Why is there so much crackpot physics?

[BurntSynapse]

BurntSynapse:
Where is your intellectual curiosity?

Somewhere far from the certainty you clearly possess.

 

[DeiRenDopa]

You know, the more I think about it, the more this seem to be the root.

You find a tool, or theory, or analogy, or idea, that sounds cool. The thought process being "Wouldn't it be great if...?" The scientist will research this, test it if the research pans out, and then toss it aside (perhaps with a sigh ) if it's found to be groundless.

The crackpot refuses to let go of this tool/theory/idea. Instead of following science, and modifying or discarding the hypothesis if necessary, they instead re-interpret (read: selectively ignore/report) the data so it does support their theory. The obvious inconsistencies are explained away by "well, there'd be answers if Big Brother Science didn't block research." There's little digging into the history (to find that the experiments were done, and aren't done anymore not because of any conspiracy, but because they showed no useful results), and often little knowledge of the underlying theories and research into the current model.

Basically, it seems they fall in love with their own ideas, and refuse to change them.

As an aside, threads like these are wonderful (if a bit frustrating for some participants), because so many knowledgeable people take the time to post the details of the real science, including links, references, mathematics, explanations, and so forth. It's a great resource for people like me; not a physicist, but fascinated by the science (I often describe myself as an interested layman). I can't follow all the math, but enough to get an idea of things.

Just thought I'd throw that atta-boy in at the end, guys I would name names, but as long as the thread is I'm afraid I'd miss someone. You all know who you are

There's another aspect of physics crackpots - or at least those who have posted in this thread, and elsewhere in JREF - which is consistent with this.

Namely, a rather extreme reluctance to engage in serious discussion of the crackpot ideas, even within the explicit framework of those ideas themselves! In other words, if you accept the validity of the crackpot ideas, as published, and try to dig deeper, within the explicitly stated scope of those ideas, you will quickly come across contradictions, internal inconsistencies, and so on. But perhaps you misunderstood what you read; perhaps these flaws are apparent, not real. A good way to proceed would be to ask questions - explicitly within the crackpot's stated framework - in the expectation (hope?) that you will get resolution.

In my experience, that doesn't, and hasn't happened. Ever.

It's almost as if the author will do anything to avoid engaging in such a detailed, focused discussion.

This - apparent? - refusal makes sense in terms of your model of crackpots, Hellbound; their love of their ideas is completely uncritical and unconditional. It's also consistent with the fact - if fact it be - that physics crackpots have essentially zero serious understudies, people who actively engage in serious discussion of the crackpot's ideas, without explicitly contradicting a core element of those ideas, sooner or later. At least, that's been my experience.

 

[DeiRenDopa]

The risk from errors in undocumented assumptions typically underlying persistent problems.

Maybe that sounds good in management-ese. Maybe it still sounds good after saying it ten times. But not one physicist here knows what you're talking about. You have provided zero concrete examples; you just keep repeating the same management-ese.
(snip)

I've been following this sub-thread with considerable interest.

And it looks - from one perspective - just like so many others, in that the advocate of the 'left-field' idea (BS in this case), and anyone claiming to support those ideas (no one else, in this case), has persistently failed to communicate the valid core of their ideas in a form which other JREF members (participating in the discussion) at least acknowledge they understand.

Why this (apparent?) total failure of communication? Is it an inability to express themselves in a way that their intended audience understands? A failure to understand the questions they are asked? Incoherence in their core ideas that they are unwilling to explicitly acknowledge?

Whatever it is, it's odd - to me - that physics crackpots fail, universally, to successfully communicate with key members of their intended audience.

So, BurntSynapse, why do you think you have been so (apparently) unsuccessful in communicating your core ideas (here, in this section of JREF)?

 

[Reality Check]

Is this a reasonable implication to draw from your statement?

I would guess that the answer will no because your implication is about mathematics and ben m was talking about physics .

In a sense both mathematics and physics are re-derived from the ground up, over and over again. This is done by students as they learn mathematics and physics.
Existing physics theories are re-derived by scientists as they learn them as a step in extending (and invalidating) them.

Experimental physics has a requirement that results can be repeated and so physicists "rederive" these results over and over again.

 

[The Man]

To me, this suggests a significant percentage of of physicists would have re-derived things like Euclid's use of integer dimensions (inherited from counting in prehistory) as appropriate for modern cosmology.

Is this a reasonable implication to draw from your statement?

I wouldn't think so as it seems to lack the specific "from the ground up, over and over" claim made in the statement. As things have already been re-derived (or derived entirely) from a mathematical ground that includes non-Euclidean geometry and fractal dimensions.

ETA: For a current physical application of fractal geometry see fractal antennas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_antenna

 

[Perpetual Student]

Originally Posted by Perpetual Student
BurntSynapse:
Where is your intellectual curiosity?

Somewhere far from the certainty you clearly possess.

Really? Let's take a look:
I occupy myself by studying physics, reviewing new developments in physics and cosmology, while comparing and considering the opinions of the most expert people in the field.
At the same time, in relative ignorance, you have the audacity to lecture that faster than light travel can be achieved through better project management and publicly assert that Maxwell's equations have been misused because quaternions have some mystical quality that avoids the "risks" of vectors.

 

[ben m]

To me, this suggests a significant percentage of of physicists would have re-derived things like Euclid's use of integer dimensions (inherited from counting in prehistory) as appropriate for modern cosmology.

Is this a reasonable implication to draw from your statement?

I get the impression that you really, really want that statement---"I wonder if there are unexamined assumptions in the statement of non-4D spacetime"---to make a lightbulb turn on over some physicists' head. "My gosh, I never thought of that! Nonstandard dimensionality!" As though you had walked up to a 21-year-old Einstein, whispered "maybe time isn't absolute" into his ear, and thereby enabled him to discover SR.

When you're daydreaming about Einstein, the reason this "prompt" sounds like a good/important thing is that the idea turns out to work. If someone had whispered "maybe time is a monopole of information" or "maybe the Earth has four separate days in one day" into Einstein's ear, it would have resulted in nothing whatsoever---first off, no new physics (because those ideas go nowhere) and secondly no documentation (because, who cares?)---and, according to your management plan, "information monopoles" and "four days in one" remain in the "undocumented assumptions cause risk" category forever. No matter how stupid they are. No matter how many people have picked up that idea, thought about it for a moment, and dismissed it. No matter how good their reasons to dismiss it are.

Here's another thing. The reason that "maybe time isn't absolute" was a good idea is that Einstein actually made it work. He had Coulomb's and Ampere's and (especially) Faraday's data at hand when he did so, and that data is what made his actual solution recognizable as a sensible one. If you'd planted the same bug in Isaac Newton's ear---"Hey Isaac, you keep writing equations of things varying in time, maybe time isn't absolute?"---he would have gone nowhere whatsoever with it. Newton had no data whatsoever that would have made this idea sensible.

So, nonstandard dimensions. Yes, for crying out loud, lots of people have thought carefully about the meaning of dimensions. Including students. Including students who read the GR textbook (MTW) I used as an undergrad, which has an extensive discussion of dimensions and what they mean, which you seem to ignore in your quest to apply "risk management" to the risk of "people failing to question assumptions about spacetime" no matter how many people have questioned assumptions about spacetime. Including various people over the years thinking about, yes, fractal dimensions, and degrees-of-freedom that aren't really dimensions but can be treated like them, vice-versa, etc. etc.. Including some of the smartest people in the room. Including fearless iconoclasts with nothing to lose. Nobody has found a good idea in fractal dimensions, BurntS. Nobody.

Why not? Is it because the idea is useless, like four-days-in-one? Is it because the idea is currently indistinguishable from useless, given what we know about the world from experiments, like a fictional Newton (correctly) declining to question the "assumption" of Galilean invariance. Whichever it is, the answer is we can't find anything. If we can't find anything by questioning assumptions without prompting from a risk manager, then we also can't find anything by questioning assumptions with prompting from a risk manager.

 

[lpetrich]

Quoting from ben m's link (Cosma Shalizi on Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science):

1. He considers himself a genius.
2. He regards his colleagues, without exception, as ignorant blockheads. Everyone is out of step except himself....
3. He believes himself unjustly persecuted and discriminated against....
4. He has strong compulsions to focus his attacks on the greatest scientists and the best-established theories. When Newton was the outstanding name in physics, eccentric works in that science were violently anti-Newton. Today, with Einstein the father-symbol of authority, a crank theory of physics is likely to attack Einstein in the name of Newton....
5. He often has a tendency to write in a complex jargon, in many cases making use of terms and phrases he himself has coined....

(Martin Gardner's classic, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, written in 1952 and 1956)

You only learn physics when I'm around, Hellbound. I explain things in a way you can understand, and I back up what I say with references to Einstein etc papers and to evidence. Nobody else does that.

Seems like Martin Gardner's first and second criteria -- claiming to be the only one with any real knowledge of physics, with all one's colleagues being ignorant blockheads.

And come on, you don't "follow the maths enough to get an idea of things".

Martin Gardner noticed in his chapter "Down with Einstein!" that many physics crackpots have a hostility to complicated mathematics. They thought that one shouldn't need complicated mathematics like what Einstein worked with. Which makes it rather difficult to be an Einstein follower and an opponent of mathematics in physics.

Oh, and have a read of Woit's blog about why there's so much crackpot physics. You're on the wrong side of the crackpot fence mate.

Seems like the next step in Martin Gardner's fourth criterion, to oppose recent theories while claiming the authority of Newton and Einstein.

 

[Perpetual Student]

Another favorite activity of crackpots is to engage in endless debates about the definition of established scientific terms. Somehow they believe the debate about these definitions is a real scientific question, to which only they have genuine insight. Some time ago, we had Mozina (RIP) with interminable quibbling about pressure, discharge, dark energy, etc.
Now, we have Farsight arguing that the electric field, E, is not a field -- as silly as that sounds.

 

[ben m]

Now, we have Farsight arguing that the electric field, E, is not a field -- as silly as that sounds.

Yep. In this case, we have Farsight not merely claiming that he's the first person in 100 years to read Einstein correctly, but also that he's the first person in 50 years to read J.D. Jackson correctly.

I think part of the problem---and this is not specific to Farsight---is a conflation of several aspects of crackpottery. Crackpots have a vague mental picture of what mainstream physics says about their pet topic. This vague picture, including all of its inaccuracies, is as important to their crackpottery as the model they replace it with.

The crackpot daydream almost always insists that the mainstream has done something wrong. "What did we do wrong?", we ask. But the answer comes from a mix of several things:

a) "Here is my mental picture of what the mainstream is doing, and it's nonsense". (The crackpot's mental picture is wrong. That is not what the mainstream is doing.)

b) "Your forum-post disagrees with my mental picture of what the mainstream is doing, so clearly you are not competent to defend the mainstream position." (The crackpot's mental picture is wrong.)

c1) "What the mainstream is doing differs from the truth, which is my correct model." (The fact that the mainstream does not include the crackpot's model is a feature, not a bug.)

c2) "What you just said differs from the truth, which is my correct model." (The fact that the mainstream does not include the crackpot's model is a feature, not a bug.)

d) "Here is a randomly-chosen disagreement between {pick two of: random 150-year-old papers, Wikipedia, random textbooks, New Scientist articles, recent papers, JREF forum posts, an anecdote I heard from a well-respected publican whose brother is a physicist} which I can't let go of." (The crackpot often does not know enough physics to understand a subtlety, a change of convention or terminology, etc.)

Part of the problem is that the crackpot will oscillate between multiple of these problems, in the course of a single argument. Their understanding, their definitions, even their goals will vary from post to post depending on which of the above seems like the best way to disagree with the enemy poster.

 

[Farsight]

See the dynamics of the electromagnetic field section of the Wikipedia article on the electromagnetic field, and note this:

"In the past, electrically charged objects were thought to produce two different, unrelated types of field associated with their charge property. An electric field is produced when the charge is stationary with respect to an observer measuring the properties of the charge, and a magnetic field (as well as an electric field) is produced when the charge moves (creating an electric current) with respect to this observer. Over time, it was realized that the electric and magnetic fields are better thought of as two parts of a greater whole — the electromagnetic field."

A charged particle has an electromagnetic field. It doesn't have an electric field.

 

[Pixel42]

See the dynamics of the electromagnetic field section of the Wikipedia article on the electromagnetic field, and note this:

"In the past, electrically charged objects were thought to produce two different, unrelated types of field associated with their charge property. An electric field is produced when the charge is stationary with respect to an observer measuring the properties of the charge, and a magnetic field (as well as an electric field) is produced when the charge moves (creating an electric current) with respect to this observer. Over time, it was realized that the electric and magnetic fields are better thought of as two parts of a greater whole — the electromagnetic field."

Do you seriously think the posters with whom you're having this discussion aren't perfectly aware of this?

A charged particle has an electromagnetic field. It doesn't have an electric field

Of course it has an electric field. And a magnetic field. Which are better thought of as two parts of a greater whole - the electromagnetic field. Exactly as the article you quote explains.

 

[edd]

See the dynamics of the electromagnetic field section of the Wikipedia article on the electromagnetic field, and note this:

"In the past, electrically charged objects were thought to produce two different, unrelated types of field associated with their charge property. An electric field is produced when the charge is stationary with respect to an observer measuring the properties of the charge, and a magnetic field (as well as an electric field) is produced when the charge moves (creating an electric current) with respect to this observer. Over time, it was realized that the electric and magnetic fields are better thought of as two parts of a greater whole — the electromagnetic field."

A charged particle has an electromagnetic field. It doesn't have an electric field.

The electromagnetic field has two parts, both of which are also fields, which are connected in well defined ways. Is that really such a big problem? I mean, you wouldn't say that my head doesn't exist because it's better thought of as part of my body, would you?

 

[ctamblyn]

Farsight still seems unwilling to address his errors relating to the AB effect...

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?p=9302791#post9302791

 

[Farsight]

I haven't made any errors relating to the Aharonov-Bohm effect. Your link merely leads to a post where you make a claim and ask questions that we all know the answers to.

The electromagnetic field has two parts, both of which are also fields, which are connected in well defined ways. Is that really such a big problem? I mean, you wouldn't say that my head doesn't exist because it's better thought of as part of my body, would you?

Some people have unfortunately had their heads separated from their bodies. You simply cannot do this with an electromagnetic field. You cannot create an electric field which does not appear to be a magnetic field when you move through it. In similar vein you cannot create a magnetic field that doesn't appear to be an electric field when you move through it. For this reason the word "aspect" is typically used instead of "part". In similar vein you can't have a particle that has a magnetic field only - you can separate the North and South poles of a magnet, and you can emulate this in CMP, see this - but magnetic-monopole particles cannot exist because the field concerned is the electromagnetic field.

I've just noticed this:

Farsight and BurntSynapse:
Where is your intellectual curiosity? We can all develop misconceptions and follow dead ends, but when someone is available and willing to share knowledge, why do you put up barriers and withdraw into your preconceived world? What happened to your willingness to learn something new?

I don't put up barriers or show unwillingness to learn something new. You do.

I suggest you attempt to open your minds to what is being offered here. There is a vast resource of information available to confirm what you can learn here. Let the light in!

That's what you should do. Now go and look up the electromagnetic field. Do your own research, and you will find that what I'm telling you here is indeed correct. The electron has an electromagnetic field. One field. Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism a hundred and fifty years ago.

 

[edd]

Some people have unfortunately had their heads separated from their bodies. You simply cannot do this with an electromagnetic field. You cannot create an electric field which does not appear to be a magnetic field when you move through it. In similar vein you cannot create a magnetic field that doesn't appear to be an electric field when you move through it. For this reason the word "aspect" is typically used instead of "part". In similar vein you can't have a particle that has a magnetic field only - you can separate the North and South poles of a magnet, and you can emulate this in CMP, see this - but magnetic-monopole particles cannot exist because the field concerned is the electromagnetic field.

None of this means that in a given frame you cannot usefully distinguish the electric and magnetic fields. Also magnetic monopoles are not observed to exist and Maxwell's Equations are traditionally written to reflect that, but nothing about the electromagnetic field prevents them from existing. It may be that they don't but this is not some logical consequence of the unification of electric and magnetic forces.

 

[Perpetual Student]

See the dynamics of the electromagnetic field section of the Wikipedia article on the electromagnetic field, and note this:

"In the past, electrically charged objects were thought to produce two different, unrelated types of field associated with their charge property. An electric field is produced when the charge is stationary with respect to an observer measuring the properties of the charge, and a magnetic field (as well as an electric field) is produced when the charge moves (creating an electric current) with respect to this observer. Over time, it was realized that the electric and magnetic fields are better thought of as two parts of a greater whole — the electromagnetic field."

A charged particle has an electromagnetic field. It doesn't have an electric field.

I posted this on your other thread; it clearly applies here also:
Think man! The expression F=qE is a field equation. It is a mathematical description of the condition of space due to the field E, which results in a force on the point charge q. Consequently E is a field -- by definition. Stop all the quote mining and look at the math -- the answer is there!

 

[Farsight]

None of this means that in a given frame you cannot usefully distinguish the electric and magnetic fields.

A frame isn't something that actually exists. You cannot point up to the clear night sky and say look, there's a reference frame. It's an abstract thing. Instead of saying "in your frame", it's better to say "in your state of motion". When you have no relative motion you might deem an electromagnetic field to be an electric field. Your "test charge" moves linearly. But when you move through it you start to reveal its true nature. The force on your test particle is no longer just a linear force. And you haven't created any new field at all, you've simply moved.

Also magnetic monopoles are not observed to exist

Unicorns and fairies are not observed to exist either.

and Maxwell's Equations are traditionally written to reflect that, but nothing about the electromagnetic field prevents them from existing.

Yes it does. It's the electromagnetic field. An electron has an electromagnetic field. You can no more have a magnetic monopole than you can have an object which has a front but no back. Try cutting a solenoid in half, or a bar magnet.

It may be that they don't but this is not some logical consequence of the unification of electric and magnetic forces.

It absolutely is. A charged particle has an electromagnetic field. It's electric charge is a misnomer because it doesn't have an electric field, it has an electromagnetic charge. Magnetic charge is a fallacy that arises from failure of understanding.

 

[edd]

Unicorns and fairies are not observed to exist either.

To be clear I'm not suggesting magnetic monopoles do exist. Unlike unicorns and fairies though, they are predicted by some physical theories (as topological defects in cosmology for example), are explained away by other physical theories that are well motivated for other reasons (inflation) and would arguably make Maxwell's equations more symmetric.

Yes it does. It's the electromagnetic field. An electron has an electromagnetic field.

An electron has an electric monopole (charge) and a magnetic dipole moment. It's not exactly symmetric in that respect in an interchange of electricity and magnetism. However, Maxwell's equations do show a remarkable symmetry between electricity and magnetism (which is what in the absence of electric and magnetic charges allows electromagnetic waves to pop out so easily, of course). edit: I also meant to mention the neat argument by Dirac about the existence of monopoles and the implied quantisation of electric charge - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_monopole#Dirac.27s_quantization , not least as if Dirac of all people is considering magnetic monopoles you might want to sit up and think that they are not completely ruled out by Maxwell.

That symmetry (broken in practice by prescribing the lack of magnetic monopoles when traditionally writing them down) is exactly what should make you realise that there isn't anything truly fundamental to classical electromagnetism and the unification of the E and B fields into one that precludes the existence of magnetic monopoles.

It absolutely is. A charged particle has an electromagnetic field. It's electric charge is a misnomer because it doesn't have an electric field, it has an electromagnetic charge. Magnetic charge is a fallacy that arises from failure of understanding.

It's patently wrong to say that a charged particle has an electromagnetic and not an electric charge. It's why in the traditional formulation
∇E= ρ_e (edit: well, give or take a factor of ε₀)
and
∇B = 0 .

You may have a philosophical reason to not use the E and B notations, but I use them here because they're what most other readers will be most familiar with, and they make the connection between the charge and the electric part of the field abundantly clear, and however you might wish to write down a description of the behaviour of the electromagnetic field the mathematical statement remains the same.

 

[ctamblyn]

I haven't made any errors relating to the Aharonov-Bohm effect. Your link merely leads to a post where you make a claim and ask questions that we all know the answers to.

What all of us save one know is much closer to this (do feel free to ask around):

1. You claimed that the AB effect was first described in a paper on classical electromagnetism, namely Ehrenberg and Siday's 1949 paper "The Refractive Index in Electron Optics and the Principles of Dynamics".

2. When it was shown many times (see W.D.Clinger's post where the links are collected for you convenience) that the ES paper treated the electron quantum mechanically (backed up with quotations from their paper), you "countered" that by posting links which (amusingly) actually highlighted the fact that E+S used a quantum mechanical analysis.

3. When it was pointed out (at the bottom of this post) that the whole point of the ES paper was to highlight an effect unknown in classical electrodynamics, and that the AB effect is detected by a shift in interference fringes generated by electrons, your response (at the bottom of this post) was astonishingly irrelevant and strongly indicitive of an absolute lack of appreciation of elementary quantum theory.

4. Despite being asked - and reminded of the questions, not once but twice - to explain what you thought the AB effect is and how it is detected experimentally, you failed to provide answers. This is now the third reminder. I'd imagine that to a neutral observer it looks very much like you know you have been caught in an error, but refuse to publicly admit it.

5. Finally, for now, I posted a passage from near the end of the ES paper where they explain in unambiguous terms that you were wrong. I'll post it once more here (now with equation 50 present), to be sure you have read it.

One might therefore expect wave-optical phenomena to arise which are due to the presence of a magnetic field but not due to the magnetic field itself, i.e. which arise whilst the rays are in field-free regions only. Consider now an arrangement as in Figure 3. O denotes a point source of electrons which is focused by the lens M at the point P. Through the pair of slits separated by l a set of interference fringes will arise so that the distance of the nth maximum from P is given by d = bλ₀n/l. If, now, a magnetic flux is established normal to the plane of the paper through the area a, then, according to (43), the order of interference at any point of the focal plane is changed by

N = {λ₀(Hρ)}^-1∫∫H_ndσ, _ or with (35) by _ N = (e/ch)∫∫H_ndσ. _ ......(50)​

Thus, a flux of 3.9 ✕ 10^-7 gauss cm² is required to change the order of interference by 1, and half of this flux will change the maximum at P to a minimum.

It is very curious that equation (50) associates a phenomenon observable at least in principle with a flux; one expects a change of flux, but not steady flux, to have observable effects. The effect has, however, a certain analogy in the existence of a permanent current in a superconducting ring due to a magnetic flux through it.

Well, blow me down. E+S have calculated the effect of the solenoid's field on interference fringes generated by electrons! That's pretty quantum mechanical, n'est-ce pas?

Now, are you ready to tackle those two questions?