Why is there so much crackpot physics?

[godless dave]

Nobody said they create time. Listen to what I said. Go and look at what a clock actually does. You can't open up a clock and see the time being measured. You see some kind of regular cyclic motion, along with some kind counting mechanism to show a cumulative display.

And that's how we measure time.

I've already referred to Thorne and Wheeler. Here's Hawking, and here's Kaku and Carroll. What sort of physicists are these guys? Fringe?

Hawking is clearly speaking speculatively - he even says so.

 

[Perpetual Student]

Hawking is clearly speaking speculatively - he even says so.

Don't waste your time. Farsight has demonstrated numerous times that he is incapable of distinguishing between crackpot physics and speculative physics presented by accomplished physicists. Consequently, he regards anti-gravity machines in the same manner as speculations about multiverses.

 

[Farsight]

No I don't. Provided conservation of energy is adhered to I don't have a problem with antigravity. A shelf stops a brick falling down, but to lift that brick up to the shelf you need to do work on it, and add gravitational potential energy to it. Then when you push it off the shelf the brick falls down and gravitational potential energy is converted into kinetic energy. Once this is dissipated, you're back where you started. If you can do all this with some kind of field, good luck to you. It isn’t in the same league as the multiverse that can never be proven and is unscientific

And that's how we measure time.

Let's try to make it clearer. Imagine it's a parallel-mirror light clock, used to explain time dilation. It counts the number of times the light reflects between the mirrors. There's no actual time flowing or passing between the mirrors. It's just light, moving. So it isn't actually time that's being measured in an empirical sense.

Hawking is clearly speaking speculatively - he even says so.

Yeah yeah, and his chronology protection conjecture contains the word "conjecture", so that doesn't count either. On that basis everything Hawking talks about is speculative. For example, Hawking radiation remains unproven. It remains hypothetical. So it's speculative. Come on Dave, serious physicists talk seriously about time travel, and they're considered to be mainstream physicists, not crackpots. Then when I'm skeptical about time travel, guys like Perpetual Student call me a crackpot.

 

[godless dave]

No I don't. Provided conservation of energy is adhered to I don't have a problem with antigravity. A shelf stops a brick falling down, but to lift that brick up to the shelf you need to do work on it, and add gravitational potential energy to it. Then when you push it off the shelf the brick falls down and gravitational potential energy is converted into kinetic energy. Once this is dissipated, you're back where you started. If you can do all this with some kind of field, good luck to you. It isn’t in the same league as the multiverse that can never be proven and is unscientific

Let's try to make it clearer. Imagine it's a parallel-mirror light clock, used to explain time dilation. It counts the number of times the light reflects between the mirrors. There's no actual time flowing or passing between the mirrors. It's just light, moving. So it isn't actually time that's being measured in an empirical sense.

Your final sentence doesn't follow from your penultimate one.

Yeah yeah, and his chronology protection conjecture contains the word "conjecture", so that doesn't count either. On that basis everything Hawking talks about is speculative.

Hawking's most important work isn't on websites or in his books, it's in the research papers.

 

[Perpetual Student]

Then when I'm skeptical about time travel, guys like Perpetual Student call me a crackpot.

That is untrue. I agree that time travel is a subject for science fantasy. Your crackpottery has to do your numerous claims about time not being fundamental, your claim that only you have interpreted the words of Einstein, that the work of physicists like Susskind have no merit, and more.

Breach of rule 12 removed.

Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Cuddles

 

[godless dave]

That is untrue. I agree that time travel is a subject for science fantasy. Your crackpottery has to do your numerous claims about time not being fundamental, your claim that only you have interpreted the words of Einstein,

Which is funny, because Einstein was a proponent of viewing time as a dimension.

 

[Perpetual Student]

Which is funny, because Einstein was a proponent of viewing time as a dimension.

Yes, irony at its best!

 

[seycyrus]

Mainstream physicists don't like to use the word "impossible".

 

[Zeuzzz]

Consequently, he regards anti-gravity machines in the same manner as speculations about multiverses.

They're both nothing more than ideas with no scientific evidence currently in support of them. One of them can be tested extensively (and has), the other can be theorized about extensively (and has). I'd definitely put my money on anti-gravity in the future, and bet for multiverses going down in history as an arcane mathematical relic, another vain attempt to come up with an interdisciplinary theory for life and everything else. Would make a great book or fairy tale in the future to it's credit.

 

[edd]

Mainstream physicists don't like to use the word "impossible".

Nonsense. We use it to talk about teaching some of our students on a regular basis.

 

[ben m]

Then when I'm skeptical about time travel, guys like Perpetual Student call me a crackpot.

It's not just when you're skeptical about time travel.

 

[Farsight]

Your final sentence doesn't follow from your penultimate one.

It does. If you have two identical parallel-mirror light-clocks at different elevations and so different gravitational potentials, the lower clock runs slower than the upper clock. People then tend to say it's because "time is running slower" but those clocks aren't actually measuring time running. They're counting the number of times light bounces back and forth. Check out A world without time: the forgotten legacy of Godel and Einstein. It's heavy-going philosophy at time, but it's interesting reading. Note though that you pick up "time does not exist", but it ought to be "time, as we ordinarily understand it, does not exist". There's no literal fundamental thing called time flowing/running/passing between those parallel mirrors.

Hawking's most important work isn't on websites or in his books, it's in the research papers.

Try pointing to some important work that has been validated by scientific experiment.

Which is funny, because Einstein was a proponent of viewing time as a dimension.

No problem with that, but it's a dimension in the sense of measure rather than a dimension that offers freedom of motion. Like, you can jump forward a metre but you can't jump forward a second. Part of the problem is that the word dimension has shifted in meaning from "a measuring" and is nowadays assumed to be associated with some degree of freedom to move or travel through that dimension.

 

[dafydd]

It does. If you have two identical parallel-mirror light-clocks at different elevations and so different gravitational potentials, the lower clock runs slower than the upper clock. People then tend to say it's because "time is running slower"

Which people? Both sets of people would see their clock running normally. The word 'relativity' is a big hint here.

 

[Farsight]

Any people. Whether you have two sets of people or not, everybody will agree that the lower clock is running slower than the upper clock. The guys at NIST have demonstrated this with optical clocks where one's a third of a metre higher than the other. See this report, but be wary of phrases like time passes more quickly and differences in the passage of time. Because like I said to dave, there isn't any literal time passing or flowing within the clocks. There's just something moving, and in the lower clock it's moving a bit slower than in the upper clock.

 

[godless dave]

It does. If you have two identical parallel-mirror light-clocks at different elevations and so different gravitational potentials, the lower clock runs slower than the upper clock. People then tend to say it's because "time is running slower" but those clocks aren't actually measuring time running. They're counting the number of times light bounces back and forth.

And you can use that count to measure time passing.

There's no literal fundamental thing called time flowing/running/passing between those parallel mirrors.

Nobody claims there is.

 

[Perpetual Student]

Although Farsight may hold a few crackpot ideas, Farsight's pondering about time (time does not flow, one cannot move through time, time is not a dimension, etc.) are not really crackpot notions since they are not testable and there is no real scientific content. These comments are merely so much philosophic daydreaming. We know that treating time on an equal footing with space with 1/c² as a conversion factor is essential to doing modern physics and we can't even formulate a simple Lagrangian in classical physics without t. So, whether one chooses to call it a dimension or not is nothing more than an empty semantic exercise. The mathematics of physics is how things are really done and provides us with insights about the universe; playing with the words are for poets, philosophers and cranks.

 

[seycyrus]

Nonsense. We use it to talk about teaching some of our students on a regular basis.

Ha! It seems you might be in roughly the same situation as I am. Go take an informal poll and ask your colleagues whether they believe TT is impossible or extremely improbable. As a third choice you might provide the options that go along the ways of "Well, what do you mean by time?"

 

[W.D.Clinger]

Then when I'm skeptical about time travel, guys like Perpetual Student call me a crackpot.

It's not just when you're skeptical about time travel.

Wasn't Farsight the fellow who posted an absurd formula for the ratio of electron and proton masses? And continued to deny his errors, even though his formula for that dimensionless ratio isn't dimensionless? And refused to show how he can get the same ratio using any system of units other than SI?

Come to think of it, he did a lot of that in this very thread:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=8788204#post8788204
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=8795556#post8795556
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=8795703#post8795703
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=8799769#post8799769
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=8800112#post8800112
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=8800134#post8800134

Farsight must be very sure of himself...but not sure enough to back up his claims:

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!

I was thinking about how to describe it with squares and cubes and c=λf, where for two harmonic standing waves λ₁f₁= c and λ₂f₂= c and √(λ₁f₁) = √(λ₂f₂) = c^½. But then I thought it's too tricky and it's too novel, I'm here to talk about what Einstein said and knock the woo on the head, not this.

It's valid Robo, because regardless of your system of units E=mc² and KE=½mv² and λ₁f₁= c and λ₂f₂= c and √(λ₁f₁) = √(λ₂f₂) = c^½. It's just too difficult to explain, and it's just too much of a distraction.

Nonsense is usually difficult to explain.

Not everything Farsight says is wrong:

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.

 

[fuelair]

I'm vaguely curious if the first page of any other thread here has the number (or more) of people who have been banned posting on it's first page??!!!

 

[Perpetual Student]

I'm vaguely curious if the first page of any other thread here has the number (or more) of people who have been banned posting on it's first page??!!!

That's interesting. I just went back to the first page for a look. I suppose this thread caused a bit of defensive activity on the part of some cranks, whose passion ultimately resulted in banishment.