Remember Marconi. He wanted to do wireless telegraphy across the Atlantic. Maxwell's equations predicted that radio waves traveled in straight lines. Hertz's ex

Remember Marconi. He wanted to do wireless telegraphy across the Atlantic. Maxwell's equations predicted that radio waves traveled in straight lines. Hertz's experiments had proved the point. Marconi's radio waves were not going to bend round the curvature of the earth. Marconi went ahead anyway. This wasn't stupid. He already knew that radio propagation wasn't strictly line of sight. Nevertheless, radio waves don't follow the curvature of the earth well enough to get messages across the Atlantic. He was gambling that the laws of physics could be circumvented. He won! Not for the reason that he gambled on, but by dumb luck. His radio waves headed off into space and bounced back from the ionosphere. If I were clever I would know the moral of this story. It is either "Sometimes you can circumvent the laws of physics." or its "Watch out for the Marconi trap. He won the 1909 Nobel prize by trying to circumvent the laws of physics and succeeding. And what we have learned in the past hundred years is that people have been throwing their money away trying to repeat this ever since, with no success, so don't go fooling yourself and throw your money away too."