From: arromdee@jyusenkyou.cs.jhu.edu (Ken Arromdee)
Subject: Re: John Woods Campbell
Organization: Johns Hopkins University CS Dept.
Date: Wed, 30 Dec 1992 03:16:02 GMT

In article <1jyQnK#2sc2r75z3Q0d8ROvHg7mTzsk=esr@snark.thyrsus.com> esr@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) writes:
>If
>you'd ever read the published volume of his letters you'd know that a lot of
>this was showmanship, intended to jar people into thinking outside their
>preconceptions.

Unfortunately, not every bad argument equally encourages thinking.  For
instance, one which depends on a factual error doesn't encourage thinking,
except in the limited sense that checking a reference book is "thinking".  This
is still so if the factual error is phrased as a conjecture.  (One common
crackpot technique is to make scattershot claims phrased as conjectures; if the
crackpot stumbles on anything, he takes credit for it, while denying he meant
the others as anything but suggestions--after all, he didn't _say_ they were
_true_, he was just throwing out ideas.)

Similarly, bad arguments that depend on elementary logical errors don't really
encourage thinking, except again in a limited, simplistic, sense.

"It's to make people think" is a lazy person's excuse--one could _always_ make
that excuse for _any_ argument, no matter what one's actual motives are.  And
it's impossible to disprove.

>For that matter, the final verdict on the Dean drive isn't in yet; the research
>that would have done so was defunded for political reasons in the early 70s and
>never resumed. There's an extension of Newtonian mechanics that adds a `surge'
>term reflecting the fact that objects don't respond instantaneously to applied
>force --- the pressure wave needs time to propagate from point of application
>across the object, and this can interact with velocity and elasticity in some
>ways that conventional theory does not predict.  This extension (the "Davis
>Mechanics" of Heinlein's _Podkayne_Of_Mars_, named after the developer, Greg
>O. Davis) actually predicts and models the Dean Drive.

But the statement you just made about objects isn't true.  Action and reaction
happen simultaneously; or rather, action and reaction happen at any point
simultaneously.  In some sense there's a pressure wave that has to propagate,
but if you take a snapshot of something during a pressure wave you'll find that
the total momentum of the object stays the same even though the wave didn't
reach the end of the object yet.  Interactions with velocity and elasticity do
not change this momentum.

Why is it that Campbell defenders seem to use the "I didn't steal your pot,
and anyway I returned it in perfect condition" argument?  If you want to argue
that Campbell didn't really support the things we criticize him for, fine.
If you want to argue that Campbell did support them, but that they're not
crackpot ideas, fine.  But to argue both is contradictory; if Campbell was only
throwing out ideas and didn't really think the Dean Drive works, why are you
defending Campbell by trying to convince me it _does_ work?

>The SF mainstream he defined outlasted them; it will
>outlast the current `PC' furor; and it will almost certainly outlast *you*.

The nice thing about predictions about the future is that you have to wait
until the future to see if they come true.  But it also makes such predictions
worthless in arguments that take place now.  To say that Campbell's influence
will outlast *me* is not an argument; it is an incredibly arrogant assertion,
equivalent to "I am right and you are wrong", and it does not and cannot serve
as support for your real arguments.

Anyway, I don't see many Dean Drive SF stories.  I do see stories where writers
use various drives which defy physics, but the competent writers recognize that
they do so, rather than claiming their space drives work in the real world.
For that matter, I don't even see proportionately as many "human culture is
always the best" stories as appeared before.  The only real influence I see is
psi, and that's a special case--Campbell was far less responsible for psi in
SF than most people think; and much modern use of psi in SF is as a substitute
for magic in stories otherwise far closer to fantasy than science fiction.
--
"On the first day after Christmas my truelove served to me...  Leftover Turkey!
On the second day after Christmas my truelove served to me...  Turkey Casserole
    that she made from Leftover Turkey.
[days 3-4 deleted] ...  Flaming Turkey Wings! ...
   -- Pizza Hut commercial (and M*tlu/A*gic bait)

Ken Arromdee (arromdee@jyusenkyou.cs.jhu.edu, arromdee@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written