Note that "low speed effects" means "every speed generated by humankind outside of a particle accelerator".
I'll let the GPS guys they can stop with the relativistic corrects, yeah?
Then there's refraction across different media, theory directly derived from relativity concepts. Or that transistor width is constrained by quantim tunneling effects, which are also based in relativity and not Newtonian physics.
You were referring to new science of the form, "everything we know is wrong". My point is that that doesn't really happen. In modern science, the things we know... we know. We observe them up, down, and crossways. We measure and remeasure and confirm. New science can't change what we have already seen! Any new understanding of the universe must be consistent with old understanding. F'rex: We have observed gravity's scaling with the square of distance on the scale of mountains to the scale of galactic clusters. Any new idea of gravity must be consistent with those observations, or the new idea of gravity is clearly wrong.
New things in science don't say, "You were wrong." They say, "Oh, and also this..." New science adds to old, it does not replace the old.
So, any form of FTL that we get must still be consistent with everything else we have ever observed. And that puts some very restrictive boundaries on it if it does exist.
This is a subtle misrepresentation. Firstly, I'm discussing theory and models, not observations. The switch to pretend I'm talking about observations is a bit disappointing. Of course a new theory has to continue to explain our observations. This is trivial, and frankly insulting that you'd even attempt to lecture that obsevations already made don't change.
Secondly, you slyly elide the fact that observations are by no means comprehensive. Just like Newton observed falling apples (apocryphally) but could not detect relativistic effects on falling apples doesn't mean that this missed bit didn't lead to nuclear bombs. What we observe is incomplete.
Finally, restrictive boundaries have always existed. A bomb that creates short-lived minature suns wasn't contemplated during Newton's time -- there were some restrictve boundaries in place. But a new theory leading to new observations, consistent with old, led to a moving of boundaries.
The characteristic of believing you're at the end of history, scientific or otherwise, is evergreen. Ironically.
You are being way too vague here. In general, determining a value for G with greater than 0.1% precision has proven difficult. But that *IS NOT* the same as saying it is variable on things we didn't understand. Claims that G varies are, as yet, entirely speculative. G has been hard to nail down, and ego tends to make us speculate that this is the fault of G, rather than a fault with our experiments to measure it.
We have to experiment to determine the value of G, which is not directly measurable but instead is the constant we've invented to make our math balance, because we have no theory to explain it. G usn't a theoretical value we're confirming, it's a value we have to experiment to find out how big it should be (and what units we need to assign it) to balance an equation. Same with any other constant we use to balance our maths. The habit is to forget these represent failures of understanding because they're so damn useful.
[Quite]
"that much" isn't really all that much, though. We don't need to know much to make FTL travel a highly questionable proposition.[/QUOTE]
Of course it's questionable. I've said that multiple times, including in the post you just quoted. (You elected to snip that bit, I suppose so you could chastise me?) Questionable is what science is about. I just don't believe we're at the end of history for science. I rationally accept we could be, but it seems we've been too oft proven wrong on that account to have faith.
