Comedy courtesy of Farsight

Discussion in 'The Cesspool' started by AlphaNumeric, Aug 14, 2010.

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  1. AlphaNumeric Fully ionized Registered Senior Member

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    Farsight is a poster known to many here for his 'work' entitled Relativity+ which, despite his assurances, didn't set the physics community alight and which he then self published in a book which didn't set Amazon alight. If you're unfamiliar with him there's this thread (try not to smash your head into your keyboard too hard on reading). But that hasn't deterred him! Not satisfied by being laughed off pretty much every science related forum Google could find him and rejected from every journal he could submit a document to he's taken his attempt to rewrite physics to the small screen!

    Behold, [name removed] (aka Farsight) explains physics! (part 1 of 3!)

    Its like a car crash. You know you shouldn't but everyone slows down to have a look. Then everyone things "Thank god that isn't me!". Hats off to Euler of PhysOrg for finding this shining gem of ...... well, pick your own descriptive. As Euler points out on PhysOrg the phrase 'whale spinors' is gold. It took me a while for my brain to realise what Farsight was meaning to say but it was all the funnier for it. Sadly its a joke which few will get.

    Yes, this is partly an attempt to get Farsight's comment on it. There's a thread on PhysOrg but he sticks his head in here more than there. Should the subject matter be inappropriate for the 'physics and maths' forum (after all, Farsight does neither) I understand if for the purpose of keeping the peace this is moved or locked but at least it might be entertaining to some.

    /edit

    And the horrific production values just tell you how pathetic day time digital TV is here in the UK. Still, its better than Radio 3.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Nov 30, 2010
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  3. QuarkHead Remedial Math Student Valued Senior Member

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    Weyl spinors?

    As you are fond of saying in respect of Jack, misuse of technical terms is the hall-mark of somebody who doesn't know what they are talking about. With the exception of Feynman, who seems unsure how to pronounce de Broglie, one might extend this to people's names.

    Yooler, Lybnizz, Cootchie spring to mind.....
     
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  5. AlphaNumeric Fully ionized Registered Senior Member

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    I work with people who between them come from half a dozen different countries and we all have different ways of pronouncing 'Pauli'. I tend to flick between 'paw-lee' and 'powel-ee' depending on who I'm talking. But given its general in a discussion of Lie algebras and quantum mechanics its okay. There's an Irish guy who pronounces 'genuine' as 'jen-yew-wine' but that's something else....
     
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  7. Roubini Registered Member

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    This is genuinely a show that is broadcast? Like, on actual television? Yeesh.
     
  8. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    Preview article for many of the pictures and statements made in the show:
    http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=1513383077798582254&hl=en&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=2000
    (it's undated, and probably the same as the self-published version at: http://relativityplus.com/RELATIVITY pdf.pdf )

    Cited as the "evidence" that photons form electrons: http://members.chello.nl/~n.benschop/electron.pdf
    JG Williamson, MB van der Mark "Is the electron a photon with toroidal topology?" Annales de la Fondation Louis de Broglie 22:2, 133-160 (1997)

    Kind of precisely the type of negative endorsement that citations from certain sources brings.

    A quick note for people who might think this merits attention: the problem in fundamental physics is not to explain just one particle in terms of one other, but to explain all particles.

    Both papers ignore the electron's interaction with the W and Z particles, and ignore the implications for the muon, tau lepton, and quarks. That's because even in their hand-waving, free-form speculation, they can see that their story explains nothing. Like the Ancient Greeks explaining sunrise and the change of seasons, a separate god has to be created to explain every facet of every particle, and they soon lose the track of their narrative. It is less a physical explanation than a dreary theistic soap opera, but instead of gods per se, it is stocked with airy conceits that the authors can't or won't put into math to be confronted with physical experiment.
     
  9. przyk squishy Valued Senior Member

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  10. Trooper Secular Sanity Valued Senior Member

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    There's videos of the time cube debate at MIT. This has to be a satire; otherwise, it is just a bunch of intellectual bullies picking on someone with a mental illness, which in itself would be weird.
     
  11. Roubini Registered Member

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    That seems to be the whole point of this forum...?
     
  12. Trooper Secular Sanity Valued Senior Member

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    A forum with anonymity is expected but a highly respectable university? It really does make you wonder why they have this need. :shrug:
     
    Last edited: Aug 15, 2010
  13. Terry Giblin Banned Banned

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    "Thank god that isn't me!" - How do you spell God?

    He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.

    Alpha(N) and Euler have published and given everyone, Farsight real name, John Duffield.

    I would like to know the real names of my accusers.

    Light in, Light out.

    Kind Regards,

    Terry Giblin


    It is only fair, they give their own real names.
     
  14. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    He pretty much did it himself on National Television.
     
  15. AlphaNumeric Fully ionized Registered Senior Member

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    Its on the title page of the 'book' he wrote and then posted on every science forum he could find. He told everyone. Mind you that's not as bad as you, you've posted your address!
     
  16. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    I think he no longer lives there -- he was asking about a real estate agent to repurchase said address.
     
  17. AlphaNumeric Fully ionized Registered Senior Member

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    Terry posted a picture of a letter from the Isaac Newton Institute which had his address in the top left. That's not as bad a Raphie Frank, who posted his address and phone number.
     
  18. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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  19. MacGyver1968 Fixin' Shit that Ain't Broke Valued Senior Member

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    Wow...looking at the archived episodes...that show is like a Who's Who of Woo. A 9/11 no planer...chemtrailers...ufo nuts...they've got it all!

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  20. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    See -- it's not just Americans and residents of Queensland. Some Brits are nutters, too.
     
  21. Farsight

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    Hello guys, what's this?
     
  22. AlphaNumeric Fully ionized Registered Senior Member

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    Stranglely close to what I thought when I saw that video, which was something along the lines of "What..... the..... ****..... is ..... that......".

    How's the overturning of all of physics going John? Books flying off the shelf? Your letterbox clogged with requests to talk at international conferences?

    I have to ask because you've had no impact on any papers published on ArXiv, so its a little hard to gauge the impact your 'work' has had if one were to go by the topics of interest to the mainstream research community.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  23. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    AlphaNumeric and I frequently do ourselves a disservice because of our perceived inability to let go of things. But time and time again when battling denialism and psudoscience, those anti-science forces repeat the same tired codswallop without bothering to address decades-old facts that render their viewpoints sterile and without hope of persuading an informed individual. Since the anti-science forces only exist to prey upon the uninformed sheep willing to follow any light of self-proclaimed authority, they listen to the occasional gushing ignoramus and ignore the weight of centuries of progress and observation, and maintain themselves outside of the realm of fact and usefulness.

    Thus AlphaNumeric and I find ourselves driven to confront such persons with their past failures and ask them to own up to those failures so that they may persuade us anew that their (purportedly new) viewpoints have merit.

    As an example from this forum, Walter L. Wagner for decades after the claim was retracted by the authors of the research program, proclaimed loudly that he was the "discoverer" of the magnetic monopole. In 2008 he even filed a court case based partly on that assertion. When pointed out that his every physical and legal assertion was baseless and groundless and not persuasive, he requested that I leave him alone and start a new thread. That I have, and watched him come up with even more preposterous ideas. He has largely fallen silent on the issue on this forum, but had not retracted his baseless claims in Federal court nor in a public post here or on his fear-mongering site. So I must continue to dog his anti-science claims because there is evidence that such baseless and unreal claims can cause actual damage when taken up by the ignorant.

    In John Duffield's case, the real harm is to the young, who may misunderstand the author's constant reference to Einstein as if some mantel of authority existed and was passed to Duffield.

    Page 6 -- unsourced alleged quote of Einstein "If you can't explain it to your grandmother, you don't understand it yourself." is actually given by older sources as a Russian proverb. Author obviously has not relied on primary sources. Luis Sancho of the 2008 court case fame did worse with a paragraph stolen from a 1950's issue of Scientific American where he misquoted Einstein and got the meaning 180 degrees backwards.

    Page 9, copyrighted photo of Challenger disaster turns out to be credited to the US Government on page 196. Other sources may have copyright problems, and are less well traced.

    Chapter "A brief history of Relativity" takes ridiculous position that Einstein understood GR better than all who followed.

    Page 15: The "mystery" of the Möbius strip seems entirely in the author's head an not on the page. It is not until page 197 that reading between the lines indicates the question is one of how to represent the physical Möbius strip's natural shape when made of modeled elastic materials. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0707/07072405 http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v6/n8/full/nmat1929.html http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucesgvd/moebius.pdf

    Footnote 33: Trying to distinguish between "curved spacetime" and "time goes slower there" as contradictory explanations of Shapiro delay is stupid in a text written at this level. The Einstein curvature tensor in the Einstein equation which sits at the heart of General Relativity strongly favors the "curved spacetime" interpretation and "time goes slower there" is a pop-physics phrasing of the same.

    http://www.amazon.co.uk/RELATIVITY-Theory-Everything-John-Duffield/dp/0956097804
     
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