RoR: Forum

Post 0

Tuesday, December 18, 2007 - 7:07pm

Bookmark

Link

Edit

Was this a two-page advertisement, or a two page article in Science Illustrated?

The reviewers seem quite lackluster - a "biologist" from "FPL" and the "operations manager" of "Florida Microelectronics?"

I am no where being even close enough to judge the mathematical or physical merits of whatever his arguments seem to be. But I find the fact that he avails us of his entire preface, which says little other than that "there is a problem" in itself unimpressive.

I have heard some other recent cosmological theories, such as that the Universe is fractal and not smooth on a large scale, and the idea that our "universe" might be a bleb on the surface of an otherwise hyperdense surface but that due to the run-away inflation of our portion of that surface we are too far from the underlying "dense space" to observe it directly.

Cosmological theories are great fun, as are such things as the search for the roots of the earliest common human language. Joseph Greenberg has posited such roots such as *tik = "finger" which has its equivalent in the Latin-derived digit the Japanese te "hand" and the native English toe. The search for "common human" is charming, and it does present testable predictions, but it has little impact on our practical existence other than to entertain linguists. If new cosmological theories lead to new practical applications, that will be wonderful. Does this Null-Physics, besides supposedly making predictions, (which I can't evaluate) have a potential practical effect on our lives in the way that Einstein's equations did?

Ted Keer

Post 1

Thursday, December 20, 2007 - 11:16am

Bookmark

Link

Edit

Good points, Ted.

One nugget of wisdom that I took away from my cursory review of excerpts from this book relates to the recent "Taking Science on Faith" news article ...

"The signatures of elements are the same in ancient light, billions of years old, as they are in the light from our sun, only minutes old. This means that the laws of physics have not changed in billions of years. If this isn't a good enough track record for their stability, it is difficult to envision a better one. The machinery of existence everywhere, in the form of particles, photons, and interactions, depends on energy conservation. It's what keeps the universe's stars burning. ... energy conservation is a vital universal characteristic."

This excerpt (of an excerpt) seems to contradict what was said in the recent "Taking Science on Faith" news article; although there may still be solipsistic wiggle-room within this excerpt, to simply push back the time-line (to beyond billions of years ago), and stake the arbitrary claim that the laws of physics might have been different trillions of years ago.

I think. [?]

Ed

Post 2

Sunday, December 28, 2008 - 5:43am

Bookmark

Link

Edit

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

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

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

Conclusion: Bad mathematics and even worse physics.