No flying machine will ever reach New York from Paris.
One of the Wright brothers said that. It’s actually my favorite quote because it always reminds me we have no idea what the fuck we’re wrong about.
No flying machine will ever reach New York from Paris.
googles
Interestingly, when he wrote that, it was part of a larger quote saying virtually the same thing that you are, just over a century ago:
Wilbur in the Cairo, Illinois, Bulletin, March 25, 1909
No airship will ever fly from New York to Paris. That seems to me to be impossible. What limits the flight is the motor. No known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping, and you can’t be sure of finding the proper winds for soaring. The airship will always be a special messenger, never a load-carrier. But the history of civilization has usually shown that every new invention has brought in its train new needs it can satisfy, and so what the airship will eventually be used for is probably what we can least predict at the present.
Oh, and to provide numbers:
https://www.distance.to/New-York/Paris
That’s 5,837.07 km.
As of the moment, the longest flight by distance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Atlantic_GlobalFlyer
In February 2006, Fossett flew the GlobalFlyer for the longest aircraft flight distance in history: 25,766 miles (41,466 km).
That’s 7.1 times the Paris-to-New-York flight distance.
As for time:
No known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping…
The longest flight by time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutan_Voyager
The flight took off from Edwards Air Force Base’s 15,000 foot (4,600 m) runway in the Mojave Desert on December 14, 1986, and ended 9 days, 3 minutes and 44 seconds later on December 23, setting a flight endurance record.
Plus X-37B has flown round the earth for two and a half years on its longest flight. I know it’s not really what he was thinking about as it’s launched in space from a rocket in orbit but then that just adds even more to the notion tech advancement can be almost impossible to predict.
“Brought in its train” what an interesting phrase, do people still say this? Is it the same as “in its wake” we use today?
He also isn’t talking about airplanes, but airships. Sure plenty of planes make the journey every day, but zero airships do because they really are quite useless for it. Obviously he was wrong becauae a few airships did end up making Atlantic crossings, but they were slow, cramped, and dangerous compsred to ocean liners.
At a computer trade show in 1981, Bill Gates supposedly uttered this statement, in defense of the just-introduced IBM PC’s 640KB usable RAM limit: “640K ought to be enough for anybody.”
That quote was in the context of the 1981 personal computer market, and in that context is correct.
It’s like a game company CEO saying 12GB of video ram is enough in 2024 so we don’t all need an RTX 4090.
Scientists in the 1800s also proclaimed we figured everything out and science was completed.
*1900s. Max Planck famously pondered whether he should pursue physics or music and was told by his professor that Physics was “done except for a few minor details”. Planck then went on to invent quantum physics to screw over students the world over.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-56594-6_11
The most exciting result of scientific discovery is “well that’s odd.”
When I first began learning HTML (way before CSS and the modern web), my most engaged moments were when things broke. Way more satisfying learning how to fix them than having it work right away. What a great observation / comment.
As a professional dev my reaction to broken things is more like “ah fuck, not again! I hope it’s nothing serious.”.
This is amazing news. It’s like being shown that Neutonian physics are wrong, so now we have the ability to come up with a better model, then massive advancements in technology can occur.
We did find out that Newtonian physics is wrong. Einstein got famous for it and we now use general/special relativity and quantum phsyics.
No, Newtonian physics works just fine. Unless things are too big, too small, too fast, or too slow.
At least that’s what a meme I once saw said.
So it works fine on human scales, but for most of the universe it is inadequate. That means it’s wrong. Quantum physics and relativity are also wrong since he are unable to reconcile the two, despite them both being the best models we have for their respective scales. We have known for the past century that we have only just begun to understand the universe, and that all our models are irreconcilable with each other, meaning that they are ultimately wrong.
Just because a model is useful doesn’t mean it is right.
Isaac Newton made some incorrect assumptions. In most situations on earth the error is small enough to ignore (you don’t need to worry about time dialation to calculate the projectile path of a thrown rock), but there’s depreciencies in the cosmos (like mercury’s weird precession). So in a sense, elementary mechanics never was correct, but it was the best humanity had for awhile until Einstein’s relativity and it’s still useful in many not-extreme contexts.
Really, until we actually find dark matter, we can’t say for sure that relativity is correct either, but that’s just science.
I think it’s better to say that Newtonian physics is incomplete rather than wrong.
Bingo. All models are “wrong”, good models are useful despite being “wrong”. Relativity is wrong too since it can’t account for anything quantum… Relativity isn’t better, it’s just more accurate under certain conditions - but outside of those conditions it’s more complex than it needs to be, and Newton’s models are good enough.
I’d like them to look for repeats of galaxies. Galaxies that may be the same but slightly different or in different parts of the universe. If the universe was its own black hole we might see like a sort of kaleidoscope effect
The trouble with that is the difference in time. Since the light has to travel such a vast distance, multiple images of the same galaxy will show different stages of maturity. Even the stars will have been recycled. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to ever demonstrate that two galaxies separated by billions of light years are actually the same galaxy in a curved Universe.
I believe that would be a Torus-shaped universe that could produce that effect, basically a donut where space loops back in on itself. I think it’s something that’s been considered, though it sounds as if there’s no evidence for or against that idea, and it’s not considered likely.
My money is on a dodecahedron.
Neutonian physics are wrong
Dangerous way of putting that since we have so many easily weaponized idiots who will carry that water, a better way to say it would be “our understanding of neutonian physics is incomplete at the moment”
I agree, it is more accurate that way. English is not my first language, so I missed that detail. In South Africa, we also don’t have a significant anti-science movement, so it does not always occur to me naturally. The scientific approach is generally well respected and understood here.
We have a very limited view of the universe so it’s no surprise that our theories are often wrong or incomplete. The beauty of science is that when a theory proves inadequate, it gets replaced with a more complete one.
yeah, but it’s always a shitshow when someone brings alternate theories to the big bang. it’s almost like back in those days when they burned people for suggesting the earth may be slightly less flat than expected.
That’s because alternative models like MOND or string theory end up breaking more things than they solve. Fixing the leak in your roof is great, but doing so by breaking the living room wall isn’t really an acceptable solution.
In optimization problems, you can get stuck at a local maxima. It looks like any direction you go makes things worse. But the only way out of that is to try something that does make things worse and try refining from there to see if you can get to something better. Maybe that living room wall does need to come down in the process.
It’s always funny to me when people bring up how science was wrong in the past, as evidence for why we shouldn’t trust it now.
You know what replaced the bad science? Good science.
Or rather, we replace the bad science with the best explanations we can offer, right now.
I’ll take the plumb pudding model over “deity did it, stop asking questions” any day, because you can still do something useful with it.
Doesn’t even matter if our understanding is wrong and will be updated later.
Science is the best philosophy 💪
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…'” --Isaac Asimov
