How did crackpot Electric Universe papers get published in a peer-reviewed journal?

[Almo]

Shouldn't the question be, "How did the crackpot EU thread finally drop off the front page?"



On topic, the idea of pay-to-publish really is a bad one. I'm surprised anyone pays attention to them, but I guess the crackpots have realized they need a new strategy, and the people running them are happy to take their money.

 

[Reality Check]

[I should add (as I can't edit my post) the only reason I brought up Peratt + Plasma Cosmology here is because his book 'physics of the plasma universe' is one of the few references in the opening paper, so is obviously considered by him one of the seminal publications in this area, even if its merging with eu theories is unfortunate due to EU theories previous record of sloppy work]

The first thing you should note is that the editorial and this entire special issue is not about Plasma Cosmology. Plasma Cosmology is Alfvén's invalidated cosmological theory.

The special issue is about the crank plasma cosmology (note the small p and c) that cannot even be defined (remember your attempt to define it, Zeuzzz?) except as a collection of often mutually exclusive theories with the common thread that standard cosmology is assumed to be wrong.

The editor only cites Peratt's 'physics of the plasma universe' as a book on plasma physics in the universe, not as a book on plasma cosmology.

 

[fuelair]

Curious.

That webpage is dated 2010, and the list is entitled (my bold) Proposed Scientific Advisory Board Members.

Also on this list is Herman J. Mosquera Cuesta. That makes three (of four, George Ellis is the odd man out) members of the Editorial team (i.e. not counting the OAJ Editorial Advisory Board) on this list.

(not much effort on proof-reading the list either, "Professor Marco Morelli of the Fondazione Prato Ricerche" is listed twice!).

Possibly the Professor paid extra to be listed twice.

 

[Zeuzzz]

For those who can't be bothered to look at the papers themselves, here's a scratch-the-surface sample of what's scientifically wrong with the editorial by Dunning-Davies and with the four single-author articles by Smith, Scott, Ransom, and Thornhill.

Starting with the editorial by Jeremy Dunning-Davies:

• After citing The Electric Universe by Wallace Thornhill and David Talbott, and The Electric Sky by Donald Scott, he avers that these "ideas are supported by much computer modelling".

• 
  
  
  The computer modelling facade is due to Peratts use of supercomputers in the early 90's to model a new type of galaxy formation. We have not seen the coding, so no-one can really comment on this further.
  
  

  [*]He promotes the looks-like-a-bunny approach to astronomy: "However, at least visually, some of the phenomena observed in the laboratory are very like what is observed by some of the most powerful of telescopes....Examples such as these prove nothing but should awaken people to the possibility of alternative explanations for astronomical phenomena."

  
  
  See bolded, is that really promoting it?!
  
  

  [*]He complains about routine use of "powerful mathematics".

  
  
  Yes he does, well done. Crothers, unlike Thornhill, can actually do maths however. And Crothers provides a very specific context for this misuse of powerful mathematics in place of rigorous experimental physics.
  
  

  To
  that point in time, his experimental and observational
  achievements had tended to be overshadowed by the purely
  theoretical predictions and explanations of the geophysicist,
  Sydney Chapman. Once again, powerful mathematics seems
  to have held sway over the more expected techniques of
  physics – experimentation and observation, with
  mathematics a mere tool to be used when necessary. This is
  not to decry Chapman’s work but to emphasise the
  overwhelming importance of the physics when investigating
  natural phenomena.

  
  

  [*]He speculates that electromagnetic forces may be responsible for the anomalies that have driven the search for dark matter.

  
  
  Yes, he does. And he's wrong.
  

  [*]He says astrophysics should treat gravity as "secondary" because "the electric force is so much more powerful."

  
  
  Do you know how many sig fig EM forces are stronger than gravity? 36 sig fig is not a small amount!
  
  Put very simply: What usually wins, a magnet picking up a metal object or the entire weight of the earth pulling down on it?
  
  Now imagine a magnet the size of the earth and a brick the size of a magnet. You get my point.
  
  

  [*]He repeats the canard about "the strength of a magnetic field produced by an electric current is inversely proportional to the distance from the current but the gravitational force between stars is inversely proportional to the square of the distance." (Both fields, gravity and electromagnetic, obey the same inverse-square law. He's comparing the force produced by an infinitely long generator of the field to the force produced by a point source.)

  
  
  You seem to be confused between the inverse square law for magnetism and electrostatics (which is indeed 1/r²) where as Amperes law (or its equivalent Biot Savart force law) does indeed obey a 1/r relationship when the filaments in question are an infinite line of charge, which for most intents and purposes they can be considered as. Analogous to two wires obeying amperes law, but scaled up over ten orders of magnitude, which is done by virtue of maxwells equations being translationally invarient. Numerous observations from the nanoscale to the stellar and galactic scale have been shown to hold time and time again with extreme precision.
  
  Again, this is all dealt with in Peratts book physics of the plasma universe that has been accepted by previous posters here as a book about plasma physics, and this is clearly outlined in, as reality check has just kindly pointed out previously:
  
  

  Right - the editorial references Peratt - Physics of the Plasma Universe. This is a book on plasma physics.

  
  If you go to the third chapter this topic is dealt with at length, validating in fact what crothers says as true from page 93 onwards.
  If you can not access the book there will be a fair few plasma physicists that will have referenced that chapter for the basis of their work. I can link you to them if you want, I remember reading them before.
  
  http://www.plasma-universe.com/index.php/Physics_of_the_Plasma_Universe_(Book)
  3. Biot–Savart Law in Cosmic Plasma, page 93
  
  This is usually where Ziggurat chimes in about amperes law being only a short range force, a claim which he has never even defined theoretically let alone mathematically despite repeated requests; let alone provided experimental evidence for. So I can only presume this "short range force" is a "short range force" because thats how he assumed it works due to it usually being learnt about on small scales.
  
  

  [*]He then says "this well-known difference between the two forces" (which doesn't even exist) "could lie at the heart of the problem of the galactic rotation curves".

  
  
  It does exist, Im afraid, as explained above.
  
  I am also afraid that it does not do anything to explain galactic rotation curves. That Crothers has indeed gotten wrong,
  
  

  [*]Smith writes "It is a fact that major "theories" of popular cosmology and its Standard Model have not been tested because they cannot be" (with emphasis as in the original). In reality, the standard model makes many testable predictions, including the cosmic background radiation and its character, the correlation between red-shift and distance, the existence of black holes, gravitational lensing, all the standard tests of general relativity, and many other tests that others here are more qualified than I to list.

  
  I do find that statement a bit bizzarre.
  
  Haven't got time to read smiths paper so will comment on the rest another time.
  
  

  In the second paragraph of his section III, Scott constructs a caricature of magnetic reconnection and then attacks that strawman. As I proved in the "Electric Sun" thread, magnetic reconnection is a simple consequence of Maxwell's equations. Scott discredits himself whenever he pretends otherwise.

  
  Scott has actually backed up his reasoning with rather sound mathematical deductions, as explained in depth here:
  
  Real Properties of Electromagnetic Fields and Plasma in the Cosmos
  www.electric-cosmos.org/IEEE-TransPlasmaSci-Scott-Aug2007.pdf
  by DE Scott - 2007 - Cited by 6 - Related articles
  IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PLASMA SCIENCE, VOL. 35, NO. 4, AUGUST 2007
  
  If you are going to try to discredit him based on a few sentences you will never understand why he is saying what he is saying. You should address the chapters in that paper (primarily IV) where he has clearly outlined the reason for his views in the literature for all to see and critique. If you can find such critiques, please feel free to link me to them.
  
  Despite his rather confrontational rhetoric, which still seems to blind a lot of peoples views on his papers here, he makes a good case. I have found other researchers work before that have arrived at the same conclusions, if you want I can find the thread and dig up the links to their abstracts too, I'm not even sure Scott is aware they have arrived at the same conclusions as him yet.

 

[ben m]

Man, those four papers are monuments to ignorance.

Ransom's paper is delusional. Yes, hypervelocity impacts and spark-discharge welds both make round dimples in surfaces. Yes, we see round dimples on various scales on planetary surfaces. OMG WHAT COULD IT MEAN? It's like "Here are some photos of broken windshields. Here is an experiment where I strike a windshield with the claw of the SUPPOSEDLY EXTINCT GIANT SLOTH. Note the similarity! This motivates further searches for a relic giant sloth population in the parking lot at the Costco."

Thornhill's and Smith's papers are classic pseudoscience. They're simply statements of belief in every plasma-cosmology-like paper that's every been written. Here's someone who claims to explain galaxy formation! Here's someone who claims to explain the CMB! Here's another one! Here's a Geocities page claiming to explain the Kennedy assassination! All of which Thornhill reports as victories set in stone---never mind that the papers are gibberish. Never mind followups, refutations, and so on. If you published a paper in 1982 saying "Plasma cosmology predicts the top quark mass to be 10 GeV, which is correct", Thornhill would probably be citing it today.

Scott's paper is the usual anti-reconnection gibberish. "There is no known mechanism that can grab hold of two adjacent ‘lines of force’ in a magnetic field and push
them together. So how (why?) do they do this?" If there were no known mechanism, Scott, then why does plugging Newton's and Maxwell's equations into a computer show lines of force that move? There's always "no known mechanism" if you're deliberately ignorant of the mechanism.

 

[Zeuzzz]

Possibly the Professor paid extra to be listed twice.

Dont be ridiculous.

It's much more likely he read it through twice, so deserves to be mentioned twice in the list.

 

[W.D.Clinger]

After citing The Electric Universe by Wallace Thornhill and David Talbott, and The Electric Sky by Donald Scott, he avers that these "ideas are supported by much computer modelling".

The computer modelling facade is due to Peratts use of supercomputers in the early 90's to model a new type of galaxy formation. We have not seen the coding, so no-one can really comment on this further.

I'm fairly confident that Peratt's work is okay. In fact, I've skimmed Peratt's long review of that work myself.

(ETA: I'm talking about Peratt's work on numerical modelling of plasmas in general. So far as I know, Peratt hasn't simulated any plasma universe theory of galaxy formation. So far as I know, the plasma universe theory of galaxy formation does not exist in a form that's sufficiently well defined to be modelled numerically.)​

It was not okay for Dunning-Davies to suggest that Peratt's (or anyone else's) computer modelling supports the two books by Thornhill/Talbott and by Scott.

[*]He complains about routine use of "powerful mathematics".

Yes he does, well done. Crothers, unlike Thornhill, can actually do maths however. And Crothers provides a very specific context for this misuse of powerful mathematics in place of rigorous experimental physics.

I'm sorry, but Crothers got the math wrong. I could walk you through some of his errors, but Jason Sharples has already done that. Crothers responded to Sharples, but I could also walk you through the errors in Crothers's response.

Crothers gave a devastating proof of his mathematical incompetence in a back-and-forth with Sharples in written comments at the "Dealing with Creationism in Astronomy" blog site. During that exchange, Crothers defended the claim made in one of his papers that there exists a homeomorphism (which all of the discussants referred to as a one-to-one correspondence, but they meant homeomorphism) between Euclidean 3-space and an arbitrary 3-dimensional metric manifold.

No such homeomorphism exists. (ETA: Not in general, and Crothers was talking about the general case in his paper.) That's a variation of exercise 8 in part 1 of the exercises I formulated for Farsight, and it's a fact that undergraduate math majors should learn (even if they may not learn how to prove it). Crothers contradicted that well-known theorem in one of his papers, and continued to deny that fact even after his wrongness was pointed out to him. He couldn't even handle the one-dimensional case, which Sharples asked him to address.

Had Crothers been competent at math, he wouldn't have given us that demonstration of basic incompetence.

[*]He says astrophysics should treat gravity as "secondary" because "the electric force is so much more powerful."

Do you know how many sig fig EM forces are stronger than gravity? 36 sig fig is not a small amount!

As I said, that comparison is not relevant to astrophysics, where the charge balance is nearly perfect.

[*]He repeats the canard about "the strength of a magnetic field produced by an electric current is inversely proportional to the distance from the current but the gravitational force between stars is inversely proportional to the square of the distance." (Both fields, gravity and electromagnetic, obey the same inverse-square law. He's comparing the force produced by an infinitely long generator of the field to the force produced by a point source.)

You seem to be confused between the inverse square law for magnetism and electrostatics (which is indeed 1/r²) where as Amperes law (or its equivalent Biot Savart force law) does indeed obey a 1/r relationship when the filaments in question are an infinite line of charge, which for most intents and purposes they can be considered as.

I am not confused about this. I stated the situation correctly.

An infinitely long line of matter would generate a 1/r force just as an infinitely long line of current density produces a 1/r magnetic field. A small, compact source of matter generates an inverse-square field, as does a small, compact source of current density.

[*]He then says "this well-known difference between the two forces" (which doesn't even exist) "could lie at the heart of the problem of the galactic rotation curves".

It does exist, Im afraid, as explained above.

As explained above, you're wrong. I've done the math. You should try it sometime.

In the second paragraph of his section III, Scott constructs a caricature of magnetic reconnection and then attacks that strawman. As I proved in the "Electric Sun" thread, magnetic reconnection is a simple consequence of Maxwell's equations. Scott discredits himself whenever he pretends otherwise.

If you are going to try to discredit him based on a few sentences you will never understand why he is saying what he is saying.

Scott denies magnetic reconnection in many of his articles and at his web site. The magnetic reconnection that Scott denies is a simple consequence of Maxwell's equations. I've done the math.

 

[DeiRenDopa]

I'd like to point out some other oddities in the editorial board.

Let's look at the board of directors of a company called "Steriwave":
Jeremy Dunning-Davies, Francesco Fucilla, Waldyr Rodriguez, Franco Selleri ...

Let's look at the board of staff of a company called "Yellow Energy PLC":
Waldyr Rodriguez, Francesco Fucilla, Franco Selleri, Christian Corda ...

Let's look at the editorial board of Ruggero Santilli's personal crackpot journal "Hadronic Mechanics":
Ruggero Santilli, Christian Corda (editor in chief), Jeremy Dunning-Davies ...

Let's look at the board of directors of the crackpot-award-giving "Telesio Galilei Academy of Sciences":

Waldyr Rodriguez, Franco Selleri, Jeremy Dunning-Davies. In the membership list we see Christian Corda, Wallace Thornhill. Let's keep reading: there's Reginald Cahill, Florentin Smarandache, and (for crying out loud) Wladimir Guglinski.

Well, it seems just about anyone can become a member!

More interesting, perhaps, is that one of the OAJ's Special Issue (the PC one) authors is an "Honorary Member" - Dave Smith.

Who has WON the Telesio Galilei awards? Why, look! It's Jeremy Dunning-Davies, Wallace Thornhill, Stephen Crothers, Wladimir Guglinski, Franco Selleri, Florentin Smarandache. (Keep reading: Myron Evans!!)

True, but the 2011 gold medal winners include Nicola Cabibbo and Luigi Luca Cavalli Sforza.

So there seem somewhat conflicted.

Draw your own conclusions. My conclusion is that the Santilli-ites and the plasma cosmologists have built a "walled garden". They found institutes to give one another awards, they take over journals and give one another special issues, and every so often their fake-prestige is enough to get a government grant or two. Bentham got roped in.

Another interesting fact: Christian Corda wrote "A clarification on the debate on "the original Schwarzschild solution"", which rips Crothers' nonsense to shreds (take note, Zeuzzzzz). This appears immediately above a Crothers document, in the TGA's Publications and Discussions section.

Their Missions and Goals page contains this:

Disclaimer

The Telesio - Galilei Academy of Science has no connectivity to Prof. Santilli Institute for Basic Research whatsoever. The Telesio - Galilei Academy of Science operates independently to any other institutes.

I had not heard of Santilli before; one of the documents in the TGA's Publications and Discussions is a "paper" by him ... to say it's bizarre is to give that word a whole new dimension of meaning ...

 

[DeiRenDopa]

Shouldn't the question be, "How did the crackpot EU thread finally drop off the front page?"

Yeah, sorry.

On topic, the idea of pay-to-publish really is a bad one. I'm surprised anyone pays attention to them, but I guess the crackpots have realized they need a new strategy, and the people running them are happy to take their money.

I think there's more to it than that, taking a wider look*.

Do OA-type journals fulfill a genuine need, among astronomers?

Is there a place of OA-type journals, one that arXiv doesn't provide?

Does an editorial association with an OAJ-type journal damage one's academic reputation? Should it?

* in this particular case, the responsible editors at OAJ were asleep at the wheel, for putting J D-D on the advisory board, for allowing him to be editor of that special issue, for not doing any QA on something published in their name, for ...

 

[ben m]

The main things people on this page have brought up are nothing to do with the papers in question, there's nothing about EM forces being responsible for the motion of large mass bodies in any of these papers.

Quite the contrary. In the crackpot Bentham issue we're discussing, we have both Smith's paper:

Computer models based on verified plasma science,
show that two interacting Birkeland current filaments can
reproduce the fine detail and motion of spiral galaxies ...

Plasma cosmology thus suggests that the continuous flow
of Birkeland currents not only creates and holds galaxies
together but also drives them like a homopolar motor ...

And from Thornhill's:

The scandalous truth is that there is a model of spiral galaxy formation (Fig. 2) that has long been demonstrated by
laboratory experiment and ‘particle in cell’ (PIC) simulations
on a supercomputer. But instead of using stars, gas and dust
as the particles subject to Newton’s laws, the particles are
charged and respond to Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism. This seems like an obvious approach when we know
that more than 99.99 percent of the visible universe is in the
form of plasma. Most cosmic plasma is a gas influenced by
the presence of free electrons, charged atoms and dust.
Plasma responds to electromagnetic forces that exceed the
strength of gravity to the extent that gravity can usually be
ignored over interstellar distances. This simple fact alone
suggests why gravitational models of galaxies fail.

 

[Zeuzzz]

^ I didn't read either of those papers fully (they seemed the least competent of the lot from a cursory glance). Seems that old dogmas die harder than I thought.

 

[Zeuzzz]

What I find confusing is that Scott assosciates with people that still have views such as the above. He should know as an electrical engineer and professor, simply from the shape of every planets magnetic field, that EM forces have nothing to do with galactic rotation curves.

 

[W.D.Clinger]

What I find confusing is that Scott assosciates with people that still have views such as the above. He should know as an electrical engineer and professor, simply from the shape of every planets magnetic field, that EM forces have nothing to do with galactic rotation curves.

Scott retired in 1998. His professional reputation as an EE is unlikely to be much affected by his hobby advocacy of electric universe cosmology. His dismissals of mainstream cosmology will eventually be forgotten, unless he's lucky enough to be right about something, in which case he'll become a cult hero. He's risking little in return for an extremely unlikely jackpot. In the meantime, he sells some books.

 

[ben m]

What I find confusing is that Scott assosciates with people that still have views such as the above. He should know as an electrical engineer and professor, simply from the shape of every planets magnetic field, that EM forces have nothing to do with galactic rotation curves.

Well, that's practically the definition of a physics crackpot---to quote Posner, he is "inexplicably obsessed by an obviously unsound idea".

And: you thought that Thornhill's and Smith's papers were the worst of that EU/PC collection? Surely Ransom's "round things are round" photo album, with its wacky suggestion that asteroids and planets can get struck by invisible space lightning, is worse.

 

[DeiRenDopa]

Shouldn't the question be, "How did the crackpot EU thread finally drop off the front page?"

I see that MM has discovered this thread, and - from what others quote of his posts - is up to his usual tricks. If he actually posted anything that is directly relevant to the topic of this thread, would you (or any other reader who does not have MM on Ignore) please quote it? Thanks.

A thought just occurred to me: since OAJ seems happy to publish at least some (crackpot EU) papers with zero peer review, maybe MM could further destroy its reputation by asking Jeremy Dunning-Davies to publish a paper that he (MM) writes? One on why the Sun has a solid iron surface perhaps (or is it rigid iron-compound/amalgam?), or how neon keeps that surface from melting/subliming? Better yet, how solar flares are electrical discharges, like terrestrial lightning, taking place through a dusty plasma (per Bruce)!

Oh, wait; that won't work ... Jeremy Dunning-Davies, acting as editor, wouldn't publish any such stuff without (TGA Gold Medal winner) Thornhill or Talbott or Scott's express permission, would he? He can't afford to call into question his position at TGA, can he?

 

[ben m]

A thought just occurred to me: since OAJ seems happy to publish at least some (crackpot EU) papers with zero peer review,

Oh, I doubt it. I'm sure that special-issue-editor Jeremy Dunning-Davies chose the reviewers personally. I'm sure that Scott's, Ransom's, Thornhill's, and Smith's papers were "peer reviewed", and recommended for publication, by some combination of Scott, Ransom, Thornhill, Smith, Dunning-Davies, Peratt, etc..

ETA: Don't forget Ruggero Santilli, founder of TGA, who also seems to have a friendly audience here.

The root problem is Bentham. I doubt they care in the slightest. They "launched" this "journal" for the cost of (a) adding a line to their MySQL database and (b) sending out an email bomb or two. The email bomb got them their "editors", and that provides (at exactly zero admin overhead) a "journal" that has racked up twenty or thirty full payments of page-charges already. Ka-ching! What do they care if the content is miserable, the impact-factor zero, and the entire business is a laughingstock? They've got a business model (i.e., zero marginal cost per journal) that works despite that, and that doesn't give them any professional journal-improvement-and-monitoring staff.

 

[Michael Mozina]

So if this is such a laughing stock of a publication, demonstrate it and get Clinger's nonsense published in the same publication. Then I'll know for sure it's worthy of your attacks.

 

[phunk]

So if this is such a laughing stock of a publication, demonstrate it and get Clinger's nonsense published in the same publication. Then I'll know for sure it's worthy of your attacks.

Maybe because that journal charges the author to publish? Why do you think it's free for the reader?

ETA: $800 if I remember correctly.

 

[tusenfem]

Let's keep the mozina discussion in the mozina thread. Let's not let this develop in yet another endless pointless thread where MM tries to defend his misconceptions about electrodynamics and plasma physics. This is about Bentham, and I just got an email from them this morning to publish in their open journal on atmospheric science. I have too little knowledge of atmospheric sciences to judge whether this also has crackpot issues in their publication list.

Another comment is on paying for your paper.
All respectable journals that I publish my papers in (Annales Geophysicae, Journal of Geophysical Research, Geophysical Research Letters, ...) you have to pay page charges for your paper to be published. At AG it is about 50 euro per page (but with my last paper 21 pages, that still adds up) and at JGR and GRL the page charges are even higher (although you can get the charges waived now and then), so just the fact that you need to pay for your paper is not a decisive criterion on whether the journal is bogus or not.

 

[phunk]

Another comment is on paying for your paper.
All respectable journals that I publish my papers in (Annales Geophysicae, Journal of Geophysical Research, Geophysical Research Letters, ...) you have to pay page charges for your paper to be published. At AG it is about 50 euro per page (but with my last paper 21 pages, that still adds up) and at JGR and GRL the page charges are even higher (although you can get the charges waived now and then), so just the fact that you need to pay for your paper is not a decisive criterion on whether the journal is bogus or not.

That wasn't the point I was making, I was just commenting on why someone might not want to publish nonsense just to prove the journal is trash. I generally don't like paying the people who I believe are doing things wrong.

 

[DeiRenDopa]

I don't know what you guys are getting so wound up about. Take a look at The Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark. It was published in Foundations of Physics. It's pimping the garbage pseudoscience notion that our physical world is an abstract mathematical structure. There's a spectrum of other examples, such as Eric Verlinde's Entropic Gravity published in the Journal of High Energy Physics. What, you think Dunning Davies and others are the only interest group who work together to promote their work? Wake up. Science is a battle of ideas. Interest groups are ubiquitous.

Oh, and Clinger, I haven't made any mistakes. I've offered clear scientific evidence along with Einstein references and a clear chain of logic. You could offer no counterevidence or counterargument, and your "mathematical exercises" only highlighted your inability to do so.

I can't speak for anyone else who's posted in this thread, but as the OP, I thought I had made what I was getting wound up about crystal clear: none of the papers in the OAJ 2011 Special Issue "Some Initial Thoughts on Plasma Cosmology" was peer-reviewed (or, if peer-reviewed, the reviewer(s)' recommendations etc ignored).

True, ben m has pointed out that "Scott's, Ransom's, Thornhill's, and Smith's papers were "peer reviewed", and recommended for publication, by some combination of Scott, Ransom, Thornhill, Smith, Dunning-Davies, Peratt, etc..", and that may be true. It's well-known that Scott, Thornhill, and Smith at least* all have a radically different view of what constitutes "review" than the authors of papers which are regularly published in ApJ, MNRAS, AJ, etc.

In particular, they apparently care not the least about:
a) accurate attribution/citation/etc (e.g. how many of the Figures in Thornhill's paper are given correct attributions?)
b) ensuring primary sources are referenced (e.g. Scott's use of press releases, rather than peer-reviewed papers, as sources)
c) citing key papers directly relevant to the topic of the paper (e.g. Dunning-Davies' omission of any of Alfvén's papers)
d) accurate summaries of cited papers' conclusions (e.g. Smith's, of the 2006 Lieu et al. paper on the SZE)
(there's more, of course, but this will do to make my point)

It's one thing to have crackpot nonsense published in a journal whose stated aims are quality peer-review; it's another to have papers published that are grotesquely deficient in terms of having been reviewed for the accuracy of the central evidence presented.

* I can't really comment on Ransom, Dunning-Davies, or Peratt

 

[Perpetual Student]

I don't know what you guys are getting so wound up about. Take a look at The Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark. It was published in Foundations of Physics. It's pimping the garbage pseudoscience notion that our physical world is an abstract mathematical structure. There's a spectrum of other examples, such as Eric Verlinde's Entropic Gravity published in the Journal of High Energy Physics. What, you think Dunning Davies and others are the only interest group who work together to promote their work? Wake up. Science is a battle of ideas. Interest groups are ubiquitous.

Oh, and Clinger, I haven't made any mistakes. I've offered clear scientific evidence along with Einstein references and a clear chain of logic. You could offer no counterevidence or counterargument, and your "mathematical exercises" only highlighted your inability to do so.

There is an important difference between highly speculative notions in science that are not currently verifiable like Tegmark's and Verlinde's speculations and notions that are demonstrably wrong like crackpot Electric Universe conjectures.

 

[DeiRenDopa]

Oh, I doubt it. I'm sure that special-issue-editor Jeremy Dunning-Davies chose the reviewers personally. I'm sure that Scott's, Ransom's, Thornhill's, and Smith's papers were "peer reviewed", and recommended for publication, by some combination of Scott, Ransom, Thornhill, Smith, Dunning-Davies, Peratt, etc..

ETA: Don't forget Ruggero Santilli, founder of TGA, who also seems to have a friendly audience here.

The root problem is Bentham. I doubt they care in the slightest. They "launched" this "journal" for the cost of (a) adding a line to their MySQL database and (b) sending out an email bomb or two. The email bomb got them their "editors", and that provides (at exactly zero admin overhead) a "journal" that has racked up twenty or thirty full payments of page-charges already. Ka-ching! What do they care if the content is miserable, the impact-factor zero, and the entire business is a laughingstock? They've got a business model (i.e., zero marginal cost per journal) that works despite that, and that doesn't give them any professional journal-improvement-and-monitoring staff.

As I said in my last post, what I find particularly awful is not so much that crackpot nonsense gets published in something which claims to peer-review its papers, but that either there is no review at all (more likely) or that the reviews conducted were done in accordance with standards which are antithetical to just about any kind of scholarship.

For example, consider fraud. Dunning-Davies was, apparently, quite willing to engage in plagiarism, and Thornhill has, apparently, no qualms about claiming others' work as his own (all those unattributed Figures in his OAJ paper, to take just one example).

Another example: blatant (even cynical?) gross mis-representation is, apparently, regarded as perfectly acceptable (example: from the Smith paper "IF it [the CMB] is the most distant thing we can see, (a remnant of the Big Bang) then we should observe the silhouettes of galaxy clusters and other major cosmic structures imposed on this image, which we do not [5]"; [5] is this 2006 Lieu et al. paper on the SZE*; the abstract contains these words "After co-adding the 31 cluster field, it appears that WMAP detected the SZE in all three bands"!)

This is all the worse for it being (cynically?) hypocritical; should a paper somehow get published in OAJ, attacking the PC/EU ideas in the five Special Issue papers, with a similar level of blatant disregard for basic principles of scholarship, imagine how loud the screams would be from these five authors.

Oh, and no, I do not accept that the authors are merely ignorant ...

* never mind that a later paper by the WMAP team itself cites this Lieu et al. paper (as do 36 others), and reports a conclusion utterly unlike Smith's characterization)

 

[Cuddles]

This thread is about a few specific papers and how they were published. If you want to carry on exactly the same general discussion about electric universes that you've all had many times before, go and do it in the appropriate thread.

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

 

[DeiRenDopa]

... that either there is no review at all (more likely) or that the reviews conducted were done in accordance with standards which are antithetical to just about any kind of scholarship.

Here's an example which supports the 'no review at all' hypothesis.

Smith's paper contains this text:

An analogy is often drawn between the behavior of light and that of sound, as when the pitch of a siren is heard to increase when approaching and then decrease when receding, hence the term 'Doppler redshift' of light from receding stars. The distance to galaxies, quasars and such has traditionally been defined by Doppler redshift theory. According to this theory, the degree of redshift an objects displays acts as an indication that it is receding from the observer (blueshift = advancing toward the observer) and additionally, that it allows us to calculate the object’s distance from us.

Now Dunning-Davies says this, in v1 of the arXiv preprint withdrawn by arXiv admin (co-author is R. Gray; see above for a link to it):

However, after Hubble discovered a rough correlation between the increasing redshift and the increasing distances of galaxies, theorists almost immediately realised that these observations could be explained by a different mechanism for producing redshifts. Hubble's law of the correlation between redshifts and distances is required by models of cosmology derived from general relativity that have a metric expansion of space¹⁴. This idea is different from that of the Doppler effect theory of redshift in that the photons increase in wavelength and redshift as the space through which they are travelling expands, as opposed to the velocity boost between the source and the observer being due to classical momentum and energy transfer¹⁵.

So it would seem that Smith is contradicting Dunning-Davies, and rather bluntly too. How likely is it that Dunning-Davies - editor of this Special Issue - would have allowed such an inconsistency to be published, if he had, in fact, actually reviewed Smith's draft?

 

[Farsight]

I don't know what you guys are getting so wound up about. Take a look at The Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark. It was published in Foundations of Physics. It's pimping the garbage pseudoscience notion that our physical world is an abstract mathematical structure. There's a spectrum of other examples, such as Eric Verlinde's Entropic Gravity published in the Journal of High Energy Physics. What, you think Dunning Davies and others are the only interest group who work together to promote their work? Wake up. Science is a battle of ideas. Interest groups are ubiquitous.

There is an important difference between highly speculative notions in science that are not currently verifiable like Tegmark's and Verlinde's speculations and notions that are demonstrably wrong like crackpot Electric Universe conjectures.

No there isn't. Tegmark's notion that the universe is made of mathematics is crackpottery in the extreme. But I'm afraid I can't give you a comparison between that and the EU without incurring the wrath of the JREF thought police, who moved my post along with others to the "abandon all hope" trashcan.

 

[DeiRenDopa]

There is an important difference between highly speculative notions in science that are not currently verifiable like Tegmark's and Verlinde's speculations and notions that are demonstrably wrong like crackpot Electric Universe conjectures.

No there isn't. Tegmark's notion that the universe is made of mathematics is crackpottery in the extreme. But I'm afraid I can't give you a comparison between that and the EU without incurring the wrath of the JREF thought police, who moved my post along with others to the "abandon all hope" trashcan.

Again, I don't think you've actually read the papers in the OAJ Special Issue.

In an earlier post, W.D.Clinger quoted from the Thornhill paper. YMMV, but I think it's hard to not conclude that Thornhill treats contemporary astrophysics as a religion (and the EU as a different, competing, religion).

For example:

However, the Big Bang is ideology and not science. Science welcomes refutation and the unknown while Big Bang adherents exhibit the same disregard of contrary evidence and religious intolerance of dissent, as do fundamentalist believers in other creation myths.
[...]
The selection of earlier ‘giants’ whose shoulders we must stand on is predetermined and unquestioned. But standing on someone else’s shoulders does not make us taller. The debates and politics that surrounded the consensus that raised those ‘giants’ to their exalted status are lost in the myth-making. We must worship the sainted geniuses our forefathers chose for us. Questioning the ‘laws,’ the contradictions and misleading language of science is discouraged. Yet educators are surprised by the growing disinterest in science. Perhaps it is because Big Bang cosmology has nothing to offer about life and the human condition. Instead, our cosmology is a bizarre narrative of miracles, chance, isolation and the hopelessness of eventual total darkness or a return to a cauldron of rebirth

IMHO, PS is also mistaken; the distinction isn't so much between speculative notions and demonstrably wrong crackpot Electric Universe conjectures as between science and religion, or science and anti-science. Viewed in this way, the apparent sloppiness in the various OAJ Special Issue papers is more easily understood/explained: the authors are engaged in a religious propaganda campaign (in a similar vein, Tom Bridgman has, in several of his blog entries, drawn attention to the similarity between the EU and creationism).

 

[Michael Mozina]

Again, I don't think you've actually read the papers in the OAJ Special Issue.

In an earlier post, W.D.Clinger quoted from the Thornhill paper. YMMV, but I think it's hard to not conclude that Thornhill treats contemporary astrophysics as a religion (and the EU as a different, competing, religion).

For example:

Considering the fact that even my single line QUESTION about whether the problem was actually with the publication, or with this particular group was removed from this thread, it's hard not to see mainstream theory as a "religion". Even QUESTIONING the legitimacy of BASHING the publication isn't to be tolerated around here.

 

[ben m]

Hey folks, here's a good one. This is a note from Waldyr Rodrigues (whose name appears on many of the Telesio/Galilei/Santilli/whatever boards) explaining what it's like to "edit" and "review" for Hadronic Press, whose chief editor Corda also edits TOJJA.

http://www.ime.unicamp.br/~walrod/A SAD STORY.pdf

This is amazing stuff. Papers sent to Santilli and Corda's non-crackpot journal got printed on the sly in the crackpot journal instead:

Now, very serious incidents happened involving the above papers. Indeed, the first
two articles have been published without the authors’ authorizations in Hadronic
Journal, instead of Algebras Groups and Geometries. Due to this fact, some of the
authors became, of course, very furious and informed to me that they wanted to sue a
lawsuit against Hadronic Press

Papers got published years before they were sent to referees:

Besides this episode, it is necessary to quote another one, in order to demonstrate the
very low administrative organization level of Hadronic Press. I was asked on June 2007
to write a referee’s report on the paper: Resolving Russel’s Paradox within Cantor’s
Intuitive Set Theory (by Feng Su) submitted for publication in AGG.
After studying that paper I felt that it was not suitable for publication in a Mathematical
journal, but before taking a final decision I asked the opinion of an expert, and on basis
of the report that I received
4
the paper has been rejected.
Well, for my great surprise I discovered that the mentioned paper was already published
in HJ 29. 227-232 (2006)!

Santilli sent Rodrigues his own book asking for comments; Rodrigues found errors and wrote a paper about them, to which Santilli replied:

S9. Feel free to do whatever you wish for I could not care less. My job
is to denounce your work for scientific corruption in my forthcoming
volumes Hadronic Mathematics, Mechanics and Chemistry http://www.i-br.org/Hadronic-Mechanics.htm Posterity, a certainly out your accomplices, will then judge.

S10.This is also to terminate all personal and scientific contacts as
well as to terminate Dr. Rodrigues as editor of AGG and HJ for ethical
misconduct.

S11. All messages you may wish to send us from now on via email will be
automatically trashed and all mail equally trashed. There has to be
somebody who stoops the disrupting political manipulations in favor of
organized interests on Einstein and leave a mark for posterity

 

[Farsight]

Again, I don't think you've actually read the papers in the OAJ Special Issue.

I've now read Jeremy Dunning Davies's editorial, which I thought was fair enough. I've also read Wallace Thornhill's Towards a Real Cosmology in the 21st Century down as far as the electric stars, when I'm afraid I lost interest. IMHO it's rather a rambling polemic essay, and I think much of what he says is mistaken. But there is food for thought in there - IMHO he isn't entirely wrong about everything. And I didn't end up feeling angry and wanting to screw the thing up and chuck it in the bin shouting pseudoscience trash! That's how I've felt with some other material. I'd say there is more of a "religious" aspect to broad-brush physics than you appreciate, hence I don't see this "peer reviewed" collusion as entirely untypical.

In an earlier post, W.D.Clinger quoted from the Thornhill paper. YMMV, but I think it's hard to not conclude that Thornhill treats contemporary astrophysics as a religion (and the EU as a different, competing, religion).

I really think Thornhill picked the wrong target with big bang cosmology. See this bit from page 196?

"Although more appealing to commonsense than the Big Bang, it too fails by invoking creation of matter and accepting the metaphysical notion that space can expand".

That's wrong. It just has to expand. It can't not expand. Not unless one believes in an infinite universe, and we have no evidence to support that.

For example:

"However, the Big Bang is ideology and not science. Science welcomes refutation and the unknown while Big Bang adherents exhibit the same disregard of contrary evidence and religious intolerance of dissent..."

I'd say there is more ideology in science than you think. I am reminded of Hawking pontificating on the front page of The Times a year or so ago, peddling M-theory and blithely pronouncing that the universe was born of a quantum fluctuation. That isn't much better than God did it. And don't be hoisted by your own petard here. This thread should be explaining why Thornhill is wrong instead of squawking in outrage and attempting some kind of character assassination.

IMHO, PS is also mistaken; the distinction isn't so much between speculative notions and demonstrably wrong crackpot Electric Universe conjectures as between science and religion, or science and anti-science. Viewed in this way, the apparent sloppiness in the various OAJ Special Issue papers is more easily understood/explained: the authors are engaged in a religious propaganda campaign (in a similar vein, Tom Bridgman has, in several of his blog entries, drawn attention to the similarity between the EU and creationism).

We'll have to agree to differ about that. IMHO there's plenty of other stuff out there that's "peer reviewed" and peddled by interest groups via propaganda campaigns. Some of it is crackpot, and some of that has a veneer of respectability. What we have here is just another interest group pushing their stuff.

I've spoken to Jeremy Dunning Davies in the past by the way. And read his book, which I thought was interesting. As I recall he rather railed about some things, and I certainly didn't agree with everything he said. But I got something from it nevertheless. I think it strengthened my "Voltaire" view: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

 

[DeiRenDopa]

Again, I don't think you've actually read the papers in the OAJ Special Issue.

I've now read Jeremy Dunning Davies's editorial, which I thought was fair enough. I've also read Wallace Thornhill's Towards a Real Cosmology in the 21st Century down as far as the electric stars, when I'm afraid I lost interest.

Well, of those who have tried to defend this Special Issue as being consistent with the stated aims of OAJ*, you seem to be only the second to have actually read at least some of the papers. Congratulations.

IMHO it's rather a rambling polemic essay, and I think much of what he says is mistaken. But there is food for thought in there - IMHO he isn't entirely wrong about everything. And I didn't end up feeling angry and wanting to screw the thing up and chuck it in the bin shouting pseudoscience trash!

Is your reading comprehension really so poor? Or is it your logic?

Have your forgotten this? Or did you simply not read it at all (even though I added bold)?

I can't speak for anyone else who's posted in this thread, but as the OP, I thought I had made what I was getting wound up about crystal clear: none of the papers in the OAJ 2011 Special Issue "Some Initial Thoughts on Plasma Cosmology" was peer-reviewed (or, if peer-reviewed, the reviewer(s)' recommendations etc ignored).

So, would you like to take the time to re-read at least those two, this time with a view to writing something pertinent to the topic at hand? In case you still haven't got it, please allow me to repeat it:

None of the papers in the OAJ 2011 Special Issue "Some Initial Thoughts on Plasma Cosmology" was peer-reviewed (or, if peer-reviewed, the reviewer(s)' recommendations etc ignored).

That's how I've felt with some other material. I'd say there is more of a "religious" aspect to broad-brush physics than you appreciate, hence I don't see this "peer reviewed" collusion as entirely untypical.

Right.

Got it.

The problem lies with your logic.

Specifically, in Farsight logic, "there are some papers, somewhere - no I didn't present any evidence, just trust me - that I, Farsight, think were not peer-reviewed; therefore it's OK that five papers in OAJ that were not peer-reviewed"

Oh wait.

Your logic is not even this good.

It goes something like this: "I, Farsight, think there is a "religious" aspect to broad-brush physics - no I didn't present any evidence, just trust me - therefore it's OK that five papers in OAJ that were not peer-reviewed."

I shall try to keep what you evidently regard as impeccable logic in mind, as I read your rants posts on black holes (in other threads). That way I may understand better what you're trying to say.

Wanna try again?

<stuff totally irrelevant to the topic at hand skipped>

This thread should be explaining why Thornhill is wrong instead of squawking in outrage and attempting some kind of character assassination.

Well, if you'd like to start just such a thread, please, by all means do so.

On the other hand, if you've nothing to say about the topic, clearly presented in the OP, how about you refrain from putting your fingers on your keyboard?

IMHO, PS is also mistaken; the distinction isn't so much between speculative notions and demonstrably wrong crackpot Electric Universe conjectures as between science and religion, or science and anti-science. Viewed in this way, the apparent sloppiness in the various OAJ Special Issue papers is more easily understood/explained: the authors are engaged in a religious propaganda campaign (in a similar vein, Tom Bridgman has, in several of his blog entries, drawn attention to the similarity between the EU and creationism).

We'll have to agree to differ about that. IMHO there's plenty of other stuff out there that's "peer reviewed" and peddled by interest groups via propaganda campaigns. Some of it is crackpot, and some of that has a veneer of respectability. What we have here is just another interest group pushing their stuff.

OK, so, a straight question which is pertinent: what, in the Farsight universe, are the key aspects of 'peer-review' (with respect to a journal whose stated aims are similar to those of OAJ)?

For example:

* is the person doing the review required to be conversant with the published literature on the topic?

* is the reviewer required to spot errors of the kind Smith makes (e.g. with respect to his reference [5], see above)?

* should a reviewer require the author of the paper being reviewed to find the primary sources (a peer-reviewed paper, for example), and not use press releases?

* should a reviewer require such an author to cite the sources they use for their figures?

I've spoken to Jeremy Dunning Davies in the past by the way. And read his book, which I thought was interesting. As I recall he rather railed about some things, and I certainly didn't agree with everything he said. But I got something from it nevertheless. I think it strengthened my "Voltaire" view: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

That's nice.

And it is relevant to the topic of this thread, how, exactly?

* there are only three, you, Zeuzzzz, and MM (SG's comments are, perhaps, marginally relevant too; she obviously read the editorial). It took a while, but Z actually got around to reading at least one of the five, you've read one and a bit, and MM has - apparently - not read any yet

 

[Farsight]

Well, of those who have tried to defend this Special Issue as being consistent with the stated aims of OAJ*, you seem to be only the second to have actually read at least some of the papers. Congratulations.

My pleasure.

Is your reading comprehension really so poor? Or is it your logic?

Neither.

Have your forgotten this? Or did you simply not read it at all (even though I added bold)?

None of the papers in the OAJ 2011 Special Issue "Some Initial Thoughts on Plasma Cosmology" was peer-reviewed

No I haven't. And don't shout. The point is that there's plenty of papers that have been "peer reviewed" and printed in journals, and they're absolute psuedoscience trash. They haven't really been peer-reviewed. They've been through some you-scratch-my-back club where quackery gets the stamp of approval. Peer review is not some kind of noble perfection. People form interest groups and defend and promote their own theory/area whilst dissing the competition. That's how the world is. Get used to it.

Right.

Got it.

The problem lies with your logic.

Specifically, in Farsight logic...

Enough. You're being abusive. It does you no favours. I'm for free speech in science, and if you don't like that, tough.

 

[DeiRenDopa]

Have your forgotten this? Or did you simply not read it at all (even though I added bold)?

None of the papers in the OAJ 2011 Special Issue "Some Initial Thoughts on Plasma Cosmology" was peer-reviewed

No I haven't. And don't shout. The point is that there's plenty of papers that have been "peer reviewed" and printed in journals, and they're absolute psuedoscience trash. They haven't really been peer-reviewed. They've been through some you-scratch-my-back club where quackery gets the stamp of approval. Peer review is not some kind of noble perfection. People form interest groups and defend and promote their own theory/area whilst dissing the competition. That's how the world is. Get used to it.

Wow, I don't think I could have written a more devastating, satirical, me-standing-in-for-you reply if I had tried!

Let's see now ...

a) you did not even try to argue that the five papers (singly, or in any combo) in that OAJ Special Issue were reviewed, by a peer

b) by omission, you implied that lack of peer-review is, in your world, perfectly OK, for a journal whose clearly stated aims are to the contrary

c) you claim that there are plenty of papers published in journals which claim to peer-review them, but that the process results in publication of "absolute psuedoscience trash", and you offer, as evidence, the following:

d) in short, you chose to respond to the central topic of this thread by completely ignoring it.

Congratulations, you behavior puts you - objectively, and independently verifiably so - in the same class of JREF member as MM. Keep this up and I'll put you on Ignore too*.

Enough. You're being abusive. It does you no favours.

So let me give you one version of how this response reads, Farsight: I asked you, several times, to discuss the topic of this thread, as clearly stated in the OP. Many of your posts in this thread were so far off-topic that an admin removed them to AAH. Your posts/responses subsequently are only marginally better; there's almost nothing in any of them that is directly relevant to the - clearly stated - topic. In response to being called out for repeated use of diversionary tactics (and more), you go into a sulk, and declare you'll contribute no more to this thread.

Can you see how others (at least one, anyway, me) see you, Farsight?

I'm for free speech in science, and if you don't like that, tough.

I like the idea of peer-reviewed journals, in science (well, physics, astronomy, and so on). When a journal which aims to be one such publishes papers which, I contend, have not been peer-reviewed, I like the fact that I can freely speak about it. When a self-professed defender of "free speech in science" spams the thread I started to discuss this, I reserve my free speech right to respond appropriately.

* Why? because there is - objectively - no common basis for a rational discussion

 

[Dancing David]

Farsight, it is strange how when you respond to a statement about the Big Band as ideology, you do so by talking about something other than the BBE and Thornhill's discussion of it.

Then you make comments about other people not addressing Thornhill's statements.

Rather odd

 

[ben m]

Farsight, do you want to comment on your personal involvement with TOJJA? Namely, the fact that an "A Worsley" personally thanks you, John Duffield, for assistance with his or her article in the latest issue?

The actual TOJJA article is pretty bad. (I have no idea why the author thinks there's CDM in need of explanation at Galactic centers; there probably is, and people have tried very hard to detect its tiny gravitational effect, but no such search has picked it up.) It discusses Worsely's theory, which indeed sounds pretty bad, but the details are lost in citations to two Physics Essays articles, both by Worsley, neither available online. My university library doesn't subscribe to Physics Essays, you see.

Perhaps, given that it's actually relevant to the thread, you can tell us what you know personally about TOJJA's referees. And, who is this Worsley? I find no evidence of his existence on any KCL web page or directory.

 

[W.D.Clinger]

Farsight, do you want to comment on your personal involvement with TOJJA? Namely, the fact that an "A Worsley" personally thanks you, John Duffield, for assistance with his or her article in the latest issue?

The actual TOJJA article is pretty bad.

...snip...

Perhaps, given that it's actually relevant to the thread, you can tell us what you know personally about TOJJA's referees. And, who is this Worsley? I find no evidence of his existence on any KCL web page or directory.

I think you're talking about The Open Astronomy Journal, which seems to use TOAAJ (not TOJJA) as an abbreviation.

As for Worsley, he may be the author of this book:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/soaring-on-the-wings-of-genius-andrew-worsley/1102735057

[size=+1]Meet the Author[/size]

Andrew Worsley is Consultant UHL, University of London and Hon. Senior Lecturer, University of London. Author of On the Wings of Genius: A Chronicle of Modern Physics, Book I and Flying on the Wings of Genius: A Chronicle of Modern Physics, Book II

I found a PDF of the book online. Page 3 says:

About the Author:​

Dr. Andrew Worsley,
(nee: Andrzej Wojciechowski)
Honorary Senior Lecturer, University of London.
Consultant, UHL, University of London.

 

[ben m]

I think you're talking about The Open Astronomy Journal, which seems to use TOAAJ (not TOJJA) as an abbreviation.

My mistake. I don't know how I convinced myself otherwise.

 

[Reality Check]

Considering the fact that even my single line QUESTION about whether the problem was actually with the publication, or with this particular group was removed from this thread, it's hard not to see mainstream theory as a "religion".

Given that your and my posts were moved because they were off topic, the mainstream theory that is a "religion" is called the Membership Agreement .
The answer to your single line QUESTION is that the problem is both with the publication and the papers as already stated.

I do not have that much of a problem with the The Open Astronomy Journal itself. If a publishing company wants to make money by trying to publish a science journal then that is just business. If it wants to do an awful job of it then that is their business also.

The problem is this special issue of the The Open Astronomy Journal with the obvious lack of competent peer review. The invalid science in the papers is so blatant that the editor should have picked it up and thrown them out. But Jeremy Dunning-Davies happens to be a supporter of the Electric Universe pseudoscience and as W.D. Clinger pointed out is a contributor to the Thunderbolts.info web site.

 

[DeiRenDopa]

Maybe my internet search skills are somewhat lacking ...

There is no Dr. Andrew Worsley (nor Andrzej Wojciechowski) at the University of London, in any role at all (per their website). UCL (University College London) is apparently one of the University of London's Colleges and Institutes. UCL has a unit called BEAMS (School of the Built Environment, Engineering and Mathematical and Physical Sciences). Within that school there is a Faculty of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, and within that, a Department of Physics and Astronomy. Andrew Worsley is not listed as a member of staff of this Department, nor as a Retired Staff member. "UHL" means what? I could find nothing that makes sense, for someone writing papers (and books) on gravitation, cosmology, and physics.

Within UCL there is UCL Discovery:

UCL Discovery showcases UCL's research publications, giving access to journal articles, book chapters, conference proceedings, digital web resources, theses and much more, from all UCL disciplines. Where copyright permissions allow, a full copy of each research publication is directly available from UCL Discovery.

A search for "A. Worsely" turns up six records that would seem to be our Andrew:

String quintessence and the formulation of advanced quantum gravity, "Physics Essays , 22 (3) pp. 364-377. 10.4006/1.3182733" (the last number string is a link, when clicked it returns "Error - DOI Not Found")

An advanced dynamic adaptation of Newtonian equations of gravity, "Physics Essays , 21 (3) pp. 222-228. 10.4006/1.3027501" (ditto re clicking the link)

An advanced modification of dynamic gravitation, "Physical Review D" (no link, but PDF available)

Then there are three books, "Worsley, A. (2005) On the wings of genius: a chronicle of modern physics: Book 1. Universal Publishers: Boca Raton, US." (ISBN-13: 9781581124514, PDF available); "Worsley, A. (2006) Flying on the wings of genius: a chronicle of modern physics: Book 2. Universal Publishers: Boca Raton, US." (ISBN-13: 9781581129380 PDF available); and "Worsley, A. (2006) Soaring on the wings of genius: a chronicle of modern physics: Book 3. Universal Publishers: Boca Raton, US." (ISBN-13: 9781581129489 , PDF available).

ADS turns up only five publications by "Worsley, A." In addition to the OAJ paper (see above) and the two Physics Essays in UCL Discovery, there are two other Physics Essay publications:

The formulation of harmonic quintessence and a fundamental energy equivalence equation ("Physics Essays, vol. 23, issue 2, p. 311", dead DOI link), and Harmonic quintessence and the derivation of the charge and mass of the electron and the proton and quark masses ("Physics Essays, vol. 24, issue 2, p. 240", ditto).

A search I did for a paper by Worsely, in Physical Review D, and came up blank.

The "Physical Review D" PDF in UCL Discovery gives two academic affiliations for the author: "Dept of Physics and Astronomy, UCL, Gower Street, London, UK, WC1E 6BT", and "Hon. Senior Lecturer, Consultant, UHL, University of London, UK SE13, 6HL".

I seem to be missing something here; can anyone help please?

 

[edd]

UHL is the University Hospital Lewisham. I believe Dr Worsley's speciality is endocrinology.