McCoin Last Thread

[Holler Hoojer]

"Dr Lincoln - Debates" - Is Debates a book or a journal?

That's Don Lincoln from Fermilab, a very easy-going, gentlemanly sort. Here is the debate
http://www.sciencechatforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1038&hilit=macm

 

[Reality Check]

1 - I have in the past been party to (3) formal debates with a High Energy Physicist. He at least acknowledged that much of my views were actually viable although he personally prefered to stay with relativity due to it's simplicity. I seek out those that have some small amount of common sense and aren't full of themselves. Most here seem completely unwilling to even consider that relativity may be wrong or that the assumption of time-space is in error based on a complete misunderstanding of the basis for the measured invariance of light.

So lets see what Dr Lincoln replied in response to MacM's posting at SPCF about his health problems:

I'm sorry to hear that Mac. I hope that the docs are able to do something to push the cancer into remission.

I think the formal debates just got moved to physics and are to be found buried several years back.

[For those not old enough to remember the legendary Lincoln/Mac arguments (how legendary were they if they are forgotten?), Mac is an anti-relativitist and I, of course, am a practicing physicist. We had lots of long and drawn-out debates on the subject of relativity. From my point of view, the arguments always turned on a misuse and misunderstanding of relativity by Mac, but I must concede that Mac always came up with the most puzzling relativistic conundra. Unlike the usual problems (twin paradox, for instance), sometimes I'd have to scratch my head for a week to figure out how to approach the problem.]

Hang in there dude...sometimes the docs get lucky.

Lincoln

In other words: MacM is mistaken (as usual ).
Dr Lincoln did not think that any of MacM's views were "actually viable" - Mac just raised interesting problems which needed some thought to resolve.

 

[Reality Check]

Found another MacM/Lincoln debate at SPCF: Relativity confronts an Absolutist perspective

ETA: The last comment in that debate by Dr Lincoln is a good summary of MacM's misconceptions.

Well I will be more brief. I have only a few comments.

If one rejects special relativity with cause, one must first understand it. And your examples frequently do not properly use the mathematical framework of relativity. I have detailed this framework throughout the debate and will not reiterate it now.

In addition, you tend to reject mathematics. Possibly this is because you think that mathematics hides flaws. This is far from the truth. Mathematics is a succinct language, well-suited for scientific discussion. I suspect that your distaste for mathematics reflects more a discomfort with a language that requires some time to master. In fact, it is words that come laden with confusing meanings. Discussing relativity with words requires careful definition of terms so as to make clear how the meaning of the "physics" words differ from the normal usage. Mathematical defintions are simpler and more succinct.

Your closing post brings in acceleration and special relativity...a topic mix outside the earlier discussion. We had that discussion in a separate debate and I will not reopen it now. Suffice it to say that special relativity can handle acceleration, although without the mathematical simplicity afforded by general relativity.

The bottom line is that you prefer an absolutist variation of relativity. Such a variant was held by many of the physicists of the late 19th and early 20th century (including...once Einstein's idea became apparent...some of the early architects and developers of relativity). There was a reason they rejected the idea. It does not conform to the totality of physical measurements.

Finally, you first rejected and then ignored the truly stunning observation that relativity plays a central role in the symmetry of electricity and magnetism. It is true that your preferred experiment to demonstrate what you call the reciprocity of velocity is technically difficult and financially prohibitive, but only a very stubborn person can reject this impressive unification. It unambiguously demonstrates the Lorentz contraction for which you demand proof.

I am certain that I will not convince you. I no longer wish to try. However, I do hope that the readers of the debate come away with an improved understanding of how to do relativity and its extraordinary successes. This is difficult to do in an unstructured bulletin board, but perhaps I have had some modest success.

Were I in your shoes, I would instead spend my time trying to devise an experiment that could be accomplished to prove the inadequacy of special relativity, rather than trying to argue it away using pseudo-philosophical techniques. If the experiment could be done for modest cost...say to the tune of one to ten million dollars...you might convince a physicist to try to get the funding to do the experiment. It is only through experimental data and, I am sorry to say, mathematical persuasion, that you will make headway with the scientific community.

In the meantime, Shalom....

 

[tsig]

Actually the most interesting aspect of your post is the expose' of your pathetic personality.

You find it more apporpriate to sit back poke fun at an old man perhaps just months left who's vision has started to blur, fingers have arthritis.

FYI: I have had substantial formal education in my time. I have done higher mathematics (but not lately). I used to type 65 wpm without any spelling errors.

At the moment and undercurrent conditions I really don't give a big crap about spelling, typo's, etc. All petty BS.

Your fixation on such things tells us a great deal about yourself. Have a nice day.

PS: Not looking for sympathy here just stick to issues and forget the cute ass stuff. It isn't actually cute.

What you're looking for is "spell-check". Get it, use it, lose the excuses.

 

[MacM]

The joke wasn't even primarily about you. It was mostly just an excuse to make a reference to one of my favorite lines from a movie I really like. Don't take it personally, and learn to laugh at yourself a little. Nobody actually cares about your spelling, but you'll get more respect with less defensiveness.

Then stop complaining about my joke and get back to the actual topic. Do your conversion with units. Prove me wrong. The calculations should be easy.

Well if I came here to tell jokes perhaps. But I didn't.

Now considering that I am not sure how many months I may have left I don't intend using them to defend against slander and other negative innuendos.

Having said this I will now post for the sake of others that may run across these threads my recent recontact with Dr Lincoln and two of the three formal debates we had. I may find the third and post from it as well.

I do this just to emphasize the difference in attitude compared to that received here. Many of you may well be educated but you have a feather in your cap that really needs to be clipped. You try to fly to high.

*****************************************************

Sent: June 15th, 2009, 6:19 am
From: Lincoln
To: dkmllm

Hey, I had nothing to do with your banning. You did have a tendency to turn every thread into an anti-relativity one. I think that irritated the mods. Truth be known, I forget the particulars.

I'll take a look at your notice. It sounds ominous but I hope it is not as bad as it sounds.

Cheers..

Lincoln


by Lincoln on June 15th, 2009, 7:10 am

I'm sorry to hear that Mac. I hope that the docs are able to do something to push the cancer into remission.

I think the formal debates just got moved to physics and are to be found buried several years back.

[For those not old enough to remember the legendary Lincoln/Mac arguments (how legendary were they if they are forgotten?), Mac is an anti-relativitist and I, of course, am a practicing physicist. We had lots of long and drawn-out debates on the subject of relativity.

From my point of view, the arguments always turned on a misuse and misunderstanding of relativity by Mac, but I must concede that Mac always came up with the most puzzling relativistic conundra. Unlike the usual problems (twin paradox, for instance), sometimes I'd have to scratch my head for a week to figure out how to approach the problem.]

Hang in there dude...sometimes the docs get lucky.

Lincoln

******************* Debate 1 w/ Extracts *****************

http://www.sciencechatforum.com/bulletin/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1038&p=9201&hilit=Formal+Debate#p9201

In retrospect, the final result was trivial. Trivial, in this case, means many hours of a professional research physicst thinking with paper and pencil, along with consultations with at least half a dozen other experimentalists and a couple of theorists. We so seldom do acceleration in the context of SR, it took some time to think it over. Just like in math class....once it's done, it's trivial.

First, let me say that the conundrum posed by Mac was a rather good one, the solution of which is non-trivial.

Relativity simply tells you how different observers will perceive a situation.

On the other hand Mac, the query you posed was good enough to stump a number of my colleagues. The amount of time needed to figure this out was substantial….more than I had originally anticipated. Most physicists don’t have the time to put into answering these conundrums…I certainly didn’t….but since I committed, I needed to follow it through. Others won’t.

You know Mac…as much as you have thought about this, you would be well-advised to see if you could take a relativity class at a local university, preferably one of a respectable caliber. A thorough understanding of relativity would make you all the more intellectually dangerous....or maybe you’d just come over to the dark side…

**************** Another Debate ******************
http://www.sciencechatforum.com/bulletin/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1410

(1) time is perceived differently for observers at different velocity

So as to not again put donuts in jeapordy (Mac will understand even if the rest of you don't), I'll double check them before posting.

I don't think Mac is a loon...he's an intelligent and quite clever, although misguided, guy...he is definitely in the minority. And I am the mainstream guy (or member of the cabal, suppressing in jealously the brilliance of those who challenge our intellectual power, depending on your spin on things).

******************************************************

Now to summarize while Lincoln was obviously not a convert he did vascillate on key issues. That is came tantalizingly close to saying it correctly but declining to take that step.

i.e - His use of the term "Percieve" (once even said SR only predicts what others will "See") but consistantly refused to agree that to"See" or "Percives" is not the same as being the physical reality. That is the physical reality is that only one clock becomes dilated regardless of what others "See".

Also he had a tendancy to rely on mathematical solutions which frankly occasionaly volated tenats of SR themselves.

i.e. - I raised an issue where closing rate to a distant star would become FTL according to SR. Of course (excludingtychons) nothing can ever go FTL right? Well he ultimately came up with some math that claimed the observer would not "See" the closing rate as FTL because the event would be behind an event horizon.

1 - Not seeing an FTL event is entirely different than claiming nothing ever goes FTL.

2 - Not seeing something in your path does not make it vanish physically and continued travel would predict collision with something not visable because it is going FTL. That is outside the limits of SR. But he claimed the math salvaged SR.

3 - Numerous objects have been recorded as having apparent FTL motion. Again math has been developed to show that for objects moving relavistically in a narrow line-of-sight motionwill falsely produce the appearance of FTL motion.

That solution fails to acknowledge that less than 1/2 % of such objects show either red or blue shift consistant with line of sight motion. They appear to be proper motions (orthogonal to line of sight).

 

[Cuddles]

Well if I came here to tell jokes perhaps. But I didn't.

634 of your posts say otherwise.

 

[MacM]

What you're looking for is "spell-check". Get it, use it, lose the excuses.

Spell check. Maybe if I were writting for the President, not you guys.

 

[MacM]

634 of your posts say otherwise.

You should take a look at your own worthless posts. No contribution what-so-ever. Keep up the good work.

 

[Ziggurat]

Well if I came here to tell jokes perhaps. But I didn't.

That's too bad. Enjoying a joke is one of the finer pleasures in life, there's rather more reason to spend time appreciating them than arguing about technical stuff if you've got limited time.

i.e - His use of the term "Percieve" (once even said SR only predicts what others will "See") but consistantly refused to agree that to"See" or "Percives" is not the same as being the physical reality. That is the physical reality is that only one clock becomes dilated regardless of what others "See".

There's an issue in relativity which I think should be made explicit, though it often is not. There is a difference between what one sees and what one observes. The latter word is used in a rather precise way in relativity. What you see is literally just the light that reaches your eyes. What one observes, however, is different from what one sees: it is an idealized measurement of how things are (the physical reality) in your reference frame. One can often infer an observation from what one sees, but they are not the same thing. For example, let's say an airplane flies overhead. You hear a noise of jet engines, but you hear that noise coming from some location behind where the airplane is. But what do you observe? Well if you know the speed of sound, the speed of the jet, and the distance from you, then you can calculate where the jet was when the noise you are hearing was made, and you'll find that the noise does actually come from the jet, and not from a location behind the jet. So while you hear noise coming from behind the jet, you observe noise coming from the jet.

Same thing in relativity. There are lots of optical effects due to the finite propagation speed of light which can cause someone to see things which aren't real (including superluminal velocities, the apparent rotation of fast-moving objects, etc). But an observation represents reality in your reference frame. Things like time dilation and length contraction are observations. They are not what one sees, but are completely real.

And MacM, you still haven't shown your conversion with units. Your conversion is wrong, the units don't work. Admit your mistake or show us your work.

 

[RussDill]

I do this just to emphasize the difference in attitude compared to that received here. Many of you may well be educated but you have a feather in your cap that really needs to be clipped. You try to fly to high.

You need to take a step back and humble yourself before calling out others. Remember that you are the one who is claiming that millions of highly educated people are missing something that you can clearly see, even without a background in theoretical physics.

People in this forum are just explaining physics and current experimental data as they understand it.

 

[RussDill]

Same thing in relativity. There are lots of optical effects due to the finite propagation speed of light which can cause someone to see things which aren't real (including superluminal velocities, the apparent rotation of fast-moving objects, etc). But an observation represents reality in your reference frame. Things like time dilation and length contraction are observations. They are not what one sees, but are completely real.

Not only that, but we most often want our measurements and observations in 3 neat space dimensions and 1 neat time dimension. This is (afaik, correct me if I am wrong) another usage of the term "perceive" when it comes to relativity.

And MacM, you still haven't shown your conversion with units. Your conversion is wrong, the units don't work. Admit your mistake or show us your work.

Yes, I would be most interested in this too. As well as a set of rules for picking an inertial frame of reference before performing calculations.

 

[RussDill]

You should take a look at your own worthless posts. No contribution what-so-ever. Keep up the good work.

Cuddles has made some pointed posts early on in your threads, but I think he or she has less motivation/patience to try to help and/or understand you. If Cuddles is just noise to you, ignore him or her.

It really doesn't help you to author mean-spirited posts against those who make this forum possible. You might instead say, hey Cuddles, I appreciate you volunteering your time to make the JREF forum possible. Or maybe, Cuddles, I'd appreciate if you keep on topic within this thread, etc.

Edited s/as/has/g

 

[realpaladin]

I like Mac! Even though he is wrong, he is a strong minded individual!

 

[Uncayimmy]

<snipped quote>

You find it more apporpriate to sit back poke fun at an old man perhaps just months left who's vision has started to blur, fingers have arthritis.

At the moment and undercurrent conditions I really don't give a big crap about spelling, typo's, etc. All petty BS.

PS: Not looking for sympathy here just stick to issues and forget the cute ass stuff. It isn't actually cute.

Look, Mac, I know this will sound harsh, but your health issues are irrelevant to the discussion, so stop bringing them up. You can't say, "I'm sick and dying" and then say, "But I don't want any sympathy." Of course people will feel sympathy for you.

When it comes to spelling and typing, you must remember that sloppy presentation is often interpreted as an indicator of sloppy ideas. If you want people to take you seriously, take yourself seriously. You're trying to overturn what scientists consider a pillar in their understanding of the universe. Physics is a study in precision. Since you refuse to use the most precise language available (math), you must be very precise in your use of English.

Take your repeated use of infered. The correct word is infrared. Besides being phonetically different and thus an obvious misspelling, your misuse demonstrates a lack of understanding about the word itself. Infra means below. Thus infrared is below the red end of the visible spectrum.

Since you didn't even recognize the misspelling when it was pointed out, it would seem that you're not familiar with the term. Someone researching relativity will no doubt encounter "infrared" being tossed about. Considering your repeated misstatements about relativity, your use of "infered" is just one more indicator that your claims are not well researched.

It's bad enough that you misuse terms and state things ambigiously. Add in sloppy execution (typos, repeatedly misspelled terms), and few people are going to want to take the effort to figure out what you meant to say.

If you want to be taken seriously, treat yourself seriously. That means taking the time to write clear, concise posts. If you don't, then don't get mad when your valid points are missed.

 

[theprestige]

I like Mac! Even though he is wrong, he is a strong minded individual!

Which causes me to wonder if "strong-mindedness" isn't actually a virtue, any more than "largeness".

One person might be large in the sense of being well-fed, well-muscled, and physically fit: We might say that a two-meter, 360-kilogram Olympic athlete is "virtuously large". On the other hand, another person might be large in the sense of being morbidly obese; we might say that such a person is "viciously large".

Personally, I prefer to admire "sound-minded" individuals, on the principle that a sound mind is a virtue, and would certainly be strong when necessary (but would not exercise strength in the pursuit of un-soundness).

 

[MacM]

What one observes, however, is different from what one sees: it is an idealized measurement of how things are (the physical reality) in your reference frame. One can often infer an observation from what one sees, but they are not the same thing. For example, let's say an airplane flies overhead. You hear a noise of jet engines, but you hear that noise coming from some location behind where the airplane is. But what do you observe? Well if you know the speed of sound, the speed of the jet, and the distance from you, then you can calculate where the jet was when the noise you are hearing was made, and you'll find that the noise does actually come from the jet, and not from a location behind the jet. So while you hear noise coming from behind the jet, you observe noise coming from the jet.

And MacM, you still haven't shown your conversion with units. Your conversion is wrong, the units don't work. Admit your mistake or show us your work.

1 - When you calculate the time distance affect of the jet and it's noise you are computing the ONLY relaity. The rest is what is just illusions of motion. It may seem real to you but it is not real and there is and will be no permanent physical affects caused by the illusion.

The ONLY reality is that the jet is producing the noise LOCALLY in it's proper frame..

2 - There is not and never have been units of converson involved. I gave E=mc^2 as an example of the ratio of volumes. The ratio is a factor which in the example would be 9E16 period. NO units period except those of your initial volume multiplied by the factor..

 

[MacM]

I like Mac! Even though he is wrong, he is a strong minded individual!

I like that etter than hard headed - l

 

[MacM]

<snipped quote>


Look, Mac, I know this will sound harsh, but your health issues are irrelevant to the discussion, so stop bringing them up. You can't say, "I'm sick and dying" and then say, "But I don't want any sympathy." Of course people will feel sympathy for you.

When it comes to spelling and typing, you must remember that sloppy presentation is often interpreted as an indicator of sloppy ideas. If you want people to take you seriously, take yourself seriously. You're trying to overturn what scientists consider a pillar in their understanding of the universe. Physics is a study in precision. Since you refuse to use the most precise language available (math), you must be very precise in your use of English.

Take your repeated use of infered. The correct word is infrared. Besides being phonetically different and thus an obvious misspelling, your misuse demonstrates a lack of understanding about the word itself. Infra means below. Thus infrared is below the red end of the visible spectrum.

Since you didn't even recognize the misspelling when it was pointed out, it would seem that you're not familiar with the term. Someone researching relativity will no doubt encounter "infrared" being tossed about. Considering your repeated misstatements about relativity, your use of "infered" is just one more indicator that your claims are not well researched.

It's bad enough that you misuse terms and state things ambigiously. Add in sloppy execution (typos, repeatedly misspelled terms), and few people are going to want to take the effort to figure out what you meant to say.

If you want to be taken seriously, treat yourself seriously. That means taking the time to write clear, concise posts. If you don't, then don't get mad when your valid points are missed.

You are right I'm not looking for sympathy here but I did find it irritating that he repeatedly just wanted to poke fun and not address issues.

 

[MacM]

Which causes me to wonder if "strong-mindedness" isn't actually a virtue, any more than "largeness".

One person might be large in the sense of being well-fed, well-muscled, and physically fit: We might say that a two-meter, 360-kilogram Olympic athlete is "virtuously large". On the other hand, another person might be large in the sense of being morbidly obese; we might say that such a person is "viciously large".

Personally, I prefer to admire "sound-minded" individuals, on the principle that a sound mind is a virtue, and would certainly be strong when necessary (but would not exercise strength in the pursuit of un-soundness).

As an old saying goes "I'm not fat I'm just to short".

 

[MacM]

In other wordsr Lincoln did not think that any of MacM's views were "actually viable" -
.

Actually this isn't entirely correct. I'll have to try and find his ONE post where he acknowledged that my concept of physics could be employed but that he would continue to use relativity because it would be far simplier. I also agreed with him. My view of physics gets rather complex but my point is not to throw out relati ity but to acknowledge it is a convienent mathematical tool but poor physical theory. Further that what is important is to discorver the reality.