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The E-Cat has been replicated?

animpossibleinvention.com

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Re: The E-Cat has been replicated?

#41

Post by mrfusion »

wcoenen wrote: post #32
api wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EmDrive is actually less physically plausible than the E-Cat if you get into it, since reactionless propulsion is identical to perpetual motion and/or infinite energy. Someone had a nice explanation of this over on Reddit but I don't have a link handy. Basically if momentum is not conserved then you can build kinetic energy without bound on finite power or something like that. The only way the EmDrive could work…

> Someone had a nice explanation of this over on Reddit but I don't have a link handy. Basically if momentum is not conserved then you can build kinetic energy without bound on finite power or something like that. Are you referring to this reddit comment by myself? https://reddit.com/r/spaceflight/comments/34ay1c/nasa_resear...

What you say is true but I don't see why people make assumption 1. Does anomalous thrust tell you it can accelerate linearly to power?

Re: The E-Cat has been replicated?

#42

Post by mikeash »

guscost wrote: post #20
aetherson wrote: post #12

I'm genuinely curious as to why HN so regularly has articles about various "wouldn't it be great if this worked but obviously it never will" scams/inventions/measurement errors on the front page. Is it because there is a contingent of HN voters who are true believers in this stuff? Is it "point at the silly people and laugh"? Is it some kind of attempt to make a meta point about credulity or discuss scams or somethin…

Maybe all of those are a factor. Personally, while I try to maintain skepticism about big claims like this, I don't like to dismiss an idea offhand just because most other people have previously dismissed it. Others are probably willing to extend the same courtesy even if the particular claim is unlikely to hold. Just curious, would you put the EM drive[0] in the same category? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_re…

At least the EmDrive is legitimately difficult to verify. It's claimed to produce tiny amounts of thrust. That requires extreme care to measure and makes it hard to see if it works as claimed.

The e-cat, on the other hand, is claimed to be a megawatt nuclear reactor. Verifying it should be easy: let it run and see if it produces power. Let it run long enough to rule out trickery like hidden batteries. If it does what the creator says it does, it should pass this test easily.

But for some reason they won't do this. They run all sorts of other weird tests but won't just demonstrate power production. To me, this makes it obvious that the "some reason" is because it doesn't work. If it worked there wouldn't be any question.

Re: The E-Cat has been replicated?

#43

Post by pknight »

xenophonf wrote: post #36
pknight wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 'real scientific' article wouldn't do anything to convince people - it would be picked apart and doubted. Which is kind of an interesting thing in an of itself. I think for controversial stuff, you simply won't get scientists to budge no matter how transparent or rigorious the reporting. If the stuff turns out to be true, there will be a long delay before acceptance. I no longer believe that open replications make…

A 'real scientific' article wouldn't do anything to convince people - it would be picked apart and doubted A/K/A the scientific process, which is why experimental scientists publishing results with 5-sigma confidence intervals also painstakingly account for all of the different ways they could have screwed up, e.g., the recent gravitational waves paper, the Higgs boson discovery, etc. It goes the other way, like thos…

There have been studies with over 5-sigma confidence intervals that are not taken seriously simply because it's controversial. It's just we're wired to the status quo and nobody likes to be tricked.

And you can't keep say, a factory or a house running on snake oil, so it will be evident pretty quickly.

Re: The E-Cat has been replicated?

#45

Post by brudgers »

maxxxxx wrote: post #39

The E-cat definitely triggers all my bullshit detectors. Has there ever been a case where somebody had this fantastic invention but never let anybody take a close look but the invention was actually legitimate? The only one I can think of is the Wright brothers who didn't show their flyer for years until the patents were finished.

Greek fire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire

Re: The E-Cat has been replicated?

#46

Post by brudgers »

aetherson wrote: post #12

I'm genuinely curious as to why HN so regularly has articles about various "wouldn't it be great if this worked but obviously it never will" scams/inventions/measurement errors on the front page. Is it because there is a contingent of HN voters who are true believers in this stuff? Is it "point at the silly people and laugh"? Is it some kind of attempt to make a meta point about credulity or discuss scams or somethin…

In 1982, I read Herman Kahn's The Next 200 Years and got pumped about power from nuclear fusion. The tokamak was hot and the wisdom at the time was that it was 20 years away. I talked with my Dad, he said fusion power had been 20 years away since he was also 17. It's still looks like it's 20 years away.

My point isn't that practical fusion power is a scam. But to me it doesn't look appreciably closer to practicality than cold fusion and a whole lot more money has been spent on it [which as a metric of grift is probably among the better ones]. Which is to say that my point is that what constitutes a scam is in the eye of the beholder. We celebrate Charles Babbage.

Re: The E-Cat has been replicated?

#47

Post by api »

pknight wrote: post #43
xenophonf wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 'real scientific' article wouldn't do anything to convince people - it would be picked apart and doubted A/K/A the scientific process, which is why experimental scientists publishing results with 5-sigma confidence intervals also painstakingly account for all of the different ways they could have screwed up, e.g., the recent gravitational waves paper, the Higgs boson discovery, etc. It goes the other way, like thos…

There have been studies with over 5-sigma confidence intervals that are not taken seriously simply because it's controversial. It's just we're wired to the status quo and nobody likes to be tricked. And you can't keep say, a factory or a house running on snake oil, so it will be evident pretty quickly.

Show me a house running on an eCat then.

Re: The E-Cat has been replicated?

#48

Post by clock_tower »

emcrazyone wrote: post #29
clock_tower wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I was wondering what this was about; my best guess was the CueCat from one of Joel Spolsky's old columns...

hahaha, I was thinking the exact same thing, literally cue cat and all too. Even funnier is my undergrad degree was, originally, applied physics before switching to EE. I follow science when I can but boy do I feel out of the loop sometimes. Reading your post gave me a nice chuckle.

Glad you liked it!

I just checked, and CueCats are as low as $7 on eBay. Barcode readers convert barcodes to plaintext (and barcode printers go the other way), so CueCats are good for more than just scanning ads...

I wonder if there's room for a CueCat Users' Group. :)

Re: The E-Cat has been replicated?

#49

Post by [deleted] »

xenophonf wrote: post #36
pknight wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 'real scientific' article wouldn't do anything to convince people - it would be picked apart and doubted. Which is kind of an interesting thing in an of itself. I think for controversial stuff, you simply won't get scientists to budge no matter how transparent or rigorious the reporting. If the stuff turns out to be true, there will be a long delay before acceptance. I no longer believe that open replications make…

A 'real scientific' article wouldn't do anything to convince people - it would be picked apart and doubted A/K/A the scientific process, which is why experimental scientists publishing results with 5-sigma confidence intervals also painstakingly account for all of the different ways they could have screwed up, e.g., the recent gravitational waves paper, the Higgs boson discovery, etc. It goes the other way, like thos…

[deleted]

Re: The E-Cat has been replicated?

#50

Post by [deleted] »

xenophonf wrote: post #36
pknight wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 'real scientific' article wouldn't do anything to convince people - it would be picked apart and doubted. Which is kind of an interesting thing in an of itself. I think for controversial stuff, you simply won't get scientists to budge no matter how transparent or rigorious the reporting. If the stuff turns out to be true, there will be a long delay before acceptance. I no longer believe that open replications make…

A 'real scientific' article wouldn't do anything to convince people - it would be picked apart and doubted A/K/A the scientific process, which is why experimental scientists publishing results with 5-sigma confidence intervals also painstakingly account for all of the different ways they could have screwed up, e.g., the recent gravitational waves paper, the Higgs boson discovery, etc. It goes the other way, like thos…

[deleted]
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