From the Wired interview, I was asked if I was an amateur astronomer. Obviously not. I'm an amateur engineer. I'm a professional astronomer and science writer

That's so refreshing.  If we got one more professional engineer who was an amateur scientist and claiming to invent a warp drive I was going to go crazy.

“If we got one more professional engineer who was an amateur scientist and claiming to invent a warp drive I was going to go crazy”. Hank I will refrain from driving you crazy with warp drive, leaving that to Marc Millis and the Tau Zero people. Warp drive is rather old fashioned anyway. Nearly all professional engineers have a college degree in science, and a great many of them work in scientific laboratories. It could be claimed that most engineers are scientists, but not many scientists are engineers. In my college years a first engineering degree required a minimum of 145 semester hours, compared to a minimum of 120 for a science degree. Not many engineers managed to finish in 4 years with the minimum program. Some specialties required around 170 semester hours for the Bachelor of Science in engineering. Now the programs have been changed. The difference between science and engineering education is not as great. Next please notice that scientists don’t usually invent things. They discover things, but usually not a long lost warp drive. Engineers and hobby shops invent things. More often scientists discover their budget has been cut and part of their equipment is missing or broken. Most of the warp drive talk is not coming from engineers. It is coming from hobby work shops, people who might wreck the neighborhoods they live in. The best known warp series by an engineer comes from a British Aerospace Engineer, Leonard Cramp and predates the fictional entertainment variety by more than 5 years. More recently an Aerospace Engineer now retired, Boyd Bushman received a patent on magnetic levitation, and published claims that he actually tested another warp type device with success. If an Aerospace Engineer isn’t welcome to write about warp, then I don’t know who would be. Maybe an astronomer would. The great debates of history were settled by a demonstration of working models. There were the contest of horses against steam engines, sailing ships against rowing galleys, and propellers against paddle wheels. If a working model is preferred to a scientific formula, then you get it from an engineer, or maybe from a hobby shop. It would be embarrassing to go crazy over a topic, and then come out on the losing side of a practical demonstration. A lot of people did, but we don’t remember who they were. When people talk about going crazy, I remember Ludwig Boltzmann, who hanged himself because his science was not taken seriously. Now his work is the foundation of thermodynamics, cosmology, and quantum mechanics.

I prefer Roger Penrose to Stephen Hawking, but still buy the books and read them several times. Unfortunately a lot of people are trying to build working models in their residential neighborhoods, with no permits or protection against radiation or explosions. The chance one of them will succeed in wrecking a peaceful place is rather high. That opinion comes from something Stephen Hawking wrote, but Penrose didn’t object to it. If he writes a FTL, I’d like to read it several times and link to it, even though I believe his fundamentals are wrong. No apologies either way.