Why is there so much crackpot physics?

[Daylightstar]

Yep. It isn't called millimeter for nothing, and you can't open up a metre. ...

It isn't? Can you even explain why it is called a millimeter?
I just told you that you can't open up a meter ....

... But you can open up a clock, and you don't see time flowing through it. So your comparison is indeed ridiculous. Try to make a sensible contribution to the discussion next time.

Why do you even want to start WWIII over whether you can actually see time flowing through the inside of a clock?
It's ridiculous.
Cars don't have their wheels mounted on the backseat, do they? It would not serve a meaningful purpose. Time flowing through the inside of a clock would obviously serve no meaningful purpose either.
Everyone knows that time flows in circles on the outer perimeter of the dial of a clock. There's even an hour hand and a minute hand pointing at it, and if you're patient, you can see that the hands are following the time while pointing accurately at it continuously, which is the point of a clock.
How much clearer can this be?

 

[Farsight]

But I can open up a yardstick and see distance moving through it?

...Everyone knows that time flows in circles on the outer perimeter of the dial of a clock...

Why is there so much crackpot physics? Because people dismiss the scientific evidence that's right under their nose, because they believe in things for which there's no scientific evidence, and because they just love their woo. There's so much crackpot physics for the same reason there's so much religion, spiritualism, political dogma, and other garbage like homepathy.

 

[Farsight]

For someone who regularly makes careless errors, you do love to dwell on those of others to deflect attention from the weakness of your arguments.

I make the odd mistake, but you're the one dismissing patent scientific evidence and accusing me of crackpottery, then making not just one schoolboy error, but three. It's just not good enough. Buck your ideas up, or forever remain a Perpetual Student.

You can label the "conversion factor" c, 1/c, -c, -1/c, 1/c², -1/c² depending on how one looks at the equation. I don't care; indulge yourself.

The conversion factor between distance and time is c, get used to it. Note that nobody has chimed in on this, because I'm right.

The point is that your unfounded belief that a minus sign effects "footing" -- whatever you think that means -- is misguided. The equations of relativity treat time as a dimension with a conversion factor. That is a mathematical truth. Time is real, it is fundamental, it is a dimension in our most accurate and important model of the behavior of the universe. Motion is defined mathematically by Δx/Δt; there is no other definition of motion nor is there any physics with time as a derived quantity.

I haven't got any unfounded belief, you have. It doesn't matter how the equations of relativity treat time, and it doesn't matter how motion is defined mathematically. You can see things moving through space, and you can move through space. You can hop forward a metre. But you can't hop forward a second. All the mathematical truth in the world doesn't change that.

As you are so fond of saying, one does not "see time flowing inside of a clock." Nor does one see a gravitational field. It is nevertheless one of the fundamental forces of nature. Your "seeing" argument is nonsensical.

No, it's empirical. You know the gravitational field is there because you're sitting on your chair on planet Earth, and when you drop a pencil it falls down. The phrase gravitational field is the name you give to a region of space where things fall down, and it's based upon what you can observe or measure. Asserting that a clock measures the flow of time isn't empirical, because it patently isn't some chronological gas meter. Instead there's something moving in there, regularly. The inner mechanism of a clock isn't called a movement for nothing. The clock counts the regular cyclic motion and gives you some form of cumulative display that you call the time. That's what a clock does. There is no time flowing inside it, so it isn't literally measuring the flow of time. That's just a figure of speech. Now get used to the idea that we can see space and motion, and we can derive the time dimension from that motion, but we have absolutely no scientific evidence to support the fairy tale that time flows like a river, or the myth that you travel forward through it at one second per second. You don't. Any travelling you do is through space. And when you say what time it took, all you're doing is referring to something else moving in space, such as some regular cyclic motion in a clock that is counted and converted into some kind of cumulative display like the 21:59 in the corner of my screen. That's all there is to it, that's why time travel is bunk. And like I said, the reason why there's so much crackpot physics is because people dismiss the empirical scientific evidence that's right there under their nose, because they'd rather believe in fairy tales instead.

 

[Daylightstar]

Why is there so much crackpot physics? Because people dismiss the scientific evidence that's right under their nose, because they believe in things for which there's no scientific evidence, ...

The crackpot's belief says the crackpot has 'scientific evidence', and that it's obvious. They may even want to forcefully 'educate' others in the crackpot's 'scientific evidence'.
The crackpot may forcefully pretend to know better than .... basically everyone else, persistently and flatly resisting any critical analysis of their presented ideas and employing the defense mechanism of (again) forcefully attempting to 'set the crackpot's reviewers straight', while painting him/herself as the true reference of science.

 

[Roboramma]

I referred to work by Andrew Worsley, who gives the electron Compton wavelength as 4π / n c^1½ metres, where n is a dimensionality conversion factor with a value of 1 which converts c into a dimensionless number. After that comes the proton/electron mass ratio c^½ / 3π.

Great, so please apply that conversion factor and use it in some other system of units

Then we will all see that you are obviously correct

If you can't do that, clearly the conversion factor doesn't work

It's pretty simple Farsight, and I suspect it's very obvious to everyone reading the thread

 

[Farsight]

No, because I mentioned it in passing, and people try to use it as deliberate derail when I've won the argument. Stay on topic. We're talking about time travel and empirical evidence and why anybody who believes in the possibility of time travel is a crackpot.

The crackpot's belief says the crackpot has 'scientific evidence', and that it's obvious. They may even want to forcefully 'educate' others in the crackpot's 'scientific evidence'. The crackpot may forcefully pretend to know better than .... basically everyone else, persistently and flatly resisting any critical analysis of their presented ideas and employing the defense mechanism of (again) forcefully attempting to 'set the crackpot's reviewers straight', while painting him/herself as the true reference of science.

No, the scientist points to the evidence which everybody can see. But the crackpot dismisses it with weasel words instead of addressing it.

 

[Daylightstar]

...
No, the scientist points to the evidence which everybody can see. But the crackpot dismisses it with weasel words instead of addressing it.

Ah yes, reversing roles is another mechanism employed by the crackpot.

 

[Daylightstar]

... Stay on topic. We're talking about time travel and empirical evidence and why anybody who believes in the possibility of time travel is a crackpot. ...

Follow your own advise above, and example shown below:

Why is there so much crackpot physics? ...

The topic is: "Why is there so much crackpot physics?"
Not: "time travel and empirical evidence and why anybody who believes in the possibility of time travel is a crackpot"

 

[Perpetual Student]

I make the odd mistake, ...

The speed of light (c) can appear in the denominator, numerator, squared or not, negative or positive in any of the equations of relativity. The term "conversion factor" is a general expression for any of these forms. Real physics is done using a mathematical expression. Whatever you like to call a conversion factor is unimportant; this is also true of h or h-bar in quantum theory.
Your fixation on the words is your undoing as I will further demonstrate here. You said above,

"It doesn't matter how the equations of relativity treat time ... You can see things moving through space, and you can move through space."

What you fail to understand is that the only thing that matters is how time is used mathematically. That is how modern physics is done. Your Aristotelian notions about motion are irrelevant and unscientific.

You said,

"You know the gravitational field is there because you're sitting on your chair on planet Earth, and when you drop a pencil it falls down."

More words! Newton defined gravity in scientific terms with mathematics. We feel gravity and we sense the passage of time. Our human feelings about these things remain general observations until some scientific statement is made about these notions using mathematics. Your dismissal of Δx/Δt as a scientific expression of motion is quite revealing.

You said,

"it doesn't matter how motion is defined mathematically."

On the contrary, when doing physics the only thing that matters is how motion is defined mathematically.
Here, we have the fatal flaw revealed in your pseudoscience. You do not understand that general notions about the behavior of the universe have been supplanted with mathematical descriptions. Newton is a long way (in time) from Aristotle! Quite ironically, you're living in the past!

You said.

... Stay on topic. We're talking about time travel and empirical evidence and why anybody who believes in the possibility of time travel is a crackpot.

I am not aware of a single poster on this thread who has expressed a belief in time travel. I have noticed that this has been your default straw man for a few years on this and many other threads. Follow your own directive and "stay on topic." If and when someone here expresses a belief that time travel is possible, I will mount my horse and join you in the heroic enterprise of thrashing all time travel windmills.

 

[Kwalish Kid]

The last time somebody said that to me I'd showed them the fossils, the strata, the carbon dating, etc.

When somebody insists that a clock measures time passing like it's some gas meter hooked up to the flow of time, it's useless to try to get them to examine the empirical observable scientific evidence of what a clock actually does.

Many people here have tried to show you the physics equivalent of fossils and carbon dating, yet you seem to have ignored this.

You have yet to show us how one can do any physics with your particular time-free physics. You have yet to show us how you can count your waggling of arms as movement through space.

 

[ctamblyn]

Great, so please apply that conversion factor and use it in some other system of units

Then we will all see that you are obviously correct

If you can't do that, clearly the conversion factor doesn't work

It's pretty simple Farsight, and I suspect it's very obvious to everyone reading the thread

Here's a little help for Farsight, to add to the examples already given.

If (in a fever, perhaps) we choose to write

λ = 4π / n₁ c^3/2​

for the Compton wavelength of the electron, and

m_p / m_e = n₂ c^1/2 / 3π​

for the proton/electron mass ratio, then the two new constants we are forced to introduce - or "fudge factors" to give them their proper name - have the values

n₁ = 3.1552 × 10^-12 ns^3/2 Å^-5/2 n₂ = 0.31606 ns^1/2 Å^-1/2​

(Nanoseconds and Ångströms seemed as reasonable as any other choice of units.)

 

[W.D.Clinger]

a running example of crackpot physics, part 2

In a previous post, I remarked upon a tactic often seen among those who promote crackpot physics:

When crackpots can't answer criticism, they often claim victory and say their critics have no argument, even when (as here) the crackpot's errors would be obvious to any scientifically literate high school student.

For example:

It came up in a conversation about something else where I'd won the argument hands down, and was used as deliberate distraction by people who had no counterargument. So do try to make a sincere discussion to the topic in hand, Clinger. Deliberate distractions in lieu of counterargument will not go unnoticed.

Contrary to what Farsight wrote above, he was the one who introduced the Worsley/Farsight crackpot numerology units fail into a thread devoted to serious discussion of whether the Higgs boson had been discovered. His crackpot numerology was off topic in that thread. He introduced that crackpot topic as a deliberate distraction because he was losing several arguments, badly.

We're seeing the same tactic in this thread:

No, because I mentioned it in passing, and people try to use it as deliberate derail when I've won the argument. Stay on topic. We're talking about time travel and empirical evidence and why anybody who believes in the possibility of time travel is a crackpot.

Farsight appears to have forgotten which thread he's in, but we should consider the possibility that his introduction of time travel into this thread is just another of his deliberate derails. He must know he can't defend his crackpot numerology, and is trying to change the subject.

 

[ctamblyn]

Money


Next question.


Paul

Some crackpots, so I gather, publish books on their alternative views of reality. Long ago I encountered an especially troublesome member on a public wiki who fell into this category, and who would edit Physics / Mathematics pages to align with his/her views (he/she was obsessed with quaternions, IIRC, to almost the point of fetishisation).

In such cases (where sales are in jeopardy) the chances of them ever publicly admitting their error must be drastically reduced, even if they realise they're wrong.

 

[Farsight]

... Farsight appears to have forgotten which thread he's in, but we should consider the possibility that his introduction of time travel into this thread is just another of his deliberate derails.

Garbage. In post 972 after Darat and Perpetual Student bumped the thread I said It isn't counter-culture Zeuzzz. What it is is that people just love mystery and woo. They do, they love it, and they cling to it with utter conviction. And if you take issue with their time machines or their sky falling in, or their wormholes or white holes or branes or multiverse, they get all sniffy and say stuff like you don't understand the math, crackpot. Then Godless Dave said mainstream physicists don't believe in time travel, then I referred to Thorne and Wheeler and Hawking, then we were all having a nice chat and I was proving my case when you did the derail in post 998 with ad-hominems directed at me re the Andrew Worsley's expressions. You're doing the same thing again after I put Perpetual Student straight about the conversion factor. You should have said Actually, Farsight is right about that. Not doing so and trying another dishonest ad-hominem instead merely discredits you. Now, can we get on please?

 

[Daylightstar]

The crackpot's belief says the crackpot has 'scientific evidence', and that it's obvious. They may even want to forcefully 'educate' others in the crackpot's 'scientific evidence'.
The crackpot may forcefully pretend to know better than .... basically everyone else, persistently and flatly resisting any critical analysis of their presented ideas and employing the defense mechanism of (again) forcefully attempting to 'set the crackpot's reviewers straight', while painting him/herself as the true reference of science.

... I put Perpetual Student straight about the conversion factor. You should have said Actually, Farsight is right about that. ...

Okidoki. Close enough.

 

[Kwalish Kid]

The problem, Farsight, is that even when you happen to be right about a particular conclusion, your reasoning is often hopelessly wrong.

I think that I have mentioned before that you seem to think that being a skeptic is to hold dogmatically to your scientific positions; nothing could be further from the truth. You hold scientific positions strongly yet you clearly cannot hold these positions through understanding the scientific reasoning for these positions; and, yes, this is because you do not understand the math.

In the case of "time travel", you are correct that many physicists believe in "time travel" if one uses a pathological definition of the phrase (as you tend to), but not if one uses a more standard definition of the phrase. You use "time travel" to refer to the standard practice in physics of requiring a time coordinate for every event and for requiring some account of time in order to provide a description for a physical system. As someone pointed out in the relevant thread, your argument against time travel is merely that time travel is impossible. I suspect that you focus on looking for time in clocks rather than on looking for time in the applications of physics because of your inability to perform physics.

It is not an ad hominem to point out that your reasoning is incredibly bad, especially when identifying the topic of crackpot behaviour; that is directly addressing the argument at hand.

 

[Perpetual Student]

You're doing the same thing again after I put Perpetual Student straight about the conversion factor. You should have said Actually, Farsight is right about that. Not doing so and trying another dishonest ad-hominem instead merely discredits you.

The way you deceive yourself is quite amazing. Whatever is called a conversion factor is a matter of convention and can vary from one author to another and one set of equations to another. One sees ħ, 1/ħ, -ħ, etc. depending on the authors choice and the nature of the equation. There is no substance to what is called a conversion factor; what matters is the mathematics.
If I write s² = x² + y² + z² - (ct)², then c can be called a conversion factor. If I write s² = x² + y² + z² - c²t², I can call c² a conversion factor. These are merely loose terms describing a relationship that is only really defined by the mathematics. IT DOES NOT MATTER!
Are you beating this to death because you can no longer defend your unsupportable claims about time? How about responding to the following with a substantive argument:

The point is that your unfounded belief that a minus sign effects "footing" -- whatever you think that means -- is misguided. The equations of relativity treat time as a dimension with a conversion factor. That is a mathematical truth. Time is real, it is fundamental, it is a dimension in our most accurate and important model of the behavior of the universe. Motion is defined mathematically by Δx/Δt; there is no other definition of motion nor is there any physics with time as a derived quantity.

 

[Farsight]

The speed of light (c) can appear in the denominator, numerator, squared or not, negative or positive in any of the equations of relativity. The term "conversion factor" is a general expression for any of these forms. Real physics is done using a mathematical expression. Whatever you like to call a conversion factor is unimportant...

Not when we're discussing the conversion factor between distance and time and you get it wrong three times. So don't you lecture me on "real physics". You haven't got a clue about real physics.

Your fixation on the words is your undoing as I will further demonstrate here.

No you won't. You'll just flounder around and dig yourself even deeper into the hole you're in.

You said above,What you fail to understand is that the only thing that matters is how time is used mathematically. That is how modern physics is done. Your Aristotelian notions about motion are irrelevant and unscientific.

Wrong. What matters is understanding. That's why we do physics. To understand this world, and benefit from our understanding. Not to indulge in abstract mathematics that ends up with some untestable unscientific hypothesis that rumbles on for decades because it's deliberately insulated from experimental disproof, because it's a "theory of anything" and in truth not a theory at all. .

More words! Newton defined gravity in scientific terms with mathematics. We feel gravity...

It's not just words. Pencils fall down, and as Newton noted, so do apples. Newton's mathematics advanced our understanding, but in case you hadn't noticed, that mathematics came with words. And here's some more words from Newton that might further advance your understanding of gravity:

"Doth not this aethereal medium in passing out of water, glass, crystal, and other compact and dense bodies in empty spaces, grow denser and denser by degrees, and by that means refract the rays of light not in a point, but by bending them gradually in curve lines?"

...and we sense the passage of time.

No we don't. We sense the passing of buses because we can see 'em, and smell the diesel, and feel the air they displace blowing our hair. But we don't sense the passage of time any more than we sense angels dancing on the head of a pin. It's just a figure of speech, and there is no empirical evidence to support the notion that time passes or flows or that clocks are magic chronological gas meters.

Our human feelings about these things remain general observations...

And you don't observe time passing. You don't observe that clocks measure the flow of time. You take the back off a clock, and what you observe is cogs and sprogs moving in a regular cyclic fashion.

...until some scientific statement is made about these notions using mathematics.

What, you mean things like this?

That won't help you to understand what a clock actually does. You need to look at the clock for that, not a mathematical definition of proper time.

Your dismissal of Δx/Δt as a scientific expression of motion is quite revealing.

I haven't dismissed that expression for velocity. What I've said is you can see a gap aka a space and you can see things moving, but you can't see time flowing, so you give some priority to the things you can see over the things you can't, and it pays dividends. I suggested you start a thread on the latter, but you declined.

On the contrary, when doing physics the only thing that matters is how motion is defined mathematically.

What matters is what actually happens in the real world.

Here, we have the fatal flaw revealed in your pseudoscience. You do not understand that general notions about the behavior of the universe have been supplanted with mathematical descriptions.

They haven't been supplanted with mathematical descriptions, they're supported by mathematical descriptions. Which offer testable predictions which support the theory and give us confidence that our understanding is correct.

Newton is a long way (in time) from Aristotle! Quite ironically, you're living in the past!

Not me buddy. The physics I tell you about isn't in your fifty-year old textbooks yet, that's all.

I am not aware of a single poster on this thread who has expressed a belief in time travel. I have noticed that this has been your default straw man for a few years on this and many other threads...

See what I said to Clinger. I listed a bunch of crackpot notions, Godless Dave started this conversation on time travel.

Follow your own directive and "stay on topic." If and when someone here expresses a belief that time travel is possible, I will mount my horse and join you in the heroic enterprise of thrashing all time travel windmills.

OK, so we're all agreed then that time travel is crackpot. Let's talk about something else then. Something that will help you understand why there's so much crackpot physics. How about the multiverse?

 

[Perpetual Student]

How about the multiverse?

OK, how about the multiverse?

 

[godless dave]

You take the back off a clock, and what you observe is cogs and sprogs moving in a regular cyclic fashion.

I've bolded that part that explains how clocks measure time.