Piled Higher and Deeper

I was going to get into why this book, Possible Minds, aggravated the hell out of me, but then, while making coffee and mumbling to myself, I heard Roger Penrose in the back ground on Youtube saying (to me personally), ‘We’ll assume that you’re not unhappy with the idea of space and time being fitted together into one thing…’

‘I am unhappy, Roger!’ I was meanwhile noticing the double negative in Roger’s phraseology and how ‘not unhappy’ is a different concept from ‘happy.’ I mean if you think about it. But what does being happy or not unhappy have to do with physics?

‘…(‘one thing’ being) a four-dimensional ‘space-time’ as we call it,’ Roger went on from YT, and I suspended my coffee-making to get more aggravated than I already was.

Addendum: The most interesting thing I found out about buzzards yesterday was their means of self-defense: They projectile vomit the stinking, rotten mass of carrion they’ve been eating into the face of a predator, thereby not only freaking the hell out of the predator but lightening their load for easier flight. Also, buzzards have an incredibly acidic digestive system (which allows them to eat rotten meat). So on top of the stench, you get acid sprayed into your face, if you upset a buzzard. Keep this in mind if you encounter one vandalizing your… boat, say. (Do not do a bull rush to shoo him away.)

Hearing this Nobel laureate spouting pure nonsense put me on one of my bad mood/Youtube rolls. But first, I let Roger show me a 2-D graph with ‘time’ on the vertical axis and three dimensional ‘space’ on the horizontal axis (with three arrows representing the three directions of space as we know it, all in one-dimension). Now we have some visual nonsense.

Tell you what. Go here (linked above also) and watch just the first minute and a half of Penrose’s talk. If you do this and come away thinking anything like ‘Boy, that guy is brilliant! He’s so smart that I can’t figure out what he’s talking about!’ then you are missing my point here completely… (You can and should stop watching after Penrose says the line, ‘But don’t worry about that.’ I say ‘should’ because going further in his talk could do physical damage to your synapses.)

How to explain?… Yesterday, at least one of you said something to the effect that I’m smart, which made me uncomfortable. See, I’m not that smart, especially lately. I’ve glanced at I.Q. tests and am sure I would not do well on one, for example.

My only talent, intellectually, is an ability to spot bullshit. (‘Bullshit’ being defined as any sort of untruth.) I often cannot explain how I know bullshit when I see it, but usually with concerted effort I can figure it out. This ‘space-time’ concept is a good example. (I know: I’ve brought up the subject of ‘space-time’ before but if something is important, in my view it bears repeating.)

Addendum: One way of spotting bullshit via, say, Youtube (or any media), is to see if it’s often repeated by people with letters after their names. I realize that this sounds facile and smart-alecky (and should therefore be suspect), but I have done extensive research on the matter and can assure you I’m correct. We all know that 95% of what’s on Youtube is bullshit to begin with, but even stuff that’s basically true – if repeated by academically-lettered authorities – will have bullshit in it if you peel back a layer or two.

I did a YT search for ‘What is space-time?’ and came across a real piece of work documentary from good old PBS called ‘How the Universe Works.’

I recalled that I actually have the DVD set for this (it’s pretty old), and how I’d once sent a clip of it to Steve Crothers (back when he was responding to my emails). It was of a cosmologist saying that in order to form a star all you need is ‘A cloud of gas and time.’ She (it was a female cosmologist) meant that if you have a cloud of gas in space, it will eventually collapse into itself until it gets dense enough (via gravity) and therefore hot enough to fire up a fusion reaction and voila! you have a star.

Steve thanked me for the clip, saying it was a wonderful example of what’s wrong with physics these days.

This star-formation business is also a good example of what I mean by spotting bullshit. And how anyone can do it, usually via simple common sense.

This woman had spent most of her adult life studying star formation and could not even see that the ‘standard model’ (of star formation) violates common sense. (That she also could not see that it violates at least three of the laws of thermodynamics is perhaps an even more egregious example of what’s wrong with academia.)

Let’s think about it. What happens to the gas that comes out if you open a soda bottle in a small room? Well, the gas expands and fills the room. That’s just common sense, right? I mean if you think about it.

Okay, what happens if you enlarge the room by, say, moving the walls further apart? Right. The gas expands further, so there’s more space between the molecules floating around. Right. And if you keep making the room bigger? The gas keeps expanding. How about if you disintegrate the walls? Now there are no walls. Theoretically, the gas will just keep expanding, right? Right. This is common sense.

But what this doctor of cosmology is telling us is that in the vacuum of space, a cloud of gas will do the opposite and contract — until a nuclear fusion reaction lights up a star. (Aside from violating common sense, this is a ‘system’ doing work on itself, which is impossible.) What we have here is pure, unadulterated bullshit.

It really is that simple. (Hey, ‘Sean’! If you’re still out there, let’s hear how/why I’m wrong!)

But now that we know that Phd’s can and do spout utter nonsense (in PBS documentaries), let’s get back to ‘space-time.’ This is important, I think, because in a way, the idea of ‘space-time’ will tell us regular folks (non-physicists) why all of modern theoretical physics is bullshit. (I’m not talking about engineering kinds of physics. Big difference.)

You know what? Instead of me trying to explain what’s wrong with ‘space-time’ how about I let a real physicist explain it. Compare this video featuring Wal Thornhill to the bit I subjected you to via Roger Penrose. Oh, and first go to the Penrose video one more time (just for a few seconds!)… go to 14:30 and listen to him say this:

‘You can actually say what you mean by dividing the number by zero. It’s infinity. You might think that infinity isn’t really a number.. well it is here… that’s the nice thing about mathematics, you see, you can cheat… you can say you’re not allowed to do this but what happens if I do though… it may land you in trouble immediately but it may not, there may be a way of getting around that…and this is one of those things…’

If you don’t have the patience to go and listen to the above, fine: I’ve taken it down pretty much verbatim and the only ‘context’ that’s missing is… that nothing Penrose says here makes any sense at all:

First, when you divide any number by zero – even if you have a Phd – the answer is ‘undefined’… the answer is not infinity… Let’s quote wiki:

‘In ordinary arithmetic, the expression has no meaning, as there is no number which, when multiplied by 0, gives a (assuming a ≠ 0), and so division by zero is undefined.’ [end quote]

Then Penrose says that infinity isn’t really a number but it is here. No it fucking isn’t, Roger. It isn’t a number anywhere in the known universe! But wait: The nice thing about mathematics is that ‘you can cheat’? Doing it (dividing by zero) may ‘land you in trouble’?! By ‘trouble’, does Roger mean ‘making no sense’? Is this the result of getting a Phd and a Nobel prize?

The above is not an example of Allan cherry-picking, i.e., scanning YT videos for an example of a genius screwing up one time. Go to any ‘authority’-based video on modern theoretical physics and this is what you get. Pure bullshit. And you can usually uncover it with simple common sense!

Now go to the Thornhill video and see the difference. Then think about the fact that Thornhill is branded a crank by all of academic physics.

Implications!

Allan

By the way, the title to this is what Ph.d actually means.