Some People Work Hard To Write Idiocies, Why ?, why this thrill ?

Incredible !

Read the page 17 of this book:

http://www.thefinaltheory.com/images/Final...-_Chapter_1.PDF

According to the author of "The Final Theory", Mark McCutcheon, the gravitation would contradict the energy conservation!
This guy doesn't even know the basic concepts of elementary physics,
yet he is able to work enough to write a big book on "The Final Theory" that would contradict elementary physics.
And I am sure he could be convincing for many people!

I wonder why are so many people motivated by such absurd behaviour?
What are the reasons for that?
Is that typical of the USA or is that spread over the world?

And of course, I would also like to understand our Zephir.

This post has been edited by Lalbatros on Jul 17 2007, 12:50 PM

Lalbatros
If you really want to understand Zephir, read about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

He opposed strongly the use of mathematics for a description of natural laws. A man who felt poets and artists were as important as scientists in understanding the universe. If you can not explain the laws of nature with pictures and words, you have not arrived at a clear understanding. He saw math as a veil that distorted your view, and keep the common man from understanding.

In 1807 he proposed his 'theory of color' to show that one can explain light without the use of math. He complained about the 'artificial' nature of physics. in his mind the physicist "makes himself the master over phenomena, gathers experiences, and by screwing them together by means of artificial experiments, fabricates ideas."

The main difference is how physicists treated him verses Zephir. Though most disagreed with his view, they admitted that, in a way, he was correct. He had a great mind that showed deep insight into nature. Others treated him with at least some respect, even if they did not agree with him.

It was after reading about Goethe that I returned to this forum, after leaving it due to Zephir. I now try to be more civil towards him, for now I think I understand some small part of what makes him tick.

Charles

This post has been edited by Aireal on Jul 17 2007, 01:53 PM

Aireal,

In physics, Goethe is totally irrelevant.
Just as Einstein is irrelevant for basketball.

Further, very little competence is needed to understand that Zephir is simply posting nonsense here.
He just grabs information here and there, specially on the web, and claims a lot without proving anything.
Most often his claims have even no meaning. But for sure, he believe himself.

If you look at "The Final Theory" by Mark McCutcheon, you see something very different from Zephir, but just as irrelevant.
The author apparently is an electrical engineer.
I wonder what "engineer" could mean in the USA if some engineer may totally fail to understand secondary school physics: energy conservation and gravitation (potential energy = m*g*h, secondary school, I said).

The common point is that both spend a huge amount of time on obviously hopeless ideas.
How is that possible?
What are the motivations?

But what are my own motivations too?
Why do I waste my time to convince those who are convinced or to stirr those who are not?

Maybe, just as for Zephir, this is easier that to work out real physics ...
(specially after business hours)

This post has been edited by Lalbatros on Jul 17 2007, 04:30 PM

Clarify, don't just state.

No he wasn't. You obviously didn't even read what Aireal wrote. Goethe's field was physics, or at least the cosmology of the day. He just went about it in a different way.

People that can do physics write papers and conduct experiments, people that cannot, write selfpublished "books" like the one you saw and "essays" for various forums. Just as simple

Yes, as I recall, he starts out by misunderstanding existing classical physics, insisting that a force constantly consumes energy even when it is not doing work. In particular, that gravity takes a constant source of power, like an electromagnet.


I agree with your sentiments. In a book store recently, I was amazed at how many crank books were on the shelf mixed in with real "pop physics" books like Greene and Hawking. Worse, it was not always easy to tell the difference at a quick look.

Too bad I didn't have any stickers on me.

This post has been edited by LearmSceince on Jul 17 2007, 09:04 PM

deleted

This post has been edited by Dallas on Jul 17 2007, 10:26 PM

We "owe" the pleasure to the greediness of the publishing houses that, for a price. would publish any crank. This is a new phenomenon.
Besides, with the advent of the internet, any crank can have a "physics" website. There is a website, "crank dot net" that makes a business of listing the cranks and their sites. See here, pretty funny.

I welcome any dialogue or book, which gets people thinking and interested in physics.

But:

Because Goethe misinterprets some experiments, he incorrectly thinks that these experiments show Newton to be wrong.

http://webexhibits.org/colorart/ch.html

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

Since then, Science has moved on, and color theory is strongly dominated by numbers today. For example, the 1931 report by the International Commission on Illumination (CIE in French), summarized thousands of experiments to define an average "standard observer" of color. The precise physiological impact of illumination is modeled as presented as a set of numbers for each of dozens of wavelengths of light. Then, to find out what color something is, is little more than multiplication and addition. This is the same technology used by "paint matching to sample" machines and other automation. These work even when the reflected spectrum of the sample will differ a lot from the reflected spectrum of the paint. Also game designers of 3-d worlds can use these numbers to paint their world in colors which look natural for non-florescent and non-self-luminous paint. (Some colors in RGB space are too bright and saturated to be produced by mere filtering of white illumination. The CIE Standard observer helps weed those out.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase...ion/colper.html
http://www.google.com/patents?hl=en&lr=&vi...=fnd&dq=6744513

Yes I do find this question more perplexing than the topic. Some of you guys are stuck in a loop, and it's Zephir flipping the switch.

Why doesn't anybody ever pick on me? I have crackpot ideas, too. And mine are fairly quantitative. They should be more convincingly refutable.

My theory seemingly breaks the hell out of conservation of both momentum and energy, BTW. Doesn't bother me that much.


http://home.comcast.net/~d.lush/dave_30DecY6.htm

If you can provide reasoning for how conservation can be broken, then your theory would be acceptable, albeit still likely largely ignored...

Amazing is Zephir, he has everyone stirred up! I wonder, how is this? It is true that probably lots of people have been considered wrong on this board and not gotten near the fuss.

I know too little about physics and even less about math to actually know who is wrong about what. In basic human psychology, the one who gets everyone piling on like they are the football usually is thought of by the common masses as some sort of seer or prophet (I will not say physicist because I do not know enough). (Sort of like when Bill Clinton was condemned for the Lewinsky affair, he went up in the polls.) I am trying to stay neutral as far as persons here.

I never knew physics was just like politics. I went on walkabout around the net and noticed such peculiar things. There is "pro-relativity" and "anti-relativity." I saw a anti-relativity board filled with a religious sort of passion, a subject I never imagined was so emotional.

So the deep question here, I think, is why such passion over physics? The cranks that take all the trouble to put up their version of some theory, why? The passion is that of Christian missionaries saving souls.

But, I guess I should be used to it. In my youth I was a free-will Baptist arguing against Calvinist Presbyterians. There was an issue of whether baptism is by sprinkling or dunking. Now it is the followers of Einstein vs. the anti-relativity. (O.K. I'm liberal, anti-relativists do not go to hell. )

Well actually I don't believe either is actually broken. However, the nonconservation of mechanical center-of-mass momentum is quite striking in my computer model. The center of mass jiggles up and down at the orbital frequency. It may be that the electromagnetic fields are balancing the momentum equation. I haven't assessed that yet but will eventually. (I'm tied up trying to get the "Scale Determination of Hydrogen ..." paper ready for submitting.) Alternatively, it may be an artifact of the way I incorporated intrinsic spin and intrinsic magnetic moment. It may be saying that the idea of intrinsic spin as an invariant property like charge is just plain wrong. So it would be just an approximation for the more rigorous theory of spin where the magnitude of the spin would participate in the dynamics. This theory already exists - it's the zitterbewegung interpretation of quantum theory by David Hestenes.

This extra layer of dynamics under the spin that I don't model might also explain non-radiating orbits. Hestenes proposed this in his ZBW interpretation - there is resonance and cancellation that can happen with the ZBW motion going on. De Luca has worked some of it out. If he works it out entirely and convincingly it will be the end of quantum theory as a fundamental theory. That is, quantum theory would still be true, but it would be derivable from classical electrodynamics. Planck's comstant would have to be derived for this to be true. In my theory, Planck's constant still gets to be fundamental. So a quantum principle still exists but it exists at the level of particles not atoms. Orbital angular momentum can exist in other than multiples of (the reduced) PLanck's constant but the intrinsic spins being h-bar over two is making orbits unstable unless they are multiples of h-bar.

I continue to be optimistic that I will get a paper published in a not-totally-crackpot journal. And then, let the ignoring begin in ernest!