5 ms·

What are your credentials, if you don't mind my asking?

by libeclipse 9y ago

phkahler 9y ago
He can do the math himself.
- CamperBob2 9y ago
  All the math?
- coldtea 9y ago
  Whereas professional physicists can't and haven't taken those maths into account?
  - phkahler 9y ago
    That would be correct. I wondered if the problem was me reading things like Wikipedia which says the expected galactic rotation curve should follow something based on Kepler's laws. Then someone got me a subscription to Nature... You know the prestigious "peer reviewed" journal where the serious stuff is. Don't get me wrong Nature had some really awesome content. But there was a paper about a galaxy found in the early formative stages and the authors measured a rough rotation curve and felt the need to compare it to something Kepler would predict. Ugh. If anyone can tell me why Kepler applies galaxies (vs 2-body systems with certain constraints), I'd be happy to show where the error in that analysis is. Kepler doesn't apply to galaxies. It's really that simple.
trhway 9y ago
Credentials are irrelevant here as what I'm talking about is high school level integration of Newtonian forces.
- SamBam 9y ago
  And you, personally, correctly calculated the actual expected rotation? I can't imagine the amount of superiority you must feel to assume that physicists don't know high school level integration of Newtonian forces.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - davidmr 9y ago
    I used to work in a well-regarded Astronomy and Astrophysics department at a research university. Every few months, I would go through the department "crackpot folder" when I was especially bored. Every couple days the department chair or some well-known professor would get a letter (this was before most of the crackpots had email accounts, I guess) claiming that some theory--particularly general relativity--was wrong and all it took was a simple application of high school arithmetic to see it. One of our faculty happened to coin the phrase "dark energy" while I was there, and man did the letters start coming in after that. Of course, the only absolutely universal commonality among all of the letters was that they were all nonsense, like the above. In general, I felt sort of bad because you could tell that a lot of these people were really not well, but it's still hard for me to see things from someone's perspective who genuinely believes that the entire astrophysics community (save a tiny handful of contrarian actual physicists) has somehow engaged in a massive conspiracy to ignore introductory physics in favor of some other vastly more complicated theory for absolutely no possible benefit. (Especially when these professors are literally teaching introductory physics to students while they're pursuing their research.)
    - trhway 9y ago
      I feel your pain :) Back then the most such fun we had were Fermat theorem proofs coming to the algebra department.
    - pilsetnieks 9y ago
      There was a time when the entire scientific community believed the entire universe was filled with a light-bearing medium (luminiferous aether) because they couldn't explain propagation of light in empty space; or that there was another planet between Mercury and the Sun (Vulcan) because they couldn't explain Mercury's orbit. I'm not claiming it is the case now (though it does smack of luminiferous aether a bit) but the scientific community can and has been wrong sometimes in the face of as yet undiscovered principles.

What are your credentials, if you don't mind my asking?

phkahler 9y ago

He can do the math himself.

CamperBob2 9y ago
All the math?
coldtea 9y ago
Whereas professional physicists can't and haven't taken those maths into account?
- phkahler 9y ago
  That would be correct. I wondered if the problem was me reading things like Wikipedia which says the expected galactic rotation curve should follow something based on Kepler's laws. Then someone got me a subscription to Nature... You know the prestigious "peer reviewed" journal where the serious stuff is. Don't get me wrong Nature had some really awesome content. But there was a paper about a galaxy found in the early formative stages and the authors measured a rough rotation curve and felt the need to compare it to something Kepler would predict. Ugh. If anyone can tell me why Kepler applies galaxies (vs 2-body systems with certain constraints), I'd be happy to show where the error in that analysis is. Kepler doesn't apply to galaxies. It's really that simple.

trhway 9y ago

Credentials are irrelevant here as what I'm talking about is high school level integration of Newtonian forces.

SamBam 9y ago
And you, personally, correctly calculated the actual expected rotation? I can't imagine the amount of superiority you must feel to assume that physicists don't know high school level integration of Newtonian forces.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- davidmr 9y ago
  I used to work in a well-regarded Astronomy and Astrophysics department at a research university. Every few months, I would go through the department "crackpot folder" when I was especially bored. Every couple days the department chair or some well-known professor would get a letter (this was before most of the crackpots had email accounts, I guess) claiming that some theory--particularly general relativity--was wrong and all it took was a simple application of high school arithmetic to see it. One of our faculty happened to coin the phrase "dark energy" while I was there, and man did the letters start coming in after that. Of course, the only absolutely universal commonality among all of the letters was that they were all nonsense, like the above. In general, I felt sort of bad because you could tell that a lot of these people were really not well, but it's still hard for me to see things from someone's perspective who genuinely believes that the entire astrophysics community (save a tiny handful of contrarian actual physicists) has somehow engaged in a massive conspiracy to ignore introductory physics in favor of some other vastly more complicated theory for absolutely no possible benefit. (Especially when these professors are literally teaching introductory physics to students while they're pursuing their research.)
  - trhway 9y ago
    I feel your pain :) Back then the most such fun we had were Fermat theorem proofs coming to the algebra department.
  - pilsetnieks 9y ago
    There was a time when the entire scientific community believed the entire universe was filled with a light-bearing medium (luminiferous aether) because they couldn't explain propagation of light in empty space; or that there was another planet between Mercury and the Sun (Vulcan) because they couldn't explain Mercury's orbit. I'm not claiming it is the case now (though it does smack of luminiferous aether a bit) but the scientific community can and has been wrong sometimes in the face of as yet undiscovered principles.