Cranks and Physics

reply to post by metalshredmetal

what are these "EM particles" that you are referring to?

They are called photons. And giving them physical spin does nothing to resolve quantum paradoxes.

But it's rather fun, from a real physics point of view, to see you two belabouring each other.

Originally posted by playswithmachines
Cranks, yes.
The Wright brothers were cranks, their machine could never fly.
Tesla was a crank, too, with his laughable idea of AC power.

John Logie Baird was totally insane, he had this really stupid idea that you could send & recieve images electronically.

Completely insane, all of them............

The Wright brothers were never considered cranks, and they pursued advanced experimental (and some theoretical) science of the time. There was substantial effort in science & engineering communities to try to do what they were doing and the Wrights were aware of all the latest developments from USA and Europe. They built a wind tunnel and performed substantial experimental measurements. Their primary innovations were in (mechanical) control systems which made powered flight feasible.

Tesla was not a crank early on, and AC power was known before him, but he developed some important technology to make it more practical and effective. Later, he became in all probability mentally ill and was a crank and contributed nothing to science.

John Baird was a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, an honor not given to cranks .

None of them were cranks or insane when they were developing their inventions, they were inspired inventors following contemporary science and engineering to the maximum.

reply to post by mbkennel


hm, your response was somewhat agreeable, IMO...up until the last sentence.

define "contemporary" science, please.

it seems you mean to say that they were following "fringe/frontier" science...in which case i would agree.

.they must have studied the fringe theories in order to propose a "new" theory which the "mainstream" has not yet realized. right?

Originally posted by metalshredmetal
reply to post by mbkennel

 

hm, your response was somewhat agreeable, IMO...up until the last sentence.

define "contemporary" science, please.

The best known science of their time period.

it seems you mean to say that they were following "fringe/frontier" science...in which case i would agree.

.they must have studied the fringe theories in order to propose a "new" theory which the "mainstream" has not yet realized. right?

No. These people study the most up-to-date theories and experiments and think about things and do more experiments. Certainly from 1880 to 1930, for example, basic physics was changing very rapidly, completely different from today. "fringe" theories are sufficiently vague and nonsensical to not be worth real scientists' effort.

Of course, for example, Bohr and Heisenberg's quantum mechanics was truly radical and mindblowing to any physicist in 1926, but they had some good prior experimental evidence and from there made a giant intuitive leap.

The difference between that and nonsense is that they work hard at figuring out how what they knew already and the experimental facts fit in with the new theory. The correspondence principle and deriving it was critical.

These people study the most up-to-date theories and experiments

i'm glad we can agree!

Science is to explore the unknown, in order to explain it, is it not?
How can one do so without venturing occasionally, at least, into the fringe, for it is to encompass the fringe and move beyond it, I would think....
And the most "up to date," contemporary theories, are theories, based upon other theories, for example, that may, in fact, not be correct, for they are based on our limited perceptions. And this could be nothing but compounding an erroneous view, one way or the other. I think most scientists even acknowledge this possibility.

Originally posted by tetra50
Science is to explore the unknown, in order to explain it, is it not?

Science is also the search for constants, and the constants don't require our specific explanations or our abstractions, because they're already written in a language far more robust and real than anything humans have yet come up with. In fact, any explanation we could offer would require the usage of those constants (namely, numbers). Number and nature don't much differ when it comes to first principles of physics and computation, they are mirrored in each other.

The Standard Model evangelists here would have you believe that math and science is purely dependent on human-invented axioms. They believe this, because that was a mantra of the 20th century Western industrial capitalism: 'man creates reality'. Hopefully this notion will be corrected at some point.

Originally posted by tetra50
Science is to explore the unknown, in order to explain it, is it not?
How can one do so without venturing occasionally, at least, into the fringe, for it is to encompass the fringe and move beyond it, I would think....
And the most "up to date," contemporary theories, are theories, based upon other theories, for example, that may, in fact, not be correct, for they are based on our limited perceptions. And this could be nothing but compounding an erroneous view, one way or the other. I think most scientists even acknowledge this possibility.

edit on 9-2-2012 by tetra50 because: (no reason given)

I'd call all of string theory and loop quantum gravity fringe theories,but the people doing them at least make an attempt to fit in with known phenomenology and derive correspondence with known macroscopic physics.

Crank stuff is usually

a) sufficiently underspecifed and unclear that one cannot get a quantitative computation of ordinary phenomena, and the theory does not explain why one cannot (say e.g. as string theory posits phenomenon at Planck energy scales which are experimentally inaccessible).

and b) directly contradictory to known experimental facts

c) violates too many known theoretical principles at once

and with some frequency

d) mathematically mistaken

and virtually always e) shows a profound misunderstanding or ignorance of known science.

Originally posted by mbkennel
Crank stuff is usually...

Does this fit into any of those categories?

It was written by Marko Rodin in 2010:



(backup link if the above image doesn't load, same thing: freepicninja.com... )

The conclusion seems to be that the unsolved problem in physics known as dark matter is no longer unsolved, if I'm reading that right, but for some reason this doesn't seem to have persuaded the scientific community?

reply to post by mbkennel

we have already established watch crack science is:

The prefix pseudo- (from Greek ψευδής "lying, false") is used to mark something as false, fraudulent, or pretending to be something it is not.

So pseudo, cranck science is by definition false.

reply to post by mbkennel


I know, i was being sarcastic.
But it illustrates my point; Who are we to laugh at someone else's theories, when everyone laughed at the aforementioned inventors?
And you may notice, most inventions are developed in sheds by people shunned by their 'peers'.
Photocopier, anyone???