Re: What is this newsgroup really about? Newcomer question
- From: "JanPB" <filmart@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 24 May 2006 13:57:14 -0700
Fred Darrah wrote:
hello -
I'm a working physicist who has spent very little time on usenet. I looked
at the posts in this group expecting to see discussions about current
research in special relativity, general relativity, and field theory by
other physicists and mathematicians. Instead, I found a lot of posts by
non-scientists that seem to concentrate on crackpot theories 'refuting'
relativity. Since SR and GR have long been proven and are staples of
scientific and engineering fields from astrophysical observation to
satellite clocks, I don't understand what is going on here.
Is this group the equivalent of the flat-earth society? Are any responsible
discussions going on here.
It's not exactly flat earth society. The newsgroup was originally
created to deflect the crank traffic from sci.physics. As you've
noticed, in this regard this newsgroup has succeeded admirably. As to
the motivation of many posters here? There are several:
1. It wasn't quite as obvious before the Internet just how widespread
scientific crackpottery was. This is an innocent form of willful
ignorance and normally people afflicted with that lead perfectly normal
lives while being 100% competent at their daily jobs (which are
frequently quite sophisticated). Before the Internet it was assumed
that angle trisectors, circle squarers, and
Einstein-made-a-dumb-arithmetic-mistake people were some sort of a
fringe. Now it's clear these ideas are widespread and apparently have
always been. Because these ideas at the end of the day do not count,
nobody really bothered or bothers to research the phenomenon more
seriously which is a pity IMHO because there are ideas which can be
dangerous - think how many lives could have been spared if we had known
how to stop the spread of Communism way back in the 19th century.
2. Relativity is particularly susceptible to this sort of abuse (just
like plane geometry, integer arithmetic, and the like) because it
demands very little in terms of purely mathematical prerequisites for
just a *bit* of an illusion of understanding. That's why you never see
cranks dissecting the fine points of - say - the Hamilton-Jacobi
equation or the second part of Einstein's 1905 paper.
I think pseudoscience, UFOs, etc., are all very interesting inner,
psychological phenomena which deserve a serious study.
--
Jan Bielawski
.
- Prev by Date: Re: GPS falsifies H&K experimental claims
- Next by Date: Re: "Overview of the Einsteinhoax Website"
- Previous by thread: Re: What is this newsgroup really about? Newcomer question
- Next by thread: Re: What is this newsgroup really about? Newcomer question
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
