5 ms·
"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." -- Lord William Thomson Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist, president of the British Royal Society,
by ctoth 5y ago
"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." -- Lord William Thomson Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist, president of the British Royal Society, 1895.
Edit: See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27816225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27816225 for a discussion of the paper that launched this whole topic.
Edit 2: The actual paper you want is this one by the author of OP, the first one is referring back to this: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.07125 https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.07125
- stevebmark 5y ago"Inertia is a property of matter" - fundamental unchangeable property of the universe
- lolsal 5y ago...so far.
- heavenlyblue 5y agoWhat about perpetual motion machines though? :)
- BurningFrog 5y agoScientifically speaking, the fact that someone was wrong in the past, doesn't mean someone else is wrong now, even if they use a similar sentence structure. PS Yes, I am fun at parties, if I ever get invited to one again!
- xupybd 5y agoYou're technically correct but missing the point. Past hubris is a warning that we are capable of similar hubris. What we can say is our current model of the universe does not allow for any practical travel beyond the speed of light.
- cirrus3 5y agoValid warnings also don't mean anything.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- krapp 5y agoWe can also say that our current model of the universe is orders of magnitude more accurate, so it's more likely that we're correct about the speed of light - something which has been experimentally tested and verified by hundreds if not thousands of people - than the opinion of one particular Lord Kelvin regarding the viability of aircraft. It's just as hubristic to assume that science is as ignorant now as it always has been.
- xupybd 5y agoYes but we do have theories that suggest getting from point A to point B faster than light could be possible. We just have to do some things that appear impractical such as bend spacetime.
- bashinator 5y agoIf FTL were possible, don’t you think there’d already be evidence of the time travel? First thing I’d do with FTL is travel back to the earliest habitable epoch in the Universe and start building galaxy-sized Dyson spheres.
- xupybd 5y agoCan you elaborate please. Why does FTL produce time travel? Why go back and build Dyson spheres?
- mannerheim 5y agoIn special relativity, faster-than-light travel or communication is equivalent to time travel.
- klyrs 5y agoWhich ignored the obvious and prevalent heavier-than-air flying birds. We have no such examples to point at with FTL travel.