Failures of theoretical physics
On this page are listed the core failures of modern physics, along with other important errors.
The links on this page will take you to the relevant section on the main site.
The core failures of physics
Central to special relativity, the notion that ‘everything is relative’ has proved confusing, contentious and false, as detailed here.
Superficially central to quantum mechanics, the conclusion that light is a particle has been a comprehensive failure and a wild goose chase that has led physics into the metaphysical, identified on this site and by Schrödinger as being entirely inappropriate in science.
As a direct result of its commitment to particle light, the rhetoric of quantum theory is almost entirely bizarre and unscientific, and has justified a huge amount of nonsense both within the mainsteam and among its critics. Offering duality as a ‘model’ is scientifically reprehensible.
Alongside their failures, these concepts have been associated with mathematical models of physical phenomena – due to Lorentz, Poincaré, Planck, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac and others – that have had considerable success. Because there has previously been no deconstructive analysis of these theories to separate out the wheat from the chaff, the success-by-association of relativism and particle light has led physics away from physical understanding.
These two apparently central concepts of special relativity and quantum mechanics – relativism and the particle photon – were required by the nineteenth century failure of the (observational and theoretical) search for the aether. When properly analysed, they now provide a reductio ad absurdum for the conclusion that the aether had to be abandoned. A re-analysis of the evidence and arguments supporting this abandonment shows that it was premature.
Central to this conclusion was the failed hydrodynamic model of light and electromagnetism offered by Maxwell. It failed because it was physically inconsistent, but that flaw turns out to be easy to correct, as detailed here.
Peripheral failure
The particle photon and relativity were, at the time, worthy attempts to overcome the problems of 1900. They are the conceptual basis of theoretical physics for the past century. They are conflicted, failed ideas, and at the heart of the decline in theoretical physics during the twentieth century. Perhaps more importantly, they created an epistemological catastrophe – the failure of theoretical physics as a competent, honest, functioning science.
These ideas represent a comprehensive breakdown of a rational understanding of how science works in the period 1900 to 1930, and this has legitimated further failures of theoretical process and outcome on a grand scale. These further failures are in the fields of general relativity and cosmology.
General relativity uses the metric approach introduced in special relativity, but it is readily seen that treating the motion of both light and matter (planets &c) as the natural geometry (or geometrodynamics) of the Universe is glaringly flawed, as detailed here. The two forms of motion need to share all core features to make this approach viable, but they share almost none.
The theory incorporates in its metric simple and accurate mathematical models of light speed and clock rate, but this does not validate or legitimate the overweening mathematical structure of quasi-Riemannian mathematics.
Additionally, the principle of equivalence between acceleration and gravitational attraction is clearly false, since the two phenomena can readily be separated by observing the bending of light. This has been known since the failure of the 1911 paper by Einstein, which incorrectly applied the same mathematics to the different motions of light and planets.
Despite its inherent conceptual and scientific problems, the big bang was a reasonable idea at first, but soon descended into nonsense as more and more unscientific ideas had to be added. The black hole is poor science and exceptionally poor mathematical modelling.
The failures in these four ideas are so complete that they can be taken as a reductio ad absurdum of each. It is reasonable to conclude that there was no big bang, there are no black holes, and no geodesics appropriate to both light and the motion of matter.
The importance of these theories is therefore twofold, in legitimating exceeding poor reasoning in physics over the past century, and now in clearing the way for genuinely scientific alternatives.
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