Uncertain Propulsion Breakthroughs? • Hacker News Board

Re: Uncertain Propulsion Breakthroughs?

#91

Post by Nomentatus » Mon, Jan 02, 2017, 1:06 AM UTC

speeder wrote: post #74

nonbel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people treated medical research with the same skepticism they treat this EM drive... the world would be a much healthier and safer place.

Medical research don't suffer from lack of skeptism, instead it suffers from unscientific thinking, shamanism, cargo cults, and so on... For example: for 30 years we had research blasting cholesterol and saturated fats as evil, because predecessors had that result, some arguments were completely circular (saturated fats are bad because they raise blood cholesterol, and blood cholesterol is bad because a bad thing rai…

That shamanism was really corruption:

November 2016 Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents Cristin E. Kearns, DDS, MBA1,2; Laura A. Schmidt, PhD, MSW, MPH1,3,4; Stanton A. Glantz, PhD JAMA Intern Med. 2016;176(11):1680-1685. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.5394

The SRF sponsored its first CHD research project in 1965, a literature review published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which singled out fat and cholesterol as the dietary causes of CHD and downplayed evidence that sucrose consumption was also a risk factor. The SRF set the review’s objective, contributed articles for inclusion, and received drafts. The SRF’s funding and role was not disclosed. Together with other recent analyses of sugar industry documents, our findings suggest the industry sponsored a research program in the 1960s and 1970s that successfully cast doubt about the hazards of sucrose while promoting fat as the dietary culprit in CHD.

http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article...

(PS - I've known a Shaman or two, and they were quite sensible people, for the most part, except when they started mixing in miscellaneous white people's trashy magic.)

Re: Uncertain Propulsion Breakthroughs?

#92

Post by Nomentatus » Mon, Jan 02, 2017, 1:07 AM UTC

greglindahl wrote: post #23

xupybd wrote: post #14

Wow, I've not read something like that in a long time. More news needs to be like this. Examining what we know presenting where we are. Not taking sides and polarizing the discussion. I do think people miss one small aspect of this story. How long has it been since we've had a device built that we've no understanding of the principles of it's operation? I think that's an amazing fluke and (if the effect is genuine) s…

It is not unusual for a physics experiment to produce a weird result, and it turns out to be experimental error.

True, it's but this has been replicated. It may yet be an error, but it's not a one-off by now.

Re: Uncertain Propulsion Breakthroughs?

#93

Post by Nomentatus » Mon, Jan 02, 2017, 1:17 AM UTC

powera wrote: post #19

IMO the "rational" approach is to treat the claims as a bunch of pointless lies until there's a repeatable demonstration. Remarkable claims demand at least some evidence before wild speculation commences. As it is, Harry Potter is just as credible a theory of reality. After all, they've made the same claim repeatedly for 15 years after their first experiments were demonstrably not what they claimed.

Yes and no. Hume's dictum that miracles must have a shit-ton of evidence (extraordinary claims, blah, blah) helped science dismiss the reality of meteorites for a very long time, for example. Rocks falling from the sky? Go on! Epigenetics is a vital field now - but one that was discovered, rediscovered and buried and ignored for many, many decades. "Methodological Conservatism" shouldn't be generalized into a dismissal of anomalies.

Re: Uncertain Propulsion Breakthroughs?

#94

Post by freehunter » Mon, Jan 02, 2017, 11:47 PM UTC

mhneu wrote: post #83

bicubic wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't expect the em-drive to work, but the parent post has a point. We've had repeated experiments yielding unexpected results. It's worth an inquiry; if nothing else, to thoroughly explain what went wrong so the same mistake is avoided in future experiments. Outright dismissing new ideas, no matter how far-fetched, is very much the antithesis of the scientific principle. You mustn't forget that everything we take…

Many possibilities of what went wrong are well-explained in the parent article, drawing on experience of other scientists that make low-force measurements. (E.g. forces on rig due to electrical current flow, or liquid flow.) Unfortunately it seems likely we won't learn much by finding the possible sources of error - the sources are already well understood by people doing low force experiments.

Wouldn't it be worth repeating the experiment controlling for different factors at the very least to rule out some of the "many possibilities"? If there are "many possibilities" for why something is happening, by definition we don't know why it's happening. Science says repeat the experiment until we know why it's happening, or at least until we can't rule anything else out.

Re: Uncertain Propulsion Breakthroughs?

#95

Post by trhway » Tue, Jan 03, 2017, 11:56 PM UTC

we have several unexplained things which possibly look like some interaction between gravity and EM - em-drive, spinning magnet/superconductor gravimetric effects and unexpected velocity of stars in the galaxies (which are big rotating piles of plasma)