bad physics:
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...
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Posted on May 13, 2008 8:59 PM • 31 Comments •
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...
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Posted on April 16, 2008 8:05 PM • 45 Comments •
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...
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Posted on February 21, 2008 2:41 PM • 26 Comments •
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...
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Posted on January 17, 2008 3:37 PM • 34 Comments •
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,...
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Posted on January 1, 2008 6:21 PM • 31 Comments •
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...
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Posted on December 6, 2007 2:04 PM • 55 Comments •
As 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,...
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Posted on September 26, 2007 4:23 PM • 56 Comments •
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...
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Posted on September 11, 2007 9:41 PM • 33 Comments •
A couple of weeks ago, I revisited George Shollenberger, the creator the alleged "First Scientific Proof of God", and commented on his pathetic antics on amazon.com, trying to explain just why no one had bothered to post a single...
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Posted on April 2, 2007 9:14 PM • 42 Comments •
In the comments to another post, Blake Stacey gave me a pointer to a really obnoxious article, called "A New Theory of the Universe", by a Robert Lanza, published in the American Scholar. Lanza's article is a rotten piece...
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Posted on March 13, 2007 9:35 PM • 116 Comments •
Over in the thread about Engineer Borg and his wacked-out electromagnetic theory of gravity, a commenter popped up and pointed at the web-site of someone named Tom Bearden, who supposedly has shown how to generate free "vacuum" energy using...
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Posted on February 26, 2007 8:50 PM • 33 Comments •
It's that time again - yes, we have yet another wacko reinvention of physics that pretends to have math on its side. This time, it's "The Electro-Magnetic Radiation Pressure Gravity Theory", by "Engineer Xavier Borg". (Yes, he signs all...
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Posted on February 20, 2007 3:52 PM • 63 Comments •
Yet another reader forwarded me a link to a rather dreadful article. This one seems to be by someone who knows better, but prefers to stick with his political beliefs rather than an honest exploration of the facts. He's trying...
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Posted on January 21, 2007 7:39 PM • 44 Comments •
Over the weekend, in an attempt to cheer me up, a kind and generous reader sent me a link to a really wonderful site of crackpot science. It's a crackpot theory about how physics has it all wrong. You see,...
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Posted on December 19, 2006 9:55 AM • 166 Comments •
While there's nothing mathematical about this bit of silly woo, I couldn't resist mocking it. There's a Japanese inventor who claims to have created a device that instantly ages wine through a magical homeopathic-sounding process of magically restructuring water molecules....
Posted on December 12, 2006 9:50 AM • 17 Comments •
So, as promised, it's time for part two of "The Creationists and the Shrinking Sun". The second main tack of the creationists and the shrinking sun is to not use the bare measurements of an allegedly shrinking sun as their...
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Posted on November 20, 2006 5:27 PM • 33 Comments •
One of the more pathetic examples of bad math from the creationist camp is an argument based on the claim that the sun is shrinking. This argument has been thoroughly debunked by other folks, so I haven't bothered to add...
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Posted on November 19, 2006 5:26 PM • 26 Comments •
I was reading an article on Slashdot the other day about a recent discovery of what might be a MECO. A MECO is a "magnetospheric eternally collapsing object"; if this were true, it would be a big deal because according...
Posted on July 29, 2006 5:49 PM • 45 Comments •
