> > "I think it was General MacArthur who said: 'You're remembered for the rules you break,'" Rush told the Mexican YouTuber alanxelmundo.
> The problem with this approach is that the CEO failed to distinguish between human rules (to which MacArthur was referring) vs. laws of physics. Laws of physics do not know about, care about, or yield to any human action or intention. They are absolute, and will kill you if you get on the wrong side of them.
To be fair, there's a difference between the actual laws of physics and our beliefs about the laws of physics. You can get the math right but misinterpret its practical implications. For example, around the 1940s, full inertial guidance of missiles was widely believed to be physically impractical due of Einstein's equivalence principle, which makes acceleration and gravity indistinguishable. If you propose to create such a guidance system, many experts would attack its feasibility.
From time to time, researchers with an unorthodox view would then successfully challenge these false beliefs with hard evidence. Today, everyone knows that the equivalence principle is only a thought experiment, it's valid within a infinitesimal point in space and time. Meanwhile, for practical purposes it's indeed possible to distinguish acceleration and gravity - for example, the gravitational gradient between different heights are measurable - so it was simply a precision measurement problem in engineering.
Of course, I'm not saying it was what OceanGate did, due to inadequate testing, they certainty did not have any hard evidence on the safety of its design...
> The problem with this approach is that the CEO failed to distinguish between human rules (to which MacArthur was referring) vs. laws of physics. Laws of physics do not know about, care about, or yield to any human action or intention. They are absolute, and will kill you if you get on the wrong side of them.
To be fair, there's a difference between the actual laws of physics and our beliefs about the laws of physics. You can get the math right but misinterpret its practical implications. For example, around the 1940s, full inertial guidance of missiles was widely believed to be physically impractical due of Einstein's equivalence principle, which makes acceleration and gravity indistinguishable. If you propose to create such a guidance system, many experts would attack its feasibility.
From time to time, researchers with an unorthodox view would then successfully challenge these false beliefs with hard evidence. Today, everyone knows that the equivalence principle is only a thought experiment, it's valid within a infinitesimal point in space and time. Meanwhile, for practical purposes it's indeed possible to distinguish acceleration and gravity - for example, the gravitational gradient between different heights are measurable - so it was simply a precision measurement problem in engineering.
Of course, I'm not saying it was what OceanGate did, due to inadequate testing, they certainty did not have any hard evidence on the safety of its design...