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Comment by lutusp | Hacker News Reader

Old-style science is apparently dead. Imagine if Einstein created General Relativity today, but (in keeping with the times and contrary to everything we know about Einstein) realized the commercial potential of the ideas before submitting his paper for publication.

Or the quantum theorists of the 1920s -- imagine that they somehow foresaw all the commercial potential of these ideas, before publishing the broad outline of theories that essentially define modern times.

This is not to suggest that the EM Drive will necessarily pan out as some of its adherents are claiming, only that the old, pure-research tradition of publishing everything in advance of any consideration of applications seems to be dead.

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Old-style science was not as expensive as new style science. If a team does something for commercial gain then it becomes publically accessible 20 years later when the patents expire. Probably sooner if people ignore the patents or find a way round them. The worst case scenario is that they sit on their invention and do nothing about it. The best case is that they create a new viable industry. Either way, eventually the technology will become available to everyone for free. If there was little incentive to develop these ideas then fewer people would bother and this tech may only have been invented in 100 years time.

"it becomes publically accessible 20 years later when the patents expire" I'm about 90% sure this is the opposite of how patents work. You describe the methods in the patent, and in exchange you get to use or license it for the duration of the patent. It's publicly accessible but not usable, which is a useful distinction. Without patents there wouldn't be an incentive to disclose.

The theoretical ideas are still out here. It'd be more if someone figured out a way to do GPS (with relativity issues solved) and decided to keep that secret.

Bit of a devil's advocate for patents too. Sure, you can't build the exact same thing for a while, but at least the principles are revealed.

There were many inventors/scientists in that era who developed things in secret or patented the heck out of their work, such as Edison or Tesla.

The analogy is not quite right for General Relativity, but this EmDrive thing is not at the same level either.

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