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by ggm 2339 days ago
The problem I have in this, is that history is littered with things which without hindsight were crazy-batshit-ideas, and in a world of IPR and patents, definitely do get flagged as wierd. But.. then turn out to be useful.

Liquid metal refrigerators using electromagnetics to send the fluid around instead of just pumping ammonia? Thats .. crazy. But also, What Szilard and Einstein patented: safer by far, no moving parts in the working refrigerant fluid.

Directed beam weapons: notoriously the 'kill a goat' test for the BRL and Navy tired of loony inventors, but actually the ground work of Radar and like activity according to Robert Buderi (yes, this is a gloss, but there are linkages. The forces people assumed RF beams were weapons, not detection systems)

Infra-Red for detection of the enemy. No more stupid than what they had, which is sound, giant sounding dishes to hear bombers. Turns out its harder to do IR than RF, but didn't stop Lord Cherwell obsessing about it, to the detriment of other science initiatives, but NOW IR is a stable of all kinds of things.

These UFO patents may contain ideas which make sense in limited fields, or huge fields, or no fields.

(obviously, if they are based on perpetual motion flawed physics it tends to no fields)

5 comments

In all of those cases the inventions sounded crazy And no one had really tried it before. A lot of smart people have been working on plasma physics with the goal of controlled fusion for 70 years. HTS research has been ongoing for nearly as long. Suddenly one guy who speaks like a crackpot has discovered things no one else has thought of? Occam’s Razor.
Totally agree with this bit. The alarm bells about these ones are pretty huge.
The fusion tractor's control system needs far more EM signal processing and optics than we understood util recently.
You don’t really need a serious amount of computation even for tokamak feedback systems. The computers of the 90s are adequate. Most other confinement machines (magnetic or otherwise) don’t even need feedback. It’s just bog standard industrial automation/control.

We’ve been on the ball for optics for a long time now. Where computation really comes in handy is in simulation and optimization. Plasma physics is still a very unfinished field and computation is a very valuable tool in speeding up the theory <-> experiment loop.

The "quintessence" bit was a bit of a red flag wasn't it
I would be careful with that one. 'Dark Energy' has been in this weird grey area for a while now, where we have this observation that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, but we have no explanation. There have been a lot of hypothetical explanations. Seems like Quintessence is just one of them.

Recently there has been growing doubt that expansion of the universe is accelerating at all, favoring that it's constant. That would completely undermine this Quintessence thing.

https://phys.org/news/2020-01-evidence-key-assumption-discov...

I would have no problem listening to this guy and trusting him and believing in his view of physics if he would just show some of his stuff. If he really has a compact functional fusion generator and a gravity wave device and other things, then he certainly deserves to be taken seriously. Give us a quick demonstration of the technology and then say all you can, please!

Conversely, if all he has are ideas I can't understand without any demos or examples, I have no problem doubting him. Perhaps he's right, but I won't be able to tell until I see the gizmos working. Because of that, I have no hesitation in defaulting to the view that he isn't credible, reliable, or right.

So, there's this story that goes around at Office of Naval Research about Enrico Fermi walking in one day and saying he had a new method of powering ships. In retrospect we all realize nuclear power is in fact a great way to power submarines, but they shoo'd him out the door and regretted living to tell the tale. So there's the profound cultural mythos in the Navy around missing out on the next energy solution which probably makes them particularly vulnerable to this line of quackpottery.

https://youtu.be/cNgAMjOVB4Y?t=1221

This sounds like a story that has grown to cover some need.

They can't have shoo'd him away for too long, the Navy started working on it in the 1940s and had one in use by 1953.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion#Mi...

You're massively overestimating the number of inventions that were sudden crazy-sounding discoveries. Almost none are like that.
None of these ideas seemed particularly crazy even at the time.