Okay, I've been away for a few days, but I've not given up on this.
Okay, let's look at the answers to these questions I asked (Rainman, I'm sorry, but you got 2 out of 3 wrong).
I can't really remember why the telephone exchange was invented but I think it was so that the troops could get information easily to base.
Nope. I chose this question because it is probably
the most famous invention story of the 20th Century, but not many people will know it unless they have a personal interest in telecommunications, inventions or the history of the 20th century. There was a small American town where there were two undertakers. One of the undertaker's wives worked at the switchboard. As a result, when people rang the operator(s) and asked to be connected to the undertaker, they were connected to the one whose wife worked there, and the other undertaker got little business. To prevent this he invented the telephone exchange to automate the system and get rid of his rival's advantage.
It's an unusual and unlikely sotry, but it's true and pretty memorable. I fail to see how any historian who is an expert in the 20th century would fail to know that.
The bloodiest war is probably vietnam.
"Probably"? You're the expert on the timeperiod, aren't you?
Actually, it's neither the Vietnam war nor the Korean war. It is interesting, though, how Western-centric a pair of answers they are, though. The kinds of answers I'd expect from people from England or America in the 20th century who have had a lifetime of being bambarded with Vietnam movies and repeats of
M*A*S*H on TV. A historian, however, would know that civil war in the Congo (also involving Rwanda and Uganda) was the bloodiest war after WWII in the 20th century.
The public safety announcement was about performers injuring their heads but not really sure.
Rainman was absolutely right about this. The warning was to warn people about "bad" brown acid. You want proof? You can download the announcement here:
http://www.audiosparx.com/sa/play/play.cfm/sound_iid.37146
The reason for this question was that it's a pretty famous moment in history. It's iconic in the same kind of way the "I have a dream...", "We will fight them on the beaches..." and "They think it's all over..." is to a certain sub-set of people. However, it's not only a chiefly
American moment, but also one very much of it's time. And, as such, I thought that what I assume is a fairly young man from England would not know it. However, for a historian of the 20th century not to know it is about as likely as a man with a PhD in electronics not knowing how to wire up a plug.
I'd say that your bluff has well and truely been called.
Ah, but I'm having a laugh, so I'll carry on. But if you could explain how come you don't know these things, and maybe give an outline of some event that you do know about. You're an academic and a historian, so I assume you'll be able to make it consise, interesting and not at all vague. Hey, as you've heard of it and find it interesting, maybe a quick couple of paragraphs on the origins of rap and hip hop in New York, and the influence from Jamacia and the tradition of toasting?
If you read back I said I could not speak arabic.
You're enough of a respected academic to be trusted to come back in time and to communicate with people, telling them who you are and what you're doing, but you don't speak the language that's most common and most widely spoken on the planet? How, exactly, does the academic world operate in your time?
We stopped world hunger with a little bit of communism, as there is enough food for everyone on earth we rationed it out.
Okay, so how did you overcome the inherant flaws of Communism? How did you conquer the human equasion? Also, which form of Communism are we talking about? Marxism? Or do you just mean Socialism?
We can travel light speed. it takes us about 1 hour to reach andromeda in an exploration/war ship
Really? And yet Andromeda is 2.9 million light years away. So, if you were travelling at lightspeed it would take 2.9 million years to get there. Care to explain?
If you read back you should know that it is an element found deep within the moon. I don't know where it is found but I think the atomic weight of it is 288.
An atomic weight of 288? Man, I tell you what, if you are a time-traveller, it's from the 1950s. "Lunarium from the moon!" You do know that after about 83 protons per nucleus that atoms become unstable and split into two or more seperate atoms with smaller atomic weights, right? You do know that because of this there are only 88 naturally occurring elements in the universe, right? And we know what they all are. You do know that, after 88, all elements with higher numbers are synthetic, don't you? And there've basically got no uses and useful properties at all, right? You do know that "finding" a naturally occurring "element" on
the moon with an atomic weight of 288 is impossible, right? It would have flown back inthe era of
It Came From Outer Space, but not in the days when every schoolchild should know about atomic weights.
Oh, and these elements with the higher atomic weights usually have a half-life of anywhere inbetween a millisecond and a second, so it certainly wouldn't be found in nature. Oh, and there's no way anything with an atomic weight of 288 would be a metal.
We dealt with greenhouse gases with a little bit of terraforming.
How?
It depends really, if we have been gone two hours then earth will have aged two hours.
Nope, you really don't understand relitivity. I know you had the bare-faced cheek to say that Einstein was wrong with that theory, but are you aware that it's been proven in experements many times? You can say that it's wrong until you're blue in the face but the simple fact is that it's something that is easily testable (assuming you can get your hands on very accurate clocks and very fast vehicles) and has been tested and is right. Personally, I'd have invented some technobabble about being sheilded from relativity by a bubble of something or other. I suspect that your grasp of physics simply isn't good enough to pull this kind of scam off.
damn, I feel like a fool now. according to the doctor star ships do travel forward in time when going faster than light but it is only 33 seconds.
No comment, really. I just found this particularly funny. Oh, alright, one question, 33 seconds according to which time?
My advice is to do a little research before trying this again. You plainly do not have the first clue about any of the physics or maths, which you'd have to know the
basics of, at least. A racing driver may not know the Periodic Table, but I'll bet you anything you like he could tell you the torque of his engine. However, even if I could forgive the huge gaps of knowledge you have here, you have no credibility as an academic as you don't seem to actually know anything about what you're supposed to be an expert in. As well as that, were you a historian come here to study us that'd basically make you a temporal anthropologist. And what's the most important thing in anthropology? Understanding the language. That you make no effort with spelling, grammar or capitalisation, despite the fact that that's hampering your ability to communicate effectively, definately marks you out as not an academic of any sort, let alone one of the best to be given this oppourtunity to come back here.
Sorry, but at the very least, if you're going to try this again, learn to use a search engine effectively, and learn new ways to aquire knowlegde. I tried to make my 3 questions both things that would be fairly well known, but also things that were somewhat obscure. Both the undertaker and the acid would be readily available with the minimum research, and the Congo question may take a bit of poking around, but I'm sure a quick search of Amnesty International's site would have yielded results. Instead, I'm gussing that you took a wild guess and hoped. Which has proven an ineffective tactic because you don't have enough base knowledge to make your answers convincing.
