Scientists have discovered new TYPE of Superconductor

[tim0901]

17 hours ago, Trik'Stari said:

Again, I would argue our understanding of physics is inherently flawed if our mathematics result in infinite energy as any form of answer.

 

Mainly because infinity is irrational and cannot be proven to exist. As you point out, it is considered axiomatically true, which means "assumed to be true for the sake of argument". That to me, says our understanding and technology are seriously flawed, not "it's impossible".

 

The concept of infinity does exist, and it's incredibly easy to prove its existence. If I start counting from zero, I can keep on counting forever. For any number, you can add another digit on the end of it to get another number. There is no number after which I cannot keep counting, or cannot add another digit - there are an infinite amount of numbers. Axioms aren't just arguments that are "assumed to be true for the sake of argument". They can also be arguments that are "self-evidently true". It can be a bit hard to come to accept infinity as a concept, but it's existence with regards to mathematics is perfectly rational and proven.

 

In physics we often use the concept of infinity not because infinity itself is important, but instead because the laws of mathematics surrounding infinities can result in large simplifications. Sure I could deal with every possible arrangement of the atoms inside my gas canister, but we would be talking about numbers that are hundreds or thousands of digits long. Instead we can just call that an infinite amount of arrangements and simplify the process.

 

In the case of accelerating an object to the speed of light, what we know is that the amount of energy you need increases as it's velocity increases. It's asymptotic - it takes more energy the closer to the speed of light you get.

 

If we take the interval 0-1, and a number inside it, eg 0.99999999999 , then we know that there is always a number greater than this value that's still inside this interval. I can just add another digit - there are infinite amounts of numbers - and so we can forever get closer and closer to the speed of light without reaching it. But this will require more and more energy the closer we get. Eventually we will get close enough that to accelerate the object even more, we would exceed the amount of energy that exists in the universe. And we still wouldn't be at the speed of light.

 

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As for what we can and cannot observe. Our inability to observe something does not mean it does not exist. How many things have existed for eons that humanity only recently became aware of?

Sure, and there are fields that do search for things that we predict using mathematics, like paritlce physics. No scientist will try to say that current science can explain everything we see, nor that there aren't things we can't explain out there. But wildly predicting that things should exist without any evidence or well-founded reason for why they should exist doesn't fit into the scientific method. Sure reverse time travel could exist, but we have zero evidence for it's existence and so we can just as easily say it doesn't, as far as science is concerned.

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I dislike this sort of thinking as I believe it stifles the imagination, and thus limits our scientific progress. I would greatly prefer we approach things from a "we haven't figured that out yet" point of view, rather than "it's not possible".

That's exactly how science works. We see something in the universe that we don't understand and go out of our way to explain it. Why does this apple hit the ground when I let go?

 

But proving the existance of something and then explaining how it works is far easier than proving the nonexistence of something. In fact disproving something's existence is oftentimes impossible. How do you disprove the existance of backwards time travel? How do you disprove the existance of a God? We can't, all we can say is there's no known methodology, that doesn't go against our current theory of reality as we know it, for how it could exist. Aka "it's not possible in modern physics".

 

Science has made mistakes like this before, deciding to wildly speculate new ideas without reason or evidence of their existence. The geocentric model, Flat Earth theory or the Luminiferous Ether are all examples of this. The EmDrive seems like it's another. Almost always these beliefs come back to bite us in the future - it's just generally a bad idea and can waste a lot of time and money researching it.