Viewed through the lens of personal development I suppose one could make an argument that there wasn't much difference between rediscovering an existing valid or invalid solution. Both lead to internalisation of a domain's constraints.
Outside of math and computational science, nothing is proven to not work because scientific research doesn't work in proofs. Even in math and computational science, there are fields dedicated to researching known proven wrong logic because sometimes there are interesting findings, like hypercomputation.
The problem is that when the proof is wrong, as in this case a related conjecture held up for 40 years, which is not a "proof" per se, but still ostensibly an extremely high reliability indicator of correctness.
Another example is when SpaceX was first experimenting with reusable self landing rockets. They were being actively mocked by Tory Bruno, who was the head of ULA (basically an anti-competitive shell-but-not-really-corp merger between Lockheed and Boeing), claiming essentially stuff along the lines of 'We've of course already thoroughly researched and experimented with these ideas years ago. The economics just don't work at all. Have fun learning we already did!'
Given that ULA made no efforts to compete with what SpaceX was doing it's likely that they did genuinely believe what they were saying. And that's a company with roots going all the way back to the Apollo program, with billions of dollars in revenue, and a massive number of aerospace engineers working for them. And the guy going against them was 'Silicon Valley guy with no aerospace experience who made some money selling a payment processing tool.' Yet somehow he knew better.
All the cases you bring up are not "proofs": a conjecture is very much not one, it's just that nobody bothered to refute this particular one even if there were results proving it isn't (cited in the paper).
Similarly, ULA had no "proof" that this would be economically infeasible: Musk pioneered using agile ship-and-fail-fast for rocket development which mostly contradicted common knowledge that in projects like these your first attempt should be a success. Like with software, this actually sped things up and delivered better, cheaper results.
Do we know that the economics work for SpaceX? It's a private company and it's financials aren't public knowledge, it could be burning investor money? E.g. Uber was losing around 4B/yr give or take for a very long time.
porkbrain|1 year ago
SkyBelow|1 year ago
phyzix5761|1 year ago
Manabu-eo|1 year ago
somenameforme|1 year ago
Another example is when SpaceX was first experimenting with reusable self landing rockets. They were being actively mocked by Tory Bruno, who was the head of ULA (basically an anti-competitive shell-but-not-really-corp merger between Lockheed and Boeing), claiming essentially stuff along the lines of 'We've of course already thoroughly researched and experimented with these ideas years ago. The economics just don't work at all. Have fun learning we already did!'
Given that ULA made no efforts to compete with what SpaceX was doing it's likely that they did genuinely believe what they were saying. And that's a company with roots going all the way back to the Apollo program, with billions of dollars in revenue, and a massive number of aerospace engineers working for them. And the guy going against them was 'Silicon Valley guy with no aerospace experience who made some money selling a payment processing tool.' Yet somehow he knew better.
necovek|1 year ago
Similarly, ULA had no "proof" that this would be economically infeasible: Musk pioneered using agile ship-and-fail-fast for rocket development which mostly contradicted common knowledge that in projects like these your first attempt should be a success. Like with software, this actually sped things up and delivered better, cheaper results.
scheme271|1 year ago
ExoticPearTree|1 year ago