And here's one from Carl Sagan for a nice counterpoint:
"The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
To be fair, Columbus did underestimate the size of the Earth by about a factor of 2, and that was over 1500 years after Eratosthenes had calculated it to a reasonable degree of accuracy. A lot of the geographers laughing at him did so for that reason, not because they thought the Earth was flat. To his dying day he thought he'd sailed half way round the world to the East Indies. That's why we call those islands the West Indies, and call native american's Indians to this day. If the Americas hadn't been there, the expedition would have all died when the supplies ran out. Columbus wasn't right, he was lucky.
I kinda disagree with that, as anyone trying to do something new is being laughed at, in general.
I don't really care about the ideas, it's just frustrating to be laughed at every time to want to try something new. There's always something dismissive, some jealousy, some surprised inability to be humble while facing something strange or new.
It's nice to see that not all of the claims made that turned out to be false were in the negative.
e.g:
Automobiles will start to decline almost as soon as the last shot is fired in World War II. The name of Igor Sikorsky will be as well known as Henry Ford's, for his helicopter will all but replace the horseless carriage as the new means of popular transportation. Instead of a car in every garage, there will be a helicopter.... These 'copters' will be so safe and will cost so little to produce that small models will be made for teenage youngsters. These tiny 'copters, when school lets out, will fill the sky as the bicycles of our youth filled the prewar roads. - Harry Bruno, aviation publicist, 1943.
Furthermore, I notice that's by an aviation publicist; and that just happens to lend to my other comment / question:
How many of these people were paid to have the stance that they had?
Can anyone explain the flaw in Bickerton's reasoning? It's not obvious to me where the mistake is:
"For a projectile entirely to escape the gravitation of earth, it needs a velocity of 7 miles a second. The thermal energy of a gramme at this speed is 15,180 calories... The energy of our most violent explosive--nitroglycerine--is less than 1,500 calories per gramme. Consequently, even had the explosive nothing to carry, it has only one-tenth of the energy necessary to escape the earth... Hence the proposition appears to be basically impossible."
He is correct. He is saying that a gram of fuel doesn't have enough energy to get itself into orbit. That is a true statement. But he ignores the fact that rockets spend many many grams of fuel to get a gram of non-fuel into orbit.
The calculation is entirely correct -- we cannot shoot a projectile into space. There is no sensible way to get something to go fast enough to make it to space from Earth with no further propulsion. A better argument, actually, is about acceleration. In order to not be utterly crushed, a projectile would need a massive vertical track to be shot into space. Earth's escape velocity is around 10km/s. g=10m/s^2. If we assume maximum acceleration of 10g to not crush the pilot, to get out, we'd need to accelerate at 10g for 1,000 seconds. During that time, we'd travel a few thousand kilometers. Accelerating faster -- as with a nuclear explosion -- only exasperates the problem.
We solved the problem by having propulsion the whole way up. We can fire a rocket into space, and it can take it's sweet time to get up there.
He just described the energy requirements: each gram of payload needs 15k of energy put in to escape orbit. He didn't think of fuel which exists simply to move the rest of the fuel (the rocket equation).
Imagine 50 sticks of dynamite separated by metal plates. The bottom stick explodes, lifting the pile a bit (energy split 50 ways). Then the bottommost explodes, lifting more (split 49 ways). This continues until the second stick propels the first into orbit.
You can play with the numbers so
explosion energy * (1/50 + 1/49 + ...) = escape energy
You quickly realize it gets asymptotic, and extra fuel contributes relatively little to the payload.
I think he is imagining detonating all the explosives at once, like a gun, the bullet being the payload you want to put into orbit - like in the Jules Vernes books - instead of progressively consuming a fuel like kerosene (which itself has, from wikipedia, an energy density of about 10 kcal/g), leaving more and more mass behind as you ascend.
The gun idea seems to be, instinctively, very inefficient because of the need to fight the air density in the lower atmosphere all in one shot. I may be wrong there - mostly imagining what may be wrong with the approach (beyond reducing a live payload to a pink mist) based on kerbal experience :-p
Just guessing here, but he assumes that the thermal energy of that gramme traveling at 7 miles/second needs to be applied instantaneously or nearly-instantaneously, when it can instead be given to that gramme over the course of several minutes via, say, a Saturn V rocket system.
> The energy of our most violent explosive--nitroglycerine--is less than 1,500 calories per gramme.
Well, part of it is that you don't really want "violent explosives", you want a controlled combustion. Once you take that limitation out of the way, turns out that explosives don't have very high energy densities, they are actually, for the most part, less energy-dense than food. Take a look at this table: http://physics.info/energy-chemical/
(Funnily enough, was discussing this over lunch just now).
I've always thought about it as the difference between "throwing something out of Earth's gravity" (launching a projectile with initial force only) versus "climbing [a ladder?] out of Earth's gravity" (continually applying force just over gravity's influence.)
I think Bickerton has confused the two concepts.
Consider that gravity is the weakest of all forces. You overcome it every time you jump, run (with both feet off the ground) or climb a ladder. You don't overcome it for long enough to get into orbit, but you still overcome gravity. Birds and airplanes regularly overcome gravity.
That statement considers a projectile shot with a cannon. Gravimetric energy density of e.g. gasoline is much higher than nitroglycerine (6.4 MJ/kg vs. 46 MJ/kg).
He ignores staging and conservation of momentum. The explosives stay on Earth, and transfer their energy to a smaller mass which departs it. Since that smaller mass can in turn be explosives, you can repeat the process infinitely to achieve any desired net thrust-to-weight ratio for the final stage.
> The menace to our people of vehicles of this type hurtling through our streets and along our roads and poisoning the atmosphere would call for prompt legislative action ...
Is this really so off-the-mark? Or have we just got used to vehicles being the kings of the streets, displacing pedestrians and filling our breathing air with pollutants?
Early outrage over automobiles injuring and killing pedestrians at an alarming rate threatened to stall the growth in driving. In response, the auto industry undertook a major campaign to assert that cars should have the right-of-way and to denormalize people walking and cycling on the street, pushing them to the edges and criminalizing "jaywalking".
Now, when a person driving a car kills a person walking, the default reaction is to blame the person walking for not being careful or attentive or visible enough. We have been conditioned point the finger at the pedestrian's earbuds rather than the obvious source of danger.
Even when a driver is found guilty of careless driving, the maximum punishment - at least in most North American jurisdictions - is a $500 fine and maybe a few demerit points.
Considering that before cars, cities were drowning in horse manure, I would say the quote is off the mark.
> The horse was no newcomer on the urban scene. But by the late 1800s, the problem of horse pollution had reached unprecedented heights. The growth in the horse population was outstripping even the rapid rise in the number of human city dwellers. American cities were drowning in horse manure as well as other unpleasant byproducts of the era’s predominant mode of transportation: urine, flies, congestion, carcasses, and traffic accidents. Widespread cruelty to horses was a form of environmental degradation as well.
The situation seemed dire. In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan’s third-storey windows. A public health and sanitation crisis of almost unimaginable dimensions loomed. [0]
"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in "Metcalfe's law"--which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants--becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."
>People give ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon... Whoever wishes to appear clever must devise some new system, which of all systems is of course the very best. This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but the sacred scripture tells us [Joshua 10:13] that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth.
- Martin Luther (1483-1546) [Criticizing Copernicus' heliocentric theory of planetary motion.]
Because Copernicus wasn't the first astronomer to suggest this. In fact there's a very long line of Muslim astronomers that preceded Copernicus and noticed that the Greek model was wrong, based on a very simple observation: if the earth is stationary and every thing else revolves around it, the view of the heavens should be the same every night (which it isn't). In fact the Muslims actually proposed and experimentally tested several models before Copernicus.
> every thing else revolves around it, the view of the heavens should be the same every night
Well, unless of course the heavens revolve as well. Which is how it was usually pictured in those days, the distance of the stars was surprisingly much larger than even the wildest estimates.
"It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years." - John von Neumann in 1949
Don't go West young man. (Advice to Columbus.)
I. A Voyage to Asia would require three years.
II. The western Ocean is infinite and perhaps unnavigable.
III. If he reached the Antipodes he could not get back.
IV There are no Antipodes because the greater part of the globe is covered with water, and because St. Augustine said so.
V. Of the five zones, only three are habitable.
VI. So many centuries after the Creation, it is unlikely that anyone could find hitherto unknown lands of any value.
- Report of the committee organized in 1486 by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain to study Columbus' plans to find a shorter route to India.
Makes you wonder about widely derided projects such as Mars One.
See the other comment by simonh in this discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9261989): Columbus had a multiplicity of detractors because his estimate of the circumference of the Earth was off by a factor of 2, and to his dying day insisted he'd found the East Indies, not the very fortuitous West "Indies". If the Americas weren't there, he'd be at best a footnote in history, a crazy explorer who'd perished with his crews.
Not really. Nobody is saying that the stated goals of Mars One are impossible to reach. People are saying that it's a scam without the means or even a viable plan to reach those goals.
It's also a classic example of an argument that proves too much. If the earth can't move because it lacks limbs then surely the sun isn't able to move either.
Is it too much to ask for references? I have had too many bad experiences over the years where person x was alleged to have said something when in fact never did.
Interesting that at least one prediction is too optimistic:
Bitcoin is definitely going to be trading at $10,000 or more and in wide use by the end of 2014.
- Many otherwise smart people, November of 2013
And I have to comment on:
Superhuman machine intelligence is prima facie ridiculous.
- Many otherwise smart people, 2015
It's not prima facie ridiculous, but the more common error is to take it for granted. I just don't like it when people start to make predictions about the future based on technology uploading brains to computer or simulating the universe (which was done in the book "Superintelligence" which I just read). It's far from obvious that those things are even possible.
not in the same vein as "it'll never work", but, arthur-eddington's heavy-handed approach to subramanyam-chandrashekar's theory on maximum mass of a stable white dwarf star (chandrashekhar's-limit), seems to have set back cosmology by at least couple of decades.
what is kind of interesting, is that, lot's of luminaries f.e. bohr, fowler, pauli etc. agreed with his (chandra's) analysis, but owing to reputation of eddington, were unwilling to support him publicly.
an excellent book by arthur-miller (empire-of-stars) is quite fascinating
And just to think: what if the human race from the beginning of time, never lost any knowledge. No libraries were burnt, books and theories weren't banned, scientist kept their heads...on their bodies, info after a fallen empire was retained, the dark ages never happened, the pyramid mystery would never have been one, etc..., would we be several hundred years ahead of where we are now? Or is there some existential force that dictates the progression of innovation? Is it tied to the evolution of the human brains' capabilities?
David Deustch in his book "The Beginning of Infinity" claims the 'existential force' is the emergence of a culture of criticism that recognizes the need for good explanations. The catch is these types of cultures have only sprung up occasionally in the history of humanity, with the vast time between made up of periods of stagnation.
[+] [-] jeffreyrogers|11 years ago|reply
"The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
[+] [-] simonh|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jokoon|11 years ago|reply
I don't really care about the ideas, it's just frustrating to be laughed at every time to want to try something new. There's always something dismissive, some jealousy, some surprised inability to be humble while facing something strange or new.
[+] [-] mytochar|11 years ago|reply
e.g:
Automobiles will start to decline almost as soon as the last shot is fired in World War II. The name of Igor Sikorsky will be as well known as Henry Ford's, for his helicopter will all but replace the horseless carriage as the new means of popular transportation. Instead of a car in every garage, there will be a helicopter.... These 'copters' will be so safe and will cost so little to produce that small models will be made for teenage youngsters. These tiny 'copters, when school lets out, will fill the sky as the bicycles of our youth filled the prewar roads. - Harry Bruno, aviation publicist, 1943.
Furthermore, I notice that's by an aviation publicist; and that just happens to lend to my other comment / question:
How many of these people were paid to have the stance that they had?
[+] [-] MichaelGG|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Patient0|11 years ago|reply
"For a projectile entirely to escape the gravitation of earth, it needs a velocity of 7 miles a second. The thermal energy of a gramme at this speed is 15,180 calories... The energy of our most violent explosive--nitroglycerine--is less than 1,500 calories per gramme. Consequently, even had the explosive nothing to carry, it has only one-tenth of the energy necessary to escape the earth... Hence the proposition appears to be basically impossible."
[+] [-] sandworm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpks|11 years ago|reply
The calculation is entirely correct -- we cannot shoot a projectile into space. There is no sensible way to get something to go fast enough to make it to space from Earth with no further propulsion. A better argument, actually, is about acceleration. In order to not be utterly crushed, a projectile would need a massive vertical track to be shot into space. Earth's escape velocity is around 10km/s. g=10m/s^2. If we assume maximum acceleration of 10g to not crush the pilot, to get out, we'd need to accelerate at 10g for 1,000 seconds. During that time, we'd travel a few thousand kilometers. Accelerating faster -- as with a nuclear explosion -- only exasperates the problem.
We solved the problem by having propulsion the whole way up. We can fire a rocket into space, and it can take it's sweet time to get up there.
[+] [-] throwawaymsft|11 years ago|reply
Imagine 50 sticks of dynamite separated by metal plates. The bottom stick explodes, lifting the pile a bit (energy split 50 ways). Then the bottommost explodes, lifting more (split 49 ways). This continues until the second stick propels the first into orbit.
You can play with the numbers so
explosion energy * (1/50 + 1/49 + ...) = escape energy
You quickly realize it gets asymptotic, and extra fuel contributes relatively little to the payload.
[+] [-] duozerk|11 years ago|reply
The gun idea seems to be, instinctively, very inefficient because of the need to fight the air density in the lower atmosphere all in one shot. I may be wrong there - mostly imagining what may be wrong with the approach (beyond reducing a live payload to a pink mist) based on kerbal experience :-p
[+] [-] hudibras|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pdpi|11 years ago|reply
Well, part of it is that you don't really want "violent explosives", you want a controlled combustion. Once you take that limitation out of the way, turns out that explosives don't have very high energy densities, they are actually, for the most part, less energy-dense than food. Take a look at this table: http://physics.info/energy-chemical/
(Funnily enough, was discussing this over lunch just now).
[+] [-] ekanes|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skybrian|11 years ago|reply
(Also, I don't know how that compares to rocket fuel.)
[+] [-] progrn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] delinka|11 years ago|reply
I think Bickerton has confused the two concepts.
Consider that gravity is the weakest of all forces. You overcome it every time you jump, run (with both feet off the ground) or climb a ladder. You don't overcome it for long enough to get into orbit, but you still overcome gravity. Birds and airplanes regularly overcome gravity.
[+] [-] Geee|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] XorNot|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xyzzyz|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gonvaled|11 years ago|reply
> The menace to our people of vehicles of this type hurtling through our streets and along our roads and poisoning the atmosphere would call for prompt legislative action ...
Is this really so off-the-mark? Or have we just got used to vehicles being the kings of the streets, displacing pedestrians and filling our breathing air with pollutants?
[+] [-] RyanMcGreal|11 years ago|reply
Now, when a person driving a car kills a person walking, the default reaction is to blame the person walking for not being careful or attentive or visible enough. We have been conditioned point the finger at the pedestrian's earbuds rather than the obvious source of danger.
Even when a driver is found guilty of careless driving, the maximum punishment - at least in most North American jurisdictions - is a $500 fine and maybe a few demerit points.
[+] [-] bko|11 years ago|reply
> The horse was no newcomer on the urban scene. But by the late 1800s, the problem of horse pollution had reached unprecedented heights. The growth in the horse population was outstripping even the rapid rise in the number of human city dwellers. American cities were drowning in horse manure as well as other unpleasant byproducts of the era’s predominant mode of transportation: urine, flies, congestion, carcasses, and traffic accidents. Widespread cruelty to horses was a form of environmental degradation as well.
The situation seemed dire. In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan’s third-storey windows. A public health and sanitation crisis of almost unimaginable dimensions loomed. [0]
[0] http://www.uctc.net/access/30/Access%2030%20-%2002%20-%20Hor...
[+] [-] adamio|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gfodor|11 years ago|reply
"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in "Metcalfe's law"--which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants--becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] melling|11 years ago|reply
http://www.businessinsider.com/paul-krugman-responds-to-inte...
Sounds like that might be the wrong thing to say.
[+] [-] wodenokoto|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xerophyte12932|11 years ago|reply
>People give ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon... Whoever wishes to appear clever must devise some new system, which of all systems is of course the very best. This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but the sacred scripture tells us [Joshua 10:13] that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth. - Martin Luther (1483-1546) [Criticizing Copernicus' heliocentric theory of planetary motion.]
Because Copernicus wasn't the first astronomer to suggest this. In fact there's a very long line of Muslim astronomers that preceded Copernicus and noticed that the Greek model was wrong, based on a very simple observation: if the earth is stationary and every thing else revolves around it, the view of the heavens should be the same every night (which it isn't). In fact the Muslims actually proposed and experimentally tested several models before Copernicus.
[+] [-] jacquesm|11 years ago|reply
Well, unless of course the heavens revolve as well. Which is how it was usually pictured in those days, the distance of the stars was surprisingly much larger than even the wildest estimates.
[+] [-] Buge|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codeulike|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Simp|11 years ago|reply
Makes you wonder about widely derided projects such as Mars One.
[+] [-] hga|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brazzy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qiqing|11 years ago|reply
"Men might as well project a voyage to the Moon as attempt to employ steam navigation against the stormy North Atlantic Ocean."
- Dr. Dionysus Lardner (1793-1859), Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy at University College, London.
[+] [-] johnchristopher|11 years ago|reply
> - Scipio Chiaramonti [Professor of philosophy and mathematics at University of Pisa, arguing against the heliocentrc system, 1633]
I can't help thinking that particular sentence context is more political than `scientific`.
[+] [-] Symmetry|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danieltillett|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asadlionpk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chubot|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] signa11|11 years ago|reply
an excellent book by arthur-miller (empire-of-stars) is quite fascinating
[+] [-] Cshelton|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gfodor|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andyidsinga|11 years ago|reply
BTW, some of these remind me of some of the critics of travel to Mars
[+] [-] camperman|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theklub|11 years ago|reply
If he had just said "data" instead of computer.
[+] [-] cpks|11 years ago|reply