Hillman, Baez and company on Crackpots
Ace Schallger
it is interesting to see that they have tried to round up all the
component characteristics of what they call "crackpots" and produce a
sort of "ideal crackpot". Now, if someone has any of the components of
the ideal crackpot it looks like he is swept right into the bucket.
How is this not a form of bigotry?
As it is, they (Hillman, Baez, et al) are seemingly wanting to identify
crackpottery as a form of mental illness, a psychosis of some sort.
I'm of the opinion that if you get a person to tell you what they
believe in, you have, at the same time, gotten them to define
themselves.
Now, I always suppose that if a person believes in something then they
ought to be able to present you with what their notion of 'sufficient
reason' for their belief happens to be. So, as we grind away at a
person to define himself one of the last things that we do as we are
jamming them in the corner is to try and get them to tell us why they
believe in what they believe in and we should really press the point
and see if we can squeeze anything out of them that looks like logic.
But logic can't totally define the man and occasionally people believe
things because of a seemingly unquantifiable thing that we call
'intuition'. Now intuition itself seems to be a strange nebulous sort
of stuff that like quicksilver is difficult to pick up with your
fingers and put in a bottle. I have been told that the ancient Greeks
believed that intuition was the source of all true knowledge. Now, I
don't know exactly which ancient Greeks believed this but I thought
that it made a nice sound bite from a friend who emailed this tidbit to
me. So, why do I believe that the Greeks believed this? Ah, because
someone I trusted once told me so. Since it pleases my own sense of
the idea of the source of knowledge I didn't want to check too closely
and burst that particular bubble. Isn't it strange that we tend to
believe things that correspond to what we already believe? :-).
Do I, personally, have sufficient reason to believe in intuition?
Well, yes, I do, but is it 'scientific' or is it 'logical'? and my
answer has to come back that it is experiential. I've had insights or
instances of intuition myself and I've learned over the years that
ignoring the intuition always left me with an uncomfortable feeling and
that the intuition was very often correct. I've set a glass on the
table and then got a real sense that leaving it in that spot will be
related to the disaster of it being knocked over. I ignore that
insight and then am not surprised when one of my teens comes bustling
into the room roughhousing with one of his younger brothers and wham
there goes the glass skittering off of the table. Is that scientific?
Well, I haven't kept a log of all the times that I've had an intuitive
feeling or an insight of knowledge about an outcome like that and then
compared it to real outcomes. Who has time to document their life and
thoughts while they are living through them? But people do see
patterns. Of course, there's the old saw that "when the only tool you
have is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail". In other
words, we may see certain patterns and impose some sort of order on the
chaos around us but imposing that order itself may have no more
validity than 'Bible Codes' (my pejorative use here indicates I think
'Bible Codes' are utter nonsense) and so once again we tend to see
things in a manner that corresponds to those things in which we already
believe.
So, the facts are that we can't always account for, in a rigorous
manner, why we believe things but we should at least be prepared to
defend or be willing to give up certain beliefs if we cannot produce
sufficient reason. Now for me, I can't simply believe in something
because I can turn a crank and get the right answer. I am more
interested in process, dynamics and structure. I'll look at a watch's
parts with all of its gears and escapements and springs and try to
grasp the interconnectedness of it all. If I can count all the gears
and see all their connections and count all their teeth and figure out
the ratios and write it all down and then confirm that I'll get one
turn of the minute hand for x number of turns of a specific gear in the
mechanism then I'm satisfied. But if I, by observation, or trial and
error, came across the right ratio then I could plug that ratio into my
calculations and get the change in position of the minute hand for a
given rotation of that specific gear. But I tell you, I wouldn't be
happy. I'd want to know the machinery of it all. I want to know all
the in between gears and processes that go on to produce the right
answer.
Now Chris Hillman seems to make a big deal out of the fact that quite a
few people don't believe in relativity. In fact, it seems that if you
don't believe in relativity then you are 1) a layman not capable of
grasping the fine details or 2) you are a crackpot. It seems to me
that the attitude is that even if you are a layman then you ought to
believe in it because your betters (intellectual betters) believe in
it. And if you are a crackpot then you don't believe in it because you
are very much like the layman in that you don't understand it except
for the fact that you are being adamant about it because you meet
certain profiles for being a crackpot. Hillman's site and links
produce or list reasons that range through everything from antisemitism
(because Einstein was a Jew) to right wing Christianity trying to hold
onto a sense of the Absolute while seeing Relativity as a moral evil
because they make a direct connection between it and cultural or
ethical or moral relativism.
Long ago, I learned that what we see with our eyes and what we hear
with our ears and what we feel with our fingers doesn't necessarily
have anything to do with the truth of a matter. For example, a close
friend may one day stab you in the back in an attempt to make his own
shortcomings look better to management. I had this happen to me in the
military - my neighbor, my golfing buddy, my friend and drinking buddy,
and my co-worker - was in the process of stabbing me in the back to our
commanding officer and I happened to walk up behind him and I listened
to the whole thing without his knowing that I was standing there. What
he said about me was absolutely untrue - and I was able to document it
immediately. I was shocked, I was also deeply hurt. And in examining
that hurt I realized that my outward senses were inadequate to
determine the character of the hearts of my friends. What I saw with
my eyes and heard with my ears on other occasions coming from this
'close friend' apparently had little to do with what was in this
fellow's heart and mind.
What I could see with my eyes and what I heard with my ears was not
always reliable. I thought it best that I make a note of that. I
know that a lot of people have claimed to have personally seen UFO
craft. Yet, in spite of there being thousands and thousands of alleged
sightings there still isn't, to my knowledge, a single piece of hard
data that confirms that such sights are actually alien space craft. In
fact, I've personally known at least three people (and have interviewed
them) who all claimed to have seen a UFO that fits the criteria of a
'craft'. Does that mean that such 'craft' exist or does it mean that
each of these people have seen an illusion, or does it mean they have
misconstrued a natural phenomenon like Ball Lightning, or does it mean
that they each have for some reason unknown to me felt compelled to
make up a lie (like my co-worker of days gone by), or is there a mix of
two or more of these, or did any of them actually see an alien craft?
Personally, I haven't seen such a craft as they claim they have and so
I am terribly skeptical about it all.
Here's some physical phenomenon that people can access with their
senses and then some related beliefs:
1) People believe in the notion of a static electric field because they
can put their hand near a small operating Van de Graaf generator and
'feel' the 'electric field'. Who can doubt what they feel with their
hands. They can rub a balloon on their coat or a carpet and then make
another person's hair stand on end. Who can doubt the existence of
that 'static electric field'?
2) We shine a flashlight toward the heavens and we believe that if the
photons don't interact with matter on their journey they will just keep
on going forever.
3) We measure an electric 'field' with a potentiometer (or
electroscope) and we believe that because no matter where we go around
the source of that field that we get a reading that the 'field' itself
must be continuous.
A) (link this to 1 and 3 above). The idea that an electric field
associated with a charged object is 'static' is preposterous. We
understand that electrons have an attribute we call charge and we
somehow connect the idea of our intellectual notion of a charge with
our experience and we believe that which we feel with our hands near a
Van de Graaf is identical in character with that which surrounds an
electron or proton. Now I can't speak for all people, of course, but
from what I have read and from my conversations with people, some of
whom have been physicists, I have come up with this general idea or
notion of what people think an electric field is. People draw cartoons
of an electrically charged particle and we see a point type object from
which radiates 'lines'. Looking at such a picture one might be moved
to ask: "How many lines?" Then a physicist will step in and explain
that the picture is an attempt to graphically illustrate the notion of
an electric field and that if we use the notion of a finite number of
lines that penetrate a number of spherical surfaces with different
radii the surface of any one being those points that are equidistant
from the source we can then get a notion of flux density and we can
understand the idea of inverse square laws and we can understand the
notion of a gradient and potential difference and many more things.
But we are also told that the idea of a finite number of lines is
misleading and that what we are really trying to illustrate are the
notions that we can grasp if we use a finite number of lines in a
drawing but that we really should understand that the 'field' is not
composed of finite number of things and certainly not lines but rather
is continuous and is, in fact, like a continuous mathematical function
that is infinitely differentiable. So as soon as the physicist is
able to dispose of the notion of those lines by explaining that they
are used just as a graphical device and that the 'field' has a certain
'density' or gradient by virtue of distance from the source then the
question of where those lines go becomes moot or nonsensical to ask.
We can then ask, 'Does the 'field' of the particle just 'thin out
forever and ever'? The standard answer is 'yes' that in principle it
is omnidirectional and goes on forever and its density per unit of
surface area falls off as 1/r^2.
B) How can we be sure that photons are emitted in directions in which
there is no matter present to intercept them? Now if you believe that
they are then I would ask that you present sufficient reason to explain
why you believe this.
C) But this goes back to A) above also because how do we know that a
'field' is present at some place where no measurement is taken. What
if the measurement itself or the 'field' itself is a function between
the source of the 'field' and some other bit of matter. In truth, the
only time that we can measure the potential of a point in a 'field' is
when there is another bit of matter (which happens to be the measuring
instrument).
So, I believe that I am posing several legitimate questions, and I
would guess that those who 'believe' in relativity actually believe in
the concept of continuous structures, of the notion of an infinitely
differentiable 'field'. Now, I'm not an aether theorist myself so I
can't quite wrap my head around the notion of 'absolute motion' but
neither can I bring myself to believe in a thing (continuum type of
'field') that I cannot even in principle prove exists in physical
correspondence with the mathematics that is normally used to describe
it.
So....Here we have it. Aether theorists believe in a thing that they
cannot prove exists and they are deemed to be "crackpots" because they
are fixated in their belief. Yet those who believe in relativity also
believe in a thing that they cannot prove exists, either, and are
likewise 'fixated' in their belief. How are they different?
I define a 'crackpot' as a person who believes in a thing without
sufficient reason, without a comprehension of structure, dynamics and
process.
Now I am not sure that it is always easy to decide and agree upon what
constitutes 'sufficient reason' for a belief but I would at least think
that one ought to be able to defend with logic why they belief
something. And I'm not so diehard picky that I would necessarily
reject a person if they said they believed it for intuitive or
religious revelatory reasons - at least then I could perhaps subject
those reasons to more scrutiny - and I would not be faced with the
brick wall that remains when a person cannot give you any reason that
they believe a thing. If you want to tell me that fairies told you,
fine. I personally haven't seen or heard from any fairies. The
source of your knowledge whatever you claim it to be isn't as important
as the reliabilty of the knowledge. Is it logically consistent? Is it
logically certain? The fellow who discovered the Benzene Ring had a
dream vision of a snake eating its tail. From that he came to the
realization that the Benzene molecule was of the nature of a ring. No
one could actually see the ring and I will guess it was many years
before there was physical evidence by way of x-ray defraction patterns
or some other method that confirmed the notion - that had already by
then proven itself to be so useful in many other respects. If you
want to tell me you believe something because your predictions based
upon mathematics are highly accurate, then that is fine also but it
still doesn't tell me about the physicality of the processes that are
going on, it doesn't show me the gears or the teeth on the gears and
without process, structure, and dynamics, then there exists what I
believe is an unacceptable gap. I believe that true knowledge has an
attribute that pseudoknowledge does not. I believe that true
knowledge, in principle, will let you predict things that have not yet
been seen or that if seen were not understood correctly at all.
Now I can't say that I believe in relativity nor can I say that I
disbelieve it completely. In other words, I don't think that it is
void of all possible quality and that to toss it out wholesale is
possibly to toss out the baby with the bathwater. In other words, I'm
hoping there might be a baby in there somewhere. I know there's some
bathwater and the reason I believe there is some bathwater is that
there are parts of it which cannot pass the test of sufficient reason.
If Chris Hillman or John Baez believe in the continuous structures of
GR and QM, I'd sure like to know why. If they believe that light
exists where it cannot be measured I'd like to know why. Or at least
I'd like to know why they aren't crackpots if they cannot give
sufficient reason for their beliefs.
Ace Schallger (Curious as a cat about these matters).
Dramar Ankalle
Ace Schallger <phys...@att.net> wrote in message
news:080620011110260447%phys...@att.net...
> Using Hillman's links and reading his (and other's) essays and comments
> it is interesting to see that they have tried to round up all the
> component characteristics of what they call "crackpots" and produce a
> sort of "ideal crackpot". Now, if someone has any of the components of
> the ideal crackpot it looks like he is swept right into the bucket.
>
> How is this not a form of bigotry?
>
I wonder why Hillman hasnt answered my very specific questions, dealing with
papers I downlaoded from his website from the St Petersburg Mirror Lake
Branch library.
Perhaps it is as you say, but it would be no loss for me, as I already know
what I was looking for, and since then have discovered.
Uncle Al
>
> Using Hillman's links and reading his (and other's) essays and comments
> it is interesting to see that they have tried to round up all the
> component characteristics of what they call "crackpots" and produce a
> sort of "ideal crackpot". Now, if someone has any of the components of
> the ideal crackpot it looks like he is swept right into the bucket.
>
> How is this not a form of bigotry?
It is not bogitry any more than saying that people who smell bad
stink, analysis being delivered after you sniff them. Statement
of objective empirical fact is not bigotry. Pigmies and midgets
don't become basketball players, seven-foot dudes don't become
jockeys, and no matter how much anabolic steroid you stuff in a
woman she still can't write her name in the snow while standing
stationary. One half of all people are below average. Live with
it. If you are dealt a shit hand in poker and don't know how to
bluff, you lose and everybody sees it happen. You don't get the
pot as "compensation."
One can propose wildly heterodox physics without coming anywhere
near being a crackpot -
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/eotvos.htm
http://www.calphysics.org/research.html
http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw15.html
and, of course, M-theory.
> As it is, they (Hillman, Baez, et al) are seemingly wanting to identify
> crackpottery as a form of mental illness, a psychosis of some sort.
> I'm of the opinion that if you get a person to tell you what they
> believe in, you have, at the same time, gotten them to define
> themselves.
Either you've never read the crackpots or you are a crackpot
yourself. Mere content does not a crackpot make. Crackpots are
immune to contradiction by empirical observation, eschew
correction of math errors, are ineducable, perserverative, and
prolix (like your 262 lines, most of which I will snip as soon as
I get bored).
http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/psp7761121.html
math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
Read the list and don't make the same errors again.
> Now, I always suppose that if a person believes in something then they
> ought to be able to present you with what their notion of 'sufficient
> reason' for their belief happens to be.
Once. When you discover yourself to be riding a dead hose,
dismount. (The Managerial/Consultant version follows my
signature block)
[snip]
Science delivers to spec every time and exercises rigid
performance criteria to pull it off. If you want the fruits of
dialectic processes and faith, live in the Third World. Even
Soviet Russia got trounced by uncaring physical reality.
If you cannot explain what you are doing with no more than a
swizzle stick, a cocktail napkin, and 5 minutes you don't know
what you are doing.
--
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/
http://www.ultra.net.au/~wisby/uncleal/
(Toxic URLs! Unsafe for children and most mammals)
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" The Net!
BEATING A DEAD HORSE
(C)1999 Alan M. Schwartz
This traces back to the College and University Public Relations
Association of Pennsylvania (CUPRAP) as "Indian Wrestling with
Management." We surmise the author has been discharged for cause
and the objects of his derision repeatedly promoted. (The
original list had only twenty items, but then we were audited in
duplicate by the Federal Reduction in Paperwork Act.)
Dakota Indian tribal wisdom passed on from one generation to the
next says that when you discover that you are riding a dead
horse, the best strategy is to dismount. In modern business,
government, and academia factors parameterized as discounted
cashflow/return on investment extrapolations and managerial
performance evaluations are critical junctures. Other dead horse
strategies must be appraised to boost the bottom line:
1. What dead horse?
2. Buy a stronger whip and beat the dead horse.
3. Change riders.
4. Contact Personnel and demand an explanation.
5. Appoint a committee to study the dead horse.
6. Assemble a PowerPoint dead horse presentation.
7. Has the dead horse's warranty expired?
8. Visit subsidiaries to see how they ride dead horses.
9. Upgrade dead horse working conditions.
10. Increase standards to include dead horses.
11. Attend a Dead Horse Motivational Seminar
12. Assign the dead horse to Marketing.
13. Assign the dead horse to R&D.
14. Retrofit the horse with new tack.
15. Shorten the track.
16. Create a training session to increase the riders' load share.
17. Rotate the dead horse into LIFO inventory.
18. Discard the saddle; ride the dead horse bareback.
19. Point the dead horse in the opposite direction and note how
well he maintains his position.
20. Reclassify the dead horse as living-impaired.
21. Change the form so it reads: "This horse is not dead."
22. Innovate benchmarks for industry dead-horse leaders.
23. Hire outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
24. Assign the dead horse to the graveyard shift.
25. Compare current riding to riding before horse acquisition.
26. Tighten the dead horse's cinch.
27. Factor in dead horse savings re food, water, and maintenance.
28. Harness several dead horses together for increased speed.
29. Appoint a Tiger Team to revive the dead horse.
30. "This dead horse was procured with cost as an independent
variable."
31. Relocate the dead horse.
32. Send the dead horse to a continuing education course.
33. Send the dead horse to a convention.
34. Send the dead horse on vacation.
35. Authorize the dead horse for behavioral counseling under the
company HMO.
36. Donate the dead horse to a recognized charity, deducting its
full original cost.
37. Compare your dead horse's performance to other companies'
dead horses.
38. Render unto Caesar.
39. Provide additional funding to increase the dead horse's
performance.
40. Threaten the dead horse with termination.
41. Downsize the dead horse.
42. Downsize the dead horse and retain it as a contract hire.
43. Downsize the dead horse and replace it with an entry-level
dead horse at one-third the salary.
44. Discharge the dead horse for cause.
45. Do a time management study to see if lighter riders would
improve productivity.
46. Purchase an after-market product to make dead horses run
faster.
47. Declare that a dead horse has lower overhead and therefore
runs faster.
48. Proactively initiate parametric discounted cashflow/return on
investment dead horse projections under varying microeconomic
scenarios.
49. Issue a corporate mission statement to develop more "passion"
for the art of horse riding.
50. List the dead horse as a new asset.
51. Survey the state of dead horses in today's business
environment.
52. Repackage the dead horse.
53. Reassign fault to the dead horse's breeding.
54. Form a quality focus group to find profitable uses for dead
horses.
55. Survey business school casebooks for dead horse models.
56. Require at least two more dead horses before this dead horse
is validated as a dead horse source.
57. Re-engineer riding styles.
58. Renormalize standardized evaluations of riding ability.
59. Base manager productivity evaluations upon the dead horse's
performance.
60. Award the dead horse to a retiree.
61. Rewrite the expected performance requirements for dead
horses.
62. Apply standards and metrics to the riding of dead horses.
63. Is it time for the company picnic?.
64. Write an SBIR grant application for national defense studies
of necrofillya.
65. Declare the dead horse to be a trade secret.
66. Execute a major reorganization including one-time dead horse
writeoffs.
67. Gather other dead animals and announce a diversity program.
68. Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.
69. Write off the dead horse as a Y2K incompatibility.
70. Dead Horse, Emeritus.
71. Call it a virtual horse dot com and spin off an e-business
plus IPO.
Rob Virkus
> One half of all people are below average.
This is not true. Think about it.
Best Regards,
Rob Virkus
Uncle Al
>
> Uncle Al wrote:
>
> > One half of all people are below average.
>
> This is not true. Think about it.
Either it is true or you are a bigot. Look at the racial IQ
curves in the "Bell Curve."
Irony, Bob, irony. Don't be mean about my median mode - I'm
rarely conciliatory. "8^>)
Speaking of pond scum in the gene pool...
"Operation Track Shoe" started this morning at UVic. For three
days the campus will be flooded with Mongoloid idiots (literally
- Trisomy 21 genetic trash); their parents, trainers, doctors,
nurses, Emergency Action teams (oh, you have a hangnail...
ambulance!), counselors, coaches, staff, chefs, hangers-on, live
bad music, the Media... and an army of managers and
administrators, all suckling the public teat like it was the Wolf
Bitch of Rome. Dining will be sumptuous and continuous (but not
for the Mongoloid idots. Who really gives a sparrow's fart in a
windstorm about them, eh?) Abundantly filled adult diapers will
decorate the campus as performance art.
Purveyors of social oppression and hate crimes - students, etc. -
will be banned from campus eating areas. "Other arrangements"
have been made. I believe "other arrangements" include wooden
troughs and galvanized buckets in muddy fields.
"Special Olympics" has priorty. Scholarship must learn its
place.
charles vind
Uncle Al wrote:
> Ace Schallger wrote:
> >
> > Using Hillman's links and reading his (and other's) essays and comments
> > it is interesting to see that they have tried to round up all the
> > component characteristics of what they call "crackpots" and produce a
> > sort of "ideal crackpot". Now, if someone has any of the components of
> > the ideal crackpot it looks like he is swept right into the bucket.
> >
> > How is this not a form of bigotry?
>
> It is not bogitry
You cannot even spell the word correctly. Let alone define what it is or is
not.
> any more than saying that people who smell bad
> stink, analysis being delivered after you sniff them. Statement
> of objective empirical fact is not bigotry.
Mr. Schwartz abuses this statement. He uses this term to slam any opinions
or ideas he is in disagreement with. He never has the courage to directly
confront any of the points or statements that he claims to be erroneous.
Instead he just resorts to petty bickering and name calling without ever
backing up his malicious accusations.
> Pigmies and midgets
> don't become basketball players, seven-foot dudes don't become
> jockeys, and no matter how much anabolic steroid you stuff in a
> woman she still can't write her name in the snow while standing
> stationary.
Objective, empirical fact reveals that you are an extremely hateful,
viscious, and intolerant person. You are by all practical definitions a
sociopath. Your behavior on these newsgroups alone provides sufficient
evidence to support this statement. If you were a real human being underneath
you would be ashamed of your behavior although most humans(in fact none)
truly never even approach behavior as monstrous as your own.
> One half of all people are below average.
Below what average? Can you provided us with any objective references that
would support this statement or are we supposed to accept all your statements
as fact-- being you are spawned from a superior race(3855)?
The remainder of this sociopath's psuedointellectual nonsense has been as
he would say it "snipped". Please refer back to his original post if you wish
to read it.
c.h.thompson
Uncle Al <Uncl...@hate.spam.net> wrote
> Ace Schallger wrote:
> >
> > Using Hillman's links and reading his (and other's) essays and comments
> > it is interesting to see that they have tried to round up all the
> > component characteristics of what they call "crackpots" and produce a
> > sort of "ideal crackpot". Now, if someone has any of the components of
> > the ideal crackpot it looks like he is swept right into the bucket.
> >
> > How is this not a form of bigotry?
>
> It is not bogitry any more than saying that people who
> smell bad stink,
If you look at Baez' list <math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html >, this most
certainly IS bigotry, and the way you express it sounds to me similar to
racism. How dare anyone classify other human beings like this? Are they --
the orthodox -- so terrified that their painfully-learned theories are going
to be exposed as nonsense that they have to gang together to exclude and
ridicule anyone who challenges them?
"Let him who is without sin cast the first stone!"
Baez includes in his list of crackpot identifying features:
"mailing your theory to someone you don't know personally and asking them
not to tell anyone else about it, for fear that your ideas will be stolen."
What else does he expect them to do? It will take a few years before the
innocent discoverer finds out that no member of the establishment is going
to steal any really radical new idea! He will not risk the ridicule of his
peers.
Another of Baez points:
"suggesting that a famous figure secretly disbelieved in a theory which he
or she publicly supported. (E.g., that Feynman was a closet opponent of
special relativity, as deduced by reading between the lines in his freshman
physics textbooks.) "
It may well happen that the writer has read books that are not on the
standard lists. A considerable number of the Founding Fathers of quantum
theory, for instance, expressed doubts about it. How many people know that
Paul Dirac, in "Directions in Physics" (John Wiley and Sons 1978) wrote re
Einstein and God not playing dice:
"He believed that basically physics should be of a deterministic character.
And I think it might turn out that ultimately Einstein will prove to be
right, because the present form of quantum mechanics should not be
considered as the final form. There are great difficulties . It is the
best we can do up till now . I think that it is quite likely that at some
future time we may get an improved QM in which there will be a return to
determinism and which will, therefore, justify the Einstein point of view .
We would have to pay for it in some way which we cannot yet guess at ."
In addition to such open statements, there may well be hints of disbelief
"between the lines", and why should the newcomer not take notice of these?
After all, the orthodox do not hesitate to call on the weight of opinion,
even if (in sci.physics debates!) they are careful not to call directly on
authority.
Caroline
--
c.h.th...@pgen.net
http://www.aber.ac.uk/~cat
me...@cars3.uchicago.edu
>
>Uncle Al <Uncl...@hate.spam.net> wrote
>> Ace Schallger wrote:
>> >
>> > Using Hillman's links and reading his (and other's) essays and comments
>> > it is interesting to see that they have tried to round up all the
>> > component characteristics of what they call "crackpots" and produce a
>> > sort of "ideal crackpot". Now, if someone has any of the components of
>> > the ideal crackpot it looks like he is swept right into the bucket.
>> >
>> > How is this not a form of bigotry?
>>
>> It is not bogitry any more than saying that people who
>> smell bad stink,
>
>If you look at Baez' list <math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html >, this most
>certainly IS bigotry,
Nonsense oft repeated remains nonsense.
>and the way you express it sounds to me similar to racism.
The modern day last argument of the the idiot.
>How dare anyone classify other human beings like this?
I do. Feel free to complain to your local PC center.
Mati Meron | "When you argue with a fool,
me...@cars.uchicago.edu | chances are he is doing just the same"
Paul F. Dietz
> How dare anyone classify other human beings like this?
It's easier than shooting them.
Paul
charles vind
"c.h.thompson" wrote:
> Uncle Al <Uncl...@hate.spam.net> wrote
> > Ace Schallger wrote:
> > >
> > > Using Hillman's links and reading his (and other's) essays and comments
> > > it is interesting to see that they have tried to round up all the
> > > component characteristics of what they call "crackpots" and produce a
> > > sort of "ideal crackpot". Now, if someone has any of the components of
> > > the ideal crackpot it looks like he is swept right into the bucket.
> > >
> > > How is this not a form of bigotry?
> >
> > It is not bogitry any more than saying that people who
> > smell bad stink,
>
> If you look at Baez' list <math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html >, this most
> certainly IS bigotry, and the way you express it sounds to me similar to
> racism. How dare anyone classify other human beings like this? Are they --
> the orthodox -- so terrified that their painfully-learned theories are going
> to be exposed as nonsense that they have to gang together to exclude and
> ridicule anyone who challenges them?
You are making some goodpoints Caroline. It should be considered however that
the current doctrine being espoused by most, if not all (self appointed)
maintstream theoretical physicists while containg a great deal of fact) has
probably been tempered with disinformative, self-limiting ideas that can hinder
the development of new ideas and concepts. These new ideas and concepts could
explain things such as multiple universes, physical laws that exist outside of
our own, the basic structure of matter/energy, the true meaning of time or a
time dimension, the physics of consciousness, the nature of infinities, and of
course the list could go on. The point being that alot of physicists in the
mainstream(arbitrary to mankind) establishments only want certain modes of
thought and learning to be viewed as acceptable. By having people aroud that
serve as "crackpots" the establishment can supress ideas and concepts that are
in conflict with the way they want the general population to percieve reality.
Today If you have ideas of your own(scientific or otherwise) that are
threatening enough to the establishment's current doctrine and you cross over
certain lines or boundaries in trying to express them you can meet with severe
consequences including incarceration in a jail, prison, or mental institution
without any real justification. You might even wind up dead, although I am
unaware myself of anyone ever being killed for a theory about physics(possible
though).
>
>
> "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone!"
>
> Baez includes in his list of crackpot identifying features:
> "mailing your theory to someone you don't know personally and asking them
> not to tell anyone else about it, for fear that your ideas will be stolen."
>
> What else does he expect them to do? It will take a few years before the
> innocent discoverer finds out that no member of the establishment is going
> to steal any really radical new idea! He will not risk the ridicule of his
> peers.
>
> Another of Baez points:
> "suggesting that a famous figure secretly disbelieved in a theory which he
> or she publicly supported. (E.g., that Feynman was a closet opponent of
> special relativity, as deduced by reading between the lines in his freshman
> physics textbooks.) "
If you read books by alot of today's modern physicists(mainstream) and read
between the lines(be careful not to get carried away though) and apply some
creative analysis to their works you may find yourself coming up with all kinds
of interesting ideas and concepts that oppose mainstream science. The trick is
to remain fiercely skeptical and analytical of all information and
ideas(especially your own). Just remember it is a serious mistake to discard any
idea or concept based purely on the word of a so-called expert. If someone can
prove(provide a convincing argument) that something that is fact is false or
something that is false is true then they have alot of power over how any of
their believers may happen to think. This is not at all uncommon with the
practice of most of the accepted mainstream religions in soceity today.
>
>
> It may well happen that the writer has read books that are not on the
> standard lists. A considerable number of the Founding Fathers of quantum
> theory, for instance, expressed doubts about it. How many people know that
> Paul Dirac, in "Directions in Physics" (John Wiley and Sons 1978) wrote re
> Einstein and God not playing dice:
>
> "He believed that basically physics should be of a deterministic character.
> And I think it might turn out that ultimately Einstein will prove to be
> right, because the present form of quantum mechanics should not be
> considered as the final form. There are great difficulties . It is the
> best we can do up till now . I think that it is quite likely that at some
> future time we may get an improved QM in which there will be a return to
> determinism and which will, therefore, justify the Einstein point of view .
> We would have to pay for it in some way which we cannot yet guess at ."
>
> In addition to such open statements, there may well be hints of disbelief
> "between the lines", and why should the newcomer not take notice of these?
> After all, the orthodox do not hesitate to call on the weight of opinion,
> even if (in sci.physics debates!) they are careful not to call directly on
> authority.
>
> Caroline
>
> --
> c.h.th...@pgen.net
> http://www.aber.ac.uk/~cat
Thank you for your response Caroline. I hope my post wasn't too dismal for
you. There is alot of good that can be done so don't feel to bad about all the
suppression in the scientific community as it in a way may serve as a stimulus
for an even more critical and creative analysis of the so-called facts than
would not occur otherwise. This may in turn produce a new synthesis of old ideas
that would may also have not otherwise occurred. There are alot of interesting
books and websites that challenge current doctrine and can serve as the stepping
stone for knewly acquired knowledge as long as you have a mind open to change.
The job of each individual is the find the materials and information that will
best suit him/her in the quest for true knowledge.
Please feel free to see my newly established website(development in
progress)at the following address:http://www.west.net/~simon/
Rob Virkus
>
>
> Speaking of pond scum in the gene pool...
>
> "Operation Track Shoe" started this morning at UVic. For three
> days the campus will be flooded with Mongoloid idiots (literally
> - Trisomy 21 genetic trash); their parents, trainers, doctors,
> nurses, Emergency Action teams (oh, you have a hangnail...
> ambulance!), counselors, coaches, staff, chefs, hangers-on, live
> bad music, the Media... and an army of managers and
> administrators, all suckling the public teat like it was the Wolf
> Bitch of Rome. Dining will be sumptuous and continuous (but not
> for the Mongoloid idots. Who really gives a sparrow's fart in a
> windstorm about them, eh?) Abundantly filled adult diapers will
> decorate the campus as performance art.
>
> Purveyors of social oppression and hate crimes - students, etc. -
> will be banned from campus eating areas. "Other arrangements"
> have been made. I believe "other arrangements" include wooden
> troughs and galvanized buckets in muddy fields.
>
> "Special Olympics" has priorty. Scholarship must learn its
> place.
>
Uncle Al, deal with it. You should just hope you never get Dementia.
Regards,
Rob Virkus
Richard Henry
"Uncle Al" <Uncl...@hate.spam.net> wrote in message
news:3B213D77...@hate.spam.net...
> One half of all people are below average.
By definition, one half of all people are below median. If it also happens
that one half of all people are below average, that is just an accident of
the statistics.
Richard Henry
"c.h.thompson" <c.h.th...@pgen.net> wrote in message
news:3b215...@news2.vip.uk.com...
>
> How dare anyone classify other human beings like this?
All people can be classified into two groups: those that can be classified
into two groups, and those that can't.
The Small Kahuna
> > One half of all people are below average.
>
> Below what average? Can you provided us with any objective references that
> would support this statement or are we supposed to accept all your statements
> as fact-- being you are spawned from a superior race(3855)?
Um, half of all people are below median. Go pick up your high school
statistics book. It'll be in the first few chapters.
The average is the summation of all values divided by the number of
values.
If we have a data set of the following:
name annual income
Joe 0
John 10,000
Fred 10,000
Juan 20,000
Bill Gates 1,000,000,000
The average income of these people is $200,000,000. Which would be a
real surprise to Juan, I'm sure as he would get depressed finding
himself well below average.
The median is a completely different calculation altogether as it
represents the value where 1/2 of the people are below and 1/2 are
above. The median of a set of "n" numbers is the middle value (after
the values are sorted) if n is odd, or the average of the middle two
numbers if n is even. In the above list the median income is $10,000,
which makes Juan feel much better. He is no Bill Gates, but can
justifiably consider himself "above average" in the vernacular as
opposed to the mathematical.
I mean, if you are going to slander each other in a technical group, at
least get the math right. Sheesh!
And anyway, you forgot about Lake Woebegon where *all* of the children
are above average.
Vincent Maycock
charles vind wrote in message <3B21588D...@west.net>...
It's a joke, Charles. The reference is to a normal distribution, where the
mean (or average) equals the median, and half the people are below average
(gasp!) by definition. See, it's supposed to sound like this great social
ill, but the punchline is that it's just a statistical characteristic of
Gaussian (or "normal") distributions.
>Can you provided us with any objective references that
>would support this statement or are we supposed to accept all your
statements
>as fact-- being you are spawned from a superior race(3855)?
What is it that you *like* about crackpots (seeing as how Uncle Al's post
was essentially a polemic against crackpots)?
> The remainder of this sociopath's psuedointellectual nonsense has been as
>he would say it "snipped".
That's actually a very common word in this context.
--
Vince
John Creighton
Richard Henry wrote:
Hmmmm. You might of just as well said all people can be classified into two
groups. The universe and the empty set.
Double00
true.
It IS wrong to classify people by things that they can't help... Race,
gender, etc.
But if their intentional actions are responsible for your classification and
different set of actions, they deserve it.
-regards
double00
Paul
wrote:
>Read the list and don't make the same errors again.
I just read the crackpot list at math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
Of course, Baez is probably right about most of these. Usenet,
especially, is full of crackpots.
But here's a problem that I noticed with point #32, which reads:
"50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no
concrete testable predictions."
Ummm, last I heard, String Theory, which is claimed to be
"revolutionary", has no testable predictions. Does that mean everybody
who's working on string theory is a crackpot? This would include Nobel
prize winner Steven Weinberg...
The way that *discoveries* are made in science is not always
"logical". When the apple fell on Newton's head and he got the idea
for Universal gravitation, there was nothing logical about that. It
was merely a flash of intuition that happened to be right....or right
enough for the time. You can have an idea that turns out to be
right...or maybe wrong. And when you have that idea, you may think
it's "revolutionary", and even tell people that you think so. Does
that neccessarily make you a crackpot? Of course, Newton later turned
his insights into a testable theory. But was he a crackpot between the
time of his insight and the time he codified the theory in his
Principia and it was tested? Wasn't that a period of more than 10
years?
Yes, there's plenty of crackpots around. The good thing is that
they're easily identifiable by inconsistencies, etc. These crackpots
are not a problem, because they have no influence on science anyway,
so why worry about them?
Here's the other side of the coin, a problem that you do need to worry
about, because it *does* have a negative influence on science.
It's a problem that Uncle AL (the management consultant) should be
able to appreciate.
A company usually is started by an entrepreneurial type, someone who
has a vision and is willing to take big risks to turn it into reality.
Nothing happens in business and industry w/o these people. But as the
company grows, it becomes bureaucratic and the "bean counter" types
take over; the creative types jump ship and go somewhere else or start
their own company. The company is unable to hire new creative people,
simply because the bean-counter type wouldn't know a creative person
if it bit him in the face. Besides, a creative person wouldn't "fit
in" with the new, conservative culture of the bean counters. Anyway,
the company often goes down the drain, unless it's in an industry
where creativity doesnt matter.
Well, I say the same thing happens in science. (And physics is a
science!!) You have the entrepreneurial visionaries, who take the big
risks and come up with the great theories, etc., that everybody ends
up using. No progress is possible w/o these people. After their
theories became accepted, and especially after the visionary dies, the
"bean counter" types take over. Whereas the visionaries are often not
great students in terms of grades, test scores, etc., the bean
counters who take over after them usually have terrific grades, test
scores, and pedigree -- this is their claim to fame. They ride their
academic prowess to the top of the scientific pecking order. But if
you look at their "scientific" work, it's really just a restatement,
regurgitation, or rearrangement of stuff that's already known. They
make no new discoveries, or contributions. They got where they are
simply by being great at taking tests and pumping out papers, period.
These people have a place in science, just like bean counters have a
place in business. The problem is when they take over the whole show
and begin to stifle the creative people from doing their work. I
believe this is the situation in physics now. The last great creative
period in theoretical physics ended around 1930. Since then the bean
counters have gradually taken over, so that now you have a situation
where a majority of the academic ranks in physics (especially in the
theory area) is filled with the bean-counter type -- uncreative,
unoriginal; taking no risks, always flying under the radar. I suspect
that people like Baez, Hillman, etc. are of the bean-counter variety.
They're great at restatement, regurgitation, and rearrangement of
stuff that's already known, but will never have the kind of insights
and take the huge risks that are always necessary to make progress.
The ability to identify crackpots does not guarantee that the
identifier is any less pathological in his own way. In fact, as I've
said, I think the crackpots are basically harmless to science. But the
bureaucratic physicists do real harm when they take over the direction
and soul of physics, as I think they have done.
Paul White
**To reply by email, replace "nospam" with "netcom" in the address above.**
me...@cars3.uchicago.edu
me...@cars3.uchicago.edu
>On Fri, 08 Jun 2001 14:02:47 -0700, Uncle Al <Uncl...@hate.spam.net>
>wrote:
>
>>Read the list and don't make the same errors again.
>
>I just read the crackpot list at math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
>
>Of course, Baez is probably right about most of these. Usenet,
>especially, is full of crackpots.
>
>But here's a problem that I noticed with point #32, which reads:
>
>"50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no
>concrete testable predictions."
>
>Ummm, last I heard, String Theory, which is claimed to be
>"revolutionary", has no testable predictions. Does that mean everybody
>who's working on string theory is a crackpot? This would include Nobel
>prize winner Steven Weinberg...
He did not get a Nobel Prize on string theory. And appeals to
authority do not go down well in science.
>
>The way that *discoveries* are made in science is not always
>"logical". When the apple fell on Newton's head and he got the idea
>for Universal gravitation, there was nothing logical about that. It
>was merely a flash of intuition that happened to be right....or right
>enough for the time. You can have an idea that turns out to be
>right...or maybe wrong. And when you have that idea, you may think
>it's "revolutionary", and even tell people that you think so.
An "idea" is one thing, a "theory" is another. The meaning of
"theory" in science is narrow. Newton's mechanics is a theory,
Maxwell's equations are a theory. An "I think that X may be causing
Y" is not a theory, is just a concept that may pan out or may not.
>Does that neccessarily make you a crackpot?
Claiming that you've a theory when you have none, makes you such.
>Of course, Newton later turned
>his insights into a testable theory. But was he a crackpot between the
>time of his insight and the time he codified the theory in his
>Principia and it was tested? Wasn't that a period of more than 10
>years?
Yes. And Newton didn't spend this time running around and proclaiming
that he has a revolutionary new theory. This is the point. Get
something to work, then present it.
John Creighton
me...@cars3.uchicago.edu wrote:
> In article <3B217AFB...@hotmail.com>, John Creighton <JohnCre...@hotmail.com> writes:
> >
> >
> >Richard Henry wrote:
> >
> >> "c.h.thompson" <c.h.th...@pgen.net> wrote in message
> >> news:3b215...@news2.vip.uk.com...
> >> >
> >> > How dare anyone classify other human beings like this?
> >>
> >> All people can be classified into two groups: those that can be classified
> >> into two groups, and those that can't.
> >
> >Hmmmm. You might of just as well said all people can be classified into two
> >groups. The universe and the empty set.
> >
> Sigh. Seems that sense of humor is becoming a rare quality.
Ummm.....I thought it was probly a joke and did find it mildly funny. But keep your
day job.
John Creighton
Vincent Maycock wrote:
Does this mean that some people are bellow zero?
John Creighton
me...@cars3.uchicago.edu wrote:
> In article <3B217AFB...@hotmail.com>, John Creighton <JohnCre...@hotmail.com> writes:
> >
> >
> >Richard Henry wrote:
> >
> >> "c.h.thompson" <c.h.th...@pgen.net> wrote in message
> >> news:3b215...@news2.vip.uk.com...
> >> >
> >> > How dare anyone classify other human beings like this?
> >>
> >> All people can be classified into two groups: those that can be classified
> >> into two groups, and those that can't.
> >
> >Hmmmm. You might of just as well said all people can be classified into two
> >groups. The universe and the empty set.
> >
> Sigh. Seems that sense of humor is becoming a rare quality.
Come to think of it I don't like the two groups I choose. They aren't
mutually exclusive since the universe contains the empty set.
Paul Mays
and had to work it out on my own until I was
recognized and awarded the Honor
Vincent Maycock wrote:
--
"I aim for the stars, but sometimes I hit London." - Wernher von Braun
Paul Mays
John Creighton wrote:
> Vincent Maycock wrote:
>
> Does this mean that some people are bellow zero?
--
Nathan Urban
> I just read the crackpot list at math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
> [...]
> "50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no
> concrete testable predictions."
> Ummm, last I heard, String Theory, which is claimed to be
> "revolutionary", has no testable predictions.
He means testable _in principle_. String theory makes plenty of
predictions, but _in practice_ we haven't been able to test them yet.
(At least, none that differ from already known physics.) A common
problem of some of the more far-out crackpot "theories" is that they're
too vague to make concrete testable predictions even in _principle_.
(The cynic in me says that their vagueness and inability to be tested
seems to be in direct proportion to the scope of what they purport to
"explain".) As Feynman said, you can't prove a vague theory wrong.
Paul
>In article <3b217cf3...@nntp.ix.netcom.com>, pb...@ix.nospam.com (Paul) writes:
>>On Fri, 08 Jun 2001 14:02:47 -0700, Uncle Al <Uncl...@hate.spam.net>
>>wrote:
>>Ummm, last I heard, String Theory, which is claimed to be
>>"revolutionary", has no testable predictions. Does that mean everybody
>>who's working on string theory is a crackpot? This would include Nobel
>>prize winner Steven Weinberg...
>He did not get a Nobel Prize on string theory. And appeals to
>authority do not go down well in science.
That last statement is naive. Wherever humans beings are involved in
something, you will find all of the usual pathologies, including power
politics, undue influence, appeals to authority, etc. Science is no
exception. How do people get into "prestigious" schools? Money and
influence are often involved. For example, if you didnt spend a lot of
your undergraduate time kissing up to professors, you will have no one
to recommend you for graduate school, and thus you won't be accepted,
especially to the more prestigious (i.e., wealthy) universities. A
letter of recommendation is an appeal to authority. Einstein is a
notable case in point....couldnt get into graduate school because no
one would recommend him. This almost kept 20th century physics from
happening. The stupidity of politics permeates everywhere, including
science.
Besides, the fact that you didn't come out an call Steven Weinberg a
crackpot outright (which he is by your criteria) means that you too
are afraid of authority. It's easy for you to say that Newton was a
crackpot (as you later do), because he's dead, and can do you no harm.
Let's hear you say Weinberg is a crackpot. If you say he is a
crackpot, then I'll know that you're not a physics major, graduate
student, or physicist. It wouldnt be good for you career prospects to
say that.
>An "idea" is one thing, a "theory" is another. The meaning of
>"theory" in science is narrow. Newton's mechanics is a theory,
>Maxwell's equations are a theory. An "I think that X may be causing
>Y" is not a theory, is just a concept that may pan out or may not.
So they should rename it the "String Idea" ?
I think the String Idea became a "Theory" when a lot of prominent,
bigtime physicists started working on it. *There's* an "appeal to
authority" for you (but I must be wrong, cuz appeals to authority
never happen in science).
Since your idea of what constitutes a theory is inconsistent with the
actual use of the word "theory" in science (at least in the case of
string theory), and since inconsistencies are the hallmark of
crackpots, then you must be a crackpot. hmmm.
>>Of course, Newton later turned
>>his insights into a testable theory. But was he a crackpot between the
>>time of his insight and the time he codified the theory in his
>>Principia and it was tested? Wasn't that a period of more than 10
>>years?
>Yes. And Newton didn't spend this time running around and proclaiming
>that he has a revolutionary new theory. This is the point. Get
>something to work, then present it.
What if Newton had died between the time of his insights and the time
of publication, without telling anybody? Where would we be now? (We
wouldn't be typing into computers, that's for sure.) Perhaps Newton's
contemporaries (Halley?) could have at least carried his ideas
forward, until such time that someone came along who could turn it
into a testable theory? It took thousands of years of history just to
come up with the ideas; if Newton had died w/o telling anyone it could
have delayed scientific and technological progress by a few hundred
more years easily. That means you'd be working a plow somewhere right
now, which maybe isn't such a bad idea, because you probably need to
get more acquainted with the real world anyway.
Paul W.
me...@cars3.uchicago.edu
>
>
>me...@cars3.uchicago.edu wrote:
>
>> In article <3B217AFB...@hotmail.com>, John Creighton <JohnCre...@hotmail.com> writes:
>> >
>> >
>> >Richard Henry wrote:
>> >
>> >> "c.h.thompson" <c.h.th...@pgen.net> wrote in message
>> >> news:3b215...@news2.vip.uk.com...
>> >> >
>> >> > How dare anyone classify other human beings like this?
>> >>
>> >> All people can be classified into two groups: those that can be classified
>> >> into two groups, and those that can't.
>> >
>> >Hmmmm. You might of just as well said all people can be classified into two
>> >groups. The universe and the empty set.
>> >
>> Sigh. Seems that sense of humor is becoming a rare quality.
>
>Come to think of it I don't like the two groups I choose. They aren't
>mutually exclusive since the universe contains the empty set.
>
Chris Hillman
On Fri, 8 Jun 2001, Dramar Ankalle wrote:
> Ace Schallger <phys...@att.net> wrote in message
> news:080620011110260447%phys...@att.net...
> > Using Hillman's links and reading his (and other's) essays and comments
> > it is interesting to see that they have tried to round up all the
> > component characteristics of what they call "crackpots" and produce a
> > sort of "ideal crackpot". Now, if someone has any of the components of
> > the ideal crackpot it looks like he is swept right into the bucket.
> >
> > How is this not a form of bigotry?
>
> I wonder why Hillman hasnt answered my very specific questions, dealing with
> papers I downlaoded from his website from the St Petersburg Mirror Lake
> Branch library.
What questions? I rarely read this newsgroup--- I'm more likely to see
questions posted in sci.physics.research or maybe sci.physics.relativity.
Chris Hillman
Home Page: http://www.math.washington.edu/~hillman/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
NOTE: Since I post under my real name, as an anti-spam measure, I have
installed a mail filter which deletes incoming messages not from the
"*.edu" or "*.gov" domains or overseas academic domains.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
me...@cars3.uchicago.edu
>On Sat, 09 Jun 2001 02:11:23 GMT, me...@cars3.uchicago.edu wrote:
>
>>In article <3b217cf3...@nntp.ix.netcom.com>, pb...@ix.nospam.com (Paul) writes:
>>>On Fri, 08 Jun 2001 14:02:47 -0700, Uncle Al <Uncl...@hate.spam.net>
>>>wrote:
>
>>>Ummm, last I heard, String Theory, which is claimed to be
>>>"revolutionary", has no testable predictions. Does that mean everybody
>>>who's working on string theory is a crackpot? This would include Nobel
>>>prize winner Steven Weinberg...
>
>>He did not get a Nobel Prize on string theory. And appeals to
>>authority do not go down well in science.
>
>That last statement is naive. Wherever humans beings are involved in
>something, you will find all of the usual pathologies, including power
>politics, undue influence, appeals to authority, etc. Science is no
>exception. How do people get into "prestigious" schools? Money and
>influence are often involved. For example, if you didnt spend a lot of
>your undergraduate time kissing up to professors, you will have no one
>to recommend you for graduate school, and thus you won't be accepted,
>especially to the more prestigious (i.e., wealthy) universities.
Very simple minded picture. But never mind.
>
>Besides, the fact that you didn't come out an call Steven Weinberg a
>crackpot outright (which he is by your criteria) means that you too
>are afraid of authority.
But he isn't a crackpot by my criteria. He didn't promote anything
that is untestable in principle.
>It's easy for you to say that Newton was a
>crackpot (as you later do), because he's dead, and can do you no harm.
But I didn't say that Newton was a crackpot. Should work a bit on
your reading comprehension.
>Let's hear you say Weinberg is a crackpot.
If and when he'll start behaving in a way that qualifies him as
crackpot, I'll say so. So far he didn't.
>If you say he is a crackpot, then I'll know that you're not a physics
>major, graduate student, or physicist. It wouldnt be good for you career
>prospects to say that.
You've a very childish image of science.
>
>>An "idea" is one thing, a "theory" is another. The meaning of
>>"theory" in science is narrow. Newton's mechanics is a theory,
>>Maxwell's equations are a theory. An "I think that X may be causing
>>Y" is not a theory, is just a concept that may pan out or may not.
>
>So they should rename it the "String Idea" ?
>I think the String Idea became a "Theory" when a lot of prominent,
>bigtime physicists started working on it.
Personally I think that String theory is over advertised and that the
hype generated around it (before it managed to chalk any significant
success) is rather unbecoming for science. One should wait with the
celebrations until there is actually something to show. Nevertheless
it is much more than just an "idea" at this stage, as it already has a
logical framework, mathematical formalism and is capable of generating
predictions (though not such as we can check at the moment.
> *There's* an "appeal to authority" for you (but I must be wrong, cuz
>appeals to authority never happen in science).
You might not be aware of this but the people who got String theory
rolling were hardly (if at all) known at that time (and no, Weinberg
wasn't one of them). So it certainly didn't get going based on appeal
to authority. Same as Relativity which got dumped on the scientific
world by a total unknown, yet gained acceptance extremely fast.
Again, no "appeal to authority" factor.
>
>Since your idea of what constitutes a theory is inconsistent with the
>actual use of the word "theory" in science (at least in the case of
>string theory), and since inconsistencies are the hallmark of
>crackpots, then you must be a crackpot. hmmm.
>
Here, here, feeling better now:-)
>>>Of course, Newton later turned
>>>his insights into a testable theory. But was he a crackpot between the
>>>time of his insight and the time he codified the theory in his
>>>Principia and it was tested? Wasn't that a period of more than 10
>>>years?
>
>>Yes. And Newton didn't spend this time running around and proclaiming
>>that he has a revolutionary new theory. This is the point. Get
>>something to work, then present it.
>
>What if Newton had died between the time of his insights and the time
>of publication, without telling anybody? Where would we be now? (We
>wouldn't be typing into computers, that's for sure.)
That's not terribly relevant to the topic. And, if it wouldn't have
been Newton, it would have been somebody else. When the time is ripe,
things happen.
>Perhaps Newton's contemporaries (Halley?) could have at least carried
>his ideas forward, until such time that someone came along who could turn it
>into a testable theory?
You still have problem understanding the distinction between
crackpotery and real science. Nobody said that you cannot share
insights and ideas before they're fully worked out. People do it all
the time. What is a bad form is to claim that you've something
spectacular before you've even checked that you've anything at all.
There is a big difference between "I've this idea, what do you think
of it?" and "everybody is wrong, I've the true theory which'll
revolutionize the world". In the second case, you'll better have
something to show.
New ideas are dime a dozen. Hundreds of them are being tossed around
in scientific institutions daily. Most of them are being shot down
within minutes, crashing into the hard rock of existing evidence.
Some survive days, some show enough promise to get serious work
invested in them. And out of these, some actually pan out. That's
the normal process.
Double00
> "theory" in science is narrow. Newton's mechanics is a theory,
> Maxwell's equations are a theory. An "I think that X may be causing
> Y" is not a theory, is just a concept that may pan out or may not.
Would this be called a hypothesis? I vaguely remember covering the basics of
the scientific method in various classes in school, and that word sticks
out. Haven't seen it in this NG, however...
-regards
double00
Bill Nelson
:> One half of all people are below average.
:
: Below what average? Can you provided us with any objective references that
: would support this statement or are we supposed to accept all your statements
: as fact-- being you are spawned from a superior race(3855)?
Uh, Charles? They are "below average" - by definition. The other half are
"above average".
--
Bill Nelson (bi...@peak.org)
Chris Hillman
On Fri, 8 Jun 2001, Ace Schallger wrote:
> Using Hillman's links and reading his (and other's) essays and comments
> it is interesting to see that they have tried to round up all the
> component characteristics of what they call "crackpots" and produce a
> sort of "ideal crackpot". Now, if someone has any of the components of
> the ideal crackpot it looks like he is swept right into the bucket.
>
> How is this not a form of bigotry?
This isn't really worth a reply, but what the heck, it's Friday.
First, Ace, notice that -Baez- devised the "crackpot index" and it is a
-joke- (although as a matter of fact, real cranks really do score high on
his "test").
Second, I frequently declared what I consider to the defining
characteristics of cranks, and yes, like other mathematicians who have
studied this phenomenon, I do consider crankery a thought disorder, and in
extreme cases, a mild psychosis. I think what I've said is perfectly
clear and I have nothing to add.
Third, you fail to address the substance of my brief comments pointing out
some things which are screamingly funny about George Hammonds' posts, to
anyone in the know about the relevant math.
Fourth, I dare say anyone who has been the victim of real bigotry (look up
the dictionary definition) will find your implication that George Hammond
has been subjected to bigotry to be naive at best and even distasteful.
George has been subjected to -ridicule-, and very well deserved ridicule.
Let me repeat an analogy: imagine a man who cannot carry a tune, can't
read music, has no musical training whatever, has heard of Enrico Caruso
but has never heard a recording of an opera or anything else in
"classical" music [sic], and yet firmly believes that he is the greatest
tenor who has ever lived, and indeed who will -ever- live. Imagine that
this man insists upon giving public "performances" in the local park,
every hour on the hour. Imagine that he continues this practice despite
all the catcalls from derisive passersby. Wouldn't you say such a person
is mentally ill? He may be deserving of pity in that he feels compelled
to suffer constant public humiliation, but there is no denying that the
situation has an element of humor. Eventually, of course, our "tenor"
winds up simply being the village nuisance-- only visitors from other
towns will fall down laughing at his antics.
> As it is, they (Hillman, Baez, et al) are seemingly wanting to identify
> crackpottery as a form of mental illness, a psychosis of some sort.
Actually, I don't think Baez ever said crackpots are mentally ill. But
-I- did. Don't confuse JCB and myself-- we are not only not equal to each
other, but not even isomorphic ;-/
> (my pejorative use here indicates I think 'Bible Codes' are utter
> nonsense)
Hey, we agree about something! :-)
> Now Chris Hillman seems to make a big deal out of the fact that quite a
> few people don't believe in relativity.
No, no, no, you have completely missed the point. I was simply trying to
explain for the benefit of the rest of you why George Hammond's posts are
so screamingly hilarious to those who know a bit of the relevant math. I
was simply trying to brighten the day of anyone who didn't understand the
nature of some George's funniest howlers.
As for "believing in relativity", whenever the topic of the nature of
theories in mathematical physics comes up, I have made it quite clear that
I think a theory is just a theory. For example: you might think that I
"believe in str" but "don't believe in Newtonian mechanics". In fact,
that is not how I think at all. I know that NM is very good theory which
works extremely well under a wide variety of circumstances, and because of
its underlying simplicity, it is the best theory to use wherever it is
known to work well (e.g. nonrelativistic relative motion of objects, weak
and slowly changing gravitational fields, above the quantum scale, etc.).
Similarly I know that nonrelativistic QM is a very good theory which works
very well in a wide variety of circumstances, and because of its relative
simplicity, it is the best theory to use when quantum phenomena are
important but relativistic considerations can be neglected. Maxwell's
theory of EM is an excellent theory which works very well under a wide
variety of circumstances, and has the added virtue of being very simple
and elegant. Again, it is the best theory to use wherever quantum effects
in EM, or gravitational effects, are not important. Str is simply the
kinematical setting for Maxwell's theory of EM. You might think I
"believe in" Lorentz invariance. Again, that is not how I think about it
all. Lorentz invariance is an elegant concept which has been very
carefully tested in many ways, and so far always has been found to hold
true. Thus, until I see good evidence to the contrary, I will assume that
the best theories (most general, most accurate) in physics will
relativistic and will obey the principle of Lorentz invariance. You might
think I "believe in gtr". Again, that's not how I think about it all. At
this point I refer you to the "evidence page" on RWWW (see link from my
home page below).
> In fact, it seems that if you don't believe in relativity then you are
> 1) a layman not capable of grasping the fine details or 2) you are a
> crackpot.
No, if you haven't a clue how the math works or why Lorentz invariance was
introduced into physics in the first place, you're a physical illiterate
at best. If you are a physical illiterate and insist that all of us who
have actually learned some physics have got it all wrong, using
"arguments" which are based upon numerous VCM's (very common
misconceptions), and if you ignore all corrections of said VCM's, then
you're a crank. I don't know if you qualify--- I don't recall having read
any of your posts before. But George Hammond certainly does. In fact,
the analogy above is really a very good one when applied to his case.
But if you don't know the math, you'll either have to learn it or else to
take my word for it.
> What he said about me was absolutely untrue - and I was able to
> document it immediately. I was shocked, I was also deeply hurt. And
> in examining that hurt I realized that my outward senses were
> inadequate to determine the character of the hearts of my friends.
(LOL)
Sorry, this was obviously a highly traumatic experience for you, but I
can't help laughing because it so weirdly off-topic.
[snip, snip, SNIP]
OK, enough for me. Have fun, y'all, arguing about what you all think I
-really- mean when I say what I mean :-/
Richard Henry
"John Creighton" <JohnCre...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:3B218B59...@hotmail.com...
>
>
> me...@cars3.uchicago.edu wrote:
>
> > In article <3B217AFB...@hotmail.com>, John Creighton
<JohnCre...@hotmail.com> writes:
> > >
> > >
> > >Richard Henry wrote:
> > >
> > >> "c.h.thompson" <c.h.th...@pgen.net> wrote in message
> > >> news:3b215...@news2.vip.uk.com...
> > >> >
> > >> > How dare anyone classify other human beings like this?
> > >>
> > >> All people can be classified into two groups: those that can be
classified
> > >> into two groups, and those that can't.
> > >
> > >Hmmmm. You might of just as well said all people can be classified into
two
> > >groups. The universe and the empty set.
> > >
> > Sigh. Seems that sense of humor is becoming a rare quality.
>
> Come to think of it I don't like the two groups I choose. They aren't
> mutually exclusive since the universe contains the empty set.
>
includes the set of all people who cannot.
me...@cars3.uchicago.edu
>> An "idea" is one thing, a "theory" is another. The meaning of
>> "theory" in science is narrow. Newton's mechanics is a theory,
>> Maxwell's equations are a theory. An "I think that X may be causing
>> Y" is not a theory, is just a concept that may pan out or may not.
>
>Would this be called a hypothesis?
Yes, that would be the usual terminology.
charles vind
Bill Nelson wrote:
This is an oversimplification on your part. Anyway what Mr Scharwtz was referring
to was intelligence. There are obviously many different indices for considering
intelligence so any statement that declares that half of the population is less
intelligent than the other half is without merit. You should read up on Mr. Schartz
in his prior posts that are available on deja new's
archives------http://groups.google.com/googlegroups/deja_announcement.html
Do a search for UNCLE AL and you will find all kinds of vulgar and repulsive
statements concerning his views about the intelligence and worthiness of others
whom he claims are inferior breeds of human beings. As far as uncle al is
concerned he is of a superior breed or race of human beings and that somehow
standardized IQ tests are an accurate measure of a persons value as a human being.
He is a thug whose has only a single set of quantifiable personality traits,
Destructiveness and Violence(toward others).
>
>
> --
> Bill Nelson (bi...@peak.org)
Jonathan Silverlight
Henry <rph...@home.com> writes
The phrase "bell shaped curve" comes to mind.
Paul W.
wrote:
>He means testable _in principle_. String theory makes plenty of
>predictions, but _in practice_ we haven't been able to test them yet.
You mean string theory is currently falsifiable? In other words, a
testable prediction (in principle or practice) has been proposed that,
if the result is negative, would trash string theory as a viable
model?
If string theory is "testable" as you say, then the whole model that
the world consists of tiny strings needs to be falsifiable, not just
some little aspect of string theory. This is what Popper meant by a
"testable" theory. Otherwise you need to say, "Some particular aspects
of string theory are currently testable, but not the string hypothesis
itself."
Paul W.
Dirk Van de moortel
No way oversimplification.
IQ is *defined* such that half the population is below 100 and the other half above.
Of course this says nothing about intelligence.
There as many definitions of intelligence as there are psychologists.
But IQ is the closest they can get to measure intelligence.
If you can find a better way, then half of the population you work with will
be below average.
Dirk Vdm
Dirk Van de moortel
> On Fri, 08 Jun 2001 14:02:47 -0700, Uncle Al <Uncl...@hate.spam.net>
> wrote:
>
> >Read the list and don't make the same errors again.
>
> I just read the crackpot list at math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
>
> Of course, Baez is probably right about most of these. Usenet,
> especially, is full of crackpots.
>
> But here's a problem that I noticed with point #32, which reads:
>
> > "50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no
> > concrete testable predictions."
>
> Ummm, last I heard, String Theory, which is claimed to be
> "revolutionary", has no testable predictions. Does that mean everybody
> who's working on string theory is a crackpot? This would include Nobel
> prize winner Steven Weinberg...
But!
As far as I know - not much, just read a few books on the topic -
String Theory (or M-Theory) is a superset of the Standard Model.
This means that the other theories (like General relativity and Quantum
Field Theory) are incorporated in String Theory as special cases.
This implies that String Theory is not debunked by anything we *do*
observe.
Revolutionary crackpot theories are immediately dismissed by this criterion.
Dirk Vdm
Paul W.
>In article <3b219811...@nntp.ix.netcom.com>, pb...@ix.nospam.com (Paul) writes:
>>Besides, the fact that you didn't come out an call Steven Weinberg a
>>crackpot outright (which he is by your criteria) means that you too
>>are afraid of authority.
>
>But he isn't a crackpot by my criteria. He didn't promote anything
>that is untestable in principle.
>>It's easy for you to say that Newton was a
>>crackpot (as you later do), because he's dead, and can do you no harm.
>But I didn't say that Newton was a crackpot. Should work a bit on
>your reading comprehension.
I said:
Of course, Newton later turned
his insights into a testable theory. But was he a crackpot between the
time of his insight and the time he codified the theory in his
Principia and it was tested? Wasn't that a period of more than 10
years?
You replied:
"Yes."
I thought you meant "Yes", he was a crackpot. I guess not.
And you said:
"And Newton didn't spend this time running around and proclaiming
that he has a revolutionary new theory."
Do we really know what he did or did not say? I know he had some
run-in's with other scientists on The Royal Society. I don't remember
what the issues were.
"This is the point. Get
something to work, then present it."
It took Newton at least 10 years to get his theory to work. He delayed
presenting it for so long because he couldn't justify treating a body
as a point mass. He should have presented his preliminary results
earlier. Math has it's "conjectures", and so should physics. In fact,
physics does allow conjectures, but only from well known "celebrity"
physicists. If you look on sci.physics.research, all you see is Baez,
et. al. presenting their conjectures. But if a non-celebrity wants to
get a word in edgewise, he must be a crackpot. I think this is what
bugs some people. It's a double standard. Basically, they've created
an exclusive club of like-minded people who tell each other what they
want to hear, while pretending to be "objective" scientists. It's all
a bunch of rubbish. Power always corrupts unless there's some built-in
check on it. The moderators have absolute power in that NG, and so it
has turned into their little fiefdom where they monopolize the pulpit.
I understand their motivations -- to keep down the "noise" and keep
out the crackpots. The authorities in China would offer the same type
of justification for their absolute control over the media there. So
what you have in China is a monologue of the state, and in
sci.physics.research you have a monolgue of Baez et. al.
>>Let's hear you say Weinberg is a crackpot.
>
>If and when he'll start behaving in a way that qualifies him as
>crackpot, I'll say so. So far he didn't.
He's a string "theorist". But the "theory" is not currently (as far as
I know) falsifiable, and thus not testable according to Popper.
Therefore, by Baez criteria (which you seem to be siding with)
Weinberg must be a crackpot. (see item 32 on Baez' list).
Paul W.
ca314159
Every time I look at the speedometer I get lost."
-Barnacle news:rec.arts.sf.written
To convince a bird that it has a need to build a
spaceship so that it can escape to the moon,
one first has to convince the bird that the weasels
are attacking.
Relative contrast is not absolute brightness.
Ace Schallger wrote:
>
> Using Hillman's links and reading his (and other's) essays and comments
> it is interesting to see that they have tried to round up all the
> component characteristics of what they call "crackpots" and produce a
> sort of "ideal crackpot". Now, if someone has any of the components of
> the ideal crackpot it looks like he is swept right into the bucket.
>
> How is this not a form of bigotry?
>
> As it is, they (Hillman, Baez, et al) are seemingly wanting to identify
> crackpottery as a form of mental illness, a psychosis of some sort.
> I'm of the opinion that if you get a person to tell you what they
> believe in, you have, at the same time, gotten them to define
> themselves.
>
> Now, I always suppose that if a person believes in something then they
> ought to be able to present you with what their notion of 'sufficient
> reason' for their belief happens to be. So, as we grind away at a
> person to define himself one of the last things that we do as we are
> jamming them in the corner is to try and get them to tell us why they
> believe in what they believe in and we should really press the point
> and see if we can squeeze anything out of them that looks like logic.
>
> But logic can't totally define the man and occasionally people believe
> things because of a seemingly unquantifiable thing that we call
> 'intuition'. Now intuition itself seems to be a strange nebulous sort
> of stuff that like quicksilver is difficult to pick up with your
> fingers and put in a bottle. I have been told that the ancient Greeks
> believed that intuition was the source of all true knowledge. Now, I
> don't know exactly which ancient Greeks believed this but I thought
> that it made a nice sound bite from a friend who emailed this tidbit to
> me. So, why do I believe that the Greeks believed this? Ah, because
> someone I trusted once told me so. Since it pleases my own sense of
> the idea of the source of knowledge I didn't want to check too closely
> and burst that particular bubble. Isn't it strange that we tend to
> believe things that correspond to what we already believe? :-).
>
> Do I, personally, have sufficient reason to believe in intuition?
> Well, yes, I do, but is it 'scientific' or is it 'logical'? and my
> answer has to come back that it is experiential. I've had insights or
> instances of intuition myself and I've learned over the years that
> ignoring the intuition always left me with an uncomfortable feeling and
> that the intuition was very often correct. I've set a glass on the
> table and then got a real sense that leaving it in that spot will be
> related to the disaster of it being knocked over. I ignore that
> insight and then am not surprised when one of my teens comes bustling
> into the room roughhousing with one of his younger brothers and wham
> there goes the glass skittering off of the table. Is that scientific?
> Well, I haven't kept a log of all the times that I've had an intuitive
> feeling or an insight of knowledge about an outcome like that and then
> compared it to real outcomes. Who has time to document their life and
> thoughts while they are living through them? But people do see
> patterns. Of course, there's the old saw that "when the only tool you
> have is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail". In other
> words, we may see certain patterns and impose some sort of order on the
> chaos around us but imposing that order itself may have no more
> validity than 'Bible Codes' (my pejorative use here indicates I think
> 'Bible Codes' are utter nonsense) and so once again we tend to see
> things in a manner that corresponds to those things in which we already
> believe.
>
> So, the facts are that we can't always account for, in a rigorous
> manner, why we believe things but we should at least be prepared to
> defend or be willing to give up certain beliefs if we cannot produce
> sufficient reason. Now for me, I can't simply believe in something
> because I can turn a crank and get the right answer. I am more
> interested in process, dynamics and structure. I'll look at a watch's
> parts with all of its gears and escapements and springs and try to
> grasp the interconnectedness of it all. If I can count all the gears
> and see all their connections and count all their teeth and figure out
> the ratios and write it all down and then confirm that I'll get one
> turn of the minute hand for x number of turns of a specific gear in the
> mechanism then I'm satisfied. But if I, by observation, or trial and
> error, came across the right ratio then I could plug that ratio into my
> calculations and get the change in position of the minute hand for a
> given rotation of that specific gear. But I tell you, I wouldn't be
> happy. I'd want to know the machinery of it all. I want to know all
> the in between gears and processes that go on to produce the right
> answer.
>
> Now Chris Hillman seems to make a big deal out of the fact that quite a
> few people don't believe in relativity. In fact, it seems that if you
> don't believe in relativity then you are 1) a layman not capable of
> grasping the fine details or 2) you are a crackpot. It seems to me
> that the attitude is that even if you are a layman then you ought to
> believe in it because your betters (intellectual betters) believe in
> it. And if you are a crackpot then you don't believe in it because you
> are very much like the layman in that you don't understand it except
> for the fact that you are being adamant about it because you meet
> certain profiles for being a crackpot. Hillman's site and links
> produce or list reasons that range through everything from antisemitism
> (because Einstein was a Jew) to right wing Christianity trying to hold
> onto a sense of the Absolute while seeing Relativity as a moral evil
> because they make a direct connection between it and cultural or
> ethical or moral relativism.
>
> Long ago, I learned that what we see with our eyes and what we hear
> with our ears and what we feel with our fingers doesn't necessarily
> have anything to do with the truth of a matter. For example, a close
> friend may one day stab you in the back in an attempt to make his own
> shortcomings look better to management. I had this happen to me in the
> military - my neighbor, my golfing buddy, my friend and drinking buddy,
> and my co-worker - was in the process of stabbing me in the back to our
> commanding officer and I happened to walk up behind him and I listened
> to the whole thing without his knowing that I was standing there. What
> he said about me was absolutely untrue - and I was able to document it
> immediately. I was shocked, I was also deeply hurt. And in examining
> that hurt I realized that my outward senses were inadequate to
> determine the character of the hearts of my friends. What I saw with
> my eyes and heard with my ears on other occasions coming from this
> 'close friend' apparently had little to do with what was in this
> fellow's heart and mind.
>
> What I could see with my eyes and what I heard with my ears was not
> always reliable. I thought it best that I make a note of that. I
> know that a lot of people have claimed to have personally seen UFO
> craft. Yet, in spite of there being thousands and thousands of alleged
> sightings there still isn't, to my knowledge, a single piece of hard
> data that confirms that such sights are actually alien space craft. In
> fact, I've personally known at least three people (and have interviewed
> them) who all claimed to have seen a UFO that fits the criteria of a
> 'craft'. Does that mean that such 'craft' exist or does it mean that
> each of these people have seen an illusion, or does it mean they have
> misconstrued a natural phenomenon like Ball Lightning, or does it mean
> that they each have for some reason unknown to me felt compelled to
> make up a lie (like my co-worker of days gone by), or is there a mix of
> two or more of these, or did any of them actually see an alien craft?
> Personally, I haven't seen such a craft as they claim they have and so
> I am terribly skeptical about it all.
>
>
> Here's some physical phenomenon that people can access with their
> senses and then some related beliefs:
>
> 1) People believe in the notion of a static electric field because they
> can put their hand near a small operating Van de Graaf generator and
> 'feel' the 'electric field'. Who can doubt what they feel with their
> hands. They can rub a balloon on their coat or a carpet and then make
> another person's hair stand on end. Who can doubt the existence of
> that 'static electric field'?
>
> 2) We shine a flashlight toward the heavens and we believe that if the
> photons don't interact with matter on their journey they will just keep
> on going forever.
>
> 3) We measure an electric 'field' with a potentiometer (or
> electroscope) and we believe that because no matter where we go around
> the source of that field that we get a reading that the 'field' itself
> must be continuous.
>
> A) (link this to 1 and 3 above). The idea that an electric field
> associated with a charged object is 'static' is preposterous. We
> understand that electrons have an attribute we call charge and we
> somehow connect the idea of our intellectual notion of a charge with
> our experience and we believe that which we feel with our hands near a
> Van de Graaf is identical in character with that which surrounds an
> electron or proton. Now I can't speak for all people, of course, but
> from what I have read and from my conversations with people, some of
> whom have been physicists, I have come up with this general idea or
> notion of what people think an electric field is. People draw cartoons
> of an electrically charged particle and we see a point type object from
> which radiates 'lines'. Looking at such a picture one might be moved
> to ask: "How many lines?" Then a physicist will step in and explain
> that the picture is an attempt to graphically illustrate the notion of
> an electric field and that if we use the notion of a finite number of
> lines that penetrate a number of spherical surfaces with different
> radii the surface of any one being those points that are equidistant
> from the source we can then get a notion of flux density and we can
> understand the idea of inverse square laws and we can understand the
> notion of a gradient and potential difference and many more things.
> But we are also told that the idea of a finite number of lines is
> misleading and that what we are really trying to illustrate are the
> notions that we can grasp if we use a finite number of lines in a
> drawing but that we really should understand that the 'field' is not
> composed of finite number of things and certainly not lines but rather
> is continuous and is, in fact, like a continuous mathematical function
> that is infinitely differentiable. So as soon as the physicist is
> able to dispose of the notion of those lines by explaining that they
> are used just as a graphical device and that the 'field' has a certain
> 'density' or gradient by virtue of distance from the source then the
> question of where those lines go becomes moot or nonsensical to ask.
> We can then ask, 'Does the 'field' of the particle just 'thin out
> forever and ever'? The standard answer is 'yes' that in principle it
> is omnidirectional and goes on forever and its density per unit of
> surface area falls off as 1/r^2.
>
> B) How can we be sure that photons are emitted in directions in which
> there is no matter present to intercept them? Now if you believe that
> they are then I would ask that you present sufficient reason to explain
> why you believe this.
>
> C) But this goes back to A) above also because how do we know that a
> 'field' is present at some place where no measurement is taken. What
> if the measurement itself or the 'field' itself is a function between
> the source of the 'field' and some other bit of matter. In truth, the
> only time that we can measure the potential of a point in a 'field' is
> when there is another bit of matter (which happens to be the measuring
> instrument).
>
> So, I believe that I am posing several legitimate questions, and I
> would guess that those who 'believe' in relativity actually believe in
> the concept of continuous structures, of the notion of an infinitely
> differentiable 'field'. Now, I'm not an aether theorist myself so I
> can't quite wrap my head around the notion of 'absolute motion' but
> neither can I bring myself to believe in a thing (continuum type of
> 'field') that I cannot even in principle prove exists in physical
> correspondence with the mathematics that is normally used to describe
> it.
>
> So....Here we have it. Aether theorists believe in a thing that they
> cannot prove exists and they are deemed to be "crackpots" because they
> are fixated in their belief. Yet those who believe in relativity also
> believe in a thing that they cannot prove exists, either, and are
> likewise 'fixated' in their belief. How are they different?
>
> I define a 'crackpot' as a person who believes in a thing without
> sufficient reason, without a comprehension of structure, dynamics and
> process.
>
> Now I am not sure that it is always easy to decide and agree upon what
> constitutes 'sufficient reason' for a belief but I would at least think
> that one ought to be able to defend with logic why they belief
> something. And I'm not so diehard picky that I would necessarily
> reject a person if they said they believed it for intuitive or
> religious revelatory reasons - at least then I could perhaps subject
> those reasons to more scrutiny - and I would not be faced with the
> brick wall that remains when a person cannot give you any reason that
> they believe a thing. If you want to tell me that fairies told you,
> fine. I personally haven't seen or heard from any fairies. The
> source of your knowledge whatever you claim it to be isn't as important
> as the reliabilty of the knowledge. Is it logically consistent? Is it
> logically certain? The fellow who discovered the Benzene Ring had a
> dream vision of a snake eating its tail. From that he came to the
> realization that the Benzene molecule was of the nature of a ring. No
> one could actually see the ring and I will guess it was many years
> before there was physical evidence by way of x-ray defraction patterns
> or some other method that confirmed the notion - that had already by
> then proven itself to be so useful in many other respects. If you
> want to tell me you believe something because your predictions based
> upon mathematics are highly accurate, then that is fine also but it
> still doesn't tell me about the physicality of the processes that are
> going on, it doesn't show me the gears or the teeth on the gears and
> without process, structure, and dynamics, then there exists what I
> believe is an unacceptable gap. I believe that true knowledge has an
> attribute that pseudoknowledge does not. I believe that true
> knowledge, in principle, will let you predict things that have not yet
> been seen or that if seen were not understood correctly at all.
>
> Now I can't say that I believe in relativity nor can I say that I
> disbelieve it completely. In other words, I don't think that it is
> void of all possible quality and that to toss it out wholesale is
> possibly to toss out the baby with the bathwater. In other words, I'm
> hoping there might be a baby in there somewhere. I know there's some
> bathwater and the reason I believe there is some bathwater is that
> there are parts of it which cannot pass the test of sufficient reason.
>
> If Chris Hillman or John Baez believe in the continuous structures of
> GR and QM, I'd sure like to know why. If they believe that light
> exists where it cannot be measured I'd like to know why. Or at least
> I'd like to know why they aren't crackpots if they cannot give
> sufficient reason for their beliefs.
>
> Ace Schallger (Curious as a cat about these matters).
jmfb...@aol.com
Uncle Al <Uncl...@hate.spam.net> wrote:
<snip>
>Speaking of pond scum in the gene pool...
>
>"Operation Track Shoe" started this morning at UVic.
<snip>
Uncle, it could be worse. At least they're all running around
outside.
/BAH
Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.
jmfb...@aol.com
>In article <3b215...@news2.vip.uk.com>, "c.h.thompson"
<c.h.th...@pgen.net> writes:
<snip>
>>and the way you express it sounds to me similar to racism.
>
>The modern day last argument of the the idiot.
>
>>How dare anyone classify other human beings like this?
>
>I do. Feel free to complain to your local PC center.
Some day, one of you will point out that she does this
with photons.
Paul Mays
Jonathan Silverlight wrote:
--
Jonathan Silverlight
de moortel <dirkvand...@ThankS-NO-SperM.hotmail.com> writes
>
>No way oversimplification.
>IQ is *defined* such that half the population is below 100 and the other half
>above.
>Of course this says nothing about intelligence.
>There as many definitions of intelligence as there are psychologists.
>But IQ is the closest they can get to measure intelligence.
>If you can find a better way, then half of the population you work with will
>be below average.
>
Hasn't the research that said intelligence was symmetrically distributed
around the mean been shown to be fraudulent? ("The Bell-shaped curve",
again)
IQ_78
wrote on 6/9/01 12:44 AM:
Not true Bill! You are either assuming a symmetric distribution or a binary
measurement (only two states being measured) which isn't by "definition".
A set of four people are rated respectively at 1,7,8,9 averages 6.25, which
means there are 3 people above average and only 1 person below average, not
half.
Uh, Bill? You should know your shit a little better before you start acting
pompous.
Uncle Al
[snip]
> First, Ace, notice that -Baez- devised the "crackpot index" and it is a
> -joke- (although as a matter of fact, real cranks really do score high on
> his "test").
>
> Second, I frequently declared what I consider to the defining
> characteristics of cranks, and yes, like other mathematicians who have
> studied this phenomenon, I do consider crankery a thought disorder, and in
> extreme cases, a mild psychosis. I think what I've said is perfectly
> clear and I have nothing to add.
[snip]
Poor Chris Hillman is being brought to task by the prolix
caterwauling maunderings of precisely those defective mentalities
he has so punctiliously sought to define and vilify for their
perserverative cornucopian scholarly trespasses in sci.physics.
In the meanwhile Uncle Al, who has privately bared his left
breast to Chris,
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/eotvos.htm
has not been subjected to a single erudite techno-evisceration,
not so much as a bluntly wielded diffeomorphism! This has not
gone on long enough! (Which is to say, this having not gone on
at all has persisted in not happening for an intolerably long
interval!)
Ubi est mea?
Uncle Al is sorely tempted to toss in a few more Phys. Rev. D
footnotes. When we run Petitjean's and Avnir's conflicting ab
initio quantifications of geometric chirality of 3x3x3 clusters
of x-ray unit cells in the Fall, given Glazer's tracing of higher
order counterhelices in accurately determining optical gyrotropy
of crystals, you will ALL be SORRY! We will have NUMBERS and post
Web page LINKS and there will be POSTING THREADS the size of
RUTABAGAS!
Uh, what was the question? Oh yeah... and this proves the
existence of Sterculius. QED.
--
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/
http://www.ultra.net.au/~wisby/uncleal/
(Toxic URLs! Unsafe for children and most mammals)
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" The Net!
Nathan Urban
> On 8 Jun 2001 23:18:08 -0400, nur...@crib.corepower.com (Nathan Urban)
> wrote:
> >He means testable _in principle_. String theory makes plenty of
> >predictions, but _in practice_ we haven't been able to test them yet.
> You mean string theory is currently falsifiable? In other words, a
> testable prediction (in principle or practice) has been proposed that,
> if the result is negative, would trash string theory as a viable
> model?
Of course! You can calculate loads of string scattering amplitudes and
stuff. If we run scattering experiments at sufficiently high energies
(_really_ high, hence the "in practice" problem), and we don't see
scattering like that, then string theory is wrong.
> If string theory is "testable" as you say, then the whole model that
> the world consists of tiny strings needs to be falsifiable, not just
> some little aspect of string theory.
That's not true. You don't test an idea, you test a theory. Experiments
are capable of falsifying theories. Ideas don't exist in vacuum; they
have to be put into a concrete framework in order to be tested.
For instance, you don't have to falsify the whole notion of spacetime
curvature in order to test or falsify general relativity. You don't
have to falsify the whole notion of force fields in order to test or
falsify Newtonian gravity.
> This is what Popper meant by a "testable" theory.
I think not.
> Otherwise you need to say, "Some particular aspects
> of string theory are currently testable, but not the string hypothesis
> itself."
I'm not talking about "the string hypothesis", I'm talking about _string
theory_. There are specific theories of strings that have been proposed.
Those theories are testable. If the experiments come out against them,
those theories are wrong.
All that being said, there are not very many consistent string theories,
and they all make similar predictions about some things. Crank the
energies up to the Planck scale and I guarantee you will be able to tell
if they're right. Strings are fundamentally, physically, measurably
different from point particles.
John Creighton
Clearly this is because Chris says he is a nice guy.
You on the other hand seem to take pleasure in your flame wars.
me...@cars3.uchicago.edu
>On Sat, 09 Jun 2001 04:54:15 GMT, me...@cars3.uchicago.edu wrote:
>
>>In article <3b219811...@nntp.ix.netcom.com>, pb...@ix.nospam.com (Paul) writes:
>
>>>Besides, the fact that you didn't come out an call Steven Weinberg a
>>>crackpot outright (which he is by your criteria) means that you too
>>>are afraid of authority.
>>
>>But he isn't a crackpot by my criteria. He didn't promote anything
>>that is untestable in principle.
>
>
>>>It's easy for you to say that Newton was a
>>>crackpot (as you later do), because he's dead, and can do you no harm.
>
>>But I didn't say that Newton was a crackpot. Should work a bit on
>>your reading comprehension.
>
>I said:
>
>Of course, Newton later turned
>his insights into a testable theory. But was he a crackpot between the
>time of his insight and the time he codified the theory in his
>Principia and it was tested? Wasn't that a period of more than 10
>years?
>
>You replied:
>
>"Yes."
>
>I thought you meant "Yes", he was a crackpot. I guess not.
I meant, "yes, it was a period of more than 10 years".
>
>And you said:
>
> "And Newton didn't spend this time running around and proclaiming
>that he has a revolutionary new theory."
>
>Do we really know what he did or did not say? I know he had some
>run-in's with other scientists on The Royal Society. I don't remember
>what the issues were.
We know that even when he had his stuff worked out he wasn't at all in
a hurry to publicize it.
>
>"This is the point. Get
>something to work, then present it."
>
>It took Newton at least 10 years to get his theory to work. He delayed
>presenting it for so long because he couldn't justify treating a body
>as a point mass. He should have presented his preliminary results
>earlier.
That his judgement, not yours.
> Math has it's "conjectures", and so should physics.
It does. I'm afraid you're still missing the point. Yes, math has
conjectures and they're presented as such. A mathematician presenting
a conjecture and claiming it to be a theorem while not having a proof
will be rightly deemed a crackpot.
> In fact, physics does allow conjectures, but only from well known
>"celebrity" physicists.
:-)) you must've never been to a physics conference. Physics allows
conjectures from everybody.
...
>
>>>Let's hear you say Weinberg is a crackpot.
>>
>>If and when he'll start behaving in a way that qualifies him as
>>crackpot, I'll say so. So far he didn't.
>
>He's a string "theorist". But the "theory" is not currently (as far as
>I know) falsifiable, and thus not testable according to Popper.
What part of "not testable in principle" you don't understand? There
is no problem with "currently not testable", only with "not testable
in principle.
>Therefore, by Baez criteria (which you seem to be siding with
Siding with? I *enthusiastically* embrace them.
me...@cars3.uchicago.edu
Bennett Standeven
> Vincent Maycock wrote:
>
[...]
> >
> > It's a joke, Charles. The reference is to a normal distribution, where the
> > mean (or average) equals the median, and half the people are below average
> > (gasp!) by definition. See, it's supposed to sound like this great social
> > ill, but the punchline is that it's just a statistical characteristic of
> > Gaussian (or "normal") distributions.
>
> Does this mean that some people are bellow zero?
IIRC, 15 points on the IQ scale corresponds to 1 standard deviation.
So if someone is 7 standard deviations below the average (which is
rare in the extreme, of course), their IQ will be -10.
John Creighton
Bennett Standeven wrote:
Scary. IIRC someone with an IQ of 40 is classed a moron and doesn't even know how to go to the bathroom.
I can't imagine what someone with an IQ of -10 would be like and how it would be possible to develop a
suitable scale to measure their IQ.
Tom Potter
As an ex-scientific instrumentation sales engineer,
and entrepreneur, who has interviewed, and intimately known,
hundreds of mathematicians, physicists and chemists,
and who has analyzed thousands of their resumes,
I have observed that most had few ego-building experiences as children.
Kids who are not physically attractive, not physically strong,
do not excel at competitive sports, and have few ego building experiences
tend to rebel against parents and society. If they are average or below.
they tend to become musicians, cops, high school dropouts,
join motorcycle clubs, etc. If they are above average in intelligence they
tend to become science nerds.
Unlike folks in most trades and disciplines who look upon knowledge as a way
to earn money, and to do things better, science nerds tend to look at knowledge
as a competitive weapon they can use to display their superiority
over their parents, the jocks, the cool dudes, the rah rahs, etc.
Math and science nerds feel a sense of community, and
have a "David Koresh Complex". They perceive that their group
is privy to esoteric knowledge, and that the rest of society
does not appreciate their understanding of the "seven seals".
As I suggest a few years ago, this alienation could be solved with
a "National Sex Care Program". Why should the good looking,
and talented guys get all the good sex? If the government provided
a "National Sex Care Program", and forced the good looking gals
to pay equal attention to the heretofore alienated kids and grownups,
then they wouldn't be driven to sulk, insult, demean and sometimes kill.
A good "National Sex Care Program" would go a long way
toward mellowing out these alienated science nerds.
--
Tom Potter http://home.earthlink.net/~tdp
Martin Hogbin
"Ace Schallger" <phys...@att.net> wrote in message news:080620011110260447%phys...@att.net...
>...(Hillman, Baez, et al) are seemingly wanting to identify
> crackpottery as a form of mental illness, a psychosis of some sort.
> I'm of the opinion that if you get a person to tell you what they
> believe in, you have, at the same time, gotten them to define
> themselves.
>
> Now, I always suppose that if a person believes in something then they
> ought to be able to present you with what their notion of 'sufficient
> reason' for their belief happens to be.
Yes, but bear in mind that you have posted this to three science
newsgroups.
> So, as we grind away at a
> person to define himself one of the last things that we do as we are
> jamming them in the corner is to try and get them to tell us why they
> believe in what they believe in and we should really press the point
> and see if we can squeeze anything out of them that looks like logic.
>
Believe me, I have tried. But with some of the posters here there is
nothing that remotely resembles logic.
> But logic can't totally define the man and occasionally people believe
> things because of a seemingly unquantifiable thing that we call
> 'intuition'.
Physics has nothing against intuition, it can be very important, but
any acceptable theory must be self consistent and agree with
experiment.
<Snip>
> Do I, personally, have sufficient reason to believe in intuition?
> Well, yes, I do, but is it 'scientific' or is it 'logical'? and my
> answer has to come back that it is experiential. I've had insights or
> instances of intuition myself and I've learned over the years that
> ignoring the intuition always left me with an uncomfortable feeling and
> that the intuition was very often correct.
The great achievements of science are only possible because we can
build on the achievements and theories of earlier scientists. Nobody
can do science from scratch.
We need some way of determining which of the millions of ideas that
people have had in the past have proved useful. That is why we have
experts, learned journals, text books, and moderated newsgroups.
If you tried to make progress by listening to everything that had ever
been suggested you would be overwhelmed by ideas, most of them
useless.
> I've set a glass on the
> table and then got a real sense that leaving it in that spot will be
> related to the disaster of it being knocked over. I ignore that
> insight and then am not surprised when one of my teens comes bustling
> into the room roughhousing with one of his younger brothers and wham
> there goes the glass skittering off of the table. Is that scientific?
If you want to talk about human behaviour that is fine, but it has no
significance on a physics newsgroup.
<Snip>
>
> So, the facts are that we can't always account for, in a rigorous
> manner, why we believe things but we should at least be prepared to
> defend or be willing to give up certain beliefs if we cannot produce
> sufficient reason. Now for me, I can't simply believe in something
> because I can turn a crank and get the right answer. I am more
> interested in process, dynamics and structure. I'll look at a watch's
> parts with all of its gears and escapements and springs and try to
> grasp the interconnectedness of it all.
> If I can count all the gears
> and see all their connections and count all their teeth and figure out
> the ratios and write it all down and then confirm that I'll get one
> turn of the minute hand for x number of turns of a specific gear in the
> mechanism then I'm satisfied. But if I, by observation, or trial and
> error, came across the right ratio then I could plug that ratio into my
> calculations and get the change in position of the minute hand for a
> given rotation of that specific gear. But I tell you, I wouldn't be
> happy. I'd want to know the machinery of it all. I want to know all
> the in between gears and processes that go on to produce the right
> answer.
Fine, but remember that there is no reason why the universe should
behave in a way that suits you.
>
> Now Chris Hillman seems to make a big deal out of the fact that quite a
> few people don't believe in relativity. In fact, it seems that if you
> don't believe in relativity then you are 1) a layman not capable of
> grasping the fine details or 2) you are a crackpot. It seems to me
> that the attitude is that even if you are a layman then you ought to
> believe in it because your betters (intellectual betters) believe in
> it.
I think it is fair to say that if you do not understand a theory then you
cannot sensibly not believe in it.
Before you can criticise a theory you must know what is says, at least
in principle.
<Snip>
> Long ago, I learned that what we see with our eyes and what we hear
> with our ears and what we feel with our fingers doesn't necessarily
> have anything to do with the truth of a matter
Agreed.
<Snip>
All very interesting but I do not see what the point is that you are trying
to make, or the connection with crackpots.
> B) How can we be sure that photons are emitted in directions in which
> there is no matter present to intercept them? Now if you believe that
> they are then I would ask that you present sufficient reason to explain
> why you believe this.
>
> C) But this goes back to A) above also because how do we know that a
> 'field' is present at some place where no measurement is taken. What
> if the measurement itself or the 'field' itself is a function between
> the source of the 'field' and some other bit of matter. In truth, the
> only time that we can measure the potential of a point in a 'field' is
> when there is another bit of matter (which happens to be the measuring
> instrument).
>
> So, I believe that I am posing several legitimate questions, and I
> would guess that those who 'believe' in relativity actually believe in
> the concept of continuous structures, of the notion of an infinitely
> differentiable 'field'.
Yes and you correctly used the words 'concept' and 'notion', which is
exactly what they are. Whether something 'really' exists is a question
for philosophers not physicists.
Also, your point is not particular to relativity or QM, it applies to classical
physics just as well. In fact, from what I have read, you might find
yourself a supporter of the Copenhagen interpretation of QM.
> Now, I'm not an aether theorist myself so I
> can't quite wrap my head around the notion of 'absolute motion' but
> neither can I bring myself to believe in a thing (continuum type of
> 'field') that I cannot even in principle prove exists in physical
> correspondence with the mathematics that is normally used to describe
> it.
At last I see your point. As I said above, your problem is not with relativity
but with fields in general.
And, of course, you are quite right. It is known that classical physics
breaks down on a very small scale, this is why there is much current
research into a quantum theory of gravity, but none of this prevents
classical physics from being extremely useful when applied correctly.
>
> So....Here we have it. Aether theorists believe in a thing that they
> cannot prove exists and they are deemed to be "crackpots" because they
> are fixated in their belief. Yet those who believe in relativity also
> believe in a thing that they cannot prove exists, either, and are
> likewise 'fixated' in their belief. How are they different?
>
What is this 'thing' they 'believe in?
> I define a 'crackpot' as a person who believes in a thing without
> sufficient reason, without a comprehension of structure, dynamics and
> process.
I would not argue with this.
Have you tried talking to some of the posters on this newsgroup.
The posts of General L Bradford Jr are completely incomprehensible.
Spaceman believes that the velocities of both light and sound are
affected by the velocity of the source.
Keith Stein believes that light moves at a constant velocity relative to
the physical medium through which it is travelling (including space).
You try and convince these people that they are wrong.
>
> Now I am not sure that it is always easy to decide and agree upon what
> constitutes 'sufficient reason' for a belief but I would at least think
> that one ought to be able to defend with logic why they belief
> something. And I'm not so diehard picky that I would necessarily
> reject a person if they said they believed it for intuitive or
> religious revelatory reasons - at least then I could perhaps subject
> those reasons to more scrutiny - and I would not be faced with the
> brick wall that remains when a person cannot give you any reason that
> they believe a thing.
I agree. But many of the posters on the physics newsgroups are quite
unmoved by reason.
> If you want to tell me that fairies told you,
> fine. I personally haven't seen or heard from any fairies. The
> source of your knowledge whatever you claim it to be isn't as important
> as the reliability of the knowledge. Is it logically consistent? Is it
> logically certain?
Yes. Who is claiming otherwise?
> I believe that true
> knowledge, in principle, will let you predict things that have not yet
> been seen or that if seen were not understood correctly at all.
So whom are you arguing with?
> Now I can't say that I believe in relativity nor can I say that I
> disbelieve it completely. In other words, I don't think that it is
> void of all possible quality and that to toss it out wholesale is
> possibly to toss out the baby with the bathwater. In other words, I'm
> hoping there might be a baby in there somewhere. I know there's some
> bathwater and the reason I believe there is some bathwater is that
> there are parts of it which cannot pass the test of sufficient reason.
>
Relativity is not really the problem. It seems that you do not like most
of classical physics.
> If Chris Hillman or John Baez believe in the continuous structures of
> GR and QM, I'd sure like to know why.
What do you mean by this?
> If they believe that light
> exists where it cannot be measured I'd like to know why.
Quite the reverse, I would say. QM says very little about that
which cannot be measured.
Your post seem very reasonable to me, but I think you have not been
around on the sci.physics newsgroups for long enough to see who
the real crackpots are.
Martin Hogbin
Dirk Van de moortel
> Fundamentally, the forces at work here are insecurity, ego and sex.
>
> As an ex-scientific instrumentation sales engineer,
> and entrepreneur, who has interviewed, and intimately known,
> hundreds of mathematicians, physicists and chemists,
> and who has analyzed thousands of their resumes,
> I have observed that most had few ego-building experiences as children.
>
>
> As I suggest a few years ago, this alienation could be solved with
> a "National Sex Care Program". Why should the good looking,
> and talented guys get all the good sex? If the government provided
> a "National Sex Care Program", and forced the good looking gals
> to pay equal attention to the heretofore alienated kids and grownups,
> then they wouldn't be driven to sulk, insult, demean and sometimes kill.
Good looking girls *forced* to have sex with physically unattractive boys?
And you're asking why the government doesn't listen to you?
Did you encourage your two smart, independent, well-adjusted, beautiful
( single ) daughters Julie and Kathy to set an example for the rest of the
nation and have sex with those ugly motherfuckers of next door?
You must be utterly dumb or utterly vile, or some tasty combination of both.
I thought you were a nice but very naive person.
Apparently I was wrong.
Dirk Vdm
Charles Francis
ngton.edu>, Chris Hillman <hil...@math.washington.edu> writes
>Second, I frequently declared what I consider to the defining
>characteristics of cranks, and yes, like other mathematicians who have
>studied this phenomenon, I do consider crankery a thought disorder, and in
>extreme cases, a mild psychosis. I think what I've said is perfectly
>clear and I have nothing to add.
Actually this "thought disorder" is a normal part of the functioning of
any human being. The worst form of the affliction is shown by those who
think they are immune to it.
>Let me repeat an analogy: imagine a man who cannot carry a tune, can't
>read music, has no musical training whatever, has heard of Enrico Caruso
>but has never heard a recording of an opera or anything else in
>"classical" music [sic], and yet firmly believes that he is the greatest
>tenor who has ever lived
I can think of a self-styled mathematician who thinks that.
>, and indeed who will -ever- live. Imagine that
>this man insists upon giving public "performances" in the local park,
>every hour on the hour. Imagine that he continues this practice despite
>all the catcalls from derisive passersby.
And he keeps posting regardless.
> Wouldn't you say such a person
>is mentally ill? He may be deserving of pity in that he feels compelled
>to suffer constant public humiliation,
Yes, we do feel sorry for you.
>but there is no denying that the
>situation has an element of humor.
And we laugh.
>
>> As it is, they (Hillman, Baez, et al) are seemingly wanting to identify
>> crackpottery as a form of mental illness, a psychosis of some sort.
>
>Actually, I don't think Baez ever said crackpots are mentally ill. But
>-I- did.
Thus showing how badly you are afflicted. JB is nowhere near as badly
afflicted.
>
>As for "believing in relativity", whenever the topic of the nature of
>theories in mathematical physics comes up,
... snip, all the way down to../
>. Thus, until I see good evidence to the contrary, I will assume that
>the best theories (most general, most accurate) in physics will
>relativistic and will obey the principle of Lorentz invariance.
Yes, Chris, that is what believing in relativity means. As you explained
it here, you can only believe in theories. Understanding why they hold
seems to be beyond you.
Regards
--
Charles Francis
Charles Francis
<JohnCre...@hotmail.com> writes
>
>Clearly this is because Chris says he is a nice guy.
>You on the other hand seem to take pleasure in your flame wars.
Rest assured, Chris Hillman is an arrogant shit of the first water, and
flaming him can afford a great deal of fully justified pleasure.
The first time I came across him he was flaming me on s.p.r. for posts
on alt.sci.physics which he had not understood, containing deliberate
simplication for the benefit of non-mathematicians and for work which I
had put on lanl, and which he had not read. He had not even have had the
decency to discuss a single point I had made before launching into his
diatribe. When I did take him up on it it transpired that he did not
even recognise the Newtonian potential for gravity, and had made a
reputation as a mathematician on the NGs by showing "new" coordinate
transformations in gtr, with just enough obfuscation to make non
mathematicians think it was terribly clever. As this is precisely
equivalent to doing shears and stretches that schoolboys do at the age
of fourteen, it casts serious doubt on his judgement.
Still, he is a complete buffoon, and it is amusing to take the piss out
of him. It is also rather easy to take the piss out of him, precisely
because he fills his posts with supercilious sneers at others.
Regards
--
Charles Francis
Tom Potter
"Dirk Van de moortel" <dirkvand...@ThankS-NO-SperM.hotmail.com> wrote in
message news:Y9IU6.24860$mR5.2...@afrodite.telenet-ops.be...
> "Tom Potter" <t...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:83EU6.688$Il5....@newsread1.prod.itd.earthlink.net...
> > Fundamentally, the forces at work here are insecurity, ego and sex.
> >
> > As an ex-scientific instrumentation sales engineer,
> > and entrepreneur, who has interviewed, and intimately known,
> > hundreds of mathematicians, physicists and chemists,
> > and who has analyzed thousands of their resumes,
> > I have observed that most had few ego-building experiences as children.
> >
> > [snip rest of typical reasoning based on typical generalizations]
> >
> > As I suggest a few years ago, this alienation could be solved with
> > a "National Sex Care Program". Why should the good looking,
> > and talented guys get all the good sex? If the government provided
> > a "National Sex Care Program", and forced the good looking gals
> > to pay equal attention to the heretofore alienated kids and grownups,
> > then they wouldn't be driven to sulk, insult, demean and sometimes kill.
>
> Good looking girls *forced* to have sex with physically unattractive boys?
> And you're asking why the government doesn't listen to you?
Hey guy, I am just going along with Hillary Clinton.
She wants to force folks who have worked hard and saved,
to give up the fruits of their labor,
to the government to provide National Health Care for "ugly",
lazy, and not so thrifty people.
What's the difference in forcing hard working folks to give up the
fruits of their labor and forcing good looking gals to have sex
with science nerds? And some good looking gals might
like "getting screwed by the government."
jmfb...@aol.com
"Tom Potter" <t...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>Fundamentally, the forces at work here are insecurity, ego and sex.
>
>As an ex-scientific instrumentation sales engineer,
I knew it.
/BAH
<snip>
Charles Francis
<pb...@ix.nospam.com> writes
>On Fri, 08 Jun 2001 14:02:47 -0700, Uncle Al <Uncl...@hate.spam.net>
>wrote:
>
>>Read the list and don't make the same errors again.
>
>I just read the crackpot list at math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
>
>Of course, Baez is probably right about most of these. Usenet,
>especially, is full of crackpots.
>
>But here's a problem that I noticed with point #32, which reads:
>
>"50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no
>concrete testable predictions."
>
>Ummm, last I heard, String Theory, which is claimed to be
>"revolutionary", has no testable predictions. Does that mean everybody
>who's working on string theory is a crackpot? This would include Nobel
>prize winner Steven Weinberg...
That seems fair.
>
>The way that *discoveries* are made in science is not always
>"logical". When the apple fell on Newton's head and he got the idea
>for Universal gravitation, there was nothing logical about that. It
>was merely a flash of intuition that happened to be right....or right
>enough for the time. You can have an idea that turns out to be
>right...or maybe wrong. And when you have that idea, you may think
>it's "revolutionary", and even tell people that you think so. Does
>that neccessarily make you a crackpot? Of course, Newton later turned
>his insights into a testable theory. But was he a crackpot between the
>time of his insight and the time he codified the theory in his
>Principia and it was tested? Wasn't that a period of more than 10
>years?
One difference was that Newton kept his mouth shut. He did not tell
anyone about his theory until after he had testable predictions.
>Yes, there's plenty of crackpots around. The good thing is that
>they're easily identifiable by inconsistencies, etc. These crackpots
>are not a problem, because they have no influence on science anyway,
>so why worry about them?
Actually science has always been stuffed full of crackpots easily
identifiable by inconsistencies etc, and still is. All field theorists
developing qft by the second quantisation of matter waves, and carrying
out infinite renormalisations are crackpots by this token. As these are
almost necessary requirements of top physicists these days it is almost
impossible to become a top physicist unless you are a crack pot.
>Here's the other side of the coin, a problem that you do need to worry
>about, because it *does* have a negative influence on science.
> They ride their
>academic prowess to the top of the scientific pecking order. But if
>you look at their "scientific" work, it's really just a restatement,
>regurgitation, or rearrangement of stuff that's already known. They
>make no new discoveries, or contributions. They got where they are
>simply by being great at taking tests and pumping out papers, period.
After all if they did not just do regurgitation, it would not be a part
of established scientific theory, and would therefore be rejected by the
editor of a journal as being overspeculative. I agree. This is why most
of the established journals are really no better than bog paper.
>These people have a place in science, just like bean counters have a
>place in business. The problem is when they take over the whole show
>and begin to stifle the creative people from doing their work. I
>believe this is the situation in physics now.
Yes.
>The last great creative
>period in theoretical physics ended around 1930. Since then the bean
>counters have gradually taken over, so that now you have a situation
>where a majority of the academic ranks in physics (especially in the
>theory area) is filled with the bean-counter type -- uncreative,
>unoriginal; taking no risks, always flying under the radar. I suspect
>that people like Baez, Hillman, etc. are of the bean-counter variety.
>They're great at restatement, regurgitation, and rearrangement of
>stuff that's already known,
Well Baez is great at that. Hillman is no Baez clone.
> but will never have the kind of insights
>and take the huge risks that are always necessary to make progress.
>The ability to identify crackpots does not guarantee that the
>identifier is any less pathological in his own way. In fact, as I've
>said, I think the crackpots are basically harmless to science.
I'm not so sure. What if some unheralded genius, working outside the
establishment for the reasons you have outlined, cannot make himself
heard for the noise of crackpots. It takes a lot of work to confirm
someone's reasoning and calculation, and if the 'bean counter' to whom
such a task falls is already fed up with real crack pots, he may not
give it a fair review.
>But the
>bureaucratic physicists do real harm when they take over the direction
>and soul of physics, as I think they have done.
Yes.
Regards
--
Charles Francis
Uncle Al
In the future, evrybody will agree with Uncle Al.
The first step (of twelve, of course) is to emplace privately
contracted brothels on all high school and college campuses.
Staffing could include bored middle-aged housewives otherwise
consumed by a corrosive maelstrom of booze, tranks, and soap
operas while their husbands' eyes wander. Teenage pregnancy
would all but vanish. Everybody would be suddenly happy except
the One True Church (pick One, any One). As I remember, the
Church of Rome got kickstarted with the bastard spawn of an
adulterous affair between two different species.
An extraordinary flow of angst and pain would vanish overnight.
Venereal diseases would be kept in check, teenage boys would
learn how to be skilled lovers while it would still do them some
good. The program would be self-supporting.
One caveat: Don't put the government in charge.
Step two: If you don't get good grades you can only get laid by
the local amateur talent.
Chris Hillman
On Sun, 10 Jun 2001, Tom Potter, whom I would seem to have offended at
some point in his life, wrote:
> Fundamentally, the forces at work here are insecurity, ego and sex.
>
> As an ex-scientific instrumentation sales engineer,
> and entrepreneur, who has interviewed, and intimately known,
> hundreds of mathematicians, physicists and chemists,
(LOL)
Wow, that ought to be good for a Guiness record: "most number of sexual
partners who are professional mathematicians, physicists and chemists".
Maybe even, person most responsible for the presumed epidemic of STDs
among mathematicians, physicists and chemists.
> and who has analyzed thousands of their resumes,
> I have observed that most had few ego-building experiences as children.
>
> Kids who are not physically attractive, not physically strong,
> do not excel at competitive sports, and have few ego building experiences
> tend to rebel against parents and society. If they are average or below.
> they tend to become musicians, cops, high school dropouts,
> join motorcycle clubs, etc. If they are above average in intelligence they
> tend to become science nerds.
(ROFL)
Thanks, Tom, you made my day! :-) I am sure that everyone who has ever
accused me of being an arrogant git will be laughing too. :-)
Or anyone who knows that I am, in fact, a software package*, and therefore
would be ineligible for your proposed program.
But I hope you go ahead anyway and start lobbying Congress to start a
federally funded pilot program along the lines you suggest, just because
it would make such screamingly funny stories in News of the Weird! ;-/
Chris Hillman
Home Page: http://www.math.washington.edu/~hillman/
^
|
*LOOKY HERE, TOM!!!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
NOTE: Since I post under my real name, as an anti-spam measure, I have
installed a mail filter which deletes incoming messages not from the
"*.edu" or "*.gov" domains or overseas academic domains.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Bennett Standeven
[...]
>
> The first step (of twelve, of course) is to emplace privately
> contracted brothels on all high school and college campuses.
> Staffing could include bored middle-aged housewives otherwise
> consumed by a corrosive maelstrom of booze, tranks, and soap
> operas while their husbands' eyes wander. Teenage pregnancy
> would all but vanish. Everybody would be suddenly happy except
> the One True Church (pick One, any One). As I remember, the
> Church of Rome got kickstarted with the bastard spawn of an
> adulterous affair between two different species.
>
> An extraordinary flow of angst and pain would vanish overnight.
> Venereal diseases would be kept in check, teenage boys would
> learn how to be skilled lovers while it would still do them some
> good. The program would be self-supporting.
>
> One caveat: Don't put the government in charge.
>
> Step two: If you don't get good grades you can only get laid by
> the local amateur talent.
But what do we do about the female geeks?
slavek.krepelka
> > it is interesting to see that they have tried to round up all the
> > component characteristics of what they call "crackpots" and produce a
> > sort of "ideal crackpot". Now, if someone has any of the components of
> > the ideal crackpot it looks like he is swept right into the bucket.
> >
> > How is this not a form of bigotry?
> >
>
> papers I downlaoded from his website from the St Petersburg Mirror Lake
> Branch library.
>
> Perhaps it is as you say, but it would be no loss for me, as I already know
> what I was looking for, and since then have discovered.
Crackpots? Hehehe.
My Dears,
I have uploaded this little thingme to my new site location at
www3.sympatico.ca/slavek.krepelka/ttf2/fpf.htm
THE FIRST PRINCIPLE OF FORCE
We shall take 100 kg mass and drop it over 29.4m as our quantities
combined with natural gravitational acceleration g. We shall compare few
quantities of
the said object first dropped the 29.4m in one increment and then
dropped in three increments of 9.8m each, totaling again 29.4m.
- A -
Lets assume that we have a flywheel, which can collect kinetic energy of
the single increment free fall as spin.
The object falls through the full 29.4m height in 2 seconds. This means
that the force of gravity acted on the object for the duration of 2
seconds and
imparted work to the object, which caused its acceleration to the final
speed of 19.6m/s at the time of dumping its energy into the flywheel.
We can use the standard formula "0.5 x m x v^2" and calculate that the
theoretical kinetic energy of the object at the bottom of the single
increment free
fall equals 0.5 x 100 x 19.6^2 = 0.5 x 100 x 384.16 = 19208 units of
kinetic energy (KE). In simple terms, the standard formula gives us
19208 KE units
after two seconds of gravitational acceleration of a 100kg body in a
free fall.
- B -
Lets assume that the same flywheel can collect KE from three-increment
fall of the same body.
The body falls 9.8m in each increment, being stopped at the end of each
increment by some mechanical translation arrangement and having its
energy
dumped into the flywheel three times, instead of once.
Therefore, we allow the object to accelerate by free fall three times,
which totals duration of g acting on the body totaling 3 seconds.
Therefore, the work
imparted to the accelerated body should equal 1.5 times that of the
previous single increment free fall.
Using the standard formula 0.5 x m x v^2, we can calculate that the
theoretical kinetic energy of the object at the bottom of each increment
in the
three-increment free fall equals 0.5 x 100 x 9.8^2 = 0.5 x 100 x 96.04 =
4802 units of KE. Multiplied three times for the three increments of
total 29.4m
fall, the total comes to 14406 units of KE.
What we are looking at is a major discrepancy in theoretical kinetic
energy yield from speed of an object. We get 2 seconds of acting force
in the first
single-increment free fall yielding substantially more KE units than the
three seconds of acting force in the three-increment scenario.
Quite logically and without any further math, it can be stated that the
same force "g" will yield the more work, the longer it is allowed to
accelerate a
body, therefore that the kinetic energy yield will be proportionate to
the duration of force acting on a body. In our case, we can expect that
the
three-increment free fall will dump 1.5 times more energy into the
flywheel than the single-increment free fall.
Translated into plain English:
- 1 -
A flywheel constructed so that it gains RPM from three-second
three-increment free fall will lift the same weight in a single
increment lift and theoretically
leave 1/3 of the KE gain to be used as pleased, as long as the time
duration of the lift is again 2 seconds maximum. But, since the
three-increment
dumping can accelerate a properly designed fly wheel to a higher speed
than what is needed for 2 second weight lift, the lift will consume even
less energy
than needed for two second lift, and even more than 1/3 of the kinetic
energy can be collected from the flywheel.
Oh, I forgot. A properly designed flywheel is such, which has as much of
its mass on its periphery as possible. A solid flywheel does not work,
because it
does not gain the speed needed to sufficiently accelerate a bearing ball
up to the loading position.
- 2 -
The physical formula for calculation of kinetic energy of motion of a
body is NFG. Somebody screwed up.
S.D.K. 10 June 2001
My delighted regards, Slavek.
Chris Hillman
On Sun, 10 Jun 2001, Charles Francis wrote (in sci.physics):
> In article <3B2247D2...@hotmail.com>, John Creighton
> <JohnCre...@hotmail.com> writes
> >
> >Clearly this is because Chris says he is a nice guy.
> >You on the other hand seem to take pleasure in your flame wars.
>
> Rest assured, Chris Hillman is an arrogant shit of the first water, and
> flaming him can afford a great deal of fully justified pleasure.
>
> The first time I came across him he was flaming me on s.p.r. for posts
> on alt.sci.physics
Well, Charles, I am certainly surprised to see this absurd "issue" surface
again, because last time I knew, you said in public you were -grateful-
for my comments, and that you were revising the preprint in question
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/physics/9909048
on the basis of such comments!
I suggest that you reread forthwith the posts in question, which I am
confident speak for themselves.
> which he had not understood, containing deliberate simplication for
> the benefit of non-mathematicians and for work which I had put on
> lanl, and which he had not read. He had not even have had the decency
> to discuss a single point I had made before launching into his
> diatribe.
"Diatribe"? Let's read my first post in sci.physics your incorrect claims
regarding in gtr, in which I specifically challenged your claim that "the
mechanism of gravitation is photon exchange", a patently ludricrous claim
which, IIRC, you eventually were forced to withdraw:
=============== BEGIN REPOST ==============
From: Chris Hillman (hil...@math.washington.edu)
Subject: Re: LET inconsistent with SR and refuted by GPS
system
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Date: 1999/09/30
A bit of background: experts on gravitation physics have frequently
remarked in recent years that things are getting boring in the sense that
almost all of the many gravitation theories which were consistent with
known data in the fifties have mostly been eliminated, leaving only gtr
and much more complicated theories which mimic gtr. By application of
Occam's razor, gtr is therefore our gold standard theory of gravitation.
On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Charles Francis wrote:
> The mechanism for relativity, special and general, is photon exchange.
>
> http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/physics/9909048
> Conceptual Foundations of Special and General Relativity
I just had a quick look at this preprint, which appears to claim to derive
-Newton's law of gravity-, and which does not even claim to derive the
many classical predictions of gtr, such as perihelion precession, light
bending, time delay, etc. Therefore I think the title is misleading, at
the very least.
The preprint appears to start from the dubious hypothesis that gravitation
is due to photon exchange, i.e. is an electromagnetic phenomenon. However,
the preprint does not explain how the properties of gravitational
radiation a la general relativity would arise from this hypothesis: how
would you explain the observations of Taylor and Hulse, for instance?
Your discussion of -Gaussian- curvature and your citations suggest that
you have not studied modern differential geometry, the modern theory of
differential manifolds, semiRiemannian geometry, or general relativity a
la Wald or other modern textbooks. Is that correct? Are you a PhD
physicist? If so, what was your specialty? Have you submitted these
preprints to physics journals and if so have any been accepted?
In a word, can you convince me that your preprint is worth taking the time
to read in detail?
Chris Hillman
Home Page: http://www.math.washington.edu/~hillman/personal.html
================ END REPOST ===============
That's a -diatribe-?! ;-/
A few days later I started a thread in sci.physics.research which briefly
mentioned your preprints in passing. I quote this post verbatim; note
that I invited readers of that group to -read your preprints- and -your
then "current" posts in sci.physics- and comment upon my (very bad)
impression of them, which I reported concisely and clearly:
================ BEGIN REPOST ================
From: Chris Hillman (hil...@math.washington.edu)
Subject: Various Dubious Preprints on LANL
Newsgroups: sci.physics.research
Date: 1999/09/30
I am very happy to see that Steve Carlip has taken the time to rebut Tom
van Flandern's infamous paper in Phys. Lett. A, in which TVF claimed that
"gravitational influences" travel faster than light. See
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/9909087
Unfortunately, it seems to me that more unpleasant work along these lines
remains to be done. There are now many preprints on LANL (mostly posted
in 1998-1999) which appear to me to be based on misconceptions about
general relativity--- in some cases very elementary misconceptions! As
far as I know, none of these have been published, and if I am correct in
thinking they are all wrong, they should not be published, but I'd like to
hear what acknowledged experts on gravitation physics have to say.
In decreasing order of sophistication (by my rough estimate):
1. Mitra (http://arXiv.org/find/gr-qc/1/au:+Mitra/0/1/0/past/0/1) has
claimed that the singularity theorems are gtr are wrong (at least, a
casual reading seems to suggest that this is his claim), that
gravitational collapse to a black hole is -not- after all predicted by gtr
(i.e. that Chandrasekhar, Oppenheimer and Synder, Wheeler, Penrose,
Hawking, etc., are all wrong), that the Schwarzschild solution does not
contain a curvature singularity (similar comments), that the standard
interpretation of the Kruskal coordinates in wrong and that timelike
radial infalling geodesics become null at r = 2m, and so on and on. To my
knowledge, none of these papers have been accepted, and Tereno has written
one preprint rebutting the claim about the alleged "unphysical" motion of
infalling particles at r = 2m in the Schwarzschild solution. I haven't
read any of this stuff closely, but casual perusal of some of Mitra's
preprints suggested to me that this work rests upon various serious
misconceptions concerning semiriemannian geometry. Any comments?
2. Quiros (http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/9903041) has claimed that the
standard interpretation of general relativity is wrong and that another
interpretation is possible in which black holes are spurious. I would be
surprised if this is true, but I haven't had time to read this preprint.
Any comments?
3. Loinger (http://arXiv.org/find/gr-qc/1/au:+Loinger/0/1/0/past/0/1) has
claimed that gravitational waves are fictitious, that black holes are
fictitious, and also translated original papers by Schwarzschild and
Levi-Civita which he claims support his arguments. I looked over some of
these and they all appeared to me to be based upon transparent errors
arising from misconceptions about semiriemannian geometry. Any comments?
4. Francis (http://arXiv.org/find/physics/1/au:+Francis/0/1/0/past/0/1)
has claimed that gravitation arises from photon exchange and that the
interpretation of gravitation in terms of curved spacetime is wrong (or at
least misleading). I only glanced at one of these and noticed that
Francis discusses only -Gaussian- curvature and that only in what appeared
to be a naive fashion. See also his recent postings in the unmoderated
newsgroup sci.physics. Any comments?
5. Zakir (http://arXiv.org/find/gr-qc/1/au:+Zakir_Z/0/1/0/all/0/1) has
claimed (apparently) that the Birkhoff theorem is incorrect and that there
are many distinct spherically symmetric vacuums with various lengths of
"throats" and that the curvature singularity is spurious, and has made
similar claims about the Reissner-Nordstrom solution. A quick glance at
some of these preprints suggested to me that he doesn't correctly
understand the meaning of the Schwarzschild radial coordinate, and that a
simple coordinate transformation brings his metrics back into the standard
Schwarzschild form. In other words, it appears to me that these preprints
are based upon errors which could be corrected first year graduate
students in a modern gtr course. Any comments?
6. The web version of a published paper by S. C. Bell, "A numerical
solution of the relativistic Kepler problem", Computers-in-Physics. vol.9,
no.3; May-June 1995; p.281-5, which I looked at a few years back, claimed
among other things that there are stable circular orbits inside r = 3m and
specifically stated that the books by Wald and Chandrasekhar are
incorrect. IIRC, the author set up the geodesic equations as first order
ODEs on flat space, evolved the trajectories using linear algebra (matrix
exponential, I guess), and claimed that the curved spacetime
interpretation of gtr is erroneous. IIRC, the author also claimed that
tensor analysis is unnecessary in gtr and that gtr reduces to linear
algebra or at least to first order ODEs. The web version of this paper
seems to have disappeared, so maybe the author has withdrawn his claims.
I haven't looked up the published version to see if these claims ever
appeared in print. It should be noted that Bell claimed particular
expertise because he has worked on navigating commercial satellites; I
believe he has published papers on the control of the Titan launch vehicle
and other computer programming topics. Any comments?
Several of the above listed authors appear to claim that the curved
spacetime interpretation of general relativity is unnecessary and that
one can regard the theory as a field theory on flat spacetime. Some of
them claim that Steven Weinberg makes this claim on his textbook (which I
haven't examined, although I have studied most of the other modern
textbooks). I think this makes sense only locally (in some neighborhood
of a particular event), but cannot be carried through globally. I haven't
examined these claims very closely, but I guess that they come down to the
claim that every semiriemannian metric admits a single global coordinate
patch which can be transformed to be all of R^4. It seems to me that the
humble sphere S^2 already shows this is not correct and that these authors
have perhaps misunderstood two dimensional Penrose-Carter diagrams, or
have misunderstood what Weinberg actually wrote. Any comments?
I know that public claims that X's papers are wrong can lead to tedious
and very unpleasant correspondence, so I would be happy to receive
comments by private email. I have the impression from the abstracts of
the above papers that several of them were submitted to prestigious
journals but were rejected by the referees.
I myself will not have time to study any of these papers in detail for
several months (at least), and I reiterate that I am not claiming that
these authors are all in error, only that a causal perusal strongly
suggested that possibility to me. I won't have time to study their claims
in detail for several months, at least. Or in other words: I'm not really
a combative person, I am very busy, and I would prefer to avoid arguing
with the above listed authors, but at the same time, it does appear to me
that there are some seriously erroneous preprints "enshrined" on lanl, so
I'm caught on the horns of dilemma. Noone wants to spend time rebutting
incorrect preprints (especially when they are so poorly written, in many
cases, that it is difficult to understand just what the author is really
trying to say), but to some extent this seems like a professional duty and
one must occasionally bite the bullet.
And now a general question: does it matter if wildly erroneous preprints
are submitted to LANL? I think it does, at least slightly, because many
non-scientists, perhaps misled by the common phrase "submit preprint X to
lanl", which suggests some kind of review process, seem to think that any
preprint posted to LANL consitutes an authoritative source, whereas -we-
know that the only review process is a crude robomoderator, and that a
fair number of posted preprints could never pass a stringent peer review
process, i.e. should never appear in print.
Another question: in private email, someone told me that he feels that one
should only post preprints to LANL -after- they have been accepted for
publication, or at least after receiving a favorable referee report. But
someone else suggested that one should post preprints as quickly as one
finishes them, and them revise them later as needed (or even, God forbid,
withdraw them)! So there seems to be a wide range of self-imposed
discipline concerning when it is appropriate to post preprints to LANL. I
ask this with some urgency, since I have been working on a preprint which
concerns a particularly tricky technical point in gtr, and am also looking
for a job, and the more preprints I have in the pipeline, the better! :-)
Chris Hillman
Home Page: http://www.math.washington.edu/~hillman/personal.html
================ END REPOST ==================
This post started a long thread (59 articles are remembered by Google, but
there were actually many more, and IIRC, some new threads were also
spawned by my post). Unfortunately, Google doesn't seem to have any
record of your reply--- I also tried searching Kevin Scaldaferri's archive
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/spr/1999-10/
but couldn't find it there either. However, I replied to your reply as
follows:
=============== BEGIN REPOST =============
From: Chris Hillman (hil...@math.washington.edu)
Subject: Re: Various Dubious Preprints on LANL
Newsgroups: sci.physics.research
Date: 1999/10/04
On 1 Oct 1999, Charles Francis wrote:
> In article <Pine.OSF.4.02A.9909...@goedel1.math.washing
> ton.edu>, Chris Hillman <hil...@math.washington.edu> writes
>
> >4. Francis (http://arXiv.org/find/physics/1/au:+Francis/0/1/0/past/0/1)
> >has claimed that gravitation arises from photon exchange and that the
> >interpretation of gravitation in terms of curved spacetime is wrong (or at
> >least misleading). I only glanced at one of these and noticed that
> >Francis discusses only -Gaussian- curvature and that only in what appeared
> >to be a naive fashion. See also his recent postings in the unmoderated
> >newsgroup sci.physics. Any comments?
>
> No, my claim is that the geometrical relationships found in space-time
> are generated by photon exchange - can you think of a measurement of
> time or space co-ordinate which does not involve the transfer of
> photons? I study the mathematical results of this observation. I show
> that the resulting geometrical relationships are those described by
> Einstein's field equations and lead to gravitation in the usual way.
I think we are talking at cross purposes here. For starters, I think the
use of the term "photon exchange" is injudicious, since it creates the
impression you are claiming that electromagnetism and gravition are due to
the same type of interaction (in terms of QFT or something). The standard
name for what you appear to be discussing is "Schild's ladder".
It would also be helpful if you used a phrase such as "determining the
metrical relations by radar ranging" to emphasize that you are not (I
hope) really claiming that gravitation and electromagnetism are identical
interactions. And because "photon" conjures up the spectre :-) of QFT, in
the context of classical gtr, I strongly advise talking about "a light
beam" or even "a radar pulse" instead of "the world line of a photon".
> I do criticise the use of the word curvature applied to non-Euclidean
> geometry, since I wish to emphasise that internal curvature as discussed
> is not indication of external curvature in higher dimensions.
This appears to be another nonstandard usage which only adds to the
confusion. Perhaps you meant to say "intrinsic curvature" and "extrinsic
curvature", but even after making these substitutions I have no idea what
you are trying to say, other than that it appears to concern embeddings of
spacetime models (four dimensional curved manifolds) in higher dimensional
flat spaces with semiriemannian metrics.
> The manner in which I treat curvature is to characterise it by a single
^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> parameter, which can be identified with red shift.
^^^^^^^^^
This is one thing which told me right off, without even reading your
preprint, that something must be wrong. You just cannot characterize the
curvature of higher dimensional riemannian or semiriemannian manifolds by
one number. The notion you want is the "curvature operator". Or rather,
a set of curvature operators. In the case of two dimensional manifolds,
there is only one curvature operator and it is the generator of an
infinitesimal rotation (riemannian case) or boost (semiriemannian case),
i.e. it is described by a matrix
[0 -a] (riemannian case) [0 a] (semiriemannian case)
[a 0] [a 0]
So indeed, in this case, as Gauss already knew (for the riemannian case),
a scalar -does- fully characterize the intrinsic curvature.
But for three dimensional manifolds, or higher dimensional manifolds, this
accident of low dimensions is -no longer true-. It is a standard exercise
in gtr textbooks to compute the number of algebraically independent
components of the Riemann (or Weyl) tensors at each point of an n
dimensional manifold.
In fact, I am now beginning to suspect you might even have confused
"curvature" and "metric".
> This is not naive, but a genuine simplification of the mathematics of
> general relativity, and is done with the intention of making the
> subject easier to understand.
Einstein himself said it best: one must always strive to make things "as
simple as possible, but no simpler!" In this case, it seems to me that
you have literally oversimplified the situation. You appear to be
claiming that curvature in an arbitrary 3+1 signature spacetime (or at
least, a solution to the field equation in the sense that the Einstein
tensor agrees with a matter tensor which is reasonable in terms of
classical physics) can be completely described by a single scalar field,
and that just is not so. A tensor field is required. See for example the
gtr textbook by Wald.
> It was not my own original observation that this can be done, though I
> cannot now find the original reference where I read the idea. I
> believe it is well known to relativists and I have checked that it is
> the case.
Well, either you misunderstood, or you misremember. You seem to be
checking again right now, and the check is failing. Warning bells are
clanging and red lights are flashing!*
I have a very simple common sense which applies in cases like this: when
person A (entirely unknown to me) says that he has a theory Y which
drastically simplifies theory X, a subtle theory with which I happen to
have a close familiarity (in the sense of making lots of computations in
this theory on a daily basis over the past year, and in the sense of
having closely studied some standard textbooks), my first question is:
"does A understand theory X?" In particular, "can A carry out standard
computations using theory X?" If A can convince me that he really does
have a solid grasp of theory X, -especially- if he can convince he is
fluent in making computations in that theory and correctly interpreting
the results of his computations, -then- a "catastrophe" in the sense of
Thom occurs ("catastrophe": another case of really bad terminology, but
never mind) and I am go from assuming that A simply doesn't understand the
phenomena treated by theory X, and having no interest in reading A's paper
on Y, to being suddenly intensely interested in reading all about Y.
Presumably that is the outcome you desire in this interaction, multiplied
by all the tens of thousands of other students around the globe who have
studied gtr at the graduate level.
> The characterisation of curvature by red shift removes from
> non-Euclidean geometry all the arbitrary qualities of coordinate
> systems in Riemann's treatment and, in my view, makes it much easier
> to understand the underlying notion.
Well, one of the many(!) things you fail to make clear is whether you are
really talking about -arbitrary- 3+1 manifolds, or even -arbitrary- exact
solutions in gtr (in which case, something is wrong) or whether you are
talking about a very special spacetime. But even the case of
Schwarzschild spacetime, you just cannot characterize the curvature by a
single scalar field.
[...pause...]
You know it would -really- help if people who attempt to write preprints
on gtr would first master the content of a book like MTW or WALD, if for
no other reason than to avoid misusing technical terminology like
"curvature". After all this grief, it finally occurs to me that perhaps
what you are groping toward is another form of the Schwarzschild metric
which I derived as one of my many computational exercises earlier this
year (and posted all about my little find on sci.physics.relativity).
To wit: a standard exercise in gtr is to study the Rindler metric
ds^2 = -x^2 dt^2 + dx^2 + dy^2 + dz^2
This is of course locally isometric to flat spacetime, and globally can be
"extended" to Minkowski spacetime (in terms of the standard cartesian
coordinates, the Rindler metric lives on a "double wedge"). The "lines"
x, y, z constant are the world lines of a family of accelerating
observers. (Each observer has constant acceleration, but different
observers, in general, have difference accelerations. Exercise: find the
invariant decomposition of the congruence of timelike curves, into
expansion sclar, shear tensor, and vorticity tensor [silly, I know!] as in
Hawking and Ellis.)
The complementary "double wedge" can be described by Kasner coordinates
ds^2 = -dt^2 + t^2 dx^2 + dy^2 + dz^2
It is a good exercise to carefully solve the geodesic equations in both
cases and compare the results with the curves you get by transforming
straight lines in cartesian coordinates into the Rindler or Kasner
coordinates.
One might ask for analogous coordinates for Schwarzschild vacuum. Indeed
ds^2 = -w^2 dt^2 + 16 m^2 dw^2/(1-w^2)^4
+ 4m^2/(1-w^2)^2 (du^2 + sin^2 u dv^2)
describes the Schwarzschild vacuum in Rindler coordinates.
Now, can you tell me what is the interpretation of the coordinate w? Think
hard--- don't be too glib about this. Next, can you tell me (it should be
easy to read this right off the form of the metric) the required
transformation back to the standard Schwarzschild coordinates? Next, can
you write down an appropriate metric Ansatz for these Rindler coordinates
and solve the field equation to recover the metric given above? No fair
cheating and consulting my post!
Chris Hillman (who is -really- too busy to argue anymore about this)
Home Page: http://www.math.washington.edu/~hillman/personal.html
*no off color blueshift jokes, please!
=============== END REPOST ==============
You replied on 1999/10/05 but Google (and Scaldaferri's archive) seems to
have lost my reply to your reply. However, I think the above repost shows
very clearly that I -had- read enough of your paper to know that you had
said a number of things which were -flat out wrong-, and further things
which were -highly misleading-.
For example, I found the following 1999/10/03 post to sci.physics, and
several subsequent posts, which contain detailed and specific critiques,
and which make it perfectly clear that I had read your preprint carefully
enough to spot numerous -serious errors- and -highly misleading
statements- concerning gtr:
========= BEGIN REPOSTS =============
From: Chris Hillman (hil...@math.washington.edu)
Subject: Re: Speed of Light in a Gravitational Field
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Date: 1999/10/03
On Sun, 3 Oct 1999, Charles Francis wrote:
> Yes, it is easy to be inexact in these postings. As a general rule I
> make all my statements in the context of natural metric in which the
> speed of light is (locally) always 1. I try to be more precise in my
> papers.
>
> Conceptual Foundations of Special and General Relativity
> http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/physics/9909051
You say your papers are expository, intended to present the core ideas of
gtr in a form (non-tensorial) which will be easier for undergraduates to
grasp. The trouble is, a glance at your preprint shows you are terribly
confused about exactly what you have done.
The title implies you intend to discuss the conceptual foundations of both
str and -gtr-. But the abstract reads:
> The k-calculus was advocated by Hermann Bondi as a means of explaining
> special relativity using only GCSE level mathematics and ideas. We
> review the central derivations, using proofs which are only a little
> more elegant than those in Bondi's books, and extend his development
> to include the scalar product and the mass shell condition. As used by
> Bondi, k is the Doppler red shift, and we extend the k calculus to
> include the gravitational red shift and give a derivation of Newton's
> law of gravity using only 'A' level calculus and basic quantum
> mechanics.
So in the abstract, you do not mention gtr at all; rather, you claim that
you will derive "Newton's law of gravity", which can only mean the inverse
square force law.
But then in the second paragraph of section one, you say "The purpose of
the present paper is to show that the laws of special and general
relativity can be derived from a straightforward treatment of measure
which does require either the assumption of a manifold, or an
understanding of the tensor calculus..." and you do not mention "Newton's
law of gravity" in the entire first section at all! If we look to see
what equation you claim to have derived, we find it is
E = E_0 (1 + GM/s)
which is neither the field equation of gtr
G_(ab) = 8 pi T_(ab)
nor Newton's law of gravitation! Rather, it appears to be a gravitational
redshift formula.
So it is not necessary to actually read the preprint to see that you are
terribly confused about what the paper is really about, and when the
teacher is terribly confused, the students are in serious trouble!
It is -no less important- that the author of an -expository- paper have
-mastered- his subject that it is for the author of a -research- paper.
Indeed, researchers can easily tell when someone one is spouting BS (as
you are), but students can rarely detect the conceptual errors, although
they can usually sense that the "teacher" doesn't know what the heck he's
talking about, if the teacher is sufficiently confused, which is the case
here.
In your postings, you have compounded your sins by making further wildly
inaccurate claims about the nature of general relativity. You have not
only misused a half dozen technical terms, which is sure to confuse
students who may be trying to read a modern gtr textbook, but you have
presented an absurd caricature of gtr which in fact bears almost no
relationship to the real theory.
In a posting to sci.physics.research, I stated:
>> 4. Francis (http://arXiv.org/find/physics/1/au:+Francis/0/1/0/past/0/1)
>> has claimed that gravitation arises from photon exchange and that the
>> interpretation of gravitation in terms of curved spacetime is wrong (or
>> at least misleading). I only glanced at one of these and noticed that
>> Francis discusses only -Gaussian- curvature and that only in what
>> appeared to be a naive fashion. See also his recent postings in the
>> unmoderated newsgroup sci.physics. Any comments?
You replied:
> No, my claim is that the geometrical relationships found in space-time
> are generated by photon exchange - can you think of a measurement of
> time or space co-ordinate which does not involve the transfer of
> photons? I study the mathematical results of this observation.
In other words, you here claim only to derive the -metric- structure of
spacetime from a generalized k-calculus. Even this claim is wrong (see
below), but in other posts you stated
> The mechanism for relativity, special and general, is photon exchange.
and
> Not really. The photon is instrumental in generating the geometrical
> properties of space, not the other way round.
which clearly suggest that you believe that "photon exchange" actually
-causes- the metric structure, and this is absurd. In particular, it
suggests you have no inkling of the physically very different
characteristics of electromagnetic and gravitational radiation, that you
have no idea of physical significance of the Ricci and Weyl curvature
tensors in gtr, and indeed that you do not understand the distinction
between curvature and metric. You claim that "photon exchange" is the
"mechanism" with "generates the geometry" is absurd. You have a lot to
learn about gravitational radiation and the physical mechanism by which
matter here can affect distant matter across a vacuum.
> I show that the resulting geometrical relationships are those
> described by Einstein's field equations and lead to gravitation in the
> usual way.
In fact, you have not derived Einstein's field equations; indeed you could
not do so, because your claim that curvature can be characterized by a
single scalar is absurd. This is true only in two dimensions; it is a
standard exercise in gtr to show that the Riemann tensor in 3+1 has twenty
algebraically independent components, ten for the Ricci (or Einstein)
curvature which is due to the immediate presence of nongravitational
mass-energy, and ten for the Weyl tensor, which is the part of the
curvature in which disturbances can propagate for long distances through a
vacuum, as gravitational radiation. This radiation is -completely-
different in character from EM radiation.
Going back to your weaker claim that you can characterize the -metric-
structure of spacetimes in gtr in terms of your generalized k-calculus,
you say:
> As a general rule I make all my statements in the context of natural
> metric in which the speed of light is (locally) always 1.
If you had bothered to write out this "natural metric", the absurdity of
your claim that every spacetime possesses such a metric would become
clear. You are clearly talking about what the rest of the world calls a
metric which is conformally equivalent to Minkowski spacetime:
ds^2 = f(t,x,y,z)(-dt^2 + dx^2 + dy^2 + dz^2)
= g(t,z,r,theta) (-dt^2 + dz^2 + dr^2 + r^2 (d theta)^2)
= etc.
But is -completely incorrect- to claim that every spacetime has a
coordinate patch in which the metric takes this form. Indeed, such a
patch would be -conformally flat-, which is -equivalent- (this is a well
known theorem, proven in the textbook by Wald) to saying that Weyl tensor
-vanishes-. So, you are only considering spacetimes in which the only
curvature is Ricci curvature! That is, either they are flat (locally
isometric to the Minkowski vacuum) or else they are nonvacuum spacetimes.
In either case, there is -no long-range gravitational interaction at all-
in such a spacetime (or more accurately, because of the symmetrical
distribution of mass-energy, all the long range interactions cancel out).
You say
> I am not using photons to generate null geodesics as such, though that
> would follow. The claim is that the metric relations we observe (simple
> measurement of time and space co-ordinate are determined by photon
> exchange, by analogy with radar.
If you used "radar-ranging" rather than "photon-exchange" (inappropriate
in a discussion of a classical field theory, if you want to avoid
confusing students), you -could- investigate how much information you
could recover by studying redshifts and blueshifts. But as I have pointed
out above, your assumption of the existence of a "natural metric" is
-incorrect- in general (in particular, it fails completely for the
Schwarzschild vacuum), and even for the very special class of conformally
flat spacetimes (such as the FRW solutions), you have not even explained
how you propose to recover the conformal factor f(t,x,y,z) by radar
ranging, as Steve Carlip pointed out.
> An intelligent layman with a grounding in school level algebra can
> probably understand the special theory of relativity in about two
> hours. No calculus required. The general theory will take a little
> longer, but still only simple calculus and no tensors.
This is an absurd underestimation of the subtleties involved. I have
already pointed out that you have an absurdly oversimplified notion of
"curvature" (indeed, you appear not to recognize the distinctions between
"curvature" and "metric" and "connection"), and in all your postings it is
clear that you have no inkling of the fundamental local versus global
distinction in differential geometry.
> The expert will have been taught at college to manipulate the
> equations, and may be very good at it but unless he takes the trouble
> to learn it as an intelligent layman does, he will understand nothing.
Unfortunately for you, it is plain that you are the one who understands
nothing about gtr. The grieveous errors I have already mentioned are not
all. You say:
> I do criticise the use of the word curvature applied to non-Euclidean
> geometry, since I wish to emphasise that internal curvature as
> discussed is not indication of external curvature in higher
> dimensions.
Here you presumably mean "intrinsic curvature" and "extrinsic curvature".
But in your papers you refer only to the classical theory of surfaces. You
use the words "Gaussian curvature" but appear to have little idea what
this means or how it relates to the Riemann curvature tensor in higher
dimensions. Similar remarks apply to the extrinsic curvature tensor.
You say:
> The manner in which I treat curvature is to characterise it by a
> single parameter, which can be identified with red shift. This is not
> naive, but a genuine simplification of the mathematics of general
> relativity, and is done with the intention of making the subject
> easier to understand.
This is not merely "naive", it is -flagrantly incorrect-! Einstein
himself said it best: one must always strive to make a theory "as simple
as possible, but no simpler". Your "expository papers" are not talking
about gtr, but about an absurd caricature of that theory which bears
almost no recognizable relation to it. Nor is your "theory" even a real
theory distinct from gtr. In particular, you have not shown how to
reproduce the classical results of gtr such as light bending, the
precession of the perihelion of Mercury, Shapiro time delay, etc.
Indeed, I am sure you cannot do that, because you are claiming that a
scalar theory of gravity can reproduce those results. It is a standard
exercise in gtr textbooks to show that a scalar potential theory cannot
work, a vector potential theory cannot work, and a tensor potential theory
on flat spacetime cannot work (it does give the right weak-field
predictions, but it is inconsistent). See for MTW, where it is explained
by fixing the problems with the tensor theory one is ultimately led to the
full field equations and to curved spacetime.
What you have done is analogous to a history teacher who solemnly explains
to his students that the American Revolution was a minor incident in which
angry colonials armed with spears and led by a masked marauder called
Robin Hood stole heroin shipments from Canadian trucks on the Kabul
Highway, which led to the invasion of Vermont by NATO forces which
restored order, brought the Americans back under the rule of the Queen of
Sheba, and restored Serbo-Croatian as the official language.
This kind of "teaching" is actively harmful.
> It was not my own original observation that this can be done, though I
> cannot now find the original reference where I read the idea.
And no wonder, because it is hilariously incorrect.
> I believe it is well known to relativists and I have checked that it
> is the case.
You either misheard or misremember what you are told. You seem to be
checking your "facts" again right now--- and they aren't checking out!
> The characterisation of curvature by red shift removes from
> non-Euclidean geometry all the arbitrary qualities of coordinate
> systems in Riemann's treatment and, in my view, makes it much easier
> to understand the underlying notion.
Read my lips: it takes a fourth rank tensor field, the Riemann tensor
(with twenty algebraically independent components at each event) to
characterize -curvature-. Relative to a congruence of timelike curves (a
family of neutral test particle) the Riemann tensor can be decomposed into
(a tensor built from) the Einstein tensor (ten components, which can be
broken down into a scalar, a vector, and three-dimensional stress tensor),
and the Weyl tensor, another fourth rank tensor field, which splits into
two three dimensional traceless tensors (five components each).
In this decomposition, the Einstein tensor represents the (averaged)
Gaussian curvatures of two dimensional sections which is due to the
immediate presence of nongravitational field energy. The Weyl tensor
represents the Gaussian curvature of two dimensional sections which is due
to the long range interactions via gravity between distant conglomerations
of matter. The "electrogravitic" part of the Weyl tensor corresponds to
the Newtonian "Coulomb" field, but represents tidal distortions (analogous
to those which occur in Newtonian gravity), not a vector force field in
the Newtonian sense. The "magnetogravitic" part of the Weyl tensor
corresponds to relativistic corrections to the quasi-Newtonian tidal
forces.
An analogous decomposition, relative to the same congruence of timelike
curves, splits the electromagnetic field tensor into the electric and
magnetic vector fields. Here too, the electric field may have a "Coulomb
character" and then the magnetic field may be regarded as relativistic
corrections. It is entirely possible that the field energy of the
electromagnetic field might be the sole cause of Einstein curvature, in
which case we might typically have electromagnetic radiation mixed with
gravitational radiation.
Actually, this is somewhat oversimplified (I'm slurring over a local
versus global distinction in some the analogies), but it is a heck of a
lot more accurate that your completely incorrect assertions.
You claim
> that gravity is to electromagnetism quantum electrodynamics as tidal
> forces are to the inverse square law.
That is, you appear to claim that gravitation arises from QED. That is
utterly absurd and you ought to know better. EM radiation can directly
cause Einstein curvature in gtr, and backreaction might then create
gravitational radiation, which is entirely distinct from electromagnetic
radiation. But there are other ways in gravitational influences can
arise, for instance by throwing a baton in the air.
Exercise: estimate the amount of gravitational radiation produced by
throwing and catching a baton, according to a classical field theory,
namely gtr. Estimate the number of gravitons producted.
> As I recally Misner Thorne Wheeler say that at least six dimensions
> (in a simple case) and possibly many more would be required to embed
> space-time in higher dimensional space.
This is another case where you fail to distinguish between local and
global embeddings. See for instance
Clarke, CJS, (1970) 'On the global isometric
embedding of pseudo-Riemannian manifolds',
Proc Roy Cos Lond A Vol 314, pp. 417--428.
The upper bounds are not sharp, but not large. It is essential to realize
that to embed a manifold with tangent spaces E^(1,3) you will need to use
E^(p,q) with p, q both greater than one, except in very special cases like
the FRW models. For the Schwarzschild solution, E^(2,4) suffices.
> I have also seen comments that it is impossible to do this even in
> principle for the actual geometry of space-time.
That's ludicrous. It is very well known that every riemannian or
semiriemannian manifold can be globally embedded in a finite dimensional
euclidean or psuedoeuclidean space.
> In practice, because the mathematical definition does not require
> higher dimension, we may conclude that higher dimensions are
> meaningless.
This is the -only- thing you seem to have right.
> It is better to find ways of thinking about curvature which avoid the
> analogy with curved 2-d surfaces in 3-d space.
This is an odd comment, because in your preprint you discuss only the
Gaussian theory of two dimensional surfaces in E^3.
You horrify me with your comment:
> They have been submitted for publication.
Where? I would like to make an "over the transom" referee report to the
editor. Your papers are -extreme- examples of erroneous "expositions"
which entirely misrepresent an important and subtle theory, and they
should certainly not be published.
Now let's change the focus. You are in my "Hall of Shame" and you want to
get out. Instead of talking about what is wrong with your "expository
preprints" (almost everything you say), let's talk about what you can do
to correct the situation. First, you must throw out your present
preprints. They cannot be simply rewritten to be worthwhile, because
almost everything you say is dead wrong. Next, you -must- make a thorough
study of a good modern textbook like Wald, and master the tensor
techniques, including the decompositions I mentioned (see Hawking and
Ellis for these). This won't take you a week; I expect it will take you a
year to do enough exercises (get the problem book by Lightman et al. and
get MTW) to really have mastered gtr properly, which is clearly (is it
not?) a prerequisite for trying to teach young students what gtr is all
about. Do not omit to learn about orthonormal frames (anholonomic bases).
Finally, after mastering gtr and doing lots of computations with index
gymnastics and with coordinate free notations, revisit your k-calculus.
Carefully work out exactly what properties of spacetime you can recover
from radar ranging. Now that you know the lingo and the core concepts of
gtr, you'll be in a much better position to write an expository paper
explaining what astronomers can discover using redshift data alone.
There is just one problem: gtr is a subtle theory, and your paper will be
too challenging for most students. But at least it stands a chance of
presenting a correct exposition of (what you will find to be) a small part
of gtr.
Here's something to bear in mind: why must you master the standard tensor
calculus approach (including null tetrad, anholonomic bases, and
coordinate free notations) to gtr before writing an expository paper about
gtr? Why is there no short cut? The simple answer is that gtr is a very
subtle theory and you will (and obviously do) have serious conceptual
misunderstandings about what the theory really has to say about
gravitation physics, unless you have made a thorough study.
You should probably also learn about the Nordstrom and Whitehead theories
of gravitation, and study their failures to account for all of the
classical (and confirmed) predictions of gtr. I suspect that your k
calculus idea will turn out to be an oversimplification of a scalar theory
of gravity (which don't agree with observation), not an oversimplification
of gtr (which does agree with observation).
I have a very simple common sense which applies in cases like this: when
person A (entirely unknown to me) says that he has a theory Y which
drastically simplifies theory X, a subtle theory with which I happen to
have a close familiarity (in the sense of making lots of computations in
this theory on a daily basis over the past year, and in the sense of
having closely studied some standard textbooks), my first question is:
"does A understand theory X?" In particular, "can A carry out standard
computations using theory X?" If A can convince me that he really does
have a solid grasp of theory X, -especially- if he can convince he is
fluent in making computations in that theory and correctly interpreting
the results of his computations, -then- a "catastrophe" in the sense of
Thom occurs ("catastrophe": another case of really bad terminology, but
never mind) and I am go from assuming that A simply doesn't understand the
phenomena treated by theory X, and having no interest in reading A's paper
on Y, to being suddenly intensely interested in reading all about Y.
Presumably that is the outcome you desire in this interaction, multiplied
by all the tens of thousands of other students around the globe who have
studied gtr at the graduate level.
Here are some specific suggestions you can probably use (after you have
mastered gtr and played around with some of its competitors which fell by
the wayside in 1919) to make something out of your k-calculus.
A standard exercise in gtr is to study the Rindler metric
ds^2 = -x^2 dt^2 + dx^2 + dy^2 + dz^2
This is of course locally isometric to flat spacetime, and globally can be
"extended" to Minkowski spacetime (in terms of the standard cartesian
coordinates, the Rindler metric lives on a "double wedge"). The "lines"
x, y, z constant are the world lines of a family of accelerating
observers. (Each observer has constant acceleration, but different
observers, in general, have difference accelerations. Exercise: find the
invariant decomposition of the congruence of timelike curves, into
expansion scalar, shear tensor, and vorticity tensor [silly, I know!] as in
Hawking and Ellis.)
Exercise: find the Unruh horizon and discuss the Unruh radiation.
The complementary "double wedge" can be described by Kasner coordinates
ds^2 = -dt^2 + t^2 dx^2 + dy^2 + dz^2
Exercise: carefully solve the geodesic equations in both cases and compare
the results with the curves you get by transforming straight lines in
cartesian coordinates into the Rindler or Kasner coordinates.
Exercise: write down the Fermat metric for the Rindler patch. Use this to
say in simple terms what the trajectories of light beams look like. (See
Frankel, Gravitational Curvature, for the Fermat metric.)
One might ask for analogous coordinates for Schwarzschild vacuum. Indeed
ds^2 = -w^2 dt^2 + 16 m^2 dw^2/(1-w^2)^4
+ 4m^2/(1-w^2)^2 (du^2 + sin^2 u dv^2)
describes the Schwarzschild vacuum in Rindler coordinates.
Exercise: find the invariant decomposition of the e_t flow, in the obvious
orthonormal frame, into expansion scalar, shear tensor, and vorticity
tensor. What does the last tell you about orthogonal hyperslices?
Exercise: compute the three dimensional Riemann tensor of the orthogonal
hyperslices. What does this tell you about the e_t observers? How are
they related to Schwarzschild observers?
Exercise: explain the interpretation of w in this coordinate system. Be
careful to specify which observers are involved in your interpretation!
Exercise: find the Schwarzschild horizon and discuss the Hawking
radiation.
Exercise: read off from the metric the transformation back to
Schwarzschild coordinates and verify that this metric does indeed describe
the Schwarzschild exterior vacuum.
Exercise: write down an appropriate metric Ansatz corresponding to these
coordinates, and solve the vacuum Field equation to obtain this coordinate
patch. Explain why it was inevitable that you would recover the
Schwarzschild exterior vacuum in different coordinates.
Exercise: explain what part of the Kruskal extension is covered by the
coordinate patch above.
Exercise: analyze the geodesic equations using the effective potential
method, and discuss null geodesics using the Fermat metric.
Chris Hillman
Home Page: http://www.math.washington.edu/~hillman/personal.html
From: Chris Hillman (hil...@math.washington.edu)
Subject: Re: On the question of Spacetime Curvature
Newsgroups: sci.physics.research
Date: 1999/10/07
On 6 Oct 1999, Charles Francis wrote:
[the quoted paragraph was written by me]
> >Other people who know a lot (a lot!) more than me about this will probably
> >comment, but since I seem to have initiated an interesting discussion of
> >whether spacetime curvature is "real", my understanding is that there is
> >good reason to think that classical gtr, -including- the curved spacetime
> >structure, must emerge from a quantum theory, but one which is far more
> >subtle than QFT on flat spacetime. Cf. "the it from the bit" discussions
> >of Wheeler in various books/articles.
>
> It's funny, I thought you were suggesting that this was out of the
> question in regard of the work I have done towards demonstrating it.
I was very clear in what I said about your preprint "On the Conceptual
Foundations of str and gtr" in this group and in sci.physics. I said that
I understand you to claim this is an expository paper intended to explain
the core concepts of gtr in a way which would make that theory more
accessible to undergraduates. I pointed out that you keep changing your
mind about what the preprint is intended to accomplish, and that when the
teacher is terribly confused, the students are in big trouble. I also
pointed that specific claims you made in sci.physics postings are flat out
wrong. In particular, curvature cannot be characterized by a scalar
except in two dimensions. Steve Carlip and I also pointed out that your
"natural metric" is a very special one, which doesn't even include the
Schwarzschild vacuum metric. I pointed out numerous ways in which your
preprint presents a -completely misleading- and even -inaccurate- portrait
of "the core concepts of gtr".
In my sci.phyics posting (a longer version of the post which appeared
here), I remarked "Let's change the focus from what is wrong with your
preprint to what can be done to make it right" (words to that effect) and
I then added -extensive- specific suggestions for further investigation
which should enable you to make something of your extended k-calculus,
which as I said isn't neccessarily a bad idea. But to make it work, i.e.
to have a -correct- paper, you'll need to master gtr first, with all the
tensors you dislike so much.
There is a chateau in France where you have to climb up before you can
climb down to get to one room. An architectural metaphor for what you
will need to do. You'll need to master the full theory of classical gtr
to understand all the subtleties and why your extended k-calculus can only
tell part of the story, and perhaps even then only for a certain class of
manifolds. Then when you write your paper, you'll be able to say accurate
what your calculus can and cannot do.
> If one formulates qm as an abstract theory of measurement, in which
> co- ordinates are merely sets of possible results of measurement, not
> part of a spacetime background for the theory, then builds qft on
> that, one does get a version of qft which is not dependent of flat
> space-time, and in which curvature is necessary.
My criticism was of claims such as "the mechanism for gravitation is
photon exchange", and other things which are flat out wrong. The claim
that gtr can be interpreted as funny fields living on flat spacetime is
also wrong, except for a very special case of spacetimes, as many posts
here have explained.
The advice I gave you in my sci.physics posting is good advice and I hope
you choose to withdraw your preprint, study up, and try again once you
have mastered classical gtr (something worth doing for many reasons quite
apart from your natural desire to make something true of your extended
k-calculus, which is not neccessarily a bad idea--- but if you study gtr,
you'll find that you cannot use it to make the sweeping claims you have
made in your preprint, which is so inaccurate that it needs to be
completely scrapped. You'll need to start all over once you've mastered
gtr and write a completely new preprint. If you follow my advice, you'll
probably come up with something which is both correct and interesting, but
it won't be readable by many students, because this is subtle stuff, as
you'll discover. You'll need to change your target audience to physics
teachers and graduate students.
I'm AFK starting NOW for about a week-- this is an interesting thread so I
hope it doesn't die in my absence.
Chris Hillman
Home Page: http://www.math.washington.edu/~hillman/personal.html
Note: due to time pressure, the quotes above are approximate, but reflect
the spirit of what I said and what you said.
From: Chris Hillman (hil...@math.washington.edu)
Subject: Re: On the question of Spacetime Curvature
Newsgroups: sci.physics.research
Date: 1999/10/18
On 9 Oct 1999, Charles Francis wrote:
[snip stuff comments on my critique of his preprint "On the Conceptual
Foundations of Special and General Relativity"; the LANL search engine
isn't working for me right now or I'd add the gr/qc reference]
> I think you have sent a post which I have missed. Please could you
> forward a copy as I am sure it will be helpful.
You should have no problem finding this by searching Deja News, with
"Author" set to my email address and with "Forum" set to sci.physics, but
in any case my advice is rendered moot by the coincidental appearance of a
quite interesting and very well written preprint on a genuine (but
necessarily "wrong") scalar theory of gravity has just appeared on LANL:
http://xxx.LANL.gov/abs/gr-qc/9910032
Relativistic Scalar Gravity: A Laboratory for Numerical Relativity
Authors: Keith Watt, Charles W. Misner (University of Maryland)
My constructive advice can now be boiled down very succinctly:
1. Study MTW, taking care to carefully do the exercises in the chapter on
scalar, vector, and tensor theories of gravity,
2. Study the Watt-Misner preprint very carefully and notice how the
authors make it clear at the outset their rationale for studying a theory
of gravity which does not agree with observation and experiment, and
notice how in the text they explain clearly and concisely exactly where
their theory agrees with gtr and where it disagrees with gtr (and
experimental results), even listing the PPN parameters. Note too that
they explain clearly and concisely that their theory assumes a different
"prior geometry" from your prior geometry, and has a preferred frame, and
has other physical/mathematical features which the authors carefully point
out. They even explain very nicely the relationship of their theory to
other, better known theories of gravity which agree with most (but not
quite all) of the "classical tests" of gtr, such as the theory of Ni and
the Rosen two-field theory. Note too that they solve their (delightfully
simple!) field equation to find the field of a point mass (providing a
simple but nontrivial solution is the simplest way of showing that a field
theory is probably self-consistent), and they clearly and concisely
explain how their "quasi-Schwarzschild solution" is almost
indistinguishable from the real thing. In particular, they discuss the
effective potential (the geodesics are almost the same) and they even
compute the gravitational radiation from an inspiraling mass and compare
with the Schwarzschild solution. Note too that they admit that they have
been unable of find "cosmological" solutions in their theory, so they even
give a good "warmup problem" for some graduate student. It's a short,
very carefully and well written preprint, and I think many will be
surprised just how far one can get with such a simple theory. Indeed, in
this sense, their paper is also a very nice piece of pedagogy, because (to
my mind) it shows just how important the idea of "no prior geometry"
really is in the foundation of gtr.
[An aside for the parallel discussion here of flat spacetime
interpretations of gtr: the Watt-Misner theory might be called a theory
with "conformally flat space" and a preferred frame, and notice that their
theory begins to disagree very considerably with gtr near the exterior of
the event horizon of their quasi-Schwarzschild solution. This is the sort
of behavior I would expect: theories with prior geometries and an
incorrect model of frame dragging must fail near the horizons of black
holes.]
I'll repeat something I said earlier: trying to figure out how far you can
get using k-calculus on a curved spacetime is not at all a bad idea
(though it might very well already have been done, so you should check the
literature). However, you should take the Watt-Misner preprint as your
exemplar, both in terms of what you must figure out (the PPN parameters,
how your scalar theory relates to other gravitation theories) before
writing a completely new preprint, and also as a model of the right way to
write up a preprint describing a new scalar theory of gravity, beginning
by giving a clear rationale for discussing a theory which disagrees with
experimental results.
Chris Hillman
Home Page: http://www.math.washington.edu/~hillman/personal.html
From: Chris Hillman (hil...@math.washington.edu)
Subject: Re: EPR Paradox - explanation requested
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Date: 1999/10/21
On Thu, 21 Oct 1999, Charles Francis wrote:
[snip]
> My background is in qed, and while I can see clearly how curvature
> arises in the model my exposition is weak, except as a conceptual
> introduction.
[snip]
> I find it more surprising that after more than seventy years of
> relativity and quantum mechanics there are so few people who seem able
> to ask a correct set of questions, and think clearly enough about them
> to find correct answers, less surprising if there are differences in the
> actual questions asked.
[snip]
> http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/physics/9909048
Charles Francis
> Conceptual Foundations of Special and General Relativity
Abstract: "The k-calculus was advocated by Hermann Bondi as a means of
explaining special relativity using only GCSE level mathematics and ideas.
We review the central derivations, using proofs which are only a little
more elegant than those in Bondi's books, and extend his development to
include the scalar product and the mass shell condition. As used by Bondi,
k is the Doppler red shift, and we extend the k calculus to include the
gravitational red shift and give a derivation of Newton's law of gravity
using only 'A' level calculus and basic quantum mechanics."
I'll try again. You (Charles Francis) admit that your exposition is
"weak" and that paper is "conceptual" rather than "mathematical". I say
again that it is so deeply flawed that you should simply withdraw it.
You promise to say something deep about -gtr- in the title, but in fact
you don't say anything about that theory at all. As far as I can tell,
you do not even succeed in "deriving" -Newton's- law of gravity from your
modified k-calculus, which is the claim you make in the introduction.
[Long aside to other readers: the k-calculus is a well known and useful
formalism in str, and Hermann Bondi has enjoyed a long and very productive
career; ironically, his name figures prominently in a preprint I myself am
currently working on, which concerns gravitational waves, and the
k-calculus appears briefly in my other preprint, on warp drive metrics.
Bondi's greatest contribution to gtr may be that he enthusiastically
promulgated an ingenious argument, due to Richard Feynman, which finally
convinced all doubters that gravitational radiation is indeed a prediction
of gtr; this happened about 1960. As often happens in science, most
people now think the argument originated with Bondi :-/ The true story
appears to be that in 1960 Feynman thought gtr was beneath him, so Bondi
was the first to publish his argument. I've heard a story that Feynman
even attended a gtr conference around 1960 under a false name, because he
didn't want to attach his name to the "rubbish" being discussed there! His
highly critical comments about this conference, or possibly another one,
appear in one of his posthumous books. I must stress that these events
occurred a few years before the beginning of the "Golden Age of
theoretical general relativity", when the field really was in a state of
theoretical confusion. That suddenly changed around 1963, and 1965-1975
could be fairly called the Golden Age of theoretical general relativity.
Many experts believe that 2005-2015 may turn out to be the Golden Age of
gravitational wave astronomy.]
[For the k-calculus see for instance Spacetime Physics by Taylor &
Wheeler, or the first chapter of Introducing Einstein's Relativity, by
d'Inverno. Francis is attempting to generalize this calculus to curved
spacetimes, which is a perfectly natural idea, and it has probably been
done correctly a long time ago, although I don't know of a citation. I am
confident that if done correctly, the result would be that the modified
k-calculus can uncover some but certainly not all of the classical
predictions of gtr, since this should amount to a relativistic scalar
theory of gravitation, which has been known not to work since Einstein's
early work during his quest for general relativity. See MTW, Gravitation,
for details. See also MTW for some of Bondi's work on gravitational
waves. For gravitational wave astronomy, search on LANL for dozens of
recent preprints and survey papers.]
Interested readers can look for my detailed critique of the preprint by
Charles Francis which appeared in sci.physics.research and in this
newsgroup, and should also look at a beautifully written preprint on
another scalar theory of gravity ("wrong", but surprisingly good
nonetheless, and useful for some purposes, as the authors clearly
explain):
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/9910032
Keith Watt, Charles W. Misner (University of Maryland)
Relativistic Scalar Gravity: A Laboratory for Numerical Relativity
Abstract: "We present here a relativistic theory of gravity in which the
spacetime metric is derived from a single scalar field $\Phi$. The field
equation, derived from a simple variational principle, is a non-linear
flat-space four-dimensional wave equation which is particularly suited for
numerical evolution. We demonstrate that while this theory does not
generate results which are exactly identical quantitatively to those of
general relativity (GR), many of the qualitative features of the full GR
theory are reproduced to a reasonable approximation. The advantage of this
formulation lies in the fact that 3D numerical grids can be numerically
evolved in minutes or hours instead of the days and weeks required by GR,
thus drastically reducing the development time of new relativistic
hydrodynamical codes. Scalar gravity therefore serves as a meaningful
testbed for the development of larger routines destined for use under the
full theory of general relativity."
I repeat: the point of citing this preprint is that you (Charles Francis)
appear to be groping toward a scalar theory of gravity; such theories are
known to disagree with certain experiments involving frame dragging [and
most disagree with many of the other classical predictions of gtr; the
Watt-Misner theory is remarkable in that it is about as good as a scalar
theory can possibly get]. So you should study the Watt-Misner preprint as
a model of how to write up your own ideas as they pertain to gtr.
You (Charles Francis) complain about what you imagine the attitude of
modern working physicists toward spacetime to be, but you seem to be
blissfully unaware of the tremendous amount of fascinating work which has
been done on quantum gravity in the past dozen years, work which has
greatly altered our concept, or if you prefer, our mathematical models of
spacetime at very small length scales (or very large curvatures, perhaps
1/(Planck length).
See
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-th/9910131
Carlo Rovelli,
The century of the incomplete revolution: searching for general
relativistic quantum field theory.
To appear in the Journal of Mathematical Physics 2000 Special Issue
Abstract: "In fundamental physics, this has been the century of quantum
mechanics and general relativity. It has also been the century of the long
search for a conceptual framework capable of embracing the astonishing
features of the world that have been revealed by these two ``first pieces
of a conceptual revolution''. I discuss the general requirements on the
mathematics and some specific developments towards the construction of
such a framework. Examples of covariant constructions of (simple)
generally relativistic quantum field theories have been obtained as
topological quantum field theories, in nonperturbative zero-dimensional
string theory and its higher dimensional generalizations, and as spin foam
models. A canonical construction of a general relativistic quantum field
theory is provided by loop quantum gravity. Remarkably, all these diverse
approaches have turn out to be related, suggesting an intriguing general
picture of general relativistic quantum physics."
For the benefit of other readers, I stress that this work has certainly
not altered our concept or mathematical model of spacetime in the "strong
curvature regime" mentioned by the astronomers who have observed the
"plunging" of material from the inner edge of the accretion disk into the
horizon of a relatively close supermassive black hole, just as gtr
predicts. Or the continuing study of the Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar,
which continues to progress toward the final "dance of death" and fusion
at exactly the rate which is predicted by gtr. This is often called
"tests of strong field gtr" (the classical tests are tests of weak-field
gtr), but this "strong field" is nowhere near the Planck length scale.
So there is some confusion of terminology in the literature which could
mislead the unwary amateur reader.
The point is this remark is that stellar mass to supermassive black holes
and event horizons are "real", as classical approximations or mathematical
models, and gtr is the "right" theory for studying these phenomena. Deep
inside these holes, curvatures should become sufficiently great that gtr
breaks down, and no-one yet knows what quantum gravity will say about what
happens after that. I stress this point because some people are under the
mistaken impression that quantum gravity will exorcise event horizons and
black holes from modern physics. This is certainly wrong. Indeed, there
is some evidence that quantum gravity may not even exorcise curvature
singularities. To those who are disappointed by this state of affairs, I
can only say: Nature makes the rules. Deal with it.
Chris Hillman
Home Page: http://www.math.washington.edu/~hillman/personal.html
From: Chris Hillman (hil...@math.washington.edu)
Subject: Re: Why is the Speed of Light the Speed of Light?
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Date: 1999/10/28
On Wed, 27 Oct 1999, Charles Francis wrote:
> I would prefer that you understood it. The preprint will be replaced
> when I am ready to rewrite it. I am keeping your criticisms, and will be
> referring to them when I rewrite it. From that point of view I am
> grateful for them.
Fine, we'll let it rest there. In the meantime you should take that
preprint out of your sig, though, because the present version is too
misleading to be useful to beginning students and too vague/incorrect to
be useful to researchers.
> > It is misleading to suggest that (as you have stated
> >in some postings) light "creates" the metric.
>
> I do not think so. But to see why I say this it would really be
> necessary to study my other papers, perhaps also to gain some expertise
> in foundations of quantum mechanics and qed.
You will have to explain in detail how QED gives rise to the theoretical
known properties of gravitational radiation. Note that these properties
are not generally considered to be in doubt, so if you believe otherwise
you should write another paper explaining in detail what -your- "QED as
everything" predicts LIGO and other gravitational wave detectors will
detect.
> >You need to learn a whole lot more about gravitation physics before you
> >attempt to write on this subject.
>
> I regret that I have forgotten much of what I knew, and I am now reading
> Wald to fix that. As far as I can tell my preprint contains a lack of
> clarity in certain place which will be largely irrelevent to anyone
> seeking only an introduction, and ignored by anyone who undertakes a
> full course in gtr.
Which is exactly what I did: the preprint was so clearly inadequate that I
didn't bother to read it. Do you want good physicists to respond the same
way to your other papers? I am simply saying that you have a big job
ahead: you'll need to convince specialists in classical gtr (in
particular) that light quanta can somehow give rise to this theory in the
classical limit, or if that is not what your theory says, you'll need to
figure out in great detail what it does say, compute the PPN parameters of
the implied theory of "gravitation", and in particular to make testable
predictions about what LIGO and gravitational wave detectors which should
begin taking data in a few years will "see". Compare the large literature
on the gtr predictions----you'll need to write preprints using the same
language, which can be easily read by the same people who read and write
those preprints. If you want your theory to be tested.
Chris Hillman
Home Page: http://www.math.washington.edu/~hillman/personal.html
=========== END REPOSTS ==========
> When I did take him up on it it transpired that he did not even
> recognise the Newtonian potential for gravity, and had made a
> reputation as a mathematician on the NGs by showing "new" coordinate
> transformations in gtr, with just enough obfuscation to make non
> mathematicians think it was terribly clever. As this is precisely
> equivalent to doing shears and stretches that schoolboys do at the age
> of fourteen, it casts serious doubt on his judgement.
This is ludicrous. I think the above posts speak for themselves in
showing that my criticism of your preprint was very well founded. Indeed,
the current version of that preprint speaks for itself in terms of my
characterization of it as one of the silliest things I've ever seen on
LANL. Even as a "first exposition for undergraduates" it is -absolutely
useless-, especially when compared to say this paper by Baez:
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/0103044
And I repeat, in your posts in September 1999 you made it very clear that
you really thought that gravitation as it is treated in gtr ultimately
arises from "photon exchanges", or (in effect) that all spacetimes are
conformally flat, things which could have been said only by someone with
an almost complete ignorance of the mathematical and physical foundations
of gtr and indeed of Maxwell's theory of EM.
> Still, he is a complete buffoon, and it is amusing to take the piss out
> of him. It is also rather easy to take the piss out of him, precisely
> because he fills his posts with supercilious sneers at others.
I don't know what "take the piss out of him" means, but I have the
impression that you are trying to claim that my criticisms of your
flagrantly erroneous and/or misleading claims were somehow unfair or
misplaced. The above quotations show that is not the case.
I remind you that I offered to take you out of the so-called "Hall of
Shame" on well-known website Relativity on the World Wide Web, which I
then maintained, if you would agree to revise the preprint. You did so
agree, and promptly I removed your name--- but you never revised the
preprint to remove the misleading claims which are still there for all to
see!
If I still maintained RWWW, your name would now reappear in the Hall of
Shame, because the second version of your preprint remains -wildly
misleading- even as what it claims to be, a first introduction to gtr for
undergraduates.
Charles, nobody forced you to post physics/9909048 to LANL or to make
flagrantly erroneous statements on sci.physics and other newsgroups for
which you were quite rightly criticized (by Steve Carlip, among others, as
well as myself). You along are to blame for these rash actions and their
unpleasant consequences.
I urge you more strongly than ever to simply -withdraw this preprint
entirely-. (See this http://xxx.lanl.gov/help/withdraw for directions.)
This would be a satisfactory resolution of the "image problem" you have
created for yourself, and which you are now, quite childishly, attempting
to blame -me- for.
Chris Hillman
Home Page: http://www.math.washington.edu/~hillman/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Richard Henry
"slavek.krepelka" <slavek....@sympatico.ca> wrote in message
news:abc2fdea.0106...@posting.google.com...
> Crackpots? Hehehe.
>
> My Dears,
>
> I have uploaded this little thingme to my new site location at
>
> www3.sympatico.ca/slavek.krepelka/ttf2/fpf.htm
>
>
Please allow to humbly register a disagreement with your arguments and
arithmetic. If I have erred in this discussion, blame it on old age and
today's 5-mile hike with the kids. Of course, maybe you are only kidding,
in which case I am the kidded.
> THE FIRST PRINCIPLE OF FORCE
>
> We shall take 100 kg mass and drop it over 29.4m as our quantities
> combined with natural gravitational acceleration g. We shall compare few
> quantities of
> the said object first dropped the 29.4m in one increment and then
> dropped in three increments of 9.8m each, totaling again 29.4m.
>
> - A -
>
> Lets assume that we have a flywheel, which can collect kinetic energy of
> the single increment free fall as spin.
>
> The object falls through the full 29.4m height in 2 seconds. This means
> that the force of gravity acted on the object for the duration of 2
> seconds and
> imparted work to the object, which caused its acceleration to the final
> speed of 19.6m/s at the time of dumping its energy into the flywheel.
>
It appears that the acceleration due to gravity in your example is intended
to be 9.8m/s (19.6m/s over 2 seconds), but if that is true, it would have
fallen 19.6m, not the 29.4m you state.
> We can use the standard formula "0.5 x m x v^2" and calculate that the
> theoretical kinetic energy of the object at the bottom of the single
> increment free
> fall equals 0.5 x 100 x 19.6^2 = 0.5 x 100 x 384.16 = 19208 units of
> kinetic energy (KE). In simple terms, the standard formula gives us
> 19208 KE units
> after two seconds of gravitational acceleration of a 100kg body in a
> free fall.
>
> - B -
>
> Lets assume that the same flywheel can collect KE from three-increment
> fall of the same body.
>
> The body falls 9.8m in each increment, being stopped at the end of each
> increment by some mechanical translation arrangement and having its
> energy
> dumped into the flywheel three times, instead of once.
>
> Therefore, we allow the object to accelerate by free fall three times,
> which totals duration of g acting on the body totaling 3 seconds.
> Therefore, the work
> imparted to the accelerated body should equal 1.5 times that of the
> previous single increment free fall.
>
Does the object fall 3 times for one second each, or three times for 9.8m
each? They are different. Using simplified engineers' math, the formula
for distance s travelled under acceleration a for time t is
s = (at^2)/2
So if we drop the body for one second, it will have fallen only 4.9m.
Manipulating the math, t = sqrt(2s/a).
So if we drop the body 9.8m from rest, it will take 1.414 seconds,
approximately.
Also, work is defined as force * distance, not force * time as you seem to
be implying here.
> Using the standard formula 0.5 x m x v^2, we can calculate that the
> theoretical kinetic energy of the object at the bottom of each increment
> in the
> three-increment free fall equals 0.5 x 100 x 9.8^2 = 0.5 x 100 x 96.04 =
> 4802 units of KE. Multiplied three times for the three increments of
> total 29.4m
> fall, the total comes to 14406 units of KE.
>
> What we are looking at is a major discrepancy in theoretical kinetic
> energy yield from speed of an object. We get 2 seconds of acting force
> in the first
> single-increment free fall yielding substantially more KE units than the
> three seconds of acting force in the three-increment scenario.
>
> Quite logically and without any further math, it can be stated that the
> same force "g" will yield the more work, the longer it is allowed to
> accelerate a
> body, therefore that the kinetic energy yield will be proportionate to
> the duration of force acting on a body. In our case, we can expect that
> the
> three-increment free fall will dump 1.5 times more energy into the
> flywheel than the single-increment free fall.
>
Again this falls down due to the misdefinition of "work". In terms so
simple even I can understand it without resorting to pencil and paper, the
uninterrupted fall gathers more work into kinetic energy because it acts
over a greater distance.
> Translated into plain English:
>
> - 1 -
>
> A flywheel constructed so that it gains RPM from three-second
> three-increment free fall will lift the same weight in a single
> increment lift and theoretically
> leave 1/3 of the KE gain to be used as pleased, as long as the time
> duration of the lift is again 2 seconds maximum. But, since the
> three-increment
> dumping can accelerate a properly designed fly wheel to a higher speed
> than what is needed for 2 second weight lift, the lift will consume even
> less energy
> than needed for two second lift, and even more than 1/3 of the kinetic
> energy can be collected from the flywheel.
I do not understand that!
>
> Oh, I forgot. A properly designed flywheel is such, which has as much of
> its mass on its periphery as possible. A solid flywheel does not work,
> because it
> does not gain the speed needed to sufficiently accelerate a bearing ball
> up to the loading position.
>
I did not know that! I thought a solid flywheel would accelerate to high
RPM more quickly than a flywheel constructed like a bicycle wheel. Angular
momentum, etc.
> - 2 -
>
> The physical formula for calculation of kinetic energy of motion of a
> body is NFG. Somebody screwed up.
>
I agree with part of that statement. Please try again.
Gregory L. Hansen
Rob Virkus <a017...@msp.sc.ti.com> wrote:
>Uncle Al wrote:
>
>> One half of all people are below average.
>
One half of all people are below median, anyway.
--
"'No user-serviceable parts inside.' I'll be the judge of that!"
Randy Poe
> Let me repeat an analogy: imagine a man who cannot carry a tune, can't
> read music, has no musical training whatever, has heard of Enrico Caruso
> but has never heard a recording of an opera or anything else in
> "classical" music [sic], and yet firmly believes that he is the greatest
> tenor who has ever lived, and indeed who will -ever- live. Imagine that
> this man insists upon giving public "performances" in the local park,
> every hour on the hour. Imagine that he continues this practice despite
> all the catcalls from derisive passersby.
To carry the analogy all the way to the behavior I've seen in
sci.*...
This guy further insists that his music is far beyond any music that
has ever been produced, and others simply have too poor an understanding
of music to appreciate him. Further, you all have been brainwashed
into mindlessly accepting the definition of music preached to you
by the critics, or by the "accepted" composers. You are sheep,
unable to think for yourselves. And only children who have not
yet been brainwashed have minds open enough to realize that our
street performer is the greatest tenor who ever lived.
- Randy
slavek.krepelka
I built that. It is a simple wheel in which a ball is dropped against
vertical restriction and a spoke of the wheel. The spoke is S shaped
and a bit arregular to allow for three free falls of a ball inserted
just above the shaft onto the S when in horizontal orientation.
> > Oh, I forgot. A properly designed flywheel is such, which has as much of
> > its mass on its periphery as possible. A solid flywheel does not work,
> > because it
> > does not gain the speed needed to sufficiently accelerate a bearing ball
> > up to the loading position.
> >
>
> I did not know that! I thought a solid flywheel would accelerate to high
> RPM more quickly than a flywheel constructed like a bicycle wheel. Angular
> momentum, etc.
That is truth. I had to take into consideration total mass of the
wheel. At specific weigth, the solid flywheel will acellerate and
decelerate faster. But, concern with my wheel is mass on the perimeter
combined with speed. The higher the mass of that wheel, the longer it
takes for the dumped force to accelerate that wheel, the more momentum
I build up in the wheel, but I need that momentum combined with speed.
So, I had to place the mass on the perimeter. I need speed of just
about all the mass. The lower speed of mass toward the center of solid
flywheel is usless.
- 2 -
> >
> > The physical formula for calculation of kinetic energy of motion of a
> > body is NFG. Somebody screwed up.
> >
>
> I agree with part of that statement. Please try again.
Yes, my arithmetic stinks, I shoot from the waist, but my gismo works.
I had to go through that math stuff today and you are right. I will
have to rewrite it a bit, that is when it comes to arithmetic.
My kind regards and thank you for pointing it out to me. It actually
works much better with correct math. Just go one second farther. <g>
Slavek.
Tom Potter
"Randy Poe" <rp...@nospamatl.lmco.com> wrote in message
news:3B253173...@atl.lmco.com...
Compared to Elvis, Enrico Caruso
ain't nothing but a hound dog
howling at the moon.
Charles Francis
gton.edu>, Chris Hillman <hil...@math.washington.edu> writes
>
>[Two more things Charles thinks I don't understand:]
>
>> heat energy is contained in stress energy,
>
>[snip]
>
>> intrinsic curvature is less directly related to the common idea of
>> curvature than to the common idea of stretching,
>
>If you would like to discuss whatever it is you think I don't understand
>about the two statements you made, again, if you think it really matters
>and if you can keep a civil tongue and post a clear and coherent
>explanation to s.p.research, I will try to learn whatever it is you feel
>that I don't yet understand, or to politely explain where I think you have
>erred, if that proves to be the case. Fair enough?
Chris, I don't really think you don't understand these statements. They
were clear enough in the context of the discussions in which they came
up recently. I just think your response to having been on the losing
side of an argument was unbelievably snooty. There's certainly no point
in re running the argument. If you really didn't understand it, you
never will. But actually I think you are smart enough to have understood
it, but too (expletive deleted) to admit it.
Regards
--
Charles Francis
Gregory L. Hansen
>In article <88iU6.74411$gA.21...@monger.newsread.com>, "Double00"
><doub...@panet.net> writes:
>>> An "idea" is one thing, a "theory" is another. The meaning of
>>> "theory" in science is narrow. Newton's mechanics is a theory,
>>> Maxwell's equations are a theory. An "I think that X may be causing
>>> Y" is not a theory, is just a concept that may pan out or may not.
>>
>>Would this be called a hypothesis?
>
>Yes, that would be the usual terminology.
Even an hypothesis is a little more restricted, I think. An idea can be
anything about anything. An hypothesis should at least be a statement
about the physical world that can be tested in some way, while an idea can
be "not even wrong".
Gregory L. Hansen
Jonathan Silverlight <jsi...@merseia.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>In article <nfeU6.35320$%a.19...@news1.rdc1.sdca.home.com>, Richard
>Henry <rph...@home.com> writes>>news:3B213D77...@hate.spam.net...
>>> One half of all people are below average.
>>
>>that one half of all people are below average, that is just an accident of
>>the statistics.
>
>The phrase "bell shaped curve" comes to mind.
How about "asymmetric curve"?
Gregory L. Hansen
Dirk Van de moortel <dirkvand...@ThankS-NO-SperM.hotmail.com> wrote:
>"charles vind" <si...@west.net> wrote in message
>news:3B21B6A7...@west.net...
>No way oversimplification.
>IQ is *defined* such that half the population is below 100 and the other
>half above.
>Of course this says nothing about intelligence.
>There as many definitions of intelligence as there are psychologists.
>But IQ is the closest they can get to measure intelligence.
>If you can find a better way, then half of the population you work with will
>be below average.
Only if your new test also grades on the curve.
But if half the population scored below 100 that means the median is 100.
The mean doesn't have to be.
Gregory L. Hansen
Paul W. <pb...@ix.nospam.com> wrote:
>On 8 Jun 2001 23:18:08 -0400, nur...@crib.corepower.com (Nathan Urban)
>wrote:
>
>>He means testable _in principle_. String theory makes plenty of
>>predictions, but _in practice_ we haven't been able to test them yet.
>
>You mean string theory is currently falsifiable? In other words, a
>testable prediction (in principle or practice) has been proposed that,
>if the result is negative, would trash string theory as a viable
>model?
>
>If string theory is "testable" as you say, then the whole model that
>the world consists of tiny strings needs to be falsifiable, not just
>some little aspect of string theory. This is what Popper meant by a
>"testable" theory. Otherwise you need to say, "Some particular aspects
>of string theory are currently testable, but not the string hypothesis
>itself."
Re-read Popper. The predictions of a theory are deductions from its
premises. If any prediction of the theory is wrong, then something in its
premises must be wrong. Pretty much any test is a test of the entire
theory.
me...@cars3.uchicago.edu
should stick its neck out far enough so you can take a swing at it.
Mati Meron | "When you argue with a fool,
me...@cars.uchicago.edu | chances are he is doing just the same"
Gregory L. Hansen
Uncle Al <Uncl...@hate.spam.net> wrote:
>Uh, what was the question? Oh yeah... and this proves the
>existence of Sterculius. QED.
I crap, therefore I am.
Ace Schallger
<glha...@steel.ucs.indiana.edu> wrote:
> Re-read Popper. The predictions of a theory are deductions from its
> premises. If any prediction of the theory is wrong, then something in its
> premises must be wrong. Pretty much any test is a test of the entire
> theory.
This isn't true at all. Many theories cover a broad range of ideas and
certain aspects may be extrapolated upon insufficient cause or data and
their failure may not mean the failure of the entire 'theory'. Parts
of GR may be correct and parts utterly incorrect. The theory as a
whole (including its parts) may be wrong but certain concepts that are
parts of the theory may not be wrong at all.
Ace Schallger
Nathan Urban
> In article <9g5ejm$c6p$4...@jetsam.uits.indiana.edu>, Gregory L. Hansen
> <glha...@steel.ucs.indiana.edu> wrote:
> > Re-read Popper. The predictions of a theory are deductions from its
> > premises. If any prediction of the theory is wrong, then something in its
> > premises must be wrong. Pretty much any test is a test of the entire
> > theory.
> This isn't true at all.
Nothing he said was wrong. In fact, nothing he said disagrees with what
you said.
> Many theories cover a broad range of ideas and
> certain aspects may be extrapolated upon insufficient cause or data and
> their failure may not mean the failure of the entire 'theory'. Parts
> of GR may be correct and parts utterly incorrect.
If any prediction of GR is falsified, the entire theory is wrong, even
if it makes other predictions that are correct. GR, like all physical
theories, makes definite physical predictions. If those predictions do
not agree with experiment, then the theory is not right. Period.
But the real point is that even a wrong theory can be a good approximation
in some circumstances. Newtonian physics is wrong, but that doesn't mean
that it's not still useful as an approximation to what's really going on.
> The theory as a
> whole (including its parts) may be wrong but certain concepts that are
> parts of the theory may not be wrong at all.
If any one part is falsified, the whole theory is falsified. That's what
he means to say that a test of a part is a test of the whole. However,
that doesn't mean that some of the theory's features can't be incorporated
into a better theory.
JeffMo
>Ace Schallger <phys...@att.net> wrote in message
>news:080620011110260447%phys...@att.net...
>> Using Hillman's links and reading his (and other's) essays and comments
>> it is interesting to see that they have tried to round up all the
>> component characteristics of what they call "crackpots" and produce a
>> sort of "ideal crackpot". Now, if someone has any of the components of
>> the ideal crackpot it looks like he is swept right into the bucket.
>>
>> How is this not a form of bigotry?
>>
>
>I wonder why Hillman hasnt answered my very specific questions, dealing with
>papers I downlaoded from his website from the St Petersburg Mirror Lake
>Branch library.
>
>Perhaps it is as you say, but it would be no loss for me, as I already know
>what I was looking for, and since then have discovered.
What's the relevance of which library you used for downloading?
JeffMo
The smar...@aol.com Quote Collection -- The Third Wave
"I'm not a grasshopper."
"I'm NOT your grasshopper, 'Goofus'. And I just might get that Nobel prize."
"I was speaking to grasshoppers... ."
"Well idiots that act like grasshoppers, are grasshoppers...."
"Well the Smart Model does describe crap in sewers too."
"Microsoft Windows is the best software you can buy. The rest is poor followers."
"Yes, here's the faggit queer mind award."
"Then we can observed the Supreme Intelligent Being God, causing the Big Bang, [...]"
"Well this shows you are not in the main flow of science. So your statements are goofy.... ."
"Everything points to a young earth."
"I wouldn't want people like you observing my Home Page.. ." [directed towards JeffMo]
"First I must re-write physics and correct all the mistakes they have made... ."
"Well, the worst evolution looks the better creation science looks..... ."
"Like I said, if you are going to quote the bible, at least have the common courtesy to quote the whole thing, not just parts.... ."
"Your case is stupidity. I have always helped your case... ."
Dramar Ankalle
JeffMo <jef...@dipstick.cfw.com> wrote in message
news:3b29413e...@news.rmci.net...
> "Dramar Ankalle" <mika...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
> >Ace Schallger <phys...@att.net> wrote in message
> >news:080620011110260447%phys...@att.net...
> >> Using Hillman's links and reading his (and other's) essays and comments
> >> it is interesting to see that they have tried to round up all the
> >> component characteristics of what they call "crackpots" and produce a
> >> sort of "ideal crackpot". Now, if someone has any of the components of
> >> the ideal crackpot it looks like he is swept right into the bucket.
> >>
> >> How is this not a form of bigotry?
> >>
> >
> >I wonder why Hillman hasnt answered my very specific questions, dealing
with
> >papers I downlaoded from his website from the St Petersburg Mirror Lake
> >Branch library.
> >
> >Perhaps it is as you say, but it would be no loss for me, as I already
know
> >what I was looking for, and since then have discovered.
>
> What's the relevance of which library you used for downloading?
>
> JeffMo
In order to distinguish entries, I needed to call the time period something,
and I was at the library accessing his math pages and posting to usenet at
the time.I assumed since certain pages were reaped, he/it could trace which
papaers they were acdcording maybe to some old logs and update some of the
ideas that have developed since those papers.
So it wasnt the *downloading*, but actually the other way around.
Good luck!
ctrlA
ctrlE
Ace Schallger
<nur...@crib.corepower.com> wrote:
> If any one part is falsified, the whole theory is falsified. That's what
> he means to say that a test of a part is a test of the whole. However,
> that doesn't mean that some of the theory's features can't be incorporated
> into a better theory.
There seems to be no way to get through to you that there's often a
baby in the bathwater. If one part of the Bible is untrue then by
your idiotic logic it all must be untrue (even the parts which are
substantiated by archeological finds such as a writing from King
Sennecarrib that states 'I came up against the forty six fortified
cities of Judah and took them' [which is also documented in the
Bible]). No matter what is said, Urban, you must be correct in your
own mind or apparently the universe comes apart. If there is a flaw
in a thing that is taken as a whole and believed to be flawless as a
whole then only the belief that it is flawless as a whole is wrong - it
doesn't mean that it is wholly wrong but only as a whole not perfect.
Ace Schallger (exasperated at the illogic of the net denizens like
Nathan Urban)
Nathan Urban
> In article <9g8qj1$e2u$1...@crib.corepower.com>, Nathan Urban
> <nur...@crib.corepower.com> wrote:
> > If any one part is falsified, the whole theory is falsified. That's what
> > he means to say that a test of a part is a test of the whole. However,
> > that doesn't mean that some of the theory's features can't be incorporated
> > into a better theory.
> There seems to be no way to get through to you that there's often a
> baby in the bathwater.
There seems to be no way to get through to you that neither the poster
you were responding to, nor I, are fundamentally disagreeing with you.
Despite the fact that I pointed this out to you already.
> If one part of the Bible is untrue then by
> your idiotic logic it all must be untrue
Your idiotic self has no understanding of my logic, or even of what I'm
actually saying.
The Bible is not a physical theory. Any random collection of statements
is not a physical theory. I can falsify some of a collection of
statements and not automatically falsify the others if there is no
explicit logical connection between them.
However, a physical theory is a logical, consistent whole that is derived
mathematically from a set of posulates. Everything the theory has to
say is explicitly derivable from one or more of the postulates. If you
falsify one aspect of a theory, then the whole theory is false because
at least one of its assumptions is false. What "the whole theory is
false" means is that the theory does not correctly describe all aspects
of nature. It must be discarded as a fundamental description.
But as I said before -- and as you ignored in favor of your strawman --
that doesn't mean that you can't make a valid _new_ theory out of some
of the falsified theory's other assumptions. It just means that _that_
particular theory is wrong. For that matter, the new theory can even
agree with some of the old theory's predictions -- just not all of them,
because the old theory is known to be wrong.
me...@cars3.uchicago.edu
based on a set of postulates, you've T = {A_1 and A_2 and ... A_n}.
Now what ought to be understood (and, yes, I know that you know it but
the way you write it doesn't make it quite clear is that faslification
of the theory, i.e. (not T) does not mean
{(not A_1) and (not A_2) ... and (not A_n)}. It only means
{(not A_1) or (not A_2) ... or (not A_n)}. In other worlds, that the
theory as whole is falsified, does not mean that all (or even most) of
its parts are falsified.
Mind you, this is separate from the issue of "it may still serve as an
approxiamtion". Inot talking about approximations but about parts
(often very significant parts) of the theory being still at the status
of "rigorously true" even though the theory as a whole is falsified.
Paul Mays
historical records include all the books of the bible, stone tables,
wall carvings, old bones, and every documented bit of data ever
collected.... The "Historical Record" is the present day "best"
explanation of all historical records... It is a fluid concept...
it self corrects as data is collected that is in opposition to
its previous views.... We can have historical records that
are totally incorrect or that are incorrect in part.... all, even the
incorrect data is considered by the "Historical Record" then
set aside if either it cannot be verified, tested and repeated
until additional evidence is produced to verify, test and repeat
that data....
I regard the bible as a set of historical records.. Some can be
tested and verified, most cannot. Where science and religion
butt heads is that science says some historical records that
have no viable data that they are incorrect and religion says
it doesn't matter cause we have faith...
Which to me is ok... the problem I have is that for all
of our recorded history religions way of dealing with this
was to kill all who didn't have faith.... Or torture, excommunicate
ostracize and make it impossible to even pass along an
opposing view....Causing man to have to relearn over
and over again... If not for religion man would
be among the stars today... Religions have wiped
mans knowledge base at least once and given free reign
would do so again.....
Nathan Urban wrote:
--
"I aim for the stars, but sometimes I hit London." - Wernher von Braun
Nathan Urban
> Now what ought to be understood (and, yes, I know that you know it but
> the way you write it doesn't make it quite clear is that faslification
> of the theory, i.e. (not T) does not mean
> {(not A_1) and (not A_2) ... and (not A_n)}. It only means
> {(not A_1) or (not A_2) ... or (not A_n)}. In other worlds, that the
> theory as whole is falsified, does not mean that all (or even most) of
> its parts are falsified.
I wrote (emphasis added),
"If you falsify one aspect of a theory, then the whole theory is false
because AT LEAST ONE of its assumptions is false ... that doesn't mean
that you can't make a valid _new_ theory out of some of the falsified
theory's OTHER assumptions."
which is what you said. (Note the "at least one" as opposed to "all", and
the part where I said that the non-falsified assumptions can be reused.)
me...@cars3.uchicago.edu
Sure, no problem. What I'm commenting on is usage of language. A
nit, if you wish:-) Thus, I would not say "the whole theory is false"
but "the theory as a whole is false". A subtle difference and perhaps
not very significant to those who know what it the whole thing is
about. To those who're just trying to grasp the concepts, though, the
meanings conveyed by these two phrases are quite different.
Ace Schallger
<nur...@crib.corepower.com> wrote:
> In article <150620010952147234%phys...@att.net>, Ace Schallger
> <phys...@att.net> wrote:
>
> > In article <9g8qj1$e2u$1...@crib.corepower.com>, Nathan Urban
> > <nur...@crib.corepower.com> wrote:
>
> > > If any one part is falsified, the whole theory is falsified. That's what
> > > he means to say that a test of a part is a test of the whole. However,
> > > that doesn't mean that some of the theory's features can't be incorporated
> > > into a better theory.
>
> > There seems to be no way to get through to you that there's often a
> > baby in the bathwater.
>
> There seems to be no way to get through to you that neither the poster
> you were responding to, nor I, are fundamentally disagreeing with you.
> Despite the fact that I pointed this out to you already.
Nonsense. You state it then you refute your own statement.
> > If one part of the Bible is untrue then by
> > your idiotic logic it all must be untrue
>
> Your idiotic self has no understanding of my logic, or even of what I'm
> actually saying.
You have shown no logic. It would be difficult to agree that I
understood that which has yet to be shown even exists.
> The Bible is not a physical theory. Any random collection of statements
> is not a physical theory. I can falsify some of a collection of
> statements and not automatically falsify the others if there is no
> explicit logical connection between them.
Now you show you seem to have some understanding of the problem but you
fail to recognize that there are components of relativity that are not
rigorously logically connected.
> However, a physical theory is a logical, consistent whole that is derived
> mathematically from a set of posulates. Everything the theory has to
> say is explicitly derivable from one or more of the postulates.
One or more? Which is it? That is like saying more or less.
> If you falsify one aspect of a theory, then the whole theory is false because
> at least one of its assumptions is false. What "the whole theory is
> false" means is that the theory does not correctly describe all aspects
> of nature. It must be discarded as a fundamental description.
This would be true if the entire theory were a whole cloth neatly
woven. It isn't so the point is moot.
> But as I said before -- and as you ignored in favor of your strawman --
> that doesn't mean that you can't make a valid _new_ theory out of some
> of the falsified theory's other assumptions.
Now you are being illogical if you are saying that some of the
assumptions of a whole cloth thing can be true and not force the entire
thing to be true. By inference you are implying that it never was
whole cloth if part of it is true and part of it is false. And that
happens to be my point.
> It just means that _that_
> particular theory is wrong. For that matter, the new theory can even
> agree with some of the old theory's predictions -- just not all of them,
> because the old theory is known to be wrong.
As wrong, no doubt, as your illogical conclusions.
Ace Schallger.
Ace Schallger
wrote:
<snip nonsensical ranting>
> If not for religion man would
> be among the stars today...
How idiotic. We are among the stars today. We're surrounded by them.
> Religions have wiped mans knowledge base at least once and given free
> reign would do so again.....
Nonsense. Sometimes irrational people do things and because they are
part of a power structure of a particular belief system then you are
supposing that the 'religion' did this or did that when in fact it was
not the 'religion' that did it at all but rather men. You'd like to
lay it off on religion but you fail to recognize that much of what
passes for 'science' these days to the illiteratti like yourself is
actually the religion you rail against.
Ace Schallger.
Paul Mays
Ace Schallger wrote:
> In article <3B2A5CE3...@Home.Com>, Paul Mays <Pa...@Home.Com>
> wrote:
>
> <snip nonsensical ranting>
>
> > If not for religion man would
> > be among the stars today...
>
> How idiotic. We are among the stars today. We're surrounded by them.
Obviously your abilities to see beyond your arms length is in question..
the fact that your mind is deluded does not make the truth idiotic.
>
>
> > Religions have wiped mans knowledge base at least once and given free
> > reign would do so again.....
>
> Nonsense. Sometimes irrational people do things and because they are
> part of a power structure of a particular belief system then you are
> supposing that the 'religion' did this or did that when in fact it was
> not the 'religion' that did it at all but rather men. You'd like to
> lay it off on religion but you fail to recognize that much of what
> passes for 'science' these days to the illiteratti like yourself is
> actually the religion you rail against.
Nonsense.. Your god myths have locked many a mind into
a view that all that do not believe are waiting for the
big elevator to hell.. this belief system, when it is allowed
to control, has in all of history lead to the attempt to wipe
any that would not believe.... Even to day we have groups
that for the belief in there version of god would kill, torture
and die just to stop the non b'levers.... You snip as you
wish.. god myths are the bane of mans future....
>
>
> Ace Schallger.
Nathan Urban
> In article <9gdgju$f1r$1...@crib.corepower.com>, Nathan Urban
> <nur...@crib.corepower.com> wrote:
> > There seems to be no way to get through to you that neither the poster
> > you were responding to, nor I, are fundamentally disagreeing with you.
> > Despite the fact that I pointed this out to you already.
> Nonsense. You state it then you refute your own statement.
I disagree with your interpretation of what I'm saying, but what we
actually _believe_ is not fundmamentally in disagrement because you're
Now I suspect that you have fundamental misconceptions when it comes to
logic, so maybe you're just saying something incoherent.
> > The Bible is not a physical theory. Any random collection of statements
> > is not a physical theory. I can falsify some of a collection of
> > statements and not automatically falsify the others if there is no
> > explicit logical connection between them.
> Now you show you seem to have some understanding of the problem but you
> fail to recognize that there are components of relativity that are not
> rigorously logically connected.
Every feature of relativity is logically connected to one or more of
its postulates. The _postulates_ can't be derived from one another
because they're independent. You can replace one postulate with another
and get a new, logically consistent theory.
> > However, a physical theory is a logical, consistent whole that is derived
> > mathematically from a set of posulates. Everything the theory has to
> > say is explicitly derivable from one or more of the postulates.
> One or more? Which is it?
One, or more.
If you falsify some statement, it means that at least one of its
assumptions is wrong. It can be one wrong assumption, it can be many,
but it is always at least one.
> > If you falsify one aspect of a theory, then the whole theory is false
> > because at least one of its assumptions is false. What "the whole theory is
> > false" means is that the theory does not correctly describe all aspects
> > of nature. It must be discarded as a fundamental description.
> This would be true if the entire theory were a whole cloth neatly
> woven. It isn't so the point is moot.
It *is* a whole cloth, just like a mathematical proof is a "whole cloth",
as far as assumptions and logically derivable conclusions are concerned.
(That doesn't mean that any given "whole cloth" is actually *right*.
See below.)
> > But as I said before -- and as you ignored in favor of your strawman --
> > that doesn't mean that you can't make a valid _new_ theory out of some
> > of the falsified theory's other assumptions.
> Now you are being illogical if you are saying that some of the
> assumptions of a whole cloth thing can be true and not force the entire
> thing to be true.
Yes, that's right. If *some* of the assumptions of the theory were true,
but *others* were false, then the entire thing is false. However, you
can replace those false assumptions with true ones, and get a different
theory based on different assumptions that is itself true.
Take Euclidean geometry as a simple mathematical analogy. It is an
*assumption* that Euclid's fifth postulate is true. If you throw that
assumption out, you get a different kind of geometry, non-Euclidean
geometry. Both Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry are perfectly
consistent ("whole cloths"). But they're different. And the assumptions
of non-Euclidean geometry do not automatically force Euclidean geometry
to be true, even though the assumptions of the former are a subset of
the assumptions of the latter.
A physical analogy would be SR vs. GR, since this is actually the main
difference between the two theories; GR's geometry is non-Euclidean
while SR's is Euclidean. It is an experimentally testable statement
whether Euclid's fifth postulate holds for our spacetime, so (unlike
in mathematics) we don't have to assume it's true or false, we _know_
it's true or false (in our universe).
> By inference you are implying that it never was
> whole cloth if part of it is true and part of it is false.
I don't know what you mean by "whole cloth". *I* mean "logically
consistent and derivable from postulates" -- i.e., logically valid.
In logic there is a difference between a "valid" statement and a "true"
statement. It's possible to construct a perfectly *valid* chain of logic
-- in the sense that each step logically follows from the previous one
-- that is nonetheless *false* because the assumptions you started with
are false.
> > It just means that _that_
> > particular theory is wrong. For that matter, the new theory can even
> > agree with some of the old theory's predictions -- just not all of them,
> > because the old theory is known to be wrong.
> As wrong, no doubt, as your illogical conclusions.
Grow up.
Ace Schallger
wrote:
> > > Religions have wiped mans knowledge base at least once and given free
> > > reign would do so again.....
> >
> > Nonsense. Sometimes irrational people do things and because they are
> > part of a power structure of a particular belief system then you are
> > supposing that the 'religion' did this or did that when in fact it was
> > not the 'religion' that did it at all but rather men. You'd like to
> > lay it off on religion but you fail to recognize that much of what
> > passes for 'science' these days to the illiteratti like yourself is
> > actually the religion you rail against.
>
> Nonsense.. Your god myths have locked many a mind into
You make an ass of your self by assuming that which is not in evidence.
I have no 'god myths'. But you have surrounded yourself with nothing
and immersed yourself in nothing but god myths as you worship
pseudoscience.
> a view that all that do not believe are waiting for the
> big elevator to hell.. this belief system, when it is allowed
> to control, has in all of history lead to the attempt to wipe
> any that would not believe....
What a puerile view of history.
> Even to day we have groups
> that for the belief in there version of god would kill, torture
> and die just to stop the non b'levers.... You snip as you
> wish..
Certainly....I snip idiocies.
> god myths are the bane of mans future....
And poor spelling and ignorance and a lack of judgment is the bane of
yours.
Ace Schallger
Ace Schallger
<nur...@crib.corepower.com> wrote:
> In article <170620010120196630%phys...@att.net>, Ace Schallger
> <phys...@att.net> wrote:
>
> > In article <9gdgju$f1r$1...@crib.corepower.com>, Nathan Urban
> > <nur...@crib.corepower.com> wrote:
>
> > > There seems to be no way to get through to you that neither the poster
> > > you were responding to, nor I, are fundamentally disagreeing with you.
> > > Despite the fact that I pointed this out to you already.
>
> > Nonsense. You state it then you refute your own statement.
>
> I disagree with your interpretation of what I'm saying, but what we
> actually _believe_ is not fundmamentally in disagrement because you're
> Now I suspect that you have fundamental misconceptions when it comes to
> logic, so maybe you're just saying something incoherent.
As evidenced by your inability to finish a sentence you demonstrate
also your incompetence in logic.
> Every feature of relativity is logically connected to one or more of
> its postulates.
Wrong. Connected but not logically connected.
> The _postulates_ can't be derived from one another
> because they're independent. You can replace one postulate with another
> and get a new, logically consistent theory.
There's always a certain circularity in truth because its
extrapolations always lead back to itself.
> > > However, a physical theory is a logical, consistent whole that is derived
> > > mathematically from a set of posulates. Everything the theory has to
> > > say is explicitly derivable from one or more of the postulates.
>
> > One or more? Which is it?
>
> One, or more.
>
> If you falsify some statement, it means that at least one of its
> assumptions is wrong. It can be one wrong assumption, it can be many,
> but it is always at least one.
fuzzy logic.
>
> > > If you falsify one aspect of a theory, then the whole theory is false
> > > because at least one of its assumptions is false. What "the whole theory
> > > is
> > > false" means is that the theory does not correctly describe all aspects
> > > of nature. It must be discarded as a fundamental description.
>
> > This would be true if the entire theory were a whole cloth neatly
> > woven. It isn't so the point is moot.
>
> It *is* a whole cloth, just like a mathematical proof is a "whole cloth",
No. It isn't a whole cloth and you just argued against it being a
whole cloth above. You are lost in your own irrationality. There's no
point in arguing with you because you will by your own trite
definitions manage to console yourself that you know what you are
talking about even when you refute your own fabrications.
> as far as assumptions and logically derivable conclusions are concerned.
> (That doesn't mean that any given "whole cloth" is actually *right*.
> See below.)
>
> > > But as I said before -- and as you ignored in favor of your strawman --
> > > that doesn't mean that you can't make a valid _new_ theory out of some
> > > of the falsified theory's other assumptions.
>
> > Now you are being illogical if you are saying that some of the
> > assumptions of a whole cloth thing can be true and not force the entire
> > thing to be true.
>
> Yes, that's right. If *some* of the assumptions of the theory were true,
> but *others* were false, then the entire thing is false. However, you
> can replace those false assumptions with true ones, and get a different
> theory based on different assumptions that is itself true.
>
> Take Euclidean geometry as a simple mathematical analogy. It is an
> *assumption* that Euclid's fifth postulate is true.
It is really an axiomatic definition of parallel lines. If you wish to
redefine the meaning of parallel lines to that which does not reduce to
Euclid's fifth postulate then you produce a different set of
extrapolations which is not part of plane geometry.
<snip prolixity>
>
> A physical analogy would be SR vs. GR, since this is actually the main
> difference between the two theories; GR's geometry is non-Euclidean
> while SR's is Euclidean. It is an experimentally testable statement
> whether Euclid's fifth postulate holds for our spacetime, so (unlike
> in mathematics) we don't have to assume it's true or false, we _know_
> it's true or false (in our universe).
I can't begin to express how many witless assumptions you imposed with
your nonsense above in assuming the existence of spacetime continuum
and then ignorantly labeling it as 'our spacetime'. And it isn't
'experimentally' testable - you can do experiments and then decide to
interpret the experiments in a manner that lacks logical deductive
consistency and then pop the champagne cork and declare your
'discovery' but really all you have done is tied yourself up in a neat
knot of your own words that have little or nothing to do with actual
'science'.
>
> > By inference you are implying that it never was
> > whole cloth if part of it is true and part of it is false.
>
> I don't know what you mean by "whole cloth". *I* mean "logically
> consistent and derivable from postulates" -- i.e., logically valid.
Of course, you don't know what I mean by 'whole cloth' - hell, if you
did you take your fingers off of the keyboard and quit making a fool of
yourself. But as long as you can claim ignorance....and redefine
anything you want to mean what you'd like it to be at the moment then
you believe that you cannot be nailed down in your illogic.
> In logic there is a difference between a "valid" statement and a "true"
Oh, horseshit. You grow up - you dissembling ass.
Ace Schallger
Nathan Urban
> [puerile drivel]
<plonk>
Tom Potter
<Snip of a beautiful article!>
> If Chris Hillman or John Baez believe in the continuous structures of
> GR and QM, I'd sure like to know why. If they believe that light
> exists where it cannot be measured I'd like to know why. Or at least
> I'd like to know why they aren't crackpots if they cannot give
> sufficient reason for their beliefs.
You have to understand that Chris Hillman or John Baez
have a strong vested interest in GR, and that translates
to prestige, security, and income. Furthermore, it is not natural for
members of an existing order to have open minds
about people, things, and ideas that could weaken
their positions. This applies to religion and politics,
as well as science.
I suggest that "gravity" does not exist,
and that the concepts of "gravitational" and "inertial" forces
arise because of the limitations of man's two body math.
The concept of "gravity" came about as a result of Newton's equation:
force = mass(A) * mass(B) * G / distance^2
and "G" was taken to mean that a "gravitational" force existed.
This misconception was amplified by Einstein's "Equivalence Principle"
which asserted the "equivalence" of "gravitational" and "Inertial" forces.
The fact of the matter is, that interactions are symmetrical,
and one bodies mass is another bodies media (Time, space, and flux), and
two bodies interact about a common point (The center of mass),
in a common time (The system period).
For example Newton's equations can best be expressed as follows:
mass(Sun) * G / C^3 = time interval(Earth)^3 / time period(common)^2
mass(Earth) * G / C^3 = time interval(Sun)^3 / time period(common)^2
Note that G/C^3 is a universal time per mass constant.
"C" is just a number that is used to differentiate between
time periods and time intervals. It can be any number you like.
Time intervals are commonly multiplied by "C" and called spaces.
space(X) = time interval(X) * C
"G" is just a number that is used to differentiate between
a body perceived to be fixed in media, from a body perceived
to be varying in media. For example, in the Earth/Sun system, the
Earth is perceived to be varying in media, and it gets the 365.25 days
and the 93,000,000 miles, while the Sun is perceived to be fixed
in media and it gets the "G" to balance the equation.
"G", like "C", can be any number you like.
To make my point clear, let us compare the interaction between masses to the
interaction between charges.
Let's express the charge equation as:
force = charge(A) * charge(B) * F / distance^2
And let us call "F" the universal "flubber" constant.
Can you imagine people talking about flubber waves, flubber forces, etc?
(Or for that matter permittivity waves, permittivity forces, etc.)
Chris Hillman
On Wed, 20 Jun 2001, Tom Potter wrote:
> You have to understand that Chris Hillman or John Baez have a strong
> vested interest in GR, and that translates to prestige, security, and
> income.
So, uh, Tom, thanks for the kudos, but do you mind if I ask-- I visited
your page but couldn't find any information there about your formal
education. Would you be willing to divulge any information?
Chris Hillman
Home Page: http://www.math.washington.edu/~hillman/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
NOTE: Since I post under my real name, as an anti-spam measure, I have
installed a mail filter which deletes incoming messages not from the
"*.edu" or "*.gov" domains or overseas academic domains.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tom Potter
"Chris Hillman" <hil...@math.washington.edu> wrote in message
news:Pine.OSF.4.33.010620...@goedel1.math.washington.edu...
>
> On Wed, 20 Jun 2001, Tom Potter wrote:
>
> > You have to understand that Chris Hillman or John Baez have a strong
> > vested interest in GR, and that translates to prestige, security, and
> > income.
>
> So, uh, Tom, thanks for the kudos, but do you mind if I ask-- I visited
> your page but couldn't find any information there about your formal
> education. Would you be willing to divulge any information?
Gee whiz, are you writing a book about me?
Jim Carr
In article <3b21e2bc...@nntp.ix.netcom.com>
pb...@ix.nospam.com (Paul W.) writes:
>
>And you [meron] said:
>
> "And Newton didn't spend this time running around and proclaiming
> that he has a revolutionary new theory."
>
>Do we really know what he did or did not say?
Yes. People knew how to write back then and kept records of public
meetings, diaries, copies of letters, all that sort of stuff. That
is why we know about Newton's run-ins with Hooke and Leibnitz.
>I know he had some
>run-in's with other scientists on The Royal Society. I don't remember
>what the issues were.
Priority. Also stature in the case of Hooke, if you get my drift.
>It took Newton at least 10 years to get his theory to work. He delayed
>presenting it for so long because he couldn't justify treating a body
>as a point mass. He should have presented his preliminary results
>earlier. Math has it's "conjectures", and so should physics.
Sure, but people generally don't publish conjectures until they know
they cannot prove them -- and sometimes not until they are dead. Why
present results that might be based on a false premise?
>In fact,
>physics does allow conjectures, but only from well known "celebrity"
>physicists. If you look on sci.physics.research, all you see is Baez,
>et. al. presenting their conjectures.
The idea that sci.physics.research is at the heart of professional
physics discussions is bizarre to say the least, matched only by
your belief that only "celebrity" physicists (and it is far from
clear if John is one at this time) post conjectures there.
>But if a non-celebrity wants to
>get a word in edgewise, he must be a crackpot.
An assertion unsupported by the crackpot index which has, I might
add, stood the test of time.
<... snip rant ...>
>I understand their motivations -- to keep down the "noise" and keep
>out the crackpots.
A statement based on the false premise that only the moderators
voted to create that newsgroup.
--
James Carr <j...@scri.fsu.edu> http://www.scri.fsu.edu/~jac/
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