Kyle Mcallister wrote: > --- "Stephen A. Lawrence" <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Kyle, you do cool stuff. Your posts about stuff >> you've done are always >> interesting, sometimes fascinating, often extremely >> entertaining. Don't >> think nobody's interested, just because there are >> not a lot of comments! >> (Politics is easier to comment on than experimental >> results, by the way.) > > Why?
Dunno -- maybe because it takes no thought, it's just regurgitating opinions which one already has. > >> But when you mix politics with experiment with >> theory I, for one, kind >> of lose interest. > > If politics makes interest be lost, why is Vortex the > slum of political and religious postings now? > >> So Morton says that *his* experiments indicate that >> for the last 300 >> years physicists have been totally confused: >> Newtonian mechanics flat >> out doesn't work for bodies which are accelerating >> ... and until Morton >> came along, nobody noticed. > > Nobody noticed what you could do with certain rocks, > either, if you put them together the right way. > Where'd that heat come from? Can't be right, all of > chemistry would be wrong. No, it was just something > else going on. > > I don't think we're exactly talking about the same > Morton effect. I am not investigating his other > claims, which I myself, in a post that was probably > either misread or skimmed over, said were kind of > kooky. Yes, I know, and yes, I know, and what you've already posted, involving firing sparks through a glass tube and looking for something which sounded something like a vortex ring, was interesting. And certainly Mortimer had a lot to say about that as well. The problem I have is that Mortimer also convinced himself he'd proved Newton wrong. As far as I'm concerned that kind of does it for believing Mortimer was any kind of adequate experimentalist, not because he did experiments wrong, but because when he got results which flew in the face of 300 years of other people's results he just casually assumed *they* were wrong and *he* was right, without either trying really hard to find the source of his (very likely) error or, apparently, without so much as wondering how everybody else could have been so far wrong. > In my mind, the Morton effect is simply *the > report of a beam of some unknown force emanating from > the configured Van de Graff generator.* That is all I > tested. I don't know about anything else he did. Right, I realize that. I just read a little farther and found what I considered to be evidence that Mortimer qualified as a crackpot. > >> I'm pathologically skeptical about just a few >> things, but this hits dead >> center as far as I'm concerned. If Morton's >> experiments indicate that >> accelerating bodies violate Newton's laws really >> badly (and at low >> velocities, too) then I write it up to Morton having >> crummy lab >> technique and I move on. I don't know what caused >> the effects he >> observed with spinning tops and I'm not willing to >> spend the time to >> find out. > > Great. Fine. If you don't want to spend the time, > don't. But don't confuse what I'm doing. I am not > testing these parts of his claims, simply the 'effect' > itself, whatever it is, from the VdG. That's all I > ever claimed to be working on, period. I qualified > that quite a while back. > > ...You do know that pathological skepticism is > somewhat frowned on here, yes? WVORT.HTML and all > that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I realize that. So, I admit to it in this case. And I won't say anything more about it with regard to Mortimer's effects, OK? Anyhow gotta run, a bit more later, perhaps. [snip part I'm not addressing just now...]
