JeanTate said:
May I ask, why do you think that?
When kooks post threads here claiming to have overturned Einstein, or whatever, one common thread is that they post in terms of thought experiments and refuse to do the maths associated with real physics. Here what I'm seeing is optiongeek posting the maths and everybody else responding with dismissive verbosity.
If this is what you think - and I have no reason to doubt what you wrote - then I will have to work harder. For the record, I regard my response to optiongeek's posts (the relevant ones, for this sub-sub-thread) as anything but "
dismissive verbosity".
Would you be willing to get explicit about why you think my posts are "
dismissive verbosity"?
If the maths is wrong, I'd like to see how it's wrong - whether that be by being based on faulty premises and assumptions, whether it's performing mathematical equivocation and combining things that cannot be combined, whether it's applicable only if applied in a very specific way to a very specific set of circumstances*, or whatever else.
Did you miss my questions/comments, about the uncertainties? About the source of the values optiongeek posted? Here they are: "
Oh, and you left off estimates of uncertainty, for both g/2 and alpha. Nor did you give a source for your g/2 value. Why is that?"
Do you understand why these questions - and the answers to them - are important?
Do you realize that optiongeek was not posting (solely) about "maths", but physics?
If it's right but the underlying theory in wrong, I'd like to understand why it is that the maths is right, and why it is that this maths isn't used out in the real world.
To repeat: this isn't (solely) about "
the maths". As optiongeek herself makes clear.
Bringing this back to Mills: he claims, as do most if not all his fans here, that his theory is universal in its scope of applicability. One inevitable corollary: if any sufficiently well established set of observations can be shown to be inconsistent with this theory, then we are free to consider it a failed theory. And say so. Loudly and clearly. And it matters not one jot that some parts of the theory seem elegant.
I don't think that's true. Mercury's orbit is well established and can be shown to be inconsistent with Newton's theory of gravitation and laws of motion, yet we don't consider those "failed". If you want to describe the motion of snooker balls, you turn to Newton. If NASA wants to put someone on the moon, they turn to Newton.
Newton's theory wasn't "a failed theory", it is just applicable in more limited circumstances than was originally thought. It had a narrower scope than had been previously thought.
I've added some hilites. They're important.
One very important aspect, for what we are discussing, is the fact that "Newton's theory" can be shown - mathematically and physically - to be consistent with GR in certain physical regimes (briefly, non-relativistic, low mass density, etc). With well-defined and well-understood ranges of accuracy. Hence, for example, both HIPPARCOS and GAIA need to incorporate the bending of light, by the Sun (and for GAIA, most of the solar system planets too), per GR (not Newton), to get consistent results. But for their orbits, Newton is good enough (that said, for GAIA, serious work was done to show that this was the case; i.e. the mission planners explicitly tested whether they needed the full GR, vs relying on Newton).
For "Mills theory", your analogy fails. Why? Because he claims his classical physics-based approach is fully applicable in physical regimes where one would normally use QM/QFT only.
Similarly, whether or not Mills is right about hydrinos (and I think there's plenty of evidence that he is wrong), has no bearing on whether or not he's right about any particular equation.
Well, we disagree on this (obviously).
And if an equation he has derived himself is both accurate and more parsimonious and elegant than the equations already in use, then why shouldn't people use it? And, if it is those things then, regardless of the source, isn't that kind of cool?
Good questions.
Pity optiongeek did not present good answers.
But no, it's no more "kinda cool" than me observing that the square root of 10 is close to pi, and that with some fairly simple juggling and reverse engineering (which I suspect is what Mills has done), I can produce all kinds of elegant-looking, amazingly good, correspondences.
Personally, I suspect that it's wrong in some way that I'm not knowledgeable enough to understand, and I base that conclusion on the other things surrounding it - not least the way Mills has behaved suspiciously in the past, like changing the company name and attempting to erase from existence previous claims. But I'm not going to pretend that that is, in and of itself, a rebuttal to optiongeek's post. It's not. And treating it like it is is, if anything, just giving ammunition to the cries of "Mills' theories don't get any traction because there's a conspiracy interested in maintaining the status quo which has tarnished his reputation so people are afraid to engage with his ideas for fear of being thought foolish, and because people have a vested interest in the status quo and are therefore afraid that he might be right".
It's wholly counter-productive.
*Like, to give a spurious analogical example, if I were to give a formula for accurately predicting a die roll as being 6x , where x is the number of cars I can see parked outside my window, and the formula only works if x is 1 and the die rolled a 6.
Indeed.
Which is why I think much more effort needs to be put into exposing "Mills theory" - as a whole, which is how he, and his fans, view it - as hogwash (IMHO, it's not even pseudo-science).
Perhaps starting with insisting that optiongeek answer key questions like the uncertainties, and experimental methods used to determine the values in question. After all, this is not "maths", but physics.
