Marshall Barnes

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Ockham
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Joined: Sun Apr 03, 2011 6:15 am

Marshall Barnes

Unread post by Ockham »

If you missed him at RSE this week, you can meet Marshall Barnes at the curiously aptly named All-Con in Dallas, Texas next week, March 8-10, 2013. Barnes will be giving his talk, Practical Development of a Working Time Machine.

Details here: http://www.all-con.org/pnl.html . (DEAD LINK)
Ockham
Posts: 803
Joined: Sun Apr 03, 2011 6:15 am

Re: Marshall Barnes

Unread post by Ockham »

The reason I brought this up Marshall Barnes is to point out the quality of material you're going to get if you pony up the money to take a class at RSE. The stature of your RSE featured speaker is that of a panel speaker at a science fiction and comic book convention.

It is interesting to look at Barnes' own publicity release:
http://www.prlog.org/11912335-scientifi ... -days.html
I found it rather amusing that the best Barnes can muster is that he, "had a relationship with the web site," formerly participateing in a blog formerly hosted by Scientific American. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to look on the Internet Archive to see if participating in the blog meant merely reading the blog or acutally posting something of substance. Note that Barnes, to my knowledge, never appeared in print in the magazine itself where he would have had to meet the bar of peer review.

By the way, anybody can participate in 1000 scientists in 1000 days. All that is required is to call one's self a scientist, then fill out the on-line form. As far as I know, there is no credential checking, as the web site is merely a meet-up for would-be scientists and educators looking for people. It would be up the educator to decide whether or not to avail herslef or himself of the scientists' desire to lecture.

Barnes also likes to bill himself as a critic of Princeton physicist J. Richard Gott:
http://www.i-newswire.com/j-r-gott-stum ... rnes/73372
I think if you go on the Coast To Coast web site and pay to listen to the show archvie, you'll find that Barnes asked a unanswerable non sequitr. Perhaps one may be, as I am, so cynical as to believe that Barnes did the stunt merely so he'd have something to create a PR page about.

On the other hand, J. Richard Gott actually does have something interesting and controversial to say about time travel and the origin of the universe..., and actually has been cited in Scientific American:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podca ... 3264BAF825
Ockham
Posts: 803
Joined: Sun Apr 03, 2011 6:15 am

Re: Marshall Barnes

Unread post by Ockham »

There's more on this featured speaker reported in a Columbus, Ohio newspaper which covered a demonstration of the time machine prototype to a Grandview high school physics class.

http://www.thisweeknews.com/content/sto ... s-yes.html

Hmm, time machine or strobeoscope? I remember as a kid watching Westerns at the movie theater where the spokes on wagon wheels looked like they slowed down or rotated backwards. Were those stage coaches time machines? Actually, I believe it can be explained by the Shannon-Nyquist sampling theorem. In short, the theorem says that when information sampled in discrete increments, information is lost, and the result is an alias that is the difference between the original frequency and sampling rate. A movie camera takes 24 picture per second. The rotating wagon wheel, when some multiple of approximately 24 spokes per second pass the camera lens, will appear to stop or rotate backwards as a result of the information lost in the sampling process.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroboscope
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon-Ny ... ng_theorem

It is pretty sad that the high school physics instructor didn't ask some pointed questions about the so-called verdrehung fan. Performance art - probably; science, maybe not. Verdrehung = twisting (as in the facts?)
Lost in Space
Posts: 375
Joined: Sun Jan 06, 2008 12:49 am
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Re: Marshall Barnes

Unread post by Lost in Space »

Beam me up Scotty! Lol.
I think this is fascinating, Ockham. However, the science fiction of yesterday may become the science fact of today - writings of Jules Verne are eerie because many of the at the time fantastical and improbable premises of his novels turned out to be possible, like submarines and flying airships. There are currently experiments taking place concerning teleportation and, yes, time travel. I don't know enough about them to say whether they are the results of really zany people getting PhD,s and running amuck or whether they represent pure hard science.
Ockham
Posts: 803
Joined: Sun Apr 03, 2011 6:15 am

Re: Marshall Barnes

Unread post by Ockham »

I agree completely. There is some credible work being done on time travel and non locality. It is strictly my opinion, but I think Barnes' gadget appears to be no more than strobe lights attached to a rotating disc. To me it looks more like performance art than a real time machine. Barnes certainly has the look down right -he looks a lot like Doc from Back to the Future.
Lost in Space
Posts: 375
Joined: Sun Jan 06, 2008 12:49 am
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Re: Marshall Barnes

Unread post by Lost in Space »

Sounds like "the cone of silence" from Get Smart - a cumbersome hi-tech looking contraption that, rather than working, made everything more difficult for the folks at Control, lol. Also, though, I think that just because a person has a PhD we cannot assume they are either sensible or sane.
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