Null Physics anyone?

[BFM]

Both ben m and I read the book.
Both ben m and I participated in a forum run by Mr. Witt until Mr. Witt shut it down.

The fact that his ideas are wrong are easy to see. Read "Our Undiscovered Universe" by Terence Witt: Review 1; Review 2.

There is no prediction of excess electrons producing the observed microwaves in galaxy centers that I recall from the book. If there is then cite it.

Uhh wrong. Page 345.

 

[Reality Check]

Dismissive of Ideas that are wrong

Uhh wrong. Page 345.

What does he actually predict?
What does he predict for the microwave radiation from this?
How close is the match to the Fermi data?

P.S.
The really bad mathematic and physics in "Our Undiscovered Universe" by Terence Witt: Review 1; Review 2.

 

[BFM]

What does he actually predict?
What does he predict for the microwave radiation from this?
How close is the match to the Fermi data?

"This excess diffuse emission is centered on the Galac-
tic center, and can be parameterized by a simple two-
dimensional Gaussian template (` = 15, b = 25).
The template-correlated spectrum of this emission is sig-
nificantly harder than either 0 emission or ICS from
softer electrons, whose fitted spectra agree well with
models. This harder spectrum coupled with the distinct
spatial morphology of the gamma-ray and microwave
haze are evidence that these electrons originate from a
separate component than the softer SN shock-accelerated
electrons." http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0910/0910.4583v1.pdf THE FERMI HAZE:
A GAMMA-RAY COUNTERPART TO THE MICROWAVE HAZE
Gregory Dobler,1,2,5 Douglas P. Finkbeiner,1,3 Ilias Cholis,4
Tracy Slatyer,1,3 & Neal Weiner4

Reread pages 335-351 of Witt's book and it you will find an identical argument with an explination. Unless you want me to transcribe those pages for you to read here.

 

[Reality Check]

"This excess diffuse emission is centered on the Galac-
tic center, and can be parameterized by a simple two-
dimensional Gaussian template (` = 15, b = 25).
The template-correlated spectrum of this emission is sig-
nificantly harder than either 0 emission or ICS from
softer electrons, whose fitted spectra agree well with
models. This harder spectrum coupled with the distinct
spatial morphology of the gamma-ray and microwave
haze are evidence that these electrons originate from a
separate component than the softer SN shock-accelerated
electrons." http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0910/0910.4583v1.pdf THE FERMI HAZE:
A GAMMA-RAY COUNTERPART TO THE MICROWAVE HAZE
Gregory Dobler,1,2,5 Douglas P. Finkbeiner,1,3 Ilias Cholis,4
Tracy Slatyer,1,3 & Neal Weiner4

Reread pages 335-351 of Witt's book and it you will find an identical argument with an explination. Unless you want me to transcribe those pages for you to read here.

Not really. It is a total waste of time rereading his book given the really bad mathematic and physics in it ( Review 1; Review 2 )

I hope that you did not lose too many brain cells reading that lump of pseudoscience !

ETA:
There is no "identical argument" between the paper and Witt's book. The paper does not state an origin for the electrons giving rise to the Ferni haze.

 

[sol invictus]

"This excess diffuse emission is centered on the Galac-
tic center, and can be parameterized by a simple two-
dimensional Gaussian template (` = 15, b = 25).
The template-correlated spectrum of this emission is sig-
nificantly harder than either 0 emission or ICS from
softer electrons, whose fitted spectra agree well with
models. This harder spectrum coupled with the distinct
spatial morphology of the gamma-ray and microwave
haze are evidence that these electrons originate from a
separate component than the softer SN shock-accelerated
electrons." http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0910/0910.4583v1.pdf THE FERMI HAZE:
A GAMMA-RAY COUNTERPART TO THE MICROWAVE HAZE
Gregory Dobler,1,2,5 Douglas P. Finkbeiner,1,3 Ilias Cholis,4
Tracy Slatyer,1,3 & Neal Weiner4

Reread pages 335-351 of Witt's book and it you will find an identical argument with an explination. Unless you want me to transcribe those pages for you to read here.

Few posters here have Witt's book. Why don't you transcribe the relevant section so we can see for ourselves?

 

[BFM]

Not really. It is a total waste of time reading his book given the really bad mathematic and physics in it ( Review 1; Review 2 )

I hope that you did not lose too many brain cells reading that lump of pseudoscience !

Without getting into an ad hominem argument, my braincells are fine. I gave you and answer, you didn't like it (notice i didn't say you evaluated the facts and formed a conclusion afterwards, as a man of science might) so your answer is "not really".

I assume you pick and choose when to behave in a professional manner in your daily life as well.

 

[Reality Check]

Without getting into an ad hominem argument, my braincells are fine. I gave you and answer, you didn't like it (notice i didn't say you evaluated the facts and formed a conclusion afterwards, as a man of science might) so your answer is "not really".

I assume you pick and choose when to behave in a professional manner in your daily life as well.

It is not an "ad hominem argument" (unless you are Witt in disguise). It is a humorous statement that reading his book will kill your brain cells !

I liked the answer: Witt's book has a prediction (according to you) of excess electrons at the galaxy center.
Whether that matches the prediction in the paper depends on whether Witt also predicts the energies of the electrons and hopefully the microwave radiation given off by them.

I assume you also pick and choose when to behave in a professional manner in your daily life as well.

Did you notice the really bad mathematics and physics in "Our Undiscovered Universe" by Terence Witt?
If not then read these reviews: Review 1; Review 2.

 

[BFM]

Few posters here have Witt's book. Why don't you transcribe the relevant section so we can see for ourselves?

I could scan it to .pdf and leave it here for digestion, is that possible here?

 

[Reality Check]

I could scan it to .pdf and leave it here for digestion, is that possible here?

Probably not due to copyright.
We just need Witt's predictions that match what is in the paper. That should be a paragraph or 2.

 

[sol invictus]

It's certainly possible technically (you can attach images to posts), but I have no idea what the copyright issues are. I would think a few scanned paragraphs/pages would constitute fair use, but I'm not sure. Maybe you could check with a mod?

Of course the fact that these so-called predictions are buried in a book that costs $60 is just one more reason to not bother with them. No real scientist would ever do that - the goal of science is to discover new things and make them known. Scientists want their work to be as widely read and discussed as possible.

 

[BFM]

Probably not due to copyright.
We just need Witt's predictions that match what is in the paper. That should be a paragraph or 2.

Gladly. I have and will talked with the author, about transcribing/linking to a .pdf of the work for those who can't follow the argument. I might add that This is more effort than it would take than for one who has supposedly bought read and reviewed the book to reread it, so do you actually still own it? It's not Mao's Little red book and McCarthy is long dead here in the states (NZ might not have a kiwi hunter but we sure had a commie hunter)

 

[Reality Check]

I might add that This is more effort than it would take than for one who has supposedly bought read and reviewed the book to reread it, so do you actually still own it?

I did not buy it. Witt sent it to me for free for being on his now defunct forum.
Currently it is buried at home somewhere in my pile of old books to get rid of sometime.

I did review this collection of really bad mathematics and physics: Review 2.

 

[BFM]

I did not buy it. Witt sent it to me for free for being on his now defunct forum.
Currently it is buried at home somewhere in my pile of old books to get rid of sometime.

I did review this collection of really bad mathematics and physics: Review 2.

You keep saying that....... I have read your review, why do you keep bringing it up?

You are at work right now and you can't dig it up, understood. Let me propose a pause to this conversation for a day or so as i want to go to bed, my buddy from oxford is stateside tomorrow, we have a lot of drinking to do. I will contact the author to get permission to reporoduce a section of his work, you can go home and literally take 5 minutes to "kill some brain cells" or review the pages i cited. We can reconvene and continue.

Until Then

 

[Reality Check]

You keep saying that....... I have read your review, why do you keep bringing it up?

Because if you read it then you would understand that his book is full of pseudoscience. He may be "correct" (but see below) this time but that is an accident.

I will read that one page you cite again but I doubt that it will be more than an assertion that there will be excess electrons at the center of the galaxy. As a prediction that would be useless since there is no way to tell the excess apart from an excess from any other cause.

 

[BFM]

Because if you read it then you would understand that his book is full of pseudoscience. He may be "correct" (but see below) this time but that is an accident.

I will read that one page you cite again but I doubt that it will be more than an assertion that there will be excess electrons at the center of the galaxy. As a prediction that would be useless since there is no way to tell the excess apart from an excess from any other cause.

Thank you for agreeing to reread some of his work, please read Pages 335-351, they detail a mechanism of where the excess radiation comes from.

PS. I was wrong about you......

 

[theneedtoknow]

I haven't read the book, but this quote from one of the reviews made me laugh quite hard

"Terence Witt then takes this "infinity" which is actually a finite length and uses it exactly like a number, e.g. theorem 3.9 (on page 72) "The time required for light to traverse the Universe is eternity, infinity/c" (where eternity is not the eternity seen in every dictionary but "the longest possible duration") and the equally absurd theorem 2.8 on the next page: "The resolution of translational motion is infinity moments per absolute second, (infinity/sa)". Read Infinity is NOT a number for a clear description about why treating infinity as a number invalidates the foundations of mathematics."

Even with his ridiculous definition of infinity, why would eternity be the time that the FASTEST "object" (a photon) traverses that distance...wouldn't something moving at the lowest speed possible take a much greater time to traverse "infinity", resulting in a whole slew of possible timeframes that are orders of magnitude longer than "eternity"??????

 

[schrodingasdawg]

And this quote (from earlier in the thread) made me laugh.

Most of our current physical theories are constructionist, building mathematical models from empirical data. They provide, naturally, great correspondence to observed phenomena, since they are based on same, but give us no insight into the foundational nature of the universe because they lack natural philosophy. Relativity, conversely, is based on a few simple principles, but even these don’t give us much insight because they are reasonable extrapolations of our observations of the natural world. Relativity, for instance, can’t tell us WHY the speed of light is constant in any reference frame or WHY matter generates a gravitational field.

As one of the reviews stated, 17 on the crackpot index.

 

[Reality Check]

Thank you for agreeing to reread some of his work, please read Pages 335-351, they detail a mechanism of where the excess radiation comes from.

Read it.
This is his "black holes are not black and magically convert all elements to hydrogen" fantasy.
The "black holes are not black" dream is debunked in my review.

“Our Undiscovered Universe” has a prediction for Sagittarius A* when treated as a galactic core: It is a “massive black hole with a radiant output of ~6*1031 W, peaking in the infrared near ~0.06 mm” (page 359) or the output of 200,000 Suns at a wavelength of 60 microns.
This prediction shows that Terence Witt has never looked for the many papers since 1965 that detail the many infrared observations of the galactic center. This includes at least one observation exactly at 60 microns ("IRAS images of the galactic center" published in 1984). The actual intensity of Sagittarius A* in the infrared band has been measured many times over the years, e.g. in this pre-print accepted for publication in 2007: "A Constant Spectral Index for Sagittarius A* During Infrared/X-ray Intensity Variations". So here is one prediction by the author that has been falsified. This information took me less than an hour to find. Any competent scientist would have checked to see what data existed for Sagittarius A* and would quickly found that there was something wrong with their theory when the prediction was falsified. Any competent scientist not working in astronomy would have checked this prediction with an astronomer.

In addition

• He never explicitly states that there are excess electrons in the center of the galaxy. His term "thermal electron current" might be them.
• In science a prediction has to be testable and falsifiable.
  His assertion is not testable. He never defines the properties of his "thermal electron current". His idea cannot be compared to the Fermi haze (PDF). Thus the Fermi haze is not evidence that his "thermal electron current" exists.

ETA
And another problem with his idea - his "galactic cores" and probably stellar black holes (which he ignores) have surfaces that extend a tiny bit past the Schwarzschild radius, i.e. they have no event horizon.
Real black holes also have another property - matter vanishes into the event horizon. This means that astronomers can compare observations of black hole candidates to objects that definitely have surfaces, i.e. neutron stars. Type I X-ray bursts are a characteristic of matter hitting a surface. They are seen when matter falls onto the surface of a neutron star, is compressed and heated as it accumulates which leads to thermonuclear reactions (and X-rays). For some reason any in-falling matter from the accrual disk of Sagittarius A* and the observed black hole candidates are not accumulating on a surface. So either there is no in-falling matter (unlikely and really fatal for Terrence Witt's idea) or we have an event horizon. See for example The Rates of Type I X-Ray Bursts from Transients Observed with RXTE: Evidence for Black Hole Event Horizons; Remillard, et al., Astrophysical Journal 646(1): 407-419, July 2006.

 

[ben m]

IIRC, Witt generically "predicted" electrons doing something in the direction of Galactic centers. What was the "something"? Well, it's hard to say, because Witt did not have any laws of physics describing these electrons. It's even harder to say when you consider that Witt had to violate several laws of thermodynamics in the process.

Given a theory whose entire content is "there are electrons over there behaving contrary to all known laws of physics", how do you get to "... and this theory predicts the WMAP and Fermi hazes"? It's very simple. You do it the same way as a bad sci-fi author. "Since dilithium crystals are unstable except in a warp core, and they're harvested from asteroids, let's make the Tunguska event into a dilithium-crystal explosion." Maybe you plug the known Tunguska magnitude into a scale you made up earlier so you can tell your readers that the Tunguska event only required a microgram of dilithium. Rephrase that same sentence and put in a crackpot book and you've got "my lithium theory predicted the magnitude of the Tunguska explosion". My response: no it didn't, your theory said "maybe some things explode" and you tarted that up into a post-diction.

"Hyperspace drive makes you travel through time, but time travel makes paradoxes, so we need some sort of exotic black hole to erase those paradoxes." Put that into a crackpot book and you can rephrase it as my time-paradox theory predicted the existence of intermediate-mass black holes.. Convincing, no?

Without the book in front of me (I threw it away when I moved), I will guess that Witt's "prediction" is either:

(a) in the style of the dilithium example, a post-diction of the WMAP haze which was discovered in 2004. Hypothesized process: Witt knows that his theory wants to move electrons around weirdly. Witt learns about WMAP haze. Witt says, "Tell me more about this haze ..." and learns what the distribution and spectrum are. Witt fiddles with theory and convinces himself that his weird electrons of course produce that spectrum and that distribution. Voila! Or perhaps (b) in the style of the black hole example, you can skip the part about the "fiddles with the theory" and "convinces self" and jump straight to "voila" without any analysis at all. I've seen both kinds.

 

[Reality Check]

Without the book in front of me (I threw it away when I moved), I will guess that Witt's "prediction" is either:

(a) in the style of the dilithium example, a post-diction of the WMAP haze which was discovered in 2004. Hypothesized process: Witt knows that his theory wants to move electrons around weirdly. Witt learns about WMAP haze. Witt says, "Tell me more about this haze ..." and learns what the distribution and spectrum are. Witt fiddles with theory and convinces himself that his weird electrons of course produce that spectrum and that distribution. Voila! Or perhaps (b) in the style of the black hole example, you can skip the part about the "fiddles with the theory" and "convinces self" and jump straight to "voila" without any analysis at all. I've seen both kinds.

Witt may not know about the Fermi haze.

The claim was from BFM:

Now that being said here's a link which speaks right to the astrophysical construct Mr. Witt proposes in his book, the cycle of rebirth and galactic cooling via electron flow.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fermi-haze

The empirical data shows that there is an excess of free electrons in the inner galaxy. This data cannot be explained by current processes.......

And the answer is......
The empirical data shows that there is an excess of free electrons in the inner galaxy. This data cannot be explained by current processes. This data definitely cannot be explained by Terrence Witt's idea.