bad physics
goodmath | June 11, 2010 Today is another bit of rubbish from viXra! In the comment thread from the
last post, someone (I presume the author of this paper) challenged me to
address this. And it's such a perfect example of one of my mantras that I
can't resist.
What's the first rule of GM/BM? The worst math is no math.
And what a whopping example of that we have here. It's titled "Spacetime
Deformation Theory", by one Jacek Safuta. I'll quote the abstract in its entirety, to
give you the flavor.
The spacetime deformations theory unifies general relativity with quantum
mechanics i.e. unifies all interactions,…
goodmath | June 8, 2010 Sorry for the ridiculously slow pace around here lately; I've been
ridiculously busy. I'm changing projects at work; it's the end of the school
year for my kids; and I'm getting close to the end-game for my book. Between
all of those, I just haven't had much time for blogging lately.
Anyway... I came across this lovely gem, and I couldn't
resist commenting on it. (Before I get to it, I have to point out that it's on
"viXra.org". viXra is "ViXra.org is an e-print archive set up as an
alternative to the popular arXiv.org service owned by Cornell University. It
has been founded by scientists…
goodmath | November 2, 2009 After
href="http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/12/the_real_bozo_attempts_to_aton.php">the
fiasco that was my flame against the downwind faster than the wind
vehicle, you might think that I'd be afraid of touching on more air-powered
perpetual motion. You'd be wrong :-). I'm not afraid to make a fool of myself
if I stand a chance of learning something in the process - and in this case,
it's so obviously bogus that even if I was afraid, the sheer stupidity here
would be more than enough to paper over my anxieties. Take a look at this -
the good part comes towards the end.
What this…
goodmath | October 2, 2009 In the history of this blog, I've gone after lots of religious folks. I've mocked
lots and lots of christians, a few muslims, some Jews, some newagers, and even one
stupid Hindu.
Today, I'm doing something that's probably going to get me into trouble
with a lot of readers. I'm going to mock a very well-known atheist. No, not PZ.
As much as I disagree with PZ, as far as I can tell, he's consistent about his
worldview.
Over at Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait has been a major voice for skepticism and
a vocal proponent of atheism. He has, quite rightly, gone after people of all stripes
for…
goodmath | May 3, 2009 Via the Bad Astronomer comes one of the most pathetic abuses of
probability that I've ever seen. I'm simply amazed that this idiot was willing
to go on television and say this.
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The crank in question is Walter Wagner, the moron who tried to use a lawsuit
to stop the LHC from being activated. (Just that much, already, is amazingly silly;
he sued in Hawaii, but the LHC is in Geneva,…
goodmath | January 22, 2009 I'm sure you've all heard about the airplane that ditched in the Hudson last week. (Just 30 blocks from my office!) When it happened, after we found out more about what caused the plane to ditch, I wondered how long it would take before the 911 Truthers came up with a conspiracy theory about it.
Not long. Via SkepticBlog comes news of a conspiracy theorist claiming that the ditching doesn't make any sense. Brian Dunning at SkepticBlog does a good
job explaining what's so stupid about this, but there were two things about
it that I thought were particularly interesting from the point of view…
goodmath | January 8, 2009 One of the many great things about my readers is how you folks keep me up to date with any new crap that springs up, so that I don't need to spend so much time
hunting down the real good stuff. There's a beautiful piece of crap on youtube that was pointed out to me by one of you guys. It's really a wonderful bit of circularity.
Circularity is something that I find beautiful in math. What I mean by
circularity is that because numbers are closed, you can run around in circles playing
games with that closure. Another post that I've got in progress is talking about RSA
encryption, which is a…
goodmath | December 3, 2008(NOTE: It appears that I really blew it with this one. I'm the bozo in this story. After lots of discussion, a few equations, and a bunch of time scribbling on paper, I'm convinced that I got this one wrong in a big way. No excuses; I should have done the analysis much more carefully before posting this; looking back, what I did do was pathetically shallow and, frankly, stupid. I'm sincerely sorry
for calling the guys doing the experiment bozos. I'll follow up later this weekend with a detailed post showing my analysis, where I screwed up, and why this thing really works. In the meantime,…
goodmath | July 31, 2008 Once again, you, my readers, have come through with some really high-grade crackpottery. This one was actually sent to me by its author, but I didn't really look at it until several readers sent me the same link because they thought it was my kind of material. With your recommendations, I took a look, and was rewarded. In a moment of hubris, the author titled it
A Possible Proof of God's Existence from Multiverse Assumptions.
This article is basically a version of the classic big-numbers probabilistic
argument for God. What makes this different is that it doesn't line up a
bunch of fake…
goodmath | June 23, 2008UPDATE(9/1): In a move that, frankly, astonished me, the author of the piece that I mocked in this post has withdrawn the article, because he's recognized its errors. And he didn't just withdraw it - he came back to this blog to explain the withdrawal. I've never seen a fundamentalist writer admit to errors this way. Most
authors of what I consider bad religion/science/math either ignore their errors, or silently pull the erroneous articles and pretend that they never existed. The way that
Mr. Bar-Cohn handled this is an excellent example of how honest people with genuine integrity behave.…
goodmath | June 13, 2008 Via several blogs, including the normally wonderful
Making Light comes a link to an obnoxious Reuters' story that once again demonstrates just how
scientifically and mathematically illiterate reporters are.
We have yet another company basically claiming to have invented a perpetual motion machine. From Reuters:
Tired of petrol prices rising daily at the pump? A Japanese company has invented an electric-powered, and environmentally friendly, car that it says runs solely on water.
Genepax unveiled the car in the western city of Osaka on Thursday, saying that a liter (2.1 pints) of any kind of…
goodmath | June 12, 2008 A reader sent me a really wonderfully wacko link. It's a fundamentalist islamic site, which tries to use relativity to argue for the divinity of the Koran. It's remarkably silly. (I also recently got a link to something similar, but from a Jewish perspective - claiming that the Torah disproves relativity. Alas, I screwed up and lost the link; if whoever sent me that link could re-send it, I'd really appreciate it!)
The claim that relativity proves the Koran is true. See, they claim that the Koran tells you what the speed of light was, and that the real absolute speed of light as described…
goodmath | May 13, 2008 This has been mentioned elsewhere - like on the Machinist blog on Salon (where I first saw it) - but I can't resist saying something about it myself. And I'll also chip in a little bit of originality, by also criticizing some of the people that I've seen criticizing it.
The story is, there's a scammy company that sells a rather expensive device that allegedly increases your gas mileage. The way that it (supposedly) works
is that it uses electricity from the alternator to get hydrogen by splitting
water, and then adding that hydrogen to the air that gets mixed in the engine. The argument is…
goodmath | April 16, 2008 You might have heard the story that's been going round about the asteroid
Apophis. This is an asteroid that was, briefly, considered by NASA to be a collision risk with earth. But after more observations to gather enough data to compute its orbit more precisely, the result was that it's not a significant risk. The current NASA estimates are that it's a collision risk of about one in 45,000.
The news around it is that some German kid claims to have figured out that
NASA got it wrong, and that the real risk is 1 in 450. What was NASA's big
mistake, according to the kid?
He says that if the…
goodmath | February 21, 2008 I was asked by a reader to take a look at yet another crackpot theory of everything. This time, it's the Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe. This one is as cranky as any, but it's actually got some interestingly silly math to it.
Stripped down to its basics, the CTMU is just yet another postmodern
"perception defines the universe" idea. Nothing unusual about it on that
level. What makes it interesting is that it tries to take a set-theoretic
approach to doing it.
The real universe has always been theoretically treated as an object, and specifically as the composite type of object…
goodmath | January 17, 2008 I managed to trash yet another laptop - the city commute through the subways seems to be pretty hard on computers! - so while I'm sitting and slowly restoring my backups, I was looking through the folder where I keep links to crankpots that I'd like to mock someday. I noticed one that I found quite a long time ago - and to my surprise, I realized that I never wrote about it! And given that I've been mocking relativity-haters lately, it's particularly appropriate to cover it now.
The site is called "The Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics". It takes quite a different approach to…
goodmath | January 1, 2008 Sorry that the blog has been so quiet lately; I managed to catch a vicious flu for the first time since I started getting flu shots, so I've been feeling too ill to write. I'm still far from recovered, but I'm feeling well enough to share a bit of delightful foolishness with you.
After seeing my recent post about a relativity denier, a reader sent me a link to another extremely amusing anti-relativity site. (In fact, I've recieved a bunch of links to anti-relativity sites; I'm only posting the most amusing ones.) This one has
several particularly amusing properties, but from my point of…
goodmath | December 6, 2007
Isaac Newton was a total nutjob. Did you know that he tried to pop his own eyeball out with a knitting needle as a part of an experiment? That he nearly blinded himself staring into the sun? That he was an avid alchemist?
Why do we pay so much respect to a person who was clearly mentally IMBALANCED? Why
would anyone take such a total lunatic seriously? It can't be because of science - his
science was a sloppy mess that he had a hard time explaining to anyone else.
The only reason we look on him as such a figure of respect is because we're told to.
Scientists and mathematicians are…
goodmath | September 26, 2007As of 2/24/2008, Sewell has just responded to this, pretending that he just noticed it. To make discussions easier to follow, I have responded with a new post here, and I would appreciate it if comments could be posted there, to keep it all in one place.
My SciBling Mark Hofnagle over at the Denialist blog wanted me to take a look at the pseudo-mathematical ramblings of Granville Sewell. It actually connects with some of the
comments in the thread about the paper by Dembski and Marks - Sewell uses part of the article to make
the same kind of quantum nonsense claims that showed up here.…
goodmath | September 11, 2007 In one of Jeff Shallit's recent posts on the Panda's Thumb, he mentioned that Tom Bethel, aside from
being a creationist, was also a relativity denier. In general, relativity denial is a veritable mine
of bad math. So I went looking - and found Bethel's anti-relativity site. As I expected, we've got extremely silly bad math. In fact,
it's the worst kind of bad math - it's a lack of math masquerading as being math. It's also, sadly, full
of pathetic errors.
For instance, there's this:
The argument that gravity must travel faster than light goes like this. If its speed limit is that of light…