Strange Misconceptions of Gerald t Hooft Roger J Anderton R.J.Anderton@btinternet.com This is a look at an example that can occur in the breakdown in communication between mainstream physicists and dissenters, when both sides have diametrically opposed points-of-view with no common ground for dialogue. Gerald t Hooft who describes himself as a Professor of Theoretical Physics [1] has this to say [2] : Physicists who write research papers, lecture notes and text books on the subject of General Relativity - like me - often receive mails by amateur scientists with remarks and questions. Many of these show a genuine interest in the subject. Their requests for further explanations, as well as their descriptions of deeper thoughts about the subject, are often interesting enough to try to answer them, and sometimes discussions result that are worthwhile. However, there is also a group of people, calling themselves scientists, who claim that our lecture notes, text books and research papers are full of fundamental mistakes, thinking they have made earth shaking discoveries themselves that will upset much of our conventional wisdom. I think I know the type of group of people he means. I hasten to add, its not me emailing 't Hooft. As well as scientists (and people interested in science) who believe in Einstein's relativity, there are scientists (and people interested in science) who believe Einstein is wrong. And the number of these dissenters is growing. G. t Hooft: Indeed, it often happens in science that a minority of dissenters try to dispute accepted wisdom. There s nothing wrong with that; it keeps us sharp, and, very occasionally, accepted wisdom might need modifications. Its decent of him to admit that existing wisdom of the mainstream might be wrong. However he continues- G. t Hooft: Usually however, the dissenters have it totally wrong, and when the theory in question is Special or General Relativity, this is practically always the case. Now that is just his prejudiced bias, how can he be sure that he has it right.
G. t Hooft : Fortunately, science needs not defend itself. Wrong papers won t make it through history, and totally ignoring them suffices. We can dig up history, things in the literature we (who are opposed to the mistakes associated with Einstein's relativity) search out for those papers that get ignored by the likes of 't Hooft and present them to him again. So if he thinks totally ignoring them suffices the first time is enough then he is mistaken. And as per the way that truth gets recognised it goes through 3 stages, the first stage being ignore it, so sounds like he is at this stage of ignore. G. t Hooft: Yet, there are reasons for a sketchy analysis of the mistakes commonly made. They are instructive for students of the subject, and I also want to learn from these mistakes myself, because making errors is only human, and it is important to be able to recognize erroneous thinking from as far away as one can He then gives examples of themes; the main theme being that Einstein is wrong in some way. Einstein made lots of changes to physics, so there is a lot of area in which dissenters can claim Einstein is wrong. His response is - G. t Hooft: When confronted with claims of this sort, my first reaction is to politely explain why they are mistaken, attempting to identify the erroneous ideas on which they must be based. That's decent of him to try to be polite, but from the other-side the mistakes are perceived as being on his side, where they have a mountain of changes made by Einstein which happen to be a large collection of mistakes, so when he tries to explain why the dissenters' side is mistaken, really he is wrong and appealing to lots of mistakes on his side. G. t Hooft: Occasionally, however, I thought that someone was just reporting things he had read elsewhere, and my response was more direct: "Never have I seen so much nonsense in one single package..." or words of similar nature. This, of course, was a mistake, because these had been the thoughts of that person himself. When other correspondents also continued to defend concoctions that I thought to have extensively exposed as unfounded, I again felt tempted to use more direct language. So now I am a villain. Yes it was a mistake to do that and seems to destroy the false-front of trying to be polite. G. t Hooft: A curious thing subsequently happened. A handful of people with seriously flawed notions of general relativity apparently joined forces, and are now sending me more and more offensive emails, purportedly exposing my "stupidity" and collecting more "scientific" arguments to back their views. The group that think Einstein's relativity is wrong is growing and from their point of view the group that believes in Einstein have seriously got things wrong.
G. t Hooft: They find some support from ancient publications by famous physicists; in the first decades of the 20 th century, indeed, Karl Schwarzschild, Hermann Weyl, and even Albert Einstein, had misconceptions about the theory, which at that time was brand new, and these pioneers indeed had not yet grasped the full implications. They are digging up the history in other words from which G. t Hooft and his associates have been at stage 1 in trying to ignore. G. t Hooft: They can be excused for that, but today s professional scientists know better. I doubt it, from my perspective those people are generally very ignorant of the history of their subject, and what are valid arguments for them being mistaken are in general ignored by them. G. t Hooft: As for my "stupidity", my own knowledge of the theory does not come from blindly accepting wisdom from text books; text books do contain mistakes, so I only accept scientific facts when I fully understand the arguments on which they are based. Wow, hold on a minute, G. t Hooft accepts that text books have got some things wrong, so he is going to read them and decide to only believe in things that make sense to him. But the issue then is how can he be sure that everyone else is agreeing to his opinion. Based on such a procedure people could read the textbooks and come to lots of different opinions. The mistakes should be clearly pointed out, but so far the textbooks just seem to be repeating the same types of mistakes and rarely admitting that previous textbooks got it wrong. G. t Hooft: I feel no need whatsoever to defend standard scientific wisdom; I only defend the findings of which I have irrefutable evidence, and it so happens that most of these are indeed agreed upon by practically all experts in the field. But the textbooks he is not going to defend presumably, and he is going to allow them to continue teaching mistakes to future generations, so he's not a very good defender of the truth, if he is going to allow the textbook readers to be deceived. G. t Hooft: The mails I have sent to my "scientific opponents" appear to be a waste of time and effort, so now I use this site to carefully explain where their arguments go astray. So they have motivated a reaction, he is not quite still at stage 1 of ignore, instead he has been provoked to enter stage 2. G. t Hooft: Rather than trying to bring them to their senses (which would be about as effective as trying to bring Jehovah s Witnesses to their senses), I rather address students who might otherwise be misled by what they read on the Internet.
It's interesting that he mentions Jehovah's Witnesses - he perceives the dissenters as having something like a religion, from the dissenters position it seems to us that the mainstream with its belief in Einstein, are a religion not open to questioning their beliefs. He does not want to mention the names of the dissenters he was talking to and gives them initials. G. t Hooft: From their reactions it became clear that analyzing someone s mistaken train of thought is far from easy. What exactly are the blind spots? I try to spot these, but I receive furious responses that only suggest that the blind spots must be elsewhere. Where do their incorrect assertions come from? Of course, the mathematical equations at those points are missing, so I start guessing. I had to modify some of the guesses I made earlier on this page; actually, I prefer to explain how the math goes, and why the physical world is described by it. It is not very good to guess; trying to read more into what such people are saying is trying to second guess them, and probably misrepresenting their point-of-view. G. t Hooft: This is not intended as a scientific article, since after all, the math can be obtained from many existing text books. Sadly, these text books are "dismissed" as being "erroneous". He has already pointed out there are mistakes in the textbooks, so when it comes to dismissing them it sound like he is. But presumably he means his opponents dismiss them. The answer to that is since he treats them as wrong, then why can't they. G. t Hooft: Clearly, therefore, I won t be completely successful. To the students I insist: most of the text books being criticized by those folks are actually very good, although it always pays to be critical, and whatever you read, check it with your own common sense. Cough, cough commonsense. There are many relativity textbooks that point out Einstein's relativity violates commonsense, and if one rejects them because they violate commonsense then this is going to get you into Einstein's relativity is wrong group. Textbooks and literature promoting Einstein's relativity often delight in pointing out Einstein's relativity violates common-sense, but then insist that one must accept it anyway. Let's look at one example - Robert Bluhm, Sunrise Professor of Physics at Colby College. [3] says - Prior to the development of special relativity, the laws of physics and the laws of common sense were practically one and the same. Measurements of space and time were absolute. There were no limits in principle on how fast a person could travel. A meter was a meter and a second was a second no matter what. The birth of Albert Einstein's theory 100 years ago marked the death of these common-sense notions of space, time, and travel. According to Einstein, measurements of time and length intervals differ when made by observers who are moving relative to each other. If all 't Hooft has for testing to know the truth is his personal opinion of what common-sense is, then he does not have much to convince others, because they can have their own version.
Skipping to an interesting part - G. t Hooft: Mr. L. makes this claim, and now he basically refers to a paper that he once managed to get published in a refereed journal. It is clear to me that the referee in question must have been inattentive. It happens more often that incorrect papers appear in refereed journals. So now 't Hooft makes the claim that there are mistakes in refereed journals same as there are mistakes in textbooks, its high-time that the physics community addressed what these mistakes are supposed to be instead of ignore them. G. t Hooft: Science is immune to that; false papers are simply being ignored, and so is this one; it is not being referred to by professional scientists (Spires mentions only one reference that is not by the author himself). All the other papers could be wrong, and the paper that is correct is being ignored. The method of ignore that G. t Hooft advocates is not a good one. The conversation between L and 't Hooft degenerates; neither accepts what the other is saying, it seems to be a clash of two different ways of looking at physics in deeming what is allowed and what is not allowed. Skipping on, the comeback that L gives for for some maths that G. t Hooft gave, 't Hooft explains is- G. t Hooft : Yet, L insists: "I have proven that dynamical solutions do not exist, so your solution is wrong. It violates causality". Now G. t Hooft admits he does not know what L means by this. G. t Hooft: What? To me, causality means that the form of the data in the future, t > t1, is completely and unambiguously dictated by their values and, if necessary, time derivatives in the past, t = t1. So it is sounding like they are not agreeing on what causality means. Bringing back Einstein into the picture Einstein has been very influential in physics and made many changes to what is meant by concepts like causality. So if going by Einstein then that can be looking at things in a very different way to people who think Einstein is wrong (and are looking at things without Einstein's changes). This is why communication can break down. For myself I try to concentrate on the first of the fundamental changes that Einstein made, namely to that of the concept of time and then complain about that in my relevant articles. After Einstein makes the change to time then he has to start changing the other physical concepts to match that change.
Picking up on another issue- G. t Hooft: And now there is a thing that L and C fail to grasp: a black hole can be seen to be formed when matter implodes. Start with a regular, spherically symmetric (or approximately spherically symmetric) configuration of matter, such as a heavy star or a star cluster. That's from theory, when a sufficiently massive object's gravity is strong enough then from existing theory of gravity there is nothing that can stop gravity collapsing that object to a singularity. However there are theories/speculations where add extra things to stop such gravitational collapse. So black-hole in that sense is only based on existing theory of gravity and that theory might be incomplete. L and C might be disputing a theory that allows black-holes to form, and in that sense deeming black-hole does not exist. And as for observations well they only get interpreted from existing theory, and that interpretation might be wrong, therefore black-holes have not really been observed; they have only been theorised to exist from data. So when 't Hooft says - a black hole can be seen to be formed when matter implodes. that's false, it is not seen, it is only theorised to exist. (If it were seen then that would be an observation, and observation confirming saidtheory, but there has been no such observation, merely data interpreted by theory. It is a very subtle difference in words, 't Hooft might want his use of seen to mean theorised from the data, but it does not convey that. ) G. t Hooft: It s casting pearls to the swine; my crowd of friends, E., L, C and DC being principal representatives, do not show the slightest willingness to revise their views, and they will probably react with further twists, as they did in the past. Those will usually end up in my spam filter (their mails are too numerous and too offensive to me), but if anyone else has questions, I would be obliged to respond. So he has gone back to stage 1 of ignore. He has his way of thinking about things, these other people have their way. He has tried to get them to revise their way of thinking, he realises he can't do that; and its not an option that he will consider of revising his way of looking at things, so back to stage 1 ignore those who don't look at things his way. References [1] http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/ [2] Strange misconceptions of General Relativity, G. t Hooft http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/gravitating_misconceptions.html [3] Robert Bluhm: The death of common sense http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/february- 2005/robert-bluhm-the-death-of-common-sense (By the way - I disgree what Bluhm has to say about physics in the rest of the article.) c.rjanderton29aug2013