[insert witty title]

OK this is awesome, I think everybody by now has been exposed to the internet’s quintissential crank, Gene Ray and his timecube theory. The site is an absolute masterpiece of multicoloured fonts and schitzo ramblings, if you haven’t seen the timecube yet you should definitely check out the link above.

YOU ARE EDUCATED STUPID BY YOUR GOVERNMENT AND SCHOOLS TO BELIEVE THAT THERE IS ONE DAY, WHEN IT IS CLEAR TO ALL ENTITIES THAT THERE ARE 4 SIMULTANEOUS CUBED DAYS GOING ON AT THE SAME TIME, THANKS TO THE UNITED STATES AND THE JEWS. EVIL ACADEMIC BASTARDS WHO PREACH THE ONE TIME THEORY ARE KEEPING YOU STUPID AND SHOULD BE KILLED. GOVERNMENT, RELIGION AND CORPORATE MONEYMOGULS ARE ALSO EVIL FOR SUPPRESSING TIME CUBE, AND NEED TO BE HANGED AT GALLOWS IF THEY DO NOT CHANGE THEIR WAYS.

What I did not know is that Gene Ray has been interviewed on television, and then he uploaded the results to Youtube. Is he espousing a new type of physics, or is he just batshit insane? I REPORT YOU DECIDE

…I have great faith that every single person who takes the time to read this blog is not functionally retarded, and as such I believe everybody will react in the same way as I did to the following challenge.

To win all you need to do is go to the following self-help ‘guru’ site and watch this entire video without wanting to smash your own face through the computer screen in order to attack the woman on the other side.

Here is your challenge. Are you man enough?

I tried to take some choice quotes from the video so that I could make snide comments about them here, but it just felt too easy, like a heavyweight boxer demolishing a toddler, so I’ll just let the quotes speak from themselves:

“Electromagnetic energy is actually stored in the microtubules of our cells”

“anything you have ever seen [...] is actually stored as thought forms that are stored in the the microtubules of ourselves. The microtubules have little water molecules where the im-a-ges are stored, and actually every single perception we have is stored as an image in our microtubules”

“[...] that nation of images - otherwise known as the imagination”

“[...] water molecules can transform given certain shifts and actually all he does is use a piece of paper,and puts a label on his water and he freezes the water. And the water transforms, the crystals of the water transform and takes a new shape, based on the word he has put on the water.”

“The images stored in ourselves are stored in the quantum field”

“Electromagnetic energy is beyond space and time”

“Well, as a brilliant doctor by the name of Dr. Bruce Lipton, a microbiologist, has been sharing across the world, giving this tour presenting some really incredible information about his research where he’s actually taken the genes out of cells, and noticed that the cells behaved exactly the same - as if the genes were still in the cells. [...] it was being run by a force outside the body”

Oh, what do you win by completing this challenge?

Scorn. I will fucking hate you if you can enjoy watching this in a non-ironic way. Actually if you fail at the challenge and are interested in learning more about this bullshit then you are going to lose to the tune of $2,400 for a ten phonecall session.

My good friend Mark (the king of relentlessly attacking idiocy where he finds it) recently wrote a very long and detailed refutation of the pseudoscience of autodynamics. I would like to add one more piece of evidence to the huge pile he already amassed.

I’ll introduce it in the same way one of my physics teachers did back when I was but a young ‘un: apples and oranges are not the same thing.

This is a simple enough proposition (or common sense) and I doubt that anybody will have any big objections to it. On top of this I need to add one more little definition. When you see an equals sign in an equation it means that in the context of maths and physics:

Two mathematical objects are equal if and only if they are precisely the same in every way. (Wikipedia)

If two things are linked by an equals sign they must be the same thing. If, on the left hand side of an equation you have some oranges there had better be oranges on the right hand side else the whole construction is incoherent. It works the same with physical units, if there is a density on the left hand side of an equation there must also be a density on the right. As a slightly more involved example take the well known relation:

The left hand side is an energy; in the SI system energy has units of kg m² s^-2 the right hand side of the equation has exactly the same units. This simple check lets us know that the equation is plausible (although not necessarily correct!), it is a check that must be carried out on every single equation derived, and is known as performing dimensional analysis. Dimensional analysis is a simple and powerful tool used by every physicist in the world.

I was pretty surprised, therefore, to find the following AD quotes in Mark’s critique:

Carezani is working with some ideas (slowly and sporadically) with energy equal to E = mc³. (See here.)

and

So, does the famous equation “E=mc²” survive in Autodynamics? The answer is, currently, yes. Carezani discovered the Autodynamic equations using the same steps as Einstein, simply with a correction. He assumes this equation to be true for now. It may be that the equation for energy and mass equivalence is something different where E = m K where “K” is some constant other than c^2. But for now, it is assumed to be correct. (Here.)

E=mc³?!?! This is just insane. Even the most cursory examination shows that this makes no sense and that the autodynamicists do not have a rudimentary knowledge of physics between them. Surely at least one of these fine scientists should have noticed that apples and oranges are different things; and that E=mc³ is nothing short of incoherent nonsense.

Beware, I’m talking about work in this post

We recieve (or seek out) a pretty steady stream of crank science theories, so getting an email with somebodies earth shattering theory in it isn’t exactly an uncommon occurance. The one that arrived today, however, was a little different. The grammar and spelling were actually both good enough that I was capable of understanding what the guy was trying to get at! Here are a few thoughts on bits of the email (reproduced in full here so I can’t be accused of quoting out of context):

THE BIG BANG FRAUD © 2004 William C. Mitchell

On the first line the warning flags begin to go up. Referring to an accepted scientific theory as ‘fraud’? check. All capital letters? check. Copyrighting your own alternative theory? check. He then tries to discredit modern cosmology with a few poorly thought out comments about the Friedmann equations before stating:

The consensus of working astronomers seems to be that rate [the hubble constant] should be about 65 km/sec/MPc, but, because it appears to make the BB universe older, BBers prefer a value of about 50 km/sec/MPc (equal to about 15 km/sec/MLYs)

This is just completely wrong. It’s not even the sort of wrong that is based on scientific misunderstanding, it is the sort of wrong that only happens when you haven’t even bothered to read a single book/article in the last ten years. The Hubble constant can be measured in a large variety of independent ways (including from high-redshift clusters at X-ray and microwave wavelengths using the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect, measurements of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background radiation, and optical surveys). All these methods give a value of approximately 70 km/s/Mpc. The consistency of the measurements from all three methods lends support to both the measured value of H0 and the Lambda-CDM model. Far from weakening the Big Bang model, the recent measurements of the Hubble constant strengthen it considerably.

The so-called "Age Paradox" has plagued BBT [Big Bang Theory] since day one. Some stars are known by astronomers to be considerably older than the reputed age of the BB universe;

On this point I’ll let the eloquent Mr. Norris speak for me “It was the case several years ago that this [stars older than the Universe] appeared to be true, but that was due to the models used in the field to estimate the age of stars from their spectra. Modern models take into account subleties that were ignored previously. In the past 3 years I have not seen a single star that has high signal-to-noise spectra have an age that is more than 12-13Gyr, despite the models frequently allowing ages up to 18Gyr.”

and far worse than that, a number of astronomers have estimated that it might have taken more than 100 billion years for the formation of the giant galactic structures that are observed in space.

Once again, what the christ? There is an incredibly well founded body of work describing precisely how all large structures in the Universe form (example). I have not met a single astronomer that would claim galaxy clusters take 100 billion years to form. I can only assume that when the author says ‘a number of astronomers’ he means one or two of the nuts, crackpots and cranks on the APOD forums. I can’t help but think that this guy bases all his ideas on a poorly remembered popular science article from the 1960’s. Perhaps he mistrusts everything that appeared in the intervening 30 years as a product of the “Big Bang Theory Establishment”.

The email then veers from poorly understood, badly researched science and wild speculation to crazy conspiracy:

However, leading BB cosmologists are well aware of those; and many more problems and inconsistencies of BBT. While attempting to appear unconcerned, minimize their importance, or avoid mention of them, they struggle to invent new schemes to circumvent them; while making big money as professors, lecturers, TV personalities, and authors of articles and books with intriguing new titles. However, most of the innovations they produce (like inflation and acceleration), that are intended to solve BBT problems, produce only new problems.

If I really wanted to make big money I’d not be wasting my time with astrophysics. Seriously. There are easier ways to make money. Plumbing for example.

Is this really what my life has come to? Dissecting crank science emails on a Friday night?

A couple of days ago John hit the motherlode of so called “free thinkers” websites with this. I have a morbid fascination with these guys and ended up clicking around the website quite a bit.

Turns out they’re making a documentary, described in the following way:

Follow the journey of "Mrs. de" as she goes into the classroom, out into the streets, attends an underworld physics conference, and finally takes physics into her own hands to discover the truth about relativity and the "miracle year" of Einstein. See her enter the dark side of physics where the legend of Einstein is not the solution, but part of the problem.

It actually sounds quite interesting! I want to be invited to an underworld physics conference!

The film, however, moves from interesting to hilarious when you look at the cast and crew:

# Director:

Robert de Hilster
Doris de Hilster
# Supporting
Geoff Hunter
Michael de Hilster
Addie de Hilster
Luanda de Hilster

Yep, that’s right. Some guy is making a documentary about his mum going and disproving Einstein. There is a trailer out now and yes it is every bit as hilarious as you would imagine. My personal favourite quote:

“Just when you thought it was safe for physicists to walk the streets”

Yet another ‘all-of-atomic-physics-is-wrong-and-only-I-know-the-truth’ email. This one arrived from one Mr. Gabor Fekete and stated simply:

Subject: A recommended physics site