To find faults and even errors in someone else’s work is not that difficult. And to make an error is easy as well. Famous people, even “authorities”, make errors.
Sir Roger Penrose
A couple of my papers:
- “Geometry and Shape of Minkowski's Space Conformal Infinit”, Reports on Mathematical Physics, 69 (2012), 179-195.
- "On Conformal Infinity and Compactifications of the Minkowski Space", Advances in Applied Clifford Algebras, DOI: 10.1007/s00006-011-0285-5, 2011,
see also "Compactified Minkowski Space: Myths and Facts", Prespace Journal, 3(2) (2012), 21-30.
were devoted to straightening out errors caused by unfortunate statements by a renowned mathematical physicist, Sir Roger Penrose. In his 1964 paper “The Light Cone at Infinity”. Roger Penrose made a couple of confusing statements concerning the shape of “space-time infinity”. Both physicists and mathematicians have tried to prove rigorously what they thought was the essence of the comments made by Penrose, and they have made errors in their proofs. How else can you prove a false theorem if not by making an error in its proof? These errors have found their way into monographs, and no referee has thus far noticed that they are erroneous. Probably one of the reasons for that is the fact that Roger Penrose is considered to be an “authority” – which certainly he is, except that even authorities make errors and need to be checked.
Even Experts Make Mistakes
We all make errors. I make them too. Just a few years ago I discovered one erroneous statement in one of my old papers, concerning the localization of photons – no one had ever pointed it out to me. Now I have to find out the corrected and true statement and make it public. But of course, that may take many hours of calculations.
Or, for example, in my recent paper, "On the Bundle of Clifford Algebras Over the Space of Quadratic Forms", originally I have made a serious error. A Lemma and its proof were false! The early version of this paper, with the error, is available on arxiv. In the later version, and in the final publication, it has been corrected. This time, thanks God, the Referee understood my paper better than I did!
Confucius
The fact that errors are not that difficult to make can so easily be used as a means to destroy someone’s reputation. If some author wrote a book that is quite good and useful, but it also contains some unfortunate statements and even errors, then , when several critics join in to attack and point out only the errors – the result can be disastrous for the author.
P.S.1. From important actualities:
"According to Einstein (1953, [2004]) the states of consciousness of an individual appear, to that individual, pictured in a series of events in which each particular state, accessible to the individual’s memory, appears to be placed in accordance with an irreducible criterion of a “before” and an “after”. There is, thus, to each individual, a sense of personal time, a subjective time that is not, in itself, and, still according to Einstein (1954, [2004]), measurable, although one can associate numbers to the different events, such that what takes place after something else, always gets a higher number, even if only the ordering of events matters, for the subjective time, and not the particular distance between the two numbers, which means that this time is not metrizable, but, solely expressible upon an ordinal scale."
P.S.6 Recently discovered: Marcin Schroder, my ex-PhD student. I was trying to force him to work with simplicial complexes and holonomies. His papers on academia.edu - very interesting.
Marcin Schroeder, "FROM PHILOSOPHY TO THEORY OF INFORMATION"
".... The formalism utilizing mathematical concepts from the theory of closure spaces and associated with them complete lattices of closed subsets playing the role of generalized logic of information is taking into consideration the selective and structural manifestations of information. Since the original source of inspiration in the development of the formalism was in quantum logics, an outline of concepts in this domain is included in the appendix. "
P.S.7. Back to Aristotle, Galileo and Newton (and Cartan) - so I acquired this wonderful book:
Not to mention the fact that my name is listed in the References several times (with those of Blanchard, Canarutto, Janyška and Modugno).
P.S.8. Reading now (p. 409):
P.S.9.
https://twitter.com/revoltwear/status/1654521604251197440
P.S.10.
P.S.11.
"... The world runs on math," he said. "you said so yourself. It's a universal language. Spells used to be written in old English because that's what they used back then. But if you were creating a spell now, wouldn't math be a perfect language?"
I was shaking my head, nauseous at the thought of something I loved being twisted into- "No. No! Math isn't - It's about hard science, it's nothing like magic!"
"You said that some of the equations were to do with astrophysics, Wormholes. That's like a rip in space, right? A door that connects two different places? Sounds a lot like magic to me."
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