Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site denelcor.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxl!houxm!houxz!vax135!floyd!cmcl2!seismo!hao!denelcor!lmc
From: lmc@denelcor.UUCP (Lyle McElhaney)
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Re: Death Star weapon.
Message-ID: <451@denelcor.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 2-Jun-84 04:29:30 EDT
Article-I.D.: denelcor.451
Posted: Sat Jun  2 04:29:30 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 5-Jun-84 08:34:44 EDT
References: <1104@qubix.UUCP>
Organization: Denelcor, Aurora, CO
Lines: 41

> >  The plausibility is the same as for FTL, thiotimoline, and the radio in
> >  Galileo's day - impossibly small *at this time*. Later on, who knows?
>
>     
>         FTL is *IMPOSSIBLE*   DO YOU HEAR ME????
>         YOU HAVE A BETTER CHANCE AT MAKING A PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE
>         THAN YOU HAVE AT MAKING AN FTL DRIVE!!!!
>     
>
>     {skip the inuendo}
>
>     What Einstein discovered, is a new (UNBREAKABLE) law: much like
>     the Second Law of Thermodynamics.   And ALL THE FUTURE SCIENCE IN
>     THE WORLD, will not change it, or allow one to get around it
>     somehow.

You are, of course, absolutely correct. Einstein said so, Asimov says so,
every physicist I've ever read says so. And yet...

After saying so, stridently, in one of his monthly columns, Isaac Asimov
followed up the next month with a column of the shearest speculation on
what might be possible. Robert M. Powers in "The Coattails of God" says

	"If rearranging the distances to the stars is not easy to do,
	there may be ways in which the barrier of the speed of light may
	be broken...[it] is a tentative "possibility"."

To be sure he makes it very doubtful that such may come to pass.

I find it very difficult to be as dogmatic as your statement above; but
then I'm an engineer, not a physicist (or philosopher, which may be a
better judge). As Clarke (Heinlein?) has said,

	"If a highly placed scientist says that something is possible
	he is very likely correct; if he says that something is
	impossible, he is very likely wrong."

Of course, that probably doesn't say anything about your position.
-- 
		Lyle McElhaney
		(hao,brl-bmd,nbires,csu-cs,scgvaxd)!denelcor!lmc