NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/sci/physics/19284

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-19 | 7.2 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!sun-barr!cs.utexas.edu!asuvax!chnews!sedona!bhoughto
From: [e-mail] (Blair P. Houghton)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Re: Religion & Physics Don't Mix
Date: 20 Nov 1992 07:14:56 GMT
Organization: Intel Corp., Chandler, Arizona
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In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Cameron Randale Bass) writes:
>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Blair P. Houghton) writes:
>>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Cameron Randale Bass) writes:
>>>     Madness is also in the eye of the beholder.
>>
>>A disingenuous and logically bereft statement, at best.
>
>     Apparently you believe it is true since you do not seem to
>     have taken my bet that the majority of the first ten psychaiatrists
>     I asked would not share your definition of psychosis.

How rigidly do you want to define my definition, which ten
psychiatrists (I need somewhere to send the bribes) and do
you imagine that in the face of your obviously delicate
condition they will antagonize you by even admitting that
psychosis exists?

>>20 years, 2 million blocks, and it was a public-works
>>project that provided a damping of economic variation
>>during the periodic lulls in the continuous rotation of
>>the dozens of crops grown in the Nile floodplains.
>>
>>Imhotep invented workfare.
>
>     Hogwash.   Show me documentary evidence that a) it took 20 years

Show me documentary evidence that there is a God.

>     b) it was a 'public works' project of the nature of 'workfare'.
>     I'd even be satisfied with good numbers on the number of
>     people required to construct it.  You have them cutting, moving and
>     placing nearly 300 blocks a day, every day for 20 years.

Check out any good, recent resource on Egyptology.

That period was marked by the appearance of large
granaries; the heiroglyphics and graphics of the time
indicate that taxes were collected in grain and workers
were paid from the taxes.  The Nile valley has several
dozen "growing seasons".  Different crops use the land
differently, and require different climate (not wildly
different; just rains and winds).  The floods fertilize the
land with silt, annually.  But each farming community has
some time during which its choice of crop rotations had a
slack time, and then they went to the goverment for work
and food.

The average (2e6stones/20y) is about 300 stones a day; if
you look at a pyramid, though, you see that it's big at the
bottom and small at the top, meaning there's more room to
work in the beginning; and, getting stones up the structure
takes time and energy (and the building of ramps), so you
can get less done as the pyramid rises.  In the beginning
they'd have been able to place several thousand stones per
day; in the last few weeks perhaps only a few per day.

>     That there hole is quite a ways from that there rock pile by
>     foot.  A

That there hole is about half a mile from the pyramid.  95%
of the volume is raw limestones quarried halfway down the
hill from the pyramid to the river.  The rest is high-quality
white limestone from several miles up-river.  The outer
stones were carefully shaped before they were placed, then
smoothed.  At the time the Great Pyramid was complete, it
would have been near-perfectly smooth (chisel ridges, no
waves or rough spots) and shimmering white.  Now most of
the outer stones have crumbled off, and the rest (most that
remain are near the top) have grown brown with oxidation.

On hard surfaces they used rollers.  On soft surfaces they
used dusty dirt paths studded with transverse timbers, by
wetting the clay dust on the timbers, you produce a slick
surface on which a wooden sled slides very easily.  All it
takes is some rope, a water-skin, and 5-10 people per stone
to pull it along at walking speeds.  As the inner stones are
placed they need some rough fitting, which produces a large
quantity of large limestone chips.  When these are mixed
with mud and layered, they form a good material for
building the ramps, which carried the wood-tied paths,
and spiraled up around the pyramid.  It takes 10-20 people
to pull a stone up a 5-10% grade, but at this point the
rate of placement of stones is decreasing.

Call it 20,000 heads at the peak of activity, and you can
get the job done.  Not a lot for a region with a population
of nearly a million.  They'd have come from the entire
length of the nile and a hundred miles either side of
it--pretty much the entire civilized world at the time.

Now, it only takes a thousand people six years to build
something as intricate as the World Trade Center, which
won't last a tenth of the 7000 years the Great Pyramid's
owned the planet.

>     Apparently you have not heard of the rather common practice of
>     appropriating the work of previous rulers as one's own.

The previous rulers had over the previous 200 years
constructed 5 other major Egyptian pyramids and dozens of
minor ones, most in the same 10 sq. mi. area of the Nile
valley.  The Great Pyramid was begun and completed during
20 years of the life of the guy they buried in it.

I'm surprised you didn't bring up slavery.

There appears to have been none, since we've found no
evidence of any shackles or whips or chains; but I'm
surprised you didn't invoke it.  You were probably waiting
to spring your Civil Engineers From Outer Space theory on
me...

>     By the way, by my definition, such work programs are insanty.  And yet...

The only insanity around here is my continued subornation
of this joke you call an argument.

>     Madness is in the eye of the beholder.  Parts of their society
>     remain today while the competing societies have vanished.

They probably died happy, though.

>>>     It is inappropriate to judge theology by the rules of science.
>>Only to a twit.
>     More of that vaunted logic?  I'm impressed.
>     "... I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of
>     a personal God is a childlike one.  You may call me an agnostic,
>     but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional
>     atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation
>     from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth.
>     I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness
>     of our intellectual understanding of nature and our own
>     being."
>                              Albert Einstein (1949)

In other words, Einstein rejects God.  I'm not quite a
professional athiest, either, just an itinerant one,
practicing my pirouettes and parry-thrusts on your
ever-flatter cranium.

>     Apparently there are many of us twits who have the wisdom to realize

I'd hardly call misinterpreting Einstein's passage "wisdom."

>     that there are things outside of science, and that outside, we have
>     only opinions.

That's hardly what Einstein said, but you'll come to
realize that, in time.

                --Blair
                  "You're gonna do pushups
                   until *I'm* tired."
                   -My DI, on many occasions