[escepticos] Decidme que es una broma

[Adela Torres Calatayud <torresad@...>]

Hola a todoooos,

Mientras esperamos la gloriosa venida de la siguiente entrega del curso de
transgenicos (estoy disfrutandolo con placer casi pecaminoso, alabada sea
la santisima Carpa, niebla tu ya me entiendes)... Por donde iba...? Ah,
si. Decia que estaba yo hojeando el numero del 22 de Abril de Science y me
encuentro, en la pagina 669,una misteriosa columna llamada "Daedalus" sin
mas, firmada por un tal David Jones,  con la siguiente "perla":

SPIRITUAL MATTERS
The connection between matter and spirit has been debated for millenia.
The central mystery is that certain material objects (human beings)
contrive to be conscious and to posess a spiritual dimension. This implies
that matter itself has some rudimentary spiritual character.
Daedalos reckons that tha spiritual world occupies the same space as the
material one, but at most points is very weakly coupled into it.
Nonetheless, over cosmological space and time, this weak coupling must
have brought the two realms into thermodynamic equilibrium. So the spirit
world will have acquired the average temperature of the physical universe
-- 3 K, the temperature of the microwave background. (This explains why a
ghost, an invasion of the material world by the spirit one, tends to cool
the room.)
So Daedalus is looking for the weak thermodynamic coupling between the two
worlds. A warm material object, even in a perfect vacuum and surrounded by
a perfect reflector, should slowly cool down by thermal leakage into the
spiritual world. The experiment will test modern thermometry and
high-vacuum techniques to their limits; but success would open a new field
of discovery.
Daedalus is already planning his exploration of it. He hopes to discover
whether relics and ritual objects, imbued with spiritual significance,
cool faster than mundane ones. He expects that biological materials,
especially the neurotransmitters and proteins of brain chemistry, will
cool faster still. They are part of the secret of human consciousness, and
should be quite tightly coupled with the spiritual world. This coupling
might take the form of a strong spectroscopic emission at the 3 K
blackbody peak in the millimetre-wave region, or it might be far more
subtle. But detailed experiments, aided by such insights, should reveal
the spiritual capacity of a wide range of objects and substances.
Perhaps the most interesting objects for testing will be semiconductors,
either as bulk solids or in the form of integrated circuits and
microprocessors. If they cool no faster than common minerals, this will
demonstrate their lack of a spiritual dimension -- in which case no
computer, however powerful, could be conscious. But if they turn out to
cool as fast as the neurotransmitters, then conscious technological
monsters like Hal and Deep Thought should indeed be possible.
David Jones

FIN DE LA TRANSCRIPCION

Y ahora digo yo: es una broma, no? Los editores de Science de vez en
cuando se ponen algo filosoficos, o bromistas, y ponen estas cosas. Porque
no se dice quien o que es Daedalus, ni a que viene esto, ni por que hace
lo que hace ni con que dinero ni donde ni nada. Asumiendo que es una
broma, la cosa es divertida y bastante ingeniosa, y da a los LGM de las
neveras una nueva e insospechada dimension espiritual, porque seguramente
se enfrian bastante rapido (por cierto, quiere eso decir que las tazas de
cafe, el plato de cocido, el Colacao del desayuno, los pies, y otras
sustancias de rapido enfriamiento, son fuertemente espirituales? Ahora
bien, si esto esta escrito en plan serio y sin bromas, y Sciencie lo ha
editado, a mi me va a entrar mucho tutoooo.

Opiniones? Peticiones de traduccion? Cafe?

Adela

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|Adela Torres          | "OUTSIDE OF A DOG, A BOOK IS A MAN'S BEST FRIEND |
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