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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?

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rshow55 - 03:02pm Sep 11, 2003 EST (# 13608 of 13611)
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 was asked to think about the nuts and bolts questions of building "concrete bridges to and from abstract worlds." ( It wasn't as clear as that - people were stumped - the bolded phrase just before is lchic's phrase. ) I was asked, in the most concrete, nutsy boltsy way, to do what I could to take the magic out of connection between tangible physical things and their mathematical representations.

I've worked on that. A lot of that work would have gone faster if I'd been clear - explicitly clear - about the key organizing fact that all the math that is applicable to science and engineering can be traced back, in a relatively few steps, to the core

. Geometry . . . . Calculus

. Arithmetic . . . Algebra

And each of these basic fields informs the others in focusing fashion - every which way.

That's a fact you could explain to a kid - or classes of kids. It would be useful to do so.

I've worked with these books from time to time - and each one of them would have been written differently, more easily, and might have taken logic further- if the fact just above had been clear - and part of the culture.

. Mathematics and Logic by Mark Kac and Stanislaw M. Ulam ( Ulam has often been called the other father of the H-bomb http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.N1U6bBMLEee.8541375@.f28e622/15276 ) available from Dover - a reprinting of Mathematics and Logic - Retrospect and Prospects , an Britannica Perspective prepared to commemmorate the 200th Anniversary of the Encyclopedia Britannica 1968 ( written at the request of a committee close to the committee that published Kuhn )

. Similitude and Approximation Theory by Stephen J. Kline McGraw-Hill, 1965

. What is Mathematics, Really? by Reuben Hirsch

. The Limits of Mathematics by Gregory. J. Chaitin Springer - 1997.

And many others. The entire mathematical tradition - in its interaction with itself, and with the wider world - would be clearer and could become more coherent if the simple fact that all the math that is applicable to science and engineering comes from

. Geometry . . . . Calculus

. Arithmetic . . . Algebra

Were more sharply and widely known. And that fact can easily be taught - at different levels, fit to different maturities and interests..

Sometimes relations converge . Getting the convergence isn't easy. But the answer, once it is found - can be very useful.

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