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Absolute raging bullshit. The chances that the most major breakthrough in physics debateably ever happened without any indication on Arxiv etc is tiny. The chance that furthermore the engineering work to scale up the discovery happened without it being leaked massively is zero.
I am embarrassed that the responses here so far are giving this any credence at all. It's always nice to be reminded of how wrong I must be about areas I know little about given that when people comment on my areas, they're often confidently hilariously wrong.
Do you know who Ning Li is? Mike McCullough? Both of those people might be/have been full of it/wrong, but their work wasn't exactly secret (until it was, anyway). If Ning Li made an anti-gravity breakthrough, you probably read about it on Wired before it went into a special access program.
But secondly, I don't think what you're describing is as far-fetched as you might thing. Apparently, during the late unpleasantness (World War Two), the Soviets and perhaps others deduced that the United States was working on nuclear weapons specifically because we stopped publishing on nuclear weapons research.
Any future classified research into fundamental physics would need to be more than suppressed, it would need to be overlaid with a misleading theory that was nevertheless embraced by most scientific gatekeepers, and the actual line of research or any breakthroughs would need to be kept carefully out of the realm of respectable science by ridicule and gatekeeping. And I don't think this would be as hard as it sounds: in the United States, the research world is very beholden to the US government, and universities did lots of classified and sometimes shady research on behalf of the US government. I'm not sure it would be hard to keep the lid on something, for a while, particularly if you had an alternative hypothesis that was unfalsifiable or elusive but made the math work (I'm looking at you, dark matter!)
String theory and dark matter being scientific dead ends but great cover stories for gravitics? I love it.
It's particularly interesting when you realize that the implications of (e.g.) quantized inertia are something similar to "gravetics."
Unfortunately I don't have the credentials to evaluate the relative merits of string theory and dark matter in a way that's particularly persuasive, but I do think that they (or at least dark matter, I know even less about string theory) are the sort of wild goose chase you'd want to send everyone on if you were trying to cover up physics breakthroughs. "Just build another multi-billion dollar supercollider, maybe you'll find dark matter THIS time!"
I have no training in physics, but just considering what an odd duck dark matter seems to be, my guess would be that a different theory is developed to explain it and gains consensus by 2100. I'd say I have confidence in this because dark matter exists to balance equations, but I've heard that enough of Einstein's "I just threw this in to make the numbers add up" things have turned out to be empirically verifiable to give me a certain faith that the math is on to something.
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It’s almost as dumb as that sci-fi movie with Cillian Murphy that came out two years ago. That one about an entire city being built in the New Mexico desert for physicists to construct a world-ending super weapon in complete and total secrecy. How a film with such a ridiculous premise could win so many Oscars is beyond me.
Nuclear fission was published in a journal four years before the Manhattan project was started. Szilard described a fission chain reaction in a patent six years before the project. The fundamental building blocks for the atomic bomb were publicly known, accepted physics already - where are the accepted fundamental building blocks of antigravity technology?
“The Unobservable Universe: A Paradox-Free Framework for Understanding the Universe” by Scott M. Tyson, self-published and universally shunned.
I was his friend for nearly a decade. The man was a materials scientist and helped solve cosmic ray errors in satellite electronics. Whip-smart but distractible, he was looking for a funder who wouldn’t look at his proposed experiments and think “oh God, another perpetual motion nut.”
His theories start from the concept that we got gravity wrong: instead of masses having gravity, he believes it’s more accurate to say gravities have mass. From there, he explains the Casimir effect, propulsionless motion, and free energy, but doesn’t mention in the book the possibility of gravity bombs more terrible than the Tsar Bomba.
Indeed, there's plenty of crackpots with all kinds of theories. The key difference with fission bombs is that fission itself was already published in Nature years before the Manhattan project began. Fission was emphatically not a crackpot theory.
Plate tectonics and continental drift were very explicitly a crackpot theory for quite a while, even though a lot of the evidence had actually been shared already. Sometimes the individual crackpots are right and the entire rest of the field is wrong - just ask Alfred Wegener (assuming you have a Ouija board on hand).
I don't really know much about the history of plate tectonics. Wikipedia says:
So it sounds like there was some more evidence that was required for everything to really fit together (heh).
Of course crackpots can sometimes be right. However, the hard part is to figure out a priori which crackpots are right. Since I haven't taken physics since college and I don't have the time to comprehensively evaluate every crackpot physics claim I come across, going with the base rate of ~0% seems to be the most reasonable approach.
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The one that remained a secret for a few years, rather than a few decades?
The reason it was only a few years was because Truman decided to drop two of them on Japan and announce it to the entire world. If the US government had decided it was in their strategic interest to not use them on Japan and keep it a secret, it could have very well been decades. You’d probably have a handful of scientists leak about it over the years, but the government and skeptics would declare those scientists to be obvious schitzos and bullshit artists. The “adults in the room” would industriously gaslight everyone about how the weaponization of fusion is scientifically preposterous.
No, it wouldn't have been. the science was already public. That's how the US government became aware of it in the first place. Scientists were studying radiation since Curie discovered it, and they would have continued to do so, within America or without it. In fairly short order, they would have broken the science wide open.
Sure, if you’re a physicist you might quietly believe that there’s something fishy about the denial. Plenty of virologists found the claim that COVID was a natural phenomenon fishy, but they mostly kept their mouths shut and went with the party line. The ones that didn’t were mocked and their work was suppressed. John Q. Public who’s a machinist in Iowa would just believe what he’s told.
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It remained secret until it was unavoidably revealed because its result needed to be used and was impossible to hide.
We know that other secret military planes have remained secret for decades before being revealed.
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Eh, there's like two posters further down giving it some amount of credence. We've had bigger threads about the Tic Tac at the time, and my sense was that the vast majority do not buy either the UFO or the classified scifi tech theory. It's just less exciting to argue the same thing over and over again when the evidence for the theories is always of the same shape (US military whistleblower full of red flags, blurry or unclear video, lots of reported sightings surely must mean they can't all be wrong, friend-of-a-friend who is very smart and has access believes it), especially when the UFO/scifi believers aren't really anyone's outgroup.
(Though with the Tic Tac, I did actually have a favourite classified scifi tech sort of theory: US skunkworks developed a way to dazzle integrated sensor systems with coherent false readings. Intended audience was China and/or funding agencies. Efficacy demonstrated by showing that even muggle US military were completely overwhelmed by it.)
Kind of related, I lean strongly towards the skeptical side, and found in support this video showing that one of those famous videos of supposedly impossible aircraft maneuvering and looking weird actually corresponds pretty well to being a perfectly normal jet aircraft being shot in infrared through a sophisticated aircraft tracking camera that we're looking at the raw feed of.
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The US government [almost certainly] developed a way to generate plasma balls using a particle beam and tested it at Groom Lake back in the day as an electronic warfare weapon. This is why you might have heard of Bob Lazar.
I think there's something to the UFO weirdness (in part because of how the US security state moves around it) but my best guess for a "prosaic" explanation for the Tic-Tac is laser holography deployed from a submarine (recall the pilots mention a water disturbance). Since plasmas can reflect radar waves, this would be a great electronic warfare asset that would also be visible with the naked eye.
Probably in unrelated news, the US Navy started putting lasers on their submarine masts a few years ago.
So is it lasers or proton beams? Those two are not the same.
Either way, even if we commit to the proton beam story, I don't quite buy it. Beams are directional - they occupy an area in space that looks like a (decaying, if they are getting absorbed) half-line, not like a point, and accordingly getting them to pump a lot of energy into a compact volume that is not continuous with the emitter is going to be very hard. There have been some attempts to do this for scifi display tech by having a wide beam converging at a removed focal point and relying on some discontinuous physics (plasma phase transition) around it, but those are still at a "tabletop" rather than a "sector of airspace" scale, they come out blurry even at those short ranges, and the energy requirements are already so high that it needs to be pulsed, resulting in the plasma (that constantly pops in and out of existence) being very noisy.
Putting the focal point at a distance of hundreds of meters or even some kilometers from the emitter, rather than centimeters, would get you plasma foci that are either extremely stretched/washed out in the direction of the beam (especially considering atmospheric scattering and everything, the energy density at the focus will not be terribly different from the energy density a meter up or down the beam from it), or you would require massive emitters (so the incoming beams converge at a wide angle), which I doubt they would place at sea and would be very far beyond civilian technology levels for any sort of coherent beam, or you would require multiple distributed emitters with perfect stabilisation to have a strongly lit up intersection point of beams that are individually too weak to induce plasma, which I could maybe believe on land (but then military anti-air beam weapons would be much further along than they appear to be) but not on sea.
Based on this line of thought and the circumstance that the Tic Tac video had obvious and much-commented-on camera effects (features/"hair" that seemed to track sensor orientation rather than that of the putative object in the real world), I'm leaning towards much weaker energetic interference upon the sensor itself, something perhaps more akin to virtual retinal displays for FLIR. Any reports of "water disturbance" (of which we were not given any visual, even though we should assume that the US military records plenty of visible-light video everywhere it goes) can be just as easily chalked up to either metaphorical water-muddying by involved military (like, what if your superior orders you to add this detail when talking to the press?) or the usual psychological tendency to hallucinate additional detail in disturbing situations experienced in a group (you're scared; the people next to you are scared; what is everyone scared of? Isn't the water looking kind of funny today?).
Correct, but either can produce a plasma field in the atmosphere.
That's the thing about proton beams - the accelerated particles will lose velocity and at a certain point they will release their remaining energy. If you're using the proton beam for cancer treatment, it releases that energy into the cancer cells. If you aim it at the sky, it will create an ionized patch of plasma. Tom Mahood goes into the numbers here.
Yes, this is exactly the sort of tech I'm thinking of. Look, if you're telling me you don't think this sort of tech was sufficient to create a Tic-Tac event, I am not going to argue with you! I'm not convinced that it was responsible. I just find it interesting that the tech exists, if even in a modest form, and that the US military has been doing research on particle beams and radar decoys for decades (and thus might be ahead of civilian technology in this area) and that they started putting lasers on submarines at a time which would make sense if the Tic-Tac was an IOC/prototype test. Am I convinced? No. Do I think it makes a certain amount of sense? Sure.
I think this makes sense, but wouldn't account for the eyewitness reports unless there was something visible to the naked eye. (Obviously ECM could account for the radar detection.)
Fravor, the pilot who reported the water disturbance, wasn't able to capture any footage of the Tic Tac as I understand it. That was captured by a subsequent jet.
To expand on this a bit, I'll add that I don't think this is a good assumption, nor do I think it tracks how the military uses its sensors. The military prefers IR sensors, and the Tic-Tac footage was from an ATFLIR pod (YMMV on whether this counts as visible-light). But as far as I know, the F-18 has no feature to continuously record all of its surroundings. The ATFLIR pod would need to be pointed at a specific target (in this case, the Tic-Tac), and not all aircraft carry ATFLIR pods, nor does the ATFLIR pod necessarily always function. I believe the F-18 also has a "gun camera" that captures, essentially, the view of the HUD - very far from a 360 degree recording, and I do not know if those are even routinely turned on. Likewise for any other in-cockpit cameras, cell phone cameras, etc. In short, as far as I know, there's no particular reason to believe that any given event would be captured visually on any equipment besides the HUD camera by a Navy fighter unless it was especially equipped with a reconnaissance/sensor pod. And to catch something in the HUD, you'd need to "pull it into the HUD" (point your aircraft at it) and have the HUD recorder on.
From what I've seen of the accounts, the water was what Fravor noticed first - then the Tic-Tac. I doubt the adrenaline kicked in just from seeing an ocean disturbance. But as long as we're postulating extra details manifesting from stress, I'd say that cuts towards the "plasma holography" theory, as one could just as easily assume that the pilot's brain "filled in" a blobby shape with solid details, and then contaminated other aircrew's perceptions by describing it, causing them to report the same thing. Not saying I think this is what happened, but I think it's more parsimonious an explanation than Fravor stress-hallucinating an ambiguous water feature.
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Seconded, see the latter bit of my post here: https://www.themotte.org/post/1322/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/283449?context=8#context
Great minds!
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This is the biggest cope I have ever heard about Lazar, he doesn't even address all his proven lies and fabrications about his own personal history.
I dunno if you read the linked article, but it goes into depth about Lazar's many and varied lies.
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I figure the whole 'military technology is so far advanced!' thing is only in areas where the military has far more of an interest than civilian scientists, like radar stealth/detection. The US military probably isn't hiding super-iphones. Gravity manipulation certainly isn't in their wheelhouse.
I agree with you, but "antigravity" is very much one of those things where the military has a definite if apparently pointless interest, to the point that you can read about its exploits (or lack thereof) on Wikipedia – which now also mentions the Las Vegas bombing.
I think that during the Cold War various agencies threw cash at a variety of off-the-wall projects. If there was a Road Not Taken lying around for bizarre experimentation to detect, it doesn't seem insane to think they might have found it. However, conversely, just because the US military/CIA researched something during the Cold War doesn't mean it was real. If someone had written an op-ed to say that beating Communism required imagining a dozen impossible things before breakfast, you can bet the CIA, DIA, and J. Edgar Hoover would have all had their best and brightest in a pilot program within the month.
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If it's real, then it would likely be a fancy sounding name for something more mundane than sci-fi anti-gravity.
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