My take on this is that quantum mechanics is essentially a counter intelligence attack on knowledge of physics. It makes sense to me that - to keep people from engineering nuclear bombs - we would put some misinformation into the educational materials people have that would lead them to be able to construct one.
Of course I might be wrong about that. But we certainly seem to be investing a lot of money into making sure that academics are... well... academic, and so specialized that we do not accomplish much of anything useful. Whether that is something achieved intentionally through careful planning or whether it's pure happenstance achieved through ignorance and community effort is not something I am qualified to judge. But this kind of semi-paranoid, semi-humorous narrative should give you something of an idea of where my head is at when I write this. See... back in the 90s, I remember a presentation on possibilities for building optical computing devices. It was really basic and straightforward stuff, with a few problems relating to not having electronic computing devices that would work in the 3-4Ghz range for their clocks. We had pretty much everything we needed then to start building counters and other basic logic devices, but we didn't have anything fast enough to hook up to the slowest speeds we could make photonic circuits work at. And shortly after that, we were hugely overbuilding our optical network infrastructure. And then all of a sudden everything collapsed. I remember reading news claiming that we did not need anywhere near the capacity which had been built. And then it ceased to even be news (at least in the contexts where I spend my time). And, now, we have Obama who was a huge fan of whistleblowers coming into presidency and his administration has been attacking whistleblowers left and right - even going way above and beyond what any past presidency has done. And, we can see from the recent government shutdown that he's an incredibly strong willed and dedicated guy. And, we can see from his family that he's a very sane and intelligent individual. So... anyways... My take is that we do have a huge optical computing infrastructure already built. And that our government is so twisted around its own structure that it can't admit, yet, to having built it, nor what its capabilities are. And I think I know why. And I'm trying to work up enough courage to express those thoughts. And, who knows, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I just need to figure out how to express myself coherently, despite my fears. Or maybe someone else can. (I've been seeing some news and events lately that corroborates some of my hunches and I've been seeing fairly rapid contradictory news for some of my other hunches - and by contradictory I mean evidence that I had misquanitified some things.) See... another possibility is that our government is so incompetent that it has only been pretending like it has doing something useful with all of the resources we have been giving it for this kind of purpose. Anyways, my gut feeling is that there are a lot of us working on this tangle. But how do we distinguish between counterintelligence and real stupidity? Thanks, -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
