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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 - 03:45pm Oct 4, 2003 EST (# 14300 of 14302)
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'm going on - there's not much to the last post, in my opinion.

I'm saying that going around in circles is essential to much human logic - and can convege - though it need not. Cantabb is, in general, against the idea. We're dealing with subject matter here that science writers - and "average readers of The New York Times" care about - and it seems to me that illustration of difficulties with "connections of the dots" is worth talking about - and relates to missile defense - ( imho ) because there is already much on this board about the technology of missile defense that can be focused and largely validaded by internal crosscheckings - many of them recursive.

Can such things converge ? Some "connections of the dots" do not converge - and people make emotion - laden jokes about it. I liked these pieces, that deal with problems of recursion without sufficient convergence - and for all I know, Cantabb might, as well ( though he may object to having them on this board. )

MIRROR MIRROR A History of the Human Love Affair With Reflection. By Mark Pendergrast. Illustrated. 404 pp. New York: Basic Books. . . was reviewed in

'Mirror Mirror': Lens Crafters By LIESL SCHILLINGER http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/10/books/review/10SCHILL.html

"PSST -- want to save $160,000? Don't send your son to college; slip him this book instead. It shoehorns an entire liberal arts education into a cultural history of mirrors that touches on architecture, anthropology, sex, painting, myth, religion, math, science, magic, astronomy, literature, business, espionage and warfare, and travels from the Big Bang to the rise and fall of the Greek and Roman Empires, the waxing and waning of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the discovery of the New World and, at last, space: the final frontier. Anyone who masters the contents of ''Mirror Mirror'' need never fear Trivial Pursuit again.

"In the last dozen years or so, a spate of books has capitalized on the public's fascination with certain of the more easily recognized nouns (tobacco, salt and pencils quickly come to mind) and the halo of factoids that surrounds them. Mark Pendergrast is no stranger to this type of literary ''Jeopardy!,'' having previously produced two books about beverages, one on Coca-Cola, one on coffee. This time he goes meta, embracing the broadest conception of his noun possible, thought up by a Basran Persian named Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (known in the West as Alhazen) 1,000 years ago (''Every visible object that is not a direct light source is a kind of mirror''), while adding a proviso by the 13th-century English theologian Robert Grosseteste (''Each thing contains all other things'') and a caution from modern astrophysicists (all these things may exist in duplicate, triplicate or infinicate in ''multiple mirror universes being created all the time'').

"How could a subject so all-embracing fail to grab the interest of any but the most blamably incurious shut-in? And yet, how does one pay attention to . . . everything? Luckily, the book's title turns out to be a misnomer; the author cares little for the looking glass, which he deplores as a vicious tool that ''helped transform the United States into a pleasure-seeking, vain, celebrity-driven society.'' He is interested in the telescope, whose powers depend on mirrored lenses. En route to his true focus (the mirror in science), Pendergrast screeches past the checkpoints in the history of reflection in a no-brakes Grand Prix through Western Civ 101.

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