I am looking through Scientific American and a new magazine I just subscribed to, Science Illustrated (with lovely illustrations, I have to say), and what do I continue to come across? These damn 2-page ads that some guy with a BSEE and way too much money on his hands has plastered across most popular scientific magazines for the past year to sell his new book. [Our Undiscovered Universe: Introducing Null Physics (no longer available on Amazon.com)] Terrence Witt has decided he will rewrite physics in a way that only an outsider (read: untrained) person can. He claims that science has been “stalled for 30 years” and he can answer all the questions of the Universe. He claims that science should be able to answer “why” the universe exists and “what” caused the Big Bang (except he claims there was no Big Bang).
It is annoying to see someone who has no real understanding of science trying to rewrite all of physics from the ground up using his own circular logic (read the JREF forums for some debunking of his “theories”). It is also annoying that someone has so much money, they want to spend it on flooding popular science magazines in the hope people will “believe” what he writes because they see ads in so many places. People might decide the book is peer-reviewed and legitimate just because the magazines allowed the advertising. Well, I think it is an inappropriate and desperate act for these magazines to accept his advertising dollars, when there are no mainstream physicists who think he has any worthwhile ideas, and most think he is just plain wrong. (I am sure he has a self-consistant argument for the case he presents, but the fact he has convinced himself he is right doesn’t mean he knows what he is talking about. He is using fallacious arguments to sell his book (read my write-up on Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit). He is an authority because he says so, but if you challenge him he claims only an outsider can bring paradigm change to “modern science”. As much as he would probably protest, he is coming from the same camp as Ben Stein. He is able to manipulate the facts and show correlations based on limited, select data and he confuses correlations with causation. Fortunately for him, if he has an explanation of what happened before the Big Bang, it is unlikely anyone will ever be able to prove him wrong, but that in itself is proof that what he is offering is a (flawed) philosophy and not science.
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2 responses so far ↓
1
Reality Check
// Sep 28, 2008 at 11:44 am
Actually it is not even valid mathematics or science. See this review of “Our Undiscovered Universe” by Terence Witt from a professional physicist:
http://web.mit.edu/~bmonreal/www/Null_Physics_Review.html
2
Reality Check
// Nov 5, 2008 at 7:50 pm
Also see my review at http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~fiski/ouu_review.html
The flaws of this crackpot book are many and include:
Redefining the concept of infinity as a length with magnitude.
Defining a line as a series of points written as zeros, treating them as numbers so that they add up to zero and then treating the number zero as a point again!
A really bad atomic model “proving” that a electron orbiting a proton has a ground state that it cannot decay from by creating a new physical law.
Using the high school description of a neutron as a proton plus an electron and not realizing that this is just his atomic model!
Postulating that galaxies have “galactic cores” which are super massive objects that are not quite black holes and not realizing that the centre of the Milky Way is well observed. These recycle stars into hydrogen. Oddly enough astronomers have not noticed dozens of stars vanishing from the galactic centre in the many images that they have taken over the last few decades.
Conclusion: Bad mathematics and even worse physics.
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