Musk? rotfl

larkin

Patent office lawyers don't understand much. I've got a three patents, and my father and a couple of my friends got more, and we all understand (or understood) that.

Experimental tests don't always mean what the people who set up the tests would like the viewers to think. There's a long history of fraudulent "inventions" designed to extract money from investors

I'm not interested enough to find out what you would like me to do to go to the trouble and expense of verifying whatever it purports to do.

The patent office will take your money and give you a patent if your claim is plausible. They aren't set up to test it.

Getting to Rome would cost me money - it's been a while since I've been there - and the chance that that expenditure would pay off is in the parts per million range.

If what you are claiming were true, it would be worth it but you wouldn't be touting the idea here if it were.

This is to be expected of the worlds most sucessful con man.

When one day the fools ( like Musk) who believe in rocketry are convinced of the evidence, namely that with rockets you cannot colonize the Moon, let alone Mars, we will remind you that PNN (Non-Newtonian Propulsion) exists

The odds are that you are fooling yourself about that. If you had had enough sense to test your reactionless drive in a good vacuum, you might have been worth taking seriously, but you don't seem to be the kind of meticulous experimentalists who can set up a convincing test, and you do seem to be silly enough to have tweaked your experiments to maximise the potential confounds,when you should have been minimising them.

It seems to me that you haven't done any experimentation and just repeats what others have already said. Basically, you want to continue believing in the status quo. The only way, 'perhaps,' to convince you is to have you witness long experimental PNN tests without further chatter. But that's not possible.Besides it seems to me that you are not convinced that Lorentz force can exist in circuits in which alternate current flows.

Regards

I'd actually have to take your gear apart and put it back together, which is rather more than just "witnessing". I was trained as an experimental scientist, and my subsequent career as a electronic engineer involved quite a lot of bug-hunting on almost-working hardware.

It's entirely possible, if totally impractical.

Magnetic forces are Lorentz forces. The universe looks compressed in the direction of motion for moving charges so they are effectively closer to the stationary static charges that attract them than the moving charges of the same sign that repel them.

I worked this out for myself in 1961 - Wheeler and Feynman had published on the subject in 1949. but as an undergraduate chemist I hadn't been taught about it.

It's obviously true that Lorentz forces exist in circuits in which alternating currents flow, but that probably doesn't mean what you would like it to mean.

Thank you for keeping Mr Sloman amused.

You make a lovely couple.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

It's Dr.Sloman.

Both of us know quite a bit more than John Larkin (faint praise), and the discussion does seem to be going over his head, which he resents.

Given a sound theoretical basis confirmed by experiment, it is our company policy to never hire PhDs.

You guys are just adorable together.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

That makes sense. The literature survey is an essential part of a any Ph.D. thesis, and it has to demonstrate a capacity of for critical thinking. John Larkin doesn't like criticism.

John Larkin adores anybody who can flatter him, which would call for a strong stomach.

Just four of the problems with PhDs:

Years of being forced to kowtow to authority

and

Ingrained unwillingness to think crazy

and

Affection for complexity.

and

Lack of common sense

Phil, of course, is the rare exception. The occasional dose of gin+tonic cures any residual academic side effects.

I've been to some meetings of physicists. They are brutal, instantly attacking any non-scientifically-defensable idea. Not a good brainstorming environment.

Are chemists the same way?

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I don't recall doing much of that.

My Ph.D. work didn't proceed the way my supervisor had expected. There wasn't anything crazy about using computers and modern electronics, but he wasn't familiar with either - it didn't worry him, though he would have liked it to go faster.

Knowing what you are doing - not your strong suite - can lead to elaborations that the less well-informed can see as unnecessary complexity. My colleagues were known to describe me as "gadget happy" but were happy enough to accept my help when writing computer programs.

You think that Trump has common sense. Anything that cures what he has got has got to be a good thing.

Alcohol does make people stupid.

They can probably spell defensible correctly too.

You can waste a lot of time in brain=storming sessions on obviously impractical ideas. Getting rid of them without inhibiting the expression of the unconventional idea you want can be difficult. Not including ignorant half-wits in the the brainstorming session is an easier solution.

The ones I interacted with mostly knew what they were talking about, which didn't prevent heated discussions.

When I was in high school, I worked two summers in the physics department of LSUNO. MIcrowave spectroscopy and Mössbauer Effect mostly.

They registered me as a fake student so they could pay me 50 cents per hour, made me student number 20,000.

I noticed even then the streak of cruelty that runs through academic physics. The dean wanted me to be a physicist but I didn't like the vibe. Good choice I think: engineering is more fun.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I can't say I've seen it. But you seem to be able to detect cruelty in the less favourable responses you get here.You probably had even more exaggerated ideas about your capabilities back then than you have now.

The only gap I can see is between theoretical physics - which is essentially a branch of applied math, and experimental physics which is largely engineering. Win Hill started a Ph.D. in chemical physics, which is a bit more physical than the physical chemistry where I got mine, which was also mostly about engineering.

At Melbourne the physicists in my generation got their Ph.D.s by doing vacuum plumbing on the Melbourne cyclotron, which wasn't all that powerful or big. At least the Physics department library was petty well stocked with electronics text-books and I did quite a lot of reading there. My supervisor would have been happier if I'd done the reading in the Chemistry Department library, which was next to his office but it was short on the kind of books I needed to read.

A guy was applying to get into grad school, and was making a presentation about particle accelerators to the dean and a prof, basically an oral qualification exam. I was invited to sit in. The guy did his talk, the dean asked a couple of questions, and the dean said "I think I've heard enough" and they just walked out. The poor student was crushed.

I thought that was cruel.

I have seen that sort behavior in other physics meetings.

Engineers are not often that skilled in brutality.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

It's undiplomatic - but flattering people to make them feel good is optional. It takes time and busy people don't have a lot of that

You do make it clear that you expect to be flattered at every possible opportunity. Most people don't. Where I've worked people will occasionally say that a presentation was unusually impressive, but they don't say it often.

It's pretty much the norm. You get up and say your piece, and the meeting moves on to the next speaker.

What you are describing isn't brutality. Brutal behavior involves pointing out what was wrong with the presentation and spelling out how it could have been improved by adopting the approach that had been the industry standard for years. I've seen that done.

It saves a lot of time. It doesn't seem all that effective in getting people to do better next time - if they were dim enough to say stuff that was obviously stupid in public they probably don't have the capacity to do better.