Today is Christmas in the year of our Lord 2013 a decade before Peter Weyland is

Great posts Nostro and Corpo.

Indy John, In answer to your question, Holloway should have been more than satisfied with the huge achievement of proving that his thesis was correct - that the evidence that they found strongly supports the idea that we are genetically derived from the Engineers. If the Prometheus crew had stayed longer without getting into trouble they may even have found definitive evidence that they engineered us. But just finding them based upon cave drawings and carvings where we thought they would be in zeta 2 reticuli LV223 is an astounding discovery. That fact could not be disputed by their peers if the evidence was made public. The appropriate reaction should have been to drink some Champagne and not out of disappointment. His expectation of finding Engineers alive that would be friendly and willing to speak with him was just unrealistic and hoping for way too much. PS Thanks Javablue!

[b]nostromo001[/b] is of course part of the conspiracy. Actually, science is done [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C_fohdaD9A]like this[/url] (please excuse the annoying ads that adultswim insists on putting before its clips). Now back to seriousness, beside peer review, there's something that keeps the tamer side of physics (which includes Quantum Mechanics) in check- technology. Your computer is proof that whatever theories we have about quite a lot of phenomena are not that wildly wrong. Who was it, Orwell(?), who said, that war is an excellent way to keep people in touch with physical reality. 2 and 2 may make 3 or 5 if religion, philosophy, politics or morality may so require it. But they better make 4 when making a weapon.

Kaku thinks too much like a conventional scientist. Although trying to remain realistic in his postulations he's bound by 3rd density thinking not yet seeing himself as universal consciousness having a human experience. He will probably never understand nor likely bother reading J. Krishnamurti, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Atmananda, Yogananda or any other self-realized teacher/master because it's too abstract for him to understand from a mechanistic level or from the psychophysiological machinery of 3rd dimensional perception. Most astrophysicists don't have a very good grasp of what consciousness is because they remain in their separate world of limited quantum and classical science they can piddle with using mathematical equations that only explain things in hteory devoid of direct recognition and experience. Kaku should at least drop some pure LSD, eat psychedelic mushrooms, smoke DMT or take Ayuasca...even better learn to meditate or open his imagination up...just something or anything to shatter his limited worldview and misconceptions of reality.

.. only explain things in hteory devoid of direct recognition and experience..." I was wondering if David's Orrery Experience was something that fit your words, Theseus. As good as an experience is, as mind expanding as the expereince might be,,the trap is getting lost in the experience and look backwards to relish it again in the form of memory. Each a moment is an experience. Enjoy the ride! I think of all the charactors in our movie David would be most likely to be aware of the next experience to balance his analytcal mind.

There was a reference to Kaku. I had use wiki to discover he is the Scientist seen on various programs. I don't know about the quality of his thinking but he explains thngs in a mnner iIcan understand.. If he tries any of experience suggestions mentioned in a recent post then I would expect an even better explanation to our world.

I just think you have to improve or expand the machinery of perception or consciousness to better understand reality. If the container is small the scope of perception and argument is limited and small. If you expand the level of perception of the knower/perceiver the outcomes of experiements and scope or range of the understanding of reality is much greater. David, free from conditioning and programming from Weyland could have the potential of expansion of consciousness. I think David discovers he can and does have an infant soul sort of unrealized until he reaches Paradise where it becomes obvious. Without a soul consciousness remains stagnate. Back to Kaku...I like how he explains things as well but I see the limited range of his mind because he has to stay within the confines of what he knows or thinks he knows in the realm of proveable science. He still looks at quantum theory from the perspective of a limited human body rather than from the perspective of universal consciousness. in other words his languaging is trapped in neurolinguistic constructs from a 3rd density perception rather than doing an Einstein "thought experiment" to check for fallacies. One must open up the range of thinking, perspective and understanding reality.

[i][Holloway] had no right to have unrealistic expectations as an experienced scientist.[/i] Perhaps it's time to apply an old adage to Holloway: If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then the chances are that it is a duck. Holloway, from his mistake riddled presentation, his cowboy-like attitude on the excursion to the dome, his un-archeological reaction to the temple discovery and his complete non-involvement in anything scientific, is not walking and quacking like a duck - ie scientist. Huge chance he's not an archeologist - too many basic errors - nor a scientist. [i]Holloway should have been more than satisfied with the huge achievement of proving that his thesis was correct - that the evidence that they found strongly supports the idea that we are genetically derived from the Engineers.[/i] There is no evidence that humans derived from the space jockeys. The DNA was a match. Shaw does say something like "their DNA predates ours" but 1. Shaw doesn't know shit from clay 2. What she shows Charlie is exactly the same as we saw in the lab - that it's a match and 3. if the DNA is the same it can't predate ours. That's illogical - it's like saying "we predate us." It's either wishful thinking on her part, she doesn't know what she's talking about or she's trying to bring Charlie out of his depression. Remember the amps she pumped into the jockey's head. As you pointed out that is ridiculously high - it's hundreds of amps more than it takes to kill a man. Yet before Holloway returns to the room, we see Shaw wondering what caused the head to explode. How many dumb things do we need to excuse in this film?

irt. [b]Theseus[/b]: I think you give Kaku too much, and too little, credit all at once. For my money he's not explaining things at all clearly; not because he's not smart or doesn't know them (he is, and he does), but because there seems to be something about TV pop-sci that makes it superficial and doomed to be light fluff, if not worse. He's also very happy to step out of experimentally proven physics, and often without seeming to care much that he does so. A lot of the supposedly 'cool' and 'meaningful' stuff in physics is too grand for current experiments, which creates an annoying to me focus on wild ideas that seem put only for their own sake, without flagging them as flights of fancy. OTOH, I'm quite sure he, and all that generation of physicists, spent the 60s proper baked, like everyone else. And finally, I think you don't give enough credit to the 'mechanistic' world-view. Flights of fancy are quite possible here too, and I'll now indulge in one. This is difficult to explain in a forum post, and in fairness the crucial step is my own crazy leap of faith, but it would go like this- Way back, we thought everything was alive. Everything had guiding spirits, because we (thought we) understood ourselves, so we tried to understand the world by projecting ourselves into it. It turned out though that at least a big chunk of the world behaves in fairly ... predictable ways. Even when things are strange, chaotic and even apparently random, one can discern some underlying mechanisms causing that behavior. So far, I think, nothing too controversial. It's also not controversial, at least as far as most scientists are concerned, that the same methods of understanding/describing the world are applicable, and may well be successful, at tackling that puzzle that is the human mind. To quote Daniel Dennett, "we have a soul; it is made of tiny robots". The question, of course, is what kind of aggregation principle is necessary to construct a mind (or soul, or spirit, if you prefer) from smaller parts. My leap of faith comes in believing that those aggregation principles are a bit more common that we give them credit for. A consequence of that is, if it were true, it would make sense to describe various sufficiently complex dynamical phenomena as if they had a mind. For example, nations. I'm tempted to take the "[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_politic]body politic[/url]" metaphor as quite literal. For example, history, with its almost lifelike (if you squint a bit and are crazy) currents. And I am sure you are already familiar with the [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis]Gaia hypothesis[/url]- an analogy between the self-regulating mechanisms inside a living organism, and those of the Earth's ecosphere as a whole. I must again stress, this is an idea I entertain but label as crazy. I'm not the only one, of course, and I'd recommend Douglas Hofstadter's "[url=http://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6del-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/dp/0465026567/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1357906491&sr=8-1&keywords=goedel+escher+bach]Goedel, Escher, Bach[/url]" as a presentation of similar lines of thought. The strength of the 'mechanistic' view you so decry is that it would allow one to place such questions in a format that surpasses human intuition and imagination: Mathematics. Following the necessary implications of a model can take you to weird places indeed. It also can indicate, unambiguously, when a model would no longer be supported by other available evidence. There is already a strong trend in cognitive science to apply dynamic system theory to neural networks, in particular the brain. I think the time will soon be ripe to apply things in reverse, from a [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind]theory of mind[/url] (understood as a model of intentions, fears etc of others; we all use such a thing to navigate society) to the underlying dynamic structure needed to support it. We use 'theories of mind' to make sense of each other, because they are highly compact ways to explain the world, when applicable. So yeah, whatever. A third and final time I must stress that the above is speculation, not even conjecture. But, the real point is, one can dream strange powered by math, and math has the added bonus to not care about your dream. If it's wrong, it will wake you up eventually. TL;DR: Math. Not even once.