Is this just-a-nuther krakpot?

[CaveDave]

Howdy, friends;

Reading a copy of 'Smithsonian' [March 2008] (which I normally consider a top-tier publication), I saw a full-color professional-looking two page ad for a book (http://nullphysics.com/) written in 2007 by Terence Witt, that purports to stand all of modern physics on its ear.

Has anyone heard of this before? Is this guy a crank?

I could not my ancient OS/browser combo to scroll below the initial display on any but the PDF pages (I could not read the FAQ or biography or author's journal), so short of the excerpts that told me little, I couldn't find out much.

Any first hand knowlege out there?

Cheers
Dave

[Gate2501]

Howdy, friends;

Reading a copy of 'Smithsonian' [March 2008] (which I normally consider a top-tier publication), I saw a full-color professional-looking two page ad for a book (http://nullphysics.com/) written in 2007 by Terence Witt, that purports to stand all of modern physics on its ear.

Has anyone heard of this before? Is this guy a crank?

I could not my ancient OS/browser combo to scroll below the initial display on any but the PDF pages (I could not read the FAQ or biography or author's journal), so short of the excerpts that told me little, I couldn't find out much.

Any first hand knowlege out there?

Cheers
Dave

He actually came here and posted some during my lurking days... It was very interesting, however, the man was a full on woo woo.

[CaveDave]

He actually came here and posted some during my lurking days... It was very interesting, however, the man was a full on woo woo.
I musta' missed it :(.
Do you remember the thread(s)?

Dave

[fuelair]

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=94861
might help!

[CaveDave]

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=94861
might help!

Wow...

Same ad, same magazine, multiple people, earlier issue, same impressions.

Thanks for the pointer. I'll be reading that next.

Thanks,
Dave

[grmcdorman]

He advertises quite frequently in Smithsonian magazines, actually - always a full page colour ad near the end of the magazine. Pretty much the same ad every time though ("Physics is stuck! Nothing new in physics for 30 years! My book solves everything!").

Sigh.

[ben m]

I could not my ancient OS/browser combo to scroll below the initial display on any but the PDF pages (I could not read the FAQ or biography or author's journal), so short of the excerpts that told me little, I couldn't find out much.


The FAQ and journal are pretty entertaining, actually. The journal, after a bunch of "Wow! A number of people have bought Our Undiscovered Univese and the Null Physics revolution has surely begun!" posts, devolves into griping about how people online are bashing the content of the book without having read it.

I think he's talking about us.

And the FAQ contains yet more explicitly wrong physics. Terence Witt objects thusly to people who call his redshift ideas "tired light":

Null physics shows, using the general theory
of relativity, that the observed intergalactic redshift is consistent with the static spatial curvature of a nonexpanding universe.


which shows that he at least knows what redshift is. But he follows it with



Since the universe is not expanding, the energy lost by photons through intergalactic redshift has to go somewhere.
The universe's primary luminosity is the optical band (UV-red), and when these photons are redshifted they release
microwaves directly into the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Although these microwaves are
initially colinear with their source photons (in order to conserve energy and momentum) they are quickly (by astronomical
standards, at least) scattered by the next link in what is referred to in Our Undiscovered Universe
as the cosmic fusion cycle. The CMB's power spectrum is consistent with this scattering mechanism, but there
is far more direct evidence of this process, and it is presented in detail in Part IV of Our Undiscovered Universe.

So, he's invented a photon decay mechanism. He wants normal photons to lose energy with distance, since he needs to explain redshift. He wants microwaves to appear out of nowhere, since he needs to explain the CMB. Why not kill two birds with one stone by making the CMB photons the decay products of the optical photons?

Well, because the CMB photons aren't pointing back to sources; they're nearly isotropic. And nearly a perfect blackbody. But Terence Witt isn't a moron, so he's invented a new photon scattering mechanism.

So, we've added yet another Null Physics prediction: microwave-frequency photons are scattered when they travel cosmological distances This prediction is false; I refute it thus (http://www.nrao.edu/imagegallery/php/level3.php?id=436). And Witt is still predicted blurring of optical spectral lines due to the stochastic nature of decay, which I refute thus (http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~wws/qsoabs.html), I can't say that Witt won't be able to fine-tune his decay properties in order to vaguely match the CMB blackbody (no matter what source spectrum is doing the decaying) but he''s going to have to do that to better than 1% over a range of 1000 in wavelength---I suspect that the decay law will look something like "Each optical photon looks up the blackbody spectrum in a textbook, queries neighboring photons to find agreement on a reference frame, then chooses a decay pattern so as to match this spectrum in the common frame."

Then there's this one:

Null physics claims that the most fundamental units of energy are second-meter^2. Isn't this in direct conflict
with basic physics, which has energy's units as kilogram-meter^2/second^2?
No, it's actually a unification of basic physics. The SI system of measurement contains a number of 'fundamental'
units, such as second, meter, kilogram, and Coulomb, many of which have been used, in one form or another, for
hundreds of years. Theoretical physicists talk about grand unification all the time, but fail to realize that a
truly unified theory will actually <em>reduce</em> the number of independent units that are used to describe the
physical world. Null physics demonstrates a <em>geometric</em> relationship between the SI units of second, meter,
and kilogram.

I'd really like to see how E = 1/2 mv^2 gives you units of seconds-meters^2. I'd also like to see how Null Physics will handle it if someone ever tries to measure energy in grams, centimeters, and seconds. According to Terry Witt, a 1 gram object moving at 1 cm per second is has 10^-4 joules of energy, but a 0.001 kg object moving at 0.01 m/s has 10^-7 joules. :jaw-dropp

[CaveDave]

The FAQ and journal are pretty entertaining, actually. The journal, after a bunch of "Wow! A number of people have bought Our Undiscovered Univese and the Null Physics revolution has surely begun!" posts, devolves into griping about how people online are bashing the content of the book without having read it.

Wish I coulda' seen it.


I think he's talking about us.

Tee hee hee.
Must have been fun to get that reaction.



I'd really like to see how E = 1/2 mv^2 gives you units of seconds-meters^2. I'd also like to see how Null Physics will handle it if someone ever tries to measure energy in grams, centimeters, and seconds. According to Terry Witt, a 1 gram object moving at 1 cm per second is has 10^-4 joules of energy, but a 0.001 kg object moving at 0.01 m/s has 10^-7 joules. :jaw-dropp
Wait, umm.... aren't those equivalent?? ... Ohh, I get it. ... Good catch.
What a maroon he must be. :D

Dave

[ben m]

Wait, umm.... aren't those equivalent?? ... Ohh, I get it. ... Good catch.
What a maroon he must be. :D

I want to keep emphasizing that Witt is (probably) not a moron; I'm sure he doesn't actually believe my crazy statement---he just never thought about units that way. (And, believe me, event the brighter physics majors have trouble getting used to dimensional analysis.)

That's why he's a crackpot and not a maroon.

[skeptigirl]

When supposed scientific advances or discoveries are introduced or sold to the public and not to the scientific community you can bet it is either a scam like Kevin Trudeau's, "The Cures They Don't Want You to Know About", or it is something the proponents were unable to convince the scientific community of, such as irreducible complexity or Intelligent Design.

This is a typical pattern for woo promoters.

[Reality Check]

See this review of “Our Undiscovered Universe” by Terence Witt from a professional physicist (Benjamin Monreal):
http://web.mit.edu/~bmonreal/www/Null_Physics_Review.html

Also see my review at http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~fiski/ouu_review.html

The flaws of this crackpot book are many and include:

Redefining the concept of infinity as a length with magnitude.
Defining a line as a series of points written as zeros and separated by plus signs, treating them as numbers so that they add up to zero and then treating the number zero as a point again!
A really bad atomic model "proving" that a electron orbiting a proton has a ground state that it cannot decay from by creating a new physical law.
Using the high school description of a neutron as a proton plus an electron and not realizing that this is just his atomic model!
Stating that galaxies have "galactic cores" which are super massive objects that are not quite black holes and not realizing that the centre of the Milky Way is well observed. These recycle stars into hydrogen. Oddly enough astronomers have not noticed dozens of stars vanishing from the galactic centre in the many images that they have taken over the last few decades.
Conclusion: Bad mathematics and even worse physics.

[Soapy Sam]

Perhaps then, the issue of importance here is the fact that "Smithsonian" displays full page ads for the book.
Maybe Randi should send a letter to the editor suggesting they at least add a disclaimer?

[Starthinker]

Perhaps then, the issue of importance here is the fact that "Smithsonian" displays full page ads for the book.
Maybe Randi should send a letter to the editor suggesting they at least add a disclaimer?

Because he paid them? I'll bet if I could afford such an ad I could write a book on soap shavings and make a profit.

[shadron]

If you want to see this sort of argument in action, come see http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=131501. We have a vociferous claimant to the crown of Physics wonder kid of the century there.