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Stephen J. Crothers

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I'm neither a mathematician nor a physicist. More accurately, I'm a gardener and home handyman who does science in his spare time.
—Stephen J. Crothers[1]

Stephen J. Crothers (1957–) is a handyman/gardener and part-time amateur scientist who claims that black holes do not exist and are neither predicted by nor compatible with General Relativity.[2] His body of work consists primarily of articles that he posts at either viXra or his own personal website,[3][4] thus steering clear of the peer review process. He has also been a frequent guest speaker at the annual EU conferences held by the Electric Universe crowd.[5][6][7]

Crothers is currently listed as a staff member at the Alpha Institute for Advanced Studies;[8] a minuscule (in size and influence) group of misfits and malcontents headed by "free energy" crank Myron W. Evans.[9]

Crothers and Evans co-authored the book Criticisms of the Einstein Field Equation,[10] which advocates replacing General Relativity with the widely-discredited Einstein-Cartan-Evans (ECE) theory, a pseudoscientific theory invented by Myron Evans and used as justification for perpetual motion machines and various free energy scams.[11][12][13]

In 2005, Crothers was expelled from the University of New South Wales; all the sordid details of the incident are chronicled at his website, which he falsely attributes to "suppression of science".[14] Undeterred by his forced dismissal from academics, Crothers would soon go on to receive an honorary doctorate degree from the Maxwell Einstein University;[15][16] a fake, make-believe school created by his colleague and partner in crime, Myron Evans, for the sole purpose of doling out phony diplomas to his cohorts and cronies.

In 2008, Crothers and Evans each received a "Gold Medal Award" from the Telesio-Galilei Academy of Science;[17] a lunatic fringe organization that hands out second-rate menial awards to virtually any disreputable crackpot and con artist.

Starving for attention, Crothers e-mails his childlike scribblings to prominent scientists for comment, and surprisingly, renowned theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate, Prof. Gerard 't Hooft, has responded via his own personal website. However, their ongoing correspondence[18] has been contentious from the start, with Professor ‘t Hooft asserting that the gardener/handyman's "strange misconceptions" are "nonsense".[19] Similarly, world-famous mathematician Dr. Roy Kerr (best known for discovering the Kerr metric, an exact solution to the Einstein field equations of General Relativity), has aptly described Crothers' shoddy work as "rubbish".[20] In the comments sections of his repetitive scribblings on viXra, Crothers continually belittles and insults his critics, also showing a great fondness for the word "adduce", which he thinks makes him sound grand.

In 2016, the two devious hokum peddlers (Crothers and Evans) published their second book Principles of the Einstein-Cartan-Evans Theory.[21][22][23] Just more of the same (free energy extracted from spacetime torsion) drivel and hogwash.[24]

Crothers is a member of the anti-scientific cult organization PSI (Principia Scientific International) [25] where he is promoted as "...the most able scholar in Einsteinian type general relativity. He has produced many definitive refutations of big bang, black holes and other fallacies and errors of Einsteinian general relativity."

Claims[edit]

Here are a few of the many schoolboy howlers from "the Miles Mathis of cosmology": Stephen J. Crothers.

  • There has been a deliberate suppression of scientific truth by the community of physicists and astronomers concerning the black hole and the big bang.[4]
  • There is no theoretical basis whatsoever for the existence of black holes.[26]
  • Neither Newton's theory nor Einstein's theory predicts black holes; both theories preclude it.[4]
  • Black holes are the result of David Hilbert’s corruption of the so-called Schwarzschild solution.[4]
  • Schwarzschild's "coordinate singularity" at r=2m is non-removable.[27]
  • The Kruskal-Szekeres coordinates are just unmitigated rot built upon a set of invalid assumptions.[28][29]
  • The (Penrose-Hawking) singularity theorems are not theorems at all, as they are based upon false concepts.[30]
  • It is possible to have M3 and E3 in one-to-one correspondence. [31][32][33]
  • Einstein's gravitational waves are fictitious.[34]
  • Einstein's pseudo-tensor is a meaningless concoction of mathematical symbols.[35]

Critics[edit]

The majority of scientists that Crothers has contacted (via mass e-mailings[38]) have wisely chosen to just ignore him which is perfectly understandable. Unsolicited e-mail from anyone (especially a rank amateur) claiming that black holes are a “scientific fraud” perpetrated by “corrupt physicists” is all but guaranteed to elicit unmitigated skepticism and prompt deletion. Nonetheless, Crothers did manage to convince a handful of notable scientists to examine his work.

The following is a list of mathematicians and physicists who have fully analyzed his far-fetched claims (see linked References below). One and all have unanimously concluded that not only is Crothers downright rude and obnoxious,[20][39][40] he is also a colossal waste of time: "The plethora of articles by the author (Stephen J. Crothers), which are largely identical, do not warrant serious contemplation by qualified scientists and mathematicians".[41]

Supporters[edit]

References[edit]

  1. http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread188540/pg7
  2. http://vixra.org/abs/1508.0106
  3. http://vixra.org/author/stephen_j_crothers
  4. 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 http://www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/
  5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBorBKDnE3U
  6. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q185InpONK4
  7. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXF098w48fo
  8. 8.0 8.1 http://www.aias.us/
  9. 9.0 9.1 https://drmyronevans.wordpress.com/
  10. http://www.amazon.com/Criticisms-Einstein-Field-Equation-Century/dp/1907343288/ref=sr_1_16?ie=UTF8&qid=1419450862&sr=8-16&keywords=Myron+Evans
  11. See the Wikipedia article on Einstein–Cartan–Evans theory.
  12. http://www.cheniere.org/megstatus.htm
  13. http://www.et3m.net/faqone.html
  14. http://www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/PhD.html
  15. https://drmyronevans.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/prof-stephen-crothers-accepts-ph-d-degree/
  16. https://drmyronevans.wordpress.com/2009/09/25/stephen-crothers/
  17. http://www.telesio-galilei.com/tg/index.php/academy-award-2008
  18. http://www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/Hooft.pdf
  19. 19.0 19.1 http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/gravitating_misconceptions
  20. 20.0 20.1 20.2 http://www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/Kerr.pdf
  21. https://www.amazon.com/Principles-ECE-Theory-paradigm-physics/dp/178719180X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1494836121&sr=8-1&keywords=Myron+Evans
  22. https://drmyronevans.wordpress.com/2014/12/17/principles-of-ece-theory-in-prep/
  23. https://drmyronevans.wordpress.com/2014/05/28/chapter-of-new-book-by-stephen-crothers/
  24. http://www.aias.us/documents/uft/UFT382.pdf
  25. https://principia-scientific.org/why-psi-is-proposed-as-a-cic/
  26. http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2005/PP-01-10.PDF
  27. http://vixra.org/pdf/1011.0062v1.pdf
  28. http://vixra.org/abs/1101.0012
  29. https://drmyronevans.wordpress.com/2008/10/01/dealing-with-criminality-in-the-obsolete-physics/
  30. http://vixra.org/pdf/1101.0012v1.pdf
  31. http://dealingwithcreationisminastronomy.blogspot.com/2009/12/paper-illustrating-more-of-crothers.html
  32. http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?p=8092280#post8092280
  33. http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2007/PP-09-14.PDF
  34. http://www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/NPA-paper.pdf
  35. http://www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/Ricci.html
  36. http://vixra.org/abs/1101.0009
  37. http://www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/Hooft.pdf
  38. http://www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/challenge.html
  39. 39.0 39.1 http://www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/letter-10.pdf
  40. http://www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/Hooft.pdf
  41. 41.0 41.1 http://crankastronomy.org/contrib/sharples/ReplyBS.pdf
  42. http://www.cesura17.net/~will/Ephemera/Nerdliness/Relativity/Crothers/denialism.html
  43. http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?p=8092280#post8092280
  44. http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?p=10777342#post10777342
  45. http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/theoristbad.html
  46. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1999/thooft-bio.html
  47. http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2010/PP-20-L1.PDF
  48. http://crankastronomy.org/contrib/sharples/KSdoc.pdf
  49. http://dealingwithcreationisminastronomy.blogspot.com/2009/06/some-preliminary-comments-on-crothers.html
  50. http://dealingwithcreationisminastronomy.blogspot.com/2009/12/paper-illustrating-more-of-crothers.html
  51. http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.6031
  52. http://www.libertariannews.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/The-Corda-Dialogues.pdf
  53. http://www.mathematik.tu-darmstadt.de/~bruhn/onCrothers041008.html
  54. http://www.mathematik.tu-darmstadt.de/~bruhn/CrothersViews.html
  55. http://www.mathematik.tu-darmstadt.de/~bruhn/toRabounski030508.html
  56. http://newt.phys.unsw.edu.au/STAFF/VISITING_FELLOWS&PROFESSORS/hamer.html
  57. http://www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/crothers2.pdf
  58. http://www.phys.canterbury.ac.nz/people/kerr.shtml
  59. http://www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/letter-9.pdf
  60. http://www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~mm/
  61. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6t-7-rUyW3I
  62. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euLHLJoe7pA
  63. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfuI6jECJxk
  64. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Cartan%E2%80%93Evans_theory
  65. http://vixra.org/author/pierre-marie_robitaille
  66. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voXNBs6ls7Q
  67. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99T7d_OYOw8
  68. http://milesmathis.com/
  69. http://milesmathis.com/croth.pdf
  70. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SI6xKcO3ufs
  71. http://www.gillan.com/friends56.html
  72. http://www.gillan.com/qa-91.html
  73. https://www.facebook.com/sylvia.stefanovska
  74. http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=286881
  75. https://www.youtube.com/user/MrWolynski
  76. http://vixra.org/abs/1303.0157
  77. http://vixra.org/abs/1205.0107
  78. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y4SiQ92UK4