Comments on: Getting hot & bothered over the “12inch miracle tube”

By: Frank the SciencePunk

Frank the SciencePunk — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 14:48:25 +0000

I love the idea that you could have “one of these in every home in Britain”. Surely you’d only need one, which would eventually release enough energy to power the country, if not the entire world.

Steorn must be gutted - they’ve at least these guys have a working prototype.

By: John Matthews

John Matthews — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 23:05:03 +0000

I hypothesize… if you’d discovered some sort of previously unknown energy source in water and had invented a device that uitlized this energy that (paradoxically) created more energy than it consumed would you a) develop a 12 inch (metric please Daily Mail!) version to use as a lowly immersion heater, or b) build an industrial version that could power entire cities?! Why is this is not an answer to our energy woes? Unless, of course, its a complete load of bull!!

By: Shinga

Shinga — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 11:17:44 +0000

This is interesting for so many reasons. We have an on-going household riff about lowering expectations everytime there is an story on the TV that requires some simple maths to be understood and the interviewer/presenter says in their ‘communter on the Clapham Omnibus sort of way’, “Ooh, complicated”. People are being taught not to expect to understand the sort of science in this story and effectively, “Don’t bother your pretty little head about it. Basically, some sort of science-y miracle occurs”.

This lowering of expectations from being confident enough in your basic science knowledge to look at this and say, “Well - that fractures many fundamental ‘givens’ in science but how plausible is it” is precisely what happens when people are educated to be “consumers of science not producers of science“.