Why is there so much crackpot physics?

[Perpetual Student]

This came up in my feed today - http://telescoper.wordpress.com/2012/11/26/to-my-own-correspondent/

What? The Great Pyramid of Giza does not predict the Higgs boson?

 

[Farsight]

This came up in my feed today - http://telescoper.wordpress.com/2012/11/26/to-my-own-correspondent/

Good one edd. Note the bit that says "I regret to announce, therefore, that the plethora of papers telling me why Einstein was wrong..."

I'm the guy here who's saying Einstein was right. It's the recurrent theme of our little chats. And what do we see in response? Dismissal such as bah, cherry-picking and physics has moved on, all amounting to Einstein was wrong. The irony is just delicious.

 

[Pixel42]

I'm the guy here who's saying Einstein was right. It's the recurrent theme of our little chats.

The recurrent theme of these little chats is that you're the guy saying that Einstein would agree with your crackpot ideas, whilst people who actually understand his work patiently try to get you to understand why he wouldn't.

 

[Farsight]

They're defined, to start with, using arbitrary human choices---the 18th century decision that a "meter" is yea big and the medieval decision that a "second" is about yea long in human terms. Those are honest to goodness arbitrary definitions. Starting with those definitions, the speed of light turns out to be 3x10^8 French-distance-unit per medieval-time-unit. Alternatively, the French-unit turns out to be 3x10^-9 light-medieval-units. Or, the medeival-time-unit turns out to be the time it takes light to travel 3x10^8 French-distance-units.

After you pick an arbitrary time, you can define distance using light.

After you pick an arbitrary distance unit, you can define time using light.

You can't do both.

What? You absolutely don't understand this definition thing. Now go and read post 747 and pay attention this time. You don't pick an arbitrary distance unit to define time. You sit there counting incoming light waves, then when you get to some suitable number you say that's a second. Then you use that second along with moving light again, and when some suitable time has elapsed, this time being defined using moving light, then you say that's a metre. You use motion to define time and distance, not each to define the other. That's a tautology. You missed the other tautology too: you always measure the speed of light to be 299,792,458 m/s because you use the motion of light to define both the second and the metre. What you don't do is say the speed of light is absolutely constant and dismiss what Einstein said about the speed of light varying with gravitational potential.

"Fixing the Planck constant" is the same thing as "picking the number 299000000, calling it the speed of light, then letting that define the meter". This is what physicists have been doing for a century, Farsight. "Natural units", an arbitrary human choice to say G=c=h=1, are the most common such choice, and they result in new distance-unit/time-unit/mass-unit. Another arbitrary choice, to say c=hbar=1, results in different new units.

Sure. But like I said you then lose the c² in E=mc², which is not good. It's like trying to lose the v² in KE=½mv² which distinguishes it from p=mv. Our cannonball's stopping distance is not linearly related to the stopping time.

Once again, you're pointing at Freshman-level physics knowledge you don't understand, hinting that no one but you knows it (!), further hinting that it contradicts the other Freshman-level physics you don't understand.

You've got nothing. I understand it.

Everybody understands that the mass of a body is a measure of its energy content. Including Peter Higgs. Including Einstein.

Good. Then that's what it's a measure of, not something else. So we can throw away all that cosmic treacle.

You are making inferences far beyond "mass is a form of energy", you're doing so using your error-ridden scholastic technique, and you're getting these inferences wrong.

No I'm not. I've reiterated what Einstein said: the mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content. I've also said momentum is a measure of resistance to change-in-motion for a massless wave propagating linearly at c. It's no great inference to then say that if the wave is a standing wave, it still exhibits resistance to change-in-motion, but we don't call it momentum any more.

I agree with E^2 = p^2 c^2 + m^2 c^4, and I disagree with your interpretation of it.

All I said is that in pair production and annihilation we see a flip-flop between the momentum and mass terms. We start with two massless photon, we do gamma-gamma pair production to get an electron and a positron which aren't moving very fast. We end up with two massless photons. What's not to like?

 

[Farsight]

The recurrent theme of these little chats is that you're the guy saying that Einstein would agree with your crackpot ideas, whilst people who actually understand his work patiently try to get you to understand why he wouldn't.

No Pixel, the recurrent theme is that I'm the guy who gives the Einstein quotes, which are then dismissed by people who don't understand his work. For example, Einstein described the electron as a body, and said the mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content. So the latter is utterly contradicted by the mass of a body like the electron is a measure of its interaction with the Higgs field. You aren't going to sweep that under the carpet with ad-hominems like your crackpot ideas. Because E=mc² was Einstein's idea. Not mine.

 

[Perpetual Student]

There is no tautology. The second is defined as a specific number of vibrations of a physical system known to be consistent and reproducible. The meter is then defined by the second and the speed of light.

 

[edd]

What? You absolutely don't understand this definition thing.

Yes he very much does.

Now go and read post 747 and pay attention this time. You don't pick an arbitrary distance unit to define time. You sit there counting incoming light waves, then when you get to some suitable number you say that's a second.

'suitable'
'suitable' here is arbitrary, to the extent that it is chosen so that a second is 1/86,400th of a day (plus or minus minor details about how long a day actually is).

Then you use that second along with moving light again, and when some suitable time has elapsed, this time being defined using moving light, then you say that's a metre.

'suitable' here is arbitrary, to the extent that it is chosen to match previous definitions of the metre.

You missed the other tautology too: you always measure the speed of light to be 299,792,458 m/s because you use the motion of light to define both the second and the metre.

You use light along with the specially chosen by humans number 299,792,458 and the specially chosen number 9,192,631,770 to define the second and metre to fit the previously specially chosen choices of society in the past.

Those specially chosen numbers do not somehow magically fit into a formula to give the not chosen at all by humans value of m_p/m_e.

 

[dlorde]

...
I hope you enjoyed some of those as much as I did.

Very much! Thanks for that summary (a more detailed forum discussion can be found here).

It's interesting that the relatively intemperate language used by Gerlich & Tscheuschner ("scientific fraud", "scientific misconduct", "... diagrams are nonsense...", "...lies outside any science", etc.) is familiar in, and almost diagnostic of, crackpottery.

 

[Farsight]

OK, indulge me in pursuing this question. I read your post 607 and I'm not clear what point it is you are attempting to make. Try responding in a non bombastic manner.

Einstein said repeatedly that the speed of light varies with gravitational potential, and that the SR postulate of the constant speed of light "cannot claim any unlimited validity". He also said "a curvature of rays of light can only take place when the [geschwindigkeit=] speed of propagation of light varies with position". But when you use the motion of light to define the second and the metre, and then use them to measure the motion of light, you always measure the speed of light to be 299,792,458 m/s. It's a tautology because the speed of light is defined using the speed of light. You end up thinking the speed of light is absolutely constant, contradicting Einstein and clutching for reasons to say he didn't mean what he said.

The second is defined as so many vibrations of a physical system, not the motion of light.

No it isn't. Look at the definition again: the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom. It isn't 9,192,631,770 hyperfine transistions, it's 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation. I got that wrong on an early Time Explained. Like I said, it's like you sit there with waves coming at you, you count 9,192,631,770 waves going past you, and then you say that's a second. The important thing to remember is that you can't talk about frequency when you're defining the second, because frequency is cycles per second.

Then, we use the speed of light and the second to define length. Where is the tautology?

The tautology is that when the light moves slower, in line with Einstein see above, the waves come at you slower, but you still count 9,192,631,770 of them going past you and say that's a second. It's a bigger second. Then you define the metre, which stays the same because the bigger second and the slower light cancel each other out. Then you use the bigger second and that metre to measure the speed of the slower light, and you still get 299,792,458 m/s! Then when you look at Brian's gif, which is a simplified version of the NIST super-accurate optical clock, you end up saying that the two light pulses are moving at the same speed. It contradicts Einstein and the empirical evidence. And it's all the more unforgiveable once you know about A World without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein. There is no time flowing between those two mirrors, it's just light, moving.

Let's see if it is possible to have a civil discussion with you.

As we all know, I'm a lot more civil than some people here.

 

[Farsight]

....You do go around saying that GR, at least as practiced, is all wrong. You denigrate the actions of scientists that use certain solutions to the Einstein Field Equation and you attack those who determine how much dark matter there is in given physical systems...

I challenge people who try to use the authority of Einstein and GR to peddle pseudoscience like the sky is falling in and the universe revolves around the Earth, or who attempt to dismiss Einstein and GR whilst promoting a hypothesis for which there is no experimental evidence.

Yet you show no signs that you actually have read and understood how to do these things. You have never shown where these solutions or determinations fail and it is likely that you yourself know that you are unable to give a proper analysis of these activities. So why continue to be so firm in your convictions?

Because Einstein said what he said, and GR is one of the best-tested theories we have. See The Confrontation between General Relativity and Experiment by Clifford M. Will.

Interestingly, a search of your recent activity on other science message boards shows you attacking scientists who work on dark matter and your admission that you are "not going to bother" working out the relevant mathematics. Given that the evidence for dark matter is entirely from the results of mathematics (just like the evidence for Newtonian gravity and the evidence for all of Einstein's work), this seems quite a damning admission of a failure to understand the relevant physics.

It isn't damning at all. There's plenty of evidence that "dark matter" exists in some form, but there's absolutely no evidence that it exists in the form of particles such as WIMPs. Einstein wasn't lying when he said "the energy of the gravitational field shall act gravitatively in the same way as any other kind of the energy". There's papers out there such as Inhomogeneous Vacuum: An Alternative Interpretation of Curved Spacetime and there's Einstein's 1920 Leyden Address where he said this:

"This space-time variability of the reciprocal relations of the standards of space and time, or, perhaps, the recognition of the fact that “empty space” in its physical relation is neither homogeneous nor isotropic, compelling us to describe its state by ten functions (the gravitation potentials gμν), has, I think, finally disposed of the view that space is physically empty."

I've also referred to the Lambda-CDM model which uses the FLRW metric which "starts with the assumption of homogeneity and isotropy of space". The space between the galaxies expands whilst galaxies don't, conservation of energy has stood us well, and inhomogeneous spatial energy has a mass-equivalence and a gravitational effect. Space is dark, it has its vacuum energy, and there's a lot of it about. In the light of this, the WIMP hypothesis, which has been going for decades without experimental verification, deserves a bit of skepticism instead of popscience-groupie acceptance, don't you think?

What about the problem with your presentation of the Minkowski metric? What about your serial problem with "0.2" and "0.02"? What about your bizarre determination of physical constants that depends on the units that you chose? These seem like mathematical problems to me; indeed, they seem like the mathematical problem of someone who merely cuts and pastes mathematics without going through the mathematics properly. Do you deny that you made these mistakes?

No. I make mistakes from time to time. Like I said, one of the reasons I post here is to get feedback and correction.

You may wish to. I know that you have spent some of your own money to publish your book. You spend a great deal of time on message boards promoting your positions (but seemingly none on educating yourself in the relevant mathematics).

It's a tough old job fighting psuedoscience, but somebody's got to do it.

Is it really such a waste of time and money to visit a therapist just once or twice?

LOL. I'm going to report your post.

The large difference here seems to be that in this situation, I have worked through the relevant science and you, admittedly, have not. Doesn't this worry you?

You haven't worked through the relevant science, I have. And it obviously worries you.

 

[Pixel42]

No Pixel, the recurrent theme is that I'm the guy who gives the Einstein quotes, which are then dismissed by people who don't understand his work.

I know that's what you believe, but you're as wrong about that as you are about so much else.

 

[Roboramma]

Good. Then that's what it's a measure of, not something else. So we can throw away all that cosmic treacle.

The mass of a body is a measure of it's energy content. Okay, so what determines it's energy content?

In this case, it's interaction with the Higgs Field.

Now, whether that's correct or not, it's clearly consistent, can you really not see that?

 

[edd]

It isn't damning at all. There's plenty of evidence that "dark matter" exists in some form, but there's absolutely no evidence that it exists in the form of particles such as WIMPs. Einstein wasn't lying when he said "the energy of the gravitational field shall act gravitatively in the same way as any other kind of the energy".

The energy in the gravitational field doesn't go into the stress energy tensor. You're welcome to try to demonstrate that a stress energy tensor with a matter component that is solely based off the visible matter can conform to astronomical and cosmological observations. Most people would be happy with the simplification that would offer, but no-one has managed it without fundamentally altering GR. Which you wouldn't want to do by the sounds of it.

 

[Farsight]

You never posted step-by-step logic.

I did when we were talking about mass on the Higgs boson thread. I've tried to do the same here starting with the speed of light, but we can't get past first base.

You posted an equation with imbalanced units---a standard physics-novice mistake---and you were magically able to do arithmetic. But people called you out on the unit mistake. Indeed, people other than you showed the arithmetic, step by step, in various units.

We've discussed the expression before, and the conversion factor n that reduces c to a dimensionless number. Remember the name Andrew Worsley? He's the medical doctor who came up with it.

You posted that there was an implied "c^-3/2" term---which wouldn't have helped, and which was not present in your first arithmetic---but you were unable to do arithmetic again.

No I didn't. There's a c^2½ expression for electron frequency and a c^3 expression for proton frequency. Which can be recast as a c^1½ expression for electron wavelength and a c^2 expression for proton wavelength.

Several people asked for arithmetic---how would a society whose base units are "inches" and "minutes" do your proposed calculation? How would a society whose base units were "light years" and "years" do it? No arithmetic ensued.

Because you have to be consistent, and just as c² and v² still apply in E=mc² and KE=½mv², the above powers of c still apply.

You posted great gobbets of stuff about the general science of units, much of which appeared to be confused and hasty cribbing from Wikipedia...

Oh here we go with the "appeared" and the "implied". Why are you trying to make such a big deal about this expression? When I gave it as a throwaway remark? It wouldn't be because you lost the argument on E=mc², would it? Or that you're trying to divert attention from the howling error you made? You know, when you said this:

"However, given that space is curved near the planets, the laws of coordinate-motion are always coordinate-dependent, so you'd better get used to it."

See my post 864 where I demolished that. But what, no response from you about it? Tut tut ben. A word to the wise: if you lose your integrity, you are lost.

 

[Farsight]

The whole point is that you DO NOT understand enough physics to give a legitimate opinion, even though you believe you do.Liisten to what the others here are trying to teach you! Think about the saying, "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing." It explains why your partial and distorted knowledge of physics leads you to dismiss widely accepted concepts held by the top experts in the world.

Yeah yeah, and I don't know enough scripture to dismiss widely accepted concepts like heaven and hell either. But I do know enough physics to say here's what Einstein said, and when some self-appointed "top experts in the world" flatly contradict that, I know enough physics to take them apart. LOL. My little knowledge is a dangerous thing all right. Dangerous to people who dismiss Einstein and peddle woo.

 

[edd]

Remember the name Andrew Worsley? He's the medical doctor who came up with it.

Thank you for the warning.

 

[Roboramma]

We've discussed the expression before, and the conversion factor n that reduces c to a dimensionless number. Remember the name Andrew Worsley? He's the medical doctor who came up with it.

Great! So demonstrate how you use that conversion factor to get the same result for the ratio of electron mass to proton mass with some other system of units!

 

[Hellbound]

You only think I guessed wrong! That's what's so funny! I switched glasses when your back was turned! Ha ha! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders - The most famous of which is "never get involved in a land war in Asia" - but only slightly less well-known is this: "Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line"! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha...

*Vizzini stops suddenly, his smile frozen on his face and falls to the ground dead*

Am I the only one that keeps having this scene run through my head?

 

[Kwalish Kid]

No Pixel, the recurrent theme is that I'm the guy who gives the Einstein quotes, which are then dismissed by people who don't understand his work.

They are dismissed as cherry-picking because that is what you do: you pick things out of context to support a position that does not make sense given the context of the quotation. The context of the quotations that you choose is the science of the General Theory of Relativity. Your position contradicts this context but you apparently do not realize this because you cannot follow the practice of the science of the theory.

For example, Einstein described the electron as a body, and said the mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content. So the latter is utterly contradicted by the mass of a body like the electron is a measure of its interaction with the Higgs field. You aren't going to sweep that under the carpet with ad-hominems like your crackpot ideas. Because E=mc² was Einstein's idea. Not mine.

This is a great example of your cherry-picking: you fail to see how, in the actual practice of doing what Einstein laid out, there is no contradiction between (Special in this case) relativity theory and the Higgs theory. Again, this failure seems to be due to your inability to actually work through problems in physics.

I challenge people who try to use the authority of Einstein and GR to peddle pseudoscience like the sky is falling in and the universe revolves around the Earth, or who attempt to dismiss Einstein and GR whilst promoting a hypothesis for which there is no experimental evidence.

By now we all know that here you are using code words for specific systems of coordinates that you do not know how to use. They are systems of coordinates that make certain claims about what relationships can be maintained in physics and what cannot. This same geometrization can be done with Newtonian gravity (i.e. Newton-Cartan theory). They are a consequence of the idea that there are no special properties of spacetime that pick out particular axes of rotation. And this seems to be true. So far, you have not addressed those solutions to the Einstein field equation that do pick out particular axes of rotation. If you want to be taken seriously, you should learn the mathematics and address them.

Because Einstein said what he said, and GR is one of the best-tested theories we have. See The Confrontation between General Relativity and Experiment by Clifford M. Will.

If you took Will seriously, then you would learn the relevant mathematics; the overwhelming majority of the evidence that Will presents exists only after a very detailed mathematical argument that takes all of the Newtonian corrections to solar system gravity into account. All other evidence requires similar mathematical work. So far, you have given no evidence to support the idea that your positions are even consistent with Will's results.

<comments about Leyden address, inhomogeneity, and dark matter snipped>

You are presenting an alternative theory that doesn't make any sense mathematically or even historically. As to the latter, given that the isotropic and homogeneous models of cosmology were the ones promoted by Einstein, your choice of quotations seems like a particularly egregious example of cherry-picking. As to the former, if you bothered to learn the mathematics you would see that the isotropy and homogeneity of these models exist only in a particular system of coordinates: a simple change to the system of coordinates and the homogeneity disappears, but this does not change the physics.

Now you could imagine that I am lying or that I am deluded. Yet it seems that you would have to imagine, on your own faith, that everyone working with the numbers is part of a sinister conspiracy or makes basic mathematical mistakes (the kind you have demonstrated) every time they do cosmology and every time in exactly the same way.

This seems like a kind of paranoia that is worrying; it should worry you.

No. I make mistakes from time to time. Like I said, one of the reasons I post here is to get feedback and correction.

It is good to see that, at least in general, you are not denying your mistakes. However, you still seem to be clinging to some of them, even here in this thread.

LOL. I'm going to report your post.

Report all you wish, that doesn't stop my concern for you and your friends and family. Even if you truly are a lone crusader against injustice, you may wish to get some help in bearing that burden.

You haven't worked through the relevant science, I have. And it obviously worries you.

Again I ask: how can you work through the relevant science without knowing the relevant mathematics?

 

[Farsight]

I suspect it's this one: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=172265

Looks pretty civil Robo. I wish there were more like that.

You might find the above thread worth checking out

When I've got more time perhaps. I did make some post/s there, and I have commented on CMBR rest frame before.