Moderator: Alyrium Denryle
Source (may cause brain damage).According to Scandinavian physicists ‘cold fusion’ happens due to the formation of ultradense hydrogen/deuterium as described in the widely acclaimed work and theoretical understanding by professor Svein Olafsson (Sindre’s Phd. supervisor in Iceland) and Norway’s Professor Svein Holmlid.
No it isn't. Unconventional (high temperature) superconductivity works but no-one knows how it works. Up until recently perhaps, bikes worked but no-one knew how they worked. Devices using permanent magnets were around way before anyone worked out how permanent magnets worked. Boats worked before Archimedes explained how they worked. That antibiotic from Bald's Leechbook I posted a while ago worked and people still don't really know how it works.Simon_Jester wrote:Well, realistically, if cold fusion works, it works because you do something to a sample of hydrogen. If you don't have a theory for how to make cold fusion happen, you probably can't set up apparatus to make it happen.
It is almost unheard of in modern science for a technology to exist and be widely accepted as working by the scientific community, before the theoretical underpinning to explain how it works have been discovered.
Yeah and a number of people over the years have claimed to have done so, without any of it being substantiated. Generally the levels are so low that even by the claimants own results they are within the margin of error of the detectors used. Production of radioactive isotopes of helium, tritium and several varying heavy elements (depending on fuel choice) would also be expected at detectable levels were any of this to actually work.Sky Captain wrote:If cold fusion worked wouldn't it be easy to prove by detecting large amounts of high energy neutrons given off by reaction?
[sighs]High temperature superconductivity isn't a technology, it's a specific material property.jwl wrote:No it isn't. Unconventional (high temperature) superconductivity works but no-one knows how it works. Up until recently perhaps, bikes worked but no-one knew how they worked. Devices using permanent magnets were around way before anyone worked out how permanent magnets worked. Boats worked before Archimedes explained how they worked. That antibiotic from Bald's Leechbook I posted a while ago worked and people still don't really know how it works.Simon_Jester wrote:Well, realistically, if cold fusion works, it works because you do something to a sample of hydrogen. If you don't have a theory for how to make cold fusion happen, you probably can't set up apparatus to make it happen.
It is almost unheard of in modern science for a technology to exist and be widely accepted as working by the scientific community, before the theoretical underpinning to explain how it works have been discovered.
Oh, each individual part might be understood well, but if we have a definite answer to why bikes stay up, it's news to me.And what on Earth do you mean people didn't know how bicycles work? Every part of a bicycle is straightforward mechanical engineering, using well understood principles like leverage and gears and gyroscopic effects. All of which was well known in the late 1800s when the bicycle was invented.
Why does the date of the technology have any bearing on anything at all? Did we suddenly lose the ability to create technologies without the relevant background in 1500? Anyway, apart from the boat, in all of the examples I gave, whilst the invention may be pre-modern, the explanation of how it works (if any) isn't. Also, the idea that Bald's Leechbook is pre-science is nonsense. One of the scientific explanations I was posting about is prior to that.Simon_Jester wrote:Early permanent magnets, boats, and "that antibiotic from Bald's Leechbook" are not examples of "in modern science;" all three of those things date back to a time before science was practiced in any form. I specifically said "in modern science" because it is in the nature of modern science to make precise, testable predictions based on logically verified theories- and modern technology uses modern science, not just random trial and error.
I was thinking more of this: http://www.phys.lsu.edu/faculty/gonzale ... p51_56.pdfAnd what on Earth do you mean people didn't know how bicycles work? Every part of a bicycle is straightforward mechanical engineering, using well understood principles like leverage and gears and gyroscopic effects. All of which was well known in the late 1800s when the bicycle was invented.
Most "cold fusion" devices basically consist of electrolysing water or heavy water in the presence of certain amounts of certain elements. It is hardly more complex than synthesising YCBO, cooling it to liquid nitrogen temperatures, and running a current though it.Let me explain what I'm getting at. There's a difference between a material property, or a property of a chemical mixture or some such, and the function of a mechanism.
High temperature superconductivity is a material property. You don't have to craft some sort of mechanism to make it happen; you just make a hunk of the right exotic ceramic and it happens on its own. Try enough different ceramics and you'll get one that works by dumb luck. Even so you won't be able to predict in advance which ceramics can do it until you've actually analyzed the phenomenon enough to have useful theories about it... but basically, high temperature superconductivity 'just happens.'
By contrast, an internal combustion engine doesn't just happen. You cannot, in a realistic amount of time, make a working internal combustion engine by bashing random bits of metal together while being ignorant of the principles of how machines (and gasoline aerosol) work. It's not enough to just put some steel and some gasoline together and wait for good luck to give you a working configuration, because internal combustion engines are composed of numerous separate parts, and do a thing which does not normally occur in nature, and in order to work, they must do so in an ordered, purposeful way. To get them to work you must impose purpose and order on your engine mechanisms, and to do that you have to understand those mechanisms.
As a result, no one has ever designed a working internal combustion engine without a clear idea of how one works, except possibly as a "monkey copy" that in effect plagiarizes the work of someone else who did understand how one works.
Note that while high temperature superconductivity is an example of a scientific phenomenon, an engine is a technology, an intentionally designed, physically made thing which induces an unusual thing to happen for our benefit.
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And I said "it is almost unheard of in modern science (i.e. post-1900 or so) for a technology to exist and be widely accepted, before the [theory] to explain how it works has been discovered."
People didn't build diesel engines until they understood gases and thermodynamics. People didn't build radio antennas until they understood radio waves. People didn't build computers until they knew how transistors worked. Trying to build any of these devices, while being ignorant of the underlying principles, is a recipe for wasted effort.
Likewise, cold fusion is not a normally occuring thing. If it was, we'd have observed it many times and in many ways. Therefore, to make cold fusion occur must require manipulating matter in unusual ways. And as a rule, manipulating matter in unusual ways requires manipulating matter in precise ways. You have to know what you're doing in advance, or you won't do it correctly and it won't work.
This is why I am profoundly skeptical of people who say they were just screwing around with random microwave cavities or whatever and SUDDENLY they discover a working cold fusion reactor or inertialess drive. That's not how it really worked with things like rocket engines or nuclear reactors, so why should we expect it to suddenly work that way for cold fusion and reactionless thrusters?
Science as a systematic discipline is relatively recent, with its emphasis on falsifiable predictions and hypotheses, on controlled experiments, and on rigorous, mathematical modeling of complex systems.jwl wrote:Why does the date of the technology have any bearing on anything at all? Did we suddenly lose the ability to create technologies without the relevant background in 1500? Anyway, apart from the boat, in all of the examples I gave, whilst the invention may be pre-modern, the explanation of how it works (if any) isn't. Also, the idea that Bald's Leechbook is pre-science is nonsense. One of the scientific explanations I was posting about is prior to that.Simon_Jester wrote:Early permanent magnets, boats, and "that antibiotic from Bald's Leechbook" are not examples of "in modern science;" all three of those things date back to a time before science was practiced in any form. I specifically said "in modern science" because it is in the nature of modern science to make precise, testable predictions based on logically verified theories- and modern technology uses modern science, not just random trial and error.
Not understanding how, mechanically, human riders maintain their balance on bicycles is not the same thing as not understanding bicycles. You're still back in the position of understanding the mechanics of the bicycle, in order to design the bicycle.I was thinking more of this: http://www.phys.lsu.edu/faculty/gonzale ... p51_56.pdfAnd what on Earth do you mean people didn't know how bicycles work? Every part of a bicycle is straightforward mechanical engineering, using well understood principles like leverage and gears and gyroscopic effects. All of which was well known in the late 1800s when the bicycle was invented.
As he says in it, everyone prior to that generally said that bicycles work because of gyroscopic effects, but since the bike was relatively *easy* to ride without gyroscopic effects, and URBIII worked with weights on without a passenger, that really isn't even approximately correct.
Since the article was realised in 1970 and people have been working on it since, zeropoint, I would have assumed it was reasonably settled by now.
Most "cold fusion" devices basically consist of electrolysing water or heavy water in the presence of certain amounts of certain elements. It is hardly more complex than synthesising YCBO, cooling it to liquid nitrogen temperatures, and running a current though it.[/quote]See, that's the problem. People have been doing electrolysis for a long time. If induced cold fusion were a natural property of electrolysis we'd have expected it to show up some time ago, and to be 'easy' to discover.Let me explain what I'm getting at. There's a difference between a material property, or a property of a chemical mixture or some such, and the function of a mechanism....
And I said "it is almost unheard of in modern science (i.e. post-1900 or so) for a technology to exist and be widely accepted, before the [theory] to explain how it works has been discovered."
People didn't build diesel engines until they understood gases and thermodynamics. People didn't build radio antennas until they understood radio waves. People didn't build computers until they knew how transistors worked. Trying to build any of these devices, while being ignorant of the underlying principles, is a recipe for wasted effort.
...
Internal combustion engines are more difficult to make, and to make functional, than steam engines, because they are less forgiving of attempts to build them crudely using rules of thumb. A low-pressure steam engine can be built in this way, and we learned a lot of scientific principles by observing said steam engines... in particular, by trying to explain why all the ones that didn't work failed.As for internal combustion engines, you do know that the laws of thermodynamics were initially discovered as rules of thumb for making steam engines and other machines during the industrial revolution, rather than the other way around, right? There's a reason the first law of thermodynamics is often expressed as "a first-kind perpetual motion machine is impossible".
The date, in purely temporal terms, is utterly irrelevant. The current state of scientific knowledge, however, is; there aren't any low-hanging fruit left. It is extremely difficult at this point to come up with a potential technology that can be made accidentally which hasn't already been invented.jwl wrote: Why does the date of the technology have any bearing on anything at all? Did we suddenly lose the ability to create technologies without the relevant background in 1500? Anyway, apart from the boat, in all of the examples I gave, whilst the invention may be pre-modern, the explanation of how it works (if any) isn't. Also, the idea that Bald's Leechbook is pre-science is nonsense. One of the scientific explanations I was posting about is prior to that.
You're being obtuse. There's no force acting on a bicycle in motion to make it fall over; therefore it doesn't. If you're genuinely concerned about this, feel free to demonstrate why a bicycle should fall over; this is the physics equivalent of the trolley problem.I was thinking more of this: http://www.phys.lsu.edu/faculty/gonzale ... p51_56.pdf
As he says in it, everyone prior to that generally said that bicycles work because of gyroscopic effects, but since the bike was relatively *easy* to ride without gyroscopic effects, and URBIII worked with weights on without a passenger, that really isn't even approximately correct.
The laws of thermodynamics are direct derivations of the conservation principles that exist in chemistry and physics. both of which predate thermodynamics by a significant period. Additionally, it's a completely irrelevant point because systematic science post-dates the 1850s, when they were codified. The whole point Simon, and now I are making is that while it was possible to stumble upon effective mechanisms early on in the scientific process, it is vastly more difficult now due to the hugely expanded scientific knowledge base and the much greater relative complexity of existing unsolved problems. I'll also point out that your cold fusion accidental discoveries aren't replicable and, even according to their discoverers, may have been simple instrument error.Most "cold fusion" devices basically consist of electrolysing water or heavy water in the presence of certain amounts of certain elements. It is hardly more complex than synthesising YCBO, cooling it to liquid nitrogen temperatures, and running a current though it.
As for internal combustion engines, you do know that the laws of thermodynamics were initially discovered as rules of thumb for making steam engines and other machines during the industrial revolution, rather than the other way around, right? There's a reason the first law of thermodynamics is often expressed as "a first-kind perpetual motion machine is impossible".
I'm not denying that Bald's Leechbook itself is somewhat less than scientific. It is not, however, pre-scientific, because science still existed before Bald's Leechbook was published, it just wasn't used so much in Bald's Leechbook itself.Simon_Jester wrote:Science as a systematic discipline is relatively recent, with its emphasis on falsifiable predictions and hypotheses, on controlled experiments, and on rigorous, mathematical modeling of complex systems.jwl wrote:Why does the date of the technology have any bearing on anything at all? Did we suddenly lose the ability to create technologies without the relevant background in 1500? Anyway, apart from the boat, in all of the examples I gave, whilst the invention may be pre-modern, the explanation of how it works (if any) isn't. Also, the idea that Bald's Leechbook is pre-science is nonsense. One of the scientific explanations I was posting about is prior to that.Simon_Jester wrote:Early permanent magnets, boats, and "that antibiotic from Bald's Leechbook" are not examples of "in modern science;" all three of those things date back to a time before science was practiced in any form. I specifically said "in modern science" because it is in the nature of modern science to make precise, testable predictions based on logically verified theories- and modern technology uses modern science, not just random trial and error.
Bald's Leechbook is an example of pre-scientific medicine. Some of its treatments work quite well, and some of the techniques may well have been developed using methods we could recognize as 'scientific' today. On the other hand, some of its treatments are predicated on the assumption that the patient's feet have been cursed by elves. Not so scientific.
Science is not the only way to learn anything. But science is just about the only way to gain a deep understanding of a complex system that will permit you to control that system.
Of course it's the same thing as not understanding bicycles. There was no guarantee before making it that it would be stable apart from mistaken ideas about gyroscopes. There are plenty of ideas of vehicles you could make which would not be stable.Not understanding how, mechanically, human riders maintain their balance on bicycles is not the same thing as not understanding bicycles. You're still back in the position of understanding the mechanics of the bicycle, in order to design the bicycle.I was thinking more of this: http://www.phys.lsu.edu/faculty/gonzale ... p51_56.pdf
As he says in it, everyone prior to that generally said that bicycles work because of gyroscopic effects, but since the bike was relatively *easy* to ride without gyroscopic effects, and URBIII worked with weights on without a passenger, that really isn't even approximately correct.
Since the article was realised in 1970 and people have been working on it since, zeropoint, I would have assumed it was reasonably settled by now.
To be fair, a bicycle is simple enough that it could be designed using only trial and error and rules of thumb... but by contrast, bicycles are a much simpler sort of thing than cold fusion.
Not the electrolysis of heavy water they haven't. And of course there is very good reason (theoretically) to think that cold fusion is impossible. That was my entire point: it is so far "out there" in terms of theory that if it is correct nobody is going to work out how it works until after it is already accepted. (Experimentally there is reasonably good reason too, but the experiment is far more ambiguous than the theory). Anyway, people had been running currents through stuff for a long time before LCBO (or indeed, mercury) turned up.See, that's the problem. People have been doing electrolysis for a long time. If induced cold fusion were a natural property of electrolysis we'd have expected it to show up some time ago, and to be 'easy' to discover.Most "cold fusion" devices basically consist of electrolysing water or heavy water in the presence of certain amounts of certain elements. It is hardly more complex than synthesising YCBO, cooling it to liquid nitrogen temperatures, and running a current though it.
If induced cold fusion were a natural property of certain materials, then those materials would have to be capable of inducing a nuclear reaction, which is not merely 'unexplained.' It's a thing we have good reason to consider impossible.
Having a look at the history of internal combustion engines, this is apparently not the case. The first liquid fuel internal combustion engine was in 1794, and there were gunpowder engines before then. The laws of thermodynamics meanwhile, started turning up in the mid 19th century.Internal combustion engines are more difficult to make, and to make functional, than steam engines, because they are less forgiving of attempts to build them crudely using rules of thumb. A low-pressure steam engine can be built in this way, and we learned a lot of scientific principles by observing said steam engines... in particular, by trying to explain why all the ones that didn't work failed.As for internal combustion engines, you do know that the laws of thermodynamics were initially discovered as rules of thumb for making steam engines and other machines during the industrial revolution, rather than the other way around, right? There's a reason the first law of thermodynamics is often expressed as "a first-kind perpetual motion machine is impossible".
My point here is that working technology beyond the crudest level generally cannot be designed or built without an understanding of the underlying science. It is possible to discover substances with desirable properties, but that's not the same thing.
[sighs]jwl wrote:I'm not denying that Bald's Leechbook itself is somewhat less than scientific. It is not, however, pre-scientific, because science still existed before Bald's Leechbook was published, it just wasn't used so much in Bald's Leechbook itself.
Read some of "On Floating Bodies" and tell me it's not science.
No, it is not, there is a fundamental point here you are being very, very obtuse about.But that is missing my main points: what date the invention happened, or indeed the explanation turned up, is irrelevant. If inventions can occur without the necessary background in one time period, there's no reason why they can't do so in any subsequent time period. Arbitrarily restricting examples to the modern era is silly.
Not understanding one thing about bicycles (with empirical testing revealing that they are in fact rideable) is not the same as not understanding any thing (not having the faintest clue how a bicycle can even move around and operate and do things). The people who built the first bicycles knew enough about wheels, gears, and human musculature to design a machine that would function. They may not have been able to predict it would work well until they tried, but if they had possessed only Stone Age knowledge, or if they'd just been bashing bits of metal together randomly, it wouldn't work at all.Of course it's the same thing as not understanding bicycles. There was no guarantee before making it that it would be stable apart from mistaken ideas about gyroscopes. There are plenty of ideas of vehicles you could make which would not be stable.
Put this way, "run current through deuterium-bearing water" is not exotic enough to be a plausible "we only just found this result and no one's ever tried anything like it before."Not the electrolysis of heavy water they haven't.. Also, heavy And of course there is very good reason (theoretically) to think that cold fusion is impossible. That was my entire point: it is so far "out there" in terms of theory that if it is correct nobody is going to work out how it works until after it is already accepted. (Experimentally there is reasonably good reason too, but the experiment is far more ambiguous than the theory). Anyway, people had been running currents through stuff for a long time before LCBO (or indeed, mercury) turned up.
Carnot was working extensively along those lines as early as 1825 or so... and frankly, the early internal combustion engines were at best toys, totally uncompetitive and unworkable.Having a look at the history of internal combustion engines, this is apparently not the case. The first liquid fuel internal combustion engine was in 1794, and there were gunpowder engines before then. The laws of thermodynamics meanwhile, started turning up in the mid 19th century.Internal combustion engines are more difficult to make, and to make functional, than steam engines, because they are less forgiving of attempts to build them crudely using rules of thumb. A low-pressure steam engine can be built in this way, and we learned a lot of scientific principles by observing said steam engines... in particular, by trying to explain why all the ones that didn't work failed.As for internal combustion engines, you do know that the laws of thermodynamics were initially discovered as rules of thumb for making steam engines and other machines during the industrial revolution, rather than the other way around, right? There's a reason the first law of thermodynamics is often expressed as "a first-kind perpetual motion machine is impossible".
My point here is that working technology beyond the crudest level generally cannot be designed or built without an understanding of the underlying science. It is possible to discover substances with desirable properties, but that's not the same thing.
I guess my point to him, which I imagine you agree with, is that designing anything complicated that actually works requires a great deal of understanding of the systems you're using. In some areas this design effort can be done by trial and error. But if so, there will be a LONG string of failed trials before eventual successes.Terralthra wrote:Worth noting that the earliest bicycles weren't bicycles at all, but tricycles and quadricycles, as the pre-scientific hobbyist community in the early 1800s dismissed out of hand the possibility that someone could balance a 2-wheel device while not making contact with the ground. Earlier velocipedes with two wheels were designed so the riders made frequent contact with the ground, rather than pedaling a drive. Penny-farthing designs were quite hazardous. Only 60-70 years later with the aptly-named "safety bicycle", which included pneumatic tires, a chain drive, diamond-frame, and equally-sized wheels, did bicycles stop being dangerous toys and start being used as viable transport.
"Well-understood" my arse, in other words. No one slapped together a working, usable bike from random metallic parts laying around.
You assume that there are no low-hanging fruit because....?Esquire wrote:The date, in purely temporal terms, is utterly irrelevant. The current state of scientific knowledge, however, is; there aren't any low-hanging fruit left. It is extremely difficult at this point to come up with a potential technology that can be made accidentally which hasn't already been invented.jwl wrote: Why does the date of the technology have any bearing on anything at all? Did we suddenly lose the ability to create technologies without the relevant background in 1500? Anyway, apart from the boat, in all of the examples I gave, whilst the invention may be pre-modern, the explanation of how it works (if any) isn't. Also, the idea that Bald's Leechbook is pre-science is nonsense. One of the scientific explanations I was posting about is prior to that.
I suggest you attempt to balance a sharpened pencil point-down. There is no force acting on the pencil to make it fall over, so why should it?You're being obtuse. There's no force acting on a bicycle in motion to make it fall over; therefore it doesn't. If you're genuinely concerned about this, feel free to demonstrate why a bicycle should fall over; this is the physics equivalent of the trolley problem.I was thinking more of this: http://www.phys.lsu.edu/faculty/gonzale ... p51_56.pdf
As he says in it, everyone prior to that generally said that bicycles work because of gyroscopic effects, but since the bike was relatively *easy* to ride without gyroscopic effects, and URBIII worked with weights on without a passenger, that really isn't even approximately correct.
The laws of thermodynamics are not direct derivatives of conservation principles in chemistry and physics. The first law of thermodynamics has precursors in the sense that the approximate conservation of *kinetic* energy was believed to occur in certain systems, and the heat people thought that heat was conserved, but that isn't the same as having a well-defined conservation law of all types of energy. Of course you could extend the conservation of kinetic energy to heat if you were to use the kinetic theory of heat, but the kinetic theory of heat was not popular before the mid-19th century. At the time before then the popular idea was that heat was a sort of liquid, not caused by the kinetic movement of particles. And you can't really say there is a proper understanding of thermodynamics until the second law of thermodynamics turns up, which didn't have such precursors.The laws of thermodynamics are direct derivations of the conservation principles that exist in chemistry and physics. both of which predate thermodynamics by a significant period. Additionally, it's a completely irrelevant point because systematic science post-dates the 1850s, when they were codified. The whole point Simon, and now I are making is that while it was possible to stumble upon effective mechanisms early on in the scientific process, it is vastly more difficult now due to the hugely expanded scientific knowledge base and the much greater relative complexity of existing unsolved problems. I'll also point out that your cold fusion accidental discoveries aren't replicable and, even according to their discoverers, may have been simple instrument error.Most "cold fusion" devices basically consist of electrolysing water or heavy water in the presence of certain amounts of certain elements. It is hardly more complex than synthesising YCBO, cooling it to liquid nitrogen temperatures, and running a current though it.
As for internal combustion engines, you do know that the laws of thermodynamics were initially discovered as rules of thumb for making steam engines and other machines during the industrial revolution, rather than the other way around, right? There's a reason the first law of thermodynamics is often expressed as "a first-kind perpetual motion machine is impossible".
We're dealing with high-order problems, now, instead of comparatively simple ones. If I heat water in a confined system, I get a steam engine as it expands; fine, easy enough to stumble upon. If I use that steam engine to generate electricity to power a particle detector made of particular materials to specific tolerances that's tuned to detect an individual particle emanating at a certain speed from a particular object, itself of a similar complexity, you can understand why it would be unlikely for anyone to do that without having some reason to start in the first place. That reason would be - say it with me now - a theory or well-grounded hypothesis.
Okay, I'm willing to concede the point on Bald's Leechbook being pre-scientific, but only because the work of Archimedes (and indeed Galen, he may not have been right about everything but he was a scientist) was lost at the time. When these works were re-discovered, you couldn't really call the society pre-scientific because, whether they actually practice scientific research or not, they possess scientific information.Simon_Jester wrote:[sighs]jwl wrote:I'm not denying that Bald's Leechbook itself is somewhat less than scientific. It is not, however, pre-scientific, because science still existed before Bald's Leechbook was published, it just wasn't used so much in Bald's Leechbook itself.
Read some of "On Floating Bodies" and tell me it's not science.
OK, if you want to use the 'lawyering' sense of "pre-scientific" as meaning "pre-scientific times stopped as soon as some one, somewhere, at some time practiced something recognizable as scientific thinking," you're right.
Of course, by that standard the Native Americans were an Iron Age civilization in 1490, on account of someone else on another continent was in the Iron Age, and on account of a few Inuit in Greenland having tools bashed out of meteoric iron.
The realistic and sane point here is that there's a qualitative difference between societies where science is practiced comprehensively and where it is not. There can be a gap of centuries between the times people recognizably start practicing science (e.g. Archimedes or Roger Bacon) and the time the society has a 'scientific community' in a meaningful sense. Different fields become 'scientified' at different times- physics crossed that boundary before 1800 in most respects, whereas psychology took rather longer.
But the cold fusion designs typically used *are* simple.No, it is not, there is a fundamental point here you are being very, very obtuse about.But that is missing my main points: what date the invention happened, or indeed the explanation turned up, is irrelevant. If inventions can occur without the necessary background in one time period, there's no reason why they can't do so in any subsequent time period. Arbitrarily restricting examples to the modern era is silly.
Simple things can be invented through accident, serendipity, and luck. You can discover them by randomly testing lots of different things until you stumble on something no one could have predicted (in a prescientific culture), or something no one got around to predicting (in a scientific culture, because for instance it's not like material scientists have simulated literally every possible substance to determine its properties under every possible combination of external stimuli).
Complex things have to be designed rationally by people who understand the principles that make them operable. They may not understand all the principles (the first planes to encounter the sound barrier were designed by people who had not actually encountered the sound barrier, or they would probably have been designed to avoid its damaging effects.
But no one could ever have designed those near-sonic aircraft if they didn't have a good grasp of aerodynamics, engine design, and the like.
And for modern technology, our understanding of complex things, which we use to design them, is invariably grounded in scientific knowledge. That is why I keep talking about modern or recent history.
For instance, you CAN build a surprisingly large ship out of wood and canvas without any formal knowledge of hydrodynamics or physics or whatever, just using accumulated experience and rules of thumb. But that same approach fails dramatically if you try to use in giant oil tankers or WWII battleships. In premodern times it was very common for people to do complicated things without knowing the underlying science... but in many cases they failed, and in most cases their best efforts look rather unimpressive compared to what we can do today.
I'll point out that the early bicycles didn't have gears. The ones you usually think of are penny farthings, which have a giant front wheel, and the actual oldest pedalled bike seems to work via rope. It seems to me you are throwing out bits of history assuming that you are right without actually checking what really happened.Not understanding one thing about bicycles (with empirical testing revealing that they are in fact rideable) is not the same as not understanding any thing (not having the faintest clue how a bicycle can even move around and operate and do things). The people who built the first bicycles knew enough about wheels, gears, and human musculature to design a machine that would function. They may not have been able to predict it would work well until they tried, but if they had possessed only Stone Age knowledge, or if they'd just been bashing bits of metal together randomly, it wouldn't work at all.Of course it's the same thing as not understanding bicycles. There was no guarantee before making it that it would be stable apart from mistaken ideas about gyroscopes. There are plenty of ideas of vehicles you could make which would not be stable.
The cold fusioneers are not claiming to do the kind of procedure you are outlining. The most common (and original) claim was that it occurs when you electrolyse heavy water using palladium electrodes. Many of these fusioneers now say it only works if the palladium sample passes a certain quality threshold and the experiment ran beyond a certain time period (because otherwise they don't have an explanation for the negative replications), but that still doesn't make is massively complicated. Yes, there are some devices nobody would think to build in a million years and others which someone might try within a year of the relevent materials becoming available. But there are others where you would expect someone to try within two years, others within five, others within ten, others within twenty, others within fifty, etc. Your argument seems to assume that it works in a binary way but there is really no reason to think that. As it happened, I looked up to see if anyone had tried the cold fusion experiment prior to the original claim, and I can't find anything apart from this guy who claimed a positive result pretty much right after deuterium was synthesised but also claimed a similar kind of positive result with normal water.Put this way, "run current through deuterium-bearing water" is not exotic enough to be a plausible "we only just found this result and no one's ever tried anything like it before."Not the electrolysis of heavy water they haven't.. Also, heavy And of course there is very good reason (theoretically) to think that cold fusion is impossible. That was my entire point: it is so far "out there" in terms of theory that if it is correct nobody is going to work out how it works until after it is already accepted. (Experimentally there is reasonably good reason too, but the experiment is far more ambiguous than the theory). Anyway, people had been running currents through stuff for a long time before LCBO (or indeed, mercury) turned up.
Something like "Run current through deuterium-bearing water while bombarding it with six varieties of ultrasound and liberally salting it with lithium during a full moon" is more plausible along those lines... but hte very reason nobody's done it is because no one can think of a reason to bother. There are an infinite number of possible experiments. Most of the simplest possible ones have by now been done 'on spec' by scientists who wanted to establish basic knowledge about as many things as they could. The complex ones often haven't been done... but those are the very ones that nobody would ever try because they're randomly fiddling around. They're done in specific ways because someone has already predicted in advance that something interesting is going to happen, because they had a good understanding of at least some of the underlying science.
Okay, I might be a decade or two out, but I wasn't out by a lot. But Carnot was talking about his "perfect" heat engine *in comparison with other existing imperfect heat engines*.Carnot was working extensively along those lines as early as 1825 or so... and frankly, the early internal combustion engines were at best toys, totally uncompetitive and unworkable.Having a look at the history of internal combustion engines, this is apparently not the case. The first liquid fuel internal combustion engine was in 1794, and there were gunpowder engines before then. The laws of thermodynamics meanwhile, started turning up in the mid 19th century.Internal combustion engines are more difficult to make, and to make functional, than steam engines, because they are less forgiving of attempts to build them crudely using rules of thumb. A low-pressure steam engine can be built in this way, and we learned a lot of scientific principles by observing said steam engines... in particular, by trying to explain why all the ones that didn't work failed.
My point here is that working technology beyond the crudest level generally cannot be designed or built without an understanding of the underlying science. It is possible to discover substances with desirable properties, but that's not the same thing.
Plus, if you want I can easily present better examples like a gas turbine engine. Or a nuclear reactor. Or chemotherapy regimens. Or brain surgery. Or workable aircraft. In each case, the field didn't even begin to get beyond the level of science fiction until science had learned enough about the subject matter to be able to predict most of the challenges involved in making things work.
All right, fine, let's take heavy water as an example. Heavy water is (was) used in nuclear and biological research, as well as nuclear power generation. The questions it answers are not questions that could be asked without a thorough theoretical grounding, and its industrial applications are similarly non-intuitive. It is not possible to accidentally stumble upon heavy water, because you need electrolysis, semiadvanced chemistry, and a reason to make it in the first place as prerequisites. Nobody would do such an expensive and potentially-dangerous thing without an idea that it would be useful for something. Why is this so hard for you to grasp?jwl wrote:You assume that there are no low-hanging fruit because....?Esquire wrote:The date, in purely temporal terms, is utterly irrelevant. The current state of scientific knowledge, however, is; there aren't any low-hanging fruit left. It is extremely difficult at this point to come up with a potential technology that can be made accidentally which hasn't already been invented.jwl wrote: Why does the date of the technology have any bearing on anything at all? Did we suddenly lose the ability to create technologies without the relevant background in 1500? Anyway, apart from the boat, in all of the examples I gave, whilst the invention may be pre-modern, the explanation of how it works (if any) isn't. Also, the idea that Bald's Leechbook is pre-science is nonsense. One of the scientific explanations I was posting about is prior to that.
Obviously people haven't tried everything, because you can only get access to e.g. heavy water as technology progresses, and indeed can only prove that barely-working devices work as technology progresses.
Of course there is. The pencil point isn't perfectly flat, or perfectly conical; air currents affect the balance of something that light; a human can't balance things that precisely. I'm sure there's more. Tell me: why should a bicycle fall over? Please provide exact physical arguments that remain unanswered currently. Remember, as per Newton, movement is the positive statement.I suggest you attempt to balance a sharpened pencil point-down. There is no force acting on the pencil to make it fall over, so why should it?
You're being obtuse. There's no force acting on a bicycle in motion to make it fall over; therefore it doesn't. If you're genuinely concerned about this, feel free to demonstrate why a bicycle should fall over; this is the physics equivalent of the trolley problem.
The blunt answer to "why can't electrolysis in cold water be low-hanging fruit" is "atoms don't work that way, you moron."jwl wrote:You assume that there are no low-hanging fruit because....?
Obviously people haven't tried everything, because you can only get access to e.g. heavy water as technology progresses, and indeed can only prove that barely-working devices work as technology progresses.
You're still being obtuse. Early bicycles would fall over, and did, and this was precisely why bicycles took so long to be adopted. Eventually, more stable bicycles were developed through a combination of engineers using scientific knowledge,* and trial and error. The "bicycles are stable because gyroscopes" brainbug, which I freely admit I fell prey to, is one of those pop-sci myths that emerges at random like "rockets work by pushing on the air so they don't fly in a vacuum."I suggest you attempt to balance a sharpened pencil point-down. There is no force acting on the pencil to make it fall over, so why should it?You're being obtuse. There's no force acting on a bicycle in motion to make it fall over; therefore it doesn't. If you're genuinely concerned about this, feel free to demonstrate why a bicycle should fall over; this is the physics equivalent of the trolley problem.I was thinking more of this: http://www.phys.lsu.edu/faculty/gonzale ... p51_56.pdf
As he says in it, everyone prior to that generally said that bicycles work because of gyroscopic effects, but since the bike was relatively *easy* to ride without gyroscopic effects, and URBIII worked with weights on without a passenger, that really isn't even approximately correct.
The laws of thermodynamics are entirely joined at the hip with the conservation laws. Without the kinetic theory of heat, you don't have conservation laws; without conservation laws, you have no particular reason to believe that heat is a conserved quantity.The laws of thermodynamics are not direct derivatives of conservation principles in chemistry and physics. The first law of thermodynamics has precursors in the sense that the approximate conservation of *kinetic* energy was believed to occur in certain systems, and the heat people thought that heat was conserved, but that isn't the same as having a well-defined conservation law of all types of energy. Of course you could extend the conservation of kinetic energy to heat if you were to use the kinetic theory of heat, but the kinetic theory of heat was not popular before the mid-19th century. At the time before then the popular idea was that heat was a sort of liquid, not caused by the kinetic movement of particles. And you can't really say there is a proper understanding of thermodynamics until the second law of thermodynamics turns up, which didn't have such precursors.
If those devices work, then yes, it would be a certainty that they would be proven to work before anyone understood them.Yes, the cold fusion devices probably don't work. What I object to is the idea that in principle, some sort of thing like the cold fusion idea might happen. In fact, this kind of thing has happened. I was also saying that if you were to assume that the cold fusion devices work, then it is likely that the cold fusioneers will get sufficient evidence that it does work before anybody works out any kind of valid theoretical framework for it.
As noted above, 'science' is not a piece of information you somehow have or don't have. It's a process. Knowing a fact discovered by a scientist does not mean you are practicing science. To practice science you have to do certain things, and medieval Europe with a handful of exceptions was not a place where scholars did those things. Sure, a few scholars practiced something recognizable as science, but science as a whole had not been embraced as a way of discovering relevant truth.Okay, I'm willing to concede the point on Bald's Leechbook being pre-scientific, but only because the work of Archimedes (and indeed Galen, he may not have been right about everything but he was a scientist) was lost at the time. When these works were re-discovered, you couldn't really call the society pre-scientific because, whether they actually practice scientific research or not, they possess scientific information.
Which is precisely why we can confidently expect them not to work... and our expectations haven't been disappointed, either.[snipping my explanation about how simple things can be developed in a pre-scientific context without understanding how they work, but complex things can't]
But the cold fusion designs typically used *are* simple...
I'll point out that the early bicycles didn't have gears. The ones you usually think of are penny farthings, which have a giant front wheel, and the actual oldest pedalled bike seems to work via rope. It seems to me you are throwing out bits of history assuming that you are right without actually checking what really happened.Not understanding one thing about bicycles (with empirical testing revealing that they are in fact rideable) is not the same as not understanding any thing (not having the faintest clue how a bicycle can even move around and operate and do things). The people who built the first bicycles knew enough about wheels, gears, and human musculature to design a machine that would function. They may not have been able to predict it would work well until they tried, but if they had possessed only Stone Age knowledge, or if they'd just been bashing bits of metal together randomly, it wouldn't work at all.Of course it's the same thing as not understanding bicycles. There was no guarantee before making it that it would be stable apart from mistaken ideas about gyroscopes. There are plenty of ideas of vehicles you could make which would not be stable.
And, notably, their experiments don't work, which is exactly what I'd expect, and exactly my point. Devices for doing strange and unknown things in modern times tend to be complicated precisely because if they were simple they'd be done already. If all you had to do to make cold fusion work was use very pure palladium, the math would support that (since we know how hydrogen behaves in a palladium lattice). If all you had to do was sit and wait a while, likewise.The cold fusioneers are not claiming to do the kind of procedure you are outlining. The most common (and original) claim was that it occurs when you electrolyse heavy water using palladium electrodes. Many of these fusioneers now say it only works if the palladium sample passes a certain quality threshold and the experiment ran beyond a certain time period (because otherwise they don't have an explanation for the negative replications), but that still doesn't make is massively complicated.
Yes, because Carnot was the first guy to model an engine in thermodynamic terms. Other successors expanded on his work and we learned a lot as a result.Okay, I might be a decade or two out, but I wasn't out by a lot. But Carnot was talking about his "perfect" heat engine *in comparison with other existing imperfect heat engines*.
Yes, but trepannation cannot be said to work- because it does do more harm than good, especially if you do it without understanding why it works. If you use it as a treatment for 'evil spirits in the brain,' it will usually kill the patient or at best fail to kill the patient but also fail to cure them. It does work if you use it to cure a hematoma under the skull... but you have to know what a hematoma is and how to expect one to happen.In terms of your examples, not all of them have experiment coming before theory (and I never said that this always does happen, just that it can happen), but brain surgery happened before the brain was understood with Trepanning, and later was expanded to actually operating on the brain. This probably mostly did more harm than good, but sometimes it would have worked.
Yes, because kites are simple (a quadrangle of fabric being the easiest option). Gliders happened some time before powered aircraft but actually not long- because of a lack of understanding. A lot of people built gliders that just plain wouldn't fly, because they had no idea how to design one that would.Engine-powered aircraft didn't turn up until after aerodynamics was established, but more primitive ideas like kites, Chinese lanterns and gliders happened well beforehand. When gas turbine engines were developed depends on your definition of gas turbine engines.
Yes, it is possible to accidentally stumble upon heavy water (I mean, other isotopes and elements were discovered this way), but that's not what I was talking about. What I mean is, things like the discovery of heavy water allow people to try out combinations that haven't been tried before, giving them the opportunity to discover new things by accident.Esquire wrote:All right, fine, let's take heavy water as an example. Heavy water is (was) used in nuclear and biological research, as well as nuclear power generation. The questions it answers are not questions that could be asked without a thorough theoretical grounding, and its industrial applications are similarly non-intuitive. It is not possible to accidentally stumble upon heavy water, because you need electrolysis, semiadvanced chemistry, and a reason to make it in the first place as prerequisites. Nobody would do such an expensive and potentially-dangerous thing without an idea that it would be useful for something. Why is this so hard for you to grasp?jwl wrote:You assume that there are no low-hanging fruit because....?Esquire wrote:
The date, in purely temporal terms, is utterly irrelevant. The current state of scientific knowledge, however, is; there aren't any low-hanging fruit left. It is extremely difficult at this point to come up with a potential technology that can be made accidentally which hasn't already been invented.
Obviously people haven't tried everything, because you can only get access to e.g. heavy water as technology progresses, and indeed can only prove that barely-working devices work as technology progresses.
Oh, come on, you must know what my balanced pencil tip example represents: it's the one of the most commonly examples of an *unstable system*.Of course there is. The pencil point isn't perfectly flat, or perfectly conical; air currents affect the balance of something that light; a human can't balance things that precisely. I'm sure there's more. Tell me: why should a bicycle fall over? Please provide exact physical arguments that remain unanswered currently. Remember, as per Newton, movement is the positive statement.I suggest you attempt to balance a sharpened pencil point-down. There is no force acting on the pencil to make it fall over, so why should it?
I suppose you could say in the same way unconventional superconductivity doesn't work because atoms don't work that way you moron, or indeed regular superconductivity in the pre-BCS understanding. That's the whole point we're talking about; technologies which are discovered which exist outside of the understanding of the time.Simon_Jester wrote:The blunt answer to "why can't electrolysis in cold water be low-hanging fruit" is "atoms don't work that way, you moron."jwl wrote:You assume that there are no low-hanging fruit because....?
Obviously people haven't tried everything, because you can only get access to e.g. heavy water as technology progresses, and indeed can only prove that barely-working devices work as technology progresses.
The reason there are no or nearly-no "low-hanging fruit" is that once you have a systematic, competent approach to science and engineering, low-hanging fruit become childishly obvious. This is precisely why technology has changed as radically in the past 100-150 years as it did in the millenium or two before that: the cumulative effect of large numbers of logical, methodical, organized thinkers exploring the implications of what was available to them, and constructing increasingly complete theories.
Understanding atoms has allowed us to predict and design numerous technologies that wouldn't even function if we were that wrong about atoms, wrong enough for electrolysis in heavy water to enable cold fusion. If it were that simple, the odds are overwhelming that the phenomenon would have been observed already. It's not like the first person to stick electrodes in heavy water suddenly magically got a huge surge of thermal energy or something, either- people were trying this both before and after Pons and Fleischmann, with consistently disappointing results. Many people have tested this and the results aren't replicable.
Look, if you are going to continue coming back to me on that point, please actually read the article I linked on the matter.You're still being obtuse. Early bicycles would fall over, and did, and this was precisely why bicycles took so long to be adopted. Eventually, more stable bicycles were developed through a combination of engineers using scientific knowledge,* and trial and error. The "bicycles are stable because gyroscopes" brainbug, which I freely admit I fell prey to, is one of those pop-sci myths that emerges at random like "rockets work by pushing on the air so they don't fly in a vacuum."I suggest you attempt to balance a sharpened pencil point-down. There is no force acting on the pencil to make it fall over, so why should it?
You're being obtuse. There's no force acting on a bicycle in motion to make it fall over; therefore it doesn't. If you're genuinely concerned about this, feel free to demonstrate why a bicycle should fall over; this is the physics equivalent of the trolley problem.
The point in all this is that the people who built working bicycles in real life had a pretty good understanding of the science and engineering that went into them. They designed their bicycle as it was designed for a reason, not because they were fooling around with random hunks of metal and got lucky somehow.
*(so they knew that a lower center of gravity, or soft tires that provide at least slight resistance force against small torques, or the like, would help)
The conservation of heat (as opposed to energy) did not come from the kinetic theory of heat, if came from caloric theory. The idea is, heat is a liquid, and this liquid is conserved. Carnot was not thinking of the kinetic theory of heat when he published his paper, he was thinking in terms of a modified version of caloric theory. The kinetic theory of heat became popular because of the laws of thermodynamics, which in itself turned up because of machine making in the industrial revolution, not the other way around. The reason why energy was thought at first to be a conserved quantity was because that was what they observed in the machines they were building. That's all.The laws of thermodynamics are entirely joined at the hip with the conservation laws. Without the kinetic theory of heat, you don't have conservation laws; without conservation laws, you have no particular reason to believe that heat is a conserved quantity.The laws of thermodynamics are not direct derivatives of conservation principles in chemistry and physics. The first law of thermodynamics has precursors in the sense that the approximate conservation of *kinetic* energy was believed to occur in certain systems, and the heat people thought that heat was conserved, but that isn't the same as having a well-defined conservation law of all types of energy. Of course you could extend the conservation of kinetic energy to heat if you were to use the kinetic theory of heat, but the kinetic theory of heat was not popular before the mid-19th century. At the time before then the popular idea was that heat was a sort of liquid, not caused by the kinetic movement of particles. And you can't really say there is a proper understanding of thermodynamics until the second law of thermodynamics turns up, which didn't have such precursors.
Please give a chapter number or something in that book, it's 222 pages long.If you look at how thermodynamics actually evolved, it was an excellent example of the scientific process extending itself into a new field, a concept you appear to be missing. I'd be missing it too if I hadn't gone digging through my college library, though, so I hope you won't mind if I explain.
[The short form of my explanation is "see The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn." Kuhn did a great job of explaining the process by which intellectual disciplines evolve from pre-science or non-science into science. This process occurs in parallel across different fields, at different rates, and may occur sooner or later in some places than in others. If you read the book, you will understand the root of why I talk about how the process of discovery is qualitatively different in pre-scientific scholarship, and why you can expect to see a lot of 'we discovered a thing we don't understand' technology in pre-scientific settings.
But things do do that, approximately, especially in high-drag situations. Aristotle may not have been completely right on that one, but, empirically, he was approximately right.The long form... basically boils down to a few key ideas:
1) Science is a process, not an object
2) Pre-scientific scholarship lacks a unifying paradigm
3) The emergence of a paradigm greatly accelerates discovery.
1) Science is a process, not an object
'Science' consists of a complex of different ideas and methodologies that all fit together into a system that is different from 'non-science.' The strengths of these different methods reinforce each other, in sometimes complicated ways. Science is not a single thing. Sort of like how an 'army' is distinct from a random collection of guys with weapons. And how you can look at a random bunch of armed men and say 'at this time they were a rabble with weapons, five years later they were beginning to organize, and ten years later they were an army.' You cannot definitively say 'they became an army when they got uniforms' or 'they became an army when they appointed a general.' You have to look at the overall mix of different features that characterize armies.
So you can't say "science was invented on October 3, 1622" or "how can this Archimedes' work on flotation be 'pre-scientific' when it is so scholarly and smart" or something like that. Because 'science' is not a specific object, technology, or specific idea. It combines many ideas, like:
-The need for logical consistency of explanations with observed fact (no fair claiming objects naturally fly in straight lines until they run out of impetus and fall to the ground, when things like rocks and cannonballs don't actually do that).
I have never claimed that Bald's leechbook itself is scientific. What I (incorrectly) thought was that Bald's Leechbook can't in any way be called "before" science because they were aware of knowledge obtained through scientific methods. Now I have reminded myself that classic scientific works were at the time, in England, lost.-The importance of concrete, falsifiable hypotheses (most pre-scientific fields are riddled with 'unnecessary entities' that cannot be falsified and which distort the thinking of scholars; Bald's Leechbook contains many ideas about disease which are not falsifiable, and despite its scholarship is a characteristically pre-scientific work in part for this reason).
-Use of controlled experiments to test hypotheses against facts (I have no doubt Bald and those who taught him practiced this to a degree).
-Mathematical analysis of systems (Archimedes was one of the earliest people to do this, and for this reason alone would deserve to be viewed as a legendary genius)
That's not an exhaustive list but those are among the big ones. Basically, different fields embrace these notions at different times. Physics evolved into a science during the late 17th and the 18th century; by 1800 large parts of the 'science' of physics were locking into place, which permitted the burst of major discoveries of the early 1800s. At the same time, chemistry was just becoming scientific (perhaps if Newton's genius had been in chemistry rather than physics, it might have ended up the other way round). Biology was beginning to head this way but was still a discipline in search of a coherent paradigm (which it found in the mid-19th century). Meanwhile, in 1800 economics was still very much pre-scientific for most of the world, and there wasn't anything remotely like a scientific study of psychology.
That's not to say there weren't people with ideas about economics or the mind, but they were unlikely to achieve useful results except for relatively simple results they'd find by poking around at random. This is because they did not have a coherent understanding of that which they are tinkering with; they lacked, in other words, a paradigm.
And upon what basis did this paradigm shift occur? On the relativity side it was the Michaelson-Morley experiment and the aberration of starlight, alongside the precession of mercury. In quantum theory it was quite a few things: black body radiation, the photoelectric effect, changing heat capacity with temperature, the rutherford experiment, and the line spectra of elements.2) Pre-scientific scholarship lacks a unifying paradigm
The concept of a 'paradigm' is used by Kuhn to describe very fundamental theories that describe the basic 'order' of a field, and provide unifying explanations for a wide variety of phenomena within the field. Examples of 'paradigms' include evolution in biology, Newton's theories in astronomy and the mechanical motion of objects, germ theory in medicine, Maxwell's equations governing electromagnetism, 'atomic theory' in chemistry, or 'supply and demand' in economics.
These are not merely specific ideas that happen to be helpful, the way, say, alternating current is. These radically alter the way we describe and think about scientific disciplines. They generally have broad predictive power that enables them to explain a wide variety of seemingly unrelated phenomena. And they usually allow us to create whole new categories of technology for controlling the systems they describe.
So for instance, around 1900-1920 there was a sharp transition in physics. This shift can be described as a move away from the 'Newtonian' paradigm under which space-time was absolute, matter consisted of tiny quantized, rigid particles, and energy was an analog phenomenon. Things moved toward the 'Einstein-Schrödinger' paradigm of space-time being relative, matter consisting of analog, fuzzy, dispersed waves, and energy being quantized. As a consequence of this paradigm shift, in a very real sense, physicists of 1885 and 1935 weren't even speaking the same language on a variety of important subjects, and would find it almost impossible to collaborate meaningfully even on subjects that were a mystery to them both. Numerous things that would seem magical or logically impossible under one paradigm were common sense under the other. Of course, the new paradigm was right about a lot of things the old one got wrong- but that's not the point here. The point is that the paradigm is more than just a single idea, it is a 'keystone' for an entire discipline.
But the "low hanging fruit" here are inside the paradigm. We're talking about "low hanging fruit" outside the paradigm.In a very real sense, no field of inquiry can be scientific in a meaningful sense without a well established paradigm that has a grounding in fact. Even when the paradigm is partially incorrect, it serves useful purposes. It permits scholars to communicate effectively, because they can share the definitions of basic concepts and terms. It provides a logical basis for the design of experiments. It allows people to detect and avoid outright fraud (compare how many medieval alchemists made long careers pretending to turn lead into gold, whereas nonsense like N-rays in the early twentieth century was uncovered within a year or two).
Even within a specific discipline, different sub-fields get their unifying paradigms and become scientific at different times. In 1800 celestial mechanics was very much a rigorous scientific study, and they were using more or less the same paradigm we use today to describe the motion of the solar system. But electromagnetism, another area of physics, was still very much pre-scientific, working at the level of random individuals tinkering with things they didn't understand and couldn't really quantify. Fluid dynamics was a massively useful field of physics... but was not a science at that time, nor was thermodynamics. And yet all these areas have since become just as much a science as celestial mechanics was.
3) The emergence of a paradigm greatly accelerates discovery and implementation of discoveries
In any event, the key reason this affects our discussion has to do with what happens when a field becomes scientific, once a useful, fact-based paradigm exists. Within a given field, once a paradigm emerges that is capable of explaining most of what is known in the field, any 'low hanging fruit' will be rapidly snapped up. The only new, useful ways of exploiting the new science are going to come about if advances in other technologies alter the limits of the possible (i.e. computers let us do a lot of things with fluid dynamics that could not be done before). And after a decade or two, large scale research and theorizing allows us to talk and predict what will become possible, even if we can't build it yet (i.e. hot fusion reactors).
As a result becomes highly unlikely that any 'obvious' ways of exploiting real phenomena are going to be found, within a generation or so of the new paradigm emerging. Occasionally a radically new paradigm will emerge and permit a new generation of low hanging fruit to be plucked from the new tree... but this only happens when there is clear, unambiguous evidence that the old paradigm is consistently wrong in significant ways.
The only reason why there is a reason think cold fusion is possible at all is that idea that those positive experiments have some validity. Without them, unless you are talking about something qualitatively different like muon-catalysed fusion, there is no reason to think cold fusion will ever work at all. So if you presume cold fusion is possible, you are presuming by extension that some of those positive experiments have something in them.Basically, to design a bicycle in 1800 was very hard, because many basic things about how machines should be designed or how forces interact were not understood. What understanding did exist has in many cases not penetrated into the community of technology-builders, who were mostly artisans or managers of artisans (with a few conspicuous exceptions).
To design a bicycle in 1880 was still hard, because while there were educated engineers in the world, the supply was highly limited and a lot of the work of 'inventing' was still being done by self-taught tinkerers who would try many things that did not work in exchange for discovering each innovation that did work. As a result, late 19th century bicycles were often ludicrously unsafe or inefficient.
By contrast, if the bicycle has somehow not been invented until 1960, and someone had a brainstorm and decided to build a bicycle, we would probably have safe, working models within a matter of a few years... because the professional engineers with a clear understanding of mechanics, forces, and material properties would be doing the work.
The rise of a physics-based paradigm of methodical engineering made it easy to design things that would have been far harder without the paradigm. Simple things became trivial, complicated things became simple, impossible things became merely complicated.
It is this process that leads us to proclaim all the low-hanging fruit has been swept up. There are occasional exceptions (especially in the field of consumer goods, because it is always possible to devise a product people want which nobody else created), but on the whole, practical experience bears this out. it is now genuinely hard, intellectual work requiring a firm understanding of what one is doing to actually create new things.
If those devices work, then yes, it would be a certainty that they would be proven to work before anyone understood them.Yes, the cold fusion devices probably don't work. What I object to is the idea that in principle, some sort of thing like the cold fusion idea might happen. In fact, this kind of thing has happened. I was also saying that if you were to assume that the cold fusion devices work, then it is likely that the cold fusioneers will get sufficient evidence that it does work before anybody works out any kind of valid theoretical framework for it.
But that is like saying "if wishes were horses, all men would ride;" it's clearly true but is irrelevant to the world as we know it.
The point I'm making is that because paradigms matter in science, because atoms are fairly well understood under our current paradigm, and so forth, it is highly unlikely that any simple, crude, "juststick electrodes in a solution with a hunk of metal" method would actually work to induce cold fusion. Now maybe there's a way to induce cold fusion, and maybe there isn't. But if there is a way to do it, it won't be some childishly simple thing a random idiot could design by fiddling around with a big pile of components.
Cold fusion will, realistically, be discovered either by making a complex application of existing paradigms, or as one of the first new brilliant discoveries associated with a new paradigm. If it were a likely thing to have happen in the lab with relatively simple and cheap experiments, using only technologies we've had for some time already, it would already have been discovered.
What you seem to be saying is that it is not the possession of knowledge obtained through scientific processes which magically removes the ability to find technologies outside of current theory, but instead the practice of scientific processes. I don't see why I should take either of these positions, but let's assume position 2: while Fleischmann and Pons were scientists, there are plenty of people who aren't. Under this understanding, it is still possible that these people might make a technology which does not have a theoretical framework behind it now, they just have to not be scientists.As noted above, 'science' is not a piece of information you somehow have or don't have. It's a process. Knowing a fact discovered by a scientist does not mean you are practicing science. To practice science you have to do certain things, and medieval Europe with a handful of exceptions was not a place where scholars did those things. Sure, a few scholars practiced something recognizable as science, but science as a whole had not been embraced as a way of discovering relevant truth.Okay, I'm willing to concede the point on Bald's Leechbook being pre-scientific, but only because the work of Archimedes (and indeed Galen, he may not have been right about everything but he was a scientist) was lost at the time. When these works were re-discovered, you couldn't really call the society pre-scientific because, whether they actually practice scientific research or not, they possess scientific information.
Thus, the society lacked the infrastructure to practice science on a large scale, and was in this critically important sense "pre-scientific."
In the same way, there are a whole load of experiments which didn't produce cold fusion until one allegedly did. I don't see the difference.Which is precisely why we can confidently expect them not to work... and our expectations haven't been disappointed, either.[snipping my explanation about how simple things can be developed in a pre-scientific context without understanding how they work, but complex things can't]
But the cold fusion designs typically used *are* simple...And to bridge the gap required massive trial and error and successive improvement. Which is the usual way that pre-scientific people (like a lot of hobbyists and tinkerers who do not know the math and science behind the things they work with) tend to go about inventing things.I'll point out that the early bicycles didn't have gears. The ones you usually think of are penny farthings, which have a giant front wheel, and the actual oldest pedalled bike seems to work via rope. It seems to me you are throwing out bits of history assuming that you are right without actually checking what really happened.Not understanding one thing about bicycles (with empirical testing revealing that they are in fact rideable) is not the same as not understanding any thing (not having the faintest clue how a bicycle can even move around and operate and do things). The people who built the first bicycles knew enough about wheels, gears, and human musculature to design a machine that would function. They may not have been able to predict it would work well until they tried, but if they had possessed only Stone Age knowledge, or if they'd just been bashing bits of metal together randomly, it wouldn't work at all.
On your main point, there was no guarantee the bicycle would be stable, in fact from what Terralthra said it sounds like it was initially thought that bikes would be unstable. On the note of it slowly developing, in terms of stability, according to Jones, Penny farthings and modern racing bikes are comparable (although there are obviously other reasons to prefer modern bikes, but stability is the relevant aspect we are talking about here). But really the point is that at one point there was not a ridable bike-like device and at another there was, and there was no guarantee from theory beforehand that it would work.
Eventually something like the modern bicycle emerged from the evolutionary sequence... but this process was far more complicated and laborious than it would have been in more recent times. Which is in large part why the low-hanging fruit become exhausted. It's so much easier to design things you understand and predict phenomena you understand, that almost any simple thing that can be done with well understood things gets done.
There's a reason Edison tried a thousand light-bulb filaments before finding one that would work- he didn't know enough to predict which substances wouldn't work. To some extent because nobody knew that, to some extent because he personally didn't know things that were known elsewhere in the world.
But the reason why people were unreliable on gliders and trepanning was because they didn't pick up and write down when the process worked and when the process didn't and keep doing the process that did work. If they did do these things, then, regardless of what theory they used, they would have consistently working gliders and (primitive) brain surgery.And, notably, their experiments don't work, which is exactly what I'd expect, and exactly my point. Devices for doing strange and unknown things in modern times tend to be complicated precisely because if they were simple they'd be done already. If all you had to do to make cold fusion work was use very pure palladium, the math would support that (since we know how hydrogen behaves in a palladium lattice). If all you had to do was sit and wait a while, likewise.The cold fusioneers are not claiming to do the kind of procedure you are outlining. The most common (and original) claim was that it occurs when you electrolyse heavy water using palladium electrodes. Many of these fusioneers now say it only works if the palladium sample passes a certain quality threshold and the experiment ran beyond a certain time period (because otherwise they don't have an explanation for the negative replications), but that still doesn't make is massively complicated.
Yes, because Carnot was the first guy to model an engine in thermodynamic terms. Other successors expanded on his work and we learned a lot as a result.Okay, I might be a decade or two out, but I wasn't out by a lot. But Carnot was talking about his "perfect" heat engine *in comparison with other existing imperfect heat engines*.
Yes, but trepannation cannot be said to work- because it does do more harm than good, especially if you do it without understanding why it works. If you use it as a treatment for 'evil spirits in the brain,' it will usually kill the patient or at best fail to kill the patient but also fail to cure them. It does work if you use it to cure a hematoma under the skull... but you have to know what a hematoma is and how to expect one to happen.In terms of your examples, not all of them have experiment coming before theory (and I never said that this always does happen, just that it can happen), but brain surgery happened before the brain was understood with Trepanning, and later was expanded to actually operating on the brain. This probably mostly did more harm than good, but sometimes it would have worked.
Yes, because kites are simple (a quadrangle of fabric being the easiest option). Gliders happened some time before powered aircraft but actually not long- because of a lack of understanding. A lot of people built gliders that just plain wouldn't fly, because they had no idea how to design one that would.Engine-powered aircraft didn't turn up until after aerodynamics was established, but more primitive ideas like kites, Chinese lanterns and gliders happened well beforehand. When gas turbine engines were developed depends on your definition of gas turbine engines.
Even supposing that you discover a new substance accidentally, the response is not 'neat, let's stick electrodes in it to see what happens,' at least not under a modern scientific framework. It's 'okay, that was unexpected. How did we not predict this, and have somebody draw up a rigorous set of tests to see what its properties are.' And you're actually missing the point yet again: the list of things that can be accidentally discovered under plausible circumstances is finite, and exhausted or nearly so. Penicillin was an accident. Modern antibiotics cost a billion dollars and ten years of exhaustive research to develop. Other fields are in the same boat, which is why you need the LHC to discover new facts about subatomic structures instead of an alpha particle emitter and a piece of gold foil.jwl wrote:Yes, it is possible to accidentally stumble upon heavy water (I mean, other isotopes and elements were discovered this way), but that's not what I was talking about. What I mean is, things like the discovery of heavy water allow people to try out combinations that haven't been tried before, giving them the opportunity to discover new things by accident.Esquire wrote:All right, fine, let's take heavy water as an example. Heavy water is (was) used in nuclear and biological research, as well as nuclear power generation. The questions it answers are not questions that could be asked without a thorough theoretical grounding, and its industrial applications are similarly non-intuitive. It is not possible to accidentally stumble upon heavy water, because you need electrolysis, semiadvanced chemistry, and a reason to make it in the first place as prerequisites. Nobody would do such an expensive and potentially-dangerous thing without an idea that it would be useful for something. Why is this so hard for you to grasp?jwl wrote: You assume that there are no low-hanging fruit because....?
Obviously people haven't tried everything, because you can only get access to e.g. heavy water as technology progresses, and indeed can only prove that barely-working devices work as technology progresses.
Yes, I know. What force acts on a modern bicycle in motion that ought to make it fall over? There isn't one, or else bicycles would fall over. The dispute is, as far as I can tell, over the precise degree to which a set of factors contribute to this stability individually, not over how it's possible in the first place. "We don't know the exact mechanism behind this thing that obviously works" is not equivalent to "we know nothing about how it works." As others have said, it took decades of painstaking iterative design work to get bicycles to be functional transportation devices instead of dangerous toys.Oh, come on, you must know what my balanced pencil tip example represents: it's the one of the most commonly examples of an *unstable system*.
In an unstable system (like a balanced pencil) any small movement in another direction causes a force which magnifies that movement (in this case that force is gravity). In a stable system (like a moving bike) a small movement will cause a force that opposes that movement, causing the bike to right itself. If you were to just think of the bike as a rounded board it would be an unstable system, it is only details of the bike (which the designers hadn't thought clearly about) which cause it to be stable.
Well, yeah, that isn't generally the response. But the accidental discovery of a new substance is one point, the accidental discovery of weird phenomenon with a new substance (accidentally discovered or not) is another. The point is that the discovery of new substances and machines allows you to try new combinations with those new substances and machines that haven't been tried before. And talking about antiboitics takes us back to bald's leechbook again. Between the writing of bald's leechbook and the finding of it, no-one seems to have acidentally rediscovered the antibiotic there. This may be due to the fact that the materials used in the antibiotic in bald's leechbook mostly don't exist anymore, and the antibiotic only worked when they tried to track down the exact materials that would have been used in bald's time, giving a reverse form of this.Esquire wrote:Even supposing that you discover a new substance accidentally, the response is not 'neat, let's stick electrodes in it to see what happens,' at least not under a modern scientific framework. It's 'okay, that was unexpected. How did we not predict this, and have somebody draw up a rigorous set of tests to see what its properties are.' And you're actually missing the point yet again: the list of things that can be accidentally discovered under plausible circumstances is finite, and exhausted or nearly so. Penicillin was an accident. Modern antibiotics cost a billion dollars and ten years of exhaustive research to develop. Other fields are in the same boat, which is why you need the LHC to discover new facts about subatomic structures instead of an alpha particle emitter and a piece of gold foil.jwl wrote:Yes, it is possible to accidentally stumble upon heavy water (I mean, other isotopes and elements were discovered this way), but that's not what I was talking about. What I mean is, things like the discovery of heavy water allow people to try out combinations that haven't been tried before, giving them the opportunity to discover new things by accident.Esquire wrote:
All right, fine, let's take heavy water as an example. Heavy water is (was) used in nuclear and biological research, as well as nuclear power generation. The questions it answers are not questions that could be asked without a thorough theoretical grounding, and its industrial applications are similarly non-intuitive. It is not possible to accidentally stumble upon heavy water, because you need electrolysis, semiadvanced chemistry, and a reason to make it in the first place as prerequisites. Nobody would do such an expensive and potentially-dangerous thing without an idea that it would be useful for something. Why is this so hard for you to grasp?
Of course, if a bicycle doesn't fall over, it doesn't fall over. That's an obvious point that doesn't require you to even know what a bicycle is. My point is that when the bicycle was invented, they didn't know why (or indeed if) the bicycle didn't fall over.Yes, I know. What force acts on a modern bicycle in motion that ought to make it fall over? There isn't one, or else bicycles would fall over. The dispute is, as far as I can tell, over the precise degree to which a set of factors contribute to this stability individually, not over how it's possible in the first place. "We don't know the exact mechanism behind this thing that obviously works" is not equivalent to "we know nothing about how it works." As others have said, it took decades of painstaking iterative design work to get bicycles to be functional transportation devices instead of dangerous toys.Oh, come on, you must know what my balanced pencil tip example represents: it's the one of the most commonly examples of an *unstable system*.
In an unstable system (like a balanced pencil) any small movement in another direction causes a force which magnifies that movement (in this case that force is gravity). In a stable system (like a moving bike) a small movement will cause a force that opposes that movement, causing the bike to right itself. If you were to just think of the bike as a rounded board it would be an unstable system, it is only details of the bike (which the designers hadn't thought clearly about) which cause it to be stable.
