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Why is there so much crackpot physics?

This is you unable to state your idea clearly.

What is your idea?

Since I don't know of anything that could not be subject to the "its not clear enough" objections you raise, and you are unwilling to supply an example proof from such objection, I'm not certain I can help.

Undefined acceptance criteria are impossible to meet. Why would anyone spend their time to keep repeating their claim in different ways, e.g.: "incorporate into assessment and planning of potentially transformative research the replacement of object concepts with process concepts in a manner that recategorizes exemplars in ways impossible under the currently prevailing frame", under such conditions?

While this claim may not be a clear statement to many, it is to experts in the field of cognitive science of scientific revolutions, who IMO know what they're talking about.
 
I'm not telling historians what to do.
No, you claimed the entire point of what they actually do. I claim the assumption of a single point is naive, even if it were true, which I claim it is not reasonably defensible. a justifiable at bestresponded that your assessment
If a historian wants to develop a method for predicting the occurrence of future revolutions, they're welcome to do so.
This red-herring/straw-man has little to do with the definition of attributes which distinguish revolutions. My claim is that this definition is appropriate to apply to future scientific advances just like we apply definitions of "economics" or "chemistry". These current definitions do not predict anything other than our ability to say "This research which proposes to study 'Catalyzation via a Homologous Series of Tetraalkylammonium Graphite Compounds', belongs in the chemistry category."

You've talked about, for example, how an ABC-inspired manager might walk up to a physicist and suggest that they think about lower-dimensional spacetime.
After repeated objections on my part that such extrapolations are counterproductive, because they lead inevitably to incorrect conclusions when the basics are not understood, like:

I'm claiming that the physicist has probably already thought about lower-dimensional spacetimes, without the manager having told them so.
A point with which I would agree. If thinking about X is not consistent with our understanding of results in outcome Y, we should not expect Y to result from this particular thinking about X, should we?

If the thinking of lower dimensions is unaffected by knowledge of object and process concept reconfigurations which occur during revolutions, are revolutionary new models more or less likely to arise, in you opinion?
 
Since I don't know of anything that could not be subject to the "its not clear enough" objections you raise, and you are unwilling to supply an example proof from such objection, I'm not certain I can help.

Undefined acceptance criteria are impossible to meet. Why would anyone spend their time to keep repeating their claim in different ways, e.g.: "incorporate into assessment and planning of potentially transformative research the replacement of object concepts with process concepts in a manner that recategorizes exemplars in ways impossible under the currently prevailing frame", under such conditions?

While this claim may not be a clear statement to many, it is to experts in the field of cognitive science of scientific revolutions, who IMO know what they're talking about.
Except you can't explain exactly what that means , now you are hiding behind "experts in the field of cognitive science of scientific revolutions". so exactly and specifically what do you think tehy have to say about the constant of c.

Nope, the burden is still on you. Explain exactly how this alleged and as yet unexplained tool would work.
You have refused to do so, and that is your problem. Explain exactly how you alleged cognitive tool, book citations and book that you have mentioned will have an impact on actual research?

Be specific, that is your problem, you are engaging in some abstracted idea and you have as yet to explain how it work in application.

How exactly does it help change the limitations of general relativity?
 
Except you can't explain exactly what that means , now you are hiding behind "experts in the field of cognitive science of scientific revolutions". so exactly and specifically what do you think tehy have to say about the constant of c.

Nope, the burden is still on you. Explain exactly how this alleged and as yet unexplained tool would work.
You have refused to do so, and that is your problem. Explain exactly how you alleged cognitive tool, book citations and book that you have mentioned will have an impact on actual research?

Be specific, that is your problem, you are engaging in some abstracted idea and you have as yet to explain how it work in application.

How exactly does it help change the limitations of general relativity?

Just to try and translate this (I've found I'm fairly good at reducing complex questions to simple ones):

If we do things your way, what would be different? What additional steps would a researcher take, or not take, compared to the current process?
 
This red-herring/straw-man has little to do with the definition of attributes which distinguish revolutions. My claim is that this definition is appropriate to apply to future scientific advances just like we apply definitions of "economics" or "chemistry". These current definitions do not predict anything other than our ability to say "This research which proposes to study 'Catalyzation via a Homologous Series of Tetraalkylammonium Graphite Compounds', belongs in the chemistry category."

Show me a historian, other than yourself, who claims to be able to be able to analyze revolutions while they're in progress. Kuhn doesn't. Anderson, Barker, and Chen don't. Where do you get the idea that this is possible?

If the thinking of lower dimensions is unaffected by knowledge of object and process concept reconfigurations which occur during revolutions, are revolutionary new models more or less likely to arise, in you opinion?

"During revolutions". That means "when the new model has popped up and is you're deciding whether to adapt to it".

It is not a motivational tool for encouraging new models to pop up. So, no, I don't think that telling people to think about revolutions makes the slightest difference to anything.

I repeat that: what theorists actually do, at their desks every day, is something that Kuhn or Anderson (or you) would probably label as "object and process reconfigurations". We have vast mathematical toolkits whose entire point is to map between different ways of describing concepts. Walk into a theory seminar and you'll see people taking every physics concept you've ever heard of and quantizing it, rotating it, regauging it, taking its holographic dual, going from representations to groups to bundles to fibrations to God-knows-what and back again. Things you thought were particles turn into fields. Things you thought were fields turn into correlation functions. Things you thought were correlation functions turn into trajectories. Things you thought were spatial dimensions turn into massive scalar particles.

Isn't this "replacing object concepts with process concepts"? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, who cares? Is it likely to lead to a revolution? Well, it will if some version of it turns out to actually work. But "finding a version that works" is what physicists are already doing.

In other words, I think that if you walked into a physicists' office with a copy of CSoSR, and attempted to apply it, you would not be able to tell what the object concepts are. You would not be able to tell what the process concepts are. If you offered advice to "try replacing object concepts as process concepts", the theorist would probably attempt to shoehorn what they're already doing into that description.
 
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This discussion is reminding me of this video of Richard Feynman, talking about coming up with new theories, from the 7:40 mark on:
 
Here's the latest on EW: How to test Weinstein's provocative theory of everything - physics-math - 31 May 2013 - New Scientist
Perhaps more fundamental yet, it should be possible to perform a calculation called anomaly cancellation on Weinstein's equations, says Conlon. This checks whether a list of particles is a consistent extension of the standard model, much like the digits of a credit card number can be added in a certain way to confirm their validity. If the predicted particles fail the test, the theory is wrong. "It would take an hour and a half," Conlon said to Weinstein at the lecture.

"Can I ask you to do that?" countered Weinstein, who admitted that he did not have answers to these and other questions raised by his talk, but said he would like to discuss them further. He also has remained vague about when and where his equations will appear in print.
Seems like EW was shifting the burden of proof to his questioner.

Anomalies are quantum-mechanical inconsistencies that result from certain combinations of interactions, and the only way to keep them from appearing is to make the interactions cancel in certain ways. The Standard Model has anomaly cancellation, but does EW's theory?

Anomalies and the Standard Model - from a graduate-level physics course, [0802.0634] Lectures on Anomalies
 
Just to try and translate this (I've found I'm fairly good at reducing complex questions to simple ones):

If we do things your way, what would be different? What additional steps would a researcher take, or not take, compared to the current process?

Thanks, I was in 'verbose"|FL

:D
 
"If the predicted particles fail the test, the theory is wrong".

That's not a good test, lpetrich. A good test is whether predicted particles are actually observed. And like the NS article says, the LHC hasn't seen anything special. As I said on another thread, if you look at Woit's blog and then the comments, you can see Mitchell Porter say this:

"On Quora.com, there is an account of the latest talk, which makes his theory sound like a topological QFT.

That's good. I'm into that. I refer to TQFT and talk about electrons and positrons having the opposite chirality, and being like the logo on the Edinburgh geometry and topology group. But then Able Lawrence posted a link to Quora.com. See this:

"So I don't care what people have written about this or me or what people expect of this theory of how they think I view it, I'm going to answer your question the way I see it. YES. I DO believe that we only see half the picture, and that the other half is in some other world. I DO believe that we're only seeing half of the perturbed vacuum, and the other half is not accessible to us but is "out there" in a very real sense, because it HAS to be due to the fact that this theory is telling us it is (if the theory is right)"."

But how does space have a chirality? How can gravity have a chirality? I don't like time travel or quantum mysticism or the multiverse. I'm into mundane plain-vanilla physics instead. And I really don't like the idea that's there's some shadow-world mirror-universe overlaid on our own.
 
...
...
But how does space have a chirality? How can gravity have a chirality? I don't like time travel or quantum mysticism or the multiverse. I'm into mundane plain-vanilla physics instead. And I really don't like the idea that's there's some shadow-world mirror-universe overlaid on our own.

The kind of sentiments expressed above are at the root of of much crackpot thinking. The universe does not care what you like, what Archimedes or Newton liked or what I or anyone else who ever lived liked. Our knowledge of the universe is based on experiment, observation and the formulation of models that have predictive power.
On the other hand, speculations in science are what feed new ideas, new avenues of research and new discoveries. When such speculations are demonstrably contradicted by observation, they are abandoned; however, when they are not discarded, they can be another source of crackpot thinking.
 
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Except you can't explain exactly what that means

I have explained, but until we agree on what you consider "exact", I don't think I can help.

now you are hiding behind "experts in the field of cognitive science of scientific revolutions".

Citations of experts' judgment was to illustrate recurring objections that the ABC criterion & Nersessian Model were original and unsupported were false. This hardly seems "hiding behind experts".

so exactly and specifically what do you think tehy have to say about the constant of c.
I have no expectation they will say anything specifically and exactly about c.

However, we can expect that the next, more consistent model physicists seek will describe space-time as an observational consequence of a process, which would have implications for how we interpret c.
 
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Just to try and translate this (I've found I'm fairly good at reducing complex questions to simple ones):

If we do things your way, what would be different? What additional steps would a researcher take, or not take, compared to the current process?
Identifiable changes occur in operations of management, administration, and proposal review panels. Specifics with researchers are much harder to predict.

Incorporating these criteria in assessments of transformative potential in proposals and portfolios offers improvement (like enabling relative rankings) over the low-maturity "I know it when I see it" approach & process.

Researchers are affected by this similar to the way iron filings are aligned by a magnet, they may not move position at all, but diverse units with shared orientation does often have emergent advantages. Such as we see in businesses with strong, inspiring cultures.
 
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Allow me, Buck:

Dancing David said:
...so exactly and specifically what do you think they have to say about the constant of c.
That it isn't constant, search arXiv on varying speed of light and VSL. The coordinate speed of light varies in a non-inertial reference frame, optical clocks go slower when they're lower, de duh de duh. Einstein said repeatedly that c varied with gravitational potential and the SR postulate was of limited applicability.
 
Identifiable changes occur in operations of management, administration, and proposal review panels. Specifics with researchers are much harder to predict.

Incorporating these criteria in assessments of transformative potential in proposals and portfolios offers improvement (like enabling relative rankings) over the low-maturity "I know it when I see it" approach & process.

Researchers are affected by this similar to the way iron filings are aligned by a magnet, they may not move position at all, but diverse units with shared orientation does often have emergent advantages. Such as we see in businesses with strong, inspiring cultures.

Okay, so what changes should occur in management, adminsitration, and proposal review panels? You've still avoided giving an answer, and instead fallen into "business speak"...a way of sounding as if you're saying something without imparting any information.


Or, to translate your post:
Things change in adminsitration and oversight, I don't know about reasearchers.

The changes I have not yet identified and communicated will make things better in an unsepcified way.

These changes will trickel down.

Allow me, Buck:

That it isn't constant, search arXiv on varying speed of light and VSL. The coordinate speed of light varies in a non-inertial reference frame, optical clocks go slower when they're lower, de duh de duh. Einstein said repeatedly that c varied with gravitational potential and the SR postulate was of limited applicability.

Farsight, are you actually aware of what the constant "c" refers to? Because I don't believe you are.
 
Identifiable changes occur in operations of management, administration, and proposal review panels. Specifics with researchers are much harder to predict.

Incorporating these criteria in assessments of transformative potential in proposals and portfolios offers improvement (like enabling relative rankings) over the low-maturity "I know it when I see it" approach & process.

Researchers are affected by this similar to the way iron filings are aligned by a magnet, they may not move position at all, but diverse units with shared orientation does often have emergent advantages. Such as we see in businesses with strong, inspiring cultures.
So what you want is to limit funding of research that does seek to make FTL travel possible.

This will obviously have an effect on researchers like "the way iron filings are aligned by a magnet", but will it make FTL possible, or will it lead to massive waste of ressources? What is your risk assessment of these proposals?
 
I have explained, but until we agree on what you consider "exact", I don't think I can help.
So sure, you don't know how this tool applies and are just fudging. Fine by me.
Citations of experts' judgment was to illustrate recurring objections that the ABC criterion & Nersessian Model were original and unsupported were false. This hardly seems "hiding behind experts".
How exactly does that apply to current research?

please explain because I don't get it, explain how it would apply to cold fusion for example.
I have no expectation they will say anything specifically and exactly about c.
So in other words, you can't say what this tool would tell us about research into cold fusion or antigravity.
However, we can expect that the next, more consistent model physicists seek will describe space-time as an observational consequence of a process, which would have implications for how we interpret c.

So?
 
Identifiable changes occur in operations of management, administration, and proposal review panels. Specifics with researchers are much harder to predict.

Incorporating these criteria in assessments of transformative potential in proposals and portfolios offers improvement (like enabling relative rankings) over the low-maturity "I know it when I see it" approach & process.

What criteria? So now you think that a review panel can look at a research portfolio and spot "object concepts replaced with process concepts" as a criterion. You're missing the point. No one can look at a research portfolio and actually apply your vague retrospective "criterion". Not you, not me, not Ed Witten, not Thomas Kuhn.

If what you mean is "research management should put more weight on high-risk, high-reward proposals", well, that's a real idea---a research panels can and do identify high-risk-high-reward research, and discussion of how to prioritize this part of the portfolio has been discussed (sans Kuhn) at every advisory-panel and town-hall I've ever been to.
 
However, we can expect that the next, more consistent model physicists seek will describe space-time as an observational consequence of a process, which would have implications for how we interpret c.

a) No we can't "expect" that. That's up to Nature, not to you.

b) "next"? What makes you think so? How do you know there aren't 1000 years of non-process spacetime theories (whatever that means) intervening?

c) In view of our modern understanding of dualities, what is the actual difference between an object and a process? Is AdS a process concept and CFT an object concept, or vice-versa, or both, or neither?
 
That it isn't constant, search arXiv on varying speed of light and VSL. The coordinate speed of light varies in a non-inertial reference frame, ...
We are getting a bit astray but that post needs clarification:
The speed of light c by definition is constant.
The speed of light in vacuum, commonly denoted c, is a universal physical constant important in many areas of physics. Its value is exactly 299,792,458 metres per second, a figure that is exact because the length of the metre is defined from this constant and the international standard for time.[1]
It is also measured to be constant.

There are speculative theories where the speed of light does vary: Variable speed of light theories.

The coordinate speed of light is not the speed of light - note the additional word coordinate. This is the speed of light in GR in the coordinates used by an observer and can vary from 0 to infinite. It also varies from observer to observer because any observer can select any coordinate system.

Einstein did go through a period where he incorrectly thought that c varied with gravitational potential (and see Variable speed of light theories).
 
So what you want is to limit funding of research that does seek to make FTL travel possible.
It doesn't seem to me we can directly support FTL research until our maths are improved, which seems a prerequisite for a consistent physics model to emerge. That future model is more likely to develop if we are working on a concrete problem, according to Nersessian.

The strength of the standard model, combined with well-established, historical organizational structures (into divisions, directorates, departments) makes it a challenge to adopt effective, concrete problems outside a current model.

This will obviously have an effect on researchers like "the way iron filings are aligned by a magnet", but will it make FTL possible, or will it lead to massive waste of ressources?
This is a false dichotomy since whatever we do could theoretically result in FTL and massive wastes, either of those outcomes, or neither...So we would normally not consider this a critical factor in our decision.

Our choice is to: A)incorporate new, relevant knowledge into administration of research or B) not to incorporate it.

What is your risk assessment of these proposals?
The possibility of FTL remains unknown, but I believe we are more likely to make better resource allocation decisions using the best available information rather than not, and currently we are not incorporating the knowledge of history & philosophy of science revolutions into our planning & assessments of potentially transformative research which delivers such revolutions.
 
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