Kevin O'Malley <[email protected]> wrote:
> ***There currently is no accepted theory of gravity. There is a law of > gravity but no widely accepted theory. > That is correct. As far as I know there is no theory explaining inertia either. And in fact, when the Wright brothers got a patent for their invention, > they did not have to generate the equation of flight, did they? > Well, they generated hundreds of pages of equations, but that was engineering, or applied science, not first-principle physics. Scientists did not understand the physics of flight until the 1920s. See the quote from Crouch, here, under Appendix B: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJthewrightb.pdf The Wrights were VERY GOOD at first principle physics. Their engineering equations did take into account many fundamentals. I wrote earlier that discovery comes before theory, which comes before technology. That was not always the case in the past. Technology up to the 20th century sometimes outpaced scientific understanding. Before 1600 there was no modern science and all technology outpaced understanding, in a sense. Crouch notes this: "How was it possible to build a flying machine without first understanding the principles involved? In the late twentieth century, we regard the flow of technological marvels from basic scientific research as the natural order of things. But this relationship between what one scholar, Edwin Layton, has described as the 'mirror image twins' of science and technology is a relatively new phenomenon. Historically, technological advance has more often preceded and even inspired scientific understanding." Someone such as Rossi might come up with a technology, and from that we might reverse engineer the physics of cold fusion. That does not happen often these days but we cannot rule it out. - Jed
