Le plus ça change…

The lesson for today is from The Gospel according to Morrissey.

I’ve been struck by a few things in the last couple of days where I’m surprised that other people are surprised when history repeats itself.

The first was an article on an amazing invention that a colleague gave me from the Mail on Sunday. It’s a tabloid, so there was a big chance it would irritate me (snob? moi?) and yes it does on two counts. First is the bit “it violates almost every known law of physics”. I did less physics than many people, so I may well have got this wrong, but I think that the only law it violates is the first law of thermodynamics. Admittedly it’s a fairly fundamental law, but it’s not like it’s breaking the law of gravity, or the law of cause/effect and permitting time travel. Grrr…

The second way it annoys me is the overall tone of the article. It implies that scientists will have to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new model of the world – oh dear, the sky is falling in, our beautiful tablets of stone are all wrong. Scientific arrogance really annoys me (I appreciate that there are both humble scientists and lay people who are scientifically arrogant). People thought that with Newton’s laws we’d pretty much got things sorted, and science just had to fill in a few gaps. Then – bang – quantum theory and relativity come along and suddenly Newton’s laws are shown to only be useful under certain (everyday) conditions. But we haven’t got it completely sorted now either – why shouldn’t something else come along and disrupt things again. And again… Just because we have iPhones and vacuum cleaning robots and Twitter doesn’t mean We Have Got There Now. I’m sure the Romans were pretty chuffed with their legions and surveying tools etc. and thought that their science was pretty groovy too.

The current international financial problems are another instance of history repeating itself. An unavoidable part of the capitalist system is greed – economists for some reason seem unhappy when things don’t grow. So if you give people enough power (like those in banks in the US) and new ways to be greedy, and surprise surprise, at least some of them will be greedy so much that it hurts other people. I don’t like the prospect of interest rates going up because of the mortgage, but I’m not surprised that there is a problem in Big Finance.

A slightly less depressing note, where someone other than me is doing the ranting, is a nice article about web things from Joel Spolsky.

3 thoughts on “Le plus ça change…”

  1. Okay, this thing puts out “up to” (I so love that little piece of meaninglessness) twice the energy put in. And, oh look, it has a “secret catalyst”. Probably runs on Kentucky Fried Chicken then.

    If it works, then the answer is to build a bloody great big one and attach it at the power station end, so that the power station can pump out twice as much power, and then attach another one and so on. That way we will only need one power station and since energy will cost nearly nothing to produce, there won’t be any point us spending out on buying these devices for our homes.

  2. I agree it sounds too good to be true, but to be fair they say it turns electricity into more heat.

    In order to do the chaining together that you suggest you’d need to convert the heat produced by step X back into electricity to use as the power for step X+1. The conversion of heat to power won’t be even 100% efficient (unless there’s another miracle device somewhere 😉 ) in which case at best you’re likely to break even i.e. you can add extra steps with no loss of power, rather than adding extra steps increases power.

  3. And it has that old staple ‘previously unrecognised source of energy, stored at a sub-atomic level within the hydrogen atoms in water’. good ol’ hydrogen, it’ always seems handy for a bit of secret energy storage.

    I take your general point here Bob, but really can’t take this seroiusly 🙂 another ‘cold fusion’ I imagine.

    And as for the independent scientists (York were paid 15 grand for the tests) checking it this is what Jim Lyons has to say about himself:

    http://www.scimednet.org/testimonies.htm

    And they don’t seem to have got far since 2003

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/05/18/ncell18.xml

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