Kookiness
drorzel | May 19, 2016Noted grouchy person John Horgan has found a new way to get people mad at him on the Internet, via a speech-turned-blog-post taking organized Skeptic groups to task for mostly going after "soft targets". This has generated lots of angry blog posts in response, and a far greater number of people sighing heavily and saying "There Horgan goes again..."
If you want to read only one counter to Horgan's piece to get caught up, you could do a lot worse than reading Daniel Loxton's calm and measured response. Loxton correctly notes that Horgan's comments are nothing especially unique, just a variant…
drorzel | May 28, 2014A little while back, I was put in touch with a Wall Street Journal writer who was looking into a new-ish health fad called "earthing," which involves people sleeping on special grounded mats and that sort of thing. The basis of this particular bit of quackery is the notion that spending time indoors, out of contact with the ground, allows us to pick up a net positive charge relative to the Earth, and this has negative health consequences. Walking barefoot on the ground, or sleeping on a pad that is electrically connected to ground via your house's wiring, allows you to replace your lost…
drorzel | January 13, 2012I reported on the start of this class last week, and sinc ethen, we've had three more class meetings. Since this whole thing is an experiment, I'll keep reporting on it from time to time (heh). First, though, a quick answer to a request from comments:
I'd like to hear more about your class on time and timekeeping. How well do you think students learn the big ideas about how science works from these classes, as apposed to a more traditional general physics class? How much transfer do you see in students' understanding of the content of this course to understanding of science in general?
The…
drorzel | December 14, 2011Over at Scientific American, John Horgan has a blog post titled In Physics, Telling Cranks from Experts Ain't Easy, which opens with an anecdote any scientist will recognize:
A couple of decades ago, I made the mistake of faxing an ironic response to what I thought was an ironic faxed letter. The writer--let's call him Tachyon Tad--had "discovered" a new physics, one that allowed for faster-than-light travel. In my reply, I told Tad that if he built a warp-drive spaceship, I'd love to hitch a ride. Dumb joke. For months, my fax machine churned out sheets covered with Tad's dense elaborations…
drorzel | May 12, 2011The title is a .signature line that somebody-- Emmet O'Brien, I think, but I'm not sure-- used to use on Usenet, back in the mid-to-late 90's, when some people referred to the Internet as the "Information Superhighway." I've always thought it was pretty apt, especially as I've moved into blogdom, where a lot of what I spend time on involves the nearly random collisions of different articles and blog posts and so on. It's also as good a title as any for this tab-clearing post, which consists of pointing out two pairs of articles that, in my mind at least, seem to have something to say about…
drorzel | May 11, 2011While Kenneth Ford's 101 Quantum Questions was generally good, there was one really regrettable bit, in Question 23: What is a "state of motion?" When giving examples of states, Ford defines the ground state as the lowest-energy state of a nucleus, then notes that its energy is not zero. He then writes:
An object brought to an absolute zero of temperature would have zero-point energy and nothing else. Because of zero-point energy, there is indeed such a thing as perpetual motion.
This is really the only objectionable content in the book, but he certainly made up in quality what it lacks in…
drorzel | August 21, 2010I'm probably about the last person with an interest in such things to get around to watching Phil Plait's (in)famous "Don't Be a Dick" speech, but I finally got around to it, and it's really excellent:
Phil Plait - Don't Be A Dick from JREF on Vimeo.
Phil has posted about the speech itself, online reactions to it, and the in-person response after the talk. His thoughts are well worth reading, to put the whole thing it better context.
I really don't have anything to add, which is fine, because I should spend less time typing blog stuff anyway.
drorzel | August 12, 2010The problem with writing about fake physics is that once you start, it's hard to stop. And there's always something new and disreputable to find, such as this hideous bit of scammery. As I said in How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, if quantum physics really allowed you to amass vast wealth just by wanting it, Dave Wineland's publications wouldn't need to acknowledge funding from a handful of acronyms-- he'd be able to bankroll his own research out of his personal fortune..
Quantum physics is not magic. It allows many things that seem weird and counterintuitive, but those effects are very…
drorzel | August 10, 2010A reader emails to ask about a new-to-me theory of physics, called "Quantum Space Theory" being promoted by a fellow named Thad Roberts. I wouldn't usually bother with this, but Roberts was one of the speakers at TEDx Boulder. this is disappointing, to put it mildly-- TED is a respected organization, and I don't like seeing them lend their support to something that is just dripping with kook signifiers. The key paragraph of the overview of the theory is:
To start grasping this higher-dimensional intuÂitive picÂture check out the book excerpts in the book excerpts secÂtion. If you are more…
drorzel | June 23, 2010I don't remember who pointed me at this transcript of Deepak Chopra interviewing Michio Kaku, but if I remember who it was, I fully intend to hate them.
DC: Is our conversation affecting something in another galaxy right now?
MK: In principle. What we're talking about right is affecting another galaxy far, far beyond the Milky Way Galaxy. Now when the Big Bang took place we think that most of the matter probably was vibrating in unison.
DC: So it was already correlated?
MK: It was already correlated. We call this coherence or correlation. As the universe expanded, we're still correlated, we'…
drorzel | May 23, 2010As mentioned previously, I have an inexplicable fondness for the "Ancient Aliens" show on the History channel. It's such a bizarre mishmash of every crazy idea out there in the UFO community that it ends up being hilarious where it ought to be just reprehensible.
To give you an idea of the wackiness, the episode they re-ran last night featured a guy whose job title was "Biblical archaeologist," which is usually incredibly dodgy-- most of the people appearing on the History channel with that job title are trying to use archeology to demonstrate the literal truth of some Old Testament story. On…
drorzel | May 9, 2010One of my many character weaknesses is a fondness for the kooky UFO programs run on the History Channel and other educational cable networks. The nuttier the better-- there's something about the credulity and self-delusion displayed by the "researchers" they trot out that I find really hilarious.
I have to say, though, that they've outdone themselves with this new Ancient Aliens series. To the point where it almost has to be a put-on-- last week, they had a pudgy guy with wild eyes stating that stone obelisks around the world were really receivers in a global energy distribution network based…
drorzel | April 29, 2010A sad and sordid story from the Times Higher Education following the rescinding of invitations to a conference on quantum foundations:
Details of the conference in August for experts in quantum mechanics sounded idyllic. Participants were due to discuss "de Broglie-Bohm theory and beyond" in the Towler Institute, which is housed in a 16th-century monastery in the Tuscan Alps owned by Mike Towler, Royal Society research fellow at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory.
Last week, any veneer of serenity was shattered. Conference organiser Antony Valentini, research associate in the…