Rapid Fire 08/​30/​06

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1. Haninah says:

   August 30, 2006 at 8:57 am

   About that Wired arti­cle… as a physi­cist with no horse in the string the­ory race, I have to say that the guy is a total hack. There is no one in main­stream physics who denies that string the­ory is a) still a vague col­lec­tion of mutu­ally con­tra­dic­tory mod­els and b) unproven. That’s why even while the whole lay world, includ­ing this guy, is obssessed with string the­ory, the pro­fes­sional world is still con­sid­er­ing it only as one type of approach, which may prove to be incor­rect, and is busy look­ing for alter­na­tives. What he’s basi­cally bitch­ing about in the arti­cle is that no alter­na­tives to string the­ory are being pre­sented — *at a con­fer­ence on string the­ory*! This guy is try­ing to make an easy dime by pick­ing one side in a very healthy sci­en­tific debate and pre­tend­ing it’s a neglected orphan that he’s rid­ing in to res­cue. Tool.

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2. Robot.Economist says:

   August 30, 2006 at 10:03 am

   I’m with Haninah on the string the­ory arti­cle. Sure, its a vague the­ory, but spout­ing well-​​worn crit­i­cism is easy — try­ing to val­i­date a new approach is hard. I’m sure my 19 year old nephew who is study­ing physics at UCLA could write a pretty con­vinc­ing book crit­i­ciz­ing string the­ory as well.
   Also, I don’t see how MIT could jus­tify all of the heavy breath­ing on cruise mis­sile pro­lif­er­a­tion. First of all, the topic has been cov­ered a num­ber of times in schol­arly jour­nals since before the Rumsfeld Commission report. Also, there is a rea­son why anti-​​ship cruise mis­siles are on the MTCR’s cater­gory II list — that horse has been out of the tech­no­log­i­cal barn for decades.
   Anti-​​ship cruise mis­siles are designed to hit large, slow mov­ing metal objects mov­ing across a flat plane (the ocean). Its not hard for any state to cob­ble together an altime­ter, barom­e­ter, clock and sim­ple active or pas­sive radar hom­ing sys­tem. The “DIY cruise mis­sile” guy in New Zealand got pretty far before the U.S. pres­sure the Kiwi gov­ern­ment to clamp down on his web­site.
   Although anti-​​ship cruise mis­siles in the hands of Iran do pose a threat, we should keep the ori­gin of that threat in per­spec­tive. Bronze medal (20–30 year-​​old) weapons tech­nolo­gies pro­lif­er­ate pretty quickly once their sci­ence hits avi­a­tion and engi­neer­ing text­books. Hyperventilating about it does nothing.

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