Tuesday, August 29, 2006

ADiots

Further to the posts of Craig and iBaDaiRon I thought it was high time I entered the strange world of Autodynamics. To any of you not familiar with the subject I suggest a quick look at the wikipedia article here, but the basic tenet seems to be this: Einstein WAS WRONG!!!, about EVERYTHING!!! In brief a physicist called Ricardo Carenzani decided in the 1940's he didn't like the look of Special Relativity so he decided to come up with his own version. Some of the basic conclusions from his own version (dubbed Autodynamics) are: Einstein was wrong (unsurprisingly), there is no such thing as the neutrino, and there are several new particles (picogravitons and electromuons) and decay chains that have never been observed.

Now this is all fine an dandy (just another Einstein was wrong nut), except this one is devised by someone with some background in physics, so you think maybe he has come up with something interesting until you try and do anything with their new equations. For this part I'm going to copy directly from their own website here (note this is from autodynamicsuk the British offshoot):


Question:
According to the Web page, the velocity sum equation in AD is:

Bsum = sqrt(1 - (1-B1^2) * (1-B2^2) * ... * (1-B3^2))

Well, I plugged in the following scenario:

B1 = 0.926 * 10^-9 = 1 km/hour B2 = 0.926 * 10^-9 = 1 km/hour

Going through the equation, I obtain:

Bsum = 1.31 * 10^-9 = 1.41 km/hour

If the velocity sum equation means anything like the velocity equation in SR, then this is telling me that if I am walking a 1 km/hour, and I see Bob pass me at 1 km/hour, then Bob is moving at 1.41 km/hour.

What' s wrong here? Is the equation misstated? Am I misinterpreting the equation (and if so, what does the equation mean)? Is AD invalid at speeds

Answer: ***You are right. There is no mistake in your calculation.

Classic Mechanics give 2 km/h SR gives 1.9999 km/h AD gives 1.41 km/h

The rest of the answer goes on to state various mistaken opinions about when and where SR or AD conserves energy/momentum. But personally my favourite part of the response is this:

*** Any theory is not intrinsically right or wrong. Regarding your statement "What I do care about is whether it's close to reality or not," we can say that "reality," as an absolute concept, doesn't exist. A theory is closer to "reality" when more experimental or observational results can be explained.

Er. But the AD result does not match even CM never mind SR, I dont know about you but I think its fairly well established that if you looked at the speedometer on two cars driving driving in the situation described they would read 1km/h and 2km/h. So what part of what he is describing matches the observational results?

I could go on, looking at the website one is continually astounded at the layers upon layers or rubbish, some highlights to come in future posts include: the picograviton (or the Le Sage Ultramundane Corpuscle), no neutrinos and particle propellant.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Pssst!

They're watching you!

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/autodynamics/message/2303

:)