WHY WE DON’T YET LIVE IN THE “WORLD OF TOMORROW”
I've always held a strong belief in the individual's contribution to the large steps made in human knowledge vs. the institution's, particularly as it applies to objective men of the mind.
This writer brings that belief into sharp illustration. But can we break the institutional chains?
"The Prison of Science
Since I don’t for a moment believe that we’ve discovered all that can be known, the obvious conclusion is that physics is being held in a sort of stasis.
My argument has been this:
Institutions are oppositional to individual will, and individual will is the only thing that creates breakthroughs in science.
Albert Einstein agrees with me, by the way. See this:
Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
And this:
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
And this:
Great spirits have always been violently oppressed by mediocre minds.
Within an institution, a scientist must either please the authorities or see his work jettisoned. And scientific grants always have to please authorities.
So, who are these “authorities”? They would certainly include government bureaucrats, but the authorities that really matter here are older scientists who have given themselves over to institutional politics. These are the more common oppressors of new and different ideas.
There’s an old joke that reflects this:
Q: How does physics progress?
A: One funeral at a time.
The oppressors of new scientific theories are entrenched in scientific institutions. From there, they either allow or disallow almost every research project. And anyone who is not part of those institutions is ridiculed, excluded, and ignored.
It was farm boys, outsiders, and self-educated people who invented radio, television, the airplane, the electric light, the telegraph, the phonograph, the automobile, radar, and much more."
How many Higgs Bosons are needed to build each of the six varieties of quarks? Can you combine a string with a boson to build a lepton? Is there a way of generating Higgs Bosons in the first place and under what circumstances?
Lots of questions to theorize. And then, you have to prove that you can do it.
My example would be a tree farm. If I buy a plot of land, and pay to plant little baby trees, I've sunk a lot of money, and will have to wait many decades to be able to harvest giant trees. That doesnt mean I can't already sell that land for profit, because the next guy won't have to plant, and won't have to wait as long from the time of his purchase as I did from mine. The trees arent actually profitable until I can harvest them, but they do increase in value..... this is why they keep promising that xxx technology is only a few years away... so buy it from me now, and then you can be the one to reap the benifits long term.
www.cathodixx.com
The wheel has been around for a long time. So has the gyroscope. The Segue is recent.
Cars have been around for awhile. One that gets 82 mpg on a gas engine only... That's called "Elio" soon to be made in America.
I prefer the John Galt model: a man engages in basic science and, for a fee of some kind, and by lecture or subscribed periodical, communicates his insights to others willing to pay top dollar (or top gold ounce) for them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_beta_f...
The future is just around the corner.
Ever since the late 1940s, institutionalized science has declared that fusion power by magnetic confinement is only a "decade away", and nations have spent over a trillion dollars in pursuit of that promise. Somehow, even though enormous resources have been poured into this concept for 70 years, we are still decades away from fusion power.
By contrast, Philo T. Farnsworth, who created the first practical television using the cathode ray tube (against the institutionalized science that was still using mechanical scanning), observed that a more practical method of creating fusion power would be to use electrostatic confinement, and for a tiny fraction of the money poured into magnetic confinement, demonstrated higher energy and neutron production than any magnetic systems. However, instead of pursuing Farnsworth's innovative ideas, the institutions have spent more money demonizing anyone trying inertial electrostatic confinement (IEF) than investigating the concept.
The Tokamaks keep getting bigger and more expensive, and have still failed to reach the break even point of producing more power than they consume. IEF reactors can be built by amateur scientists, and it may well be one of these rebels that first demonstrate successful fusion. I suspect that institutional science will still ignore the facts and insist that only peer-admired, state-supported scientists are deserving of public recognition.
I don't begrudge a man who licenses the products of his mind any more than I laud the man who has enough and gives the rest away. Both are receiving the reward they want from their efforts.
In today's world, you have to delve much deeper into a topic to truly make any groundbreaking advances, and because those advances are specific to that advanced topic, their scope of application tends to be much smaller. The investment of time and resources into the advancement also grows, making each advancement more capital-intensive (expensive) for only a nominal yield.
Now one will be quick - and right - to point out that because the field is broader, there are more actual inventions being created, and this I would readily agree with. That being said, each individual achievement has a high price and limited scope that makes it seem much less earth-shattering than many prior advances.
Of course it could also be that expectations have changed as well: we are more accustomed to the new and inventive than others throughout human history!
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