Flawed Science

Yeah, suddenly I'm wanting to write about scientific mistakes and dead ends. This very neatly dovetails with Tuesday's "mad science" theme so I am hopeful of relevant prompts.

That happened to the Wright Brothers. While they were working on their airplane models, they realized that one of the reference books was wrong, and the wrong numbers in there were making things not work in the models. So they cobbled up a wind tunnel and used models to redo the calculations. I think it was the equations for wing shape and lift. There was a documentary that mentioned it, very cool stuff.

This is the kind of thing that happens a lot in The Blueshift Troupers where people are dealing not only with alien biotech but also the changes to Earth-origin lifeforms that sometimes happen in transit. When people are trying to figure stuff out, sometimes they get it wrong, and other folks build on that and it causes problems.

I'm cool with that too. But it immediately makes me think of the joke about the computer user who used the disc tray as a cup holder -- because that was what she needed it to be. I strongly suspect that kind of divide would happen in working with alien technology: you could get it to do something and maybe even something useful, but not necessarily what it was meant to do or did best.

Agreed! I'm currently reading Necessity's Child. All honor to the Caylon.