Gravitational Constant: Deriving Newton's Law with a TOE

[daniel_i_l]

I wasn't sure were to put this but I think that it's supposed to go here:
I was in some science site and I saw one of those "prove Einstein wrong" kind of adds. Now I know that that kind of stuff is garbage but I was curious (and bored) so I went to have a look. It turnes out that there's a book called "the final theory" claiming that modern physics is wrong and that he has found the TOE . In order to persuade people to buy the book he had a whole list of "proofs" as to why modern physics is wrong. His "proofs" were pretty lame as far as I could see but there he said that he had derived Newton's gravitational constant with his new theory but you could only see how in the book. Well I wasn't crazy enough to buy that book but does anyone here know how he did that (if he really did that)? Just curious.

 

[Pengwuino]

Got any links?

 

[daniel_i_l]

Here:
http://www.thefinaltheory.com/pages/7/index.htm"
To see a discusion in PF:
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=2972&page=2"

 

[daniel_i_l]

Does anyone know what his "finaltheory" actually is?

 

[matthyaouw]

I get the feeling that I still wouldn't be able to answer that had I read his book from cover to cover.

 

[Chronos]

He has proven it's possible to make money selling cut and paste excerpts from internet sites.

 

[daniel_i_l]

Thanks guys

 

[dgoodpasture2005]

What is a TOE? That everything is completely random?

 

[jhe1984]

a TOE in physics at least, is a theory of everything. Some use the term TOE interchangeably with the term GUT (or grand unification theory). However, technically, a GUT - unifying gravity with the other three forces - is likely to stop short of being a TOE.

The idea of one theory describing all things is not a new one. If I understand correctly, books like the I Ching (eastern phil), Greek philosophy - hell, all of philosophy - has pursued a TOE - or universal truths. Things like the Golden Ratio, Fibonacci Sequence, et al are also cool and perplexing truths as well.

There are only a handful of figures in human history who have claimed or have been said by others to possesses a TOE-esque understanding of the world: namely Buddha, Jesus Christ, the prophet Muhammad, and a few others who I will be probably eternally damned for forgetting.

That said, there are an inconceivably large number of people who have claimed this ability: David Koresh, Jim Jones, and Bill Paxton in Frailty. Now, the unifying theme in the latter group seems to be that hanging out with these guys has generally ended pretty poorly.

On a side note, any website ending in .com should be viewed very skeptically - not to insult our current, very informative host.

Cool google search techniques:

define: *word* gives def's plus links
google.com/unclesam - gives official US pages and govt testimony
site: *url type* returns only specific urls
scholars.google.com - self-explanatory

Sorry if all this is old news

 

[dgoodpasture2005]

philosophically... wouldn't a theory of everything also contain a theory of nothing?

 

[loseyourname]

philosophically... wouldn't a theory of everything also contain a theory of nothing?

Depends on who you ask. Many philosophers (and I probably agree with them) will tell you that giving ontological status to 'nothing' is simply to mistake a grammatically correct word construction with a true substantive. That is, it is grammatically possible to construct a noun from the negation of the word thing, "nothing," to create the general substantive "nothingness," but unlike true substantives, the word has no actual referent. It is purely a linguistic construct. In fact, even the specific substantive "nothing" is really just a linguistic construct that can be built simply because the rules of language allow us to negate the word "thing." However, just because the rules allow it, it doesn't follow that we are really referring to anything when we do so. We can construct the nominal (or substantive) phrase "not a stapler," and there are plenty of objects in the world that this can refer to. However, what can "not a thing" possibly refer to? Everything is a 'thing.' It only takes on a referrent in certain contexts: for instance, the phrase "nothing that you were talking about" can be an answer to a question that has a real referrent - anything that is something the person asking the question was not talking about. Extending the word to negate all things, however, takes it out of its realm of good usage.

Edit: Reading back over this, I'm not sure that I phrased much of it very clearly. Maybe you should look this up online. I'm sure a real philosopher has provided a better explanation somewhere than I have here.

 

[dgoodpasture2005]

It's fine, thanks for your input, i understood it, just wanted to see what the feedback would be... i realized that too... that nothing is just that, nothing, so there is no way to define it. Someone tried to tell me that nothing is anti-matter... one of the more belligerent explanations I've ever heard... but nevertheless, i understand it's easy for the laymen to mistake such things. The word nothing is thrown around so loosely and used outside of it's true context so much that it is mistaken for SOME-thing... when it is really NO-thing. So is this a paradox? Because a theory of everything would still need to include a theory of nothing... nothing is a part of everything... although it's nothing, the possibility of explaining it still exists, since we can fathom it and stamp a label on it.

 

[RunDMC]

Rene Descartes tried to say that since a TOE includes absolutely everything -- including notional concepts such as 'three angles in a triangle always add to equal two right angles' -- things that are true of the world according to a TOE are also true of the notional concepts (barring a 'universal deceiver').

He used this argument to try to prove the existence of God (a 'perfect' idea).

I find this argument less compelling than "(Even if I doubt all, I nonetheless doubt, so..) I think, therefore I am."