Possible evidence for tabletop cold fusion [Times Online; registration required] to be announced this week. If true, this will change the world. Or rather: the enormous change that would come when the cheap-oil energy boom has to halt in a few decades won't come. Which amounts to much the same thing. It's a ripple of the future, anyhow.
And another comment: Do the big effects tend to come from things that aren't predictable/known from conventional science? Does science always just explain what's already there? How often are the predictions themselves steps into the unknown? I've talked a lot to people [Julius, Stephen] about the future of maths and physics. Julius says the next 100 years are going to be a glorious golden age of maths, of science. Counterintuitives all over the place. How do those measures I've mentioned just now change in those kind of eras? Do those kind of measures pre-empt those eras? Can we see them coming?
Possible evidence for tabletop cold fusion [Times Online; registration required] to be announced this week. If true, this will change the world. Or rather: the enormous change that would come when the cheap-oil energy boom has to halt in a few decades won't come. Which amounts to much the same thing. It's a ripple of the future, anyhow.
And another comment: Do the big effects tend to come from things that aren't predictable/known from conventional science? Does science always just explain what's already there? How often are the predictions themselves steps into the unknown? I've talked a lot to people [Julius, Stephen] about the future of maths and physics. Julius says the next 100 years are going to be a glorious golden age of maths, of science. Counterintuitives all over the place. How do those measures I've mentioned just now change in those kind of eras? Do those kind of measures pre-empt those eras? Can we see them coming?