National Post: Climate Change is Bogus. Warp Drive, on the Other Hand…
You may remember, as I do, how quickly even the most fervent anti-science hyper-skeptics went into fits of excitement over the announced discovery of the Higgs boson earlier this summer. I doubt any of them could tell you what a Higgs boson is, beyond the fact that some wag once called it “the God particle,” and the nickname stuck. That didn’t seem to matter. The moment that some physicists announced that they’d completed their analysis and had the expected result, people who have been droning on for years about how the evidence for climate change “just isn’t persuasive” dropped everything and jumped onboard the God Particle bandwagon.
I was especially bothered by the National Post’s uncritical reception. The National Post is Canada’s climate change denialist media par excellence. Their columnists host an annual Junk Science Week, dedicated to junking real science, especially climate change. The irony in the Higgs boson case was bad enough. But this one takes the cake:
Warp drive is possible. And NASA is on it…
Alcubierre’s formula was reviewed and held to be… practically unusable. That may have changed.
That’s Matt Gurney in this week’s National Post, sharing his justifiable excitement at the news that a NASA physicist who thinks he’s come up with a usable warp drive. On paper. According to mathematical formulae. Gurney is optimistic, although he admits that “it might take 100 years, or a thousand.” Contrast that with his fellow columnists, who think climate change was invented by a bunch of ignorant socialist lefties.
The reference, incidentally, is to a concept known as an Alcubierre drive. It’s one of several hypothetical methods of faster-than-light space travel. As a rule, nothing can travel through space faster than the speed of light. Miguel Alcubierre argued in the 1990s that you could essentially “cheat” by creating a special region of space around the ship, which he referred to as a bubble, which could flow through space-time like a wave. The ship would never travel at faster than the speed of light within the bubble, but the bubble itself would move at much higher speeds. The science Gurney is excited about is a new paper from a NASA scientist arguing that the energy requirements for the Alcubierre drive might be a fraction of what Alcubierre thought they would be. Hence, interstellar space travel is possible.
Well, maybe. Alcubierre didn’t explain how to create a warp bubble, or how to get your spaceship out of one once you’re in it. The drive also needs about a tonne of exotic matter with negative mass (which we don’t have any of, and can’t get any of, and which may not exist anyways). These are not small problems. So I’m truly befuddled at why the Post would be promoting warp drives but dismissing climate science.
I should point out: I don’t think interstellar travel is actually a kooky idea. The first plans were drawn up by British and American researchers in the 1960s, with cool names like Valkyrie, Daedalus, and (hilariously) Longshot. Maybe if we’d put some serious thought into the subject, we’d be well on our way to experimenting with starship design by now. Instead, we’re fighting religious idiocy and facing the prospect of less than a century left before the only planet we do have becomes mostly uninhabitable.
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Troy
Just a minor nitpick. There wasn’t any waggery involved in the monicker, ‘God Particle’. Merely a squeamish publisher that didn’t want to release a book titled, ‘The Goddamn Particle’. Or rather, perhaps the real waggery was the attempt to call it the Goddamn Particle, and the author was overruled.
Sixth Estate
Interesting. I didn’t know that.
kootcoot
It must be because there isn’t a herd of researchers, Dave Suzuki and Al Gore getting fantastically wealthy yet from the God particle and oh yeah, making dem poor mouth Fossil Fuel pushing, automobile building and super highway constructing corporations suffer to the point where they will have to sit on Hastings and Granville with a begging bowl rather than just getting direct deposit corporate welfare directly from Ottawa and Washington DeeCee.
Oh yeah, I forgot those long suffering producers of clean coal!
jrkrideau
It’s just a novelty piece. Fast, easy-to-produce, and non-controversial (well, presumably so, outside some scientific or engineering circles).
It reminds me a lot of old Popular Science articles–did you know that we are supposed to be using personal helicopters to travel now. I think the predicted date was for 1972 when they would take over from the car.
I would not book a ticket just yet. My personal helicopter pad now has roses.
Sixth Estate
Helicopters, hovercrafts… well, we did get computers. And cell phones with the power of a 1960s supercomputer. So it’s not all disappointment.
I take your point, but I also stand by mine. A newspaper that is going to consistently dismiss scientific research with massively important real-world implications should think very carefully about the value of implying that NASA is just a few long steps away from building a starship with a warp drive. Especially by a major columnist.
Norm Farrell
Late in WWII, rumours spread that Nazi scientists had developed unusual flight technology that was behind many reports of UFOs . (Close encounters of the third Reich?) The stories persisted post-war and are still believed by elements of the loony fringe.
However, we do know that rumours of strange objects in the sky helped gain British, American and Canadian funding for research. One was Project Y. The Avrocar that resulted was little more than a hovering frisbee. The machine’s real success was in stimulating funding that kept scientists working.
Project Y failed but, as you point out, more followed. The flacks realized that cool names and friendly stories planted with lazy journalists were necessities of getting the dollars in place.
The militarists don’t talk much about drones and other weapons that allow them to kill anyone, anywhere anytime. They’d rather talk about space travel or time machines. It makes their work seem so worthwhile and harmless.
Sixth Estate
Indeed.
Although in all fairness, I can’t imagine the military application of an Alcubierre starship. Anyone who thinks they might be able to get the materials necessary to build one, pretty much by definition, wouldn’t need to talk about it in order to guarantee a steady supply of grant money. In this case I suspect it’s more like what jrkrideau was talking about — a quick, easy story about whizz-bang fringe “science” that sounds really cool.
Which is fine for Popular Science, but I won’t allow an anti-science newspaper to get away with this sort of thing easily.