This sort of argument is routinely used to dismiss the laws of thermodynamics as merely 'theories' and to then move on to the most outrageous violations of known physical law.
We are pretty sure of what we are sure of and we are pretty sure of what we aren't sure of, impressions notwithstanding. Science is a method, not a set of facts, and it has a built in mechanism to allow greater insights to replace lesser ones. As long as we stick to science we'll one day find the limits of what is knowable.
I don't think you and GP are in disagreement. The scientific method to let greater insights replace lesser ones is precisely to try and fail at falsifying observations that violate known physical laws.
No physical law is holy for this purpose, although scientists will necessarily have heuristics for what presumed observations they consider good enough to examine closer. Evidently, the EmDrive observations made the threshold! And now we know for sure. Well, close enough, anyway.
"A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability. Therefore the deep impression that classical thermodynamics made upon me. It is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced will never be overthrown, within the framework of applicability of its basic concepts."
(Albert Einstein)
"The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."
As plato would say the wall is choosing to hold us up. We may not understand why but it continues this way. At any point this could change. It wasn't until the theory of gravitation that we were able to define our obvervation as a general law.
"Newton's law of universal gravitation is usually stated as that every particle attracts every other particle in the universe with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers"
This is still a law. We haven't proved this to be true even though it looks to be true.
Laws can get superseeded.
The phlogiston theory is a superseded scientific theory that postulated the existence of a fire-like element called phlogiston (/flɒˈdʒɪstən, floʊ-, -ɒn/)[1][2] contained within combustible bodies and released during combustion
Can’t say I agree with the idea, but it’s certainly interesting to consider and at the least should help strengthen or discard a few assumptions!
I think he’s conflating the process with all the other human factors involved. Sure, Galileo maybe did some shady stuff to convince people of his arguments. But that in no way makes a telescope stop working the way it does.
If you want to go down a rabbit hole, Nonlinear dynamics is another way to understand science. Many systems operate from a different paradigm of causality; it happens in biology, also common in fields like weather prediction where a large dataset is analyzed for patterns and then hypotheses are driven off the data in the opposite direction.
This has caused some controversy in the scientific community because researchers have been caught using the methodology to "reverse engineer" hypotheses without disclosure, effectively gaming the system.
Huh? I was more trying to imply that there are probably no limits to what is knowable. Or at least, if we stay scientific, we should never believe we’ve reached the limits.
> it has a built in mechanism to allow greater insights to replace lesser ones. As long as we stick to science
Well you're not sticking to science when you assume any non-explained phenomenon is "impossible" and dismiss it outright.
Science has a long list of "impossibles" that have been proven to be possible. Though of course that list was mostly of phenomenon we couldn't ignore.
Saying "EMdrive is impossible given our current knowledge therefore it is not worth measuring" is tautological!
Electricity and magnetism were seen as separate phenomenon as well and it seems a lot of people would be opposed to even try to put a compass next to a wire!
The only thing I know is that the skeptics don't get the Nobel Prizes.
Good, they measured, and as expected, no thrust. Cool.
What makes this article so refreshing and so compelling is that they replicated the NASA results, and then explained and eliminated them. Another "We don't see anything and it's impossible anyway so you guys are idiots or charlatans" would not be helpful. This is.
Just because nothing is 100% knowable ultimately, doesn't mean all unknowns are equal.
Everyone who doesn't want to invest 10000 human lives and a small countries total resources trying to find out if maybe oxidization isn't really exothermic but just somehow always looks that way (is fire hot?), isn't guilty of being incurious or religious.
Part of the problem is that it's much easier to come up with a new perpetual motion machine or reactionless drive concept than to prove that it doesn't work. After seeing them all fail, at a certain point people are going to stop paying them any attention. Oh, this time it uses X force in Y configuration? Go away until you have data, we could be more profitably spending time on just about anything else.
It's only difficult because typically it involves a claimed effect right at the limits of what's measurable. A real effect wouldn't have to be barely perceptible, would it?
The person who discovered nitroglycerine didn't somehow find the amount they could make to be right on the edge of detection.
> Part of the problem is that it's much easier to come up with a new perpetual motion machine or reactionless drive concept than to prove that it doesn't work.
We are pretty sure of what we are sure of and we are pretty sure of what we aren't sure of, impressions notwithstanding. Science is a method, not a set of facts, and it has a built in mechanism to allow greater insights to replace lesser ones. As long as we stick to science we'll one day find the limits of what is knowable.