Sorry that the blog has been so quiet lately; I managed to catch a vicious flu for the first time since I started getting flu shots, so I’ve been feeling too ill to write. I’m still far from recovered, but I’m feeling well enough to share a bit of delightful foolishness with you.

After seeing my recent post about a relativity denier, a reader sent me a link to another extremely amusing anti-relativity site. (In fact, I’ve recieved a bunch of links to anti-relativity sites; I’m only posting the most amusing ones.) This one has
several particularly amusing properties, but from my point of view what makes it
such a great target is that it uses the mathematical precision of relativity as part of its argument against it. You see, math is ultimately the basis of a grand anti-religious conspiracy to replace god with randomness and evolution!

The site is called “Common Sense Science”. Alas, the full range of their insanity isn’t available for me to view: they publish textbooks and journals, and to get the full details about their “theories”,
you must buy the books and/or subscribe to the journals. But there’s more than
enough there on the site to see what they’re going on about.

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In one of Jeff Shallit’s recent posts on the Panda’s Thumb, he mentioned that Tom Bethel, aside from being a creationist, was also a relativity denier. In general, relativity denial is a veritable mine of bad math. So I went looking – and found Bethel’s anti-relativity site. As I expected, we’ve got extremely silly bad math. In fact, it’s the worst kind of bad math – it’s a lack of math masquerading as being math. It’s also, sadly, full of pathetic errors.

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Over in the thread about Engineer Borg and his wacked-out electromagnetic theory
of gravity, a commenter popped up and pointed at the web-site of someone named Tom Bearden, who supposedly has shown how to generate free “vacuum” energy using electronic and/or electromagnetic devices.

I hadn’t heard of Dr. Bearden before, and promised to take a look at his website.

So I went and took a look. And wow, I hit the jackpot! This is an absolute masterwork of crackpottery. Dr Bearden’s lunacy covers just about every conceivable topic, from conspiracy theories, to HIV denalism, to wacky physics, magical woo healing devices, post-Soviet KGB collaborations with the Japanese government to shoot down American planes and manipulate weather….

To give you a bit of flavor: he’s got a bibliography of information that allegedly supports his theories. If you take a look at it, the first thing you see is listed as “National Science Foundation letter favorably reviewing Bearden Paper”. The contents of that link consist of a scanned letter from the NSF replying to an email sent by Dr. Bearden, which consists of a basic standardized form letter inviting him to submit an actual proposal, and warning that he’d better include some proof that his perpetual motion machine really works, and an explanation of how.

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It’s that time again – yes, we have yet another wacko reinvention of physics that pretends to have math on its side. This time, it’s “The Electro-Magnetic Radiation Pressure Gravity Theory”, by “Engineer Xavier Borg”. (Yes, he signs all of his papers that way – it’s always with the title “Engineer”.) This one is as wacky as Neal Adams and his PMPs, except that the author seems to be less clueless.

At first I wondered if this were a hoax – I mean, “Engineer Borg”? It seems like a deliberately goofy name for someone with a crackpot theory of physics… But on reading through his web-pages, the quantity and depth of his writing has me leaning towards believing that this stuff is legit.

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Yet another reader forwarded me a link to a rather dreadful article. This one seems to be by
someone who knows better, but prefers to stick with his political beliefs rather than an honest
exploration of the facts.

He’s trying to help provide cover for the anti-global warming cranks. Now, in light of all of the
data that we’ve gathered, and all of the different kinds of analyses that have been used
on that data, for anyone in the real world, it’s pretty undeniable that global warming is
a real phenomena, and that at least part of it is due to humanity.

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Over the weekend, in an attempt to cheer me up, a kind and generous reader sent me a link
[to a *really* wonderful site of crackpot science][adams]. It’s a crackpot theory about how physics has it all wrong. You see, there is no such thing as gravity – it’s all just pressure. And the earth (and all other planets) is actually a matter factory – matter is constantly created in the *hollow* center of the earth, and the pressure of all the new matter forces the earth to constantly expand. And the pressure of expansion creates the illusion of gravity. And according to the crackpot behind it all, the best part is that [*the math works!*][mathworks]
The site is the masterwork of graphic artist Neal Adams. Mr. Adams is a computer animation
guy; he’s responsible for the obnoxious bumblebee “nasonex” ad. Mr. Adams believes that in
addition to drawing comic books and animated TV commercials, he’s also a genius who’s going to
totally reinvent all of physics, and show how all of those bigshot physicists and geologists are all wrong about everything.
[adams]: http://www.nealadams.com/morescience.html
[mathworks]: http://www.nealadams.com/PhysicsOfGrow.html

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