While there’s nothing mathematical about this bit of silly woo, I couldn’t resist mocking it. There’s a Japanese inventor who claims to have created a device that instantly ages wine through a magical homeopathic-sounding process of magically restructuring water molecules.
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. Buying it aged for that long is very expensive (I’ve paid as much as $210 for a particularly good bottle of 1970 port that I used for my Y2K New Years Eve party); and waiting for it to age in the basement is both frustrating and tricky. (If it gets too warm, it can be ruined; if it gets too damp, the cork can rot and ruin it; if it gets too dry, the cork can shrink and ruin it.) So anything that could *really* accelerate the ageing process without wrecking the wine is something that I would really love to see.
There are two links for this. First, [a short NYT piece](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/magazine/10section4.t-8.html?_r=2&oref=login&oref=slogin):
>As liquor ages, Tanaka explains, the water molecules slowly rearrange themselves more closely around
>the alcohol molecules, giving the alcohol its distinctive mature taste. Tanaka puts that process into
>overdrive. He pours the wine into a 70-pound container outfitted with an electrolysis chamber. A
>few-second electrical zap gives the wine a slight charge, which breaks up the water molecules and
>allows them to blend more completely with the alcohol. Voilà: Instantly-aged pinot noir, “smoother and
>more mellow than before,” Tanaka’s American partner, Edward Alexander, claims.
Pure bullshit. In wine, what you’re going for in the aging process is breaking down tannins. Tannins are
a compound that come primarily from the skins in red wines. When you drink a young red wine, and there’s a bitterish bite, and a sensation that the wine is drying your mouth, that’s coming from the tannins. Over time, some the tannins are decomposed, and settle out of the wine as sediments in the bottle. The end result is that there’s less of the hard biting tannin, and you can taste the wine. The big tradeoff is that the parts of the grape that give a red wine the most flavor are the same parts that contribute the tannins. So most good red wines are very tannic when young, and they need to be
aged for a while to allow enough of the tannins to break and settle.
As always, though, there’s some tradeoff. The organic chemicals that can give wine a fruity flavor
also break down as the wine ages. So if you like the fruity flavor of a wine like a good red Zinfandel (note the **red** in that statement!), you have to drink it young. The usual trick for that is to open the wine, and “let it breathe” – that is, let it sit open to the air for a while. The oxidation process that happens when you expose wine to air will start to break down the tannins, so that the wine will be less harsh.
None of this is magic; none of it has anything to do with any homeopathy-like woo about clustering water molecules around alchohol. It’s relatively simple organic chemistry.
So guess what these guys have done? They’ve invented a machine that bubbles the wine through a bunch of hoses with some air and passes electricity through it. The important part is “bubbles through a bunch of hoses with some air”. They’re just doing a quicker version of the “letting it breathe” thing, and attaching some silly woo to explain why you need their fancy expensive machine to do it.
Anyway – here’s the *real* prize. They did a [promotional *cartoon* about their gadget,][cartoon] complete with
woo-babble about charging water with “positive electricity” and wine (I think they meant alchohol) with “negative electricity” in order to make the water be attracted to and cluster around the alchohol.
[cartoon]: http://www.salon.com/ent/video_dog/ads/2006/12/11/wine/index.html

I 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 the site is a total crackpot; not only does he propose a way of totally redefining physics, but he also proposes an explanation for everything that’s wrong with modern software, and exactly how to build a real, proper AI.
One of my mantras for dealing with crackpots is: “The very worst math is no math”. This guy does a spectacular job of demonstrating that.
Just for fun, I’ve got to quote the beginning of his diatribe. There’s nothing more fun than watching a crackpot rant about how it’s the *rest* of the world that are crackpots.
>The Crackpottery
>
>We have all been taught that there is no such thing as absolute motion or
>position or that every motion and position in the universe is relative. This
>unsubstantiated belief, which I have named exclusive relativity, has been
>around for centuries, even before the advent of Albert Einstein and the theory
>of relativity. It was not until early in the twentieth century, however, that
>exclusive relativity became in vogue. Nowadays most physicists consider the
>concept of absolute motion to be no more credible than the flat earth.
>Simple Proof #1 That Exclusive Relativity Is Bogus
>If all positions are relative, then we have a self-referential system in which
>every position is ultimately relative to itself. For example, suppose we have a
>two-body universe. Body A’s position is relative to body B’s position and vice
>versa. Since both positions are relative to the other and there are no other
>bodies, each body’s position is ultimately relative to itself. Of course, it
>does not matter whether there are only two bodies or a billion.
>
>Exclusive relativity amounts to saying things like, “you are as tall as you
>are” or “this sound is as loud as itself” or “pick yourself up by your own
>bootstraps.” Of course this is silly but this is the sort of silliness we have
>to believe in if we accept exclusive relativity.
Nope.
If you have two particles and nothing else, you can define their *positions* relative to each other in terms of their *distance* from each other. It’s not circular. Distance is the important fact. In a relativistic universe, there is no special *distinguished* reference point where the “real” position of objects is defined relative to that reference. Everything is described relative to *a* reference; but that reference can be pretty much any location you choose.
This doesn’t mean that measurements or positions are meaningless. It just means that they’re *relative*.
There’s actually a whole field of mathematics that studies things like this: it’s called metric topology. Speaking *very* loosely, metric topology looks at what kinds of *shapes* a continuous surface can take, and how to measure distance in those different kinds of spaces.
For example, if we lived in a two dimensional world, we could imagine that the world was a flat plane. In that case, the distance between two points is defined in one way. And it doesn’t matter *where* you put your reference point on the plane; the distance between two objects on that surface will be the same. We could also imagine a two dimensional world that was the surface of a torus. The distance between objects would be rather different there; but still, you could measure the distance between two objects on the surface of the torus. And no matter what point of reference you choose, the torus looks the same.
But if you’re a clueless twit who doesn’t understand what “relative position” means, then you can end up with the argument that this guy just presented.
>Simple Proof #2 That Exclusive Relativity Is Bogus
>
>Suppose there is a force acting on a particle so as to accelerate it. The
>particle has as many relative velocities as there are possible frames of
>reference, an infinite number in fact. Which of the myriads of relative
>velocities does the force change? How does the accelerating agent know about
>them so as to change them all? Answer, it does not. Only one velocity is
>changed by the force because it has no access to the others. The others are
>abstract, i.e., non-physical.
Once again, nope.
One of the things that’s beautiful about relativity is that it provides a set of equations that make this all work. From one point of reference, it may appear that an object is accelerating at rate X; from another point of view, it may appear that it’s accelerating at rate Y; work out the relativity equations, and they’re *both* right. Time dilation and relativistic mass shift makes it all work. (If fact, if you were around to read [my series on group theory][groups], you can see [where Blake Stacey explained in a comment][relativity] how relativity describes a lot of things as groups that are symmetric over the kinds of transformations that we’re discussing.)
The problem with the author of this piece is that *he’s not doing math*. Relativity isn’t just a theory with a bunch of words that say “position is relative”, etc. It’s a set of mathematical equations that define in a very precise way what that means, and how it works. Like I said: the worst math is no math. If he’d tried to understand the math, he’d know that there’s no problem here.
>Simple Proof #3 That Exclusive Relativity Is Bogus
>
>Let’s consider the motion of a particle. How does a particle “know” about its
>motion or rest relative to extrinsic frames of references so as to move or be
>at rest relative to them? Are particles psychic? I think not. No particle in
>the universe can make use of the relative because it has no access to it. It
>follows that the universe does not use the relative. The only properties that
>it can use are absolute ones.
Same exact problem as his “simple proof #2”. He didn’t do the math, and so he drew a really stupid invalid conclusion. The math of relativity explains how this works: the apparent velocity and acceleration of a particle in all frames of reference are equally valid; and the reason that they’re equally valid is because if you do the math for shifting the reference frame, you find that the different apparent values are really just different views of the same thing.
[nastytruth]: http://pages.sbcglobal.net/louis.savain/Crackpots/nasty.htm
[groups]: http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/06/group-theory-index.html
[relativity]: http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/04/some-applications-of-group-theory.html
[wiki-meco]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetospheric_eternally_collapsing_object
[slashdot-meco]: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/28/0543250