Skepticism in science is the right approach. Not blind, dogmatic skepticism of any idea that disagrees with orthodoxy, but informed skepticism that demands compelling evidence for surprising claims.
Maybe a computer analogy would be useful: Imagine reading an article about someone working on a revolutionary new image compression algorithm. He claims that it's lossless and that it can achieve at least 99.4% compression on arbitrary photographic input. But all he's willing to say about his technique is that it's based on wavelets, and he has no actual evidence to show. How excited would you be?
> You can achieve a X goal by doing Y, but to say you can achieve only by doing Y is wrong.
The trouble in this case is that the guy at NASA has said that his warp drive ideas are based on Alcubierre's work. Alcubierre's results are very explicitly constructed within the framework of general relativity, and that framework puts some pretty strict constraints on the content of space-time near an Alcubierre bubble. So it doesn't matter whether he's satisfying those constraints by doing X, Y, or Q: anything that met the necessary conditions would be one of the biggest scientific achievements in our lifetimes. (It would dwarf the Higgs discovery, just for instance.)
Maybe a computer analogy would be useful: Imagine reading an article about someone working on a revolutionary new image compression algorithm. He claims that it's lossless and that it can achieve at least 99.4% compression on arbitrary photographic input. But all he's willing to say about his technique is that it's based on wavelets, and he has no actual evidence to show. How excited would you be?
> You can achieve a X goal by doing Y, but to say you can achieve only by doing Y is wrong.
The trouble in this case is that the guy at NASA has said that his warp drive ideas are based on Alcubierre's work. Alcubierre's results are very explicitly constructed within the framework of general relativity, and that framework puts some pretty strict constraints on the content of space-time near an Alcubierre bubble. So it doesn't matter whether he's satisfying those constraints by doing X, Y, or Q: anything that met the necessary conditions would be one of the biggest scientific achievements in our lifetimes. (It would dwarf the Higgs discovery, just for instance.)