Today’s Crackpot May Be Tomorrow’s Nobel Prize Winner
Guest blogger Geoff Nicholson writes:
I just noticed something very curious…. Airplanes fly more when exposed to direct sunlight, hence, confirming you thesis that solar energy is the way to go. Check out this video of airplane traffic over a 24 hour period. Note that airplanes tend to fly toward the sun… and when the sun is overhead, airplanes leap off the ground and fly around a lot. There’s a very high correlation between exposure to sunlight and energy utilization. Clearly, aluminum, titanium and stainless steal have a similar characteristic as chlorophyll in plants. I think this must be a new, bizarro and highly efficient transformation of solar energy into both potential (altitude) energy and kinetic (velocity) energy. What do you think? 😉 lol
(….and then later)
I think I answered my own question about metal acting like chlorophyl. Clearly, aircraft must not be constructed of stainless steel but, rather, “stainless steal” as I had misspelled it in my prior post. This unnatural material “steals” the quantum energy from the photon impact and, instead of heating the stainless steal, causes the material to get highly irritated and then the airplane leaps off the ground and flies around. The musings of a new-age, mad engineer. Mad I say.
To which I reply:
Great stuff, man. Hilarious. Thanks for the post. And I love that video. Happy Thanksgiving to you and all other particpants at 2GreenEnergy.
I hate to sound like I have no sense of humor, but what you’ve written here reminds me that there are a great number of ideas being circulated out there, which I try to categorize as:
1) Pseudoscientific garbage from well-meaning crackpots, i.e., people who actually believe in them.
2) Pseudoscientific garbage from charlatans, i.e., people who do not actually believe in them, but hope to profit from the gullible.
3) Solid but relatively uninteresting, inconsequential, “me-too” ideas.
4) Unproven but theoretically possible and super-transformative ideas. These of course, as the things that get us excited. Unfortunately, they’re also the things that get squashed by big, powerful interests that are threatened by the prospect of change.
Having said this, I believe there is no amount of training that anyone could possibly have that would enable him to get this categorization right in 100% of cases. And we all need to keep our arrogance under control; we need to keep in mind the fact that civilization 100 years from now will look back on 2009 with a mixture of pity and ridicule, as we were so pathetically unable to break out of our entrenched paradigms and see the world from a 22nd century viewpoint.
In any case, let us bear in mind that often, many times, today’s crackpot is tomorrow’s Nobel Prize winner.
