Why is there so much crackpot physics?

[KingMerv00]

IMO this is a totally and completely irrational request. I have already stipulated that GR theory is NOT the problem. The problem is that you never established any physical cause/effect relationships between "gravity" and "dark" stuff.

Show me that dark energy has any effect on objects with mass in a controlled science experiment. *THEN* I'll be happy to let you point at the sky and claim "dark" stuff did it.

How'sa bout this?

 

[Perpetual Student]

Getting back to the OP, the more discussions I see here, the more apparent it is that lack of mathematics knowledge is at the root of the amateur physics crackpot's ability to ignore real physics and instead advocate "looks like a bunny" theories.
That, coupled with the quasi-religious dedication shown toward certain historical figures is an interesting phenomenon that permits the cult like attitudes that manifest in certain beliefs like EU/PC mumblings.

 

[Locknar]

I've gone back about 5 pages, and edited/moved a few posts. As always, please keep the posts civil/polite, on topic, and address the argument not attack the arguer. I've removed this thread from Moderated Status.

Posted By: Locknar

 

[Perpetual Student]

Michael Mozina

Originally Posted by Perpetual Student
I am not a physicist. I rely on the opinions and commentary of professionals to understand the workings of the universe;

FYI, this is actually no different than a theist saying the same thing about their "clergy". No matter how much evidence and maths I put before creationists, they tend to "rely on the opinions" of others, not what they read for themselves.

The problem here is that you actually cannot see the difference between someone who has spent a lifetime interested in science, who can think critically but relies on scientists for information and informed opinions in contrast to someone who slavishly clings to a shaman and revealed doctrine.

So, by virtue of your personal criticism of me, are you telling us that you are a physicist and cosmologist?

 

[Michael Mozina]

Once again, I shall employ Michael Mozina's strategy against him...



When you can show me *IN THE LAB* that an entire star, and the associated solar plasma physics, isn't a figment of your imagination, then and ONLY then will you have demonstrated that you understand what 'empirical' means.

Until then, I predict Mr. Mozina shall continue to worship Apollo and call it "science".

Now, watch those goalposts move!

Again, you're confusing *SCALING* issues with *EXISTENCE* issues. You can't demonstrate "dark energy" has any effect on anything made of matter. Fusion has been demonstrated on Earth. I therefore don't have a problem with you claiming "fusion did it". Right or wrong, at least I know that fusion isn't a figment of your imagination and it's a real energy source. If you pointed at the same star and claimed "dark energies did it", then I'd complain.

 

[Michael Mozina]

Wormholes, as of yet, have no experimental evidence in their favor. As such, they are an unproven hypothesis. That is NOT the same as crackpottery because they are based on other theories (like General Relativity) which have solid backing.

Again, GR theory is *NOT* dependent on "dark energy" or "inflation" or any exotic forms of matter! In no way does GR theory support your mythical entities. Stuffing magic into a GR formula does not make magic exist, even if you can wave at the sky and make it fit some observation.

PC theory is *WAY* more supported at the level of empirical PHYSICS!

There is nothing wrong with speculation as long as you acknowledge that's all your doing.

Ya, you but side never acknowledges that "Dark energy did it" is PURE SPECULATION.

You guys have two standards, one for stuff you "like" and one for "electrical theory in space" which you obviously don't like in any way shape or form.

 

[Michael Mozina]

Which nicely underlines the critical point. He was a Nobel prize winning plasma physicist. He was not a Nobel prize winning cosmologist.

What's the difference considering the fact that most of the matter in space is in the form of a plasma?

As far as I'm aware, he had no more credentials for cosmology than I do and he appears to have been ignorant of some basic results of GR (as I probably am too).

http://www.thesurfaceofthesun.com/Alfven/CosmologyAlfven.pdf

Actually he was a big fan of Klein's model.

Well, you won't get much reward for it when you're dead.

If that was my motive, I might be worried about it. Birkeland was dead before the mainstream recognized the value of even his auroral theories. I'm certainly not holding my breath.

 

[Michael Mozina]

Have you read Einstein's papers on GR?

Yes, and at least one of his books too.

 

[Michael Mozina]

The *math* isn't the problem! *Physics* is the problem, specifically your inability to physically and empirically link "acceleration" and "dark energy". A universe full of math's won't fix that problem.

GR most certainly is the (well a) problem with PC.

Why? I simply see PC theory as the mixture of plasma physics and GR. Why is GR a problem for PC theory?

I'm not claiming ""dark" stuff did it".

What makes you think it's "ok" to stuff "dark" anything into a GR formula?

 

[Michael Mozina]

How'sa bout this?

What about it? I'll grant you all the "missing mass" and MACHO forms of "dark matter" that you might want, but you'll have to demonstrate the existence of any 'exotic' forms of matter that you wish to "fill the gaps" with.

 

[KingMerv00]

What about it? I'll grant you all the "missing mass" and MACHO forms of "dark matter" that you might want, but you'll have to demonstrate the existence of any 'exotic' forms of matter that you wish to "fill the gaps" with.

Right. That's why WIMPs are only hypothetical and they are performing experiments. That's what scientists do. Think think of models and then test them.

We'll have to wait and see how it pans out. If dark energy and dark matter fail, so be it. I don't know why you are so animated about this whole thing.

 

[Tim Thompson]

Crackpot Science I

Going back to the OP ...

I am curious: What do you suppose drives crackpot physics and cosmology? ...

I think it's a purely statistical effect. Brains are really complex things, and the personalities that arise from them are likewise complex. Brains & personalities are statistically distributed just like anything else. Let's say in a normal distribution, in the absence of a good reason for some other distribution. Pick any feature of a personality you want and that feature will be found normally distributed in the population of people. To make matters more complicated, people can be found near the center of the distribution for one personality feature, as a high end outlier for another, as a low end outlier for another, and so on (hence the idiot-savant syndrome).

I think the crackpots are outliers of that type in the statistical distribution of people. It is nearly impossible to understand them in terms of normal thinking, because their brains are literally hardwired in such a way that what seems bizarre or stupid to us seems perfectly acceptable to them. They are as genuinely unable to understand why we can't see that they are obviously right, as we are to understand how they ever got so confused.

Furthermore, we are all "idiot-svants" in some hopefully mild way. I am rather better at science & math, chess & language than the average person. But I have tried to learn music many times and it totally escapes me, I can't do it. And ask me to fix anything, and I will just make it more broke. Still I suspect that most of my personality features are found in the big fat central region of the normal distribution, which of course should be the case for most people (the normal distributions are themselves normally distributed).

I don't argue with apparent crackpots for their sake, as I think their brains have faulty wiring and they are in any case beyond all but the most extraordinary hope. I do it because I assume there are a bunch of more or less normally distributed "lurkers" lurking around watching. The "lurkers" lack knowledge but not intelligence and mostly do not suffer from the self-righteous arrogance typical of a true crackpot. They are willing to learn, and able to understand that other people, with more knowledge & experience than they have, will better understand the subject, and will comment on it with some level of credibility. Hopefully those lurkers will both learn from those more experienced people and at the same time not be duped by the affable and intelligent looking but still seriously flawed crackpot.

Before I discovered this forum, I had no idea that so much crackpot physics existed. I had never heard of electric universe, plasma cosmology, etc. ...

The forms of physics crackpottery we deal with around here are mostly tame compared to the real prize-winning cracked pots. See, for instance, The Saturn Myth, which holds that the original solar system found Venus, Mars & Earth orbiting Saturn such that from Earth the rings of Saturn were always face on (putting Earth permanently aligned with Saturn's orbital axis), with Venus and Mars permanently aligned between Earth & Saturn, only a few thousand years ago. I have been arguing with them for 16 years. Page down and you will see that one of the allegedly promising physically valid models for the Saturn polar configuration came from one Thornhill, the same Wal Thornhill responsible for the electric sun & electric universe. Thornhill invented the electric universe idea many years ago in order to provide a "physical" basis for glowing towers connecting planets in the Saturn polar configuration. The Saturn Myth is enshrined in David Talbott's book "The Saturn Myth".

There will always be crackpots, and there will always be crackpot ideas. The best we can do is provide sufficiently intelligent counterpoints so as to prevent the normally distributed lurkers from falling prey to arguments that "look good" to the layman, but look really silly to those who know better.

 

[W.D.Clinger]

Have you read Einstein's papers on GR?

Yes, and at least one of his books too.

What makes you think it's "ok" to stuff "dark" anything into a GR formula?

Had you understood those papers you claim to have read, you'd have known that Einstein stuffed the lambda term into his own field equations.

In the past, you have argued it was okay for Einstein to add the lambda term to his field equations, but it is not okay for those of us alive today to investigate the possibility that his lambda term may improve the fit between GR and observation. Your argument has always seemed incoherent to me, and you have always ignored requests to explain your personal interpretation of Einstein's field equations, but I see you're still using pejorative language to attack the laws of general relativity as formulated by Einstein.

 

[Perpetual Student]

Michael Mozina

Originally Posted by Perpetual Student
Have you read Einstein's papers on GR?

Yes, and at least one of his books too.

Then how is it that you do not understand the equation:

[latex]G_\mu_\nu +\Lambda g_\mu_\nu = \dfrac{8\pi G}{c^4} T_\mu_\nu [/latex]

?

 

[ben m]

Pick any feature of a personality you want and that feature will be found normally distributed in the population of people. To make matters more complicated, people can be found near the center of the distribution for one personality feature, as a high end outlier for another, as a low end outlier for another, and so on

So what are the crackpots? I would have said high on narcissism/self-importance, but (other than never being wrong) our local EU/PC crackpots don't seem to exhibit that. Unlike many others, they're not writing papers and naming things after themselves---they give all the credit to Alfven et. al.

I wonder if there's some insight to be gained from the study of cults, another context in which non-narcissistic people endlessly repeat praise of their chosen in-group, rejecting any outside influence that goes against the revealed truth?

Page down and you will see that one of the allegedly promising physically valid models for the Saturn polar configuration came from one Thornhill, the same Wal Thornhill responsible for the electric sun & electric universe. Thornhill invented the electric universe idea many years ago in order to provide a "physical" basis for glowing towers connecting planets in the Saturn polar configuration.

Wow. I didn't know that. That makes Tom Van Flandern look positively sane.

 

[dasmiller]

I'm no expert on psychology, but if I were to make a list of ways to avoid being thought a crackpot, "Find a thread about the psychology of crackpots and use it to post attacks on mainstream physics" probably wouldn't be on it.

 

[Perpetual Student]

...
The forms of physics crackpottery we deal with around here are mostly tame compared to the real prize-winning cracked pots. See, for instance, The Saturn Myth, which holds that the original solar system found Venus, Mars & Earth orbiting Saturn such that from Earth the rings of Saturn were always face on (putting Earth permanently aligned with Saturn's orbital axis), with Venus and Mars permanently aligned between Earth & Saturn, only a few thousand years ago. I have been arguing with them for 16 years. Page down and you will see that one of the allegedly promising physically valid models for the Saturn polar configuration came from one Thornhill, the same Wal Thornhill responsible for the electric sun & electric universe. Thornhill invented the electric universe idea many years ago in order to provide a "physical" basis for glowing towers connecting planets in the Saturn polar configuration. The Saturn Myth is enshrined in David Talbott's book "The Saturn Myth".
...

I just took a look at that link. Good grief! That goes beyond crackpottery -- to just plain lunacy, like flat earth people -- are we sure it's not a spoof?

 

[Tim Thompson]

Crackpot Science II

I just took a look at that link. Good grief! That goes beyond crackpottery -- to just plain lunacy, like flat earth people -- are we sure it's not a spoof?

No, it's no spoof. I have been arguing with the Saturnists for many years. They have held conventions and had some really heated arguments. For a while they were touting the polar model built by a testy structural engineer named Grubaugh who tried as I recall to use the methods of engineering statics to demonstrate stable orbits, a method which eventually failed for obvious reasons. Here is a collection of Talk.Origins posts from 1994 discussing Talbott's criticism of my criticism, which I hit on with Google by accident: My Dinner with Tim (Talbott's facetious title). And here is a small collection of an exchange between myself & Grubaugh (and a few others) about the same time: On the Grubaugh Polar Configuration.

The Saturn myth is built on an even deeper belief that myth is in general infallible, so that all mythical stories must be true. Talbott once told me that physics was subordinate to myth and that if physics disagreed with the myth, then the physics must be wrong. That's when I stopped arguing with him. It would not surprise me if Thornhill were of the same mind, but I don't know that.

The fundamental postulate of the whole Saturn thing is that Saturn must have been far larger in the sky then than it is now because otherwise one cannot explain its importance in myths around the world.

 

[Drachasor]

Again, you're confusing *SCALING* issues with *EXISTENCE* issues. You can't demonstrate "dark energy" has any effect on anything made of matter. Fusion has been demonstrated on Earth. I therefore don't have a problem with you claiming "fusion did it". Right or wrong, at least I know that fusion isn't a figment of your imagination and it's a real energy source. If you pointed at the same star and claimed "dark energies did it", then I'd complain.

Actually, you can look at gravitational lensing and realize dark matter did it. If it was ordinary matter then you'd have the matter all inside the galaxy. Instead the gravity-producing matter surrounds the galaxy like a halo.

There are other examples such as the bullet cluster:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster

Electromagnetic Effects are accounted and explain what we see, but the gravitational lensing effects indicate the majority of the mass involved does not respond to electromagnetic effects. In other words, it isn't any kind of plasma, and indeed isn't any sort of ordinary matter.

 

[Michael Mozina]

Actually, you can look at gravitational lensing and realize dark matter did it. If it was ordinary matter then you'd have the matter all inside the galaxy. Instead the gravity-producing matter surrounds the galaxy like a halo.

There are other examples such as the bullet cluster:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster

Electromagnetic Effects are accounted and explain what we see, but the gravitational lensing effects indicate the majority of the mass involved does not respond to electromagnetic effects. In other words, it isn't any kind of plasma, and indeed isn't any sort of ordinary matter.

I agree with you that there is 'missing mass' to account for based on that study (and other studies as well). You cannot be sure from here that it is not composed of ordinary matter however. You're assuming that it's exotic in some way based on a whole host of other assumptions that are frankly off topic in this thread.

I think it's becoming increasingly pointless for me to engage myself in this "crackpot" conversation. It would be like an atheist trying to participate in the thread entitled "Why are atheists so evil?". It's a "no win" scenario. For daring to refer to someone here as a "crackpot" I have been given not one, but *two* warnings, one for doing it originally, and one for mentioning *WHO* I did it to (I guess?). The double standards around here are really amusing. It's absolutely fine for the mainstream to refer to anyone and everyone who disagrees with their beliefs as a "narcissistic crackpot". In fact they can freely refer to whole fields of physics as a "crackpot" field of science! God forbid however that I should dare to refer to anyone as a "crackpot"

I think at this point I'll just let this old dog lie. It's very clear that not one of the PC/EU critics that are participating in this conversation has actually read even one of these works cover to cover (tusenfem excluded):

A) Cosmic Plasma (Alfven)
B) Physics Of The Plasma Universe (Peratt)
C) THE NORWEGIAN AURORA POLARIS EXPEDITION (Birkeland)

These are pretty much the new and old testaments of PC/EU theory, yet those who refer to PC/EU theory as a "crackpot" field of physics have typically never even bothered to read these works in their entirety. Ignorance is not bliss gentlemen. The "maths" you seek are in fact found inside of these works. If you wish to read them, be my guest. If not, oh well.....