Wednesday 26 August 2009

Black Sheep Physics

Here's an extract from my recent entry on; http://forums.about.com/ab-physics/messages where there's a lovely discussion on relativity.

I can't spill the beans informally yet but it's a bit frustrating being in this position. To explain I suggested;

Just use Sherlock Holmes famous conclusion;

Lets say I keep a sheep in a field on the Scottish border. One day they were spraying tarmac on the adjacent road and a malfunction sprayed it all over one side of the sheep.

Some highly reputed Physicists, Mathermaticians and Astronomers then passed in a train and all witnessed the 'black' sheep, (though all drew slightly different conclusions about what this proved). They were, at the same time, speaking on their mobiles and waving to another bunch of scientists driving up the road the other side of the field.who all witnessed the white sheep.
At the conference the subject of the sheep came up and a heated argument started about it's colour. I arrived late as I had to clean a ruddy sheep! I ended up putting it in the dip, and it came out all brown! I overhear the argument, listen, and smile.

So; do I tell them with tongue in cheek that they're both wrong and the sheep is brown, which I can conclusively prove by observation, or that they're both right, and how it happened, (which is also entirely inductively and deductively provable). ..Of course I must explain the truth.

I do so. They hardly bother to look me up and down, shake their heads, turn away and carry on the argument.

So here I am, smiling, but wondering about what future of the human race has. If something must be right cos most of their mates agree it is we really have no future! That attitude makes the theory that the true facts will come to the fore rather 'crackpot' itself.

How did it go? - "there are a million crazy ideas in the naked physics city, and, somewhere in there, just one of them is right" Is anybody bothered to look?

Peter J

2 comments:

  1. Hello Canticle,

    Thanks for leaving a comment on my blog.

    Is the sentence "there are a million crazy ideas in the naked physics city, and, somewhere in there, just one of them is right" a famous quote? If so, who's the originator? Whatsoever, it lacks some open-mindedness;-) I would prefer to say "there are a million crazy ideas in the naked physics city, and all of them are right, although on different assumptions."

    Btw, what's exactly your idea? I couldn't deduce it from your posts.

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  2. Arjen
    It's a misquote from a really old classic US TV series 'The Naked City' alway closing with the sentence;
    "There are a million stories in the naked city, this has been just one of them"

    But more importantly; my 'idea' or I prefer 'model'. It's fully evidenced and I'm genuinely convinced it's bigger than relativity! ....but there are a million.........."

    Are you familiar with the Templeton Foundation physics prizes? I've just had an essay accepted into this years competition. It needs the odd good public 'rating' vote so check out their website (FQXi).
    It's titled 'Perfect Symmetry'. Angled to meet the essay subject, and highly compressed.
    I'm posting a blog link. and if you look in the posts under the article you'll find the only link on the web so far to the proper 'Article' attached to post 5.
    Let me know your views.
    Thanks. Peter

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