Templeton Foundation awarded PCW Davies $1M for religion, after Davies, a physics professor, wrote a lot of popular books about the beauty of mysterious and unexplained equations. The award ceremony was in a London cathedral.
In 1995, physicist Davies wrote on pp54-57 of his book ‘About Time’:
‘Whenever I read dissenting views of time, I cannot help thinking of Herbert Dingle… who wrote … Relativity for All, published in 1922. He became Professor … at University College London… In his later years, Dingle began seriously to doubt Einstein’s concept … Dingle … wrote papers for journals pointing out Einstein’s errors and had them rejected … In October 1971, J.C. Hafele [used atomic clocks to defend Einstein] … You can’t get much closer to Dingle’s ‘everyday’ language than that.’
Now, let’s check out J.C. Hafele.
J. C. Hafele is not horses***. Hafele writes in Science vol. 177 (1972) pp 166-8 that he uses G. Builder (1958) as analysis for the atomic clocks.
G. Builder (1958) is an article called ‘ETHER AND RELATIVITY’ in Australian Journal of Physics, v11, 1958, p279, which states:
‘… we conclude that the relative retardation of clocks… does indeed compel us to recognise the CAUSAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ABSOLUTE velocities.’
Just to remind ourselves of what Einstein and his verifier Sir Arthur Eddington wrote on this:
‘The special theory of relativity … does not extend to non-uniform motion … The laws of physics must be of such a nature that they apply to systems of reference in any kind of motion. Along this road we arrive at an extension of the postulate of relativity….’ – Albert Einstein, ‘The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity’, Annalen der Physik, v49, 1916.
‘The Michelson-Morley experiment has thus failed to detect our motion through the aether, because the effect looked for – the delay of one of the light waves – is exactly compensated by an automatic contraction of the matter forming the apparatus…. The great stumbing-block for a philosophy which denies absolute space is the experimental detection of absolute rotation.’ – A.S. Eddington, Space Time and Gravitation, Cambridge, 1921, pp. 20, 152.
So the contraction of the Michelson-Morley instrument made it fail to detect absolute motion. This is why special relativity needs replacement with a causal general relativity:
‘According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable.’ – Albert Einstein, Leyden university lecture ‘Ether and Relativity’, 1920. (A. Einstein, Sidelights on Relativity, Dover, 1952, p. 23.)
‘… with the new theory of electrodynamics [vacuum filled with virtual particles] we are rather forced to have an aether.’ – P.A.M. Dirac, ‘Is There an Aether?,’ Nature, v168, 1951, p906. (If you have a kid playing with magnets, how do you explain the pull and push forces felt through space? As ‘magic’?)
‘Children lose interest … because a natural interest in the world around them has been replaced by an unnatural acceptance of the soundness of certain views, the correctness of particular opinions and the validity of specific claims.’ – Dr David Lewis, You can teach your child intelligence, Book Club Associates, London, 1982, p. 258.
Wonder why the ‘defenders of Einstein’ don’t attack general relativity? I suppose they are too busy defending obsolete special relativity, which only applies to non-accelerating motion…. Open debate, promised by the religion-science Templeton Foundation, sounds very nice, and was promised also by Britain’s Prime Minister who stated we were going to war to defend liberty.
When people wanted to raise the issue of liberty in Iraq during the last Labour Party conference, the Government used its power over the police to have an old member held under the ‘Prevention of Terrorism Act’ to prevent free speech. He was lucky compared to the guy who was repeatedly shot in the back until dead ‘by accident’.
Templeton will have to turn similarly paranoid when it runs into the real world. The whole point of ‘blacklisting’ seems to be accusing people of terrorism or being unethical, without foundation.
They will simply take the moral high ground like religion and when you start asking questions or providing ideas they’ll fabricate some irrelevant excuse to suppress you, saying you’re a cowboy. [This was inspired by Woit's post: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=297]
posted by nige @ 2:43 AM
11 comments
11 Comments:
Kevin,
If you are an ant (?) a flat earth theory is probably OK for you.
Special relativity works because it duplicates the ether theory equations of FitzGerald-Lorentz (1889-93), Larmor (1903), and Poincare (1904). Poincare is a bit like Zweig in this story, writing a longer and more detailed paper (Poincare put some considerations of gravity, admittedly the mistaken ideas of Minkowski and Einstein around 1908, in his 1904 paper).
Einstein got published because Planck was editor. Einstein put forward, after his first rambling philosophical relativity paper (which has no references or anything), E=mc2. His 'derivation' was rot.
Planck then wrote a paper getting E=mc2 rigorously.
A review article on relativity cited Planck for E=mc2.
Einstein then wrote to the editor of the review, claiming he had E=mc2 first, just because he had a rotten argument valid in limited circumstances.
This is Einstein the egotist. If priority disputes are valid, Poincare - who Einstein never had to guts to acknowledge - should take precedent, and several electronics engineers got E=mc2 from electromagnetism more rigorously that Einstein, earlier.
It's the hero worship issue. Just because someone becomes famous, you get a million 'defenders' of the guy trying to warp history and facts to 'defend' their hero.
Dingle as you say, messed up. He was only a professor of the history of science, not a mathematician of skill or a good physicist. This is why he messed up everything he did, making friends with Einstein for the wrong reason, writing a silly essay that annoyed Einstein, and then trying to get back at Einstein after he had died and when his (Dingle's) mind was not at its peak.
‘The idealised physical reference object, which is implied in current quantum theory, is a fluid permeating all space like an aether.’ – Sir Arthur Eddington, MA, DSc, LLD, FRS, Relativity Theory of Protons and Electrons, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1936, p. 180.
‘Looking back at the development of physics, we see that the ether, soon after its birth, became the enfant terrible of the family of physical substances. First, the construction of a simple mechanical picture of the ether proved to be impossible and was discarded. This caused to a great extent the breakdown of the mechanical point of view. Second, we have to give up the hope that through the presence of the ether sea, one co-ordinate system will be distinguished and lead to the recognition of absolute and not only relative motion. … After such bad experiences, this is the moment to forget the ether completely and to try never to mention its name. We shall say our space has the physical property of transmitting waves and so omit the use of a word we have decided to avoid. The omission of a word from our vocabulary is of course no remedy; the troubles are indeed much too profound to be solved in this way. Let us now write down the facts which have been sufficiently confirmed by experiment without bothering any more about the ‘e---r’ problem.’ – Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, Evolution of Physics, 1938, pp. 184-5; written to get Jewish Infeld out of Nazi Germany and accepted as a worthy refugee in America.
(Einstein was against ether in 1905 to wide praise from politicians, because ether had bogged physics down in speculation, but then in his inaugural lecture at Leyden in 1920 Einstein said ‘According to the general theory of relativity, space without ether is unthinkable’, and in 1938 conceded defeat at the e---r word!)
The problem is that the Einstein 'defenders' are really athetists who have no God and need to identify God with someone like Einstein, who unfortunately was a big sinner, for all his genius and for all his genuine advances.
'Special relativity' is a cult religion aimed at sneering at people and putting kids off science, and this attitude has led to string theory. While I respect all Einstein's equations, he should have been more forceful about the ether and the flat-earth nature of special relativity. He was too much in touch with his enormous fan club.
Kevin,
You say, "it is really rather pointless arguing about the assignment of priority."
Einstein was the one arguing he was first, because he was probably ignorant of the others. Ignorance is no excuse in law, and certainly not in physics either.
It is relevant to bring this up because string theory operates by censorship, namely covering up scientific work to make fantasy appear the only way forward.
The downside of this is that people endlessly re-discover the same things, because the record is endless being wiped clean by arXiv.org. This is a colossal waste of time and effort.
My latest post on this blog contains an analysis of how arXiv.org fraudulently uses U.S. taxpayers money to suppress genuine science, citing examples of 'blacklisting' that was done to save face for Witten's M-theory of 10/11 dimensions.
This fraud has its roots in the media brainwashing that special relativity and the relativity of motion is right. It is false, because you can't go in a straight line at uniform motion.
All real motion in the universe is along curved paths due to gravitation caused by the presence fo mass in the gauge boson field that constitutes the spacetime fabric.
Therefore, all real motion involves accelerations, which are absolute, not relative.
If I wanted to start a priority row over Einstein's fame (which I don't), I'd have mentioned the fact that Hilbert obtained 'Eistein's' field equation of GR just before Einstein! In fact, I'm being very kind to Einstein.
E=mc^2 implies a light speed in all matter. I've quoted t'Hooft admitting electron spin with the classical electron radius would have the equator going 137c.
"by calling your critics rude names."
It's not rude to call a spade a spade. The critics are the ones being rude, falsely labelling cranks etc., without knowing what they're dealing with. I'm interested in facts, not in name calling, which is why I call spades spades, and don't mislead people.
Do you love Hawking's unethical pronouncements, for example his essay dismissing all crackpots because different crackpots have different ideas, which are not compatible with other crackpots?
He is unethical because he fails to say that different establishment "explanations" of the gravity strength, none of which have factual tests or proof unlike mine which has both uniquely, are thus crackpot by his definition.
All his definition proves is his arbitrary power in his fame to call anyone a crackpot without reading the paper. This is unethical because it is precisely the attitude, arrogant ignorance, which holds back science.
It is a NAZI type fascist dictatorship. Actually, the Nazis did something for science like speeding up developments which led to rockets for space exploration, although they were evil. The modern version of NAZISM in science is just plain evil.
"Calling a spade a spade."
Best wishes,
Nigel
Kevin,
Your post seems nonsense from start to finish. You cannot extract energy from the 500 m/s air molecules at sea level, any more than from the electrons, which orbit at 0.01c, not 0.1 c which you falsely state.
If you think that the 0.01c speed of orbit of electron gas on the surfaces of conductors is the number to use in E = 0.5mv^2, you are crackpot, and to assert such a thing so strongly makes you arrogant, not me.
You can only use the net change in speed in the kinetic energy formula. Since the 0.01c speed remains the same, and the only variation is the 1 mm/s drift speed, about 3 x 10^-12 c, that is the number to use when calculating the net kinetic energy transfer in electricity.
Feynman points out somewhere that energy is meaningless if you don't use it or can't use it. You can't extract the 0.01c electron energy, so ignore it. All you can use is the energy from the net 0.00000...0003c speed of drift.
By your argument, the 10 m/s wind energy is not the mass of air times half the square of the wind speed, but must include the air molecule speed of 500 m/s.
The textbooks are written by people who don't give a piss about physics, but write on the subject to get a cheque from the publisher to buy their wives new sports cars.
This is why Hawkins or is it Hawking, has the fuc___g arrogance to promote himself for untestable Hawking radiation which appears as gamma rays swamped by the background radiation of space and thus unpredictable, while still having the shamelessness to say:
‘I don’t demand that a theory correspond to reality because I don’t know what it is. Reality is not a quality you can test with litmus paper. All I’m concerned with is that the theory should predict the results of measurements.’
[Stephen Hawking in S. Hawking and R. Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1996, p. 121.]
Hawking is a li_r for saying "All I’m concerned with is that the theory should predict the results of measurements."
His work does not fit into this category, which he has no Nobel prize. He gets away with such arrogant lies because he has the media on his side for non-scientific reasons, like his political success in climbing the greasy pole to the top of physics, despite minor handicaps. I'm actually a fan of Hawking radiation as it is theoretically well founded, so I'm in the unhappy position of trying to ridicule people who have some work that is not wrong.
The great fallacy is that people are either 100% genuine or 100% crackpot. In every case human nature makes it less clear cut when you dig into the details...
The speed to use in E = 0.5 mv^2 to get kinetic energy is the difference in speeds resulting from the energy transfer.
If you get a 1 kg rock hurled at you at 1 m/s, but you are travelling away at the same speed, the rock hit you with .5(1)(1) = 0.5 J.
It will deliver 0.5(1)(0) = 0 J.
It is the amount by which the speed VARIES which determines the energy actually transferred. In electricity this is the drift speed of 1 mm/s for typical 1 A currents, not 0.1 or 0.01 c.
Take another example, if you have two 1 kg stones each moving at 1 m/s towards each other. The relative speed of either with respect to the other is then 2 m/s.
In the frame of reference of either stone (assuming one stone is stationary, as if you are riding on it), the total energy is then
.5(1)(0) + 0.5(1)(2^2) = 2 J.
But in the central frame of reference where both stones are going 1 m/s towards each other, the total energy is then
0.5(1)(1) + 0.5(1)(1) = 1 J.
Hence the impact energy is double if you watch the collision from the mid-collision frame of reference, than if you watch it from one stone or the other!
So energy depends on the frame of reference and is not universally absolute.
Thanks for that, I thought Kirchoff's laws were horseshit for physics purposes because he deals with equilibrium and not transients. Likewise, Ohm's law is horseshit because current doesn't instantly flow around a circuit and adjust itself instantly for resistances it encounters. Once the switch closes, the current has to reach the resistor before it "knows" what the resistor value is.
Logic therefore disproves conventional electrical wisdom, which is of course a duality like wave-particle duality in modern physics. You use the Compton equation for gamma rays being shielded by lead, which assumes gamma rays are particles.
But you use the wave equation for gamma rays for other purposes.
Likewise, you use Kirchoff's and Ohm's laws where the time taken for current (light speed energy current of Heaviside, not the 1 mm/s drift current) to complete a circuit is small, i.e., for desktop electronics, you have to use the wave model (Heaviside) for long circuits like signals in telegraph lines, where the delay time is significant.
There are lots of mathematical fiddles that work, Kevin. It is not useful really to refer to the physicists of the mainstream as if they knew what they were doing or have a single textbook that is consensus.
Catt, for all his shortcomings, recognises that the exposure of the LACK OF CONSENSUS in the mainstream is valuable.
Dr Peter Woit does not help his own case by referring to "string theory" when he means a landscape of 10^500 different possibilities, of branes, dimensions, explanations of the weakness of gravity, etc., that together are referred to as "string theory". Really, Woit should publish that there isn't a "string theory" just a lot of squabbling crackpottery which contradicts each other, within the actual mainstream.
Catt is also weak on this point. The first thing to do is to emphasise that there is no official consensus, and then to blow apart the "most promising" candidates, and finally put up a strong argument for an alternative which resolves everything.
Kevin,
If Dr McEwan, Reader in Electromagnetism at Bradford University, and physicist Profesor Pepper of Cavendish Lab, Uni of Cambridge, don't know what Catt's Question means, they should admit ignorance instead of being charlatans. If it is a basic exercise in comprehension, Dr McEwan and Prof Pepper have failed.
Dr Lunsford has exposed Professor Edward Witten as a "failure", because Witten invented M-theory, the current mainstream string theory in which 11-d supergravity is the limit to 10-d superstrings, in March 1995, and was involved in the original string theory break through in 1985. Because of this, Lunsford's work in Int. J. Theor. Phys., v 43 (2004), No. 1, pp.161-177 is suppressed from arXiv.org.
The main difficulty is that Lunsford disproves the Kaluza-Klein 5-d unification of general relativity and electromagnetism, by doing it right using 6 dimensions.
This disproves 10/11 dimensional M-theory because in the latter 6 dimensions are curled up in the Calabi-Yau manifold, leaving 4 dimensions of general relativity.
D.R. Lunsford shows that 6 dimensions in SO(3,3) should replace the Kaluza-Klein 5-dimensional spacetime, unifying GR and electromagnetism: ‘One striking feature of these equations ... is the absent gravitational constant - in fact the ratio of scalars in front of the energy tensor plays that role. This explains the odd role of G in general relativity and its scaling behavior. The ratio has conformal weight 1 and so G has a natural dimensionfulness that prevents it from being a proper coupling constant - so this theory explains why ordinary general relativity, even in the linear approximation and the quantum theory built on it, cannot be regularized.’
Lunsford's work is likely the correct mathematics, the heuristic mechanism for which will be the Feynman gravity scheme, because that has no cosmological constant, which is a major prediction of Lunsford's unification.
As for your first point, no. I calculated the kinetic drift energy of the electrons at 1 mm/s, and showed that it's billions of times too small to deliver the electric energy we use. The reason I put numbers in was to expose the absurdity of the mainstream theory of electricity taught in schools.
You need to look to light speed gauge boson (virtual photon) radiation for force transmission in QED, and that has been stagnant since Dirac's breakthrough in 1929, when you omit the mathematical renormalisation which Dr Chris Oakley and indeed Dirac and Feynman themselves expose as a fraud: http://www.cgoakley.demon.co.uk/
Oakley has awful political views, but his stuff on http://www.cgoakley.demon.co.uk/qft/ is ok:
"[Renormalization is] just a stop-gap procedure. There must be some fundamental change in our ideas, probably a change just as fundamental as the passage from Bohr's orbit theory to quantum mechanics. When you get a number turning out to be infinite which ought to be finite, you should admit that there is something wrong with your equations, and not hope that you can get a good theory just by doctoring up that number."
- Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, Nobel laureate 1933
Oakley: "Oxford's contribution at the time (1980) was a series of public lectures at Wolfson College, the most memorable of which was given by Murray Gell-Mann, one of the leading lights in the field.
"Both Tim Spiller, my tutorial partner, and I wanted to do research in the field, and both of us succeeded. He did a Ph.D. at Durham University and I a D.Phil. at Oxford, following a one-year course at Cambridge to study the relevant mathematics. Tim and I were the bane of our tutors as undergraduates because of the way we would never accept "hand-waving" (unrigorous) explanations. I like to think that the good side of this fussiness was that the theses we eventually produced (in totally different branches of field theory) were of higher quality than average.
"Apparently the thing about gauge theories was that they were "renormalizable". Just what renormalization and gauge theories were I did not discover until I went to Cambridge.
"This renormalization failed the "hand-waving" test dismally...
"As long as I have known about it I have argued the case against renormalization. On the other hand I did want to get my degree, so I just chose research that avoided confronting the issue. I tried to get to grips with some of the things that one has to deal with before getting to renormalization: issues related to non-interacting fields, such as the spin-statistics theorem and Lagrangians for particles of higher spin. There were loose ends in the subject, some of which I think I was able to tidy for my doctoral thesis. This was done by March, 1984, which left me with a few months in hand, so I started looking at renormalization again to see if I could make any more sense of it second time round.
"I then discovered something that seems so obvious that I cannot believe that I am the first to see it: namely that if the field is written as a power series in the coupling constant, then the field equations enable a simple reduction of an interacting field in terms of the free field and any amplitude can be calculated just by inspection. Specialists please go here for more.
"Even though there is very little in the literature related to this paper, I would be surprised if similar ideas to this were not being bandied around at least in the early days of quantum field theory. Personally, I suspect that they were but were thrown out for two reasons: (i) the local field equations that people expect to be able to use give immediate, nonsensical, infinite answers and (ii) properties such as orthonormality of a basis of particle states at constant time no longer seem to apply. The former is not actually that much of a problem. Within certain constraints such as relativity and other invariance principles, the only reason for choosing one field equation over another is to get agreement with experiment. If unmodified local field equations give infinite answers then obviously they are not agreeing with experiment so we make an adjustment called "normal-ordering" which eliminates the problem. The latter is Haag's theorem: in the presence of interactions, it is always assumed that the Hamiltonian can be split into a "free" part and an "interaction". The free part is essential to help define the set of states to which the interaction applies. Haag's theorem says that this is not possible, or to put it another way, it is not possible to construct a Hamiltonian operator that treats an interacting field like a free one. Haag's theorem forbids us from applying the perturbation theory we learned in quantum mechanics to quantum field theory, and I suspect the refusal to accept Haag's theorem was something to do with the reason why the early quantum mechanics did not follow the road my research has gone down. Even now, the text-books on quantum field theory gleefully violate Haag's theorem on the grounds that they dare not contemplate the consequences of accepting it.
"However, in my view, acceptance of Haag's theorem is a very good place to start. The next paper I wrote, in 1986, follows this up. It takes my 1984 paper and adds two things: first, a direct solving of the equal-time commutators, and second, a physical interpretation wherein the interaction picture is rediscovered as an approximation.
This is how it works. In the way that quantum field theory is done - even to this day - you get infinite answers for most physical quantities. Are we really saying that particle beams will interact infinitely strongly, producing an infinite number of secondary particles? Apparently not. We just apply some mathematical butchery to the integrals until we get the answer we want. As long as this butchery is systematic and consistent, whatever that means, then we can calculate regardless, and what do you know, we get fantastic agreement between theory and experiment for important measurable numbers (the anomalous magnetic moment of leptons and the Lamb shift in the Hydrogen atom), as well as all the simpler scattering amplitudes...
"With regard to the second thing, the matrix elements consist of transients plus contributions which survive for large time displacements. The latter turns out to be exactly that which would be obtained by Feynman graph analysis.
"My third paper applies all of this to the specific case of quantum electrodynamics, replicating all scattering amplitudes up to tree level. As for reproducing the "successes" of traditional QED, namely the Lamb shift and the anomalous magnetic moment of leptons, I do not know. I would want to be confident that I had an understanding of bound states before I attempted a Lamb shift calculation and would want to be sure I understood the classical limit of the photon field before I attempted an anomalous magnetic moment calculation. Finding time to do it is the problem.
"Here is the correspondence I had with the journals. It seems that my greatest adversaries were the so-called "axiomatic field theorists", who not content just to disagree, appeared to be determined to ensure that nothing I wrote ever got into print. Maybe if I had acknowledged and referenced their own work things might have been different. However there was, and is no real reason to do so. I am amazed that so many supposedly intelligent people can work for so many years and have so little of interest to show for it. In particular, results obtained for spacetimes other that those with three space and one time dimension are not relevant. Do it in 3+1 dimensions, or not at all. More generally, blocking publication of a paper just because it does not fit in with your world view smacks of the Stasi. To borrow Tony Blair's phrase, I do not wear unpopularity as a badge of honour. If I could have conformed, I would have. I have not gone off on this tangent to make some kind of point, but simply because it was the best way I could see at the time of solving the relevant problems.
"In a nutshell, my proposal is this: write the interacting fields as sums of tensor products of free fields. Use coefficients in the expansion that are almost those which follow from the usual local equations of motion. I say "almost" because the terms must appear in normal order. Then use the known properties of free fields to evaluate the matrix elements directly. Comparison of these expressions with time-dependent perturbation theory (from ordinary quantum mechanics) shows that these consist of transients plus the tree-level Feynman graph amplitudes. As no re-definition of the mass, coupling or field operators is required (infinite or otherwise), there is no renormalization.
"Unfortunately for me, though, most practitioners in the field appear not be be bothered about the inconsistencies in quantum field theory, and regard my solitary campaign against infinite subtractions at best as a humdrum tidying-up exercise and at worst a direct and personal threat to their livelihood. I admit to being taken aback by some of the reactions I have had. In many cases, the issue is not even up for discussion.
"The explanation for this opposition is perhaps to be found on the physics Nobel prize web site. The five prizes awarded for quantum field theory are all for work that is heavily dependent on renormalization."
Another piece of evidence of suppression is that even string theorists who disagree with Witten's M-theory are suppressed for clinging on to 26 dimensions rather than adopting 10/11:
Tony Smith's CERN document server, EXT-2004-031, uses the Lie algebra E6 to
avoid 1-1 boson-fermion supersymmetry:
'As usually formulated string theory works in 26 dimensions, but deals only with bosons ... Superstring theory as usually formulated introduces fermions
through a 1-1 supersymmetry between fermions and bosons, resulting in a reduction of spacetime dimensions from 26 to 10. The purpose of this paper
is to construct ... using the structure of E6 to build a string theory without 1-1 supersymmetry that nevertheless describes gravity and the Standard Model.'
I wonder why this sort of work is excluded by the string theorists who censor arXiv? Could it be that THEY are the paranoid ones?
The only consensus is that imposed by fascist dictatorship from ignorant or unethical physicists controlling arXiv.org. This is because the claims of mainstream string theory are simply crackpot:
‘String theory has the remarkable property of predicting gravity’: false claim by Edward Witten in the April 1996 issue of Physics Today, repudiated by Roger Penrose on page 896 of his book Road to Reality, 2004: ‘in addition to the dimensionality issue, the string theory approach is (so far, in almost all respects) restricted to being merely a perturbation theory’. String theory does not predict for the strength constant of gravity, G!
If there is useful science in M-theory, mainstream string theorists have had a decade to find it! More likely, it's a dead end, like Kelvin's vortex atom or Maxwell's elastic aether. Just because Kelvin and Maxwell were top mathematicians as well as physicists, did not make their speculations correct.
String theorists should study Kelvin's vortex atom and Maxwell's aether to see the fate of paranoia-type defence of crackpotism. Science can't cover up the ineptitude of famous people endlessly.
Ivor Catt's model for the charging of a vacuum dielectric capacitor is right, which is mainly down to Drs Walton and Davidson. Catt had been going crackpot since the early 1970s when or perhaps 1969 when he got New Scientist to print "Dinosaur in the data". Catt wrote a book called "The Catt Concept" (you get my drift), and bought up the copies when remaindered. I met with Catt and Raeto West and was given a copy of the book, autographed by the author. It is a cult thing that Catt is into, which puts me off as I only want to understand what the hell is going on. Catt is into the end of enlightenment in a big way.
I fear Dr Peter Woit's blog, who has sensible views on Catt (he won't allow comments on Catt, since he allowed a couple on New Year's day this year), is going into the same business as Catt.
It is curious to read about the end of enlightenment (retreat to the
medievalism of 1100) from Dr Woit's blog, including the observation that
Bush's torture program for suspected terrorists, is being relabelled to get
away from the torture spectra:
"string theorists - which new device can you build using string theory ... Put up or shut up. I'm tired of the 50-dollar words and the incoherent equations. Show me the hard objectively falsifiable evidence or shut up, sit down, and stop wasting my time....
"The real tragedy of the superstring fiasco is that we're living in an incredibly anti-intellectual era.
"Arguably it's the New Medievalism.... to the redefinition of "torture" into
something (anything) less offensive.
"Yes, kiddies, we're rocketing back into the year 1100, and it's not pretty. What with the catastrophic drop in the funding of basic research and the wholesale destruction of skeptical critical thnking and the ever-growing public disdain for evidence and logic, America's in serious trouble."
-http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=302
Since Dr Woit deletes every comment he can't stand, he obviously agrees with this.
Another comment in the same list:
"there is no comparison of string theory with alchemy or phlogiston. Alchemy (preparative alchemy) was based in experimental work and worked! "
Catt's excuse for pontificating on everything like a string theorist at http://www.theonion.com/content/node/41454 is that his computer inventions worked, he could put the product on the table.
However, this doesn't extend to radio wave theory or quantum mechanics, and if Catt's theory was complete (and he makes big claims for his work) it would predict all kids of things in other areas of physics. In fact, Catt doesn't have the energy to even discuss the big bang objectively or anything else, just political type discussions.
I have to discuss physics not with Catt, but with string theorists like Dr Motl of Harvard University at http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/11/physics-fades-from-uk-classrooms.html. After posting a summary of Lunsford's paper, Dr Motl referred to "Lunsford's ingenious work". Censorship of Lunsford off arXiv.org after publication in Int. J. Theor. Phys. 43 (2004) no. 1, pp.161-77 points to the end of enlightenment.
It is weird that people want to discuss politics and trivia, but not fundamental force mechanisms or mass mechanisms for fundamenta particles.
Kevin,
Catt does try to break things as you say. I've found myself that small people like me on forums like Bad Astronomy or Physics Forums just attract critics, who try to sneer at people making progress "you are wrong, because of this and that" when they haven't bothered to read it, even. Then they become abusive when asked to piss off so you discuss with people who are SCIENTIFIC, CONSTRUCTIVE, even constructively critical, although I can do constructive criticism myself. I know Catt's theory very well, and it's easy to find errors, but they are not scientific problems, they are Catt problems, so I don't criticise.
Recently, he has been abusive to me, and in fact since 1995 he has never listened to me. So after 10 years getting to understand his work, I'm free to point out where his egotism has misled him. This is a different matter from someone saying that "the earth must be flat or the seas would run off the edges". THAT sort of abusive criticism, which is just ignorance, is made up for egotism, and it is that which held back the age of the enlightenment. It wasn't the church unaided censoring science, it was the professor of padau refusing to put his eye to Galileo's telescope, and then stating that sunspots or the stars in the milky way were artifacts of the telescope lens, and Galileo was just stupid. JEER, JEER, JERKY, JERKY, HA, HA. Kepler though the earth was held in orbit by magnetism, because Gilbert has said earth was a giant magnet. So the armchair experts can sneer at Kepler for slipping up there, never mind the fact he was an astrologer and his mum was prosecuted for witchcraft. A real nutter. Clever? I don't think so! Newton had to wit to IGNORE what was wrong and concentrate on what was RIGHT. He didn't publish a damning attack on Kepler, or sneer at him. He built on what kepler had done that could be built on, the three laws. He ignored Kepler's musical theories of the solar system, where different planets play different tunes, and all the magnetic crackpottery, his efforts were concentrated on building, not destroying.
These nutters are the reason why Newton wrote Principia in Latin. It is easy to sneer and say it is "incomplete" or "lacks this or that" (Newton had no mechanism, for example), but it is HARDER TO BE POSITIVE, to take an idea and develop it.
The crackpots think that by copying the nefarious bigwigs who sneer at others, they will somehow acquire the greatness of the nefarious bigwigs they attempt to emulate by being nasty. You have to pity them, really, especially Ivor Catt.
He HONESTLY seemed to believe that my March 2005 letter in Electronics World, gently pointing out his error and correcting it politely, was a personal criticism, and wrote to the editor to object, with a PERSONAL attack on me: he wrote I was just plain wrong, without giving any analysis or reasoning! That is sad, not for me, but for him. He refused to discuss it with me for 10 years, wasting my time by telling me about his political campaigns when we met instead of discussing physics, then he complains when I finally have the facts published!
That is the paranoia which leads to crackpottery, when people refuse to behave reasonably, constructively. Sneering and personal attacks just aren't science. I've had them since age 5 when I had hearing problems which resulted in speech problems, and all the usual playground shit that our great fellow human beings exhibit to anyone slightly different to the norm. So I'm very lucky to have known from early age what people are really like, and the farce, the sham which masquerades as civilisation. I don't need to pretend I'm shocked by Iraq or 9/11 or other intolerance to others.
Intolerance and bullying are the normal way of humankind, and anything else is unusual. I'm no do-gooder, and just want revenge.
;-)
However, only against intolerant sods who have suppressed my scientific paper, like certain editors and people on Bad Astronomy website and Physics Forum website, and only a few custard pies in their faces.
:-)
Click HERE to see Professor Brian Josephson exposed as a crackpot
And then click HERE for a sympathetic article about Professor Edward Witten's sad string theory crackpotism (with name changed to avoid legal action)
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