Plus those who knew something about aviation didn’t laugh at the Wright Brothers, who were firmly in the mainstream. Being laughed at by ignorant yahoos is different from being an ignorant yahoo yourself.
I’m not specifically referring to political truth but rather truth in general.
I find scientific truth to be more interesting but it doesn’t change the validity of the hypothesis that a very small percentage of wackos are correct. There’s also the benefit of being able to prove a wacko is correct scientifically. This is not possible in the political arena.
But If the guy claiming we had unknown bacteria in our stomachs making us sick (somehow able to survive the acidic conditions) wasn’t crazy enough for you, here’s another one:
Roger Shawyer, inventor of the EmDrive. The guy sounds crazy, makes crazy claims about violating physics, and his invention looks like something built for a high school play about space travel. Yet the technology works and has the potential to be the greatest break-though in deep space travel to date, far more efficient than the ion engine. He’s still considered a crackpot by many even after NASA conducted a successful test of his engine. In contrast to the example above I think Shawyer may actually be a wacko. But he’s a wacko who may have invented something brilliant.
I can’t find anything that says it actually works as promised – that is, by creating momentum out of nothing. The explanations seem to be that there are forces from the power in the cables or that there’s a measurement error or something like that.
The Em Drive, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to actually work. As you noted, it would he a huge breakthrough if it did as it would be a reactionless drive, but as best as we can tell, this is not the case.
Yeah I would bet money at very bad odds that EM drive will go the way of cold fusion and faster than light Neutrinos. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and claims don’t come any more extraordinary than violating a building block of physics as fundamental as conservation of momentum.
I did check, and I agree, it is also interesting that the guys at Rationalwiki also looked at and came to also see this as underwhelming even if it had worked.
One recent review (used also by RationalWiki in their article) from Cosmology Science writer, astrophysicist, science communicator & NASA columnist Ethan Siegel, points at the debunking that so far has not had a good reply from the proponents of the emdrive.
Although there were many believers, the default scientific response is to be skeptical. Laws of physics are not so easily broken, and laws that have been well established under a wide variety of tests and conditions are even more difficult to break. When the OPERA collaboration claimed to detect faster-than-light neutrinos at the beginning of the decade, the default assumption was that there was a flaw with their experiment, not that Einstein’s relativity was suddenly wrong. When Pons and Fleischmann announced cold fusion, the default assumption was that their detection and measurement system was erroneous. And when Shawyer announced the success of the EmDrive, the expectation is that he was fooling himself.
But is that something evidence for new physics? Or were all the experimental teams fooling themselves, Sonny White’s team included? According to a new paper out this week, by a team led by Martin Tajmar, there was one effect that none of the teams accounted for: the magnetic fields produced by the electrical wires feeding the alleged EmDrive.
Tajmar’s results are exactly what you’d expect for the systematic error explanation: with a properly shielded apparatus, with no additional electromagnetic fields induced by the wires, there is no observed thrust at any power. They conclude that these induced fields by the electrical wires, visibly present in the other setups, are the likely culprit for the observed, unexplained thrust:
Our results show that the magnetic interaction from not sufficiently shielded cables or thrusters are a major factor that needs to be taken into account for proper µN thrust measurements for these type of devices.
To the best of our knowledge, then, rockets will still require propellant. The EmDrive isn’t a reactionless drive at all, and all the laws of physics should still work. In short, we fooled ourselves.
So, it’s a really crappy rail gun?
Worse than a Nail Gun. (“Shit, that’s good!” Piccolo in Team 4 Star Dragonball Abridged) 
Now, speaking about finding “The Truth” Many do malign Rationalwiki and Wikipedia, but in the search of the best facts out there many do miss the point, it is their cites the ones that one should look. Not only to verify the citations, but also the spin that a source may give you. The cites are also a treasure trove of information and data that then one can use to support arguments, indeed as Red from Overly Sarcastic Productions noted, you are not supposed to rely on Wikipedia alone, you need to look at the sources they used.
That video is a great illustration of why I don’t bother trying to track down the “Truth”, other than going to reputable sources.
That is good up to a point IMHO. One has to always be ready to do a check of an item once in a while to constantly test the quality of the sources one uses.
One shortcut I admit using:
When a source has a lot of topics, I find if they are more reliable than not by checking how they report on controversial issues that me or many others researched before; a few that trips many on the left or the right will do, like climate change that makes right wing sources go ape, or how GMOs make left wing sources go crazy too.
That is one way I realized that a left leaning source like Rationalwiki (that condescends like a Cecil on steroids) was better than many assumed by making fun of the ones that are anti GMO. They also did a good job with their reporting about climate change (with a lot of snark to the skeptic right-wingers) I loved the graphic they used for National or international scientific bodies that reject anthropogenic global warming:
[Tumbleweeds rolling in an empty field]
Now, Conservapedia’s (yeah I know, but this is a demonstration of my shortcut) entry on Global Warming starts as: “(AGW) is a liberal theory suggesting that human activity is causing the Earth to warm.”
Had to give up right there…
Their entry on GMOs is a plain stub with no position in favor or against, but it basically explains the technology.
I hadn’t seen this explanation. It was an interesting read, thank you.
I feel like those random wacko blocks and news sources are very appealing to people who feel like they “know they aren’t telling us something”. So once you relieve yourself of having to believe reputable news sources, it’s easy to glom onto the wacko stuff.
The simple reason I think Fox News is full of crap because they are constantly telling me that normal stuff that Joe Biden says is secretly horrible and horrible stuff Donald Trump says is really normal stuff misinterpreted. Like Fox is trying to translate from English to Moron.
I would submit that facts and reality (truth) can be two different things.
People should not debate facts, as facts are clearly observable and either happen or they don’t. But don’t assume that people who see the same facts will necessarily experience the same reality or reach the same conclusions about the “truth.” Reality is often whatever the hell we think it is.
I disagree. There’s only one reality, which each of us perceive correctly or not to different degrees.
You’re right in one sense, completely wrong in another.
IMO two good tests for evaluating arguments and the people making them are fairness and numeracy.
The first one is the person fairly and accurately describing the other side and do they show evidence of learning from their opponents? For example do they make arguments like “While I disagree with the overall thesis X, the specific point Y is valid”
The second one is simply whether the person has a good grasp of the key numbers and how they fit together. Media pundits are often innumerate and operate mainly at the level of stories and slogans whereas in reality most major issues can only be understood by analyzing and interpreting the key numbers.
Sure, in a “physics problem” sense. But we all see those facts through the prism of our own experiences and biases.
These are good tests. And few news sources can pass them these days.
Facts and proof are true…even if nobody believes it.
Errors, irrelevancies, and outright fabrications are false…even if everybody believes it.
No lie, no matter how cherished, no matter how many believes it, has ever miraculously transformed into the truth.
No truth, no matter how despised, no matter how many rejects it, has ever been converted into a lie.
But what if they’re peer-reviewed and published in a high-impact journal?