Why is there so much crackpot physics?

[ben m]

That's cool.

Let me be absolutely clear: nothing in that report is talking about "what underlies quantum uncertainty" or whatever.

OK, you made yourself absolutely clear this report says nothing about a topic no one has raised AFAIK

Didn't you object to many-worlds, consciousness-causes-collapse, etc., aspects of quantum interpretation? That's what I'm talking about.

In that case, I've led you astray again. My personal preference is that researchers find out what space and time are in sufficient detail so we can identify potential loopholes to get from A to B, circumventing the intervening distance.

Researchers are "finding out what space and time are" using every tool available. That's the point. You have not identified anything wrong, or missing, or overlooked, in the actual research being done. You are taking your assumptions about the physics---"surely something more could be done about FTL"---and guessing, incorrectly IMO, that this "something" was/is overlooked due to poor management.

The actual "management" of physics has funded, and supported, an incredible diversity of research relevant to understanding spacetime. This includes experimental searches for non-GR gravity (lunar laser ranging, Gravity Probe B, fifth-force searches); experimental searches for particular quantum gravity hypotheses (a vast body of LHC data analysis looking for, e.g., Randall-Sundrum radions, MSUGRA, Kaluza-Klein excitations, etc.); and a vast body of theory (resulting in new ideas about strings, entropic gravity, black holes, inflation; recent exciting developments include Arkani-Hamed et. al's "Grassmanian" and Almhieri et. al's black hole unitarity oddity.) You want better understanding of spacetime? We're working on a better understanding of spacetime.

Do you have an objection to that? How does one make progress on a high-priority scientific unknown, other than "keep working on it, in every direction you can think of"? Because that's what we're doing. What you are proposing is not better management of the known followup avenues. What you are proposing is: "follow up in every direction YOU can think of, except the ones lampooned in mass-market books, plus you should prioritize this additional vague suggestion from a random guy on the internet."

 

[dasmiller]

Here again we see an intriguing preponderance of engineers involved in crackpot physics. My own personal experience is in the context of teaching freshman calculus and linear algebra to engineering students. I do have the general impression (perhaps unfairly) that the engineering students tended to perform poorly in math compared to the physics and mathematics majors.

I'd expect that, though. For engineers, the math is simply part of the toolkit to be used to accomplish various engineering tasks. For physicists and mathematicians, developing the math is the task. Just as I'd expect race car drivers and taxi drivers to be better drivers than, say, salespersons.

Beyond that, I suspect that mathematics and physics simply draw a smarter and more dedicated crowd than engineering. Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for anyone who gets a degree in engineering from a good program, but mathematicians and physicists are, I think, more elite on average.

Of course, individuals will vary wildly.

That observation is certainly consistent with the fact that all the cranks I have observed in these threads seem to lack a good understanding of the mathematics needed to do physics.
A few computer programmers also come to mind. I personally know both engineers and computer professionals (retired) that embrace crackpot notions.

I've been noticing more programmers among the crackpot ranks, too, though I don't have any statistics to back it up. In my experience, programmers tend to be more woo-accepting than engineers, but programmers are less confident in their understanding of how the world works. That would make them more likely to believe crackpots, but less likely to be crackpots.

Again, individuals will vary widely.

I acknowledge that the above comments are purely anecdotal and I'm on thin ice here.

Same here. All anecdotal, and I doubt that I'd vigorously defend any of the above.

 

[Farsight]

xtifr, listen up, you'll like this.

Pathlogical Physics: Tales from the Box - a talk on crank physics. Apparently lasts about an hour, despite two hour timescale of video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXSgp755DSA

I don't have an hour to spare, but I had a little sniff around and found some stills here. Have a look at slide 19. It's about some crank called Bob who claims Einstein was wrong and E≠mc² or E=mc². Remember we were talking about mass, and I said the Higgs mechanism contradicted E=mc² because "the mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content", not something else. And you said I was wrong?

I'm not Bob. You are.

 

[Hellbound]

xtifr, listen up, you'll like this.

I don't have an hour to spare, but I had a little sniff around and found some stills here. Have a look at slide 19. It's about some crank called Bob who claims Einstein was wrong and E≠mc² or E=mc². Remember we were talking about mass, and I said the Higgs mechanism contradicted E=mc²because "the mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content", not something else. And you said I was wrong?

I'm not Bob. You are.

A swing and a miss!

 

[godless dave]

xtifr, listen up, you'll like this.

I don't have an hour to spare, but I had a little sniff around and found some stills here. Have a look at slide 19. It's about some crank called Bob who claims Einstein was wrong and E≠mc² or E=mc².

Yes, that's a good example of crackpot physics.

I said the Higgs mechanism contradicted E=mc² because "the mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content", not something else. .

And so is that.

 

[Hellbound]

Can we do a thought experiment? I promise to clean up afterwards!

Let's say I have a 100g chunk of iron. It's exactly 100g. I know it is, it's been measured six ways from Sunday. Take it as a given.

Now, we place this in a perfectly sealed vacuum chamber. Nothing in there but the iron.

Now, we take a laser...a low powered one, and we fire it at the iron, until it glows red hot.

Has the mass of the iron changed?

If you answer yes...

Then you're violating you're own rule! Mass is a measure of energy content, not electromagnetism! That's the same sort of mistake you're making with your argument that the Higgs mechanism violates Relativity. It shows a complete lack of understanding of what the Higgs mechanism actually proposes. It's a field that provides a portion of the energy that is reflected in an objects mass. Period. You could, I suppose, say that the photons added the mass...but if photons have mass you're still violating Relativity, as anything with mass can't travel at c.

Or you can choose no...

In this case, you've disproven yourself. A red hot, glowing iron chunk has more energy than an identical chunk without the heat. So if it doesn't have more mass, then mass cannot be a measure of energy content.

Step right up! You get to choose how wrong you want to be!

 

[Farsight]

Are you PMI certified? If we can talk in PM specific terms its much better...and faster.

No, sorry.

Depending on what you mean by "beginning with" I agree from a standpoint of developing a reliable vision of success, that's the first major step.

Then we break that one down too. Not just into multiple activities, but multiple streams.

I provided an overview of what I'm about at the 100 Year Starship symposium in Houston last year, and is online as Starship Vlog 005.

I've set it rolling.

Edit: you missed out Maxwell. Aaagh! I'm glad you referred to Faraday though. But I'm glad you referred to Maxwell's quaternions and Heaviside's recast. That replaced a description of the field with a description of the linear and rotational forces resulting from field interactions. It wrecked it. Tait was right. He knew more than people appreciate. Forget supergravity. Focus on electromagnetism. The electron doesn't have an electromagnetic field and a separate gravitational field. It has one field.

In that, I note that the most expertise in developing long range visions of technological progress are science fiction authors...

You're kidding me. I used to write science fiction. This is me. It's a partial list. Spindizzy is about a home-made antigravity car. Verge is about a guy stuck in a runaway ship doing a constant 1g. See Far Point. Pete Hamilton and Charles Stross kept at it.

...and because its both so well known and had so many people working on what would be their ideal outcome I used Star Trek tech for an idealized vision of future manned spaceflight.

I'm really not fond of "the physics of Star Trek". There's too much fantasy in there that hasn't been properly thought through.

Then I work backward to say out of all the zillions of future developments needed to make a vision like that...

I'd start by crossing a few things off the list.

..., what can we say about those technologies that offer concrete problems which require revolutionary paradigm change of the kind likely to impact the issues raised by the Quantum Universe committee.

Those issues were raised by a committee of particle physicists. They use "mysteries" to ingratiate themselves with the public because they deliver nothing. And they dominate. If some relativist or classical electromagnetism guy solved one of those mysteries, you wouldn't get to hear about it. Pick a number between 1 and 9 and I'll try to demonstrate why a mystery isn't really a mystery at all, and why there aren't multiple battles to fight. Don't pick 8.

My opinion is that our focus should be on improving mathematical modeling for reasons I partially covered earlier in the forum.

Cross my heart and hope to die, but that isn't the problem. The problem is "The Trouble with Physics", and it isn't limited to string theory. Take a look at this. See the sentence in the paragraph above the end-note that says "We conclude that the field describes the curvature which characterizes the electromagnetic interaction". The mathematics has already been done, and you don't even know about it. See the problem yet? You don't need mathematics, you need a Faraday.

I'd add that a major insight of Popper is missing: evidence is cheap! There's mountains of evidence for astrology, religions, political theories and pseudo-sciences of every kind.

No Buck. There's none.

What discussions in this forum need, IMO, are more good criteria for distinguishing good science from bad...

What this forum needs is a microcosm of what physics needs.

OK, let's take that conversation offline. You can email me.

Will do. Nice talking to you.

 

[Farsight]

xtifr, this is for you. It's a gift.

Can we do a thought experiment? I promise to clean up afterwards!

Let's say I have a 100g chunk of iron. It's exactly 100g. I know it is, it's been measured six ways from Sunday. Take it as a given.

Now, we place this in a perfectly sealed vacuum chamber. Nothing in there but the iron.

Now, we take a laser...a low powered one, and we fire it at the iron, until it glows red hot.

Has the mass of the iron changed?

If you answer yes...

Then you're violating you're own rule! Mass is a measure of energy content, not electromagnetism! That's the same sort of mistake you're making with your argument that the Higgs mechanism violates Relativity. It shows a complete lack of understanding of what the Higgs mechanism actually proposes. It's a field that provides a portion of the energy that is reflected in an objects mass. Period. You could, I suppose, say that the photons added the mass...but if photons have mass you're still violating Relativity, as anything with mass can't travel at c.

Or you can choose no...

In this case, you've disproven yourself. A red hot, glowing iron chunk has more energy than an identical chunk without the heat. So if it doesn't have more mass, then mass cannot be a measure of energy content.

Step right up! You get to choose how wrong you want to be!

LOL! Priceless! The mass increases. Because like Einstein said, the mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content.

The Higgs mechanism is said to be responsible for only 1% of the mass of matter. Read A Zeptospace Odyssey: A Journey into the Physics of the LHC by Gian Francesco Giudice. There's a search-inside on Amazon, and if you search on Higgs sector you can read pages 173 through 175. He starts by saying this:

The most inappropriate name ever given to the Higgs boson is "The God particle". The name gives the impression that the Higgs boson is the central particle of the Standard Model, governing its structure. But this is very far from the truth.

He finishes by saying this:

In summary, the Higgs mechanism accounts for about 1 per cent of the mass of ordinary matter, and for only 0.2 per cent of the mass of the universe. This is not nearly enough to justify the claim of explaining the origin of mass.

Giudice is a physicist at CERN with a hundred-plus papers to his name.

OK, who's got the sincerity to say actually, Farsight is right about this. Come on guys, this is where people find out whether you're honest or not. Like I said, I'm not the one here saying E≠mc².

I'm not Bob.

 

[xtifr]

xtifr, listen up, you'll like this.

I don't have an hour to spare, but I had a little sniff around and found some stills here. Have a look at slide 19. It's about some crank called Bob who claims Einstein was wrong and E≠mc² or E=mc².

What does that have to do with the fact that your grasp of mathematics is hopelessly limited?

Remember we were talking about mass, and I said the Higgs mechanism contradicted E=mc² because "the mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content", not something else. And you said I was wrong?

Nope, because that never happened. I've repeatedly called you out on your utter inability to do maths beyond what I learned in high school. I've never said anything to you about physics, because I'm not a physicist.

I'm not Bob. You are.

Even if we grant the imaginary scenario where I said what you think I said, and even if the example you're citing was actually an incorrect claim instead of simply another example of your failure to understand maths and physics, my being wrong wouldn't make you right. That's what's called a false dichotomy. You and Bob seem to both be wrong. In different ways. Even I can tell that, and as I said, I'm no physicist. I might have had some hope for you until I saw your mind-boggling attempt to assign meaning to a coincidence of numbers that were totally dependent on the unrelated units you happened to be using. That was an error I learned to avoid before I finished high school. (But I didn't call you on that one, because others had already done quite an adequate job of it.)

 

[ctamblyn]

The Higgs mechanism is said to be responsible for only 1% of the mass of matter.

It's (probably) some low percentage of the mass of all the matter in the universe, that is true. When it comes to the charged leptons, though, the situation is this: if the Higgs mechanism is an accurate description of nature, as seems increasingly likely as time goes on, then it is responsible for 100% of the rest mass.

OK, who's got the sincerity to say actually, Farsight is right about this. Come on guys, this is where people find out whether you're honest or not. Like I said, I'm not the one here saying E≠mc².

It's strange that anyone would keep insisting that a theory with Lorentz invariance built in to its very foundations is inconsistent with special relativity. Perhaps it because the Higgs mechanism eliminates the need for certain just-so stories purporting to explain electron mass in terms of self-trapped (or rather, "loopy") photons, but to be fair these loopy photon models were broken in several other ways, as has been recorded elsewhere in these forums. Higgs' theory being disproven would not be enough to save them, not by a long chalk.

Which makes me wonder, by the way, why don't supporters of fringe/crackpot ideas like Williamson and van der Mark's "toroidal photon" complain about charge conservation as vehemently as they do about Higgs, that being equally fatal for such ideas? Would it be too obviously ridiculous?

 

[BurntSynapse]

BurntSynapse and Farsight seem to be claiming that the mainstream scientific community is too closed-minded and unwilling to accept new theories.

I can't speak to what anyone chooses to perceive as what another seems to claim, but I wouldn't agree the mainstream scientific community is too closed-minded and unwilling to accept new theories, unless we had better criteria for solving the demarcation problem available to them.

You can't blame the craftsman for not doing work requiring tools that don't exist.

 

[BurntSynapse]

That's cool.

Let me be absolutely clear: nothing in that report is talking about "what underlies quantum uncertainty" or whatever.

Didn't you object to many-worlds, consciousness-causes-collapse, etc., aspects of quantum interpretation? That's what I'm talking about.

OK...I'm almost as skeptical about that as the interpretations that people should read repeated references to incredibly dramatic revolutions as really meaning "ordinary" stuff.

Now you seem to claim that its reasonable, out of the zillions of topics discussed in this forum, to interpret "what underlies quantum uncertainty" with a social phenomena in physics where members of the community adopt a particular view. One has to do with guys at FermiLab talking about ideas, the other with subatomic particles across the universe to which those ideas may or may not refer.

Researchers are "finding out what space and time are" using every tool available. That's the point.

Since I've provided examples and evidence to the contrary, (such as the lack of feedback from philosophy of science to monitor and control risk in theory development) along with the perspective and its assumptions which are required to reach that conclusion, you don't seem to be paying attention and I don't feel any need to repeat reasoning that has already been ignored.

You have not identified anything wrong, or missing, or overlooked, in the actual research being done.

Of course not, because if were in the actual research being done, it CAN'T be missing, can it?

Astonishing.

The actual "management" of physics has funded, and supported, an incredible diversity of research relevant to understanding spacetime. This includes experimental searches for non-GR gravity (lunar laser ranging, Gravity Probe B, fifth-force searches); experimental searches for particular quantum gravity hypotheses (a vast body of LHC data analysis looking for, e.g., Randall-Sundrum radions, MSUGRA, Kaluza-Klein excitations, etc.); and a vast body of theory (resulting in new ideas about strings, entropic gravity, black holes, inflation; recent exciting developments include Arkani-Hamed et. al's "Grassmanian" and Almhieri et. al's black hole unitarity oddity.) You want better understanding of spacetime? We're working on a better understanding of spacetime.

Do you have an objection to that? How does one make progress on a high-priority scientific unknown, other than "keep working on it, in every direction you can think of"? Because that's what we're doing. What you are proposing is not better management of the known followup avenues. What you are proposing is: "follow up in every direction YOU can think of, except the ones lampooned in mass-market books,

I think its pretty fair to call that a lie, absent a cornflake of evidence that I think the guy who claimed his cardboard box was a wormhole generator or that I've ever encountered sci fi lampoon paperbacks...a new genre to me, and I used to work at Explore Booksellers in Aspen...

Nevertheless, I discuss criteria for de-prioritizing whole classes of research proposals based on sci fi visions at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t95xWsxqNvI.

...plus you should prioritize this additional vague suggestion from a random guy on the internet."

Real things tend to seem vague when poorly understood and get more interesting the closer we look, Unreal things are the opposite.

As for being a random guy...OK, that's perhaps true. On the other hand, I am also a random guy who happens to have an award from NASA on the bookcase next to me for the risk management work I did on Gravity Probe B, which you seem to think I need schooling on...

 

[Reality Check]

Have a look at slide 19. It's about some crank called Bob who claims Einstein was wrong and E≠mc² or E=mc². Remember we were talking about mass, and I said the Higgs mechanism contradicted E=mc² because "the mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content", not something else. And you said I was wrong?

I'm not Bob. You are.

Actually you "are Bob".
Bob denies the obvious, i.e. that E=mc² .
You deny the obvious, i.e. that Higgs mechanism is a relativistic QFT and thus includes E=mc²
Farsight: What does Higgs mean by Lorentz-covariant and relativistic?
First asked 19 November 2012
163 days and counting, Farsight!

You also deny what E=mc² means: This equation does not define mass. It defines an equivalence between mass and energy.

If someone were to be ignorant enough to just look at E=mc² without trying to understand what it means then they would actually say that it defined energy. Look at the great big E on the defining (left) hand side of the equation, Farsight !

 

[Reality Check]

The Higgs mechanism is said to be responsible for only 1% of the mass of matter. Read A Zeptospace Odyssey: A Journey into the Physics of the LHC by Gian Francesco Giudice.

What you still cannot understand, Farsight, is that no one who knows about the Higgs mechanism thinks that it accounts for 100% of mass. Gian Francesco Giudice knows about the Higgs mechanism (like maybe millions of people) and so has written that the Higgs mechanism does not account for 100% of mass!

ETA: Since you are also unaware of Wikipedia, Farsight, I have updated to link and quote from the relevant article.
Higgs mechanism

In particle physics, the Higgs mechanism is a kind of mass generation mechanism, a process that gives mass to elementary particles. According to this theory, particles gain mass by interacting with the Higgs field that permeates all space. More precisely, the Higgs mechanism endows gauge bosons in a gauge theory with mass through absorption of Nambu–Goldstone bosons arising in spontaneous symmetry breaking.

But there is also E=mc² ! That makes the mass of composite particles like protons greater then their parts as pointed out on 12th March 2013

Mass of proton = 938 Mev
Mass of 1 quark = ~11 Mev
Mass of 2 quarks = ~22 Mev
Mass of 3 quarks = ~33 Mev
Mass of proton minus its constituent quarks = 938 Mev - ~33 Mev.
Thus the proton gets ~905 Mev (or ~99% of its mass) from something other than the mass of its quarks, i.e. not the Higgs mechanism. And this is:

Originally Posted by lpetrich
Nucleons get most of their masses from color confinement. Their quarks and gluons cannot get more than about 10^(-15) m from each other without those particles' interactions getting superstrong. This means that those particles' wavefunctions cannot extend over a greater size, and thus that their masses should be about a few hundred MeV. Thus, the nucleons' masses.

Anything in this that you do not understand, Farsight?

I will repeat the question for you:
Anything in this that you do not understand, Farsight?
First asked 12th March 2013 - 50 days and counting!

 

[Perpetual Student]

...
Nevertheless, I discuss criteria for de-prioritizing whole classes of research proposals based on sci fi visions at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t95xWsxqNvI.
...

Clearly, the speaker in that video is quite ignorant of the modern physics that he attempts to criticize. Glib comments about pointless math formalism and complexity expose that lack of understanding. Mathematics is the very language and only vehicle for analysis of the physical world; the complexity and formalism he decries is the very tool that has yielded the amazing revelations of modern physics. Let's not forget that Mathematics is nothing more than a systematized extension of logic.
Having 9 (or 100 for that matter) unresolved questions does not represent a crisis. Let's stop the hyperbole! Does anyone really believe mankind will attain a full understanding of the totality of the nature of the universe and have no remaining questions or mysteries?
I would like to see some evidence that quaternions (which I have never studied) offer such a superior insight into Maxwell's equations (over vectors) that we have gone so far astray from understanding electromagnetism. That the speaker simply accepts that assertion uncritically is another indication of his naivety and overreach. If quaternions are better for some analysis, mathematicians and physicists are quite capable of mastering that approach. My own brief look at the Wikipedia article tells me there is no special mystery about quaternions even if they might offer some productive insight that is superior to vectors.
Basically, this video consists of so much specious pontification from someone out of his league in the world of physics.
He and Farsight should make a great team!

 

[godless dave]

xtifr, this is for you. It's a gift.

LOL! Priceless! The mass increases. Because like Einstein said, the mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content.

The Higgs mechanism is said to be responsible for only 1% of the mass of matter. Read A Zeptospace Odyssey: A Journey into the Physics of the LHC by Gian Francesco Giudice. There's a search-inside on Amazon, and if you search on Higgs sector you can read pages 173 through 175. He starts by saying this: He finishes by saying this: Giudice is a physicist at CERN with a hundred-plus papers to his name.

OK, who's got the sincerity to say actually, Farsight is right about this. Come on guys, this is where people find out whether you're honest or not. Like I said, I'm not the one here saying E≠mc².

I'm not Bob.

You would have to actually be right for that to happen.

e=mc² does not account for mass. It expresses the equivalency of mass and energy.

 

[Roboramma]

xtifr, listen up, you'll like this.

I don't have an hour to spare, but I had a little sniff around and found some stills here. Have a look at slide 19. It's about some crank called Bob who claims Einstein was wrong and E≠mc² or E=mc².

Yep, anyone who claims that special relativity is false is a crackpot.

Remember we were talking about mass, and I said the Higgs mechanism contradicted E=mc² because "the mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content", not something else. And you said I was wrong?

I'm not Bob. You are.

He said you were wrong about the highlighted bit, not about the bit you italicised. We all agree about the bit in italics. Luckily it doesn't contradict the Higgs mechanism.

It's so obvious that there's no contradiction that I'm honestly shocked that you can't see this.

 

[ben m]

Since I've provided examples and evidence to the contrary, (such as the lack of feedback from philosophy of science to monitor and control risk in theory development) along with the perspective and its assumptions which are required to reach that conclusion, you don't seem to be paying attention and I don't feel any need to repeat reasoning that has already been ignored.

Let me put it another way. "Controlling risk" is not an action item. You don't walk onto a factory floor, close your eyes, and say "I am a risk controller; I am controlling risk by thinking about risk-control theory." Nor is he controlling risk if he closes his eyes and shouts at the workers---"control risk, you fellows. Don't forget. It's risky out there." Nothing happens until the risk-controller looks at the actual machinery on the floor and produces action items. Slow down this machine; paint this lever yellow; replace this scheduled-inspection plan with this different surprise-inspection plan; train this worker differently.

You haven't pointed out an action item that we're ignoring. There are a bunch of physicists on the factory floor. They're building accelerators. They're analyzing data. They're exploring odd corners of mathematics and looking for connections. They're talking to each other. (Unbeknownst to you, many of them *are* trained in project-management, philosophy, history of science, etc.) When your nonphysicist risk-manager pokes his head out of the closed office, and looks out at this factory floor---how is he going to suggest an action item? "Build a new accelerator, like this." "Paint this detector yellow." "You, over here, train this other guy.")

I see lots of expert physicists already doing this. "Hey, folks, here's an idea for a symmetry you haven't tried yet." "Hey, folks, given proposals A,B, and C and funding level D, the highest discovery potential is to fund A and half of C." "Hey, folks, the anomaly from Experiment X shouldn't be ignored." That's what the funding agencies, review process, etc., are all about.

I don't see philosophers or other nonphysicists doing this. "Hey, guys, um, how about thinking about space and time more?" That's not an action item. "Hey, um, I really don't like dark-energy. Do something about it. I dunno what---something?" Also, not an action item. "Stop working on the LHC", that'd be an action item, I suppose, but not a very useful one unless you tell the DOE what it should be doing with that money instead. "Stop working on the LHC and spend the money on dark energy research." (We *are* spending money on dark energy research, so that's also not an action item. Which dark-energy research? Would the nonphysicist risk-expert prefer to spend billions on a duplicate JWST, or an upgraded LSST, or a passel of theorists? Will the nonphysicist risk-expert please read arXiv:1304.7772, 1304.7798, or 1304.7987 and, as an action item, rank them in followup priority?)

That's the problem. A generic gripe, "I don't think you're working on space and time enough", is not actual risk-management. It's just a gripe. Even if it is true (and you have not made any concrete argument to this effect) that we're incurring a "risk" by not spending "enough" effort on "space and time" ... well, that's still not risk management, that's just griping.

Let me know when you come up with an action item. What currently-unfunded spacetime-physics proposal should be funded, and what non-spacetime proposal should be de-funded to compensate? And, given that you're presumably disagreeing with an expert-peer-review funding decision, what technical details have informed this choice?

(Oh, you're a GPB guy. Fair enough. Tough project. I thought STEP should have been funded, by the way. And LISA Pathfinder, obviously.)

 

[Perpetual Student]

Those who have an intimate knowledge of physics might have a basis for determining where avenues for breaking new ground exist. Non-physicists using glib businessbabble offer only empty visions and false criticism.

 

[Hellbound]

Ah, Farsight. Good to see you haven't lost your ability to be oblivious to the blindingly obvious. I was so hoping to prompt you into another post of asinity (that's a portmanteau that works well, I think), and you didn't disappoint.

Although, I suspect the amount of straw in here has GOT to be violating fire codes.