BELIEVE   ME   NOT!    - -     A   SKEPTIC's   GUIDE  

. . . system.^16.1

There are, of course, many other ways of stating the SECOND LAW, but this suffices for my purposes.

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. . . robot^16.2

Maxwell specified a "demon," but as A.C. Clarke says, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," so there is no practical difference.

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. . . surroundings.^16.3

An awareness of such consequences is perhaps a first step toward an enlightened form of "environmentalism."

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. . . outlay.^16.4

Another lesson for the wise consumer: always consider the long term energy-economics of a prospective appliance purchase. For example, a fluorescent light takes as little as 1/4 as much power as an incandescent bulb to generate the same amount of light; on the other hand, turning the fluorescent light on and off may shorten its lifetime even more dramatically than for the equivalent incandescent bulb, and the replacement fluorescent light costs far more (in energy) to make! So one should strive to use fluorescent light in applications where the light stays on essentially all the time, but in on-and-off applications it is not so clear.

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. . . cannonball?^16.5

This question has still not been answered in an intuitively satisfactory way; the General Theory of Relativity [coming up!] nicely avoids the issue by making gravitational acceleration equivalent to warped space-time - and thus replies, "the question is meaningless." Maybe all "forces" will eventually be shown to be false constructs, misleading paradigms conjured up to satisfy foolish prejudices and ill-posed questions; it wouldn't surprise me a bit. But for the time being we still cling to the image of two "things" acting on each other and have managed to reconcile this image (sort of) with Quantum Mechanics and Relativity in all cases except Gravity, where even stretching the metaphor to the breaking point has not sufficed. More on this later.

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