Often my instinctive, non-articulable "feeling" toward a situation of a problem has proven correct over the years. I suppose many "feelings" have been wrong, but I don't remember those ;-)
Here are three instances.
In the late 1990s, I was discussing Sandy Weill with acquaintances at a NYC club bar. The WSJ article had just appeared where his favoritism towards his daughter at Citibank had been unveiled. I stated that the story inferred he was untrustworthy. My fellow debaters/drinkers vehemently disagreed. Several years later, the Jack Grubman - Worldcom case proved me correct.
A couple of years ago, Weill's performance at Citibank was being discussed in a chat room. I posted that he had really done nothing but engage in merger-itis as the long term chart of C proved. The stock had gone nowhere for the time he controlled the company. I was challenged that he "built up the company". Now we see widely accepted in the business press that he just created a mess. And the mess will likely soon come apart as Chuck Prince is resigning.
About 33 years ago, I gave a talk on the mass of galaxies. I had learned much galactic dynamics in an advanced graduate course, including the mystery of the rotation curves of galaxies and the unseen virial mass of clusters of galaxies. Putting 2 and 2 together, I knew that a uniform, very heavy distribution of "dark matter" would explain both. So I gave a short talk on the problem and solution in another graduate course where the question had come up. Being rather young [I was just a junior in college], I was unable to answer quite a few of points that captious* fellow students tossed up. A few years as a graduate student myself and a teaching assistant, later I assigned a scattering theory problem to students to illustrate how some types of matter would be unobservable. In recent years, the existence of a uniform field of "dark matter" in the universe is now accepted by astrophysicists. Its makeup is still unknown.
So one must respect one's instincts, provided they have led one well in the past.
*see Thurday's word of the day
About Me
- Bunkerman
- I have a pioneer mentality. My wife & I live in the woods - neighbors aren't visible except slightly in winter. Our "bunker" - hehe, really a fine home & barn - has plenty of security. We have four dogs: Krypto (age 9, Kelpie), Ava (age 13, Rat Terrier), Sky (Kelpie, age 5) and Lucky Star (age 1, kelpie). I don't take crap from anyone anymore, having enough resources & gear stocked up to survive in any circumstance. I have three degrees from Harvard including a Ph. D. in a physical science, and an MS in Management from MIT. I worked as an investment banker for about 25 years, mainly in secured finance, at three major Wall Street firms and for the last 17 years with my partners at our own firm. I'm semi-retired now, managing some private corporations and business interests and doing my own trading & investing. This is not to boast, but to give you an idea I know a little about some subjects from experience. The photo is my 1943 M16 half-track which I am restoring. These armored vehicles were ubiquitous in the US Army in World War II and Korea. It's driveable.
1 comment:
So to put it in spinese...say you have 2 galaxies....ones 20 mil light yrs(whatever)..ones 30...in theory..the light should come straight to our view...you should be able to see 2 lights...but...there's either another galaxy or dust with the mass of a galaxy(lol) that has a gravitional pull and is bending or "warping" the light of one of the 2 ....so you end up only seeing one....The one you cant see is dark matter.....and the force...the gravitational pull that bends the light is dark energy?....light travels at 186k miles/sec...but...dark energy...slows the light.....So when you saw Star Trek and they were sayin warp 5..warp 6(lol)... they had a way of slowing down or speeding up light..time travel maaan..lol
Bunk write about redshift,opened closed universes....great stuff,,thanks
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