3 ms·

Apropos of nothing, in 1903 the NYT confidently declared airplanes would take ten million years to develop.

• cwillu 4y ago
  It's the difference between scaleable quantum computing, and hypercomputation: one appears to be a matter of engineering, which may turn out to be completely impractical/require a million years/whatever. The other is ruled out by our understanding of the universe. Pre-Wright, flight was the former, not the latter.
  • hnews_account_1 4y ago
    Our understanding of gravity isn’t complete. General relativity looks relatively unbreakable but the smartest minds agree non particle gravity just doesn’t make sense in an otherwise QFT universe so we’re missing something deeper. Whether that will provide a way to travel FTL in space time or outside it, we don’t know. But the science is not as settled as it seems even if mere mortals cannot think up a theory to beat the truly incredible power of GR.
    • puffoflogic 4y ago
      No no you don't understand. Science was wrong and incomplete in the past but now (as everyone learns in school) The Science has been completed. What we know is infallible and what we don't know is unknowable.