At 08:24 PM 10/31/2009, [email protected] wrote:
>A few years I seem to recall Mark popping in briefly to inform the Vort >Collective of his interpretation of the GUT. > >See: >http://www.lnhatom.com/index.html [snip] Has any one here bought this, and if so would they care to review it?
Dr. Kowalski did write a review of an extract from it, at http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/cf/322rutherford.html. Selling books is a legal way to make money from total bogosity. Which doesn't mean that hydreno theory is bogus; however.... I'm certainly not motivated to buy the book. If Porringa could suggest simple experiments which would discriminate between his theory and standard theory, I'd be very interested, especially if anyone has replicated them. However, I don't see any sign of such experiments ever having been done, so what the theory would amount to is an allegedly superior theory that has no obvious consequences, not obvious enough that Mr. Porringa himself would put together the experiment.
What happened with cold fusion was that very weak theory (i.e., not validated by experimental evidence, which was only applicable to the condensed matter environment through an assumption that exact solutions would not deviate substantially from approximations based on 2-body behavior, was asserted to be superior to actual experimental evidence. The evidence must be discarded in favor of the theory. While such a conflict is certainly grounds for caution, it is not grounds for rejection unless there is very good evidence, independent from theory, that the experimental results are bogus or artifact.
On what basis can it be claimed that Mr. Porringa's theory is superior to standard theory? That it is, to him, intuitively satisfying would not be enough. If his theory was originally supported by experimental anomaly, which it then successfully "predicted," great. One would think he would make this prominent in his publicity. And then, we would want to know that all or at least most of the successful theoretical prediction of standard theory were likewise predicted by his theory. And we would be very interested in predictions of the results of experiments not yet performed, where the predictions of standard theory and those of his theory deviate with sufficient strength to be measured.
He does claim that the theory explains the monoisotpic stability of aluminum, as an example. If the theory could predict the occurrence of isotopic stabilities based on a relatively small number of assumptions, it could be worth looking at. He does predict (or "explain") astrophysical phenomena that to my superficial examination don't match known observations. (But it's easy to get this stuff wrong....) http://www.lnhatom.com/postulates.html in the section, "Some Astrophysical Implications." Quote:
4) Ultimately, the energy which powers a star comes from the absorption of a small fraction of the incident ZPF energy. Thermonuclear fusion, consequently, is not really the fundamental source. Effectively stars just recycle the energy of the vacuum, transducing it from the incident unobservable, ultra-high frequency scalar radiations to the emitted observable low frequency thermal radiations of the conventional EM spectrum. Sufficient interstellar spacing is therefore critical to the survival of a star.
Eh?
