Cold Fusion, Q-Thrusters, Neutrinos, and Scientific Bias

[rtxoff]

Well most of the science world see's the GRT and SRT as fundamental laws and not science theories. They are completely ignoring the fact that a theory must be falsifiable hence there can be something we don't know yet about it. With such an thinking there is no progress possible. We are on the best way into the next medieval age where everyone thinking different will be punished with the holy strike of the mighty science inquisition burning the mark of the "Crackpot" onto their foreheads. It's an unwritten law that people with enough given time become always that they hate most. In the case of science it has already become the instrument of politics and a tool for the rich and powerful.

Just look at the list that was posted here a few post ago of the so called accomplishments of CERN.

Following things i can see in this list: MammoGrid, PositronEmissionTomography, ClearPET, Accelerators for medicine, Hadron-therapy, Proton facility, Ions Facilty, LIBO, ARC, Isolde and many more.

Now my question, do you think all this technologies which mostly are medical instruments will be available for a great amount of people here on Earth?

IMO they will become only available who can afford them and this is maybe 10% off Earths population. Everybody not having enough money or an health insurance would not have any access to it, at least not as long as all the investments that where necessary to create them are paid off. Given the sheer amount of money institutions like CERN and companys which are building this equipement consumed this is going to take a very long time until this investements are amortized.

Already a long time science is not science anymore, it's just a way to make money for the rich and the global research priorities reflect this more then enough. Also think about who can become a scientist? To become a scientist you will have to go through a study that takes many years and a great amount of money on a university. So poor guys from the street will not have the opportunity to become Ph.D's. And the rich ones only work for they interests. Not speaking of doctrines you learn there which might need some overhaul.

It's very easy to ignore all this things i wrote and go back into the pink world you live in and continue life as it is, it's very hard for some people to take off their pink glasses and see the world like it really is.

I do not fear that we can't feed poor people, i fear that we can't satisfy the rich ones.

At the end there is only one world that could make me happy, it would not be a world where money is the driving motor it would be a world where the quest for knowledge is.

[arcaios26]

Science is a constructive discipline. We are entirely ok with looking for things that are wrong within it, but there must be a goal.

For example, there are teams at accelerator facilities looking for heavy photons. They almost certainly won't find them, because they almost certainly do not exist. Our theory says so. But it says so based on certain assumptions that don't absolutely have to be correct. And if heavy photons are found, we need to fix these assumptions and readjust our theory. It would be of great benefit, and we wouldn't have to scrap things we've learned. So all in all, it's worth wasting this effort just on the off chance. Because, occasionally, you do find that you're wrong. CP violations are a good example.

On the other hand, if Q-Thrusters or EMDrive are shown to work at thrust/power levels advertised, then physics is wrong. All of it. From very bottom to very top. There is not a shred of modern theory we can preserve against it. All of Quantum Mechanics and all of General Relativity ride on the concept of local symmetry groups, and these two devices violate these local symmetries. It is absolutely beyond salvage. And with these go all of classical mechanics, all of classical gravity, all of classical electrodynamics, all of classical thermodynamics... You get the point. There is absolutely nothing left that doesn't rest on these fundamental symmetries.

So we have a situation where two things are evident. First of all, if these devices work, we've made correct computations of everything from gyromagnetic ratios of elementary particles to signals we receive from distant neutron stars based on wrong physics. Lasers, semiconductors, superconductors, and even your GPS, all hinging on the assumption that symmetries hold, we got them by total chance in a world where these symmetries do not hold. Unlikely does not begin to describe it. I do not like to use the word "impossible", but I can think of nothing that's more appropriate.

And if, on this impossible chance, it does turn out to be true, what do we get? Complete collapse of all of physics with absolutely nothing to replace it. We'd have to go all the way back to Archimedes. It probably wouldn't require quite 2,000 years to catch up, but it'd be centuries for sure. And until then, what? We keep using these devices that produce thrust out of nothing? Who knows what else they produce out of nothing? If momentum isn't conserved, then why should energy be. And if you don't conserve energy, where is the guarantee that when you try to bring these up to full power they wouldn't start spewing black holes, or something.

It's absolutely destructive. If these things work, everything we know is wrong, and we should not continue using these things, because we cannot predict outcomes. At all. So not only are the odds of these devices working essentially zero, but so is their benefit. Why invest into something that is guaranteed to be a net loss no matter what?

On the note of the Q-thruster, you are of course implying that it works by violating known physics principles. The possibility of the design working due to some unknown principle that someone stumbled upon by accident does exist, the realm of possibility is vast though probability is a different matter. On another note, as I have read more into the concept it wouldn't technically violate what we know unless it did actually work as a truly reactionless drive but the concept is believed to function on a theoretical principle involving quantum vacuum virtual particles. However, the concept makes a lot of assumptions without proof they are real in the first place.

In the end it wouldn't be the first time someone discovered something other than what they thought they were making by pure accident.

[Bill Phil]

Science is naturally biased. It has to be to function. It's biased toward thijgs that are proven.

[YNM]

I guess the main problem is economy and politics. Science itself says that everything's limited or conserved, so does its own funding. That's why you get electron emitter everyehere (like CRT), but not quark emitter. Or why we go to LEO tens of times but only a few to Moon.

[PB666]

Science is naturally biased. It has to be to function. It's biased toward thijgs that are proven.

Novalty is the failure of the null hypothesis. The argument is established as alpha the risk of testing a hypothesis that is true and demonstrates as false. The bias begins at 19:1 but frequency is strengthened to 2000:1. In a genome wide association study bias maybe 100000000:1. This all seems horrifically stubborn but it actually works well. Statistics allows you to retest, just not the same sample. So if you take the sites that are marginal fails, you might find two or three close to each other in primary sequence and hunt down new variants; and instead of testing a million sites you might retest 10000 sites with new sites lowering the random probaility of the best site relative to a lower alpha.

In this examples, it shows how science deals with a new idea that does not meet the criteria, and it has proven too numerous to count times. This is why philosophically why I differ from K2. You cannot let a desire to prove a new idea to lead your data, but simply because it does not conform to old successes does not men its false. As I stated during the discussion and quoted statistian Zar, beta, the risk of the null hypothesis being shown true when it is actually false we systematically do not care about and do not test for. If a scientist does not concern himself with this weekness he can end up exhibiting concretized thinking.

Its not that the Cannae drive is distorting the previously held beliefs about momentum conservation, its that we have to allow reasonable violation of old rules to undergo the full round of testing when compared to tests where historically we dont have an opinion either way, like disease sites for a suspect genetic disease on the vastness of the human genome. We know that most, the overwhelming majority, will prove to be null hypothesis true, but after two or three rounds of refined testing we know that we are likely to find breakthrough science.

Edited September 6, 2015 by PB666

[K^2]

On the note of the Q-thruster, you are of course implying that it works by violating known physics principles. The possibility of the design working due to some unknown principle that someone stumbled upon by accident does exist, the realm of possibility is vast though probability is a different matter.

It's not just violation of known principles. It's violation of the most fundamental principles that have been tested in most precise experiments we have. Some specifically designed to test these principles. We've gotten to multi-TeV levels with these. You are not going to violate these principles with a cheaply-built microwave cavity. This is the same level of absurd as expecting one of the perpetual mobile devices on YouTube to work.

[Steel]

K^2: You are completely overreacting. Yes theoretical physics would require a rewrite but all our current technologies wouldn't suddenly stop working. Current science has worked for a long time and even if things are wrong things we've built still work and will continue to do so. Further more anything we make in the future could still be based on these principles. We'd just have more potential things to study as a new set of rules has been discovered.

Life and society would go on the same, you'd just have a few scientists trying to figure out what is wrong and how it could be fixed.

I think you might be under reacting. What K^2 is trying to get across is that if this is in fact somehow the way the universe works, we have absolutely zero understanding of it. That's not just the scientists get a bit embarrassed because they were wrong, that's a world where we wouldn't actually know how our computers, power stations, light bulbs, e.t.c actually work, just that they do work somehow, but not the way we designed them with our old theories.

[Rakaydos]

They question then becomes, If something we "know" has to be wrong for it to work, what woud be the smallest error we could have made in physics for this to work?

[Steel]

The smallest error we could have made for this to work is the error of assuming local symmetry. I think K^2 says best what the consequences of this are:

All of Quantum Mechanics and all of General Relativity ride on the concept of local symmetry groups, and these two devices violate these local symmetries. It is absolutely beyond salvage. And with these go all of classical mechanics, all of classical gravity, all of classical electrodynamics, all of classical thermodynamics... You get the point. There is absolutely nothing left that doesn't rest on these fundamental symmetries.

[Rakaydos]

What is a "local symmetry group?"

[Steel]

I'm no expert, as we only get a very brief overview of this sort of stuff at undergraduate level (so if you want a more detailed explanation, wait for K^2's return) but I understand the significance. So here's my attempt to explain:

Basically, Gauge Theory (and more broadly, Field Theory) is key in physics. As my lecturer in 1st year once very helpfully said, if you get stuck with remembering Newton's EoM in the exam, you can always derive them from local gauge invariance. Local symmetry groups are a fundamental concept of gauge theory.

In their purest form, they are a mathematical concept that basically define a group that is invariant to certain mathematical transformations in local coordinates (as opposed to global symmetries, which are invariant to transformations in any and all coordinates). Now I've almost certainly butchered that to a point far from the truth, but its a difficult concept to explain to someone without going into lectures on mathematics.

I admit it's difficult to see the significance, but trust me, if K^2 is worried if these local symmetries are broken, you should be too.

Edited September 7, 2015 by Steel

[Rakaydos]

Newton got a few other things "almost" right- Relativity is an edge case in newton's laws of motion, after all. And I recall reading a suggested tweak to F=MA to explain supposed "Dark Matter" in the universe. He still gets taught, though, because his laws are close enough for everyday understanding.

What I'm wondering is if a similar tweak could explain the EM drive, while keeping the existing Guage Theory as a "good enough approximation."

(though I'm in the camp that the device is probably a low vaccum ion propeller, it's always fun to push the limits of possibility.)

[Steel]

It's not Relativity being an edge case in Newton's laws, it's Newton's laws being a special case in Relativity. Newton's laws can be derived directly from relativity given certain constraints (i.e. v<<c, the system is in an inertial frame,...) on the system, so - contrary to popular belief - they are not proved incorrect by relativity. In actuality they were just shown to be a special case of relativity when certain conditions are applied to the system.

On the other hand, EM-/Q-drive breaks local symmetry, which is what Gauge theory is entirely based on, hence completely destroying gauge theory. Not rendering it a special case, making it completely wrong.

(Also, I'm not entirely sure I have the full picture with just Gauge theory, as I said my knowledge of Field Theory is very limited, so there's likely other reasons why violating local symmetry groups is a bad idea)

I hope I made the destinction clear-ish, it's quite hard to explain this.

If you take away conservation of momentum/energy, everything in physics is wrong. This is not an exaggeration. This isn't a matter of "our choice of coordinate system wasn't general enough." It's "every single conclusion we've made has been based on wrong assumptions."

Yes, new theory would have to explain old data. But more importantly, it would need to explain how a theory that was completely wrong explained the data we had. Again, we aren't talking about small algebraic corrections due to higher order terms. We are talking about completely wrong logic leading to seemingly correct results.

As K^2 was saying earlier, it's not that a new theory can't happen, it's just the absurdity that everything we've ever done is using completely false reasoning, but gets the correct results.

Edited September 7, 2015 by Steel

[Mazon Del]

In the physics world of academia and certain aspects of tech development, sure, finding out that our current understanding of the universe is effectively flat out wrong would upend quite a lot of things. On a practical level though, you might see a slowdown in some aspects of research while we suddenly start taking looks (spending R&D funds) on projects we once thought were crazy because apparently they might not be as crazy as we thought. But really at the end of the day, even if our current physics descriptions apparently have no idea why something like a transistor works (just a random example), the calculations we have previously been using have allowed us to invent, build, and use newer and better transistors consistently for some time, so they are clearly good enough for most purposes and will continue to be used until such a time as better calculations and such are provided.

Even if the underlying "deep physics" of something are completely different than what we thought they were doesn't mean that for practical purposes we need to immediately abandon the original methods for doing it. V=RI still holds true even if WHY it holds true is different than we thought.

[PB666]

Newton got a few other things "almost" right- Relativity is an edge case in newton's laws of motion, after all. And I recall reading a suggested tweak to F=MA to explain supposed "Dark Matter" in the universe. He still gets taught, though, because his laws are close enough for everyday understanding.

What I'm wondering is if a similar tweak could explain the EM drive, while keeping the existing Guage Theory as a "good enough approximation."

(though I'm in the camp that the device is probably a low vaccum ion propeller, it's always fun to push the limits of possibility.)

That depends on perspective, almost everything in our visible universe exhibits a high degree of red-shifting, not to mention light, neutrinos and black holes. Also at the quantum scale, which exists everywhere, Newton is also wrong. Many wrongs however do make a right. I should also mention, that gravity is not a force, if you throw a basketball into the air, there is no force acting on it (except drag) - the basketballs motion relative to the ground is largely explained by an inertial reference frame in space-time. When it strikes the ground, the ground is acting against its inertia, it in a non-inertial reference frame. It continues to act against its inertia when its stops bouncing. Warping of space-time cause by mass is creating a fictitious force, just like centripetal acceleration is a fictitious force. Therefore newton got inertia right in two horizontal dimensions, but not the vertical (radially) dimension, because resting on the ground is a non-inertial reference frame in space-time. In Newtons defense, Einstein is relying on observations that occurred after Newtons death, so with the information that Newton had, there are two valid conclusions and he chose one that later proved to be inaccurate.

I should point out that the inventor of calculus and matter energy conservation can get it wrong, and Einstein can get it wrong, to a lessor degree, then QFT could also get it wrong in some aspects, one has to have perspective. In fact if you read some of the articles on quantum mechanics all the oddness and implications have not been worked out. This why its best not to get concretized in a line of thought.

So now we have the Cannae drive, it is a piece of information that neither Newton or Einstein had (although the thrust was observed 80 years ago). Neither would be blamed if this shows something else, but the issue is that it hasn't shown its nature, just the result of its nature. Because the nature of the thrust has not been ciphered. All of us want an answer, but lets not lead the question with an answer we want or an answer some of us summarily reject.

If we know everything, then its not science.

[PB666]

As K^2 was saying earlier, it's not that a new theory can't happen, it's just the absurdity that everything we've ever done is using completely false reasoning, but gets the correct results.

The universe exists whether or not we exist to observe it, it is a word we use to describe everything, but our estimate of everything and its properties has radically shifted since Isaac Newton. The universe actually is indifferent to our knowledge, whether we know everything or not, and therefore it is free to be what it is, whatever that is. We cannot be so arrogant as past generations to believe we are the first generation to get it right, that is the domain of faith. Almost everything, in fact, is definably beyond our scope, our scope is CNBR. The argument over matter-antimatter asymmetry is an excellent example, all experiments to date show they exhibit symmetry, and there are two theories about the origin of normal matter, and neither have specific evidence, the third which argues that part of the universe is an antimatter universe is left out.

While this philosophically is a low-level omnibus, in the specific argument is that while X says it shouldn't happen, he also cannot explain dark matter, dark energy, no-one can, because the explanation lacks data. And the more we test, the same conclusion is repeated. So we have to philosophically account for the information we have, Newton improved our understanding, Einstein improved it more, And QM further improved it, but its not perfect and if we believe that it is generally perfect, then a philosopher would expect violations to occur, not because of the theories, but because of our expectations. If we believe that it imperfect, then philosopher would expect science will occur. A theory is just a word, like universe, like relativity, it does not imply perfection, perfection is an issue of faith, and in that stream stories become theories and theories become dogma.

In this case my opinion (also another word) is that we will be gently surprised by the drive, that this wont be a full violation, but a bizarre exception that makes sense in one context, but not all contexts, just like Newton, gravity and inertia. Statistically speaking truth lies at the intersection of valid perspectives, the more perspectives we have on the truth, the better that we can define it, but statistics is not religion, and uncertainty reinforces the hazy nature of things, and so that the best we can get is a confidence ranges that have dimensionality. And a theory could be correct in many dimensions, but lacking of observations in one dimension could blind us to its range in that dimension. I should note that quantum uncertainty is not just a behavior at natural unit scales, any time you deal with small numbers of events uncertainty can exist, 1 person will always win the lottery, before QFT we had the laws of mass action, it applies to just about every discipline, the implications of which normal behavior is observed with accumulation. In this case nature is also a function of observation and perspective. The Cannae drive has been observed under one rather homogeneous set of conditions (two if you count in vacuum and not in vacuum), it does not suffice in creating the proper perspectives. The philosopher would conclude that the argument is incomplete, and not worthy of great effort along the lines don't waste great thinking on bad data.