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Couldn't it just be that some scientists saw a problem with an experiment and used the hype to gather money to get that problem fixed?

• thoughtstheseus 6y ago
  Not much money either.
• jfengel 6y ago
  It didn't start with scientists. It started with tinkerers (who prefer to be called "inventors", though I'm unable to find anything else that they've invented). It wasn't really an "experiment" in that it wasn't testing a well-defined hypothesis. It really was just a guess. For some reason it attracted the attention of Harold White, a genuine scientist who NASA employs to do nutjob work. It never produces anything. It looks for all the world as if NASA likes having a pet mad scientist they can trot out to say, "Look, we're taking your stupid ideas seriously, now leave us alone." He couldn't figure out why pumping vast amounts of energy into a thing produced a tiny effect he couldn't otherwise account for, though "it made something hot that you didn't measure" seems a pretty obvious answer. Entropy is squirrely, and we all knew that. It did attract White more hype, so I guess you're right on that score. And as the sibling post notes, it's not all that money, and it comes out of NASA's PR budget. It then attracted more money and that's the money (and time) that really feels wasted. No problem got fixed. It was just an expensive version of the "Is it possible that dark matter is made of the socks that disappear from my washing machine?" type questions that plague scientific Q&As.