bad physics
goodmath | April 2, 2007 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 review of his book. (If you'll
recall, according to George, it's because everyone is too busy considering the impact that his proof is going to have on their activities.)
Normally, I wouldn't revisit a two-bit crank like George after such a short interval, but he showed up in the comments again to specifically point at a post he made on his own blog, which he…
goodmath | March 13, 2007 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 of new-age gibberish, with all of the usual hallmarks: lots of woo, all sorts of babble about how important consciousness is, random nonsensical babblings about quantum physics, and of course, bad math.
Lanza's "theory" (if one wants to be generous enough to call it that) is that life is a fundamental, in fact the fundamental guiding force of the entire universe. His…
goodmath | February 26, 2007 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 electronic and/or electromagnetic devices.
I hadn't heard of Dr. Bearden before, and promised to take a look at his website.
So I went and took a look. And wow, I hit the jackpot! This is an absolute masterwork of crackpottery. Dr Bearden's lunacy covers just about every conceivable topic, from conspiracy theories, to HIV denalism, to wacky physics,…
goodmath | February 20, 2007 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 of his papers that way - it's always with the title "Engineer".) This one is as wacky as Neal Adams and his PMPs, except that the author seems to be less clueless.
At first I wondered if this were a hoax - I mean, "Engineer Borg"? It seems like a deliberately goofy name for someone with a crackpot theory of physics... But on reading
through his web-pages,…
goodmath | January 21, 2007Yet 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 to help provide cover for the anti-global warming cranks. Now, in light of all of the
data that we've gathered, and all of the different kinds of analyses that have been used
on that data, for anyone in the real world, it's pretty undeniable that global warming is
a real phenomena, and that at least part of it is due to humanity.
One of the standard arguments from…
goodmath | December 19, 2006Over 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][adams]. It's a crackpot theory about how physics has it all wrong. You see, there is no such thing as gravity - it's all just pressure. And the earth (and all other planets) is actually a matter factory - matter is constantly created in the *hollow* center of the earth, and the pressure of all the new matter forces the earth to constantly expand. And the pressure of expansion creates the illusion of gravity. And according to the crackpot behind it all,…
goodmath | December 12, 2006While 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.
For why I can't resist... Well, you see, I'm a
bit of a wine nut, and I'm particularly passionate about one very special wine: vintage Port. The problem with vintage Port is that it's pretty close to undrinkable when it's young; it needs to sit and age for at least a decade; 20 to 30 years is better for a really good one.…
goodmath | November 20, 2006So, 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 evidence. Instead, they use it as
evidence for a very peculiar theory. It's an interesting approach for a couple of reasons: it
actually *proposes a theory* (a bad theory, but hey, at least it's a theory!); it uses some recent theories and observations as evidence; and it casts the whole concept of how the sun works as part of an elaborate conspiracy to prop up evolution…
goodmath | November 19, 2006One 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](http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CE/CE310.html) by other folks, so I haven't bothered to
add my two cents here at GM/BM. I hadn't heard anyone mention this old canard until
recently, when a reader wrote to me to ask if I could comment on it. I *hate* to disappoint
my readers, and this is *such* a great example of flaming bad math, so I figured what the heck. So hang on to your hats, here it comes!
There are a lot of…
goodmath | July 29, 2006I was reading an article on Slashdot the other day about a recent discovery of what might be a MECO. A [MECO][wiki-meco] is a "magnetospheric eternally collapsing object"; if this were true, it would be a big deal because according to relativity, either black holes exist and MECOs don't, or MECOs exist and black holes don't.
I have no intention of getting into the MECO vs. black hole argument. But a commenter there put down a link to something that he seemed to think was a [reasonable argument against relativity][nastytruth]. I took a look, and it's just *hysterically* funny. The author of…