I saw that one, but haven't tried to get into his more detailed written theory of it.

Harriman did not "substitute ideology for facts". His essay is about the widespread terrible philosophy being improperly tied to physics and spread as if physics had confirmed it. Insisting on rationality while rejecting irrational ideology promoted in the name of science is not "substituting ideology for facts". Some of us see the irony in that accusation.

He did not analyze Heisenberg's book because he chose to write about something else: an elementary description of a more widespread phenomenon.

Your discusssions with someone else long ago while measuring the characteristics of pulses is not an argument against the Harriman article.

You didn't say what about quantum mechanics you discussed as "mysticism", but the most extreme, overt example of it is the 'Tao of Physics' movement explicitly endorsing and tying quantum theory to Eastern mysticism. Even David Bohm was lured into it with Krishnamurti and the Dalai Lama mysticism for decades. They had no difficulty finding similarities with quantum theory but lacked the sense to reject it as a reductio ad absurdum.

MikeMarotta's original question was..."If you take a million marbles and roll them through two gates, do you get a diffraction pattern?"

Do marbles diffract?

His one youtube lecture is on GR and where he thinks it goes wrong. I have not spent the time to truly understand it well. He calls it G4v

It was his own evaluation after seeing what Mike wrote, not an argument for anything, let alone ad hominem. He had concluded that the Harriman article is much clearer.

I have watched his videos that you linked to, but haven't looked up what he has written about electrodynamics or relativity.

They aren't "components", they are relations. This is epistemological, not metaphysical. Space-time is an abstraction combining space and the distance traveled by light in a specific time, with all four distances related in the equations. It isn't a thing that is curved.

Are you saying, "It's not ad hominem. It's just a fact about the person rather the claims he's making."?

I was trying to identify the source of LibertyBelle's error in what she called "modular" arithmetic.

It is not ad hominum it is a fact of MM

Look him up on youtube well worth viewing. I am not sure what the final answer will be to these issues, but I do know physics went off track in a number of areas.

ProfChuck: "For some reason there are people that hate the idea of relativity and will pursue any course to challenge it."

Perhaps "there are people" who are willing to question the authority of intellectual lemming conservatism under the name of science, especially when it is so often accompanied by insistence on such bad philosophy tied to it as part of the theory. Perhaps these people are seeking to understand and they reject the standard nonsense as not providing that, you know -- like real scientists do. Perhaps this questioning has nothing to do with "hatred" or "any course" whatever to challenge it regardless of what it is. Perhaps your accusation is blatant ad hominem.

The article he linked to did not challenge relativity as science, it argued that GPS is not a "test" for it. Do you agree with that or not? Do you regard your own (very interesting) work as a "test" for GR?

The main conflict is the copenhagen interpretation of QM and reality and it is leading to all sorts of problems

Whether they are considered entities or relationships, space and time are essential components of the universe as we know and experience it. Our existence and consciousness would not be possible without them.

Inductance was the killer. The few millimeters of wire between the pulse output and the laser diode turned the vaguely square-ish pulse into a sadly sloped lump, but with enough above the laser threshold to get substantial optical power out. Sufficient to write on optical discs in the days before we (Philips) invented the CD.

Lasers embody the essence of quantum mechanics. Quantized states with specific lifetimes are played against each other to achieve a population inversion (many more hot atoms/molecules than cool ones), which is impossible in the world of classical thermodynamics. One item drops a quantum of energy stimulating all to emit the same energy to produce miracle light. Today we take lasers for granted, but our supplications before the quantum gods made CD's, DVD's, and Blu-rays possible.

I have never "felt" the conflict between Einstein's relativity and quantum mechanics.
The Schrödinger equation, central to quantum mechanics, does indeed show the probabilistic element to which Einstein was hostile, thus his "Gott würfelt nicht" (approximately: God doesn't throw dice.)

But the beautifully elegant Klein-Gordon equation absorbs Schrödinger's equation, including Planck's constant h (the natural line-width of the probabilistic universe), mass, and the speed of light c, central to Einstein's relativity. I realized the compatibility of quantum mechanics and relativity when I first noticed that the product of quantum conjugates (position/momentum and time/energy) were relativistic invariants under Lorentz transformations. So, Planck's constant is truly constant—what the quantum dice measure produces no conflict with relativity.

The math involved is beyond the scope and character capabilities available here. See this Wikipedia entry for a taste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein%E...

I remember his saying that the bending of light is required in Einstein's theory because Einstein postulated that the speed of light is a constant, but I haven't seen Mead's own formulations.

Abstracting characteristics of characteristics is the opposite of "stealing" the concepts and treating the relationships space and time as if they were primary entities of the universe.

"He was designing electronics to send as close as possible to a one amp, one nanosecond wide(!) square-wave pulse through laser diodes we were growing in-house. "
Electricity propagates in the 120-180 ps/inch range, so the pulse is only a few inches long on a wire. Seen in the freq domain, the pulse has spectral components into several GHz, and any loop of wire is a significant inductor at those frequencies. I bet the circuit looked a lot like a wide-band transmitter operating in the GHz range.

"We were hardcore scientists/techies/Objectivists who debated about quantum mechanics."
I always imagined that if I had studied quantum physics, it would be non-mystical but different from the macroscopic world. i imagined quantum mystics take confusion about the quantum world and macroscopic world and give us The Tao of Physics and What the Bleep Do We Know?

It was in response to db's statement, "you should read Heisenberg's book Philosophy and Physics". Have you read it? You don't seem to believe that the Harriman article refers to commonly espoused views on quantum mechanics propagated as the meaning of the physics.

You are dropping the context and stealing the concept. Nothing makes 2+2 not equal to 4. Any derivative calculations such as addition mod p count on that. The remainder on division requires first adding the numbers.

The point I take away from all of this is anti-scientific people start with the answer they want to get and look for evidence. They imagine scientists do the same. So, in their minds, modern biology must worship Darwin and hold Origin of Species as a bible.

A thing is all of its characteristics, not whatever is observable at the moment. Your conventionalist Kantian-influenced epistemology of "models" cut off from "true" reality does not follow from the necessity of observing reality in order to understand it. You did not address anything I wrote and your posts show no understanding of Ayn Rand's Aristotelian philosophy.

More than "50% of you comments were coherent..." Please let's avoid ad hominem assaults.

I, too, found Harriman's article less than satisfying or compelling. It validated something from long ago when my research lab coworker, who had first introduced me to Objectivist philosophy, said, "Modern science aids and abets a primitive mysticism."

I debated this notion with him at length, particularly in that we were not laymen. He was designing electronics to send as close as possible to a one amp, one nanosecond wide(!) square-wave pulse through laser diodes we were growing in-house. I (MIT degreed physicist) was measuring the resulting spectra and other optical parameters. We were hardcore scientists/techies/Objectivists who debated about quantum mechanics.
So, no, I concur that Harriman's essay is not an excellent article.