NYT - 7/13/10 - "Gravity Does Not Exist", but pseudoscience rules
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From: Robert L. Oldershaw on 13 Jul 2010 12:43 Sigh, If you wanted proof that theoretical physics has left the world of reason and wandered into the swamp of untestable postmodern pseudoscience, braying like a crude drunk, just read Dennis Overbye's piece in the Science Times section of today's NYT [7/13/10]. General Relativity has been considered one of mankind's finest achievements. But our heroic string theorists, unrestrained by the principles of science, would blithely throw it out the window into the trashbin. In place of GR, the much-deluded Verlinde offers hand-waving about poorly defined and unmeasurable abstractions: information, entropy and holographic screens. His speculations cannot make a single definitive prediction [and the same has been true for string theory in general over the last 30 years] whereby the speculations could be considered scientific. Does the community of theoretical physicists protest? Not much. Perhaps the majority see a long-term feeding trough in this untestable pseudoscience stuff? What has happened to science? Has it run its course? Are we to go back to Ptolemaic thinking, wherein the critical Definitive Predictions/Empirical Testing of science is jettisoned in favor of revealed [by the theoretical physicists themselves, of course] "religion"? RLO www.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw
From: Surfer on 13 Jul 2010 13:55
On Tue, 13 Jul 2010 09:43:17 -0700 (PDT), "Robert L. Oldershaw" <rloldershaw(a)amherst.edu> wrote: >...Are we to go >back to Ptolemaic thinking, wherein the critical Definitive >Predictions/Empirical Testing of science is jettisoned in favor of >revealed [by the theoretical physicists themselves, of course] >"religion"? > Not all the new theories are like that. Here are some exceptions: Can Modified Gravity (MOG) explain the speeding Bullet (Cluster)? http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.2685 Testing Modified Newtonian Dynamics with Rotation Curves of Dwarf and Low Surface Brightness Galaxies http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.5456 Combining NASA/JPL One-Way Optical-Fiber Light-Speed Data with Spacecraft Earth-Flyby Doppler-Shift Data to Characterise 3-Space Flow http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.5404 Derivation of the postulates of quantum mechanics from the first principles of scale relativity http://arxiv.org/abs/0711.2418 |