Why is there so much crackpot physics?

[BravesFan]

Not to mention that we use very similar stone cutting techniques as the ancients today when we install stone walls, steps or walkways at our houses. The tried and true hammer and wedges technique. It cuts clean and straight lines and doesn't require any fancy lasers or carbon tipped saw blades.

heck, watch This Old House, they usually demonstrate said technique at least once a season or so.

 

[tedlazer]

Another testy response to a reasonable question. I can't read your mind. If you meant to say "ancient builders must have had access to advanced technology", then my response would be "no they didn't." If you meant to say "ancient builders must have been handy with muscle, rope, wood, and stone in ways we can't pin down" my response would be different. I'm asking you to clarify what you mean and you're jumping.

Jumpy again. I am happy to clarify---I should have said the question is one for archaeology, not physics.

Yep, and this is what I would call "crackpot" archaeology. I am aware of no convincing evidence that any ancient people used advanced technology. I am aware of:
a) Megaliths (Stonehenge, the pyramids, obelisks, moai, Pumapunku, etc.) which, though impressive, could reasonably have been built with primitive technology and labor.
b) Random piles of *natural* rock (the Bosnian pyramids, for example) that crackpots misidentify as manmade.
c) Random bits of modern material ("out of place artifacts") that Fortean enthusiasts mistakenly label as ancient.

To all!

Enough of this nonsence!

"Predating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, Turkey's stunning Gobekli Tepe upends the conventional view of the rise of civilization
By Andrew Curry
Smithsonian magazine, November 2008

"Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, Klaus Schmidt has made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time: massive carved stones about 11,000 years old, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery. The megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. The place is called Gobekli Tepe"

Numerous 10-12 metric ton carved rocks over 22 acres!

The very existence of carved, shaped and positioned megalith rings of this size seems to show that the old theories of human origin and evolution have been wrong. Humans obviously did not emerge from caves and they had some kind of tools in hand even before the Mesopotamian Empire existed, and the desire to create massive monuments, including artistic carvings in the stone.


Pama Punku

17.8 thousand feet above sea level. Stones 26 feet hiigh weighing from 100-300 tons. Holes in the some of the stones appearing as though they were drilled perfectely and the stones themselves are cut at perfect right angles. I retract the granite sorry, these are andesite.

So cavemen tech. did this huh with no issue either? Dudes I don't have the time.........

 

[BravesFan]

Nobody is saying that they weren't monumental accomplishments! Nor are we saying that perhaps our knowledge about when we developed tools...etc isn't perfect. What we ARE saying is that there was no advanced technology nor woo related things afoot here.

The evidence points towards, time, effort and much cleverness. if you wish to claim that there was some sort of lost technology of advanced nature that led to these constructions. The floor is yours to submit your evidence.

 

[mike3]

I am curious: What do you suppose drives crackpot physics and cosmology? They do not seem to be very knowledgeable about physics and cosmology, other than having mastered a lot of jargon. They seem to be quite ignorant of mathematics. Yet they seem to be passionate to an extreme about their views -- to the point of behaving like religious zealots. How can they possibly believe tens of thousands of specialists (many quite brilliant) are all wrong, but somehow (although they lack the education) they have stumbled on the truth?
What do they gain out of this avocation? Appearing wise to their friends and relatives and the uninformed at cocktail parties? Are they delusional narcissists? Do they hold myriad other unorthodox opinions about he world (like, say, political conspiracy theories and Internet driven puffery)?
Any opinions?

Ego. They want the fame from being the "next Einstein", they want to think of themselves as that. They might also think they are "sticking it to 'The Man'" by railing against the scientific "establishment".

Explanations like "physics is hard" don't really fully explain it, I think. The vast majority of people out there don't have much more than a cursory understanding of physics either, yet the vast majority of them are not crackpots. There's a lot more to a crackpot than that.

 

[mike3]

I'd be happy if you could supply me with an explanation as to how there is actually even writing deep inside the dam pyramids!

if we can not duplicate these things with the same technology they had as in the sites I just taked to Ben about, that is the proof PERIOD!

How is it not possible to put writing in there? You go inside and inscribe writing. Or you could put writing on the block before you put it in place. ???

 

[mike3]

@tedlazer: There have been numerous demonstrations showing how that "primitive" tech could be used to move big blocks. It's definitely 100% feasible. I challenge you to refute even one of these.

 

[Kid Eager]

To all!

Enough of this nonsence!

"Predating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, Turkey's stunning Gobekli Tepe upends the conventional view of the rise of civilization
By Andrew Curry
Smithsonian magazine, November 2008

"Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, Klaus Schmidt has made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time: massive carved stones about 11,000 years old, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery. The megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. The place is called Gobekli Tepe"

Numerous 10-12 metric ton carved rocks over 22 acres!

The very existence of carved, shaped and positioned megalith rings of this size seems to show that the old theories of human origin and evolution have been wrong. Humans obviously did not emerge from caves and they had some kind of tools in hand even before the Mesopotamian Empire existed, and the desire to create massive monuments, including artistic carvings in the stone.


Pama Punku

17.8 thousand feet above sea level. Stones 26 feet hiigh weighing from 100-300 tons. Holes in the some of the stones appearing as though they were drilled perfectely and the stones themselves are cut at perfect right angles. I retract the granite sorry, these are andesite.

So cavemen tech. did this huh with no issue either? Dudes I don't have the time.........

@tedlazer: There have been numerous demonstrations showing how that "primitive" tech could be used to move big blocks. It's definitely 100% feasible. I challenge you to refute even one of these.

No need - it appears somebody forgot to include the mysterious tech in the excellent Wiki article, and instead cited hand-held tools:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe

 

[theprestige]

I'd be happy if you could supply me with an explanation as to how there is actually even writing deep inside the dam pyramids!

That's an easy one! Whoever wrote the stuff got in and out the same way as whoever read the stuff.

How do you think we even know about the writing in the first place?

 

[tsig]

I supplied a great answer to the TS and look what I get! This is my fourth post after my answer.

You mean carved in granite too? So 200 of the strongest people that ever lived can lift up a stone weighting over 200 tons a couple hundred feet with the technology available as we know it thousands of years ago? I'm not taking this thread off topic. My answer to the TS is:

In fairness when conventional science can not explain things that can be observed with ones own eyes such as the creation of ancient megalithic Structures all over the world, many of which contain stones weighing hundreds of tons, people are compelled to 'think out of the box".

Therefore, the door is open to these crackpots to try to explain what real scientists can not.

As stated. Thanks

Rollers, levers, inclined planes.

 

[Complexity]

Dudes I don't have the time.........

No, dude, I don't have the time.

You need to stop being so gullible, forget much of the garbage that you think you've learned, and start over again learning some science from some good books.

You don't have the background to make sense out of the topics you seem most interested in.

You are in serious danger of settling into the crackpot/conspiracy-theorist stereotype and rotting there.

It is not too late to begin a real education. Get rid of the garbage and make room for the good stuff.

Trying to learn about reality through science is far more interesting (and far cooler) than any of the delusions that you seem to be attracted to.

 

[Complexity]

Why so many crackpots in physics and cosmology?

Chemistry has so many elements and chemicals. Sounds hard.

Biology has oodles of technical terms (even in Latin!) and things have so many little parts. Sounds hard.

Physics? Time and space, dude. Sounds easy.

(leaving out the math, particles, and the physics, of course)


Go, and never darken my towels again.
Groucho Marx


It is a great nuisance that knowledge can only be acquired by hard work.
W. Somerset Maugham


Time is that quality of nature which keeps events from happening all at once.


He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I ever met.
Abraham Lincoln


When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
Goethe


For the rest of my life, I want to reflect on what light is.
Albert Einstein, 1916

 

[Farsight]

So what do you know that he doesn't? And how do you know you know it (rather than just think you know you know it)?

That time is an emergent property of motion and isn't something you can move through. So a Chronology Protection Conjecture is unnecessary. I know that I know it because I've looked at what clocks actually measure, and I've read A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein. And lots of other things. I've thought it through from first principles paying careful attention to the actual scientific evidence. I'm not kidding you about this, Tubby. Incredibly some professional physicists who are highly regarded do not grasp it, and instead talk about motion through spacetime, multiple arrows of time, how to build a time machine, and so on. Crackpot stuff.

 

[Tubbythin]

That time is an emergent property of motion and isn't something you can move through. So a Chronology Protection Conjecture is unnecessary.

Pardon?

I know that I know it because I've looked at what clocks actually measure, and I've read A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein. And lots of other things.

And what do clocks actually measure? What scientific data have you analysed?
ETA. That seems to be a book on philosophy, not physics.

I've thought it through from first principles paying careful attention to the actual scientific evidence.

But what evidence can you give that your thoughts are in better agreement with the scientific evidence than those of the more learned in the field?

I'm not kidding you about this, Tubby.

I'm sure you're not. I totally believe that you think you know what you are talking about.

Incredibly some professional physicists who are highly regarded do not grasp it, and instead talk about motion through spacetime, multiple arrows of time, how to build a time machine, and so on. Crackpot stuff.

Not really.

 

[Farsight]

I don't quite get why you're so fixated on Tegmark. He's completely up front about his mathematical universe ideas being highly speculative, and has relegated them to a "just for fun" status. He has suggested possible observations that would confirm these ideas, and there's no reason to think he wouldn't be willing to abandon them should they be found wanting. Furthermore, I see no a priori reason to reject them. They're neat, interesting, probably not correct, but worth thinking about. So what's the problem?

The problem is that people believe in non-disprovable conjectures from celebrity physicists, and will not entertain the robust evidential physics that shows them to be talking out of their backsides to promote themselves. I'm not fixated on Tegmark, he's just an example I used because it came up elsewhere, along with him featuring in a Horizon program waxing lyrical about the "waterfall" analogy for a black hole. This promotes the idea that space is moving inwards in a gravitational field, which is not in accord with general relativity, one of our best-tested theories.

 

[Farsight]

...One of the reasons I happen to like the Michio Kaku's, Neil Degrasse-Tyson's and Hawkings of the world is their ability to explain complex actions in real world terms. I hope that PBS ,Discovery...etc will keep making these types of programs so as to help educate the public that physics isn't out there just making stuff up (regardless what some people on this forum may think).

Some of these guys are making things up. Things that have rumbled on for decades with absolutely no evidential support, but people believe in them.

BTW, anyone who thinks they understand the concepts of spacetime more than Hawking(who holds Newton's Chair btw....he's not just some TV scientist) is pretty much fooling themselves.

I do, and I'm not. Hawking is fooling you, and you're fooling yourself. Note that the Lucasian Chair, is a mathematics professorship, and the current holder is Michael Green, a string theorist. The problem is that people will believe any old crackpot tosh from "high priest" celebrity physicists, and if some guy like me explains why it is tosh, backed up by hard scientific evidence, they won't entertain it. It's a conviction thing. Creationists won't listen when you show them fossils, strata, carbon dating, glaciation, magnetic reversals, etc. People usually think that the trait they display is to do with religion, but it isn't, it's to do with how people are. Pick a subject if you like, start a thread, let's put this to the test and let's see how you get on.

 

[Tubbythin]

The problem is that people will believe any old crackpot tosh from "high priest" celebrity physicists, and if some guy like me explains why it is tosh, backed up by hard scientific evidence, they won't entertain it.

But you haven't provided hard scientific evidence.

It's a conviction thing. Creationists won't listen when you show them fossils, strata, carbon dating, glaciation, magnetic reversals, etc.

But you haven't provided anything like that level of evidence. So it is an utterly false analogy.

 

[Farsight]

I know of no coherent theory called "the electric universe" or "EU" or "plasma cosmology" -- but you can correct me if I am wrong.

Nor do I.

What I am aware of is an incoherent collection of blatantly crackpot conjectures that go under the banner of these crackpot labels, like:

Fair enough. Watch carefully:

The surface of the sun is solid iron.

Baloney. The surface of the sun is plasma.

The sun is a giant cathode somehow sucking in and emitting electrons.

Baloney. The sun throws out a solar wind.

Gravity is an emergent electromagnetic phenomenon.

Not baloney.

The force that dictates galaxy structure is not gravity but is electromagnetic.

Pass.

Saturn was once the sun, or some wildly similar fantasy.

Baloney.

Solar flares are analogous to lightning on earth.

Baloney.

I sincerely hope you do not hold to any of these fables.

One of them isn't a fable. Look at that vacuum impedance. The goldilocks anthropic multiverse is a fable, but c = √(1/ε₀μ₀) is not.

 

[Mashuna]

But you haven't provided hard scientific evidence.


But you haven't provided anything like that level of evidence. So it is an utterly false analogy.

If you want many more examples of Farsight failing to provide this evidence, check out the Black Holes thread.

 

[dafydd]

That time is an emergent property of motion

What? I'm sitting still and time is still passing.

 

[tedlazer]

That's an easy one! Whoever wrote the stuff got in and out the same way as whoever read the stuff.

How do you think we even know about the writing in the first place?

Be advised that you have not provided an an answer and your post shows you don't even understand what the issue may be there in. BTW I never said I did not have the answer using the tech available, I only thought you would not find the answer. Sadly it seems you could not understand the reason for even the question!