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I'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 do
by davesque 10y ago
I'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.