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In the iconic 1990s TV series The X Files, David Duchovny’s FBI agent-paranormal investigator Fox Mulder has a poster on his office wall. It shows a flying saucer in flight, with the slogan “I Want To Believe”. It perfectly sums up the dilemma the character faces. And while I’m guessing that only a few Hackaday readers have gone down the full lizard-people rabbit hole, wanting to believe is probably something that a lot of us who love sci-fi understand. It would be a fascinating event for science if a real extraterrestrial craft would show up, so of course we want to believe to some extent, even if we’re not seriously expecting it to appear in a Midwestern cornfield and break out the probes any time soon.
By All Means Believe. But Don’t Wreck Your Career
Outside the realm of TV drama and science fiction it’s a sentiment that also applies in more credible situations. Back at the end of the 1980s for example when so-called cold fusion became a global story it seemed as though we might be on the verge of the Holy Grail of clean energy breakthroughs. Sadly we never got our Mr. Fusion to power our DeLorean, and the scientific proof was revealed to be on very weak foundations. The careers of the two researchers involved were irreparably damaged, and the entire field became a byword for junk science. A more recently story in a similar vein is the EM drive, a theoretical reactionless force generator that was promising enough at one point that even NASA performed some research on it. Sadly there were no magic engines forthcoming, so while it was worth reporting on the initial excitement, we’re guessing the story won’t come back.
When evaluating a scientific or technical breakthrough that seems as miraculous as it is unexpected then, of course we all want to believe. We evaluate based on the information we have in front of us though, and we all have a credibility pyramid. There’s nothing wrong with having an interest in fields that are more hope than delivery, indeed almost every technology that powers our world will at some time have to overcome skepticism in its gestation period. Perhaps it’s best to say that it’s okay to have hope, but hope shouldn’t override our scrutiny of the proof. Of course I want a perpetual motion machine, who wouldn’t, but as a fictional engineer once allegedly said, “Ye cannae change the laws of physics”.
An Example Here In 2024
All this introspection has been brought to the fore for me by something very much in the present, the so-called hydrogen economy. It’s difficult to ignore our climate emergency, and among the energy solutions aimed at doing something about it, hydrogen seems very promising.
It’s really easy to make from water by electrolysis, there are several ways to turn it into useful energy, and the idea is that if you can store it for later use you’re on to a winner. We’ve seen hydrogen cars, trucks, aircraft, heavy machinery, trains, and even the gas supplanting methane in the domestic grid, so surely the hydrogen future is well under way, right?
Sadly not, because as many a pilot project has shown, it’s difficult to store or transport, it makes many existing metal fittings brittle, and the environmental benefit is often negated by the hydrogen being generated from higher carbon electrical supplies. We still want to believe, but we can’t claim it’s delivering yet.
Whenever we feature a hydrogen-based story, as for example with this experimental storage tech from Swiss researchers, there is no shortage of comments about all of hydrogen’s shortcomings, and some even accuse us of somehow being the snake-oil salesmen shilling the questionable product. I feel this misses the point, that even though in almost all cases the battery is for now the better option, we cover interesting technology stories regardless of judgements over their eventual success. Hydrogen has enough real science and engineering behind it that its problems might one day be overcome, thus we’d be doing our readers a disservice if we didn’t cover it. There are sometimes newsworthy stories upon which we very much take a credible stand based on opinion, but when it comes to pure tech stories such as a hydrogen vehicle we’re simply reporting on the story because we find it interesting and we think you will too. We don’t know that the breakthrough engineering work won’t occur, but we do know that it hasn’t yet.
So when looking at a piece of technology that’s not delivered on its promise, ask for a moment whether there’s a likely “yet” on the end of the sentence without too much of a suspension of credibility. You might find yourself pleasantly surprised.