Springer Publishes Crank ‘Proofs’

…nce or arguments which contradict their unconventional beliefs. (Wikipedia.org) Two propositions, Fermat’s Last Theorem and the Goldbach Conjecture, truly stand out among cranky topics, in drawing the vast majority of bogus “proofs” (although the Riemann Hypothesis may be another contender.) This is well-known among publishers like arxiv.org and philsci-archive, which get plenty of crank submissions. These topics are generally treated with distrus…

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LHC Black Holes: Why I’m Not Holding My Breath

…ut now let’s suppose that you’re a hardcore empiricist and you still don’t buy it. If that’s the case, then you don’t have to worry about mini-black-holes at CERN in the first place, as there is absolutely no empirical reason to believe they will appear. Black holes appear when a sufficiently large mass-energy to be crammed into a sufficiently small radius, which in our example is called the Schwarzschild radius (R_s) of that mass. This is not exp…

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Stop commercializing academic publishing

…ems. I’m sure you’ve done the calculation: how many people can be expected buy the textbook at that price? Not many. Not to mention that we could pick up two copies of J. K. Rowling’s “complete works” for this royal sum. This is not dissemination of information. This is you failing the academic community. Because of your silliness, Souriau’s scholarship is not being widely shared in the way that the academic community needs. In this case, the auth…

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Could You Have Defended Galileo?

…nothing about the way bodies fall. But you can still try to put upper and lower bounds on motion in free fall, in order to get your result. How can the law of uniform velocity provide bounds on the time it takes for a body to fall? On Monday, I’ll elaborate on that last hint. (It’s actually an interesting problem all by itself.) Later, I’ll sketch a little bit of the first answer to this challenge, which was given by Pierre de Fermat in an obscur…

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Overheard at New Directions in Foundations of Physics ’10

…t finished explaining how questions like the distinction between P and NP remain a major open problem in mathematics and computer science. Apparently, he considers the standard of “discovery” in physics to be a notch lower. Hopefully I’ll see some of you at one of the remaining conferences this summer! Soul Physics is authored by Bryan W. Roberts. Thanks for subscribing. Want more Soul Physics? Try the Soul Physics Tweet….

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