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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   26664 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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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.

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:

His hypothesis was not accepted by mainstream geology until the 1950s, when numerous discoveries such as palaeomagnetism provided strong support for continental drift, and thereby a substantial basis for today's model of plate tectonics.[4][5]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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