27 April 2013

Physics is different at the University of Illinois

A very good friend told me a bizarre story loosely related to the topics of this blog. She once wondered why there where around the internet, a number posts where Christoph Schiller's physics book is said to contain mistakes, but no mistake is usually mentioned. And all are under different name, but with the same animosity and the same sentences. When my friend asked Schiller, she got the answer that all those posts are written, every time under a different name, by the same person.

She then asked a computer expert and he quickly found out that these posts are by a student-physicist from the University of Illinois. This student-physicist usually calls Schiller a 'crackpot', but gives no reason. I searched a bit around, and I found some real funny physics statements from this guy:
Elementary particles can have infinite momentum and energy values. 
He really insists on this: not just very big values, but actually infinite values.
Special relativity is valid in regions where space is curved.
Classical electrodynamics is valid even in quantum theory.
He also regularly adds that his professors agree with him. Well, a real man and scientist does not talk that way, you know. Does GPS navigation not work in Illinois? Are there no photons at that university? It really looks as if at the University of Illinois the laws of physics differ from those in the rest of the world.

Bu the best thing is that this guy is jealous about Schiller! He even says that the strand model is wrong, but does not say why. He sounds like a gay man whose sexual wishes were rejected by Schiller. My usual advice to get a good wife and finally find happiness will not work on him. And if you are not gay, sorry, man, but I am already happily married.

24 April 2013

Ex vero quodlibet?

Lee Smolin has written a new book. In the introduction he writes:
I’m inclined to believe that just about everything we now think is fundamental will also eventually be understood as approximate and emergent: gravity and the laws of Newton and Einstein that govern it, the laws of quantum mechanics, even space itself…
As readers of this blog know, I agree, because the statement is correct. Particles and spacetime are the two sides of the same basic elements of nature.

Then the trouble starts. Smolin concludes that the laws of nature change, that the universe is fundamentally irreversible, that math is not important, and a lot of other nonsense.

Peter Woit, instead of simply criticizing the mistaken conclusions, also criticizes the correct statement above.

What do we learn from this debate? These two very different men, and probably many around them, both think whatever they want. They do not care about nature or truth; they only care about their personal preferences. They do not care about truth any more. This is especially sad about Peter Woit.