MIT Rocket Scientist: White House Claims on Syria Chemical Attack “Cannot Be True”

[barbos]

Professor Emeritus

When an old scientist says something is impossible they're almost always wrong.

lol, yea... I might go as far as saying that when any scientist says something is impossible, they're not being a scientist.

A lot of scientific theories state that something can't be done.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Professor Emeritus

When an old scientist says something is impossible they're almost always wrong.

lol, yea... I might go as far as saying that when any scientist says something is impossible, they're not being a scientist.

There are, in fact, all kinds of things that scientists will flat out tell you are impossible.

Escaping from the event horizon of a black hole is impossible.

Traveling faster than light is impossible (at least with all currently known science, but everyone hopes and prays we'll find something that will change that).

Perpetual motion -- along with 100% energy efficiency -- is impossible.

Reversal of entropy is impossible.

That a bomb designed to disperse a chemical weapon would leave a crater on the ground is extremely improbable, mainly because chemical weapons like Sarin are mainly released in an air-bursting weapon so that the gas can spread to a wider area before it settles towards the ground. While it is totally possible that such a bomb might have misfired and failed to detonate at the right altitude, to say the CRATER is evidence that it was an air-dropped weapon is very much like claiming that Bashir Asad once escaped from a black hole using a perpetual motion machine.

 

[barbos]

That a bomb designed to disperse a chemical weapon would leave a crater on the ground is extremely improbable, mainly because chemical weapons like Sarin are mainly released in an air-bursting weapon so that the gas can spread to a wider area before it settles towards the ground. While it is totally possible that such a bomb might have misfired and failed to detonate at the right altitude, to say the CRATER is evidence that it was an air-dropped weapon is very much like claiming that Bashir Asad once escaped from a black hole using a perpetual motion machine.

I understand that the bomb was not a regular chemical weapon munition, but instead was improvised. So it could have been designed to be dropped and then disperse the gas while on the ground.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Escaping from the event horizon of a black hole is impossible.

Traveling faster than light is impossible (at least with all currently known science, but everyone hopes and prays we'll find something that will change that).

Disagree on both of these. While we have no idea of how to do FTL we can't rule it out. Certain types of FTL cause big paradox problems but not all FTL.

And if you can do FTL that might give you a way out of a black hole.

That a bomb designed to disperse a chemical weapon would leave a crater on the ground is extremely improbable, mainly because chemical weapons like Sarin are mainly released in an air-bursting weapon so that the gas can spread to a wider area before it settles towards the ground. While it is totally possible that such a bomb might have misfired and failed to detonate at the right altitude, to say the CRATER is evidence that it was an air-dropped weapon is very much like claiming that Bashir Asad once escaped from a black hole using a perpetual motion machine.

The spent weapon would still impact and make a small crater.

 

[barbos]

The spent weapon would still impact and make a small crater.

Small dent, not a small crater. There was a ground explosion there, pretty powerful one at that.

 

[tupac chopra]

Russians already read it and were not impressed. I understand french say sarin used in the attack was manufactured using technology Syria were using before. Calling it "incontrovertible proof" is a an exaggeration I think.

Here is the report. Nothing relevant that can be fact checked or confirmed.

http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/IMG/p...n_nationale_-_anglais_-_final_cle0dbf47-1.pdf

And surprise surprise it supports the regime change agenda.

French report shown to be misleading by the head of the United Nations’ team investigating the possible use of chemical warfare in Syria (Åke Sellström)



http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2017/04/debunking-french-report-syrian-chemical-weapons.html

 

[tupac chopra]

Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi also says his sources inside US intelligence are not happy.

Debunking Trump’s Casus Belli

The insiders note that no evidence has been produced to demonstrate convincingly that Syrian forces dropped a chemical bomb on a civilian area. U.S. monitors, who had been warned by the Russians that an attack was coming, believe they saw from satellite images something close to the Russian account of events, with a bomb hitting the targeted warehouse, which then produced a cloud of gas. They also note that Syria had absolutely no motive for staging a chemical attack. In fact, it was quite the contrary, as Washington had earlier that week backed off from the U.S. position that President Bashar al-Assad should be removed from office. The so-called rebels, however, had plenty of motive. Many intelligence officials have concluded that the White House is lying and concealing what it knows.

Some employees have even expressed a desire that a whistleblower might step forward to demolish the administration’s casus belli, though none has yet offered to do so. Most of all, those on the ground are alarmed over ongoing preparations for expanding the war, including seemingly active plans to establish no-fly zones and safe havens. The uncompromising demand that al-Assad must go will lead, in their opinion, to a rapid escalation of military activity that inevitably will result in conflict with Russia.

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Council for the National Interest.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

That a bomb designed to disperse a chemical weapon would leave a crater on the ground is extremely improbable, mainly because chemical weapons like Sarin are mainly released in an air-bursting weapon so that the gas can spread to a wider area before it settles towards the ground. While it is totally possible that such a bomb might have misfired and failed to detonate at the right altitude, to say the CRATER is evidence that it was an air-dropped weapon is very much like claiming that Bashir Asad once escaped from a black hole using a perpetual motion machine.

I understand that the bomb was not a regular chemical weapon munition, but instead was improvised. So it could have been designed to be dropped and then disperse the gas while on the ground.

Why would the Syrian military need to IMPROVISE an air-dropped chemical munition? And how does that explanation make more sense than the explosive just being on the ground in the first place, or the gas being distributed as a secondary effect of someone bombing the shack?

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Disagree on both of these. While we have no idea of how to do FTL we can't rule it out. Certain types of FTL cause big paradox problems but not all FTL.

FTL is impossible for reasons that have nothing to do with paradox problems. It's a matter of energy requirements being effectively infinite to produce that much acceleration over time. There are hypothetical scenarios where the speed of light can seem to be violated on a cosmic scale, and those too require, basically, an infinite (or at least, constantly increasing) amount of energy

The spent weapon would still impact and make a small crater.

No, it would not. The spent weapon -- that is, the bomb casing -- would fragment into multiple pieces, none of which would individually have enough kinetic energy to make much of a crater. They'd make something of a pothole, to be sure, but that's not what Trump's report describes at all.

 

[barbos]

I understand that the bomb was not a regular chemical weapon munition, but instead was improvised. So it could have been designed to be dropped and then disperse the gas while on the ground.

Why would the Syrian military need to IMPROVISE an air-dropped chemical munition?

Number of reasons, they may not actually have real thing, then they may have tried to have it look like improvised. Syrian army did use improvised barrel bombs, so it's not like it's unheard of.

And how does that explanation make more sense than the explosive just being on the ground in the first place, or the gas being distributed as a secondary effect of someone bombing the shack?

It's not better. It just answers your question. To me that alleged chemical bomb have too big a crater. It could have nothing to do with Sarin at all - it's ordinary crater from from ordinary rocket with that rocket remains in it. Or it could be ordinary crater in which rebels placed their device to look like it was dropped by the Army.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

FTL is impossible for reasons that have nothing to do with paradox problems. It's a matter of energy requirements being effectively infinite to produce that much acceleration over time. There are hypothetical scenarios where the speed of light can seem to be violated on a cosmic scale, and those too require, basically, an infinite (or at least, constantly increasing) amount of energy

FTL by acceleration through lightspeed is impossible for the reason you give. Einstein does not prohibit warp drives, hyper drives, or wormholes, however. Warp drives and wormholes have paradox problems but hyper drives could impose a reference frame and thus avoid paradoxes.

The spent weapon would still impact and make a small crater.

No, it would not. The spent weapon -- that is, the bomb casing -- would fragment into multiple pieces, none of which would individually have enough kinetic energy to make much of a crater. They'd make something of a pothole, to be sure, but that's not what Trump's report describes at all.

It could go either way.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

FTL by acceleration through lightspeed is impossible for the reason you give. Einstein does not prohibit warp drives, hyper drives, or wormholes, however.

Because these things fall under general relativity and allow for local violations of the speed of light within a non-inertial reference frame. It is the same reason why distant galaxies are already moving away from us at significantly faster than the speed of light, and why an object crossing an event horizon would, also, travel at FTL velocity relative to an object outside of it.

Again, this is a relativistic constant: the REASON you cannot travel faster than light is because the speed of light is constant in all reference frames, which means even if you accelerated fast enough and long enough to exceed it, you still wouldn't, because it's a mathematical constant.

It's kinda like how the Gravitational Constant is also the same on all planets and moons in the solar system. Acceleration due to gravity will be the same on all objects regardless of mass; a feather and a rock fall at the same speed in a vacuum. Just because you can factor in wind resistance or attach a small rocket to the top of the rock to make it fall faster doesn't change the constant.

It could go either way.

No, it really couldn't. If the bomb exploded in the air, then the bomb casing is no longer coming down as a single mass and isn't going to make a crater. If the bomb exploded at ground level, then the blast from the explosive could have excavated the crater as well as spread the sarin liquid into an aerosol (if the bomb was properly designed).

The latter case is entirely compatible with the bomb striking a storage shed that already contained the sarin and the blast itself causing distribution. Which, if you haven't noticed, is the entire point of this thread: the crater, and the evidence gathered, are NOT evidence that the Syrian Army used the weapon, and do not actually support that conclusion. You can come up with all kinds of elaborate theories and fictional entities as to how the evidence COULD fit, but the evidence itself doesn't lead to that conclusion.

Much like the issue of relativistic physics above: you can come up with all kinds of theoretical exotic matter hypothetical scifi bullshit that would at least MATHEMATICALLY allow you to travel faster than light (even though every single one of them would UNQUESTIONABLY kill you if you were to try them), but that doesn't mean general relativity actually posits their existence.

 

[barbos]

The Thread about Chemical Attack in Syria evolved into FTL drive rather quickly this time
Anyway, just because something is not forbidden by the theory does not mean it's possible.
Warp drive idea involves pretty warped backward logic. People give a lot of noise it does not deserve.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Because these things fall under general relativity and allow for local violations of the speed of light within a non-inertial reference frame. It is the same reason why distant galaxies are already moving away from us at significantly faster than the speed of light, and why an object crossing an event horizon would, also, travel at FTL velocity relative to an object outside of it.

Again, this is a relativistic constant: the REASON you cannot travel faster than light is because the speed of light is constant in all reference frames, which means even if you accelerated fast enough and long enough to exceed it, you still wouldn't, because it's a mathematical constant.

You're looking at the fact that you can't accelerate through lightspeed and not considering that there might be other ways to get there. Neither warp drives nor hyperdrives are prohibited by relativity, although the former certainly has a paradox problem.

It could go either way.

No, it really couldn't. If the bomb exploded in the air, then the bomb casing is no longer coming down as a single mass and isn't going to make a crater. If the bomb exploded at ground level, then the blast from the explosive could have excavated the crater as well as spread the sarin liquid into an aerosol (if the bomb was properly designed).

The latter case is entirely compatible with the bomb striking a storage shed that already contained the sarin and the blast itself causing distribution. Which, if you haven't noticed, is the entire point of this thread: the crater, and the evidence gathered, are NOT evidence that the Syrian Army used the weapon, and do not actually support that conclusion. You can come up with all kinds of elaborate theories and fictional entities as to how the evidence COULD fit, but the evidence itself doesn't lead to that conclusion.

Much like the issue of relativistic physics above: you can come up with all kinds of theoretical exotic matter hypothetical scifi bullshit that would at least MATHEMATICALLY allow you to travel faster than light (even though every single one of them would UNQUESTIONABLY kill you if you were to try them), but that doesn't mean general relativity actually posits their existence.

You could have a dispersal device that isn't destroyed when it functions.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

You're looking at the fact that you can't accelerate through lightspeed and not considering that there might be other ways to get there.

There ARE other ways to get there. All of which leave you still at rest with respect to all other objects in your own local space-time, in which case you are not actually moving at all and neither is anything else. Almost every quasar in the galaxy (or whatever it is they have finally evolved into) are already moving away from us at around 6 times the speed of light right now. But in their local spacetime, THEY are stationary and WE are moving away from THEM at six times the speed of light. Both observations remain valid in their own frame of reference.

It isn't a "technicality" Loren. You cannot accelerate past light speed in your own reference frame, even if circumstances can cause other objects appear to do exactly that with respect to you. It's one of those cosmic Catch-22s that is completely unavoidable (like the aforementioned perpetual motion machines). The very same conditions that would cause an object to accelerate towards or away from you at FTL velocities are exactly the conditions that prevent you from doing the same with respect to any other object in your local coordinate system. Simply put: it's a feature of the way relativistic coordinate systems WORK. Some constant has to become un-constant for that to be the case, which is exactly what is happening on the cosmological scale with distant galaxies.

the former certainly has a paradox problem.

I don't know why you keep mentioning "paradox problems" but that has literally NOTHING to do with the inability to surpass the speed of light.

You could have a dispersal device that isn't destroyed when it functions.

Such a device would not, by definition, leave a large impact crater.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It isn't a "technicality" Loren. You cannot accelerate past light speed in your own reference frame, even if circumstances can cause other objects appear to do exactly that with respect to you. It's one of those cosmic Catch-22s that is completely unavoidable (like the aforementioned perpetual motion machines). The very same conditions that would cause an object to accelerate towards or away from you at FTL velocities are exactly the conditions that prevent you from doing the same with respect to any other object in your local coordinate system. Simply put: it's a feature of the way relativistic coordinate systems WORK. Some constant has to become un-constant for that to be the case, which is exactly what is happening on the cosmological scale with distant galaxies.

You're still stuck on the notion of acceleration. Relativity is silent on warp drives and hyper drives.

the former certainly has a paradox problem.

I don't know why you keep mentioning "paradox problems" but that has literally NOTHING to do with the inability to surpass the speed of light.

Time travel paradoxes are one of the standard arguments against FTL. If you can do FTL in an arbitrary reference frame then you can end up traveling into the past in some situations. However, a FTL system that imposes a reference frame upon it's use does not have the potential of paradoxes.

You could have a dispersal device that isn't destroyed when it functions.

Such a device would not, by definition, leave a large impact crater.

Depending on how hard the landing surface was. Most of the weight of the device would remain.

 

[barbos]

Back to the topic
https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/05/...idespread-and-systematic-use-chemical-weapons

HRW claims it was a soviet ХАБ-250.
To me cap does not look like it's from ХАБ-250 and in looks rusty and alien. But ХАБ-250 can release gas in air at certain height and on impact too. Wait, russians said it was designed to explode in the air, which seems make sense. It's probably explodes on impact in case it fails to explode in the air.

 

[Jayjay]

Back to the topic
https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/05/...idespread-and-systematic-use-chemical-weapons

HRW claims it was a soviet ХАБ-250.
To me cap does not look like it's from ХАБ-250 and in looks rusty and alien. But ХАБ-250 can release gas in air at certain height and on impact too. Wait, russians said it was designed to explode in the air, which seems make sense. It's probably explodes on impact in case it fails to explode in the air.

I agree that the twisted piece does not immediately look like it was part of it, but the cap looks the same. And anyway the presence of a cap at least shows that it was a chemical bomb and not some random pipe as suggested by Postol. I suppose, Syrians could have built their own bombs inspired by Russian designs?

 

[barbos]

Back to the topic
https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/05/...idespread-and-systematic-use-chemical-weapons

HRW claims it was a soviet ХАБ-250.
To me cap does not look like it's from ХАБ-250 and in looks rusty and alien. But ХАБ-250 can release gas in air at certain height and on impact too. Wait, russians said it was designed to explode in the air, which seems make sense. It's probably explodes on impact in case it fails to explode in the air.

I agree that the twisted piece does not immediately look like it was part of it, but the cap looks the same. And anyway the presence of a cap at least shows that it was a chemical bomb and not some random pipe as suggested by Postol. I suppose, Syrians could have built their own bombs inspired by Russian designs?

ХАБ-250 cap has a conforming shape. The one on the picture is flat. Also HRW claims seeing green stripes, I see nothing. Also ХАБ-250 is an ancient piece of hardware which exists only in museum. It was put out of "use" and destroyed in the 60s. HRW is really overdoing it trying to link Russia to it. Also Russians claim that rebel destroyed the evidence by repairing the crater, I wonder if it's true.
And yes syrians are fully capable to to make their own bomb if necessary.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

You're still stuck on the notion of acceleration. Relativity is silent on warp drives and hyper drives.

Half right. In general relativity those things are covered under "non-inertial reference frames" or "moving coordinate systems." The best known of those is called "gravity," which is a specific type of warped space caused by the presence of a point mass.

"Warp drive" is not a real thing. Neither is hyper drive, folding space, teleportation, wizard magic or vampires. So in a sense you're correct, relativity is indeed silent on fictional things that don't exist.

Time travel paradoxes are one of the standard arguments against FTL.

That may be, but time travel paradoxes aren't the REASON you can't exceed the speed of light. They're one of the reasons why exceeding the speed of light would be really really weird if it were possible.

It's NOT possible, so the paradoxes are irrelevant.

If you can do FTL in an arbitrary reference frame...

You can't. You can only observe SOMETHING ELSE doing FTL in a non-inertial reference frame such that your coordinate system includes a highly curved spacetime. This is the reason YOU cannot achieve FTL velocity, because as soon as you move into that curved space, it is no longer curved (and the object that was moving at FTL from your previous position no longer is in your new position). FTL in that context is a feature of highly warped coordinate systems, like in the proximity of a black hole or on cosmological scales.

You see this happen when you actually calculate the field equations: it's a "grass is greener" type thing. A highly curved space time may include a set of coordinates where all objects appear to be moving away from you at FTL velocity, but that just means that if YOU moved to those coordinates, the place you ORIGINALLY WERE would be in a curved spacetime and still moving away from you at FTL velocity. Because your observations are only valid from exactly where you ARE, it remains true that YOU can never reach FTL velocity with respect to any other object in the same coordinate system, even though other objects can (appear to) do exactly that.

All the paradoxes you keep mentioning are not OBSTACLES to FTL travel, they are EXAMPLES that (attempt to) show why FTL travel doesn't really happen. Saying "paradoxes are what prevents FTL" is a bit like saying "Silence is what prevents noise."

You could have a dispersal device that isn't destroyed when it functions.

Such a device would not, by definition, leave a large impact crater.

Depending on how hard the landing surface was. Most of the weight of the device would remain.

I think you mean "mass" and no it would not. A 500kg object broken up into 500 pieces is no longer a 500kg object. Each separate piece is now a 1kg object traveling on a separate trajectory. Which means for all practical purposes, the impact physics of each of those objects is independent of its neighbors.

Physics dude. Do the math:

Steel projectile of 1kg falling from a height of 400 meters hits the ground at 88.2 meters per second and has a kinetic energy of a little under 3000 joules.
Drop 1000 of these 1kg projectiles from the same height, all in slightly different locations. EACH ONE has the kinetic energy of only about 3000 joules.
For comparison sake: a 9mm bullet fired from something like a Glock-39 has a muzzle energy of about 500 joules. In other words, these 3000 steel balls each hit the ground with the kinetic energy of a rifle bullet.

If, on the other hand, you take a 1000kg steel projectile and drop it from the same height, it hits the ground with the kinetic energy of 3000 kilojoules. This is equivalent to about a bucket of TNT. While the mass of energy is generally the same, all that energy concentrated into one place means the impact force is far greater beneath the one-ton object than it is beneath the kilogram-sized objects.

Shit like this is why hail storms don't have massive body counts or bloody aftermath, after all. 100kg of ice literally falls out of the sky and lands on the roof of my car; as long as it doesn't land ALL AT ONCE, my car will be just fine (it won't even crack the sunroof).

Conclusion: a single crater at ground zero means a single, high-energy event, not thousands of low-energy ones. If the device exploded in the air, there won't be a crater. If the device exploded on ground level -- or hit with enough kinetic energy to excavate a crater on its own -- then it is extremely unlikely to be a specially-designed chemical weapon munition. That narrows it down to two possibilities: either a store of nerve gas, held in reserve by terrorists, was hit by a conventional munition and spread over a wide area by the resulting blast, or a badly improvised chemical munition was dropped from an airplane for reasons yet to be determined. Neither of those scenarios is directly supported by the evidence, and the latter isn't even the most plausible conclusion.