Vortex Math Returns!

Cranks never give up. That’s something that I’ve learned in my time writing this blog. It doesn’t matter how stupid an idea is. It doesn’t matter how obviously wrong, how profoundly ridiculous. No matter what, cranks will continue to push their ridiculous ideas.

One way that this manifests is the comments on old posts never quite die. Years after I initially write a post, I still have people coming back and trying to share “new evidence” for their crankery. George Shollenberger, the hydrino cranks, the Brown’s gas cranks, the CTMU cranks, they’ve all come back years after a post with more of the same-old, same-old. Most of the time, I just ignore it. There’s nothing to be gained in just rehashing the same old nonsense. It’s certainly not going to convince the cranks, and it’s not going to be interesting to my less insane readers. But every once in a while, something comes along in those comments, something that’s actually new and amusing comes along. Today I’ve got an example of that for you: one of the proponents of Markus Rodin’s “Vortex Math” has returned to tell us the great news!

I have linked Vortex Based Mathematics with Physics and can prove most physics using vortex based mathematics. I am writing an article call “Temporal Physics of Vortex Based Mathematics” here: http://www.vortexspace.org

This is a lovely thing, even without needing to actually look at his article. Just start at the very first line! He claims that he can “prove most of physics”.

Science doesn’t do proof.

What science does is make observations, and then based on those observations produce models of the universe. Then, using that model, it makes predictions, and compares those predictions with further observations. By doing that over and over again, we get better and better models of how the universe works. Science is never sure about anything – because all it can do is check how well the model works. It’s always possible that any model doesn’t describe how things actually work. But it gives us a good approximation, in a way that allows us to understand how things work. Or, not quite how things work, but how we can affect the world by our actions. Our model might not capture what’s really happening – but it’s got predictive power.

To give an example of this: our model of the universe says that the earth orbits the sun, which is orbits the galactic core, which is moving through the universe. It’s possible that this is wrong. You can propose an alternative model in which the earth is the stationary center of the universe, and everything moves around it. As a model, it’s not very attractive, because to make it fit our observations, it requires a huge amount of complexity – it’s a far, far more complex model than our standard one, and it’s much harder to use to make accurate predictions. But it can be made to work, just as well as our standard one. It’s possible that that’s how the universe actually works. I don’t think any reasonable person actually believes that the universe works that way, but it’s possible that our entire model is wrong. Science can’t prove that our model is correct. It can just show that it’s the simplest model that matches our observations.

But Mr. Calhoun claims that he can prove physics. That claim shows that he has no idea of what science is, or what science means. And if he doesn’t understand something that simple, why should we trust him to understand any more?

Ah, but when we take a look at some of his writings… it’s a lovely pile of rubbish. Remember the mantra of this blog? The worst math is no math. Mr. Calhoun’s writing is a splendid example of this. He claims to be doing science, math, and mathematical proofs – but when you actually look at his writing, there’s not a spec of genuine math to be found!

Let’s start with a really quick reminder of what vortex math is. Take the sequence of doubling in natural numbers in base-10. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, …. If, for each of those numbers, you sum the digits until you get a single digit result, you get: 1, 2, 4, 8, 7, 5, 1, 2, 4, 8, 7, 5, … It turns into a repeated sequence, 1, 2, 4, 8, 7, 5, over and over again. You can do the same thing in the reverse direction, by halving: 1, 0.5, 0.25, 0.125, 0.0625, 0.03125, 0.015625, 0.0078125, where the digits sum to 1, 5, 7, 8, 4, 2, 1, 5, …

According to Rodin, this demonstrates something profound. This is the heart of Vortex mathematics: this cycle in the numbers shows that there’s some kind of energy flow that is fundamental to the universe, based on this kind of repeating sequence.

So, how does Mr. Calhoun use this? He thinks that he can connect it to black holes and white holes:

Do not forget that we already learned that black holes suck in matter while “compressing” it; and, on the other side of the black hole is a white hole that then takes the same matter and spits it back out while “de-compressing” the matter. The “magnetic warp” video on Youtube shows the same torus shape Marko had illustrated in his “vortex based mathematics” video [see below]:

You can clearly see the vortex in the center of the torus magnets. This is made possible using two Ferrofluid Hele-Shaw Cells [Hele-Shaw effect]. Here are a few links about using ferrofluid hele-shaw cell to view magnetic fields:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hele-Shaw_flow

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/ejournal/issues/volume2issue1/snyder/

Here is a quote from a Youtube user about the magnets:

“Walter Rawls, a? scientist who did a great deal of research with Albert Roy Davis, said that he believes at the center of every magnet there is a miniature black hole.”

I have not verified the above statement about Walter Rawls as of yet. However, the above images prove beyond doubt Marko’s torus universe mathematical geometry. Now lets take a look at Marko’s designs:

The pictures look kind-of-like this silly torus thing that Rodin likes to draw: therefore they prove beyond doubt that Rodin’s rubbish is correct! Wow, now that’s a mathematical proof!

It gets worse from there.

The next section is “The Physics of Time”.

If you looked at the Youtube videos of the true motion of the Earth through space you now know that we are literally falling into a black hole that is at the center of the galaxy. The motion of the Earth; all of the rotation and revolution, all of that together is caused by space-time. Time is acually the rate and pattern of the motion of matter as it moves through space. It is the fourth dimension. you have probably heard this if you have studied Einstien theories: “As an object moves faster the rate of its motion [or time] slows down”. Sounds like an oxymoron doesn’t it? Well it not so strange once you understand how the fabric of space-time relates to Vortex Based Mathematics.

Motion of the Earth

The planet Earth rotates approx every twenty-four hours. It makes a complete 360o rotation every twenty-four hours. That amount of time is the frequency of the rate of rotation.

Looking down from the north pole of the Earth, you will see that if we divide the sphere into 36 equal parts the sunrise would have to pass through all of the degrees of the sphere in order to make a complete cycle:

Remember the Earth is a “giant magnet” that is spinning. The electromagnetic field of this “giant magnet” is moving out of the north pole [which is really at the geographic south pole] and going to the south pole [which again is really at the geographic north pole]. This electromagnetic field is moving or spinning [see youtube video at top] according to a frequency or cycle.

I don’t know if you realize this, but matter can be compressed or expanded without it being destroyed. A black hole does not de-molecularize matter then in passing to the white hole reassemble it again. Nothing that is demolecularized can naturally be put back together again. If an object is destroyed then is it destroyed; there is no reassembly. Matter can be however, compressed and decompressed. As you probably know and have heard this before there is an huge amount of distance between the atoms in your body. Like the giant void of space and much like the distances between planets in our solar system; the atomic matter in our bodies is just as similar in the amount of space between each atom.

What fills the spaces between each atom? Well, Its space-time. It is the fabric of the inertia ether that all matter in space moves through. Spacetime or what I call “etherspace” is what I have come to realize as “the space in between the spaces”. This “etherspace” can be compressed and then decompressed. Etherspace can enable all of the matter in your body to be greatly compressed without your body being destroyed; and at the same time functioning as it normally should. The ether space then allows your body to be decompressed again; all the while functioning as it should.

It is the movement of spacetime or “ether space” that is causing the rotation and revolving of the planet we live on. It is also responsible for the motions of all of the bodies in space.

Magnets will, whether great or small, act as engines for etherspace. They pull in etherspace at the south pole and also pump out etherspace at the north pole of the magnet. All magnets do this; the great planet earth all the way to the little magnet that sticks to your refridgerator door. Vortex based mathematics prove all of this. I will show you.

As I stated earlier the Earth is a giant magnet and if we apply the Vortex Based Mathematics to the 10o degree spacings of this “giant magnet” lets see what happens. Now we are going to see the de-compression of space-time eminatiing from the true north pole of the giant magnet of the Earth. Let’s deploy a doubling circuit to the spacings of the planet. We will start at 0o and go all the way to 360o .

Calhoun certainly shows that he’s a worthy inheritor of the mantle of Rodin. Rodin’s entire rubbish is really based on taking a fun property of our particular base-10 numerical notation, and without any good reason, believing that it must be a profound fundamental property of the universe. Calhoun takes two arbitrary things: the 360 degree conventional angle measurement, and the 24 hour day, and likewise, without any good reason, without even any argument, believes that they are fundamental properties of the universe.

Where does the 24 hour day come from? I did a bit of research, and there are a couple of possible arguments. It appears to date back to the old empire of Egypt. The argument that I found most convincing is based on how the Egyptians counted on their hands. They did a lot of things in base-12, because using your thumb to point out the joints of the fingers on your hand, you can count to 12. The origin of our base-10 is based on using fingers to count; base-12 is similar, but based on a slightly different way of counting on your fingers. Using base-12, they decided to describe time in terms of counting periods of light and darkness: 12 bright periods, 12 dark ones. There’s nothing scientific or fundamental about it: it’s an arbitrary way of measuring time. The Greeks adopted it from the Egyptians; the Romans adopted it from the Greeks; and we adopted it from the Romans. There is no fundamental reason why it is the one true correct way of measuring time.

Similarly, the 360 degree system of angular measure is not the least bit fundamental. It dates back to the Babylonians. In writing, the Babylonions used a base-60 system, instead of our base-10. In their explorations of geometry, they observed that if you inscribed a hexagon inside of a circle, each of the segments of the hexagon was the same length as the radius of the circle. So they measured an angle in terms of which segment of the inscribed hexagon it crossed. Within those sig segments, they divided them into sixty sections, because what else would people who use base-60 use? And then to subdivide those, they used 60 again. The 360 degree system is a random historical accident, not a profound truth.

I don’t want to get too far off track (or too farther off track), but: In fact, when you’re talking about angles, there is a fundamental measurement, called a radian. Whenever you do math using angles, you end up needing to introduce a conversion factor which converts your angle into radians.

Anyway – this rubbish about the 24 hour day and 360 degree circle are what passes for math in Calhoun’s world. This is as close to math or to correctness that Calhoun gets.

What’s even worse is his babble about black holes and white holes.

Both black and white holes are theoretical predictions of relativity. The math involved is not simple: it’s based on Einstein’s field equations from general relativity:

 R_{munu} - frac{1}{2}g_{munu}R + g_{mueta}Lambda = frac{8pi G}{c^4}T_{munu}

In this equation, the subscripted variables are all symmetric 4×4 tensors. Black and white holes are “solutions” to particular configurations of those tensors. This is not elementary math, not by a long-shot. But if you want to really talk about black and white holes, this is how you do it.

Translating from the math into prose is always a problem, because the prose is far less precise, and it’s inevitably misleading. No matter how well you think you understand based on the prose, you don’t understand the concept, because you haven’t been told enough, in a precise enough way, to actually understand it.

That said, the closest I can come is the following.

We’ll start with black holes. Black holes are much easier to understand: put enough mass into a small enough area of space, and you wind up with a boundary line, called the event horizon, where anything that crosses that boundary, no matter what – even massless stuff like light – can never escape. We believe, based on careful analysis, that we’ve observed black holes in our universe. (Or rather, we’ve seen evidence that they exist; you can’t actually see a black hole; but you can see its effects.) We call a black hole a singularity, because nothing beyond the event horizon is visible – it looks like a hole in space. But it isn’t: it’s got a mass, which we can measure. Matter goes in to a black hole, and crosses the event horizon. We can no longer see the matter. We can’t observe what happens to it once it crosses the horizon. But we know it’s still there, because we can observe the mass of the hole, and it increases as matter enters.

(It was pointed out to me on twitter that my explanation of the singularity is wrong. See what happens when you try to explain mathematical stuff non-mathematically?)

White holes are a much harder idea. We’ve never seen one. In fact, we don’t really think that they can exist in our universe. In concept, they’re the opposite of a black hole: they are a region with a boundary than nothing can ever cross. In a black hole, you can’t cross the boundary an escape; in a white hole, once something crosses the boundary, it can’t ever re-enter. White holes only exist in a strange conceptual case, called an eternal black hole – that is, a black hole that has been there forever, which was never formed by gravitational collapse.

There are some folks who’ve written speculative work based on the solutions to the white hole field equations that suggest that our universe is the result of a white hole, inside of the event horizon of a black hole in an enclosing universe. But in this solution, the white hole exists for an infinitely small period of time: all of the matter in it ejects into a new space-time realm in an instant. There’s no actual evidence for this, beyond the fact that it’s an interesting way of interpreting a solution to the field equations.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that when it comes to black holes, Calhoun is talking out his ass. A black hole is not one end of a tunnel that leads to a white hole. If you actually do the math, that doesn’t work. A black hole does not “compress” matter and pass it to a white hole which decompresses it. A black hole is just a huge clump of very dense matter; when something crosses the event horizon of a black hole, it just becomes part of that clump of matter.

His babble about magnetism is similar: we’ve got some very elegant field equations, called Maxwell’s equations, which describe how magnetism and electric fields work. It’s beautiful, if complex, mathematics. And they most definitely do not describe a magnet as something that “pumps eitherspace from the south pole to the north pole”.

There’s no proof here. And there’s no math here. There’s nothing here but the midnight pot-fueled ramblings of a not particularly bright sci-fi fan, who took some wonderful stories, and believed that they were based on something true.

30 thoughts on “Vortex Math Returns!

  1. Chad

    This is such an entertaining story. I hope the multiple creators of vortex math start a war of competing theories. How on earth would they argue with each other? Perhaps the author of this should contribute to the science with his ideas and try to wrest control of the theoretical direction. It can’t be long until the science turns into a full-fledged cult.

    I also wonder whether posts like this will give them more ideas, like ditching arbitrary degrees for radians (good luck with patterns in transcendental numbers). Or maybe we could convince them to find a prime number generating function. Surely vortex math and the mythical ordering of numbers in base ten can be used to determine the primes. What f has the property: f(n) = the nth prime number.

    Reply
  2. Ben

    I wonder what proportion of cranks that you talk about have some form of mental illness, for example schizophrenia. I’ve really enjoyed your writing about mental health in the past, so perhaps you could weigh in on that.

    Reply
    1. MarkCC Post author

      I think that most of the time, mental illness has very little to do with it.

      See my post about mental illness and responsibility. If you look at the cranks that I write about, they may be stupid, ignorant, illiterate, pompous, etc. But they’re not delusional in the psychiatric sense of the word. They’re aware of what they’re saying.

      If you actually talk to people with schizophrenia, it’s a profoundly disabling disease. Portrayals of it seem to always take two possible paths: it’s either relatively benign, a cute personality quirk; or it’s dangerous, violent psycho-killer delusion. In fact, most of the time, it’s neither. It’s a horrible personal tragedy.

      People who suffer from it struggle to function day to day. Even with awareness of their illness, with the best treatments available, it can be a terrible burden, a huge amount of effort for the person to get by.

      It is not something that typically manifests as fascination with crackpot scientific theories.

      In my experience, the biggest thing that crackpots have in common isn’t something like mental illness. It’s laziness.

      Look at Mr. Calhoun. He wants to be a scientific genius, respected and remembered for changing our understanding of the world, the way that Einstein is. But he doesn’t want to actually do the work. Becoming a scientist, spending years researching in the hope that maybe, just maybe, you’ll be able to find something – that doesn’t appeal. But if some crackpottery like this vortex rubbish were true, then he could come in, spend a couple of days writing up his little essay, and boom! He’s one of the greatest scientists of all time!

      This is the common thread that underlies so many of the crackpots – from the creationists, who want to overthrow evolution without bothering to understand the evidence that they argue against, to the electric universe guys, to the hydrino supporters, to the brown’s gas cranks, to the neocatastrophists. They want the prestige and respect of great scientists, but they want it *NOW*.

      Reply
      1. Harald M.

        I’m not so sure that’s its only laziness; I think it’s a little more complicated: We humans have something that is called “empathy” – we can and do guess how others feel. However, this (not at all one-dimensional) capability varies widely with different people; at some point, having too little empathy becomes a sociopathic property.

        All the “crackpots” I have met or whose texts I skimmed over (we had many laughs at some of them at the Tech Univ in Vienna when I was studying there) “could not listen”, “were very good at not hearing things they did not want to hear”: Essentially, they could not *feel* *why* someone was even discussing with them, let alone why their opposite would say the specific things he or she said.

        So I do not think that it is laziness: It is a “closed mind about others”.

        I still believe they are poor people who’d deserve some sort of help; but I hope that none of them ever is intelligent enough to have a job near me …

        Reply
  3. KeithB

    I used to work with a crackpot, his theory had something to do with everything being in threes and quantum mechanics was all wrong. He actually got an appointment with Kip Thorne to “discuss” it.

    Anyway, he was not mentally ill, other than being a bit eccentric.

    Reply
  4. Blake Stacey

    I’ve often seen it written that one convenience of the numbers 12, 60 and 360 for the Babylonians is that they each have a goodly quantity of integer divisors. This would be convenient, so the argument goes, when handling fractions. The appeal of a 360-degree circle was enhanced, it’s also said, by there being roughly 360 days in a year (that “roughly” being the source of calendrical issues which have burdened us ever since). The science historian George Sarton pointed out that having a large base like 60 for their number system would, moreover, have cut down the practical ambiguities due to lacking a good place-value notation: “there would be such a tremendous difference between, let us say, a length of 7 cubits and one of 420 cubits or 25,200 cubits that one or the other was indubitably meant.” [Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece, p. 70 (1952).]

    Not being a historian of mathematics, I can’t say much in support or contradiction of any of this.

    Reply
  5. Julian Frost

    Years after I initially write a post, I still have people coming back and trying to share “new evidence” for their crankery.

    I’m a little surprised. Doesn’t the system allow you to lock threads so that people can no longer comment once a post reaches a certain age?

    There are some folks who’ve written speculative work based on the solutions to the white hole field equations that suggest that our universe is the result of a white hole, inside of the event horizon of a black hole in an enclosing universe. But in this solution, the white hole exists for an infinitely small period of time: all of the matter in it ejects into a new space-time realm in an instant.

    That’s a very, uhh, interesting way to describe the Big Bang.

    Reply
  6. Jim Sweeney

    I think there’s a little more depth to the history of 12 hours and 360 days than you’re presenting. The earth takes roughly 360 days to orbit the sun, the moon takes nearly 30 days to orbit the earth, and Jupiter orbits the sun in about 12 years.

    To a first approximation, there’s considerable symmetry in these periods, and it would have taken many years of close observation to determine that none of these cycles are actually synchronous. A beautiful system that doesn’t quite work can be surprisingly convincing.

    Reply
    1. Caleb Kent Grayson

      perfect symmetry is not interesting. near perfect symmetry in cycles is because it gradually evolves – have some continuity of past while gradually integrating novelty. no one wants to listen to a sine wave all day — though i suppose the desire to make simple symmetrical models is similar to the desire to listen to pop music.

      i was really hoping the author would go into the mathematics of VBM here since this is a math blog and not spend so much time on the non-mathematical stuff. i remember seeing a vide where several algebraic functions were performed with VBM. where’s the discussion of that here? or the reasons why numbers do reduce in such vortex like patterns and why that isn’t significant in modeling the material world?

      Reply
      1. markcc Post author

        The problem is, there are no mathematics to VBM. It’s just an observation that you get repetitive cycles using repeated multiplication/addition, with a ton of metaphysical gobble-de-gook piled on top of it.

        Reply
  7. _Arthur

    The key word is “roughly”: 365.24219 is roughly like 360, 29.53 is “roughly” 30, and 11.862 years is roughly 12 years. Striking symmetry, allright.

    Reply
  8. Richard

    To discredit ancient civilizations based on their available technology vs ours today seems a rather short sighted view of things to me. Years of their crude observations being reasonably correct seems to me to be a great accomplishment. All math today came from these first rough calculations of our ancestors.

    With all of our so called advancements in mathematical theory we still can not recreate or explain the ancient wonders of constructions on this planet. So you might want to rethink your attitude about their accuracies in things and their relevant intelligence in that time.

    Reply
    1. MarkCC Post author

      I didn’t discredit anything.

      The Babylonians worked out a lot of math, and I don’t dispute that for a moment. Studying the history of math, and seeing how different civilizations did it is absolutely fascinating.

      The point that I was making in this post is that our numeric representations and units are arbitrary measures. To the universe, there’s nothing special about base-10 or base-60. To the way that particles interact, to the way that matter and energy interact in our universe, there’s nothing special about our way of writing numbers, or about our units of time, or our units of angular measure, or our units of mass and energy.

      Vortex math is based on the idea that there’s something special and magical about our base-10 notation for numbers, and that patterns in that notation reveal deep fundamental truths about the universe.

      They don’t. We happen to have 10 fingers, so we’re comfortable with base-10 numbers. That’s it.

      As for the rest of your rubbish? What constructions can we not recreate or explain? That’s a common line of bullshit used by two-bit half-assed mystics to impress rubes. But it’s got no real basis in fact.

      For a lot of things, we don’t know exactly how they made them. There are multiple ways of doing things, and we don’t know which they did. But that’s a different statement from “we cannot recreate or explain”. I don’t think that there’s anything on this planet created by humans that we can’t figure out how to recreate, using the same technologies that the people who built them had available.

      Reply
      1. rob

        While championing the integrity of scientific process and analysis of evidence; I see a great deal of emotionally driven language and concepts coming from the moderator and many of the posters here. To call those exploring new angles of understanding ” crackpots” is a dismissive behavior that does not promote the kind of open minded and inquisitive character that defines true innovative thought and advancment. Look at the personal accounts of those individuals throughout history who have ushered forth different paradigmatic shifts in our science and thought. These where individuals exploring entirely new and innovative ways of looking at old quandaries. The point here is that things like vortex math describe an undeniably constant relationship between our prime numbers. To judge it as rubbish or profound are both wastes of time and energy. As theory is applied to our technology and lifestyle in practical applications we can judge it one way or the other. until then it is prudent to acknowledge all new systems we encounter as having potential we have may not understand yet. We stay humble and are not blinded by arrogance.

        Reply
        1. MarkCC Post author

          My apologies for leaving this in the moderation queue for so long. I was on a family vacation overseas, and had no data access until I returned this morning. I’ll reply to your comment tomorrow, after I’ve had some sleep.

          Reply
        2. Richard

          Exactly my point, all misunderstood radical postulations ultimately prove out or they do not, but they do evoke exploration and further our thought processes.

          Reply
        3. MarkCC Post author

          There’s having an open mind, and there’s letting your brain dribble out your ears.

          People have ideas all the time. Some are good, some are bad. If we gave every proposed idea our full attention, we’d never have time to do anything else. When we see a new idea, we assess it, and decide whether or not it’s worth our attention.

          Not all ideas are equal. I could claim that there is no such thing as an electromagnetic field; that in fact, on a sub-microscropic level there are tiny green demons that each own their own territory, and that everything that we thing is magnetic is actually the result of alliances and conflicts between rival tribes of demons. If I were to seriously propose that, you’d justifiably discard it with no more than a moments thought. That’s not being closed-minded; that’s perfectly reasonable. If I made a claim like that, I’d have to support it with a hell of a lot of very compelling evidence before anyone would take it seriously.

          In the real world, ideas come in a wide range of forms:

          1. There are ideas which are obviously and provably correct. Examples: 2+2=4. If you put an alternating current through a coil of wire, it will create a magnetic field of an easily computed strength. These are things which we can easily test.
          2. There are ideas which are obviously and provably incorrect. For example: 2+2=5. The square root of 2 is a integer. Water is made of electricity.
          3. There are ideas which seem plausible, but which are incorrect. Examples: the 4 element model of matter. We know that it’s wrong – but if you don’t know any of the stuff we learned about matter, it sounds good, and it does appear to explain some things until you look at it in greater depth.
          4. There are ideas which seem plausible, but which aren’t provable either way. Example: string theory. It’s a fascinating idea. It fits everything that we can observe. But there are simpler things that fit our observations. ANd it’s sufficiently vague that almost any observation can be fit into its framework: nothing that we can currently do can disprove it – not because it’s necessarily correct, but because it’s got so many unknown parameters that we can find a way of making it fit any observation.
          5. There are ideas which seem absolutely ridiculous, but which nevertheless appear to be true. For example, wave-particle duality. It seems so crazy, so incomprehensible, so ridiculous – and yet, it’s true.
          6. There are ideas which seem absolutely ridiculous, because they are absolutely ridiculous. For example, Rodin’s rubbish.
          7. Ideas which are just so hard to understand that we can’t assess them without a lot of work. For example, the standard model of particle physics.

          When we see a new idea, we try to figure out which category it goes into. The more outlandish an idea is, the more evidence it requires. If you propose an idea like wave-particle duality without providing a lot of evidence. If you don’t provide the evidence, or the evidence isn’t reproducible/verifyable, then you should expect that you idea will, justly, be ignored or mocked by the world at large.

          Rodin is proposing something ridiculous: that patterns in base-10 numbers somehow mean that by wrapping coils in the right way, the laws of physics that have been withstood every test anyone can imagine can be broken. He has no plausible mechanism for any of this beyond digit-adding patterns in base-10 notation. Similar patterns occur in other numeric notations, but according to Rodin, the base-10 patterns are special, for no reason that he can explain. He makes such extravagant claims about these patterns, but he has not produced one single solitary shred of evidence to support them.

          Ignoring his ideas due to their implausibility and lack of evidence isn’t arrogance. It’s not being closed-minded. It’s being reasonable. If Rodin were to come forward with real compelling evidence of his ideas, and we still ignored them in the face of real evidence, that would be something different. But that evidence doesn’t exist at the moment – so until it does, there’s nothing wrong with pointing out the simple fact that Rodin is making extraordinarily grand claims that fly in the face of reality as we understand it without a shred of evidence to support his claims.

          Reply
      2. Caleb Kent Grayson

        MarkCC,
        you understand that this statement is not a scientific or mathematical one but a philosophical opinion, right? i’m assuming you have evidence for this or do you feel it is not necessary?

        it also assumes that ‘we’ are not apart of or expressions of the universe.

        “To the universe, there’s nothing special about base-10 or base-60. To the way that particles interact, to the way that matter and energy interact in our universe, there’s nothing special about our way of writing numbers, or about our units of time, or our units of angular measure, or our units of mass and energy.”

        Reply
        1. akismet-6f040d95a215ed01ce2553f524bc1ecb

          Actually, that is a mathematical and scientific statement.

          The vortex math stuff is, ultimately, based on two assumptions, both problematical from a mathematical/scientific point of view.

          (1) That base-10 is somehow special and distinguished in the universe. Based on scientific observation, it is not. There is nothing that we have observed in the universe that’s special about base-10 numeric notation. Humans have 10 fingers – so humans frequently choose base-10 for numbers. (But not always – base 12 and base 60 have both also been adopted by some cultures.)

          (2) That the cycle of numbers produced by doubling and arithmetic reduction in base-10 has some deep and profound meaning. Again, there is absolutely no evidence to support that.

          If you use an exponential-base number system like ours, *every* possible number system will exhibit cyclic behaviors like the ones Rodin and friends found – simply because you’re performing a repetitive process in a finite state-space. For example:

          Base-5 with doubling : 1, 2, 4, 3, 1, 2, 4, 3, … (arguably a more interesting one than the base-10, because it covers every non-zero value in the number space.)
          Base-6 with doubling: 1, 2, 4, 2, 4, 2, 4, ….
          Base 7 with trebling: 1, 3, 6, 4, 6, 4, 6, …
          Base 10 with trebling: 1, 3, 6, 9, 9, 9, 9, …

          These things aren’t profound observations about the nature of the universe: they’re inevitable consequences of a repetitive operation in a finite space.

          If you want to claim that base-10 is somehow special, you need to provide evidence to support it. At the moment, every bit of evidence that we have is that all exponential numeric systems
          are fully equivalent: anything that can be done in any one of them can be done in all of them. In fact, mathematically, that’s not even subject to argument: it’s easily provable. There is no mathematical statement that can only be expressed in base-10. There’s a ton of mathematical proofs of that – for example, in one form, that’s the Church-Turing thesis. There’s no computation that can be performed by a computing device using base-10 notation that can’t be performed by a computer using binary, or base-16, or unary, or roman numerals, or….

          Reply
  9. Trevor Hulette

    Pudddin is in the proof…. research starship coils… there ability to create a vortex electric field and also contain it in the core not resonate outward and around as any other electric or magnetic field does.

    Reply
    1. MarkCC Post author

      Give me a call when it actually works, not when it’s just some bullshit claim from a scam artist.

      Rodin *claims* that “starship coils” are derived from his vortex math rubbish; he claims that they have all sorts of magical properties. He also says that he can’t build one, because “he’s not an electrical engineer”.

      Look at how he claims it should be made; it’s a very, very simple process. But he can’t make one that actually works. Gosh, I wonder why?

      In other words: “I’ve created a wonderful magical device that creates free energy, and it really works! Only I can’t show you a working one. But trust me: it works! I just need a bunch of your money in order to hire people to build one.”

      Reply
  10. Haris Askano

    I think, even if he is totally wrong, someone else might give it a thought, proving where he is wrong and finding that way the real answer. Without the first person, the second one might never have come up with this thought. In general, at least from an artistic angle, it doesnt matter what everyone say, as for if its true or not. Everything can be true, or not. Do we know? We do! But only with from our knowledge for day one till today. Just think of this: If it is about to be something new, no matter what, and it is NOt based on something before, it is almost impossible to understand it. We use our past to understand the present. If the present gives something which wasnt there in the past we cant understand it. An example if you dont mind. if we would take an airplane as an example, we would fail. Because we had flying objects in our life so far(birds, flies etc). But if we were living somewhere, where we have not gone anywhere and have no wide range transportation options available, it would be hard to understand the fact that what you see in front of you, as far as your eyes can see is not flat, but a very slight curve and that fore earth is not flat, but a sphere. This was hard, but think about it, what would happen if we never had any spherical items around us! How difficult would it then be for us to accept it? And even thuther, how would anyone ever come up with such an idea? It had to be a guessing, with no prove. With nothing to hold on as an example to base it on it. In my opinion, everything can be, maybe not in a we understand things until today. (sorry for my poor expression, english is not my native language)

    Reply
  11. robert walden

    I was really hoping for something substantial so I can lay this subject to rest to me you seem as crazy as he does. Kind of like fighting fire with fire. Someone throw some water on the subject so I can move on. Just blah blah sounds like the witch trials for someone trying to tell them the earth is round. A bunch of insults is all I saw. Can someone explain the math and where it goes wrong?

    Reply
    1. markcc Post author

      No one can actually *explain* the math and where it goes wrong, because there *is* no real math.

      Vortex math is basically “gee whiz, look how cool this addition trick is, and I can do all sorts of magical stuff with it, but I’m not going to tell you how”.

      Reply
  12. CTMadis

    Sir:

    While your ultimate contention may be correct, your logic would appear suspect as well. The mere fact that one observes a predictable and repeatable series resulting from a repetitive operation is neither evidence for or against its substantive value. Under your logic, the Fibinocci series is likewise rubbish, despite its near universal admiration for its presence in the real wold. The fact that the operations yield similar repeating series in other bases is likewise not dispositive in proving or disproving whether the observed series has intrinsic merit. Where your argument gains currency is in its application to our observable and testable physical universe. It appears to have no valid existence or manifestation under the scrutiny of scientific method. No physical phenomena can be predicted and tested under the system, not has anyone demonstrated it can produce better results than conventional applied maths. That said, when we examine the question of the reality of complex numbers, we find them routinely used in advanced physics to describe quantum systems. Yet, the existence of the complex conjugate space is beyond the reach of provability. As pertains VBM you are right to intimate it seems to be much more based in metaphysical interpretation than anchored in physical reality. Thusly, it is of little utility and is tantamount to one making up their own vocabulary with implied meanings for things already known by other names. A rose by any other name…

    Where science loses credibility is when it’s arrogant advocates chastise and belittle rather than employ sound reasoning and engage in logical discourse. Averring to the point that complex mathematics are used in conventional physics such a tensor math does little other than to serve as a crude rhetorical device. In totality, your missive is unnecessarily critical, dismissive and serves to alienate rather than educate.

    Reply
    1. Caleb Grayson

      “it seems to be much more based in metaphysical interpretation than anchored in physical reality.”
      who are the metaphysicists that could discuss the value of a math that’s descriptive/of value to metaphysics? is their study of less value or less rational beciase it’s not real?

      Reply
  13. Pingback: Zombie Math in the Vortex | Good Math/Bad Math

  14. Haywood J Blohme

    LOL You likey apples?
    Too bad you have nothing here in your rant on a math you weren’t taught. Rattles your cage because of how useless you yourself are along with a science of observations that makes use of circular definitions you MUST overlook, as a form of religion, as we are provided severely lacking explanations. What flavor Kool-aid do you have in your big gulp? D

    Reply

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