Reworking established science, and perpetual motion machines

See Electrical harmonic experimentation

The discussion in the above was wandering away from what the OP asked about and the thread was slowly becoming hijacked. This is to continue that discussion. I include the relevant quotes below.

jremington:
Science text books summarize a couple of thousand years of people doing experiments, and then figuring out why things happen the way they do, beginning with the ancient Greeks.

You are welcome to start over, though!

Me:
Sometimes people 'start over' and discover something new. There was a German bloke called Albert* who did this around the beginning of the 20th Century, he made big improvements to our knowledge of gravity, mass, velocity and time as a result. Never discourage anyone from questioning accepted science.

Apart from that, text books can be dull and boring, much better to experiment yourself and see how stuff really works.

Are you a fan of crystal healing, or one of the anti-vaxxers?

No, they are idiots. You are confusing questioning science, which is healthy, with sticking 2 fingers up to it, which makes you an idiot.

Now there's an unaswerable thing; if you know what accepted science says then you might get taken along with some big mistake that everyone else has missed and not make a breakthrough. If you do your own experimenting without knowing too much about what others have done and how they interpreted it you might find something everyone else missed.

You also have to consider that someone who experiments with a particular aim in mind might fail in their original aim but instead discover something they were not looking for. You don't do that from relying on text books.

With even more apologies to the OP!

I'll tidy this up later, got to go out.

Your link is faulty. This Electrical harmonic experimentation works

...R

Robin2:
Your link is faulty. This Electrical harmonic experimentation works

...R

PerryBebbington:
I'll tidy this up later, got to go out.

Hi Robin,
I have a problem with the 'link' button in that it creates faulty links that I then have to edit. I was in a hurry when I created the first post, hence the comment at the end. I will fix the link now.

Typically it creates links like:

[iurl=http://"https://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=657800.new;topicseen#new"]Electrical harmonic experimentation [/iurl]

Instead of:

[iurl=https://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=657800.new;topicseen#new]Electrical harmonic experimentation [/iurl]

I've had my tame software and computer expert look at it and he can't see why it does it.

I always use the editor in "view source" mode (you can set it it in your Profile or click the right-most icon) and that faulty link problem does not arise.

...R

PerryBebbington:
Me:
Sometimes people 'start over' and discover something new. There was a German bloke called Albert* who did this around the beginning of the 20th Century, he made big improvements to our knowledge of gravity, mass, velocity and time as a result. Never discourage anyone from questioning accepted science.

Albert didn't start over, he kept what he knew and looked at what other people did in ways they did not but at no point did he ditch what he knew to be true.

He was able to take Planck's work on light energy and show more properties of light in 1902, that paper got him his only Nobel prize.

In 1905 he came out with Special Relativity that put together all past work on the failure of the Michelson-Morely experiment and in 1915 he released General Relativity which has yet to be disproven.

What science did he question? That which was already broken by M-M, the notion of Ether. Without Ether there is no absolute speed or direction in the universe.

We always have turnip-heads who would rather make shit up than learn what's real. When you go to learn about real there's always people who know more than you about real but when you make it up, YOU'RE number one!

Want to question accepted science? Come up with something real to show your point and be ready to find out you're wrong or what you thought was science is not.

Accepted science had to go through peer review and efforts to prove it wrong before being accepted. Every new degree-earning scientist looks for theories to knock over and get credit, it's the opposite with conspiracy idiots and outright cranks for whom peer review means collecting followers to "your side".

Smoke,
I agree with every word.

The thing Einstein over threw was our then understanding of Newtonian gravity and the separation of time and space as different, seperate things. Maybe I am using different language to you to describe the same thing, or seeing it from a different angle, but fundamentally I am not disagreeing with you.

Our Mushroom friend, where this started, is going to carry out his own experiments, I encourage that. At least, unlike many who 'make stuff up', he is willing to experiment and find out for himself. I am utterly confident he will not discover that which he is trying to discover, but in the process he will learn stuff for himself and there is a tiny, tiny, but non zero chance that he will discover something new. Hopefully he will have some fun along the way.

As for Relativity not having been found to be wrong, well, I agree it has passed every test that has been thrown at it, but so has Quantum Mechanics, and the two do not agree in some situations. Clearly one or the other or both is wrong in some way we have yet to uncover. Just because we have not found the flaw in either theory doesn't mean there isn't one; we know there is, we just have not managed to devise a test to uncover it.

Physics is broken at the moment; we are going round and round in circles knowing there is something really interesting to uncover, but we are not getting anywhere. I am thinking of unifying Quantum Mechanics with Relativity, of Dark Matter and of Dark Energy. The answers week seek might come from physicists working in established Universities, or it might come from some lone genius in his/her garage workshop. For this reason I wish to encourage anyone like Mushroom to investigate and challenge whatever takes their interest. Most will fail. One might render obvious to the world that which no one else has been able to understand.

Subjective beings will never really know objective reality. As for broken physics, I read about the Higgs Boson discovery on a PC through the internet. I see better medicine all the time since genome sequencers were invented. Science is less broken now than when I graduated HS over 40 years ago.

If you can't do science as it is now but think that you can replace it, you're a crank which is at least better than a fraud.

Water4Gas ferinstance is the work of a fraud. So is Solar Roadways, and they got municipal funding.

Subjective beings will never really know objective reality.

I'd say that is true but it's stronger than that; even if we manage to devise a theory that covers every possible test of reality that we can devise, has no inconsistencies, no hidden variables, nothing that it cannot explain and seems to be a perfect 'Theory of Everything' then even that that theory will not be give us complete knowledge of objective reality. The best we can hope for is a theory that correctly predicts the outcome of any test we can devise; which would mean just that; a prediction of the outcome of a test. What it would not be, and never can be, is a guaranteed correct description of what is really going on underneath. All it can ever be is a predictor of the outcome of some test we perform. Aside from that, however good the theory might be, however many tests it passes, there is no guarantee it will pass the next test that someone devises.

If you can't do science as it is now but think that you can replace it, you're a crank

Sure. I rather like cranks, they make the world more interesting. Doesn't make them right, but neither is any kind of fiction, and fiction makes the world more interesting too.

Hi, if the thermometer says 0 i can objectively say it is cold. If the thermometer says 100 i can objectively say it is hot. Frame of reference and subjectivity are different.

PerryBebbington:
Sure. I rather like cranks, they make the world more interesting.

That's fine as long as they are not trying to sell some "magic smoke" or trying to persuade people to ignore science that is actually good for people - for example vaccinations.

Unfortunately a lot of them want to impose their cranky theories on others and are not content to experiment to prove themselves wrong. It becomes more like religion than science.

My own pet crank is that while scientists have good formula that give reliable results they don't actually know what causes airplane wings to generate lift.

...R

PerryBebbington:
... if we manage to devise a theory that covers every possible test of reality that we can devise, has no inconsistencies, no hidden variables, nothing that it cannot explain and seems to be a perfect 'Theory of Everything' then even that that theory will not be give us complete knowledge of objective reality.

Not that I believe it, but what test could be devised which would determine that we're not all brains in vats and our realities are being fed to us by an outside source?
My reality is not the same as your reality.

Henry_Best:
What test could be devised which would determine that we're not all brains in vats and our realities are being fed to us by an outside source?

I can't imagine that there is such a test. Never mind brains in vats there's also the computer simulation possibility. Seems like and unlikely fantasy to me but....

PerryBebbington:
I'd say that is true but it's stronger than that; even if we manage to devise a theory that covers every possible test of reality that we can devise, has no inconsistencies, no hidden variables, nothing that it cannot explain and seems to be a perfect 'Theory of Everything' then even that that theory will not be give us complete knowledge of objective reality.

Actually it's even worse than THAT. Dig into Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, it's a bear to even get why it's true in principle. Hilbert came out with the Completeness Theorem to show certainty in everything but Hilbert was Old Guard Classical Physics. Soon after, his best student Godel came along and wrecked it just in time for the Quantum to turn physics upside down.

The Michelson-Morely experiment was run again and again with minor changes for almost 10 years before the results began to be accepted. In 1905 when Einstein released SR it was still too soon for the old heads to change their worlds over.

If you want to see a guy who was hounded to suicide because his ideas didn't fit the establishment, look up Ludwig Boltzmann who was right and did show it. He rocked the boat that M-M capsized. The way he was treated is right up crank validation lane as long as you forget that Boltzmann did not invent a new science, just pointed out inconvenient facts to men convinced of their rightness and enjoying the power of their tenured positions.

GoForSmoke:
In 1905 when Einstein released SR it was still too soon for the old heads to change their worlds over.

I recall a quotation along the lines of "Science makes progress when scientists die"

...R

The establishment back then were busy congratulating themselves on how thoroughly perfect they had things figured out.

That changed 100 years ago.

I have yet to see a perpetual motion machine or any other example of over-unity energy generation.

Do cranks believe in entropy?

PerryBebbington:
Sure. I rather like cranks, they make the world more interesting. Doesn't make them right, but neither is any kind of fiction, and fiction makes the world more interesting too.

Fiction identifies as fiction.

Cranks identify as real.

Children and idiots are susceptible to cranks and those poor kids have to unlearn BS before they can learn what's real but then IMO the same applies to a number of grade school teachers, holy babble preachers and right-wing politicians (pollut-icians).

Robin2:
My own pet crank is that while scientists have good formula that give reliable results they don't actually know what causes airplane wings to generate lift.

I don't know why you say that because it is well known how wings generate lift.

If science is the goal of getting a better understanding of the Universe, I think it is still working. Although since we already picked the low hanging fruit, progress is slower. Most of what people refer to as "advances" are really technology i.e. smartphones, internet etc. There is no new science in those. Indeed, a lot of modern day life would be understandable to a Victorian engineer.

I read a book called "The Limits of Science" which basically concluded there are no limits. I'm not sure about that. I find it stunning that we can deduce what is happening in stars millions of light years away, based on observations of tiny amounts of radiation, some logic, and a body of science gained almost completely on Earth.

OTOH, determining how inflation occurred, what happened before the Big Bang, whether there are multiverses, etc, seem to be things on the limit of ability to observe and experiment. We could never build a big enough particle accelerator to experiment at the higher energies.

Obviously physics and cosmology have a few tricky problems at the moment: reconciling gravity and quantum mechanics, the nature of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. I find that reminiscent of the days around 1900 when physicists though most things were known and only a few loose ends existed. Einstein, Rutherford et al discovered the loose ends were just the tip of the iceberg, to mix metaphors.

So it seems certain that there will be a further "revolution" or two in our understanding to resolve our current loose ends. We might have to wait for another singular genius to create a unifying theory, or maybe it will be a huge team like CERN, who knows.

All the above is pretty standard. I have one non-standard thought : if there are other intelligent species out there, why haven't they discovered all this advanced stuff and colonised the galaxy, or at least made themselves known ? I see a few possibilities:

  1. they have also got stuck at a similar level of understanding to us
  2. knowledge of things like Dark Matter doesn't lead to any practical applications, regarding space travel
  3. we are the first intelligent species in the galaxy discovering these things.

If 3) seems too unlikely, then that leaves 1) or 2).

What happens when you "do your own research"?

Youtube is plastered with cranks espousing wacky theories, there are rather less channels devoted to science. I guess most of these cranks are harmless, because the great thing about technology is that you only need a few smart people to create it, all the users can be quite dumb. So even though Flat Earthers are a time-wasting nuisance, they are largely harmless.

But when more and more people start to distrust "established" science, you get cranks like anti-vaxxers which start to do real damage.

So here is a favourite crank, Gerard Morin. He has "revised" many scientific theories, although his goal of a practical device to extract energy from "universal resonance" still eludes him (no surprise).

Warning: this guy is a crank. Not a scientist.
Gerard Morin: Tesla's Energy & How Gravity truly works

bobcousins:
I don't know why you say that because it is well known how wings generate lift.

Do please explain, or provide a link to the explanation.

...R

What happens when you "do your own research"?

Surely every scientist is 'doing their own research'? If not their own research then perhaps being paid to do someone else's 'own research'.

I think you are trying to make a false distinction. 'Respectable' scientists have spent 10s of years and countless millions, possibly billions, of pounds, dollars, euros (insert your favourite currency here) researching string theory. String theory might, perhaps, eventually yield a comprehensive and useful physical theory that unifies Relativity with Quantum Mechanics. Or it might not. In 100 or 200 year time the scientists and historians of the day might look back and wonder and the colossal waste of resources that went into what turned out to be a ridiculous dead end in physics. Or they might be celebrating its success. There is no way to know. Just because string theory is being pursued by 'respectable' scientists doesn't mean it is any more right than someone trying to make a perpetual motion machine. The only difference, if there is a difference, is that we have good, robust theories that tell us why a perpetual motion machine won't work, we do not (yet) have theories that tell us why string theory was never going to give us what we hoped for. Maybe one day we will (or not).