We will listen to sections of Finding God In Physics which aired on 11/26/11. This was a rebroadcast of a previous show.
There are fundamental lessons to be learned when looking closely at the program. This includes what I think is underlying our lives in general; namely that life doesn’t really follow reasoning. We see reasoning, but this is somehow intermixed with the basic lunacy and confusion of the world. This program illustrates this well. Here you hear psuedo-technical discussion. You also hear, however, a deep inability to learn. Therefore, you are also hearing a lot of basic confusion that persists regardless of what clarifying truth there may also be in the world. It sounds reasonable, but it is persistent confusion withsoundbites of sensible-sounding soundbites interspersed. Still doesn’t make it. It becomes a learning tool itself. We get to study this confusion, deception and stubbornness and how well it is camouflaged. Let’s listen. Beneath each clip is a transcript followed by my response in red.
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RM: “Now you take light. It will go through a glass window. And then it will slow down. So the audience – they don’t know that. I’m a diamond cutter by profession. And I know that the light will slow down at 40%. It slows down 40% before it comes out again. As spectrum. But when it comes out it picks up the same speed. So now, the question is – Is there wind blowing it, or does it take off – Again, what’s launching it from my diamond? What launches it from my diamond? That’s what I want to know.”
Yet again, there is no mystery. The photons strike electronic bonds in their path as they propagate through the piece of glass or diamond. Each collision causes a slight delay in the net motion of each photon. The photon is freshly emitted from the electronic bonds over and over again as they make their way through. Well-established physics.
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RM: “A light photon. But, to go through – look, it travels through- What are those long strands of wire?”
KW: “Oh, fiber optics.”
RM: “Fiber optics. It can go for 50 miles like that. Now, explain that to me. 50 miles of fiber optics and come out at the same speed.”
As stated, the photons move at the speed of light. He may not like that, but that’s what they do. They can lose energy in two ways: They can lose intensity or propagation frequency. This is not mysterious when you remember that the photon never actually slows down. Roy and his friends have erroneously assumed that the words “the speed of light in glass is less than in air” mean that the photons move just like they do in air, just somehow constrained so they move slower. Again, this is not what we mean.
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RM:“… the chair to Ken Wayne, who is an engineer in this stuff. Aren’t you Ken?”
KW: “Yeah. We were talking about the speed of light, and the fact that it slows down when it enters glass or a piece of quartz or some transparent medium-”
RM: “Optic fiber.”
KW: “Or fiber optic which is made of glass. And we have known values of the speed of light in a vacuum, the speed of light in air, the speed of light in water, the speed of light in glass or any other medium that’s transparent. And the interesting thing is – Why is it constant? You can have 20 miles of optical fiber, and the seed of those photons flowing through the fiber is the same from the micro-second that it enters on face of the fiber until it exits. So it’s constant within that optical medium, and then when it comes out into the vacuum or into the air it resumes the speed of light, But my question is- How is it that it’s constant inside a transparent medium?”
RM: “That’s a magical question. Because it’s being carried. The gravity force is the winds are carrying it through there because they’re going through also.”
Yet again, the speed is not constant. The photons essentially have to hop their way through the fiber optic strand. At each and every electronic bond that the photon collides with, the photon is momentarily absorbed and then re-emitted in the original direction of propagation, over and over and over again. It is perhaps easier for people to understand this in the case of a reflective material like the silvery surface at the back of a mirror. This works because the photons bounding off your face and onto it are momentarily absorbed by the electrons in the silver at the silver-glass interface, and then re-emitted back to you so you can see your reflection. No magic. Just white trash confusion.
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RM: “It travels through medium at certain speeds. This is the miracle. Why does it go through that solid material called glass and yet keep a constant in that glass at a certain speed, maybe 40% less or 20%. I don’t care. I don’t care if it’s 1% less. I want to know, what’s keeping it moving through that glass. See? That all. And I say the only thing that can do it is gravity.”
Once again. The speed is not constant. The photon propagates at its normal vacuum speed in the vacuum space between its photon-electron collisions within the piece of glass. Zero mystery. Zero miracle. Pure comic pig ignorance and aggressive learning disability.
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RM:“Michio Kaku is a good scientist. But when he comes on, as I see it, he describes all the things in the universe, and just tells you what it is. But if you look between the things, all the things he says, it is so, and many things are so. There are questions that, you know, that arise in my mind, is “Why is it so?” and I don’t that physicists or people who are practical and build things care about why anything is. It’s too difficult to ask “why”. But I love the why thing.”
The idea that scientists and engineers are so blind is low-life, white trash conspiracy theory type belief. Also, if he “loved” knowing why, perhaps he’d actually read up on basic established physics.
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RM:“I always thought gravity was flowing rivers. And collision-less that flow through each other so you wouldn’t notice any forces, unless you. Like a river, if you had a flowing river and you put a stone in it, suddenly you see the force of the river pressing against the stone – curving around it. And depending on how big a rock you have, that’s how much of the pressure the rock will feel in the river. So if you have a river flowing, and you have a big rock, the pressure against the big rock, is more than it would be against a small rock. Right? But the river, the pressure is the same. The river energy is the same. But it feels different- on one rock the pressure is less, gravity is less. But against a big rock, it pushes you harder. Correct? So it doesn’t matter what the rock is made of, whether it’s wood or anything. It depends on how it blocks the stream. So the river flows at the same speed. But the pressure against big rocks, smaller rocks and smaller rocks are all different. So therefore there’s universality to that.”
How is this consistent with the facts that:
1) If one object is placed beneath another, in no noticeable way does either object affect the other one’s weight?
2) Weight is independent of part shape (even nuclear shape) and is only a function of the part’s mass?
The next 2 clips are from the October 8th, 2011 program.
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RM: “Buy my book. You’ve gotta buy my book. It’s like 24 years it took me to write it. ‘Gravity Driven Universe’.”
You hear that he spent 24 years working on this book. During this time he never learned what is actually meant by “the speed of light is slower in-” glass or diamond or any given transparent solid. In industry you sometimes run into personalities who have inflated views of themselves. They claim a high number, like 40 years they have worked in a given field. However, you see so much missing from what they are presenting. A chemist I knew put it very well. He said that it isn’t that the person worked on the topic for 40 years, it’s that they worked on it for 1 year and then repeated it 39 times. Again, Roy is technically incompetent. He doesn’t take the trouble to read anything on the topic of physics. He’s in this for the sense of prestige. He probably closes his eyes and gives himself goosebumps fantasizing that he’s in Stockholm receiving the Nobel Prize for physics.
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RM: “So I could be crazy, but I don’t think so. But all crazy people would say that anyway. Crazy people don’t know that they’re crazy.”
SG: “No. And if we are 2 of them, we’ve got that same problem. Right?”
Bingo!
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From the 6/26/10 program:
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RM: “There’s very little to learn. I understand how a person can become a mathematician all by themselves. Because of a love of it. Someone had to start calculus – in the middle ages somewhere. Someone had to have a love for it. And I don’t think we’ve built much on it.”
The reason it’s effective to get you first education in a subject like mathematics in school is because it is laid out in the correct and detailed order, ideally by teachers who can illustrate the concepts and answer inevitable questions. You are then ready to supplement that knowledge by reading and reasoning further on your own, although professional mathematicians still read the work of other mathematicians. Also, it isn’t true that calculus was a totally fresh concept not born out of previous work in mathematics, as Roy more than implies. Also, here you have a gem of Roy Masters’ commentary to look close at. A magnificent find: “And I don’t think we’ve built much on it.” Even the most passionate Roy supporter should pause and ponder this. It beautifully illustrates what his critics often point out. What the $^!%@%! is he talking about??? First, how does he know what advancements have been made in calculus. Secondly, we have come a great distance since the work of Leibniz and Newton. – Here you see how Roy must have an opinion on everything purely to support his self importance. Raw egomania and self-indulgant, self-delusion.
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RM: “If some people love something it doesn’t come out of their rear end like it does with some of these physicists today. Like global warming. What an insane idea. It’s the coldest winter that they’ve ever had in the East. They’ve lost all their electricity. They have more snow than they’ve ever had before.”
On the topic of global warning, I have heard solid arguments against it. These include:
1) Some temperature test probes were not properly shielded from nearby heat sources.
2) On the other hand, glacial melting appears to be occuring at an unexplainably high rate. It can be said, either way, that legitimate climatologists take exhaustive measurements all over the planet and at different altitudes. The average temperature of the Earth varies much less than, say, the local temperature of some given geographic point year-to-year. You see here how Roy matter-of-factly states that the validity of global warming rests in a single year’s harsh winter in the northeastern U.S.
Let’s add that all of Roy’s physics comes out of his rear end.
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RM: And I think the best scientist is one who dabbles in his garage, like I did, in my house – with electricity and chemistry and all kinds of things, when I was a kid. It was there. And it was there where I formed some very interesting ideas that formed the basis of how I discovered how mass is made out of no-thing.
Is this supposed to sound endearing? Learning the detail of basic science in a university is extremely practical. One could conceivably make up for it by reading on their own — in order to learn what’s already proven true. But Roy doesn’t read any of the technical literature. He therefore becomes someone substituting mental and verbal masturbation for substance. His “basis” includes the erroneous notion that photons slow down in transparent material. The danger is the combination of confidence and panache with which he recklessly tells you how things apparently are, regardless of any proof otherwise – even, when he feels like it, invoking “faith” as the basis for why his ideas are correct. It’s ugly but well masked. Such confidence should be reserved for people who actually know what they’re talking about.
On this last comment I’d like to elaborate. I’ve learned that gray is more insidious than darkness. Grey is darkness with enough truth sprinkled in to make it palatable. You may find resonating information in some of Roy’s writings and diatribes. If you look close, you’ll see that it is simulcast with garbage, even madness. Chintzy, white-trash drivel.
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RM: Don’t let people shove stuff down your throat. Religeon or education, no matter what it is. Question. If you can’t learn. If it’s too much for you, you know. It’s better to leave it alone, and wait for you to understand and get a bad grade. Try again.
Meanwhile, Roy might pay your bills while you are delayed getting your degree and finding a job in science or engineering. The only major gripe science students have is that they are required to learn very quickly. Those are the breaks. The idea is to do the best you can and let your understanding develop over time and throughout your career. Roy’s not familiar with this. It’s called “earning a living”. As for shoving stuff down our throats, that’s what Roy is doing with this topic.
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RM: “All of matter spins. Constantly. Now you ask yourself- Now the question to a sensible person is, “Why does it spin?”. Dead silence! Nobody wants to talk about it. Well, surely professor there’s got to be a spin force. Well it doesn’t obey the laws of common sense. Well, to me it does. As a matter of fact, everything, once you understand, that it doesn’t defy common sense, there is a force that spins it. But they don’t know what it is. So, therefore, it just does! See? I’m stuck there.”
The confusion is entirely his. One way that energy in matter can manifest itself is orbiting motion (e.g., an electron orbiting a nucleus). Another is spin. The force that instigates the spin is found at the creation of the particle. It needn’t be applied over and over and over, again and again over billions of years, because the spin energy is not being dissipated. Quantum mechanics shows us that the energy must have a place to go, a reason to be transfered and a means of getting there, or it will stay where it is indefinitely. The electrons in your lawn chair actually exist as moving waves of energy. If they dissipated their energy, you couldn’t sit on it because after a little while it won’t be there anymore. Roy is “stuck” because he keeps himself from learning established physics – God forbid he find out that he doesn’t intrinsically know everything.
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SG: “When things don’t seem fit together quite the way we hope they would, then open our minds and wonder, maybe come up with whole new language like Einstein did when he described his theories.”
Beautiful advice. Let’s apply this to Roy’s physics commentary. Since photons don’t actually slow down in a transparent medium, we need to scrap the idea that they do. One aspect of new jargon we should apply to his writings and comments are derogatory adjectives like “incompetent”, “delusional” and “narcissistic”, along with “shameless double-talking”.
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RM: “It’s almost like a surprise when I bring up to many, many of those that I’ve spoken with, that I should be such an upstart to disagree with the big bang theory, you know, and the expansion and the way they’re taught.”
They think of you as an upstart fo talking about something of which you are pig-ignorant.
Extra comment to the reader: The general concept of a big bang shouldn’t be over-complicated. Today we see matter as being a certain way. With rare exception, like in a Bose-Einstein condensate, an atomic nucleus is like a grain of sand. The electrons are orbiting a couple of miles away. That’s a lot of room between them. Under excessive concentration of energy, we can envision the nucleus being even smaller and the distance to the electrons as being exceedingly tiny. All sorts of ramifications emerge from this reasoning including that perhaps the positive and negative charges as well as associated magnetic fields converge into more condensed existence. If this energy were allowed to become released from such a super-concentrated condition, it would be violent and the very nature of observable matter and energy could change a lot at the same time. This whole concept began with Hubble’s observation that the universe is expanding. If you start to look back in time we can then envision it shrinking. It can shrink a whole lot smaller than what we see today. No conspiracy.