startswithabang:Comments of the Week #125: from the Universe’s age to impossible engines“What a lot
startswithabang:Comments of the Week #125: from the Universe’s age to impossible engines“What a lot of people don’t realize is that AIAA is not a physics journal. They aren’t concerned with someone’s physical explanation for something, about whether it’s legitimate or plausible or fringe or accepted or completely insane. What they are concerned with is the engineering, which is to say (in an overly simplified fashion), “If you build thing A, your device will do this thing B, and you will see that thing C.” So you’ve got a device that you can build, and you test your your device to see if it does the thing you say it does, and then your report what you see, and then you’ve got an AIAA paper.But that’s not the same as having broken the laws of physics; it means you have a device that the people building and operating and testing it don’t fully understand. It could be a herald of new physics, but the far more likely explanation is that there’s something fundamental going on that the builders, operators and testers are missing. And if I’m wrong, I’ll admit it as soon as the evidence matches up in quality to the magnitude of the claims being made. What I’ll never understand is the credulity of those who don’t require that.My question for you is, “why don’t you demand that?””From alien megastructures to the Universe’s age, and from our future space telescopes to our dreams of interstellar travel, there’s always a lot to cover on our comments of the week. But I wonder, as I often do, why it’s so easy for so many of us to accept an extraordinary claim with such extraordinarily low standards of evidence? -- source link
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