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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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There are a couple of pretty boring "anti-gravity" explanations that don't violate "the laws of physics," - I don't think negative mass does, but more prosaically propulsion utilizing the Meissner effect is quite possible.

Of course, that isn't technically anti-gravity in the sense that there's no spacetime manipulation, but they would function like "antigravity" does in the movies (and wouldn't get picked up by e.g. LIGO). The released email doesn't go into specifics, so it's hard to tell if it's antigravity or "antigravity."

The war crimes claims seem at least somewhat founded, which in my mind enhances the credibility of the report, but OTOH if the guy had a break with reality he might mix fact with fiction. Or maybe he was upset about the war crimes and decided to mix it in with the UAP stuff he had read about on the news or 4chan, knowing that would get the war crimes story more traction.

I mean, actual negative mass might be physical. But the basic research needed just isn't there, and it would seem pretty hard to hide a facility better-equipped for fundamental physics experiments than the civilian ones.

The first link seems very dubious in a lot of ways. You can't just strengthen the Earth's magnetic field - at least, not without an attractive force that cancels out the repulsion from the Meissner effect. I also don't see a way that this could be used to thrust a sphere in arbitrary directions; tacking is a thing (although not as much of a thing as in water), but a sphere has no keel to tack with. When I see "spherical craft" I think "balloon", and when I see "balloon moving very fast as seen by something moving very fast" I think "you misjudged its distance from you".

NB: I say that antimatter production wouldn't be impossible to hide because a purpose-built antimatter-making accelerator (which would be far more efficient than current accelerators) wouldn't actually need to be all that big, and because the van Allen belts have antimatter in them which could possibly be tapped without being world news.

But the basic research needed just isn't there, and it would seem pretty hard to hide a facility better-equipped for fundamental physics experiments than the civilian ones.

This is the core claim, that the USG has sequestered an elite cadre of physicists and kept their discoveries under wraps. One observation in favor of this claim: the dearth of fundamental breakthroughs in physics for the past fifty years.

You don't just need to sequester the physicists; you need to sequester their equipment, too. Notice the sheer scale of facilities used for fundamental physics work these days; you're not hiding a 500-kilometre synchrotron. And a lot of the facilities that are built aren't even in the USA.

The necessary co-ordination to keep this straight quickly approaches Illuminati-complete.

Perhaps there is some physics research that doesn't require a 500 kilometre synchrotron.

Sure, but in a lot of cases this leads to "random scientists not part of the conspiracy could find it". Again, many of the facilities that are built aren't in the USA. And if your conspiracy includes all high-quality scientists everywhere (e.g. the Science Adventure series of VNs), your conspiracy is isomorphic to the Illuminati.

Secret engineering projects are substantially easier to conceal than secret basic science, due to basic science being universal and thus independently discoverable.

And yet, history is replete with nations making fundamental scientific discoveries before anyone else and using those to their advantage militarily before their competitors catch up. One way we know that this has happened in the US is that a scientist makes a breakthrough that could be militarily useful, that breakthrough is then immediately classified, and then other scientists are briefed in and conduct classified research and development based on the breakthrough. That can give you a significant first mover advantage because everyone else is still at the starting line, waiting to discover the fundamental breakthrough, and you're racing forward.

Also the entire premise of this situation is that it wasn't successfully concealed and China now has it as well.

Can you point to some in the last century? It's gotten harder over time, after all.

Atomic weapons and radar stealth are the two biggest examples.

I think laser-projected plasma generation is another that hasn't been declassified yet.

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