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Plasmatic

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Hong then replies to Athos that he should learn Chinese and determine for himself....

Certainly, that's a suggestion. I could go to school over years and acquire degrees in physics and philosophy, to help me to understand Harriman's arguments, and eventually either agree or disagree with them. What is more, Harriman himself, rather than writing a book on his ideas, could have said, "If anyone would like to understand induction, or QM, or physics, they can study those subjects and come to their own conclusions." But I expect that he meant to express his views to those without his level of expertise, or without his specific research, and that it was for this purpose that he wrote his book.

I'm currently responding to your posts, and this conversation more generally, and what I take as your ongoing efforts to express your own views to people who likewise do not have your background or perspective. I'm not telling you that you're wrong about Harriman, I'm telling you that your opinions on Harriman don't matter to the conversation, and don't help you to convince anyone of anything. I'm telling you that your approach doesn't make this conversation useful or valuable (or at least not of use or value to me -- and from what I've been able to tell in following this, and earlier threads, some of which now locked, I'm not alone on that score) and I'm trying to suggest ways of correcting that. Not out of hostility, either, or even out of disagreement, but because I'd like to see ideas discussed in an effective manner on this forum.

You're welcome to continue on as you are, depending on the patience of others, but as for myself, I'll pass. Good luck.

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Andie-Eva-Frank-bill said:

Now here's my personal story, which might give an idea of where I'm coming from:

My bestie is a Greco-Hungarian chick named Eva (Ayyy-va). Although i'm in Salamanca and she's at Emory (Atlanta), we manage to talk at least four hours per week--so yes, i miss her.

We met as pre-teen, high -testing mathoids. She's now getting her PhD in Research Psy, while my doctorate will be in Spanish Lit. Now because we constantly discuss our work, it's clear that her hero is Kahneman, from his earth-shattering, 1977 'heuristic' onwards.

Quit the claim, all your sock puppets have the same trends of topics and phrases. I' am not buying it and your personal "identity" is irrelevant to the topic here. Kahneman's (another of your family of sock puppets favorite toys) nonsense is definitely not a part of the topic I purposed this thread for.

Andie said:

Enter Rand. While all academic philosophy forces one to think slowly, most all of the discipline that's written for laypersons is heuristic, encouraging lazy thought. Yet her's, remarkably, is different, which is why I absolutely adore her.

Rand demands that one take thought seriously--part of this seriousness being a willful attitude of keeping up with science. in this respect, she regrettably passed away before she had the opportunity to give QM careful examination.

Moreover, in my reading of her, she never confused the formal properties of logic (rules) for that genre of received wisdom which she fought so hard to oppose as intellectually laziness.

in short, she would enthusiastically go with the established data as fundamentally telling the truth. To this end, i really can't imagine her denying photon-reality of non-locality for the sake of hee-hawing that such a state of affairs violates common sense.

This is because, for the most part, she insisted that common-sense, heuristic thought was wrong: her virtue was to have demonstrated this to laypersons.

Harriman, then, is an embarrassment to Objectivism, and if Rand were alive today, she'd skin him alive.

AH

You have shown virtually no understanding of Ms.Rand's views on any topic and the above claims are preposterous examples of you talking in vague, sophistic generalities with no supporting content.

That you cannot provide a single instance of Rand treating logic as a "heuristic"-pragmatic rule of thumb, and that you cannot show a single example of Ms. Rand treating "common sense" as a species of lazy reliance on automatistic- sense of life, subconscious regurgitation of unreduced bromides and floating abstractions (Which is what Kahneman's silly "type 2" is.) is not relevant to this thread. Even if it does show your constant use of sophistry.

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Andie-Eva-Frank-bill said:

Quit the claim, all your sock puppets have the same trends of topics and phrases. I' am not buying it and your personal "identity" is irrelevant to the topic here. Kahneman's (another of your family of sock puppets favorite toys) nonsense is definitely not a part of the topic I purposed this thread for.

Andie said:

You have shown virtually no understanding of Ms.Rand's views on any topic and the above claims are preposterous examples of you talking in vague, sophistic generalities with no supporting content.

That you cannot provide a single instance of Rand treating logic as a "heuristic"-pragmatic rule of thumb, and that you cannot show a single example of Ms. Rand treating "common sense" as a species of lazy reliance on automatistic- sense of life, subconscious regurgitation of unreduced bromides and floating abstractions (Which is what Kahneman's silly "type 2" is.) is not relevant to this thread. Even if it does show your constant use of sophistry.

So we might conclude that the plazmatik version of Objectivism is all about name-calling, doubting identities, and calling Nobel Laureates in Economics 'silly'! He does Rand proud!

 

Otherwise, i was crystal clear that only certain, self-defined Randian bootlicks--surely not Ms Rand herself---were bootlegging in heuristics for formal logic. In that case, speaking for Dr Franka as well as myself (bill?), we'd take our sophistry over plazmo's illiteracy any day of the week.

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Plasmatic, now that the disturbances are out of the way :-), please return when possible to our discussion. My last post addressed to you in that discussion was #46.

 

I was basically wondering why you mentioned Quantum Mechanics in connection with the paper about the validity of Kirchhoff Law. Do you imply that if this (or later developments by Planck) proves to be invalid, the validity of QM should be questioned too? I argued that this it not the case.

 

Afterwards we could discuss the paper itself.

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Certainly, that's a suggestion. I could go to school over years and acquire degrees in physics and philosophy, to help me to understand Harriman's arguments, and eventually either agree or disagree with them. What is more, Harriman himself, rather than writing a book on his ideas, could have said, "If anyone would like to understand induction, or QM, or physics, they can study those subjects and come to their own conclusions." But I expect that he meant to express his views to those without his level of expertise, or without his specific research, and that it was for this purpose that he wrote his book.

I'm currently responding to your posts, and this conversation more generally, and what I take as your ongoing efforts to express your own views to people who likewise do not have your background or perspective. I'm not telling you that you're wrong about Harriman, I'm telling you that your opinions on Harriman don't matter to the conversation, and don't help you to convince anyone of anything. I'm telling you that your approach doesn't make this conversation useful or valuable (or at least not of use or value to me -- and from what I've been able to tell in following this, and earlier threads, some of which now locked, I'm not alone on that score) and I'm trying to suggest ways of correcting that. Not out of hostility, either, or even out of disagreement, but because I'd like to see ideas discussed in an effective manner on this forum.

You're welcome to continue on as you are, depending on the patience of others, but as for myself, I'll pass. Good luck.

The article in question says that Stewart's empirical demonstration that a real Black Box does not exist refutes Kirchoff. The article is wrong.

 

That's because his black box was an imaginary situation that he developed in order to find absolute units of wave length; he simply wasn't satisfied with the classical Maxwellian units because they were set only by arbitrary units (ie tiny divisable parts of the metric.).

 

In passing, an absolute wave length would yield an absolute temperature, 'T', the holy grail of thermodynamics.

 

But this is only ancillary to the equation itself, memorized by everyone who's ever taken a course in classical Thermo: 'alpha of lambda = eta of lambda

 

Or...

 

The Absorptivity (Alpha) is the ratio of the energy absorbed by the wall to the energy incident on the wall, for a particular wavelength lambda, equaling Emissivity (Eta) of the wall-- the ratio of emitted energy to the amount that would be radiated if the wall were a perfect black body.

 

Now it's easy to see by the equation that the absolute value of 'L' (giving the holy grail T!) can be discovered to be true to the extent that 'perfect black body' exists, as well.

To this extent bb =1.0 = L = 1.0.

 

But also, bb =.9999 = L..9999. etc. In other words, Kirchoff was close enough for us today to invoke his law when designing reflector suits, glare-proof glass, et al. As bb approaches 'perfect' (1), so does L

 

The error in Stewart, then, was his failure to understand the ease in which real measurements were backed off an absolute ratio, as common practice in far-more advanced Germany. In other words, if our measurement down from an ideal (ie BB) is sufficiently close, we can assume that the ideal was close enough , too, to enshrine in an equation.

 

For example, that's why we can say 'water is H-2- O', although one part in each ten thousand isn't,being HO, which varies, too, as 'pH.' The Stewarts of the world do not refute the chemistry of water by claiming the molecule is not perfectly 2 hydrogen and one oxygen atom 100% of the time.

 

Re Planck: The deviance from perfect black box is not explained by the properties of the box itself. Rather, that photons exist as particles that both wedge into the box and bounce off of each other.

 

AH

Edited by andie holland
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Why?

Because h-slash, the reduced Planck unit explains all discrepancies in retention/reflection ratios for all materials. 

 

In other words, Stewart's measurements are off, and revised by Planck, as much as were those of Kirchoff.

 

In the cases of both Kirchoff and Stewart, their apparatuses were simply not fine enough to detect the tiny, yet consistently predictable differences.

 

That what Planck referred to as 'quanta' was in all cases the degree of discrepancy was in great measure as to why it, not 'T' became the holy grail of absolute measurement.

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Why what?

Exactly. Each point that you bring forth reduces to "Why this?" or "Why that?" If you are looking to get to the root of this issue, you need to be able to reduce it to "Why is this a tree?", or "Why is this a dog?" When you are ready to do that, you may have something there. Until then, you are simply asking "why" without any grasp of what "why" relates to . . . IMHO.

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Andie said:

So we might conclude that the plazmatik version of Objectivism is all about name-calling, doubting identities, and calling Nobel Laureates in Economics 'silly'! He does Rand proud!

One might conclude this if they had a penchant for context dropping and managed to confuse a characterization of your post as a species of claim about Objectivism qua philosophy.

Andie said:

Otherwise, i was crystal clear that only certain, self-defined Randian bootlicks--surely not Ms Rand herself---were bootlegging in heuristics for formal logic.

And because I am on the premise of integrating my knowledge, I recall that previously you claimed:

for science (as i contend, at least), logic serves as a heuristic [...]Again (to belabor the point), no one disagrees that QM is weird, illogical, whatever. The point in question is the extent to which formal properties of logic should or should not direct research. My response is that it's always served as a heuristic in all sciences. Harriman's search for a logical golden age of science is a total failure.

For example, yes, photons as 'existants' have contradictory properties at the same time because the equations put them in many possible places...at the same time (duh!).[...]The wrong-ness of Harriman's argument goes to the heart of this debate in three ways:

* He gives a misunderstanding of how science has always worked.

** He misunderstands the heuristic benefits of logic within science....

So we're supposed to "keep up with science" instead of "common sense heuristic thought" but logic is a heuristic, except when it isn't convenient and serves as a sophistic , arbitrary claim about Rand....

Andie said:

and calling Nobel Laureates in Economics 'silly'! He does Rand proud!

Yeah, I call any Nobel prize winner "silly" who's theories claim man has no volition.

Edited by Plasmatic
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Exactly. Each point that you bring forth reduces to "Why this?" or "Why that?" If you are looking to get to the root of this issue, you need to be able to reduce it to "Why is this a tree?", or "Why is this a dog?" When you are ready to do that, you may have something there. Until then, you are simply asking "why" without any grasp of what "why" relates to . . . IMHO.

Whenever you become competant to adequately describe the article in question in terms of the facts as presented, then you can begin asking why, yourself. Until then, you'll be reduced to asking 'why?' of others who can describe said facts.

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Andie said:

One might conclude this if they had a penchant for context dropping and managed to confuse a characterization of your post as a species of claim about Objectivism qua philosophy.

Andie said:

And because I am on the premise of integrating my knowledge, I recall that previously you claimed:

So we're supposed to "keep up with science" instead of "common sense heuristic thought" but logic is a heuristic, except when it isn't convenient and serves as a sophistic , arbitrary claim about Rand....

Andie said:

Yeah, I call any Nobel prize winner "silly" who's theories claim man has no volition.

Logic serves as a heuristic for science in so for as it serves as a means of making given facts cohere. 

 

EX: since Lamb Shifts demonstrate slight differences in the energy levels of the two inner orbital shells of electrons, the one closest to the nucleon is affected by the nucleons emitted energy. Therefore, these emissions can be studied as particles, too (Feynman).

 

This is done within the context of having established 'givens' of content, just as Aristotle required.

 

Sadly, certain Randians confuse this with saying logic dictates the content of the facts as such. This is pure nonsense, or philosophy gone retarded.

 

The statement 'A equals A' cannot tell you whether the 'A' is a unicorn or a horse. To claim  otherwise is what  I call 'Hee-haw'-- you're just using the word 'logic' as a empty rhetorical gesture to solidify your claim that what you observe is more true than others'. 

 

If the subject in question is Kirchoff, then yes, you're supposed to keep up with science to that degree--in order not to spew out meaningless abstractions that make you sound 'philosophical'.. So if i'm a sophist, then you're a poseur who uses Randism as a fig leaf  for your ignorance of science

 

Volition is a philosophical issue which has no relevancy to a research psychologist's work. So calling Kahneman 'silly for this reason is just a lame excuse for refusing to delve into his content. Again, you're fig-leafing.

Edited by andie holland
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Alex said:

I was basically wondering why you mentioned Quantum Mechanics in connection with the paper about the validity of Kirchhoff Law. Do you imply that if this (or later developments by Planck) proves to be invalid, the validity of QM should be questioned too? I argued that this it not the case.

I suppose it depends on what you take as essential to QM theory. It is my understanding that Planck is thought of as the founder of QM, coining the very term that is its name. As I understand it, Planck's constant was originally related to the energy of atomic oscillators within a black body. The paper argues that Kirchoff's law is part of the basis of Planck's constant. I am open to the notion that this is not the case but at the moment I don't see how the omission of this conceptual-historical basis for Planck's constant in text books would change the presupposition of universality of Kirchoff's law by Planck in the derivation of his theory. Can you have QM without Planck's constants?

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Alex said:

I suppose it depends on what you take as essential to QM theory. It is my understanding that Planck is thought of as the founder of QM, coining the very term that is its name. As I understand it, Planck's constant was originally related to the energy of atomic oscillators within a black body. The paper argues that Kirchoff's law is part of the basis of Planck's constant. I am open to the notion that this is not the case but at the moment I don't see how the omission of this conceptual-historical basis for Planck's constant in text books would change the presupposition of universality of Kirchoff's law by Planck in the derivation of his theory. Can you have QM without Planck's constants?

"Can you have QM without Planck's constants?"

 

No. 

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Andie said:

Sadly, certain Randians confuse this with saying logic dictates the content of the facts as such. This is pure nonsense, or philosophy gone retarded.

The statement 'A equals A' cannot tell you whether the 'A' is a unicorn or a horse. To do otherwise is what call 'Hee-haw', You're just using the word 'logic' as a empty rhetorical gesture to solidify your claim that what you observe is more true than others'.

You have no idea what Oist are saying. I personally have pointed out that the LOI does not tell what a thing is in particular. No one has claimed this nonsense about the LOI here. Your attacking a strawman. What the LOI does tell you is that contradictions cant exist mind independently.

Andie said:

Volition is a philosophical issue which has no relevancy to a research psychologist's work. calling Kahneman 'silly for this reason is just a lame excuse for refusing to delve into his content. Again, you're fig-leafing.

I have read his book and that includes the foot notes where he explains that he rejects volition as the basis for "rational agents". What you call "fig leafing" foundationalist call rejecting hierarchy inversions.

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I suppose it depends on what you take as essential to QM theory [...] Can you have QM without Planck's constants?

No, but you can introduce the Planck's constant without carrying over all the history surrounding it, with all the tribulations, errors and dead-ends. In all the modern presentations of QM, the Planck constant is introduced as a real positive number such as the time evolution of a system is correctly described by the Schrödinger equation:

 

12759838d4297bdb0bd88c613cbb63c7.png

 

In this way, QM is logically insulated from whatever can happen in the future with the ideas which historically led to the discovery of Planck's constant, including Kirchhoff's Law, Planck's law for black-body radiation and so on.

 

The QM theory is confirmed by testing experimentally its predictions for various systems. QM passed the exams :-) and is now an autonomous, stand-alone theory.

 

The Schrödinger eq. insures also the universality and fundamentality of Planck's constant and makes it independent of Kirchhoff's Law, Planck's law, etc. The claims to the contrary made in the paper (e.g. in the last paragraph) are therefore wrong.

 

QM being a fundamental theory, it serves, as such and/or through extensions, such as Quantum Statistical Physics, to deduce e.g. Planck's Law and other results which served historically in the discovery of QM.

 

Therefore, the possible errors committed by Kirchhoff and Planck are of no relevance to the validity of QM.

Edited by AlexL
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Andie said:

You have no idea what Oist are saying. I personally have pointed out that the LOI does not tell what a thing is in particular. No one has claimed this nonsense about the LOI here. Your attacking a strawman. What the LOI does tell you is that contradictions cant exist mind independently.

Andie said:

I have read his book and that includes the foot notes where he explains that he rejects volition as the basis for "rational agents". What you call "fig leafing" foundationalist call rejecting hierarchy inversions.

The best example of my 'straw' dog is Harriman who claimed that photons being in two places at once (Schrodinger) violates the LOI. This, again I call Hee-hawing.

 

My second is the O-ist expression itself, "Existence is Identity"-- assuming that 'identity' does indeed refer to the LOI and is not just a hyped-up tautology for "Things really exist because i identify them as....existants".

 

Otherwise, the expression Ex=Id would say, "Entities that are established by the first law of logic are necessarily true existants". Therefore, snowball the unicorn really exists because she has a horn which by definition defines what a unicorn is.

 

since 1977, the thrust of Kahneman's work has been  to establish a category of human behavior that explains irrationality. In this regard, volition is not so much rejected as seen as a meaningless tautology--a sort of intellectual 'black hole' into which we can put all behaviors deemed emotively-based.

 

In this sense, volition stands for emotion as opposed to reason.

 

Kahneman's discovery of the heuristic explains the irrational without recourse to saying that any particular act is 'volitional'. Again, his is a research strategy that explains human behavior... not a philosophical statement that says we don't have volition as such. 

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No, but you can introduce the Planck's constant without carrying over all the history surrounding it, with all the tribulations, errors and dead-ends. In all the modern presentations of QM, the Planck constant is introduced as a real positive number such as the time evolution of a system is correctly described by the Schrödinger equation:

 

12759838d4297bdb0bd88c613cbb63c7.png

 

In this way, QM is logically insulated from whatever can happen in the future with the ideas which historically led to the discovery of Planck's constant, including Kirchhoff's Law, Planck's law for black-body radiation and so on.

 

The QM theory is confirmed by testing experimentally its predictions for various systems. QM passed the exams :-) and is now an autonomous, stand-alone theory.

 

The Schrödinger eq. insures also the universality and fundamentality of Planck's constant and makes it independent of Kirchhoff's Law, Planck's law, etc. The claims to the contrary made in the paper (e.g. in the last paragraph) are therefore wrong.

 

QM being a fundamental theory, it serves, as such and/or through extensions, such as Quantum Statistical Physics, to deduce e.g. Planck's Law and other results which served historically in the discovery of QM.

 

Therefore, the possible errors committed by Kirchhoff and Planck are of no relevance to the validity of QM.

Yes, both the Schrodinger wave propagation and the more- relevant Heisenberg Particle Matrix are written with the Planck as an absolute value.

 

Yet neither 'ensured' anything without having being tested. 

 

Harriman's issue rests with the 'i' that anti-cedes the h-slash, giving two values for the wave function, 'psi'. This he says is 'illogical' because, as all good hee-hawers just know, things can;t be in two places at once.

 

Yet historically, this was the albatross that hung around QM's neck until the aspect experiments in the late 70's proved that photon do behave like this. Until that time, QMers simply tossed out the second value as irrelevant. Now to play devil's advocate, yes, the epistemological issue of doing this pretty much in your face!

 

In other words. Harrimsn's error is special because he claimed it to be an issue of first-order logic. This is his philosophical error. OTH, his Physics error is not to have referenced the experimental research--beginning again, with Aspect.

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It's very simple, no physicist has ever observed a particle in two places at once. Andie is completely oblivious to the difference between observation and deduction from equations. To claim this ("observed superpositions") is to show complete ignorance of the discussion of QM ontology in the philosophy of physics. Instead of addressing the fundamental differences between Andies philosophy of science and those here, Andie continues to beg all the questions that these differences presuppose. "Because the math says so" is not a reduction to percepts. And until Andie grasps what Oism even has to say about Identity we will be talking past him.

Harriman has discussed Aspect in his lectures.... But Andie hasn't actually listen to what he is criticizing.

Andie you have expressed the belief that contradictions exist and therefore have abdicated reason. Therefore I will treat you on your own terms and take your protestations as complete agreement and praise for Objectivism. There is therefore nothing left to convince you of. (Including the ridiculous equating of emotion with volition)

Edited by Plasmatic
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It's very simple, no physicist has ever observed a particle in two places at once. Andie is completely oblivious to the difference between observation and deduction from equations. To claim this ("observed superpositions") is to show complete ignorance of the discussion of QM ontology in the philosophy of physics. Instead of addressing the fundamental differences between Andies philosophy of science and those here, Andie continues to beg all the questions that these differences presuppose. "Because the math says so" is not a reduction to percepts. And until Andie grasps what Oism even has to say about Identity we will be talking past him.

Harriman has discussed Aspect in his lectures.... But Andie hasn't actually listen to what he is criticizing.

Andie you have expressed the belief that contradictions exist and therefore have abdicated reason. Therefore I will treat you on your own terms and take your protestations as complete agreement and praise for Objectivism. There is therefore nothing left to convince you of. (Including the ridiculous equating of emotion with volition)

The impossibility direct observations of photons was noted in the Heisenberg, 1925. Rather, the math has been tested indirectly, many times. Here, 'indirect observation' refers to 'effect'. 

 

Aspect demonstrated that' two places at once' was the only  way of describing the behavior, thereby meeting the challenge of Bell's inequality.

 

As an practical/theoretical application of superposition, I can refer you to 'Josephsen Junction', making MRI possible,

 

As for Harrimans's comments on Aspect, post and i'll be happy to read.

 

Lastly, you're convinced me that randite laws of physics and her philosophy of science does, regrettably, involve confusing formal logic with properties of content. "The (indirect) observation of superposition cannot be true because it's a logical contradiction to say that an object can be in two places at once".

 

Well no, she, he, and you are wrong. Seeming paradoxes of content are not logical fallacies. To say it is is a 'Hee-haw'. 

 

So it's not my science that you've put into  question, but rather the real, lived one that's practiced in the real world. 

 

Ditto with Kahneman. who states constantly that emotion, via the heuristic, constantly works its way into economic decisions and risk. 

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Mr. Plasmatic,

 

1. as you didn't comment on my last post (#92), I will assume that you agree with my conclusion : the possible errors committed by Kirchhoff and Planck are of no relevance to the validity of QM. You implied the contrary when starting this thread.

 

2. The paper you linked to is at least highly suspect:

 

 - it is not published in a reputable, peer-reviewed journal;

 - it appeared in "Progress in Physics", a publication which, in the name of "scientific freedom", publishes pseudoscience;

- I don't think the paper was reviewed by an independent external referent: it was submitted on Saturday January 24, 2014 and accepted on Sunday January 25, 2015 :-)

- the main author, Pierre-Marie Robitaille, is known as a crackpot.

 

3.About the scientific value of the paper... maybe, depending of the feedback. I have already showed that one of its conclusions, namely the non-universality of Planck's constant, is dead wrong.

Edited by AlexL
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