End Discredited Community Status of Beyond Light Speed

In regard to the common philosopher's stone of "perpetual motion", I would argue that this can highlight the distinction between the sciences and the arts. A new social or political theory may take decades to be accepted. First 10% adhere to the idea, then 30% and so on. Science however is rather like the soldiers "marching up and down" as Monty Python would say. Scientists must turn as quickly as the shoal of fish in water under attack regardless of what went before. Provided the experiment demonstrating and supporting the new proof can and is repeated faithfully across the world. The lesson from the "discredited community" of cold fusion theorists was an important evolutionary step amongst the online research community and even academic papers written on the subject.

The amount of investment going into "perpetual motion" research is very, very small. If some repeatable proof of such a possibility were found, within a week rather than decades money would flood in and 99% of scientists are in agreement there was no question about it not being a known truth. Contrary to this, in the social sciences (despite the label it is an "art") you could become a leading expert simply by studying the social experiment of the 1960s. Nothing has much progressed nor will do so until the next wave. The consequent political instabilities it would engender mean that there is no hurry for such new progress for purely academic reasons.

Science however is distinct from the arts as it always pursues an advancing leading edge. If you studied the computers of 5 years ago and down to the smallest detail, you would still not be regarded as anything more than an eccentric and certainly not an expert in computing.  For all these reasons I do not view it as scientific to say that because 99% of scientists believe you cannot go faster than light, it means logically there is a 99% probability you cannot. The same in theory must therefore apply to any perpetual motion "challenge". However personally I might question whether "perpetual motion" is really more a concept of metaphor than a valid scientific probability. Against this background, funding must push the known path and scientists cannot risk their budgets by advocating that perhaps the 1% probability is true and worth investigating. They must generally march and turn in total unison as if on the military parade ground.

End Discredited Community Status of Beyond Light Speed continued

The issue of faster than light speed travel is even more difficult to challenge because "proofs" cannot be easily conducted in gravity-less laboratory. No laboratory on earth can switch-off gravity, ever! Even with all the NASA investment in space, the test bed will always be very fragile and certainly not allow the "brick and mortar" ballistic experiments that can be carried out on earth. Hence the proofs on a limit are rather more theoretical than practical. Something at odds with how science normally operates, and clearly visible in rogue proofs such as clocks losing time when taken around earth in a jumbo jet. You don't need to be a psychologist to see the pain it causes scientists to admit their limitations and to eagerly accept such proofs. Even though such proofs actually, and clearly, do fall well short of the rigorous benchmarked testing to which all other scientific areas must stand-up and are subjected to.

Until there are laboratories of mass scale and of earth-like toughness in space, no proof of any theoretical velocity limits are scientifically valid as proven laws. That is if the proofing process that normally correlates "theory to law" is applied with the same rigour to this issue as it is applied elsewhere in science. Especially since the desired applications (reaching the stars) would be outside the customary gravitational factors we on a planet must be bound by. It is an error to imagine the test laboratory results in space as making any sense to us. To assume we can do so is to project our "real life" experience into non-gravity environments which are to all intents and purposes from our human perspective actual "nonsense" environments.

In that respect "perpetual motion research" is not akin to "beyond light speed research", accept that they are both unacceptable avenues for 99% of the research community. The former seeks to prove itself against the basic law of energy conservation, while the latter cannot seek proof as gravity is a component of the energy conservation laws and cannot be factored out via clinical isolation.