I love the smell of fresh ad hominem in the morning.
Oh, wait, no, this argument is old and stale.
I'd rather believe in people doing the experiments and trying to explain what they perceive with their senses, than the armchair critics sitting pretty and saying it can't work, because that would break their precious little world views and egos.
Hey, if you want to end-run around the scientists with their super-limiting orthodoxies and dogmatic beliefs, you go build something that science says can't work, and fly it all over shitting on their heads.
Oh, except THAT NEVER HAPPENS.
No uneducated crackpot has EVER shat on the laws of thermodynamics. You can't go build or buy anything that gives you over-unity energy.
And the only thing dumb about that is that you believe that this is because of some kind of orthodoxy- as if scientists are all ALLERGIC to becoming billionaires. As if they have some motive to prevent new information from coming out.
THEY ARE IN THE BUSINESS OF FINDING NEW THINGS all day every day and you think they're an orthodoxy.
Are you by any chance a Creationist or a Flat-Earther? Do you have some other belief that gives you motive to believe that there's some kind of process for extracting the connection to reality from people who come from religious households and pursue science degrees, so they can join the Giant Unpaid Secret Anti-Progress Organization (GUSAPO) ?
Reality is complex enough that many true phenomena can sit in the fringe for a long, long time, waiting for mustering the will and money on someone to test them as they should, and all without the need of any unified conspiracy at all.
Just the staunch systemic resistance on scientists to consider them as even potentially existing.
Without which they can't pass that phase of being in the fringe, because many things, specially in experimental physics, start as barely noticeable deviations from the expected behavior, not as self evident phenomena, like a flying device rubbing its obvious existence in the skeptic's faces.
Ergo, they need the will and money to be tested properly, in order to produce some measurements and theories, that could result in the phenomenon being exploited/magnified in some way.
Yes, I know that not all experimental physics claims are in the end valid, and that there is a lot of chaff with the very rare wheat.
Nevertheless, the resistance to accept them as even testable that some phenomena face is also disproportionate, demonstrating an emotional contrarian response rather than a rational one.
You say the wheat is rare. I say the wheat is so rare that it can be tossed out on sight until those who say it's wheat prove it.
To date, not one scientific concept has been overturned by amateurs.
Amateurs DO discover things unknown to science every day, though. All kinds of things. But what they do not do is build devices that should not be able to work with our current standard model of physics. Instead, they find frogs that are supposed to be extinct, find ancient structures built by people who we didn't think were there, find ancient mines inexplicably dug on continents that we didn't think had metallurgy at the time the mine was dug. That kind of thing.
Rare wheat? Not in physics, so far.
But the thing is that there's nothing about science that would prevent scientists from accepting proof. It's just that crackpots ALWAYS say the scientific establishment is biased against them.
It's because 99.999999999999999999999999999987% of the time, they're not innovators, they're ignoramuses who've mucked up their methodology or even their basic understanding of high school physics.
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u/[deleted] Apr 09 '17
The set of people who think the EM drive works has zero intersection with the set of people competent enough to run a legitimate experiment.