- the latest research is the best
- if it’s not in a refereed journal it isn’t true
- if it is, it is

- You’re skeptical about Derren’s skepticism..? hmm… not come across this one. Well if you think the European Space Agency researches “bullshit science” feel free to contact them. – Phillis

Fascinating subject though. What the Softpedia article didn’t say was that it derived from a presentation by the scientists at a one-day ESA conference, i.e. not from a published paper. Such conferences are a notoriously unreliable source of science news. Scientists often give presentations on very speculative ideas and initial, unconfirmed experimental data. I haven’t yet been able to work out if these experimenters ever published their peer-reviewed results. Can anyone help?

The coil and electric charge … interesting that it then becomes magnetic . from logic reasoning you’d say it pushes everything away. Logic from not knowing anything about it yet that is. Hm … yeah, yeah . I was hanging in the coil twirling without electric charge .. Ah, . . Oops, keyboard fails, wont type .. slightly light headed … I must be in the wrong state of mind .. not charged enough with electricity I guess (now that I type this it works fine again .. I swichted state .. ).

Einstein .. if only he had seen forward a bit …

There is another issue. We are well aware that general relativity is not the full story. It is not compatible with quantum mechanics. The current most promising idea is that the full theory is string theory, which at low energies simply reproduces the predictions from general relativity, but at very high energies, when quantum mechanics becomes important, the theory is better behaved than GR.