A Spat on Twitter

First of all, a little disclosure.  
In the past, I have made a little money telling fortunes.  I learned to read cards, and learned some cold reading techniques, because I was interested in psychic phenomena and because I'm interested in confidence tricks.
The end result of this is I'm very careful about what I believe and what people tell me, because I have told people up front "I'm a con man", given them a tarot reading and watched them walk away swearing I had psychic powers.  People generally believe what they're told if they're told in a nice enough manner.

Second, my "opponent" in this teacup storm: Lonnie Hicks.  @Lnnie is someone I've followed on Twitter for a while.  He collates and disseminates all sorts of interesting information and presents points of view that run largely counter to my own.  Why follow him?  Because it's important to be exposed to points of view that are not yours.  Sometimes it's irritating, but you do it because you don't want to live in an echo chamber.  You can't shut out dissenting views.  Lonnie is, in my experience, a nice guy with an open and welcoming attitude who presents points of view that he attempts to support with evidence.  The other night, I called him ignorant.  He'd tweeted that scientific method was little more than trial and error, and he'd not really dealt with my counters to that point.  Instead, he said:

@DocOccupant Ignorant. Have you read anything? If so what? See my website I sum up the different points of view on these issues. Gotta read.

He's entirely right, you do have to read.  And I'm not well versed in physics or maths, facts I readily admit to.  One thing I'm good at, though, is reading.  So when the next tweet arrived...

@DocOccupant Seldom called ignorant. Here some of my essays you might want to take a look at to see where I am coming from. Have u written?

...I had a bit of a giggle.  Here's the thing.

Any idiot can write.  The guy who owns the Time Cube website can, and has, written.  The act of writing proves nothing.  Now, if Lonnie has written for something like Nature, or New Scientist, then I'm being really dumb and I'm going to have to apologise quite hard.

Being the guy he is, Lonnie then provides a link so I can go read what he's written.  Cool.  That link in full is: http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewshortstory.asp?id=60829&authorid=121255

OK, so now my Spidey sense is tingling a little bit.

Lonnie's essays are collated or curated blog posts in which he pulls together links from other places and talks about what that information might mean.  We end up with stuff like this.  I've put quotes from his essay, which you should read, in bold italics.  The essay in question is: 

http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewshortstory.asp?id=54154&authorid=121255

Why did Einstein make the claim that nothing can travel faster than light in the first place? What was his argument and rationale?

It might surprize you when you get the answer.

Here it is.

Nothing can travel faster than light, Einstein says, because to do so would require an object to have infinite energy. Moreover, to approach that speed and attain it, objects would have to acquire infinite mass as well.

Well there you have it.

What is wrong with this statement?

Let me just bring this to a screeching halt.  What's wrong is that Einstein says nothing travels faster than the speed of light in a vacuum.  The speed of light changes in different environments.  This, to quote the Dothraki, is known.

He also says that the energy required to accelerate something to the speed of light increases as it gets faster.  He says the mass the thing has will increase, and that the jump from 99.99% the speed of light to lightspeed would require infinite energy.  The reason for that is the object would be gaining mass at the same time, so the amount of energy you need to accelerate it is always going to be a bit more than you currently have.

This is basically special relativity.  I'll nick the sciencey explanation from CERN:

And now, for all of us non-scientists, my attempt at understanding Albert Frickin' Einstein:

The faster you make an object move, the harder it is to get it to move still faster.  In order to get anything to do anything, you have to impart energy.  The amount of energy you add has to be sufficient to overcome what the object is already doing.

In science dunce terms, when you get close to the speed of light (let's call that c because everyone else does) the object you want to make move faster starts to acquire mass.  That makes it harder to move, it's heavier.  For every increment of energy you add, the object gets slightly heavier and therefore requires more energy to increase the speed. You can take this pretty far.  According to special relativity, you can crank something up to 99.999999999% the speed of light, but the next step - from there to c - requires more energy than you can possibly have.  More energy than exists, apparently.

First objects traveling faster than light would be invisible to us. Light is not being transmitted so an object would not be seen.

Not strictly the case.  Objects travelling faster than light are visible, but in the same way that objects travelling faster than sound are audible.  

Light is being reflected, but by the time we see it, the event or object they are reflecting off will have happened/gone past us.  Just like you'd see a jet moving faster than sound, but the noise it makes would happen moments later.

(Sounds like black holes and dark matter doesn't it?)

Nope.

Secondly, since infinity is not possible then nothing can attain that state.

Do you mean light speed or infinity?  If you mean light speed, yes.  That's what I understand.

But note that at CERN particles are being accelerated to 99.9 percent of the velocity of light. Are we seeing there infinite mass and energy? 

No. As stated in the graphic above, they're cranking nearly massless subatomic particles up to 0.999999991 c and we don't mess with the whole infinite mass/energy thing until we try to make the jump from 0.999999999 to 1.0 c

If so, is this similar to conditions to what has been described as the beginnings of the big bang?

Is there danger here? See the video below. The answer as to CERN's dangers lies in whether Hawking was right or whether Einstein was right.

I'm going to let CERN take this.  

Humm, perhaps that is why we are not hearing much talk about it. Sounds too dangerous?

No. Go read the link.  This is covered on page 10 and, under safety concerns, page 54.

Third, note that in science, infinity in an equasion means zero, or no solution possible. 

Thus the rationale for the speed limit on light has some logical problems as well and mathematical ones too.

There isn't a rationale on the speed limit on light, because that isn't what Einstein was saying about the speed of light.  Light isn't limited to a speed, photons are massless particles and they are the fastest moving things we know about.  The speed of light, of photons, in a vacuum, is the universal speed limit.

  In any event Physics is in real trouble and should not, in my view, be fooling around with forces it poorly understands which if they are wrong, such an experiment can destroy the planet.

My issue is that Lonnie appears to not understand physics.  I know I've cherry picked a connected series of statements that I can find fault with, but here's the thing.

I don't understand physics all that well, I have no qualifications in it.  I don't have a strong grasp of maths.  I was tested recently and my maths is about as good as a high school graduate.  This means it's better than it was when I graduated high school. (I didn't, I'm a Brit, I quit maths at 16).

If I can take a statement made by someone who claims to have majored in physics and who cites their own essays as evidence to support their scholarship, and pull it apart, how well is that person doing?  How much do they really know?

Special relativity still works, the LHC isn't going to destroy the world, and science is a damn site more than trial and error.  If you want me to respect your views on science, on the basis that you have written, please be published in a respected - and preferably peer reviewed - and don't construct arguments that someone with education in that field can pull apart after literally 30 minutes on the CERN website and ten minutes with Google.

Lonnie, I've read and I've written.  That makes us even.  I've also unfollowed you because the way you present information makes all my con-man radar light up.  I don't think you're a con man.  But honestly, I question the level of understanding you have and your reasons for promoting your work.  

Consequently, I've unfollowed Lonnie.  He doesn't just write on science, and over the months he's said a lot of challenging things on equality, poverty and many other subjects.  I invite readers to have a look at his feed and his works, and judge their value for yourself.  Don't take anyone's word about anything.  Do the reading.