A Dialogue

On Fake Physics

The Pros and Cons of the Hypothesis

 

 

A.  A.  Faraj

a_a_faraj@hotmail.com

 

 

 

 

Cynicus: From whatever perspective you look at it, modern physics is irrational beyond redemption.

Sinbadus:  Beyond redemption? Please explain!

Cynicus:  Explain what? All the cards are on the table face up!

Dingleus:  Specify, it's irrational in what respects?

Cynicus: Well, here they are; time dilation, curved space, variable mass, wave-particle duality, waves without a carrying medium to wave into, electrons with zero-spatial extensions, particles with no mass, uncertainties raised to principles.... The list of glaring absurdities goes on and on and on!

Sinbadus: Just because an idea is counterintuitive, it does not follow it's absurd. Common sense is proved to be a poor guide in modern physics.

Cynicus: Turn the light in your mind off and follow us! That is exactly what cultists say to the undecided. What the Relativists call scornfully 'common sense' is, in fact, the universal Logos, the eternal principles of reason. Why should we take their word for it? They eat. They sleep. And they go to the bathroom every day!

 

1.  New Mythology

Dingleus: As you all know, I have been critical of this modern mythology, for long time, now. However, I do not believe that modern physics is completely worthless. Cynicus, it appears to me, your mind is set on throwing away the bath bowl and the baby without a second thought.

Cynicus: To save any part of this absurd physics is to play the role of a surgeon who leaves a part of a malignant tumor in the body of his patient. The whole foolish thing must be eradicated.

Sinbadus: You have to admit, Cynicus. Whenever you speak against this physics in public, people are likely to point their finger to the Los Alamos Labs and say that is the proof against your allegations. In short, A- bombs and H- bombs are against you!

Cynicus: The A & H bombs are in my arsenal. I have marshaled them against the new mythology.

Sinbadus: A's and H's are in your arsenal! This, I presume, is the new mythology.

Cynicus: Before Sinbadus blows away the shells of his inborn credulity, let me explain. The so-called 'modern physics’: STR, GTR, QM, QED, Chaos (Controlled or not), Strings (Super & non-super), Plasmas, ... etc., etc., is no more and no less than a phony physics designed to conceal, hide, and cover up the right laws, the true theories, and the real physics. No one, in his right mind, could believe that absurd hypotheses, such as E= mc², might lead to anything rational, let alone practical and technically plausible. Not even in the wildest dreams of a Cyclops, this useless equation could produce A- bombs and H- bombs. E= mc² has been used by peace doves and war hawks alike, to hide the correct recipes for the A's and the H's, and to mislead the credulous and the herd-follower and the simpleton.

Sinbadus: It's absolutely ridiculous! If a patient in a hospital ward had told something like this, he would have been immediately strained in strait- jackets.

Dingleus: Gentlemen, gentlemen, wait a minute! I don't think to toss back and forth Gardner's adjectives and fallacies will help here. Let us behave during this debate as truth seekers in true Platonic settings.

Cynicus: Sinbadus' hysteric reaction fills me with joy and satisfaction. It's the proof that I have cut through a raw nerve.

Sinbadus: A raw nerve or not, the hypothesis of Falsified Physics is the ultimate far-fetched. It stands on an equal footing with Flat Earth, Squared Circles, Trisected Angles, and the Proofs of Fermat's Last Theorem! Physicists are not fools. They wouldn't corrupt the mind of their next generation, no matter what.

Dingleus: Actually, Fermat's last theorem has been proved recently. I wouldn't be very surprised, if all the digits of the Pi Number after the digit # Googol raised to the power of (Googol multiplied by Googol), all raised to the power of Googol, are found to be all zeroes. Therefore, there is a very remote possibility that the circle might be squared one day.

 

2.  Fake Physics

Cynicus: Healthy skepticism is a great asset. Sinbadus believes it's far-fetched. Allow me to respond with a plausible scenario. As you all know, the Peace Movement, in the early years of the 20th century, was very popular among Western-European intellectuals. B. Russell, A. Einstein, and A. Eddington, were amongst its members. Now, after the initial shock of discovering radioactivity with all its disastrous implications for the second law of thermodynamics, the road to weapons of mass destruction was clear to everybody. It was obvious to everyone, except perhaps the imbeciles and the morons, that the nuclear bomb is within the reach of every developed state. Therefore, the doves and the hawks of that time had every reason to falsify the real physics which they and their credulous parrots have called it contemptuously 'classical physics' ever since.

Dingleus: What a clever idea! Sinbadus, for goodness' sake look at it! I see it but I don't believe it! Everything with this hypothesis falls into its right place. The absurd paradoxes, the glaring contradictions of modern physics, the intolerance of the editors and the professors, the cult mentality of the Relativists, the obscene worshiping of mortal beings, all are beautifully explained away by the Cynicus hypothesis. What a counterstroke of propaganda!

Sinbadus: I totally agree with your last statement, Dingleus. It's a pure piece of propaganda. Cynicus is more skilled in this sort of sophistry than the propaganda ministers of Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini. He absolutely has no shred of evidence to back up his wild allegations. Cynicus, you have only scenarios, exactly as Dr. Velikovsky in his 'Worlds in Collision' Book.

Cynicus: Not so fast, Sinbadus, the Battle of Zama still lies ahead! The Theory of Falsified Physics has the full backing of sociology and psychology. For this marvelous idea to work, you don't even need sages and secret deliberations behind the scenes. The morbid fear of a Nuclear Armageddon is enough. Not only enough, it's more than enough, to propel the frightened physicists in the direction of unconscious falsification of their beloved physics.

Dingleus: I'm not a psychologist or sociologist, and I do not wish to speculate about it. But your reasoning sounds plausible to me. The people of the 20th century were certainly in the grip of a continuous fear.

Sinbadus: Unconscious falsification? That is certainly a Freudian trap. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, the physicists can do to prove they are not involved in unconscious fabrication of their science.

Cynicus: They don't have to prove anything. Their innocence is assumed. The burden of proof is on their accusers.

Sinbadus: Allow me to put forward a new hypothesis of my own. For the sake of argument, let's assume, for a moment, that Cynicus is a dove at heart. He has come up with his proposition only for the sake of peace. Cynicus is, in fact, attempting no less than to convince the physicists of rogue states to throw to the wind their references and textbooks and do physics from scratch!

Cynicus: I don't give a penny to know what the balls-holders of the Dictators think of me. They have swallowed it a whole from the Tyrants. It doesn't concern me the slightest, if they add to it the glaring absurdities of the Relativists.

Dingleus: Gosh! Cynicus, it seems to me, the ice fields of the North, and your unquestioned loyalty to Her Majesty the Queen, haven't softened your deep contempt for the rulers of the Desert.

Cynicus: I spent 10 years beside my 1000-kilowatt radio tower, in the Tropics. I was bitten by mosquitoes and scorpions and vampire bats. I was trying to show them the virtues of free life. Yet the miserable scoundrels weren't convinced.

Sinbadus: I have been there, when Cynicus from his abode in the capital of Hussein Habre, was charging the Windmills of the Middle East. By night, he was competing with the soldiers of the French Foreign Legion, for winning the hearts of modern Andromedas. By day, he turned his Tropical Wind against the villages and the cities of the Sahara Desert. He was simply telling their inhabitants about the virtues of Western Democracy, and urging them to throw themselves on the Naked Sword of the Dictators.

Cynicus: They didn't call me the Poisonous Wind for nothing. I showed them how it feels to go through life as free Roman.

Sinbadus: Free Roman! You, certainly, don't wish to be a subject of Nero, or Severus, or Caligula.

Dingleus: Cynicus is a virtual citizen of the Republic of Rome!

Cynicus: Probably, for us, Marcus Aurelius would have been just fine!

 

3.  Olbers’ Paradox

Dingleus: Cynicus, you are really politically charged. I wonder how you have run into relativity!

Cynicus: I encountered it in the fifth grade, from popular translations of Einstein and his stooges, of course. Soon after the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, I realized that the Arabian Dictators are strategically doomed. It doesn't matter to expose their vices anymore. So I turned to astronomy. Astronomy is my old passion and specialty. As you know, it's economically worthless, but I love it.

Sinbadus: Well, our passionate astronomer let me remind you of an old challenge. When you denounce Relativity, you are, in effect, restoring the notion of an infinite universe in space and time. Now, please answer this simple question. Why is the night sky so dark, relativistically speaking?

Cynicus: I don't believe that you can deny a very simple fact. No photon of whatever energy can penetrate a tiny proton. If the universe is infinite, then the line of sight, along every geometrical line, is bound to encounter a tiny proton. As a matter of fact, there will be a proton string of infinite length, along every radial line. The earth, as you can see, therefore, is shielded from infinity by a protonic sphere of infinite thickness. Not even the thunderbolts of angry Titans can reach us from infinity. The question, thus, should be: Why is the night sky so bright? It's either because the sphere of observation is so large, or because the nearby matter is in a highly excited state. Either way, Olbers' Paradox is groundless.

Dingleus:  Marvelous undercutting defeater! I know, the Olbers Paradox is a tempest in a teapot.   It’s based on the fallacy of affirming the infinity of emitting stars and denying the infinity of absorbing dust.  But, if it is infinity, then it must be infinity at all levels. When this is made explicit, the supposed paradox disappears.

Sinbadus: Don’t celebrate too early!  There is the other horn of the Olbers Dilemma. If the amount of matter in the universe is infinite, then, according to Newton’s law of universal gravitation, the universe must collapse on itself into one single point. Thus your cure for the trouble of light must bring the disease of gravity!

Cynicus: Whenever I hear an argument like this, I wish I were a jailor in the kingdom of His Majesty King of Saudi Arabia and all the Relativists in the world were brought chained and shackled to me to give them one hundred lashes each!

Sinbadus:  I’m afraid His Majesty would have had an ample opportunity to order one hundred lashes to be given to you instead!

Dingleus:  You have to agree, Sinbadus, there is no problem here at all. It’s a proven theorem in Principia that the strength of any gravitational field at its center is exactly equal to zero.  Now, if the universe is infinite, then every point in space is at the center of a sphere of infinite radius. Accordingly, the gravitational pull of matter at infinity is everywhere nil. And therefore, only local variations in density of matter are significant in this regard.

Sinbadus:  I used to picture myself standing at the center of a sphere that expands and expands forever. As the imaginary sphere expands and its radius approaches infinity, the amount of matter enclosed within its volume gets closer and closer to being infinite. Eventually, the force of gravity at the spherical surface becomes infinite and the whole thing collapses inward towards the center. But now, I realize that is a mistake. That is because every point on the surface of a cosmological sphere is at the center of a similar cosmological sphere of infinite volume. And therefore, the spherical surface at which the intensity of gravity is infinite can never exist.

 

4. The Russell Hypothesis

Cynicus:  Four Quarks for Muster Mark!  It’s too late to correct your mistake. Your fellow Relativists are still hard at work using this same blunder to justify their absurd cosmologies.

Dingleus:  It’s never too late to admit a mistake. It took the astronomers 2,000 years to realize that the Ptolemaic system was a mistake. And it wasn’t too late for them to do so.  Besides, I don’t think spicing cosmology with a few big mistakes or illusions or myths is very harmful. To the contrary, according to B. Russell, illusions and myths are extremely important for inspiring and motivating mankind.

Cynicus:  That would be true only if science were some sort of ‘Waiting for Godot’ kind of game!

Dingleus:  Wait a minute, Cynicus! I can justify the Russell hypothesis. Take a close look at any branch of science that we judge as correct, methodical, and completely free of errors and illusions. Acoustics is a perfect example. Go and examine it for 1,001 days and tell us if it inspires you to think up anything. By contrast, almost everyone is inspired instantly by the startling illusions and errors of Relativity and Quantum mechanics. It doesn’t matter whether you are being inspired to support them or to attack them. The important thing is that you have been inspired and sprung to action, exactly as B. Russell suggests.

Cynicus:  Scholastics of the Middle Ages were inspired to argue about how many angels can stand on a pin’s head for more than one thousand years!  And the end result of their inspiration was zero. Sure they had fun. But the net result was zero.

 

5. The Saga of E = mc²

Sinbadus: Gentlemen, get down to business. Can either of you come up with anything as beautiful and breathtaking as E = mc²?

Cynicus: Daddy's poor Sinbadus! Your Genius didn't come up with it. It was forced upon him. First, he decreed c is the upper limit for all velocities. He then composed his guff and fired it towards Wien's Annals. During a sleepless night, short after, he saw the blunder. Kinetic energies are infinite. If mass remained constant, experimenters would destroy his budding theory at once. So he decreed mass is variable. As you may see, follies beget follies. There was no turning back for him. The die was cast. He crossed the Rubicon River. As for its beauty, I don't see any grace that I can't find in E = mc or E = mc³ or E = mc^4. The equivalence of mass and energy, in the final analysis, is no more than fooling around with algebraic symbols.

Dingleus: Cynicus, I believe you have gone too far in your opposition. E = mc² is basically Maxwellian. It's very useful in particle physics. Nuclear physicists can't live without it. It must be preserved at all costs. Furthermore, there is at least one interpretation of E = mc², which is perfectly consistent with Newtonian mechanics and entirely logical. Here is an example. The mass of every stable nucleus is less than the mass sum of its protons and neutrons. If this mass deficit was radiated away during fusion reactions inside stars at the speed of light, it would have kinetic energy equal to E = 1/2 mc².  It would also cause the emitting materials to recoil with equal momentum. The recoil momentum would be capable of accelerating an equal amount to the mass deficit at the speed of light in the opposite direction and with kinetic energy of E = 1/2 mc². Hence the total kinetic energy in both directions is equivalent to E = mc².

Sinbadus: Your interpretation, Dingleus, is valid only, if light is composed of Newtonian corpuscles. And therefore, it is neither conventional nor Maxwellian.

Cynicus: Allow me to quote R. A. Waldron, the giant on whose shoulders I stand. "Most of the attempts to replace Einstein's theory start with an aether or attempt to save the Lorentz transformations or time dilation or the increase of mass with velocity. It is never clear why anyone wants to save these ideas, which have no observational support, and the theories, when developed far enough, always turn out to be the Lorentz-Einstein theory in disguised form" [Spec. Sci. Techn., Vol. 3, No. 4, p385-408, (1980)]. Cul-de-sacs lead to nowhere. They must be abandoned.

Sinbadus: Granddaddy's poor Cynicus! Extol your unrecognized Geniuses as much as you want. But you can't convince me.

Cynicus: Wait for Kuhn's Roulette to roll, and you shall see how bright and how giant, my Polar Stars really are!

 

6. Relativistic Sociology

Dingleus: Kuhn's Roulette! Are you a believer in Social Relativity, Cynicus?

Cynicus: It's a matter of commensurability, Dingleus. I'm only using the terms that Sinbadus can understand.

Sinbadus: I am unequivocally against that sort of Relativism. In his masterpiece, 'Against Relativism', C. Norris has set the record straight.

Cynicus: Actually, Relativity, in the social sciences, is far more convincing than in physics. At least, it's very useful in combating fanaticism, dogmatism, and few other isms.

Dingleus: But it denies absolute truths their right to exist.

Sinbadus: And it mocks everyone who is looking for them in earnest.

Dingleus: The main objection to T.S. Kuhn and like-minded people is this: The history of science, from Thales to the Reigning Monarch of Sinbadus, is unredeemably short. It does not constitute a sufficient sample for detecting patterns and trends, let alone a basis for discovering the very foundations of epistemology and the human knowledge.

Sinbadus: You are absolutely correct. That sort of philosophy of science is very similar to the Dialectic Philosophy of Karl Marx. Living in London, during the first few years of the Industrial Revolution, Marx boldly predicted the demise of Capitalism. Look at it now. It is demise all right. But it's only a demise of his philosophy and his heedless followers.

Cynicus: Stop wandering around. You don't need to swallow the entire ocean to discover it's damn salty. David Hume had settled this matter, long time ago. We all agree that a specific set of causes, leads always to the same result. But, and this is the catch, that same result can be obtained by potentially infinite number of various sets of causes. The same thing applies to our cherished logic. That is to say, the same premises always lead to the same conclusion. But the same conclusion can be reached through an infinite number of potential premises. That is the way it was. That is the way it is. And that is the way it will be, from eternity to eternity. And nothing can be done about it.

Sinbadus:  Just because you cannot be 100% sure that you have the truth on your side; it does not mean that the truth is a mirage. The ideals are ideals. And nothing of significance could be built without them.

Dingleus:  I believe that the Humean Argument against Induction is viciously circular. Hume, our dignified philosopher, is a natural sophist. He, heedlessly, bases his Argument on Induction, in order to demolish Induction. His reasoning, therefore, can lead to nowhere.

Cynicus: Notwithstanding your opposition, Hume shall remain forever a shining star. He has shaken the complacency of the naturalists down to its core.

 

7. Conclusion

Dingleus: Gentlemen, Our discussion is nearing the end. Let us issue a joint statement.

Sinbadus:  After the vipers and pythons Cynicus hurled at my favorite theories, there is nothing on Earth that can upset me. Go ahead, Dingleus! Issue our closing statement. I cannot disagree with you on that.

Dingleus: We conclude that the idea of Falsified Physics, as hard to believe, as it may seem, is a good working hypothesis. At least, it highlights the important distinction between technology and theoretical physics. We declare our unbounded admiration for modern technology and its tireless inventors. At the same time, we preserve our God-given right to seek the truth, and to question, criticize, and doubt every aspect of theoretical physics as it stands today.

 

Related Papers

Superluminal Light: http://www.wbabin.net/science/faraj8.htm

Infinite Universe:  http://www.wbabin.net/physics/faraj2.htm