Reviews for The Role Of The Large-Scale Structures In Turbulent Wall Jets

The average rating for The Role Of The Large-Scale Structures In Turbulent Wall Jets based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-11-11 00:00:00 Manuel Familia Big disappointment, alas. Macvey makes unjustifiable leaps of assumption and uses them to state as fact things that are far-fetched conjecture at best - he begins by writing in the preface that this book is speculative, that science is fact-based but requires an open mind, that too much speculation is as inadvisable as a mind totally closed to change, and that "There has to be a middle path." With that, I believe any reasonable thinker should agree. But instead of sticking to that middle path, Macvey immediately cranks the wheel all the way to the speculative side and - I think - into the ditch. He takes the dubious position that because stone age humans would have considered travel from Earth to the Moon impossible (Would they? We have no way of knowing), "we must suppose that highly intelligent beings in other parts of the galaxy will have discovered the underlying principles and developed the necessary technology" for FTL travel. The words "will have" are indefensible in any argument that claims to follow the aforementioned middle path; at best, we can only say "may have." He then uses this rickety and fallacious platform as the foundation for statements that Earth has been visited by those "highly intelligent beings," and goes on to make similar leaps of faith and state them as facts, such as the idea that 10% of stars with planetary systems have habitable (for us) planets in those systems - he cites a source for an estimate that 70% of stars have planets, but the 10% figure has no source cited. He then reduces that to 1% to err on the safe side, but with no explanation of how he derived the 10% to start with - after which he pulls another 10% SWAG out of mid-air as the number of habitable planets that are home to civilizations more advanced than our own, and goes on to assume that they have developed FTL travel and therefore some of them have surreptitiously visited Earth. Apparently he sees no importance in the facts that our civilization has existed for only about one millionth of the time Earth has existed and that our brief experience so far shows that civilizations can be short-lived; so to the above numbers, he should factor in whatever the odds are that those advanced civilizations exist at the same time as ours, out of the billions of years that have been the lifespan of the universe so far. At the same time, Macvey shows some unjustified assumptions indicating a lack of imagination. For example, he assumes that the beings of these hypothetical alien civilizations will have two genders as we do. I bought this book to use as a reference for a science fiction novel I am writing, but alas, it's pretty much useless for that purpose and irritating as well as useless in terms of science. I can't recommend this to anyone except those willing to accept total conjectures with no evidence as facts because it would be fascinating if they were true. This should have been in the fantasy section of the bookstore.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-11-17 00:00:00 Lars Peter Bundgaard Excellent and thought provoking. Loved it. In a way, this book and it's discussion of life out there is haunting... We need to get off this planet and explore the Universe.