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Eh, I don’t think it’s just about ignorance. I had a fantastic science teacher for chemistry and physics in high school, then took another few quarters of chemi

Eh, I don’t think it’s just about ignorance. I had a fantastic science teacher for chemistry and physics in high school, then took another few quarters of chemistry and physics in college, and I am fascinated by cosmology today. I’ve read Steven Hawking and I love lectures by Lawrence Krauss. I’ve watched probably every Feynman lecture on YouTube. I’m still perhaps a lay person (I am an engineer by trade), but I DO have an understanding of physics and chemistry. I don’t think there’s science people know that they’re keeping from us. I just think it’s naive to think we’ve discovered almost everything there is to know about the universe. I’m not trying to build a straw man, but I’m saying either there’s “just a little bit more” to know or there’s a whole lot. I’m inclined to believe there’s a whole lot left to discover when it comes to things that will have a big impact on our world. And to be clear, I’m not being skeptical of accepted physics. When radio was discovered it didn’t change the accepted body of knowledge so much as it added new things we could do.

lopmotr 9y ago
I don't have knowledge about this phenomenon specifically, so you might be right that even an educated person would see hope, but I suspect it's more like whatshisface's two comments here which I think are very insightful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098873 We would expect new discoveries to be outside the range of what we've already tested, not randomly in the middle of it. For example, special relativity becomes significant at high speeds that nobody had ever studied before, not at some odd speed between a horse and a train. But if you didn't know what has already been tested, you wouldn't know where "outside" is. The fact that the original device used a magnetron from a microwave oven suggests it was well within what we've already studied. Maybe the novel aspect is the very tiny effect which nobody measured accurately enough to notice before.

lopmotr 9y ago

I don't have knowledge about this phenomenon specifically, so you might be right that even an educated person would see hope, but I suspect it's more like whatshisface's two comments here which I think are very insightful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098873 We would expect new discoveries to be outside the range of what we've already tested, not randomly in the middle of it. For example, special relativity becomes significant at high speeds that nobody had ever studied before, not at some odd speed between a horse and a train. But if you didn't know what has already been tested, you wouldn't know where "outside" is. The fact that the original device used a magnetron from a microwave oven suggests it was well within what we've already studied. Maybe the novel aspect is the very tiny effect which nobody measured accurately enough to notice before.