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> they literally said, well, you know, during the Cold War we, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community and like entire

> they literally said, well, you know, during the Cold War we, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community and like entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn't proceed What are the odds that deep within US research labs, we have some crazy breakthrough tech tucked away? Like antigravity drives or force fields or whatever - complete with brand new breakthrough physical theories to support them. I'd guess suppressing such a breakthrough without raising suspicion wouldn't be hard - probably only a few top guys can make the intellectual jumps to derive such theories and the experimental setup to validate them could very well cost billions. The US government could just quietly whisk away the top talent into some secret lab, put out some fake papers showing this avenue of research is not noteworthy and not fund further public research in the area.

CamperBob2 2y ago
(a) Like all great conspiracy theories, it would require too many people to keep their mouths shut; and (b) nobody in China would care about any secrecy rules laid down by the US government, any more than Sakharov's team in Russia cared about the US's intention to monopolize the hydrogen bomb. The closest thing to this type of technology would be EUV hardware of the sort produced by ASML. We have now given China every incentive to put everything they've got into developing similar technology on their own soil. Despite slow progress to date, they will get there. Another analogy might be the math behind encryption, effectively monopolized by NSA for decades... but nobody's trillion-dollar economy was blocked by those secrets.
throwaway314155 2y ago
> What are the odds that deep within US research labs, we have some crazy breakthrough tech tucked away? Like antigravity drives or force fields or whatever - complete with brand new breakthrough physical theories to support them. Effectively zero? Did that sound more convincing when you originally wrote it? Because it's like conspiracy theory 101.

CamperBob2 2y ago

(a) Like all great conspiracy theories, it would require too many people to keep their mouths shut; and (b) nobody in China would care about any secrecy rules laid down by the US government, any more than Sakharov's team in Russia cared about the US's intention to monopolize the hydrogen bomb. The closest thing to this type of technology would be EUV hardware of the sort produced by ASML. We have now given China every incentive to put everything they've got into developing similar technology on their own soil. Despite slow progress to date, they will get there. Another analogy might be the math behind encryption, effectively monopolized by NSA for decades... but nobody's trillion-dollar economy was blocked by those secrets.

throwaway314155 2y ago

> What are the odds that deep within US research labs, we have some crazy breakthrough tech tucked away? Like antigravity drives or force fields or whatever - complete with brand new breakthrough physical theories to support them. Effectively zero? Did that sound more convincing when you originally wrote it? Because it's like conspiracy theory 101.