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There are plenty of cases where someone who doesn't understand the underlying theory has contributed due to the outsider effect or just pure luck. The hype, and

There are plenty of cases where someone who doesn't understand the underlying theory has contributed due to the outsider effect or just pure luck. The hype, and the swindling are not ok, but when an organization like NASA thinks they maybe successfully reproduced an experiment that invalidates a law of nature you have to keep trying. Sure I'm hoping for new science, always, because that is more fun, but mostly you need to know for sure what the experimental error was so that you don't repeat it in an experiment whose result you aren't as skeptical of.

arbitrage 6y ago
> There are plenty of cases where someone who doesn't understand the underlying theory has contributed due to the outsider effect or just pure luck Are you talking about anyone who was born in the last 100 years?
- dotancohen 6y ago
  Lemaitre?
- tobmlt 6y ago
  A low number of dollars spent to put to bed an idea that would have upended physics is a fairly cost effective play in the risk to reward game. That’s what it comes down too. Negative results are good. Utter quackery is not good. But hard data from experiment is usually not quackery. Even if the whole thing stands outside the established paradigm. I’d argue we could stand a bit more of it, in this age of funding bandwagons and careerism.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - thenewwazoo 6y ago
    > Utter quackery is not good. That's the OP's point. The EmDrive is utter quackery. It cannot exist because it necessarily violates the laws of thermodynamics. Anything that disproves those will literally undermine the entire foundation of what we understand about the universe. It would be directly comparable to discovering that the earth is flat.
    - nwallin 6y ago
      We already know the laws of thermodynamics has exceptions. In very small systems, the entropy of a system fluctuates randomly - up and down. A light ray traveling over extremely long distances will have its energy reduced through red shifting, and that energy doesn't "go" anywhere, it is destroyed. In both of these regimes, over extremely small scales and extremely large scales, there are exceptions carved out of the laws of thermodynamics. We know for certain that our understanding of physics is incomplete. General relativity (as formulated) is certainly wrong, because it precludes the possibility of small things existing; and yet they do. Quantum mechanics (as formulated) is certainly wrong, because it precludes the possibility of curved spacetime, and yet we know spacetime is curved. There is, of course, a minuscule possibility that the emdrive actually works. It almost certainly doesn't. Ballpark one in a thousand. But we can't exclude the possibility that it works, based on the principle that the the laws of thermodynamics, which already has two exceptions, cannot have a third exception. There's big talk about humanity traveling to other stars, colonizing other star systems, colonizing the galaxy and so forth. For this to happen, we would have to be wrong about physics. There's simply not any way to do it by building on the foundation of what we understand about the universe. So investing in low probability speculative ideas like emdrive is still necessary, even though for any given idea, there are lots of nines that say it won't work.
      - ChrisLomont 6y ago
        >the laws of thermodynamics has exceptions No, they don't. The "laws" you learn in high school are large scale approximations to the actual rules, which is codified in stat mech. It's like claiming solids are not solid because atoms... Of course physicists know all this. >General relativity (as formulated) is certainly wrong, because it precludes the possibility of small things existing Having worked on GR stuff for a long time, this is news. GR most certainly allows any size thing to exist - it's a continuous theory. >Quantum mechanics (as formulated) is certainly wrong, because it precludes the possibility of curved spacetime No, it does not. QM in curved spacetime is so old and well understood it has a Wikipedia page [1] - from which you can start digging back into the literature. You should really google such claims when making them to be sure you understand what you're claiming. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory_in_curved_spacetime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory_in_curved...
sidlls 6y ago
Can you name some of those cases?
ChrisLomont 6y ago
>There are plenty of cases where someone who doesn't understand the underlying theory has contributed due to the outsider effect or just pure luck. There are far more such cases where the outsider was wrong, so many more of these, that using the extremely rare event to claim this may be one is simply terrible reasoning. It is far more likely that this is yet another crackpot pushing nonsense. No outside has found a breakthrough that for decades (the length the EmDrive people have been making noise) was discarded. In fact, when an outsider finds something useful or novel, for a long time now the science community nearly immediately understands and embraces it. This is the opposite of that.

arbitrage 6y ago

> There are plenty of cases where someone who doesn't understand the underlying theory has contributed due to the outsider effect or just pure luck Are you talking about anyone who was born in the last 100 years?

dotancohen 6y ago
Lemaitre?
tobmlt 6y ago
A low number of dollars spent to put to bed an idea that would have upended physics is a fairly cost effective play in the risk to reward game. That’s what it comes down too. Negative results are good. Utter quackery is not good. But hard data from experiment is usually not quackery. Even if the whole thing stands outside the established paradigm. I’d argue we could stand a bit more of it, in this age of funding bandwagons and careerism.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- thenewwazoo 6y ago
  > Utter quackery is not good. That's the OP's point. The EmDrive is utter quackery. It cannot exist because it necessarily violates the laws of thermodynamics. Anything that disproves those will literally undermine the entire foundation of what we understand about the universe. It would be directly comparable to discovering that the earth is flat.
  - nwallin 6y ago
    We already know the laws of thermodynamics has exceptions. In very small systems, the entropy of a system fluctuates randomly - up and down. A light ray traveling over extremely long distances will have its energy reduced through red shifting, and that energy doesn't "go" anywhere, it is destroyed. In both of these regimes, over extremely small scales and extremely large scales, there are exceptions carved out of the laws of thermodynamics. We know for certain that our understanding of physics is incomplete. General relativity (as formulated) is certainly wrong, because it precludes the possibility of small things existing; and yet they do. Quantum mechanics (as formulated) is certainly wrong, because it precludes the possibility of curved spacetime, and yet we know spacetime is curved. There is, of course, a minuscule possibility that the emdrive actually works. It almost certainly doesn't. Ballpark one in a thousand. But we can't exclude the possibility that it works, based on the principle that the the laws of thermodynamics, which already has two exceptions, cannot have a third exception. There's big talk about humanity traveling to other stars, colonizing other star systems, colonizing the galaxy and so forth. For this to happen, we would have to be wrong about physics. There's simply not any way to do it by building on the foundation of what we understand about the universe. So investing in low probability speculative ideas like emdrive is still necessary, even though for any given idea, there are lots of nines that say it won't work.
    - ChrisLomont 6y ago
      >the laws of thermodynamics has exceptions No, they don't. The "laws" you learn in high school are large scale approximations to the actual rules, which is codified in stat mech. It's like claiming solids are not solid because atoms... Of course physicists know all this. >General relativity (as formulated) is certainly wrong, because it precludes the possibility of small things existing Having worked on GR stuff for a long time, this is news. GR most certainly allows any size thing to exist - it's a continuous theory. >Quantum mechanics (as formulated) is certainly wrong, because it precludes the possibility of curved spacetime No, it does not. QM in curved spacetime is so old and well understood it has a Wikipedia page [1] - from which you can start digging back into the literature. You should really google such claims when making them to be sure you understand what you're claiming. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory_in_curved_spacetime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory_in_curved...

sidlls 6y ago

Can you name some of those cases?

ChrisLomont 6y ago

>There are plenty of cases where someone who doesn't understand the underlying theory has contributed due to the outsider effect or just pure luck. There are far more such cases where the outsider was wrong, so many more of these, that using the extremely rare event to claim this may be one is simply terrible reasoning. It is far more likely that this is yet another crackpot pushing nonsense. No outside has found a breakthrough that for decades (the length the EmDrive people have been making noise) was discarded. In fact, when an outsider finds something useful or novel, for a long time now the science community nearly immediately understands and embraces it. This is the opposite of that.