who does this remind you of?

oriel36 wrote:
On Apr 22, 1:57 pm, Mike Collins wrote:
oriel36 wrote:
On Apr 22, 12:15 am, palsing wrote:
On Sunday, April 21, 2013 12:30:26 PM UTC-7, Mike Collins wrote:
Who does this quote by Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist at Washington

University in St. Louis remind you of?

In “How I Found Glaring Errors in Einstein’s Calculations,� Boyer discussed

his hobby of “[collecting] webpages created by crackpot physicists, those

marginal self-styled scientists whose foundational, generally revolutionary

work is sadly ignored by most established scientists.�

Boyer’s focus was on crackpottery in physics, so his list of what separates

a crackpot from a run-of-the-mill crazy person is somewhat specific to

physics. However, one of the more relevant characteristics of a

crackpottery was that “all crackpottery is foundational.� By that, Boyer

meant that

[c]rackpots do not go for the small problems, for what Kuhn called the

puzzle-solving of normal science, they invariably shake the foundations of

modern physics. They provide a new structure for the atom, a new unified

theory of field and energy, a complete alternative to general relativity,

an entirely novel cosmology, etc.

He also went on to write that “[t]he crackpot theory is invariably more

intuitive than the standard one… In the same way, the crackpot alternative

is, almost universally, less mathematically challenging than the standard

account.�

Ultimately, Boyer located the driven force of (physics) crackpottery as the

“notion that you cannot do science by just studying the right books, having

the right mathematics and being commited to (some form of) ‘scientific

method’. What you ned (sic), over and above all that, is constant social

interaction with other practising scientists.�

And from this page...

http://physics.about.com/b/2012/02/17/physicscranks.htm

"The crank phenomenon is sociologically incredibly interesting. I think
that there's essentially nothing that it adds to the progress of
science, because science is hard.... I don't think that the problem is
people who just make stuff up. It's people who think they can get the
right answer just by thinking about it without asking what anyone else
has ever thought about"...

This sounds even more like you-know-who...

It is not that astronomy is hard,empiricism is contrived and
intentionally so which scares so many people away so 'science is hard'
may make many reputations and pay a lot of salaries but all it does is
serve pretension.The resolution of retrograde motion is a case in
point insofar as the clear and easy way it was done is obscured by
those who themselves fail to grasp the evidence in the time lapse
footage and why an alternative approach the Newton took fails and with
it all the voodoo of absolute/relative time,space and motion on which
the early 20th century extensions depend.

So science is not hard but people are cruel and unfortunately few know
the difference.

.

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22105898

An essay about Galileo and empirical science.

Just another uninteresting commentary that would suit empirical
spectators about an individual coming up against the intransigence and
ignorance of the Catholic Church - a kind of dumbing down of the
technical and historical details surrounding this crucial period in
astronomical history and more importantly an unresolved technical
issue arising from that time,at least until now -

"In 1623 Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, a Florentine who had praised
Galileo’s achievements, was elected Pope under the name of Urban VIII.
Galileo had recently helped his nephew, Francesco Barberini, obtain
his doctorate at the University of Pisa, and the Cardinal had written
to express his appreciation. The postscript to his letter, which is in
his own hand, leaves no doubt about his feelings. ‘I am much in your
debt,’ he writes, ‘for your abiding goodwill towards myself and the
members of my family, and I look forward to the opportunity of
reciprocating. I assure you that you will find me more than willing to
be of service in consideration of your great merit and the gratitude
that I owe you.’ Events moved rapidly, and less than two months after
writing this letter, Maffeo Barberini had become Urban VIII, and was
about to appoint his nephew, then only twenty-seven years old, to the
College of Cardinals. Francesco became the Pope’s right hand.

Two close friends of Galileo, Giovanni Ciampoli and Virginio Cesarini,
were also named to important posts. Cesarini was appointed Lord
Chamberlain, and Ciampoli Secret Chamberlain and Secretary for the
Correspondence with Princes. Under these favourable auspices Galileo
thought the moment had come to renew his campaign for Copernicanism,
and in 1624 he set off for Rome where he had the rare privilege of
being received by the Pope six times in six weeks. Although the 1616
decree of the Index against Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus was not
suspended, Galileo felt that he could now argue for the motion of the
Earth as long as he avoided declaring that it was the only system that
fitted astronomical observations.

Here lurked the danger of serious misunderstanding. Maffeo Barberini,
while he was a Cardinal, had counselled Galileo to treat Copernicanism
as a hypothesis, not as a confirmed truth. But ‘hypothesis’ meant two
very different things. On the one hand, astronomers were assumed to
deal only with hypotheses, i.e. accounts of the observed motions of
the stars and planets that were not claimed to be true. Astronomical
theories were mere instruments for calculation and prediction, a view
that is often called ‘instrumentalism’. On the other hand, a
hypothesis could also be understood as a theory that was not yet
proved but was open to eventual confirmation. This was a ‘realist’
position. Galileo thought that Copernicanism was true, and presented
it as a hypothesis, i.e. as a provisional idea that was potentially
physically true, and he discussed the pros and cons, leaving the issue
undecided. This did not correspond to the instrumentalist view of
Copernicanism that was held by Maffeo Barberini and others. They
thought that Copernicus’ system was a purely instrumental device, and
Maffeo Barberini was convinced that it could never be proved. This
ambiguity pervaded the whole Galileo Affair."

http://www.unav.es/cryf/english/newlightistanbul.html

The fact is that the predictive convenience of the 365/365/365/366 day
format which allows the mechanical side of astronomy to predict
eclipses,transits ect is not the same one that proves the daily and
orbital motions of the Earth which in turn affect observations of
planets and moons within the solar system.If the Pope's position was
something similar to the difference between predictive astronomy and
interpretative astronomy which extrapolates the Earth's motions from
observations then he got it right for you cannot extract the Earth's
daily and orbital motions from stellar circumpolar motion and that
Collins is a fact that you and your colleagues must get familiar with.

Never seen so much false propaganda and you know what Collins,the
Church would favor your version of things than actually deal with the
issues left unattended since the Galileo affair.

From Gopnik's article

You can tell the half-bright from the barking because the barking don't
know how little they know, while the half-bright know enough to think that
they know a lot, but don't know enough to know what part of what they know
is actually worth knowing.

Not long ago, for instance, I wrote an essay about the great Galileo, and
the beginnings of modern science. I explained, or tried to, that what made
Galileo's work science, properly so-called, wasn't that he was always right
about the universe (he was very often wrong) but that he believed in
searching for ways of finding out what was right by figuring out what would
happen in the world if he wasn't.

One story of that search is famous. When he wanted to find out if Aristotle
was wrong to say that a small body would fall at a different speed from a
large body, he didn't look the answer up in an old book about falling
objects. Instead, he threw cannonballs of two different sizes off the Tower
of Pisa, and, checking to make sure that no-one was down there, watched
what happened. They hit the ground at the same time.

That story may be a legend - though it was first told by someone who knew
him well - but it's a legend that points towards a truth.

We know for certain that he attempted lots of adventures in looking that
were just as decisive. He looked at stars and planets and the way
cannonballs fell on moving ships - and changed the mind of man as he did.
We call it the experimental method, and if science had an essence, that
would be it.

In 1632 Galileo wrote a great book - his Dialogue On Two World Systems.
It's one of the best books ever written because it's essentially a record
of a temperament, of a kind of impatience and irritability that leads men
to drop things from towers and see what happens when they fall.

He invented a dumb character for the book named Simplicio and two smart
ones to argue with him. The joke is that Simplicio is the most erudite of
the three - the dumb guy who thinks he's the smart guy (the original
half-bright guy), who's read a lot but just repeats whatever Aristotle
says. He's erudite and ignorant.

Galileo wasn't naive about experiments. He always emphasises the importance
of looking for yourself. But he also wants to convince you that sometimes
it's important not to look for yourself, not just to trust your own eyes,
and that you have to work to understand the real meaning of what you're
seeing.

But on every page of that wonderful book, he's trying to imagine a decisive
test - dropping a cannonball from a ship's mast, or digging a hole in the
ground and watching the Moon - to help you argue your way around the
universe.

There's a lovely moment, it could be the motto of the scientific
revolution, when Salviati, one of his alter egos, says, "Therefore
Simplicio, come either with arguments and demonstrations and bring us no
more Texts and authorities, for our disputes are about the Sensible World,
and not one of Paper."

On Apr 22, 7:52*pm, Mike Collins wrote:
oriel36 wrote:
On Apr 22, 1:57 pm, Mike Collins wrote:
oriel36 wrote:
On Apr 22, 12:15 am, palsing wrote:
On Sunday, April 21, 2013 12:30:26 PM UTC-7, Mike Collins wrote:
Who does this quote *by Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist at Washington

University in St. Louis remind you of?

In “How I Found Glaring Errors in Einstein’s Calculations,” Boyer discussed

his hobby of “[collecting] webpages created by crackpot physicists, those

marginal self-styled scientists whose foundational, generally revolutionary

work is sadly ignored by most established scientists.”

Boyer’s focus was on crackpottery in physics, so his list of what separates

a crackpot from a run-of-the-mill crazy person is somewhat specific to

physics. However, one of the more relevant characteristics of a

crackpottery was that “all crackpottery is foundational.” By that, Boyer

meant that

[c]rackpots do not go for the small problems, for what Kuhn called the

puzzle-solving of normal science, they invariably shake the foundations of

modern physics. They provide a new structure for the atom, a new unified

theory of field and energy, a complete alternative to general relativity,

an entirely novel cosmology, etc.

He also went on to write that “[t]he crackpot theory is invariably more

intuitive than the standard one… In the same way, the crackpot alternative

is, almost universally, less mathematically challenging than the standard

account.”

Ultimately, Boyer located the driven force of (physics) crackpottery as the

“notion that you cannot do science by just studying the right books, having

the right mathematics and being commited to (some form of) ‘scientific

method’. What you ned (sic), over and above all that, is constant social

interaction with other practising scientists.”

And from this page...

http://physics.about.com/b/2012/02/17/physicscranks.htm

"The crank phenomenon is sociologically incredibly interesting. I think
that there's essentially nothing that it adds to the progress of
science, because science is hard.... I don't think that the problem is
people who just make stuff up. It's people who think they can get the
right answer just by thinking about it without asking what anyone else
has ever thought about"...

This sounds even more like you-know-who...

It is not that astronomy is hard,empiricism is contrived and
intentionally so which scares so many people away so 'science is hard'
may make many reputations and pay a lot of salaries but all it does is
serve pretension.The resolution of retrograde motion is a case in
point insofar as the clear and easy way it was done is obscured by
those who themselves fail to grasp the evidence in the time lapse
footage and why an alternative approach the Newton took fails and with
it all the voodoo of absolute/relative time,space and motion on which
the early 20th century extensions depend.

So science is not hard but people are cruel and unfortunately few know
the difference.

.

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22105898

An essay about Galileo and empirical science.

Just another uninteresting commentary that would suit empirical
spectators about an individual coming up against the intransigence and
ignorance of the Catholic Church - a kind of dumbing down of the
technical and historical details surrounding this crucial period in
astronomical history and more importantly an unresolved technical
issue arising from that time,at least until now -

"In 1623 Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, a Florentine who had praised
Galileo’s achievements, was elected Pope under the name of Urban VIII..
Galileo had recently helped his nephew, Francesco Barberini, obtain
his doctorate at the University of Pisa, and the Cardinal had written
to express his appreciation. The postscript to his letter, which is in
his own hand, leaves no doubt about his feelings. ‘I am much in your
debt,’ he writes, ‘for your abiding goodwill towards myself and the
members of my family, and I look forward to the opportunity of
reciprocating. I assure you that you will find me more than willing to
be of service in consideration of your great merit and the gratitude
that I owe you.’ *Events moved rapidly, and less than two months after
writing this letter, Maffeo Barberini had become Urban VIII, and was
about to appoint his nephew, then only twenty-seven years old, to the
College of Cardinals. Francesco became the Pope’s right hand.

Two close friends of Galileo, Giovanni Ciampoli and Virginio Cesarini,
were also named to important posts. Cesarini was appointed Lord
Chamberlain, and Ciampoli Secret Chamberlain and Secretary for the
Correspondence with Princes. Under these favourable auspices Galileo
thought the moment had come to renew his campaign for Copernicanism,
and in 1624 he set off for Rome where he had the rare privilege of
being received by the Pope six times in six weeks. Although the 1616
decree of the Index against Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus was not
suspended, Galileo felt that he could now argue for the motion of the
Earth as long as he avoided declaring that it was the only system that
fitted astronomical observations.

Here lurked the danger of serious misunderstanding. Maffeo Barberini,
while he was a Cardinal, had counselled Galileo to treat Copernicanism
as a hypothesis, not as a confirmed truth. But ‘hypothesis’ meant two
very different things. On the one hand, astronomers were assumed to
deal only with hypotheses, i.e. accounts of the observed motions of
the stars and planets that were not claimed to be true. Astronomical
theories were mere instruments for calculation and prediction, a view
that is often called ‘instrumentalism’. On the other hand, a
hypothesis could also be understood as a theory that was not yet
proved but was open to eventual confirmation. This was a ‘realist’
position. Galileo thought that Copernicanism was true, and presented
it as a hypothesis, i.e. as a provisional idea that was potentially
physically true, and he discussed the pros and cons, leaving the issue
undecided. This did not correspond to the instrumentalist view of
Copernicanism that was held by Maffeo Barberini and others. They
thought that Copernicus’ system was a purely instrumental device, and
Maffeo Barberini was convinced that it could never be proved. This
ambiguity pervaded the whole Galileo Affair."

http://www.unav.es/cryf/english/newlightistanbul.html

The fact is that the predictive convenience of the 365/365/365/366 day
format which allows the mechanical side of astronomy to predict
eclipses,transits ect is not the same one that proves the daily and
orbital motions of the Earth which in turn affect observations of
planets and moons within the solar system.If the Pope's position was
something similar to the difference between predictive astronomy and
interpretative astronomy which extrapolates the Earth's motions from
observations then he got it right for you cannot extract the Earth's
daily and orbital motions from stellar circumpolar motion and that
Collins is a fact that you and your colleagues must get familiar with.

Never seen so much false propaganda and you know what Collins,the
Church would favor your version of things than actually deal with the
issues left unattended since the Galileo affair.

Published: November 01, 1992

Moving formally to rectify a wrong, Pope John Paul II acknowledged in a
speech today that the Roman Catholic Church had erred in condemning Galileo
359 years ago for asserting that the Earth revolves around the Sun.
The address by the Pope before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences closed a
13-year investigation into the Church's condemnation of Galileo in 1633,
one of history's most notorious conflicts between faith and science.
Galileo was forced to recant his scientific findings to avoid being burned
at the stake and spent the remaining eight years of his life under house
arrest.
John Paul said the theologians who condemned Galileo did not recognize the
formal distinction between the Bible and its interpretation.
"This led them unduly to transpose into the realm of the doctrine of the
faith, a question which in fact pertained to scientific investigation.
Though the Pope acknowledged that the Church had done Galileo a wrong, he
said the 17th-century theologians were working with the knowledge available
to them at the time.,

Papal politics aside,I would imagine that few have the patience to go
through Galileo's 'Chief System's' work and make sense of the
arguments as he set them down using the limitations of equipment in
his time as well as the incredible insights he introduced via the
magnification exercise while paying tribute to Copernicus who lacked
such equipment.You are in danger Collins of outdoing the Simplicio
character in Galileo's discourse by virtue that at least that
fictional character maintained his objections through technical points
rather than personal attacks which are part of the 21st century
Usenet.

Of course Galileo was bound to develop those arguments for the Earth's
motions using a telescope and especially the luminosity variations
which occur as the planets approach closest to the Earth in our common
annual circuit -

http://www.masil-astro-imaging.com/S...age%20flat.jpg

"Next in Venus, which at its evening conjunction when it is beneath
the sun ought to look almost forty times as large as in Its morning
conjunction, and is seen as not even doubled, it happens in addition
to the effects of irradiation that it is sickle–shaped, and its horns,
besides being very thin, receive the sun’s light obliquely and
therefore very weakly. So that because it is small and feeble, it
makes its irradiations less ample and lively than when it shows itself
to us with its entire hemisphere lighted. But the telescope plainly
shows us its horns to be as bounded and distinct as those of the moon,
and they are seen to belong to a very large circle, in a ratio almost
forty times as great as the same disc when it is beyond the sun,
toward the end of its morning appearances.

SAGR. 0 Nicholas Copernicus, what a pleasure it would have been for
you to see this part of your system confirmed by so clear an
experiment!

SALV. Yes, but how much less would his sublime intellect be celebrated
among the learned! " Galileo

The outer planets have special relevance in this respect as their
luminosity is greatest when they exist at the middle point of apparent
retrogradation as this is when their orbits are closest to the Earth
when being overtaken by our planet -

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120809.html

This is why retrogrades cannot be resolved by a hypothetical observer
on the Sun as Newton asserted in what is a technical non sequitur I
have repeated so many time I will no longer bother.I am not the lone
voice you try to make me out to be,the documents all the way from
antiquity up through the arguments of Copernicus,Kepler and Galileo
and on to the late 17th century mutations definitely require attention
and the sad part is none of you find the material in any way
interesting.

On Apr 21, 3:30*pm, Mike Collins wrote:
Who does this quote *by Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist at Washington
University in St. Louis remind you of?

In “How I Found Glaring Errors in Einstein’s Calculations,” Boyer discussed
his hobby of “[collecting] webpages created by crackpot physicists, those
marginal self-styled scientists whose foundational, generally revolutionary
work is sadly ignored by most established scientists.”

Boyer’s focus was on crackpottery in physics, so his list of what separates
a crackpot from a run-of-the-mill crazy person is somewhat specific to
physics. However, one of the more relevant characteristics of a
crackpottery was that “all crackpottery is foundational.” By that, Boyer
meant that

[c]rackpots do not go for the small problems, for what Kuhn called the
puzzle-solving of normal science, they invariably shake the foundations of
modern physics. They provide a new structure for the atom, a new unified
theory of field and energy, a complete alternative to general relativity,
an entirely novel cosmology, etc.
He also went on to write that “[t]he crackpot theory is invariably more
intuitive than the standard one… In the same way, the crackpot alternative
is, almost universally, less mathematically challenging than the standard
account.”

Ultimately, Boyer located the driven force of (physics) crackpottery as the
“notion that you cannot do science by just studying the right books, having
the right mathematics and being commited to (some form of) ‘scientific
method’. What you ned (sic), over and above all that, is constant social
interaction with other practising scientists.”

B.S. Science by committee is communist and oriental and ignores
vital, individual achievements which are the driving force of cutting-
edge science.