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Re: solution to the world's energy needs

On Monday, 13 Sept 1999, William Beatty wrote:

On Sun, 12 Sep 1999, John Mallinckrodt wrote:

> On Sun, 12 Sep 1999, William Beaty wrote:
> > If the Wrights hadn't [proven sustained flight possible], would others
> > have done it? From what I've seen of that history, and from what I know
> > about human nature, I cannot say yes. Without the Wrights, there's a
> > very good chance that experimentation would have fizzled out.
>
> ... and therein lies a significant difference in our belief systems.
> Because sustained flight is both highly appealing and easily demonstrable,
> I cannot imagine that its history would have been set back by more than a
> year (and I rather suspect it would have been more like weeks or months)
> had the Wrights never been born.

The difference between us is centered in our views regarding the status of
flying machines in 1900, and the power of "pathological skepticism".

A century ago, sustained flight was not "highly appealing" to scientists.
Instead it was an embarassment, and it was the target of debunkers. Back
then, powered flight was like Yeti sightings. Or more appropriately, it
was like modern "basement inventors" who are seeking antigravity devices.
Everyone knows that antigravity devices are impossible, and any
professional researcher who wants to spend funding in such a quest will
risk their career (witness how fast Tampere University put an end to
Podkletnov's "spinning quantum-antigravity disk" project once it was
publicized.)

I rather think that you overstate your case about the conditions
regarding research into flight in 1900. Almost any biography of the
Wright brothers will leave you hanging on your seat, wondering if
they will really get there first. From the point of view of the
informed observer in 1900-1903, it was not obvious that the Wright
brothers were on the inside track. Langley was working hard to build
a flying machine, and had he been a better engineer, he might have
succeeded. After all, he had the full resources of the Smithsonian
Institution behind him as well as the not inconsiderable prestige of
Alexander Graham Bell. Had not Chanute been killed in a glider
accident, he might have been a contender, or an ally of the Wrights
and helped them to make it even earlier than they did. Had someone
else redone Cayley's wind tunnel experiments before the Wrights
realized that those results were flawed, they might have gotten there
first. If Glenn Curtiss had put his mind to the problem of flight a
little earlier and come up with the idea of the aileron, rather than
the Wrights' much more cumbersome "wing-warp" method of controlling
roll-stability. If Bleriot in France had built his airframes a little
sturdier... The list is endless. There were lots of people doing
research into heavier-than-air powered flight. To assume that only
the Wright brothers could have succeeded is not realistic. Maybe
John's comment that it would have been delayed by only a year is
optimistic, but I can't imagine that it would have been delayed more
than a decade. What may be more important for the development of
aviation was that it was first shown to be possible early enough that
it could develop enough for its military value to be shown in World
War I. If it had been delayed enough that it didn't get into the war,
then its development might have been delayed enough that by the time
World War II cam along, the airplanes would have not been much
advanced over what they actually were in WWI.



> Can you really believe that, in an era
> of fantastic advances in the horsepower to mass ratio of gasoline engines,
> flight was not an inevitability?

Yes.

Are you aware that the Wrights flew their aircraft in Dayton for an entire
year, in an open field next to a railroad line, and sent invitations to
scientists, to the military and to the press, and NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON
SHOWED UP? Not even the local press showed up. An entire year.

Yes, members of the public certainly saw their aircraft. The public even
wrote numbers of letters to the local Dayton newspapers, and the
newspapers' response was to complain about all of the time that their
people had to waste in opening all these letters from crazy people who
were seeing impossible things. Those newspapers refused to send a
reporter to check out the Wright's claims. After this experience, the
Wrights packed up and moved to Paris.

This isn't too surprising. Although they didn't try to keep their
efforts in Dayton a secret, they didn't make a huge effort to create
a public sensation, either. And the people who they kept inviting to
visit them were probably the least likely to do so. Few people in the
army at the time could have envisioned any practical use for one of
these "flying machines," and there were very few scientists who had
any particular interest in what they were doing, and if they did,
such as Langley, they were interested in doing their own flying
projects. Why should the give free publicity to the Wrights? Business
people would not be interested if they couldn't see a potential
profit in it, and the press is notorious for ignoring important
stories until they are forced to by events.


Over two years after the Wrights has started flying, the Scientific
American in Jan. 1906 carried an article ridiculing the Wrights on these
grounds:

"If such sensational and tremendously important experiments are being
conducted at a not very remote part of the country, on a subject in
which almost everybody feels the most profound interest, is it possible
to believe that the enterprising American reporter, who, it is well
known, comes down the chimney when the door is locked in his face, even
if he has to scale a fifteen-story skyscraper to do so, would not have
ascertained all about them and published them broadcast long ago?

Note well that a science reporter is writing the above. That reporter
could have traveled to Dayton, or he could have contacted a trusted person
in Dayton who could go and observe. Yet he did not, instead he talked
himself into a stance where he had no need to check out the evidence. The
problem is obvious: nobody realizes the incredible power of "staunch
disbelief", nor realizes that all of the other reporters are refusing to
inspect the evidence at the same time. The disbelievers find a thousand
justifications for refusing to examine the evidence, and when this state
of "mass disbelief" is in force, everyone in authority reasons in the same
way as the above Scientific American writer, and every single person
refuses to go and look at the Wright Brothers' aircraft, even if they keep
the demonstration going over a span of many months.

The barriers created by disbelief really are that powerful. We all know
the power of "pathological science" and delusional thinking, and we're
aware of the problem of UFO-believers, crop-circle believers,
Astrology-believers, etc. This same problem has a counterpart in
academia: pathological disbelief. It's a disbelief which is so powerful
that no evidence can possibly affect it. Is the public in thrall to
powerful beliefs? Intelligent people are not immune to this immense
force. When it masquerades as "skepticism", they fall into crackpotism
just as fast as the most devout astrology-believer, yet they see their
crackpotism as a properly scientific attitude.

Why didn't the Wrights go buzz the white house, or the local academic
campuses? I don't know. Maybe it never occurred to them. However, I
fear that such an act might have made not a bit of difference. Those who
disbelieve would simply have found a convenient reason to stare at the
ground, and then later ridicule those who saw the aircraft as being
victims of mass hallucination.


"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." - Lord Kelvin,
president, Royal Society, 1895.

"The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances,
known forms of machinery, and known forms of force can be united in a
practicable machine by which men shall fly for long distances through
the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the
demonstration of any physical fact to be." - astronomer S. Newcomb,
1906

Here's a hilarious one:

"The whole procedure [of shooting rockets into space]...presents
difficulties of so fundamental a nature, that we are forced to dismiss
the notion as essentially impracticable, in spite of the author's
insistent appeal to put aside prejudice and to recollect the supposed
impossibility of heavier-than-air flight before it was actually
accomplished."
-Sir Richard van der Riet Wooley, British astronomer, reviewing P.E.
Cleator's "Rockets in Space", Nature, March 14, 1936


The situation with Flying Machines in 1900 was very similar to the
situation with Cold Fusion today. The major skeptics of the time had
announced powered flight to be impossible. Therefore, anyone who claimed
that they had a genuine device was a crackpot, therefore any evidence they
might present must be the products of delusion. This is not "skepticism",
this is hostile, sneering disbelief which is supported by closed-loop
thinking patterns. It is prejudice, it is a kind of "science bigotry."
It is disbelief which cannot be swayed by evidence. It's a sort of
insanity. (And, what if Cold Fusion in the end proves to be entirely
real? How could anyone explain it's present status? Mass-insanity on the
part of the physics community? Yep. Just like the mass-insanity which
very nearly suppressed the Wright Brothers.)



"We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy."
- Simon Newcomb, astronomer, 1888


The history of science is replete with silly quotations by experts
and others about various phenomena that the speaker didn't think was
possible or had happened. I like to quote a NY Times editorial of
1924, castigating Goddard for having the temerity to believe that
rockets could be propelled through outer space where there "was no
atmosphere to push against." Rutherford said in 1932 that thinking
about getting useful energy from the atom was "moonshine." The story
goes that Szilard heard of this the next morning while walking the
streets of London and was inspired to imagine the chain reaction and
to take out a patent on it. Lord Kelvin made careful calculations of
how fast the earth is cooling off after its formation from the
primordial dust and found the time from the beginning to now to be at
most 100 million years, and then in a series of recalculations, got
the number down to less than 20 million. His stature probably kept
the fact that radioactivity has kept the earth warm for enough time
to allow things to develop as they have away from general acceptance
for a number of years.

Going back further, Jefferson is said to have remarked scornfully
about the reports of "rocks falling from the sky," shortly before
they were finally verified by reports that were considered more
reliable than any previous ones. I can't remember the quotation but
it had to do with what he would be willing to believe before he would
believe in the rocks from the sky. And the alternative was something
we still think to be pretty unlikely. But the fact is that, once
reports were received that the relevant people considered reliable,
the phenomenon was quickly accepted and hypotheses developed and
tested to account for it.

And what about cold fusion? Is that dismissed by most scientists out
of pathological disbelief? I seriously doubt it. The potential for
this technology, should it be true, it simply too great to dismiss it
out of hand, and, if you recall, it wasn't. In fact many people tried
to replicate Pons & Fleishman's experiments. It was only after it
became clear that they couldn't be reproduced, and P&F became more
and more secretive about their methods, that skepticism overtook
optimism, and the idea was dismissed. This, moreover, is typical when
some major new claim is made about nature. If the experiments are
easily reproduced, as were P&F's, the initial reports are positive,
but as time goes on the positive reports become fewer and farther
between and negative reports become more common, eventually becoming
nearly universal. Provided the inital reports are a false alarm. If
the phenomenon is real, then positive reports keep coming in, as well
as reports of new related phenomena. This was the case with high
temperature superconductivity, which has now become mainstream
science, although its original discoverers were reportedly told by
their superiors to stop this line of research because it was proving
fruitless. They continued clandestinely, and the rest is history.

I don't believe that most scientists fall into the category of
"pathologically skeptical," although I hope that they can be counted
as "rationally skeptical." It is important to remember that when new
and amazing things are reported, that the burden of proof rests on
the reporter and that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary
evidence." It may take a while, as it did with Wegener's hypothesis
of continental drift, but if it is valid, it will eventually be shown
to be true.

There are areas of science that are so well developed that it is not
unreasonable to reject challenges to them out of hand; for example,
the laws of thermodynamics. During several hundred years of
searching, so violations have been discovered. Similarly, in the case
of the so-called "paranormal phenomena," in a similar time scale no
credible evidence for their existence has been found. It is not
"pathological skepticism" to reject such claims in the absence of
convincing evidence. That radioactivity has enabled us to carry out,
in a fashion, the goals of the ancient alchemists, shows that, if
something is possible, then it will be reliably demonstrated
eventually. But it is still true that the alchemists were (though
unbeknownst to them) barking up a really wrong tree. To doubt the
possibility of transmutation of the elements prior to the discovery
of radioactivity was hardly "pathological skepticism." It was the
only rational conclusion, based on the evidence available.

But back to the Wright brothers. Their achievement required very
little new science, and a good thing, too, since they were not
trained as scientists. Their skill was as engineers. They were not,
contrary to popular belief, simply simple bicycle mechanics with a
dream. They were engineers of considerable skill, although largely
self-taught (a condition somewhat easier to attain then than it is
now). They were also products of "the age of invention," not only in
this country, but in Europe as well. I find it difficult to believe
that without them there would be no flight today, or a drastically
less advanced aviation industry. This was as event waiting to happen
and if not Wilbur and Orville, then any number of others who were hot
on their tail, within a few years at most. All that was required was
good engineering, and we had that in this country to spare.

Sorry for running on. This is a favorite topic of mine.

Hugh


Hugh Haskell
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
have to..
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