you please do the honours for me and do the deleting.
I have hopes of a more civilised conversation in a different place.
Can the last two exchanges between Andrew S and myself be transferred to a new site?

this thread has been removed from Peer Review

The conversation hasn't been deleted, it's still attached to the entry, which resides on your Personal Space (and remains in your convo list unless you unsubscribe).

You can click on the names of the Researchers concerned and leave them a message on their PS, inviting them to join you at your new discussion thread (it's helpful to leave a clickable link)

antimather

The ID No. for my new entry, should you be interested in seeing what it has to say, is A27063624, though I find the word `inconstant' brings up a short list of two to choose from. The only other use of the word, in a rather different context, seems to be in Shakespeare's sonnets!

I'd be happy to have your comments on the intelligibility - of the former.

I'm studying this now more deeply, and I hope to have some questions for you soon. I already have questions actually, but let's try to understand it first! My degree was metallurgy and materials science (at Imperial College, London) which is more engineering than physics. We did, however, study wave mechanics, and I was struck at the time by two things: a) this was obviously 'only' a model (albeit a useful one), and b) it did not seem to fit in with Relativity. Things have probably moved on since though: this was the early-mid 1980s.

Working through this piece, then, I have now ingested the first two sections - the historical ones - thoroughly, and they take a bit of work, but they are fascinating. I am convinced that FM misjudged the piece: you do know what you are talking about; in fact you assume far too much knowledge of the subject on the part of the reader. I think these first two sections could quite easily be re-written to make them more accessible. But that will have to wait until I have worked through the controversial bit of the entry, the next two sections.

Thanks for your first thoughts on the assumptions implicit in the entry.
I'll take a closer look at these, but after living with the problem so long it is difficult to remember my starting point for my attempt to unravel it.

Unless you wish to refer back to any of the previous comments, may I suggest we start a new conversation by tagging it onto the foot of the new entry. It would make referring to the text of it a bit simpler.

I don't know how well that will work, but here goes...