3 ms·
No I'm not. I'm saying that we know something about how the universe works. And one of the things we know is that there is no free momentum or energy (in flat s
by Certhas 10y ago
No I'm not. I'm saying that we know something about how the universe works. And one of the things we know is that there is no free momentum or energy (in flat space time).
The reason that we know this is far stronger than simply: "It hasn't been observed yet". That would allow that any new thing could end up violating the established rules.
It could be that if you write the one hundred millionth Mersenne prime on a cookie, and the one two hundred millionth on a banana they start circling each other and create free energy. This claim has not been falsified. So on what grounds do we rule it out? Because it is incompatible at an incredibly deep level with everything we know about cookies, bananas, and how their physical properties depend on what's written on them.
Every aspect of each of these objects that has ever been observed has been found to be describable in terms of some unbelievably simple mathematical structures. For these unbelievably simple mathematical structures we have prove that anything that can be described by them does not allow free energy.
An observation like the Mersenne, cookie, banana interaction can not violate the mathematical derivation, therefore it implies that out of all the infinitude of observations that have been made of bananas and cookies, that all were describable by energy and momentum conserving physical theories, somehow this one arbitrary one is special. It can not be described by even the type of mathematics we have hitherto used and yet was completely invisible.
How could that be? Flying Spaghetti Monster of course. Just as the FSM hid the true age of the earth from us by interfering with science, so it also conspired to hide the free energy Mersenne Banana Cookie interaction from us.
In other words: If you know that the FSM did not create the earth 4000 years ago, then you even more definitely know that there is no free momentum/energy. If you think that we can't know either of these things, then your concept of knowledge sucks.
- davesque 10y agoI'm not suggesting that anyone spend much time entertaining ideas like the prime cookie or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I'm merely pointing out that theory does not dictate outcomes. I'm happy that they have disproven the EM drive (or that this appears to be the case), but one of the things that's bothered me about the discourse surrounding this phenomenon has been the notion that we should immediately dismiss it as "impossible". Surely, it was improbable. But that's just what it was: improbable.
- Certhas 10y agoI disagree. Calling it improbable rather than impossible muddles language. It's a fake sort of precision that removes an important qualitative distinction, and that is what bothered me the most about this discourse. A lot of naive language prescriptivist that want to discard perfectly good words for the sake of an irrelevant logical/philosophical point. It's improbable to flip a coin 10 times and get head ten times. It's for all practical purposes impossible to do so 10^10 times. This level of mathematical probability is functionally indistinguishable from 0 thus it is entirely accurate to call it impossible. It's not logically impossible of course, it just happens not to be possible in our universe. It's physically impossible. Like the prime cookie. The appropriate amount of time spent on investigating prime cookies is not "very small", it's 0. Now there is of course reason to investigate the EM Drive to some degree: To figure out where the bug was. To learn about potential experimental errors. As a puzzle, to solve the apparent paradox. But any other framing of the issue is dishonest.