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'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

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Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#81

Post by rgbrenner »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #63
DonHopkins wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Pentium chip would probably seem like an incomprehensible material to Alan Turing (and not just because of the awful instruction set), because even though all the materials were known at the time, the design and fabrication techniques and mind-bogglingly fine granularity and complexity of how they are combined hadn't been conceived of yet. I agree the reporters probably flubbed the word "alloy" for lack of a better…

You think Alan Turing wouldn't be able to use a microscope?

It depends on what how old Turing was... if it's 20 year old Turing -- an electron microscope wasn't invented yet... so no, he couldn't use one to see all of the structures of a CPU.. just the larger structures visible with an optical microscope (limited to ~200nm (Rayleigh criteron) but I dont know if they had the lens manufacturing good enough back then to reach that limit)... which may not be enough for him to figure it out.

Edit: And even when he died in the 1954, electron microscopes werent that advanced... we still needed to invent new techniques, improve our lens manufacturing, etc. There were a lot of shortcomings with it back then that limited its usage. So even in his later years, I wonder how much detail he could actually see on a modern CPU.

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#83

Post by [deleted] »

sandworm101 wrote: post #68
DonHopkins wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Pentium chip would probably seem like an incomprehensible material to Alan Turing (and not just because of the awful instruction set), because even though all the materials were known at the time, the design and fabrication techniques and mind-bogglingly fine granularity and complexity of how they are combined hadn't been conceived of yet. I agree the reporters probably flubbed the word "alloy" for lack of a better…

Turing could see the recognizable structure and after probing it a while would quickly work out its function. He would understand all the bits and pieces and almost instantly speculate on how it was manufactured. Something alien would be more akin to showing Plato a laser pointer. Plato could spend a lifetime poking at it without learning much of anything. That's the sort of material they would need to lock up.

[deleted]

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#84

Post by [deleted] »

godelski wrote: post #72
jonstokes wrote: post #15

I totally buy it that there is no such thing as an "unidentifiable alloy." I also buy it that journalists, not being materials scientists or indeed scientists of any sort, do not know the difference between an "alloy" and "a hunk of some hard material," so at some point they wrote down "alloy" because the word sounds exotic, like something you'd find at Area 51. This happens in the press /all the time/. Journos get s…

Alloys, composites, raw materials, you can identify them. If they have atoms you can identify what is in them. Now there could be weird materials that are hard to more difficult to identify. But you need a more compelling argument. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

[deleted]

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#85

Post by joering2 »

coldtea wrote: post #61
joering2 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an absurd argument that a guy worth $200MM would not spend his time and money on a $22MM deal. Besides, why everyone assumes this is ALL they did? A "businessmen" like those two spent probably 30 minutes on the phone once, and delegate bunch of people to do the work for them. Yes, Reid would not spent his last 5 years on $22MM deal, but he would spent few hours on the phone here and there on 100 deals each worth…

> What an absurd argument that a guy worth $200MM would not spend his time and money on a $22MM deal. The argument is that a 200MM+ guy wouldn't spend his time on such an elaborate and risky 22M deal that's sure to get a lot of attention even if it was fully legit. Your straw-man version is indeed absurd, though, I'll give you that.

22M thats roughly 10% of 220M.

So you telling me if your Net worth is $1MM, you wont bother with $100k deal?

No wonder you are poor.

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#86

Post by QAPereo »

ridgeguy wrote: post #75
byebyetech wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would a material composed using highly advanced nanotechnology have strange properties purely due to its structure? Does it have to be an alloy?

Yes, and it doesn't have to be an alloy. Structure is the basis for 'invisibility cloaks', materials with small-scale structures which confer optical properties not found in the same unstructured bulk materials. [1] Another example of where structure confers strange properties on elements (not alloys) is light emission from indirect-gap materials like silicon. Make silicon particles small enough and you can get light…

One key point is that metamaterials have unusual bulk properties, but they’re still made from the usual materials, alloys, etc.

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#87

Post by [deleted] »

sandworm101 wrote: post #68
DonHopkins wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Pentium chip would probably seem like an incomprehensible material to Alan Turing (and not just because of the awful instruction set), because even though all the materials were known at the time, the design and fabrication techniques and mind-bogglingly fine granularity and complexity of how they are combined hadn't been conceived of yet. I agree the reporters probably flubbed the word "alloy" for lack of a better…

Turing could see the recognizable structure and after probing it a while would quickly work out its function. He would understand all the bits and pieces and almost instantly speculate on how it was manufactured. Something alien would be more akin to showing Plato a laser pointer. Plato could spend a lifetime poking at it without learning much of anything. That's the sort of material they would need to lock up.

[deleted]

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#88

Post by coldtea »

joering2 wrote: post #85
coldtea wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What an absurd argument that a guy worth $200MM would not spend his time and money on a $22MM deal. The argument is that a 200MM+ guy wouldn't spend his time on such an elaborate and risky 22M deal that's sure to get a lot of attention even if it was fully legit. Your straw-man version is indeed absurd, though, I'll give you that.

22M thats roughly 10% of 220M. So you telling me if your Net worth is $1MM, you wont bother with $100k deal? No wonder you are poor.

>So you telling me if your Net worth is $1MM, you wont bother with $100k deal?

You seem to have a keen eye for missing the substance, since you've missed the gist of the argument twice.

And, no, even with $1MM net worth, I wouldn't bother with a $100k deal if it was risky, illegal, and sure to get attention, including of the press.

And the tendency to risk everything for such 0,1*X more falls as one's X net worth rises, so it's even less probable than someone at 220M would risk it for $22M, since they have much less need for an additional 10% boost and much more to potentially lose.

As for whether I'm poor or not, that's not something you'd know -- besides it being an ad hominem and rude to boot.

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#89

Post by greggarious »

DonHopkins wrote: post #67
greggarious wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If Reid was looking for a quid-pro-quo, he would be working with the Mega Resorts on the strip (MGM, Caesars, and even Republican Steve Wynn). His decisions could massively benefit them, and sitting as an honorary member of their board could be profitable. Are honorary board members paid?

No, but they do tend to win a lot of jackpots in the slot machines.

>>Are honorary board members paid? > No, but they do tend to win a lot of jackpots in the slot machines.

Slot machines are highly regulated in Nevada, I seriously doubt that's a realistic scenario.

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#90

Post by andrewflnr »

yk wrote: post #64
andrewflnr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming "unit cell" is a meaningful concept for these materials. Can x-ray diffraction completely characterize, say, a quasicrystalline structure? Moreover, even if you can tell what it's made of, that doesn't necessarily tell you how it was made or how it works.

Well, there are other techniques for anything that is not a crystal, and they are similarly developed as x-ray diffraction, if nothing else, take an atomic force microscope and identify each individual atom directly. > that doesn't necessarily tell you how it was made or how it works. Absolutely, there may be materials were we don't have the slightest idea how they are made or how some property arises. But my point i…

"Identify each atom individually" won't scale very far for complex materials. In short, I think it's unwarrantedly optimistic to assume that our current lab techniques, optimized for natural and human-fabricated materials, will immediately figure out (hypothetically) alien technology. No assumption is completely safe; even "made of atoms" is not guaranteed. Probable, but not guaranteed.
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