Matter is made of waves
June 23rd, 2008 by Wadical Weft“We are standing in front of the Unknown. The goal is to find the truth. So our first step should be to propose hypotheses and examine them.” Full Slice (NOTE: The website is authored by a native French speaker, so the wording may seem odd to native English speakers)
June 25th, 2008 at 16:11
I stopped reading when the talk about asking things of any well-known scientist started.
A revolutionary new model first needs to explain why the inferior (e.g. successful, contemporary) model appears to do such a good job at describing phenomena. No credibility, no attention paid. No sorrow.
Then it needs to demonstrate one or both of two possibilities. 1) make a correct prediction that is different from what the old one predicts; or 2) predict nothing new, but make it so much easier to calculate predictions that it is worth changing how people are trained.
June 27th, 2008 at 05:01
Interesting response. The quote is One may ask any well known scientist how a photon works. He will not be able to provide an acceptable explanation. Even worse, he will also answer that light is made of electric and magnetic fields, but he still will be unable to explain how such fields work. The issue here is a lack of basic understanding of the world. Please point me to the papers that tell us what the particles we call matter are made of.
Nobody HAS to follow your rules. There is nothing wrong with proposing alternatives just for the sake of alternative thinking. A new model may be difficult to work with at first and hard for others to understand, yet be more correct. The old model becomes the approximation it really is (as is the new).
If nothing else, the website is nice for pretty graphics.
Warning, flame-on: “No credibility, no attention paid. No sorrow.” The brilliant can be such lock-steppers at times.
June 27th, 2008 at 07:29
I propose an alternative: matter is made of hand waving.
June 28th, 2008 at 08:06
Define “acceptable explanation for how a photon works” My definition would be something along the lines of being able to predict what happens when you do things with photons. Current practice does an excellent job of this, though as with all imperfect models, there is room for improvement. The term “Basic understanding of the world” is great bait for exchanges of sophistry; what exactly do you mean by it? I have no problem acknowledging that observations at the smallest and largest scales of mass/energy produce confusing results that can only be gotten used to without necessarily understanding them in the way you might mean.
Hm. You want me to do your homework for you? No: you are the advocate here. I propose that you use your own alumnus account with the UW (if you retain one) and a good physics textbook, and check some of the references. When you come up with something where the papers are wrong and some “revolutionary thought” guy is right, let me know. Perhaps you demand (trenchantly), without realizing it, something that science does not produce.
The rules you present yourself as resenting are not “mine,” they have developed since the late 1600’s (some would say since earlier) as a procedure to keep us from fooling ourselves or wasting resources on insufficiently developed ideas. As you know, it is called the scientific method. Anybody who wants scientific credibility HAS to follow those rules. If scientific credibility is not the goal, of course nobody HAS to follow those rules.
Yes, a new model may be hard to work with but make better predictions. Please point me to the better predictions that are made from this “revolutionary thought” guy that you present yourself as advocating. Again: you’re the advocate, you do the homework (not-sorry, that’s one of the rules you have to follow if you want scientific credibility). If it’s actually a better model, it will be adopted once people know about it, even if the guy started out being an asshat to everybody by telling them what idiots the are. I stopped reading the text because it exhibited the hallmarks of bullshit from the very beginning.
You present yourself as interpreting my statements as “lock-stepping.” I confess that I cannot find a chain of reasoning that goes from what I wrote to what you claim without introducing extra assumptions or exploiting contradictions. Perhaps you can attempt to practice your logical abilities by demonstrating your chain of reasoning. Or perhaps by lockstepping you bizarrely mean that I call bullshit on rhetoric, masquerading as science, that is nothing but mental wanking.
By the way, I do endorse mental and other kinds of wanking; however I prefer it to be a solitary enterprise. Having watched others do it for so long (the mental kind), I no longer award even grautuitous contrarian points, as it is so easy to wank, so rare for any progeny to result, and so easy to waste excess time. It’s hard enough to slog through peer-reviewed material whose bullshit is non-obvious.