Why is there so much crackpot physics?

[lpetrich]

Originally Posted by Farsight

You know, putting Clinger straight on his electric field and his magnetic field, that aren't fields, but instead just the linear and rotational forces that result from electromagnetic field interactions. You know I'm right about that.

Screaming "I'm right! I'm right! I'm right" is argument by assertion.

I've studied lots of physics, and the electromagnetic field is a field in its own right.

Quote:

You cannot offer any criticism of Maxwell and Minkowski's screw nature of electromagnetism. So don't try to suggest I'm guessing. I'm not, and you know it.

This alleged "screw nature" is based on their analogies for explaining the cross products for the magnetic field. Those cross products appear because the magnetic field is an antisymmetric 2-tensor in 3-space. However, that mathematical object reduces to a vector, and that reduction requires cross products.

I call it an antisymmetric 2-tensor in 3-space because the overall electromagnetic field is an antisymmetric 2-tensor in general.

More generally for different dimensions, an antisymmetric 2-tensor behaves as follows:

1: vanishes
2: scalar
3: vector
4: two 3-vectors (self-dual and anti-self-dual -- F gives E+i*B and E-i*B)
5 and more: irreducible, as a vector is

(lack of structure of an electron...)

Quote:

Searching for structure is like probing a whirlpool with a barge pole and saying whatever's in the middle of this must be really small, because I can't feel anything. There isn't anything in the middle!

Except that collision experiments do NOT work that way. It's more like repeatedly poking that whirlpool at random locations. If you poke it with a ship's rudder, you aren't going to distinguish much detail. If you poke it with an oar, you will distinguish some detail. If you poke it with a pole, you will distinguish more detail.

Low energy = large wavelength = rudder
Medium energy = medium wavelength = oar
High energy = small wavelength = pole

Quote:

Now I really must go.

Argumentum ex necessitate abitûs
("Argument from one's need to depart")

Originally Posted by Farsight

Electricity is typically the movement of electrons, so it's right handed. The usual math is Ampère's circuital law. See the right-hand-rule diagram, on the right. The article refers to electric fields and magnetic fields instead of the electromagnetic field.

The handedness is from (antisymmetric 2-tensor) -> (cross product).

Originally Posted by Farsight

As I said a day or so ago potential is "more fundamental" than field, but I'll skip that. A field is typically a spatial disposition or structure. It isn't something separate from space. It's a "state of space". When that state is uniform and homogeneous, we usually say there's no field present.

Nonsense. A field is something that's a function of space-time values, and it can have a nonzero constant value.

[Reality Check]

Originally Posted by Farsight

As I said a day or so ago potential is "more fundamental" than field, but I'll skip that.

And you get a sentence right, Farsight !
It is the AB effect that first showed that electromagnetic potentials had physical effects. Before this the fact that the potential could be scaled by any value meant that scientists treated it as a mathematical convenience and concentrated on electromagnetic fields.

[BurntSynapse]

Originally Posted by Vorpal

The linear algebras we get from vector spaces are pretty trivially not commutative, except by having some smaller subalgebra that happens to be so. Rotations in more than 2D are a very obvious example of this.

True.

In our case, unless some monitoring and/or measurement to watch for such risks creeping into the calculations is being performed, we have to say such risks are uncontrolled by definition, but there are a number of ways my guess could be wrong...

Perhaps there such monitoring controls are in place and I've simply not researched well enough...that's a medium possibility IMO.

Perhaps the advantages for Q's are inaccurate. I found Q experts who argued for the advantages of Q's, corroborated by the literature makes me think this possibility very low.

The most likely point of failure for my recommendation on where to focus math study IMO, that the specific areas like Q's, are completely inappropriate and ineffective. This definitely seems the most probable; But again: absent a better proposal, it seems justified.

Now, let's consider Al, who shoots and kills Bob. It is argued we shouldn't think of Al as a murderer because he only shot Bob during an infinitesimal fraction of Al's life, so judging Al a murderer would mis-characterize him about as wrongly as we could get.

Obvious examples where X is not the case (Al has been very good, operations are not commutative) are not how we assess whether X exists. If we can show a efforts to merely study potential risk in any significant degree relative to the amount of commutativity actually used, then we may want to look elsewhere.

Originally Posted by Vorpal

So please understand my utter confusion about your claims about how scientists are unjustifiably assuming commutativity because there's plenty of noncommutativity in linear algebras used in physics.

The existence of non-commutative calculations has no bearing on whether other calculations possess this potential, relative weakness in the same way years of being a model citizen should not influence the verdict we render of Al.

Indeed, as you point out, non-commutative techniques can be used perfectly happily with commutative operations within them.

[lpetrich]

Originally Posted by Farsight

Don't conveniently drop the Minkowski quote, lpetrich. Here it is again. ...

That's what D'rok calls "hermeneutical scholasticism", and that's what I like to call arguing like a theologian.

(Denial of Hermann Minkowski quote about the unity of space-time)

Quote:

I don't. I just point out that it's a mathematical artefact.

What makes it a "mathematical artefact"? Do you understand the mathematics behind it? Are you willing to accept that you deny Einstein and Minkowski and Feynman when you claim that space-time is a "mathematical artefact"?

Quote:

Don't talk wet, lpetrich. Hold you hands up. See that gap, that space between them? You can't see the space itself, but you can see that there is a space between them. So space is empirical. Now waggle your hands. That's motion. It's empirical too. Now you show me some time flowing.

Seems like a throwback to the methods of Aristotelian physics. Are rainbows solid objects? Are clouds solid objects? They look solid, so they must be solid, right?

(Maxwell-thumping snipped)
Carefully selecting quotations is no substitute for understanding the equations.

Originally Posted by Farsight

Originally Posted by lpetrich

Do you understand the mathematics of it? Like the mathematics of electromagnetism as a gauge theory.

Well enough. And I'm the only one here who actually understands electromagnetism, remember?

I don't "remember" any such thing. Also, claims like that seem like saying "what a great genius I am", something common among pseudoscientists.

Quote:

So I don't just understand the mathematics, I understand the meaning of it. You don't.

"Meaning" extracted from carefully selected quotes rather than from trying to interpret the mathematics directly. Do you understand what's involved in the mathematics? No quotes. You must explain the mathematics.

Quote:

E isn't a field. It's a force resulting from the interaction of one electromagnetic field with another. The electromagnetic field has a screw nature. Two dynamical vortices move linearly apart. They do this because of Fuv interaction, not because there's some E fields with radial lines sticking out of them.

Except that electromagnetism does NOT work like that. The electric and magnetic fields are *fields*, and to deny that is to deny Maxwell and Einstein and Minkowski and Feynman.

[ben m]

Originally Posted by BurntSynapse

In our case, unless some monitoring and/or measurement to watch for such risks creeping into the calculations is being performed, we have to say such risks are uncontrolled by definition, but there are a number of ways my guess could be wrong...

What risk? What are you talking about?

When Oliver Heaviside writes down a set of equation for E&M that work, and makes predictions, and passes all experimental tests ... how does this incur "risk"? Most people would call this a "discovery". That's what we want physics theories to do.

What's lower-risk than that? You think Heaviside should have used different equations to prevent ... what class of mistake, or what misdirection, or what? Do you think that Heaviside's choice of equation failed to describe some 19th-century experiment? Do you think it did so in such a way as to make physicists blind to the possibility of such an experiment?

Do you think Heaviside should have used some extra-flexible equations, as though he'd guessed that new-EM-physics would be discovered 200 years later, and left a slot open for it? How on Earth could he have done this? This seems like a worse "risk", as though today's physicists would be limited by Heaviside's imagination/guesswork about future developments. Do you consider it "risky", in retrospect, that Heaviside failed to guess about a future electroweak unification, and try to use math that made room for it?

If there's really a "risk" invoked by Heaviside's choice of representation ... well, look at the history. Einstein and Deschamps and Schwinger and Feynman and Weinberg have so little trouble rewriting E&M in a dozen different ways. If Heaviside's math is so blinkering, isn't it curious that people have so little trouble extending it? Where did we get all these experimental searches for magnetic monopoles, photon mass, dark photons, EPR correlations, squeezed light, vacuum birefringence, Z-primes, etc. etc. etc., none of which were anticipated in any way in either Maxwell's or Heaviside's E&M?

Mathematical physics does not have "lock-in". When Heaviside suggests using vector equations to describe EM fields, it is not like (say) Apple deciding to use Motorola chips---"well, now that we've chosen X we've lost the opportunity to do Y, I wish we'd thought harder about the risks before we went so far down this path". Nope. It doesn't force anyone to conform, it doesn't put a large intellectual burden on trying different things, it doesn't wrap a set of blinders around the data ... and this is obvious to everyone in the field. Theorists are trying different things all the time; the things they're trying are remarkably independent of any choices made by Huygens, Maxwell, Einstein, Schrodinger, Wheeler, etc.; that's what theorists do, and it's what they've done for 150 years.

You keep wanting to describe modern physics in terms of its "risks". You seem to be constructing these "risks" by ignoring everything that's going on in physics. ETA: It's like listening to a train-engineer talk about the risks associated with cars. "Why is there more than one car on the highway at a time? Historically, that only happens if the track signals have failed. Also, I see cars with very different widths, all trying to use the same system---this is untenable, we need to pick a gauge and stick to it. What happens if a 64" car wants to go somewhere where the road gauge is 78"?"

[ben m]

Originally Posted by Farsight

Wrong conclusion. You're scattering one whirlpool off another.

Scattering two extended objects off one another invokes the form-factor twice, meaning the cross section deviates even more strongly from the 1/q^2 dependence.

Amusingly, the 1/q^2 dependence is there in *entirely classical* scattering. Shoot two classical charge/current distributions at one another, apply the Coulomb and Lorentz force laws as they pass, and find the classical momentum transfer for each impact factor. This is not hard. I had to solve this on a blackboard during an oral exam once, impromptu, with no references, including getting all the units right.

If you're shooting point-charges, the appropriate target-area drops as 1/q^2. If you're shooting plum-puddings, the cross section drops off as 1/q^2 for small q^2, but drops faster at high q^2 ... i.e. there's a form factor.

Whirlpool-whirlpool scattering, Farsight? How much time have YOU spent thinking about it? What equation do *you* come up with, using what methods, for the cross-section? Do you think whirlpool-whirlpool scattering has a *larger* cross section at high q^2 than point-point?

Quote:

How can you diffract a point particle ben? How can a point particle spin? How in an atomic orbital can a point particle exist as a standing wave? Magic? Quantum mysticism that defies all human understanding?

It's called "quantum mechanics". It was figured out in the early 20th century. If you don't like it, why don't you and Einstein go find an experiment that disagrees with it. (Einstein tried, remember? But when the experiments were done they agreed with QM and disagreed with Einstein.)

[Reality Check]

Originally Posted by Farsight

How can you diffract a point particle ben? How can a point particle spin? How in an atomic orbital can a point particle exist as a standing wave? Magic? Quantum mysticism that defies all human understanding?

Thanks for this bit of crank "logic", Farsight !
This is either the fallacy of

• argument from incredibility (the crank does not believe X so X is wrong).
• argument from ignorance (the crank does not know about X so X is wrong).

QM equations use point particles. QM does not state that electrons, photons, etc. are actual particles. QM does not state that electrons, photons, etc. are actual waves.
Solutions to these equations show that electrons, photons, etc. behave like particles in some cases and like waves in other cases.

The case of an atomic orbital that you consistently quote mine (lie about - another attribute of a crank ) is a good example because the electrons in atomic orbitals display the properties of both waves and particles.

Quote:

With the development of quantum mechanics, it was found that the orbiting electrons around a nucleus could not be fully described as particles, but needed to be explained by the wave-particle duality.

This does remind me of a few other attributes of a crackpot

• Ignorance of a basic fact - to assert that a theory is wrong you first have to know the theory!
• The inability to learn.
  Many times we point cranks to textbooks and good web sources (even Wikipedia!) where the actual science that they dispute is explained. They ignore the science and continue with their unsupported assertions.
• The inability to acknowledge that they were wrong.
  Sometimes a crackpot will say that they have learned about the science that says that their assertion is wrong but will use any excuse to say that they are still right, e.g. "another crackpot disagrees with the science" or "an obscure, outdated paper says I am right".

[Vorpal]

Originally Posted by BurntSynapse

In our case, unless some monitoring and/or measurement to watch for such risks creeping into the calculations is being performed, we have to say such risks are uncontrolled by definition, but there are a number of ways my guess could be wrong...

What?

Originally Posted by BurntSynapse

The existence of non-commutative calculations has no bearing on whether other calculations possess this potential, relative weakness in the same way years of being a model citizen should not influence the verdict we render of Al.

You misunderstand. The point is that when old mathematics fails to apply, physicists get new math. Unlike the AI murdering someone, a fundamental mathematical 'malfunction' is not a disaster for science in general: on the contrary, it's an exciting event because we get to learn something new. When mathematics that could be described as having commutative observable operators (though it wouldn't have been described that way until after the fact) was found to fail to apply to reality, scientists discovered quantum mechanics and learned new math that did apply. I don't see how this was in any way a bad thing.

Perhaps you could describe a hypothetical situation in, say, physics, of the kind of failure your risk assessment is concerned with. Because the only thing I can imagine it could correspond to is falsification of scientific theories, but I don't see how this would provide any new insight.

[The Man]

Originally Posted by Farsight

It's not my dog. I haven't got a dog.

Indeed you do and there is even a thread already dedicated to it, so take it there if you actually want to talk about it.

Originally Posted by Farsight

Says The Man who isn't talking physics, and tries it on with a bit of sly "crackpot" abuse. Pah. Talk physics. If you don't, you might just as well stick a label on your forehead that says Troll.

In case you have missed it the topic of this thread is crackpot physics and why there is so much of it. Actually discussing the topic of the thread is not "sly" nor are your attempts to discuss your own notions here as opposed to on the thread intended specifically for that purpose. Some here feel your claims represent a good example of crackpot physics and thus provide a living demonstration of the topic at hand.

So why do you feel your notions represent a good example of crackpot physics and are thus on topic for this thread?

[Perpetual Student]

Originally Posted by Reality Check

Thanks for this bit of crank "logic", Farsight !
This is either the fallacy of

• argument from incredibility (the crank does not believe X so X is wrong).
• argument from ignorance (the crank does not know about X so X is wrong).

QM equations use point particles. QM does not state that electrons, photons, etc. are actual particles. QM does not state that electrons, photons, etc. are actual waves.
Solutions to these equations show that electrons, photons, etc. behave like particles in some cases and like waves in other cases.

The case of an atomic orbital that you consistently quote mine (lie about - another attribute of a crank ) is a good example because the electrons in atomic orbitals display the properties of both waves and particles.


This does remind me of a few other attributes of a crackpot

• Ignorance of a basic fact - to assert that a theory is wrong you first have to know the theory!
• The inability to learn.
  Many times we point cranks to textbooks and good web sources (even Wikipedia!) where the actual science that they dispute is explained. They ignore the science and continue with their unsupported assertions.
• The inability to acknowledge that they were wrong.
  Sometimes a crackpot will say that they have learned about the science that says that their assertion is wrong but will use any excuse to say that they are still right, e.g. "another crackpot disagrees with the science" or "an obscure, outdated paper says I am right".

This^

[ctamblyn]

Originally Posted by Reality Check

Sometimes a crackpot will say that they have learned about the science that says that their assertion is wrong but will use any excuse to say that they are still right, e.g. "another crackpot disagrees with the science" or "an obscure, outdated paper says I am right".[/list]

I suspect that, on some occasions at least, that is not due to honestly holding the position, but for commercial reasons. For example, the hypothetical crackpot in question may have a product to promote, so of course they can't publicly admit to any errors which call their credibility into question as this could jeopardise sales. I imagine the strategy is ineffective, as the product is likely to be patently crackpot in nature, and a quick Google will probably throw up several discussions which expose the flaws in the ideas.

[BurntSynapse]

Originally Posted by ben m

What risk? What are you talking about?

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

Originally Posted by ben m

When Oliver Heaviside writes down a set of equation for E&M that work, and makes predictions, and passes all experimental tests ... how does this incur "risk"?

By using assumptions, as all models do.

Originally Posted by ben m

What's lower-risk than that?

Doing it with modern processes and knowledge, which incorporate lots of stuff we've learned about how to manage risks & avoid failure.

Originally Posted by ben m

You think Heaviside should have used different equations to prevent ... what class of mistake, or what misdirection, or what?

Not necessarily. It would depend on what a modeling effort compliant with modern good practices yield relative to Heaviside. Perhaps as applied, we would find no discrepancy, perhaps not.

Originally Posted by ben m

Do you think that Heaviside's choice of equation failed to describe some 19th-century experiment?

I'm sure that from some perspectives, it is absolutely without defect or anomaly.

Originally Posted by ben m

Do you think it did so in such a way as to make physicists blind to the possibility of such an experiment?

No.

Originally Posted by ben m

Do you think Heaviside should have used some extra-flexible equations, as though he'd guessed that new-EM-physics would be discovered 200 years later, and left a slot open for it?

No idea what would qualify as "some extra-flexible equations"

Originally Posted by ben m

How on Earth could he have done this?

No clue, and I don't know how its a useful question for current planning. Its perhaps of psycho-historical interest to someone, but is not my focus.

Originally Posted by ben m

Do you consider it "risky", in retrospect, that Heaviside failed to guess about a future electroweak unification, and try to use math that made room for it?

No, but the risks he was warned about with vectors he chose to hand-wave away by claiming "What am I do do, not eat my lunch when I'm hungry because I don't understand digestion?"

This does not appear a low-risk decision-making process, but the pragmatic argument carried the day, with no follow-on monitoring for indications that extending narrow, vector-based algebras would run into trouble. These predictions come true whenever we try to pair those equations with GR.

Originally Posted by ben m

If Heaviside's math is so blinkering, isn't it curious that people have so little trouble extending it?

Even if I thought the premise of blinkering were true (I don't), it would not seem curious the best known tools in the world would make progress. This has no bearing on whether they can be suspected of being ineffective at resolving conflicts like that between QM & GR.

Originally Posted by ben m

Where did we get all these experimental searches for magnetic monopoles, photon mass, dark photons, EPR correlations, squeezed light, vacuum birefringence, Z-primes, etc. etc. etc., none of which were anticipated in any way in either Maxwell's or Heaviside's E&M?

No idea, and no idea what any answer anyone could provide would tell us about whether studying new math tools is a plausible option for resolving conflicts like that between QM & GR.

[BurntSynapse]

Originally Posted by Vorpal

You misunderstand. The point is that when old mathematics fails to apply, physicists get new math.

Sometimes they do, sometimes they simply plod along and adopt their framework as Quine described: when they absolutely must.

[ben m]

Originally Posted by BurntSynapse

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

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

"Documenting different assumptions" sounds like what theoretical physicists do for a living. A theoretical physicist reads Maxwell's paper and says, "Hmm, can I reformulate this as X? Can I add a mass to Y? What if this is an epiphenomenon of Z?" They do this without prompting from a project manager. They document their inquiries (write papers) and discuss the process extensively (attend conferences etc.)

Maybe this document-assumptions thing is more important in hierarchical engineering projects. When Technician A says "We can use this O-ring, I checked it out", and Engineer B says "OK, I'll pass the solution along", and Task Leader C says "We're ready to build" ... well, maybe nobody ever reads Technician A's report and discovers his temperature-range assumptions, because Engineer B's recommendation is all anyone ever reads.

This is not how it works in physics. We rederive everything from the ground up, over and over. Nobody takes Maxwell's word that he checked something-or-other, as though he was a trusted middle manager. Anyone who can think of things to check, checks them.

Quote:

Doing it with modern processes and knowledge, which incorporate lots of stuff we've learned about how to manage risks & avoid failure.

I don't think we have any such knowledge. You have some manager-speak from the engineering world (which I'm sure works there) and your guess that an obscure cog-sci textbook gives you a "process" to apply to theoretical physics.

Quote:

This does not appear a low-risk decision-making process, but the pragmatic argument carried the day, with no follow-on monitoring for indications that extending narrow, vector-based algebras would run into trouble. These predictions come true whenever we try to pair those equations with GR.

See, you don't even know what you're talking about. Quaternions and vectors are not different algebras. They're the same algebra.

Quote:

No idea, and no idea what any answer anyone could provide would tell us about whether studying new math tools is a plausible option for resolving conflicts like that between QM & GR.

I'm just pointing out that questioning Maxwell's assumptions---which you seem to think would have been inhibited by "undocumented assumptions"---has not been inhibited at all. New math is invented, willy-nilly, as fast as people can think of assumptions they want to reevaluate.

I take this as evidence that the problem you're trying to solve---the problem of "undocumented risk" of people being locked-in to inadequate, assumption-ful math---is not a problem. It's a problem you made up in order to have a nail to go with your hammer.

[W.D.Clinger]

Originally Posted by BurntSynapse

No, but the risks he was warned about with vectors he chose to hand-wave away by claiming "What am I do do, not eat my lunch when I'm hungry because I don't understand digestion?"

This does not appear a low-risk decision-making process, but the pragmatic argument carried the day, with no follow-on monitoring for indications that extending narrow, vector-based algebras would run into trouble. These predictions come true whenever we try to pair those equations with GR.

You're quite wrong about the highlighted phrases.

First of all, the ease of reformulating Maxwell's equations in covariant form was a triumph for general relativity, not a problem.

Secondly, as explained in the current Wikipedia article on Oliver Heaviside:

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

He famously said, "Mathematics is an experimental science, and definitions do not come first, but later on." He was replying to criticism over his use of operators that were not clearly defined. On another occasion he stated somewhat more defensively, "I do not refuse my dinner simply because I do not understand the process of digestion."

Heaviside's approach to mathematics was not rigorous. Had Heaviside been the only person working on vector analysis, that would have been a serious risk.

Josiah Willard Gibbs developed vector analysis independently of Heaviside. Gibbs was a capable mathematician, and his development of vector analysis was mathematically rigorous.

Heaviside's use of vector methods was justified by Gibbs, not by Heaviside.

That was all done in the 19th century. Since then, several generations of mathematicians and scientists have developed and generalized vector math far beyond what was known to Heaviside. Today, worrying about the risk of vector math is like worrying about the risk of being unable to breathe while riding in a vehicle that goes faster than a horse.

Originally Posted by ben m

I don't think we have any such knowledge. You have some manager-speak from the engineering world (which I'm sure works there) and your guess that an obscure cog-sci textbook gives you a "process" to apply to theoretical physics.

If you want to know what engineers think of his manager-speak, read Dilbert.

Originally Posted by ben m

See, you don't even know what you're talking about. Quaternions and vectors are not different algebras. They're the same algebra.

Well, they may have been the same algebra way back in the 19th century. Today, vector algebra is a generalization of quaternions, which is the same as saying quaternions are a special case of vector algebra. That means quaternions obey all the axioms of vector algebra, and also obey some additional axioms.

That means assuming the correctness of vector math is a weaker assumption than assuming the correctness of quaternions. BurntSynapse has that entirely backwards, probably because his knowledge of these subjects appears to be limited to its 19th century history, where quaternions were invented first. (In the interview I cited earlier, Buck Field seems to have gotten even that backwards.)

Originally Posted by ben m

I take this as evidence that the problem you're trying to solve---the problem of "undocumented risk" of people being locked-in to inadequate, assumption-ful math---is not a problem. It's a problem you made up in order to have a nail to go with your hammer.

Yep.

Getting back to the subject of this thread, we can now conclude that inventing a make-believe problem to go with your favorite tool is yet another source of crackpot physics.

[Hellbound]

Originally Posted by W.D.Clinger

Getting back to the subject of this thread, we can now conclude that inventing a make-believe problem to go with your favorite tool is yet another source of crackpot physics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[ctamblyn]

Originally Posted by Farsight

...
Sorry, can't stop.

Avoiding difficult questions?

When you do stop by next, do remember that you have neither acknowledged your error in claiming that the E-S paper was a "classical electromagnetism paper", nor owned up to your misunderstanding of the sources you quoted in support of that error, nor answered my questions from above which I reproduce here for your convenience:

(1) What is the Aharonov-Bohm effect?
(2) How is it detected experimentally?

(The following post may also be of interest to you, if you insist on denying that the E-S paper described a fundamentally quantum effect.)

[Reality Check]

Originally Posted by Farsight

Oh, and have a read of Woit's blog about why there's so much crackpot physics.

Woit's blog happens to be one that I follow and actually read - something that you do not seem to do, Farsight !
No mention of crackpot physics in that blog entry.
No mention of crank physics in that blog entry.
No discussion about the cause of crackpot or crank physics.

It is basically a book review. The book is about actual physics (not crackpot physics).

[Perpetual Student]

Farsight and BurntSynapse:
Where is your intellectual curiosity? We can all develop misconceptions and follow dead ends, but when someone is available and willing to share knowledge, why do you put up barriers and withdraw into your preconceived world? What happened to your willingness to learn something new?
I suggest you attempt to open your minds to what is being offered here. There is a vast resource of information available to confirm what you can learn here. Let the light in!

[BurntSynapse]

Originally Posted by ben m

This is not how it works in physics. We rederive everything from the ground up, over and over.

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

Is this a reasonable implication to draw from your statement?

[BurntSynapse]

Originally Posted by Perpetual Student

BurntSynapse:
Where is your intellectual curiosity?

Somewhere far from the certainty you clearly possess.

[DeiRenDopa]

Originally Posted by Hellbound

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[DeiRenDopa]

Originally Posted by ben m

Quote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Reality Check]

Originally Posted by BurntSynapse

Is this a reasonable implication to draw from your statement?

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

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

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

[The Man]

Originally Posted by BurntSynapse

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

Is this a reasonable implication to draw from your statement?

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

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

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

[Perpetual Student]

Quote:

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

Originally Posted by BurntSynapse

Somewhere far from the certainty you clearly possess.

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

[ben m]

Originally Posted by BurntSynapse

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

Is this a reasonable implication to draw from your statement?

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

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

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

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

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

[lpetrich]

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

Quote:

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

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

Originally Posted by Farsight

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

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

Quote:

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

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

Quote:

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

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

[Perpetual Student]

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

[ben m]

Originally Posted by Perpetual Student

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Farsight]

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

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

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

[Pixel42]

Originally Posted by Farsight

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

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

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

Quote:

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

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

[edd]

Originally Posted by Farsight

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

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

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

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