I just ran across The 10 weirdest physics facts, from relativity to quantum physics, and as I just finished up an antiscience piece, I thought I’d just turn this into a little Friday rant-o-thon.
Zapperz also ran across this, and rightly notes that nitpicking the details probably won’t matter to non-physicists, because they aren’t likely to pick up on such subtleties. But hey, this is the blogohedron. When nitpicking is out, ranting is in.
The thing you lose with stories like these is that there so much more you could get from them, but the author is admittedly a nonscientist and is missing out on a lot of the neat stuff that live in the details. He’s content to point out some things that are odd, especially when viewed through the prism of the limited everyday-classical-physics experience. The real problem in this is perpetuating misunderstandings of physics. Zz points out a big one — sustaining the concept of relativistic mass. There’s also the insistence that observing can change the past, and one of the new standards, entanglement. Thank goodness teleportation wasn’t mentioned.
This one got me:
“According to the current standard model of cosmology, the observable universe – containing all the billions of galaxies and trillions upon trillions of stars mentioned above – is just one of an infinite number of universes existing side-by-side, like soap bubbles in a foam. ”
Do cosmologists actually treat “infinite universes” as their “standard model”? I find this a bit surprising/hard to believe, since that “model” doesn’t actually provide any observable predictions (unlike, say, the standard model).
Based on the rest of the article, I’m guessing it’s a misinterpreted mishmash of many-worlds and m-theory. Basically there’s something not to like about every entry, which makes a detailed critique very time-consuming, and the shortest path here was just a rant about the general quality.
The double slit diffraciton pattern is exactly wrong – 180 degrees out of phase everywhere.
I think the most interesting part of physics is the way we perceive the concept of time. I mean how do you really know that you live in the present and not in the future? sounds ridiculous, I know… but so is the theory that time started with the big bang.