I believe the Earth goes around the Moon. Those professor guys don't agree, but they just don't get it.
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Split Thread The validity of classical physics (split from: DWFTTW)
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I believe the Earth goes around the Moon. Those professor guys don't agree, but they just don't get it.
John Freestone
Graduate Poster
Thanks. I hadn't laughed out loud today until I read that. You were getting quite good there until the scenario melted into another. Forget hobos for the time you're discussing boats. You were trying to explain ducks in a row to me, I thought. Anyway, yes, we can think of the water, all of it, as an 'immobile mass' for the purpose of the thought experiment. Obviously, it has the potential to swirl and eddy - the molecules are only loosly held together - should some other force disturb its relative immobility w.r.t. the boat. It seems that somehow, having described this fairly accurately, you don't believe it all moves as a mass, at zero velocity w.r.t. the boat. If there were ducks, either in rows or arranged some other way, not paddling or flapping their wings, they'd move with the 'immobile mass'.
See how we can use two different frames of reference in one phrase there - it's all 'moving', but since it moves together, it's an 'immobile mass'. It is immobile with respect to the boat, or the ducks, or the water, or the dead fish, or a special kind of hot-water balloon that flies in the water, and it is 'moving' with respect to the bank, a bird flying past, a frog watching the spectacle from the bank, or humber, silently meditating by the water to gain enlightenment.
Just clever enough to be right, although 'frozen' is misleading. [ETA: Oops - I missed you saying "all objects move at windspeed because a balloon does" - it's hard to keep up with your rubbish because there's so much of it and I develop a kind of impossible-blindness after all this time. Who the hell said everything moves at windspeed?]
So? If I have a pig that is enough like a piano, I could play the blues on it.
ETA: And if I've made the hobo's interior real, he will thank me when someone buys him a burger. Have you ever been diagnosed with something, like a cognitive condition? You seem unable to hold one subject in mind for any period of time. It is a great gift in the creative arts, of course, but doesn't suit you to doing physics.
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John Freestone
Graduate Poster
(helicentrist) Surely that is just a nominal centre, the sun, RossFW? I realise that you probably know that, and I have just spotted this out of context, but it might be useful to explain a bit more.
We've been discussing how all motion is relative, and we can measure the motion of the sun round the earth, or vice versa. The differences it makes concern the amounts of error we are happy to have in the numbers, how complicated our calculations are to get to them, and the uses to which we mean to put them. We can relativise the heliocentric view by pointing out that really the earth does not orbit the sun, with the moon orbiting the earth, but that they move according to their collective gravitational force on each other. We could then relativise that view, remembering that other planets are part of that gravitational system, etc.
I sincerely hope that humber's reply is ironic. It might even be thought of as a (relatively) true, deliberately provocative statement. We may never know. From the inertial frame of the moon, the earth does indeed 'orbit' it, just as from the earth frame, the sun 'orbits' us. It's odd, however, since humber usually sticks doggedly to the earth's frame.
John Freestone
Graduate Poster
Yes. Hurrah for humber! Hurrah for Galilean Relativity! If A is going round B, then B is going round A.
CORed
Penultimate Amazing
Wow, the harder you try, the wronger you get. The wheels drive the propeller on the treadmill and in the "real" wind. That is what makes the cart capable of traveling faster that the wind (or moving "upbelt" on the treadmill). The propeller drives the cart, which drives the wheels. It is (for me anyway) easier to understand from the treadmill frame of reference. It works either way, though.
Christian Klippel
Master Poster
I think that humber has made it pretty clear, through his recent posts, that he has no idea of how physics work, let alone what all the used words and phrases mean.
What he does is just fishing for words here, thinking he has got something to throw back into the discussion, to give the impression he knows something. I'll bet he has never read any physics book at all.
His posts are so full of bull, it's really astonishing. How can a single person write so much garbage and think to be right? Either he's just pulling our collective leg, or he really has no idea about physics at all. Whatever he writes makes no sense. The last posts of him even make less sense. There isn't anything in them that could be discussed on any level, as far as physics is concerned. Just random ramblings.
Remember how often he said to have proof of what he says? How often he told "i can show you"? However, he never came up with anything at all. The only thing he did was to simply use more words that obviously he don't understand. I'll guess he is googling for the words that other people use in their posts, reading the two-liners of the results pages and mixes words of them together to form something that he thinks is an reply. It just can not be that a person with even the slightest understanding of physics, and by that i mean something like the 6th class in school, would ever come up with the nonsense he writes. Unless, of course, there are some heavy deficits with that persons grasp on reality.
By now i doubt that he even knows what a treadmill is, let alone how it works. His posts allow for no other conclusion than that.
Methinks that this thread either needs moderation of a moderator who is able to filter out his nonsense, so as not to approve his nonsensical posts, or we have to let i die. There is absolutely no sense in continuing it any longer. His drivel is just pure arrogance combined with pure stupidity. It's just a waste of time to answer to that, because if there is any outcome at all, it is just that it makes humber spout even more absurd nonsense.
No matter what is discussed, humbers posts only offer two things: Complete rejection of what was said, complete twisting of presented facts. If one would tell him that the sky is blue, he would ramble on about how green the sky is. There is really not sense in arguing even the simplest, basic and most fundamental things to him. He just don't want to understand. Again, either that or he is just collectively pulling our leg.
Edit: I even seriously doubt that the drawing he once came up with, the one that didn't prove his point either, was made by him. He surely got it from somewhere else and simply posted it here, in an failed attempt to prove his point. There is just no reason to believe that a person who writes such amounts of drivel is able to come up with such a drawing. At least to me there isn't.
What he does is just fishing for words here, thinking he has got something to throw back into the discussion, to give the impression he knows something. I'll bet he has never read any physics book at all.
His posts are so full of bull, it's really astonishing. How can a single person write so much garbage and think to be right? Either he's just pulling our collective leg, or he really has no idea about physics at all. Whatever he writes makes no sense. The last posts of him even make less sense. There isn't anything in them that could be discussed on any level, as far as physics is concerned. Just random ramblings.
Remember how often he said to have proof of what he says? How often he told "i can show you"? However, he never came up with anything at all. The only thing he did was to simply use more words that obviously he don't understand. I'll guess he is googling for the words that other people use in their posts, reading the two-liners of the results pages and mixes words of them together to form something that he thinks is an reply. It just can not be that a person with even the slightest understanding of physics, and by that i mean something like the 6th class in school, would ever come up with the nonsense he writes. Unless, of course, there are some heavy deficits with that persons grasp on reality.
By now i doubt that he even knows what a treadmill is, let alone how it works. His posts allow for no other conclusion than that.
Methinks that this thread either needs moderation of a moderator who is able to filter out his nonsense, so as not to approve his nonsensical posts, or we have to let i die. There is absolutely no sense in continuing it any longer. His drivel is just pure arrogance combined with pure stupidity. It's just a waste of time to answer to that, because if there is any outcome at all, it is just that it makes humber spout even more absurd nonsense.
No matter what is discussed, humbers posts only offer two things: Complete rejection of what was said, complete twisting of presented facts. If one would tell him that the sky is blue, he would ramble on about how green the sky is. There is really not sense in arguing even the simplest, basic and most fundamental things to him. He just don't want to understand. Again, either that or he is just collectively pulling our leg.
Edit: I even seriously doubt that the drawing he once came up with, the one that didn't prove his point either, was made by him. He surely got it from somewhere else and simply posted it here, in an failed attempt to prove his point. There is just no reason to believe that a person who writes such amounts of drivel is able to come up with such a drawing. At least to me there isn't.
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CORed
Penultimate Amazing
For me, it's pure entertainment, and a kind of morbid fascination. The one thing in which humber has been absolutely consistent is that every time he attempts to deal with a frame of reference other than "the ground" he makes some utterly boneheaded error, obvious to anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of physics (and probably to most people without such knowledge). Whether it's a parachute generating maximum force at windspeed, balloons traveling slower than windspeed, canoes making bow waves, hobos jumping in a moving boxcar landing on the same spot only "if quick", or oranges that magically roll on a perfectly level (how does he know?) conveyor belt so as to stay in the same spot relative to "the ground", I can count on humber for a good laugh.
Christian Klippel
Master Poster
Hello CORed,
sorry to disagree, but it ceased to be any fun quite some time ago. All he writes is just plain rubbish. It got constantly worse, with an all-time low from him just a few posts ago. While i usually would doubt that it can get on a lower lever, knowing humber by know i wouldn't be surprised if his next rambling makes even less sense. But then, at one point we would reach the negative on the fun-scale.
But then, everyone has a different taste and different needs, so go ahead
Greetings,
Chris
What's the physics crank equivalent of Poe's Law?
H'ethetheth
fishy rocket scientist
Just a minor correction. Where you say "laminar flow" you should say "boundary layer". Laminar flow is simply the opposite of turbulent flow.
I say this mostly to be pedantic, but also because the boundary layers we are discussing here are decidedly not laminar.
I'm not sure if who made the mistake first, but it would help if we're all discussing the same things.
If Stephen Hawking were to roll his little wheelchair up to humber's front door and tell him that, having read this entire thread, he felt compelled to announce that the operation of the cart on the treadmill is exactly the same as on the road, that this is a perfect way to test a DDWFTTW cart, that DDWFTTW works, and that the treadmill videos are incontrovertible proof of this, then humber would immediately turn to us and say, "See? Hawking supports me completely! The treadmill is completely wrong, and backwards!".
John Freestone
Graduate Poster
What amazes me is how much my feelings change, and with them I change my mind. Sometimes I see how trollish the responses are from him, or someone reminds me how endless it is, or how the whole thread is dedicated to the infamy of humber, and I get angry and decide I should stop posting and ignore him. Then he might suddenly appear to be on the brink of understanding, or post something reasonably close to reality, and it seems worth pushing on a bit. Or, much more often, his mistakes and irrelevant tangents actually raise interesting points, and I want to explore them, or explaining why his mistakes are mistakes seems useful to other people who may have less knoweldge of physics than I do.Hello CORed,
sorry to disagree, but it ceased to be any fun quite some time ago. All he writes is just plain rubbish. It got constantly worse, with an all-time low from him just a few posts ago. While i usually would doubt that it can get on a lower lever, knowing humber by know i wouldn't be surprised if his next rambling makes even less sense. But then, at one point we would reach the negative on the fun-scale.
But then, everyone has a different taste and different needs, so go ahead
Greetings,
Chris
I also use it like CORed, for entertainment, and some of the funniest statements appear in humber's or humb's posts and all our posts. I'm also learning something about the useful distinction at JREF between criticising the content rather than the person, and just how critical and biting it can get if it's just about the content.
What is most irritating is when I feel that we are being made fun of by deliberate obtuseness. If, for instance, it came to light that humber was an educated physicist just out to pretend otherwise to mess with our minds, that would represent an unforgiveable abuse of trust, months of lying, deliberate provocation, for his own entertainment. Even so, the facts remain that I am gaining the above things, but it would be extremely irritating.
There are moments when I imagine it's not a physicist, but a psychologist, seeing how long people will continue to try to have a sensible conversation whilst injecting high levels of nonsense! Once again, I would be livid, but this is unlikely (and why I would be even more livid) because there are ethical guidelines for psychology experiments, and I don't believe they include this.
But yeah, I was close to stopping this yesterday. Today I enjoyed a lot of posting. I was reading bits where he seemed to be genuinely trying. Then I got to the bits you're talking about - scrambled verbage - and I feel like I've been suckered in again, a rat in humber's surreal maze.
I see us all doing it, changing our minds. Dan O seems to have managed to stay off the thread for a while. There's hope for me yet. But I remember him once asking everyone to stop feeding the trolls, in the same thread as asking humber to provide test details. To him I'm sure that made sense - if that were just pressed forward with no distractions, humber could be shown to be wrong. Since then he said he was stopping or putting humber on ignore several times, IIRC.
Of course, it seems humber is good at this, and knows how to press our buttons. He dodges difficult questions by someone who is losing their will to live, and focuses on someone returning after a little break. Collectively, we're just here supporting him in whatever it is he's doing - digging a deeper hole for himself, or getting the attention he craves, or making him feel that he might possibly still be right, or crossing off another day on the calendar that he's suckered us in.
Anyway, I need to go and do stuff. Now!
sol invictus
Philosopher
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Just in case you were serious about that (in a thread full of so much garbage it's hard to be sure), that's not true. Galilean relativity says that inertial frames are equivalent - but orbiting objects are accelerating.
Michael C
Graduate Poster
The moon does not define an inertial frame, since it is (like the earth) accelerating. For experiments with the DDWFTTW cart, a region at the surface of the earth can be considered to be an inertial frame, since the acceleration of the earth is so slight that it won't make any difference at the level of accuracy required for such experiments.
When analysing the orbit of the moon around the earth, it's best to consider moon and earth as a pair of bodies rotating around a common centre of mass.
All in orbit above your head.
Michael C
Graduate Poster
That's the main reason I skim through this thread and occasionally participate.
I'm also fascinated to see that some of you still seem to have some hope of making Humber understand something. I have long since given up on that: you just have to accept that Humber cannot see himself to be wrong, even if he is so evidently wrong that there can be absolutely no doubt about the matter. This has been demonstrated over and over again in the course of the DDWFTTW discussion. Maybe this strange doggedness against all odds has it's own particular fascination.
John Freestone
Graduate Poster
Someone who mistakes sarcasm for irony.
Yes, H'ethetheth. The boundary layer(s) is/are going the wrong way.
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