What if ?

[elecar]

Forest, using the SMOT example physics says it can not be done, thermodynamics and all that. It can not be that Physics law #2 would still stand if a SMOT was  (1) running itself (2) providing excess energy even if that energy was no more than lighting an LED.
Surely science could not have it both ways, either the SMOT is impossible or physics is wrong.

[forest]

Forest, using the SMOT example physics says it can not be done, thermodynamics and all that. It can not be that Physics law #2 would still stand if a SMOT was  (1) running itself (2) providing excess energy even if that energy was no more than lighting an LED.
Surely science could not have it both ways, either the SMOT is impossible or physics is wrong.

elecar


Buy a small solar panel, connect led bulb to it and put it directly toward sunshine. Got it ? Impossible ? Any thermodynamics law is violated ? Physics is right, but scientists are mistaken as always.

[TinselKoala]

Hi TK, that is for a politics forum. I am putting out a "what if" with regard to OU.  I am guessing it would not go down well with any scientist as it would go against all the laws they so often quote.
What would make it even worse is if some uneducated, illiterate person was to prove it. Could you just imagine the fall out. All those years of college and uni, reciting verse and line about all those laws, only to find they did not hold up to something as simple as a SMOT.

No, I completely disagree.
All it would take is one genuine case of a properly performed experiment that reliably indicated an anomalous effect, even a tiny bit of OU or excess COP the way we define it here. One repeatable and consistent experiment or demonstration. Then "conventional" science and scientists would be all over it, trying to repeat it and explain it. You could not keep them away with fences! Graduate students are always looking for research projects and the more grad students there are the harder it is to find something actually new and relevant to research for their PhD dissertations, which are supposed to add to knowledge, not just repeat what's already known.
It doesn't matter whether this repeatable demonstration comes from a twelve year old autistic kid who doesn't even speak, or from someone like a Richard Feynman. Sure, if it came from Richard people might pay more attention to it _at first_, but no matter who or from where it comes, the important thing is repeatability and confirmation of claims. When those things are done, for real, then there is no problem from capital-S Science at all. Real scientists do change their minds when they are proven wrong! It happens all the time. It might not "go down well", as you say, and some scientists might never give up their opinions, but this is a matter of personality, not science itself. We've all seen cases where a FE device or theory is soundly disproven but the core group of believers hangs on and seems utterly impervious to reason. Some people still believe in MyLOW, ffs. Scientists, the people, are no different. Science, the discipline, though, is self-correcting and what we "know" is a broad consensus and is always being revised, updated, and yes even corrected.
"Show me the sausages". If your sausages are real, then no scientist will be able, reasonably, to dispute them. But the problem is that we haven't seen any real sausages. Some people, like me, might include the word "yet" at the end of that sentence, but the sausages that we might someday see will _not_ be violating any fundamental laws that we "know" to be true, like 2LoT, conservative gravity, and so on.

[forest]

TinselKoala


Nice dreams, but look what happened to cold fusion....

[TinselKoala]

TinselKoala


Nice dreams, but look what happened to cold fusion....

A perfect example of what I'm talking about. There are still many completely conventional and legitimate scientists trying to replicate the various CF/LENR claims that have been made. Major energy corporations have sponsored some of this research. The problem with CF/LENR is not with the scientists who are investigating it, but rather with the pseudoscientists who pretend to do research and report it, like the recent paper by Levi et al. reporting on a Rossi reactor demonstration. There are so  many holes in the presentations of the CF "believers" that it has not been accepted by "mainstream" science, and this is because of the shoddy work and inadequate reportage of the believers, not because the "mainstream" is closed to new ideas.
The reason that the Bell Labs reports of the invention of the transistor were believed and accepted is because the science was good and repeatable. And now look where the transistor has gone. The reason that the P&F reports were not believed and haven't been accepted is because the science was bad, the reported phenomena not repeatable. Not because science is closed to new ideas.