Poul Anderson wrote a very interesting story years ago, called "Brainwave,"
based on the idea of a very slight change in the physical laws governing the
forces binding atoms together.  The first observable result was that, over a
period of months, the nervous systems of higher animals became very, very
slightly more efficient.  The point of the story was what would happen to the
world if everyone's IQ level increased.  Retarded people reached normal or
above-normal levels, ordinary people became super-geniuses, farm animals became
bright enough to figure out how to overcome fences and gates...  People handled
the change in different ways.  Some were thrilled and began to gather knowledge
as quickly as possible (factories were having trouble keeping people on boring,
repetitive assembly-line jobs until they started piping in instructional talks
and lectures).  Some were frightened and wanted things the way they used to be.
One woman (the wife of one of the scientists who discovered the cause of the
phenomenon) gave herself an overload on an electroshock machine, frying enough
of her brain to return to pre-change levels.  Some people took refuge in mob
mentality and joined a sort of neo-Luddite cult ("The Third Ba'al") that wanted
to destroy all science and technology.  There was even a small group of
scientists who used their new brilliance to design a field generator that would
counteract the change.  They tried to (secretly) send it up in a satellite to
return the whole planet to pre-change conditions, but they were outsmarted and
stopped by the people (scientists, politicians and ordinary people) who wanted
to use their new intelligence to build a new, stable society.  The whole point
of the story, of course, was that mere intelligence and wisdom are far from
being the same thing.





Wirt Atmar <[log in to unmask]> on 08/16/2001 04:50:36 PM

Please respond to [log in to unmask]

To:   [log in to unmask]
cc:    (bcc: Wayne Brown/Corporate/Altec)

Subject:  Re: [HP3000-L] OT: Cosmic Laws Like Speed of Light Might Be
      Changing,              a Study Finds



Jim writes:

> "An international team of astrophysicists has discovered that the basic laws
>  of nature as understood today may be changing slightly as the universe
ages,
>  a surprising finding that could rewrite physics textbooks and challenge
>  fundamental assumptions about the workings of the cosmos."

As spectacular as this sounds, and it is fairly interesting, the effect, if
real, is only 1 part in 100,000, and the result is only statistical at the
moment. But should it turn out to be real, it will lend a great deal of
credence to string theory, the idea that the universe is composed of more
dimensions than we currently perceive and that these "hidden" dimensions are
still uncurling, albeit very slowly now, long after the initial inflation of
the universe 12 to 15 billion years ago.

If all of this is true, this newly measured result perhaps shouldn't be all
that unexpected. Every physical process is a continuous event. There are no
discontinuities, step functions or paradoxes in nature, and every physical
event very slowly approaches its ultimate asymptote towards the end of its
run.

Wirt Atmar

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