Science!! Fucking magnets, how do they work?

I'd approach that hypothesis with trepidation. His youtube page has a bunch of rants about the papacy of the scientific community--behavior usually reserved for alternative medicine gurus and other charlatans.

edit: yeah, after a brief search, I found his "credentials".

Gavin Wince | existics

he has a mater's in philosophy. He isn't a trained scientist or mathematician. He is not part of academia and is generally regarded as a fringe crackpot.

He is someone that can actually do math shooting down some of his supposed accomplishments.

Genius Continuum Crackpottery | Good Math, Bad Math

Ridas_sl said:

Thats it! Thanks a lot Sentagur =)

Click to expand...

That can only really be applied when the data follows a Normal Model. Just fyi.

Iannis_sl said:

That time video was really fucking interesting. Completely out of my depth and I wonder how much of it is two schools arguing against each other, and how much of it is confirmable through observation and (more importantly) prediction.

If it really DOES completely sidestep the problems with dark matter (just making completely unrelated new shit up so that theory will fit observation, rather than refining previous theory)... I kinda wonder why no one is really flocking to it.

Or maybe they are, and maybe these sorts of ideas take decades to filter through the academic community.

Click to expand...

I don't have the technical know how to tell if the guy is correct; or not, and I'm dubious on trusting anyone who has not been published and has made some serious errors in the past. However, he does reference an amazing set of Ted Talks in there based on "quantized" space time. Essentially; it's a theory that space time is not a single membrane, like most general relativity theories imagine it as. But rather, it's a bunch of little quanta of space; between which is another dimension. Essentially, it's like a ball pit (The one kids play in) except filled with bubbles matter can pass through BUT that matter still affects (Imagine if soap bubbles didn't break on contact but instead worked as a kind of high viscosity sphere.)

From what I saw, it solves a lot of questions. Gravity is explained the same way as in regular relativity, essentially the mass makes the matrix if quantum bubbles distorted, which puts pressure on the mass and creates gravity. (As far as I understood it, I could be explaining it wrong). However, it also explains why quantum particles act so oddly; because they are moving through our plank length sections of space time, into other discreet sections. They don'treallyjust tunnel somewhere else; rather they move through the gaps in the space time bubbles, and out of our dimension. Because these gaps are so small, a larger particle, like say an atom, can't ever exist completely in one--hence why you don't see particles larger than X quantum tunneling. It also helped explain dark matter, I believe, because the bubbles naturally attempt to form an even matrix; and somehow that produces the appearance of mass due to odd gravitational distortions (Or something).

I don't know, as a layman, it could be BS; but the professors talking about it had some serious academic credentials and it certainly sounded cool. But I'm a sucker for layman space-time theories heh. Thought it was funny I saw the lecture cut up into this video though.

Yeah, I get a "not sure if serious" vibe from the video myself. Parts of it seem unnecessarily redundant while other parts of it seem to take these giant "therefor" leaps.

But the basic principle seems to be the same as putting your finger in front of your nose, closing one eye, then opening it and closing the other eye. WHERE IS YOUR FINGER? REALLY. WHICH ONE IS IT?!?!?!?!? If you apply that basic principle to cosmological time and distances... some truly bizzare shit is going to start to happen. "Artifacts". But there is potentially a way to circumvent that at the root, rather than correcting for the artifacts. At least that's what I got out of the hour.

He's obviously trying to sell the idea. He's trying pretty fucking hard. And he named it, which is gauche. "Existenz". Yuh huh. But that doesn't mean he'swrong. It just means he's an aspie. Which... people like this tend to be aspies. And it's at the point where even intimating that the big bang didn't have to happen is a political fight and going to get you accused of nuttery -- they've been selling that as God's Own Honest Truth for two generations.

Exposing the specific quackery would probably earn someone a masters degree. But you'd probably have to already have one to do it.

It really seems like pseudoscience, honestly. If one were able to dethrone general relativity, they would not have to rely on youtube vids and self-publishing to get the word out.

Seriously, do a quick search about the guy.

Oh, I'm not jumping on the tired light kool-aid train by any means. His math might stutter as much as his presentation. And that would be a significant problem. And it probably does. Because if he had a predictive tool -- he'd be getting the nobel prize and honorary doctorates from whoever was willing to pay him the most to put his name on staff -- not hits on youtube.

As a layman, it doesn't seem any dumber than string theory.

Alexzander_sl said:

It really seems like pseudoscience, honestly. If one were able to dethrone general relativity, they would not have to rely on youtube vids and self-publishing to get the word out.

Seriously, do a quick search about the guy.

Click to expand...

I'd think you would have to get the word out through youtube videos to try and replace relativity. Relativity is so accepted as truth that nobody would ever take you seriously unless you had just a massive shit ton of evidence proving it conclusively wrong.

There's a good reason for that, of course, and this guy's almost certainly wrong if that's what his theory states.

It doesn't seem like he is at all, actually. He's fairly clear about using a substitution within the already accepted framework.

He's saying to assume the speed of light is invariable, but if the mechanism of time IS variable (which there are very real indications that it is, or at the very least can be under extra-ordinary conditions) -- then potentially the speed of light doesn't mean quite as much as we've concluded that it means, and further that some of those conclusions are actually fairly questionable in regards to observation. And that's pretty basic and completely in line with what I understand to be relativity. That's actually one of the few things he said that I understood. lol. I think he says it himself fairly early. Is time a fundamental force, or is it a consequence of motion? Because it actually matters which it is.

I wouldn't crown him King of the Lab or anything. But it's the idea, not the man. Just because he's trying to be the Prophet of the Theory of Everything doesn't mean that anyone has to play that game with him.

It -is- a pretty neat idea, you have to admit! But if all it can do is postdict (and that with some difficulty), and it cannot predict... then yep, it's just philosophy disguised as pseudoscience isn't it?

Why are we discussing this theory? His math is complete bullshit, on the level of .99999~ not being equal to one, with shit like that littered throughout. This guy is just making shit up.

Because we are not smart men and we were trying to bait someone with math skillz into a pronouncement.

SUCCESS

Settle down or I'll divide you by infinity. Don't think I won't.

Hook, line, and sinker. We all know time is a cube, anyways

Time Cube

Ambiturner_sl said:

Hook, line, and sinker. We all know time is a cube, anyways

Time Cube

Click to expand...

My favorite part is the link all the way at the bottom - "Next Page"

Iannis_sl said:

As a layman, it doesn't seem any dumber than string theory.

Click to expand...

At least the mathematics work with string theory. It might not falsifiable at our current level of technology and might well be wrong, but the mathematics that are coming out of continued research in the field could likely be useful elsewhere.

BrutulTM_sl said:

This is good evidence for my theory that theoretical physicists and astrophysicists can just say whatever the hell they want because we can't understand them and we sure as hell aren't going to go learn how.

Click to expand...

How is this a useful theory in any way? Yes, scientists smarter than you can claim anything they want. However, other scientists just as smart as that guy will disagree when it goes up for peer review. Like this guy, he can claim whatever he wants. However, any physicist (or in this case, anyone with a math degree) could look at his shit and debunk it. String theory isn't just something that someone made up and claims to be true. It matches all current observations and the math actually works out.

I don't trust any of 'em, tbh.

They buy my loyalty with the promise of hovercars and fembots. I don't see any fucking hovercars or fembots.

Iannis_sl said:

They buy my loyalty with the promise of hovercars and fembots. I don't see any fucking hovercars or fembots.

Click to expand...

That isn't the fault of scientists (well, not usually). Usually a paper will claim something like "very light material found!". The media will report some dumb shit like "cavorite discovered, anti-gravity just over the horizon!".

I want a hovering fembot personally. Maybe in days of future past, they will reform Trask to make sentinels into fembots.

Here's a rule of thumb that is basically never wrong: if someone doesn't regularly publish in high tier peer reviewed journals in their field, any "revolutionary" idea they have is horseshit. Lots of people want an idea that makes big waves. Very very few are smart enough to actually do it. If they have the brains and the knowledge to do it, they are already publishing regularly about related things, even if (and it's a big if) their grand idea is blocked out by inertia in the scientific community.