Comedy courtesy of Farsight

I am certainly aware that the persona I put forth on these forums is a little more 'aggressive' than I might be in real life but the general opinions I hold are much the same. I am sure that if certain hacks and I were to have a face to face discussion in front of a black board (chalk, not marker pens damn it!) they'd be a lot less confident because they'd not have Google to run to every 5 seconds. I, on the other hand, would just use the word 'idiot' less often. At least initially.

Of course I have no desire to have such a face to face meeting with any hack, if they can't convince me when they have all the time in the world and the internet at their fingertips, being put on the spot in real life will do them no favours (despite what Terry Giblin thinks, having attempted to find and meet me!).

As Rpenner says, I can sound like a broken record because hacks need some things explained to them 10 times. If not infinitely many times. Someone starts a new thread on an entirely new topic which I'm interested in and I'll talk about it. Unfortunately hacks always swim around in the shallow end, trying to attack what they think is some deep concept when in fact its assumed knowledge for most universities!

And like some low quality toddler swimming pools eventually the hacks are just swimming in their own waste.....

 

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This is an interesting and illuminating thread on the physicists vs the woos.

Not to be pedantic, rpenner, but I'm going to point something out because your reason for objecting to my recent Einstein/grandmother quote reference is now clear to me. You have a history with the quote which is apparently used as a defense of sorts by someone that doesn't understand what you're writing. Fair enough. As an aside, a search online shows reasonable evidence that it could plausibly be attributed to Einstein.

Regardless...Einstein (and Feynman) could very well have quoted the Russian proverb because they agreed with it. Also, whatever the source, does the wisdom in the message change? Obviously there's material that cannot be simplified to the point that everyone's grandmother could understand it, but I do believe there's a direct correlation between one's complete understanding of a subject and one's ability to explain that subject in layman's terms.

 

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It can't be attributed to Einstein unless you can point to where he said or wrote it. Did he say it in German? In English? In Russian? Was he quoting it and agreeing with it, or quoting it as an example not to be emulated? Context matters. And not one book or internet source of the quote that attributes it to Einstein seems to have the first idea of where Einstein might have expressed such a thought.

Famous people often get misattributed as the source of quotes, especially when someone seeks to make an argument from authority and the perceived authority didn't say what that someone had in mind. Once someone does this trick in print or on the web, it takes on a life of its own.

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/twain.asp
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/candidate.asp
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/lincoln/prosperity.asp

Einstein understood Bose-Einstein condensates, but I see no evidence he ever tried to explain them to anyone's grandmother. Nor is it obvious that Einstein with his German and Swiss background would be given to quoting Russian proverbs. Russia is a big place, and I have yet to pin down a primary source that attributes this to a locale or community.

It is the job of educator and scientist to continually push back at the basic human instinct to wallow in the claims of authority and to push people to find out if their claims are really true. So misattributed quotes to famous people are among those harmful influences that need to be weeded out.

 

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Agreed but I maintain this subject is pedantic to the point of absurdity. The wisdom or correctness of a statement should be able to be evaluated on its own merits, not based on who utters it. Appeals to authority are only relevant in that authority's area of expertise. I give little weight to Einstein's Socialist leanings, for example. The quote we're discussing is too general to qualify as an appeal to authority in my opinion, even though I think there is truth to it. Point being, it doesn't matter to me if, when, and in what language Einstein said it.

 

That quote is quite obviously stupid. There are plenty of things that I understand well that my grandmother would have no chance of understanding, and would not care about. For starters, both of my grandmothers are dead, and secondly, if I choose a generic old woman and start trying to explain quantum field theory to her the eyes glaze over faster than I can say, "everything is made of fields."

This has happened, I have a fairly good supply of generic old women because my wife works in an old peoples home. She honestly does.

 

...so is that evidence for or against the veracity of the unsourced quote?

I keed, I keed!

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I don't agree with this statement. I'd agree that Feynman hated people making something simple sound complicated, but I wouldn't go as far as to say he thought you only understood something if you could explain it in simple terms to an elderly lay person.

Watch this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8

"I can't explain that attraction in terms of anything else that is familiar to you"

 

OK, but I wasn't saying Einstein and Feynman DID agree with the proverb, I was pointing out that the quote being a Russian proverb and also being attributed to Einstein or Feynman are not mutually exclusive.

But since you brought it up, check it:

 

My grandmother is not a freshman...

http://www.stupidvideos.com/video/just_plain_stupid/Grandma_Does_A_Keg_Stand/#202405

 

Funny...
The point remains the same however. I've seen the quote use "grandma", "barmaid" and "freshman", but the general idea is that if you aren't able to explain something in, shall we say, very simple terms to someone outside the field then you don't understand it well enough yourself.

I'm not asking you to agree with this, and I'm not saying that this is always true for all areas of knowledge. It's certainly hard to make the claim that Feynman (and possibly Einstein as well) didn't believe this to some extent, however.

 

FYI, the oldest document I can find that attributes "explain it to your grandmother" to Einstein is a small Christian press' 1998 management style book from L. Alton Garrison who is not a noted Einstein historian.
Nothing in 1956-1997.
There is also a 1947 novel by Markoosha Fischer, unrelated to Einstein.
And nothing else from 1905-1955 when Einstein was famous and alive.

And the standard for advancing a claim should not be merely that it is hard to disprove.

 

"Shut up and calculate" is another one. Contrary to what many people seem to believe, the originator of the phrase a) wasn't Feynman and b) apparently regrets saying it now. Strangely enough, "shut up and calculate" seems to be bandied around by two distinct groups of people: one of mostly non-physicists for whom it grinds an axe they have with the way theoretical physics is done today, and another of people who seem to take it as their own personal philosophy of physics.

Personally I've always found rpenner's (and Alphanumeric's, and ...) writing perfectly clear. More likely, it's a defence against people who are in denial over the fact that there are important prerequisites to fully understanding most of modern physics. Physics builds on many abstract concepts that aren't always easy or even possible to explain to someone who isn't familiar with the necessary background. Honestly I don't see why physics gets picked on so much in this respect: physics isn't the only field where climbing an initially steep learning curve pays itself many times over in the long run.

Unlikely, particularly in Feynman's case. Just open The Feynman Lectures to find him saying something very different in the introduction (with emphasis added):

On the somewhat related topic of laymen trying their own hand at physics, we get this in the series' second chapter on relativity (first page of chapter 16):

The sort of people who sympathise too much with the grandmother quote, and especially the ones who think they can do physics as anything less than a full-time career following years of training, really don't want to rely on Feynman's perceived authority to justify their causes.

There's no reason for it to be any more than a very weak correlation at best. Obviously it's necessary to possess a good understanding of something in order to explain it to anyone, but that's not sufficient on its own. In fact in some cases I've even seen the opposite: people who are so immersed in their field that they've forgotten what an outsider's perspective is, or who give overly brief and sketchy explanations in a rush to get to what they consider the interesting bits. There are many reasons someone can give a bad explanation to a given audience besides not understanding what they're explaining. Explaining well in a manner that's well adapted to a particular audience is an art and skill in itself.

 

Bro, let this one goooooooooo...

 

It isn't overturning all of physics, just some of the theories that have no supporting evidence. But it's going well, and is extremely interesting, though I'm not free to talk about certain aspects of it. Don't forget that much of it is synthesis rather than original work, drawn from papers by "unsung heroes".

I'm the one battling denialism and pseudoscience, rpenner. Don't forget that Feynman was known as "the great explainer". I offer an explanation of say The Electromagnetic Field, and only pryzk offered a reasoned response. Other responses were essentially outrage.

 

Quote-mining dead people is not explaining or bringing credit to "unsung heroes."

I don't see anyone holding a gun to your head and saying you are "not free to talk about certain aspects of it." You can't copyright or patent-protect a law of nature. So the conclusion is that you have nothing scientifically useful to report.

Finally, I don't see your replacement math. If current theories are wrong then they are wrong in only subtle ways. GPS, LHC, and lasers work as designed when those pre-existing theories were taken into effect. So to make a case, you need to find a fringe case where existing theory is not so good and show that your theory covers that case better than existing theory as well as being consistent with the cases that existing theory covers perfectly adequately.

Example: Einstein's theory of gravity covers everything seen in the solar system and of distant stars at least as well as Newton's theory which was good enough to get men to the Moon and back. But in some areas of solar system research, Einstein's theory clearly trumps Newton's theory in the numerical details. And you don't get numerical details without math.

 

And which ones might those be?

How so? You have been rejected from every reputable journal you've submitted to, you had to pay for vanity publishing, no one in the mainstream community has switched to your ideas and you can't model quantitatively a single physical phenomenon.

Convincing your family (including starting a Facebook page about your 'work') and a few laypersons isn't 'going well'. To quote 't Hooft

"You have convinced your friends at your local bar, your family, your pizza vendor, your dog, and even a local radio station of the superiority of your theory. How come that there are still some obnoxious physicists who seem to continue to work on obsolete theories as if you never did give a deadly blow to established science? Most professional physicists you wrote to never gave you any reply at all; well, that must be because they are too ashamed of all those mistakes they have made in the past, and they must now be busy studying your important work. "

Sounds a lot like the way you're going about things.

Does the 'it' you refer to in any way involve actual academics or journals in the relevant areas of physics? If not then all you're doing is continuing to circumvent those who have the ability to evaluate your work (and who don't say what you want to hear) and to convince those who don't possess the required knowledge in physics to critically evaluate something claiming to be viable physics.

If you're going down the route of "Try to convince as many laypersons as possible" then you're demonstrating you are unwilling to listen to those whose business it is to evaluate and develop physics and instead you're attempted an 'Argument by popularity'. It is a fallacious approach and certainly won't lead to your 'work' being taken up by the research community. Most people believe in a god of some kind but that doesn't mean it's automatically science and something the research community should be working on.

So, is whatever you're unable to give the details of something involving reputable physicists? You can answer that without giving away whatever details you're unwilling to provide. If 'no', why not?

I don't doubt that much of your 'work' is a combination of other people's work, pretty much all your "X explained" 'essays' were just you giving us your opinion on concepts other people had developed. Not exactly noteworthy, seeing as much of what you talked about are areas familiar to people who work in the relevant areas, like the concept of money essentially being an IOU system, a fact blatantly obvious to anyone with any kind of familiarity with economics, even on a qualitative level.

You don't unify other people's work into a single framework because you don't formalise anything.

Ah, you almost got some points from the crackpot index for comparing yourself with Feynman. Unfortunately only comparisons with Einstein, Galileo and Newton are specifically listed.

How can they be outrage, there's nothing to be outraged about, other than your complete lack of understanding of physics, maths and the methodologies they employ*. Your work doesn't provide a single quantitative model of anything in Nature, we cannot be outraged by something which does not exist. Your entire approach is summed up by Point 17 on the crackpot index :

"10 points for arguing that while a current well-established theory predicts phenomena correctly, it doesn't explain "why" they occur, or fails to provide a "mechanism"."

All you provide are your 'explanations', you don't provide any models or formulation or even coherent lines of reasoning and logic. You use Point 15 too :

"10 points for each statement along the lines of "I'm not good at math, but my theory is conceptually right, so all I need is for someone to express it in terms of equations". "

You believe you've explained something, yet you cannot model it. If you cannot model it then you have no reason to think your explanation is close to valid. I could 'explain' gravity as invisible fairies pushing things about but why should anyone think my explanation accurately reflects the real world if I can't, even in principle, a quantitative formulation with clear lines of reasoning? "God did it" is the religious explanation for the origins of the solar system and the universe but its not scientific.

* Speaking of which, have you managed to grasp the difference between a mathematical axiom and a physical postulate yet?

 

[excerpt roughly 20 minutes into this awesomeness]

Farsight, I don't know who you are, or what your science-changing discovery is, but your mere association with this guy is worth at least 2 strikes against you.

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Noted, RJBeery.

 

Here you are!

You did remark in that clip "...one just has to read the right books." But before that you've responded with things like 'your paper' Relativity+, which has long since been taking down from its web page, was worth at least 5 Nobel Prizes. Hence, it sounds like you've learned a bit of humility. That you should be credited for much less. Are you basically accusing the scientific community of 'Oops, we didn't read that bit from that guy. Thankfully, Duffield was here to show us the way.'? Please tell me what good recognition you've gotten or expect from your book.

I do confess I have not read or intend to read your book (at least for scientific purposes.) So, its up to you then to convince me if you want. You could say its just a matter of time before people start to teach your accomplishments in science classes. Yet, a non discourse would leave me saddened.

 

What I worked out when I was pulling it all together was just how few of the ideas were actually mine, and that it's more of a synthesis of material I've read. Even then I found after the event that I'd omitted some acknowledgements, such as to Qiu-Hong Hu re http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0512265, and since then I've come across even more material that the general public tend not to hear about. Interesting stuff. The book was advertised last year on the Institute of Physics PhysicsWorld website, and as for recognition, I talk to a lot of people, and I'm happy that I'm doing my bit. I had a little article in the hardcopy PhysicsWorld magazine a few months ago as it happens. I'd say yes, it is just a matter of time, not so much for my own accomplishments, but for the accomplishments of what I'd call the "unsung heroes".

NB: I must sort out that website. The company who set it up used to be in my building, then moved, it's a long story.