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

I didn't see this programme. Shame. But I have read both of Stephen Hawkings books. A brief history of time and, uh, the other one anyway. I didn't understand any of it (of course - I'm a pottery student!) but it's all very interesting and I'm sure it will all make sense and come in useful some day. To someone anyway.....

Potholer. As it happens, 'Mirror of the Heavens' does make a great deal of sense, but he did oversretch the point badly.
It does seem to me, as I was thinking about this in the bath, that Hancock's cardinal sin, as seen by others, is that he is saying previous thinking may be wrong. People are reacting very badly to this.
Seems we haven't come *very* much further than when somebody said 'Hey guys, this thing about the world being created in seven days...' and was pilloried for it.

I didn't see Hancocks programme. But if what he said sounded like what Daniken said then no wonder people were angry at him. Maybe what he said was valid and well proven. But if you have 99 crackpots going on about UFO's then when one other comes along with something similar, you tend to ignore him. Not the proper thing to do, but scientists are only human.

I read a book on superstring theory. Really didn't get it. I've read books by Hawking and about hyperspace and such. But this particular thing seemed quite strange. I hope they are right though, I don't like quantum mechanics.

Hancock's theories bear *no* resemblance to Von Daniken's. He is positing a theory that the oldest civilizations on earth are some four to five thousand years older than previously supposed.
It's revolutionary, it's contentious, but it isn't UFO-ology.

No but if what he talks about is the same as a lot of crackpots, then that will make it hard.

Also scientists don't try to keep up some dogma. But if someone comes along and says "Everything you know is wrong" they just expect him to have some damned good proof.

if it was crackpots, that would be fine.
The other disturbing thing to this is that a *lot* of the people who gree with him are native to the countries involved. It smacks a little of archeological imperialism, to be honest.

I watched the second programme last night with a fossil-hunting "scientist" friend, who had an irritating habit of picking on random phrases he disagreed with and shouting them down, thus drowning out any justification which followed...

The only problem with the programme is the documentary format. All the ideas and discoveries look a little *too* convenient because the producer has arranged them to give the best "flow". Conscious decisions have been made to find the three most "interesting" or contentious points, arrange them in order of interest and create an hour of build-up to each. Within those, three points which sound like they will stir an argument have been picked and put just before the ad breaks. Everything else has been stretched or compressed to fit in between. That's a fact of life - it's how these programmes are constructed. You can't watch them as if it was an hour-long lecture; you need to be aware of the underlying structure at all times to recognise where undue emphasis is being applied just to stretch a segment out to fit into the producer's agenda.

I, for one, would have liked at least one shot of the dredged Indian artefacts which wasn't zooming in or out to make you feel seasick...

I have always taken Hancock's theories with a pinch of salt. However, the current tv series looking at archeaological remains on the seabed is proving fascinating, for me at least.

So many cultures have tales of sunken and lost cities, which seem to be 'reappearing' with the aid of computer models mapping out pre historic coast lines and archeaological research, that these myths may well prove to have some basis in fact.

Only more independent research and time will prove Hancock's latest theory right or wrong.

I think it's also worth pointing out that the book accompanying the series is some 600 pages long. There's a lot of stuff been left out to fit into three hours of TV.
I watched it with a friend who has studied, for his own pleasure, the Indus civilization-he could follow the sense of what was being said pretty well.

even worse on Radio 4 Today program this morning (http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-bin//radio4/today/listen/audiosearch.pl?ProgID=1014120401 for sound file) they jumped on the multiverse band wagon and tried to summarise it all in 5 minutes, but it was in the "post 8:30 slot when all the men have gone to work so now let's be patronising to the house wifes" slot.

CH

Back to Horizon: Although the figure skating physisist was utterly horrible, overall I thought that for a one hour problem it did pretty well - the explanations and justificatons for what we were told may have been lacking, but there was plenty enough food for thought in there to entertain me. Any attempt to explain and justify anything as remotely complicated as m-theory in an hour long program would be terribly silly. Instead we were given brief glimpses of where physics stood, what was then realised to advance or push back certain theories over others, how the deductive process occur(s)ed.

As a detective story I thought it was very interesting, and by making you ask far more questions than it even bothered to try and answer, it mirrored the topic nicely

So if our big bang came about from a collision of membranes, and the universe began, where did the membranes come from? And what makes time so unique a dimension that it gets to be around before (uh oh) the others?

'Ere! That's what I said.

I was confused by the idea of infinity before this program but now I'm just drowning under a sea of infinitum. If there are an infinite amount of universes in the multiverse, the parallel universes should constantly be colliding, shouldn't they? Also are we going to discover parallel multiverses in the future?

Sorry to steer the conversation off its orginal track again (note subject header change), but I just realised that Horizon themselves did a special on Hancock's Mirror in the Skies series which *really* stuck the boot into his theories.

Aha - here it is : http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/atlantis2.shtml

Well it was one seriously disconcerting program. This 11th dimension is apparently a tiny tiny fraction of a millimetre away from every point in this universe, past, present and future. How a dimension can be measured in this way, I don't know, and how they think that there are infinite universes, I don't know either. If there are infinite universes in an infinitely large space, what would that mean? There is a big difference between infinite and finite, no matter how big you put the number of universes to be.

Dimensions are not quantities. query.
Instead, dimensions are frameworks that quantities can exist in - so to take example of the first three dimensions of space, call them x, y and z.

Within this framework of 3 dimensions one may have:

a)1D infinite rod where size in
x = infinity
y = zero
z = zero.


b) rod infinite in one dimension ,finite in another; 2D altogether size in
x = infinity
y = real number
z = zero

c)rod infinite in one direction, finite in other two dimensions; 3D altogether, size in
x = infinity
y = real number
z = real number

Next up in this framework of 3 dimensions are planes, then solids, but the point of it all is that what is infinite in one dimension can take up no space or very little space in another, in which case if there are 11 dimensions there is ample room for an infinite number of 10 dimensional spaces, and the universe we are able to percieve is limited to 4 dimensions.

Not sure if all of that or any of that made sense, but I tried

vp

I think the next stage is the Infinite Improbability Drive. anyone?

Woodpigeon, if you consider time to be a dimension, then isn't it actually in contact with every point in the Universe? You can't get much closer than that...

The part about colliding membranes creating new universes (ie new mambranes) seemed pretty vague and badly explained to me.
It concentrated on the generation of ripples in *existing* membranes as a result of collisions, but not on how those collisions generate *new* ones. Some kind of budding? splitting?

The issue of everything being near everything else seemed rather unexplained as well - a 2D universe with one of the dimensions rolled up tightly would be like a thin tube, a 3D universe with one dimension rolled up tightly could be like a low stack of infinite sheets of graph paper with the top sheet wrapping round to be under the bottom one. That wouldn't make every point close to every other point.
Maybe when multiple dimensions are rolled up, the case gets more complicated, and maybe it's not easy to explain, but the impression given by the program was that it was something special about having that extra 11th dimension that made every point a neighbour to every other one.
If everything *was* near everything else, that would seem at first glance to make gravity get smeared out over the whole universe.

Also, the early mention about gravity seemed a little unexplained. The theory about gravity being a relatively weak force because it leaks out across all the dimensions, I can understand to an extent.
However, the bit where they said 'but maybe it doesn't leak *out* of the universe, maybe it leaks *in* seemed merely a link to the possibility of there being other universes. The tone of the statement at the time appeared almost to imply that *all* gravity came from somewhere else, rather than from the mass in this universe that it seems to be correlated with, but kind of left that hanging.
Maybe gravity does leak in, but some kind of elaboration would have been useful.

"...to make gravity get smeared out over the whole universe."

I was once told that Gravity is the only force which affects every point in the universe simultaneously; that apparently there is no propogation delay for changes in a gravitational field, and if we could modulate gravity suitably we could communicate between any two points instantaneously. This would seem to support that suggestion...