Re: solution to the world's energy needs

[William Beaty <billb@ESKIMO.COM>]

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.)


> 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.

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

Which brings up another topic...  next message.


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