Junk Science Alert!

The Chronicle of Higher Education ^ | 1/31/03 | ROBERT L. PARK

[mikegi]

So, Mike, what color is an electron?

I don't know, you tell me. And while you're at it, give me the size and shape of a photon. Pick a wavelength, any wavelength. Scratch that ... if a photon is a point particle it really can't have a wavelength, can it, because that would imply something which varies with distance?

[js1138]

I think he could get investors. Last year someone in my home town was caught selling a modem that would transmit video speed data over a standard phone line. The list of his investors included half of Silicon Valley.

[kidd]

I have fallen into the trap of the media vernacular. I meant human-induced global warming. I have given a score of 5.0/7 for human-induced global warming.

[Sloth]

Grrrr... fixing it right now! :)

[whattajoke]

I enjoyed the layman explanation. Especially the summation!

S: These long-range correlations trouble me. Pass the hemlock.

That sums up my college physics experience (which contained nothing even close to the level of Bell's Inequality) very well!

[PatrickHenry]

Hmmmmm, I seem to remember somebody talking about laboring in isolation in their attic la-BOR-atory, with his mascot, "Plato" the Platy, on an anti-gravity machine.........

How many times do I have to tell you? Anti-gravity in the basement; perpetual motion in the attic. And in the garage (pronounced "guy-RAHGE") I do my FTL work.

[gomaaa]

Jeez, you go and actually try to do WORK for couple hours and all hell breaks loose.

The problem is that the American Academy of Science and most scientific organizations would follow the established 'party-line'.

Contrary to what you seem to think, the scientific community is not the Republican party and does not blindly follow orders from anyone. There is significant resistance to theories which challenge the currently accepted thought, but if these theories are good they will eventually pass muster. That's the way it works. Good science will eventually triumph because it is supported by real evidence.

Although there is still debate about whether this is fusion or not, there have been quite a few, repeatable, experiments which result in more energy coming out of the experiment than was put in.

I would be VERY skeptical about anyone trying to claim cold fusion. It is incredibly hard to get two protons close enough together to fuse, and the only way that's been tried with any success that I know of is incredibly high temperatures. The results you speak of are most likely someone thinking they see something that isn't really there, like those guys in Utah, though it's hard to tell without looking at the articles.

So, Mike, what color is an electron?

Better to ask, what color is quark? Or even what flavor! God I love Quantum Mechanics. Thanks for explaning things to mikegi. I may try my own hand at explaining the EPR paradox soon, but I have to go do productive things now.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Still the same. Most of the increase in CO2 is human. (There is a lot of CH4 from beavers however.)

The real problem is that the politicians are neither trying to understand nor to solve the problem. Mostly the politicians see GW as a useful issue. Koyoto did nothing except impose a tax on the US without lowering global production of CO2.

More efficient economies will help though. Unfortunately the Political GW Proponents are against these efficiencies too.

[Doctor Stochastic]

I know a Nigerian colonel who might be interested.

[PatrickHenry]

Interesting website on detecting pseudoscience: What is pseudoscience?.

[balrog666]

Bump for later.

[LiteKeeper]

read later

[Ichneumon]

By that time, only Einstein and a handful of others had a problem with it.

And even Einstein accepted the majority of it and had made his own significant contributions to the field. His main "problem" with it was the philosophical hypothesis that the underlying forces might be truly random (as opposed his personal view that they might be only apparently random but working by "hidden variables" that were deterministic). He also had a problem with the notion of "action at a distance", but to be fair the jury is *still* out on that one.

[Ichneumon]

[2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.]

This specific part is bogus. Almost all new theories face stiff resistance from the old school.

That's apples and oranges. "Resistance" is not "suppression".

Yes, radical new ideas will face initial "show me" skepticism -- which is as it should be.

That's not at all the same thing as the crank's eternal cry that his work is being rejected/ignored because the "establishment" is working as a conspiracy to "suppress the truth" -- as opposed to the more likely explanation that it's being rejected/ignored because it's nonsense and almost everyone can see that but the crank who has too much time/emotion/ego invested in it.

[Physicist]

And while you're at it, give me the size and shape of a photon. Pick a wavelength, any wavelength. Scratch that ... if a photon is a point particle it really can't have a wavelength, can it, because that would imply something which varies with distance?

You're asking ill-formed questions. They don't make physical sense.

Nature, at its core, is quantum mechanical. Electrons behave like electrons; photons behave like photons; quarks behave like quarks. Everything you think you understand--sound waves, water waves, billiard balls, butter--is composed of those quantum objects. Their properties are derived from the properties of the quantum objects that compose them.

Now you demand that quantum objects and properties be described in terms of quotidian objects and properties, but it can't be done. It it philosophically impossible to describe the more fundamental in terms of the less fundamental. It works rather the other way around.

Meanwhile, if you want to understand how a photon can be both pointlike and wavelike, study the Fourier transformation.

[Old Professer]

I'd like to be rich enough so that I could throw soap away after the letters are worn off.

Writing implements dutifully eschewed.

[Old Professer]

If the moon disappeared, the earth should change its orbit about the sun.

[js1138]

2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.

Actually, point two should include the fact that junk scientists invariably refuse to reveal the details of their inventions, lest they be stolen -- denying themselves the only opportunity to benefit from their discovery through patent or historical credit. I mean, how could General Motors or even the CIA put the toothpaste back in the tube after it was published on the internet?

[kidd]

In that case I have a huge disagreement with your assessment. Please see the site:
http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm

Here is one of many examples of their argument against human-induced global warming:

Moving 11-year average of terrestrial Northern Hemisphere peratures as deviations in ºC from the 1951-1970 mean left axis and darker line (References:Jones, P. D. et. al. (1986) J. Clim. Appl. Meterol. 25, 161-179 and Grovesman, B. S. and Landsberg, H. E. (1979) Geophys. Res. Let. 6, 767-769). Solar magnetic cycle lengths right axis and lighter line (Reference:Baliunas, S. and Soon, W. (1995) Astrophysical Journal 450, 896-901; Christensen, E. and Lassen, K. (1991) Science 254, 698-700). The shorter the magnetic cycle length, the more active, and hence brighter, the sun.

[Old Professer]

The author of the article is dead wrong on (at least) one point. I've read the entire patent in question, and it says quite plainly that the device converts magnetic energy to electricty, with the magnetic energy comning from a permanent magnet, and the permanent magnet becoming de-magnetized (or less magnetized) in the process.

Tesla's patent #396121 details a device for creating electric current by simply heating a magnet attracting an iron core attached to a spring; as the magnetic force lessened from the heat, the spring overcame the attraction and swung the core through a coil producing a measurable current; by the time the pendulant force had reversed, the cooled magnet once again attracted the core until the heat again released it.

The admitted drawback to his scheme was that there is a critical point at which the heat permanently demagnetizes the "magnet."

His designs optimized the action to extend as long as feasible the effect.

Such a device could be employed to make a "bobbing head," I would imagine.