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The Story of Starlite, the 'Blast Proof' Material (bbc.com)
OpenSourceAllTheWay writes: The BBC has posted an interesting video series on "Starlite," a white paste developed in the 1970s and 1980s by British hairdresser Maurice Ward that could completely insulate any object it coated, like a raw egg or a piece of cardboard, against extreme heat sources -- even acetylene torches, nuclear blasts and lasers capable of heating an object to 10,000 degrees Celsius. Anything Starlite paste was smeared on could withstand extreme heat exposure without the coated object melting or combusting or heating at all in the process. The heat-proof paste got a lot of attention around the world when it was demonstrated on the BBC's Tomorrow's World TV program in 1990. Ward was an eccentric inventor -- not a classically trained scientist -- who came up with the formula for Starlite by experimenting wildly with different substances. He got the initial idea for Starlite when he was burning garbage in his backyard one day and one particular piece of garbage simply would not burn at all. Ward thought that Starlite would be worth billions when commercialized. He let NASA and other scientists test Starlite -- it did work as advertised -- but never allowed anyone to retain a sample of the substance, fearing that it could be reverse engineered. Starlite never was commercialized properly, and Ward died in 2011 without making the millions or billions he had imagined he would. Sadly, Ward took the chemical formula for Starlite to his grave with him. To this day, nobody knows the exact chemical composition of Starlite, or how one might go about recreating the substance.
I'm sure the UK would throw a national security exception on publishing that patent. Maybe they did, and it's in use in their military.
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The guy was a bit of a kook. I could imagine he simply didn't trust the patent system.
The thing is, he could have sold it for millions as a trade secret. He was worried about doing that though, in case it was worth billions. While that makes sense on one level, in practice, he didn't sell it, so made £0.00
Gosh,... on the one hand we have The Standard Model. ... a dead hairdresser's undocumented process, without samples.
On the other hand
Extreme claims require extreme evidence.
It ain't there.
>Extreme claims require extreme evidence.
The quote is actually : extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The quote should be retired because it is wrong and perpetuates bullshit ideas about how science works.
Extraordinary claims just require evidence, that is all. Reproducable, confirmed scientific evidence is all that is required.
The only reason this quote is repeated so often is because of the individual from whom the quote originates.
More broadly, this is why technology barely advanced for thousands of years. Paranoid craftsmen discovering new techniques but keeping them secret, whispering them to their children while on their deathbed. Except like this guy, a lot of them never managed to pass on the secret, causing it to be lost, only to be discovered again later, to be lost yet again, etc. (We're still trying to figure out how Stradivarius made his violins.) It's not a coincidence that the pace of technological advancement began to pick up around the same time as the printing press - when ideas could be made semi-permanent by publishing, thereby entering them into the shared knowledgebase of the human race.
You are close; it should be:
On one hand we have The Standard Model.
On the other, a dead hairdresser's undocumented process discovered while burning trash in his back yard in the 1970s , without samples.
Whatever he came up with is roughly derivative of melted and slightly charred packaging and household waste from the UK in the 1970s. It's probably quite the cocktail of asbestos, brominated plastics, lead, and velvet smoking jackets. The formula is probably lost to the world, as we don't generate the same kind of toxic shit headed to the landfill anymore, and we have HOAs to prevent people from "improving" the neighborhood aroma by dumping household waste in a hole in the in the back yard, dousing it with diesel fuel, lighting it on fire, and being surprised by the God-knows-what carcinogenic goop left in the bottom of the hole that just! won't! burn!
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Eh, I think it is still a good phrase. People tend to describe a claim as 'extraordinary' when it not only stands on its own but requires the unseating of other well tested things. So it not only requires evidence of itself but evidence showing why a bunch of other things have been wrong all along, thus 'extraordinary'.
But, at minimal, evidence for a claim needs to match the claim, so if the claim is extraordinary so is the evidence for it.
Yes. Just an ablative, hyped up by members of the press who don't know what ablatives are.
"Close the door! What, were you born in a barn?" -- Police chief, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
The whole affair smacks of pseudoscience. It has many of the classic symptoms:
(1) An inventor without any training or scientific background who purports to have invented a device or solved a problem that has eluded scientists and engineers.
(2) Unreasonable secrecy about the details of the invention, and reluctance even to work with impartial third parties operating under a non-disclosure agreement.
(3) Public demonstrations, but only when made under the direct control and supervision of the inventor.
(4) Proclaimed distrust of the patent system, or else an attempt to manipulate the patent system by filing a non-enabling patent disclosure.
(5) An attitude of "pay me the money first, and then I'll show you how to make it". In other words, you have to put your faith in the inventor and give him your money, and then he'll show you the way to "salvation". (The religious parallels are quite common with pseudoscientific inventions.)
Based on my own experiences dealing with a pseudoscientific invention (and inventor), I would bet that Ward did indeed have Starlite secretly tested, perhaps numerous times ... but you never heard about those tests, because Starlite didn't work as claimed. That leads to the final symptom of pseudoscience:
(6) Despite claims of an amazing invention, the inventor seems completely incapable of doing anything useful with it on his own. It's the equivalent of the inventor who claims to have a machine that generates free electricity, but who still pays the power company to keep his lights on.
Your attitude is so 20th century, CIS/white biased. Today, extraordinary claims require that you provide it didn't happen. We have to believe the claim, and it's your job to prove the claim could never be...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
get over it, hillary, you lost.