Post by @cazabon@mindly.social

2026-03-01 05:24 UTC

@cenobyte@mastodon.thirring.org I've spent the last hour-plus going through more of the "stuff" he links from the overview, and (a) I still have no way to tell if it makes sense or if it's just LLM-generated physics drivel, and (b) I get more and more concerned that "one self-educated non-physicist overturns all of modern physics and solves all outstanding problems", while hypothetically tenable, strains credulity. I mean, a long history of cranks "disproving" Einstein (dunno why they all hated relativity so much) and Dirac and everything else just screams "This guy is a nutter". The alarm bells are ringing. I really want people who actually understand this stuff to read it and tell me whether I can write this guy off as such a crank. But weirder things have happened. Einstein was just a clerk in a patent office who no one had heard of when he demonstrated the then-new and completely unsupported-by-evidence quantum theory, which had only been proposed to solve the (ultra)violet catastrophe, could actually explain the completely unrelated and then-unexplained photoelectric effect. He won the Nobel in physics for that - not relativity - and cemented quantum theory in place, even if he never liked it. A nobody who single-handedly stamped the dividing line between classical physics and modern physics. #crank #cranks #relativity #nutter

Replies (4)

@ersmith@mstdn.ca 2026-03-01 13:20

@cazabon@mindly.social @cenobyte@mastodon.thirring.org And Einstein wasn't "just a clerk in a patent office". He was a Ph.D. student who worked in a patent office. Formal training was important even back then, and even more so now. Not that it's impossible for an outsider to make contributions, but it is very difficult indeed. So I share your skepticism.

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@cenobyte@mastodon.thirring.org 2026-03-01 17:25

@cazabon@mindly.social Gonna take a closer look if I can today. Believe it or not there are a few things people without deep knowledge in the field can do by looking at the equations. Consistency things like are there the same number of indices on the right side of the equations vs the left. Are the indices consistent? (Gotta know summation notation but that's easily explainable!)

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@cenobyte@mastodon.thirring.org 2026-03-01 17:37

@cazabon@mindly.social Haven't done a super deep dive on it,but I hate to say it at first glance, it looks like slop :(

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@cenobyte@mastodon.thirring.org 2026-03-01 18:48

This one actually doesn't look bad. They're using alot of fancy words to say that the reasons horizons generate blackbody radiation is because of the perspective of the observer. The term generic spacetime needs to be cleared up. I'm sure they mean any spacetime with a horizon (kerr, Schwartzchild, cosmological, Rindler). Gotta say fancier words to get published lol.

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