this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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[–] EdibleFriend@lemmy.world 260 points 7 months ago (15 children)

No flying machine will ever reach New York from Paris.

One of the Wright brothers said that. It's actually my favorite quote because it always reminds me we have no idea what the fuck we're wrong about.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 275 points 7 months ago (9 children)

No flying machine will ever reach New York from Paris.

googles

Interestingly, when he wrote that, it was part of a larger quote saying virtually the same thing that you are, just over a century ago:

Wilbur in the Cairo, Illinois, Bulletin, March 25, 1909

No airship will ever fly from New York to Paris. That seems to me to be impossible. What limits the flight is the motor. No known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping, and you can’t be sure of finding the proper winds for soaring. The airship will always be a special messenger, never a load-carrier. But the history of civilization has usually shown that every new invention has brought in its train new needs it can satisfy, and so what the airship will eventually be used for is probably what we can least predict at the present.

[–] EdibleFriend@lemmy.world 128 points 7 months ago (4 children)
[–] OpenStars@startrek.website 26 points 7 months ago (19 children)

Thank goodness computers are never wrong. :-P

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[–] tal@lemmy.today 26 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Oh, and to provide numbers:

https://www.distance.to/New-York/Paris

That's 5,837.07 km.

As of the moment, the longest flight by distance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Atlantic_GlobalFlyer

In February 2006, Fossett flew the GlobalFlyer for the longest aircraft flight distance in history: 25,766 miles (41,466 km).

That's 7.1 times the Paris-to-New-York flight distance.

As for time:

No known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping...

The longest flight by time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutan_Voyager

The flight took off from Edwards Air Force Base's 15,000 foot (4,600 m) runway in the Mojave Desert on December 14, 1986, and ended 9 days, 3 minutes and 44 seconds later on December 23, setting a flight endurance record.

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[–] ogmios@sh.itjust.works 183 points 7 months ago (2 children)

The most exciting result of scientific discovery is "well that's odd."

[–] EdibleFriend@lemmy.world 97 points 7 months ago (5 children)
[–] Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 56 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Peer review is "Hey. You seeing this shit?"

[–] EmptySlime@lemmy.blahaj.zone 25 points 7 months ago (1 children)

More like "Chat, is this real?" imo.

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[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 29 points 7 months ago (3 children)

When I first began learning HTML (way before CSS and the modern web), my most engaged moments were when things broke. Way more satisfying learning how to fix them than having it work right away. What a great observation / comment.

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[–] SapphironZA@sh.itjust.works 139 points 7 months ago (4 children)

This is amazing news. It's like being shown that Neutonian physics are wrong, so now we have the ability to come up with a better model, then massive advancements in technology can occur.

[–] BakerBagel@midwest.social 78 points 7 months ago (7 children)

We did find out that Newtonian physics is wrong. Einstein got famous for it and we now use general/special relativity and quantum phsyics.

[–] Rodeo@lemmy.ca 95 points 7 months ago (6 children)

No, Newtonian physics works just fine. Unless things are too big, too small, too fast, or too slow.

At least that's what a meme I once saw said.

[–] BakerBagel@midwest.social 50 points 7 months ago (7 children)

So it works fine on human scales, but for most of the universe it is inadequate. That means it's wrong. Quantum physics and relativity are also wrong since he are unable to reconcile the two, despite them both being the best models we have for their respective scales. We have known for the past century that we have only just begun to understand the universe, and that all our models are irreconcilable with each other, meaning that they are ultimately wrong.

Just because a model is useful doesn't mean it is right.

[–] Thorry84@feddit.nl 44 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (14 children)

Agreed, but it leads to people who are less knowledgeable to draw the wrong conclusions.

Basically for just about anything you want to do on Earth Newton works perfectly fine. You can send people to the moon using nothing but Newton. Two big things you need Einstein for is the orbit of Mercury and GPS satellites. So from a pure science point of view Newton is wrong or maybe incomplete. From a regular Joe point of view Newton is dead on. By proclaiming Newton is wrong, it leads to people concluding that all science is wrong, because there is always someone working on the next iteration. So people think vaccines are dangerous, wearing masks is dumb, herbs and spices cure cancer, global warming is fake and homeopathic shit does anything except remove money from their wallets. Because what do scientists know, they've been wrong all the time in the past.

Newton is not wrong, it's just incomplete for some very niche things. And Einstein fixed all of that so we're all good.

In reality it's good to always be looking to disprove something and create new and better knowledge. But only if that's your job and only for very niche things. We've got the basics down for most things on Earth and there is no reason any regular person should doubt that.

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[–] bloup@lemmy.sdf.org 31 points 7 months ago (7 children)

I agree with the essence of your point but personally I’d never use the word “wrong”, only incomplete. Seems weird to call Newton’s laws “wrong” when the only reason that we are willing to accept GR is that it reduces to Newton.

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[–] jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de 29 points 7 months ago

It's inaccurate, not wrong. Framing things in right and wrong misrepresents scientific progress in a way that leads to ridiculous conclusions like some post-modernist post-truth philosophers came up with.

[–] egerlach@lemmy.ca 21 points 7 months ago (1 children)

In fact, Lord Rutherford said that "ALL models are wrong, but some are useful" 🙂

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[–] Quadhammer@lemmy.world 23 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I'd like them to look for repeats of galaxies. Galaxies that may be the same but slightly different or in different parts of the universe. If the universe was its own black hole we might see like a sort of kaleidoscope effect

[–] Olhonestjim@lemmy.world 23 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

The trouble with that is the difference in time. Since the light has to travel such a vast distance, multiple images of the same galaxy will show different stages of maturity. Even the stars will have been recycled. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to ever demonstrate that two galaxies separated by billions of light years are actually the same galaxy in a curved Universe.

[–] paddirn@lemmy.world 19 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I believe that would be a Torus-shaped universe that could produce that effect, basically a donut where space loops back in on itself. I think it's something that's been considered, though it sounds as if there's no evidence for or against that idea, and it's not considered likely.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/07/21/why-the-universe-probably-isnt-shaped-like-a-donut/?sh=11e56b426e60

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[–] TomMasz@lemmy.world 123 points 7 months ago (4 children)

We have a very limited view of the universe so it's no surprise that our theories are often wrong or incomplete. The beauty of science is that when a theory proves inadequate, it gets replaced with a more complete one.

[–] lurch@sh.itjust.works 31 points 7 months ago (2 children)

yeah, but it's always a shitshow when someone brings alternate theories to the big bang. it's almost like back in those days when they burned people for suggesting the earth may be slightly less flat than expected.

[–] BakerBagel@midwest.social 32 points 7 months ago (3 children)

That's because alternative models like MOND or string theory end up breaking more things than they solve. Fixing the leak in your roof is great, but doing so by breaking the living room wall isn't really an acceptable solution.

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[–] Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 23 points 7 months ago

Don't dare question dark matter in front of a physicist.

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[–] Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 118 points 7 months ago (2 children)

“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…'” --Isaac Asimov

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[–] tal@lemmy.today 87 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (4 children)

The Hubble constant seemed determined not to be constant.

[–] underwire212@lemm.ee 56 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Sounds like a quote from the Hitchhikers Guide

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[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 81 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Dogulas knew:

I always said there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe.

-- Arthur Dent, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Radio Series.

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[–] anarchy79@lemmy.world 79 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (5 children)

Maybe Maybe there's something seriously wrong with the Universe? Why is it always US who are wrong?

[–] neo@feddit.de 53 points 7 months ago

Hey, it's me, the Universe. I just wanted to say, this is no longer working for me. And if it makes you feel better, sure it's not you, it's me. Please don't call.

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[–] Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 39 points 7 months ago (11 children)

It seems odd to me that the universe would be expanding at the same consistent spherical shape. I've seen plenty of explosions and they never look like that. The big bang, which consisted of literally all matter in the universe would surely be no different.

[–] phase_change@sh.itjust.works 101 points 7 months ago (6 children)

Except it’s not that they are finding the expansion rate is different in some directions. Instead they have two completely different ways of calculating the rate of expansion. One uses the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang. The other uses Cepheid stars.

The problem is that the Cepheid calculation is much higher than the CMB one. Both show the universe is expanding, but both give radically different number for that rate of expansion.

So, it’s not that the expansion’s not spherical. It’s that we fundamentally don’t understand something to be able to nail down what that expansion rate is.

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[–] xenoclast@lemmy.world 25 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

The only thing spherical is the visible universe from earth that we can see. Both in time and distance. Due to the expansion of space that volume is increasing.

The entire universe could be infinite and take on any number of infinite shapes. Our local universe could be completely different from the rest of the universe and we'll never be able to know..it's wild.

Recent experiments trying to determine what the curvature of space-time is in the visible universe has concluded that it's pretty much flat But it's entirely possible that we're just on a very very very large (infinite?) curved surface of spacetime that just looks flat to us..

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[–] Faresh@lemmy.ml 22 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

I'm no way an expert in this, but I've been told it's wrong to think of the expansion of the universe like an explosion where everything moves away from a single point, but rather that the space between each object is expanding, comparing it to the way the surface of a balloon expands (if you were to paint multiple dots on the surface of a balloon they would all move away from each other when you inflate the balloon), though I like to think of it as yeast bread expanding since that's 3d.

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[–] flying_sheep@lemmy.ml 20 points 7 months ago

Spherical? We don't know if the universe is of finite size.

As far as we know, it could just as well be infinite, and the expansion happens everywhere.

Everything is relative so the only thing we know is that the distance between galaxies increases. But we don't know if there's a “border” of the universe or not.

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[–] snooggums@midwest.social 38 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Yay! We are learning something new!

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[–] OhmsLawn@lemmy.world 34 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Over and over again. That scope is really opening things up.

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[–] Bristle1744@lemmy.today 34 points 7 months ago (7 children)

TLDR: Depending on where we look, the universe is expanding at different rates. We can now confirm it's not measurement error.

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[–] SanndyTheManndy@lemmy.world 22 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Good riddance, the answer can never be too simple.

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