= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
pnrjulius comments on The Crackpot Offer - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (69)
LOL. Color me for both, Andrew. Perpetual motion using magnetic levitation in a vacuum at 10. Attempting to come up with a simple proof of Fermat's Theorem at 20 (if there was an easy way to determine n-roots of non-primes, I'd have been SET! :-) )
Actually, perpetual motion using vacuum energy might really be feasible, since the vacuum energy keeps expanding itself... at present, it looks sort of like a loophole in the laws of nature.
On the other hand, quantum gravity may close this loophole.
Expansion of the original point: Finding various "loopholes" in the "laws of nature" that would allow FTL/perpetual-motion/infinite-scalable-free-energy/[insert-absurdly-surreal-technology-here].
I did that from age 16 (initially as a bored-by-this-math-class-let's-think-about-something-else tactic, gradually becoming more serious) onwards to around 19, when I finally realize that the "loopholes" aren't actually in the laws of nature, just in how shitty our (or in many of those cases, mine specifically) understanding of them is.
If there exists any loophole in the laws of nature such that something impossible becomes possible through this loophole, then the map was upside-down, and it was a feature of the laws of nature all along; the laws of nature had always permitted it, we just didn't know how. The Universe doesn't rape itself.
Building pmms based on loopholes in the laws of physics is probably a good way to design experiments. Physics says X reality says Y.