Polite Dissent

6 Responses to “ Technobabble Theater starring Nick Fury (with help from Dr. Bruce Banner) ”

1. raymond larsson
   June 22nd, 2007 at 7:06 pm
   

   “Everything has a unique frequency?”
   ahh, no. Everything probably can be characterized by a unique *set* of frequencies, but those sets would tend to be infinite and thus not very calcuable.(and truncated sets would probably not be unique)

   “Everything is filled with infinite space?”
   Arguably what with all the sub-atomic universes.

   “Solar energy (a vague term) becomes atomic energy — sub atomically?”
   You’ve got me … .

   “And doesn’t Nick Fury look like a muppet here?”
   Waldorf or Statler?

2. Jon Hendry
   June 22nd, 2007 at 9:21 pm
   

   That’s what you might call negative-space technobabble.

   The writer just kind of dabs at a suggested outline, and you’re supposed to fill in the rest.

   It’s like the writer knows he can’t write this stuff, so he falls back on ’see where I’m going with this?’/

3. SanctumSanctorumComix
   June 25th, 2007 at 10:22 am
   

   As for the “infinite space” line…

   I think he’s being a bit liberal with the FRACTAL theory of space.

   Part of the whole “Chaos Theory” dealt with infinites and they used FRACTALS to show that, no matter how much you zoomed in on ANY section of a fractal, it would produce MORE surface area.

   Then they took that 2D theory/fact into a 3D model, to show that no matter how far “in” to something you could go, there was infinite space to continue (just smaller).
   Then, I guess it goes sub-atomic and can continue like that nearly ad infinitum (until sub-dimensional?).

   ~P~
   P-TOR

4. Juho Salo
   June 30th, 2007 at 6:41 am
   

   This leads to Planet Hulk, right? So actually, that Fury really IS a muppet, as the real one bailed months earlier.

5. Blue Spider
   July 24th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
   

   Nick Fury looks like a goober.
   a potatohead.

   a fiend.

   this art is bad,.

6. Blake
   November 23rd, 2008 at 5:00 pm
   

   Unique frequency: well, it is true that all elements produce a unique spectrum. That’s actually how the contents of stars are identified. So while it is a stretch (because there’s too much background radiation to really do this) you could possibly identify nukes by looking for the spectrum of uranium or plutonium. Again though, good luck actually doing that.

   Infinite space: No. Except there’s an infinite number of points, maybe (though quantum physics may disagree here; in loop quantum gravity, there’s actually a ’smallest packet’ that volume can come in). However, the measure of the space is finite. Fractals don’t help you here. A fractal is self-similar at an infinite sequence of smaller scales, but it is still -smaller- at those scales. The point is that if you blow it up, you can’t tell that you blew it up, IF you start out with one that was infinitely large to start with.
   On the other hand, there’s no reason why you can’t pack energy into an arbitrarily small space. Except that when you reach the Schwarzschild mass, you get a black hole, and there goes all your energy (and possibly the earth).

   Solar energy to atomic energy: This is obvious nonsense, but it could mean that photonic radiation from the sun is used to induce subatomic particles, such as nuclei, to enter higher energy states, thus storing the energy. Such energy could be called ‘atomic,’ since it is in the nuclei. However, it should be noted that I can’t think of any situation in which this would be either practical or even theoretically feasible. Even if you came up with some way of using solar photons to put the nuclei into higher energy states, most stuff that’s not in the ground state tends to have a very short half-life, making it useless for long-term storage of energy.

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