"Heavier than air flying machines are impossible." -- Lord Kelvin, gravitational physicist, 1895
Science Daily: Flying Car Takes Wing: Invention Makes Its First Test Flights.
ScienceDaily (Mar. 24, 2009) — A prototype of what is being touted as the world's first practical flying car took to the air for the first time this month, a milestone in a project started four years ago by students in MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
At 7:40 a.m. on March 5, the winged car taxied down a runway in Plattsburgh, N.Y., took off, flew for 37 seconds and landed further down the runway -- a maneuver it would repeat about a half dozen times over the next two days. In the coming months the company, a Woburn-based startup called Terrafugia, will test the plane in a series of ever-longer flights and a variety of maneuvers to learn about its handling characteristics.
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23 comments:
What the hell? How does something designed to take advantage of the concepts of lift and aerodynamics defy gravity?
Are you going to post about helicopters and 747's as well?
Quoting Lord Kelvin is absurd. There was a great deal he didn't understand.
Mr. Keown,
"How does something designed to take advantage of the concepts of lift and aerodynamics defy gravity?"
Gravity says cars should fall to the Earth at 9.8 meters per second squared which is why gravitational physicists like Lord Kelvin predicted that heavier than air flying machines are impossible.
"Are you going to post about helicopters and 747's as well?"
Do you want me to? Because I will: I would quote Hoyle of course.
"Quoting Lord Kelvin is absurd."
Why? Rather gravitation is absurd.
"There was a great deal he didn't understand."
Like the fact that gravitation is a myth.
From some light reading, Kelvin seemed mostly interested in thermodynamics....
But he was wrong about the age of the earth, he was skeptical about x-rays, not to mention the oft-quoted but never cited ramblings about how there was nothing new to discover in physics.
In short, Lord Kelvin is the last person you'd want to de-bunk modern physics with.
I, for one, can't wait to get my cold fusion powered hover-Porche.
Um, OIM is a somewhat of a eccantcuntscimock, so you sort of have to read between the lines with everything. Hey, I'm somewhat of a quant, right!? Anyhow, defying gravity means "providing enough lift to stay in the air".
@Quantum_Flux "Um, OIM is a somewhat of a eccantcuntscimock"
Eccantcuntscimock? Is there a dirty word in there or something? OIM might not be too pleased with that monicker. :)
BTW, do neutrons defy electromagnetism? I can just imagine the headline now:
Block of Wood slips off Magnet, thus DEFYING Electromagnetic Theory - Film at 11.
In OiM's universe, nothing defies EM... because EVERYTHING is EM/Elecroweak.
I'm not certain he beleives in the Strong Force, but that's yet to be proven.
Jeffery,
"In short, Lord Kelvin is the last person you'd want to de-bunk modern physics with."
Lord Kelvin was modern physics.
Pleroma,
I call shotgun.
QF,
=)
Jeffery,
"In OiM's universe, nothing defies EM... because EVERYTHING is EM"
Exactly.
"... Matter is composed of electricity, and of nothing else ...." -- Oliver J. Lodge, physicist, 1904
It's a Russian Moniker.
The Lodge quote made me think of this:
'Suppose nothing else were "given" as real except our world of desires and passions, and we could not get down, or up, to any other "reality" besides the reality of our drives--for thinking is merely a relation of these drives to each other: is it not permitted to make the experiment and to ask the question whether this "given" would not be sufficient for also understanding on the basis of this kind of thing the so-called mechanistic (or "material") world?...
In the end not only is it permitted to make this experiment; the conscience of method demands it. Not to assume several kinds of causality until the experiment of making do with a single one has been pushed to its utmost limit (to the point of nonsense, if I may say so)... The question is in the end whether we really recognize the will as efficient, whether we believe in the causality of the will: if we do--and at bottom our faith in this is nothing less than our faith in causality itself--then we have to make the experiment of positing causality of the will hypothetically as the only one. "Will," of course, can affect only "will"--and not "matter" (not "nerves," for example). In short, one has to risk the hypothesis whether will does not affect will wherever "effects" are recognized--and whether all mechanical occurrences are not, insofar as a force is active in them, will force, effects of will.
Suppose, finally, we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one basic form of the will--namely, of the will to power, as my proposition has it... then one would have gained the right to determine all efficient force univocally as--will to power. The world viewed from inside... it would be "will to power" and nothing else.'
from Beyond Good and Evil, s.36, Walter Kaufmann transl.
Pleroma, now you've gone and done it. You've made me quote Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" which is as easily understandable as your passage is: :)
"TRANSCENDENTAL ILLUSION
WE have already entitled dialectic in general a logic of illusion. This does not mean a doctrine of probability; for probability is truth, known however on insufficient grounds, and the knowledge of which, though thus imperfect, is not on that account deceptive; and such doctrine, accordingly, is not to be separated from the analytic part of logic. Still less justification
have we for regarding appearance and illusion as being identical.
For truth or illusion is not in the object, in so far as it is
intuited, but in the judgment about it, in so far as it is thought.
It is therefore correct to say that the senses do not err -- not
because they always judge rightly but because they do not judge at all. Truth and error, therefore, and consequently also illusion as leading to error, are only to be found in the judgment, i.e. only in the relation of the object to our understanding. In any knowledge which completely accords with the laws of understanding there is no error. In a representation of the senses -- as containing no judgment whatsoever -- there is also no error. No natural force can of itself deviate from its own laws. Thus neither the understanding by itself (uninfluenced by another cause), nor the senses by themselves, would fall into error. The former would not, since, if it acts only according to its own laws, the effect (the judgment) must necessarily be in conformity with these laws; conformity with the laws of the understanding is the formal element in all truth."
I want to hear I.Kant explain gravity there.
QF,
"I want to hear I.Kant explain gravity there."
Leibniz and Mupertuis are the authorities on Newtonian gravitation.
"Meanwhile remote operation has just been revived in England by the admirable Mr. Newton, who maintains that it is the nature of bodies to be attracted and gravitate one towards another, in proportion to the mass of each one, and the rays of attraction it receives. Accordingly the famous Mr. Locke, in his answer to Bishop Stillingfleet, declares that having seen Mr. Newton's book he retracts what he himself said, following the opinion of the moderns, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, to wit, that a body cannot operate immediately upon another except by touching it upon its surface and driving it by its motion. He acknowledges that God can put properties into matter which cause it to operate from a distance. Thus the theologians of the Augsburg Confession claim that God may ordain not only that a body operate immediately on divers bodies remote from one another, but that it even exist in their neighbourhood and be received by them in a way with which distances of place and dimensions of space have nothing to do. Although this effect transcends the forces of Nature, they do not think it possible to show that it surpasses the power of the Author of Nature. For him it is easy to annul the laws that he has given or to dispense with them as seems good to him, in the same way as he was able to make iron float upon water and to stay the operation of fire upon the human body." -- Gottfriend W. Leibniz, polymath, 1695
"...to establish it [gravitation] as original or primitive in certain parts of matter is to resort either to miracle or an imaginary occult quality." -- Gottfreid W. Leibniz, polymath, July 1710
"Thus, thinking as Newton did (i.e., that all celestial bodies are attracted to the sun and move through empty space), it is extremely improbable that the six planets would move as they do." -- Pierre L. Maupertuis, polymath, 1746
Six planets huh?
I love the bits where Leibnitz predicted Time Dialation, Gravitational Lensing and the Twin Paradox... That Leibnitz.... he was so ahead of his time.
Liebnitz didn't know Gravity from his ass. But that's pretty common in these parts.
QF,
"Six planets huh?"
There were only 6 known planets at the time.
Jeffery,
"I love the bits where Leibnitz predicted Time Dialation, Gravitational Lensing and the Twin Paradox... That Leibnitz.... he was so ahead of his time."
Why would Leibniz predict myths?
"Liebnitz didn't know Gravity from his ass. But that's pretty common in these parts."
He never understood the occult. I don't either.
I think it was naive of Maupertius to have assumed only 6 planets and in the same sentence presume to know anything about the probabilities of planet formation. Where is his math that says anything whatsoever about probabilities and orbital trajectories?
QF,
"I think it was naive of Maupertius to have assumed only 6 planets and in the same sentence presume to know anything about the probabilities of planet formation."
In that case you also think Newton was naive.
"Where is his math that says anything whatsoever about probabilities and orbital trajectories?"
Newton's Principia.
"Let the future tell the truth, and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I have really worked, is mine." Nikola Tesla
"Well, I don't know if I can comment on Kant or Hegel because I'm no real philosopher in the sense of knowing what these people have said in any detail so let me not comment on that too much." Roger Penrose
"We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming." Werhner Von Braun
"One can measure the importance of a scientific work by the number of earlier publications rendered superfluous by it." David Hilbert
"Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality." Hermann Minkowski
Hmmm, this is fun :)
"The average user doesn't give a damn what happens, as long as (1) it works and (2) it's fast." Daniel J. Bernstein
"Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it." Rene Descartes
"A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding." Isaac Newton
"The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market." Mandelbrot
"A theory has only the alternative of being right or wrong. A model has a third possibility: it may be right, but irrelevant." Manfred Eigen
Okay...that is enough I suppose.
Nice...=)
6 Planets
I've finally received 3 books from Mikamar publications, Cardona' God and Flare Star books, and Ginenthal's second volume on the Pillar of History - all three tightly reasoned and cited works not easily assimilated in a day or two cursory reading.
That said, the basic assumption in mainstream science is the idea that the earth has been in its present position since time immemorial, with no change.
If we consider human history, that seems not the case. Perhaps our ancestors were looking at a sky much different to the one we see.
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