The Einstein Conspiracy

The Einstein Conspiracy  (http://www.einsteinconspiracy.co.uk/)

Ah, the striking blue-on-blue motif

At least I think this is the appropriate title — there’s no official title anywhere on the site.  It appears to be describing the work by a priest / scientist named Roger Boscovich in the 18th century on the atomic theory of matter — I think.  Lots of talk talk talk about how great Boscovich and related intellectuals are, but I’ll be damned if I can actually find a description of the theory (called the “Unitary / Unified Field Theory”) on this website.  It looks like this is more of a history of the theory, where it came from and who was involved, rather than an actual description of the theory.

Apparently, many well-respected scientists appear to be involved, including David Bohm and (of course) Einstein.  He argues that the Unified Field Theory, or UFT, work done by contemporary scientists owes a debt to Father Boscovich.  I’m sure there’s probably a clue here somewhere to what this theory actually is, perhaps if I followed any of the links (helpfully presented in the same font color as regular text, a headache-inducing white on black).  A good fraction of the page is taken up by quotes from other, more reputable books, including a long passage he quotes from Bertrand Russell.  All in all, it’s as if he set out to make a web page devoted to his work, and somehow forgot to actually put an explanation of the work in there somehow…  I mean, I admit these essays on Timeblimp are often pretty slapdash (usually, you’re reading the first draft), but at least I make my point.

Some independent digging on the web suggests that the “Conspiracy” is about efforts to create a big fat unified theory of all forces (you know, the ol’ combining electromagnetism, gravity, the strong force and the weak force into one force), back before people had known about atoms, quantum theory, nuclear forces — basically all of modern physics.  You know the people these days who try to unify gravity with quantum mechanics using string theory and loop quantum gravity and QED and QCD and all that other incomprehensible stuff?  Well, people were doing that kind of thing a century or two ago, except the only forces they knew about were gravity and electromagnetism — classical physics, in other words.  It seems that Einstein worked on this (allegedly), on a purely classical unified field theory that (allegedly) was inspired by Father Boscovich’s work.  Sounds like a cool forgotten nugget of physics history — and that’s all it would be, if people weren’t still working on it.  What the hey?  Didn’t get the memo about the new forces we discovered?  Forming a great big theory that combines all of classical physics would be a neat trick on par with making a better manual typewriter — good effort, but a little too late my friend…

Interestingly, he quotes some of the other crackpots who we profile here at Timeblimp.  Douglass White is interested in UFT, and apparently there’s some information on it in his downloadable book.  Why do people care about this now obsolete area of physics?  My guess: there’s just not much competition — you aren’t getting tenure for advances in 100-year-old classical physics.

Our scores are:

1.  Terrible English:   Pretty poor writing, reminiscent of a 10th grader’s essay for English class — lots of short sentences with lousy grammar, meandering explanations, odd changes in subject, pencil drawings of Metallica, etc.  He even uses the trick that everyone discovers in about sophomore year, to pad the word count by quoting long passages from other books.  Could this have been someone’s college-entrance essay?  Eight out of ten.

Here’s one of my favorites, from the introduction:  “Einstein agreed to the UFT that Baranski developed. Einstein then died.”  Well, if you put it that way, then I disagree with absolutely everything Baranksi ever wrote.

2.  All Science Is WRONG:  Uhhh…  possibly?  It’s so hard to tell, since there’s no explanation of the theory.  Judging from who he quotes, I’m going to presume yes.  Four out of Ten.

3.  Irritated, emotional language:  There’s a fair amount of talk about the unified field theory being ignored and suppressed by the media, but the attitude is strangely listless — again, reminiscent of a B- high-school English student who can’t quite conjure up the emotive force to give their essay the punch needed to get the A.  Nevertheless, he’s included the requisite descriptions of how he’s “digging up the Forgotten / Suppressed Past”.  Note the use of Needless Capitalizing to add dramatic emphasis.  Seven out of ten.

4.  One extremely long and ugly webpage:   Pretty good crackpot design —  they’ve gone with the “one great big long webpage” motif, and at almost 500 lines, it’s a pretty decent long continuous stream of text.  White text on black background (with repeating Einstein heads) is nice and distracting, especially with the small font.  Six out of Ten.

5.  Completely new definitions:   Not a clue — as I mentioned, I can’t find his actual theory anywhere.  It’s like the whole site is a press release, and I’m looking for the technical reports.  I have no other recourse but to give him the middle-of-the-road guess of five out of ten.

His total?  Thirty out of a possible fifty.  A pretty strong score, somewhat surprising since the website doesn’t stand out in any one category.  It’s more of an all-around strong performer in each category — sort of a Ladanian Tomlinson of wacky, hard-to-read, ambiguous pseudoscience websites.

>>>  Next Up:  The Yun-Qi Kingdom