Quantum-Tunneling Electrons Could Make Semiconductors Obsolete

No, you pretty much made that up. Or you're defining "major advancement" such that it cannot be a major advancement unless it's contradictory to current wisdom.

Regardless, the summary is clearly wrong, because there has been no breakthrough that lets information travel faster than light. If there were, we probably wouldn't be talking about transistors, we'd be talking about that breakthrough.

And the scientific wisdom is almost always right -- that's why it's so impressive when it's wrong. You absolutely should treat any claim of FTL with the same extreme skepticism as hollow Earthism. Especially since it is relatively easy to show (eg. to those with approx. an undergraduate education in a related field, or a precocious high-schooler) that FTL implies the possibility of backward time travel, barring a few really, really conceptually unlikely and unsatisfying scenarios.

In my experience, this notion of "major scientific* advances are always people who don't accept conventional wisdom" only ever seems to come up in discussions about the speed of light, in discussions about global warming, and in discussions about Young Earth Creationism. I might be forgetting a couple. But I think the unifying feature is that people really, really *want* the truth to be different from what all the evidence points to, because that would be so awesome. Well, the awesomeness is debatable in terms of YEC, but it would be really cool if global climate change were something that'll sort itself out without us, or if the speed of light turned out to be just a trivial matter and all the stupid scientists were just dribbling their lips with their fingers instead of pressing harder on the gas pedal. It's just not what anything points to and we should demand extraordinary evidence of claims to the contrary just like we would demand extraordinary evidence of a machine that resurrects people hundreds of years dead with their memories intact. Okay, maybe that latter claim is even more unlikely to be true -- but then again the extraordinary evidence should be a bit easier to produce if it is true, so I think that balances.

*For political advances people say this all the time. It's often how they defend people like Stallman for being an asshole, or Gates or Jobs or Torvalds etc..

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/xva-Sld_lAY/story01.htm

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