Yes, I’m saying looks count more than content. That’s my problem with someone claiming to have solved one of the holy grails of condensed matter physics and yet for some reason was unable to get it published in any peer reviewed journal. If he’d self-published it on a prettier website, I’d be all over it. :rolleyes:
Anyway, there’s nothing there that indicates they actually did anything apart from mining noisy signals for random patterns that they ascribe deep meaning to. In this case, attributing a relatively small fluctuation of the measured resistivity as an indication that a portion of the sample is undergoing a Meissner effect. There is no reason to make this assumption, especially given their low signal to noise ratio. Which I’m guessing is resulting from the fact that they’re just sticking probes in random powdered compounds, rather than carefully growing thin films in a vacuum chamber under clean room conditions.
I’m reminded of O.E. Wagner, a crackpot from Oregon who claimed to have found celestial waves by sticking oscilloscope probes in trees and waiting for blips. I saw a talk from him where he (a) worked out that the speed of these “W waves” was magically about the speed it takes a guy to walk from one oscilloscope to another (he didn’t make that connection, of course) and (b) showed a power spectrum that had nothing but peaks at 60 Hz and multiples thereof, i.e. all he was detecting was the overhead power lines.
No, actually we don’t. The people who understand infinitely more about high-T[sub]c[/sub] superconductivity than you or I do are light years ahead of Internet crackpots. Our attempts to feed them things to test is just going to slow them down and waste their time.
I remember a guy who swore bats emitted actual EM radar. And somehow the fact that it happened to also be 60 Hertz or some multiple/fraction of that in his measurements didn’t ring any bells in that guys belfy either :rolleyes: Also the fact the bats all appeared to be in perfect synch would IMO make their radar use a bit problematic…
It’s a little known fact Brontosaurus@home has little to do with dinosaurs. It is chiefly concerned with the modeling of large animals with the wrong heads such as the elephamoose and the sharktopus.
(Actually, considering they’re called “Little Einsteins” it’s odd that they do virtually no theoretical physics at all, unless patting and clapping count somehow.)
Hey, I’d say being able to power a rocket ship with nothing more than some kids patting and clapping is a pretty major breakthrough in physics, wouldn’t you?
June is patting!
Quincy’s patting!
Annie’s patting!
But we need more power!!
These days, actual scientists who discovered anything reasonably important would likely release their findings on the Web, like those guys who thought they had the FTL particles a few weeks back.
They’d follow up by publishing their research in the appropriate peer-reviewed scientific journals, but if you do that first, it just creates an unnecessary lag time before the wider scientific community can critique, poke holes in, or build on your work.
But the flip side is that just because something’s published on the Internet and not in a scientific journal doesn’t mean it’s legit. Real scientists publish on the Web, but so does everybody else. This one’s clearly a crank.
You’re of course correct, but I’d argue that the channels of communication legitimate researchers use are simply modern-day extensions of the peer review system. Had these guys submitted a preprint to http://arxiv.org/ or written up a summary of their findings on their institution’s front page ahead of their submission, no big deal. Like you say, that’s science in the age of the Internet.
Tucking them away on a subpage of a badly-formatted personal web page, on the other hand, should automatically raise red flags. Particularly when they’re short on data and long on conjecture and dramatic claims.
