Comment on “Floating under a levitating liquid” and related issues

Floating under a levitating liquid at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bodsuTucSxQ

and https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2643-8 (for pay, just for reference)

This is not science and sharing, but what I have come to call “eye candy”. Pretty pictures and people playing with phenomena, but not showing the context and background. You start with showing the whole of the apparatus, explain the parts, the power used, the frequencies, masses, measurements. materials and mechanics. You explain how you got to this point and how many experiments, people, time, money, supporters, effort went into it. You also explain who benefits.

But this particular only showing a tiny window on things you are interested in, and playing with, is what keeps this from being science.

Can it be replicated? If this is truly intended to help teach the human species (if it is on the Internet, the sole purpose is for the whole species, regardless why the group posted it), then tell people how it is made, how it works, who is working globally on it – the whole thing, not a tiny glimpse of some tiny part of the whole.

Where are the measurements? If it is science, it has to be quantitative (part of reproducing, them methodically checking the whole space of possibilities). What is the pressure in the air in the different compartments? What is the mass you have been able to manipulate? Where are you measurements and calibrations of liquid-air, liquid-liquid, liquid-gas (it is not simple dry air and probably contains many droplets), gas-gas interfaces?

Most particularly what are the costs? – power, heating, noise, vibration of the supporting structure? All kinds of things that will be relevant if you want to levitate real object in air, or real liquids in air, or real solids in liquids, or real anything in plasma. I don’t know why schools are teaching this “Don’t bother to tell you methods”, “Don’t tell enough for anyone else to easily check.”, “Don’t try to work with others and build global communities to advance the whole” mentality.

I know this is “Nature”, a mass media science company. Not a hurtful description. I am not putting anyone down. It is “mass media” in the push stuff out sense. It is science. Some of the best descriptions of new things come out in the magazine and online. But it always stops short of including community. And it is a commercial entity, ultimately intended to make the owners money for whatever they want to do. My point is, a commercial company can take responsibility for teaching the human species – not just entertaining whatever millions of people who happen to buy the magazine, invest in the company, read things online. I haven’t checked, it could ten tens or hundreds of millions. But it is not 7.8 Billion of which about 4.8 Billion have some access to the Internet.

The rules for publishing on the Internet are evolving, and the whole is extraordinarily inefficient. I know, because the original Internet Foundation – that was supposed to set standard of practices, measure global and partial efficiencies, investigate what needs to be done, and who is doing it – was cancelled for US political reasons. I took over TheInternetFoundation (net org com) from Network Solutions in Jul 1998. They told me why it was cancelled, and asked why one person would try to do what a billion dollar a year Foundation was supposed to do. I said, better one person than no one at all. My conclusion was “the Internet is for everyone, no exceptions’, and its primary purpose is the survival of the human species.

I know you don’t care about such things. But I am trying to suggest you at least think the 865,348 viewers (9 Oct 2021) of this video. Count the cost of their time just watching. But far more important, count the time for them to integrate what you have shown into the whole of human knowledge. Me, I can read every human, computer, scientific, mathematical paper or topic on the Internet (some take longer than others). And this one would require hours or days of tracing some really basic things that you could just tell me and these others – how was it made, how does your apparatus work, where are the actual models and data you are working on?

You can share those globally. NOT in PDF, it kills every type of data, equation, simulation, calculation (the living model) and forces it into text on the screen. Put your tools and data where the whole Internet can work together on it. Now I have been trying to sort out how the Internet is going to sort out. The groups building large central collections for monopolies, they mostly die under their own weight. They are too large without community involvement. The money goes in the pockets of a few and is not related to the goals of the people who are charged. Lots of issues. I won’t try to summaries more than 23 years of study, experiments, surveys, tests and cases.

“acoustic levitation” OR “magnetic levitation” OR “electrostatic levitation” has 7.4 Million entry points (Google, 9 Oct 2021) and those groups are NOT working together on the Internet. It is a truly global community, where every one and every group is working strictly alone, except by word of mouth. I have examined in detail about 15,000 such global communities (they ought to be global communities, but they are collections of people all reinventing the same basic things and never rising above “play”).

It looks like I need to add a new term , “vibrational” “levitation” with 2.29 Million entry points (Google, 9 Oct 2021) and also global.

Now one last thing. Most of these groups think, “we can make a killing, if we can just develop this far enough to sell”. And like most small groups, never scale to where that is feasible, and again it always only benefits a few, so it will fail. There are rules for the Internet that are as real and repeatable and sad sometimes as “things mostly fall when you let them go, unless you provide the necessary power to balance the momentum flows”.

I see hundreds of millions of individuals and groups working with “acceleration” (“force” OR “forces” OR “power” OR “energy”) and its 296 Million entry points. Force and gravity permeate all society, and all individual lives. But the quantitative modelling and use of it, is scattered among hundreds of millions of groups, all out for themselves, and not for the survival and prosperity of the human species and its related species and worlds.

Richard Collins, Director, The Internet Foundation