Why is there so much crackpot physics?

[TjW]

As posts here about FGR - by its one and only proponent - stretch back several years (at least), I wonder why FS simply hasn't stopped posting here? I mean, couldn't the immense amount of time and energy be better spent doing FGR-based research? Or writing papers, to be submitted to some relevant, peer-reviewed journal?

No one can say for sure, of course, but as to why they post on JREF, rather than doing research, writing papers, or even posting on sites that would be more receptive to their ideas:
I think for some, there's a desire to be a Galileo sort of martyr. "Oh, sure, laugh at me. They all laughed at Galileo, too." So in their fantasies they're on par with the great paradigm-changing minds of the past.
Some years ago you might get a "They laughed at Einstein, too) variation, but that seems to have died down as the news that the actual response was more like "Well, that's very counter intuitive, but the math seems to work. How can we test it?"

But for a good fantasy, you need initial rejection. If someone looks at your work, and says. "Oh, that makes sense. We'll incorporate your work into our understanding of the world.", that makes you sort of -- mainstream. Just like everyone else. Not special.

 

[edd]

But for a good fantasy, you need initial rejection. If someone looks at your work, and says. "Oh, that makes sense. We'll incorporate your work into our understanding of the world.", that makes you sort of -- mainstream. Just like everyone else. Not special.

I've seen something like this happen - as I've posted before, I once received an email from a physics crank who was very much insistent that quasars were powered by supermassive black holes. Usually they will keep at you if you respond, but when you reply "Yes, we know" they go very very quiet.

 

[dasmiller]

But here's a thought: to the extent that crackpot physics resembles textual analysis of documents accepted as inerrant, 'research' - to a proponent of such crackpot physics - consists of what 'mainstreamers' see as 'quote mining'.

You know, that hadn't struck me before, but for some of 'em, that's dead on.

And it completely baffles me. How many hundreds (or thousands!) of posts did we go through with Mozina where he'd quote-mined some document, such as a poor photocopy of a newspaper article, or a paper that said something completely different than MM interpreted? And MM was by no means unique in that regard, though I don't think it's universal among crackpots.

I hadn't thought about this as a phenomenon in its own right, but since you bring it up, I'm intrigued.

 

[D'rok]

You know, that hadn't struck me before, but for some of 'em, that's dead on.

And it completely baffles me. How many hundreds (or thousands!) of posts did we go through with Mozina where he'd quote-mined some document, such as a poor photocopy of a newspaper article, or a paper that said something completely different than MM interpreted? And MM was by no means unique in that regard, though I don't think it's universal among crackpots.

I hadn't thought about this as a phenomenon in its own right, but since you bring it up, I'm intrigued.

I love lurking in the physics cranks threads. If there's one thing that seems to unite them all, it's that every crank uses some variation of the same epistemological method: hermeneutical scholasticism.

In other words, science as textual (mis)interpretation coupled with deductive logic based on those (mis)interpretations.

The really funny part is that they typically call themselves empiricists, or caste their arguments as supported by scientific evidence, when this is manifestly not the case. Case in point, when Farsight belittles the LHC folks by saying all they have is "a bump on a graph" (or something like that). LHC scientists measure observable phenomena using precision instruments in order to confirm/disconfirm an hypothesis, and this is not empirical science according to the cranks.

Hilarious.

 

[mike3]

And in the case of this crackpot physics, quite a few JREF members do claim to at least understand that physics (or key aspects of it anyway), myself included.

Even the ones that aren't professional physicists? I'm curious: how many different fields of study do you have comparable levels of knowledge in, and more importantly, what should one do to acquire such knowledge?

 

[psionl0]

Let's try again with that invariant Lorentz interval:

No, let us go back further. Where did you get that formula from?

If that "invariant Lorentz interval" is supposed to represent an incremental distance (squared) in space-time then I would have thought that the formula would be:

ds² = dt² + dx² + dy² + dz²
Yet you have reversed the sign of the "time" component and the incremental distance along the z-axis is not squared.

Why?

 

[edd]

I think in this case you can safely assume Farsight typo'd the dz component and he is right about the dt component (give or take a c^2 which in this case it would be justifiable to quietly drop).

 

[Tubbythin]

Is it just mean that seems to think that the JREF science section has some sort of quota of crackpot posts? I haven't done any in-depth analysis but it always seems like when one gets banned another turns up or starts posting a lot more than previously so that the number of ridiculous posts remains roughly constant.

 

[W.D.Clinger]

Farsight's schooling us on crackpot physics. After all, he wrote an entire book on the subject.

Oops, my mistake, as Clinger pointed out, I wrote 0.2 instead of 0.02 - a fifth instead of a fiftieth. The square root of a fiftieth is appoximately a seventh. And there was a typo where I put a ² outside the brackets. Aw, it was late, and I was using the size option, it's fiddly. Shall we try again?

Go for it.

The real reason why there’s so much crackpot physics is conviction. And arrogance, and pride, and hubris. Some people will use anything they can to dismiss something that proves them wrong, be it experiment and evidence and explanation, and even Einstein. They come out with accusations like they never use any mathematics, but when you do, they dismiss that too. Then they make some new accusation, or change the subject, or pull some other slippery stunt.

In the rest of his post, Farsight illustrated this very nicely.

Let's try again with that invariant Lorentz interval:

Yes, let's repeat ourselves, shall we?

psionl0 and edd have already noted the missing exponent on the last term, which I had not noticed.

The more important thing to notice is that Farsight never actually used that formula in the rest of his post, nor did he use that formula in the post he thinks he's correcting. You might expect Farsight to have noticed that, because he claims to be explaining and illustrating that line element. You might think he'd have noticed the problem after I had explained the problem quite clearly:

I don't know why Farsight put a minus sign in front of the 0.142, and I hesitate to ask. It looks as though Farsight doesn't understand that the delta s1 and delta s2 invariants are supposed to be computed using the line element he quoted.

But no, Farsight doesn't notice things like that. He corrected his two trivial mistakes, but Farsight didn't even notice his major conceptual error. Instead of correcting his major error, he repeated it:

Whatever the value of t1, delta s1= t1 and delta s2 = √(-0.142t1²) + √(0.99t1²) = 0.02t1 + 0.98t1 = t1. Simple.

If it's so simple, why can't Farsight get it right?

Farsight is telling us the square root of -0.142 is 0.02. Not so. The square root of -0.142 is an imaginary number: approximately 0.37682887362833545 i.

Farsight is telling us the square root of 0.99 is 0.98. Not so. The square root of 0.99 is approximately 0.99498743710662.

Had Farsight done his arithmetic correctly, he would have written

delta s2 = √(-0.142t1²) + √(0.99t1²)
= 0.37682887362833545 i t1 + 0.99498743710662 t1
= (0.99498743710662 + 0.37682887362833545 i) t1​

Contrary to Farsight's claim, that is most definitely not equal to delta s1.

Does that mean the (corrected) line element is not invariant? No. It means Farsight didn't use the (corrected) line element he claimed he was illustrating. Instead of using the correct formula for the invariant, he invented his own incorrect formula and used his incorrect formula instead.

Does that make Farsight a crackpot? No, not at all. It just means Farsight doesn't understand relativity.

There's no shame in that. Most people don't understand relativity, but that doesn't mean they're crackpots.

To become a crackpot, someone who doesn't understand relativity would have to go well beyond not understanding relativity. For example, someone who doesn't understand relativity could prove himself to be a crackpot by writing and self-publishing an entire book that documents his failure to understand relativity.

That would be pretty extreme. Most crackpots don't go that far. Most physics crackpots just pretend to be an authority on Internet blogs or fora. Kinda like this:

That’s really useful for when you’re looking at things like black holes, when you’re really up against the crackpots. They will tell you about the waterfall analogy, where space is supposedly falling into a black hole. That's abject nonsense. It's like saying the sky is falling in, and it absolutely contradicts general relativity. But if you point that out, the crackpots will call you a crackpot. Or a heretic, or something else. And as ever they will dismiss experiment and evidence and explanation, and even Einstein.

In that paragraph, Farsight is pretending his personal opinions should be given more weight than papers published by genuine experts on general relativity, which is a far more difficult subject than special relativity. Since Farsight, in this thread, has voluntarily gone quite far out of his way to demonstrate his ignorance of special relativity, it would be hard for me to trust Farsight's opinions over the opinions of experts, even if I weren't capable of checking the experts' math for myself.

Let's return to the point Farsight set out to illustrate:

The real reason why there’s so much crackpot physics is conviction. And arrogance, and pride, and hubris. Some people will use anything they can to dismiss something that proves them wrong, be it experiment and evidence and explanation, and even Einstein. They come out with accusations like they never use any mathematics, but when you do, they dismiss that too. Then they make some new accusation, or change the subject, or pull some other slippery stunt.

Yes, crackpot physics comes from conviction borne of arrogance, pride, and hubris. Some people will dismiss anything that contradicts their delusions, whether it be math or experiment or Einstein.

Every once in a while, they respond to accusations that they never use any mathematics by posting hilariously incorrect mathematics.

I thank Farsight for stating these facts so nicely, and for demonstrating them so well.

 

[tsig]

It is amusing to witness these people, who have trouble with high school algebra, lecturing real physicists.

Oops, my mistake, as Clinger pointed out, I wrote 0.2 instead of 0.02 - a fifth instead of a fiftieth. The square root of a fiftieth is appoximately a seventh. And there was a typo where I put a ² outside the brackets. Aw, it was late, and I was using the size option, it's fiddly. Shall we try again? The real reason why there’s so much crackpot physics is conviction. And arrogance, and pride, and hubris. Some people will use anything they can to dismiss something that proves them wrong, be it experiment and evidence and explanation, and even Einstein. They come out with accusations like they never use any mathematics, but when you do, they dismiss that too. Then they make some new accusation, or change the subject, or pull some other slippery stunt. Let's try again with that invariant Lorentz interval:

[qimg]http://www.forkosh.com/mimetex.cgi?ds^2 = -dt^2 + dx^2 + dy^2 + dz^[/qimg]

You can work it through using a pair of parallel-mirror light-clocks. Event1 is when we set them running, keeping clock1 as the local clock whilst sending clock2 travelling on an out-and-back trip. Event2 is when they meet back up. We see the light moving like this ǁ in the local clock1, and each reflection adds 1 to t1. But because it’s just sitting there, x1 y1 and z1 are zero. We see light moving like this /\ in the travelling clock2. Treat one side of the angled path as a right-angled triangle, and the hypotenuse is the lightpath where c=1 in natural units, the base is the speed v as a fraction of c, and the height gives the Lorentz factor γ = 1/√(1-v²/c²). If the travelling clock2 is doing .99c the Lorentz factor is 1/√(1-0.99²/1²) = 1/√(1-0.98) = 1/√0.02 = 1/0.142 = 7. So there's a sevenfold time dilation. That means t2 is a seventh of t1. And because it’s only on a straight-line out-and-back trip, x2 is non-zero whilst y2 and z2 are zero.

When the two clocks meet back up we can be confident that delta s is the same for both clocks because the travelling clock covered a total distance x2 = vt1 = 0.99t1. Whatever the value of t1, delta s1= t1 and delta s2 = √(-0.142t1²) + √(0.99t1²) = 0.02t1 + 0.98t1 = t1. Simple. What’s even simpler is to look at what you’re dealing with, and realise the two total light-path lengths between event1 and event2 are the same in both clocks. That’s what underlies the invariant interval. Macroscopic motion comes at the cost of a reduced local rate of motion. That’s why there’s a minus on the t.

Note that there's no literal time flowing in those parallel-mirror light-clocks, just light moving back and forth between the mirrors. All a clock does is “clock up" some kind of regular cyclic local motion. That’s really useful for when you’re looking at things like black holes, when you’re really up against the crackpots. They will tell you about the waterfall analogy, where space is supposedly falling into a black hole. That's abject nonsense. It's like saying the sky is falling in, and it absolutely contradicts general relativity. But if you point that out, the crackpots will call you a crackpot. Or a heretic, or something else. And as ever they will dismiss experiment and evidence and explanation, and even Einstein.

q. e. d.

 

[ben m]

One thought on Farsight's failure to show calculations:

All of the mistakes Farsight is making are, well, the sort of mistakes you're expected to make when learning physics. All Freshman physics students will, at some point, write down a unit-imbalanced equation. Everyone will, at some point, convince themselves that some non-invariant quantity is invariant, or vice versa. Everyone will mis-assign, or double-count, or (God knows) make a sign error in an energy-budget problem. Everyone will slip up in an occasional vector problem and multiply the scalar magnitudes where they wanted the dot product.

And most people stop doing this real fast. How? Because when they get it wrong, somebody (professor/TA/classmates/tutors) tell them, "that's wrong, try again, here's another problem to try which will clarify your mistake if you solve it." Physicists get better at physics by practicing problem-solving until they're good at it.

Farsight, and perhaps crackpots generally, appears to have no problem-solving practice. When he sees a physics problem, his "hermeneutical scholasticism" that D'rok identified kicks in; he wants to invent an answer and then defend it by abstract textual argument.

I want to emphasize that, not only does this cause problems for this particular answer, but this is why Farsight doesn't have any problem-solving practice. That's why he doesn't have 500 unit-conversion problems under his belt like all physics students do. That's why he doesn't have any vector/scalar problems. That's why he doesn't have any high-school-level potential energy budget skills.

It's not that Farsight is espouses crackpot ideas because he's a bad physicist. I think that the intellectual habits of his crackpottery have made him a bad physicist.

 

[Perpetual Student]

One thought on Farsight's failure to show calculations:

All of the mistakes Farsight is making are, well, the sort of mistakes you're expected to make when learning physics. All Freshman physics students will, at some point, write down a unit-imbalanced equation. Everyone will, at some point, convince themselves that some non-invariant quantity is invariant, or vice versa. Everyone will mis-assign, or double-count, or (God knows) make a sign error in an energy-budget problem. Everyone will slip up in an occasional vector problem and multiply the scalar magnitudes where they wanted the dot product.

And most people stop doing this real fast. How? Because when they get it wrong, somebody (professor/TA/classmates/tutors) tell them, "that's wrong, try again, here's another problem to try which will clarify your mistake if you solve it." Physicists get better at physics by practicing problem-solving until they're good at it.

Farsight, and perhaps crackpots generally, appears to have no problem-solving practice. When he sees a physics problem, his "hermeneutical scholasticism" that D'rok identified kicks in; he wants to invent an answer and then defend it by abstract textual argument.

I want to emphasize that, not only does this cause problems for this particular answer, but this is why Farsight doesn't have any problem-solving practice. That's why he doesn't have 500 unit-conversion problems under his belt like all physics students do. That's why he doesn't have any vector/scalar problems. That's why he doesn't have any high-school-level potential energy budget skills.

It's not that Farsight is espouses crackpot ideas because he's a bad physicist. I think that the intellectual habits of his crackpottery have made him a bad physicist.

I think the above is right on target, but I believe one needs to account for some mysterious psychological drives to complete the picture.
As a counterexample, I have very little problem solving experience with physics, but I have studied a good deal of mathematics, including a lot of experience in solving mathematics problems. So, I would be prone to the same errors we see from Farsight, if I were to attempt to deal with physics problems on my own.
As I have undertaken some self study of physics over the last couple of years, the essential consistency of units and dimensions has become quite clear to me. Given my own inexperience, I would not be so foolish as to overextend myself as Farsight has. Instead, I rely on professionals to lead the way. It's just too obvious! So why is it not obvious to Farsight? There is something more at play here.

 

[psionl0]

I think in this case you can safely assume Farsight typo'd the dz component and he is right about the dt component (give or take a c^2 which in this case it would be justifiable to quietly drop).

I think you are right about the c^2 bit (and the typo) but the negative sign still eludes me.

Come to think about it, the formula is still incorrect because time doesn't have the same dimension as space. So the formula should look like this?

ds² = +c²dt² + dx² + dy² + dz²
BTW I have read the negative comments about Farsight and I am just testing what Farsight actually knows. If he doesn't answer me then that will be an answer.

 

[Perpetual Student]

I think you are right about the c^2 bit (and the typo) but the negative sign still eludes me.

Come to think about it, the formula is still incorrect because time doesn't have the same dimension as space. So the formula should look like this?

ds² = +c²dt² + dx² + dy² + dz²
BTW I have read the negative comments about Farsight and I am just testing what Farsight actually knows. If he doesn't answer me then that will be an answer.

dT² = dt² - dx² - dy² - dz²dS² = -dt² + dx² + dy² + dz²where c = 1, which is commonly done for convenience. If c is explicitly needed, c² will multiply the factors with T and t.

 

[fuelair]

Why is there so much crackpot physics?














Because ther are so many crackpots!!!!!

 

[Farsight]

...Here we have FS (to take another example). So far as I can tell, no one has said they even understand 'Farsight GR'. I certainly don't, even though I did try mighty hard (one cannot enter into a meaningful dialog - IMHO - on something like FGR unless one actually understands it). And it seems I am not alone; while I certainly haven't read more than a small fraction of the material posted even in this website, I have yet to read anything by any JREF member that could be construed as meaning "yes, I understand what you're saying FS, but ..."

As posts here about FGR - by its one and only proponent - stretch back several years (at least), I wonder why FS simply hasn't stopped posting here? I mean, couldn't the immense amount of time and energy be better spent doing FGR-based research? Or writing papers, to be submitted to some relevant, peer-reviewed journal?

I like posting here. This is a skeptics forum where people dismiss simple plain-vanilla physics backed by rock-solid empirical evidence because they believe in physics which has no experimental support and which they don't understand at all. So much so that they dismiss what Einstein said as "cherry picking". The irony is just delicious. Plus I use it as a test-bed to develop the simple plain-vanilla physics explanations. Whilst people dismiss say the explanation of the invariant Lorentz interval, they do give some useful feedback, like the ² on the z. And maybe I'll have to put a c on the -t, even though in the gedankenexperiment we don't actually use the speed of light, we're just counting reflections.

 

[psionl0]

dT² = dt² - dx² - dy² - dz²dS² = -dt² + dx² + dy² + dz²where c = 1, which is commonly done for convenience. If c is explicitly needed, c² will multiply the factors with T and t.

Hmmm, it would appear that dS² = -dT²
I am a little rusty with my vector calculus but it would appear that at least one of these quantities would be a complex number.

Now, what are S and T?

 

[Farsight]

I think you are right about the c^2 bit (and the typo) but the negative sign still eludes me.

Come to think about it, the formula is still incorrect because time doesn't have the same dimension as space. So the formula should look like this?

ds² = +c²dt² + dx² + dy² + dz²
BTW I have read the negative comments about Farsight and I am just testing what Farsight actually knows. If he doesn't answer me then that will be an answer.

Point taken re the c. The minus sign is there because of the way Einstein derived the Lorentz transformation. You're an observer watching a light beam going at c in a straight line through space. It covers a distance x in a time t wherein x = ct, so x - ct = 0. Another observer moving in the x direction sees it going at the same old c and says x' - ct' = 0. For Lorentz invariance x - ct = x' - ct' and you end up with x² + y² + z² - ct² for the invariant spacetime interval. We use what is in essence Pythagoras' theorem and say that for both observers, the distance travelled squared, minus c times the time interval squared, is the same. Sit two observers on top of two parallel-mirror light clocks, send one this way ← and the other one that way → at different speeds on an out-and-back trip. One travels a distance x and comes back with a clock reading of t, the other travels a distance x' and comes back with a clock reading of t'. If x is greater than x', then t is less than t'. For both observers the light-path length is the same. Draw it zigzag like this /\/\/\/\/\/\ and divide each zigzag into two right-angled triangles like this /|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\. The light-path length is the sum of the hypotenuses. The distance travelled is the sum of the bases. The clock reading is the number of triangles.

 

[edd]

No particular problem with what Farsight write above except it is a bit verbose. I think one thing that's not been made as clear as it could is that this 'interval' is zero for any two points on the same light ray and for points in general can be negative. That's ok though - it isn't the same as a distance - it's more a convenient construction for two points that will have the same ds² for everyone. When a lot of things are relative in relativity finding the things that aren't relative is very handy.

 

[Farsight]

I think the above is right on target, but I believe one needs to account for some mysterious psychological drives to complete the picture.
As a counterexample, I have very little problem solving experience with physics, but I have studied a good deal of mathematics, including a lot of experience in solving mathematics problems. So, I would be prone to the same errors we see from Farsight, if I were to attempt to deal with physics problems on my own.
As I have undertaken some self study of physics over the last couple of years, the essential consistency of units and dimensions has become quite clear to me. Given my own inexperience, I would not be so foolish as to overextend myself as Farsight has. Instead, I rely on professionals to lead the way. It's just too obvious! So why is it not obvious to Farsight? There is something more at play here.

Yes there is. The "experts" are feeding you drivel like the sky's falling in and the universe revolves around the Earth, and you're lapping it up. So much so that when I offer Einstein's relativity instead, you dismiss it as cherry-picking crackpot physics. You have a mysterious psychological drive to cling to woo. And I have a not-so-mysterious psychological drive to teach you to be skeptical about it. If don't do this, you are doomed to be a Perpetual Student forever, like some kid who never graduated from high school.