It’s probably difficult to really get a good analogy for this.
Think of the most outlandish, pie-in-the-sky idea that might be possible in your field. Something that would make everything so much easier, but that everyone in your field knows a simple problem that prevents it from being possible. Imagine this idea repeatedly showing up since at least the 8th century, put forward by people who are steadfastly ignoring that simple problem.
Then imagine someone in your field being called a “genius” in your field for presenting an updated version of that pie in the sky idea, not saying a thing about the simple problem, and blithely saying things like “there may be some math errors”, “no experts have looked at this yet”, and “If someone says it doesn’t work, I’ll be the first to say, it was worth a shot.”
Would this be a problem? Would that way of responding to “controversy” about the idea actually be constructive?
In a different context, I’d say the “you have to be prepared to be embarrassed” statement is great. But the other assertions and statements kind of blunt that.
They do have a long history of having been imagined before. I’m guessing this one’s getting attention because someone at NASA is imagining it. Typically they come from sci-fi authors or crackpot inventors who don’t have NASA rep behind them.
Nothing wrong with imagining a new take on it, it’s nice to have jump gates, wormholes, warp drives, etc. to choose from for FTL or generation ships and cryoships for non-FTL. Likewise we can choose between ansibles or subspace for FTL communications, or just use courier ships if FTL comm is impossible.
Still seems like sci-fi, and I’m not sure what this helical drive idea brings that other reactionless/inertialess drive concepts don’t already provide.
Look, all I’m saying is that new take should involve more than just special relativity, or else we already know the math doesn’t work for extremely straightforward reasons. I stand by what I said above:
I’m not against considering weird new ideas. I’m against pretending that maybe this time the clever guy can square the circle, all prior mathematics showing why all the attempts fail somehow notwithstanding.
The reason people are so down on this is press treated it like the former when it’s plainly the latter. Like the new mystery organism thing, it’s just false advertising. And at least that seems to have been a translation mistake:
I thoroughly agree, tripping over something as simple as that says some things about reporting standards. I was not offering it as an example of a particularly high bar to clear.
Yeah. There’s been a lot of noise about how journalists are so pressured by deadlines they don’t have time for this and that, but it’s more important than ever they be accurate.
Okay, I knew the words, but now that you write it that way, I wonder if someone who didn’t speak French retyped the release into a translator app wrong. It’s easy to jump a line or two when you don’t know what you’re transcribing.
Perhaps, but oh my! The meaning of “exposition” is very nearly the same in both languages. That’s the thing: English and French are chockablock with cognates.
Yeah, there are faux amis, but even they are often decipherable from the common word roots. Some of those you list (partition, extra) actually share the English meanings, but add a definition (“score”, “superlative” respectively).
Translation makes things strange, though. I know someone who went back to the old country in their early 20s after moving to Canada as a child. She still spoke her mother tongue, but she was nervous about traveling abroad without her parents for the first time.
She was taking the train to visit some relatives, and checked each station as the train pulled in because she wasn’t sure how many stations before she had to disembark.
It took three stops before she realised she was reading the regular noun “station” as the proper name of each station. Fortunately she hadn’t missed her stop yet .
Heh! Not being in contact with the maternal language makes things strange.
I had a friend back in Concordia University who was born as part of the Greek community in Alexandria, moved to Paraguay as a young girl, and thence to Montreal. She thus had a good assortment of languages available to her: Greek, Arabic, Spanish, French and English.
I recall she visited Greece for the first time while she was at Concordia. I recall she came back to Canada indignant - she had been told in Greece that she spoke Greek like an Armenian.
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