This is such a powerful meme but it's completely wrong. The Wright brothers & a century of airplane builders were engineers. Scientists first dismissed flight as impossible even after it happened, then made up a bunch of irrelevant equations to pretend to explain how it happened.
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1419765657080578052
Everything that matters to our modern life was built by engineers and workers who got their hands dirty. Scientists sat in cushy universities writing textbooks after the fact indoctrinating generations to think it was their post-hoc explanations that built things.
Lord Kelvin was one of the world's most important scientists when airplanes were invented. This is what he thought:
"I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning, or of the expectation of good results from any of the trials we heard of.”
"I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning, or of the expectation of good results from any of the trials we heard of.”
Astronomer & polymath Simon Newcomb in 1903:
"Aerial flight is one of that class of problems with which man will never be able to cope"
This was the same year in which the Wright Brothers, two bicycle shop owner high school dropouts, built the first working airplane.
"Aerial flight is one of that class of problems with which man will never be able to cope"
This was the same year in which the Wright Brothers, two bicycle shop owner high school dropouts, built the first working airplane.
Three years after the Wright Brothers flew, The London Times dismissed their claims of flight as fake, and was instead writing:
“All attempts at artificial aviation are not only dangerous to human life, but foredoomed to failure from the engineering standpoint.”
“All attempts at artificial aviation are not only dangerous to human life, but foredoomed to failure from the engineering standpoint.”
For more on the anti-scientific miracle that is the airplane, check out my paper: Slowdown papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
An excellent explanation of the relationship between science and engineering, and the economics governing them, is in Terence Kealey's amazingly important book: The Economic Laws of Scientific Research:
libgen.rs/book/index.php…
libgen.rs/book/index.php…
The first commercial steam engine was invented by Simon Newcomen, a barely literate ironmonger who had never come in contact with a scientist. James Watt was a technician, not a scientist, & explicitly denied that any scientific theories influenced his invention.
The scientific method is practiced by engineers building things, experimenting to see what works. Professional science consists mostly of nerds quibbling over each other's irrelevant papers & agreeing they all need more funding.
Nothing in science needs trust. I don't trust anyone to get in an airplane. I look at the track record of airplanes & decide the risks are acceptable given the benefits. "Trust science" is how you end up with billions of lives destroyed over virus hysteria
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1419765657080578052?s=19
Why won't you just Trust The Science of tin cans!??
https://twitter.com/RDagoist/status/1419932842516094977
The bottom line is that if the Wright Brothers had done what @paulg says and trusted the scientists, they would have agreed with Kelvin & Newcomb and never attempted flight.
The New York Times had already smugly DEBUNKED the possibility of the airplane ever existing, exactly two months before two high school dropout bike mechanics invented it
WHY WON'T THE WRIGHT BROTHERS TRUST THE SCIENCE!?
WHY WON'T THE WRIGHT BROTHERS TRUST THE SCIENCE!?
https://twitter.com/city_rabin/status/1336877593342193665?s=19
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