…and this is a 
Somebody want these?
Category: Kooks
Posted on: December 5, 2007 2:06 PM, by PZ Myers
I shouldn't hog all the kooks — there are plenty to go around.
Any physicists or mathematicians want to tackle this argument against special relativity? His claim seems to be that you can't mix mathematical and physical explanations — you have to see his explanation for Zeno's Paradox to believe it.
How about some archaeologists to appreciate this fine outrage at the "crackpots and ideologues" of biblical archaeology? It seems to be universal that when religious fanatics move into a field, all they can do is demolish it.
Comments
First paragraph of anti-Einstein kookery:
And I reject this because of its blatant ignorance of history, mathematics and proper apostrophe usage.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | December 5, 2007 2:09 PM
"Any physicists or mathematicians want to tackle this argument against special relativity?"
Oh, I'm so going to blog about this...
Blake: Well put!
Posted by: gg | December 5, 2007 2:18 PM
So, the fact that GPS systems need to be corrected for special relativity, that's just the "absence of clearness of vision (and) rigorous argument"?
So. Many. Stupid. People.
Posted by: Mike | December 5, 2007 2:20 PM
If relativity is supposedly truer than Newtonian physics, how come we still have apples?
Posted by: Brownian, OM | December 5, 2007 2:26 PM
Yeah, the first guy does seem a bit... misguided. Zeno's Paradox was long ago debunked as being an actual paradox, and not because it mixed "mathematical and physical" but rather because if you divide a finite distance infinitely, the pieces just get infinitely small; the distance doesn't actually grow, and when you put the pieces back together you still have the same amount of distance you had in the first place. You don't have infinite distance. Problem solved.
Posted by: Ric | December 5, 2007 2:27 PM
Ah, what fun! But no time to play, I'm afraid. Ya just gotta love it, though:
Heh! Check at your local particle accelerator to see if they ever get particles going faster than light. Ask how much mass those electrons going .99999 times the speed of light have. Oh, the stupid!
You get crazies attacking special relativity for some of the same reasons you get them attacking evolution: the theory is simple enough that it can be explained to the average person. But then when they don't quite understand it, they think the contradiction lies in the theory itself and not in their understanding. What they won't admit to themselves is that they just don't understand the science.
Posted by: Physicalist | December 5, 2007 2:30 PM
He only lists two experiments in support of relativity and dismisses them as "biased" (sounds like ID rhetoric)... but even my limited experience in physics (a couple of C's in undergraduate physics I and II) brings to mind a couple more: I'm pretty certain that some planes flew two atomic clocks in different directions around the planet and found a difference between the two, as predicted by relativity. And didn't someone find that the speed of light did not change with the speed of the emitter before Einstein even wrote his papers?
What motivates these denialists? I really don't get this kind of behavior. Creationism obviously comes from purely religious motives, but this "relativity-denialist" doesn't seem particularly religious, nor do the 9/11 conspiracists, anti-vaccinationists, or AIDS deniers. What's the appeal? Do these people just like being contrary? I'd seriously like to see some psych research dollars poured into investigating this behavior.
Posted by: Leukocyte | December 5, 2007 2:30 PM
I did not see the need to read further than "There are no relevant physical models [for relativity] which can be tested experimentally."
Posted by: Jobo | December 5, 2007 2:32 PM
Continuing on:
False. Hasn't this "Darrell Williams" person ever heard of symmetry groups, Lorentz invariance or, well, anything else in the sophisticated mathematical construction developed from Einstein's starting point?
False. You don't have to travel at the speed of light, only close enough to it. In fact, with a precise enough clock, you don't have to travel any faster than an airplane, as demonstrated by flying atomic clocks on airplanes. Particle accelerators use relativity every day: you don't have to push an electron or an ion all the way to light speed (that's impossible), but you can certainly get it going fast enough that relativistic effects matter. At MIT, we did this in our junior-year laboratory class, using electrons spat out of a radioactive source, bent into a curving trajectory using a magnetic field.
Oh, and magnetism is also a relativistic effect: a magnetic field is the Lorentz transform of an electric field.
Let's see, what else is wrong with this article, besides, well, everything. . . .
He mis-represents the truth about the 1919 solar-eclipse observation, and then he follows that up with mis-representing the truth about the perihelion of Mercury. We don't need to know the composition of the Sun and planets to figure out how strong their gravitational pulls will be (gravity doesn't depend upon chemical composition). We can measure masses because, for crying out loud, we can send probes to these planets and swing them around in gravitational slingshot maneuvers — you can't play cosmic billiards if your knowledge of gravity is fundamentally wrong! We can get pictures back from Cassini and land robots to drive around on Mars, so I think our understanding of planetary masses is pretty darn good.
No, it definitively ruled out Newtonian behavior. Look up the actual history. And why are you dragging "quantum theory" into this? Eddington's 1919 eclipse expedition had nothing to do with quantum mechanics.
No! No no no!
I can only guess that Darrell Williams absorbed some kind of pop-science version of quantum physics. He reads that "light is both a wave and a particle", and he equates "particle" with "mass". But the most trivial knowledge of actual physics informs us that photons are massless.
Let me say that again, for those in the back row: photons are massless. They have no mass. Their mass is not pinin' for the fjords. It is non-existent.
Again, no no no no no!
The Big Bang happened everywhere. All points in the Universe are equally the center of the universal expansion. The standard analogy for this "metric expansion of space" is as follows: imagine a balloon, and draw a speckling of dots across its surface. Those are the galaxies. Inflate the balloon, and the dots move apart; that's the Universe expanding. An observer standing on any random dot will see the same situation, and feel justified in calling himself the center of the expansion. Take some air out, and the dots move closer together. If you took all the air out of a perfectly elastic balloon, the dots would all come together. No unique center exists.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | December 5, 2007 2:33 PM
For me, the kicker is:
Maybe I'm reading this too hastily, but apparently the author is saying that one cannot use mathematics to explain the physical world! I know a lot of physicists (myself included) who would be surprised to hear this, especially having predicted new physical effects using 'abstract math'.
Posted by: gg | December 5, 2007 2:35 PM
I heard Mr. Eric H. Cline (author of the second-linked piece)
speak at the National Geographic Society in D.C. a couple of months ago. He sounded very reasonable, but he shared the stage with two oh-so-sincere Christians who seemed to feel that the only thing wrong with the crackpots was that they were wrong in the particulars of their claims.
Posted by: xebecs | December 5, 2007 2:36 PM
Yow, lots of physicists here. I'm no archaeologist but I am a historian of the period and the only thing in that article I'd take issue with is:
It is not religious views that are the issue here; it is whether good science is being done. Biblical archeology is a field in which people of good will, and all religions, can join under the banner of the scientific process.
It IS religious views that are the issue here, just not ALL religious views. Fundamentalist literalism - of any religion, but especially the monotheistic megafaiths - is not and never will be compatible with scientific inquiry.
Of course one may well interpret "of good will" to sideline the fundy maniacs.
Posted by: Sarcastro | December 5, 2007 2:47 PM
I'm only an undergraduate physics major, so perhaps Plait over at BA or one of the people at Cosmic Variance will do a better job of debunking than me.
But the author of the article is clueless. First of all, both SR and GR have been verified in many ways. Briefly, for SR:
1. We put clocks on airplanes and flew them around long enough to measure time dilation
2.We measured the lifetime of fast-moving particles in frames with different velocities.
For GR
1.We measured the (unexplainable in Newtonian gravity) precession of Mercury's orbit
2.We observed the bending of light in gravitational fields, called gravitational lensing and
3. We observed in a binary pulsar system the loss of energy due to the emission of gravitational waves.
These are just the experimental confirmations off the top of my head- Wikipedia lists others. I'll mention that I personally have observed muon decay at the Earth's surface (you can do it with a cheap spark chamber and some fast timing electronics), which would be impossible without time dilation; the muon wouldn't make it down to the surface.
He also mentions the EPR "paradox", which was Einstein showing that QM, not GR, predicted some crazy stuff; this stuff has recently been shown to occur. This does not constitute an argument against relativity.
He also argues that GR is not consistent with quantum mechanics. This is true; but both theories are extremely well-verified experimentally. Hence string theory and theories of quantum gravity; I'm out of my depth here, but this is the sort of thing (along with not finding the Higgs and the whole dark energy thing) that causes modern physicists to tear their hair out.
The bulk of the article, though, appears to be claiming that mathematical models should never be used to predict physical phenomena. You're probably more qualified to debunk that than I am, PZ. Yes we use mathematical abstractions such as point particles to predict real world phenomena, but the prove of a scientific theory is in the pudding.
Posted by: Lykourgos | December 5, 2007 2:47 PM
"The standard analogy for this "metric expansion of space" is as follows: imagine a balloon, and draw a speckling of dots across its surface. Those are the galaxies."
I've always preferred the "raisins in a loaf of raisin bread" analogy myself...
Posted by: Blondin | December 5, 2007 2:48 PM
As an archaeologist specializing in Biblical era Syria-Palestine, I can tell you the second article is pretty good, but it fails to take it far enough. The author targets amateurs too much, and doesn't stick it to the professionals that pull the same crap.
James Tabor is Chair of the UNC Charlotte Religious Studies Dept, but in the introduction to one book, he attributes Jesus' burial to two different tombs he worked on (of course after spending pages discussing his desire to feel a connection to the JC).
People like him get into it for crappy religious reasons, then it stains their work irreparably.
Posted by: thadd | December 5, 2007 2:49 PM
Continuing on with gg's theme, I'd like to call "fuckwit" on this part of the anti-Einstein diatribe:
Fuckwit.
An analogy is a perfectly valid way of producing inferences and making predictions. "X is like Y, so because X has property A, Y will have a property corresponding to A." Any given analogy may be faulty (perhaps the resemblance between X and Y is not as great as advertised), but the technique of reasoning by analogy is valid.
Did you know that an atom of a heavy element such as a rare earth is like a white dwarf star? Yes, rare-earth atom is to white dwarf star as electrostatic attraction is to gravity. In each case, Pauli exclusion pressure is holding a system up against an attractive force. Something is pulling a whole lot of electrons together, but something in the quantum character of electrons makes them not wanna get close — and you can express this quantitatively, using the same model in both circumstances to make verifiable predictions about two radically different objects, an atom and a dead sun.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | December 5, 2007 2:49 PM
Yeah, the predictions of special relativity are verified in particle accelerators every day. Special relativity is no longer open to dispute; it's elementary physics. Because of the theory's sparsity of assumptions, one has great difficulty seeing how it could possibly be any way mistaken. All we require is the constancy of the speed of light and the relativity postulate. Both seem pretty much unassailable.
Posted by: Jamie | December 5, 2007 2:53 PM
Lykourgos reminds me that I forgot to mention muon decay (that's another Junior Lab experiment, incidentally), gravitational lensing (now so well understood that it's become a tool for finding other things) and the gravitational redshift of light. That last one is an experimental test of general relativity which can be done within a building, thanks to the Mössbauer Effect. Pound and Rebka used this to verify Einstein's theory to within 1% by 1964, and the agreement has only gotten better since.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | December 5, 2007 2:54 PM
This is pretty much my feeling as well. They enter with an interest in the science but ultimately the religion angle wears about the scholar in many of them. Happened to some of the fellows at the DI also.
Posted by: JimC | December 5, 2007 2:55 PM
I nominate Blake Stacey, and Post #9 for December Molley Award. The post was clear and concise, and had a Monty Python reference in it, so it was all good.
Posted by: J-Dog | December 5, 2007 2:56 PM
What is the level of this guy ? High School physics or what ?
I mean, the title, please : "was Einstein wrong about Special relativity ?"
Of course he was "wrong". Einstein was the first to know that, he knew the limitations of SR, and that's why he worked so hard on GR.
He mixes up everything, nobody claims that the results obtained on the perihelion of Mercury prove GR. It's just that the theory makes a far more precise prediction than the classical result.
One plugs the same (approximated) mass of the sun in both models and one has a delta with observations of 43.5" (classical), the other one (GR) 0.3". From this we deduct that GR is an improvement over classical. The fact that the mass of the sun is only an aproximation doesn't matter (we know that !) as the same approximation is used in both models. And , numerous further observations since then on other objects have shown that, as predicted, the improvement on the precision gets much bigger when the objects ares moving much faster than Mercury orbits around the Sun. Always better, so there must me something "interesting" with that theory...
And the rest, is just, plain Dumb.
Posted by: negentropyeater | December 5, 2007 2:57 PM
As one of those in the math and physics metaphorical "back row" (at least here among Pharyngula readers) thank you Blake! and..."pinin" for the fjords"... priceless.
Posted by: Carl Buell | December 5, 2007 3:00 PM
Turning to the second, much nicer article, I should air some quibbles:
This is, AFAIK, a contested discovery. That portion of the Tel Dan Stele may also be translated as a place-name.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | December 5, 2007 3:02 PM
Re: analogies in science.
IMHO as an active scientist, analogy is BY FAR the best way to explain science to a lay audience. But more importantly, it is also the best way to understand science, even for the scientist. I couldn't have thought my way through my Ph.D. without them.
If you read any of Dawkins' books, you can see how he uses analogies at will, but always with the caveat that we must check every once in a while to see that our analogy has not strayed too far from reality. When it does so, we discard the analogy and use a new one.
Analogy is a perfectly valid tool of the scientist; in fact, I'd argue that it is amongst the MOST valuable.
Posted by: Mike | December 5, 2007 3:05 PM
I am over a decade removed from my exposure to relativity, but there is one thing that I am inclined to believe about his approach.
He has taken a page from the creationist playbook. He can not present an argument that will stand up against our current understanding, so he has "turned back the clock". Creationists have a long practice of ignoring modern biology and dwelling on the actions, beliefs or character of Charles Darwin. Likewise, this guy seems to think that he can invalidate relativity by down-grading Albert Einstein.
For some people, the last hundred years of scientific research just doesn't exist.
Posted by: Tony Popple | December 5, 2007 3:09 PM
Completely off-topic, but I always feel a little smug about being a computer scientist when this crackpottery -- is this a word? If not, it ought to be -- surfaces. Oh sure, I have to listen to inane rants about getting duped into installing trojan horses and how Bill Gates is, like, totally the devil and all that. But I never get told that my belief that P ≠NP is going to land me in a fiery pit for all eternity. Mind you, the whole godless homosexual liberal thing tends to make up for that.
Which is all part of my roundabout way of saying, "thank you. Thank you, biologists and physicists, for dealing with these nutjobs so the rest of us don't have to. Your fellow countrymen in the reality-based community are completely in your debt."
Posted by: Scooty Puff Jr. | December 5, 2007 3:10 PM
Before we go nuclear on this article we might want to look at some of this fellows other writings. They are quite critical of Bush and the right wing evangelical movement. For example, in the article "Religious Fundamentalism, Religious Wars and Cockroaches", Williams says:
"Instead of being a democratic system of government, a more accurate designation of the present U.S. administration, would be a Republican Christian Monarchy. Depending upon how much political power the religious right wing of the Republican Party has over the Executive, it might also be designated a Republican Christian Theocracy."
The point is that he is not the usual fundie crackpot that this site deals with. He is correct about some of the problems that exist when applying mathematical models to physics. The problem with this article is that he has picked the wrong physical theory to go after. If he really wants to criticize the application of Mathematics to reality, he should take on something else. String theory comes to mind, but I am sure someone else can find some another physical theory where the mathematics is or has been applied quite badly. Relativity, however, has a lot of things going for it. In particular, it has more recent evidence than Williams discusses in his article. (I think the GPS satellites use relativistic corrections to make their calculations come out correctly. The Manhattan project showed that E=Mc^2 was a pretty good equation.) He should have considered articles more recent than 1920.
It is also not entirely clear that Einstein was correct in each and every detail. He was probably wrong in his criticisms of quantum theory. (Probably wrong? Quantum theory? Einstein? Get it? Too subtle for you, huh?) On the other hand, Einstein almost certainly had the big picture correct about relativity. The best way someone can overturn that theory is to find a way to exceed the speed of light. I, for one, will not hold my breath waiting for that to happen.
The point is that we can disagree with Williams and think he is dead wrong - that's happened with lots of reasonable people. However, I don't think he deserves the sort of treatment this board gives to scientific charlatans such as the Discovery Institute.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled DI bashing.
--PatF in Madison
Posted by: PatF in Madison | December 5, 2007 3:16 PM
"Which is all part of my roundabout way of saying, "thank you. Thank you, biologists and physicists, for dealing with these nutjobs so the rest of us don't have to. Your fellow countrymen in the reality-based community are completely in your debt."
I got my degree in CS, and promptly turned around to work on my PHD in Iron Age Syria-Palestine, so I guess I seek out the BS.
Though, I remember there being quite a few crackpot professors at RU, and very few who understood the English language, so that may have helped push me.
Posted by: thadd | December 5, 2007 3:18 PM
That outrage one looks really good!
Posted by: Leon | December 5, 2007 3:19 PM
Another problem with our anti-Einstein loonball: Henri PoincarĂ© was in fact a co-discoverer of special relativity. Along with Hendrik Lorentz, he made several of the key conceptual breakthroughs which led to our full understanding of SR; Einstein worked independently of Poincaré, and with a different "style". Poincaré figured out the rule for adding velocities in relativity, and he realized how important it was that the transformations in the theory form a group. This insight was the first flagstone in the mathematical structure built upon relativity; we still speak of the "Lorentz group" and "Poincaré group". In his search for a smack-down against Einstein, Darrell Williams fumbles the history of the science, and reveals his ignorance of mathematics.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | December 5, 2007 3:20 PM
PatF@#27, Regardless of what he says or does elsewhere and no matter how sane or correct he is in those other places, they don't count. This article on special relativity deserves the thorough bashing it is getting. And unless he realizes what mistakes he's done and takes action to correct them, he's a fool.
Posted by: zohn | December 5, 2007 3:21 PM
So? Factual errors are factual errors. Deepak Chopra has been critical of Bush, but that doesn't earn him a free pass to spew his quantum woo.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | December 5, 2007 3:28 PM
Scooty Puff Jr., don't get too smug about Comp. Sci., as it's a target of fundamentalists as well:
Sadly, these days parody is so close to reality that it's not that funny anymore.
Posted by: Tulse | December 5, 2007 3:31 PM
Blake said something to "Mrs. D" a while back that is applicable here. When a relativity denialist says that "time doesn't slow down, only clocks slow down", they're ignoring, in essence, the definition of time. The same thing is happening here. The geometry of spacetime is assigned by the Lorentz metric which itself has everything to do with the way matter is distributed. Space is warped in the GR sense because space in GR is defined as the relationship between physical objects and their behavior, and every single test which we could ever perform with those objects will tell us that space is curved. The author seems to have this substantivist view of space, so that's probably why he's having some difficulty here. His accusations of metaphysics are ironic because, IMO, the relationalist view has fewer ontological commitments than the substantivist view of space.
The polemic against metaphysics isn't very useful, anyhow. As with any physical theory, there is nothing in the theory of relativity which demands a metaphysical interpretation and attempts at reification of a theory, though fallacious, are typically harmless because they don't tend to be applicable in any way (an exception to this is the deluge of papers written from a many-worlds standpoint). For example, it doesn't matter whether I really believe a photon "samples every path" before picking the one which minimizes its action, since regardless of the ontology I ascribe to the formalism, the formalism still describes the results of experiment. It does not matter whether a physicist thinks E and B fields are real, or just convenient mental constructs.
Furthermore, I fear that this author does not have any kind of understanding of the relationship between special relativity and the general theory, or special relativity at all, for that matter. If he understood it, he wouldn't have written:
Special relativity doesn't work that way. This is exactly the kind of thing creationists do when they try to quote the Second Law of Thermodynamics -- they leave out part of the hypothesis or conditions. I'll help him out:
See? It is relative to the frame of reference, numbnuts.
That article was a gold mine of stupid. I may come back to it later today.
Posted by: Dustin | December 5, 2007 3:34 PM
MS in Physics here, currently working on software for space systems (first Shuttle now GPS). I couldn't get past this sentence from the physics crackpot:
While it's more or less true that general relativity deals with an "alternative theory of gravity" it's better said that it considers the problem of acceleration in general, and the equivalence principle, that there is no discernible difference between being in a gravitational field and acceleration due to some other outside force. But that has to be the worst description of special relativity I've ever seen. Special relativity considers how different observers moving at different velocities (constant, not accelerating) would observe the same events. From considerations arising out of basic consistency, one arrives at the conclusion that the passage of time appears to slow for a moving observer, etc.
Posted by: Rheinhard | December 5, 2007 3:39 PM
Yeah, but the trouble is that both objects have outer bounds, and therefore have a physical center, so why wouldn't the universe have one (unless, perhaps, it's infinite?). I'd appreciate if someone were to hold my hand and explain this.
Posted by: Rey Fox | December 5, 2007 3:40 PM
All in all, he doesn't understand the difference between mathematics and empirical science.
Physics makes use of mathematical models to verify or predict empirical results. Of course, the mathematical objects used in the models do not exist in reality. They are always approximations, but it's about finding those models and approximations that work best when compared with experiments. Physics is never "proven" to be right in the mathematical sense.
That's his "tiny" misunderstanding. And it's everywhere in what he writes, every single fucking argument stems from the same basic "tiny" misunderstanding.
He probably got it wrong when he was 15 or 16 and has not improved since then.
Posted by: negentropyeater | December 5, 2007 3:42 PM
Zohn@#31
"PatF@#27, Regardless of what he says or does elsewhere and no matter how sane or correct he is in those other places, they don't count. This article on special relativity deserves the thorough bashing it is getting. And unless he realizes what mistakes he's done and takes action to correct them, he's a fool."
Blake Stacey @ #32
"So? Factual errors are factual errors. Deepak Chopra has been critical of Bush, but that doesn't earn him a free pass to spew his quantum woo."
I disagree completely. One of the great things about science is that people can make mistakes and not get hit by ultra-personal attacks as sometimes happens in other subjects. I once had an English teacher who could go ballistic when someone mixed up "its" and "it's" and drive everybody into whatever bunker was nearby. This did not help in understanding English grammar and made me very happy to retreat to my mathematics books.
We need to distinguish between people who make mistakes and those who have power hungry agendas and wish to impose those agendas on everybody else. I see Williams as wrong but not having an agenda. Engaging in personal attacks - such as calling someone a "loonball" - is not the way to treat this instance. Arguing that the writer has made some fundamental errors is.
--PatF in madison
Posted by: PatF in Madison | December 5, 2007 3:44 PM
I don't know if it applies to this Williams guy in particular, but usually when someone claims that Einstein was wrong, the real reason is because Einstein was Jewish. Anti-semites will argue that some parts of relativity are just plain wrong, and the parts they can't argue are wrong they'll say Einstein stole from Lorentz.
Posted by: Scott | December 5, 2007 3:44 PM
I suspect this diatribe is motivated by a rejection of 'Jewish science' and an attempt to find a way of explaining the speed of light question for a 6000 year old universe.
What's the 'American Chronicle'?
Posted by: Christianjb | December 5, 2007 3:46 PM
"Somebody want these?" No, PZ, we sure don't.
I work for a CRM firm in the Midwest and have run into what I call "archamagalmists". They're Godbags who spend a summer or two doing excavations while really working towards their dream of going to Israel and proving the Bible accurate or some other such nonsense. Makes me glad that I work with macrobotanicals most of the time. On site, I'd be liable to knock them over the head with a shovel and leave 'em in the backdirt.
Posted by: moon_grrl | December 5, 2007 3:49 PM
The atomic clock experiment was indeed performed by NASA scientists Richard Keating and Joseph Hafele, and it spectacularly confirmed relativity. For a while, Hafele was a colleague of mine--that is, he was an adjunct professor at my university. He is an extremely cool guy, and his recounting of the experiment is hilarious. In a nutshell--dispel any expectation that it was tightly coordinated. Instead it included mad dashes through airports to make connections and tortuously explaining atomic clocks to suspicious local security types.
Posted by: heddle | December 5, 2007 3:49 PM
Scott: Please don't anticipate my post, write it before I do and sneak it in before I hit the post button. It upsets the time-continuum.
Posted by: Christianjb | December 5, 2007 3:50 PM
The guy who wrote the article on physics is talking out of his ass. He's got his understanding of science, and they are completely wrong.
Posted by: Sam | December 5, 2007 3:55 PM
Rey Fox (#36):
Take the balloon analogy, and imagine that you're an ant living on the balloon — I mean, really living on it. Your whole evolutionary history has taken place on balloon surfaces. You have no concept of a third dimension, and indeed your brain can't intuitively process the idea. (Once you've studied mathematics for a while, you can do algebra and work with points labeled by three coordinates instead of two, but it's still not intuitive.) All your life, you walk around the balloon, never finding a hole or an edge, a limit or an outer bound.
The only unique center you can find for the balloon's expansion isn't in the balloon itself. It's enclosed by the balloon, but it's not located within the balloon material.
Now, up the dimensions by 1, and the analogy with our own Universe becomes a little more direct. (General Relativity talks about curved spacetime, not just curved space, but we can save that for another time.)
Posted by: Blake Stacey | December 5, 2007 3:56 PM
To follow up on my previous point, if he watched this video :
http://youtube.com/watch?v=NZNTgglPbUA
he would maybe understand that the mathematical objects that are manipulated are approximations of reality. But look at what this impressive design software can do. And it's all full of beautiful Physics classical mechanics in 2D. It simulates the whole experiment. It's just so fucking beautiful.
If you haven't seen this video before, watch it and start thinking of the future...
Posted by: negentropyeater | December 5, 2007 4:00 PM
Rey Fox wrote; "Yeah, but the trouble is that both objects have outer bounds, and therefore have a physical center, so why wouldn't the universe have one (unless, perhaps, it's infinite?). I'd appreciate if someone were to hold my hand and explain this."
I am sure others will come up with a better description, but I'd say that if you consider the surface of the balloon to be the universe, although only two dimensions rather than 3 (or 3 rather than 4 when you include time), then I think you can see that there is no center. The middle of the balloon doesn't exist, neither does the space outside it.
IOW, if the surface is all there is there is no boundry and no center, just like the universe.
Posted by: shiftlessbum | December 5, 2007 4:03 PM
To give the first moron some credit, it is true that mathematics rests on certain unknowns and that we have no proof from first principles of the connection of math to the phenomena it describes. That said, relativity et al are described using the same tools that describe why a bridge stands up or how you figure the odds in blackjack. If you can't use math to describe quantum or electrodynamics or relativity, then I'd be very careful walking onto a bridge because it shouldn't exist.
Posted by: jonathan | December 5, 2007 4:04 PM
I would refrain from "personal attacks", regardless of the political alignments of the author, had he not delivered a completely wrong, back-to-front absurd tirade against all of twentieth-century physics. This is not a matter of a few errors, or even a few "fundamental" errors: the piece in question misrepresents the special theory of relativity, the general theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, the use of mathematics in physics and the scientific method. This makes me angry. There's no other word for it. I've spent years studying physics, making it my profession, trying to master the material necessary to make new and genuine contributions — so when I see the field which is my life's work completely bastardized, dismissed with ignorance of such a level that it can only be sustained by incuriosity and arrogance, I find the time for civility to be long past.
Someone else can take what I write, edit out the "loonballs" and the "fuckwits", make it safe for children. That is not where my heart lies.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | December 5, 2007 4:06 PM
American Chronicle publishes some strange shit
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=44660
I thought maybe from this that the AC was a Moonie front, but there's also articles critical of the Unification Church on the website. The overall bent appears to be libertarian.
Posted by: Steven Sullivan | December 5, 2007 4:08 PM
"back-to-front absurd tirade against all of twentieth-century physics."
actually, from which one can deduct that it's against all of Physics, he got the first step wrong. (empirical sciences don't look for mathematical proofs).
Posted by: negentropyeater | December 5, 2007 4:11 PM
All I can say is that Arizona State University should be notified that an idiot is going around calling himself a "mathematician graduate" of the school.
Posted by: Mark P | December 5, 2007 4:22 PM
From the link Steven Sullivan posted:
Oh, for the love of. . . .
I wonder what the discovery of electrically neutral particles would do to this worldview, eh?
Posted by: Blake Stacey | December 5, 2007 4:25 PM
Arrgghh! I really, really hate it when someone who purports to be a mathematician makes a hash of Zeno's paradox. How did this slacker get his degree, anyway?
He's not very good at logical reasoning:
(1) Lots of people applauded Einstein even when they didn't understand what he said or what he did.
Therefore:
(2) Relativity is a popular myth rather than science.
Oh, yeah. I really find that persuasive!
(I should turn off my sarcasm switch now, but it appears to be stuck!)
Posted by: Zeno | December 5, 2007 4:34 PM
Blake Stacey @ #49
"I've spent years studying physics, making it my profession, trying to master the material necessary to make new and genuine contributions -- so when I see the field which is my life's work completely bastardized, dismissed with ignorance of such a level that it can only be sustained by incuriosity and arrogance, I find the time for civility to be long past."
In the above quotation, replace physics with Mathematics and I could have written it thirty years ago. My anger then gained me nothing nor did it help my field. I wasted a lot of time and energy by not concentrating on the real dangers to education. It was a bad idea and I eventually gave up teaching because I could not tolerate the heartache of seeing other people foul things up.
Here is a prediction. Williams article will be forgotten. No one in the physics community will take it seriously. It will remain in some internet cache and cyber-archaeologists might - I say might - trot it out as an example of the trash that could be written when there is no peer review. Raising our blood pressure to dangerous levels because someone has said something sincerely and severely stupid only serves to hurt us and not advance the cause of science or education. As long as Wiliams doesn't try to push it off as completely correct, he should be ignored.
--PatF in Madison
Posted by: --PatF in Madison | December 5, 2007 4:34 PM
Crackpot tipoff: any critique of SR or GR in which the entire math content consists of citing E=mC2.
Posted by: Tom | December 5, 2007 4:41 PM
Blake Stacey wins the internet for post #16. As the resident metaphorics wonk around here, I think I need a cigarette after reading that, and I don't smoke.
Posted by: Interrobang | December 5, 2007 4:44 PM
I suspect the writer would be more disturbed by the realization that all of the positive charges in an atom hang out together in the nucleus, while the negative charges share orbitals with each other.
Posted by: Tex | December 5, 2007 4:46 PM
GR on a galaxy and larger scale apparently only agrees
with the observations if you make (to me as a non-physicist)
relatively crack-potty sounding assumptions like
that the galaxies consist mostly of invisible dark matter and are hold together by a mysterious "dark energy".
It sounds a bit similar to the life-essence that plagued 19th century biology.
On the other hand there are now astronomers who claims they can
indirectly observe (and others who can claim they can calculate) dark matter so maybe it all makes sense and only sounds bad. Still it's
not really too convincing.
Posted by: nn | December 5, 2007 4:51 PM
Williams does make one good point:
Should populism be the basis for accepting or rejecting a scientific theory?
Send that to Texas and Florida.
Posted by: Bruce | December 5, 2007 4:57 PM
Heavy. Thanks, guys. I'll have to get out my old copy of Brief History of Time and bone up some more.
Posted by: Rey Fox | December 5, 2007 5:02 PM
I strongly agree. The author seems to exist in his own pocket space where he is trying desperately to distill relativity away from the rest of Physics without realizing how much evidence actually supports it or how scientific method, in general, actually works.
Posted by: viggen | December 5, 2007 5:03 PM
I wonder what the discovery of electrically neutral particles would do to this worldview, eh?
I hear quarks promote polyamory.
Posted by: anon | December 5, 2007 5:07 PM
Scooty@#26, CS hasn't been an attractive target up to now because most kooks see computing in practical terms: it's word processing and porn and a vehicle for getting their rants to an audience. But imagine what a crackpot magnet the field may become if we really crack AI - and I can see quantum computing attracting a fair bit of woo.
PatF@#55, Williams will be forgotten, but there's an inexhaustible supply of Williamses. In some way which I can't clearly articulate, I find the way they arrogantly attempt to demolish ideas they only dimly understand (without ever constructing anything worthwhile in their place) to be offensively corrosive to worthwhile intellectual investigation. People devote their lives to an honest attempt to further our understanding of the universe, and there's a constant chorus of clowns trying to tear down their work, for no good reason that I can see. Anger is a perfectly reasonable response, I think.
Posted by: Moggie | December 5, 2007 5:15 PM
Re #64: kooks in CS. There are certainly regularly kook like people
frequenting usenet CS related newsgroups or mailing lists of free
software. But it's much better than in other areas.
Posted by: nn | December 5, 2007 5:21 PM
PZ, you nasty man! That second article is actually fairly OK. Yes, a bit too accommodating of the religious, but biblical archaeology is a fun sport, and provides loads of ammo for us atheists. The bible is a very useful document for unpicking some elements of ancient history (as are the Assyrian and Egyptian records, for example), but should be taken with a pinch of salt the size of Lot's wife. We owe a lot to the early biblical archaeologists; the good ones eventually realised, "Hey, this bible really is a load of bollocks, isn't it?".
Piece of advice, folks: most Christians haven't a clue about the bible. Next time they're at your door, hit 'em with 1 Samuel 15, and watch 'em squirm.
Posted by: Amenhotep | December 5, 2007 5:22 PM
Oh dear Lady of Discord, the relativity denier guy claims do have a degree (in maths, no less)? His babbling doesn't even make sense.
Had a fantastic one today, on a German tech forum. Discussion about climate change - so you know the place will be swarming with denialists. Spent a while there sparring with them, but I'm not really good at that. The amusing one was the guy who went "well, if you really believe in anthropogenic climate change, you're probably the sort of person who also believes HIV causes AIDS, bah!"
He was utterly serious. He was not only an AIDS denialist, he thought that was a perfectly obvious and normal opinion to have...
Posted by: Julius | December 5, 2007 5:26 PM
Re #60: populism is already a standard criterium in science.
e.g. scientists are often graded based on citation impact which is basically just a populism test.
It's just not populism over the whole public, but just populism within
scientists working in the particular field.
Posted by: nn | December 5, 2007 5:26 PM
Moggie @#64
"People devote their lives to an honest attempt to further our understanding of the universe, and there's a constant chorus of clowns trying to tear down their work, for no good reason that I can see."
That is quite true.
Moggie @#64
"Anger is a perfectly reasonable response, I think."
Once again, I disagree.
There are a lot of other people in the world who do not believe the clown's nonsense but who are not expert enough in a field to tell where the nonsense begins and ends. I am certainly not an expert on relativity but I found Lykourogos #13 and negentropyeater #21 useful. I can check on these in a library if I desire and see where Williams goes wrong. (I probably will not have time but the fact that they offered reasonable measured responses is reassuring.)
Besides, the chorus of this type of clown is both too big and too small. There are too many clowns because, if we got angry at all of them, we would only spend our lives being angry. That's a waste of our time. There are too few because they do not have the ability to get together and form a pressure group to get states to teach their point of view. When they get together to try to get Texas to deny relativity or QM or the heliocentric theory, then I think that will be the time for anger.
--PatF in Madison
Posted by: --PatF in Madison | December 5, 2007 5:37 PM
nn,
that's why theoretical physics is getting so much more interesting nowadays. It raises a lot of questions and that's how science progresses. There is a mathematical model (MOND) that gets better results on the rotational speeds of Galaxies, but it comes out of "thin air" and noone knows why it works. There is the Dark Matter / Energy hypothesis which doesn't work as well but is more consistent with cosmological models and GR.
At the end of the 19th century, many physicists were thinking that fundamental physics was nearing it's end Goal. You can find interesting talks being made in the 1890s on the internet (Boltzmann made one which was marvelous). Well, look at what happened in the 20th century.
That's why I always find it funny when people say, Einstein was wrong. Well, they might be right, but it's the best model we have today.
Blake, I can understand that you get angry. But I have the feeling, that there is a huge latent interest from some parts of the general public for theoretical Physics. Wait until the LHC starts cranking...
I'm just an interested layman.
Posted by: negentropyeater | December 5, 2007 5:41 PM