"Luminiferous Aether" Would Be a Great Name for a Band
There's a new paper coming out in Physical Review Letters about neutrino oscillations, which I discovered in the usual way: from a comment at Making Light (scroll way down, as it's a JVP). That comment led to a ScienceDaily article, which isn't all that informative, but will do until I get back to work and have access to better sources.
More interesting than the actual article, though, were the ads provided by Google. Such an assemblage of cranks is rarely seen outside of an "Intelligent Design" workshop: we've got the Quantum AetherDynamics Institute, dedicated to introducing
a more sophisticated version of the ancient and universal idea of an Aether substratum to explain the highly successful Relativity and Quantum Field Theories. Our Quantum Physics Model provides a fluid version of Special Relativity, a non-Euclidean version of General Relativity, a topological version of Quantum Mechanics, and a vortice version of String Theory. As a result of the Quantum Physics Model, the term "Aether" is once again brought into the scientific lexicon as space is shown to include inverse mass, inverse charge, geometrical shapes, and is driven by a massive, dynamic force.
Well. There you go.
In the same vein, but not obviously related, we have an ad for a bunch of Velikovskian whack jobs hawking books that claim the aether exists. And that Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould unjustly smeared the genius of Immanuel Velikovsky-- who knew?
Finally, there's a site offering yet another Theory of Everything, explaining that quarks don't actually exist. This theory helpfully comes in two versions: one for physicists, and one for non-physicists. So, you know, there's something for everyone.
Now I know how the biologists feel.
Posted at 7:14 AM | link | follow-ups |