6 ms·

I've some direct experience with a similar situation. I can speak to the issue of "why hasn't spaceX or other major company experimented with this". During th

by MCRed 11y ago

I've some direct experience with a similar situation. I can speak to the issue of "why hasn't spaceX or other major company experimented with this". During the "Cold Fusion" era, when Pons & Fleishman had claimed to develop room temperature fusion, I worked for a major US lab doing superconductor research. (We invented the first superconductors that operated at liquid nitrogen temperatures-- Y1B2C3O) While fusion isn't our area of investigation we, being physicists, were curious. We managed to get our hands on a pre-print of the Pons & Fleishman study and did our own experiments. We kept this very hush hush. We didn't want it getting out that we were doing the experiments or people would claim that we replicated them. So, I believe that SpaceX and other companies are experimenting with this, and if they found good results (as the eagle works tests imply they would) they would continue to do so, but in secret.) We eventually published our paper because we constructed a novel experiment that disproved the P&F observation, from our perspective. None-the-less, true to our fears, this was later reported by "Mondo 2000" (The "arse technica" crossed with WIRED of the day) that we had "confirmed cold fusion is real!!1!1". The letter to the editor I wrote and got our most eminent physicist to sign was never printed by the magazine (IIRC). When you get to the fringes-- that's where the action is-- but it's also where you can have confusing or odd results. And even 30 years ago the media was not trustworthy enough to reveal these results to. Our paper was published in a journal, and yet the media still mis represented the results.

ableal 11y ago
Wishful thinking, if not base motives, overpowers most common sense. This seems to be about "reaction-less drives" - I remember reading about how hard-headed SF editor J.W.Campbell had a weak spot for such devices, several decades ago. He entertained a few demos, if memory serves. Didn't pan out then, probably won't now.
drzaiusapelord 11y ago
This is one of the many reasons why I consider all "fururist" media as just sci-fi wish fulfillment for kiddies. Its just incredible how unreadable /r/futurology is, for example. Its just a lot of pats on the back about some amazing life-changing technology, that is eternally 10 years away. I don't have access to the Mondo 2000 stuff today, but if any of that was to believed we'd have AI masterminded rockets to moon condos and eternal life by now. The big advances were actually missed as things like interchangable and standardized protocols, power saving SoCs, incremental battery improvements, touchscreens, and fast networks are "boring" compared to spacetravel and robots and such. I feel I'm also seeing the same hype train today with VR, which has unsolved major issues like motion sickness and questionable applications in gaming, let alone anywhere else. To a lesser extent I see the same thing with electric cars that are always somehow 2-3 years from affordability and economic and range parity with ICE cars. These 2-3 years keep blowing past us, but there's no 200 mile range $20,000 car yet, if there will ever be. Its a shame that practical and real advances are often "boring" to the typical sci-fi obsessed INTJ males who dominate science on the internet. I see so much spilled ink about SpaceX and very little about the upcoming SLS and its planned pioneering manned missions or NASA's robotic and science missions, which are all mindblowingly amazing to me. Sadly, this has all become politicized in the most asinine way possible with a dedicated libertarian group on the web voicing this private vs public rivalry to attack NASA, which is ironic as SpaceX is more or less a welfare program of NASA and the US taxpayers. I hope this fad doesn't last long and good science, real breakthroughs, and the largely unpredictable and usually unsexy, in terms of whiz bang space operas, future continues to unfold before us in a wonderful way. The SLS will have us on an asteroid with just boring old chemical rockets, while the futurists continue to sell snake oil to the low information true believers and diminish the amazing and real accomplishments of the day. "Everything's amazing and nobody's happy." - Louis CK.
- pauloday 11y ago
  I love reading /r/futurology comments for comedy purposes, but I have a weird sense of humor
  - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
    Has anyone told them how gaudy their banner looks?
  - kbenson 11y ago
    I just skip straight to /r/HFY. Might as well go to the source.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  >Its a shame that practical and real advances are often "boring" to the typical sci-fi obsessed INTJ males who dominate science on the internet. eh-hem implying the Myers-Briggs Personality Type is based on rigorous science /sardony /irony.
  - nine_k 11y ago
    Myers-Briggs four-letters are usually self-imposed ("I am an ENTJ"), so it's as good a wearable marker as any other trendy trinket, useful or not.
- api 11y ago
  The way I see it there are two sides to the hype coin: frothing believers and curmudgeonly skeptics. Both are simple minded and shallow. Both really come out of the woodwork for stuff like this. BTW the reason SpaceX is more exciting than SLS is VTVL reusability.
- api 11y ago
  The way I see it there are two sides to the hype coin: frothing believers and curmudgeonly skeptics. Both are simple minded and shallow. Both really come out of the woodwork for stuff like this. BTW the reason SpaceX is more exciting than SLS is VTVL reusability.
raverbashing 11y ago
> When you get to the fringes-- that's where the action is-- but it's also where you can have confusing or odd results. I think this phrase sums it the best I also usually remember that the Casimir effect, a tested and true effect, used to take a lab of experts some years to reproduce results
- api 11y ago
  Was the Casimir effect highly controversial like this? Is there a good example of a discovery that was both challenging to reproduce and initially dismissed by many but was later vindicated? We hear lots of examples of the inverse of this like Pons and Fleischmann but I'm sure there have to be cases like this.
  - madaxe_again 11y ago
    The roundness of the earth. Heliocentric solar system. Circulation of blood in the body. Yes they're "a long time ago" (really, a few centuries isn't a long time), but they're the tip of the iceberg of contested knowledge.
    - marcus_holmes 11y ago
      plate tectonics - massively, enormously controversial, it split the entire earth sciences down the middle with much shouting and name-calling. You can still find old geography textbooks that don't refer to it at all. Turned out to be true and a generation of earth scientists went muttering expletives into retirement.
    - api 11y ago
      Those all seem long ago. Are there any in the last, say, 50 years? That's when I'm having trouble thinking of any. Also the roundness of the earth was never as far as I know controversial among the learned. Heliocentricity was only controversial for religious reasons.
suprgeek 11y ago
"arse technica" - Nice one!
henkboyd 11y ago
Boeing's Phantom Works reportedly tested the EMDrive years ago [1] and nothing came out of it. Edit: Thank you nether. [1] http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/06/emdrive-and-cold-fusion http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/06/emdrive-and-c...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
mng2 11y ago
One of my profs told the class (NucE) that after the cold fusion announcement, people would come around the department to furtively ask for heavy water and such. So you can bet that smart people aren't going to pass up the opportunity to confirm what would be a major scientific discovery.
- Retra 11y ago
  That is one of my arguments against homeopathy: We've got a world full of bright young medical students looking for cheap and easy research to do that will lead to positive results. If they haven't proven homeopathy effective, it's because it isn't.
  - jdjdps 11y ago
    Oh no no. Thats not how it works at all. People only look in places where they expect to find things. Thats why we dont rub sticks together all day when building a nuclear reactor. Its also why it can take centuries to correct mistaken scientific conclusions. While I fully expect homeopathy to be bunk, if it is not then I would not be surprised that it has not been scientifically verified. Market forces/darwian selection/distributed search algorithms that we tend to find in the real world are not finding global minimums, only local minimum. This makes it tricky to construct arguments of the form, well if we havent found a solution of form x then x must be impossible within frame y.
  - Confusion 11y ago
    There is no cheap and easy research in medicine when it comes to showing that some substance heals people, which is what if often comes down to, because the actual mechanism is unknown. You can't show something as simple as aspirine 'works' by setting up a lab experiment without test subjects. And as soon as you involve those, it becomes legally complex, expensive, time consuming and hard. You simply can't compare medical experiments to physics experiments. A physics experiment can be set up to be extremely controlled. If you observe some effect, the number of things it could be due to is very small. A medical experiment requires people with all their messiness and possibly confounding variables. If you observe some effect, there are zounds of possible explanations. Controlling for all of them requires many test subjects. That makes it expensive, time consuming and hard. Even a medical experiment on human cells in a petri dish is infinitely more complex than a physics experiment, in terms of variables involved.

by MCRed 11y ago

ableal 11y ago

Wishful thinking, if not base motives, overpowers most common sense. This seems to be about "reaction-less drives" - I remember reading about how hard-headed SF editor J.W.Campbell had a weak spot for such devices, several decades ago. He entertained a few demos, if memory serves. Didn't pan out then, probably won't now.

drzaiusapelord 11y ago

This is one of the many reasons why I consider all "fururist" media as just sci-fi wish fulfillment for kiddies. Its just incredible how unreadable /r/futurology is, for example. Its just a lot of pats on the back about some amazing life-changing technology, that is eternally 10 years away. I don't have access to the Mondo 2000 stuff today, but if any of that was to believed we'd have AI masterminded rockets to moon condos and eternal life by now. The big advances were actually missed as things like interchangable and standardized protocols, power saving SoCs, incremental battery improvements, touchscreens, and fast networks are "boring" compared to spacetravel and robots and such. I feel I'm also seeing the same hype train today with VR, which has unsolved major issues like motion sickness and questionable applications in gaming, let alone anywhere else. To a lesser extent I see the same thing with electric cars that are always somehow 2-3 years from affordability and economic and range parity with ICE cars. These 2-3 years keep blowing past us, but there's no 200 mile range $20,000 car yet, if there will ever be. Its a shame that practical and real advances are often "boring" to the typical sci-fi obsessed INTJ males who dominate science on the internet. I see so much spilled ink about SpaceX and very little about the upcoming SLS and its planned pioneering manned missions or NASA's robotic and science missions, which are all mindblowingly amazing to me. Sadly, this has all become politicized in the most asinine way possible with a dedicated libertarian group on the web voicing this private vs public rivalry to attack NASA, which is ironic as SpaceX is more or less a welfare program of NASA and the US taxpayers. I hope this fad doesn't last long and good science, real breakthroughs, and the largely unpredictable and usually unsexy, in terms of whiz bang space operas, future continues to unfold before us in a wonderful way. The SLS will have us on an asteroid with just boring old chemical rockets, while the futurists continue to sell snake oil to the low information true believers and diminish the amazing and real accomplishments of the day. "Everything's amazing and nobody's happy." - Louis CK.

pauloday 11y ago
I love reading /r/futurology comments for comedy purposes, but I have a weird sense of humor
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  Has anyone told them how gaudy their banner looks?
- kbenson 11y ago
  I just skip straight to /r/HFY. Might as well go to the source.
eli_gottlieb 11y ago
>Its a shame that practical and real advances are often "boring" to the typical sci-fi obsessed INTJ males who dominate science on the internet. eh-hem implying the Myers-Briggs Personality Type is based on rigorous science /sardony /irony.
- nine_k 11y ago
  Myers-Briggs four-letters are usually self-imposed ("I am an ENTJ"), so it's as good a wearable marker as any other trendy trinket, useful or not.
api 11y ago
The way I see it there are two sides to the hype coin: frothing believers and curmudgeonly skeptics. Both are simple minded and shallow. Both really come out of the woodwork for stuff like this. BTW the reason SpaceX is more exciting than SLS is VTVL reusability.
api 11y ago
The way I see it there are two sides to the hype coin: frothing believers and curmudgeonly skeptics. Both are simple minded and shallow. Both really come out of the woodwork for stuff like this. BTW the reason SpaceX is more exciting than SLS is VTVL reusability.

raverbashing 11y ago

> When you get to the fringes-- that's where the action is-- but it's also where you can have confusing or odd results. I think this phrase sums it the best I also usually remember that the Casimir effect, a tested and true effect, used to take a lab of experts some years to reproduce results

api 11y ago
Was the Casimir effect highly controversial like this? Is there a good example of a discovery that was both challenging to reproduce and initially dismissed by many but was later vindicated? We hear lots of examples of the inverse of this like Pons and Fleischmann but I'm sure there have to be cases like this.
- madaxe_again 11y ago
  The roundness of the earth. Heliocentric solar system. Circulation of blood in the body. Yes they're "a long time ago" (really, a few centuries isn't a long time), but they're the tip of the iceberg of contested knowledge.
  - marcus_holmes 11y ago
    plate tectonics - massively, enormously controversial, it split the entire earth sciences down the middle with much shouting and name-calling. You can still find old geography textbooks that don't refer to it at all. Turned out to be true and a generation of earth scientists went muttering expletives into retirement.
  - api 11y ago
    Those all seem long ago. Are there any in the last, say, 50 years? That's when I'm having trouble thinking of any. Also the roundness of the earth was never as far as I know controversial among the learned. Heliocentricity was only controversial for religious reasons.

suprgeek 11y ago

"arse technica" - Nice one!

henkboyd 11y ago

Boeing's Phantom Works reportedly tested the EMDrive years ago [1] and nothing came out of it. Edit: Thank you nether. [1] http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/06/emdrive-and-cold-fusion http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/06/emdrive-and-c...

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

mng2 11y ago

One of my profs told the class (NucE) that after the cold fusion announcement, people would come around the department to furtively ask for heavy water and such. So you can bet that smart people aren't going to pass up the opportunity to confirm what would be a major scientific discovery.

Retra 11y ago
That is one of my arguments against homeopathy: We've got a world full of bright young medical students looking for cheap and easy research to do that will lead to positive results. If they haven't proven homeopathy effective, it's because it isn't.
- jdjdps 11y ago
  Oh no no. Thats not how it works at all. People only look in places where they expect to find things. Thats why we dont rub sticks together all day when building a nuclear reactor. Its also why it can take centuries to correct mistaken scientific conclusions. While I fully expect homeopathy to be bunk, if it is not then I would not be surprised that it has not been scientifically verified. Market forces/darwian selection/distributed search algorithms that we tend to find in the real world are not finding global minimums, only local minimum. This makes it tricky to construct arguments of the form, well if we havent found a solution of form x then x must be impossible within frame y.
- Confusion 11y ago
  There is no cheap and easy research in medicine when it comes to showing that some substance heals people, which is what if often comes down to, because the actual mechanism is unknown. You can't show something as simple as aspirine 'works' by setting up a lab experiment without test subjects. And as soon as you involve those, it becomes legally complex, expensive, time consuming and hard. You simply can't compare medical experiments to physics experiments. A physics experiment can be set up to be extremely controlled. If you observe some effect, the number of things it could be due to is very small. A medical experiment requires people with all their messiness and possibly confounding variables. If you observe some effect, there are zounds of possible explanations. Controlling for all of them requires many test subjects. That makes it expensive, time consuming and hard. Even a medical experiment on human cells in a petri dish is infinitely more complex than a physics experiment, in terms of variables involved.