How many angels can you fit on a pin? Why even pose such a silly question? Well it can effectively distract people with overlarge brains from focussing on this world rather than the next.
 
Jonathan is of course right. Why are we focussing on the speed of light when we are a climate crisis forum? What we can be sure of is that our collective mind will not solve climate change at the speed of light. The rest is infantile....
 
I remember hearing Sir Rudolph Pierls the inventor of the H bomb trigger harang a group of Pugwash scientists. Individually you are brilliant - collectively you are stupid! he went on to argue that all people and all organisations have a stupidity factor which he labelled sigma. he said one of the objectives of intelligent people and intelligent organisations should be to reduce their sigma level...that time has come for us. DO we really need a reminder like that from someone who has made lethal warfare almost a matter of omnicide? Well er ...yes!
 
We have a choice - we can decide that we are a contemplative group interested in social astronomy or we can focus. At the moment we can contemplate the price we will pay and some are paying already. In the last few weeks we have seen the movement of climate and conflict refugees from Africa to Europe, the recent climate change camp at Drax very successfully creating headlines worldwide about global warming and the quiet announcement that one of the world's biggest missile companies Raytheon has put into production a microwave weapon for perimeter control.....Meanwhile we are told in Lebannon that 100,000 explosive remnants of war have been left. These will not be cleared at the speed of light but most probably by NGO's and UN de-miners and of course children whose limbs will be turned into offal...
 
So if some  wish to continue talking about the speed of light then fair play...but military forces meanwhile will not be debating philosophy of science matters but how best to militarise the border control dillemmas imposed by climate change. We've seen how easy the civil liberties and human rights dimensions of the current war against terror have been so easily cast aside...some of us are going to be very embararssed when those techniques are refocussed in the days that lie ahead. We have some time - lets leave the how many angels on a pin/speed of light debates for a while until we have done at least as much as the climate change camp in making a difference.......
 
 
Steve

---

From: Discussion list for the Crisis Forum on behalf of Jonathan Ward
Sent: Sat 09/09/2006 11:03
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: RESTORING HONESTY IN SCIENCE

all,

surely issues such as the veracity of fundamental laws and theories in
physics can only be discussed by physicists. i would not argue over
technical points in another subject unless i had a firm grounding in all the
relevant facts and theories and methods.

secondly, for the purposes of a discussion group such as this, we need only
be concerned with the impact of the areas of sciences (or any other subject)
which are affecting the crises we talk about. we need to be practical. if
discussing an area of subject that is well-described, and this theory can be
empirically tested again and again without failure, then don't we need to
use it?

going back to the speed of light issue:

Finally, we come to the conclusion that the speed of light is not only
observed to be constant; in the light of well tested theories of physics, it
does not even make any sense to say that it varies.

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLight/speed_of_light.html

easy to find something on the internet which contradicts the argument.

but read further:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6092.html

The speed of light, one of the most sacrosanct of the universal physical
constants, may have been lower as recently as two billion years ago - and
not in some far corner of the universe, but right here on Earth.

so yes, astronomers have started a debate on long term temporal stability of
the speed of light, with the term alpha, depending on c, changing by several
  parts in 10*15. no change found in the last 2 billion years. however,
talking about the speed of light's constancy is a tricky business. you need
to consider medium (and changes within that medium over time), the frame of
reference (is it an accelerating frame), and is it absolute constancy, or
relative constancy? everytime you put light through glass or water or
anything with a different refractive index, you are changing its speed.

and so the debate goes on. theories are often challenged. sometimes they are
changed as a result, sometime they are not, the asserstions of the
challenger are debunked. but the rest of the empirical physics still occurs,
we can see and test that. it is a subject that is about creating best-fit
theories to allow us to understand and predict the world around us to the
best of our abilities. challenging einstein's theory of relativity will not
change our understanding at a practical level of the the physics of thermal
transfer, convection currents and solar energy transfer and greenhouse
effect modelling. and this is my point. we have tools that work currently,
some better than others. but these are what we need to be concentrating on.
the most urgently needed ones.

physics, philosophically is often in crisis. and probably will continue to
be, as it is a subject that tries to understand the fundementals of a
universe. but it will be contested by other physicists.

so this is a crisis-forum, but i thought we would be discussing clear and
present dangers, crises that impact upon all facets of our lives. whether c
is constant or not does not change our lives presently, just our
understanding. water shortages, overpopulation, climate change, peakoil,
wars, plagues, extreme weather, energy shortages - these are the crises that
are affecting us now, or will be soon. should be we discussing these and in
more detail?

best,

Jonathan
To view the terms under which this email is distributed, please go to http://disclaimer.leedsmet.ac.uk/email.htm