Null Physics

Rev Hellfire

I'm sure a I'm not the only one to have noticed adverts for "Our Undiscovered Universe" and Null Physics by Terence Witt.

While I'm curious to see what its about, it smacks of crackpotism and I'm to tight to fork out the money for such a thing. So has anyone actually read it and what was the verdict ?

npc_100

Haven't read it myself, but was curious when I saw some of the advertising in some magazines. did a search on the net and found an interesting thread on James randi's website that discusses the book (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=94861), Terence Witt (or someone claiming to be him) appears to have been involved in the discussion and didn't appear to sway many of the people involved. It is a book with results, of which nothing has been published in peer reviewed journals (well when I last checked in summer 08). I wam not saying it is crackpot as I have not read it, but the signs aren't good. Certainly would shell out to money to find out.

RealPhysics

npc_100 wrote: »

Haven't read it myself, but was curious when I saw some of the advertising in some magazines. did a search on the net and found an interesting thread on James randi's website that discusses the book (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=94861), Terence Witt (or someone claiming to be him) appears to have been involved in the discussion and didn't appear to sway many of the people involved. It is a book with results, of which nothing has been published in peer reviewed journals (well when I last checked in summer 08). I wam not saying it is crackpot as I have not read it, but the signs aren't good. Certainly would shell out to money to find out.

See this review of “Our Undiscovered Universe” by Terence Witt from a professional physicist:
http://web.mit.edu/~bmonreal/www/Null_Physics_Review.html

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.

...a bullet dodged...!