Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Note that Obama added comments to this fire this week. If this is disinformation and long con, e.g. by a spooked aerospace industry and military industrial complex looking for a new line of revenue, it is a very long con and one with a scale of duplicity, or complicity, inconsistent with the professionalism and careers and understood integrity of a lot of increasingly highly ranked people.

Perhaps its time to start doubting the integrity and/or professionalism of these people, rather than basic physics.

Even if conspiracy theories/government long-cons are not extremely likely (though the government, military and intelligence agencies have a huge documented record of intentionally bold-faced lying to the public, such as the fabricated WMD Irak claims), they are still far and away more likely than physics defying alien spacecraft.

Furthermore, even in the most captivating readings of these events, its obvious that these people have no clue what these phenomena actually are, so there is still no reason to actually follow the story other than morbid curiosity.

There's no such thing as "physics defying". There's physics we understand, and physics we don't understand. The job of physicists is to change the latter into the former.

Whatever these phenomena are, sharing all of the information that's available about them can only help us to understand them. If all of that information can be accounted for by physics we know, that's fine. At least we'll know for sure. And if it can't, then we need to work on learning some new physics, as we've been doing for centuries.

> There's no such thing as "physics defying". There's physics we understand, and physics we don't understand.

There's no such thing as physics defying phenomena that actually happened. But there are lots of phenomena which don't happen that would be physics defying if they did. For example, a device I claim to produce energy out of nothing is physics defying: it doesn't happen.

And more data is not in itself a good thing. If you have low quality data, then sometimes the most scientifically honest thing to do is to throw it away - we don't have infinite energy to explore every shred of information and ascertain it's trustworthiness. For the same reason physicists or doctors don't go investigating every claim of a miracle or faith healing, they shouldn't investigate every blip on the radar.

Releasing dumps of such data and insinuating that it's meaningful (while actually saying the truth, that it's simply unexplained, which is the default state of data) is generally against the public interest.

> Perhaps its time to start doubting the integrity and/or professionalism of these people, rather than basic physics

You don't need to doubt basic physics, since they allow this to happen. Spacetime warping has been theorized for more than a century.

Please see my other comment [0], based on what a real theoretical physicist explains about warp drives: FTL warp drives like the famous Alcubierre drive are not physically possible, even though they are mathematical solutions to Einstein's equations. Warp drives could be physically possible, but they would be slower than light and require a constant stream of matter/energy to accelerate.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27243900

Reply on news.ycombinator.com