My First Physics Course

JustinLevy

Check out vol. 6 and I think you'll immediately see what we're talking about. That's where he finally reveals his crackpot theory in its full "glory".

An example of serious problems before he reveals his big pet theory of everything is his gravitation section where he "derives" everything from his principle of maximum force which is wrong as he states it. He even claims to derive GR from this principle even though his principle is coordinate system dependent and doesn't even hold in GR. His method of "derivation" in that section is also a good read if you want to see some of the crackpot logic for yourself.

An example of him sneaking in stuff is when discussing E&M he lists in a table of observed values his claim for the maximum possible electric field. Besides again claiming a limit on a coordinate system dependent quantity, regardless of our opinions on his crackpot ideas I'd hope he'd be able to agree that this shouldn't be listed as an observed limit. His response when contacted was that no experiment disagrees with his claim, and if I state otherwise then I'm a lunatic. So he can't even understand basic complaints.

In short, the author is a crackpot. A student that doesn't already know the material won't be able to separate what little good there is amongst the sea of misleading information. So I strongly recommend against using Motion Mountain as teaching material.

Andy Resnick

Fair enough- I never bothered with volume 6 since it's clearly labeled "speculation", and so is not appropriate for a textbook.

Woopydalan

Why would ANYONE write a crackpot physics textbook? That has got to be the biggest waste of time ever. Is his intention to mislead students into believing false theories or something?

JustinLevy

Your questions seem to presuppose he is aware his ideas are crackpot, which I don't believe is the case. Or at least I'd prefer to believe that he means well, even if at times he makes it hard to believe so.

What makes me really upset is that he was given a grant from some physics foundation in Germany for science outreach, to promote making a great free physics textbook.

Or at least the author Christoph Schiller claims they supported him. He also claims a whole bunch of different physicists "provided material for this text". I noticed some were at my school and so I asked them. They denied having anything to do with the book, and said despite requests Schiller would not remove the claims with their name. So it is possible he is making false claims about the foundation supporting him as well.

If someone feels up to it, maybe they should contact that foundation and find out if he is really being paid by them. If it's true, someone should be a nice citizen and bring it to their attention how their money is being spent. As only a physics student, I don't feel my words would get much attention, but maybe someone else here can try.

http://www.motionmountain.net/help.html
claims "Since May 2007, this project is supported by the Klaus Tschira Foundation."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Tschira_Foundation