About a month and a half ago I published Gong BingXin's Uncertainty is Untenable, which many may recognize as the spam-published paper from a desperate Chinese physicist. Publication was controversial, and I knew this.
Yesterday I received this comment on the publication of that sophomoric paper:
One and a half year ago, I received many copies of another email, from a Chinese physicist (I believe it's a physics undergrad) at York Univ., Toronto, showed that we can pass the speed of light and Einstein was wrong. He claimed using Chinese wisdom of Qi, or Yun-Qi, combined with physics and blah blah blah. (Don't you think he should have received a Nobel prize by now?) And now, the uncertain principle is wrong.
Please, guys, do what Einstein did: get your brilliant work published in respected journals, and get a Nobel prize, for Pete's sake. I realize these Chinese guys are exercising their freedom of speech, and I applaud that from the bottom of my heart. But to abuse the internet and used up so much resources to send out these junk mails, I cannot forgive. Those computer times can be better off doing something useful. I cannot imagine how much effort they have put in to send these mails to my many email accounts, including the email account I set up for my dog, which I have never used to sign up anything. You are violating other people privacy, that I find it annoying. (For that reason, I am not giving my email address nor my real name in this posting.)
As a side note, for someone with a real physics PhD, we see the arguments they presented use only rusty undergraduate math and reasoning. The one thing that I fear most, other than wasted computer resources, is that unsuspected reader might really think Einstein is wrong, as well as the uncertainty principle! It could take a long time and effort to correct the public if that happens. Hopefully, most will only treat these as just another junk mail and trash it in a nanosecond.
I couldn't help but give just point out one of the many things in this latest article: if the size of an electron is larger than such and such? That's typical undergraduate understanding of an electron. If you try to combine classical concepts (such as electron has a definite size) with the semi-quantum, or semi-relativity physics that you've learned in college, you'll often find it contradictory.
Let me emphasize this again: I am glad these guys have the heart to pursue knowledge and the courage to tell the world. But please don't abuse the freedom, don't abuse the internet. Keep your theories to the physics journals.
One Stone
Fair enough One Stone (get it, Ein Stein = One Stone in German), only you can decide how much spam mail you can tolerate.
I am a stickler for accuracy in facts, so you should know that Einstein never won a Nobel prize for his theory of relativity. His prize was awarded for what was surely a minor project for him, the statistical explanation of Brownian motion. His 1905 paper and surrounding work on relativity was never honored by the Nobel committee. It is widely believed that the 1926 prize was awarded to Einstein in apology for the earlier snub.
I replied to the argument that Gong's email abuse is also an abuse of his (scientific and personal) freedom:
Thanks One.
Gong reads this blog (as indicated by his post, above) so you can address him directly here. I agree that his math is juvenile and his physics horridly muddled - he comes to the wrong conclusions because his question is not even stated coherently. Yet to silence him is certainly unscientific, for, in science, we let the ideas do the talking and leave the personality or the method of communication out of it.
I too have been inundated by his incessant emails - I finally sent all his mail back with increasingly profane invectives and he eventually quit sending it. I had hoped that, by publishing his paper on this blog - a non peer reviewed, off the beaten track resource - he would feel less pressure to spam mail his idea around. I did so only with the lead-in article labeling his work 'bad science'. Ideally he would have presented his paper on his own blog, but may not be allowed to do that in China. He's not abusing his freedom, he's stealing it and I'm just his fence. From a blogging point of view, posting his paper has turned out to be a good idea, since searches for it account for about ten percent of the traffic on this site.
But most people could not care less what some chinese guy thinks about a topic they don't care one rat's ass about themselves. Those that do (including everyone who reads this 'blog) are capable of reading the paper and figuring it out for themselves. In case they aren't sure, I let 'em know it's wrong right up front, but I really think the paper speaks for itself.
This was not the first time I had been criticized for airing simple-minded scientific questions. After all, I'm just a simple chemist...
By-the-way: how many of you have been hit with BingXin's spam-mail? Apparently the profanity worked, but listen, I felt justified!
