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Well according to one guy, we HAVE the technology, we just have no idea how to use it. It would be like giving Leonardo Divinci a computer and ask him to figure out how it works.
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I am still not convinced it can be a thing. I mean, in theory everything you can dream of could be a reality SOME DAY. (You just don’t know). But I have been creating an alien invasion in my head where their tech is way better than ours, but nothing fantastic like warp speed or transporters or anti-grav
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But it COULD be a thing. I mean we just NOW discovered evidence of gravity waves. We just don’t under stand how the fuck it work. Sort of like how we had no idea about magnetism at one point. So I say keep looking into it.
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That’s just what gravity WANTS you to do!
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RE your tangent: That book sounds entertaining, is this by chance it?: https://www.amazon.com/How-Build-Flying-Saucer-Speculative/dp/0552990140/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=how+to+build+a+ufo&qid=1572539143&sr=8-1
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Sorry to be a Debbie Downer, but the whole concept that somehow scientists “get rich” from grants needs to die in a fire. It gets used to deny climate change and other important science as “biased” while corporations with a vested interest in suppressing that scientific work make billions.
“Look - this researcher was able to buy a used Subaru with their ill-gotten gains. Meanwhile, the poor, downtrodden oil & gas industry lobbyist can barely afford a new yacht!”
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I had the impression that there were goings-on vaguely akin to cold fusion, wherein one person kinda sorta proposed that he found something and everyone else started scrambling to climb on the bandwagon.
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That’s the one. (I am pretty sure)
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It being an emergent property capable of affecting other systems means it is also a force, yo. “Force” and “emergent property” aren’t mutually exclusive even at the fundamental level.
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The video is from Discovery Canada, they had a great hour long daily science news show. Natasha Stillwell narrating this piece, the show was hosted by her (and others, throughout it’s run) and Jay Ingram, a science writer ( and biologist ) who was there for most of the run. At it’s best, it was a terrific show, but times change and it’s been gone a couple years now.
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As I see it they got funding for fundamental forces research on a long term basis, something that’s incredibly rare but also very important. Getting grants for this kind of research is always difficult because there’s not much chance you’ll have something to show for it at the end except for a slightly better understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe.
There’s always the danger that your friendly administrator will retire or move on to a different position and the replacement will be more focused on research that can be licensed to industry to improve the bottom line. It’s the danger of political control over academic research, and why it’s so hard to run large long term experiments. Just ask the people who were getting ready to start work with the Superconducting Supercollider down in Texas.
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What we have here isn’t science. It is cargo-cult science, trying to look like the real thing. One guy says he can do it, but his process is usually secret or lacking a proper description of some magic catalyst or element. The thing to ask is not “did your experiment work” but “why did you think it might work?”
Let’s take Gravitational Waves, for example. Special relativity started from a guess that the speed of light was the same whether you were moving or staying still. That followed several experiments by Michaelson that ought to have measured any change. This also explained how magnetism appeared if static electric charges moved with respect to you. If the effect of moving a charge propagates at the speed of light, then the effect of moving a mass ought to propagate at the speed of light too. So, even though we had not detected gravitation waves, the universe would be a lot stranger if they didn’t exist then if they did. So, Gravitional waves were a theory in 1905, even if we have only just detected them.
On the other hand, Fleischmann and Pons declared that they had got ‘cold fusion’ from a small imbalance between energy in and energy out when doing electrolysis. There energies they were putting in were less than one ten-millionth of what they would need to break up a hydrogen nucleus. Even then; then the odds that one atom would simply glance off rather than hitting head-on are tremendous. So, why were they trying to do fusion like that?
A dead giveaway is a coincidence of ‘magical’ properties. If they need a disc of single-crystal bismuth, polished optically flat, spinning in a vacuum, and a magnetic field, then be very suspicious.
It’s nice to string the military along to fund pure research to be quite honest. It means less bombs get made. In other news, the idea of anti-gravity isn’t necessary wrong but that that gravity doesn’t come in flavors or charges or poles is something that baffles physicists to this day. It’s why some propose not to treat it as a proper force on its own but an emergent property of matter from something more fundamental. It’s quite important to do this research because the other forces have some kind of flavor or charge to them which gives them limits to their reach where as gravity can pile up thanks to its unlimited reach (being the weakest of the bunch isn’t as bad of a rap as it may sound once the fact of unlimited reach becomes apparent).
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And “Remainers, how the fuck do THEY work?!”
(Oh - obvious, really. Gravity keeps them down.)
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Also vaguely on topic (as I just noted, here)
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Decades of antigravity research went nowhere never got off the ground
(I’d bet Rob thought of this and rejected it as too obvious. Better to play it straight than go with a dad joke.)
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For the record, I’m not anti-gravity… more like gravity agnostic.
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oh, gravity - a few skinned knees, a chipped tooth - you aren’t missing anything i assure you
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You know who else’s anti-gravity experiments didn’t work?
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It plays a bit part in this book.
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So, it’s still up in the air?
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Perhaps because John Tandberg had already in 1927 claimed to be able to produce helium from hydrogen using a similar process? The idea that if you take a metal that can absorb a lot of hydrogen it may screen the charges of the nucei making it simpler for them to collide isn’t inherently stupid. Solid state physics has lots of wierder phenomena like the Mössbauer effect.
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