• Small french village continues 2016 by constructing a solar roadway
    74 replies, posted
Solar Roadways are idiotic from the simple fact alone that we already have a more cost-efficient method to use the exact same technology, just not in a retarded way. It's not like it's a really inefficient baby step in the direction of much better solutions, it's effectively just a retarded step-child to the progress of tech that did not need, and may even be hurt in its development by this sort of gimmicky shit.
[QUOTE=pentium;51582255]Okay then sure. Shit on it and say it doesn't work.[/QUOTE] Bit of an overreaction, no? _Axel and Ganerumo are right. There really isn't any benefit to actually testing solar roads because no matter what, they're going to be terrible and it's far easier and cheaper to build them somewhere else and properly.
[QUOTE=AbbaDee;51582344]Bit of an overreaction, no? [/QUOTE] You guys literally just spent two pages beating the dead horse and you say I'm being harsh?
[QUOTE=pentium;51582352]You guys literally just spent two pages beating the dead horse and you say I'm being harsh?[/QUOTE] Six posts are beating a dead horse now ?
See the problem is that there is still a finite amount of resources out there. Solar cells aren't cheap to make by resource/fuel used to get the end product. This is a flamboyant way of saying they're going green but they're needlessly flinging money at something that is broken by law. All this energy and effort can be better put elsewhere. Such as an array over a parking lot, or crazy yet, of your own roof. These are only small stretches, but how many miles of failed design do you need before you realize you've wasted resources and money into a slapshod pipedream?
[QUOTE=bdd458;51580474]offer subsides for private individuals to have solar panels installed on their homes. its why my house has them lol, the state government took a huge portion of the bill.[/QUOTE] I'm sure you'll find that a bunch of rapid conservatives will froth at their mouths over any thought of government spending like that, when that's exactly the point of government spending: for things that are a benefit to everyone but that private entities will never pay for on their own.
[quote]If someone claimed to have designed a perpetual motion machine, would you say we should build it even though it would violate conservation of energy?[/quote] If it works in small scale, yes. It's a perpetual energy machine -- and it'd be a bit ridiculous to state that our present understanding of physics is the best understanding we'll ever have and that there [i]simply can't[/i] be mistakes we've made about things such as it being impossible to violate CoE. There may exist a loophole for such a machine to work - the universe came from somewhere and something after all and all this something coming from nothing also would violate our understanding of physics - so even in just the face of that it's a bit odd for us to state we've got it 'all figured out'. We haven't even figured out why gravity works the way we're pretty sure it does. Besides, the problem here isn't "it can't work" (e.g. perpetual motion machine). The problem is "it's not efficient enough to bother with it".
It's a good thing then that perpetual motion machines have been studied in the past and basically smashed into bits by the laws of thermodynamics which are quite simple enough for our current understanding of physics to suffice. Unless we find a way to literally break reality in order to supply more energy, then shit like perpetual motion machines cannot and never will work. And even if they did, they'd be weapons more than generators because an object that is able to supply its own power would create an infinitely expanding loop of creating energy out of nowhere, and unless you break the laws of physics even further by making it capable of storing infinite amounts of energy, then it would eventually give in and discharge all of this self-generated energy everywhere.
[quote]Unless we find a way to literally break reality in order to supply more energy, then shit like perpetual motion machines cannot and never will work.[/quote] Again, you're assuming that we know every single variable and potential interaction. We do not. What if there exists a loophole if we exploited how gravitons work (assuming that's what is actually causing gravitational interactions rather than something like dark matter/energy/vacuum force)? What if there's a strange interaction between quantum particles that allows us to store energy more efficiently than should be possible? Neither of those would 'break reality'. They'd just demonstrate that our understanding was incomplete - which as best we can tell, it is incomplete. How incomplete and what we're missing, I don't think we could know in advance. It is [i]incredibly unlikely[/i] we'll find a way to subvert the CoE as we understand it -- but that isn't the same as 'it being impossible' or even that our understanding of the CoE is fully correct. So it should be given an according amount of scrutiny and a very healthy dose of skepticism - as it's much more likely that whoever designed the thing just didn't measure what they were doing properly or were just straight up lying for attention - but it'd be a lot of hubris to state it 'breaks reality' when we don't even fully understand what 'reality' is yet. Heck, I'd call it arrogant.
But to [I]design[/I] a perpetual motion machine one would need to understand physics more accurately than we currently do to be able to use those hypothetical unknown variables in an advantageous way. But then the person in question would have already developed a new theory of physics based on actual real life experiments that support this theory. If someone came out of nowhere and claimed to have designed a perpetual motion machine using nothing but classical physics, then he'd just be talking out of his ass. There's no reason to construct a prototype for something that would contradict our current understanding of physics [I]without either a reasonable explanation as to why our current understanding is flawed, in which case making simpler experiments first would be much more appropriate, or actual experimental evidence that contradicts the theory.[/I] Saying that we might as well try it when there's no indication at all as to why it would work is just delusional. If things were that simple then we could simply replace engineers and scientists with randomized algorithms and save a lot on wages.
Your mistake being that you presume that we can't discover things by accident or while attempting to discover other things. As I wrote above -- if it works in small scale (and under neutral conditions where outside variables can be eliminated) it has earned the right to be studied and figured out. Just because we may not be able to guess on [i]why[/i] it works doesn't preclude that it could [i]work anyway[/i]. Even if the inventor of the device is wrong in his presumptions on how it works (e.g. 'it doesn't violate our present understanding of CoE but its principal mechanism is mind-wave-emotions') that doesn't mean the device can't work - it just means the inventor is a fool and it'll take us a while to figure out whether it's actually working and, if it is working, to figure out the actual hows and whys. Black box devices can very easily exist while we do not have a complete picture of how physics works. The likelihood of any one person managing to create such a device though is extremely unlikely -- but 'extremely unlikely' is a very different category than 'impossible' or 'breaks reality'. In fact I'd say it'd be 'delusional' to continuously reject such a black box device that continues working under all experimental conditions because it would force us to re-evaluate our understanding of the CoE -- that'd be literally rejecting real data because it doesn't match our preconceptions. That'd be about the least scientific thing I can think of.
[QUOTE=Firgof Umbra;51582578]Your mistake being that you presume that we can't discover things by accident or while attempting to discover other things. As I wrote above -- if it works in small scale (and under neutral conditions where outside variables can be eliminated) it has earned the right to be studied and figured out. Just because we may not be able to guess on [i]why[/i] it works doesn't preclude that it could [i]work anyway[/i]. Even if the inventor of the device is wrong in his presumptions on how it works (e.g. 'it doesn't violate our present understanding of CoE but its principal mechanism is mind-wave-emotions') that doesn't mean the device can't work - it just means the inventor is a fool and it'll take us a while to figure out whether it's actually working and, if it is working, to figure out the actual hows and whys. Black box devices can very easily exist while we do not have a complete picture of how physics works. The likelihood of any one person managing to create such a device though is extremely unlikely -- but 'extremely unlikely' is a very different category than 'impossible' or 'breaks reality'. In fact I'd say it'd be 'delusional' to continuously reject such a black box device that continues working under all experimental conditions because it would force us to re-evaluate our understanding of the CoE -- that'd be literally rejecting real data because it doesn't match our preconceptions. That'd be about the least scientific thing I can think of.[/QUOTE] I was talking about someone claiming he [I]designed[/I] such a machine, not that he built it. I was bringing up a scenario where there was no physical or theorical evidence that it would work and a prototype wasn't built yet. In that case there's no reason to build one since there's absolutely no reason it would work. Just like there's no reason to build solar roads since there's no reason it's going to be viable.
There's a quote I always like to refer to whenever the topic of perpetual motion machines comes up: "The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations—then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation—well these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation." — Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, 1927. The second law of thermodynamics is by far the most absolute statement that can be made in physics. There is no way to circumvent it. Any suggestion otherwise should be treated as uneducated babble.
[quote]There is no way to circumvent it. Any suggestion otherwise should be treated as uneducated babble.[/quote] Any absolute statement about physics when we lack a complete understanding of physics should be treated as self-congratulatory and arrogant wankery. Though, yes, it's proven very very very hard to circumvent so far and we don't have any present leads that I know of to suggest that we'll find one any time soon -- if ever. But to state we absolutely will not ever find a way is putting the cart before the horse; the only way to know absolutely that we won't ever find a way is to complete our knowledge of physics. It would be scary if we managed to be able to bend or even break that law -- and would have further perhaps even scarier implications -- but that scariness shouldn't scare us into labeling such a possibility as 'uneducated babble', much less 'impossible to circumvent'. Our understanding of physics right now is a black box. Just because we think we've figured out what it does doesn't mean we actually have. Much as your math teacher may have reprimanded: if you can't show all your work you can't demonstrate a complete working knowledge of the problem you've solved. Arriving at the same answer as the correct solution with an incorrect formula doesn't mean your formula is correct; even if it manages to arrive at the correct answer consistently. So long as your formula is flawed, so will your knowledge be. If we assume that the solution must be 'X + 1 = Y' and reject all assertions that it could be anything else as it's never yet failed us we may never discover that it's actually '(Z!) * X + 1 = Y'
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