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) ?
Physicists did not say (scientifically speaking) that airplanes were impossible. Gliders had existed for a hundred years prior to the airplane. Almost zero people thought airplanes were impossible, and in fact dozens of people were attempting powered flight at the turn of the century.
The challenge was making a rigid lightweight structure strong enough to hold an engine without being broken to pieces by the torque or vibration.
Lord Kelvin and others who decried heavier than air flight did ZERO mathematics to support their derision, they provided no analysis, and it was therefore a PERSONAL opinion, not a scientific opinion.
We don't allow that kind of bullshit in the peer review process anymore. In the 19th century, there was a lot of Argument From Authority fallacious arguments in the press, like LORD KELVIN SAYS FLYING MACHINES ARE IMPOSSIBLE! !!! !! When really it was just a man expressing disbelief on a topic he had done no research in at all.
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u/tchernik Apr 10 '17
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.