The more we find out about the Apollo moon missions, the more we find they were operating closer to the edge than anyone outside of NASA knew. In an excerpt from Buzz Aldrin's new book, "Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon", he tells about a crucial circuit breaker he and Neil Armstrong found broken on the floor of the moon lander. Aldrin rigged the circuit by inserting a felt-tip pen, and hoped it would work during their liftoff.
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The liftoff from the moon was intrinsically a tense time . The ascent stage simply had to work. The engines had to fire, propelling us upward, leaving the descent stage of the LM still sitting on the moon. We had no margin for error, no second chances, no rescue plans if the liftoff failed. There would be no way for Mike up in Columbia to retrieve us. We had no provision for another team to race from Earth to pick us up if the Eagle did not soar. Nor did we have food, water, or oxygen for more than a few hours.
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Comments (22)
To some the world is flat and that's that.
Besides, with our current "risk aversion" mentality, going to Mars first (or even a NEO) is practically out of the question.
And to all of the moon landing doubters, I have just one question: What does it matter? If they faked it, they faked it! That has no impact whatsoever on future space endeavors. Faked or not, the truth about the original moon landings will come out eventually.
Does Schrödinger's Cat conflict with the Law of Non-Contradiction?
Since the particles within a solid mass like a cat (or indeed a virus) are always interacting with each other, they would either never enter a superposition, or if they did, would do so individually and not stay that way for long.
But hey, maybe I've got it all wrong. The experimenters seem to think so.
The great public debates of Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Einstein et al. about the applicability of subatomic theory to superatomic objects ranged from absurdity to theology. They did, however, lead to things such as semiconductors, nanotechnology and superconductivity. All of which prove that it is possible to build large objects that demonstrate subatomic properties.
@nickolas_warner
Your flatmate is a zombie!?! That's so cool!
The system containing the cat is in a well-defined state at all times. However, the definition of a quantum state doesn't always map well onto our classical intuitions. A single particle may be in a well defined quantum state, but that state may not tell you much about what answer you'd get if you measure the particle's position.
Physicists often define a subset of allowed quantum states in a system (often energy eigenstates) as a basis of "pure states", and then call other allowed states superpositions of these states. They express the superposition as a weighted sum of pure states.
@6:
It sounds like you're talking about decoherence. Yes, eventually interactions between particles will disrupt a superposition that one of them might be in. Here, though, it sounds like they are putting the whole organism into a superposition of states, not an individual particle within it. Also, the lasers are cooling the organism to a very low temperature, which would slow decoherence and extend the life of the superposition.
Seems trying to measure this would be self-defeating.
That's where this whole thing stopped making sense to me.
Can't we just reconfigure the deflector array, replace a skeleton with adamantium, and steer clear of the ion storm?
Y'know...like that.
Nah, some of us just have gotten really good at faking it.
No, actually there are cats on it, and there are no cats on it. If you are reading Neatorama, all the cats are dead.