I love reading about old timey scientists like Galileo, Copernicus, and the like. I’m fascinated by how much work was being done on things like trying to measure the speed of light before running water was commonplace. From that, I’m gaining a growing appreciation for how much resistance a new idea encounters.

Take the guys who were the first to suggest the Earth and planets were going around the Sun, instead of the Sun and planets going around the Earth. They were hesitant to openly speculate something out of fear for their lives. Giordano Bruno was burned alive for refusing to stop disagreeing with church doctrine. Galileo spent the final years of his life under house arrest because of his support of the heliocentric model. He probably was not also burned alive because he capitulated when the catholic church demanded that he stop professing one of the main things we celebrate him for today.

It’s easy to blame those incidents on crude, rustic times, but other (less homicidal) flavors of mental resistance still exist. When Einstein published his paper on Special Relativity, he declared the aether (the stuff where there is no stuff) unnecessary. A little while after that, he published on General Relativity, which basically requires an aether. But the momentum of the collective mindset was so tremendous after the first paper that even today, ‘aether’ as a concept doesn’t seem to get any real consideration, much less, research.

The same goes for free energy. You can hardly say those two words without everyone’s internal voiceover saying “yeah, but the laws of thermodynamics say blah blah blah, no free energy”. Their attitude becomes dismissive and uninterested, and the conversation ends before it begins.

It appears to be part of the human condition to occasionally be closed minded. The more outlandish the proposition being faced, the stronger the reflex. These papers are pretty far out there, so I’m trying to caution against some of that, to apply some gentle pressure on you to observe your reactions to what you’re reading while you read it. People generally need to warm up to radical changes in their worldview pretty slowly. Drastic change is implied here, but nobody is requiring you to agree to anything, ever. So, relax. Read. Disagree freely, but politely. Don’t set anyone on fire.