With the exception of cases involving perpetual motion, a model is not ordinarily required by the office to demonstrate the operability of a device.

Hey, it's Aurov, and this is a special archived episode of Akimbo.

They put it in a parenthetical, but the patent office in the U.S. is clear.

You can't get a patent on a perpetual motion machine unless you bring in a working model.

What's this all about? It's about belief. Belief came first.

Being an infant is terrifying. Being a toddler is almost as scary. All species, every one of them, navigates the world because they have belief,

belief in what is going to happen next, hope that things will be as they were. We can't

possibly move forward without some level of belief. But along the way, we gain, as Socrates said, logos, reason,

rational thinking, the ability to make decisions based on how the world is, not how we want it

to be. That doesn't mean that belief isn't important. It remains essential.

But belief, belief and engineering don't go well together. I'm carefully using the word engineering

instead of the word science, because there are plenty of

scientists who have fallen into the trap of belief. Einstein had a very famous battle, decades

long, with Neil's bore, the guy who sketched out how the atom might work. Einstein, of course, is physics royalty,

but Boer wasn't far behind. Their argument, their argument was about quantum mechanics. It was about

waves versus particles. It was about spooky action at a distance. It was about God playing dice with the universe. It's too complicated

for this podcast, but what it's about is belief. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb,

one of the people who ushered in the modern age, was in the middle of it. There was a scientist who had come up

with an alternative to Boer and the Copenhagen group's explanation of how quantum mechanics worked.

About Boem, Oppenheimer said, if we cannot disprove Boeom, then we must agree to ignore him. This is action based on

belief that the cost of accepting an alternative way to think about the physics of the universe

was too high for those in the Copenhagen school. And so they conspired with one another to discredit

...