They were successful because they _were_ bicycle mechanics. They were particularly suited (and lucky in a few ways) to reducing the weight of a powered aircraft enough while being structurally sound to a point where it could sustain flight.
If they didn't succeed somebody else would have in a very short time. Increasingly light internal combustion engines and increasingly strong and light materials and manufacturing techniques made powered flight inevitable in the early 20th century. Who got there first is memorable, but the breakthoughs they made were going to happen with or without them.
If someone creates a warp drive it will require the energy density, funding, and high technology materials fabrication of a nation state behind it sitting on the foundation of theoretical physics well established. You might as well suggest the first nuclear bomb was more likely to be created by a tinkerer than the Manhattan project.
In hindsight, it is obvious that bicycle mechanics had a good chance because they succeeded and their design was more like a flying bicycle than a modern aircraft. However I am sure most other people thought it was only possible from groups with significant funding before the Wright brothers succeeded.
We don't know if a warp drive is practically possible, nor do we know how one would work. It may turn out that it is so easy that it can be done with a modest budget in a garage. To be clear, I am not saying this guy is on to something (probably isn't but I would be pleasantly surprised if he is). I simply object to the assumption that this type of discovery must come from a well-funded entity.
The "nuclear boy scout" was well on his way to something before he was shut down due to public safety concerns. I'm not certain what that something would have been, but Mr. Entropy suggests that a destructive device was more likely than a constructive one.
Granted, he was working off of principles already explored and established by Manhattan and other nuclear physics research, but it is still possible that he would have created something novel before killing himself, and possibly others, simply because externally funded researchers must necessarily be prudent and rational to secure external research funding, and therefore don't intentionally try anything too far beyond the ordinary.
Crackpots, on the other hand, can do whatever crazy thing they can imagine with their own money. The only thing really stopping a tinkerer's nuke is poor availability of appropriate isotopes. And David Hahn began construction of a breeder reactor in his own backyard. At age 17.
The "demon core" accidentally went critical twice, killing the person closest to it within a month, both times. In both cases, that person had the presence of mind to remove the neutron reflectors as quickly as they were able. An amateur, acting alone, might have accidentally caused a criticality event large enough to qualify as "the first nuclear bomb".
Manhattan was more about adapting nuclear bombs for military use. It's really easy to create a bomb if you don't care about blowing yourself up (see also: "Things I Won't Work With" blog), but much more difficult to destroy only what you want to destroy, without dying yourself or going bankrupt.
David Hahn used knowledge and materials which were the product of the nuclear age (many of the materials he used were created with industrial nuclear reactions). The most impressive thing he could have accomplished would be a device generously named a low grade dirty bomb, which is to say, a device capable of generating enough hydrogen to explode in a confined space distributing enough already-radioactive material to poison a few of his neighbors. Nothing he did came close to or could have come close to any significant advancement in science or engineering.
The Manhattan project was not about adapting existing bombs for military use, that's just a gross misunderstanding of history. The Manhattan project was about the basic science and engineering of creating a stable nuclear reaction and a runaway reaction in a weapon. Neither of these things existed or came close to existing outside the project. Both required the industrial scale purification and transmutation of nuclear elements only achievable in meaningful quantities by a nation state. The first bomb was the simple gun-type which only required purity of a U^235. The second bomb required the similarly difficult transmutation of uranium to plutonium, but also extremely precise mechanisms to trigger the bomb. Neither could ever be possible by a wonk of any education in his garage.
There seems to be a misguided romanticism about a lone hacker making revolutions in applied high energy physics here that doesn't have any connection at all with reality. Revolutions aren't made by a few people in a vacuum, but are iterative processes by thousands. Sometimes people outside the establishment do contribute, but like everybody else they stand on the shoulders of giants and reach a tiny bit higher.
Many times those that are able to reach just high enough to get over an easily understood hurdle are revered and understood to have made a much larger contribution than they actually did. The reality is that most of the time hurdles are jumped when there time is ripe, someone clever and lucky often takes the lion's share of the glory, but truly if they hadn't been there a hundred others would have made the same hurdle in short order.
A bomb that only kills a dozen people is still a bomb. And there are a lot of nuclear reactions that can run away and release a lot of fission energy very quickly.
The challenge in weaponizing those reactions is to make the device safe enough to be handled before you make it explode on command.
An amateur is not going to produce a tunable-yield warhead. They're going to make a little boom with a bright neutron+gamma flash and then take their Darwin Award.
Producing the basic science to perform transmutation and isotopic separation was certainly part of Manhattan, but the project could not end until an actual weapon was in hand. The explosive shockwave lensing required for a compact implosion-type device is not necessary, as you can much more easily reproduce the gun-type device by slapping together two subcritical masses with your bare hands, or using neutron reflectors, hence my mention of the "demon core".
If an amateur produced enough pure fissile material, accidentally making a bomb out of it could be as simple as putting it away on the wrong shelf of a cabinet and then going to bed. There is a huge gulf between "bomb" and "bomb with practical military application". The Manhattan scientists had to both come up with bomb ideas and narrow those down to practical weaponized designs.
If you can produce a breeder reactor in a garden shed, you can eventually obtain a critical mass of fissile materials. And if you have a critical mass of fissile materials, you can create a nuclear bomb. If you are careless or reckless, you can even do so accidentally. It wouldn't necessarily advance science or engineering, but it is possible for a sufficiently-motivated amateur to do it--not very likely, but possible.
It is that inkling of a possibility of accomplishing something great that motivates crackpot hobbyists to try to create antigravity devices or free energy collectors in their garage from old television antennas and refrigerator compressors. Not a single one of them has a snowball's chance in Hell of producing useful incremental advances in the useful sciences, so the only chance they have at success or recognition is to go for the big score.
You can't find the Higgs boson in your garage on a hobbyist budget. You can't find exoplanets with your dinky little telescope. You can't make B-E condensate with a laser pointer. You can't even build a Honda Civic replica from scratch. All the amateur scientists have nowhere to apply their energies, because the low-hanging fruit is taken. The smarter ones focus on applying existing science to real-world problems, like designing hexayurts or open-source hardware. The rest attempt the impossible, and delude themselves into thinking they are creating reproducible results.
I want them to succeed in the same way that I want the Avengers to defeat Thanos. It would be a really cool story, but deep down, I know it's just science fiction.
There are plenty of things that _are_ within the reach of garage scientists, and exoplanet detection is one of them [1] as well as lots of other astronomy, as well as Biology [2] a surprising amount of advanced materials / electronics / etc [3] and more.
What is utterly fascinating is that the Wright Brothers two well funded competitors, Alexander Graham Bell and Samuel Pierpont Langley, both quit after the first flight. Both of them wanted to be first and when they couldn't do that they walked away from what they both surely should have seen would be the birth of a huge high growth industry.
They definitely could have gone back to the lab and with the map the Wright's provided have gone on to build a better plane. In fact Alexander Graham Bell's chief assistant Glenn Curtiss did exactly that creating what ultimately became the larger company Curtiss-Wright corporation.
> What is utterly fascinating is that the Wright Brothers two well funded competitors, Alexander Graham Bell and Samuel Pierpont Langley
I've seen this conclusion drawn about Langley before. And it seems like a great anecdote for underscoring the idea that motivation is key.
At least, until you consider some other facts:
- Langley had a long and pretty distinguished career in physics before looking at aviation, indicating some innate dedication. And he did research in flight (and had success with models) for 12 years before he ever became a well-funded competitor to the Wrights.
- Langley was almost 70 years old at that point and he died three years later. I'm not sure why that isn't the go-to explanation for why he didn't keep going and participate in industry.
- Langley also apparently is recorded to have remarked to Rudyard Kipling that he didn't think he'd live to see the airplane happen, but that he was certain that it would happen. This is not exactly the mark of someone whose only motivation in participating was an attachment to personally being first.
I truly believe if someone creates a warp drive it will indeed be someone like this guy operating out of a garage and not NASA.