nick c wrote:Again, I am sorry that you find my comments snarky. In my opinion they are anything but.
If I started a post here with: "When are EU theorists going to learn from the past? How may angels can fit on the point of a pin? " ... And then repeated a common fallacious argument, I'm pretty sure you would find it snarky. That you tried to defend such a comment because of "authority" and "censorship" is no excuse. You also tried to back it up with the Natural article on Hawking's paper, but did not respond to my counterargument. If you're wrong it's good form to apologize, not for how I feel, but for being wrong and rude about it.
Yes, I was referring to Crothers and I am quite capable of judging an injustice when I see one, and so are you. It does not matter if he is wrong or right the point is that he is a competent mathematician who has been condemned to be an academic persona non grata by those with an authority- whose power arises from political position...not science.
I am capable of seeing an injustice given enough evidence and expertise, but I don't know if one has been done in this case. You claim he is a competent mathematician. I take it then you have read Clinger's and Sharples' rebuttals, and can judge them? A competent mathematician needs to meet some level of quality and also needs to correct their errors. Throw in an abrasive personality and your margin for error goes down. Here's a quote from Clinger:
Crothers's papers are rife with errors. Many of those errors have already been pointed out by Jason J Sharples, and I will explain some other errors later on in this thread.
Crothers started with and was inspired by a paper that's harder to dismiss:
Leonard S Abrams. Black holes: the legacy of Hilbert's error. Canadian Journal of Physics 67, 1989, page 919ff. http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0102055
That paper is very well-written, and its math is almost (but not quite!) correct.