The Mathematical Constants in a Fascinating Context

[_Philo Sofee]

https://eujournal.org/index.php/esj/art ... /7488/7212

This is by far one of the most fascinating articles I have read yet this year. The author also wrote a book "The Scandal of Reason, or Shadow of God," which I haven't been able to put down now - getting through it for the 4th time this year. Enjoy how he puts two and two together.

[_Physics Guy]

The "European Scientific Journal" is a bit of an iffy journal. It's on some lists of "possibly predatory" journals, it has some suspicious features, and (for what this is worth) I've never heard of it before.

This is not to say that this particular article must be bad. But it's a warning sign that you may possibly be dealing with an incompetent article, or a plagiarized one, or simply one that is too unoriginal and banal for any genuine journal to accept it.

Researchers who put a lot of time and effort into their original articles tend to avoid suspect journals. They really want to get full credit for their work, and publishing it in a dubious journal automatically knocks down the amount of credit they get for it from their peers. So even if a journal's reputation is unfair to begin with, it quickly tends to become a deserved reputation, as serious authors desert it until only cranks and crooks are left to fill its pages.

There are quite a lot of crooks and cranks in the world—enough to make a commercial market. So-called "predatory journals" are scams, from the scientific point of view, but they serve a ready market of people who want to be able to say they've published a paper and are willing to pay for that honor. Just like ordinary vanity presses, predatory journals charge authors for publication—but they have a great excuse for that. They can claim to be "open access" journals.

Traditional journals charge relatively little or even nothing to authors, but they maintain copyright on their articles and only release them to subscribers, or to people who pay a one-shot fee to download an article. Per-article fees are usually in the range of $20-$30, which is a little steep for researchers in developing countries. Subscription fees are usually tens of thousands per year, so in practice hardly anyone but institutional libraries actually subscribes to scientific journals.

Open access is a recent movement in academic publishing, with many highly reputable journals now into it. The idea is to make it easier for results to spread all over the world by not charging readers. Typically these journals only publish online, since print editions are pointless today and skipping them cuts a lot of costs. There are still substantial costs for maintaining editorial staff, though, so open access journals pay their way by charging authors. For the reputable ones that I know the fees are some hundreds of dollars per article. University faculty usually don't mind paying such fees, since it's fairly easy to scrounge that amount of funding when your paper has been accepted.

Open access online journals are thus not a scam per se, but they are a model that is easily open to abuse. Anyone can set up a website and claim to be an open access online journal. If your plan is to serve cranks and crooks rather than real researchers, obvious tactics are to give your journal a very broad subject range, advertise short review times, and appeal to authors who want to record their "achievements". The European Scientific Journal does all of those, if you look at its own website. Not a good sign.

A predatory journal doesn't have to be entirely bogus. It can sweep in a few decent articles from young or isolated researchers who don't know any better, and it can get quite a few semi-decent articles from academics who are desperate to publish for job reasons, if their employers are careless enough to count iffy publications as acceptable productivity. The thing is that an article published by a predatory journal might as well just have been posted on a blog. The journal can loudly claim to practice strict peer review, but the claim is worthless.

Scientific peer review is a powerful force that is entirely unregulated. It's whatever journal editors decide it should be. It is subject to effective constraints that tend to keep it honest and thorough, but they are free-market constraints, not regulations: namely, buzz. If a journal starts getting a reputation for slack peer review, people will start sending their best work elsewhere, to places where it can get full credit for being as good as it is. These days that effect can be measured, with a couple years' lag time, by tracking how many citations a journal's articles tend to get in other articles. So journals that are actually trying to be good academic journals try very hard to maintain strict review.

Running a predatory journal whose peer review consists solely of the editor glancing over your title is not illegal, however. Scientists may not like you, but they can't call the cops on you. All they can do is run blogs that try to list predatory journals and warn people away from them.

So, bottom line: don't assume that everything you find online which calls itself a scientific journal is actually worth anything, even if the journal name sounds prestigious.

[_Philo Sofee]

Thanks for pointing all that out PG. I am in conversation with Haight, a university professor in New Hampshire, and has been for over 30 years. He uses pretty decent sources and doesn't appear to be into woo as so many charlatans are. I honestly don't see him as a goofball at all. His information in his article was intriguing, to say the least., It gives me ideas about other areas I am investigating that makes it more enjoyable.

[_Physics Guy]

I've skimmed through that article now. Hate to break it to you, Philo, but it's classic nonsensical woo that would never be published in any genuine scientific or mathematical journal.

It does start with a peculiar fact that really is a fact. A certain ratio of electron charge, speed of light, and Planck's constant comes out to be a pure number, known as "alpha". The individual quantities in the ratio are not just numbers, but have physical units, like meters per second for the speed of light, or Joule-seconds for Planck's constant. In this particular fractional function, however, the units all cancel out, leaving only a number that would come out the same no matter what system of units we used. This pure number could be considered a "magic number" like pi, except that it is defined in terms of empirically measured physical quantities, instead of abstract geometry. As far as we know, pi would have to be the same in all possible universes but alpha could be just about anything.

The best current measurement of alpha is 0.0072973525664(17) according to Wikipedia, which should be reliable for this kind of thing. The important thing about this number is that it is small—and this really is important, because alpha is not just a curiosity in physics. It shows up constantly in any calculation in quantum electrodynamics. In fact this means that alpha is mainly important in a negative way: it is because alpha is so small that one can get through daily life without having to use quantum electrodynamics, and therefore without having to refer to alpha. So the small number alpha does not show up in day-to-day physics—Haight is just wrong when he implies that it somehow does—but it is very important as a matter of fundamental principle.

All physicists believe in their hearts that alpha can after all be deduced from pure mathematics somehow, that it is not really an arbitrary number but actually is just as definite as pi, and that someday an ultimate theory will explain to us exactly why it has the value it has. No such theory, however, has yet been constructed.

The reciprocal of alpha (one divided by alpha) is indeed quite close to 137. Your guy Haight is another in the long line of people who have gotten starry-eyed over some particular numerological coincidence that comes out with something close to 137. None of these arithmetical coincidences have ever panned out to be anything but coincidences. And Haight does not show any signs of doing better than the others. His article seriously reads as though it was written while stoned.

First of all he gets some crucially relevant basic facts utterly wrong, in ways that scream Dunning-Kruger. For example he gets all enthusiastic about how alpha "makes" seven fundamental constants "equal to one". That is such nonsense. One can indeed make all these constants (except i, for Pete's sake) equal to one by choosing an appropriate system of units for length, time, and mass; but this is absolutely nothing more than saying that one can make the duration of Earth's orbit equal to one by choosing an Earth year as the unit of time. And precisely because alpha is a pure number without any units, alpha is completely irrelevant to the unit system in which all those constants equal one. In no way whatever does alpha "make" those other constants equal anything. Most of the things that Haight says about physics in this article are either totally ass-backwards misinterpretations like that one, or are simply flat wrong.

Beyond that he gleefully shows a few equations that involve 1.37 and 13.7 as well as 137, as if those are relevant. That's flat numerological hooey, because neither Nature nor math attaches any special importance to the base-10 number system of humans. Atoms don't have ten toes. A stunt like this is an absolute smoking gun for crackpottery: it's a much too ridiculous error for any remotely serious researcher to make. And the whole article is just full of that kind of stoner logic, by which any kind of formula that happens to involve two different things in any way is somehow grounds for saying that the two things are the same, or that one of them "makes" the other "be one", or whatever buzzy nonsense popped into the author's head at the time. Seriously, most of the statements in this paper bear the same relation to actual math or physics that my daughter's imitation of French bears to actual French. She doesn't speak French at all; she just glibly babbles sounds that she thinks sound French. Her gibberish is glib enough that someone else who spoke no French might mistake it for French, but it just plain and simply is not. It's pure gibberish, and so is almost every line of this paper.

You are dealing here, I'm afraid, with a crank. And the fact that this journal published this article confirms that it is a garbage journal. A somewhat flakey but borderline journal might possibly publish a speculation about a connection between alpha and Phi, but no remotely decent journal would ever accept rambling gibberish like this.

[_Physics Guy]

Another little update: David F. Haight's faculty profile web page at Plymouth State University lists as one of his honors "Leading Philosopher of the World, Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 2006". The Cambridge Bibliographical Society is a real organization at Cambridge University but it does not award any titles like "leading philosopher of the world". That particular title is actually awarded by the International Biographical Centre, which is located in Cambridgeshire. The IBC is a vanity credential mill that will award a wide range of titles in return for cash.

Maybe he really was a Fulbright scholar at Oxford in 1965, but I couldn't find his name in the Fulbright scholars' lists from 1964-65 or 65-66.

He further claims to be one of only two "Notable Professors" at his institution, the other being Robert Frost. There's no indication of who designated him as a Notable Professor. Wikipedia lists two faculty members as "notable people" associated with Plymouth State, one of whom is indeed Robert Frost, but the other is not Haight.

Aaand in 2008 he published an article in the "Journal of Interdisciplinary Mathematics" whose abstract blithely concludes "therefore the Riemann hypothesis is correct."

Okay, now I just feel bad for the guy. He's clearly having some problems.

[_Philo Sofee]

Heh, good detective work PG. Thanks for the updates. Gotta get through the cranks while reading all sides in order to get to and contrast with the good that is out there. Part of the lesson of learning.