Re: The Generation of Wormholes for interstellar travel

:: Every reference source I have access to states that as a body with
:: mass accelerates, it gains in mass.  Now I grant you that my
:: information is a bit old, but all of them agree that the mechanism
:: for this is unknown. 

: Erik Max Francis <max@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
: Apparently you're not using very good books, then. 

True.  Another way of looking at it, is that Rodney's explanation is
an attempt to provide a mechanism to explain relativistic effects as
distortions of objects as they move faster and faster wrt some special
standard of motion.

The thing is, that was the method everybody was trying in the late 1800s,
and the special standard of motion was called "the luminiferous ether"
among other things.  What Einstein did was dispense with the nontion that
objects were being distorted by moving.  So in advancing this explanation,
Rodney is simply re-covering ground thoroughly tilled and discarded by
people more than a hundred years ago.

So.  It shouldn't be too surprising that when folks notice somebody
explaining something by methods that were abandoned as unfruitful more
than a century ago, the folks don't take the somebody too seriously. 
About as seriously as they'd take somebody trying to explain planetary
motions with epicycles.


Wayne Throop   throopw@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
   http://sheol.org/throopw