After yesterday’s post about the return of vortex math, one of my coworkers tweeted the following at me:
@MarkCC You know vortex math is worthless because it's free. But you know this is legit because it costs: http://t.co/WKIeS6azoU
— @lahosken (@lahosken) November 14, 2013
Larry’s a nice guy, even if he did give me grief at my new-hire orientation. So I decided to take a look. At oh my, what a treasure he found! It’s a self-proclaimed genius with a wonderful theory of everything. And he’s running a kickstarter campaign to raise money to publish it. So it’s a lovely example of profound crackpottery, with a new variant of the buy my book gambit!
To be honest, I’m a bit uncertain about this. At times, it seems like the guy is dead serious; at other times, it seems like it’s an elaborate prank. I’m going to pretend that it’s completely serious, because that will make this post more fun.
So, what exactly is this theory of everything? I don’t know for sure. He’s dropping hints, but he’s not going to tell us the details of the theory until enough people buy his book! But he’s happy to give us some hints, starting with an explanation of what’s wrong with physics, and why a guy with absolutely no background in physics or math is the right person to revolutionize physics! He’ll explain it to us in nine brief points!
First: Let me ask you a question. Since the inclusion of Relativity and Dirac’s Statistical Model, why has Physics been at loose ends to unify the field? Everyone has tried and failed, and for this reason so many have pointed out: what we don’t need, is another TOE, Theory of Everything. So if I was a Physicist, my theory would probably just be one of these… a failed TOE based on the previous literature.
But why do these theories fail? One thing for sure is that in academia every new ideas stems from previously accepted ideas, with a little tweak here or there. In the main, TOEs in Physics have this in common, and they all have failed. What does this tell you?
See, those physicists, they’re all just trying the same stuff, and they all failed, therefore they’ll never succeed.
When I look at modern physics, I see some truly amazing things. To pull out one particularly prominent example from this year, we’ve got the higgs boson. He’ll sneer at the higgs boson a bit later, but that was truly astonishing: decades ago, based on a deep understanding of the standard model of particle physics, a group of physicists worked out a theory of what mass was and how it worked. They used that to make a concrete prediction about how their theory could tested. It was untestable at the time, because the kind of equipment needed to perform the experiment didn’t exist, and couldn’t exist with current technology. 50 years later, after technology advanced, their prediction was confirmed.
That’s pretty god-damnned amazing if you ask me.
Based on the arguments from our little friend, a decade ago, you could have waved your hands around, and said that physicists had tried to create theories about why things had mass, and they’d failed. Therefore, obviously, no theory of mass was going to come from physics, and if you wanted to understand the universe, you’d have to turn to non-physicists.
On to point two!
Second: the underlying assumptions in Physics must be wrong, or somehow grossly mis-specified.
That’s it. That’s the entire point. No attempt to actually support that argument. How do we know that the underlying assumptions in physics must be wrong? Because he says so. Period.
Third: Who can challenge the old paradigm of Physics, only Copernicus? Physicists these days cannot because they are too inured of their own system of beliefs and methodologies. Once a PhD is set in place, Lateral Thinking, or “thinking outside the box,” becomes almost impossible due to departmental “silo thinking.” Not that physicists aren’t smart – some are genius, but like everyone in the academic world they are focused on publishing, getting research grants, teaching and other administrative duties. This leaves little time for creative thinking, most of that went into the PhD. And a PhD will not be accepted unless a candidate is ready and willing to fall down the “departmental silo.” This has a name: Catch 22.
It’s the “good old boys” argument. See, all those physicists are just doing what their advisors tell them to; once they’ve got their PhD, they’re just producing more PhDs, enforcing the same bogus rules that their advisors inflicted on them. Not a single physicist in the entire world is willing to buck this! Not one single physicist in the world is willing to take the chance of going down as one of the greatest scientific minds in history by bucking the conventional wisdom.
Except, of course, there are plenty of people doing that. For an example, right off the top of my head, we’ve got the string theorists. Sure, they get lots of justifiable criticism. But they’ve worked out a theory that does seem to describe many things about the universe. It’s not testable with present technology, and it’s not clear that it will ever be testable with any kind of technology. But according to Bretholt’s argument, the string theorists shouldn’t exist. They’re bucking the conventional model, and they’re getting absolutely hammered for it by many of their colleagues – but they’re still going ahead and working on it, because they believe that they’re on to something important.
Fourth: There is not much new theory-making going on in Physics since its practitioners believe their Standard Model is almost complete: just a few more billion dollars in research and all the colors of the Higgs God Particle may be sorted, and possibly we may even glimpse the Higgs Field itself. But this is sort of like hunting down terrorists: if you are in control of defining what a terrorist is, then you will never be out of a job or be without a budget. This has a name too: Self-Fulfilling Prophesy. The brutal truth…
Right, there’s not much new theory-making going on in physics. No one is working on string theory. There’s no one coming up with theories about dark matter or dark energy. There’s no one trying to develop a theory of quantum gravity. No one ever does any of this stuff, because there’s no new theory-making going on.
Of course, he hand-waves one of the most fantastic theory-confirmations from physics. The higgs got lots of press, and lots of people like to hand-wave about it and overstate what it means. (“It’s the god particle!”) But even stripped down to its bare minimum, it’s an incredible discovery, and for a jackass like this to wave his hands and pretend that it’s meaningless and we need to stop wasting time on stuff like the LHC and listen to him: I just don’t even know the right words to describe the kind of disgust it inspires in me.
Fifth: Who then can mount such a paradigm-breaking project? Someone like me, prey tell! But birds like me just don’t sit around the cage and get fat, we fly to the highest vantage point, and see things for what they are! We have a name as well: Free Thinkers. We are exactly what your mother warned you of… There’s a long list of us include Socrates, Christ, Buddha, Taoist Masters, Tibetan Masters, Mohammed, Copernicus, Newton, Maxwell, Gödel, Hesse, Jung, Tesla, Planck… All are Free Thinkers, confident enough in their own knowledge and wisdom that they are willing to risk upsetting the applecart! We soar so humanity can peer beyond its petty day to day and discover itself.
There’s two things that really annoy me about this paragraph. First of all, there’s the arrogance. This schmuck hasn’t done anything yet, but he sees fit to announce that he’s up there with Newton, Maxwell, etc.
Second, there’s the mushing together of scientists and religious figures. Look, I’m a religious jew. I don’t have anything against respecting theology, theologians, or religious authorities. But science is different. Religion is about subjective experience. Even if you believe profoundly in, say, Buddhism, you can’t just go through the motions of what Buddha supposedly did and get exactly the same result. There’s no objective, repeatable way of testing it. Science is all about the hard work of repeatable, objective experimentation.
He continues point 5:
This chain might have included Einstein and Dirac had they not made three fatal mistakes in Free Thinking: They let their mathematical machine dictate what was true rather than using mathematics only to confirm their observations, they got fooled by their own anthropomorphic assumptions, and then they rooted these assumptions into their mathematical methods. This derailed the last two generations of scientific thinking.
Here’s where he strays into the real territory of this blog.
Crackpots love to rag on mathematics. They can’t understand it, and they want to believe that they’re the real geniuses, so the math must be there to confuse things!
Scientists don’t use math to be obscure. Learning math to do science isn’t some sort of hazing ritual. The use of math isn’t about making science impenetrable to people who aren’t part of the club. Math is there because it’s essential. Math gives precision to science.
Back to the Higgs boson for a second. The people who proposed the Higgs didn’t just say “There’s a field that gives things mass”. They described what the field was, how they thought it worked, how it interacted with the rest of physics. The only way to do that is with math. Natural language is both too imprecise, and too verbose to be useful for the critical details of scientific theories.
Let me give one example from my own field. When I was in grad school, there was a new system of computer network communication protocols under design, called OSI. OSI was complex, but it had a beauty to its complexity. It carefully divided the way that computer networks and the applications that run on them work into seven layers. Each layer only needed to depend on the details of the layer beneath it. When you contrast it against TCP/IP, it was remarkable. TCP/IP, the protocol that we still use today, is remarkably ad-hoc, and downright sloppy at times.
But we’re still using TCP/IP today. Why?
Because OSI was specified in english. After years of specification, several companies and universities implemented OSI network stacks. When they connected them together, what happened? It didn’t work. No two of the reference implementations could talk to each other. Each of them was perfectly conformant with the specification. But the specification was imprecise. To a human reader, it seemed precise. Hell, I read some of those specifications (I worked on a specification system, and read all of specs for layers 3 and 4), and I was absolutely convinced that they were precise. But english isn’t a good language for precision. It turned out that what we all believed was perfectly precise specification actually had numerous gaps.
There’s still a lot of debate about why the OSI effort failed so badly. My take, having been in the thick of it is that this was the root cause: after all the work of building the reference implementations, they realized that their specifications needed to go back to the drawing board, and get the ambiguities fixed – and the world outside of the OSI community wasn’t willing to wait. TCP/IP, for all of its flaws, had a perfectly precise specification: the one, single, official reference implementation. It might have been ugly code, it might have been painful to try to figure out what it meant – but it was absolutely precise: whatever that code did was right.
That’s the point of math in science: it gives you that kind of unambiguous precision. Without precision, there’s no point to science.
Sixth: What happens to Relativity when the assumptions of Lorentz’ space-time is removed? Under these assumptions, the speed of light limits the speed of moving bodies. The Lorentz Transformation was designed specifically to set this speed limit, but there is no factual evidence to back it up. At first, the transformation assumed that there would be length and time dilations and a weight increase when travelling at sub-light speeds. But after the First Misguided Generation ended in the mid 70’s, the weight change idea was discarded as untenable. It was quietly removed because it implied that a body propagating at or near the speed of light would become infinitely massive and turn into a black hole. Thus, the body would swallow itself up and disappear!
Whoops… bad assumption!
The space contraction idea was left intact because it was imperative to Hilbert’s rendition of the space-time geodesic that he devised for Einstein in 1915. Hilbert was the best mathematician of his day, if not ever! He concocted the mathematical behemoth called General Relativity to encapsulate Einstein’s famous insight that gravitation was equivalent to an accelerating frame. Now, not only was length assumed to contract, but space was assumed to warp and gravitation was assumed to be an accelerating frame, though no factual evidence exists to back up these assumptions!
Whoops… 3 bad assumptions in a row!
This is an interestingly bizarre argument.
Relativity predicts a change in mass (not weight!) as velocity increases. That prediction has not changed. It has been confirmed, repeatedly, by numerous experiments. The entire reasoning here is based on the unsupported assertion that relativistic changes in mass have been discarded as incorrect. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth!
Similarly, he’s asserting that the space-warping effects of gravity – one of the fundamental parts of general relativity – is incorrect, again without the slightest support.
This is going to seem like a side-track, but bear with me:
When I came in to my office this morning, I took out my phone and used foursquare to check in. How did that work? Well, my phone received signals from a collection of satellites, and based on the tiny differences in data contained in those signals, it was able to pinpoint my location to precisely the corner of 43 street and Madison avenue, outside of Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan.
To be able to pinpoint my location that precisely, it ultimately relies on clocks in the satellites. Those clocks are in orbit, moving very rapidly, and in a different position in earths gravity well. Space-time is less warped at their elevation than it is here on earth. Relativity predicts that based on that fact, the clocks in those satellites must move at a different rate than clocks here on earth. In order to get precise positions, those clocks need to be adjusted to keep time with the receivers on the surface of the earth.
If relativity – with its interconnected predictions of changes in mass, time, and the warp of space-time – didn’t work, then the corrections made by the GPS satellites wouldn’t be needed. And yet, they are.
There are numerous other examples of this. We’ve observed relativistic effects in many different ways, in many different experiments. Despite what Mr. Bretholt asserts, none of this has been disproven or discarded.
Seventh: Many, many, many scientists disagree with Relativity for these reasons and others, but Physics keeps it as a mainstream idea. It has been violated over and over again in various space programs, and is rarely used in the aerospace industry when serious results are expected. Physics would like to correct Relativity because it doesn’t jive with the Quantum Standard Model, but they can’t conceive how to fix it.
In Quadrature Theory the problem with Relativity is obvious and easily solved. The problem is that the origin and nature of space is not known, nor is the origin and nature of time or gravitation. Einstein did not prove anything about gravitation, norhas anyone since. The “accelerating frame” conjecture is for the convenience of mathematics and sheds no light on the nature of gravitation itself. Quantum Chromo Dynamics, QCD, hypothesizes the “graviton” on the basis of similarly convenient mathematics. Many scientists disagree with such “force carrier” propositions: they are all but silenced by the trends in Physics publishing, however. The “graviton” is, nevertheless, a mathematical fiction similar to Higgs Boson.
Whoops… a couple more bad assumptions, but where did they come from?
Are there any serious scientists who disagree with relativity? Mr. Bretholt doesn’t actually name any. I can’t think of any credible ones. Certainly pretty much all physicists agree that there’s a problem because both relativity and quantum physics both appear to be correct, but they’re not really compatible. It’s a major area of research. But that’s a different thing from saying that scientists “disagree” with or reject relativity. Relativity has passed every experimental test that anyone has been able to devise.
Of course, it’s completely true that Einstein didn’t prove anything about gravity. Science doesn’t deal with proof. Science devises models based on observations. It tries to find the best predictive model of the universe that it can, based on repeated observation. Science can disprove things, by showing that they don’t match our observations of reality, but it can’t prove that a theory is correct. So we can never be sure that our model is correct – just that it does a good job of making predictions that match further observations. Relativity could be completely, entirely, 100% wrong. But given everything we know now, it’s the best predictive theory we have, and nothing we’ve been able to do can disprove it.
Ok, I’ve gone on long enough. If you want to see his last couple of points, go ahead and follow the link to his “article”. After all of this, we still haven’t gotten to anything about what his supposed new theory actually says, and I want to get to just a little bit of that. He’s not telling us much – he wants money to print his book! – but what little he says is on his kickstarter page.
So let me introduce that modification: it’s called Quadrature, or Q. Quadrature arose from Awareness as the original separation of Awareness from itself. This may sound strangely familiar; I elaborate at length about it in BLINK. The Theory of Quadrature develops Q as the Central Generating Principle that creates the Universe step by step. After a total of 12 applications of Quadrature, it folds back on itself like a snake biting its tail. Due to this inevitable closure, the Universe is complete, replete with life, energy and matter, both dark and light. As a necessary consequence of this single Generating Principle, everything in the Universe is ultimately connected through ascending levels of Awareness.
The majesty and mystery of Awareness and its manifestation remains, but this vision puts us inside as co-creative participants. I think you will agree that this is highly desirable from a metaphysical point of view. Quadrature is the mechanism that science has been looking for to unify these two points of view. Q has been foreshadowed in many ways in both physics and metaphysics. As developed in BLINK, Quadrature Theory can serve as a Theory of Everything.
Pretty typical grandiose crackpottery. This looks an awful lot like a variation of Langan’s CTMU. It’s all about awareness! And there’s a simple “mathematical” construct called “quadrature” that makes it all work. Of course, I can’t tell you what quadrature is. No, you need to pay me! Give me money! And then I’ll deign to explain it to you.
To make a long story short, Quadrature Theory supports four essential claims that undermine Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Cosmology while placing these disciplines back on a more secure foundation once their erroneous assumptions have been removed. These are:
- The origin of space and its nature arise from Quadrature. Space is shown to be strictly rectilinear; space cannot warp under any conditions.
- The origin of the Tempic Field and its nature arise from Quadrature. This field facilitates all types of energetic interaction and varies throughout space. The idea of time arises solely from transactions underwritten by the Tempic Field. Therefore, time as we know it here on Earth is a local anomaly, which uniquely affects all interactions including the speed of light. “C,” in fact, is a velocity, and is variable in both speed and direction depending on the gradient of the Tempic Field. Thus, “C” varies drastically off-planet!
- Spin is a fundamental operation in space that constitutes the only absolute measurement. Its density throughout space is non-linear and it generates a variable Tempic Field within spinning systems such as atoms, or galaxies. This built-in “time” serves to hold the atom together eternally, and has many other consequences for Quantum Mechanics and Cosmology.
- Gravity is also a ringer in physics. Nothing of the fundamental origin of gravity is known, though we know how to use it quite well. Given the consequence of Spin, gravity can be traced to forms that have closed Tempic Fields. The skew electric component of spinning systems will align to create an aggregated, polarized, directional field: gravity.
Pop science, of course, loves to talk about black holes, worm holes, time warps and all manner of the ridiculous in physics. There is much more fascinating stuff than this in my book, and it is completely consistent with what is observable in the Universe. For example, I propose the actual purpose of the black hole and why every galaxy has one. At any rate, perhaps you now have an inkling of why Quadrature Theory is a Revolution Waiting to Happen!
Pure babble, stringing together words in nonsensical ways. As my mantra goes: the worst math is no math. Here he’s arguing that rigorous, well-tested mathematical models are incorrect – because vague reasons.
There has been a shift in terminology away from “relativistic mass”, mostly because it isn’t invariant and it doesn’t behave exactly like mass in GR. When LHC physicists talk about mass, we always mean rest mass.
I’ll also note that the search for new physics isn’t just the theorists–I will bet the LHC experiments have published more papers on searches for “Beyond the Standard Model” physics than we have on the Higgs.
Funny that he should say “prey tell” instead of “pray”.
This guy read “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and thought it was a science textbook.
I came here, via Google, AFTER i read this guy’s Kickstarter page. Because i just knew, there has to be at least one or two science related blogs that will tear this ridiculous crap apart. There’s so much wrong and downright outraging in what this “Phd” Bretholt writes, i wouldn’t even know where to begin.
But you did a good job with your article.
Say what you will about OSI, it did give us a lasting legacy: a framework that helps to understand network protocol suites. Nobody uses OSI, but we all speak the OSI layer model.
As I said Mark, It’s all on you!
http://scientopia.org/blogs/the-scientopia-vision/#comment-6346
Dear Students,
Normally for a book review, I would divide the critique into two parts: the review and the reviewer. But since in this case the reviewer forgot completely about the review and concentrated entirely on his own bias, I will only need to consider the reviewer in this rebuttal.
MarkCC is in violation of Scientopia’s Code Article 4: Blogger Responsibilities
“Respect, intellectual honesty, and engagement” with … this fundamental theme.
MarkCC is neither a scholar nor a gentleman.
A scholar gathers information carefully about his subject and then evaluates it fairly and without bias or prejudice. This is also what scientific thought requires with the addition of a good portion of logic and open-mindedness. In order to justify his ranting, Mark ignored my background and the many clarifications made about my book BLINK on my website and the Kickstarter site. In particular: I am a statistics’ professor with a wide range of interdisciplinary knowledge and experience in the sciences. As a scholar, I do NOT make claims I can’t support!
Scientopia should be quite ashamed of such a posting on their site considering the legal ramifications, and I am sure that Mark’s boss (?) Larry is embarrassed for him as well. If MarkCC spent more time trying to understand what he is reading rather than trying to impress his friends by slagging new ideas and taking other cheap shots, his insight might improve. We will give him a C Minus for Scholarly Approach, not a D, since he does have a PhD, pray tell how…
Although Mark chalks up my book in his Bad Physics column without making any attempt whatsoever to understand the overview he was given as a commentator, it is obvious to anyone who has read this review that his drivel is “Pure babble, stringing together words in nonsensical ways” to put it in his own vernacular. My languaging, on the other hand, is very precise and accessible to the general reader without recourse to the mathematics that underpins it. Hence, we shall chalk him up in the Bad Journalism column and assume that he will be de-listed as a blogger with Scientopia if he does not retract the article and make a full apology. Otherwise, he should consult a lawyer on the legal consequences of libel and slander.
As for gentleman, outside of the dozens of libellous personality slurs Mark peppers throughout his irresponsible bombast (four in the first paragraph no less), when I suggested to Mark that he actually read my bio and retract the article he tweeted:
“@DR_BLINK Aw, what’s the matter, you poor idiot have a sad, because I dared point out, in detail, that you’re full of shit?” PS. Mark, you didn’t point out anything except your exceptional bias and bad taste.
If you spoke that way to a professor in my university you would be relieved of your student status. Ironically, Mark works for Twitter and should know that such abuse is also against their policy… Perhaps, his performance record in this heinous Scientopia blog indicates what kind of shoddy work he does for Twitter, I don’t know, but would you want this kind of person working for you? Mark does not rank on the scale for Gentlemen. He needs to grow up!
In lieu of retraction, I challenge Mark to re-read my BLINK document and to re-visit my KickStarter project, and then post a more gracious note about the new road to the harmonization of physics called Quadrature Theory.
Let me explain a couple of things to you, since you seem to have a problem with reading comprehension.
(1) No one “works for” Scientopia. Scientopia is a community of independent bloggers.
(2) No one at Scientopia has any say over the content of individual blogs except for the blog-owner. From the code: “All content of blogs are the sole property of their author. The collective as a whole takes no responsibility for, nor any ownership rights to the contents of any blog posts. Blog authors are solely responsible for the content of their blog entries.”
(3) One of the consistent hallmarks of crackpots is the content-free threat-complaint. You’re indignant about how unfair I was to you – but you don’t actually point out anything substantive. My post contains numerous substantive critiques of your “theory”. You can’t actually respond to those. So you resort to the implied legal threat/attempt to complain to my non-existent superiors at Scientopia.
If you want to convince me that you’re not a crackpot, the way to do it would be to actually read what I wrote. Address some of the blatant errors in your writeup. For example, how about you try actually talking about your ridiculous and unsupportable claim that relativistic mass change has been “discarded as untenable”? Where’s your evidence? Why do GPS satellites need to make relativistic time corrections? Why do we observe gravitational lensing? Why do we see relativistic time dilation effects for high speed particles in the LHC?
It is obvious that Scientopia is an open collective and that you feel that Rule 4 pertaining to “Respect” doesn’t apply to you, but I would be more worried about Twitter, if you still work there…
The reason you are so belligerent is what? Just your personality, trying to impress other bloggers, or like most students, is it because you just didn’t do your homework!
No matter, let’s end the confusion!
Relativistic Mass has a long confusing history because mass is, by definition, invariant in all frames. In fact, it was soundly rebutted in 1989 by Okun in this article.
https://www.worldscientific.com/phy_etextbook/6833/6833_02.pdf
The problem is with momentum… MV is not conserved if mass is allowed to increase! Hence, my tongue in cheek example of a light speed particle swallowing itself by producing its own black hole. This alludes to this inevitability, if Relativistic Mass exists.
But the problem is not really Relativistic Mass: it is the idea of how mass arises in the first place. This inertia problem is what gave rise to the Higgs Field. This was 40 years ago and no significant improvement in the “understanding ” of mass has been made… including the dubious discovery of “something that looks like Higgs Boson,” as was reported.
The underlying problem is the origin of matter, which I address in Quadrature Theory. On my KS Project again you will see a partial explanation of its origin. To understand it fully you will need to read BLINK for the necessary development.
GPS satellites are definitely compensating for time variations, but exactly how these variations arise is the question? All space vehicles have been compensating for time differentials since Sputnik. What retired NASA officials have revealed is that the compensations used for crafts are not truly relativistic… they use fudge factors otherwise they’d lose track of their vehicles in both space and time.
Let’s jump back in time to Einstein’s perception of the Michelson & Morley Experiment: this was the basis for his Special Relativity proposal. But their tests were deficient. The z axis co-ordinate direction wasn’t tested. Imagine what Einstein would have proposed had he known that the spinning Earth sets up its own time system, that time varies with altitude!
Now jump to 1971, the dual airplane test for Relativity. It used three synchronized caesium clocks. Their speeds and directions were well documented, but what dimension were they actually testing? The scientists didn’t realize they were testing the one position on the z axis. The altitude of the planes caused the flying clocks to go out of synch with the ground clock: neither speed nor direction have as much bearing as altitude. This also applies to compensation made for GPS satellites.
Quadrature Theory predicts these results as well, but the data would be interpreted differently, with the calculations more comprehensive and correct! Quadrature Theory accounts for NASA’s fudge factors.
Go to my KS Project page: the Tempic Field varies with distance from a Spin Centre, like on the Earth, and for other reasons as well. Q Theory is developed logically and mathematically in BLINK. Einstein’s Relativity was just a first approximation to the more comprehensive Tempic Relativity of Quadrature Theory.
The particles in the LHC are part of a spinning system, which creates its own Tempic Field effects that the scientists are oblivious to. They do observe time dilations, of course, but with fudge factors. There is a better interpretation using Quadrature Theory, which is my point! These effects are happening… but their interpretations are incomplete: They are highly skewed to their predictions and to the filter bias of the equipment.
Now what else were you “whining” about Mark?
Oh yes, gravitational lensing. How can this happen without space warping around a massive object, you might ask? Of course, we expect Einstein had it right: except for two things: He didn’t know about the origin of time or of space.
I show in BLINK that the Space Fabric cannot warp since it precedes all other aspects of reality. It serves as an unshakable rectilinear reference that is a logical consequence of Quadrature. Time, on the other hand, is dependent on the Tempic Field. Under some conditions time dilations are similar to those predicted by Einstein, but without any feedback into the Space Fabric or Relativistic Mass. In other cases, you would be surprized!
The lensing effect is due to time expansions and contractions around the Sun due to its variable Tempic Field. By conservation of angular momentum, light will follow the geodesic of the Tempic Field. As it approaches the Sun, it will blue shift and deflect toward lower Tempic Field values. As it leaves the vicinity, conservation deflects it back in the opposite direction creating the lensing effect and red shift. No Space Warpage necessary!
Please consult my KS Project again. Maybe you will get excited about the implications of what I am saying… Quadrature Theory is a long overdue renovation to the assumptions of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Cosmology!
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/649378709/blink-the-quadrature-theory-of-everything
Your response is a beautiful demonstration of the problem with talking about mathematical concepts using imprecise mathematical language. Relativistic mass change does not violate the conservation of momentum. In fact, if you work through the actual math of relativity, you’ll find that it’s quite clear that relativistic mass increase does not violate conservation of math.
But it’s not just the mass. Relativistic mass change is a real, observed effect.
You can wave your hands about how it’s really because of fudge factors and babble. But you’re again playing fast and loose with the math. Do you have any comprehension of just how astonishingly, amazingly precise the measurements and computations from something like the LHC are? There’s no room for fudge factors.
It’s really easy to stand at a remove and talk about how they’ve got it wrong. What’s hard is to actually understand what they’re doing, and understand the actual mathematics behind it – and even more importantly, just why they use such amazingly complicated math.
Non-scientists love to complain about how science uses math – exactly the way that you do in your little “theory”. But there’s a really good reason that scientists developed the tools of mathematics. When you’re working at the level of natural language and handwavy prose, it’s really easy to come up with theories that sound good. But the problem with those “theories” is that they aren’t precise.
Relativity doesn’t just explain things in an elegant way. It makes very, very specific predictions. And those predictions work. They don’t just explain hand-wavy stuff. They don’t just predict things from complicated esoteric experiments. They predict things that we observe every day.
The global positioning system is a wonderful example of this that I like to harp on, because I’ve worked on things that rely on it. To get precise position information, the GPS satellites need to make two different mathematical adjustments to their clocks. They need to adjust their clocks for their orbital velocity, and they need to adjust their clocks for gravity. The exact adjustments needed were calculated before any GPS satellite was ever launched. Let me repeat that. The exact adjustments needed to make the clocks precise enough to pinpoint position on earth to within 3 square meters was computed from the mathematics of relativity, before the satellites were launched. And it was exactly correct. The proof is probably in your pocket right now, in the GPS receiver in your cellphone. Take it out of your pocket and open maps: it can tell you precisely where you are.
For another example of math in science, take a look at my recent post about the uncertainty principle. Quantum mechanics is, in my opinion, a remarkably ugly theory, in the sense that it makes no intuitive sense at all. According to quantum mechanics, the way that things behave at very small scales is incomprehensibly strange. Honestly, I find that very upsetting. But it works. It explains real things that we experience every day. From semiconductors to solar fusion, it makes incredibly precise predictions – not close predictions with fudge factors, but precise predictions – that describe the world we live in. Throw out quantum physics, and you need to explain just how hydrogen nuclei in the sun can fuse into helium, even though the energy level in the sun isn’t anywhere near hot enough to make it happen without uncertainty.
If you want to claim that your quadrature theory is better than relativity, you can’t just wave your hands around, whine about how you’re being mistreated, and proclaim that you’re a genius. You need to show, precisely, how your theory makes a prediction that is more precise than relativity. If you want to say that uncertainty doesn’t make sense and your theory is better, you need to explain how fusion in the sun can work, and you need to make predictions about that fusion that are more precise than the predictions made on the basic of quantum mechanics.
Yes, as professor of statistics, I get your point Mark, mathematics is essential to our understanding and implementation of theory. But math is not really that important when devising a new theory: ideas are! Admittedly, there is a lot of mathematics yet to be developed in Quadrature Theory: it hasn’t had 100 years of attention by hundreds of thousands of scientists… yet. This is my first point: fledgling theories do NOT come replete with their mathematical elaborations: these need the careful attention of bright scientists, which is really what my project is hoping to solicit… you included! But fledgling theories do come with new insights and simplifications that make short work of the mathematics to come. Intuition, insight, and understanding must come first, then the mathematics can be used to confirm the theory. By Ockham’s Razor, simple insightful theories are preferable to elaborate mathematical monstrosities.
On the other hand, I agree that there does need to be sufficient mathematical foundation to propose a new paradigm in physics. Quadrature Theory has a set of fundamentals that serve both as insights and mathematical tenets. For example, there are formulae for calculating the “Field Fabric” and Spin Field Density (SFD). Using an understanding of SFD, in vector terminology, the Field Fabric consists of:
1. Gradient of Spin = Tempic Field
2. Divergence of Spin = Electric Field
3. Curl of Spin = Magnetic Field
As I mentioned in our discussion yesterday, this origin of Time (upper case used for its Q Theory sense) is necessary to understand all time-dependent relationships in physics, especially at the quantum level. This is what is missing from QCD and why it is so disturbingly messy. The “amount of Time available” for any particular transaction depends directly on the Local Tempic Field, which is Grad (Aggregate SFD). I hope you can see that this is exactly what is being ignored in QCD when it assigns a simple ratio to account for Spin. Physicists fail to interpret the subatomic data in terms of the Local Tempic environment, which they interpret as “relativity.” They account for the Weak and Strong Forces with only the Electric and Magnetic Fields. When the Tempic Field is brought into the analysis, the true dynamics that produce these forces can be calculated as well as why their strengths are so contrary. Quadrature Theory also predicts a standing wave structure for electron shells (rather than probabilistic clouds), an interlocking mechanism for protons and neutrons, and the internal structure of quarks.
My second point then is that there is a deep correspondence between the formulae given above and Maxwell’s Field Equations. The link between Time and the “Space Fabric” is given by the Tempic Field, not special or general relativity. Thus it seems likely that appropriate interpolating formulae regarding “the availability of Time” can be developed to complete Maxwell’s field set.
Hence, an understanding of the Tempic Field makes general interpretations of all types of data, both quantum and cosmological, more powerful, and ultimately more technologically useful -as in the GPS satellite calculations that you are familiar with. But theories often don’t necessarily start out with even as much mathematics as I suggest above; new theories start out with ideas! True, this may look like a lot of hand-waving gestures: if it were not for Ernst Planck, young Einstein hand-waving may have been summarily dismissed by the Academy. Nevertheless, what I propose in Quadrature Theory has a sound mathematical beginning from the point of view of a professor of statistics. I hope to get better minds working on it in time.
But for now Quadrature Theory goes far beyond just the many issues in physics that it suggests a solution for. Instead, it spans all of what might be called metaphysics and the science of life, as well. So my last point is this: what I am trying to achieve is the unification of scientific enquiry at all levels by proposing a sound underlying framework. This framework accommodates life and awareness, which have been misunderstood or ignored by science to date. This framework also helps us to re-interpret everything that we know at the scientific level: a paradigm shift does not throw out any of the old; a new paradigm simply offers a better interpretation of what we already know, and helps us see farther into what we don’t!
So, if I understood correctly, the story is as follows. Some unnamed “retired NASA officials” revealed to this guy that physics is wrong, and that it requires some “fudge” factors to work. These fudge factors are written nowhere, but, by some international complot, every physicist or engineer that needs to compute anything knows them. Magic! And this guy has a theory, who no one has seen, developed without data and not tested against them (by data I mean the tons of terabytes coming from experiments nowadays), and not reviewed by anyone, that solves every problem of current physics, unknown problems due to the international complot.
Ah, ok, this makes sense. I’ll buy the book… tomorrow… maybe…
A little OSI history: A friend and colleague was Andrew Singer (RIP), who was one of the original OSI authors. He told me that they never intended it as an implementation spec, rather as a philosophical teaching device for thinking and talking about communications protocols. Which is why those who thought it a spec had their problems – and why it was written in English and not Math.
Expanding to more of this post’s topic, the lesson here is to not try and build large edifices on top of imprecision.
My point Exactly David: the foundations of QM and Relativity are wrong… hence the edifice is ultimately flawed regardless of the Terabytes that make use of adequately filtered (fudged) data,… contrary to John’s blither, this is not what breaking paradigm’s is about!
Great argument ¬¬
I also thought Bretholt’s “theory” was like a re-working of Langan’s CTMU. And I notice that Bretholt talks about “confirmatory experiments” rather than “potentially disconfirmatory experiments” (at http://www.worldfreedommovement.net/quadrature-paradigm-lecture-series/). This is not a good sign, especially when combined with a lot of fairly obvious nonsense and the attempt at trying to get his readers to believe that attacking physicists is the same as showing flaws in their theories and their methods.
To me, it looks more like fraud than merely a prank, unless he doesn’t plan to actually accept any of the money pledged.
Further, if he wants to publish a book, he can do it now, for almost nothing, at CreateSpace or Lulu (among others). My guess is that, beyond his collection of undefined terms, he has little or nothing to publish. If he actually had something, he could publish it now and guarantee himself a Nobel prize.
Let me point out that his three “formulae” are meaningless without definitions of the terms involved, and without context of application.
Here are his “formulae”:
1. Gradient of Spin = Tempic Field
2. Divergence of Spin = Electric Field
3. Curl of Spin = Magnetic Field
Finally, his idea of an “original separation of Awareness from itself” is pure vacuous metaphysical twaddle. This is not physics but simple old-fashioned occultism. Combine this with his remark that “You will recognize a lot of what I’m talking about from your own experience especially if you are a spiritual person” (at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/649378709/blink-the-quadrature-theory-of-everything), and it’s obvious that he’s not giving us physics but warmed-over mysticism.
Also his claim that “if you are an atheist, you will love [his theory] even more because the one thing that atheists and scientists don’t really know how to explain is Awareness” is false at least for me, since I am an atheist who has no problem explaining awareness (and there are a fair number of scientists who also don’t have this problem). Bretholt does himself no favors here, since, insofar as people don’t understand awareness, it’s a problem regardless of whether they are theists or atheists. Theism provides absolutely nothing to help explain awareness, since such “explanations” always rest on something that is infinitely more in need of explanation than what it is supposed to explain, such as the idea of a “separation of Awareness from itself.”
In summary, what he has given us so far is bad physic (or anti-physics) and truly horrendous philosophical nonsense. I look forward to seeing what, if anything, he actually publishes in his attempt at fulfilling all his grandiose and so-far-baseless claims.