"Obsession: Mr. Singh’s Search for the Holy Grail"

[phantom power]

This is a rather intriguing story about an inventor in India who may have invented a simple improvement to the combustion chamber of the ICE, that improves fuel economy by 20%, reduces emissions and makes the engine run both cooler and more quietly.

Noone in the auto industy will believe him, unless he can test it, but he can't afford to test it until somebody believes him...

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/futurecar/article/0,20642,679464,00.html

[Name removed]

1. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Maple]

2. India had great science

before the US was ever heard of.

They have top mathematicians and computer scientists too.

[Name removed]

3. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[treepig]

6. btw, the usa also still has The Plague

:freak:

[phantom power]

4. Remember, this guy is *trying* to get better experimental data

The auto-company engineers are saying "we can't take you seriously without better data". Which is sensible enough, but then why not do the experiments they claim are necessary?

The modifications that he made are extremely low-tech. Why not perform the experiments? The cost would be one engine to receive the mods. The control engine would require no mods at all by definition.

[Name removed]

5. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[phantom power]

7. Srinivasa Ramanujan made important contributions to mathematics.

Aside from being untrue, your claim doesn't have any bearing on whether or not this guy's idea is useful.

Making claims about the past, true or otherwise, says nothing about the validity of any untested idea. Only experimentation can verify or disprove his idea.

[Name removed]

8. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[phantom power]

9. He developed a closed-form formula for partition-cardinality p(n)

This was in partnership with his "discoverer", GH Hardy. A fundamental result for reasoning about combinatorical problems, say for example packing-algorithms, counting the number of ways there can be to fill up a space of size (n).

That's probably the only result I can comment on. The complete list is lengthy. I'm not a mathematician, and I can't give you any specific explainations about why mathematicians regard his many other results as important, but it's pretty clear that they do. Maybe there's a mathematician in the house who can go into it.

Do a google-search on Ramanujan, and there are various lists of results he's credited for.

Regarding inventions, such as "radio" or "computer", I'm not aware of any, but I wouldn't know one way or the other.

Again, I don't see where you are going. For the sake of argument, assume you are correct and not one of the billions of Indians in history has ever invented anything useful. That says nothing about the usefulness of a modification to the combustion chamber of an ICE, which happens to have been invented by an Indian.

Do you have anything specific to say about why this guy's invention isn't useful or important?

[Name removed]

11. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[bemildred]

19. Ramanujan was a genius of the first order,

completely autodidact, startlingly original.
They still do not know what to make of some of his results.
It's a pity he died so young. There is no way to tell now
what he might have accomplished with extended study in a
supportive academic environment.

http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Ramanujan.html

I can't say I understand why you persist in throwing pearls
before swine here, this fellow is not interested in the truth.

[phantom power]

20. I suppose because his request was fair, even if his attitude was

narrow-minded. Let's say I wasn't shocked when he refused to be convinced...

All I really wanted to do was talk about an interesting idea for modifying internal combustion engines.

[bemildred]

21. OK, I read through the whole thing.

His idea makes perfect sense. Although its been a long time
since I took engines apart, I'm tempted to buy a Dremel tool
myself.

This reluctance of the "professionals" to acknowledge an obvious
improvement thought up by an "amateur" is commonly seen.

The question as to the long term effects on the engine of such a
change is of considerable interest. I would wager that once
adopted this change would have cascading effects on other parts
of engine design, which might also explain some of the inertial
resistance to the change.

The introduction of Ramanujan into the conversation is somewhat
appropriate, another self-tutored and original thinker with
interesting results.

[phantom power]

23. I thought so too. I think two mods are necessary. The grooves, plus

the use of the bell-shaped chamber. I figure that making the bell shape head would require advanced machine-shop skills.

There are some other factors that work against technology improvements. One of them is that companies are reluctant to pay royalties for other people's patents. Especially since they are already making plenty of money with the technology that they have. Just one example of the many ways that market-forces *don't* work in favor of public good, or long-term interests.

Another is testing. Testing facilities are a premimum in most large manufacturing companies. There's a continuous battle going on between various departments, getting access to the testing equipment for their experiments. So, you can imagine what the reaction is to some guy out of nowhere, who doesn't even work for the company, saying "hey, I'd like to test out this engine mod I invented!"

My line of work revolves around inventing improvements to computer software, and we see very similar dynamics. It's painful, but I learned a long time ago that inventing a better mousetrap is actually much easier than the black-art battle of getting that mousetrap to market and making a profit off of it.

[bemildred]

24. Well, I remember, back when I fooled with engines,

rebuilding a head and having the ports polished, to
improve air flow into the cylinder, so it makes sense to
"unpolish" the head to increase turbulence and hence
mixing inside the cylinder. But it's not "obvious" until
you think of it.

I spent twenty years as a software engineer, much of it in
defense. One of the most striking things was how little and
how infrequently technical quality was an important issue.
It was all marketing. I think that relates to your last comment,
it is a cut-throat business where a few make huge profits and
most go broke. There is also the "Baby duck syndrome", customers
get attached the to first thing they learn to use, so there is a
huge advantage in getting to market first and a huge inertial
resistance to dramatic changes that require users to change.

[phantom power]

26. Amen to that. "baby duck syndrome" is a great description!

Bill Gates became a billionaire because of exactly one thing: he understood baby-duck syndrome sooner and better than anybody else in the software biz.

It drives me nuts when people refer to Gates as a technology genius. It's an insult to good technology people everywhere. Gates is a *marketing* genius. Which is also a fine thing to be. If only he would use his super-powers for good instead of evil...

Now I've derailed my own thread.

[DrWeird]

10. Would you cut the white supremacy bullshit?

Ancient Indian mathematical and astronomical contributions were enormous. To name just a few, they invented the concept of zero, negative numbers, what are now called arabic numerals, and the pythagorean theorem, which they proved a couple hundred years before Pythagoras wrote it down.

The first half of the twentieth century was mared by brutal British colonalism, nevertheless they still made important contributions. For example, the great physicist and mathematician Chrandasekhar, who did major, famous early work on black hole theories.

Currently Indian science is surprisingly strong for such a poor country. They submitted many good papers to many leading journals in all fields of science. Although they're particularly strong in space sciences and atomic energy.

Somebody who rates a countries science program by whether or not they've invented the radio, or the computer obviously has no real idea how science actually works.

[Name removed]

12. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[theoceansnerves]

13. so now

you're being an apologist for british imperialism?
are we still in the 19th century?

[DrWeird]

14. you are aware India didn't gain independence until 1947, right?

Have you covered that in your social studies class yet? Or is that late date a sign of how slow and backwards the Indians are?

As for Pythagoras, he may have proved it himself ab initio, maybe he didn't but the Pythagoreans did, or maybe he learned it from Sanskrit text. Ancient cultures weren't as isolated as most people like to think they were. Who knows. Nevertheless, Indians did it before him.

I'll say again. Somebody who rates a country's (or ethnicities, being honest) scientific accomplishment on whether or not they invented the radio or the automobile doesn't know a lot about science. Especially since the radio was invented in Italy and most of the work on early automobile was done in France and Germany.

[Name removed]

15. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[DrWeird]

16. Yes. Just like the United States.

Yup. Nothing to show from there.

The general US population cares even less about science than the Indian population.

[Name removed]

17. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Name removed]

18. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[treepig]

22. geez, it seems like everytime i post in this forum lately my posts

are deleted.

i was very careful not to break any rules this time, so god only knows what the problem is :freak:

[midnight armadillo]

25. His approach is very poor

As the article states, he wanted to be singled out and receive special attention and recognition.

Don't you think that Ford et.al. have been sent hundreds if not thousands of potentially crackpot methods for better fuel economy in the past? Why should they pay any more attention to some guy in India, who has no data on modern engines? They have a system for evaluating ideas, but Singh chose to ignore it. My sympathy for him is limited.

This reminds me of Barry Marshall, the researcher who discovered that bacteria causes ulcers. He and his collaborator weren't taken seriously, but if memory serves, their entire approach to getting their results heard and publicized was suspect. Finally Marshall swallowed some of the bacteria and got an ulcer. Then people listened.