Theoretical science discussion!

[ricardo shillyshally]

Strategic Defence Initiative, Star Wars! 'How did this convergence of politics and science fiction, reality and fantasy, Washington and Hollywood come about? In his psycho-biographical study Ronald Reagan, the Movie, Michael Rogin traces Reagan's vision of missile defence back to the 1940 Warner Brothers movie Murder in the Air. In this film, Reagan plays a Secret Service agent who prevents a foreign spy from stealing the plans for a powerful new defensive weapon. By being able to stop and destroy any attacking vehicle or missile, this weapon will, according to one of the film's characters, `make America invincible in war and therefore be the greatest force for peace ever invented'. ....... More worryingly, according to Rogin, the President's identity and his conception of reality had been shaped by Hollywood films to such an extent that he was unable to step outside the fictions he had once inhabited'.(Peter Kramer).

[ricardo shillyshally]

Francis Crick was one of those scientists who questioned the obsession with death machines(working for MOD). He decided to use his methods from theoretical physics, and transferred them to biology. He was also known for his wild parties. DNA seems like firmware. Dawkins talks of the code being indestructible. 'Replicators are no longer
peppered freely through the sea; they are packaged in huge colonies-
individual bodies. And phenotypic consequences, instead of being evenly
distributed throughout the world, have in many cases congealed into
those same bodies. But the individual body, so familiar to us on our
planet, did not have to exist. The only kind of entity that has to exist in
order for life to arise, anywhere in the universe, is the immortal replicator.'(The Selfish Gene). If we start to look at ourselves, and history from the point of view of DNA, then all of life on the Earth is one entity, and DNA solves the problem of existing on a damp rock, flying around a gaseous star. It will continue to propagate, until it confronts another entity.(just thinking!)

[Tuesday Pajamas]

Brian May has a PhD in Astrophysics??? and other news for 2019 space exploration