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Thank heavens for these ‘minds!’ Because it flys over my head! But, what came to mind as I listened to this great search for the ‘meaning of everything,’...why is it, that eventually the great discovery is turned into new ways to annihilate our fellow man? Now, we are sending out (high tech) unsuspecting drones to kill people! So many in our own private society (not in a war), owns AK-47s, in case it be needed for protection against their fellowman (their neighbors). Where is the utilization of this great knowledge to save the planet, that we need to stay alive in the future?

I didn't get why that man was allowed to have 30 or 40 war weapons reaching one third of a mile.

@HenAgnDon Weapon makers have made billions selling to militaries and now they are picking harder to reach fruit, by paying politicians to make it legal to sell arms to criminals and crazies.

You can look into the night sky and a few Hubble Space Telescope pictures to get an idea of how grand and beautiful the Universe is. Science geeks like me, dig deeper and feel awed again and again. But all that digging cannot make the Universe more grand or beautiful.

@EdEarl true enough! And I agree that the space explorations are amazing and I loved your comment that...’all that digging cannot make the Universe more grand or beautiful!’ It is already, ah inspiring just being itself!

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The final 30 seconds are truly food for thought as he talks about "certain types of leaders".

Since the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the US military are aware they can be prosecuted by acting on illegal orders. We must hope that lesson will prevent the US from nuclear war illegally ordered by an incompetent, angry POTUS.

In the long term, it's hard to imagine putting off nuclear war for millennia. We need to move some people into space or onto other planets. The more humanity is distributed, the more likely we survive.

@EdEarl At the rate things are going with 'good, clean coal' and its brethren, we won't need anything nuclear to eliminate mankind.

@Petter Yesterday was Tesla Battery Day. I am pumped by the plan Tesla put together and are working to implement. There are many moving parts, but bottom line is the intent to eliminate coal and oil from the world economy, mostly by 2030. We can hope that is soon enough, or that others will help to quicken the replacement of fossil fuels by renewables.

@EdEarl ... or that holy grail of energy research, nuclear fusion.
However, that will in turn bring huge societal changes. When energy is abundant and cheap, human labour loses value.
Consider. Mankind exploited the energy of slaves, oxen, horses, etc. Then added the exploitation of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent "renewables". (One could argue that coal is a renewable, in that a hundred thousand years from now new forests will have died and become coal, but I digress.) How will mankind cope with becoming ever more redundant?

@Petter Nuclear fusion has been right around the corner since I can remember. I've given up hope for it. The Tesla basic research is complete, or nearly so. They have already a pilot factory, and are using their 4th iteration of automation to make cells. They say they will scale up over the next 18 months and start selling the new, cheaper, longer lasting batteries in the Model S. Afterward, it's a matter of expanding their market, which takes many more factories, just business. Solar farms are already less expensive than coal power plants. Fossil fuel power plants are finished, essentially. The demand for new power exceeds solar and wind factory capacity, ATM, so some new fossil fuel plants are still being constructed.

@EdEarl solar, wind and tide have a fundamental problem. They are not "on demand" sources. Nuclear fission is.

@Petter Batteries fix that limitation. In fact, they react in milliseconds, instead of seconds like fossil fuel generators.

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Enthusiasm about the fabric of everything around us & the potential of all of us - I like.

Some now want to redo some work with "time" as more detached from "space-time" than Einstein had it. The way he & colleagues looked at things is still of permanent value though. It's only very lately that his predicted gravity waves were found.

What IS a wave? Why is there combustion? (All we know is that "phlogiston" is not an element and that small amounts of combustion occur without oxygen.)

I think that at the quantum level there are topology issues (referred to by the metaphors "tunnelling" and "collapse" ) because we can only express issues in terms derived from our scale and which intriguingly are similar to those that occur at conceptual levels.

At my school, physics was experimenting. A bad maths teacher didn't teach me calculus (the claimed topic of the monkey tricks). It's essential to engage visual thinking to help make mental advances in all fields. Imagination is the laboratory atop our shoulders.

Our Universe is an experiment that we may never understand, because our imagination may be too small and language, including math, may be incompetent.

@EdEarl YES! It "Is' BECAUSE it "Is"! And that to my mind deserves RESPECT in itself, just FOR itself! I see you are a "wow" person just like me!

"Combustion" is any chemical reaction which releases heat. For instance, many reactive metals combust vigorously in chlorine gas.
Robert Hook and Isaac Newton argued antagonistically about the nature of light. Was it a wave or a particle stream. Both were correct. This is a riddle of quantum theory. Interchangeable states, which allow particles to pass through obstacles instead of having to avoid them. It's a fundamental of photosynthesis.

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