America the Police State

[Baron Munchausen]

Yes, "John Titor" makes some rather eerie predictions. The out-right civil war doesn't start until 2008, though. Some sort of civil unrest is supposed to start around the 2004 election, and I suppose it's entirely possible that some protest movement might get going in the next few months. The confrontations between government agents and resistors keep getting worse and worse (he described it as 'a Waco type situation every month, constantly getting worse' as I recall) until it reaches a critical mass around 2008 and people realize it's outright war between the government and the resistance. You're right that one of the people talking to him asked 'how will we know who is the enemy' and he responded 'they'll be the ones arresting people and holding them without due process'. That sounds pretty accurate after the so-called 'Patriot Act' and additions were passed.

[Baron Munchausen]

sachmo said:
I had a link to a site where a professor blows all of Titor's "science" out of the water. Wish I could find it, but the bottom line is people will believe what they want to believe.

Actually, you cannot 'blow Titor's "science" out of the water' because he doesn't explain it in enough detail. And he admitted he's not a scientist so anything 'wrong' about it could just as easily be his own misunderstanding. I don't think you can refute the Titor material based on science. We either need proof of who he was (i.e. a real person living here & how has to be shown to be the hoaxer) or we need to see history go in a completely different direction than he predicted. Right now it looks like his take on history was frighteningly close. The one thing that baffles me is how the EU would send an army against the Russians. Now there's a truly 'off the wall' prediction. Still, if people here in the US start shooting at each other by 2008 I'd be thinking about getting a 1950s style nuclear bunker in the backyard before 2015 arrives... or maybe moving to Australia.

[sachmo]

Baron Munchausen said:

Actually, you cannot 'blow Titor's "science" out of the water' because he doesn't explain it in enough detail. And he admitted he's not a scientist so anything 'wrong' about it could just as easily be his own misunderstanding. I don't think you can refute the Titor material based on science. We either need proof of who he was (i.e. a real person living here & how has to be shown to be the hoaxer) or we need to see history go in a completely different direction than he predicted. Right now it looks like his take on history was frighteningly close. The one thing that baffles me is how the EU would send an army against the Russians. Now there's a truly 'off the wall' prediction. Still, if people here in the US start shooting at each other by 2008 I'd be thinking about getting a 1950s style nuclear bunker in the backyard before 2015 arrives... or maybe moving to Australia.

Well sir, try this:

http://communities.anomalies.net/cgi...=000482#000000

It was good enough for me, anyway. Titor was entertaining, and he sure fooled a lot of people, but...

[sachmo]

Or for those who don't like links:

With Dr. Robert Brown's permission I am posting his replies to my emails to him regarding his opinion of the Titor saga.

I haven't posted his email address. I've been in contact with him as has a member of the Above Top Secret board. He's been very kind in spending a considerable amount of time in considering and formulating his replies. As you can see in his reply below, he's agreed to spend even more time on this but he also requests that the number of persons inquiring be very limited. I'll post his replies without editing them and I respectfully ask that you let me be the person who contacts him...I do not want this kind and valuable source to dry up:
------------------------------------------------
> From: "Robert G. Brown"
> Date: 2003/09/08 Mon AM 11:34:00 EDT
> To: "E. W. Darbyshire"
> Subject: Re: Thank You For Your Replies Re. John Titor
>

> Well, I'm not really an expert in differential geometry or general
> relativity, although I'm pretty competent in E&M and special
> relativity, including the "grown up" forms (group theory and arbitrary
> boosts and rotations via generators, not just kiddie-physics Lorentz
> transformations).
>
> However, I'd listen to Kaku, if nobody else, reason being some of
> "Titor"'s time-travel "facts" sound suspiciously like they came
> straight from Kaku's "Hyperspace", right down to the "who couldn't
> love strings" discussion. What, Kaku's book is STILL popular reading
> in 2036? I thoroughly enjoyed it myself, but don't see it surviving
> until then any more than anybody goes around reading "1-2-3 Infinity"
> any more.
>
> In my previous replies, I really haven't gotten started on Titor's
> physics -- or his engineering, which is even more egregious. Just
> this one last time, I will waste a few hours on this by pointing out
> only a few of the problems. Most serious physicists would probably
> not bother to waste the time -- you are just lucky I'm not a serious
> physicist;-)
>
> For example, he asserts that his black holes are "the size of an
> electron" in several places.
>
> Say what?
>
> An electron is an elementary particle. Elementary particles in
> physics have no structure -- they are not composite particle bound
> together with some additional force and hence possessed of a spectral
> structure. Contrast the electron with the atom (made up of nucleus and
> electrons; we ARE part of the structure inherent to this system:-).
> With the nucleus (neutrons and protons, glued with nuclear force,
> plenty of shell structure:-). With the proton and the neutron
> (elementary quarks glued with gluons, and yes, there is structure in
> the form of an SU(3) particle zoo). In all these cases the particles
> have a "size" consisting of the physical extent of the composite
> particle wavefunction.
>
> An electron or quark is NOT made up (so far as we can tell) of smaller
> particles glued together. As far as we can tell, with very high
> energy collisions, they have no physical extent and are >>truly
> pointlike entities<<. In fact, we EXPECT elementary particles to be
> pointlike entities, as if they are not pointlike (and if they are
> charged) we have to figure out what ADDITIONAL force binds all the
> charge together -- the particle suddenly has a rather large energy
> associated with its binding.
>
> So why say his BH's are the "size of an electron" when there ain't any
> such thing? Why not say they are "1.7 fermi in diameter" or "the size
> of a proton" (same order of magnitude, and this is a number that
> actually exists at least to some approximation). Or just give us the
> mass -- 10^12 kg, for example. Perhaps because there are some
> PROBLEMS with that mass, hmmm.
>
> There is actually a lot of interesting physics associated with the
> notion of e.g. electron size. Without boring you with details, there
> are lovely papers by Dirac, McManus and others concerning radiation
> reaction, preacceleration, electron size/shape in the classical
> regime. However, the most amusing result of all of this in the current
> context is that there IS one (classical) sense in which an electron
> can be assigned a "size" (and another in a quantum sense, but that is
> clearly not what he means here as the BH would be much too large to be
> believable, not that this one IS believable).
>
> If one assumes that the electron is a ball of uniform charge, and that
> the self-energy of all of this charge (bound together with some
> mythical charge-glue for which there isn't a shred of evidence to the
> best of my
> knowledge) is equal to the mass energy, then one gets (ignoring scalar
> factors of order unity and using "latex" to do ascii algebra, hopefully
> fairly clearly):
>
> \frac{ k e^2} {a} = m_e c^2
>
> which can be solved for a, the classical electron radius:
>
> a = \frac{k e^2}{m_e c^2} \approx 3 fm
>
> which is not at all coincidentally the same order as the size of the
> proton or the nucleus of your choice, which DOES confine a net charge
> of order e with a stronger attractive force but (consequently) has a
> much larger mass. The Schwarzchild radius for the electron mass is
> determined from a very similar computation (again neglecting scalar
> factors order unity)
>
> \frac{ G m_e^2} {r_s} = m_e c^2
>
> or
>
> r_s = \frac{G m_e^2}{m_e c^2} = \frac{G m_e}{c^2}
>
> which is number so tiny as to be meaningless (order 10^-57 meters,
> smaller than the Planck length and hence it IS meaningless).
>
> An amusing computation: Suppose r_s = 1 fm (somewhat smaller than "an
> electron"). Then m_BH = r_s*c^2/G, right? Plug 'n' chug. On my
> calculator, 10^-15 * 9x10^16/6.67x10^-11 \approx 10^12 kg. Let's see,
> that would be, um, a billion metric tons, the mass of a cube of water
> 1000 meters to the side (as 1000^3 = 10^9 and water conveniently
> masses a metric ton, 10^3 kg per cubic meter. How come nobody in your
> group actually did these simple computations?
>
> His suitcase contains TWO of these? He carried this suitcase on a 67
> Chevy? Man, they must put a hell of a suspension in those babies...
>
> Maybe he meant some other "radius of the electron". Alas that I don't
> know of any, as the electron doesn't have a radius in the first place
> and even the classical radius above is thus a fairly meaningless
> artifact. Still, let's suppose that he (a lay person and
> self-confessed physics idiot) was "confused" and that he meant that
> the BH's in question were around 10^-24 meters in radius, which is what
> I get for BH's that mass >>1<< metric ton. We'll use this number
> below just for the hell of it, since I vaguely recall hemming and
> hawing by him on the list that suggested that this is the order of
> magnitude of the size of his BH's. Ha.
>
> Next, Titor claims to shoot electrons into his BH to keep up its mass
> and do all sorts of other things. Oh my sweet Jesus.
>
> If you "shoot electrons into a BH", this has the unfortunate side
> effect of making the ball more and more negatively charged. This has
> all sorts of interesting (classical) consequences:
>
> a) It becomes harder to shoot each additional charge in. It is
> easy to think "Oh my, it is a black hole and hence gravity MUST be the
> strongest force present", but this is not only not the case it isn't
> even CLOSE. Compare ke^2 \approx 10^-28 to GM_b m_e \approx 10^-29
> and one sees that within a factor order ten they are the SAME, with
> electrostatic repulsion likely somewhat higher, and this is assuming,
> BTW, that the BH mass is 10^12 kg and not 1000 kg.
>
> b) Wait! Doesn't that mean that if I shoot one electron in
> (charging the black hole to -e) that the SECOND electron I shoot into
> a BH of mass around 10^12 kg is precisely unbound at the black hole
> radius? So that the black hole may be black for a lot of things, but
> not electrons? It does. For a black hole to remain bound, the NET
> FORCE on its components has to create accelerations of order c^2/r_s.
> Two electrons inside radius a have a repulsive energy (NOT attractive)
> on the same order as the gravitational binding energy of the entire
> black hole of the same radius to the same electron. Shooting the
> second electron into the black hole has a significant chance of
> knocking the first electron OUT of the black hole (as it becomes
> unbound) and REDUCING its mass. Or worse.
>
> c) Wait again, don't we have to think about quantum mechanics
> somewhere in here? We do indeed. Even in quantum mechanics the
> "classical electron radius" is an important number. It is the
> separation point where two electrons possess enough energy to think
> seriously about engaging in pair production (scattering
> electron-positron pairs out of the vaccuum), as they have enough
> energy to do so, if they have some mass around to use to conserve this
> and that in the process.
>
> In fact, another way of viewing the process classically described in
> b) is that the second electron gets close to the charged black hole,
> creates a virtual electron-positron pair while scattering off of it,
> the positron falls in (attracted by that negative charge AND gravity)
> where it annihilates an electron in the BH. The two electrons -- the
> one you shot in and the leftover from pair production -- scatter to
> infinity and "escape". The black hole itself has more internal
> kinetic energy (is "hotter"), is less massive, and less stable.
>
> IIRC the c) process roughly describes one of Hawking's instabilities,
> except that he envisions it occurring continuously near the event
> horizon of small black holes. Any charge imbalance or field imbalance
> in the electromagnetic force would be nearly instantly neutralized out
> of the vaccuum at the expense of the BH mass, and even when neutral
> vaccuum polarization makes decay a steady process. Titor shrugged off
> Hawking, which he could likely get away with since Hawking is likely
> too smart to waste his time on this sort of nonsense. If only I were
> as smart myself...:-)
>
> One could go on and on, so I will. We argue above that a BH this size
> cannot stably be charged (or be stabilized by shooting charged
> particles into it). Can it have a magnetic moment? Not without a
> charge and a spin and it cannot have a charge (although I'm almost
> surprised that Titor didn't assert that his BH contained magnetic
> monopoles, given all his other tall tales:-). Without a charge or
> magnetic moment, how do we hold on to it? How do we ENGINEER
> confinement, even in 2036? See below.
>

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > (Darby's Question): Is there any chance that you can identify the attached jpg? It was
> > posted by Titor as a cutaway schematic of his gadget. It appears to
> > me to be a vacuum tube based piece of 1960's technology. It was
> > suggested to me that it's a pre-internet Arpanet server - but I
> > haven't a clue. I sent a copy to UC Santa Barbara to see if they
> > can ID it. So far, no luck.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

>
> Naw, I have no idea what it is -- maybe a klystron unit of some sort
> for a radar at a guess -- but who cares? This schematic is ridiculous
> as a BH confinement/manipulation mechanism. Let's start by addressing
> the question of how we hold onto a black hole that we cannot stick a
> significant charge or magnetic moment on. Or even one where we can.
>
> We don't. Not ONLY do we have to create the damn thing, we have to
> keep it from falling into Earth's welcoming gravitational well.
> Clearly, if it masses 10^12 kg, we don't. Period. Ever. I don't
> care if you are an advanced society that has been around evolving
> brain for a million years LONGER than humans -- if you start playing
> with billion-metric-ton black holes near the surface of your planet
> you are only here for a visit. This is E.E. "Doc" Smith level (e.g.
> crap) science fiction.
>
> Now, if they mass LESS than a metric ton, I don't know why one would
> bother making them at all, and as noted above this is sort of the
> number I recall from some fraction of the online discussion, so let's
> pretend that the BH's are 10^3 kg each and that Titor knows just about
> as much about the radius of the electron as the history major he
> claims to be might know.
>
> We now have TWO of these pups, each weighing a metric ton, inside of
> the little chassis below (the size of an oversized suitcase, again
> from list discussion, at any rate small enough to fit into a pickup
> truck)?
>
> Hmmm. A suitcase that weighs half as much as my Ford Excursion.
> Hmmm, my Excursion supports its not inconsiderable weight on big,
> heavy, steel girders. Even my wimpy Ford Contour (which weighs just
> about as much as this suitcase and its two black holes) uses quite a
> bit of steel in its construction, and one would really hate to run
> over a toe with its far more lightly loaded steel belted radial tires.
>
> We thus have TWO very serious engineering problems that immediately
> come to mind. Well, actually more than two, more like thirty or forty
> or fifty. However, one is keeping the black hole containers from
> ripping through the bottom of the suitcase itself. Think of the BH
> containers as being leedle support posts, cross sectional area of a
> few centimeters squared each, HOLDING UP A FORD CONTOUR. Hmmm, think
> we need a little more than four little reinforced corners on the box
> that look sort of like thingies you'd find on the corners of
> loudspeakers or a suitcase or something else with cardboard sides.
> And wait, where are the four inch I-beams in the flooring? Where are
> the grappling eyes on the side (or are humans supposed to lift this
> thing in and out by HAND?). And this thing was riding in the back of
> a small pickup truck? Hmmm, not so sure that a SMALL pickup truck
> could support my Contour as well and not blow out its tires and wreck
> its suspension, especially a pickup truck that was 70 years old and
> hard to get parts for.
>
> Then there is the even more interesting question: Fine, perhaps they
> have new materials. Maybe the case has synthetic diamond struts in
> the bottom, laced into a steel cementation so that one cm of thickness
> is enough to support a metric ton without any sort of localized
> bracing or structural forms, spread out over may 100 cm^2.
>
> EVEN SO, INSIDE of those little BH container are the BH's themselves.
> They have to be held, far from any contact with matter, by means of
> raw E&M forces (unless we're going to suggest new physics, and new
> physics here would be indefensible I assure you).
>
> The mere thought of this has me ROTFL. Seriously. I >>teach<<
> graduate E&M, and I assure you that the problem of magnetic
> confinement of thermonuclear plasmas is child's play compared to the
> problem of confining an object 10^-25 meters across with a metric ton
> of mass against the Earth's gravitational field, the presumed motion
> of the long-suffering Chevy pickup truck (gawd, accelerations in
> arbitrary
> directions!) and so forth. You see, all the fields involved have to
> satisfy the laplace equation, and this means that it is almost
> impossible to create an even weakly attractive region capable of
> suspending wimpy things like atoms that is STABLE in both a vertical
> direction and its transverse plane. Try suspending the equivalent of a
> small car not on the head of a pin, not on an atom, not on a classical
> ELECTRON, but on an area that aspires to be a mathematical point. Ho,
> excuse me, I have to wipe my eyes again. Really, a delicious picture.
> I'd sooner believe in the time travel part.
>
> And wait, where the HELL is the hardware for accomplishing this
> fu**in' miracle? Oh, yeah, those leedle balls. Hey mon, we don't
> need no stinkin' massive magnetic coils, no gigavolt capacitors, no
> bus bars the thickness of your wrist. No mon, we got room temperature
> superconductors, we got new magnetic materials mon, we got monopoles.
> We can stabilize the BH, mon, and move it around and make it bounce in
> waves. Hawking? Who is this Hawking mon? Sure, it stable against
> pair-production-mediated decay. So what if its Schwarzchild radius is
> WAY WAY smaller than the radius where vaccuum polarization electron
> pair production begins to be significant and there is enough energy in
> the gravity well to knock particles out of the vaccuum. It just
> doesn't happen.
>
> But by damn, we still got old-fashioned BNC-style wiring connectors
> mon, labelled 11. We still got klystrons and big, heavy power
> switches. And we don't need no stinkin' radiation protection mon --
> the fact that we have to shoot about eleventy-zillion electrons at
> very high energy in an intense electron beam to get ONE ELECTRON to
> impact on a highly repulsive sphere with a radius of ~10^-24 meters
> (without creating a shower of secondary particles that cause the BH to
> DECAY) means nothing, mon. We definitely don't need no bending
> magnets, no quadrupolar lenses, no accelerator. Hell mon, we can put
> a gigavolt accelerator inside of a coffee pot now mon -- it's 2036 and
> we're very tribal now -- and run it with an ordinary eco-approved
> household battery! Although we don't have to, the suitcase comes with
> its own fusion generatory mon...it could run a small city if only we
> could plug it in.
>
> Seriously, I could go on and on and on. I haven't even gotten to the
> raw thermodynamics of it all. That suitcase would require a small
> lake to cool in operation, for example. And then the culture capable
> of these miracles of technology that indicate total mastery of
> materials science, quantum mechanics, gravity, superconductors, a
> society that has in its possession a star drive (for the goddamn thing
> would clearly work as such as easily as a "time machine" -- arbitrary
> translation in four space is arbitrary translation in four space and
> they have to play all sorts of games to NOT go off into space FTL)
> then is sending somebody back to our time to get an IBM 5100, a piece
> of **** computer that is an embarrassment to IBM to this day, because
> it is somehow capable of some translation chore that appears to be
> beyond them and is related to the Unix non-problem of a 4 byte
> unsigned int counter for its current time?
>
> This is so clearly a joke that I still cannot believe anybody at all
> fell for it. It's not even a good joke (believe me, I programmed
> briefly on the 5100 and I know:-).
>
> What, did all the programmers in the world suffer brain damage in the
> war? Physics got really popular and they could no longer get anybody
> to learn to program? Computers do all the programming now and
> programming in C or perl is a lost art? Computers have come to life
> and are on strike for better working conditions so they are reduced to
> finding and bringing "back" an IBM 5100 (out of ALL THE COMPUTERS THAT
> WERE EVER
> BUILT) in preference to just bringing back a goddamn programming
> reference for the language(s) they need to translate and building a
> translator with e.g. perl on a 2036 teraflop PDA?
>
> Let me be very, very clear on this. I know that there is a tendency
> to want to suspend disbelief on things like this. Heck, it is a nifty
> story, kind of science fiction thing, Orson Welles War of the Worlds
> internet style. It's "fun" to pretend to believe and kick this sort
> of thing around, but:
>
> WHO COULD POSSIBLY TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY?
>
> Screw the physics -- although I personally am by no means convinced
> that physics even >>permits<< the kind of singularity free time travel
> they (for this was surely a consortium of jokers) propose. The
> ENGINEERING is ludicrous. The COMPUTATION is ludicrous (where are the
> goddam computers in the suitcase? Where is the programming and
> control interface? Are we supposed to believe that this box has one
> knob and a switch as a control interface? Where are all the wires?).
> And as I explained in a reply to somebody else, the entire multiverse
> story totally ignores the problems of chaos, conservation laws,
> thermodynamic balance and oh, so much more -- the mere EXISTENCE of a
> multiverse has consequences in terms of detailed balance and entropy
> flow in the universe we occupy, and time travel creates a HUGE phase
> space for global entropy to increase in. You'd never get home again,
> not without a theory that permitted you to very precisely steer. You'd
> never get close. Period.
>
> I personally have never liked time travel stories (although I've read
> plenty of them) because they are so difficult to disentangle on the
> basis of chaos alone (as explored in at least one memorable story,
> where a single butterfly was killed in a visit to the Jurassic or the
> like, and upon return the entire Universe was totally different -- as
> it would be if a single ATOM were displaced a single ATOMIC RADIUS,
> let alone a butterfly). I do somewhat enjoy multiverse stories, and
> have even written (but not yet published) one.
>
> In my opinion, this isn't even a good multiverse story. Somebody is
> going to come forth one day and publish a whole book on how they made
> fun of the entire Internet with a bad story, a sad reflection on the
> gullability of our culture.
>
> And before you ask, yes, y'all can feel free to republish any or all
> of my replies on your lists, as long as you don't ask me to join them
> and keep my time-wasting interface to a minimum of a couple or three
> people. The sooner this matter is really put to rest, the sooner we
> can all return to leading useful and productive lives DOING SOMETHING
> ELSE:-)
>
> Pardon me while I blow my nose and dry my eyes. There. I feel much
> better now.
>
> Now let's leave it alone, shall we?
>
> rgb
>
> --
> Robert G. Brown > >Duke University Dept. of Physics>
>
>

Like I said, people believe what they want to. Just don't pay too much for that shelter, ok Baron?

[Atrocities]

Makinus said:
I don�t remember who said it, but it is true:

"One person is intelligent and reasonable, but a group of persons is a beast controlled by basic and irrational instincts."

Men In Black. - Tommy Lee Jones

[Makinus]

yeah, that�s it! i knew it was in a movie but i didn�t remember wich one!

[Baron Munchausen]

Interesting thought, considering whether the containment of singularities is possible in such a small device rather than worrying about the truth of the time travel discussion. But as I said, any errors of scientific fact can be attributed to his own misunderstanding of the processes involved. The actual predictions are much more important.

If his predictions turn out to be more-or-less correct, it's probably smarter to leave the country than to build a shelter anyway. And besides that, travel can be interesting and worthwhile for other reasons than fleeing conflicts.

[Suicide Junkie]

The tech is totally bogus.

The discussion the political statements generate is the only thing about it that really matters.

[sachmo]

Baron Munchausen said:
Interesting thought, considering whether the containment of singularities is possible in such a small device rather than worrying about the truth of the time travel discussion. But as I said, any errors of scientific fact can be attributed to his own misunderstanding of the processes involved. The actual predictions are much more important.

If his predictions turn out to be more-or-less correct, it's probably smarter to leave the country than to build a shelter anyway. And besides that, travel can be interesting and worthwhile for other reasons than fleeing conflicts.

Well, I wouldn't lose sleep over his predictions turning out correct.

So the bit of science that Titor offers is debunked by someone who seems to know what they are talking about, and we can just sidestep this by saying that Titor himself didn't "understand science"?

It's a good study in human behavior, I'd say, but a bit sad, too.

[Baron Munchausen]

A degree doesn't make you automatically right. The 'debunker' makes several obvious mistakes himself, such as the mass of the black holes. It is clearly stated in Titor's posts that they are around 200 pounds each, so that the machine is around 500 pounds total. And yet he insists on claiming that he couldn't possibly have a machine that size with a metric ton (2,200 lbs) of black holes in it. Well, since he doesn't claim to have one, the impossibility of this 'fact' doesn't amount to a 'disproof' of anything, does it? This is called the 'straw man' in logic. A fake rebuttal of something that the other party didn't claim.

I repeat, he didn't claim to know the science, so his knowledge of the science isn't a worthwhile test of his reliability. Would you like to compare "Titor's" description of how his time machine works with the current 'man on the street' description of things like nuclear power plants or even plain old consumer PCs or passenger cars?

The internal consistency of the predictions is much more interesting. There are some potential problems, but it's been a while since I read the material and don't have the time/motivation to go back and find the problems I had noticed again.