Slashdot Mirror
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.
>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.
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.