A most amazing TV drama documentary was shown last night on BBC4 (UK). Robert Hooke was "robbed of the credit" for the inverse square law of gravity and wiped from the pages of history. No wonder Newton never had a mechanism.. If you can stand the truth, then I highly recommend this eye-opening view and suggest that you search for it on-line. Robert Hooke: Victim of Genius
Have you ever considered learning science through books, actual text books, rather than documentaries?
The BBC license fee in the UK is $246 a year, and the population is 60 million; that's a lot of doe to spend on the best TV documentaries, the best in the world, using the top professionals and professors who write the science books! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I know, I'm British. Utterly flawed logic. What is the aim of a good documentary on science? To convey a vague understanding of concepts which are otherwise shrouded (from the point of view of a layperson) in highly technical details. They are not meant to bestow a working knowledge of science. Yes, there's often a great deal of assistance from physicists, so the documentary makers can represent the work of the physicists as closely as possible but that doesn't mean you learn more as a result, only that you learn things which aren't incorrect. If documentaries were so good at teaching people science (or anything else) why do the "professors who write the science books" bother to write books? Why write a large book full of equations, diagrams and tables when you could just make a documentary? It's because documentaries don't come close to teaching you a working understanding of science, they only skim through the more accessible stuff or to explain the concepts, not the details. You claim to have an astronomy degree. If you are being truthful surely you know the difference in how much information you get from a textbook compared to a documentary? For instance, The Elegant Universe is all about string theory and its an excellent (if not slightly over zealous) introduction to the concepts of what string theory is about or trying to do. Doesn't tell you how to actually derive any of the results nor does it even get close to some more abstract but fundamentally important concepts in string theory. You learn more about those details and deeper results from spending 3 hours reading a book, compared to the 3 hours of the documentary. Expensive and glossy documentaries are about explaining to people who don't need or want to know the details of a theory what exactly the theory is about and a bit about how people work on it. The flashy and expensive computer graphics help to sell the concepts to people who can't be sold on equations because they don't understand them. Documentaries are 'eye candy', they serve a purpose but that is not to teach you how to do anything in the theory which the documentary is about. Do you honestly think watching a TV documentary and reading pop science books but not reading any textbooks, journals or lecture courses will give you a firm grasp of the specifics of a theory? And I'm pretty sure the BBC doesn't spend all of its 60,000,000*246 dollars on documentaries (not the mention you only need a TV license for each household, so 1 license covers a family house, irrespective of numbers of people or TVs).
Alpha, much as it sticks in my craw to defend common sense seeker and to castigate you, my commitment to 'truth' impels me to do so. You have erected a complex strawman argument. I can only assume your distaste for common sense seeker is such that you reacted instead of thinking. You are denouncing the idea that one can learn meaningful physics from a documentary. That is certainly true of every documentary I have seen. However, that is not what CSS was stating. He drew our attention to something on the history of science and a documentary that dealt with what seems to me a generally accepted view that Hooke was underrated a lot, and that Newton, correspondingly, was overrated a little.
I am not so much referring to the specific documentary CSS says in this thread but more to the fact that he's posting a lot of threads about "Did you read [pop science book]?" or "I just saw on TV..." and he often then uses what he's read or seen to start saying things like "My simple and elegant explaination of dark energy follows in the same way....". Consider this thread somewhat of a 'last straw' in that he's done it so often I was prompted to make the post I did.
I wonder how much of an effect this new Robert Hooke revelation will have on the science community. We it just be swpet under the carpet, I wonder? Do the wheels of science turn too slowly to respond to this 'rocking of the boat'? btw: Hooke must have known about WARG. I attribute my work as a simple rediscovery and give credit to the great man.
1. It isn't new. 2. Why should it have any effect on the science community? There is a continual reevaluation of the contributions of major and minor scientists to the important advances in science. I suspect a majority of those familiar with the facts think Hoyle should have got a Nobel prize (and would have done so if he hadn't been so intransigently and belligerently eccentric.) Rosalind Franklin saved Watson and Crick from serious error on the structure of DNA and would have been in the running if she hadn't made the career limiting move of dying. Given that it is common knowledge and has now been aired publicly in documentary format, how exactly do you think it will be swept under the carpet? Waffle. This is about the history of science, not science. This is the domain of science historians, not scientists. You really don't understand how any of this works, do you? I'm certain he will. (In fact I think he has already started.) It's just that you were criticising him for what you expected he would say, not what he had actually said.
Can nobody see the connection between Hooke's intimate knowledge of springs (leading to Hooke's Law) and the previous section of threads concerning 'Archimedean Fractal Wave Cosmology'? He would have come to the same conclusion eventually, at least.
There's been no change in our understanding of science, no new result has come from that work by the documentary or the researcher who found out. All it means is that when someone writes about the history of British science there'll be an extra mention of Hooke. Bloody hell, get over yourself. You have nothing. No model, no theory, no results, no predictions, no structure, no justification, you have simply made up randomly a fairy tale of your own liking which you feel comfortable with and it is without anything which would make it be classified as anything close to science. You've done no experiments, made no postulates or derivations, you have literally written an entire work of fiction off the top of your head without any justified connection to the real world. God you think a lot of yourself. You make up some BS and then start saying "Oh [famous physicist] was close to this!". Guess what, you win 30 points on the Crackpot Index for that one. He did work on the physical mechanics of particular systems, with plenty of experiments and observations. You simply made up something randomly. I half believe you found out about this thing with Hooke because you were Googling for 'helix' and so you're trying to tell yourself (delude yourself) that anyone whose looked at helices in the past was groping towards your work. Except you have no work, you have an acronym title and absolutely nothing else. All you do is engage in Points 14, 15 and 26.
I've read historical accounts from other mathematicians. One account was from a mathematician who journeyed to visit Newton to see if he had found a way to explain elliptical orbits. When he inquired what sort of force law would be needed, Newton told him it would be an inverse square force. When the mathematician asked Newton how he knew this, Newton's reply was "Why, I hath calculated it." Then the mathematician eagerly requested to see Newton's notes, but Newton found the old proof he had was incomplete. So he redid the proof and completed it overnight, and the result was made public.
That fits with the story documented by BBC4 and shown for the first time last thursday. Very believable.
You are ****ing delusional. Alpha Numeric anticipated you exactly. You introduced the interesting topic of the documentary only to swerve the conversation around to your bullshit expectorations that you incredibly believe represent sound and valuable thinking. Is there no limit to your lunacy?
S*ring Theory -> can you guess the name? :facepalm: I'm so sorry, I've done it again, I couldn't help myself. Let's forget about S*ring Theory and leave the discussion open as a general topic. My apologies again.
