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Has anyone heard of this theory? A friend on mine is reading a book on it and said it was very interesting. Anyone else read it?
CS
CS
thinkies said:I'm probably not the best guy to answer this, but I am sure this is the first time I am hearing such a word (null physics)...o.0
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=94861I went through the few book excerpts, in as much detail as possible, on the web page. More detail on the crackpottery of this book:
It makes the Remedial Crackpottery 101 "discovery" that the neutron is just a proton and an electron stuck together. This is vaguely plausible if the only thing you know about neutrons is that they are neutral, and weigh a bit more than a proton. It's totally implausible if you know how neutrons decay, what electron-proton scattering looks like, or anything else.
It proposes that photons lose energy over time, and that's why the night sky isn't uniformly bright. If this occurred, it would do very odd things to the spectra of distant objects; no such effect is seen. This speculation has hung around for decades, Witt seems totally unaware of it. Google for "Tired Light"; the wikipedia article is good.
He makes the confident "prediction" that "future experiments" will show the 3He nucleon separation to be 1.639 fm. Didn't he Google for "3He nuclear charge radius"? It has been the subject of hundreds of experiments. The radius is more than 1.9 fm; there's no way to get that from 1.64 fm nucleon spacing.
He predicts that stars in the Milky Way have an average drift of 1.5 km/s towards the Galactic Center. Didn't he Google for "radial velocity survey"? The data is already there. http://www.rave-survey.aip.de/rave/ . (I don't know what the answer is; I'd have to download the catalog and make some plots. Seriously, though, this is like publishing a book saying "If my theory is correct, then 1890s-vintage Michaelson interferometers will detect a huge ether wind. Future research may test this theory ... ")
He gives a whole appendix showing how, because redshift moves light from one band to another, distant objects dim faster within the optical band than they dim overall. Uh, Terrence? We knew that, thanks. Astronomers (a) have telescopes capable of measuring pretty much all wavelengths, and (b) know how to add.
russ_watters said:I found this post on another forum: http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=94861
So I was wrong. If it were just philosobabble, it wouldn't be wrong, it would just be useless. But it says concrete things about reality that are in the domain of physics - and is straightforwardly wrong about them. That makes it pure crackpottery.
Null Physics is a theoretical concept that describes the behavior of systems where the net force acting on an object is zero. This concept is often used in the study of motion and energy.
While Newtonian Physics focuses on the forces acting on an object, Null Physics looks at the overall net force on the object. In other words, Newtonian Physics considers all forces, while Null Physics only considers the resultant force.
Yes, Null Physics can be applied to real-world scenarios such as the motion of objects in a frictionless environment or the balance of forces in a system.
Some practical applications of Null Physics include analyzing the motion of satellites in orbit, predicting the behavior of structures under different loads, and understanding the behavior of fluids in a steady state.
Null Physics is a simplified model and does not take into account all forces acting on an object. As a result, it may not accurately describe complex systems with multiple forces acting on them. Additionally, it does not account for factors such as friction and air resistance, which can affect the motion of objects in the real world.