Michael Stuart Kelly Posted November 13, 2007 Author Share Posted November 13, 2007 New Age stuff? Where?Michael Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brant Gaede Posted November 13, 2007 Share Posted November 13, 2007 That's what it sounded like to me.--Brant Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dragonfly Posted November 14, 2007 Share Posted November 14, 2007 I've now listened to the videos, and my conclusion can only be that he is a crackpot. Especially in the first videos he's babbling a lot without really saying anything. And if he finally says something specific, he betrays his ignorance. A few quotes: [about "things"]: "if you apply a force to them, they move - if you don't apply a force to them they don't move." "If you don't have a force, you can't move". Apparently he's still living in the world of Aristotelian mechanics. [about quantummechanical entanglement in the Bell experiments]: "Quantum mechanics predicts.. the speed of light is infinite, in a way." QM doesn't at all predict that, not even "in a way"; obviously he read something that he didn't really understand. [About photons]: "which is the force that accelerates them to the speed of light?". "The equation that I have, it predicts that no matter how small a mass.. it has enough energy that if it converts itself to kinetic energy, it can attain the speed of light" [here even the interviewer couldn't suppress a rather doubtful "hmmmm..."]. A typical characteristic of the crackpot is also that his "theory" can solve all the paradoxes and puzzles that exist in current scientific knowledge, just as the snake oil of the quack can cure all diseases, from cancer to multiple sclerosis, from rheuma to Parkinson's disease. Not to be taken seriously. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Stuart Kelly Posted November 14, 2007 Author Share Posted November 14, 2007 Dragonfly,The "solve everything" approach did not sound good to me either, but that is not the part that interests me.I have a quibble about your first comment and not much about the others because the moment you crawled into his head and let us know what he understood or not, they sound like they bypassed his meaning. Still, I am not sure. I do think you took his quote about applying force to generate motion out of context, since he also claimed that everything already was in motion. Maybe the "solve everything" idea qualifies him as a crackpot. I cannot make that judgment as of yet. I still do not see any response here to (1) spontaneity and (2) his Gravity Nullification Model (GNM). In all fairness, I don't know what the math is behind this last, although I remember him mentioning somewhere that he had a formula.To tell you the truth, after reading about parallel worlds and so forth coming out of science about QM, I am not too convinced that this is such the epitome of knowledge that new approaches can be dismissed without proper examination. (The Principle of Charity comes to mind...)Michael Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BaalChatzaf Posted November 14, 2007 Share Posted November 14, 2007 (edited) I've now listened to the videos, and my conclusion can only be that he is a crackpot. Especially in the first videos he's babbling a lot without really saying anything. And if he finally says something specific, he betrays his ignorance. A few quotes: [about "things"]: "if you apply a force to them, they move - if you don't apply a force to them they don't move." "If you don't have a force, you can't move". Apparently he's still living in the world of Aristotelian mechanics. [about quantummechanical entanglement in the Bell experiments]: "Quantum mechanics predicts.. the speed of light is infinite, in a way." QM doesn't at all predict that, not even "in a way"; obviously he read something that he didn't really understand. [About photons]: "which is the force that accelerates them to the speed of light?". "The equation that I have, it predicts that no matter how small a mass.. it has enough energy that if it converts itself to kinetic energy, it can attain the speed of light" [here even the interviewer couldn't suppress a rather doubtful "hmmmm..."]. A typical characteristic of the crackpot is also that his "theory" can solve all the paradoxes and puzzles that exist in current scientific knowledge, just as the snake oil of the quack can cure all diseases, from cancer to multiple sclerosis, from rheuma to Parkinson's disease. Not to be taken seriously.You can separate the physicists from the snake oil salesmen. Physicists publish in refereed vetted journals or have reputable sponsors for publications on arXiv. Snake oil salesmen make six minute video clips, such as one might find on You Tube. Thank you for the heads up. I am not surprised by your conclusions. A similar thing happened with Louis Little, he of the Theory of of Elementary Waves. He never published or was able to be published in a reputable journal. And for good reason. His stuff was balderdash as was shown by Travis Norsen another physicist (genuine PhD.) who also happens to be an Objectivist. Back in 1905 a nobody who worked for the Swiss Patent Office was able to get published in Phys. Annalen. His name was Albert Einstein. His papers were read by reputable physicists and the rest is history. One of his papers even one him a Nobel Prize. (It was his paper on the photo electric effect which put quantum physics on the map). Ba'al Chatzaf Edited November 14, 2007 by BaalChatzaf Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
merjet Posted November 14, 2007 Share Posted November 14, 2007 If there is a force in the universe that allows motion to start from a dead stop, science ain't saying. I had never noticed this until I saw the videos of Singh, but it is true (within what I know of science so far). This is the point where science runs into a wall. Science is PREDICATED on things ALREADY in motion. It never explains how things START.The following also responds to your various mentions of spontaneity.One doesn't need to invoke "motion from a dead stop" to make spontaneity plausible. Converting potential energy to kinetic energy suffices. (A human brain is about 2% of body weight but has a 20% energy share.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BaalChatzaf Posted November 14, 2007 Share Posted November 14, 2007 One doesn't need to invoke "motion from a dead stop" to make spontaneity plausible. Converting potential energy to kinetic energy suffices. (A human brain is about 2% of body weight but has a 20% energy share.)The human brain also has more electrochemical activity per unit mass than any other organ in the body. All those axons and dendrites with ion exchanges through the fiber membranes. It takes a lot of fuel to power that machine.Ba'al Chatzaf Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Stuart Kelly Posted November 14, 2007 Author Share Posted November 14, 2007 One doesn't need to invoke "motion from a dead stop" to make spontaneity plausible. Converting potential energy to kinetic energy suffices.Merlin,Do you mean like when the mind causes an otherwise healthy body to get sick, say from grief? (Grief, of course, would be the potential energy being converted.) Michael Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tjohnson Posted November 14, 2007 Share Posted November 14, 2007 Bob, I really like this part: "Science is built on assumptions some of which are untestable." I cannot think of a better way of destroying a scientific criticism of religion by using a double standard.The difference between science and religion (one of them anyway) is that in science we try to minimize the assumptions. For example, it is a huge assumption to postulate the existence of an omniscient being that created man especially considering we have no evidence of it. It is a much smaller assumption to suggest evolution by means of natural selection and there is much evidence of it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BaalChatzaf Posted November 14, 2007 Share Posted November 14, 2007 Bob, I really like this part: "Science is built on assumptions some of which are untestable." I cannot think of a better way of destroying a scientific criticism of religion by using a double standard.The difference between science and religion (one of them anyway) is that in science we try to minimize the assumptions. For example, it is a huge assumption to postulate the existence of an omniscient being that created man especially considering we have no evidence of it. It is a much smaller assumption to suggest evolution by means of natural selection and there is much evidence of it.That is not the difference at all. Science must be glued to reality by way of empirical verification or refutation of the predictions derived logically from the postulates of the science plus auxillary boundary values and measured constants. Science is empirical, religion is not. Economy and elegance in scientific theories are attractive extras but they not absolutely required.Did you know that too much exposure to The Count and his writings can lead to advanced brain rot?Ba'al Chatzaf Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tjohnson Posted November 14, 2007 Share Posted November 14, 2007 Did you know that too much exposure to The Count and his writings can lead to advanced brain rot?Are comments like this symptomatic of the nervous disorder you mentioned you are afflicted with? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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