Observer Physics
Observer Physics (http://dpedtech.com/)
I don’t think any other crackpot physics website has the sheer volume of material you can find over at the Observer Physics website. Dr. Douglass White has put a couple book’s worth of material online in a series of downloadable pdf documents — there must be a good couple thousand pages, total. And quite frankly, I’m not going to read it. I have no idea what his theory is, because I would have to devote my entire weekend to wading through enough chapters of his downloadable book to get the general idea. And that’s time away from The Soup, on the E! channel on Friday nights, that just isn’t going to happen. You want to know what it’s about? Start reading, hombre.
After wading through a couple articles at random, my guess is he’s taken a rather traditional path in wacky pseudo-physics, that of assuming the role of the “observer” in quantum mechanics to an overly literal extreme. He’s apparently arguing that we, as human conscious observers, are responsible for creating all of existence that we see around us. To be fair, plenty of actual working physicists propose similar kinds of ideas, often supposing that human conscious observation is needed for collapsing quantum wavefunctions. I don’t think any of this would have come up if anyone could think of a better mechanism for collapsing it. But that doesn’t excuse how he runs rampant with the role of the observer. I mean, if we as human beings need to observe the universe to keep everything running, then what was going on before we appeared on this planet? And what if no one happens to be looking at some particular part of reality at this moment? Anyone looking at the Pleiades Cluster at the moment? No? Well goddammit, keep observing!!! Someone better be observing the Guinness brewery right now, is all I’ve gotta say.
Our scores are:
1. Terrible English: No, Dr. White is a pretty good writer. I could even see him writing a popular science article. He’s probably too nice to write for a smartass web-based pseudoscience review, though. Two out of ten.
2. All Science Is WRONG: Even though I haven’t read all of his work, there’s hundreds of pages of it — surely there must be a passage somewhere, someplace, that criticizes Einstein? Five out of ten, though expect it to go higher when I get around to finding the relevant article.
3. Irritated, emotional language: Can’t really find any (yet — see above descriptions of my laziness at not reading the whole online book). I gotta hand it to him, he keeps it pretty professional — the online textbook at first glance looks and sounds pretty much like a textbook. Two out of ten.
4. One extremely long and ugly webpage: The main page is short and ugly — just how I like my men. And my coffee. For some reason, his main navigation style is to embed links in three asterisks, like this: * * * . I can’t find a single link on his website (and there are dozens of links) that isn’t on three asterisks. What the hell? Obviously, he’s in bed with the powerful asterisk lobby. Those guys are nuts. Look what they did to the poor interobang — you never see him anymore. At least that’s my best guess, that the asterisk oligopoly is forcing him to overuse their punctuation product, because the only other explanation is that he did this intentionally. Otherwise, the earth tones and minimalist, Santa-Fe-ish artwork make the crazy a little more palatable, and the pages aren’t wildly too long. Seven out of ten.
5. Completely new definitions: In the chapter “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves”, he defines the unit radius, or “Ru”, the volume of a sphere of unit radius, or “Ss”, the D-Shift operator, or “%”, and there’s even an extended connection of phsyical constants to the Snow White story, although I think he’s joking about that last one. Nine out of ten. He needs to look into getting some symbol or greek-letter fonts, though — the percent sign as a mathematical operator? I mean, come onnnn!
The total? Twenty five out of fifty. Appropriately symmetric — found at the center of the crackpot scale, the Middle Way of Crazy
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