Yes, we have a very good working theory of the *manner* in which gravity bends spacetime. But we can't answer even the most basic question about its *method* - why does mass bend spacetime? Or have we found some clues when I wasn't watching?

since 2001, which was at least 14 years ago.

I hate it when people show off their mad math skills.

I thought AJAX was for cleaning toilets. Are we taking about becoming a janitor?

So you are in your 30s now? Then you are too old. They want graduates who will work 50+ hour weeks for low pay. Around age 28 a little red light starts flashing on their hands and they are replaced before they start wanting s career or work-life balance.

Actually you are kinda showing your age in your post. The kids abandoned facebook, there are too many old people on there. To be honest I've lost track myself... Do they still use Snapchat?

Isn't it one of the basic assumptions of modern cosmology there's no particular reason to assume "empty" space is currently in the lowest possible energy state? I believe one of the respected "Big Bang" theories involves a point in the false vacuum spontaneously decaying to a lower energy state, setting off a chain reaction that raced (actually, still is racing) across the universe at almost the speed of light, spawning modern mass-energy in its wake. And one of the unnerving takeaways was that we have absolutely no idea whether we're at the lowest possible energy state now, or if that could happen again. We may look up one evening and discover that the night sky is beginning to glow, as the wave front of a new chain reaction enters the visible universe.

But I have to say I don't see that your other objections follow. How does empty space having some as yet undefined sort of "traction" to it (the only thing a working drive would directly imply, competing theories aside) imply that it's in a non-minimal energy state? And how would either imply that you could extract energy from it? It would seem to me that so long as the drive consumed at least as much energy as it imparted as kinetic/potential energy then there's no net energy extraction: rather we're dumping energy "somewhere" to get local momentum. Perhaps calling for a unification of the Laws of conservation of momentum and mass-energy.

Or are you directly addressing the warp drive theory? I admit I haven't actually looked at the details yet.

>Here they could have the key to warping space/time, and the first use is to putter along in orbit cheaply.

Seems beautifully appropriate to me. I love a technology that scales gracefully, and at this moment in or development cheap maneuvering around the solar system would unlock whole new worlds of potential, especially if it can be used to climb into orbit. Plenty of time for warp drives after we figure out how to live in space.

Or do I know enough of mob psychology to draw some unflattering parallels with how democracy works in practice?

Hmm, tough call... I'll say 2.718 Telemundos.
New interactions would probably imply either new forces, or new properties of the particle - and either would pretty much require rebuilding the theories upon which particle physics is based.

Of course we're also departing from the fact that there's presumably nothing but microwave photons, virtual particles and passing neutrinos within the thruster's resonating chamber. The photons can't escape, and wouldn't provide more than a tiny fraction of the measured thrust even if they did. Available neutrinos probably don't offer anywhere near the reaction mass necessary even if they could be teased into interacting with the microwaves. That leaves the virtual particles, and I suppose the fabric of spacetime itself. So a poorly understood phenomena, and a complete unknown, prime candidates for discovering new physics weirdness!

You can bet that if a theory of gravity came out and it threatened the political or economic status quo, it would provoke a political response. When Edwin Armstrong's invention of FM radio started to gain market traction, RCA used it's political influence to have the FCC take the frequency band Armstrong's radios worked on shifted, making all the radios he'd sold useless. And if that had been done today, the next thing you'd have is is an army of PR flacks and FOX selling the public on the idea that FM radio was "tainted engineering".

Climate science isn't politically tainted. That's only PR BS. If you want to see for yourself, use Google Scholar to search for climate science paper abstracts from the early 50s to the 80s -- well before anyone outside the field heard the term "global warming". You'll be able to actually see the scientific consensus shift from global cooling to warming over the course of thirty years, completely outside the public spotlight.

Things like "cold fusion" and this could actually be useful if not managed by irresponsible teams seeking to make headlines for themselves. It can be important to learn when there's things that can throw your measurements off that weren't immediately apparent. You don't need headlines to get the necessary followup; researchers in the field read the peer-reviewed literature and most definitely will take interest in such unexpected results.

I would.

I've worked in a physics lab (fusion). I've worked in a geophysics lab. Here's the thing about experimental Earth science: you're not working with a idealized, simplified object under controlled laboratory conditions. You are working with something that is immense and messy and which inherently generates a lot of contradictory data. It doesn't make the big picture impossible to put together, it just means it takes a lot of hard to obtain data to shift the consensus one way or the other. It took forty years for anthropogenic global warming to become the scientific consensus; the first papers were published in the fifties and the idea that the world was warming was hotly contested for at least three decades

Contradictory data is something fundamental to empirical science. Empirical science generalizes from contradictory evidence.

When I was in college, "conservative" meant someone who was cautiously pragmatic. Now it refers to someone who adheres to certain conservative axioms -- a radical in other words (radical == "root"). Radicals by their nature prefer deduction from known truths to induction from messy evidence. This is evident in your citing mathematics as the gold standard, despite the utter inapplicability of its methods to geoscience. Mathematics doesn't deal in messy, mutually contradicting truths. Nor does political orthodoxy of any stripe.

That's why "conservatives" latch on to local phenomena -- like the snow outside their door -- that seem to confirm their preconception that the globe is not currently warming. In mathematics the number 9 disproves the assertion that all odd counting numbers are prime. In climate science the medieval warming period in Europe doesn't disprove that the globe as a whole was cooler at that time. To radicals the existence of contradictions in the supporting data is corrupt. To scientists the lack of contradictions in data is fishy.

Left-wing radicals are equally confused by apparently contradictory data points, and likewise seize on the ones that "prove" their universal truths (e.g. that vaccines cause autism).

I'm a Comcast customer. Despite the horror stories they've largely been fine for me and I haven't had any major issues. I have their 100Mb service and consider it on the high end of being a reasonable value. I only subscribe to one of their low end TV packages (costs about $35/month) because their TV offering are WAY overpriced for what you get. There are about 10-15 channels I give a crap about and I'm not willing to pay more than I am now. I've thought about dropping the TV altogether but I do like to watch some TV now and then. TiVo makes it bearable to do so. A package with more channels would double the price I pay and I'd get maybe 3-5 extra channels I might watch. Just not good value.

Basically I'm waiting for ala-carte TV or a service through our network connection that provides basically the same thing. (No Netflix, Hulu, etc aren't there yet) I consider TV a frivolous luxury and I'm not about to drop $200/month for a bunch of channels I'll never watch.

You can't fix stupid.

You just gave me an awesome business idea. I'm going to open up a shop in Williamsburg selling stuff like bulk coax and ethernet taps so the kids can cable their apartments retro-style.

While some are claiming this means

I don't know who the "some" are in that sentence, but no one at the link provided in the story is saying this means NASA created a warp drive.

Stop, already.